To date, though, it’s Gracie who’s been the cheerleader-in-chief of all the doom-mongers; try as she might, she and Bernard just can’t seem to connect on any level whatsoever. ‘I feel like I’m about to lose my only sister,’ she told me after a few drinks too many when we first got engaged. She was a bit pissed and I think she might have forgotten that she ever said it in the first place, but I certainly didn’t.
It hurt then and it hurts even now to remember.
In fact Mum is the only one who doesn’t seem to think that I’m heading for the divorce courts anytime soon. Not that she ‘gets’ Bernard and all his constant references to obscure artists she’s never heard of and exhibitions in galleries she’s never so much as set foot in.
‘I suppose he’s solid and dependable,’ is about the most lukewarm thing she’s ever said to me in his praise, ‘with a permanent, pensionable job and everything. So if nothing else, you’ll always have a roof over your head. And I’ll say this much for him, he’s certainly not the type who’d ever cheat on you.’
Implication heard loud and clear and with that single sentence, Mum well and truly damned Bernard with faint praise. You may not exactly be marrying the love of your life, was her subtext, but I suppose you could do a whole lot worse.
And we all know exactly who she’s referring to when she says ‘a whole lot worse’.
Back to The Bridal Room though and maybe it’s the Prosecco, maybe it’s the fact that it’s a beautiful, sunny spring-like day and we’re all out of Dublin on a girlie jaunt, but right now the three of us are in great form, all my nerves and stress temporarily banished for the day as I focus on just having a lovely time with my nearest and dearest.
‘Right then, are you all ready?’ I call from inside the fitting room.
‘Come on out, love, I have the camera ready,’ Mum says.
‘Take all the photos you want,’ I yell back over the cubicle door, ‘but whatever you do, just don’t post them on Facebook or Twitter, will you? I want this to be a surprise for everyone on the big day.’
‘Course I won’t,’ says Mum. ‘Apart from Auntie Agnes, Brenda next door and Jill from the choir, I promise I won’t show a single soul. Now come on out, we’re all dying to see you.’
So I step out of the cubicle and swish my way up to a dais in the middle of the shop, then pirouette around so they can all get a really good look at the dress.
‘Well?’ I ask excitedly. ‘What do you think?’
‘Oh, my darling,’ Mum says, welling up a bit. ‘You’re just … beautiful. The dress is even lovelier than I thought it would be. Now give me a nice big smile while I take a few snaps.’
‘Absolutely stunning!’ says the saleslady, bustling over to me with a pincushion to hand. ‘It’s like the dress was made for you!’
Said saleslady, by the way, is called Cindi ‘with an i, not a y’, as she pointed out to us, and she even looks a bit like a Cindi, with swishy, long blonde hair extensions and a big, bright smile. She’s one of those bubbly effervescent women who almost seems to talk in exclamation marks and from day one she’s been nothing but shiny, positive and upbeat through all my changes of mind and last-minute panic attacks over the dress.
‘Do you think it works?’ I ask nervously, though looking in the mirror, I’m actually cheeky enough to think that it does. It’s the simplest dress you could imagine, just a plain white silk sheath, with spaghetti straps and a tiny fishtail swish to the ends, so it makes a little train as I walk around in it. No long veil for me. I decided against it at my very first fitting when I realised that against my pale, freckly skin, it made me look like a younger Miss Havisham.
So instead I’m just wearing a plain diamond clasp in my hair to hold it off my face. It’s my ‘something borrowed’ from my pal Stella, who bought it in Claire’s Accessories and wore it to her own wedding last year. I thought it would be particularly lucky because it was at this wedding that Bernard took me outside for a moonlit stroll when the dancing was in full swing, then out of the blue, proposed. Right down on bended knee and everything. Even though he ended up putting his back out, the poor dote. In fact, I spent my engagement night up in our hotel room holding an ice pack to his lumbar region, with him apologising profusely for our having to cut the night short.
Ahh, happy memories.
