by Fiona Walker
‘Gosh.’ Sophia kissed Josh on his curly blond head and let him go. She squinted across to Zoe who was being blissfully calm and serene as she was introduced to most of Niall’s confusing, bickering, hard-drinking extended family. ‘What’s she like? I’ve hardly met her.’
‘Lovely,’ Sally sighed, glancing briefly towards Matty. ‘Perfect for Niall. I think she’ll calm him down without knocking the spirit out of him. Very strange cook.’
‘Jolly attractive, though,’ Sophia sniffed rather resentfully. ‘Cass was so shocked that she walked straight into the gent’s loos after the ceremony by mistake.’
‘I know.’ Sally giggled. ‘Apparently Rory Franks was in there sniffing coke. She thought he was stooping over a mirror because he’d lost a contact lens and offered to help him find it, telling him he hadn’t a hope of spotting it with “that dusty-looking glass”. The next moment she’s whipped it off him and wiped it clean with a hanky. He’s distraught.’
To the front of Fosbourne Holt House, glowering beneath a flower-strewn harness, Snob was waiting on the impressive gravel carriage sweep, pawing angrily at the pebbles with a front leg and glaring belligerently at all around him. His pink nose bobbed as he flicked flies from his twitching ears, and he snapped at the harsh driving bit, loathing its presence in his mouth.
The whites of his eyes rolled menacingly as the bride and groom approached.
‘Jesus, I’m not getting in that thing with him in front.’ Niall regarded him in terror. The borrowed trap, despite its lick of polish, was desperately woodwormed and rickety, and Snob looked far too eager to rev off the grid and race everyone to the reception party.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Zoe told him, letting Enid jump into the trap first, her green bow tattered from being chewed by Wally during the ceremony. ‘Gus slipped him a huge tranquilliser in his morning feed – I saw him. He’s tottering around like a seaside donkey.’
Niall looked disbelieving but, as promised, when Gus climbed up in front to drive them back to Fosbourne Ducis, Snob set off at a steady if grumpy amble, shooting Tash a resentful look as she stood alongside with the cheering wedding crowd, throwing confetti and swallowing most of it as it flew back in her face.
Watching them go, Tash realised that her cheeks were streaming with tears. She looked around for Hugo, but before her eyes could search him out, found herself catching sight of Lisette hastily dabbing a tear from her own cheek, her back turned so that only Tash saw. It was so utterly unexpected that she stared in amazement. Looking up, Lisette suddenly smiled and moved forward until they were standing just a foot apart. Her huge, luminous eyes were glittering with emotion.
‘You must loathe me, Tash, and I can’t say I blame you.’
Tash shook her head. ‘Why should I loathe you? If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ Lisette groaned, closing her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve made you terribly unhappy, haven’t I?’
Tash blew her nose. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life,’ she said truthfully.
‘I’ll get my solicitors to sign my share of the horse over to you first thing next week,’ Lisette was muttering. Suddenly the huge eyes opened wider. ‘Did you say you were happy?’
Tash was gaping at her too. ‘Did you say you were going to sign Snob over to me?’
‘My half of him.’ Lisette nodded. ‘And the money he won at Badminton – I certainly didn’t earn it, and after today I don’t think I’ll need it. But I have a condition to attach.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Tash asked shakily. She knew only too well how unpleasant Lisette’s conditions could be.
‘You know how Hugo feels about you, don’t you?’ Lisette suddenly smiled. It was such a sweet smile and so totally without malice that it transformed her face entirely.
‘Yes.’ Tash sucked her bottom lip.
‘And you feel the same way about him?’
‘Yes.’ Tash sucked her top lip too, heart hammering.
‘In that case, I want you to add a line to your best man’s speech.’ Lisette suddenly took hold of her hand and squeezed it. ‘I think I owe Hugo a favour, and this might just be it . . .’
Guests were milling about on the gravel now, offering or begging lifts, gossiping like mad about what had happened and telling each other the quickest route to the farm.
