There Goes the Bride

by Holly McQueen

  Not that Vanessa made that distinction, for once, when we spoke on the phone to arrange the visit. In fact, she’s been super nice to me, by her standards, ever since she found out about the divorce, and it was her suggestion, even, that the boys come and stay.

  Perhaps it really is true that in times of crisis, you find out who your real friends are. And that you shouldn’t be too surprised if one of your real friends turns out to be your husband’s ex-wife.

  And I’m doubly grateful for Vanessa’s kindness, because Charlie is “too busy to take the boys.” Busy flat-hunting with Celia, he eventually admitted. He has to get settled in somewhere before he starts his new job at her father’s brokerage firm in a couple of weeks’ time. Turns out, happily for Charlie, that Celia’s family is superposh, not exactly short of a bob or two and, from the sounds of it, desperate to give their daughter’s liaison with a (twice) married man a patina of respectability by setting them up in a swanky mansion-block apartment in Chelsea, as close to Peter Jones as is humanly possible. Although I haven’t spoken to Charlie at much length this past week—he’s most comfortable, since I confronted him about Celia on Boxing Day, doing everything through Valentine the lawyer—I’ve got the impression that bringing Charlie into the family firm is a big part of Celia’s family’s plan, as well. Something that makes me wonder if he hadn’t already decided to leave MMA long before he found out about my relationship with Saad.

  Either way, I’m glad about the job, and glad about the flat in Chelsea. I don’t want Charlie to be unhappy, for the boys’ sake as much as anything else. And I’m desperately hoping that Percy is right about life as Charlie’s son being easier without having to actually live with him. As well as desperately hoping that his current state of being “too busy” to see the boys wears off at some point. And hoping that Celia, who seems harmless enough, tries as hard to keep Charlie involved in Robbie and Hector’s lives as I did with Percy.

  Hoping, too, that for the sake of stability in everyone’s lives, Celia isn’t dumped for a newer, younger model by the time she hits twenty-eight, with a couple of children of her own.

  “Totally naïve” is Vanessa’s pronouncement on these hopes when I drop Robbie and Hector, with their overnight bags, at her door in time for lunch.

  They’ve already shot inside to find Percy, with barely a backward glance.

  “Honestly, Grace, don’t be a total simpleton. Yes, of course this Celia girl will have a sell-by date with Charlie. All Charlie’s relationships have sell-by dates. The man is biologically incapable of withstanding the seven-year itch. If you want my opinion,” she adds, in the tone of a woman who will give it to me whether I want it or not, “he’s biologically incapable of withstanding a seven-month itch. You weren’t the first of his dalliances when he was married to me, you know.”

  “No. Well … um … that helps, Vanessa.” To be fair to her, it’s not like she hasn’t hinted darkly at this the entire time I’ve known her, with all her insinuations about Charlie “boffing” all over London. Which makes me feel like even more of a prize chump for getting all starry-eyed about Charlie in the first place. And then for marrying him. And then for having two children with him. “Thank you. And thank you, again, for having the boys to stay.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” She eyes me suspiciously. “I must say, Grace, you do look very nice. Had your hair done, have you, for this wedding?”

  “Well, yes, I am one of the bridesmaids.” I give a little laugh and start backing away down the steps. “Got to look respectable!”

  “And your skin is all glowy and fresh.”

  “Er, yes, just tried out a brand-new facial … three different kinds of oxygen, pumped into your face, while you lie in a … um … hyperbaric chamber …” This sounds vaguely enough like a Bliss facial I read about in a magazine at the hairdressers this morning. But it’s not convincing Vanessa. So I add, “And I’ve been on a bit of a diet and exercise regime, ever since Christmas, of course. You know, what with trying to shake off the festive pounds, and with the wedding coming up and everything. Got to fit into my bridesmaid frock!”

  “Mmmm.” Vanessa, despite never being one to underestimate the importance of shaking off the festive poundage, still looks unconvinced. “Well. It’s good to see you looking so well on it.”

  “It?”

  “This marvelous new regime of yours, I mean. Anyway, you probably need to get going.” She nods down at my wheelie suitcase. “You’re getting a taxi to the station, I assume?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Actually, this isn’t the plan at all.

