White Wedding

by Milly Johnson

  ‘They liked him. At least, I think they did. They welcomed him into the family, anyway. Then again, Dad and Faye are so bloody nice I think they’d have welcomed Fred West into the family if I loved him and he made me happy. What did your family think of Cathy?’

  ‘Everyone loved Cathy,’ said Dan, blowing the air out of his cheeks. ‘She had a fantastic ability to charm the birds out of the trees.’

  Bel felt her nose wrinking up. She didn’t like the sound of Cathy at all. She couldn’t imagine her now without thinking of her in a billowing white nightshirt, flying over the moors and smashing up nice men’s hearts. Bel wondered what she found in the other man that she didn’t find in Dan. He was great fun, good-looking, courteous. Even if she had once thought he was a psychopath.

  ‘What was the other guy like?’

  ‘Ex-model, lantern jaw, Porsche-driver, gym-fanatic, fellow non-chocolate eater. They make a very beautiful couple. What was the other woman like?’

  ‘A swan,’ said Bel. ‘Spoiled, golden, leggy, sexually alluring, non-chocolate eater also. Although when we were kids, she used to mainline Mars bars.’

  ‘I think we possibly both had a lucky escape,’ said Dan, reaching down behind the sofa arm and pulling up the biggest bar of chocolate Bel had ever seen. ‘Care for some Mrs Fairfax Fruit and Nut?’

  After three glasses of wine, Bel had an unexpected moment of clarity, noticing how much closer Dan was sitting to her since the film had begun. His arm was touching hers, the hairs on his tickled slightly when he shifted. She loved the cinema, but there was never anyone to accompany her and she didn’t like the idea of going there alone for fear of looking as if she’d been stood up. Richard didn’t like films. If they ever went out it was to serious networking dinners or for showy, expensive meals. Thinking about it, it was one of the many points on which they differed. But that hadn’t really mattered because she had always believed the adage ‘opposites attract’. He wouldn’t have dreamed of looking round the Bronte parsonage or even stepping foot in a café that sold Isabella’s Chilli Con Carne.

  Actually, Richard was a bit of a boring bastard, thinking about it.

  For all their reserves of money, the Candy family had always enjoyed simple pleasures: fish and chip suppers, looking through Argos catalogues, hot buttered toast for tea and fresh, new nightclothes . . .

  ‘I can’t believe that two gorgeous people like us are cuckolds, can you?’ said Dan, turning to Bel and disgruntledly placing two hands on his hips as the film credits rolled.

  ‘I’m not gorgeous,’ said Bel. ‘I’m far too short to be gorgeous.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Dan conceded. Bel chuckled, picked up a cushion and smacked him around the head with it.

  Then Dan picked up a cushion from his side and hit Bel on the arm with it.

  ‘Ouch,’ she said.

  ‘I barely touched you,’ Dan returned. ‘I think you’ve been injured enough recently.’

  ‘Liar. You hit me like this,’ said Bel, and she belted him hard with the cushion.

  ‘No, I did not. I hit you like this,’ Dan’s cushion swung round again. Bel yelped dramatically and hit him back.

  ‘This means war,’ said Dan.

  Bel lifted her arm to swing the cushion and Dan tickled her underneath it. Then they were rolling around on the sofa. And then Dan was holding her face in his hands and his lips were brushing against hers.

  Then they both sprang apart.

  ‘Oh no, rebound alert,’ gasped Bel.

  ‘You’re telling me. Most obvious fall in the book.’ Dan launched himself into a standing position and started pacing up and down in front of the fire. ‘That was so close.’

  ‘I’d definitely better go back to Charlotte,’ laughed Bel. ‘That’s my cue. Nearly snogging an ex-serial killer. Ugh.’

  ‘Yeah, ugh,’ shuddered Dan with the affected playground disgust of an eight-year-old boy.

  ‘I’m saving you from a fate worse than death. I’m far too hard to love.’

  ‘I think you’d be very easy to love, Miss Bel,’ said Dan Regent with too much tenderness in his voice for comfort. Bel felt alarm bells go off deep inside her. She was too vulnerable for this and had to leave – quickly.

  ‘Dream on, Doctor. I have a heart of stone,’ she sneered, injecting some attitude into her voice to mask the fact that her heart felt about as rock-like as an Angel Delight.

