Two Weddings and a Baby

by Scarlett Bailey

  ‘I wasn’t feeling you up, I was …’

  ‘Assaulting me?’

  ‘No, saying hello,’ the man said, utterly unrepentant, his grin infuriatingly cheerful.

  ‘I deal with far worse than you in Paris all the time,’ Tamsyn warned him. ‘Try anything and I’ll have you on the floor in under thirty seconds.’

  ‘Well, now you’re being inappropriate …’

  ‘How dare you, what do you mean? How am I being inappropriate?’

  ‘Threatening to throw Poldore’s vicar to the ground!’

  ‘The what, now?’ Tamsyn asked him, glad for a moment that the freezing rain had numbed her face into a mask.

  ‘I’m Reverend Jed Hayward.’ He repeated the information, offering her his hand. ‘The vicar here in Poldore.’

  ‘Well,’ Tamsyn spluttered. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Grabbing a woman from behind. It’s not very … vicarish, is it?’

  ‘I …’ Reverend Jed Hayward laughed out loud, which made Tamsyn want to hit him a little bit. No, actually quite a lot.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were my verger; she’s due to come and take choir practice tonight. She’s about your height, and in the rain I couldn’t make you out clearly. Although, now I look at you, I can see you are quite different. We had a few things to sort out before I left, but she hasn’t turned up. I promise you, I am a vicar and I wasn’t trying to assault you.’

  ‘You don’t look like a vicar.’ Tamsyn blinked the rain out of her eyes, to examine the supposed cleric. A man, in his mid-thirties, with a smattering of stubble, hair that was too wet to tell what colour it was, but with a fringe that fell into his eyes and rain running over high, Nordic-looking cheekbones. There was no dog collar, or anything as sensibly identifiable as a cassock. Instead he was wearing a shirt that must once have been white, an opaque veil that now clung to his torso, which, what with its well-defined pecs and an actual six-pack, was one that any of the male models that Tamsyn had worked with over the years would have been proud of.

  ‘What does a vicar look like?’ Jed Hayward asked her, apparently utterly unconcerned by the rain that punctuated every word a thousand times over.

  ‘Not bloody gorgeous,’ were the first words that popped into Tamsyn’s head, but she bit them back just in time.

  ‘Look,’ she said, grabbing onto the handle of her case and remembering what she was supposed to be doing. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t matter. You’re the vicar, you thought I was a – whatever it was you said, fine. I’ve got to go, I’m meeting my family, some of whom I haven’t seen for several years and I’m already late, so …’

  ‘So you’re Tamsyn Thorne?’ the vicar asked, catching Tamsyn off guard for the second time. ‘You’re the only sister I haven’t met yet, the designer who lives in France. I’ve heard so much about you.’

  ‘Have you?’ Tamsyn asked. That normally wasn’t a good thing.

  ‘I’m officiating? At Ruan and Alex’s wedding? You know … as the vicar.’

  There was a moment when all that Tamsyn could do was stand there, hearing the rain thundering in her ears, acknowledging the wet seeping in through her boots to soak her freezing toes, and wishing that the wind might scoop her up and whisk her off to anywhere in the universe apart from right there, right then.

  Instead, a whip of lightning cracked against the church spire, causing Jed and Tamsyn to take an instinctive step towards each other, so that they were standing chest to, for all practical purposes, bare manly chest. If Tamsyn had believed in any sort of celestial higher being, she would have put the lightning down to having improper thoughts about a vicar’s chest, but right now it didn’t seem like a terribly good idea to be standing underneath a tree, even if a sudden strike from the heavens would simultaneously solve her problem with offending vicars and having to wear puff sleeves.

  ‘Come on,’ Jed said, picking up her case. ‘We’d better get inside.’

  ‘But I’m already late …’

  ‘A few more minutes to regroup won’t hurt. And I’m late too, now.’

  It took Tamsyn a couple of seconds to realise that he’d grabbed her freezing hand and was jogging to church with her in tow, only releasing her fingers once they were inside.

  ‘That’s marginally better,’ he grinned, shaking his hair like a dog. ‘Dry, at least. I turned the heating off in March; didn’t plan on needing it again before November.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you did,’ Tamsyn said, finding herself shivering now that she was out of the rain.

