Tilly Maguire and the Royal Wedding Mess

by Emma Grey

  ‘Not really,’ Tilly corrects urgently. ‘I mean, we weren’t talking about him . . . in that way.’ What is she? Twelve? She makes it sound like they were gossiping about who likes whom behind the back shelf in the school library. Angus pulls up a kitchen stool at the bench directly opposite her. He grabs an orange from the fruit bowl and starts peeling it.

  ‘In what way were you talking about Reuben, then?’ he asks.

  Up close, peeling fruit, Angus Marsden is almost indescribably good-looking – even for someone with Tilly’s above-average vocabulary. He has that just-rolled-out-of-bed casualness that must make Kat absolutely swoon. Not that Tilly is looking. Oh. GOD. He’s caught her looking.

  She blushes, mortified.

  He smiles. ‘You can’t hide your crush from me, Tilly Maguire.’

  Gah! What? She doesn’t have a crush! Who wouldn’t stare in his presence? How is this happening?

  ‘I categorically do not have a crush!’ she says. This whole conversation is making her squirm.

  He frowns and scrutinises her. Hard. ‘Really? You don’t feel anything? But I saw the way you looked just then . . .’

  She wants to die. Seriously. How did she get into this situation? And right in front of Kat! What is it with London and pop stars and weird love triangles? She has to get herself out of this mess.

  ‘I don’t feel anything at all,’ she says quickly. ‘Admiration, obviously. For . . . you know. Talent?’ Ugh, this is awkward!

  ‘Admiration for talent. That’s it?’ He looks genuinely confused. ‘Tilly, are you absolutely certain? You feel nothing?’

  Was his ego seriously this enormous? She feels herself getting hot. It’s like the Spanish Inquisition. Kat looks concerned, and why wouldn’t she?

  ‘Nothing!’ Tilly announces, finally finding a clear thought and managing to push it all the way from her brain and out of her mouth in a properly formed word.

  There is no escape. She is going to have to drag out what increasingly appears to be the truth, not that she’s admitted it yet to anyone.

  ‘Angus. Isn’t it obvious?’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m in love with someone else.’

  Chapter 46

  As dejected as Belle feels after her parents totally not getting who she is as a person and destroying all chances of future happiness, she knows that Reuben’s sudden crisis has an urgency over her own pain. He’s never said anything about who his father is – only that he’s not proud of him and doesn’t want to talk about it. But something like this is still going to slam into him, hard. It’s the regret about what he didn’t have all along with his dad that must be killing him.

  Angie’s coming to pick up Belle from her Kensington apartment, and they’re going to hang out at Reuben’s, the way the three of them often do when something’s wrong. Belle feels a pang of nostalgia for the times this used to be easy. The times, years ago, when Angie didn’t get annoyed by every little thing Belle said or did – back when they were the closest of friends.

  She watches the orange Beetle come up the road and tries to ignore the frisson of excitement that shoots through every cell of her body every time Angie is nearby. It’s a bittersweet reminder that they inhabit two different worlds. The divide between them seems unconquerable to Belle. Even if Angie gave any hint of liking her back, her parents’ initial reaction to her coming out was disastrous.

  The car comes to a screeching halt in the street outside, as Belle skips down the stairs and tries to keep her emotions under control. They’re going to comfort Reuben together in his time of need. A united front. This isn’t a date.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she says, swinging into the front passenger seat. There’s not much room inside the tiny car, which is built for someone of Angie’s compact proportions, not Belle’s. She folds her long legs awkwardly, knees pressed against the dashboard while she reaches under the seat for the latch to push it back, and wonders not for the first time if Angie specifically chose this car just to make her feel uncomfortable in it!

  Angie frowns at Belle’s car seat readjusting, and Belle wonders if she will ever be good enough? Too tall, too royal, too gay . . . well, she would be too gay if Angie actually knew about that. Belle can only imagine all the ways she would get that wrong in Angie’s eyes. Too ‘out’. Not out enough. Too visibly affectionate. Not affectionate enough. She wouldn’t have a hope of impressing Angie in the sexual orientation department, either. Her coming out would be just as disappointing as everything else about her seems to be in Angie’s eyes. Except worse, of course, because it matters more.