There was a small press pack prowling around too, originally there just to get a few celeb shots of Niall for the Sunday supplements and gossip columns, but now snapping everything in sight – especially Tash – and barking into mobile phones as they realised they were on to a wonderful front-page splash.
Trying to hide behind a bay tree, she found herself standing next to Matty who was both hugely put out that he wasn’t in on the secret and hugely relieved that his friend had married a woman of whom he thought the world, not his feckless sister.
‘I owe you an apology for not coming clean.’ Tash scuffed her black brogues on the gravel as she mindlessly covered up the hoof slides. ‘But we thought the fewer people who knew the better.’
Matty nodded, stroking Linus’s fine, silken hair and squinting across the park to the largest of the sun-drenched lakes.
‘Mother knew, I take it?’
She grinned. ‘We tried to keep it a secret from her, but you know what she’s like. If she’d still thought I was marrying Niall this morning, she’d have drugged me to keep me away. She guessed that I’d changed my mind, but Niall got into such a panic that everything snowballed and we left it far too late to explain to everyone. The only thing we could do was ask for her help. And Daddy’s.’
‘But not mine?’
‘The more people who knew, the messier it was going to become. It seemed much easier to do it this way. We didn’t tell Sophia either.’
‘Oh, c’mon!’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Credit me with a bit more sense than her. I’m one of Niall’s oldest friends.’
‘Who hasn’t called in weeks,’ Tash reminded him. ‘Listen, you’re one of the reasons that Niall noticed Zoe in the first place.’
‘I what?’
Tash smiled, reaching out to tickle Linus’s hand which was grabbing for her rose buttonhole. ‘It was only when Zoe told Niall about you two having a bit of a flirt that he saw her for what she really is – a sexy, desirable, clever woman, not a general skivvy and mother-figure for the rest of the Lime Tree Farm mob. You opened his eyes, Matty. And yet you’ve avoided coming near any of us all year for fear of seeing her and feeling guilty. What you did was shitty, but no one blames you anymore. Niall is positively grateful – he told me so. Even Sally is, I think.’
‘Sally?’ He looked bewildered.
‘If you think how it made Niall see Zoe, imagine how the news made Sally re-evaluate her reliable, pompous, eco-friendly husband. Especially when she hopped over the fence for a while herself and found that the grass on the other side was covered in weedkiller.’
Matty looked furious. ‘I am not pompous!’
‘Of course not.’ Tash kissed him on the cheek and wandered off to find Hugo and walk back through the fields to the farm with him.
At the Lime Tree Farm reception, the notion of a formal line-up to shake hands was abandoned altogether and Zoe and Niall wandered around hand-in-hand instead, laughing delightedly at people’s reactions as the same story spilled out again and again yet never lost its shine.
Zoe was glowing and utterly content. With India roaming around making sure that all Niall’s relatives were eating and drinking enough, and Rufus frantically chatting up Henrietta’s daughter Emily in a corner of the marquee, she dragged Niall into the house for a few moments alone. It was full of eventers who had sequestered themselves to talk shop. Finally, they resorted to shutting themselves in the laundry room to be alone.
‘I have a confession to make.’ Niall was looking very hangdog. ‘In all the last-minute changes, I forgot to phone the airline and change the name on the ticket for tomorrow’s flight.’
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br /> ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Zoe laughed, kissing him. ‘The name won’t be any different. I’m Mrs O’Shaughnessy now, remember? No one’s going to quibble over an initial when we’re waving a marriage certificate in their faces.’
His face lit up and he started to kiss her back delightedly. ‘Christ, I love Zoe O’Shaughnessy.’
‘Now this,’ Zoe sighed as he lifted her on to the tumble dryer and dropped down to disappear beneath her skirts, ‘is what I call married bliss.’
‘Wow!’ he let out a muffled laugh, ‘I can see my wife flashing before my eyes – I must have died and gone to heaven.’
Having thundered around the marquee with Tom and Tor for twenty minutes playing ‘Chase the Big Bottom’, Tash collapsed exhausted at the top table beside Hugo and plunged into the glass of champagne he had collected for her.
‘You’re simply marvellous with kids,’ he laughed.
