Caitlin perched on the edge of the sofa, hands on her lap as if she was at a job interview. She refused the offer of a coffee or a tea, said she was detoxing and was only drinking water at the moment. Obviously not tap water, only the bottled stuff with a French name, which Marnie didn’t have so she’d do without. Besides, she couldn’t stay long. She and Grigori were going out to dinner with her parents.
‘So, go on then, tell me what’s wrong,’ said Caitlin, with more of a tired air than Marnie wanted to acknowledge. So Marnie told her. The lot. Everything. And then she waited – hoped – for Caitlin to be the Caitlin of old and make her feel better. The way that Marnie had made her feel better when Danny Bradford had bonked her cousin and Will Brown had told her he had gone off her because she was crap at sex. And when Grigori had said that, before he took her to meet his parents, she should work on changing how she laughed because it sounded a bit common. That wonderful, infectious bray of a laugh that Caitlin was known for had to go. And her clothes. And did her accent have to be quite so broad Yorkshire? Marnie had asked her if she was sure she really wanted to be with a man who was so hyper-critical. She said she did and slowly but surely, Grigori had turned her into Margaret Thatcher.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ said Caitlin in that strange slow way she talked now as if each word had to be vetted for accent and pitch before it emerged from her mouth. ‘You didn’t realise that he was still very much married, though he wouldn’t go out in public with you or stay the night?’
‘No. I know it sounds stupid—’ Marnie began, but Caitlin cut her off.
‘How old are you?’
‘You know how old I am, Cait—’
‘Yes, I know I know. You’re thirty-one, days away from being thirty-two and isn’t that just a little too old to be making this sort of mistake? It sounds to me as if you knew exactly what the situation was but chose to ignore it.’ And she laughed, a new Caitlin laugh, a hard, breathy mini-guffaw that carried the words how vey vey vulgar as passengers.
‘I believed him, Cait,’ said Marnie, tears racing up to her eyes. ‘He was so convincing. There’s no love without trust. So I trusted him.’
‘You’ve trusted them all,’ said Caitlin, wearily. ‘Don’t you have any BS detector? Haven’t you learned anything from being dumped on over and over again?’
‘Do any of us?’ Marnie returned, a little annoyed at Caitlin’s judgement. ‘Maybe we only see it for other people, Cait.’ They’d always said to each other that it was the world’s easiest thing to give advice but much harder to take it. In the past they’d accepted they weren’t the wisest girls when it came to men. One of Caitlin’s exes left his own engagement party to nip over for a bonk with her before racing back to it FFS. She hadn’t had a clue that he was even seeing anyone else.
‘But this is stupid,’ Caitlin came back at her. ‘You must have known. The signs were obvious. More than obvious. Even to someone in a coma. Don’t lie to yourself and me. You knew.’
‘He said he and his wife were consciously uncoupling. I might have been frustrated about the lack of speed of that process, but no – I didn’t know.’
‘Did you question him properly? No – you didn’t, because you didn’t want to face up to what you really knew. You never do. You don’t learn. No wonder I—’
She pulled up her sentence short and shook her head, continued down another path. ‘You’ve caused untold damage now, to yourself and others.’
Untold damage? Since when did Caitlin Tyler say untold damage? But Marnie was more concerned with what Caitlin had been about to say after the ‘no wonder’ line.
‘No wonder I what?’ she looped the conversation back to it. ‘What were you going to say?’
Caitlin shrugged. Then she looked at her watch. Then she stood up from the sofa, carefully, like a model afraid that a paparazzo would shoot his camera up her skirt. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m going to have to go . . .’
‘No wonder I what?’ Marnie was insistent. ‘Just tell me.’
Caitlin sighed, then looked Marnie straight in the eye and quirked a perfect left brow, as far as the Botox would allow her to.
‘Okay then, I was going to say . . . no wonder I didn’t bring Grigori with me.’
What did that even mean, thought Marnie.
‘Grigori? What’s he got to do with any of this?’
Caitlin’s hands fell onto her hips in a stance of meaning business.
