Violet didn’t say anything; she just let Joy prattle on about grandchildren and kept schtum. She and Glyn had talked about having children in the heady rush of feelings at the beginning, but it hadn’t been mentioned since. He wasn’t in any fit state to be a father with his agoraphobia and anxieties. And it wasn’t on Violet’s agenda any more.
‘I need to get my new business up and running,’ Violet excused.
‘And I’m quite happy for you to do that,’ smiled Glyn. ‘I’m looking forward to being a house-daddy as well as a house-husband.’
Blimey, he’d got all this worked out in advance, thought Violet. It was like watching John Noakes on Blue Peter saying, ‘Here’s one I made earlier.’ She had an awful feeling that if she looked in Joy’s knitting bag she would find a stockpile of little blue and pink cardigans.
‘Glyn says you haven’t got your wedding dress yet,’ said Joy, passing the sprouts.
‘Not yet,’ said Violet as she speared some pork. It was cooked to perfection, as always.
‘You’re leaving it a bit late, aren’t you?’ Norman put in.
‘Well, it’s not a big wedding, is it? I’m sure I’ll find something in time.’
‘I don’t mind coming shopping with you, if you want,’ Joy volunteered.
‘No, it’s fine,’ said Violet. ‘I’m more of a lone shopper.’
‘But you went dress hunting with friends yesterday, didn’t you?’ said Glyn. Violet could have kicked him. Luckily she thought of something off the cuff that sounded perfectly acceptable.
‘Yes, and that’s most probably why I didn’t find anything, because I’m better off shopping by myself. Other people put me off.’
‘Come on, Violet. That wouldn’t fill a bird,’ urged Joy, gesturing towards her plate. She said the same every time they dined there, though Violet wasn’t a huge eater.
She glanced over at Glyn’s plate, which had an Alp of food on it. He was tucking in as if he hadn’t eaten for days. His chin was glossy with dribbled gravy and Violet flicked her eyes away because these days the sight of him eating made her feel slightly queasy. He hadn’t been overweight when they met; in fact at a distance, with bad glasses on, he could have passed for a Phillip Schofield look-alike. Now he had a big wobbly belly and more than a hint of moobs. Glyn didn’t see a problem in his meteoric weight-gain – he just said that there was ‘more of him to love’.
‘I can’t wait to get married. I don’t know how I’d live without you, Violet,’ Glyn reached over the table and squeezed her hand.
‘Aw,’ chorused Joy and Norman.
Chapter 11
Monday morning was the first chance Violet had to visit Postbox Cottage. For once, Glyn remained asleep when she stole out of bed. She tiptoed around getting dressed and didn’t use the loo in case the flush woke him. At every second she was convinced his eyes would flick open and there would begin the inquisition about where she was going and when she would be back and what did she want to eat for lunch/tea and what should he buy from the shop. Glyn had a strange kind of agoraphobia, Violet decided. It would allow him to visit the row of shops round the corner and his parents’ house, but nowhere else. Although she could add a caravan at the seaside to the list as well now, apparently. As guilty as it made her feel, Violet was only glad that his complex neurosis didn’t permit him to venture to her workplace. Going out to create her dishes was her freedom, her oxygen. Without it, she didn’t know how she would stand her life. And now she had another place – a secret place – to hide.
Miraculously she made it outside into the fresh air and couldn’t help but breathe a massive sigh of relief after starting up the car. She knew that she shouldn’t feel so ‘free’ at being away from the man she was going to marry in seventy-five days. But, for now, there was nothing she could do about it but enjoy the periods of parole away from the prison of his flat.
Postbox Cottage was on the other side of Maltstone, in a nuclear hamlet called Little Kipping. The last in a row of three double-fronted – but tiny – properties, the cottage resembled a doll’s house with its lozenge-paned windows. Violet sat behind the steering wheel staring at the facade of her grandparents’ cottage and she sighed. She couldn’t believe it was all hers.
She eventually got out of the car, pushed open the creaky wooden front door and lifted up all the junk mail that had collected behind it. She walked from room to room, seeing it through new eyes: the eyes of an owner. It sent a delicious thrill tripping across her heart. The last tenants had left it in a reasonable state inside but not clean enough by Violet’s standards. The bathroom, especially, needed an extra scrub, and a lot of food had been left in the cupboards and needed to be thrown out.
