by Wendy Holden
A whole film was unreeling in her mind, one starring Joey which she was directing. Now he was leaving the flat and, with a machine-gun clatter of feet, hurtling down the stairs. Now, with an exploding slam of front door, he was outside, blinking in the North London sunlight, hastening to Arcadia Walk to grab a cab. Throwing himself in the back he now realised – with a slap of palm to forehead – that this morning of all mornings he had forgotten his phone! And to make things worse the traffic was terrible – sun bouncing off stationary car roofs as far as the eye could see. Distant traffic lights were turning from green to red to green again before his taxi could even move. Nell could picture it all so clearly she could actually feel the frustration grinding in his guts. Poor Joey!
The film in her head continued to play. Now, finally, the traffic was moving and he was getting close. The shining black taxi was coming along the road, the blocky orange indicator winking to announce the car’s slow swerve into the kerb outside the register office. The car door had slammed; he was paying; if she strained her ears, right now, Nell thought, she could even hear the cheery salutation of the driver as the taxi pulled away.
And now, downstairs, Joey was pushing open the heavy, brass-fitted Edwardian double doors into the gloomy lobby. He was diving up the heavy carved staircase. Any minute now he would burst into the room, cheeks boyishly pink with exertion, eyes bright with love and apology. He would sweep her into his arms, then notice the municipal muzak. ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ was playing now. They would look at each other, and giggle. Nell giggled now, thinking about it.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Juno suspiciously. She clearly had a dim view of Nell’s sense of humour since the X Factor remark.
‘Nothing.’ Nell looked down at her bouquet.
She could no longer suppress the urge to look at her phone. She had turned it off, but now she got it out of her clutch and turned it back on again. Her nerves had got the better of her tolerance, and while she wasn’t worried, she was annoyed. Was it too much to ask that Joey could send a text, let her know that he was on his way?
‘Bring Me Sunshine’ had now faded out and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ had taken up the baton. As Dionne Warwick paused after the first line, Nell’s message box beeped.
Joey. Relief flooded her; all the same, her fingers shook as she opened the message. Words sprang on to her screen.
I’ve met someone else and I can’t marry you. I’m sorry.
Nell read it a couple of times, not understanding. The phrase bounced against her brain like rain on an umbrella. She could hear the sound but felt none of the meaning.
Then, suddenly, she did. She felt something inside her shatter. She bent over as if sheltering from a bomb blast.
‘Nell!’ Suddenly Rachel was beside her, putting her arms around her.
‘Oh no! I can’t bear it!’ The pain in Nell’s heart was unbelievable. Perhaps she would die of it. Who had Joey met? It made no sense whatsoever. He’d never mentioned anyone. All he ever did was go to work and then come home again, to her. Didn’t he?
She kept swallowing and rocking back and forth, emitting low moans. She kept covering her mouth, as if she might be sick. The shock was so absolute that she could not cry.
I want to kill myself. The thought slid into Nell’s brain and gleamed there, sharp and seductive. Why not? It really seemed the easiest way out. She would never, ever get over this. She saw time moving slowly ahead, like a heavy river, into the future. She saw all the hours and days and weeks she must get through under the heavy burden of what had just happened. So many years would have to pass before she got even a distant glimpse of feeling normal again. It seemed to her that the wait was too long, and might not be worth it anyway. She should run out into the street and under the first car that came along.
As if guessing at all this, too, Rachel held her tightly. ‘You poor thing,’ she kept whispering. ‘You poor, darling thing.’
The door of the little room now opened a crack and Nell heard the registrar clear her throat. ‘We’re ready to start . . . Oh dear. Is everything all right?’
Nell forced her skull up from her hands. It felt very heavy. Perhaps grief really did weigh down the brain. She had been worried that she might cry if she tried to speak, but now all she felt was a great weariness.
Rachel took charge. ‘Not exactly,’ she said, her tone capable but tense. ‘The bridegroom’s not here.’
