by Dani Atkins
*
‘So you’re hanging up your gumshoe hat, are you?’
‘You do realise no one actually calls them that? No one has probably ever called them that.’
Karen took a mouthful of her lunchtime salad and chewed despondently. ‘I’m not sure why I’m still dieting. Your wedding’s in less than forty-eight hours; it’s too late now to look skinny in my bridesmaid’s dress.’
‘You’re going to look absolutely gorgeous,’ I assured her, trying to ignore the alien-in-my-stomach spasm I’d felt when I realised the time until I became Mrs Darrell Kingston was now measurable in hours.
‘No one’s going to be looking at me anyway,’ continued Karen. ‘All eyes will be on you in your amazing wedding dress.’
‘Talking of which, I spoke to Gwendoline from Fleurs this morning, and she’s going to personally bring the dress to the hotel on the morning of the wedding.’
‘Great. At least that’s one less thing for you to worry about,’ Karen said, unashamedly stealing a chip from my plate.
*
The hotel was a beautiful converted eighteenth-century manor house. There was a long sweeping gravel drive that wound through the trees, teasing you with tiny glimpses of the main building, until it opened out into a huge circular forecourt. I followed a succession of small, discreetly positioned white wooden arrows to an area designated for guest parking. Karen was already there, leaning up against her car and rattling off a message into her phone.
The deep gravel crunched beneath her sandals as she made her way over to me.
‘You’re early,’ I cried, pulling her into a hug, which left me feeling oddly choked and emotional. ‘I can’t believe it. You’re never early.’
‘And you always are,’ she said, nodding wisely, as though I might be thinking of contradicting her. ‘So I thought my first chief bridesmaid duty would be to make sure I got here first to greet you.’
‘Can you be “chief” if you’re the only one?’ I asked, pulling my overnight bag from the back of my car. Darrell had carried it down for me that morning, before he’d left for the day with a long ‘to-do’ list of chores in hand.
‘Just leave it in the boot, don’t worry about locking the car,’ I’d said, kissing him goodbye at my open front door. ‘I’ll be heading off myself in about fifteen minutes.’
Darrell had pulled me slowly against him, and out into the corridor, stealing one final kiss. I’d glanced beyond him down the empty hallway. It was early and none of my neighbours were around, and yet it still felt inappropriate to be outside of my flat wearing only a short silky gown that did a very poor job of concealing the outline of my breasts.
‘Darrell, no. Someone might see,’ I’d said, sounding like a nervous Quaker as his hand slid down over one breast and found the nipple through the satin fabric. He lifted his mouth from mine, but the hand stayed where it was.
‘There’s no one here,’ he’d said, his voice dipping into the kind of huskiness that told me exactly what was on his mind.
I’d placed both my hands on his chest and pushed him back. ‘Enough,’ I’d said, softening the word with a smile. ‘You have a long list of things to do, and I have to go and get pampered all day.’
Darrell had smiled, and released my boob after one final tweak of the nipple. I’d stepped back into the sanctuary of my own flat. ‘I’ll see you tonight at seven, at the rehearsal dinner,’ I’d said, primly gripping the two sides of my gown together. I don’t know why I bothered; my body’s reaction to his touch was still clearly showing through the revealing material.
*
An odd feeling of unreality settled over me as Karen and I walked towards the hotel’s main entrance. Through the trees I caught a glimpse of the lake, beside which workmen were already starting to erect the canopy beneath which Darrell and I would stand tomorrow to exchange our vows. And tonight, in one of the small private dining rooms, we would host a small rehearsal dinner for twenty people.
Then tomorrow at eleven o’clock… From out of nowhere my subconscious conjured up the sound of a mail cart trundling down a carpeted corridor. The brain is funny like that. While you’re busy thinking about one thing, it throws another thought into the mix, out of pure mischief, just to see what happens. I shook my head to dislodge the inappropriate image. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the time I was scheduled to become one man’s wife was already associated with an entirely different man in my head. Clearly I’d spent far too long watching the clock and waiting for Paul, and now I was paying the price. Well, I could do nothing to change the time of my wedding, but I could certainly put a stop to my daily conversations with Paul. After the wedding, things would be different.
