The Wedding Speech

Javier had known Oliver for fifteen years, ever since they had shared a tiny apartment in Madrid as exchange students and survived an entire winter on lentils and optimism. So when Oliver called to say he was getting married in Kent, and would Javier be his best man, Javier said yes before Oliver had finished the sentence. Only afterwards did it occur to him that best men, in England, were expected to give a speech.

He wrote it on the plane. It was, he felt, magnificent. It described Oliver as the most generous, loyal and brilliant man he had ever met, and the bride, Priya, as a woman of extraordinary beauty and intelligence. It compared their love to the sea, to the stars and, at one point, to a cathedral. It lasted eleven minutes when he read it aloud in the hotel bathroom.

The evening before the wedding, he showed it to Oliver's sister, Harriet, who taught history at a secondary school and had heard more speeches than most people have had hot dinners. She read it in silence, which Javier took as a good sign. Then she put it down very carefully, as if it might explode.

"It's lovely," she said. "It's really very lovely. Would you mind terribly if I made one or two tiny suggestions?" Javier, who was beginning to understand how English worked, realized that "one or two tiny suggestions" meant starting again from scratch.

Harriet explained over a pot of tea. At an English wedding, she said, nobody wanted to hear that the groom was perfect. They wanted to hear that he was hopeless, in a specific and affectionate way, and that the bride had, against all the odds, decided to put up with him. Praise had to be smuggled in sideways. "If you say he's the most generous man in the world, everyone squirms," she said. "If you say he once lent you his last ten euros and then spent a week reminding you about it, they'll adore him. And you."

"So I must insult him?" Javier asked. "Gently," said Harriet. "And then, right at the end, you're allowed to mean it. Once. Briefly. Then you sit down before anyone has to deal with their feelings."

He stayed up until two rewriting it. The cathedral went. The stars went. In their place came the lentils, the time Oliver had tried to order a coffee in Spanish and somehow received a plate of squid, and the night he had locked them both out on a balcony in February. Priya appeared only once, as "the first person I have ever seen make Oliver arrive anywhere on time, which is not bad at all, considering."

The next afternoon, in a marquee at the bottom of a sloping garden, Javier stood up with his notes trembling slightly in his hand. The squid got the first big laugh. The balcony got a bigger one. Oliver's uncle, a retired judge who had not smiled all day, wiped his eyes with a napkin.

Then Javier looked up from his notes. "In fifteen years," he said, "Oliver has never once let me down. Priya, you've done rather well." He raised his glass, said "To Oliver and Priya," and sat down. It had taken four minutes. Afterwards, Harriet found him at the bar and told him it had been "really not bad," which, she assured him, was the highest compliment the English language had to offer.