‘Makes you look three months pregnant,’ said Tess.
Kate’s mother pricked up her ears.
‘I’m not,’ said Kate, as hot embarrassment crept up her neck.
‘Ah, well,’ said Heidi, ‘there’s plenty of time . . . or IVF. I know a girl who had triplets on her eighth try.’
Kate couldn’t wait to get back into the changing room.
Meanwhile, the girl with the pointy face and the Mean Girl were preening side by side in the floor-length mirror. Though they were objectively both pretty enough girls, their attitudes made them look like Cinderella’s two ugly sisters getting ready for the prince’s ball. Kate didn’t even bother to try to get a better look at the dress she was wearing, to see if Tess was really right. She followed Heidi back to the changing room feeling enormous relief that the next dress was to be her last. She’d try it on, whip it off and hurry to get back into her jeans. Then she was outta here. Why had she ever let herself be talked into this in the first place? There was only so much she could put up with in the interests of making her mother happy and her sister snigger.
Ian had texted. Are you having fun? he asked.
While Heidi prepared dress five, Kate responded. Oh, yeah. This is about as much fun as being back at school.
Kate had told Ian about the cool girls who had made her teenage years a misery. Even over twenty years on, the thought of them could still make her shoulders slump. The past hour in this stupid bridal shop, with Heidi commenting so candidly on her figure and evil looks from the other brides, was having the same effect as an afternoon in the school gym. The confident Kate her work colleagues knew had all but disappeared.
Kate lifted her arms at Heidi’s instruction while the dress was slipped on over her head.
‘OK,’ said Heidi, surveying dress five, ‘your saddlebags are covered, but we’re going to need the crate.’
The crate.
Moments later, Kate found herself standing back outside in the salon on the crate in question – just a plain plastic bottle crate – while Heidi and another assistant fussed around the enormous skirt of the Giovanni Lucciani dress like a couple of busy elves. Kate, meanwhile, was having an out-of-body experience. Heidi had laced her in so tightly that she could barely breathe.
‘You’re lucky you’ve no back fat to speak of,’ Heidi said when the lacing was done.
Elaine and Tess were less damning in their praise.
‘Oh my God,’ breathed Tess, when she returned from a loo break to see Kate in the final outfit.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Elaine.
Kate, too, was stunned by her reflection. She looked like Cinderella in the last picture in the Penguin fairy-tale book she and Tess had shared as children. At least, from the neck down she did. Her waist was tiny.
‘In comparison to the skirt,’ Heidi kindly pointed out.
‘The back looks wonderful,’ said Kate’s mother.
‘Like I said,’ Heidi chipped in, ‘no back fat.’
‘You look like a princess,’ said Tess.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Kate. ‘You know this dress weighs almost three stone?’
‘It’s my favourite,’ said her mother.
‘I’m getting married in a register office.’
‘I always tell my ladies,’ interrupted Heidi, ‘that no matter where you’re getting married, you want to make sure people know you’re the bride.’
‘I don’t think anyone would make a mistake if I wore this frock. It’s much too much for me. Even Lady Gaga couldn’t pull this one off.’
‘Oh, Kate!’ Elaine suddenly sobbed. ‘It’s so wonderful!’
Kate and Tess looked towards their mother. The Kleenex were out and the waterworks were off. Tess wrapped her arms round Elaine, but Kate, stuck on that stupid crate in a dress that weighed three stone, was powerless to move. She didn’t dare.
‘Oh, Mum,’ she said. ‘Mum. Please. Please don’t cry. It’s supposed to be a happy occasion.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Elaine. ‘I am happy really. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to see you get married. It means so much to me to know that someone’s going to promise to care for you for the rest of your life. I can end my life in peace. I’ve got cancer,’ she explained to Heidi.
‘What?’ said Kate.
The definitiveness with which their mother announced her diagnosis was a shock for both Kate and her sister. Weren’t they supposed to be waiting for the results of the biopsy? Now Tess burst into tears too.
‘I’ve never seen so much crying,’ said Heidi.
