by Sue Welfare
‘Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family,’ said Sam. ‘I’d like to welcome everyone here and thank you once again for joining us tonight. If I could ask you to raise your glasses to propose a toast? To Rose and Jack.’
There was a great wave of noise that rolled towards them as everyone joined in with the toast. ‘Rose and Jack’.
The words echoed and hung in the air for an instant, then were followed by a huge cheer as the band struck up with an impromptu burst of ‘Congratulations’. The guests flocked forward to offer their good wishes and kind words and marvel at the fact that no one had guessed or let the cat out of the bag and to ask Rose if she had had any idea and to congratulate Jack and pump his hand until finally Jack lifted his hand up and called for silence.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said. ‘We’re absolutely delighted and totally amazed to see you all here this evening. We really had no idea about the party. Now if you’d just to give us ten minutes to catch our breath, we’ll be happy to come and have a chat to everyone and thank you once again for coming.’ He turned to Suzie, Liz, Fleur, Sam and Megan and smiled. ‘Thank you. This is the most wonderful surprise. Isn’t it, Rose? Now if you’ll just give us a few minutes I’m sure your mum would like to go and freshen up, put a party frock on, wouldn’t you, Rose?’
Before anyone could protest, the two of them hurried out of the marquee, closely followed by Suzie, Liz and Fleur. Sam turned back towards the guests and began encouraging people to top up their drinks and enjoy the canapés.
‘Are you okay?’ Suzie asked, as her dad opened the kitchen door.
‘Why are you asking them, why aren’t you asking me?’ said Liz. ‘You should be asking me. How could the two of them do this? We’ve been planning this party for months.’
‘They didn’t know that.’
‘Well, it’s unreasonable and so unfair. I mean, how does this make us look? We don’t even know the truth about our own parents.’
‘Getting all het up about it isn’t going to help,’ said Suzie.
Jack plugged in the kettle. ‘Tea, anyone?’ he said.
‘Bugger the tea, Dad,’ said Liz. ‘We thought we couldn’t let forty years go by without doing something special and all the time you’ve been living in sin.’
Rose, who was slipping off her shoes, laughed. ‘Oh come off it, Liz, no one lives in sin any more. This is the twenty-first century.’
‘Not where my family are concerned, it isn’t. Have you got any idea how embarrassing this is? We’ve invited everyone who came to your wedding and all your friends. I’ve put together a film for later.’
‘We found all kinds of things,’ said Suzie helpfully.
‘Yes, but apparently not the important things,’ Liz snapped back. ‘We’d got it all planned – anniversary waltz, lovely buffet, speeches, photographer, cutting the cake and everything. Just like the big day. We managed to track down the ushers, and both your bridesmaids, Fleur obviously, and Janet Fielding—’
Rose looked up. ‘Really? Fancy you tracking Janet down. We haven’t see her for years, have we, Jack?’ she said conversationally as she put her shoes in the cupboard.
‘—And Peter Hudson. We obviously knew he was your best man, he helped us with all the names. The bastard, why didn’t he say something before tonight?’ Liz slumped down into a chair at the kitchen table. ‘What on earth are we going to tell people? Why didn’t you tell us, Mum?’ said Liz.
Rose glanced at Jack. ‘I know it sounds silly saying it now, but it didn’t seem all that important, to be honest.’
‘How can something like that not be important?’ whined Liz.
‘Because it just wasn’t. Before we got divorced, your dad used to work away a lot of the time, and so in lots of ways life wasn’t that different after we split up and you were both very little and . . .’ Rose paused, glancing from face to face. ‘Obviously if we’d stayed separated, then we would have had to have said something to you eventually, but your dad came home nearly every weekend to see you both and to see me, and we still did lots of things we’d always done together and we went on holiday together all of us. It was all very civilised. You were little, and it was all a very long time ago now.’
Liz rounded on her father. ‘How could you leave a woman with two little children?’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you did that, Dad – that’s not the man I know at all.’
Jack looked as if she had punched him.
‘Liz, don’t,’ said Rose hastily. ‘It wasn’t your dad’s fault. It was me who asked him to leave.’