  She steals a glance at Angie, who’s in a soft blue jumper and jeans, blonde hair still wet from the shower. Is that the scent of Paris? It’s the fragrance Belle had given her for her last birthday. She torments herself trying to work out if this is some sort of sign.

  The irony is that there had been a time at school when they were inseparable. They had one of those tight-woven friendships that others find almost impenetrable. A memory pushes itself to mind, and she smiles. ‘Remember that interschool debating comp in Year 10?’ she asks wistfully.

  Angie immediately accelerates the car and Belle grips the door handle. What is wrong with her? How could that sentence possibly put Angie on edge when it was practically the highlight of their entire school career? An all-girls debating final against an all-boys team from Reuben’s school, and not once in the long-running history of that particular competition had the girls’ team ever won. They were expected to lose that day, as usual, but everyone had underestimated the combination of Belle’s and Angie’s intelligence.

  They’d been challenged to oppose the argument that ‘separating boys and girls in school raises performance’. Angie had torn the question to shreds.

  ‘It’s loaded in hetero-normativity,’ she’d argued, and the boys were bamboozled right from her opening line. ‘If it’s sexual chemistry that’s supposedly distracting students from their best performance, it’s irrelevant whether genders are mixed or not, unless our opponents would have us believe chemistry doesn’t exist between people of the same gender.’

  Belle had wanted to applaud at the time, but she was furiously taking notes in the hope of catching even half of the acerbic wit that tumbled out of Angie’s mouth so effortlessly. They almost could have stopped after the first speaker. Angie could have won the debate on her own.

  ‘You were on fire that day,’ Belle recalls in the car. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ Angie says.

  Vaguely? They’d brought the house down! It had gone down in school folklore! Students from both schools in the audience had actually thrown streamers when the winning team was announced, it was such an enormous upset. The two of them couldn’t have been more in sync if they’d been reading each other’s minds. And, when the announcement of the winner was made, Angie had squealed and thrown her tiny frame into Belle’s arms, wrapping her legs around Belle’s waist like this was suddenly a performance in modern dance and not debating, sending them both tumbling to the floor in a hopeless tangle of discarded palm cards and tartan skirts and crepe paper streamers and hysterical laughter.

  Belle had hit her head on the hardwood floor from the force of Angie crash-landing right on top of her. Angie had instinctively reached out and touched Belle’s hair to soothe the spot, wincing as if she could feel her pain. Recklessness had been swapped for tenderness in that moment. They’d both stopped laughing then.

  There was something in Angie’s gaze that was suddenly different. Belle thought she saw her eyes dilate and she herself had seen stars. She’d blamed the head injury at the time, except the stars returned whenever she got even close to Angie from that moment on.

  ‘What were you two doing?’ Reuben had teased them both later. ‘You’d already won the debate. You didn’t have to drive the point home.’ They’d physically backed away from each other at the sound of his words.

  The whole thing had been most indecorous, according to the head mistress, who’d hauled them
straight into her private study afterwards. ‘A pair of senior girls wrestling on the assembly-room floor at a formal debate!’

  ‘We weren’t wrestling,’ Angie had argued, but she and Belle had failed to articulate exactly what it was that they had been doing, if it wasn’t that. All Belle knew was that for one, glorious moment, she’d forgotten she was a princess. She’d remembered who she really was, and felt more ‘herself’ on that floor with Angie than she’d ever felt, before or since. It was one moment of crazy abandon that had brought home everything about her . . . but also the moment after which nothing was ever as easy again.

  Something had shifted. Angie started building a wall that day, and the wall only got taller and more impenetrable the older they became, until now – where Belle feels locked out altogether.

  Angie stops at a give-way sign and turns the music up loud, snapping Belle from her reverie and drowning out any attempt at a conversation. It’s not even music Belle knows. Or likes. But the last thing she needs is another reason to fall short of Angie’s expectations, so she tries to look appreciative.

  Angie frowns again. ‘You don’t even like this song, Belle. Why are you always pretending?’

