‘Yes, but she’s five!’
‘Almost six,’ Julia tells me, earnestly. ‘Besides, I know what gay means. It means men who like men better than they like ladies, right?’
‘Right!’ Cass looks pleasantly surprised, and gives Julia an approving high-five. ‘So, is he gay? Your dad’s friend Nick, I mean.’
‘Hmmm …’ Julia screws up her nose, thinking about this. ‘I don’t think so … I mean, Mummy never really liked Uncle Nick all that much, is all I really know about him. She said he’s … got a tight wand?’
We both stare at her for a moment, unsure how to translate this. Unsure, to be honest, how to react to this …
‘Oh! He’s a tightwad?’ Cass, showing once again that, when it really matters, she’s no dumb blonde. ‘Is that what your mum said?’
‘Yes, that’s it!’ Julia beams at us. ‘I think maybe he has quite a lot of money, but he’s really mean about spending it. Mummy’s still friends with the lady who used to be married to Uncle Nick, so she knows that sort of thing. Well, I think Uncle Nick has been married to quite a lot of ladies, actually …’
‘Good stuff, kid, good stuff … so, that takes us all the way back to the question of whether or not he’s maybe secretly gay …’
‘For God’s sake, Cass!’ I have to call a halt to this, as Julia’s soon-to-be-stepmother. As a responsible adult. As a human being. ‘Is there the slightest possibility you could think about something other than yourself, do you think, during the course of this weekend?’
‘Hey, I am thinking of someone other than myself! I’m thinking of you, Lib. I mean, your life’s going to be so much better if I manage to shack up with Nick. You’ll have someone fun to hang around with! I mean, Joel and his family are pretty serious, aren’t they? No offence, Jules,’ she adds, to Julia. ‘Anyway, you seem really great yourself. God, if only the stepkids I had for a while had been as cool as you! I might still be with Zoltan now …’
‘Instead of trying to hook up with the best man the night before my wedding,’ I say, irritably. ‘Then I think we all wish they’d been as cool as Julia.’
Cass regards me with annoyance. ‘Well, you’re being no help at all, Libby, I have to say. And what the fuck are you doing, squirrelling yourself away up here like this? I think there’s about to be some slideshow downstairs, or something. Pictures of Joel’s childhood, or some such snooze-fest.’
‘Oh, God … Julia, shall we pop downstairs now, for the slideshow, and come back up and I’ll try the dress on later?’
‘But you said you were going to show me now,’ says Julia, her angelic little face crumpling.
‘OK, OK, I’ll show you now, but very quickly,’ I say, as firmly as I feel able. ‘Cass, if Joel wants to know where I am, can you just tell him I’ll be down in a minute?’
‘Fine.’ Cass teeters back towards the door. ‘But I can’t guarantee I’m going to be able to stick out this bloody slideshow myself, you know. If Nick expresses the remotest interest, I’m going to try to get him outside for a cigarette, and then I’ll see what happens when I make my move.’ She glances down at her plunge-front, and jiggles her boobs for a moment, either to readjust them to their most pert level, or just to remind herself how fabulous they are. ‘Thanks again, kid,’ she adds, to Julia, before she closes the door behind her. ‘You and I are going to get along swimmingly, I can tell.’
Even though she’s only five, I’m pretty uncomfortable about the idea of changing in front of her, so I take the dress down from its hanger and head towards the bathroom.
‘Will you be OK here for a moment, Julia?’
‘Oh, yes, that’s no problem, Libby.’ She perches on the edge of the bed. ‘Oh, I had one question for you. Have you had your call from Grace yet?’
A jolt runs through me.
‘What did you just say?’
‘Your call from Grace,’ she repeats. ‘Have you had it yet?’
‘I … do you mean … sorry, Julia, are you talking about … Grace Kelly?’ I crouch down beside her for a moment. ‘Were you playing in the attic today? Did you … meet anyone up there? A blonde lady? Sitting on the old sofa?’
Now she’s staring at me like I’m the crazy one.
‘I haven’t been up in the attic at all. I was just wondering if you’d had your call yet. Because Mummy’s been saying it’s only a matter of time until you get your call from Grace.’
