Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2016
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover design: Jessica Lacy Anderson
Jacket illustration © Gary Newman
Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008181673
Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008181680
Version 2016-03-15
Dedication
For Natalie, Paula & Serena
My favourite mix tape
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
Keep Reading
About the Publisher
1
Life through a phone is a lie. Edie imagined the process like a diagram from physics lessons, the one on that Pink Floyd album cover – a beam of white light refracted in a prism, splintering and fanning out as a rainbow.
I mean, how much artifice, she wondered, was crammed into this one appealing photograph? She gazed at its seductive fictions in the slightly greasy, warm slab of screen in her palm as she queued at the hotel bar.
Activity in the room whirled around her, messy unkempt sweaty reality, soundtracked by The Supremes ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ In this still life, everything was forever image managed and perfect.
Untruth number one: she and Louis looked like they adored each other’s company. In order to squeeze into the frame, Edie had rested her head against his shoulder. She was coquettish, wearing a mysterious smile. He was doing the self-satisfied, slightly 007 quirk of the lip that conveyed hey life is great, no big deal. It really wasn’t a big deal.
They’d spent five hours as platonic plus ones – the wedding planner had demanded pairs, like Noah’s Ark – and now they were grating on each other, in heat and booze and wedding clothes with waistbands that had got tighter and tighter, as if inflating a blood pressure cuff.
Edie’s heels had, like those high enough for special occasions, moved from ‘wobbly and pinchy, but borderline tolerable’ to stabbing at her viciously like some mythic pain where she’d given up her mermaid tail for size 4s and the love of a prince.
Falsehood number two, the composition. Twinkling-happy party girl Edie, looking up through roadsweeper-brush-sized false lashes. You could glimpse the top half of her red dress, with nicely hoisted pale bosom, stomach carefully held in. Louis’s cheekbones were even more ‘killer in a Bret Easton Ellis’ sharp than usual, chin angled downwards.
This was because they’d held the lens at arm’s length above their heads and discarded five less flattering images, bartering over who liked which one. Edie had eye bags, Louis objected he looked gaunt, the expressions were slightly too studied, the shadows had not fallen in their favour. OK, another, another! Pose, click, flash. Half a dozen was the charm: they both looked good, but not too much like they’d tried to look good.
(‘Why does everyone do that expression now, like you’re sucking on a sour plum?’ Edie’s dad asked, last time she was home. ‘To make yourself look thin and pouty, I suppose. But you don’t look like that face you pull, in real life. How strange.’)
Louis, an Instagram professional and very sour plum, fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings. ‘Now to filter ourselves to fuck.’
He selected ‘Amaro’, bathing them in a fairytale cloud of lemonade fog. Complexions were perfected. The mood was filmic and dreamy, you’d think it captured a perfect moment. You had to (not) be there.
And then there was the caption. The biggest deception of all. Louis tapped it out and hit ‘post.’ ‘Congratulations Jack & Charlotte! Amazing day! So happy for you guys <3 #perfectcouple living their #bestlife.’
This was mostly for the benefit of the rest of the Ad Hoc agency, who’d all found elegant excuses not to travel from London to Harrogate. Nothing tested popularity like several hundred miles of motorway.
Like after admiring Like rolled in. ‘Sigh. You two are another #perfectcouple!’ ‘Shame I’m a bender!’ Louis replied. That’d be the least of our problems, Edie thought. They’d all done the arithmetic with Louis, that if he slagged off everyone else to you, he slagged you off, too.
And of course, Louis had not stopped grousing under his breath about the ‘amazing’ wedding. Edie thought criticising someone’s big day was like making fun of the way they ate, or the size of their ankles. Good people instinctively understood it was not fair game.
