‘I’m not a little girl. I’m thirty-nine.’
‘You’ll always be my little girl. I can’t tell you how much it means to me and your dad that you’ve got someone to take care of you now. It’s such a relief.’
Elaine’s eyes glittered. She didn’t need to say anything else. Kate knew that the hospital visit had confirmed that something wasn’t quite right. Though they continued to celebrate for the rest of the evening, the happy engagement bubble had already burst.
Chapter Five
Having been given much more notice than Kate Williamson’s parents, Susie Ashcroft was able to make sure that her only daughter’s engagement was celebrated in real style. Of course, Susie had keys to her daughter and future son-in-law’s house, so while they were still at Cliveden, basking in the post-engagement glow (and running up a credit-card bill that would take Ben months to clear), Susie and Nicole, Diana’s best friend since primary school, let themselves in to set up a party.
They invited forty other close friends and relations to help share the joy. Everyone mucked in, hanging brightly coloured ‘Congratulations’ banners all over Diana’s tastefully neutral decoration scheme. Nicole inflated fifty gold and silver balloons. The effort nearly killed her. Susie cut the crusts off 200 smoked-salmon sandwiches. An enormous cake was brought in from the very best local bakery. When the bride-to-be texted to say that she and Ben had just turned off the motorway, Susie ushered the engagement-party guests into hiding in the darkened living room.
‘Surprise!’ they shouted as Ben shuffled in first.
Ben, who had been looking forward to a restorative hour on his Xbox for the entire drive back to Southampton, gamely put on a show of delight. Diana, however, was genuinely delighted. A surprise party was the best thing in the world, as far as she was concerned. What was the point of bagging her man if everybody didn’t know about it? She flashed her new engagement ring and regaled the entire gathering with a description of their suite at the hotel.
‘It had a separate dressing area. That makes such a difference. I told Ben we should knock through from the box room and have a separate dressing room here.’
Then she wowed her friends with the news that one of last year’s X Factor contestants had been staying at Cliveden at the same time.
‘He’s much smaller in real life,’ she said, ‘and his girlfriend looked like a right old skank. But then didn’t I always say he was gay? She’s probably his PA, helping him scotch the gay rumours. They didn’t look very together in a real way.’
No one seemed to notice, or care, that Diana hadn’t described the proposal itself. Not when there was X Factor gossip to be had.
The clingfilm came off the sandwiches and champagne corks were popped. The champagne came courtesy of Diana’s father, who was unfortunately unable to attend that evening’s celebrations. He was still at work. He had his own business fitting kitchens and often carried on over the weekends.
‘Trust him,’ said Diana. ‘He’s always working.’
‘He’ll need to work twice as hard now,’ said Nicole, ‘to pay for your wedding. Have you thought about your venue yet?’
‘Cliveden would be amazing,’ said Diana.
It was possibly for the best that Diana’s father wasn’t there. His doctor had recently told him to avoid putting too much stress on his heart.
Diana and Ben’s engagement party was still in full swing at midnight. Ben grinned his way through it all, though he wanted nothing more than a few moments to himself. He managed just twenty minutes on his own in the master bedroom’s en suite before Diana came knocking on the door, demanding to touch up her make-up. She seemed very happy. She pressed a kiss on Ben’s cheek as they passed in the bathroom doorway. She might have been less affectionate had she known who he’d been texting in those few brief minutes of alone time.
Ben had been texting Lucy, the girl from work. She had sent him several messages over the past couple of days, asking if he was OK. Ben hadn’t told her that he was taking three days off work to get engaged and thus she had assumed that he must be absent because he was unwell. Nobody had told her otherwise.
Oh God. Every time another sweetly concerned text came through, Ben’s heart sank a little deeper. He knew he had to tell Lucy the truth before he got back to the office. She didn’t deserve the humiliation of finding out at the same time as everyone else. If he texted her now, on Saturday night, then by Monday morning she might have got used to the idea. There was no way he would be able to keep the engagement quiet for any longer. Diana’s best friend, Nicole, had a cousin who worked in the HR department. Ben wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had already made the announcement for him on the company intranet. So he knew he had to man up and let Lucy down. And, boy, would she feel let down.