Based on her tightwad confusion a couple of minutes ago, I’m starting to realize that there could be a translation element to this. And, let’s face it, with Bogdan in my life, I’m pretty adept at translation these days.
‘Julia, is your Mummy saying … fall from grace?’
‘Yep, that’s it.’ She nods. ‘Mummy had one while she was married to Daddy, she says. And I heard her telling Grandpa that it was only a matter of time before you had one, too. On account of the fact,’ she goes on, in an oddly adult way that makes it plain she’s simply parroting grown-up phrases she’s overheard, without necessarily understanding what any of them really mean, ‘that Daddy has a hard time dealing with imperfection. Because, you know, he puts people up on a pedant’s stall—’
‘Pedestal?’
‘… and then can’t handle it when they start to seem a bit more human.’
I’m feeling a sudden chill in the room, and it’s not merely because I’m only wearing a layer of thin lace.
I quickly straighten up, because it’s absolutely not right of me to be continuing this conversation with Joel’s child. If I want to talk about this with him – and I think, terrifying though it feels with the wedding approaching like a speeding juggernaut – that I have to, I need to talk with him. Find out if he’ll concede that there’s any truth in what his ex-wife is saying.
I mean, let’s be honest, it’s all pretty familiar-sounding stuff, given the way things have gone between us in the last couple of days. Given the way he worshipped the very ground I trod on from the moment we met. Given the fact that his mother seems pretty clear that I’d have to be Mahatma Gandhi crossed with Mother Teresa (but still able to look decent in a frock and heels) in order to live up to Joel’s astonishing standards.
‘I’ll just go and put my dress on,’ I say, ‘and then we really do need to go downstairs to watch Daddy’s slideshow.’
She nods, and I step into the bathroom.
I don’t actually lock the door, just push it to, then step out my of shift dress. Then I step into my wedding dress and – with shaking hands – pull it up.
I gaze at myself in the full-length bathroom mirror.
I look like a total stranger.
Don’t get me wrong: the dress is exquisite. It really does flatter my figure, with its bias cut and drapey sleeves, and it is hand embroidered with thousands and thousands of tiny crystal beads that catch the light and cast an almost ethereal glow about me. If it’s this effective in the artificial light of the bathroom, I can only imagine how incredible it’s going to look by candlelight in an early Victorian chapel, at dusk on a crisp winter’s afternoon.
If I actually end up there, that is.
I draw a deep, shuddering breath.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
Do I tell Joel I need more time? Do I call it off, out-and-out? Do I go ahead with it all, just to save the sheer mortification for both of us, and then tough it out until I can find a dignified exit strategy? Do I go ahead with it and throw my whole weight behind it, and hope that Joel will learn to just accept me as I am …?
I mean, I do love him. At least, I think I love him. I love aspects of him. I love things about him despite certain other things …
At a noise behind me, I turn round.
Julia, swift and almost-silent as a little mouse, has just darted in behind me, picked up my shift dress, and darted back out again.
Then she shuts the door.
A moment later, I hear a key turn, on the outside of the door, in the lock.
I gaze at it for a moment.
‘Um
… Julia?’
‘Yes?’ Her voice, on the other side of the door, isn’t hostile.
‘I … er … you seem to have locked me in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. I mean, could you … unlock it, maybe?’
‘No,’ she says, decisively. ‘I can’t. Because I really don’t want you to marry my daddy, you see. I don’t want a stepmummy. Step-mummies are bad. They always try to harm the princess, and give her poisoned apples, and things.’
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
‘Julia …’
‘If you don’t come down for the rest of the night, he’s going to be really cross with you. It’ll be your call from Grace, the one Mummy was talking about. So he won’t want to marry you after that. And even if he does come up and find you, that’s OK too, because he’ll see you in your dress before the wedding, and then he can’t marry you. That’s the law, right?’
‘No!’ I rattle the door-handle. I’m in no mood just now to be entranced by her whimsical views. ‘Julia, just open the door. You’re going to get in big trouble …’
‘If anyone actually hears you. I’m going to lock your bedroom door, too,’ she adds, almost conversationally, ‘and hide the key so nobody can find it.’
