Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  But next to Milly, Eva faded into the background. And to be honest, that was what she preferred. Her friendship with Milly was by no means masochistic: with Milly next to her, the spotlight was off Eva. She wasn’t expected to chat or flirt or draw attention; she could sit back quietly and enjoy herself watching others, an introvert who used an extrovert as an invisibility cloak. That was how their joint business worked, and it suited Eva much better than people realized.

  ‘Yes! Copy the ring! Like a special, limited edition, charity version. It isn’t even new, so the design won’t be copyrighted or anything. I might as well get some benefit from it being a bloody turquoise!’ Milly put her hand flat on the table, stretching out her slim white fingers, looking down derisively at the blue stone set in rose gold and surrounded by small pearls on her third finger. ‘To match my eyes . . . blah blah, like you can’t get blue diamonds? Honestly! You can do versions of it, right, Eves? With different stones, of course, so it’s not exactly the same.’

  Eva bent her head, studying the design of the ring.

  Tarquin’s ethereal voice soared above them, and several of the VIPs swayed from side to side as he sang, cans of Pimm’s in their hands, lip-syncing along with the familiar words:

  Taste my moon face all night long

  Slipping over like an electric eel

  As the butcher and poet give chase

  Singing where did we go wrong, where did we go wroooooong?

  Eva was unconsciously humming the chorus to herself as she raised her head again, letting her thoughts crystallise.

  ‘Well, I could do some in those zebra jaspers I’ve been using recently,’ she said slowly. ‘And the agates, too. They would look pretty with the pearls. I don’t usually use pearls at all, but if you want something as close to this as possible I could order them in. They’re not as ethical as our other stones—’

  ‘Oh, that’s fine,’ Milly said, fluttering her hand to signify that standards could be flexible on this occasion. ‘I love this idea,’ she beamed. ‘Talk about great publicity! Not only am I engaged, but I’m actually happy to make versions of my ring as a special charity donation thingywhatsit so I can share the love for a good cause! Wow, that sounds really good when I say it out loud. We’ll do it as a limited edition for breast cancer – is that big right now, breast cancer? I’ll check with my publicist. She’s bound to know what the hottest charity is right now.’

  Eva was used to Milly’s way of talking, accustomed to telling herself that Milly’s heart was in the right place, it was just that her words didn’t always come out quite the way she meant them. And having Milly’s name on the ethical jewellery line that Eva designed was perfect for both of them. It had been Milly’s idea, of course. When Eva graduated from art school, having decided she wanted to specialize in jewellery design and work only with companies that used environmentally positive products mined by workers paid a living wage, Milly had pointed out that in order to succeed in that kind of niche market Eva would need publicity, and that quiet, retiring Eva was the last person in the world to be able to drum it up. Milly’s brilliant solution was that Eva would design, Milly would ‘front’ the brand and put her name on it, and they would share profits.

  So far, it had worked wonderfully. Eva was more than happy to be left alone to deal with the creative side of things, and Milly was superbly gifted at working Milly and Me, the name of their company, into every interview she ever did. Making the brand ethical naturally meant that she could promote it without seeming pushy, and even Eva, who had no knack for promotion, could see that an interview with Milly where she talked artlessly about how in love she was, how happy she was to be engaged, and how she wanted to share that wonderful feeling by giving back to people whose loved ones had breast cancer would be just the kind of article which journalists from women’s magazines would fall over themselves to write.

  ‘How will Tarquin feel about it?’ Eva asked, her normally pale cheeks pinkening a little as they did every time she saw Tarquin or even pronounced his name.

  Milly, who was perfectly aware that Eva had a crush on Tarquin, smiled at her indulgently and said, ‘It’s for charity! Of course Tark’ll be fine with it! You know what a do-gooder he is.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite fair . . .’ Eva murmured, but her voice tailed off. She tipped her head forward, pretending to study the ring, but really so that a soft swathe of dark hair could cover her face. She hated it when Milly was dismissive of Tarquin. No matter how much Eva told herself that this was how people in relationships behaved, that you teased each other, you didn’t go round all the time with hearts and flowers wreathed around you, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes and only saying lovely things about how wonderful the other was, she couldn’t help wishing that Milly wouldn’t joke about Tarquin or his lyrics. It made Eva immediately want to jump to his defence, and that would give away the fact that she was madly in love with him, had been ever since she bought Ormond and Co’s first CD For Now the Lion Dreams, and been carried away by his haunting voice, his cryptic lyrics and, of course, his otherworldly beauty.