Though Ben had promised Diana that Lucy knew the status quo, the truth was that Lucy still had every reason to think that Ben had actually left Diana. With Diana raging at home, Ben hadn’t been able to face the thought of getting earache in the office as well, so he’d told Lucy that he and Diana were coming to the end of their seven-year relationship. It was just a matter of making the final break, which would naturally be difficult after such a long time. They had a joint mortgage. A big mortgage. That would take some unravelling. But unravelling it was, or so Lucy thought. It was on that basis that she had gone to bed with him. As yet, Lucy didn’t even know that Diana had found out about their night of passion, so while Ben was busy patching up his relationship, Lucy was biding her time, assuming that Ben was just waiting for the right moment to make his exit. Ben was going to have to write one hell of a text. In the end, he wrote, Got some bad news. D and me back 2gether. Got engaged. Am sorry.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified when Lucy failed to text her response.
‘Come on, you.’ Diana emerged from the bathroom, looking immaculate as ever, and took her future husband by the hand. ‘Mum has brought a cake. We’ve got to cut it together.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait until we’re cutting our wedding cake?’ asked Ben.
‘You’re such a spoilsport.’ Diana pouted. ‘Don’t ruin my evening. Besides, the sooner we wrap this party up, the sooner we can go to bed.’
Diana fluffed up her long, glossy hair and smiled seductively.
Ben followed her downstairs like a puppy.
Chapter Six
29 October 2010
Kate’s instinct that all was not well with her mother was right. Though her parents had refused to talk about it on the day they celebrated Kate’s engagement to Ian, the very next time Kate phoned, Elaine admitted that the hospital visit had brought bad news.
‘The second mammogram again showed what they thought might be calcifications, but it might be DCIS.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Ductal carcinoma in situ, a beginner’s cancer, if you like.’
Kate felt the C-word like a blow.
‘They want to do a biopsy. It’s the only way to know for sure.’
‘How soon can they do it?’ Kate asked.
‘End of the week. But I don’t want to go into it now,’ said Elaine. ‘Cheer me up. Talk about the wedding.’
Carrying on an excited conversation about wedding plans after that revelation was anything but easy. Still Kate tried. She told her mother that she and Ian had decided they wanted to get married as quickly as possible. Kate was about to go on gardening leave for two months as she moved from one law firm to another. Ideally, they would get married before Kate started her new job in February. Maybe as soon as late January if they could get everything sorted out in time. There was no point waiting any longer at their age, and a winter wedding could be so romantic. They liked the idea of the register office in Marylebone, followed by a lunch. Just a few people. Definitely not more than forty. Did her parents think enough water had passed under the bridge to invite both her godmothers, who had fallen out ten years before? Elaine didn’t seem entirely engaged with the conversation, but every ti
me Kate attempted to steer her back to the biopsy, Elaine asked about wedding cakes, invitations and party favours instead.
‘Mum,’ said Kate, ‘we’re not having party favours, whatever they are. We’re planning a simple wedding.’
Kate had a long-awaited day off work later that week. She abandoned her plan to spend the day getting the boiler serviced and doing some early Christmas shopping and instead travelled back down to the south coast to accompany her mother to hospital for the biopsy.
Kate sat in the waiting room with her father.
‘Katie-Jane,’ he said, reverting to the pet name he hadn’t used in years, ‘I can’t tell you how worried we are. If we didn’t have your engagement to celebrate, your mother and I might have reached for the arsenic.’
