by Karen Swan
Perhaps ‘blown it’ was too harsh, but she’d always had the feeling that by marrying Gil so early, she’d popped their sealed bubble. She’d met him at the Grosvenor House Ball in London and he’d swept her off her feet, not just with his extraordinary confidence and intelligence, but more particularly with his voice: crystal-cut with a whisper-soft burr. She would do anything for that voice – it had seduced her away from her virginity, taken her away from her friends, made her wait for the baby she yearned for . . .
There was a knock at the door.
‘Cassie?’ Talk of the devil.
Cassie’s eyes widened in panic. He couldn’t see her looking like this – half-dressed in a nightie over her ‘grubby’ underwear with no make-up on.
The girls clearly had the same thought and sprang up off the floor to group around her like a footballer’s wall, just as Gil peered in. He took in the scene of desolation – the empty cake box, the half-drunk bottles of champagne, the piles of shoes, the dresses on the beds and the huddle of women, two of them in identikit towelling robes and hair turbans.
‘I thought I’d find all of you in the one room together. Heaven forbid you should get ready in your own rooms,’ he quipped.
He stepped into the room, looking relieved that everyone was ‘decent’. He was already dressed for the festivities, wearing a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket and trousers in the family’s dress tartan. His sharp, hawkish features – which always looked so intimidating in his barrister’s gown and wig – were softened by the anticipation of the night’s revelries.
‘You’ve put me in the Faerie Room, Gil,’ Suzy said accusingly, hands on hips. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten that’s the one that’s haunted. You weren’t the only one who didn’t sleep a wink on your wedding night.’
Gil laughed softly at her allusion to the lap-dancing pole the girls had put up in his room. ‘I’m sorry Archie couldn’t make it this weekend. It would have been good to see him.’
‘Well, you’re not as sorry as he is,’ Suzy replied on behalf of her errant husband. ‘Camel racing with clients in Abu Dhabi is not his definition of a good time. The poor boy’s terrified. I had to give him the beta blockers I keep on standby for my nervous brides.’
Gil chortled and looked at Kelly, dressed top to toe in black – the only one who didn’t look as if she was staying at a spa. ‘And how was your flight, Kelly?’
‘Oh, you know . . . a supermodel in full tantrum in front, a drunk sleeping on my shoulder and an air hostess with rage issues. The usual,’ she said drily.
He looked at the women clustered around Cassie, whose blonde curls were poking out from the middle of them. ‘Why’re you all standing like that around my wife?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘You haven’t done anything to her, have you?’
‘No. We’re just getting her ready,’ Suzy said quickly.
‘It looks like you’ve got her so drunk she can’t stand.’
‘Non!’ said Anouk.
‘It’s just bad luck for you to see her before it’s time,’ Kelly explained.
‘It’s bad luck for me to see her in her wedding dress,’ he said, frowning. ‘Not at the anniversary party ten years later.’
‘Pah! You say tom-aaaah-to, I say tom-ay-to,’ Kelly argued, making him grin.
‘Fine,’ he said, holding his hands up in defeat. He stood on tiptoe, trying to catch sight of his wife. ‘Well, just so you know, darling, our guests are arriving.’
Cassie nodded from behind the wall of friends. ‘Ten minutes.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said knowingly, backing out of the room. ‘I’d like to see the odds they’re offering for that.’ He shut the door on the telltale sounds of women in a rush – zips opening, wardrobe doors banging, the shower running. It was going to be half an hour, minimum.
Cassie was still looking at herself in the mirror when Kelly got out of the shower. ‘You can see my knickers through this dress,’ she hissed, panicking. She knew the girls were going to make her wear the dress, and that Gil would disapprove. The girls knew it too – why else would they have hidden her from him?
‘Don’t wear any,’ Anouk said across the room as she applied her eyeliner.
Cassie looked at her in horror.
‘I’ve already thought of that,’ Kelly said, going over to her bag and throwing a plastic packet on the bed. ‘Flesh-coloured too.’