‘You look like an angel in that dress, my love. You have never looked more beautiful. I think that’s the one,’ Kate’s mother added before making a trumpeting snort into a fistful of tissues.
‘It is the one,’ Tess agreed through her tears. ‘Definitely. You’ve got to have it.’
And that was how Kate came to be the proud owner of a genuine meringue.
Kate and her family were so busy being emotional that they didn’t notice Diana step out of her changing room in the exact same Giovanni Lucciani dress. Diana’s eyes narrowed as she took in the familiar coloured ribbons on the back of Kate’s bodice. She had assumed something so expensive and intricate could only be a one-off, but no, there was a sample in a large size too, goddamnit. Diana could barely contain her annoyance. First Rat Face and now this. Was it really too much to ask for something unique?
All the same, Diana allowed Melanie to help her step up onto another upturned crate to better show off the skirt. She stood with a dancer’s poise as Melanie pulled the ribbons at the back of the bodice as tight as they would go.
Diana asked her mother for a hair clip from her handbag. With it, she gathered her chestnut hair up into a loose chignon that showed off her well-toned shoulders. Thank you, Pilates. She turned this way and that, checking her reflection from all angles. Susie and Nicole cooed their approval.
‘It’s beautiful with your skin tone,’ said Nicole.
Melanie stood on another crate in order to be able to fasten the cathedral-length veil, the perfect accessory.
‘Ben isn’t going to know what hit him,’ said Susie.
‘Especially if I can get those Swarovski Louboutins to go with it,’ Diana agreed. ‘They cost well over a grand.’
‘Your dad will be delighted to get you those shoes, I’m sure.’
‘How much is this dress again?’ Diana asked Melanie.
Diana didn’t even blink when Melanie answered, ‘Two thousand pounds . . . It’s more expensive than the others you’ve just tried on because of the flowers on the bodice. Each one of those roses has to be stitched together by hand.’
‘So you’re telling me that even though that other girl is wearing the same dress, they’re not exactly identical.’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK.’
Satisfied that she was wearing a dress better than the older bride, Diana told her mother, ‘This is the one for me.’ While Melanie scuttled off to gather the paperwork, Diana posed for a while longer on her crate, basking in what she perceived to be the envious looks of the other women in the salon. Rat Face, skinny from years of worrying and smoking, could come nowhere near this sort of perfection. Meanwhile, the older bride slunk back into her changing room and emerged in a pair of ill-fitting jeans that showed her big arse in all its glory. Round one of Bride Wars to Diana Ashcroft.
Chapter Eleven
30 October 2010
Back in London, Kate wondered what on earth had possessed her to put down a deposit for a dress Richard Branson might have filled with hot air and taken to the moon. She didn’t dare tell Ian what had happened. Though both of them made good money – great money, in fact – she had a feeling that he would be unimpressed by the idea that she had spent the cost of a damn good holiday on a dress she would wear for at best half a day. They were supposed to be getting married at a register office in March and following that with lunch at one of their favourite restaurants. If sh
e told Ian about the dress, he would think she had gone mad. Ian’s theory, casually aired to Kate’s brother-in-law, that inside every girl was a Bridezilla just waiting to come out would be proved to be true.
In any case, there was more to think about than a dress. Kate had just a month left in her current job. There were an awful lot of loose ends to be tied up before she could go on gardening leave. And now there was her mother’s biopsy to think about too. If the news turned out to be as bad as Elaine seemed certain it would be, Kate had a feeling she would be spending much of her gardening leave in Washam. All that seemed far more real than planning a wedding.
It still hadn’t quite sunk into Kate’s brain that she was going to get married. Perhaps it was simply that work and her mother’s health were much more pressing, but perhaps it was that Kate was finding it hard to shake years of not even daring to dream that she would one day find herself engaged. After she and Dan broke up for the last time, Kate had rather given up on the idea of ever being in a long-term relationship again, let alone getting married. But then she met Ian, and now she was going to have a wedding, albeit a full decade later than ‘the norm’.
