by Paige Toon
I haven’t gone so far as to ask him to walk me down the aisle, but I’m not ruling it out completely.
Luis’s mom has offered up any number of uncles to do the honour, so I have options. It’s actually tradition for the groom to choose his groomsmen on the day of the wedding, so maybe I’ll leave it that late, too, but I don’t know, it could be time to lay the past to rest.
As I think that thought, I’m struck with another vision of Will, staring at me solemnly with his blue eyes.
I sigh and Holly looks up sharply.
I shake my head at her slightly. ‘I keep thinking about Will at the moment,’ I say quietly.
She gives me a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s only natural at this time of year.’
Will Trust, Luis’s teammate and the man I once fell in love with, died in a racing accident at the British Grand Prix three years ago. It was the anniversary of his death last week.
‘He was on my mind a lot the night Luis’s proposed, too,’ I admit heavily. ‘In fact, I’ve thought about him more in the last few months than I have in the last year. I wish I could lay him to rest before I get married, you know?’ I flick a glance her way. ‘I’ve never even been to see his grave so that doesn’t help.’
She looks concerned. ‘Well, maybe you should visit his grave.’
‘I can’t. He’s buried in his parents’ local church graveyard, right next to Laura’s parents’ house.’
Laura was Will’s childhood sweetheart, the girl next door and the woman all the press thought he was destined to marry. But Will broke up with her just before he died – mainly because of his attraction to me. Laura, for some reason, kept up the charade of them still being a couple.
Luis and Holly were the only ones who knew I lost him, too.
I shudder at the thought of how much that hurt Luis back then. He was in love with me, and I was mourning the loss of his teammate and biggest rival. And he was mourning the loss of his friend. It almost broke him.
‘It’s still a public graveyard, right?’ Holly checks. ‘Surely anyone can go to visit?’
‘Yes, but I’ve always been terrified of bumping into Laura. Who knows when she’ll be visiting her parents? I don’t think Will’s mother or father would look twice at me – you know what cold fish they were – but Laura would remember me, I’m sure. What if she put two and two together? I don’t want to upset her like that.’
Holly frowns, deep in thought. ‘You know what, I don’t think she’s in the country at the moment. Pete told me that she didn’t go to Will’s ball because she was in America.’
Pete is Holly’s boyfriend’s brother and he’s a mechanic for a Formula 1 team, so we all still cross paths, even though we no longer work together.
The ball Holly is talking about is a charity event that Laura organises every year around the anniversary of Will’s death. Luis and I donate money, but we’ve never attended. It would just be too difficult, too weird.
‘She’s definitely out of the country?’ I ask, my mind ticking over.
‘I can double check for you, but I think so,’ Holly replies.
Later I head back home to our house in Hampstead, still no closer to buying the dress of my dreams. I did manage to secure shoes – gold ones, which are traditional for brides in Brazil – but that seemed to be of little comfort to Holly, who warned me how much time it takes to custom-make a wedding dress.
Luis was visiting team headquarters earlier – several of the Formula 1 teams are based here in the UK, so, thankfully, he doesn’t have to travel far – but he’s still not back when I arrive.
I get on with rustling up some dinner for us. I’ve become pretty friendly with Luis’s nutritionist over the last couple of years, and between us we do what we can to keep Luis fit and healthy. You may not think that sitting behind the wheel of a car is physically challenging, but it takes a hell of a lot of stamina to be a racing driver, not to mention skill.
Luis arrives home just as I’m finishing up with the preparation. We’re having Thai-inspired sea bass and it’ll be cooked in no time once we’re ready to eat.
‘Hey,’ he says wearily as I come into the hall to greet him.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, seeing the look on his face as his arms snake around my waist.
‘I missed you,’ he murmurs, burying his face in my neck.
‘You only saw me this morning,’ I point out.
‘And it’s been a long day without you.’
‘Are you okay?’ I ask gently, pulling away to look into his eyes.
He pauses before continuing. ‘I’ve just been on the phone with Holly.’
My stomach churns. Surely she didn’t tell him that I want to visit Will’s grave?
‘She told me that you want to visit Will’s grave.’
And there it is: our history coming back to bite us.
The blood drains away from my face and I take a step backwards as a cold flush washes over me. Why would she do that?
‘I texted her to ask how your wedding dress shopping was going,’ he reveals. ‘Don’t be angry,’ he adds. ‘She replied that I needed to get you to, how did she put it? “Pull your finger out”.’ He sounds wry. ‘I called her on speakerphone to find out what she meant and it just came out. She’s worried about you.’
Holly and Luis have always got along well, ever since they worked together. It’s not common for them to speak on the phone, but it’s not completely uncommon either: Holly is Luis’s go-to girl when it comes to my birthday and Christmas presents.
‘Should I be worried?’ he asks cautiously.
‘Of course not!’ I exclaim, trying to control my emotions. I know that Holly only has my best interests at heart, but I’m not sure it’s in Luis’s best interests to know that Will has been on my mind a lot lately.
‘Because we can go, you know. The two of us. To Will’s grave.’