I really thought Charlot
te would go for something more clean, minimal. Like Carolyn Bessette marrying JFK Jnr. The crystal beading on that gown’s a bit Pronuptia, isn’t it? Even women with taste seems to lose the plot and go Disney disaster in a bridal salon. I am so over those rose bouquets with pearl studs and white ribbon round the stems, like a bandaged stump! Once a WAG has done something, it is DONE. And sorry, but I find a tanned bride vulgar. Ugh, two sips of that Buck’s Fizz and it was into a plant pot. I can’t bear orange juice used to hide cheap champagne. Look at the DJ, he’s about fifty in a blouson leather jacket, where did he get that from, 1983? He looks like he should be on Top Gear. It’ll be rocking out to Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ and Toni Braxton for the erection section. Why can’t weddings be more MODERN?
The Old Swan in Harrogate was not, as the name suggested, modern. It had the exciting association of being the place Agatha Christie disappeared to during her ‘missing days’ in the 1920s, even though there was probably nothing exciting about being in a confused fugue state.
Edie loved it here. She wouldn’t mind absconding from her life into one of its rooms with four-poster canopied beds. Everything about The Swan was comforting. The ivy-clad frontage, the solid square portico entrance, the way it smelled like cooked breakfasts and plushy comfort.
It had been a blistering high summer day – Haven’t they been lucky with the weather becoming the go-to banal conversation opener – and the French doors in the bar opened on to the honey-lit rolling gardens. Children in shiny waistcoats were zooming around playing aeroplanes, high on Coca Cola and the novelty of being up this late.
Nevertheless, this was, for none of the reasons Louis described, the worst wedding Edie had ever been to.
Giving her order at the bar, she found herself next to a group of women in their seventies and possibly eighties, dressed as flappers. Edie guessed they were here for a Murder Mystery weekend; she’d seen a coach from Scarborough pull up earlier.
There was a ‘suspect’ with no legs, sitting in a wheelchair. She was wearing a feather headband, long knotted beads and draped in a white feather boa. She was sipping a mini bottle of Prosecco through a straw. Edie wanted to give her a cuddle, and/or cheer.
‘Don’t you look lovely,’ one of the group said to Edie, and Edie smiled and said, ‘Thank you! You do too.’
‘You remind me of someone. Norma! Who does this lovely young lady look like?’
Edie did the fixed embarrassed smile of someone who was being closely inspected by a gaggle of tipsy senior citizens.
‘Clara Bow!’ one exclaimed.
‘That’s it!’ they chorused. ‘Ahh. Clara Bow.’
It wasn’t the first time Edie had been given a compliment like this. Her dad said she had ‘an old-fashioned face.’ ‘You look like you should be in a cloche hat and gloves at a train station, in a talkie film,’ he always said. ‘Which is appropriate.’
(Edie didn’t think she talked that much, it was more that her father and sister were quieter.)
She had shoulder-length, inky hair and thick dark brows. Their geometry had to be aggressively maintained with threading, so they stayed something more starlet than beetling. They sat above large soulful eyes, in a heart-shaped face with small mouth.
A cruel yet articulate boy at a house party told her she looked like ‘A Victorian doll reanimated by the occult.’ She told herself it was because she was going through her teenage Goth phase but she knew it was still applicable now, if she hadn’t had enough sleep and caught herself glowering.
Louis once said, as if he wasn’t talking about her when they both knew he was: ‘Baby faces don’t age well, which is why it’s a tragedy it was Lennon shot instead of McCartney.’
‘Are you here with your husband?’ another woman asked, as Edie picked up her white wine and V&T.
‘No, no husband. Single,’ Edie said, to lots more staring and curious delighted ooohs.
‘Plenty of time for that. Having your fun first, eh?’ said another of the flappers, and Edie smiled and nearly said, ‘I’m thirty-five and having very little fun,’ and thought better of it and said ‘Yes, haha!’ instead.
‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ another asked.
‘No. I live in London. The bride’s family are from—’
Louis emerged from the restaurant, gesturing for her to join him with an urgent circling motion of the hand, hissing:
‘Edie!’
‘Edie! What a beautiful name!’ the women chorused, looking upon her with renewed adoration. Edie was touched and slightly baffled by her sudden celebrity status. That was Prosecco drunk through a straw for you.
‘Are you this young lady’s gentleman?’ they asked Louis, as he joined them.
‘No, darlings, I like cock,’ he said, taking his drink from Edie while she cringed.