‘Marnie, you aren’t interested in men unless they have some complication, some baggage. Think about it – every one of them,’ Caitlin picked up her handbag, a very nice Lulu Guinness with a pair of red lips as a clasp, not unlike the lips on Caitlin’s face, which were plumper than Marnie remembered them ever being before.
‘And what the hell has that to do with Grig—’ Then the icky penny dropped. ‘Oh please, tell me that you’re not suggesting I’d be after Grigori. Please don’t tell me you keep us apart because you’re afraid I’d try and steal him from under your nose.’ Marnie let loose a shriek of disbelieving laughter, expecting Caitlin’s to join it. Expecting Caitlin to tell her not to be so bloody daft.
‘Yes, if you must know, that’s exactly what I think.’ Caitlin’s expression remained stony.
‘Really?’ Marnie’s jaw dropped so low, she could have fitted a football between her teeth.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s what I think.’
Marnie stared at the woman in front of her and knew that there was nothing of her old friend left in that Caitlin casing. She was an alien, a stranger. That her best buddy could think so badly of her flooded her body with a horrible cocktail of upset and anger which spilled over into words.
‘I wouldn’t touch that chinless wonder if he peeled his skin off and he was Ryan Reynolds underneath.’
‘But you did, didn’t you?’ Caitlin threw back at her. ‘He told me what you did on the staircase at Lucy’s wedding.’
‘What I did? You mean when he stuck his disgusting tongue in my mouth and I shoved him off and he fell down the stairs and called me a—’
‘Oh, listen to yourself, Marnie,’ spat Caitlin. ‘He couldn’t stick his tongue in your mouth from a distance, could he? He’s not a fucking lizard,’ – Marnie huffed loudly at that –‘you’d have had to get up close and personal first. Don’t you think I’ve thought it through?’
Marnie threw up her hands. ‘You’d believe him over me? He was plastered, I was sober for a start and I would have never, never have done that to you. What a prick. He’s had you changing the way you dress, how you speak, how you laugh and now you tell me he thinks he’s so drop-dead gorgeous your best friend would come on to him?’
‘And that is precisely why you are not invited to our wedding,’ said Caitlin, taking her car keys out of her bag.
Marnie blinked in shock. She wasn’t sure if she was most stunned by the fact that her so-called best friend – her oldest friend – was getting married and hadn’t told her, or that she was marrying one of the biggest turnips on the planet. Or that Caitlin had believed her capable of such deception. They were all vying for top position. And all of them were winning.
‘Happy fucking birthday. Don’t bother buying me anything for mine. Let’s end it there,’ said Caitlin, dropping both the gift bag she brought in with her onto the sofa and her posh accent too. She sounded like the Caitlin of old for those few seconds before she speed-walked on her red-soled shoes towards the front door, slamming it hard behind her.
The bag fell off the sofa and the box inside slid out. It was an M&S toiletries gift set.
HISTORY OF WYCHWELL BY LIONEL TEMPLE
with contributions by Lilian Dearman.
There are presently twenty-four residences (including four derelict ones) in Wychwell plus an eight-bedroomed manor with its own boating lake, the Wych Arms pub, a post office-cum-general store, a village hall and a mobile library, which is a caravan in the church grounds. Also the church of St Jude the Apostle (patron saint of hope and lost causes)
. The Reverend Lionel Temple was born into the position as his father, Lionel senior, was also the resident reverend until his premature death aged only fifty-seven. Wychwell occupies 3,015 acres of land and woodland which surrounds the village on all sides.
The names of the cottages were chosen by the present Lady of the Manor, Miss Lilian Mathilda Dearman after the death of her father in 1988, as she felt many of the present names were too morose for such a pretty village and this process helped to put her unique stamp on Wychwell.
Every year on May Day weekend, the village honours the poor soul of Margaret Kytson and her unnamed child with a medieval fair. A May Queen is crowned. Sadly the fairs are poorly attended. Another tentacle of Margaret’s curse, perchance?