‘What?’ gasped Liz.
Suzie stared at her. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she whispered.
Rose sighed. ‘We were young and these things happen. And then one day I was standing in the kitchen, your dad was walking up the drive and he just looked at me and smiled and my heart did that fluttery-happy-excited thing that hearts do and I realised just how much I’d been looking forward to seeing him. And how much I’d missed him and I realised that I’d made the most awful mistake and that I still loved him and that I didn’t want him to go.’ As she spoke, Rose looked up at Jack, smiling, her eyes bright with tears. ‘And so I asked him to stay, and he did. And that was it really.’
That was it? What an understatement. Suzie stared at the pair of them, seeing the love between them and their obvious joy in being together even after all these years, and was stunned and close to speechless.
‘All those years and I had no idea,’ she murmured. ‘No idea at all.’
‘Well, how would you? We didn’t need to say anything, because things were back to how they had been,’ said her dad apologetically. ‘And through it all we always loved you—’
‘And besides Mr and Mrs bloody Peter Hudson, just how many people out there know?’ said Liz pointing towards the marquee. Her face was a picture.
‘Quite a few of them, probably . . . And there is something else—’ he said, glancing at Rose.
‘This is just too bizarre,’ Liz stammered, cutting him short. ‘And what about Fleur? Did you know?’
So far, Fleur hadn’t said a word and now, looking from face to face, she began to laugh, and laugh hard. ‘You know, all this is absolutely bloody priceless,’ she said, ‘There was me thinking you two had got it all worked out. All these years I’ve thought of you as the golden couple, nothing ever going wrong, roses all the way. All sorted. Bloody hell – I don’t believe it.’
Rose looked at Jack and then at Fleur. ‘I’m sorry, we owe you an apology too. You were living in Australia at the time and had this whole new life out there. It sounded so different from mine – all high-powered and go-getting – and if you remember, we weren’t talking much back then. You always seemed to have your act together and were so successful, I thought you’d think I was being stupid, foolish. It was pride really – I was worried what you might think of me . . . And we’d lost Mum and Dad by then, and it just didn’t seem the right time to say anything.’
‘So come on then, why did you ask him to leave?’ said Fleur. ‘Did you meet someone else? What the hell happened?’
Rose shifted uncomfortably under everyone’s gaze. ‘It wasn’t like that, and it was a long time ago now. Do we have to talk about it now? We need to get changed. We can talk about it later.’
‘We want to talk about it now, Rose,’ said Fleur. ‘You can hardly spring that one on us and then not tell us what the hell happened.’
‘I think we should,’ Jack began. ‘I mean, after all, we aren’t the only ones involved.’
‘Look, I don’t like to point this out again,’ said Liz. ‘But we’ve got a marquee full of people out there expecting to celebrate your fortieth wedding anniversary. We can’t keep them waiting all night. What the hell are we going to say to them?’
‘Maybe we could just change it to forty years together,’ said Suzie hastily.
‘Give or take a few years, you mean?’ snapped Liz angrily, prowling round the kitchen. ‘How could you do this to me, you two?’
‘In some ways it’s a lovely story, really romantic. We could just cut out the whole marriage thing—’ suggested Suzie.
‘And the wedding cake? And the ruby wedding party favours, and the band that are all primed to play “Here Comes the Bride”?’ snapped Liz, glaring furiously at her mum and dad. ‘The more I think about it, the worse it gets. I can’t believe you two, I really can’t. We’ve had balloons specially printed and everything. And what about our emotional and mental wellbeing? Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Rose anxiously.
‘Well, we’ve all been holding you two up as prime examples of good, clean living for years – happily married, weathering life’s storms together, kind and good and well behaved. You’ve been this family’s moral compass,’ said Liz. ‘God knows what’ll happen now.’
‘But all those things are still true,’ protested Rose. ‘Nothing’s changed, it’s just that we aren’t married.’
‘They might not have changed for you,’ said Liz indignantly. ‘But it’s a disaster for us. What is Suzie going to tell the girls? How can she have a go at them for behaving badly when their grandparents are living in sin?’