Her five-year-old logic isn’t quite impeccable, but she’s thought it through pretty effectively, nonetheless. Nobody will hear me yelling if the bedroom door is shut, too and, even if they do realize I’m up here, they’ve still got to get in somehow. And I will miss the slideshow. And Joel will be pissed off with me. And he will see me in my wedding dress …
Oh! My one saving grace (no pun intended) – Cass. She knows I’m up here. She’ll send up a posse, when I don’t come down …
‘In fact,’ Julia goes on, almost as if she can read my mind through a heavy bathroom door, ‘I might just say I think you’ve run away, or something. That way nobody will come and look for you. Oh, but don’t worry,’ she adds, ‘I’ll come up in a couple of days’ time and push some biscuits under the door. I may not want a new step-mummy, but I don’t want you to starve, or anything. You can drink the water from the bath tap.’
And that’s that. Silence. She’s obviously gone, presumably locking the bedroom door behind her.
The major flaw in her half-cooked plan becomes apparent to me a moment later: the bathroom has a huge, almost floor-to-ceiling double window that leads out on to the narrow, balustraded balcony that runs pretty much all the way around the second floor of the house.
I hurry to open the double window, lean out and see, right away, that another window, in the room the next but one along from mine, is also open. I think it’s the room Barbara has been put in, actually, because there was a bit of very last-minute touching-up of paintwork going on in there this morning, and the window has presumably been left wide like that to air the fumes before bedtime.
I can easily climb out, walk quickly along the balustrade bit, and get in that window, then nip downstairs and try to get someone’s attention before Joel does, in fact, see me in my wedding dress.
Not that it matters, probably, any more, to stick to the superstitious tradition. Because that’s only if the wedding is actually going ahead. And, let’s face it, that’s seeming less likely with each passing minute of this day.
Still, the wedding dress is the only thing that might cause any problems on this little journey: even if I’m not actually going to wear it down an aisle any time soon, it’s still a stunning item that I can’t possibly damage in any way. So I’m going to have to be r-e-a-l-l-y careful, as I step out of the window and up on to the little balcony, that I don’t catch it on anything, or get the hem grubby at all. But actually, if I hold the skirt a couple of inches off the floor, and keep the swooshy bias-cut fabric pulled fairly close to my legs, I think I’m going to be OK.
I’m almost at the other open window, and just congratulating myself on my good sense in not picking out some truly impractical, Cinderella’s ballgown-style meringue when, quite suddenly, the floor opens up beneath me.
I mean, my foot actually goes straight through what I’m walking on.
Somehow I have quick enough reactions not to just blindly put my other foot right down in front of me, which would be a bad, bad idea, seeing as the balcony floor – presumably badly affected by my weight after not having been stepped on in … years? decades? centuries? – has literally begun to collapse all around me. It’s like an avalanche of shale and weak concrete, with me right in the middle of it.
I do the only thing I can do, which is to throw myself sideways – not in the balustrade direction, but towards the wall – and put one foot, and then the other, on to the wide windowsill closest to me. It’s not the room I was aiming for, the one with the window wide open, but it’s the only surface I can see that looks as if it’s going to hold up. I put my hands on to the jutting-out brickwork around the window-frame, and grip as tightly as I can.
This is not good.
I mean, sure, the window-ledge is wide – just wide enough for my entire foot. But I’m wearing heels. With leather soles that don’t grip all that well at the best of times, let alone on a chilly, slightly rain-spattered window-ledge.
And, more to the point, I’m two storeys up. Two extremely tall storeys, thanks to the Georgian architects of this place, and their fondness for a high ceiling.
And the balcony that, only five seconds ago, was beneath my feet, is now little more than a crumbling ruin. There’s at least an eight-foot clear gap through which I can see down to the gravel driveway a good – oh, shit – thirty feet below.
This must be the dodgy masonry that Joel’s planning to repair this coming spring, under my aegis. Masonry that’s chosen a really bad time to throw in the towel, several months too early.