I shouldn’t even be thinking about Paul today, I acknowledged, as I walked up the stone steps to the hotel entrance. There was no excuse; it wasn’t even as if I’d seen him recently. Not for almost a week, I realised. The mail cart had been pushed by one of his colleagues all week, and on the third day – when I’d casually enquired where Paul was – I was told he was taking some time off. There was no explanation for the weird disappointment I’d felt that he hadn’t mentioned it to me himself. Obviously he was free to do exactly as he pleased – particularly as he practically owned the company, or would do one day. But a tiny voice kept asking why he’d not said anything to me. Perhaps it was time to finally acknowledge that one of us had possibly been reading a great deal more into our eleven o’clock chats than they should have been.
*
We had just enough time to check into our rooms before our first treatments in the hotel spa.
‘See you in five,’ Karen said, disappearing down the corridor to her own room.
My room was lovely, all chintz fabrics and reproduction furniture. It even had a four-poster bed, which made me stupidly excited for absolutely no reason at all. I threw my overnight case on to the bed and ran open the zipper, wanting to grab my toiletry bag for the spa. I noticed ‘it’ immediately, because it was right there on the top, where it definitely did not belong.
Unlike the previous messages, this wasn’t on a card, nor was it addressed specifically to me. But as it was sitting inside my case, right on top of my underwear in fact, I didn’t think there could be any question about the intended recipient. I didn’t even want to touch it. It had no place being there among my things. It was a single sheet of lined paper, which appeared to have been roughly torn from a notebook. Even the handwriting looked rushed and hurried, as though the author had scribbled it quickly, before they were caught. I swept the paper off my clothes, as though it was contaminating them. It fell on to the deep pink pile of the carpet, an ugly intrusion in my beautiful hotel room.
Have you no shame? read the message, in huge untidy letters. His hands were all over you.
She had been there. Somewhere in the corridor she had been there, watching as Darrell had touched my body. My stomach reacted instinctively, in exactly the way you would expect on encountering poison. I ran into the adjacent bathroom, my hand clamped over my mouth, only just managing to make it to the toilet before losing my breakfast.
*
After that she was everywhere. And nowhere. She was the woman in the jacuzzi, who looked at me with mean, narrowed eyes when I got to my feet and stepped out of the bubbling tub. She was the manicurist with the surly expression, who nicked my cuticle when filing my nails and mumbled only an insincere apology. She was the woman in the restaurant, sitting alone in a corner table for one, whose eyes raked the other diners in our matching white waffle gowns.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? You still don’t seem to be in a very relaxed, chilled-out kind of mood,’ observed Karen in concern, after the waitress had finished refilling our coffee cups. Yeah, because that’s just what I needed, more caffeine. Like I wasn’t jumpy enough already. But of course I’d been trying to hide that fact from Karen all day. Although apparently, without much success.
‘I am relaxed,’ I insisted, my spoon clattering noisily again
st the china cup as I stirred my coffee far more vigorously than required. ‘It’s just pre-wedding jitters. It’s a big step, getting married, you know,’ I added unnecessarily.
Karen looked at me carefully, and I could almost hear her inner debate. Speak now, or forever hold her peace. She chose to speak. ‘It’s a step you don’t have to take tomorrow, you know. If you’ve got any doubts at all, or have last-minute cold feet, no one is going to blame you for deciding to call things off or postponing them.’
It’s not the kind of thing you expect your bridesmaid to say to you on the day before you get married. Although I could hardly blame her for putting two and two together and coming up with five, because I’d chosen not to tell her about that vile note, or how it had come to be in my luggage. There was only one person I wanted to discuss that with, and I wouldn’t be seeing him for another six hours. It would have to wait.