‘Oh for goodness sake,’ Rose said, reddening furiously. ‘We’re doing no such thing. You sound like some Victorian patriarch. This is not the Dark Ages, Liz. People do it all the time. Marriage as an institution is on the decline. Lots of people’s parents aren’t married.’
‘Yes, but not my parents,’ glowered Liz. ‘My parents are the height of respectability.’
‘Why didn’t you just get re-married?’ asked Suzie.
‘It wasn’t that simple,’ Rose began, just as the back door flew open and Megan burst into the kitchen, all smiles and joy and noise.
‘Grandma, Granddad, why aren’t you changed yet? Dad wants to know what’s taking so long. And he wanted you to know that the photographer is here to take the photos and Matt said the crowd is getting restless, and that people want to eat, and how much longer are you going to be, only I’m totally starving.’
Rose laughed. ‘Well, we can’t have that now, can we? You go and tell your dad we’ll be over in five minutes. Tell him Grandma just needs to change into her glad rags. Come on, Jack, let’s get going, we can’t keep everyone waiting.’
And with that she turned and headed upstairs leaving Suzie, Liz and Fleur with an awful lot more questions than answers.
For the briefest moment, Suzie thought that her dad was going to say something else, but instead he turned and followed Rose upstairs.
Chapter Twelve
Down on the riverbank, a mile or so away from the party, Sadie pursed her lips, screwed up her eyes and very carefully, having slipped the wire cage off the cork, began to ease it out of the champagne bottle with her thumbs.
‘Steady, steady,’ she murmured to herself.
‘Oh bloody hell, just stop messing about, will you?’ said Tucker, breaking the tension. ‘How long does it take to open a bottle of booze? Just get the bloody cork out, will you? A man could die of thirst around here.’
‘We wish,’ said Sadie. ‘Don’t you know anything about anything, Tucker? You have to do it right or it’ll go all over everywhere. What’s the point of Hannah nicking us a bottle of champagne if it ends up all over the floor?’
‘But I thought that was what you did with champagne – you know, shake it up and spray it about like they do on the telly,’ Tucker said, miming with his thumbs pressed together.
‘Not if you want to get drunk on it, you don’t, dingbat,’ said Simon, without taking his eyes off Sadie or the bottle.
‘Who are you calling a dingbat, moron?’ Tucker snarled at him.
‘Shut up and cool it, you two. If you shake it up you lose half of it,’ said Sadie. ‘Nice and easy does it.’
They were hiding out inside a dense stand of rhododendrons down beyond the golf course that over the years had formed a natural den by killing off the grass and plants beneath it. Overhead the thick evergreen foliage formed a leafy canopy. It was cool under the contorted branches and the spread of dense, shiny, green leaves. Shaded from the late afternoon sun, their makeshift camp was softly dappled, the air heavy with the scents of summer, of loam and barbeques and newly mown grass. Beyond the shelter of the foliage, Hannah could pick out the early evening sound of insects buzzing away and the distant drone of a mower, but inside the air was still and heavy with the smell of cigarette smoke.
The ground beneath the branches was clear except for a few logs, a battered folding chair and an assortment of odds and ends that the four of them had brought there. In the centre of the den were the remains of a campfire that they had had the previous weekend, surrounded by stones that Simon and Tucker had carried up from the river. Beyond the bushes and below the den, the water idled past, glinting in the sunlight, cool, deep, dark and inviting.
Tucker had the patience of a toddler. ‘Daft bloody stuff. What’s the point of having something when you lose half of it when you open it? That’s stupid – why don’t we just crack open the vodka instead? I’ve got half a bottle of Coke in my rucksack, we could just mix the whole thing up. Get on down and parteeeeeeee.’ He stood up and waggled his hips, hands above his head.
‘And you drank out of the bottle?’ asked Sadie, eyes still on the end of the champagne bottle.
Tucker nodded, looking confused. ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I? Like I carry a silver goblet around to drink out of—’
‘Like we want to drink your spit,’ said Sadie, as the cork finally slid from the end of the bottle with an explosive, satisfying thunk. It soared out through the rhododendrons, vani shing in the long tussocky grass further down the riverbank.
