Anyway, Charlie was conceived the year Diana turned eighteen. In actual fact, the news of his impending birth broke on Diana’s birthday. Dave had tried to put things right. He promised Chelsea he would pay for her to go to a spa in St Lucia for a fortnight if she would terminate the pregnancy. Chelsea accepted his kind offer of a holiday but refused to get rid of the baby. She announced as much by breezing into Diana’s birthday party in a midriff-baring top that showed her new bump to best effect. Susie filed for divorce a few weeks later.
Dave had tried to explain to his daughter that the marriage had been moribund for a long time. Why else would he have been attracted to Chelsea in the first place? But as far as Diana was concerned, it was clear the blame lay with her father. She forgave him to the extent that she allowed him to buy her a car and pay for driving lessons, but she vowed she would never speak to Chelsea, even when the bitch became her father’s second wife. Diana had never met Charlie. She wasn’t even interested in seeing the photograph of him on Dave’s mobile phone.
It was her dad’s betrayal of her mother that made Diana so determined that Ben would not do the same to her. She needed to be certain of his love. For a start, she wanted to cut the hen party short and go home at once. There was no way she was going to leave Ben alone in the house overnight now that she knew Juicy Lucy was still in town. She called Ben up to let him know what had happened.
‘She threw the first punch,’ Diana lied, ‘just in case she calls you up and says otherwise.’
By the time she got back to the house, Diana was feeling a little calmer. Her mother and Nicole had talked her down from the peak of her fury. Her recovery had been helped by an assurance from the spa hotel’s manager that they would not be using Juicy Lucy again. The last thing the hotel needed was for Diana to make a formal complaint.
When she got home, Diana found Ben sitting in front of the television, with a round of sandwiches on his lap. Clearly, news of Diana’s unfortunate encounter with the slag from his office had not ruined his appetite. Not yet, anyway. When he saw Diana’s face, Ben put his half-eaten sandwich back on the plate. Suddenly, he wasn’t hungry any more.
‘I have forgiven you,’ Diana announced. ‘I accept that you didn’t know that Ed had booked that lap-dancing club for your stag do. I even accept that Ed didn’t really know what he was doing. I’ve decided he can still be your best man. I also accept that you weren’t to know that Lucy had been booked as the entertainment for my hen night. But I’m upset, Ben, and I want us to do something in the service that represents the way things are going to be from now on.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been talking to Mum and Nicole on the drive back here about what would reassure me and they have suggested that we write our own vows. I think they’re right. We should write something more personal to us than the religious ones.’
‘Diana, we’re getting married in a cathedral. I don’t think we can write our own vows.’
‘I’m going to tell Dad to ask tomorrow morning. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t. It’s a free country. They let you say your own vows everywhere else, and Dad’s paid a lot of money for our service. Anyway, I have already started writing mine, and I’ve also done a draft of what I would like you to say.’
‘Hang on.’
Diana handed him a piece of paper.
‘I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to expect you to say these things in front of our friends and family.’
Ben read the densely typed lines. ‘You really want me to say this?’
‘I do. We can have a practice now, if you like.’ Diana took the paper back and began to read aloud what she had written.
‘“My darling Ben, you have been the centre of my life for the past seven years and now we are promising to be the centre of each other’s lives for ever. You know that you are my best friend, and I am yours. You are the only other person I will ever need in my life, and I am the same for you. Once we are married, we will need nothing but each other. Our pasts will be as a slate wiped clean.”’
Ben winced.
‘“To make sure that slate is wiped clean, we are going to promise today, in front of our families and our friends, that there will be no more secrets between us from this moment forward. You will always tell me where you are going and who you will be with, and I will do the same in return. When I call you, you will always pick up the phone. When I want you to come home, you will be there within half an hour. I will never have to wonder what you’re up to again.”’
‘Diana, these aren’t wedding vows. These are rules. This is you ticking me off in front of everyone we know. I can’t say these things.’
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘Well, frankly, no, I don’t want to.’
