by Karen Swan
Cassie rubbed her friend’s arm lightly as the train pulled away again. ‘Of course you didn’t. You’ve done exactly the right thing, putting Velvet first.’ Suzy’s mania in the run-up to Kelly’s wedding had led to Velvet being born several weeks early.
‘Have I, though? Cass, the phone’s barely rung with any new enquiries for weeks now. I think word went out that I wasn’t taking on any new jobs, as opposed to I wasn’t taking on too many jobs. I’ve got Marie colour-coding the magazines, and my last bride gets married a week Saturday. There’s nothing in after that.’
‘Nothing?’ Cassie couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.
Suzy shook her head, swallowing hard. ‘That’s not all. We’re . . .’ Her voice faltered. ‘We’re struggling with the mortgage. Arch thinks we might have to sell.’
Cassie grasped her friend by the wrist. ‘Oh, Suze, no!’
‘But you mustn’t say a word about it – not to Arch, not to Henry either,’ Suzy said urgently. ‘If Arch wants to talk about it, then he will. You’ve got to let him bring it up. He’d kill me for telling you.’
‘Of course not. I won’t say a word.’
They sat in silence for a bit, both rocking to the motion of the train.
‘So what are you going to do?’ Cassie asked.
‘Not sure. Hang out at the London Eye and hand my card to anyone coming off with a red rose and an empty bottle of fizz?’
‘Surely your contacts and suppliers can put the word out for you?’
‘Listen, by the time someone gets to a caterer or a florist, they’ve already got the wedding planner.’
‘Oh, right, yes, I guess.’ Cassie bit her lip. ‘Well, I mean, I can keep an eye out for you. I’ve got the Ascot gig tomorrow and then the Gold Cup polo. I bet loads of proposals happen there! I could keep a load of your cards on one of the tables.’
Suzy arched an eyebrow. ‘Or you could just hurry up and marry my brother? Now that’s a wedding I’m dying to organize.’
‘We’re too busy to get down to the nitty-gritty of organizing something like that at the moment. Henry’s about to swan off to the Arctic, and I’m booked for the next five years of Ascots already.’
It was Suzy’s turn to place a hand on Cassie’s arm. ‘And that is precisely why people like you hire people like me.’
Cassie had to grin. ‘Suze, I promise you that there will be no one organizing my wedding other than you. Not me. Not even my mother.’ Cassie frowned. ‘Actually, especially not my mother – she’d have me in gold.’
‘Well, I don’t know, Cass,’ Suzy sighed despondently. ‘What hope do I have of landing other brides, if I can’t get you to marry my own freakin’ stud-muffin brother?’
Cassie shrugged. ‘It’s not because I don’t love him, you know.’
‘Oh, I know that! We all know exactly how much you two love each other, thanks to the almost-permanent snogging going on between you.’
The train stopped again. West Brompton. They were overground now and Cassie looked out over the London rooftops, pigeons roosting on chimney pots, inflated white clouds billowing across the sky like flyaway sheets.
The carriage was almost theirs alone now, save for a couple of teenagers with their feet on the seats at the end – they were lucky Suzy hadn’t pounced on them: she was to dirty shoes what Kirstie Allsopp was to litter – and a man in a suit two seats along, engrossed in a level of Candy Crush on his iPad. Cassie wondered whether he’d missed his stop. The area they were travelling into was becoming more and more residential.
Velvet was beginning to wriggle on Suzy’s lap now, the amusement factor of travelling on public transport diminishing with the crowds. Suzy reached into her bag and pulled out a small Tupperware of carrot sticks, handing one to her eager child.
The doors closed and the train pulled away again, Cassie still lost in thought about her friend’s problems.
‘So, are you all set for Ascot? You said it was a big gig,’ Suzy asked.
‘Oh . . . yes. We’ve got sixty covers and three separate sittings to cater for: champagne breakfast, lunch and high tea. I’ve got to bake a hundred and eighty eclairs today, once I’ve picked the car up after this.’