‘Has hell frozen over?’ asked one of her college friends when she telephoned to tell him the news. Even her very best female friends – Helen and Anne, who had known her since the three of them had rocked up at Cambridge, aged eighteen – agreed that they wouldn’t have put money on this particular outcome, though they were absolutely delighted, of course.
But no matter how often Kate kept pinching herself, expecting the status quo to be restored at any moment, Ian was still there beside her when she woke up in the morning. He had been beside her for only eleven months but already it was starting to feel as though Kate had never been without him. She certainly never wanted to be without him again. Spending the rest of her life with him should be a breeze.
When people asked how they met, Ian would say, ‘In a bar.’ He wouldn’t be drawn any further. Ian liked to keep things simple. Plus, he was slightly embarrassed by the truth.
‘Your version of events makes me sound like an alcoholic nympho who hangs around in public places waiting for unsuspecting men,’ Kate protested, but Ian did not want people to know they had met through a dating site.
Kate had no such qualms, though she found that when she said, ‘We met on Sugardaddy.com,’ people were generally too amused to ask for the whole truth, which was that she and Ian had found one another on Guardian Soulmates. Perhaps it wasn’t as romantic as eyes across a room, but, realistically, where else would she have met her match at such a late stage in the game? The pool Kate could fish from had dwindled dramatically during the four years she had wasted with Dan. She just didn’t meet single men any more. She didn’t have a wing-woman with whom to go clubbing. Most of her friends had long since paired up and were on to their second, third or even fourth babies. Kate’s social diary was all fortieth birthday parties and christenings. She hadn’t been invited to a wedding in years. The choice was simple: it was sign up or never have sex again for the rest of her life.
Kate actually passed over Ian’s profile the first time she saw it. He hadn’t included a photograph and the computer declared them to be just a 20 per cent match. Despite such a damning assessment, Ian wrote to her anyway, and through his emails he soon set himself apart from the crowd. He was polite and thoughtful. There was none of the innuendo that she had come to expect. He didn’t seem to be trying to gauge whether she might be up for a one-night stand. Ian said in his profile that he was looking for a serious relationship and he approached their early acquaintance accordingly. Kate was glad. The week before Ian started writing to her, she had become embroiled in a furious email slanging match with a man who accused her of being a ‘frigid bitch with an agenda’ because she asked if she could have his phone number in preference to giving him hers for the sake of personal safety. In that context, perhaps it was easy for Ian to seem refreshingly normal. Whatever, by the time Ian let Kate see his photo, she was already sold. She knew she would definitely meet him.
Ian’s behaviour on their first date was equally gentlemanly. He was waiting for her when she arrived at the bar where they agreed to meet for a drink. He said he had been there for fifteen minutes already to make sure she didn’t find herself alone. He didn’t want her to feel awkward. Kate appreciated that. She had chosen a drink at a bar as the safe option. As a veteran of Internet dates, she knew only too well that what seemed promising online could quickly turn into a nightmare when you brought it into the real world. She was determined not to be stuck spending a whole evening with a man whose conversation began and ended with the Inland Revenue, for example, as had happened the month before.
So Kate had made sure she had another appointment lined up. She had arranged to meet Helen for dinner at a restaurant close by. If this meeting with Ian went badly, then at least she and Helen would have something to laugh about later. So Kate was pleased and surprised to find that she and Ian had far from run out of conversation by the time the moment to leave rolled around. Quite the opposite, in fact; it was hard to drag herself away. Over dinner, she found herself telling happily married Helen that she thought she might have met someone really nice.
‘Oh, yeah? You thought Dan was “really nice” at the beginning,’ Helen reminded her. Helen had held Kate’s hand through her many break-ups from Dan, from the first one, which had only lasted for a week, until the last, which had been surprisingly permanent. Kate often wished she’d taken Helen’s advice to give Dan up as a lost cause far earlier.
‘No, really. He is nothing like Dan.’