  ‘Yeah, go before we both do something we really regret. We would only have ended up in bed,’ said Dan with forced casualness. ‘You’d obviously scream out my name fifteen times and then be unable to look at me in the morning.’

  ‘You wish,’ smiled Bel, pulling her keys out of her jeans pocket. She lifted her eyes to his and saw the very wounded man behind the jokey exterior. Spending the night with him was something she would imagine in bed, alone, in safety. ‘Thank you for another lovely evening, Dan.’

  ‘Don’t forget to thank Ricky too,’ Dan reminded her, gesturing towards the TV.

  ‘Thanks, Ricky,’ said Bel.

  She looked up at the nice kind face of Dr Dan and thought that Cathy must be a fool. She didn’t move away as his hand came out and gently tweaked the tip of her nose.

  ‘Goodnight, Miss Bel. Thanks for sharing my cheese. Oh God, that sounds so wrong.’

  Bel chuckled. ‘Goodnight, Dr Dan.’ She held up her fingers in a two:two formation. ‘Live long and prosper.’

  Charlotte was very very cold when Bel walked in and switched on the light. She touched her nose where Dr Dan’s fingers had landed and felt more alone than she could ever remember feeling before in her whole life.

  Chapter 40

  Nan had a good talk to the lovely angel with flame-red hair in the middle of the night. She had tried to whisper so Susan wouldn’t hear. Susan would only have said the angel didn’t exist, but Nan knew without any doubt that she did. The angel didn’t talk back to her physically, but Nan felt her answers.

  She and the angel had a lot in common. They’d both known what it was like to be locked into an unhappy marriage and also the joy of finding their one true love. The angel said that Nan wasn’t to worry about her family when she was gone, and she knew what Nan was especially concerned about. Nan wanted to see her granddaughter happily married before she went; she needed to know that she had found her soulmate, her Jack. She hadn’t seen that much of Glyn but it was obvious that he adored Violet, worshipped the ground she walked on, even; but he wasn’t someone that Nan would have picked for her lovely girl. She wanted Violet to be looked after, not do the looking after.

  The angel had smiled at her and said something quite odd: ‘You will send him back to her.’ When Nan asked what that meant, the angel just repeated the words: ‘You will send him back to her.’ And though Nan hadn’t a clue what she was on about, she trusted the angel enough to know that she was telling her that everything would be all right.

  Chapter 41

  Bel woke up suddenly just as Dan was leaning over her and about to kiss her. She sat up in bed and patted her racing heart because that dream had felt so real she could almost taste his lips as they touched hers. She had gone to bed thinking about him, and he had been in her thoughts all night. Now she had woken up annoyed that her dream had ended. She was heading for trouble because she was wise enough to recognize how her poor battered heart was reaching out to the warmth and kindness within its immediate radius – Dan Regent – as he was reaching out to her. They were two crazy mixed-up people incapable of making sensible decisions. It was time for her to rejoin the real world before she made any more mistakes – or got hurt again.

  She washed and dressed and gathered all her stuff together, packing it into her case. Hearing a clang she looked out of the bedroom window to see that Dan was bending down by her car and taking off her tyre. As if he sensed he was being watched, he turned his head upwards and waved. He had such a kind face when he smiled, even if it was a bit on the saturnine Heathcliff side when he didn’t. She laughed to herself thinking
about the concept of a ‘nice Heathcliff’. That was the trouble with Wuthering Heights, in her opinion: all the characters were too polarized. Edgar was so caring he was wimpy, Heathcliff was a total bastard and Cathy was a cow. Give her Jane Eyre any time, with her perfectly imperfect characters: the feisty, lovely heroine and the manly, passionate – but ultimately decent – Rochester. Yes, Dan was definitely more Rochester than Heathcliff. He had gentler, warmer eyes than Heathcliff could ever possess, even if they were almost black. They were eyes that could make a woman melt seeing them first thing in the morning, turning to hers on the pillow. Bel blew out two large cheekfuls of air and shook her head. The sooner she left the better. She was, after all, a married woman.

  He gestured to her that she open the window.

  ‘Morning,’ she called.