Cassie picked it up. ‘Spanx? What’s that?’
Everyone rolled their eyes. ‘Sausage knickers, Cass!’ Suzy said. ‘They hold your fat bits in and give you a smooth line under the dress. I make all my brides in bias-cut wear them.’
‘What shoes have you got?’ Kelly asked, already dreading the answer. Don’t say pumps. Don’t say—
‘I’ve got some nice kitten heels I bought in the L.K. Bennett sale last Christmas.’ There was a heavy silence. ‘What? They’re my best ones.’
Anouk sighed and went to the jumble of shoes in the middle of the floor. She picked up a strappy gold Louboutin with a four-inch heel. ‘Try that. We’re the same size.’
‘Oh, you have got to be joking. I don’t wear anything higher than a welly-boot all year round. You can’t seriously expect me to get down the staircase in those. I’d have to slide down the banisters.’
‘If that’s what it takes,’ Anouk shrugged.
Cassie sighed and slipped them on, instantly rocketing up to six foot. She had to admit they were stunning with the dress, and they certainly felt more comfortable than they looked. But then she hadn’t tried moving yet. Which reminded her . . .
‘I hope you’ve all remembered there’s reeling later on. You’ll need sensible shoes.’
‘There’s no such thing,’ Anouk and Kelly declared in unison.
‘Sweetie, the only thing I intend to be reeling from tonight is the drink,’ Suzy said, wriggling into her dress and making them all – even Cassie – dissolve into laughter.
Forty-five minutes later, the four women descended the winding staircase arm in arm like a daisy chain. Even Cassie couldn’t remain oblivious to the stares that met her. None of her friends – Gil’s friends – had ever seen her look like this before. She felt incredible. Anouk had plaited her muddy-blonde hair in Grecian style across the front, leaving the rest to fall in heavy ripples down her back, and Suzy had made up her huge round blue eyes with gold and bronze shadows and put a matt stain on her wide, ever-smiling mouth.
Her friends had stood back and admired her like a work of art they had produced. She bore no resemblance to the woman who’d been digging in thirty raspberry bushes in the garden in floral dungarees and one of her husband’s moth-eaten lambswool sweaters at two o’clock that afternoon. She knew she looked good, but what worked at a fashion show in Paris or at a cocktail party in Manhattan wasn’t what cut it with the Scottish shooting set. Gil was ten years older than she was, and all his friends older still. Did she look . . . appropriate? She scanned the room anxiously, hoping to find Wiz’s eyes before Gil’s.
Cassie couldn’t see either of them, but there was no doubt that everyone else thought the dress was a hit. As they reached the ground floor, a cloud of guests and perfume enveloped her and she quickly became separated from the girls.
‘Hello . . . How lovely to see you . . . Oh, you are kind . . . Hello . . . Are you well? . . . So pleased you could make it . . . Oh, do you think so? . . . You look radiant too . . . I know, divine weather, isn’t it? . . . Hello . . . Thank you for coming . . .’
But there’s only so much revolution one party can take, and as a glass was placed in her hand by a man who’d matched his sporran to his beard, the conversation returned to the dull but familiar territory of the abomination of the wind farms on the Earl of Luss’s neighbouring estate.
Discreetly, she let her eyes graze the room. A string quartet was playing in the minstrels’ gallery, the men were dressed in trews or kilts, some with sashes and flamboyant horsehair sporrans that fell to their hemlines. The women were equally grand in full-length gowns w
ith heirloom jewels. They looked stately and impressive, but as her eyes flickered between them and her modish urban friends in cascading coral silk-plissé ruffles (Anouk), intricate ethnic gold beading (Suzy) and laser-cut jet satin (Kelly), it occurred to her that the grandes dames looked exactly the same as they always did at these events.