‘Dad,’ Kate pleaded, ‘it could be nothing. Wait for the results.’ But she could imagine what he said was true. Her parents, who had married at the tender age of twenty, had spent less than seven nights apart in their whole almost five-decade-long marriage. Even through her darkest dating disasters, Kate had been sustained by the idea of a marriage like the one her parents had built together. They proved it was possible to find for-ever love. Nothing was too difficult for them to get through together. Except this, perhaps, if it turned out to be breast cancer. That day, privately and separately, each told Kate how much they feared for the other in the face of such a foe.
The mood remained sombre even when they were back at home and their neighbour ‘Keith Richards’ tripped over their low garden fence as he staggered by en route to the bottle bank.
‘Poor man,’ said Elaine. ‘He’s got no one to look after him.’
Elaine made a grab for her husband’s hand and squeezed until his fingers went white.
Kate knew that her mother was imagining a day when John might be the one tottering towards the bottle bank with no comfort but a bottle of whisky.
The arrival of Kate’s sister for lunch was a huge relief.
‘Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?’ Kate hissed when their parents were safely in the kitchen.
‘No one wanted to rain on your parade, stupid. You’ve waited long enough to bag your Mr Right.’
‘I can’t believe I was off on another planet like that while Mum and Dad have had so much to think about. I would never have acted like such a selfish cow going on and on about me and Ian.’
‘Kate, believe me, the thought of your wedding has really cheered them up. Your news came at exactly the right time.’
‘I feel like an idiot. I should have guessed.’
‘There’s no point beating yourself up,’ said Tess. ‘We’re not going to know anything for certain until Mum gets the results, so we’ve just got to keep calm and carry on. And keep Mum and Dad distracted.’
‘How can we do that? I feel like Pollyanna talking about anything but Mum’s health right now.’
‘How about . . .’ Tess suggested that a trip to a bridal-wear shop might cheer their mother up.
‘What? Today? I haven’t really thought about what I want to wear yet,’ Kate protested.
‘Well, there’s no harm in seeing what’s out there. It’s just an outing. We could go to Bride on Time.’
‘The prom-dress place above the supermarket? You’re kidding. Ian and I aren’t planning a wedding with a trailer-park theme.’
But Tess insisted. ‘I hear that’s where all the local brides go. Apparently, it’s not as tacky as it looks once you get upstairs. There’s a woman there used to work for Vivienne Westwood.’
When Elaine heard the plan, she clapped her hands together and a proper smile appeared on her face for the first time that day.
‘I’ve always wanted to see you in a wedding dress.’
Kate was suddenly acutely aware that at thirty-nine, she had kept her mother waiting longer than most.
‘OK,’ said Kate, resigning herself to the idea. ‘We’ll go to Bride on Time.’
Still, as she made the call, she crossed her fingers and prayed there would be no chance of an appointment before she had to go back to London. No such luck. As it happened, there had been a cancellation. Melanie Harris and her team would be delighted to see Kate that very afternoon.
Chapter Seven
Diana had long since decided that she would be getting her wedding dress from Bride on Time. It was where her best friend Nicole’s sister, Gemma, had bought her dress – a fabulous hand-embroidered number called Evangeline that cost more than her first car. Diana’s cousin Grace had also bought her dress there. And Grace’s sister-in-law. And Diana’s next-door neighbour. And Diana’s colleague Jane. Everyone who was anyone within a fifty-mile radius had to be a Bride on Time bride. All the girls recommended Melanie Harris in particular.
‘You have to make sure you get an appointment with her,’ said Gemma, ‘the boss. Or Heidi, who used to work for Vivienne Westwood. You don’t want one of the juniors, who don’t know what they’re doing.’
Diana duly booked an appointment with the boss for 29 October.
It was the first in a series of wedding-related appointments in Diana’s diary. She had pencilled most of them in even before the weekend at Cliveden. She had also, unknown to Ben, been collecting cuttings from wedding magazines and Sunday supplements for years. The length of time that had elapsed since Diana began her ‘wedding folder’ was evidenced by the changing styles of the dresses she had clipped. In the past couple of years, Diana had been erring towards simple shapes that were almost more evening dress than traditional wedding gown, but there were genuine meringues among the dresses Diana had picked out over the decades. And of course there was the iconic wedding dress worn by her princess namesake.