‘But you want me to be happy, yes?’
‘Of course I want you to be happy. But this is not about making you happy. This is unreasonable. These vows will make us both look like idiots. Why can’t we have the ordinary service? I’m going to promise to love and honour you for the rest of my life. Isn’t that enough?’
‘What about obey?’
‘No one says obey any more. In any case, that was what the woman had to say. The groom never had to say that.’
‘I want us to have our own vows. It won’t be our personal wedding without them.’
‘I’m not going to say that shit about always picking up the phone when you call. If I don’t pick up the phone, it’s because I’m busy.’
‘Busy with some slut!’
‘Or working. How about that for a novel idea?’
‘Ben, you don’t know how traumatic the past six months have been for me. I was completely happy in my life before I found that text from Lucy on your phone. You shattered my trust in you. No one else is to blame. You shattered it, Ben. Everything we built together was shaken because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants. Well, you’re not going to do that to me again. It’s my way or the highway. If you don’t want to promise me the things that I’m asking for, then let’s just call off the wedding and you can pay my father back every single penny he’s spent on it.’
There was the rub. Ben had already calculated that Dave had spent at least £50,000.
‘Are you ready to do that?’ Diana challenged him.
‘Of course not,’ said Ben. ‘We’re going to get married.’
While Diana was on the phone to her mother again, no doubt telling her what a loser Ben was, he picked up the sheet of vows and read them through again. It would be funny, he thought, if he didn’t know that Diana meant to make him say every humiliating word. His only hope was that the bishop would veto such craziness, or that he would grow a pair of balls overnight and finally tell Diana what he really thought. But £50,000? He would need to win the lottery at the same time. Ben put his head in his hands.
Chapter Forty-Four
Kate said goodbye to her two best friends and her mother and sister in the lobby of the spa hotel. They’d had a wonderful day together, just the five of them. Elaine said that she felt a thousand times better after an aromatherapy facial than after three weeks of radiotherapy. She said she was pleased too, to see Kate looking so relaxed.
Kate assured her that was only the result of an eyebrow shape.
Much as she had resented another demand on her time, Kate had to admit to herself that it was nice to spend the day with the most important women in her life. Back when they were at college, Kate, Helen and Anne had lived in each other’s pockets. Girly moments like that spa day were so rare now. The conversation had moved on too. They no longer talked about the boys they fancied. Instead, Kate nodded sagely as Helen and Anne talked schools with Tess and Elaine.
‘You’ve got all this ahead of you,’ said Helen. Later, as they walked from the spa dining room to the treatment area, Helen linked her arm through Kate’s and asked her if she’d thought about booking an appointment with her GP for a fertility check-up.
‘What?’ said Kate. ‘Ian and I haven’t eve
n talked about kids yet.’
Helen pulled a face. ‘Chop, chop.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Sorry,’ said Helen. ‘None of my business.’
It was the only bum note of the day. Kate tried hard to keep her annoyance from her face, but later, Tess asked if she was OK and seemed unconvinced when Kate insisted she was fine.
‘Thank you.’ Kate kissed Elaine and Tess goodbye for the twentieth time. Helen and Anne were already on the road.
‘Drive safely,’ they said. As far as they were concerned, she was going straight back to London, but Kate had other ideas. They thought she was going back to Ian. Ian thought she was staying at the spa hotel overnight. Kate texted Matt. It wasn’t entirely premeditated.
What are you doing?
Just dropped the children back with their mother.
Got time for a drink? Kate asked him.
He did have time.
So Kate drove down to Southampton and met Matt. They didn’t meet in their usual pub this time. Kate went to his house, a small, modern semi on the outskirts of town. It was the first time Kate had been in Matt’s personal space since 1997. His taste had changed quite considerably. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that he had acquired some taste at last. Matt accepted Kate’s compliments on his furnishings but admitted that he’d simply ordered straight from two pages of a John Lewis catalogue. ‘Interior design by numbers.’ Rosie had kept everything else.