As the bubbles erupted, Sadie quickly pressed the bottle to her lips and drank greedily, belching back the gas as she pulled away and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The bottle was cloudy with condensation, little rivulets of moisture trickling down the outside of the heavy green glass.
‘Oh wow, that is so cold,’ she said with a shiver, handing the champagne over to Hannah. ‘Ladies first,’ she growled, as Tucker tried to make a grab for it in passing.
‘Oh come on,’ said Tucker. ‘Hannah’s a total lightweight. She doesn’t really want any booze, do you, Hannah? Come on. Gimme a go.’
‘She will when she’s done,’ said Sadie.
Aware that they were all watching her, Hannah held the bottle in both hands and tipped it up, expecting the contents to be sweet and fizzy like lemonade; certainly not sour and tasting vaguely like sick, which was what it did taste like. She spluttered as the taste filled her mouth, and then gasped and choked all in the same instant as the champagne flooded down her throat. She couldn’t help but pull a face, grimacing and struggling to stop herself from retching as she pulled the bottle away.
‘See. Yeah, you’re a real hard drinker, aren’t you?’ laughed Tucker triumphantly, trying to snatch the bottle away from her. ‘Gimme that here. Let me show you how it’s done.’
‘Shut up,’ said Hannah, slapping his hand away. ‘It just went up my nose, that’s all. I’ve had loads of champagne at weddings and parties and stuff, it just went down the wrong way. Okay?’
Determined to show him she could do it, Hannah took a great big slurping slug from the bottle before handing it on, trying hard not to gag as she did so.
‘Yeah, like you’re so hard,’ said Tucker as he took a mouthful. Screwing up his nose, he pulled the bottle away to stare at it. ‘Yeuk, bloody hell – no wonder you choked, that’s horrible, this can’t be the stuff all them footballers and that drink. It’s foul. I like the blue fizzies. My brother gets them for me, they taste like bubble gum.’
Simon took the bottle from Tucker and drank without comment. Hannah couldn’t help but be impressed.
Meanwhile Sadie had got her hands on the vodka. ‘You pair should have got some Coke or lemonade or something as well,’ she said to Hannah and Simon, cracking the seal on the bottle.
‘We would
if you’d have said something,’ said Simon.
‘Well, I didn’t think I’d have to,’ said Sadie, all sarcasm.
‘I’ve got—’ Tucker began.
‘Yeah, yeah, we all know what you’ve got,’ said Sadie waving the words away. ‘You already said and if I need it I’ll tell you, okay?’
Simon stretched and stood up. ‘I could go up to the shop and get a couple of cans if you like. What do you reckon?’
Hannah wondered if she dared offer to go with him. As she was thinking it, Simon said, ‘You fancy coming with me, Hannah?’
Sadie caught her eye and grinned. ‘Worried you might get lost, are you, Simon?’ she said.
Hannah felt her colour rising.
‘Yeah right,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking she could help me carry stuff.’
‘Really?’ said Sadie.
‘I was just thinking we could do with some paper cups or something.’
Sadie laughed. ‘You pair will be wanting bloody doilies next.’ And then turning to Tucker, she leant over and waggled her fingers at him. ‘C’mon on then, hand it over.’
‘What?’ he said looking bemused.
‘The Coke, you moron, give me it here, will you?’ she said. ‘The alcohol will kill the germs and, let’s face it, beggars can’t be choosers. We can pick up some cans on the way back to my house.’
Simon was about to say something but Sadie was ahead of him. ‘Sit down and relax, Si – it was a lovely offer, sweetie, but let’s be honest, we can’t wait that long.’
Tucker meanwhile did as he was told and handed the bottle over and, while they all watched, Sadie very carefully decanted a hefty measure of vodka into the half empty bottle. She swirled the contents round a little and then, after wiping the top, took a long, slow, gulping drink. She offered it to Tucker who, grinning like a loon, took a swig.
‘Oh yeah. That’s better,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘Oh yesssss, very nice, very nice indeed. Loads better than that poxy bloody champagne.’ He handed it on to Hannah.