  ‘Anyway, like I said, my verger is in charge of choir practice tonight, not that I can see anyone coming out in this weather. I’m going down to the pub, too, so once I’ve changed my shirt we can head down there together. I’ve probably got a raincoat or something that might keep you a bit drier. It’s like a branch of M&S in the vestry, people always leaving things in the pews; once I found a flask full of whisky – that one never got claimed …’

  The second Tamsyn realised that Jed was hurriedly unbuttoning his shirt, she averted her eyes, but it was a second too late not to notice how the wet cotton of the shirt peeled off his firm chest. Was it possible to be struck by lightning inside a church, Tamsyn wondered, for noticing a vicar’s wet chest? She braced herself, but the next time the lightning flashed, seemingly right overhead, it was still outside the window. A few seconds later a distant rumble of thunder followed, and Jed froze for a moment, looking up at the heavens.

  ‘Not a fan of thunder?’ Tamsyn asked him.

  ‘Worried about the town,’ Jed said. ‘It’s typical of Poldore people that everyone is hoping for the best and not preparing for the worst. They are all in the pub right now, as if they can simply drink through the worst storm we’ve seen here in years.’

  ‘Well,’ Tamsyn said, ‘who knows, maybe they can? Probably do more good than praying, anyway.’

  Jed grabbed a towel that was hanging over the back of a pew and dried himself, before pulling on a light grey shirt and a slightly darker sweater that was also waiting there.

  ‘Well, of course you are entitled to your opinion,’ he said. ‘But so far I have yet to see evidence that getting drunk improves anything. Whereas prayer gives a great deal of people comfort and hope.’

  ‘Hope,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I always think it’s an overrated concept. Much better simply to expect that everything is going to hit the fan, and then be pleasantly surprised if things are less bad than you imagine.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jed said, his brow furrowing briefly as he looked at her.

  ‘For what?’ Tamsyn asked him.

  ‘That you feel that way, so pessimistic.’

  ‘I’m not a pessimist,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I am a realist, and I just don’t do the whole happy-clappy thing, that’s all.’

  ‘Shame,’ Jed grinned. ‘You are so going to feel awkward when everyone in the congregation stands on the pews and holds hands during the wedding …’

  He stopped what he was doing to take in Tamsyn’s naked expression of pure horror and then doubled up with laughter.

  ‘Funny,’ Tamsyn said. ‘A funny vicar, how very modern. I bet you play guitar and rap the Lord’s Prayer, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s a pretty good idea,’ Jed said, and Tamsyn found it was hard not to return his smile, although she did her best. She wasn’t a fan of do-gooders. She’d met a lot of them, during her life. Always trying to understand her; always trying to work her out. She never wanted to be worked out; she just wanted to be left alone.

  ‘I was just trying clear out the guttering when it really started coming down. I was up a ladder when I saw you there in that long coat, but then I thought it had to be Catriona, the verger. Either way, good job you turned up when you did – if I’d still been up that ladder when the lightning struck, chances are it would be a small pile of ashes leading the service at your brother’s wedding. God does move in mysterious ways. Towel? I’ll get you a fresh one, of course.’

  ‘I am, you know, sorry,’ Tamsyn mumbled,
rather half-heartedly, as he bent down between the pews and produced another towel, from where it seemed he kept an impromptu changing room. ‘And not only because I’m dripping on your floor. I’m sorry I accused you of being a … pervert. You must think I am an idiot.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Jed smiled at her in exactly the way that one person who thought another person was an idiot would do, as he handed her the towel. Tamsyn made a vague effort at towelling her hair, which she let down knowing that the moment it approached anything near being dry it would snake into the same unruly, untamed curls that had blighted her teenage years. ‘I’ll just change these trousers, and then I can walk you down.’

  ‘Mmm,’ was all that Tamsyn could manage to say, waiting for Jed the vicar to strip off his kecks right in front of her, but it seemed that that was where his sense of propriety kicked in.