It was a dear little place. The front windows were small and leaded and didn’t let in a great deal of light so Nan and Grandad Jack had knocked down the wall between the lounge and kitchen to ‘borrow’ light from the south-facing back windows. A heavily shelved cellar housed a box freezer and was dry enough to be used for storage. Upstairs there was a large bedroom, a much smaller bedroom and the sweetest square bathroom ever; on the second floor was a long attic room with a large dormer window affording views of the Pennines and beyond. Outside at the back was a cottage garden, once Jack’s pride and joy but now an overgrown mess. Violet had spent many happy hours trailing after him, helping him plant seeds and taking the fat white rose heads that he cut off for her so she could make some rose-water perfume with Nan. But now the rosebushes and flower beds had been swamped by virulent choking weeds rampaging over everything they could grab at and cling to.
Violet’s eyes filled with a blind of tears. She loved this cottage; it was so full of warm memories for her. She wished she could lock the door and stay there.
So why can’t you? asked a tempting voice inside her. It would be the simplest thing.
She opened the bag of cleaning products she had bought en route and began to scrub at everything in sight, as if she were scrubbing at her own life, trying to take the grunge from it and make it clean.
Chapter 12
Bel’s father’s house was a beautiful new build, constructed to make it look old and as if it had been there for ever. An architectural triumph, it was built five years ago on the site of his previous house – the much smaller, but still sizeable, nineteen thirties dwelling in which Bel grew up. Faye was naturally gifted at interior design and had done a fabulous job of making the huge new home feel like an old lived-in and loved one. While Vanoushka and Martin’s house was magazine perfect, it wasn’t cosy at all. But the Nookery was a place where comfort came before the need to impress. It was a welcoming house, and even though Bel had long since left home, the Nookery had a bedroom for her use only. Not that she had ever used it.
It was a source of annoyance to Vanoushka Bosomworth-Proud that her sister’s house had more rooms than hers. And an orangery. Vanoushka would have sold her liver for that orangery, but her husband’s financial advisory business wasn’t nearly as profitable as her brother-in-law’s confectionery factory. Treffé Chocolates had started life as Trevelen Chocolates – a two-man business consisting of Trevor and Helen Candy. It didn’t do that well, though, and was wound up. Helen died within the year and Trevor went back into business management, only to marry his secretary – Faye – who reignited all his dreams of being a chocolate magnate, and thus Treffé Chocolates was born. They worked well, and hard, together and Trevor had learned a lot from mistakes made the first time round. Now Treffé had stretched over the sea, first to Germany then to France and Belgium, giving the experts there a run for their money. Their products had won many awards and the company was defying the recession and rising from strength to strength. Bel only wished the success story had been her mother’s and not Faye’s.
‘Hello, darling,’ said Trevor, coming to the door to greet the daughter who always rang the bell to gain entry rather than just walk in, even if both Trevor and Faye told her that the Nookery was as good as her home too. He had a pipe lodged betwee
n his lips and he removed it in order to give Bel a peck on the cheek. With his large ears, thinning grey hair and easy way, he had more than a passing resemblance to Bing Crosby. ‘Come in, come in. And by the way, I have a bone to pick with you. Why haven’t you banked that cheque I gave you for the wedding yet?’
He smacked his daughter’s bottom lightly as she walked into the house.
‘No rush, Dad. Too busy at the moment,’ said Bel.
‘Hello, darling,’ chirped Faye. She’d appeared at the lounge door wearing some sort of pale blue kaftan that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. But on tall, slim Faye it looked like something a top model would have worn, and the shade was stunning against her expertly dyed caramel-blonde hair, which was piled into a messily perfect bun.
‘Hi, Faye,’ called Bel. As in recent days, more so than ever before, the smile on her lips didn’t quite reach her eyes. Because Faye was one of them – a Bosomworth – even if she was the only one of the three sisters who didn’t still cling to their maiden name to force a double-barrel. But blood was thicker than water, after all.