Until the 1930s a ‘Wychwell Pie’ was made, each attempt aiming to be larger than the previous one, an idea borrowed from the famous Denby Dale Pie events in West Yorkshire. This tradition ended with the death of Lilian’s grandfather Erasmus Fortescue Sutton Dearman and it proved too unpopular to revive.
Chapter 11
Marnie realised how ridiculous her situation was when she ran out of toilet rolls a couple of days later and didn’t dare go out to the shop to get more. She felt as if a million watt light would pick her out and sirens would go off as soon as she stepped over the threshold and Melissa from next door would race out screaming abuse and try to attack her car with an axe by way of revenge. So, Marnie waited until it was dark before setting off for the supermarket in Doreton to buy some essential household basics: loo rolls, milk and bread. She had just passed the bottom of the wine aisle en route to the till when who should she see looking at bottle labels but Vicky. Of all times, of all supermarkets. This one was miles from where she lived, so why was she here? That old chestnut Sod’s Law was obviously in operation. Marnie broke out in a cold sweat as she hurried to the self-service till and with shaky hands scanned the contents of her basket quickly, ready to abandon everything if she heard that stupid computer voice asking her to wait for an assistant. It didn’t, but as she was bagging up her Warburton’s loaf, she saw Vicky approach a manned till and realised that it wasn’t her at all. In fact, hair style excepted, the woman looked nothing like her.
She knew she couldn’t live like this, eaten up by worry and paranoia. She almost smashed into a van driving out of the car park and received a mouthful from the aggressive male driver. She drove into her garage, sped into the house, closed the door behind her, locked it and felt close to tears with the relief. There were so many beads of perspiration on her face, she could have made an eighteen-inch necklace out of them. Her phone went off in her bag – an email alert.
I do hope you are still coming tomorrow, Marnie. Here’s my mobile number so you can let me know. 07970 . . . Lilian x
Her thirty-second birthday. She could either spend it holed up in this house wondering what Melissa at the other side of the wall was thinking, lamenting that she wouldn’t be waking up beside her lover, hearing her mother’s voice on a continual loop in her head that she was a trouble-causer, a tart, a disgrace. Or she could journey up to a small village in the Dales where only one person knew her, but that person was lovely and liked her.
She replied within the minute, to Lilian’s mobile this time
Yes. I’ll be there x
*
The sun was shining its little heart out the next morning. Marnie had managed a full six hours’ sleep, a record since the Suranna Fox incident on Wednesday. She checked her phone, once again, for a birthday message from Justin and hated that she had. She might have deleted his number but she hadn’t blocked it. There were no texts. And, for once, her brain wasn’t drumming up excuses why that was. But what it had been doing, between the hours of six and seven, when she woke up for no reason and couldn’t get back to sleep again, was dissecting her relationship with Caitlin. It had opened up lots of boxes in her head, full of information that she had stuffed away not wanting to acknowledge (oh, she was so good at that!). Caitlin could be great fun and witty but there was a cold side to her that Marnie had always been wary of. In short, Caitlin could be – and had been – a right cow sometimes.
As if her grey cells were on a major head de-clutter, it had dragged out lots of files containing memories that stung like wasps: how Caitlin hadn’t wanted to be her friend at first and was a bit of a bitch at school, until Ali Scott-Marshall emigrated and Caitlin found herself at a loose end. How Caitlin resented Marnie having boyfriends when she was single but dropped her like a boiling brick when she found one of her own. Caitlin snogging the boy at a sixth-form college disco whom Marnie was nuts over, blaming it on strawberry-flavoured Mad Dog. Caitlin going to Julie Duckworth’s party when she’d invited everyone in the class but Marnie (solidarity – not). Caitlin always managing to be last to the bar whenever they went out.
Then there was the matter of the Saturday job in the local shop that Caitlin had snatched from under her nose. Marnie had forgiven her all of these things because no one was perfect – oh boy, she knew that for a fact – but for Caitlin, her friend for so long, to believe the warped account of a man she’d known for less than a year over her own . . . well, there was no coming back from that. Their friendship was irrevocably dead. And it wasn’t worth the funeral.