  So when Milly had met Tarquin backstage at a fundraiser it had been horribly bittersweet for Eva; she got to meet her idol and find out that he truly was as gentle and poetic and honest about his emotions as he seemed in his songs and his interviews. But the price, of course, was that she had to watch him following Milly around like Mary’s little lamb, staring at her worshipfully with his big, pale blue eyes – the colour of powder-blue quartzite, thought the jewellery designer side of Eva, just a tiny hint of lavender in the blue – writing songs about Milly, and now, marrying Milly . . .

  ‘The wedding’s going to be such an amazing opportunity,’ Milly was saying. ‘Wait till I tell my publicist! Wow, just think of the photo-spreads that Tark and I can do. Is it cool that we’ve got the same colouring, or is it a little weird? You know, making us look like brother and sister? Some people post comments like that online . . . I think we definitely need to work on the styling so we’re not dressed too alike. Tark’s got his new-folk-crusty-whatever thing, which honestly I hate, but I can see it’s huge right now, so I’m all right with it, and I have a more flower-child vibe, so there’s a difference there . . .’

  Inside her pale suede Isabel Marant crossbody bag, Milly’s phone vibrated to signal an incoming text; she pulled it out and gasped.

  ‘It’s Katharine!’ she said excitedly. Katharine was her publicist. ‘She says it’s trending on Twitter already! Cool! Oh yeah, I should tweet a photo of the ring. God knows why I didn’t do that already, what’s wrong with me? Everyone loved when I posted that pic you took of the daisy chain in my hair earlier today – oh, Eves, that’s a good idea, what about doing some daisy-chain jewellery? That would be really on brand for Milly and Me.’

  She scrolled down.

  ‘Oh wow!’ she exclaimed. ‘Katharine’s going to pitch the wedding to Style first thing Monday. They’re doing a Brides issue in the UK for the first time ever next June, and she’s going to push for me and Tark to have the cover! Can you imagine? Oh my God, Eves, this is huge! I’m so, so glad that Tark proposed now!’

  Milly was so excited that she momentarily forgot about photographing, tweeting, Facebooking and Instagramming her ring: she clasped the phone to her narrow chest as ecstatically as if it were a contract for a leading role in a Hollywood romcom, her eyes shining as brilliantly as the blue diamonds she infinitely preferred to turquoises.

  ‘Oh,’ she added, ‘and Katharine thinks the turquoise is fab – right on brand, she said. I can’t wait to tell her about Milly and Me Breast Cancer – no, that doesn’t sound right at all. Katharine will think of how to put it, she’s a genius that way. Anyway, I’ll totally put up with having to wear a bloody turquoise if it gets me on the cover of Style Brides!’

  She gazed at Eva, her eyes so dazzling that Eva almost blinked.

  ‘And Eves, you’ll help me do it all,’ she went on, quite as if she were conferring t
he most generous of favours on her best friend. ‘You know how much I rely on you! We’ll get a wedding planner, of course, but I want everything to reflect my and Tarquin’s ethos, you know? Wildflower meadows, home-made lemonade – ooh, maybe we could get Pimm’s to sponsor the drinks? Everything has to be right on brand, and you just get that so instinctively. British, ethical, down-to-earth but just sheer luxury at the same time.’

  Milly heaved a huge sigh of bliss.

  ‘God, I didn’t see this coming at all!’ she said, deliciously aware that even the VIPs hanging out in the backstage area were taking surreptitious photos of her – Milly Gamble from Dr Who looking all blissed-out and loved-up just after Tarquin Ormond had proposed to her. ‘This is really going to take me – and Milly and Me, of course – to a whole new level of brand awareness!’