  The plan, in fact, is for Saad to pick me up, somewhere along Vanessa’s road, and drive me not just to the station but all the way down to Wiltshire. Which is exceptionally generous of him—playing chauffeur for the day—seeing as he isn’t actually going to come to the wedding with me. I just think it’s a bit soon to be introducing him to Polly and her family as my … well, whatever he is now.

  Is it too soon to say boyfriend?

  “For heaven’s sake, just how excited are you about being a bridesmaid? You can hardly stop smiling!” Vanessa accuses me. “Now, about the boys staying over. Please feel assured that I have every confidence in my brand-new nanny—she’s a marvelous Belorussian girl, just joined us before Christmas. I assume you’d like her to get the boys into bed promptly at seven thirty p.m.? And obviously I assume neither of them has any fussy eating habits? Anything that might make Katya’s job more difficult?”

  Oh, God, I’m going to accidentally see off another of Vanessa’s nannies, aren’t I? Ten minutes of Robbie refusing to eat any breakfast but eggs Benedict and Hector gleefully inspecting the contents of each and every nappy and running through the latest pet names he’s given his head lice, and the poor girl will be on the very next flight back to Minsk.

  But it’s a bit late for me to worry about any of that. So I just shake my head, and smile, and ask Vanessa to give the boys a big kiss from me, and then I start lugging my wheelie case back down her freshly swept front steps and garden path, and in the direction of Parsons Green, where Saad will collect me on the corner.

  I’ve only gone a few yards when I hear my name being sung out from a little way along the road.

  “Gra-ace!”

  It’s Chief Miranda. Actually, it’s Chief Miranda plus two more of the Mirandas—I think one of them (Caroline?) is the one with the chalet in Verbiers, and the other one is the mother of the truly unpleasant Sebastian who emptied Robbie’s lunchbox over his head on his second day of school. All three of them are dressed in spanking-new tracksuits and MBT trainers and evidently coming to the end of a power walk.

  “Oh, hi, Miranda. Hi … um … ladies. Happy New Year to you.”

  “And happy New Year to you!” Chief Miranda says, before adding, “Or is it?”

  “Well, I’m just off to my best friend’s wedding, and the sun is shining, so …”

  “It’s quite all right, Grace.” She puts her head on one side in a show of simpering sympathy. “We do all know what’s happened. Charlie leaving you. I heard about it from Vanessa over Christmas.”

  Of course she did.

  “You poor, poor thing,” she carries on before turning to the other Mirandas, almost as though she’s forgotten I’m here for a moment. “It’s for a younger woman, did I mention? And from a terribly wealthy background, too. Her father is the Wilkes in Wilkes Jonas Betteridge, isn’t that right, Grace?”

  “I’ve no idea who her father is,” I say.

  “Oh, well, of course you don’t want to think about those kinds of details too much. Especially someone with your artistic temperament. It must all be just so upsetting for you.”

  “Will you get to keep the house, do you know?” Caroline-Miranda pipes up. “It’s just that my parents-in-law are thinking of moving to the area, and they don’t want anywhere quite as big as ours. You’re in one of the small terraces, on Crediton Road, aren’t you? Can you tell me, have you extended into
the loft space, because …”

  “Caroline!” Chief Miranda looks shocked and thrilled in equal measure. “You can’t go asking poor Grace if she’s going to lose her house, not when she’s only just lost her husband!”

  “He didn’t die or anything!” I protest. “And really, I’m absolutely fine. Thank you for your …” Prurient interest? Gleeful nosy-parkering? Unashamed thrill at the karma that has turned me into the dumped, older wife for a change? “… concern.”

  “Well, you know, if there’s anything we can do … I mean, it isn’t going to be as easy as you think, Grace, life as a single mother. Now that you’re not quite as young as you were, and with one failed marriage behind you …”

  Chief Miranda stops, distracted by the noise of a nearby car engine.

  She’s even more distracted—we all are—when it turns out to be a sleek, gleaming dark green Aston Martin, pulling up in the space closest to us.