  Is she playing the song deliberately to annoy her? ‘Ange . . .’

  Angie squirms, cutting her off. What has Belle done? This passive aggression is way out of all proportion.

  ‘Today is about Reuben,’ Angie says definitively. ‘Let’s not get into this. Let’s focus on him.’

  Not get into what?

  ‘Shouldn’t be too hard for you,’ Angie adds under her breath.

  Belle would protest this observation, except Angie’s attempting a hair-raising reverse park outside Reuben’s Bloomsbury apartment, in the too-small space between a BMW and a Porsche.

  ‘Look, Ange. Before we go in . . .’

  But Angie’s not interested in anything Belle has to say. She’s already unbuckled her seatbelt and is out of the car, up the flight of steps and unlocking Reuben’s front door before Belle can even speak. Belle watches her go with a rising emptiness. Reuben comes to the door and Angie marches in like she lives there. He steps across the threshold and looks out into the street for Belle and that’s when she sees Angie’s face fall in the shadows behind him.

  Ahh. Belle feels her heart sink deep into her chest as it all makes sense. She understands now exactly what it is that she has done, and why Angie has been so prickly around her for years. Jealousy. Like half of England, Angie thinks Reuben and Belle are secretly together.

  And worse. Angie, like half of England, must be in love with him . . .

  Chapter 47

  ‘At least let me explain before you completely reject me,’ Jack says on the phone.

  ‘It’s not you I’m rejecting,’ Tilly argues back. ‘It’s your offer! And the way it came about.’

  She won’t go near Jack Guthrie or his publishing house, or accept a publishing deal out of sympathy. Who do these people think she is? Seriously!

  ‘If someone had sent me this piece blind, with no name, and with the supporting evidence I’ve collected about your other writing, I’d have made the same offer, Tilly. You need to give yourself more credit. And me. At least meet me for coffee. Let me explain properly why I want you to write this book so much.’

  She shudders. Maybe rejecting him face to face will work better. Then she can get on with her life, and get on with this book, and pretend the insane interlude of the last few days never happened.

  ‘Tilly?’

  She sighs. ‘I’ll meet you for one coffee, Jack. One. I’ll give you fifteen minutes of my time.’

  ‘I’ll only need ten. How fast can you get to Russell Square station?’

  ‘You want this book so much? You come to me. There’s a cafe across the road from Angus and Kat’s place. I’ll be there until four. Writing.’

  She hangs up. Who is she? The Tilly who landed in this country practically yesterday would never have been so in command of a situation. Any situation. Yet here she is, ordering a leading publisher about. How?

  She snaps shut the lid of the laptop, and checks her reflection in the hall mirror on the way through. Not for Jack. For the media. They’re probably lurking behind the hedge outside like they were earlier and, if so, she’d rather look at least halfway presentable. In every other shot they’ve captured she’s looked like a wreck, and maybe this accidental double-denim debacle needs a rethink. It’s just that she was cold, and Kat had said she could borrow her jacket. Kat, who’s now a bona-fide indie goddess in her own right, and Tilly’s newest friend . . . Not that anyone could replace Caitlin, obviously.

  ‘Caitlin!’ she says urgently on FaceTime moments later as she’s crossing the street, dodging reporters. ‘I’m about to meet someone for coffee and I’m freaking out. Talk me down.’

  ‘Is this a date?’

  ‘What? No! It’s with Jack!’

  ‘Who’s Jack? What happened to Reuben? Oh my God. What’s Angus like in real life? He’s hot, right? I mean, stupid question . . .’

  Tilly feels her cheeks burning.

  ‘Tilly!’ Caitlin says, moving closer to her phone screen to get a better look. ‘You’re so transparent. Tell all!’

  ‘Well, it was the most embarrassing thing . . .’

  ‘Again?’

  Tilly glares at her friend on the screen.

  ‘More embarrassing or less than the thing in the cab outside the museum with Reuben?’

  ‘Caitlin!’

  ‘Worse than the newspaper article, or better?’

  ‘Will you stop it! It was just embarrassing, all right? Look, I’m just going to say it. Angus Marsden thinks I’m in love with him.’