  Chapter Five

  Two hundred miles away from the Sussex fields across which Ormond and Co were blasting out their song ‘Moon Face’, Tamra Maloney was settling into the hand-upholstered, leather back seat of her Bentley Flying Spur as her chauffeur drove her back to London, blessedly unaware that Brianna Jade now had a rival for the Style Bride of the Year tiara. If anything could have improved Tamra’s mood at that moment, which probably wasn’t even possible, it would have been her Bentley. She just loved this car. There was nothing like it in the States, nothing at all. Yes, you could get hugely luxurious and expensive cars over there, of course, but nothing so elegant and refined. From the ‘B’ of the Bentley logo hand-sewn into the capacious headrests, to the built-in case of drinking glasses and the tables that slid out so smoothly from the back seats, to the DVD screens and the multimedia remote control that lay discreetly between the seats, everything had been hand-fitted by experts; it was like relaxing into a moving work of art.

  Deciding to spend over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the Flying Spur had been the easy part. Picking her colour choices for the interior by contrast had been agonizing. Bentley offered a dark-red leather called Fireglow for the seats and upholstery, with a dark stained burr walnut for the wooden veneers that was almost black. Tamra had been seriously tempted by the rich crimson and charcoal combination of one of the showroom models. But the salesman, with exquisite tact, had murmured: ‘Very nightclub, madam. This colour choice is extremely popular with our Russian and Arab clients . . .’ and Tamra, who was very quick on the uptake, had read his meaning instantly.

  ‘I got it,’ she had said, flashing him a gorgeous smile. ‘Like we’d say in the States, keep walking. What do you suggest?’

  The salesman had allowed himself a much smaller smile and advised Tamra that the combination of a damson exterior, plus beige leather seats and matching damson leather interior trim, with the dark walnut veneer, would be the choice he would make for madam. Madam was modern and elegant, and the deep purple reflected her style and was contemporary without being – well, nightclub.

  And she loved it. The purple made her feel positively regal, and the sales guy had been right – the beige seats looked a lot classier than the red would have done. Tamra had no problems flashing her money around, no wish to pretend she wasn’t anything but the newest of new multi-millionaires; it was a shame, she often thought, that there wasn’t a word that fitted in between ‘multi-million’ and ‘billion’. The former didn’t really convey the scale of her wealth, and she wasn’t quite in the latter’s league. Yet. Never say never.

  She was perfectly happy to buy everything new and shiny and custom-made: that was her deal. But there was luxurious and there was flashy, and she knew she needed to stay on the right side of that line. It was proving surprisingly easy: the Bentley guy had been typical of the high-end salespeople here, who were very happy to guide you along the right path as long as you learnt their keywords. You went into their shops dressed all elegant and rich-looking – not flashy, Armani rather than Versace – and you listened out for key phrases like ‘refined’ and ‘restrained’, or their antonyms, ‘perhaps a little flamboyant’, or the killer ‘Arab/Russian/nightclub’ trifecta used by the Bentley salesman, which was the biggest warning of all. Having tons of money was fine in the UK, but being vulgar with it was not. Tamra had learnt to focus her love of shiny things squarely into jewellery.

  And this kind of shine, she thought, reaching out to run one finger over the surface of the open table next to her, the walnut lacquered in layer upon layer of hand-painted applications till it shone like a mirror. Look at that glossy finish. There can’t be a car in the world more beautiful than this.

  She drank some of the Cristal from the glass she was holding and selected a small canapé from the plate that was resting on the table: smoked salmon, tossed in the lightest dressing of lemon juice, low-fat crème fraiche and chopped dill, served in a Little Gem lettuce leaf cup. No carbs, of course. Barely ever any carbs in solid form, only in liquid: the Cristal, for instance. Tamra was fine never eating solid carbs again in her life, but by God, you’d have to pry the liquor bottle from her cold dead hands, even if it was getting harder to keep the weight off now that she’d gone past the forty mark.

  Forty! My God! I still can’t believe it!