‘Glass of champagne?’ asked Faye. ‘Come and try this new fizz from France.’
‘Thanks, but I’m driving.’
‘Driving? You can’t drive tonight; it’s the family equivalent of a hen night. Leave your car here and pick it up tomorrow,’ Trevor nudged her. ‘We’ve got this champagne in especially for you. It’s called Belle de la Nuit. Come on, Bel, let your hair down. This is the last time you’ll be with us as our “Miss Candy girl”.’
‘I’ll be okay with just the one glass, Dad. I’ve got to keep a clear head – I have so much to do in the next couple of days,’ she said, more than half wishing she could lift a bottle of Belle de la Nuit to her lips and drink it in one.
‘All right, then, if you’re sure,’ sighed Trevor, handing her a glass of bubbly. ‘It’s so nice to see you here. You don’t come often enough, you know. And we’ll probably see even less of you when you’re married.’
‘You’re welcome any time, you know that,’ said Faye, nodding heartily as she moved towards Trevor. He slipped his hand round her and something flicked at Bel’s heart. Even now, after all these years, she wanted to rush between them and say, ‘He’s mine, not yours. Mine and Mum’s.’ Trevor and Faye had always been affectionate with each other, hand holding, darling this, sweetheart that. Even after twenty-eight years of marriage.
‘Have you changed your mind about the house?’ asked Faye. ‘I notice it’s still for sale.’
‘Nope,’ said Bel. ‘I told you, I’ve gone off it.’
This was another lie that hurt to tell. She had fallen in love with Bell House when she and Richard had found it three months ago – even the name made it sound like it was meant to belong to her. So everyone was stunned when she announced the following month that she was no longer interested in it.
In the same week she told Richard that she wouldn’t be staying at his flat any more until after the wedding. And he wasn’t to stay at her apartment either. She said she wanted her wedding night to be special – unforgettable. Something worth waiting for. Explosive.
Richard was next to arrive, just as Bel took a huge gulp of the zesty fizz. She felt it trace a cool path down to her stomach. Then she pulled in a deep breath as her gorgeous, suave and sophisticated fiancé made a perfect-white-toothed smiling beeline for her.
‘Hello, stranger,’ he said, draping his arms round her shoulders and kissing her firmly on the lips. ‘This separation is killing me, you know.’ He leaned in close to her ear. ‘I have a constant hard-on like you wouldn’t believe.’
She gave his crotch a surreptitious single stroke. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered, licking her lips. ‘It’s really only hours away to our wedding night.’
‘Hello, Richard,’ Faye interrupted, handing him a glass of champagne and clinking hers against it. ‘What a happy evening we’re going to have with you both here together.’
A car pulled up harshly in the drive, spraying gravel everywhere. Martin’s Aston Martin. Like everything else he had, it was being paid off monthly. He was obsessed by the need to keep up with the Joneses – the Joneses in his case being his sister-in-law and her husband, who, it grieved him to think, could have paid for his car and his house with change from their arse pocket.
‘Vanoushka’s here,’ Faye trilled, running to the champagne bottle to pour out three more glasses, for her elder sister, brother-in-law and niece.
‘Whoopee,’ said Bel drily to Richard. ‘At least it will be nice to see Shaden. You haven’t seen her for ages, have you?’
Richard didn’t appear to have heard the question. Instead he whispered in Bel’s ear, ‘So how many times do you think Martin will say the word “investment” tonight, then?’
‘Oh at least forty-five,’ smiled Bel, enjoying the sensation of his arm round her, squeezing her into his side. It felt so nice she wanted to cry. Her bottom lip began to tremble. She hadn’t figured tonight would be so hard.
Vanoushka was first through the door, with her perfect bottle-blonde hair, Botox-frozen head and Goodyear-tyre lips. She made Jackie Stallone look like Shirley Temple. She kissed the air at either side of her younger sister’s ear as she breezed in on a perfume cloud of something as heavy and spicy as a Moroccan market. They could probably smell it in Morocco, as well – she’d put enough of it on for that to be possible.
Behind her came the heavily jowled Martin, who’d also had a bit of work done recently. His eyebrows were virtually lodged in his crown. There was nothing frozen about his eyes, though, as the little beady blue circles roved around the hallway, taking in everything, checking for things that were different from his last visit.