  And she’s positively openmouthed when Saad opens the driver’s door and climbs out.

  “Hello, ladies! Sorry to interrupt your jog!” He smiles around at everyone, then comes right up to me, takes my case from my hand, and leans down to plant a firm kiss on my lips. “Ready to go, Grace?”

  Right.

  Well, the cat’s well and truly out of the bag now. And I’d rather receive the Mirandas’ scorn and envy than their jubilant “sympathy.”

  I’m far more accustomed to the former, let’s face it, than the latter.

  I go on tiptoe to kiss him back. “Absolutely, totally ready! It was good to see you all,” I add, turning around to smile at the Mirandas while Saad takes my case to the trunk. They’re openmouthed, practically guppylike, in astonishment. “Caroline, I’ll let you know about the house, shall I?”

  “Uh … wha … ah …”

  “Great! Well, happy New Year again!”

  “Happy New Year,” Chief Miranda manages, rather faintly.

  They’re still staring, not returning my cheery wave, as Saad and I drive away toward Parsons Green.

  “I love this,” says Saad as we drive smoothly along the ever-narrowing country roads toward my home village. “Seeing where you grew up. Where you came from.”

  “Yes, well, I hope you won’t be disappointed.” Now that we’re nearly here, I’m a little embarrassed about Saad seeing where I grew up, where I came from. Compared with his own exotic childhood homes, in all the places he’s told me about—Beirut, New York, and Paris—Little Lavington is bound to be a letdown. It’s a bit of a letdown by any standards, to be honest. There are forty-ish houses, one small church, a corner shop that sells the day before yesterday’s papers (if you’re lucky) and anyway is only open two and a half days a week, and a fenced-in village green that for some reason has become home to two seriously bored-looking donkeys. “It isn’t exactly teeming with life and vitality. Oh, hey, slow down a bit before this bend,” I add, my fingers automatically tightening on the leather seat as we approach the particularly nasty blind corner on the way into the village. “The one with the big oak tree.”

  “You mean the one with about half an oak tree.” Saad slows down, peering with curiosity at what is, indeed, a rather mangled remainder of the huge oak tree that used to be there. “Looks like a few people have taken chunks out of that in their time.”

  “Yes. Polly’s sister being one of them.”

  “Ouch.” Saad winces. “That had to have hurt.”

  “Mmm.”

  He glances over at me. “You OK?”

  “Yes, absolutely. It’s just … well, it’s a big thing. Polly finally getting married. Especially after everything that’s happened.”

  “All the fuss and cancellation, you mean?”

  “Yes.” In the wing mirror on my side, I can still see the oak tree—Bella’s oak tree, as I’ve rather perversely thought of it for the last ten years—vanishing into the distance behind us.

  “So, has Polly explained what it was that changed her mind about marrying this guy?”

  “I’m still not completely sure I know what it was that made her change her mind about not marrying him in the first place!” I’m not about to go into the things Polly said outside Bella’s flat on Christmas Eve. That stuff about feeling guilty. Which was the first time I began to think I might know what the whole drama was about.

  “Safer not to ask too many questions until after the wedding, perhaps.” Saad grins at me.

  “Exactly.” Luckily now I have to give him directions through the village, to get to the Atkins’ house, which is a handy way of diverting the conversation off this topic. “Take a left turn onto Main Street,” I tell him, “and don’t be fooled by the fact that it looks about as main as … oh, shit.”

  Polly is actually outside the house, waiting for us. Which completely screws up my plans to keep Saad’s presence on the down-low.

  “Is that the bride-to-be?” Saad asks, pulling the car up onto the curb outside the house as Polly lets out a shriek of excitement and starts running toward us.

  “Yes, look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean for there to be any big introductions …”

  But it’s too late. Polly has already pulled my door open and is throwing her arms around me.

  “Gracie! You’re here! Isn’t this amazing? My wedding, after everything that’s happened! And as for you …” She stands back to let me get out of the car, and to have a look at the car herself—and at Saad, who’s clambering out of the other side. Her eyes widen and she shoots me an oh my God look. “You must be Saad!”