‘I love them,’ she said simply, feeling champagne bubbles pop in her nose. She ducked as Polly threw a handful of confetti at her before running away giggling.
‘Then we’ll have lots.’ Hugo’s eyes were watching her closely for a reaction, but Tash hadn’t heard him.
‘I can’t believe it’s gone so well today,’ she sighed, leaning against him and pressing her chin to his shoulder. ‘You were so terrific. I’m hugely proud of you.’
‘You do realise that once we’ve all stuffed our faces you’re going to have to make a speech, don’t you?’ he asked as she grinned happily at him, blown away by the fact it had all worked out so well.
‘I love you,’ she breathed, her face flushed from her recent exertions, dark hair escaping from its ponytail and clouding around her face. Her eye make-up was smudged, her tie lop-sided and she still had a huge red lip-stick stain on her cheek.
‘You are so beautiful, Tash, I can’t wait to move you into Haydown properly and start to look after you.’
‘Do you really mean that?’ she gulped, almost beside herself with excitement.
‘Of course I do.’ He started to kiss her mouth with a cool, skilful tongue until she felt like jelly on a spin dryer. Pulling away, he cupped her face in his hands and looked at her seriously, his face suddenly anxious. ‘You do want to move in with me, don’t you?’
She nodded, still staring at him with eyes as misty as Lalique glass. ‘More than anything.’
Hugo’s curly mouth suddenly couldn’t stop smiling.
‘Now I’ve finally got you,’ he pressed his lips to her ear, his voice no more than a breath, ‘there’s absolutely no way I’m going to let another bounder like Niall O’Shaughnessy swagger in and steal you away from me again.’
‘That’ll never happen.’ She kissed him back, sliding a hand beneath the table and feeling him quiver as her fingers started to perform some dressage of their own on his thigh.
‘Too right it won’t,’ Hugo laughed, pushing her hair back from her face and looking at it. Tash was almost blown away by the intensity of those laser-blue eyes. ‘Tash, there’s something I’ve got to ask you –’
She pressed her lips to his mouth and kissed the question clean away, knowing what he had been about to ask. When they finally surfaced, Hugo was feeling far too randy to remember what he’d been saying.
‘Christ, I love you.’ He gently levered open a stud and slipped his hand into her shirt. ‘I want to take you away and ravish you right now, Tash French. Let’s go home.’
‘We can’t.’ She pressed her nose to his, shivering deliciously under his touch. ‘I’ve got a speech to do, people to thank and stacks of telegrams to read out – there’s even one from Steven Spielberg. I’m taking my job very seriously, you know.’
‘You know,’ Hugo started to kiss the hollow of her throat, lips pressing so gently that she arched against them, eager for more, ‘I’ve kissed a lot of bridesmaids in my life, but this has to be the first time I’ve necked the best man.’
‘Good grief, there’s two men over there kissing one another!’ gasped Alicia Beauchamp. She frantically scrabbled for the glasses on a loop around her neck. ‘And I think one of them’s my son.’
‘I believe you’re right.’ Lisette drained her champagne flute and immediately whisked another from a passing tray. ‘You know, I never thought he was that way inclined. I could have saved myself a great deal of time.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, it’s just Tash.’ Alicia whipped off her spectacles, hugely relieved. She turned back to Lisette and gave her an appraising look which stretched down the entire length of her beaky nose. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll definitely find the right chap soon. You’re a good-looking gel.’
Lisette smiled gratefully. ‘Thanks – but I’m rather bored of men reaching for their wallet at the end of a meal and blushing when their wedding ring falls out. I think I might buy a dog.’
‘Jolly good idea.’ Alicia looked at her approvingly. ‘Get a pug.’
‘That woman just has to Veuve Clicquot her fingers and men come running,’ Sally muttered, watching as both Rory Franks and James French hovered close to Lisette with bottles of champagne, waiting for her to drain her glass.
Sitting beside her with Linus on his lap, Matty watched as Niall’s ex-wife gazed round the marquee with her haunted eyes, seemingly oblivious of the drooling attentions of the men. She had a strange, excited look on her face that took Matty back years. He hadn’t seen her look like that since their early BBC days when she was less confident and less obsessed by her career. It was the same look of anticipation she’d once worn before her very first dates with Niall. She seemed to be waiting for something to happen.