His greasy lips spread into a smile as he air-kissed Faye too and shook Trevor’s hand. Bel prepared herself for ordeal by air-kissing, although ‘Uncle Martin’ didn’t air-kiss her – he laid his big slobbery lips on her cheek and his hand was more on her bum than her back, as usual. Then he grabbed Richard’s hand, nearly breaking it off with the shake he gave it.
Then in came Shaden, looking more like a clone of Vanoushka every time Bel saw her, which was rarely these days. Gone was the mousy-haired, lumpy, quiet thing who had been like a little sister to Bel as they were growing up. They’d found common ground in jumping on the trampoline in the garden, playing hide and seek among the many trees behind the Candys’ old house and a desire to snog Simon le Bon. They’d been close, until Shaden’s twenty-first birthday, when she – totally out of the blue – announced that her mother was giving her a boob job as a coming-of-age present. Bel had laughed, presuming she was joking. Shaden didn’t even wear foundation and skipped past the make-up pages in girls’ mags.
Ten years after her pneumatic breast implants, Shaden was unrecognizable as the girl Bel knew. Waxed and preened, teeth straightened and whitened, lips inflated to pout-perfect standards, weekly spray-tanned, hair bleached to Californian blonde – much to her mother’s delight, Shaden Bosomworth-Proud had become a miniature Barbie whose knockers arrived in a room five minutes before she did. Only her nose remained the same: long with a small bump near the top. Bel didn’t doubt that her conk would be the next thing on the plastic-surgery list and probably would have been done already if Martin hadn’t been struggling financially for a few years, although no one would believe that from the family face they showed to the world.
Shaden had acquired a glam set of her own friends who swarmed around her as if she were a queen bee, and she no longer had use for the cousin who used to outshine her at every turn. In fact Bel hadn’t seen her – or heard from her – since choosing the bridesmaid’s dress in Leeds.
‘Hi, coz,’ Shaden smiled at Bel, and whereas years ago she would have bounced over and thrown herself on Bel, now she teetered over on her huge spiked heels and kissed the air inches away from her cheek. Bel watched as she greeted Richard the same way: brief, perfunctory, polite.
‘I can’t believe the wedding is only two
days away,’ smiled Faye. She was getting some really heavy creases round her eyes when she laughed, thought Bel. She obviously hadn’t had any of the work done that her two older sisters favoured.
‘Is everything arranged, then?’ Vanoushka asked her.
‘I . . . I . . . think so,’ began Faye, looking to Bel for comment.
‘I’ve done everything myself. I didn’t want any help,’ explained Bel.
‘Oh? Why not?’ asked Vanoushka in her plummy tones. She always spoke very slowly, feeling that added an extra notch of class to her voice. ‘It’s quite an undertaking to arrange a marriage by yourself, Belinda.’
‘I knew what I wanted so it wasn’t necessary to involve anyone else.’
Vanoushka would have raised her eyebrows if she could. Bel knew that when Shaden got married, Vanoushka’s nose would be well and truly stuck into the business of organizing the wedding. Although Shaden was quite happy playing the field for now. She was holding out for a multimillionaire with a dicky ticker and no concept of the phrase ‘pre-nup’.
‘I don’t know yet what we’re going to be eating at the reception,’ laughed Richard.
‘Even you haven’t had any involvement? In your own wedding?’ Vanoushka looked horrified – at least as much as she was able to.
‘Well, Liam and I have picked our suits. That’s about it,’ he replied. ‘And I’ve arranged the honeymoon in Las Vegas. The Bellagio.’
‘Very nice,’ sniffed Martin. ‘Although I’d have gone for the Venetian myself.’
Like he would know, thought Bel, pressing down on the snarl her lip wanted to make. He was only saying that to intimate that he was a savvy world traveller. Bel bet that he wouldn’t know a Ritz hotel from a Ritz cracker.
‘Still, in our circles it’s a bit odd, surely, for the bride to arrange everything herself,’ said Vanoushka, sounding exactly like the snob she was.
White Wedding Page 6