‘Well,’ said Helen, ‘I’m glad to see you looking so excited. Just promise me you’ll be careful. Take it easy. At least make sure he’s not married before you sleep with him.’
‘He’s definitely not married,’ said Kate. ‘I think he’s just a straightforward nice guy who’s been too busy setting up his career to settle down. He’s the kind of guy you always said I should look for.’
Helen picked up her glass. ‘I’ll raise a toast to that.’
The second date, for which Kate allowed a whole evening, was just as lovely. Kate was impressed by Ian’s modesty, even though throughout the course of the meal it became clear that he had done some pretty impressive stuff with his life. He was very successful in his career. He was a partner in a big accountancy firm. He had grown up in Telford and was the first member of his family to go to university. He hadn’t forgotten his roots, though. He saw his family often. He doted on his nephews, his sister’s boys.
By the end of the second date, Kate knew that she really, really liked this ordinary man and would definitely be seeing him again. It was just so easy to be with him. Dates three, four and five totally restored her faith in single men.
With Ian, there was none of the usual trauma she associated with early dates. He called when he said he would. He always wanted to know what she was doing at the weekend. This experience was a world away from the nightmare of the early days with Dan. Kate remembered one horrible Sunday when she and Dan had arranged to have lunch together. He had promised to call first thing on Sunday with the plan. He didn’t call until two o’clock, by which time Kate had already made herself a sandwich. Dan blamed his flakiness on the trauma of his divorce.
‘I find it very hard to be pinned down,’ he said.
‘It’s hardly being pinned down,’ Kate tried. ‘If you ask someone to have lunch on a Sunday, they in return expect you to call and tell them when and where before one o’clock on the Sunday afternoon.’
Ian had no psychological excuses for bad behaviour because, it seemed, he simply had no intention of behaving badly.
After they’d been dating for about three months, Kate and Ian went on a mini-break to Copenhagen. They spent three nights in a charming hotel right by the port.
‘This is the first time we’ve spent three nights in a row together,’ Kate pointed out. ‘Do you think we could go for four?’
‘I t
hink we could go for a whole lot more than four,’ said Ian.
Kate had forgotten – or perhaps she had never really known – just how easy a relationship could be. Ian was constantly thinking of ways to amuse her. One morning, having stayed over, he left a note in her fridge, on a Post-it stuck to the milk.
‘You are lovely,’ was all it said.
It was such a simple little gesture, but it reduced Kate to happy tears. There were so many moments like that.
Kate hadn’t really expected to find love through a website. It seemed too clinical a medium ever to inspire grand passion. She had thought that Dan was the love of her life. Certainly, no one had ever brought out in her such a range of emotions. However, as time passed, she began to realise that as far as Dan was concerned, her overriding emotion had actually been frustration. Frustration that he just didn’t seem able to move their relationship forward. Frustration that after four years he still hadn’t introduced her to his children, who were by that time seventeen and nineteen, and doubtless had much more to worry about than whether or not their father was dating again.
Ian would not make Kate feel frustrated. At least, not in the same way.
There was only one small seed of doubt in Kate’s mind: Ian was very different from the men Kate had dated before. Her preference had always been for tortured, soulful types. By contrast Ian was remarkably simple. His approach to life was in fact so simple that about six months in, Kate wondered if she would be bored, but as Tess pointed out, she’d had an awful lot of practice with the tortured, soulful types and none of it had got her anywhere near the altar.
‘Easy is good. Just go with it,’ Tess had advised her.
Almost a year after their first date, Kate was still going with it and it was working out very well indeed.
For once she was glad she had taken her sister’s advice.
Chapter Twelve
Diana thought that people who had to resort to Internet dating must be profoundly sad. She couldn’t begin to imagine how terrible it must be to have to sift for a partner among strangers online. She herself had never had a problem finding a date. At junior school, she was always the first girl in her class to get a Valentine. One year, she had seven. The trend of adoration continued when she moved up to a private secondary school. At the end of her second year there, Diana was voted ‘Most Beautiful Girl in School’ by the boys in the year above.
Kate's Wedding Page 5