The Wedding Diary (Choc Lit)

by James, Margaret

  ‘I’ve never understood the dubious charm of S & M,’ reflected Fanny. ‘It puts you off your popcorn, doesn’t it?’

  ‘God, it’s horrible.’ Cat turned the screen away. ‘Fan, he’ll be a laughing stock when all his mates see this.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ drawled Fanny. ‘But angel, does it matter? Do you care?’

  ‘Well, I suppose so, just a bit.’

  ‘You’re too soft, my darling. Listen, Cat – he treated you like gum, to be chewed up and then spat out. He called me a hideous old slapper with – what was it – plastic jugs and orange hair. The cheek of it, my stylist would be outraged, this is Sienna Gold. I’ll have you know my boobs are all my own. He was mean to Caspar, too. He called my darling boy a bloody dog. Cat, my love, you’ve gone all red, why’s that?’

  ‘It’s quite hot in here.’

  ‘No it isn’t, sweetheart – the temperature is absolutely perfect.’ Fanny looked at Cat with narrowed eyes. ‘You’ve been having very naughty thoughts.’

  ‘I – yes, I have.’ Cat had long since realised there was nothing she could hide from Fanny. ‘I’m sorry, Fanny, but for a while I wondered if—if you and Jack—’

  ‘My goodness, how disgusting.’ Fanny shuddered. ‘Cat, my angel, you’re like all the young. You see a man and woman talking and you think of just one thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fanny.’

  ‘I should think so, too,’ said Fanny. ‘Darling, I’m attracted to very clever men – to men with power and money – to men who fascinate and mystify. As for Jack – well, it took me two seconds flat to work out Jackie-boy. He’s very easy on the eye, I’ll give him that. But he’s very stupid and his looks will fade and then he will have nothing, so he’s not my sort at all. Angel, have a petit four?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A petit four.’ Fanny pushed a pretty little silver box at Cat. ‘They’re flower-scented fancies, lavender and violet and jasmine – interesting, eh? The woman who makes them wants me to promote them, to get them put in goodie bags at literary parties, dinners, lunches and the like. But they’re rather horrid. When I tried one, I was almost sick. They taste of soap and smell like cheap deodorant. Caspar doesn’t like them, do you, darling? When I gave him one, he spat it out, and usually his manners are exemplary, as you know.’

  ‘I think I’ll pass,’ said Cat, now determined not to be deflected, charmed, or lulled into a false sense of security by clever, devious Fanny Gregory.

  ‘Take the box then, angel. Do admit, my sweet, it’s very lovely. All that silver foiling, swirly writing, rather classy, don’t you think? A bit too classy, actually, for what are just pretentious little biscuits. It’s rather like our Jack – an excellent example of ridiculous over-packaging, considering what’s inside.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps,’ said Cat, still stony-faced.

  ‘So go on, darling, put it in your bag. You could keep your buttons in it, couldn’t you, or perhaps your earrings?’

  ‘I don’t want it, Fanny,’ Cat insisted as she pushed her sushi box aside. ‘What are you going to do about the money?’

  ‘What money, darling heart?’

  ‘The money you said I owed you when I broke it off with Jack.’

  ‘Oh, forget it, sweetheart,’ Fanny said. ‘You don’t owe me a thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Cat stared, open-mouthed. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I think you heard me, angel.’

  ‘But all this time I’ve worried and I’ve wondered and I’ve tossed and turned at night!’ Cat jumped up and glared at Fanny, outraged. Caspar looked alarmed as well. ‘You told me I’d signed a binding contract! You said I had agreed—’

  ‘Cat, my love, stop hyperventilating.’ Fanny stroked her greyhound’s sleek, dark head and calmed him down again. ‘Put yourself in my place for a moment. I was just a little bit annoyed with you and lovely Jack. I couldn’t have you thinking it was perfectly okay to say you’d graciously accept the prize, but then five minutes later to say you’d changed your minds, and I’d just have to go along with it.’