The registrar’s eyes bulged with panic. She looked at the narrow gold watch strapped to her plump and freckled wrist. ‘Oh dear. Is he going to be long? I have another wedding at three.’
Nell suppressed a heaving sob at the thought of the wedding at three, and all the weddings after that, and all the weddings before as well. People got married all the time, all over the world, old, young, beautiful, ugly, for the first time or the twentieth. And yet she herself had been left in the lurch.
‘Traffic, is it?’ pressed the registrar.
‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s not coming. At all.’
The registrar was blinking repeatedly, a serial viewing of gunmetal eyeshadow. ‘Oh dear.’ The air smelt of her sweet, thick perfume and an underwhiff of perspiration and fear.
Dean Martin had started on the muzak tape now, crooning about moons hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. But what hit Nell was the sheer farce of the situation and she bent over and burst uncontrollably into tears. She felt like crying for the rest of her life.
The registrar was alarmed. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she gasped, hurrying out of the room and closing the door behind her.
Bent over, her face in her knees, Nell heard Rachel murmur to Juno to go out too.
‘Joey’s dumped me,’ Nell wailed into her lap.
She felt Rachel draw in a deep breath. ‘Not necessarily the end of the world,’ she said softly. ‘If he’s the type of guy to pull a stunt like this he’s not really the guy you want to spend your life with.’
Nell spoke into her knees. ‘I’m nearly thirty,’ she said into her fingers, bleakly. The idea of having to resume her life where she had left off, start working on the catalogues again, all by herself, for ever, weighed on her like a ton of concrete.
She could feel the light pressure of Rachel’s hand on her back. ‘Yes,’ she gently agreed. ‘But you’d still have been nearly thirty if Joey had turned up.’
Nell clutched her hair, crushing the daisies in her fingers. How stupid the whole Sixties theme had been. Silly dressing-up, mere stage-setting for a production in which Joey, in the end, hadn’t turned up to play his part. ‘I’m on my own,’ she whispered
‘Join the club,’ said Rachel. ‘Although it’s not quite the same club.’
Nell recognised that she was checkmated. Joey wasn’t here, but at least he wasn’t dead.
‘No, but he’s dead to you,’ Rachel pointed out when she said this.
‘I’m hardly going to venerate his memory, though,’ Nell said tightly. ‘Frankly, if he had a grave I’d dance on it.’
She looked up at Rachel in concern; was that going too far? But Rachel was smiling. ‘That’s the spirit.’
‘I feel such a fool.’
‘Don’t,’ Rachel said briskly. ‘It isn’t your fault. You were in love with someone different from the person you were marrying.’
‘No, that was Joey. He was in love with someone different.’
Rachel patted her shoulder. ‘I mean that the Joey you loved and the lying reptile he really is are two different people.’
A great hard lump was blocking Nell’s throat and hot tears were stinging her eyes. She swallowed frantically and buried her face again.
Rachel patted her back. She opened a small silver handbag and produced a small silver flask. ‘Brandy,’ she said, proffering it. ‘It might help.’
Nell stared at her. Rachel had come prepared.
‘You knew, didn’t you? You expected this.’
Rachel met her gaze sorrowfully. ‘I didn’t really know. Not for definite. But I did think he sounded too good to be true.’ She shook her head. ‘I never thought he would be as bad as this, though.’
The liquid burned down Nell’s throat and settled into a glow in her stomach. She took another swig. And another. Gradually, she felt stronger.
‘Go on,’ Rachel encouraged her. ‘You may as well finish it.’ Nell drained the last few fiery drops.
‘Better?’ asked Rachel.
Nell nodded. The alcohol had numbed the sharp edges and added a helpful sense of distance. She felt now as if she were watching someone else. But what should this someone else now do?
‘I’ll tell you what I would do,’ said Rachel, producing some wipes and proceeding to clean up Nell’s streaked face.
CHAPTER 14
Rachel’s idea was to carry on as if nothing had happened.
‘But nothing has,’ Nell pointed out. ‘There wasn’t a wedding, was there . . . ?’ She gulped, and new, hot tears began to slide down her face. She tried not to care that Juno, squinting through her glasses in the bright sunlight, was staring at her curiously.