En route to Wychwell, Marnie remembered that Lilian had said something about dressing in medieval clothes. Not that it mattered because she didn’t have any. If she wasn’t allowed entry because she was in jeans and a T-shirt, then so be it. She had enough to worry about, never mind trying to find a last-minute fancy dress costume.
It was a lovely drive once she’d left the motorway. The road took her through the village of Skipperstone and she saw again the Tea Lady tearoom where she’d first met Lilian and a smile spread across her face before immediately shrinking back. How could her life have changed so much in the fortnight since then? She had gone from bouncing around like Tigger to feeling as if there were lead weights on her feet. She’d gone from being the first woman to run her own department in Café Caramba to a despised pariah. She’d gone from a relationship with a gorgeous, sexy, successful man to being estranged from a lying, cheating dickhead. Now she was rudderless, without direction, adrift, unloved and reduced to sneaking out of her house in the dead of night for bog rolls. It wasn’t good.
And it was her birthday and she’d had no cards to open, apart from the one from Caitlin and Grigori that wasn’t the usual ‘best/special/great friend’ card, but an arty one with abstract coloured blobs on it. ‘Have a Very Happy Birthday love from Grigori and Caitlin x’ she’d written inside. Even her bloody handwriting had changed. Plus, she’d not only added that twat’s name, but put it first. Marnie hadn’t displayed it on the mantelpiece where it would only have looked impossibly lonely and even more indicative of her Billy-no-mates status than none would have been, but binned it. It meant nothing. Caitlin had written ‘love’ whilst hating her for supposedly coming on to her boyfriend. Possibly her mother’s and Gabrielle’s were in the post, though it wouldn’t have set a precedent if they had ‘forgotten’ to send one. They didn’t believe in belated cards as they were, apparently, just another way for shops to money-grab, so if a card didn’t arrive near enough on time, it wouldn’t arrive at all.
She tried not to think of making love with Justin in a four-poster bed in wildest Derbyshire before a delicious breakfast and a slow drive back home, possibly via a country inn for a small vino and a light lunch, but concentrated on heading towards the privately owned realm that was Wychwell. She tried, but soft-focus images of the day she should have had kept poking through the net of her resolve and she had to keep bashing them back.
After Skipperstone, the scenery became quite beautiful: patchwork green fields, rich brown squares of ploughed land that reminded her of chocolate cake crumbs. Rivers tripping over stones ran alongside the road for a spell; in the distance the smoke-grey Pennines rested their heads against pillows of wispy clouds and a sheet of pale blue sky. Signs pointed to very Yorkshi
re-Dales-like sounding places such as Kettlehead, Mintbottom, Uttersthorpe. There were no signs for Wychwell, even though the satnav told her she was only three miles away now. The road started to weave left and right like a mad giant snake climbing up a hill before beginning a gentler curve over the top, one side flanked by high rocks wearing what looked to be hairnets, the other by forest.
Alerted by the satnav, she took a left turn down a two-way but very narrow lane darkened by the trees that arched above. Wychwell, half a mile. Marnie wondered if she was traversing the wood where the witch lay buried. No wonder they couldn’t find the well; it was huge, dense. Then the trees began to thin and she saw in the near distance a church spire and buildings. With the window down, she could hear a pounding drumbeat and a tambourine-tinkle as she approached what looked like the remains of medieval village defensive walls. There was a large hand-painted sign reading ‘CAR PARK FOR VISITORS’ and an arrow pointing to an area with two vehicles in it and she pulled up in one of the many empty spaces. She walked towards a man sitting at a table where an equally rough sign advertised ‘ENTRY TO THE FAIR’. He was wearing a long gold-blonde wig and a hessian tunic and was foraging in a sack at his side. Marnie waited for a polite amount of time and then coughed to alert him to her presence. His head snapped around and she wondered if the full beard and moustache that matched the hair were false too. He smiled and Marnie took a small involuntary step back in horror. His teeth were disgusting, brown and protruding and she bet that they smelt of cheese.
The Perfectly Imperfect Woman Page 8