  ‘Fan, it wasn’t like that at all, you damn well know it wasn’t! You had me lying awake and fretting, thinking I would have to borrow money from a loan shark, at a huge rate of interest—’

  ‘Darling, if you’d used your common sense and gone to a solicitor, he’d have charged you fifty quid and told you not to worry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cat, I probably couldn’t have touched you for a single penny, even if I’d been inclined to try. My time is precious, angel. It simply wouldn’t have been worth my while.’

  ‘So you played with me. You made me worry that I’d be in debt forever.’ Cat slumped down into her chair again. ‘Fanny, that was mean of you,’ she said reproachfully.

  ‘Yes – perhaps a teeny tiny bit.’ Fanny had the grace to look ashamed – for half a second, anyway. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’

  ‘How much money did you lose?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t spend a penny piece.’

  ‘But Fan, you told me – what about that first time?’

  ‘What do you mean, my angel?’

  ‘When we went to Dorset and you showed me round and Rick took all those photographs?’

  ‘I sold them to an agency, of course,’ said Fanny, smiling sweetly. ‘When someone googles images for pretty blonde and English country house, you ought to come up first.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cat, then realised she was not at all surprised.

  ‘But that’s enough of talking about tedious little you,’ continued Fanny merrily. ‘Now I’ve got my runners-up in training, and I think they’ll soon be sorted out. My flower, I must admit that I don’t find them as attractive as you and lovely Jack. But, all things considered, they’re turning out quite well.’

  ‘Who are they, then?’ asked Cat.

  ‘Tony Smith and Brenda something unpronounceable. I think it must be Polish. Or Latvian, perhaps? Lots of consonants jammed up together, anyway.’ Fanny Gregory sighed. ‘Tone and Bren they call each other. Ghastly, isn’t it? When we do the promotion, I think I’m going to call them Ant and Bee.’

  ‘What are they like?’

  ‘They’re very sweet, my angel, but they’re desperately dull. She works in a beauty salon in some boring suburb of – I think she said Northampton. Something hampton, anyway. She waxes women’s whatsits all day long. I can’t imagine anything more tedious and depressing. Tone’s involved with sewers or drains, I can’t remember which, but it’s something sordid to do with pipes and smells.

  ‘Cat, it’s such a shame that you and Jackie-boy fell out. You made a gorgeous couple. If you could have managed to get on for just a few more months – well, you would have been so perfect for the magazines.’

  ‘We’d have been divorced within a year.’

  ‘Oh, quite probably,’ said Fanny, nodding. ‘But you’d have had the loveliest of weddings, and I’d have made a mint.’

  ‘Fan, how did you know about me and Adam?’ Cat enquired casually.

  ‘You and Adam, darling?’

  ‘Fanny, please stop messing me about?’

  ‘Honestly, my angel, I don’t know what you mean. But it was obvious he liked you. I saw the way he looked at you when we met by accident in Dorset. When he came to Surrey to quote me for a little bit of work he might do on my barn – the stables round the back need sorting out, and sorting stables is his special subject, after all – I got him opening up.’

  ‘You asked him about me?’

  ‘It wasn’t very difficult to get him to admit that if you weren’t engaged he might be tempted. I can be very persuasive, as you know. You seemed so upset about your breaking up with Jack, and I thought you needed cheering up. But darling, are you saying there was something going on already?’

  ‘You
don’t know we went to Italy?’

  ‘No – I thought you said you went alone?’ Then Fanny’s sharp, blue eyes began to glitter, like they did when she was on to something, or she thought she might be. ‘Come on, darling – tell?’

  So Cat explained.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Fanny acidly. ‘Well, you’re a dark one, aren’t you?’

  ‘You really, truly didn’t know?’

  ‘My darling, how on earth could I have known?’

  ‘You know everything,’ said Cat.

  ‘Well, perhaps I had a little inkling.’ Fanny smiled her smuggest smile. ‘I’m quite good at inklings. Anyway, my sweet, I need to see some other people now. You must get back to Adam.’

  ‘Yes, I’m meeting him in half an hour,’ said Cat, pushing back her chair and standing up.