‘Ooh, look at you, you’re breathtaking,’ coos Cindi.
‘You’re like a film star,’ says Mum, with the camera focused firmly on me. ‘Just stunning. Now keep smiling till I get a few more photos.’
‘Have to hand it to you,’ says Gracie with her arms folded, taking me in from head to toe. ‘You certainly scrub up well. Looking good, babes.’
The three of them give an impromptu little round of applause and I giggle and twirl again feeling like a princess as Mum fires off another volley of camera shots.
‘So who’s the lucky guy then?’ Cindi asks innocently, from where she’s bent down on her hands and knees at my feet, making the tiniest little adjustments to the hem of the train.
But now, after a dream afternoon of laughter and messing and chat – there’s total silence. Not a peep out of Mum or Gracie, absolutely nothing.
‘Have you been engaged for long?’ Cindi persists, to an even deeper silence this time. All I can hear is the tinny sound of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March being piped over the sound system. And still not a word from either Mum or Gracie.
By now the silence is starting to get uncomfortable and I’m sure poor Cindi must be wondering why, after a whole afternoon of bright giggles and chatter, there’s suddenly a pin-drop silence in the room. I swear I can almost see it writ large across her big, hopeful face … did I just say the wrong thing?
I look over to Mum, but she doesn’t say a word about her son-in-law-to-be, instead she just stays firmly focused on her reflection in the mirror, this time with a giant dish-shaped hat on her head that’s so ridiculously oversized it looks like you could pick up Sky Atlantic on it. Not a squeak out of Gracie either as she stares at herself in the mirror, shifting from this angle to that and pointedly saying nothing.
‘He’s called Bernard Pritchard,’ I eventually tell Cindi, flushing scarlet red in the face and breaking this horrible silence, seeing as how it looks like no one else is going to. ‘And he’s lovely,’ I can’t resist throwing in. ‘You’d like him, everyone does.’
Yet another unbearably long drawn-out pause and for a split second, Gracie and I lock eyes, me willing her to say something, anything, but she just glares into the mirror, now totally avoiding eye contact with me, the way she always does whenever she’s struggling to keep her mouth shut. I swear I can physically sense steam coming out of her ears, cartoon-like, from the stress of having to bite back her tongue.
‘So the groom’s name is Bernard?’ Cindi chats away, innocently skating over the surface tension that’s almost pinging off the walls.
‘Yes, yes that’s right,’ I answer automatically.
‘Well I’m sure he and all your family get on like a house on fire.’
‘He’s a lecturer in City College,’ Mum eventually chips in, while Gracie just stares blankly ahead, mouth firmly zipped.
‘And he has a really good pension plan and everything,’ Mum adds, to still total silence from Gracie.
Except this time the silence has somehow turned into something much, much angrier as Gracie and I stare each other down, me willing her to say something nice about her brother-in-law-to-be, her glowering right back at my reflection in the mirror, like she’s determined not to blink first.
Lovely Cindi finally seems to sense that there are thunderclouds brewing between bridesmaid and bride-to-be, so she excuses herself and steps out of the room on the pretext of getting some more safety pins.
Which is when I seize my moment.
‘Jesus, would it kill you, Gracie?’ I ask her straight out.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asks blinking her blue eyes, faux innocent.
‘You know exactly wh
at I’m talking about,’ I say, deliberately trying to keep the sharp, stinging hurt out of my voice.
‘Now, now, girls,’ says Mum from over at the dressing table. ‘We’ve been having such a lovely day. There’s absolutely no need for the pair of you to start into each other. There’s a time and a place for conversations like this and that’s certainly not here and now.’
‘Mum, tell her!’ says Gracie defensively. ‘I never even opened my mouth and she’s still having a go at me!’
‘No, you didn’t open your mouth,’ I say, ‘and that’s exactly my point. For God’s sake, Gracie, it’s less than a month to go to the big day and yet when a total stranger asks you about the man I’m about to marry, you still can’t find it in yourself to say a single good word about him?’