‘He likes who?’ said one of the women. ‘Who’s “Cock”?’
‘No. Cock.’ Louis made a flexing bicep gesture that Edie didn’t think made it much clearer.
‘Oh, he likes men, Norma. He’s a Jolly Roger,’ said one, casually.
Attention shifted to Louis, the not-that-jolly Roger.
‘I prefer a game of Bananagrams and a hot bath, these days,’ another offered. ‘Barbara still likes a bit of cock, well enough.’
‘Which one of you did it, then?’ Louis said, eyeing their costumes. ‘Who’s the prime suspect?’
‘There’s not been a crime yet,’ one said. ‘Rumour has it there’s going to be a body found on the third floor.’
‘Well you can probably rule her out then,’ Louis said, tapping his nose, gesturing at the woman in the wheelchair.
‘Louis!’ Edie gasped.
Fortunately, it caused a cackle eruption.
‘Sheila used to dig her corns out with safety pins. You don’t mess with Sheila.’
‘Looks like she overdid it.’
Edie gasped again and the old ladies fell about, howling. She couldn’t believe it: Louis had found his audience.
‘Great meeting you, girls,’ Louis said, and they almost applauded him. Edie was forgotten; chopped liver.
‘Come back to the table. It’s all kicking off big style in the main tent,’ Louis said to her. ‘The speeches are starting.’
With a heavy heart, Edie excused herself. The moment she dreaded.
An Audience With The Hashtag Perfect Couple, Living Their Hashtag Best Life.
2
‘Was that free?’ barked the sixty-something man with the hearing aid, dressed as a posh country squire, eyes fixed on the glass in Edie’s hand. Edie and Louis had been put on the odds and sods, ‘hard work, nothing in common’ table. The others had immediately abandoned the hard work and scattered, in the longueur between meal and disco. This sod remained, with his timid-looking, equally tweedy wife.
‘Er, no? I can get you something if you like?’
‘No, don’t bother. You come to these bloody interminable things and they fleece you like sheep. As if the gift list wasn’t brass neck enough. Four hundred pounds for some bloody ugly blue cake whisk, the silly clots. Oh hush, Deirdre, you know I’m right.’
Edie plopped down in her banqueting chair and tried not to laugh, because she thought the KitchenAid was a rinse, too.
She swigged the acidic white wine and thanked the Lord for the gift of alcohol to get through this. The top table passed the microphone down the line to the groom, Jack. He tapped his glass with a fork and coughed into a curled fist. His sleeve was tugged by his new mother-in-law. He put a palm up to indicate, ‘Sorry, in a second, folks.’
‘What’s this crackpot notion of wearing brown shoes with a blue suit and a pink tie, nowadays?’ said hearing aid man, of the groom’s attire. ‘Anyone would think this was a lavender liaison.’
Edie thought Jack’s tall, narrow frame in head-to-toe spring-summer Paul Smith looked pretty great but she wasn’t about to defend him.
‘What’s a lavender liaison?’ Louis said.
‘A marriage of convenience, to conceal
one’s true nature. When one’s interests lie elsewhere.’
‘Oh, I see. We’re having one of those,’ he grinned, clasping Edie to him.
‘Forgive me if I don’t scrabble for my inhaler in shock,’ he said, looking at Louis’s quiffed hair. ‘I had you down as someone who likes to smell the flowers.’
Edie had heard more inventive euphemisms for ‘homosexual’ than she expected today.
‘Think you’ll ever bother with marriage?’ Louis said, under his breath.
‘I think it’s more whether marriage will ever bother with me,’ Edie said.
‘Babe. Loads of people would marry you. You’re so “wife”. I look at you and think “WIFE ME”.’
Edie laughed, hollowly. ‘Surprised they’re not making this known to me then.’
‘You’re an enigma, you know …’ Louis said, prodding the bottom of his glass with the plastic stirrer. Edie’s stomach tensed, because meandering, whimsical trains of thought with Louis were always headed to the station of I Can’t Believe You Said That.
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Who's That Girl? Page 1