  ‘Before you go,’ said Fanny, ‘Rosie’s had an offer of a PR job in Paris for a year. She says she’d like to take it. I can’t blame the darling girl. She’ll have such fun in France and she already speaks the language. Then, when her sister finishes at Oxford, they want to start a PR and promotions business of their own.’

  ‘Yes, she mentioned that to me,’ said Cat.

  ‘Oh, did she really?’ Fanny smiled a steely little smile. ‘I’m going to have to watch my back with Rosie, I can see. She’ll be after all my smaller clients, and she can’t have the lot. So, anyway—’

  ‘You’ll want somebody else to boss around?’

  ‘I’ll need a new assistant, certainly. Angel, I was wondering if you’d like to work for me? It’s forty thousand basic, lots of tips and bonuses and freebies and sweeteners and samples – adds up to quite a package, all in all.’

  ‘No,’ said Cat.

  ‘At least consider it?’

  ‘I don’t need to consider it.’

  ‘What if we said forty-five and private health insurance?’

  ‘Fanny, I could never work with you,’ said Cat, refusing to allow herself to realise this was twice what Barry paid and was probably more than Adam earned. She hadn’t thought to ask what her new job with him would pay. ‘I’d sooner sweep the streets.’

  ‘I wondered if you might say that, my angel, but I thought I’d ask you, anyway.’ Fanny stood up too and held out one red-taloned hand. ‘I hope we can be friends?’

  Cat stared for a moment, but then she started laughing, thinking that for sheer effrontery and blatant chutzpah Fanny Gregory could have no equal. She pitied Jack, but told herself it also served him right. So she shook Fanny’s hand.

  ‘We’re friends,’ she said.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Fanny. ‘So I’ll be in touch about the work.’

  ‘What work?’ demanded Cat. ‘Fanny, I’ve already told you I could never work with you.’

  ‘But you’re going to change your mind, my angel.’ Fanny allowed herself a little chuckle. ‘People always do. You and darling Adam – let me help you make some serious money?’

  ‘Fanny, I don’t want anything to do with you and money.’

  ‘We’ll see, my love, we’ll see.’

  ‘Fanny says she didn’t know that we met up in Italy,’ said Cat, when she joined Adam later in a Starbucks close to Fanny’s office.

  ‘Why should she have known about us meeting up in Italy?’

  ‘She’s a witch, she’s psychic, she knows everything,’ said Cat. ‘If she didn’t know about us going to Italy, and if she didn’t know we’d had a row, why did she invite you to her party? Why was she so keen to try to get you off with me?’

  ‘She invited me because I’d sourced some garden stuff and it was her way of saying thank you. I expect you were some sort of present, Cat, gift-wrapped in a Lulu Minto frock.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Oh, and because she thinks I’m the most gorgeous, sexiest man she’s ever met – she told me so herself.’

  ‘She must need contacts, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam, laughing. ‘Yes, she must.’

  ‘That’s not all she needs.’

  Then Cat told Adam everything, and he frowned and muttered, and finally he said he thought what Fanny bloody Gregory needed most was locking up.

  ‘You can’t lock up our fairy godmother,’ objected Cat.

  ‘She’s not our fairy godmother,’ growled Adam. ‘As you said, the woman is a witch. But listen, when she said you owed her money, why didn’t you ask how much?’

  ‘I did,’ said Cat. ‘I tried to make her tell me. But she said she didn’t have the paperwork to hand. Then, when I said I had no money anyway, she said I’d have to work, and—listen, Adam, I know I should have gone to a solicitor. I wasn’t thinking straight. There was lots of other rubbish cluttering up my life. Jack and—’

  ‘Me,’ said Adam. ‘I’m so sorry, Cat. That night we came home from Italy – if only we’d gone back to yours, not mine.’

  ‘I should have listened to you properly, not got all angry, all upset. I ought to have believed you, not stormed off in a huff.’

  ‘In your place, I’d have stormed off, too,’ said Adam.

  ‘But you don’t seem the storming kind,’ said Cat. ‘You’re always so composed, so calm.’

  ‘Oh, I can storm,’ said Adam. ‘Or do things I never meant to do and wouldn’t have done if I’d been thinking straight.’