They were outside on the town hall steps. The plump registrar had expressed her deepest condolences yet was obviously relieved to get rid of them. Rachel was insisting they went to the Pink Pirate, where Joey had booked a lunchtime table for two to celebrate their wedding.
‘I can’t,’ Nell said bluntly.
‘You should,’ Rachel replied, equally bluntly. ‘It shows you have balls. That you’re not going to give up and crawl away.’
‘But that’s exactly what I want to do,’ Nell groaned. Why did Rachel not understand this? She of all people.
Rachel put an arm around Nell’s trembling shoulders and squeezed them. ‘My dear, as I’m in a uniquely informed position to tell you, life goes on. And lunch goes on, more to the point.’
‘Yes . . . but . . .’ Nell made a catch-all gesture intended to convey everything from the state of her hair to the great chasm of eternal misery yawning inside.
Rachel dismissed this kindly, but firmly. ‘We need to eat somewhere. It’s not as if everyone at the Pink whatsit will know what’s happened.’
She had a point, Nell thought. No one knew, apart from themselves and the registrar. Most especially, her parents didn’t know.
She felt the first glimmerings of something like relief. Thank God they hadn’t come. They would never need to be told. There was something about the whole sorry mess to be thankful for after all.
‘Well?’ Rachel pressed.
‘I suppose we may as well,’ Nell allowed. She could do with a drink or three, at any rate.
‘That’s the spirit!’ Rachel clapped her on the back. ‘Now toss the bouquet!’
Nell had forgotten about this particular rite of bridal passage. As there were no bridesmaids or even any guests apart from a purple-haired widow and her eccentric small daughter, it seemed slightly pointless. Bouquets were traditionally tossed by brides so a single woman in the crowd could catch the posy and become the next up the aisle. But she, Nell, hadn’t even got married herself and she doubted that Rachel, after her own bitter wifely experience, was planning to repeat the experiment.
She threw it anyway, and watched the white daisies wheel upwards into the bright blue sky. Rachel, sportingly, caught it and a car hooted as it passed.
‘Goodbye to the scene of the crime,’ Juno remarked darkly, once they were on their way in a taxi.
As the vehicle rattled through the leafy streets of Hampstead, Nell’s misgivings returned. This was madness. She felt angry, despairing and desperately sorry for herself.
She was, despite this, half aware of a conversation that Juno and Rachel were having. ‘What did you say?’ Rachel was exclaiming, her voice low, but urgent.
‘That I called Carrington’s,’ Juno replied composedly, making no attempt to keep her own voice down. ‘While you two were in that cupboard.’
Nell flashed back to the moment she and Rachel had emerged from the registrar’s anteroom. Juno had not been, as expected, in the big ceremonial chamber with the maces and spades. She had been sitting outside on a bench in the lobby.
‘I asked the registrar’s assistant for a local telephone directory,’ Juno was explaining calmly. ‘Then I asked if I could make a call. She didn’t mind at all.’
‘And what did Carrington’s say?’ Rachel pressed. She still spoke in a murmur, apparently convinced that Nell was lost in her own dark thoughts. Now she glanced at her friend and saw Nell was following every word.
Juno rummaged in her pocket and produced a spiral-bound notebook. She licked the tip of her finger and flicked through the pages. ‘They said that no one called Joey worked for them any more.’
‘What?’ Nell and Rachel exclaimed in unison.
‘That can’t be right!’ Nell gasped. It was difficult to absorb this after all that had happened. She was so shaken up it was difficult to remember anything properly. But she was sure that Joey had said nothing about leaving his job.
‘Well, it’s what Carrington’s said.’ Juno was referring to her notebook. ‘He left his job yesterday. The same day that the lease ended on his flat.’
‘Lease?’ But he’d told her he owned it. She had been going to move in there, it was to be her new home! Nell’s hands were pressed against her mouth. She felt that she might be sick.
