I wanted to scream with frustration. How could I tell him that I didn’t bloody want an identikit stylish wedding in a country house hotel with hundreds of his relatives there and flower girls and pageboys and the most boring menu known to man? How the hell could I possibly tell him I’d lied about the dress? And if I couldn’t talk about those things, how could I talk about the stuff that actually mattered?
“I’m just going to baste that goose.” I opened the oven and over the sound of sizzling fat, I said, “It’s too late to change things now, anyway. We’ve only got a month and a bit.”
“It’s not too late! Pippa, all that matters is that you’re happy. Is it the food? I can email Hugh, and we can make a plan for you to go down there and see him again and change anything you want to change. Bollocks to the cousins, it’s your wedding and if you want truffled foie gras and roast nightingale, that’s what you must have.”
He stood up and put his arms round me from behind. I turned round in his embrace, my hands still in the oven gloves, and looked up at him. I could feel tears starting to pour down my face, which was hot and scarlet from the heat of the oven.
“I don’t care about the food,” I said, “Well, I do, obviously. But that’s such a small thing. I’m more. . .”
“Here,” Nick said, “sit down. I’ll top up your glass. Spanx wants to know what’s wrong, and so do I. Come on, tell us.”
“When you say it isn’t too late to change things. . .” I began.
But then there was a knock at the door.
“Leave it,” Nick said. “It’ll be Jehovah’s Witnesses, or something.”
“No, I’ll get it.” I blew my nose on a piece of kitchen roll and went to the door, just as the knock came again and a familiar voice called, “Nick? Pippa? Are you there?”
It was Iain. He had the beginnings of a spectacular black eye, and there was blood all over his white shirt.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ring first,” he said. “I couldn’t. Katharine chucked my mobile in the fishtank.”
Once we’d got him changed into a jumper of Nick’s and given him a stiff whisky, and reassured him that it was totally fine, he hadn’t interrupted anything at all, it was only Christmas dinner after all, and Iain had stopped shaking quite so much, Nick said, “Surely Katharine didn’t do that to you, did she?”
“Katharine? God, no,” Iain said. “It was some bloke I’ve never seen before. I know who he is now, obviously, but until today I didn’t have a fucking clue he even existed. Because Ludmilla never fucking said.”
I had a pretty good idea what he was on about, of course, but Nick didn’t. So I turned my back to them and started cutting crosses in sprouts, and listened in silence while Iain spilled the beans.
“I’m a total shit, I know,” he said. “I feel like the world’s biggest cunt. But you know how it is. Ludmilla’s only twenty-two. She made it so easy. She was so, like, grateful for everything. She admired me. And Katharine. . . nothing I do is good enough for her. Because she deserves everything to be the best, obviously. And I let her down. And I deserve this, totally.” He gestured at his rapidly swelling nose.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t go to A&E?” said Nick.
“Nah,” Iain said. “It’s not broken. I’ve been twatted in the face before and lived to tell the tale. God, he was a big bastard, though. A fucking brickie, or something, by the looks of it.”
“Peelers?” said Nick.
Iain shook his head. “I’m not going to report it. I’d have done the same thing, in his shoes. Sneaky fucker, though! He was waiting outside our flat when Katharine and I left this morning to go to bloody church. He said, ‘Are you Iain Coulson?’ And like a total dick I said yes, and he said, ‘You’ve been fucking my woman, now I am going to fuck you up.’ And it would have been a lot worse, only Katharine kicked him in the bollocks and we managed to get back inside the door.”
“Bloody Nora, mate,” said Nick.
“Yeah,” said Iain. “And then she went completely mental. Not that I blame her. So she drowned both my mobiles – the main one and the other, the one I’d been using to. . . you know. It turns out she knew, she’s known for a while. She was just waiting to see whether some of the stuff I’d bought on a credit card that she knew about was presents for her or not, but it wasn’t, obviously. I got her a Lakeland voucher, same as usual. I thought that was what she wanted. And she’s told me to fuck off out of her life and never come back. So I hailed a cab and, like, here I am.”