‘These feet are perfectly toasty,’ I said, extending one towelling-slippered foot from beneath the table. The newly painted bright pink nails looked outrageously cheerful, mocking my inner mood. ‘And with seventy friends and family already on their way here, or heading this way in the morning, I think it actually is too late to be rethinking anything.’
‘Until you actually say “I do”, there’s all the time in the world,’ Karen reassured, nodding her head encouragingly. That’s when I realised she might actually be hoping that I was going to cancel everything. But why? I thought she’d got past her misgivings about Darrell. Was he right? Did she resent the fact I was going to be heading up the aisle before her? The thought shouldn’t even have been able to creep into my head, and yet suddenly I found myself thinking the unthinkable: could Karen have been the one who’d silently crept up to my unlocked car and left that note in my suitcase?
I got quickly to my feet, desperate to leave the ugly seed of an idea behind before it took root. ‘I’m fine. Everything is fine. Except that we now have only four minutes to get to the treatment room for our hot stone massage.’
Karen fell asleep during hers, but although the warmed oil and strategically placed stones were relaxing, I couldn’t turn down the dial on my anxiety. It was firmly settled in the red zone, where it was destined to stay until Darrell slipped the thin platinum band on my finger, hopefully without anyone leaping to their feet during the ceremony, screaming out their objection.
*
Darrell wasn’t spending the night at the hotel. We’d decided to stick to that one piece of propriety at least, and not see each other tomorrow until the actual ceremony. He’d be returning to his own flat tonight after the rehearsal dinner. But I’d left word at Reception, asking them to direct him to my room as soon as he arrived that evening.
I was just finishing my make-up when a soft knock sounded on the door, followed by his familiar voice, calling out in a sing-song tone: ‘Room service.’
Despite the jittery herd of elephants that appeared to have taken up residence in my stomach, I smiled. I went to the door and checked through the peephole before unlatching it. The fisheye lens distorted the image of the man I was marrying, making him momentarily a crazy hall-of-mirrors stranger, then he shifted a little closer to the door, and he was Darrell again. I opened the door, grabbed his hand and practically dragged him across the threshold into my room.
‘Hey, hang on a minute,’ he said, still playing off a totally different page than me. ‘I’m a soon-to-be married man, and this definitely isn’t covered by room service. In fact—’ He broke off suddenly, reading the expression on my face. No words were required.
‘What’s happened now?’
I crossed over to a reproduction armoire and pulled open the bottom drawer. It held two objects: a Bible, courtesy of the Gideons; and the note, courtesy of person or persons unknown. If I’d hoped the good in one might cancel out the evil in the other, I was mistaken. The scrawled words still had the power to hit me in the stomach like a mule kick.
Darrell’s face turned pale, then ashen as he read the note and heard where I’d found it. There literally isn’t any shade lighter he could turn, I thought in concern, as I watched a waxy sheen glisten over his skin. He walked woodenly to the edge of the four-poster and sat down heavily. He leant forward, his hands in his hair, his elbows on his knees. His head was almost imperceptibly moving from side to side, as though he was listening to some inner voice that was disagreeing with him.
I said nothing for several minutes, allowing him to process what had happened. I expected him to eventually lift his head and give me the usual This is nothing to worry about or We should just ignore it response. I was even prepared for yet another round of We still don’t know it’s her. What I wasn’t ready for, what I hadn’t even for one single moment considered, were the words that came from him in a crushed tone, as though something deep inside was broken.
‘I think we should cancel the wedding.’
I don’t remember crossing the room. One minute I was over by the dressing table, the next I could feel the pile of the carpet beneath my bare knees as I looked up at him in distress.
‘What? No. We can’t.’