  She resisted the impulse to pull out her pocket mirror and scan her face; she’d told herself to stop doing that any more. It led to paranoia, which led to unnecessary surgery, which led to looking like one of the women off the Real Housewives shows, who literally didn’t know where to stop. Some of them were like wax models of their former selves, Madame Tussaud’s come to life, smooth, motionless, their eyes stretched artificially wide by upper eyelid repositioning surgery: or blepharoplasty, where any excess fatty tissue was removed from around the eyes, making them seem bigger, but also oddly stretched. Like Manga teenage eyes in a middleaged face.

  And once you start, you don’t stop. For confirmation, she only had to look back at all the other women in the social circle in Florida into which marriage to Ken Maloney, the Fracking King, had precipitated her. Ken had proposed to her within a week of their first meeting and whisked her and Brianna Jade off to his marble beachfront palace. The levels of nipping, tucking, lifting and liposuctioning in West Palm Beach had to be seen to be believed. If an alien from another galaxy had landed there, it would immediately have assumed that all the women at the country club were engaged in a terrible, suicidal competition to stretch their skin as tight over their skeletons as humanly possible. Tamra, with only a nose job and boob implants, was quite a contrast, and only the deep well of common sense from which she had drawn ever since she’d found herself a pregnant single mother at sixteen had saved her from the temptation to start tinkering with her face.

  It had been shockingly unprecedented in West Palm Beach when she’d gone under the knife to actually reverse a cosmetic procedure. Ken had whined when she’d had her implants removed, but Tamra had his ring on her finger by then, so there was nothing he could do about it. And since she was a B/C cup anyway he’d had to admit, post-surgery, that there wasn’t that much of a difference.

  Dr Dubrow did a great job, she thought now, complacently looking down at her breasts. The girls look great. Tamra still regretted never having done pageants herself; with her, it would’ve been Miss USA or die trying. She had the attitude as well as the looks. Brianna Jade was drop-dead beautiful – Tamra had been a knockout at sixteen, but she genuinely thought that her daughter was even better-looking than she had been at that age. However, Brianna Jade had never truly relished getting up on that stage and selling her personality with everything she’d got.

  Tamra’s perfectly shaped lips curved in a smile of nostalgic amusement as she remembered the struggle it had been to find her daughter a suitable talent for that specific part of the competition. When Brianna Jade had won Pork Queen at the Kewanee State Fair (prize: five hundred dollars, a pigskin jacket and the lead place on a tractor trailer in the parade), all the contestants had been required to prepare a pork dish as part of the contest, and Brianna Jade’s Tater Tots casserole had been widely appreciated.
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  Thank God for Mrs Lutz, our landlady, helping BJ with that pork casserole. Someone had to – I could never cook to save my life – and at least BJ did the gruntwork herself. I know damn well that Barb Norkus, who came second and went on to win Watseka Corn Queen, didn’t do anything with her pork ’n’ beans but carry the casserole – her mom cooked it all.

  But you couldn’t hand out your pork casserole to judges from the stage, nor could you even cook it as you travelled around the Midwest staying in the cheapest of cheap motels and living off bulk-bought ramen noodles, yoghurt and take-out salads from Arby’s. And Brianna Jade couldn’t sing or dance, not well enough to compete with the other girls, that was for sure: most of them had come off the kiddie pageant circuit and had been taking lessons since they were four. So Tamra had come up with a comic skit for her daughter, ‘Twenty Things You Didn’t Know About the Pig’, complete with a slide show, and, after intensive coaching, BJ had managed to pull it off okay.

  Never enough to win, though. BJ was beautiful enough to place as a runner-up for the prize money to keep them going, but it wasn’t enough for the big time. And Tamra had never blamed her for it. She had pushed her daughter into pageants to get them out of Kewanee, and it had worked.

  But Tamra had been getting more and more worried, waiting in vain for that big break that would happen for BJ, the competition she’d win, the nice rich guy who’d fall for her. People would tell Tamra to take BJ to LA and try the acting circuit, but no way was BJ an actress: she only managed that comic monologue with Tamra coaching the hell out of her. And Tamra could easily imagine what pretty girls who weren’t great actresses went through in Hollywood to get cast. She’d have taken a rusty old pickaxe to the balls of the first guy who asked her daughter to get down on her knees at an audition.