Kate's Wedding

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘You OK?’ one of her colleagues asked as they left the meeting room.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Kate. ‘Just a bit distracted.’

  ‘Already given up on us now you know you’re leaving, eh?’ The colleague raised an eyebrow.

  Kate was mortified. ‘No. It’s not that. It’s just that—’

  ‘Keep your eye on the ball, Williamson,’ was her colleague’s parting shot.

  Kate fumed. That particular colleague had already suggested ‘in jest’ that Kate was wasting time moving firms since now she was getting married, it wouldn’t be long before she had children and quit altogether. It was a stunning comment, especially coming as it did from an employment lawyer.

  Back in her office, Kate took a call from her mother.

  ‘Your father said you found out a few things about my condition,’ she said.

  Kate’s heart fell. She could tell by the tone of her mother’s voice that Elaine was hoping for some good news. She also had a horrible feeling that her mother would take more notice of Kate, with her 2:1 in jurisprudence, and her half-day’s Googling than she would of her learned physicians.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve found anything out exactly, Mum. I just read a few papers online. One was written by your consultant, Mr Calil. He seems to be pretty well respected in the field.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad you think that. I know it sounds silly, but it’s just . . . it’s just he looks so young! I can’t believe he’s really done all that training.’

  ‘He’s not that young, Mum. He’s a year older than I am. He’s got more letters after his name than most of the professors at my college ever had.’

  ‘OK. Well, if you think he’s qualified . . .’

  ‘He’s definitely qualified. You don’t get to be a consultant without taking exams year after year. You have to train your entire career.’ Kate made that last bit up, but it sounded right. Possibly it was right.

  ‘There was an article in the Daily Mail about a man who impersonated a doctor. He ended up running a whole hospital in Utah.’

  ‘That’s the States, Mum. I’m sure they have different criteria there. That would never happen on the NHS.’

  Or would it? While her mother chatted, Kate typed ‘fake surgeon’ into the Google search box. It produced a horribly large number of hits.

  ‘I’ve got to go, Mum. I’ve a meeting in ten minutes.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sweetheart. We know you’re busy.’

  That made it worse. Kate wasn’t really too busy. She didn’t really have another meeting that day. She just didn’t think she could continue to hold it together, and the last thing her mother needed right then was to hear Kate cry.

  That evening, she couldn’t wait to get back to Ian’s flat, which was where they had been spending most nights since the engagement. (They were properly living together for the first time. Kate would be moving the rest of her things into Ian’s flat when her gardening leave began, leaving her own place empty and ready to be put on the market.) Unfortunately, that night, the Tube conspired against her. Random delays held her underground for far longer than most people could stand. Kate, full of worry for her parents, thought that she might have to scream. When she got to the flat, Ian was already home, sitting at his PC, comparing the price of one package of accountancy software to another ostensibly identical package. Ian could occupy himself for hours with such a seemingly pointless endeavour. Internet prices rarely differed that much from site to site any more. Still, Ian was absorbed. He didn’t look up as Kate walked by his office door on her way to the kitchen. She had never quite got used to that. She’d told him that it bothered her the way he didn’t say, ‘Hello,’ unless she said it first.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who’s come into the flat?’ she asked him. ‘I could be anyone. I could be a burglar. Why don’t you at least look up?’

  ‘Because I know it’s you,’ said Ian simply. ‘I can tell by the way you sigh when you’re hanging up your coat.’

  That night, Ian went one better. While he did not call out, ‘Hello,’ as Kate walked down the hall, he did decide, five minutes later, that it was appropriate to shout out, ‘What’s for dinner?’

  The floodgates opened. Of all the evenings when Kate really needed a hug upon her return to the flat, Ian could not have chosen a worse one to fail so absolutely to anticipate her needs.