I stare at him for a long moment, seeing the shine come over his eyes and then my own vision goes blurry. His arms close around me and I nod, then we stand there in the hall for a long time, just holding each other.
Will was buried in a graveyard beside a small, old church in a village in Cambridgeshire. I duck out of my lessons the next day and Luis drives us both there, heading north of London on the M11 for about an hour before coming off the motorway. He found out in advance where the graveyard is, and I map-read to direct him. We could just plug in the satnav – in fact, he’s so good with directions that he could probably find the village from memory – but I’m glad to have something to take my mind off things.
I’ve been remembering the last time Luis drove me up this way. It was for Will’s funeral. The memorial service took place at one of the big university churches in the city, but his family laid him to rest near their family home.
I wasn’t privy to the private service that they held, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Will would have wanted me there. It was incredibly painful to be left out in the cold.
Soon we’re driving along winding, narrow roads, over tumbling streams, through tiny, quaint villages and past amazing, old thatched cottages with crooked walls and exposed beams. It’s a perfect English summer’s day with only a few fluffy clouds in the pale-blue sky. The trees are green and leafy and the fields are full of golden rods of wheat, bathed in sunshine. This is where Will grew up, a far cry from Luis’s Brazil and my Manhattan.
There are very few houses in Will’s tiny village and they’re mostly set within large grounds and back behind brick and stone walls.
‘I think that’s Will’s home, there,’ Luis says quietly, slowing to a stop outside a gated driveway. The front garden is densely populated by mature trees and behind them is an imposing country house.
‘And that must be Laura’s,’ I say, taking in the farmhouse to its right with its cream walls and red-tiled roof.
Further to the right, up a small hill, is a stone church.
Luis slowly drives towards it, pulling off the side of the gravelly road. He cli
mbs out and I turn around to pick up the bunch of white calla lilies lying on the back seat. My door opens and Luis is standing there, giving me a sad smile.
I take his hand and step out, noticing both of our wedding rings glinting beside each other in the afternoon sunshine. Diamond engagement rings like mine are not actually typical in Brazil – it’s more normal for both the bride and groom to wear wedding rings on their right hands when they get engaged. During the marriage service they’re swapped to their left hands. Seeing our rings together like this now gives me strength.
I give Luis’s hand a squeeze and stand up, pushing the door of his navy-blue Ferrari closed behind me. We walk hand-in-hand up the hill towards the church where unstable-looking gravestones from decades past are crammed into every square metre of available space. My breath catches as I scan the scene before me, my eyes almost immediately seeking out the clean, straight lines of the most recent memorial, belonging to Will.
Luis tenses beside me, and I know that he’s seen it too.
We walk towards it together and stand in silence, looking down at the inscription for William Henry Trust. There is a vase of fresh red roses sitting on the white stones covering his grave, and I wonder if his mother or father brings them here regularly, or if these flowers have just been placed here in honour of the anniversary of Will’s death. I suspect it’s the former. The flowers probably came from his family’s rose garden.
I thought his parents seemed icy and aloof when I met them. Will said they showed no interest in his racing career when he was growing up. It was his grandfather who encouraged his passion, taking him karting from the age of seven and leaving him money when he passed away so he could fund himself. But his parents loved him and were devastated when he died. They didn’t outwardly show warmth – Will and I had that in common. Luis, on the other hand, was raised in a crazy big household full of love.
For a moment, I can see Will clearly, staring at me in the darkness of his Chelsea home as we lay side by side on his bed. We had fallen asleep together and until that point had done nothing more than kiss. It was supposed to stay that way until he’d had a clean break from Laura, but in the very early hours of the morning we both woke up, and without speaking a single word, we made love to each other. A few short hours later, he was gone.
A lump springs up in my throat and I want to give myself over to my grief, but I don’t want to upset the man standing beside me by losing it over another.
Did I really, truly love Will? I barely knew him. I was certainly infatuated with him, but what I felt for him pales in comparison to the depth of my feelings for Luis. That’s a tricky word, though: comparison. It’s hard to compete with a dead man.
I lean down and place the flowers on Will’s grave, then reach over and touch my hand to his gravestone, looking up sharply at the sound of Luis’s shaky breathing. His bottom lip is trembling dangerously and his eyes are about to spill over with tears.
‘Oh, baby,’ I murmur, my heart going out to him. And then he pulls me into his arms and we both let out a sob, holding each other tightly as we let go.
It is cathartic and liberating, and later when we return to the car, I feel lighter than I have in months.
‘I didn’t know that I needed to do that,’ Luis says, staring across at me.
I grin and loop my hand around the back of his neck, drawing him in for a tender kiss. ‘I’m so glad we’re in this together,’ I whisper. ‘I love you so much. A million times more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You do know that, right?’
He grins at me, his dark-brown eyes twinkling. ‘I do. Now can we please go and get married?’
‘Hell yeah,’ I reply. ‘I just need to buy a goddamn dress.’
‘Okay, let’s go shopping then,’ he says flippantly.
‘As if!’ I laugh.
‘Why? It’s not like I haven’t bought a dress for you before,’ he says with a smirk.