Her cream Morris Minor was back in the garage again. Henry had warned her about the unreliability of the alternator and radiator, but she’d been so adamant it looked right (much as the teeny-tiny flat had looked right) – so shiny! so post-war! – parked beside the bell tent on their big-set, yesteryear picnics that she’d gone ahead and bought it instead of a new Golf. Now it was in for ‘touchups’ every other month and she knew Jim, the mechanic, so well she took him tins of home-made rainbow-coloured macaroons for his wife’s birthday.
‘How is Jim?’
‘Really pleased. Kayla got her first-choice school.’
‘Yeah? That’s great,’ Suzy murmured distractedly about the family she’d never met.
The train was already slowing again and they were pulling into the platform at Fulham Broadway, their destination.
‘We’re here,’ Cassie said, getting up and walking over to the doors.
‘Yes, but are they?’ Suzy asked as the train slowed almost to a stop.
‘Hmm, I can’t see them,’ Cassie said, pressing her face as close to the glass as she dared. ‘Oh, wait!’ Cassie laughed suddenly as she caught sight of Henry racing into view like he’d been catapulted, his blond-brown scruffy hair flying behind him, his tie flapping like a windsock by his shoulder as he ran over the bridge and descended the stairs three at a time, coming to a stop just as the doors opened. Jammy devil.
They stared at each other for a beat, him panting hard, before he grinned. ‘What took you so long?’ he asked, kissing her on the mouth and straightening his tie as he stepped back onto the very carriage he had disembarked from four stations earlier. Mission accomplished. Winner of the Annual Tube Dash six years running.
A gaggle of other sprinters, all racing for second place, hove into view moments later, jumping down the stairs like grasshoppers – missing four at a time – and flying into the carriage with roars of delight, slapping each other and highfiving, as they too had successfully negotiated twenty-seven roads, four Tube stations and thousands of pedestrians to sprint the 1.5-mile course and beat the train.
‘Oh Jeez, where’s Arch?’ Suzy asked, resignedly throwing the nappy bag over her shoulder and lifting Velvet as she stood up. The runners seemed more in need of her seat than she did. ‘Anyone seen him?’
Henry shrugged. ‘Sorry, Suze. I wasn’t looking behind me,’ he grinned.
Suzy swatted him about the head – as his big sister by thirteen months, it was her prerogative.
‘I overtook him at the hospital if that helps,’ one of the other guys laughed, holding his arms up protectively in case she came and walloped him too.
‘It’s OK – I can see him, Suze,’ Cassie said, pointing to the bridge.
Archie and a couple of the other runners were not so much running as lurching their way across, their eyes on the train already at the platform.
‘Come on, Arch!’ Suzy bellowed, leaning out from the carriage. She had the lungs of a pufferfish. ‘You can do it!’ She turned to Cassie. ‘Oh, please, God, let him do it. If he can just do it this one time, then he can give it up.’
Henry sucked on his teeth. ‘I don’t know, sis,’ he teased. ‘Look, the station guard’s got his paddle up. It’s not looking good.’ Cassie marvelled that Henry’s breathing had already returned to normal. Henry leaned back out through the doors again. ‘Come on, Arch! One last push!’
‘He’s not having a bloody baby!’ Suzy protested as Archie began descending the stairs, holding the handrail as he staggered down them.
The warning beeps that the doors were about to close sounded and Suzy automatically leaned against one of them, holding it open.
‘Come on, Arch!’ she hollered again.
‘I don’t think so!’ Henry said, spotting her trickery and pulling her away, al
lowing the doors to close.
‘Henry!’
‘No, no cheating. It’s not fair, and it’s not what Arch would want. You either win or lose on merit alone – he knows that.’
As if to prove the point, an exhausted runner got to the doors, two seconds too late, pressing his palms to the glass windows as the train slowly began to roll towards the river and Putney beyond. The other guys began to jeer at the poor fellow; Henry gave an apologetic shrug and a ‘never mind’ thumbs-up.
‘Well, that’s all very well for you to say when you’re six foot four with legs as long as ladders,’ Suzy argued, exasperated that this would mean another year of listening to Arch moan about having to ‘train for the train’.