‘Now, hang on a minute. He left his job and moved out of his flat? Yesterday?’ Rachel’s head was twisting so fast between her daughter and her newly stricken friend that curls were detaching themselves from the chignon and flying about. ‘But he took you to the hotel last night,’ she directed at Nell, puzzled.
Nell could only stare back. She was numb, her every feeling masked by the same heavy, thick sensation that had followed Joey’s text. There was something to understand here, something horrid and hurtful, but she couldn’t grasp the edges of it. When she tried to, it slid away from her.
‘But taking you to the hotel,’ Rachel said slowly, brow clearing, ‘meant that he could leave the flat without you knowing anything about it.’
In some distant part of her Nell could see that it was possible Joey had set her up, deliberately deserted her and never intended to marry her. But what possible reason could he have had to treat her like this?
‘Why?’ she burst out, looking at the others in utter bewilderment. ‘Why did he do it? It’s so cruel.’
Rachel squeezed her hand. ‘It makes no sense. But people can be cruel.’
Juno leaned forward and took her other hand. ‘As Miss Marple’s always saying,’ she said gravely, ‘there are some very bad people in the world.’
At the Pink Pirate, Larry was resplendent with his trademark gelled up hair and falling-down jeans. ‘Where’s that nice boyfriend of yours?’ he demanded.
Rachel put her face close to his ear. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘Like that, is it?’ Larry rolled his eyes. ‘Well, chin up, ducky,’ he urged Nell. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Chance’d be a fine thing, eh? I like a good grind, myself. Table’s this way, ladies.’
The Pirate was, as usual, full of wealthy, glamorous, successful-looking types who seemed to have stepped straight from the weekend supplements. Perhaps even more than usual; the place was packed. ‘I wonder why there are so many people here,’ Rachel mused, struggling between the punters.
‘It’s the dancing,’ Juno said, pointing at a board on the wall advertising ‘Larry’s Larky Sixties Saturday Lunchtime Disco’.
They settled at their table. Over champagne, Rachel began to tell Nell that she could not let Joey beat her. So what if he had made a mockery out of her love and smashed her happiness into smithereens? That didn’t mean she was
giving in. She had her pride.
‘But I don’t,’ Nell wailed. ‘I’ve been entirely rejected and humiliated.’
The dancing had begun. ‘Ticket To Ride’ was now blaring out in the bar, and both the lounge and the bar were crowded with dancing families, all braying with laughter. The main event was Larry, who was tripping the light fantastic, leaping about with his mouth open in a permanent grin. He was clearly the type of manager who felt it incumbent on him to get events under his roof going with a swing.
‘Come on, darling!’ he shouted to Nell as ‘Waterloo Sunset’ struck up. ‘Get up and dance! You’ve dressed for it!’
Nell closed her eyes. Being stood up at the altar was bad enough. That Larry assumed her wedding outfit was merely homage to his lunchtime disco added insult to injury.
Thankfully, the landlord had turned his attention elsewhere. ‘Life’s just one long party, don’t you agree?’ he shouted at a very old lady gamely doing the twist.
And you’re invited, Nell thought, bitterly remembering the line she had written in so many catalogues.
‘So what about the honeymoon?’ Rachel broke in.
Nell’s miserable thoughts suddenly came into focus. She had imagined the rest of her life a formless, planless blur. But there was, of course, one immediate plan that she had completely forgotten about. A week in a country gastropub.
‘Shit. I should ring them.’ Nell was on her feet now. ‘I made the booking. I’d better cancel it.’
‘But why?’ Rachel drained her champagne glass. ‘Why not go?’
Nell, incredulous, let the hand holding her smartphone flop to her side. ‘What?’
‘So the wedding never happened,’ Rachel went on cheerily. ‘But you’ve had the wedding party. So why not go on the honeymoon too?’
Was Rachel joking? Drunk? Sticking to the lunch plan was one thing. But going on the honeymoon, a bride without a groom . . . Nell struggled to find words to express the strength of her objection. There was no possibility. No way on God’s earth.