He reached for my hand, missing it on the first pass, because suddenly his eyes were full of tears. I was more shocked by that than I think I’d been by the note. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry, and for a moment I felt thrown. I had no idea how to react. Perhaps I did hesitate for a moment, just a fleeting one, imagining a world where I just said Okay then, let’s do that, before the sensible side of me kicked in. The side that had carried a wedding planning portfolio around with her for the last six months, who knew exactly what every last minute of the next twenty-four hours was meant to look like. And cancelling the wedding now, because of… because of her… just wasn’t in the script.
‘Maybe that was it,’ I said desperately, gripping his hands so tightly the skin of his fingers turned almost as pale as his face. ‘Maybe that was their last-ditch attempt to ruin the day for us. And if we cancel the wedding, then they’ll have won, won’t they? They’ll have driven a wedge through us, through you and me, and we might never get over it.’
He released one hand and wiped it across his eyes, looking almost surprised to see the dampness on his fingertips. My heart broke a little when I realised he hadn’t even known he’d been crying. ‘Then what do you want to do?’ he asked, his eyes staring so deeply into mine, my soul felt bare and exposed. ‘Whatever you want to do, Suzanne, I’ll go along with it.’
I closed my eyes to shut out the expression in his. I saw myself as though in a corridor that branched off in two different directions. Take one, and I would become Mrs Darrell Kingston, take the other and I’d go back to being a single woman, because there would be no ‘us’ after this if I cancelled the wedding. I knew that, even if Darrell didn’t. One path led to a life as a married woman, the other left me free to see and do whatever I wanted: date, don’t date; live alone, live with someone else; watch the clock each day, waiting for something I had no right to want as much as I did, or move forward.
‘No one is going to stop me marrying you,’ I said definitively. ‘No one. Whoever is doing this, whether it’s Catherine—’ I heard Darrell’s sudden indrawn hiss of breath, shocked that I had remembered her name – as if I was ever likely to have forgotten it. ‘Whether it is her, or someone completely different, it doesn’t matter. They have no way of knowing where we are, or how to find us here. They won’t know the name of the hotel, or that tomorrow is our wedding day. And by the time we go back to our normal life, it will be done. We’ll be married, and then all of this will finally stop.’
*
The private dining room looked elegant and very British, making me feel like a Downton Abbey extra who’d been sent the wrong dress code memo. My short red cocktail dress with matching strappy heels was sexy and a little daring and chosen deliberately because of its contrast to the classically beautiful gown I’d be wearing the following day. Darrell had met me in the hotel lobby. He’d said he wanted to take a w
alk in the grounds to calm down and clear his head before meeting our guests – practically all of whom were either my family or my friends. Unsurprisingly, the guests he’d asked had politely declined the invitation.
Darrell held out his hand to me as I stepped off the sweeping staircase, and if it weren’t for our modern outfits, we could have been transported back to a time when people ‘dressed for dinner’.
His eyes appraised me with obvious appreciation. It was that kind of dress. ‘I’ve not seen that one before,’ he whispered into the fall of my hair, as he leant forward to kiss me. Tomorrow my hair would be worn in a loose topknot, and decorated with tiny fresh flowers, but tonight it was softly curled and falling freely over my shoulders. I smelled the hint of alcohol on his breath, even before I caught its lingering taste on his lips. I guess Darrell had found an alternative method to calm down, rather than taking a walk.
‘I think everyone’s here now,’ he said, guiding me towards the private room. I felt a moment of guilt that I hadn’t been here to greet them, but like Darrell I had needed time to decompress from the anxiety we were both determined to hide from our guests.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Darrell replied, when I commented on how rude we must seem. ‘Your parents seem to be enjoying the opportunity to play host.’
‘What? Together? No arguments or disagreements?’
‘Not a one, as far as I can see,’ confirmed Darrell, his hand reaching for the ornate brass door handle that led to our private dining room. ‘In fact, they even arrived together in the same taxi.’ I turned to him, my face a picture of amazement. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me one little bit if there’s not another wedding in the Walters family before too long,’ he said with a small wink.