‘Wait . . .’ Cassie gasped, her tone like a blade through the siblings’ spat. Suzy and Henry looked back out of the window. Archie was near the bottom of the stairs, but he had stopped running – not because the train was pulling away. His eyes were wide, but he didn’t even appear to be seeing the train. He was holding on to the handrail with one hand, seemingly frozen on the spot.
‘Arch?’ Suzy whispered, taking in his grey pallor compared to everyone else’s florid pink cheeks, watching as the freeze in his features gave way to a silent splitting spasm, which wracked his face and shocked his body back and then forwards, sending him flying down the last steps onto the platform.
He was only feet away from where they had been, but the train was moving faster now, and as she was whisked out of sight of her dying husband, Suzy began to scream.
Chapter Three
Midnight had been and gone by the time Henry eased open the spare bedroom door and peered in. Cassie, who had been staring at the wedding photo of her two closest friends in the world – wholly unable to sleep – propped herself up on her elbow and blinked back at him, trying to read the news in his face. All she could see was his exhaustion.
‘Just say it quickly,’ she said, before he could open his mouth.
‘There’s nothing to say,’ Henry said, sinking onto the side of the bed beside her. She was still in her clothes – not sure if she would be summoned to bring Velvet to the hospital at a moment’s notice – and lying on top of the duvet. It had seemed easier to stay at Suzy and Archie’s rather than in their tiny flat, not least because all of Velvet’s toys and nappies and bottles were here, but the tragedy seemed amplified in the house of its victims – photographs on every surface, memories at every turn – and she hadn’t been able to close her eyes long enough to doze.
Henry absently reached for the raspberry-pink wool blanket at the bottom of the bed and draped it over her while he talked, trying to stay busy, keep occupied as he said the words. ‘He’s not out of the woods yet. He’s still in the CCU. His heart rhythms are too erratic for him to be moved anywhere else at this point.’ His eyes flicked to hers. ‘He had another heart attack two hours after being admitted, so they’re not taking any chances.’
Cassie’s hands flew to her mouth. Another one? He had been completely grey by the time Cassie and Suzy had got to him. Henry had run all the way back from Parson’s Green, the next stop, beating the cab the girls had frantically hailed on the street and, no doubt, all the trains too.
‘And how’s Suze?’ Cassie’s big blue eyes were as wide as the sky was dark. She knew that behind her friend’s straight-talking, don’t-mess demeanour was a heart as fragile as a bird’s egg.
‘Being invincible. She’s watching over him like a bodyguard, wanting to know what every tube is for, and she didn’t let go of his hand once the whole time I was there. She bawled out one nurse because she got the date wrong. She said if she wasn’t even sure of the day’s date, how could she trust her on anything more serious?’ He shrugged, rubbing his face in his hands. ‘How’s Velvet?’
‘Oh, she’s fine,’ Cassie nodded. She had been looking after the child from the second Suzy had clambered into the ambulance with Archie. ‘Oblivious, really. The only wobble was when she wanted Suzy at bedtime, but she was fine as soon as she had her bottle. I thought she might want to sleep in here with me, but she went down in her cot, no problem.’
‘Sweet thing,’ Henry murmured, but a fault line ran through his voice, close to cracking it in two. ‘She’s too young to—’
‘Shh, I know,’ Cassie said, scrambling up onto her knees and wrapping her arms around him. She knew what he had been going to say – that Velvet was too young to be without a father, that she’d be too young to remember him if Archie did die.
‘No. All this is my fault,’ Henry said, pulling away from her and, resting his elbow on his knees, pinching the bridge of his nose as agonies ran over his features.
‘Henry, how can you think that? Of course it isn’t!’
He whipped up his head. ‘Cass, I physically stopped Suzy from keeping the doors open. I kept her from getting to him.’
She remembered how he’d moved Suzy out of the way of the doors to let them close, how, as they’d pulled out of the station, he’d had to stop Suzy from tugging the emergency cord – his logic wrestling with her instinct, as he’d tried to explain it was, counter-intuitively, quicker for them to get to the next station than stop in a tunnel outside that one, even though her husband was lying on the platform and beginning to die.