Just like the house, she thought. They were hemmed in, curtailed, by tradition. The hall looked imposing as usual – even a bunch of daisies in a teapot would be imbued with gravitas in these baronial surroundings – but it looked the same as it probably had at every party that had been thrown here in the last two hundred years. The antler-framed chandeliers flickered with as-yet-unseen candlelight, thick swags of ivy were draped around the austere family portraits, slightly fraying faded ceremonial flags hung from brass holsters in the walls, and the enormous stone fireplace had been filled with a profusion of garden flowers and thistles – it was too warm for a fire tonight. Only the bright red balloons tied to the banisters at every other tread and shouting ‘We Are 10’ showed that it was Cassie who was the mistress of the house, not her scary mother-in-law, nor indeed any of the women who glared grimly down from the walls.
Across the room, she could see that the girls – who were sticking together like barnacles – had nabbed Wiz first. More formally known as Lady Louisa Arbuthnott, Wiz was the prized daughter of the most senior judge in the country, Lord Valentine, and as well as being Cassie’s best friend, was one of the best-connected women in Edinburgh. She did events like these in her sleep. Wind farms, poor grouse stocks, declining peat bogs in the central belt – she could extrapolate and amuse on every topic. Nothing fazed her. No one bored her. Everyone adored her.
Dressed in an elegant olive-coloured silk column dress with black pearls at her throat, her reddish-auburn hair wound up into a chignon, she was the only other woman here who could rival the outsiders for style. She was as much at home in the city as in the country, and as a senior partner at Edinburgh’s leading divorce firm McMaster & Mathieson, she retained a personal shopper at Harvey Nicks who made a point of reserving the key pieces from the designer collections for her.
Her head was thrown back in laughter at something Kelly had said and they were all smiling, but Cassie was fluent in the group’s microscopic body language and her stomach lurched – Anouk had her eyes fractionally narrowed, Suzy was smiling slightly too brightly, Kelly’s chin was dipped a bit too low. Although the girls had never mentioned it, there was an unspoken tension – jealousy, she supposed – surrounding her friendship with Wiz.
Cassie knew they all did their best to keep her in the loop. They spoke regularly on the phone and sent emails; they had even persuaded her to leave status updates on Facebook, but after a fortnight’s rotation of Cassie Fraser is . . . drinking a cup of tea/sitting at the computer/bored, they had begged her to stop. The simple fact that she’d never seen sausage pants and thought gladiator sandals were last worn by the Romans highlighted just how far outside their orbit she was circuiting. They might be old friends, but their lives were very different now, and the truth was it was Wiz who now knew her best.
When Cassie’s beloved father had died four years ago, it had been Wiz who’d booked the tickets for her to go back to Hong Kong for a couple of months to be with her mother. And it worked both ways. When Wiz’s husband, Sholto, had walked out on her when she was five months pregnant with their son Rory, it was Cassie who had attended all the antenatal classes with her, held her hand during the birth and become a besotted godmother.
For nearly ten years, the two separate strands of friendship had worked in perfect harmony because they had never overlapped. Tonight was a first for all of them.
Making a vague excuse about circulating, she tried to make her way over to the girls, but the demands of courtesy in response to the attention engendered by her dazzling dress meant it was like wading through mud. By the time she grabbed Suzy’s arm, Wiz had gone.
‘Where is she?’ she asked, disappointed. She desperately wanted her opinion on the dress. Gil was still cloistered in a group out of eyeshot somewhere.
‘She had to take a phone call. Someone called Martha?’
Cassie nodded. ‘That’s her nanny.’
‘Right. Well, she’s in the study.’
‘Thanks. I’ll come straight back,’ she said, smoothing her palms anxiously on her thighs.
She wound her way through the crowd, trying to keep her eyes down. ‘Sorry, phone call . . . excuse me . . . I’ll be straight back . . .’
The door to the study was ajar, but she could hear Wiz’s soothing voice as she said goodnight to Rory. ‘I love you, darling,’ she heard. ‘Be good for Martha, okay . . .’