  ‘You can sort out your own bloody dinner,’ she shouted. She threw a dirty mug into the cold water in the sink and left it there. When Ian eventually came to look for her, Kate was face down on their double bed. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. And she was crying like a child. When Ian touched her, she flipped over onto her back so that he could experience the full horror of her fear and premature grief. She didn’t feel like hiding it from him. She wanted him to know just how miserable she was. She let her mouth fall open and she bawled.

  Ian’s face was a picture of panic.

  ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’

  Kate just continued to bawl.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Ian said, when it was clear that she wasn’t about to stop crying. ‘Is it something I did? Is it something I said?’

  ‘No,’ said Kate. ‘No, of course it’s not.’

  ‘Then what am I supposed to do? What should I say?’

  ‘You could have just given me a hug when I walked through the door instead of asking me what’s for bloody dinner. My mum has cancer, Ian. Actual bloody cancer.’

  ‘But isn’t it early stage?’

  ‘That doesn’t make it better! I’ve had a terrible day. I can’t take it any longer. I just need a hug.’

  ‘I can give you a hug.’ Ian held out his arms to give her the hug he thought she’d asked for, but Kate just shook her head.

  ‘It’s too late now. I want to be on my own. Go away.’

  She sent him out of the bedroom. Ian lost more points by not even trying to stay.

  Kate was still in a foul mood when Ian came to bed three hours later. Not even the cup of tea he brought with him could shake her out of it. He brought more disapprobation upon himself when he managed to fall asleep in an instant, leaving Kate wide awake and utterly unable to persuade her racing brain to switch off.

  As he had got ready for bed, Ian had asked her to tell him about the diagnosis, but she hadn’t felt able to. She didn’t want to have to say the ugly words out loud again. Now she was angry with him for not having insisted that she get the whole story out there. It might have helped. He might have lain awake too. As it was, he was sleeping like a baby, as usual. Nothing was worrying his big, fat head.

  Kate rolled away from Ian’s body, irritated by even the sound of his breathing. It was only then that she saw the small black box on the bedside table. Her engagement ring had arrived.

  Chapter Fifteen

  What interested Diana most about the engagement of Kate Middleton and Prince William was that they had actually become engaged on the same day as Diana and Ben. That meant that Diana had a special interest in all the astrological websites that posted charts for the auspicious day, twenty ten, twenty ten. Diana was very pleased to see that she and Ben had become engaged under such good stars.

  There was, of course, still the question of the actual wedding to come. Diana pondered the suggestions the press put forward. The royals would choose a summer wedding, surely, the better to cash in on the boost to tourism such a special occasion would bring. God knows the UK needed such a lift.

  Diana also closely examined the outfit Kate Middleton had chosen for the couple’s engagement announcement. She wondered if Kate’s hair was its natural colour. Did she have extensions, or was her long, glossy mane simply the result of good breeding and great nutrition? Diana bought every newspaper she could lay her hands on in the hope of finding a clue. She made notes of the names of Kate’s hairdresser and facialist, and began to plan a trip to London to engage their services herself. She pencilled a date on the chart she had bought especially for the purpose of wed
ding-planning.

  Susie agreed that the news that Diana and Prince William had become engaged on the same day was auspicious. She told her daughter that she had always been convinced that the spirit of Princess Diana was looking out for her. ‘I mean, think about it, sweetheart. You were born on the day that she married and became engaged on the same day as her son. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence. That seems like karma. The princess will make sure your wedding is every bit as good as Will and Kate’s.’

  Diana shared this view with Ben as they settled down to sleep that night.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if they chose to get married on the same day as us? That would be proof that Princess Di is on our side.’

  ‘They’re unlikely to get married in April,’ said Ben. ‘That’s nowhere near long enough to plan a big wedding.’

  ‘We’re planning our wedding for the end of April,’ Diana pointed out. ‘Our wedding is going to be big too.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben, ‘but for us it’s just a matter of booking the venue and sending out the invites. They’ve got to close down a nation, mount security for heads of state from all over the world, have some special coins minted . . . Kate Middleton has got more to worry about than her dress.’