‘You did the right thing, at every point,’ Cassie said quietly.
He shook his head irritably. ‘I set the pace too fast.’
‘No. The train set the pace too fast. You had nine and a half minutes to make it; the train wasn’t waiting for anyone. That’s the whole point.’
Henry got up and paced across the floor, raking his hands through his hair. ‘I shouldn’t have talked him into it. He didn’t even want to do it. I made him do it.’
Cassie watched him. ‘The only person who makes Arch do anything is Suzy. We all know that.’
Henry laughed, but it came out like a bark – joyless and hard – and he continued pacing. ‘I shouldn’t have—’
‘Henry, stop this! Archie is unfit and stressed to the eyeballs. Suze told me on the train while you were gone – his job’s on the line. They might lose the house. She’s been worried about him for weeks.’
Henry stopped moving. ‘What are you talking about? He hasn’t said anything about it to me.’
‘He hasn’t talked about it to anyone.’
Henry stared back at her, his eyes unseeing upon her face for once as the news sank in, before he collapsed back down onto the bed again, dropping his head into his hands.
Cassie crawled over to him and began kneading his shoulders. They were practically sewn together by the tension in his body. ‘Listen, he’ll be OK now. He’s in the safest place he could be, and it’s been nearly twenty-four hours since it happened. That’s the most dangerous time, right?’
Actually, it had only been fifteen hours, but neither one of them made the correction. They both wanted to believe . . .
Henry groaned as she worked on a particularly hard knot in one of the muscles.
‘You’re exhausted,’ she said quietly, reaching over and kissing the side of his neck. ‘Lie down. You’re no good to anyone without sleep, and Suzy’s going to need us to keep the wheels on for her tomorrow.’
Without resistance or complaint, but guilt still written all over his face, Henry rolled down onto his side. Cassie covered him with the blanket. He was still wearing his suit trousers with the trainers, his meeting with the Explorers Club completely forgotten in the aftermath of Archie’s collapse. Cassie pulled his trainers off for him, the laces still tied.
The slow rise and fall of his ribs told her he was already almost asleep and she spooned herself around him, her hand resting on his hip, his tight body slackening with incipient sleep. But there was no crab apple tree outside this bedroom window, no birds singing, and she wondered how she could have felt so safe and bulletproof in her world yesterday when today it felt made of glass.
The blue hulk of the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital towered over them and Cassie held Velvet
closer to her as she walked through the doors, half a step behind Henry. It was the hospital where Velvet was supposed to have been born, had she not come early, and Cassie’s only visits here had been happy ones – accompanying Suzy on some of her antenatal appointments and laughing at Suzy’s lively facial expressions as she jumped on the scales or had blood taken, before linking arms and splurging on coffees and cake in the Starbucks outside. They, neither one of them, could have foreseen that two years later they’d be back here in such terrible circumstances.
Henry, after only an hour and a half of utter oblivion, had slept badly and he jabbed the lift button impatiently, his jaw thrust forward, hands on his hips. They hadn’t showered or had breakfast, and Cassie watched his foot tap before she broke her gaze to stroke Velvet’s hair as the child asked for Mummy and Daddy again.
‘Just one more minute, darling,’ Cassie whispered, kissing her head, before repositioning her on her hip. ‘We’re on our way to see her right now.’
The lift opened and Henry tutted as he stepped out of the way of a porter pushing a man in a wheelchair. He pressed the button too hard again to the right floor, shaking his head irritably as the doors closed at a sedate pace.
‘It’ll be OK. They would have rung us if there’d been any change,’ Cassie said, touching his shirtsleeve lightly.
Henry glanced down at her with ashen skin and bloodshot eyes, and she swallowed at the sight of him so cut up. She’d never seen him like this before. Henry was always the fixer, the calm eye at the centre of every storm, the beating heart of every party. He knew everyone and everything (the temperature of the sun? The velocity of a speeding bullet shot in a vacuum? The speed of sound when measured at sea level? Cassie had flung all these questions at him and he’d known the answers off the top of his head), and his happy-go-lucky smile and energy for life saw him make friends, contacts and alliances wherever he went.