‘Well what do you want me to do?’ is her comeback. ‘Be a complete hypocrite and pretend that I don’t think you’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life?’
‘Come on now, girls, there really is no need for this,’ Mum hisses warningly, ripping a fascinator off her head and turning round to face us both. ‘Cindi might hear the pair of you squabbling and then what’ll she think of us?’
‘You’re my only sister, Gracie,’ I tell her, ignoring Mum, determined to say my piece. ‘And what’s more, you’ve agreed to be my bridesmaid. So is it too much to ask that you could be a little bit more enthusiastic about my wedding? God knows, I’m not asking you to be best friends with Bernard, you’ve made your misgivings about him clear enough—’
‘And I’m sorry, I really am,’ says Gracie, stepping down off the dais, where she’d been posing in her dress, and kicking off the high heels she’d been wobbling uncomfortably in. ‘But I still stand by what I said.’
‘I know you don’t like him, but what I don’t get is why you can’t accept that I love him and I’m marrying him no matter what you might think!’
I’m red in the face and properly angry now. Hot tears are starting to sting at the corners of my eyes now that the gloves are well and truly off. The dull pain from the horrible comments and the thousand searing humiliations Bernard and I have had to put up with ever since we got engaged is suddenly fresh in my mind now, almost making me shake with white-hot anger. But then this particular row has been brewing between Gracie and me for a very long while, and no time like the present, etc.
‘Yeah but you’re marrying him for all the wrong reasons,’ is Gracie’s quick as gunfire reply. ‘You know as well as I do that you’re just getting married on the rebound from Paul. In fact this is such a textbook rebound case, it’s almost a cliché.’
‘That’s not true and you know it isn’t—’
But she just cuts across me.
‘Well, I’m here aren’t I, babes?’ she says, stepping closer to me now, arms folded aggressively. ‘I’m practically beaten into a dress that frankly makes me look anaemic with my pasty white skin – and all for you. Because you’re my one and only sister and, believe it or not, I love you and I want to be there for you. Just don’t expect me to dance cartwheels when you exchange your vows, because to be perfectly honest with you, I think in two years’ time you’ll be singing a very different tune. So there. Now I’ve said it. To your face.’
Silence in the room. Cold, stony silence. It’s only now I notice that Cindi has already come bustling back in with a mouthful of pins, most likely having overheard the gist of our row. I’m actually shaking and even Mum is at a loss for words, which is not like her at all.
Thank God for Cindi though, who instantly clicks back into mindless-saleslady-patter mode, effortlessly gliding over the surface tension that’s just beneath.
‘I really am so happy you went with this style, Tess,’ she says brightly, getting back to re-pinning the hem of my dress. ‘You’ve certainly got the figure for it, and not many would have, you know. I don’t think in all my years working here I’ve ever seen a dress suit a bride so well.’
I’ll take a large bet that she says that to just about every bride who passes through these doors, but right now I’m just so grateful to her for changing the subject, that it doesn’t bother me.
Still more silence.
‘So have you been checking out the long-range forecast?’ asks Cindi, aware of the dark undercurrent and seemingly determined to jolly us all out of it, bless her. ‘Because you know there’s a weather app that a lot of my brides find very accurate!’
‘Erm, no,’ I say in an unsteady voice. ‘I haven’t just yet, but I certainly will when it gets closer to the time.’
Another excruciating pause while Gracie stares furiously off into space and Cindi keeps steadfastly pinning the hem of my dress. Then Mum, bless her, comes to my rescue. She’s drifted over towards a coffee table now so she can top up her glass of Prosecco and her eye falls on a newspaper that’s lying there.
‘Oh, now isn’t that very interesting, girls,’ she says, picking up the paper as something catches her attention.
‘What’s that?’ says Cindi brightly.
‘Kate King is in the papers again,’ says Mum, sitting down on a sofa and leafing through the pages. ‘On the front page and everything.’