Cassie smiled and stopped just short of the doorway, not wanting to intrude. Rory was three now and had just started at nursery, but he already had a social diary that outranked Cassie’s, and she had joked on more than one occasion that it would be easier to schedule a meeting with the Pope than a playdate with Rory. If he wasn’t at kindergarten he was at baby-gym, yoga, French classes or toddler football, or otherwise napping. Cassie knew from the newspapers that ‘overscheduling’ was a modern parent’s malaise, but there never seemed to be any mention of the other modern dilemma – the earnest godparent worrying about her place on the sidelines of the child’s life.
She leant against the door jamb, tracing the navy and bottle-green tartan wallpaper with her fingers.
‘And remember to brush your teeth. Martha told me you had ice cream for pudding . . .’
Cassie looked back towards the hall and watched as the waiters walked around with trays of drinks and the guests took them graciously. No one would do anything as improper as get drunk tonight.
‘Okay, Daddy’s here to say night-night . . .’
What?
Cassie stood up straight, the sound of blood rushing to her ears. Sholto was here?
She shook her head. Wiz had had no contact with him since he’d left – nearly four years ago now. And there was no way Gil would have invited him. He knew as well as she did what a betrayal – not to mention humiliation – it had been for Wiz when he’d walked out.
‘How’s my little man been today?’
The pounding in her ears got louder and she felt her heart begin to pump more quickly.
‘The castle? . . . Good boy . . . Well now, do as Mummy says and brush your teeth . . . I’ll be home in two sleeps, okay? . . . I miss you, Ror. Sleep tight . . .’ said the voice, that oh-so-distinctive voice that she had first fallen in love with.
NEW YORK
Chapter One
Cassie watched as the city rose up towards her, leaping out of the ground in huge sculpted shards of steel and glass, the famous river meandering like a copper snake between them. She tried to understand what the fuss was all about, but it was difficult from ten thousand feet up. It was one of those cities that everyone said you simply had to visit at least once in your life, but she’d never had the faintest interest in coming here. Not that she could publicly say so – it would be like admitting that she didn’t really want Mandela as her ideal dinner guest or that Pretty Woman was her all-time favourite film.
But now here she was – first decision made. The last place she’d wanted to come had been her first. It was as far outside her comfort zone as she could imagine, everything she’d never wanted – loud, bright, glaring and blaring. A great honking, seething mass of urban humanity that would guarantee to distract her, at the very least, from the ruins of her own life.
The plane circled the Statue of Liberty – tall and proud and as green as a peppermint – twice, as though making a heavy-handed point to her: See? Liberty. Freedom. Independence. It’s all good here. But she wasn’t fooled. There was nothing great about ‘freedom’ as far as she could see – it was just a piece of PR spin on the word ‘isolation’ or ‘loneliness’.
She shook her head and finished the rest of her drink. She knew she was drunk and depressed. Both would pass, one faster than the
other. She wondered whether Gil was either of these things right now, whether her immediate flight off the estate and out of the country had brought sudden clarity to his actions and made him realize what a mistake he had made.
But even as she thought it, she knew that probably the only thing he felt right now was relief. In so many ways – socially, historically, Scottishly – he and Wiz were a much better fit, and now he was free to give up the charade of weekly commuting and just be with his second family.
She paused.
Were they the second family – or the first? Was she just the appendage? After all, they had had a child together. They had a blood tie. She just had a gold ring and a legal document. Then again, she’d been married to him first . . . She tried to debate the dilemma rationally, but six back-to-back gin and tonics made it difficult. Aha! Wait! Her legal document had also been sworn before God. She had God on her side . . . And the girls.
She sank back against the headrest and closed her eyes. God and the girls. Who could argue with that? Certainly Gil couldn’t. Hadn’t.
In the frigid aftermath of her discovery, Gil and Wiz had just watched as Suzy, Kelly and Anouk had sprung into action – whisking her upstairs, pulling her dress over her head and packing a bag for her, finding her passport, pushing her feet into the muck boots by the door, bundling her into the car, even doing up her seat belt for her as she sat shell-shocked, too fractured to pull herself together and fight back, just waiting to be spirited away to her next life. Wherever that might be. Down there, perhaps? She peered out of the window again.