  Caitlin for once is silent, until eventually she finds some words. ‘How has he formed this impression, Tilly?’

  ‘Well, we were in the kitchen. He was peeling fruit . . .’

  ‘Peeling fruit? I’ve got images of a Roman god . . .’

  Tilly has a flashback to Angus in the kitchen. ‘Exactly like a Roman god,’ she confirms.

  ‘Feeding you grapes?’

  ‘Huh? No! Eating it himself! It was an orange!’

  ‘An orange? And he was eating it himself?’

  ‘Yes, Caitlin! Stop clarifying every last detail and let me get on with the story! I had just said that Kat and I had not been talking about Reuben in that way, and then I realised how stupid that sounded, like something we’d have said about a boy in primary school, and Angus was looking at me, and I could feel myself going bright red, and then he said, and I quote, “You can’t hide your crush from me, Tilly Maguire!”’

  ‘Your crush on Reuben?’

  Tilly pauses. ‘What?’

  ‘He was talking about your crush on Reuben, obviously. Wasn’t he?’

  That’s not how Tilly had interpreted it. He’d caught her staring at him, she’d gone red, he’d teased her about her crush. The crush she’d assumed he thought she had on him, because of the blushing and the stammering and the staring . . . oh, God, he meant her crush on Reuben . . .

  She looks up from the phone and sees Jack enter the cafe and come towards where she’s now sitting, in the bay window facing the street.

  ‘What did he say next?’ Caitlin asks curiously.

  ‘He quizzed me about whether that was true,’ Tilly answers quickly. She needs to end this conversation before Jack overhears any of it. ‘Whether I really meant that I felt nothing . . .’ She feels the blood drain from her face as Jack pulls out the chair opposite her. ‘Caitlin!’ she whispers, turning towards the window, away from him. ‘I told him I’m in love with someone else. I meant Reuben, but he must have thought . . .’

  She sees Jack sit down, out of the corner of her eye, and then everything happens very fast. Camera flashes. A barrage of them, like enemy fire over a trench.

  ‘Tilly,’ Caitlin says loudly, seemingly not caring whether or not Jack hears the whole thing. ‘You told Angus you’re not in love with Reuben. You said you’re in lo
ve with someone else. And now you’re being photographed with this Jack person? Do you love him?’

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘REUBEN, oh my God, will you keep up with your own love life!’

  Tilly hears Caitlin’s question and can barely bring herself to answer it. She’s already told Angus the truth, but admitting it aloud to her best friend seems more official. She’s fangirled over Reuben for years, but does she honestly love him? Does she?

  ‘I’m going to take the totally shocked expression on your face as a yes, all right? Now listen. You have literally minutes to get to Reuben before he sees these pictures online. Minutes, okay? You have to get to him first. You have to explain yourself, Tilly, because Angus is his best mate. He’ll want to let him down gently about you, and he’ll be rushing to do that when the scoop breaks, if it hasn’t already. You need to go. Now.’

  Tilly finds herself standing up at the sound of Caitlin’s instructions, and doesn’t care that Jack will have overheard their FaceTime call. ‘Jack, do you have a car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I borrow it?’

  He laughs. ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘What do I have to do to change your mind?’ Tilly asks desperately.

  He looks at her, a flicker of an idea playing across his features. ‘You do have something I would love,’ he says firmly. ‘I’ve wanted it ever since Belle sent it to me.’

  Belle sent it? ‘You said it came from Reuben!’ Tilly accuses him, outraged.

  ‘It did, originally. He saved it. She sent it. She said he’d explained that all you wanted was a publishing deal. I can only suppose that he wasn’t going to arrange it for you – typically self-centred – so she did.’

  The level of Tilly’s fury over this totally unfair representation of Reuben surprises even her, but she’s not going to give Jack the satisfaction of taking his bait.

  ‘Why would Belle want to help me? I thought she hated me!’

  But Jack doesn’t answer that. He looks like he’s hiding something, but Tilly has to focus now on unravelling the mess she’s devised through her trademark inability to think situations through without jumping to wild conclusions.