What am I going to do? I can’t, I absolutely cannot, grip on to the brickwork for ever. I mean, there’s nothing to really hold, if you see what I mean, just two right-angles that my hands are holding like a crab’s pincers.
‘Help!’ I call out. ‘Anyone? Help!’
But it’s pretty windy up here, and I’m a long, long way up and, as far as I know, Joel has started his slideshow way down below anyway, so the chances of anyone hearing my plaintive cries are … let’s be realistic. They’re zero. I mean, even the noise that mini-avalanche of concrete must have caused, smashing down to the gravel drive below, won’t have been audible. It’s fallen down at the back of the house, and everyone is in the library, in the front corner.
I’m trying very, very hard not to panic, but it’s getting harder with each passing second. There’s nothing else for me to hold on to. Nothing at all. I look, frantically, left and right, below my feet and above my head … the only thing sticking out at all amid the vast expanse of smooth wall is the ledge from the small window right above me. An attic window, presumably. Even if I could reach up and grip it, which would be a stretch, it wouldn’t give me anywhere to put my feet. I’d just have to sort of dangle off the side of the house. Instead of clinging to the side of it, as I’m doing now.
It’s a kind of Sophie’s Choice, really, of catastrophes.
I really think I’m a bit fucked.
I don’t know how long I can stay on this ledge for. My feet are already slipping, and I think I just heard a faintly sinister cracking sound that is probably the wood giving way beneath my weight. If the ledge breaks off, I’m done for. That’s it. I’ll be straight down through the hole to land on the driveway below.
I guess I’ve had a good enough life.
I mean, my childhood was pretty crap, admittedly, and I definitely got dealt a bit of a short straw in the parents department. But hey, it could have been a hell of a lot worse. And I’ve gone on to make a decent success of myself since then, right? I leave a bit of a legacy behind me, with my jewellery, even if I’ve not managed to have a child yet, or anything. And all right, I’ve made an absolute pig’s ear of my love life, but at least I can plummet to my certain death knowing that the people I love are happy. Nora
, in her idyll of Mark and Clara and the new baby. Cass, who’ll probably turn my messy demise to her advantage and use Joel’s best man as a (rich, albeit penny-pinching) shoulder to cry on. Olly, who …
Olly.
Oh, Olly.
If I’m going to die, in this terrible, undignified way, crumpled in a gory heap in my never-used wedding dress, I want Olly to be the last thing I think of. Not Joel. Joel, whose standards of perfection, both for himself and others, I could never, ever live up to. But Olly, who has always taken me the way I am. Flawed. Limited. Imbecilic, frankly, ever to have meandered out on to a two-hundred-year-old flat roof in the first place—
‘Oh, my God!’
I can hear, faintly, a sudden scream from below.
It’s Cass. I can just see that it’s Cass, appearing in the floodlit garden. She must have persuaded Nick to accompany her outside for a cigarette and a snog after all!
‘Cass!’ I bleat, even though I know she’ll be hard pressed to hear me back. ‘Get someone!’
‘She’s going to jump!’ Cass shrieks, to an accompanying bark of alarm from Nick, suddenly appearing from around the side of the house to join her. ‘Everyone! Come quick! Libby’s suicidal!’
What? No …
‘I’m not bloody suicidal!’ I call back, but obviously I can’t yell anywhere near as loudly as Cass, because it’ll make me wobble too much on my ledge. (A ledge that, even as I say this, makes another alarming cracking sound beneath my feet.) ‘In fact, I really, really don’t want to die!’
Now Nick has vanished, presumably to tell the assembled wedding guests that the bride-to-be has put on her white frock and is threatening to leap from the second storey and End It All.
‘Libby, don’t do it!’ Cass howls. ‘I know maybe I’ve never really been there for you, I know maybe I’ve always been too wrapped up in myself, but that’s only because my life always seemed so much more interesting than yours!’
As suicide-prevention speeches go, I have to be honest, it’s not the greatest.
‘If you want to back out,’ she’s going on, ‘and not marry Joel, then all you have to do is say so! He’ll get over it! To be honest with you, he’s seemed pretty distant all night, so I’m not sure he’ll be all that bothered anyway …’
A Night In With Grace Kelly Page 28