Yes, and it was absolutely stunning. The night I wore it was the first time we slept together.
‘Your mum would go mental. It’s bad luck!’
‘Who gives a shit about that?’ he asks.
I laugh. ‘No way. I’ve got it covered. And I promise you can still take it off me at the end of the night.’
‘Well, in that case…’ he says with a cheeky grin, pulling back onto the main road. And just like that, we leave our past behind us and drive towards the bright future that lies ahead.
When Lily Met Alice
Bronte, from Thirteen Weddings, first appears in Pictures of Lily as the magazine editorial assistant who Lily covers for. When I came to write Thirteen Weddings, I wanted to acknowledge Lily in turn, and, as Bronte now worked at a celebrity magazine in London – very much modelled on heat magazine, where I worked between 2000 and 2007 – it also felt like the perfect time to cameo film star Joseph Strike and his now-fiancée, Alice, from One Perfect Summer.
To remind you of the scene from Thirteen Weddings, Bronte hears that Alice and Joe have visited the conservation park where Lily works, and Alice’s baby bump has been caught on camera – an exclusive and big news in celebrity-magazine world! Bronte calls Lily for the inside scoop.
I wasn’t sure whether to write this scene from Lily’s or Alice’s point of view, so I asked readers of The Hidden Paige to vote. Lily won with 55 per cent of the votes, so voila! Here she is…
I wake up alone. It’s the early hours of the morning and Ben is not in bed beside me. This is not that unusual, considering, but I know I won’t get back to sleep without checking on him.
I sit up and slide my feet out onto the cold floorboards, then find my dressing gown from behind the door and slip my arms into it, tying a knot across my no-longer-flat stomach. I pad quietly out of our bedroom and into the hall. The lights are off in the kitchen, so I take a left and head for the living room, coming to a sudden stop in the doorway.
My husband is fast asleep on the sofa, lying on his back with his bare arms cradling a tiny bundle to his chest. This is the third morning in a row that I’ve found him here.
‘You need your sleep,’ he told me yesterday morning when I berated him for not just bringing her into bed with us when he heard her crying.
‘So do you,’ I pointed out.
And now here he is again, and he has to work again today.
Poor thing, he must be cold. It’s late March and the nights are drawing in, especially here in the Adelaide Hills. We still haven’t upgraded the heating in our home, which once belonged to Ben’s grandmother. She practically raised him and left this house to him when she died. We’ve been living in it for about three years now, but we can’t afford much on his keeper’s salary or my part-time junior keeper wage. If only I could make more of a living as a photographer.
‘You can’t expect it to happen overnight,’ Ben keeps telling me.
Still, I wish it would.
I walk back down the hall and into the spare room, dragging the blanket off the end of the bed, before returning to the living room with it. Quietly making my way over to Ben, I lay the blanket across his sleeping body. He stirs and his eyes open, even darker blue than usual in this dim light. I can see now how red they are.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,’ I whisper, squeezing onto the sofa beside him and touching my hand to his warm, stubbly face. ‘You look exhausted,’ I add with concern.
‘I’m oka—’ His sentence is cut off by the violence of his yawn. His broad chest rises and falls, the bundle moving with it. But still, she sleeps.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I murmur. ‘Let me take her so you can go back to bed.’
He shakes his head and smiles up at me, sleepily. ‘I’m alright. How was your night?’
‘Better,’ I tell him with a nod. I slept badly the night before.
‘What’s the time?’ he asks.
‘Six.’
‘Lily, get back to bed!’ he commands in a loud whisper.
‘No, I’m awake now. You should go.’
‘I
’ve got to be up in an hour anyway,’ he says, never one to complain.
‘I love you,’ I tell him, bending down to kiss him.
‘Mmm,’ he murmurs against me, the vibration tickling my lips. I deepen our kiss and he returns my gesture with increasing passion. I really want him to put his arms around me, but he can’t because they’re otherwise engaged. It’s very frustrating.
‘Do you think she’ll transfer?’ I ask impatiently against his hot mouth.
‘Let’s try,’ he replies with his own sense of urgency. He sits up, still cradling the bundle to his chest.
I’m rigid with tension as I watch him put her down. Her eyes open and she lets out a squeak.
No, no, NO!
He glances up at me, his face filled with regret and apology as she continues to cry.
‘I’d better feed her,’ he says.
No!
But I just nod, the disappointment crushing. A mean part of me wishes he’d let her cry, but I know that’s not Ben.
If this is what he’s like with a two-week-old infant koala, what’s he going to be like when I give birth to an actual human baby in five months’ time?
‘Do you think someone else might like to take the joey tonight?’ I ask Ben later, over breakfast. I try to keep my voice sounding casual so he doesn’t think I’m a complete hussy who wants him only for his body.
God, I really do want his body, though.
He cocks his head to one side. ‘Mike and Janine are still on holiday until Wednesday, but I suppose I could ask Owen.’
‘Yes! Surely he’d love that?’ Owen is quite new so he should be overjoyed at the prospect of having a baby koala all to himself.
‘I don’t know,’ Ben replies with a shrug. ‘We’ll see.’