  “And you must be Polly.” He leans in to give her a kiss on either cheek. As well he might, seeing as Polly is looking back to her old self, poured into spray-on jeans and a little cardie that hugs her every curve. Weirdly, though, I don’t even feel the smallest pang of jealousy. Funny how it takes a relationship with an international playboy to make you feel so secure. “It’s great to meet you.”

  “It’s great to meet you. Now, please, both of you, come inside out of the cold and …”

  “Saad isn’t staying,” I say hastily. “I mean, he has to get back to London pretty much right away. Don’t you?” I turn to Saad, who’s looking at me with amusement.

  “Well, I do have a late meeting …”

  “Exactly. He has a late meeting.”

  Polly looks disappointed. “But he could come back, couldn’t he, after the meeting? Or tomorrow? In time for the wedding.”

  “Er, no, no, I don’t think …”

  “But there’s plenty of room!”

  Plenty of room isn’t really the point. Saad isn’t going to want to spend the best part of two days at the wedding of a couple he doesn’t even know. In the middle of nowhere. Cooped up in an ordinary little house that’s roughly the same square footage as his bedroom suite. Sleeping in a bedroom that’s smaller than his dressing room. Sharing a bathroom, for God’s sake, that probably has the same rickety old shower that I remember from long-ago sleepovers, where your odds of suffering a boiling-water burn are about even with the chances of getting chilblains, and the odds of enjoying a pleasurable bathing experience are ten million to one. Why would Saad want to be doing any of that, when he could be whisking back up the motorway in his fabulous car to his fabulous house, with its acres of space and spectacular furnishings and its fabulous (and fully functioning) bathroom?

  Which is why I practically fall over when I hear him saying to Polly, “Hey, if it’s no trouble, I’d really love to come to the wedding. I mean, I do have to get back to London right now, unfortunately. But I can pick up some of my stuff while I’m there and head back later tonight.”

  “It’s no trouble at all!” She beams at him; at both of us, in fact, while I open and shut my mouth like a startled goldfish. “We’ve done this at such short notice that we need all the extra guests we can get. And you’ll stay in the same room as Grace, of course,” she adds, shooting a knowing grin in my direction, “so you won’t even upset my sister’s careful plans for who’s sleeping where.”


  “Great!” Saad reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze. “That OK with you, Grace? If I make it back here by around midnight?”

  I’m about to answer when there’s a shrill ring from Polly’s mobile, and while she answers it (to give rather hopeless train instructions to a relative who appears to be planning to come down from Northumberland) I take the opportunity to collar Saad.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know!” I hiss at him.

  “Do what?”

  “Come to the wedding. I mean, you’ll be horribly bored. And uncomfortable, too, if you stay the night. I mean, there’s only one bathroom, and the shower’s like something from the Old Testament, and you won’t have your super-king-size bed with the lovely Frette sheets, and …”

  “Only one bathroom? Hmmmm.” He appears to muse. “Does that mean it would be most efficient for me to share my shower with someone? You, for example?”

  The prospect of sharing a shower with Saad, even under water that’s either boiling or containing solid chunks of ice, is enough to distract me for a moment.

  “And this bed you’re talking about,” he carries on. “Is it so small that there’s a risk I could fall out and hurt myself? And does that mean I’d have to hold on to you for dear life all night?”

  Again, the prospect of snuggling up with Saad all night—the first whole night, it occurs to me, that we’ve ever been able to share together—prevents me from forming a sentence.

  “You think I’m only happy when I’m staying somewhere palatial. That 17 Main Street, Little Lavington is too shabby for me.”

  “It’s a bit shabby for pretty much anyone,” I mumble, embarrassed that he’s seen through me. “I’m being serious about the shower.”

  “I’ll survive it. Or maybe I’ll just bring some diamond-encrusted wet wipes with me from London and avoid showering altogether.” He smiles at me. “Come on, Grace. It’ll be our first night together. I’d sleep in a haystack and wash in a muddy puddle if it meant the chance to spend an entire night with you. Though I realize that sounds a bit like I might be planning to also spend the night with those two donkeys back there on the green.”