It was undeniably true. There he was, at our kitchen table, with Spanx on his knee, a glass of our Jack Daniels in his hand and the flat filling up with smoke from his Marlboro Lights.
“Stay as long as you like,” Nick said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Begurk
That’s how you spell the noise hens make, right?
Just wanted to say thanks for organising tomorrow night, and have a great time.
Nx
Want to know what’s a bad idea? Having your hen night on New Year’s Eve, the day before you leave to spend two weeks working abroad. And what’s an even worse idea? Having the estranged husband of one of your hens being your self-invited house guest when you’re getting ready to go on said hen night. Honestly, it was seriously awkward. There I was trying to put my make-up on, craning my neck because the only mirror in Nick’s office is really high up on the wall, tiny and poorly lit, when Iain came and hovered in the doorway. I could just see a corner of his head in the mirror.
“Er. . . Pippa?” he said.
“Uhhh,” I said, because I was putting on mascara and as everyone knows, it’s essential to have your mouth open while doing this.
“I just wanted to say, um, I really appreciate you letting me use your sofa, and everything.”
I hoped that this would be the prelude to him saying he’d found a hotel to move to, but it wasn’t.
“Especially at such a busy time, with the wedding and all that.”
“It’s no bother,” I lied, putting the cap back on my mascara and starting to apply lipliner.
“Pip. Is Katharine. . . you’re going to be seeing her tonight, right?”
My hand jerked a bit and my lipliner skidded southwards over my chin. “Shit! Yes, as far as I know she’s going to be there. But I haven’t spoken to her. I left a voicemail for her the other day asking whether she was okay but she hasn’t come back to me.”
“If she’s there, Pip, please could you tell her I’d love it if she would call me? And that I miss her, and I’m sorry.”
“Iain! Seriously, that’s mental. It’s my hen night, if Katharine does turn up – and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she doesn’t, she must be devastated and I’m actually quite worried about her – the last thing she’ll want is for me to stage some sort of intervention on your behalf. I don’t want to give you the idea that you aren’t welcome here, because of course you are, but it’s just. . . It’s weird, you know? It puts me in a bit of an awkward position where Katharine’s concerned.” I squirted mousse into my hand and turned upside down to scrunch it through my hair. It felt horribly inappropriate being watched while I did this stuff, by someone who wasn’t Nick.
“I do understand, honestly I do,” Iain said, looking a bit sheepish. His black eye was fading, I noticed; it was getting to the point where it was nothing a bit of Touche Éclat couldn’t handle. “But if you were to have a moment, when you were, like, confiding, or whatever girls do on hen nights, maybe you could talk to her?”
I didn’t say that what girls do on hen nights was, in my case, going to be some mystery activity organised by Callie – for which I’d been instructed to dress warmly – followed by drinking enough cocktails to sink a fleet of battleships, then going on for dinner and eating until our spines stuck out at the back, and then possibly going on somewhere to dance. Not a trace of confiding in sight.
&nb
sp; “Iain, I promise that if Katharine comes tonight and if there’s a moment when it seems appropriate to talk to her, and if my female intuition says there’s a chance that wouldn’t totally ruin her evening, then I’ll think about it. And that’s the best I can do. Now I need to get changed.” And I gave him a look that I hoped said as eloquently as possible, ‘So get out of my makeshift bedroom, you adulterous toad.’
In the event, Katharine was the first of my hens to arrive at the designated meeting point at Waterloo. I’m sure she’d been doing her fair share of crying, but I guess she’d been at the Touche Éclat too, because it didn’t show one bit. She’d had her hair cut into a really short, sexy pixie cut, she was wearing super-skinny jeans and gold boots and a squashy faux fur coat, and she looked absolutely knockout stunning. I gave her a hug and told her so.
“And I’m so glad you came,” I said, “It’s wonderful to see you, it really is.”
For a second her lower lip wobbled. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls,” she said. “It’s been a bit shit, really. Actually, it’s been a lot shit. I still don’t know what I’m going to do, but I got sick of sitting at home counting the walls and crying and deleting Iain’s messages, so I thought I’d better come out and get pissed. Do the others know?”