Matt poured two glasses of wine.
‘How was your hen night?’ he asked.
‘Quiet, calm, relaxing. Except when a fight kicked off in one of the aerobics studios. Apparently, another bride ended up scrapping with a burlesque dance teacher.’
‘Now that I would have liked to see,’ Matt told her.
‘Well, God knows what it was about, but you could hear the shouting from miles away. It made it rather difficult to concentrate on the whale music in the massage rooms. I hate whale music,’ Kate added. ‘Makes me think of the dentist.’
‘Don’t mention dentists,’ said Matt. ‘Are you nearly ready for the wedding?’
Kate looked down into her glass.
‘Not really. I mean, there are all sorts of silly little things to be done.’
‘I know. I think the week running up to my wedding was one of the worst of my life. You’d think we were planning to invade another country.’
‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’ Kate asked.
Kate had come to Matt because she didn’t want to think about the wedding at all. She wanted to have an evening without wedding talk and without thinking about the marriage ahead of her. For just one night she didn’t want to sink into a sofa next to Ian and bite her tongue while he flicked between channels like a child. She didn’t want to look at his bald patch and wonder if the next forty years would all be downhill. Her mother’s illness, her father’s fear in the face of it and Ian’s seeming inability to understand why such things had affected Kate so badly had left her feeling tired and pessimistic. Her new job was more stressful than she had imagined. She wondered if she had bitten off more than she could chew.
Matt was a link to a better, more optimistic Kate. He was a link to a Kate who didn’t snap at the juniors in the office because they happened to walk in right after another frustrating conversation about radiotherapy or RSVPs. She wanted him to make her laugh again. Until Rosie came along, they’d had such an easy rapport. They’d always had such . . . chemistry.
‘Are you OK?’ Matt asked. He put his hand on her hand again. Kate felt heat flood her body. She looked up into his eyes and saw her own thoughts reflected back at her. She knew that if she closed her eyes now, he would take it as acquiescence. He would take it as a sign that he should kiss her. His eyes flicked from her eyes to her mouth. She licked her lips, sub-consciously making them glossier and more inviting.
‘Kate.’ Matt pronounced her name urgently. ‘Kate . . . we . . .’ He squeezed her fingers tighter. It was as though that pressure on her fingers broke the spell.
She looked at her watch. ‘My God, is that the time?’ she said, all false jollity. ‘I ought to go. I’m keeping you up.’
‘You don’t have to go on my account,’ said Matt.
It was precisely because of Matt that Kate had to go.
Ian was already in bed when Kate got back. He barely stirred as she tiptoed into the bedroom. She crept under the duvet and pressed herself against his back. She breathed in the smell of his freshly washed hair and the aftershave balm that she liked so much. She prayed that when she woke up next to him the following morning, those happy feelings of love she’d felt in Paris would be back again.
But the next day, Ian admitted that he had been unable to find the time to organise their honeymoon. It was the one and only significant job on the groom’s side of the to-do list.
‘It’s fine,’ said Kate, full of guilt from her late night at Matt’s house. ‘I’ll do it.’
That Sunday afternoon, she Googled hotels in Barcelona. They had left it much too late to find a bargain. It seemed that half the nation was going to be taking advantage of the extra bank holiday for the royal wedding to go on a spring holiday. Kate lost patience as she checked hotel after hotel in the city and found all of them booked or only having their most expensive rooms available. If Ian had only admitted that he didn’t have time to sort out a honeymoon, Kate could have been doing this search months ago. Now she was just getting more and more angry as she realised that there was little chance of the five-star start to her honeymoon she had hoped for. Kate tried four more hotels.
Ten minutes later, she was Googling ‘quickie divorce’.
Chapter Forty-Five
28 April 2011
Two days before her wedding, Kate travelled down to the south coast to stay with her parents and make the final preparations for the day itself. Kate’s mother had a long list of items that still needed to be checked off.