‘Really?’ says Gracie, suddenly back to herself now that we’re talking about something other than Bernard. ‘But then, Kate King is never out of the papers, is she? Particularly these days with all this talk about court action and charges being pressed and some painting she and the ex are bickering over.’
‘Oh yes, I heard about this!’ says Cindi. ‘My pal is a hairdresser who does a friend of Kate’s hair and I heard it all from her first hand. Well, almost first hand.’
‘Are they divorced yet?’ asks Gracie.
‘Legally separated and just biding their time apart till they can finalise it,’ Cindi says knowledgeably, looking like she’s delighted with the change of subject. ‘And that’s where all the trouble started, apparently. The Kings went for mediation ages ago and that broke down because Kate wants more money out of him, before she’ll agree to a divorce. And even though Kate’s been charged by the courts and everything, she’s still sticking to her guns and is refusing to give back this particular painting that Damien says she’s no right to. Insists it’s her big insurance pay-out.’
‘I love the way Kate does her hair,’ says Mum, gazing dreamily at her photo in the paper. ‘She always looks so fabulous, doesn’t she? In spite of what she’s going through.’
‘She’s had work done for definite.’
‘Sure we’d all look fabulous if we’d had the amount of Botox and fillers that she’s had.’
‘And of course everyone knows Damien King wouldn’t exactly be the world’s most faithful husband, at least that’s what I heard.’
‘Well, maybe that’s it then. Maybe that’s why he wants rid of Kate?’
‘Sure they were fifteen years married and they still didn’t even have kids! Something seriously wrong there, mark my words—’
‘Apparently he was desperate for a family and she’d been going for all these really expensive fertility treatments but none of them worked—’
‘Oh, I read that too on Your Daily Dish—’
‘And I’d say Kate was dying to get her hands on as many valuables as she could from that stately pile of theirs, before she got turfed out on her ear—’
‘I’d love to know what went wrong there,’ Cindi muses thoughtfully. ‘When they first got together, they just seemed so … happy. So devoted to each other. I really thought they were a genuine love match.’
‘And look at the two of them now, at each other’s throats—’
I’m only half-listening to them all though. Instead, I slip out of the fitting room on the pretext of going to the ladies, to have a little lip-wobbling moment in private, where no one can see.
Feck Gracie anyway, I think, looking at my reflection in the mirror. To hell with what she said. I’m most definitely not getting married on the rebound and that’s all there is to it.
In four weeks’ time, I�
��ll be Mrs Tess Pritchard. And Gracie and the whole lot of them can learn how to deal with it.
Just like I have.
KATE
Spring 2002
Eight months, two weeks and four days. That’s exactly how long Kate had been married before she began to see a very different and slightly worrying side to Damien.
She could still remember it vividly. They had been due to have dinner that evening with a business contact of his, along with his wife. Not just any business contact though – Damien had so many, it was impossible to keep up with them all – this was a guy who’d flown in all the way from Missouri especially for the night and Damien was hoping to persuade him to come on board as a Globtech investor. Kate knew it was a huge deal for him and, as ever, the last thing she wanted to do was let him down.
About an hour before they were due to leave, she was still up in her bedroom at Castletown House, blow-drying her hair before changing into a slinky Armani cocktail dress she’d bought in Harvey Nichols earlier that day, a whispery slip of a thing that only someone as long and lean and elegant as her could possibly carry off. From two floors beneath her, she heard Damien coming home from work and moments later, he strode into the room and was straight over to her, locking his arms around her waist and nuzzling deep into her neck.
‘Missed you,’ he said, kissing at her ear. ‘Did you miss me?’
‘Stop messing,’ Kate laughed, playfully pushing him away from her so she could concentrate on putting in her earrings. ‘We only just saw each other this morning!’
‘Far too long to be apart,’ he said, gripping her even tighter. ‘Nine hours stuck in the Globtech office without you? Completely ridiculous. Might have to start bringing you into work with me.’
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