  ‘What light through yonder window breaks,’ grinned Dan, opening his arms in an expansive gesture. ‘It is the east, I think, and . . . what’s your name again?’

  ‘It’s west, by the way.’

  ‘I need your keys so I can put your spare tyre on.’

  ‘Are you fixing my car so I’ll offer to cook lunch?’ she said, oh so aware that she was flirting – not that she even attempted to stop herself.

  ‘Actually, I have to go to Skipton to get some printer ink. Want to come with me for the ride? And cake? After I’ve sorted out your car.’

  You really must not go, said her brain. You need to return home to Barnsley and face the music. You have to say no.

  ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you my keys.’

  Then she closed the window and skipped downstairs like a five-year-old child on her birthday.

  Dan’s car had just gone down the hill when Bel’s phone started playing out a series of chimes. Then, in his pocket, Dan’s phone started to play the theme tune to Doctor Who.

  ‘We both brought our phones,’ said Dan with a resigned nod.

  ‘I figured it was time I needed to face up to things,’ said Bel, sighing as she pulled her phone out of her bag and looked at the list of emails from Amazon, clients, spam. Texts from Max and Violet, Faye, her dad, none from Shaden – surprise, surprise. She scrolled past them all looking for ones from Richard . . . and found them, loads of them. They all said more or less the same thing:

  Bel, darling, we need to talk. Please ring me.

  She had a lot of missed calls from him too and her voicemail was full of messages that she couldn’t bring herself to listen to yet.

  Her heart seemed to twist inside her. She hadn’t reckoned on feeling so confused when she saw his name on her phone screen. She had envisaged raising two fingers to it but instead there was a great big fat ache inside her, as if she had just been kicked all over again.

  When they pulled up in the car park in Skipton town centre, Dan pulled out his phone and looked through the mails and texts received.

  ‘Well, well, Cathy wants to talk to me,’ was all he said, before he put the phone back in his pocket. He wasn’t smiling as he said it.

  He was silent as he bought his printer cartridges. Even though Bel had met Dan Regent only a week ago, she knew what was going through his mind. She wanted to pull his head down on to her shoulder and stroke his hair. She wanted to hold his face and kiss his lips. Oh yes, it was definitely time to go home and get off the rebound bus.

  ‘Right, I promised you cake and cake we shall have,’ Dan said, clapping his hands and trying to inject a bit of jollity into proceedings.

  ‘I seem to remember there is a tea shop to die for at the back of the castle,’ Bel replied.

  ‘Bit extreme,’ said Dan, still not quite out of the grim-faced woods but his voice was warming to playful. ‘I’d rather live to enjoy more cake. But lead the way. I’m in your hands.’

  An image flashed through Bel’s mind of Dan Regent in her hands, in bed, naked. She bet he was lovely in bed . . . tender. The sort of man who got up and brought you a cup of tea in the morning. Richard never did that. He was full of great big expansive gestures like booking weekends to Rome and buying jewellery and bouquets of roses, but he never brought her morning cups of tea or held out his arm for her to take.

  Bel led the way to the tea shop, hoping it was still there. It was, and just as teeny and pretty as Bel remembered. She and Faye and Dad had eaten the biggest pieces of Death by Chocolate here once after staying for a weekend in Emily. She remembered them all moaning about how sick they felt afterwards.

  The Pudding House had very low ceilings and Dan tutted as his head crashed into a hanging lampshade.

  ‘You didn’t tell me it was suitable only for Borrowers,’ said Dan, feigning pain while rubbing his head.

  ‘Sit down, you wuss. Anyway, if you’ve injured yourself, you can sort it.’

  ‘Physician, heal thyself,’ boomed Dan so loudly that the woman at the next table jerked and a profiterole dropped off her fork.

  Dan slipped into gentleman mode, apologized quietly and went scrabbling around on the floor for the fallen profiterole, while Bel turned away to disguise her laughter.

  Profiterole retrieved, Dan sat down and studied the menu, then he cast it back on to the table.

  ‘It just feels wrong without all the Bronte names,’ he said. ‘Which sounds better:“Carrot Cake” or “St John Rivers Carrot Cake”?’

  ‘Do you really want me to answer that?’ asked Bel, raising her left eyebrow.