  ‘Great, I’ll be back in a second. I think there’s an old golfing umbrella in the vestry too …’

  ‘Take your time,’ Tamsyn called after him, a little weakly. So, OK yes, she had made a fool of herself with the vicar, that was true. But on the bright side, her mother couldn’t be cross with her lateness when it was the vicar’s fault, because the vicar’s lateness couldn’t be misconstrued as sullen sulkiness, like Tamsyn’s declining the offer to stay with Alex or Alex’s mother had been. After she’d refused, Tamsyn’s mother had asked her flat out if she was going to have a problem with Ruan getting married and she’d said no, of course she didn’t disapprove of the wedding. She just didn’t completely approve. Far away from Poldore, far away from this life of sexy vicars up ladders and torrential rain in June, sometimes Tamsyn forgot how everything had changed back here, and sometimes it slipped her mind that Merryn wasn’t still here, living her life with her brother. So much so that it still felt as if the wedding she was about to attend would be featuring the wrong bride, although that didn’t make any sense and she knew it.

  It was odd, standing at the back of the church, so quiet and empty as it was now, only half of the lights switched on, filling the building with shadows that seemed to be watching her. The sound of the rain outside provided a sort of background static, but otherwise it was completely silent and still.

  There had been a time, back in the days of the old vicar, the one they had so shamelessly baited, the one who was bald and fat and looked like a vicar should do, when she and Merryn had been in the choir. It had been her dad’s idea. He thought if she’d joined something, she might have a sense of purpose, something that might then tip over into her school life, which she had avoided as much as possible. Every Sunday they’d giggled through the family service, singing like angels and telling each other silly jokes behind their hands through the sermon, until one reached Reverend East and he sent them out, the two of them sniggering all the way up the aisle like a pair of fallen angels.

  Laura Thorne had despaired of her rebellious daughter back then, and Merryn’s mum had even come round claiming that it was Tamsyn who was leading the other girl astray. Tamsyn remembered feeling especially proud of that claim, although it was not true. She and Merryn had just found everything so completely funny. There was no aspect of life they felt had to be taken that seriously, and that included school and church.

  ‘Right, it’s time to brave the elements!’ Tamsyn spun round to see Jed pulling on a bright orange Superdry coat, just able to catch a glimpse of an actual dog collar, now tucked under the collar of his shirt, and what looked like dark blond hair as he pulled up his hood. ‘If you promise not to attempt to have me arrested for harassment, I’ll even let you come under my umbrella.’

  He brandished the object at her, like a small boy playing at swords, and Tamsyn wondered if he really was the vicar, or if she’d accidentally befriended a very attractively built delusional person, because that was normally the sort of thing that happened to her. Mad people on the Metro, angry people on aeroplanes, pretend hot vicars in rainstorms, egotistical but irresistible French fashion designers – that pretty much summed up her life.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much point,’ Tamsyn said, as he opened the door and they observed the sheets of water from the relative comfort of the porch. ‘After all, it’s only water.’

  ‘That’s what Noah said,’ Jed said. ‘And he had an ark.’

  Chapter Two

  There wasn’t much small talk on the way down to the Silent Man. For one thing, the rain was coming down so hard and heavily that it was impossible to speak without having your words snatched away by the wind. Tamsyn had never known such a volume of water to come from the sky at such speed. Also, she knew that if she opened her mouth she would manage to say something unfortunate. Putting her foot in it was practically her hobby, and had been from the moment she could talk, according her mother. Like the time her Uncle Howard had come for Christmas and she had told him that he was too short to be a grown-up. She was eleven at the time.

  Somehow in Paris it didn’t matter; in actual fact it was almost a positive in her profession to say exactly the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. Within the design community she had developed quite the reputation for her cutting wit, ruthless efficiency and determination not to mince words. What no one, not even Bernard, had guessed about the Englishwoman who had somehow infiltrated the heart of the French fashion scene, was that none of it was by design. Tamsyn just had a habit of saying the first thing that came into her head and, as yet, at the age of twenty-nine, it wasn’t a trait she had managed to grow out of. So, although she was always honest, often insightful, it was only Tamsyn who knew that her reputation as the ‘Reine de Glace anglaise’, who must never be crossed, was entirely accidental.