29 July 1981
Diana Ashcroft was born on the day that Lady Diana Spencer married her prince. Diana’s mother, Susie, watched the wedding on a TV set wheeled into the delivery room by the midwife, who was determined not to miss a minute of this historic occasion for any birth, no matter how difficult. For a long time the procession of guests arriving at St Paul’s took Susie’s mind off her labour, which had been going on for twenty-two hours by the time the princess-to-be and her father appeared at the cathedral in their carriage. Unfortunately, Susie and the midwife missed most of the ceremony itself, as Baby Ashcroft chose that exact moment to make her appearance to a soundtrack of Kiri Te Kanawa singing Handel and her mother’s best collection of swear words. She was bald as an earthworm and bore an uncanny resemblance to her paternal grandfather, but Susie pronounced her new daughter at least as beautiful as the newly minted princess.
‘I’m calling her Diana,’ Susie told her husband when he finally came to pay his respects two whole hours later. Dave had been watching the wedding in a pub, or rather, he had been sitting at the back of a pub sinking lager and stuffing sausage rolls from the complimentary royal wedding buffet the pub’s landlady had put on for her regulars. He hadn’t seen a moment of the ceremony.
‘You can’t call her bloody Diana,’ he said, realising simultaneously that this name nonsense must mean he had a daughter and not a son. Bang went his plan to be allowed to buy a Southampton FC season ticket and an enormous Scalextric track.
‘I’ll call her what I bloody well like. You didn’t have to squeeze her out through your private parts. Where the hell were you, anyway? You were meant to be holding my hand. Ten minutes you said you’d be gone. Ten minutes! I bet you were in a bloody pub.’
‘It’s a day of national celebration, sugar.’ Dave tried to soften his wife up with her pet name. ‘I was toasting our future queen.’
‘How about toasting your first-born, you tosspot? It’s been two hours since she was born. Two bloody hours! I didn’t know where you were. You might have been run over by one of the floats in the royal wedding parade for all I knew. You had better make this up to me,’ said Susie.
Dave promised that he would, and he did. As soon as the shops reopened after the national holiday, Dave bought his wife a new charm for her treasured bracelet: a little
golden bootee studded with pink crystal to mark the birth of a girl. He bought his new daughter, his first-born, a charm bracelet of her own. In silver. Susie sent him back to the shop to change it for a gold one.
‘She’s your daughter, Dave, your only child.’
‘My first child.’
‘Your bloody only child if I have anything to do with it. And from now on your daughter wears gold.’
It was the first hint of the long list of expenses to come: private school, a pony, a car . . .
The fact that Dave would be bankrolling the whole project did not, however, mean that he would have much, if any, say over the wedding preparations. He certainly wouldn’t be allowed to join the first excursion to Bride on Time. Choosing a wedding dress was women’s work. Diana would be accompanied by her mother and by Nicole, her newly appointed maid of honour.
In any case, by the time his darling Diana got engaged, Dave had been divorced from her mother for almost eleven years. They didn’t even speak. He had cited unreasonable behaviour. Susie promised she would never forgive him. Neither would she ever tire of making Dave’s life a misery. Thus Susie was right behind her daughter’s plan to have the biggest and the best of everything, especially if it meant that Dave couldn’t spend that money on Chelsea, his second wife.
‘I want you to have the dress I was never able to have,’ Susie told Diana as they drove to Bride on Time.
When Susie and Dave got married, Susie had had to wear a maternity dress. She had wanted to wait until after Diana was born to have the wedding, so that she could slim down and wear a proper bridal gown, but Diana’s maternal grandfather had insisted that the marriage came before the birth. He would not countenance an illegitimate grandchild.
‘So I missed out on everything,’ said Susie. ‘I had to wear a nylon sack and have my reception in a working men’s club. Your wedding is a chance to have the day I always wanted.’
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