  ‘I’ll order, but it’s not the same.’ Dan shrugged his shoulders and pretended to be disappointed.

  What a lovely, fun man, thought Bel. She never had any of this silliness from Richard. He was – she searched inside her for a description of him – so adult.

  They ordered two slices of coffee and walnut cake and a huge cafetière of coffee. Not even Bel could finish the giant wedge that was delivered to her. Under the table Dan’s leg was touching hers. It felt lovely and she didn’t move away.

  ‘So, which Bronte character do you think I most resemble?’ asked Dan, picking up the last nub of walnut and placing it between his lips.

  ‘Nelly Dean,’ said Bel with a straight face.

  Dan chuckled. ‘No, really. Am I a Heathcliff, a Hindley, an Edgar?’

  ‘What am I?’ asked Bel.

  ‘No question about it. Jane Eyre,’ said Dan with conviction.

  ‘Ah, so I’m small and plain. Cheers,’ huffed Bel.

  ‘You’re small,’ Dan nodded. ‘Not in the slightest bit plain, though. Jane Eyre was a force to be reckoned with. A formidable woman. Now, me?’

  Bel tried not to make eye contact with Dan. Because to say that of all the Bronte characters he most resembled Rochester would have been dangerously flirty.

  ‘Heathcliff,’ she said. ‘Moody, particularly where kitchen implements are concerned.’

  ‘You’re lying, said Dan, his eyes twinkling so much that Bel felt a rare blush sweep across her cheeks. And she hardly ever blushed.

  ‘How long will you stay in the cottage?’ Bel changed the subject before her cheeks got any hotter.

  ‘I don’t know. I need to do some serious writing,’ said Dan. ‘Especially now that you’ve given me my mojo back.’

  ‘How does your bride get murdered?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait for the book,’ grinned Dan.

  ‘And what about Cathy?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a plot I’m not sure how to write,’ said Dan, his grin shrinking. ‘What about Richard?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bel. ‘I’m going to have to talk to him at some stage. We’re married, after all.’

  Dan put his hand over Bel’s and made it feel as warm and safe as she wished the rest of her felt. His touch was almost painful in its tenderness.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m actually going to miss you,’ he said, mirroring her own thoughts exactly. ‘Who will I blame when the tin opener goes missing?’

  Bel shrugged silently and dropped her head. Dan realized that she was close to tears and kindly took the opportunity to go to the lo
o so that she might compose herself. The waitress brought over the bill and Bel paid it immediately, before Dan came back.

  ‘Do you and your husband want a doggy bag of the cake you left?’ the waitress asked.

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ said Bel, suddenly wishing that she was married to someone like Dan Regent. Someone who took her out for afternoon tea and got dirty kneeling on the ground to change her tyre. Someone who liked to walk arm in arm with her and didn’t fuck her cousin. She pulled a deep calming breath inside her and managed a smile as Dan returned.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t pay the bill,’ he said.

  ‘I did, as thank you for changing my tyre.’

  ‘Now I owe you,’ he said. ‘This could go on for ever.’

  She wished she could stay. She wished he would insist on paying her back for the coffee cake by making her cheese toasties again. Then she could pay him back with a tin of soup, if he would lend her the tin opener.

  They walked back to the car slowly, in genial silence. Then Dan slipped the car into gear and left Skipton behind them.

  ‘When are you going home?’ asked Dan, as he pulled on his handbrake outside the cottages.

  ‘Now,’ replied Bel. ‘You’ll be able to get some work done in peace.’

  ‘About time too,’ said Dan drily. ‘And I can stop fixating about missing tin openers.’

  They both climbed out of the car and turned awkwardly to face each other because there was a heavy goodbye hanging in the air.

  ‘So,’ said Dan.

  ‘So,’ echoed Bel.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I hope things turn out okay for you.’

  ‘And for you,’ replied Bel, defying her eyes to leak. ‘And good luck with the bride-murdering book.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Dan. Then he bent to kiss her cheek. One single soft kiss that she felt all the way down to her toes. Then he was gone.

  Bel picked up her case from Charlotte, locked the door behind her and drove down the lane to the main road without a single glance in the rear-view mirror. She didn’t want to risk seeing Dan Regent standing there and waving to her, because she knew she would have gone back to him.