I assured her that I hadn’t said anything to Callie. “I’ll tell her if you want, but I thought you’d rather do it, or not mention it at all.”
“Not mention it at all, definitely,” she said. “I expect I’ll show myself up horribly later by pouring my heart out and crying, but for now I’m going to have a good time and celebrate with you. Speaking of which, have you found a dress yet?”
But before I could update her, Callie and Phoebe arrived, shortly followed by Eloise and Tamar, Julia and my old mate Tom who I trained with, who’d insisted he was an honorary girl and should be allowed.
“So, here we all are then,” I said to Callie. “Come on, let’s have the big reveal.”
“Right, follow me,” she said. “It’s just across the river.”
Callie’s idea of booking ice-skating at Somerset House proved to be inspired. I felt as if I’d wandered into a Christmas card – apart from the fact that my arse was soaking wet, obviously. I’d fallen over more times than I could count, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I’d attempted to skate backwards, with some degree of success, holding the edge of the rink with one hand and Katharine with the other. Callie and Phoebe had braved the middle of the ice, fallen over, and found it impossible to get back on their feet, and the harder they tried the more they laughed. Tom had not unexpectedly put us all to shame by proving to be really good at skating, and was doing all sorts of fancy one-legged manoeuvres in between zooming around at top speed. Tamar had wisely decided that she wasn’t risking falling over in her condition, thanks, and was sipping mulled apple juice in the bar, and Eloise and Julia had taken a break and joined her.
It felt like about five minutes since we’d first glided – or rather precariously slid – on to the ice, that our session was over and it was, as Callie succinctly put it, “Time to fall face-first into a vat of cocktails.”
So that’s what we did. We went to The Savoy, where they have a fabulous martini trolley that gets wheeled over to you by a charming and patient mixologist who doesn’t mind when you ask for the fourth time what the other kind of bitters was, not the rhubarb or the chocolate but the other one? There were handsome waiters who kept bringing us more bowls of smoked almonds, cheese straws and olives without us having to ask. There were totally fabulous loos with ankle-deep carpets, marble tiles, rose hand cream and mirrors that made me look like I’d lost a stone.
After a bit we went on to a so-hip-it-hurts burger bar, and I have no idea what Callie had had to do, probably promise them the blood of her first-born child or something, but instead of having to queue outside in the cold like everyone else, we got whisked straight in to a table, and we ate fat- and salt-laden junk food washed down with bottles of lager and followed by ice-cream sundaes for those who had room. It was over the pudding that Katharine finally did start to cry, but it was only to say what a great time she was having, how much she loved us all, how glad she was that she’d come, and how Tom was the best ice-skater in the world, easily, and should enter the Winter Olympics.
Then we went on to a club and danced, and Eloise was absolutely sure she saw Harry Styles and Kendall Jenner, but Tamar said that was impossible, because she never sees any celebs, ever, but then she saw Daniel Radcliffe and had to admit that she was wrong. By this stage both she and Julia were starting to feel the pace, and said they wouldn’t come with us to see the fireworks, but would head home early and go to bed instead, which I chalked up to my growing list of reasons why motherhood is clearly a bad idea.
And that’s where it all gets a bit fuzzy, to be honest. We walked back to the river, fighting to stay together through the crowds of tourists. It was absolutely mad – there were people everywhere, tides of them all appearing to be trying to move in different directions. I was almost pushed off my feet several times, and when we eventually got to fireworks viewing point, Eloise said she thought she’d go home as well, before the Tube got too rammed. The rest of us agreed that if we got separated, we’d just head home too.
So I waited with Tom, Callie and Phoebe for midnight to come and the fireworks to start. And it was amazing, it really was – everyone counting down, then the chimes of Big Ben echoing over the noise of the crowd, and everyone kissing everyone else and wishing them happy new year, and then all going, “Oooh,” in unison at each spectacular explosion and shower of white, green, golden or violet sparks. The display seemed to take ages and I stood, happily transfixed, even forgetting about my sore feet, until it was over. Then when I looked around me I realised I’d lost everyone else.