‘Does the florist know that two of these buttonholes need to be smaller than the rest for Ian’s little nephews? Have you spoken to the cake lady? Does the hotel have the music you want for your processional, or will we have to take a CD?’
Kate answered the enquiries distractedly. The whole time her mother was firing questions at her, Kate was simultaneously dealing with a barrage of emails from the office, all of them seemingly urgent. Her new colleagues were desperate to get her attention before she disappeared for her two-week honeymoon. (Kate had found a self-catering flat for that.) She had to try hard not to snap as so many things competed for her time. Her mother had insisted on taking all the little details on and yet there didn’t seem to be a single thing on her list that she could achieve without Kate’s input.
‘Dress fitting at five o’clock,’ was the last thing on the list. There was definitely no one but Kate who could deal with that.
So at five o’clock, Kate was back on the upside-down crate for the last time. Heidi, thank God, was having a day off, so it fell to the proprietor, Melanie, to lift the three-stone dress over Kate’s head.
‘Working here does wonders for your bingo wings,’ said Melanie, as the deceptively heavy skirt fluttered down to the ground. ‘Perfect.’ She gave the fabric another flounce. ‘Absolutely perfect. You look gorgeous, sweetheart.’
Kate looked at her reflection in the mirror. Melanie’s pronouncement was fair comment from the neck down, perhaps. Heidi may have been a cow, but the evil-tongued seamstress had worked wonders with the dress, adding extra boning along the seams that smoothed the line from Kate’s waist to her hip. The saddlebags were hidden as if by magic. The bodice fitted so snugly that Kate began to believe Heidi’s assurance that she wouldn’t have to spend all day hoicking it up. The skirt had been trimmed to the perfect length so that it showed just the toe of Kate’s wedding shoes, some blue brocade Blahniks her sister had found on eBay.
‘Those are the most fabulous shoes,’ Melanie cooed.
‘Thank you,’ said Kate.
&nb
sp; Now Kate was taking in her reflection from the neck up. Not so perfect at all. Where had that line between her eyes come from? Though she tried to smile, her eyes simply wouldn’t stop frowning. Had her jawline always been so square? Two muscular points stood out so far she could have done a reasonable impression of blockhead Formula One racing driver David Coulthard. She realised that she was clamping her jaw. She gave an embarrassed start as her back teeth actually slipped and squeaked across each other in a muscle spasm. Melanie didn’t seem to have noticed.
‘You’re all set,’ said Melanie, as she picked a tiny piece of fluff from the bodice. ‘There’s nothing left for us to do except give the dress a final pressing. Your sister is coming to collect the dress on the morning – am I right? Remind her she needs to bring a duvet cover. Doesn’t need to be an old one, because we’re not going to cut any holes in it, but it’s really much better than any of the covers that come with the dresses. They’re never big enough, so the dress always creases. We want you to look as perfect as possible.’
Kate nodded.
‘Do you want me to go through the loops on the back of the skirt one more time?’
‘No,’ said Kate, ‘I think I’ve got it.’
Melanie demonstrated the loops one more time regardless. It was quite a tricky process. The loops were made of fishing wire and were all but completely invisible, as was the white silk-covered button onto which the loops had to be hooked.
‘There you are,’ said Melanie. ‘Now you can dance the night away. Happy?’
Kate’s face crumpled.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Melanie. ‘Are you not happy with the dress? Do you think it still needs taking in or something?’
‘I think I don’t want to get married.’
Balling up the skirt of the ridiculous £2,000 dress as carelessly as though it were a dustbin liner, Kate sat down on the sofa where her mother and sister had sat months before. Outside, life carried on as normal. A post van pulled up opposite the postbox. Half past five. Last collection. A harassed young mum tried to persuade her toddler to keep up. The toddler was poking a stick into some dogshit. An old man tied his dog to the special ring outside the Co-op and informed the cross-eyed Jack Russell that he really wouldn’t be long. The dog whined as though they were to be parted for ever. Kate felt like whining too.
Kate's Wedding Page 20