  There was a pause of the sort that Ben had come to recognise as a harbinger of trouble. He heard Diana’s sharp intake of breath and knew he had somehow offended her.

  ‘Is that all you think I’ve got to worry about? My dress? Do you think that finding a venue for the reception and thinking up a colour scheme and finding a caterer and booking a band and making sure it goes to plan is going to be easy?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, but—’

  Diana sat up in bed and switched her bedside lamp on. ‘That is what you think, isn’t it? You think that all I have to do is buy the dress and get my hair done. Do you have any idea how stressful this wedding-planning is for me already? I’m going to show you my chart. Do you know how much I have to get done in the next five months?’

  ‘We could always push it back a bit,’ said Ben, slightly too eagerly.

  ‘No way,’ said Diana, already out of bed and looking for her A3 pad. ‘Absolutely no way. But I do need as much time as I can get, Ben. In fact, I think I might have to leave work.’

  ‘What?’

  Now Ben was sitting up in bed too.

  When, a few days later, the royal wedding was set for 29 April 2011, the day before Ben and Diana’s own big day, Diana’s mind was made up. Kate Middleton would not be working in the run-up to her wedding, so how could she, Diana, be expected to hold down her job, run their home and plan a wedding too?

  ‘Kate Middleton is marrying the freaking heir to the throne,’ Ben pointed out.

  Diana deferred to her mother and father, who both agreed that Diana should take a small career break for this most important day of her life.

  ‘You are my princess, after all,’ said her mother.

  That was good enough for Diana. Ben would just have to get used to it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  27 November 2010

  Kate had no idea what planning a wedding involved. While Diana was already letting the stress bubble up in her, five months in advance, Kate hadn’t thought beyond booking the slot at the register office for a Saturday in mid-March. She assumed that once she was on gardening leave, it would be relatively easy to pull together a lunch party for forty. (A honeymoon would have to wait until Kate had been in her new job for a little while.) And of course she already had the dress. That stupid dress. Over a quick lunch to celebrate Kate’s engagement, Helen and Anne had dissolved into tears of laughter when Kate admitted that she’d accidentally put down a deposit on a meringue. There was, Kate hoped, still time to let her mother down gently over that. Maybe that weekend. And maybe, just maybe, Bride on Time would not yet have put her order through so she could get her money back.

  Kate had often felt guilty that she didn’t spend enough time with her parents since they had retired, and now her mother’s diagnosis made it seem important to spend all the time she could with them. Luckily, the wedding made it possible for her to drop down to Washam without making it obvious that she wanted to keep an eye on her mum and see how her father was coping.

  The weekend after the definitive cancer diagnosis, Kate was at her parents’ place again. They were going to visit a wedding fair held at a local luxury hotel.

  ‘It will cheer Mum up,’ was Tess’s reasoning when she announced the plan. ‘Plus, you might get some ideas.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For what you absolutely don’t want to do.’

  Ian had declined to go with them.

  ‘Aren’t you worried I might come home having spent all our money on sugared almonds?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No,’ said Ian. ‘I know you wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Kate asked him.

  ‘I trust you,’ he said, and gave her a hug. He had been giving her an awful lot of hugs since the night Kate had her freak-out over the cancer news. She had cried pretty much all night. For her mother, for herself and because she had been so vile to Ian, when all the time he could have – and might have, were he less subtle or more clever – pulled out the engagement ring in an attempt to shut her up. She loved him for not having done that. She loved him even more when he finally did put the ring on her finger the next morning.

  The solitaire, with its simple gold setting, glittered against the steering wheel as Kate drove down to the south coast on her own again. She dropped her car off at her parents’ house and got into the back of her dad’s car for the short trip to the hotel. Her sister had leaped upon the excuse to leave Lily with her father, Mike.