I checked my phone, but there were no messages and I realised they probably wouldn’t get through anyway, because all around me tourists were frantically sending texts to their relatives in New Zealand and Nigeria and Nicaragua. So I decided to wander in the general direction of home, and if I found them that would be great, but if not I’d just walk back to the flat or get a bus.
It wasn’t long before I spotted Callie and Phoebe in the crowd ahead of me, but there was no way I could get to them – there were just too many people. I started to feel a bit panicky, pushing against a wall of humanity, trying not to let Callie’s blonde head and Phoebe’s fur-hatted one disappear from view. After a while they paused, leaning against the balustrade and looking out over the dark river, and I hurried towards them.
But then I stopped, because they kissed each other. It wasn’t the kind of celebratory, suddenly-we’re-all-friends kiss everyone had been exchanging on the stroke of midnight. It wasn’t the sort of cheesy snog some girls always seem to do with their mates when the DJ plays Katy Perry and they want to impress blokes. I wasn’t very close to them, but I was close enough to see that this was the real thing, the way two people kiss who love each other.
Callie’s fingers were buried in Phoebe’s tangle of red hair, keeping warm against her skin under her fur hat. Phoebe’s arms fitted snugly, familiarly around Callie’s slim waist. As I watched, she reached a hand up and stroked Callie’s cheek, and Callie broke off the kiss to brush her lips against Phoebe’s fingers. I knew I was intruding on a moment that was, in spite of the throngs of strangers surrounding them, intensely private. I knew I wasn’t supposed to have seen them, so I turned away and went home, the picture of the two of them together mixing with the martinis and champagne and lager and shaking my brain into a cocktail of confusion.
I didn’t know whether I was going to say anything to Callie about what I’d seen. I had no way of telling when things between her and Phoebe had changed. I felt hollow with hurt that she hadn’t felt able to tell me something so important. But still, a lot of things had begun to make sense.
Here’s another thing that’s a seriously poor idea: packing for a two-week trip abroad with only two hours to g
o before you absolutely have to leave, and a stinking hangover that’s kept you confined to bed for most of the day.
Nick tried several times to wake me up, but I just hid under the duvet and said, “Leave me alone, please, I’m dying.” So he put a can of Diet Coke next to the bed and went out somewhere with Iain, leaving me to spend the day wallowing in my own filth, cuddling Spanx, trying to sleep and worrying about Callie.
If she hadn’t told me about her and Phoebe, she wouldn’t have told anyone. And that was weird, because honestly, I wouldn’t have cared in the slightest, and she knows that – Tom’s been out ever since I’ve known him and he’s one of my best mates. And besides, this is England in the twenty-first century, not Victorian times or Uganda or something. Only a reactionary idiot would react to Callie and Phoebe having a relationship with anything other than delight that they’d found something that made them happy.
Only a reactionary idiot like Phoebe’s dad. Over the last couple of years I’d heard a few stories about him, some from Phoebe herself, who tried to make light of his behaviour, and some second-hand from Callie, who didn’t. And given how protective Phoebe was of him, I guessed there were many, many other things that only she and her mum knew about.
I remembered when we’d been chatting about holidays, and Callie and I reminisced about the epic Club 18-30 binge to Ibiza we’d been on together a few years before. Phoebe had looked all wistful and told us that she’d planned something similar with her mates, only a couple of days before they were due to leave her mum had come down with absolutely awful flu and hadn’t been able to do all the heavy lifting and stuff for Vernon, Phoebe’s dad. Which would normally have been fine, because although Vernon’s mobility was limited, he was capable of getting himself to the shower and sticking something in the microwave, or whatever. But then his back suddenly locked into terrible spasms, Phoebe said, leaving him unable to stand, and that was the end of her holiday.
It must have taken a huge amount of courage for Phoebe to leave home at all. I remembered when Phoebe first moved in with Callie, shortly after Callie and David had split up. I’d got the train to Southampton to see her and do a brief stint on drunken text prevention duty, but soon realised that no drunken text prevention would be needed. Callie had looked all happy and shiny, somehow, like she’d been dipped in glitter, even though she was wearing her normal sombre dark lawyer’s trouser suit.
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