‘I think I could finally get around to forgiving her,’ he said levelly.
‘You what? Blast!’ Sally knocked her glass over. Matty rarely forgave anyone – it was an honour he bestowed as rarely as beatification.
‘I think you were right when you pointed out that we have a lot to thank her for.’ He smiled. ‘It’s like Niall said, sometimes truly selfish acts can help other people far more than so-called charitable ones.’
Sally started to laugh. ‘Well, she’s certainly going to get enough publicity out of this wedding to guarantee that Four Poster Bed will be a huge hit.’
‘Yup.’ He traced a finger across her cheek, his eyes softening. ‘Plus she gave Niall a great part, you a chance to see how dull and fickle her so-called glamorous life is, and me a huge great slap in the face that made me get off my arse and get a decent contract.’
‘And Tash’s horse?’ She bit her lip.
‘I have a strange feeling he might just trot off into the sunset too.’ Matty was still stroking her cheek, amber eyes full of bolstering confidence. ‘That’s the funny thing about Lisette’s films. Not only are they marketed brilliantly, but they all have happy endings.’
Rolling her eyes, Sally dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘I hate to say this, but your mother’s bearing down on us.’
‘Darlings, hasn’t this all worked out gloriously?’ Alexandra inserted her floppy purple hat between them in a waft of Arpège. ‘Pascal is unspeakably excited – he’s just sold Polly’s home video to that Satellite Showbiz gossip channel. I can’t get him off his cell-phone. And just think – we may all be doing it again in a few months’ time!’
‘What?’ Matty said darkly.
Alexandra nodded excitedly across the tent where the chief usher was kissing the best man in a most ungentlemanly fashion.
‘Oh, Christ, no.’ Sally closed her eyes. ‘Not her again. She’ll go off with one of her horses this time.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, sweetheart,’ Alexandra said sharply. ‘Pascal has already agreed to foot the bill. And there’s no reason why we can’t go for a church this time – in France maybe? The local one at Champegny is divine around Christmas, and I’ve always adored winter weddings – all those romantic long coats, squashy hats and flickering candles. What do you think?’
But Sally and Matty were already backing quietly away to escape into the garden toget
her, grabbing full champagne flutes on their way out.
Standing up after the long, boozy and gloriously informal wedding lunch, Tash kept her speech short and to the point, partly because she wasn’t particularly adept at speaking publicly, and partly because Hugo – who had moved into the seat beside her during coffee – had started playing on the back of her thighs with his fingers which made her forget most of what she was going to say, a lot of it mid-sentence. As his fingers moved idly upwards, so did her voice until she was squeaking away like a fledgling.
In his own very funny, articulate speech, Niall had already thanked so many people so profusely, and with so much easy, off-the-cuff wit, that she could do little more than endorse his sentiments and add her own grateful thanks to her family. Telling everyone how perfect the bride and groom were for one another was easy too – it was so screamingly obvious that it hardly needed to be said at all. Even in the few short hours since the wedding, Mali’s entire family seemed to have fallen as head-over-heels in love with Zoe as he had, and Ma was already calling her ‘daughter’.
But there was one thing that Tash was determined to say, and as soon as she had read out the last of the telegrams, she looked out across the vast marquee and swallowed nervously, suddenly not knowing how to start. Feeling herself colour, she searched around the faces in a panic until she finally spotted Lisette, sitting at the very back of the tent, her beautiful face smiling encouragingly. The next moment she was holding up both hands, long, slim fingers crossed in a message of good luck.
Laughing, Tash felt a great wash of confidence.
‘This has almost certainly been the oddest wedding most of you will ever have attended,’ she started boldly, then swallowed down her squeaky voice as Hugo’s fingertips slipped around her leg to touch her hand. ‘And I’m afraid that, just before I propose a toast to the bride and groom, I’m going to make it even odder.’ She smiled broadly as she felt Hugo’s fingers slide between hers.