  As the rain ran down the back of her neck, she tucked her chin into the collar of her coat and allowed herself the briefest of moments to ponder on Bernard and what he would be up to now, right now, before deciding that it was probably best not to dwell on it. They had been ‘together’ for eleven months, since the night he had told her all her designs were ‘épouvantable’ – dreadful – swept them off the pattern-cutting table and her into a passionate embrace. Tamsyn, who had been raised never to let any man assume such rights over her person, had punched him very hard on the nose and broken it. To his credit, in between howling in agony, Bernard had found it all very funny. He had apologised to Tamsyn as she’d taken him to a private hospital, to have his nose reset, without any fuss. He told her he wasn’t in the habit of pouncing on women the way he had on her, and that he deserved her reaction. The flashing fury in her eyes had just been impossible to resist. Tamsyn had accepted his apology, because in that particular city it was impossible to keep a secret, and if Bernard had been a serial philanderer who preyed on the many much younger and more beautiful women he worked with on a daily basis, she would have known it. It seemed that his philandering was more sporadic and always consenting.

  As Tamsyn had dropped him off at his apartment in the early hours of the morning, he’d asked her very sweetly if he might kiss her, and she had allowed it. And it turned out that Bernard, as challenging as he was as a boss, was an exceptionally good lover. So Tamsyn, whose love life up until that point could largely be summarised under the heading ‘nothing special’, had considered telling him where to go for about five seconds only. Another five seconds after that and she knew she was smitten.

  Their affair could have been construed as inappropriate in the work place, of course, but Bernard had a talent for being beguiling at exactly the same moment that he was being infuriating. So despite the lack of any sort of courtship, Tamsyn had found herself very happy to be engaged in a romantic liaison with Bernard du Mont Père. The fact that Bernard insisted on keeping it a secret meant it had that extra frisson of excitement.

  In the last eleven months, Tamsyn had learnt that the secret to sustaining her relationship with Bernard was never to let him see that she cared one bit about it, a trick she was rather good at as she had spent much of her life pretending not to care about anything. And as for her succes
s coming from her association with him, well, if anything the opposite was true. So far not one of her designs had made it to the catwalk, as it was mainly the business and PR side of things Bernard let her handle, although he did sometimes let her have a belt buckle, or a pocket, in one of his designs if he was feeling very generous. And Tamsyn didn’t have a problem accepting that; it took a long time to get to the top in the fashion industry, and she’d rather pay her dues than think for even one second that her fondness for kissing Bernard had advanced her career before she had earned it.

  ‘We made it,’ Jed said eventually over the thunderous rain, pushing open the door of the pub for her, and for precisely one moment Tamsyn was glad to be out of the wet and in the steamy fug of beery warmth provided by the pub. And then she heard the cheers, and then she saw the banner ‘WELCOME HOME TAMSYN!’

  And then she wanted to throw herself into the swollen river and try and hitch a lift back to France on the next passing boat.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said to a room full of smiling, familiar faces, ‘please tell me this isn’t a party.’

  ‘Tamsyn!’ It was her mother who came and dragged her from the door, nodding politely to Reverend Jed as she hugged her rather wet daughter and unbuttoned her coat while she was at it.

  ‘You’re soaked through, you poor thing.’ Tamsyn submitted as her mum dragged the sodden coat off her shoulders. ‘You look like a drowned rat, and you’re thinner. You are too thin, you know. I do hope that fashion isn’t giving you body disorders.’

  ‘What’s a body disorder, if it isn’t your mother always telling you that the body you were born with isn’t too thin?’ Tamsyn asked Laura, hugging her anyway.

  ‘Mother, let the poor woman get in the door!’ Her sister Keira grabbed her hand and pulled her over to a long table that had been made up from several separate ones, and was lined with people, most of whom Tamsyn recognised, such as professional busybody and local aristocrat Sue Montaigne and her husband, Rory, with their children. There was Vicky Carmichael, whom she’d known since childhood and who – she knew from her mother, who despite not living in Poldore for decades still had a hotline on whatever anyone was up to – was now a vet, and even old Jago and Mr Figg the chemist, still hanging in there, neither one of them looking older than the last time she’d seen them, almost as if they had been a hundred years old for all of her life. Of course, her sister Cordelia was there, knocking back shorts at the bar; and Eddie Godolphin, the town’s mayor and landlord of the Silent Man, and his wife Rosie behind the bar. Despite the horrible weather outside the pub, inside it was warm, festive and friendly, almost as if they’d decided to hold the wedding breakfast a few days early, only with a great many packets of salt and vinegar crisps in place of canapés. Smiling and waving at everyone, Tamsyn took a seat, while at exactly the same time wondering if she’d be able to wriggle out of the window of the ladies’ loo and sneak back up to the hotel in time to order room service.