  ‘It’s a long time since I got to go to a wedding fair,’ Tess said.

  Kate didn’t remember having accompanied Tess to anything like a wedding fair. It was possibly because at the time that Tess got married, she and Kate weren’t as close as they had become in their thirties. Kate had thought Tess was old before her time, getting married at twenty-five. She was sure that Tess looked down on her and thought her flat-sharing, single life quite tragic. And Kate wasn’t wrong about that. At the time that she got married, Tess did feel rather sorry for her older sister, but now, twelve years and one daughter on, Tess didn’t mind admitting that she wished she could have experienced some of Kate’s freedom. She wished she’d travelled. She wished she’d lived alone for a while. The grass is always greener.

  Kate was glad that Tess was coming with her and both their parents to the bridal fair. Tess could always be relied upon to fill an awkward silence with some tale about her child. Just that morning, said Tess, Lily had walked into the kitchen at breakfast time and addressed her parents with the cheery line ‘Hello, old people.’ When Mike had pointed out that wasn’t very nice, Lily had amended her greeting to ‘Hello, poo people.’

  ‘Lily would have liked to come to this bridal fair,’ said her proud grandmother Elaine.

  ‘She’d have had her sticky fingers into everything,’ said Tess. ‘It would have cost me a fortune in damages.’

  Tess and Elaine remembered an afternoon when Lily had climbed into a bedding display in the enormous branch of Marks & Spencer at Hedge End. The shop assistants had smiled indulgently as Lily pretended to snuggle down for the night. They were a little less pleased when Lily climbed back out of the bed, leaving a streak of brown on the bottom sheet. Tess still shuddered as she remembered trying to persuade the shop assistants that it really was just chocolate.

  ‘You’re right. It’s not a good idea to let Lily anywhere near a wedding dress,’ Elaine conceded.

  ‘I will make sure she doesn’t have any chocolate on your big day,’ Tess told Kate.

  ‘She’s going to make a lovely bridesmaid,’ said Elaine.

  ‘I don’t know if I can have bridesmaids at the register office,’ Kate pointed out.

  ‘Of course you’ll be allowed to have bridesmaids,’ said Elaine. ‘I’ve seen pictures of bri
desmaids coming out of the register office in Southampton. Besides, you’re going to need help with that skirt.’

  ‘Ah, yes, about that dress—’ Kate saw her moment but failed to take it before she was interrupted.

  ‘Lily has already asked me if she’s going to get a new dress too.’

  ‘She’d make a beautiful bridesmaid,’ said John from the driver’s seat.

  ‘All right,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll ask Ian.’

  The online advertisement for the bridal fair had suggested opulent surroundings in the form of the Grange Hill Hotel. The photograph of the hotel used to illustrate the ad showed a smiling couple walking out through an ivy-covered doorway to a Rolls-Royce parked on an immaculate gravel drive. As soon as John turned off the dual carriageway at the first sign for the hotel, Kate had a feeling that the website had somewhat oversold the event. The official wooden sign, which could have used a coat of paint, had been embellished with a plain sheet of A4 paper, on which someone had written, ‘Bridel Fayr,’ in Magic Marker.

  ‘Can’t get the staff these days,’ John commented as he took in the mistake. Two further signs drawing punters towards the hotel advertised the bridal fair with different variations on the spelling of the words: ‘Bridle Farye’ and ‘Bridul Faire.’ Kate was ready to ask her father to turn the car round then take them to a pub on the seafront.

  But Tess and Elaine were determined. They had planned the whole afternoon around this bridal extrava-ganza. They would look around the first half of the fair – the advertisement had promised more than three hundred exhibitors – then they would break for lunch in the hotel’s garden room, which was trumpeted as the ideal venue for a top-class wedding reception.

  ‘We should definitely check that out,’ said Tess.

  ‘But we’re getting married in London,’ Kate reminded her sister.

  ‘It’s still useful to have a comparison.’