  ‘You mean like telling Mr Portland you wouldn’t work for him?’

  ‘No, as time goes by I realise it was a godsend, dumping him. He and that wife of his – between them, they’d have driven me mad.’

  ‘We can’t have you going mad, it isn’t in the schedule.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  Cat looked at him and was reminded of Mr Rochester and Mr Darcy and Mr Jackson Brodie all blended into one.

  She thought it must be time to get his shirt off.

  ‘Adam, let’s go back to mine,’ she said.

  ‘We messed up big time, didn’t we?’ said Cat, as she and Adam lay in bed together in her flat. ‘I mean, before we met each other, before we got it right?’

  ‘We did,’ said Adam. ‘I thought I knew Maddy through and through, but I didn’t know anything at all. I had this image in my mind, of Maddy in some country cottage, making jam and growing vegetables and keeping chickens, going on family holidays in Tuscany with half a dozen children. But the woman in the country cottage wasn’t Maddy, and it was never going to be like that.’

  ‘I was on a mission to rescue Jack,’ said Cat, and sighed. ‘He always said he didn’t have a family, that he’d never had a real home. So I decided I would give him both. Of course, he always was a dreamer, fantasist and liar. I didn’t know the real Jack. I only knew a phantom. I knew the tortured genius I’d created for myself.’

  ‘He’s history now,’ said Adam. ‘What about the future, you and me?’

  ‘The future, that’s a big and rather terrifying prospect.’ Cat looked hard at Adam. ‘I didn’t know Jack at all. Do I know you?’

  ‘I think you know too much,’ said Adam, laughing. ‘You know about my moodiness, my awkwardness, my total inability to learn a foreign language—’

  ‘Your kindness, generosity, honesty—’

  ‘Stop it, Cat, I’m blushing, and it doesn’t suit me. But anyway, you wanted to get married. You dreamed about it, planned it. I’m offering you the chance to live your dream.’

  ‘You’re asking me to marry you – again?’

  ‘It seems a shame to waste a wedding opportunity and deny our mothers their chance to wear some really horrid hats.’

  ‘Well, if you feel we should.’

  ‘So that’s a yes?’

  ‘I think it must be,’ Cat replied.

  ‘I hear that note of hesitancy in your voice again. It’s always there when I ask you to marry m
e.’

  ‘Well, obviously there are terms, conditions.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘We have to get married at the Melbury Court Hotel.’

  ‘Where else would we get married?’

  ‘You agree?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Adam.

  ‘We’ll have to tell her ladyship, you know.’

  ‘You mean Fanny Gregory, I suppose,’ said Adam, shrugging. ‘Why do we have to tell her anything? She’ll only interfere.’

  ‘If we don’t let her know, and do it now, she’ll very soon find out.’

  ‘How will she do that?’

  ‘She’ll get out her cauldron, drop in bits of frog and newt, brew up a magic spell.’

  ‘Magic, huh,’ said Adam. ‘I wouldn’t put it past the bloody woman to have had us bugged. Perhaps we’d better get new mobiles? You ought to check the lining in your bag.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps I should. God, I’m so tired,’ Cat said, yawning. ‘It must be all that partying.’

  ‘The private party isn’t over yet,’ said Adam, turning out the light.

  Tuesday, 5 July

  When Cat told Fanny she and Adam were going to get married, she said they had to come into her office straight away.

  When they called in that evening, she told them she’d decided she didn’t want Ant and Bee to do a thing for the promotion, except of course the getting married bit.

  ‘You’re so much more attractive, much more charismatic, darlings,’ she said wistfully. ‘If you’d do a tiny little bit of work for me in lead-up to your wedding, I could make it really worth your while. I’m assuming it will be just months?’ she added, frowning. ‘You’re not thinking of a long engagement stretching into years?’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ said Cat. ‘But those two other people, won’t they want to do promotions, and won’t they want to be in magazines?’

  ‘I’ll think of things for Ant and Bee to do to keep the sponsors sweet,’ said Fanny. ‘You don’t need to worry about them.’