I was doing my chief-bridesmaid bit and standing out front, holding Rose’s heavy bouquet. Judging by the rigid tension in her back, she was suffering from more than the normal wedding nerves. When we got to the ‘just cause and impediment’ part the vicar paused for an agonisingly weighted second. Rose’s head quivered, as if she were willing herself not to turn around and look at the congregation, and I heard an audible sigh of relief as the vicar moved on to the next bit. She was asked if she would take this man Jeremy and she hesitated long enough for my heart to plummet sickeningly before she replied with a confidence-inspiringly firm, ‘Yes.’
She’d probably been momentarily unsure who this ‘Primrose’ the vicar was talking to was. Rose claims she was about two when everyone realised that to call her ‘Prim’ anything was a ludicrous misnomer. She’s been simply Rose ever since.
I was trying to examine the guests without making it obvious that I was rubbernecking, not easy when you’re supposed to be standing with eyes to the front. I too was intensely curious about the man with blue eyes, What was it about this Nigel that had alarmed Rose so much? For it hadn’t only been shock, it was fright as well. As far as I knew, he was just someone she’d had a fling with during the year I’d spent in France as part of my history degree. It had been long over by the time I returned and she’d never mentioned his name since, except in passing, so I’d assumed he was one of her long list of loved, left and forgotten. It seemed that I’d been wrong. But I knew Rose well enough to be sure the beans would be spilt eventually.
In the meantime, I was a lot more interested in Nigel’s friend. The one who looked as if he’d got out of bed just in time to dress on the way to a wedding at three-thirty in the afternoon. The one who could have modelled for my adolescent fantasies of what a man should look like, and sometimes I didn’t feel that I’d grown up so very much. Not that someone with the face, and I was prepared to bet the pulling power, of a fallen angel was going to take a second look at an oversized shepherdess, apart from to have another laugh. As we charged up the aisle I’d caught a glimpse of them tucked away in one of those dark corners with a limited view of the bride given as a punishment to late arrivals. Golden-haired Lucifer was nudging his friend and pointing to the front. He certainly hadn’t been bothering to look at me. Still, it didn’t do any harm to dream. It wasn’t until I heard some indignant throat-clearing that I realised I’d been so lost in my thoughts I’d missed my cue to give Rose her bouquet back. She held out her hand with an expression promising explanations were going to be expected, and had better be given, later. I smiled sheepishly, passed it over, and tried to get the circulation back into my hands. There’d have to be explanations on both sides, wouldn’t there?
CHAPTER 2
I was glad to see that Rose had given up her imitation of the spectral bride. It’s not the done thing for a bride to walk back down the aisle looking as if she’s just received a death sentence, certainly not very flattering for her new husband. Even though he probably wouldn’t have noticed, Jeremy isn’t long on observation even when not suffering from a crippling hangover, but his mother would have had great pleasure in pointing it out.
Rose’s mother, who was having a field day getting her only daughter married, and so well too (a thousand-acre estate and a large house), was eking out every enjoyable moment. She insisted on extensive photographic sessions both in front of the church and when we got back to the house, much to the annoyance of the bride, who was saying in a loud voice she needed a drink and a cigarette or she’d pass out. The groom looked as if he heartily agreed with the first part of her demands. The photographer attempted to compromise by having an ever-so-romantic shot of them lifting a glass to each other in a toast. By the time he got his focus right both glasses were empty.
As soon as we finished being recorded for posterity I went to make what improvements I could to my outfit. There wasn’t much I could do without scissors and a packet of dye, but at least without the topknot of pink roses and the apron I merely looked as if I was wearing a grossly unflattering dress of quite the wrong colour rather than resembling an ageing Shirley Temple manqué who’d never made it in the cute stakes. Then I ripped the muslin fichu thing off and began to feel happier. The neckline was cut unexpectedly low under its frilly covering and now you could see my cleavage - one of my better points - rather than me looking as if I was supporting a lace-trimmed bolster. The colour was still hell. Have I mentioned that my hair is red? Well, my mother likes to call it strawberry blonde, but truthfully it’s more of a pale carrot, which can be quite an attractive colour. Just not when combined with pink. Never mind, a few - a lot of glasses of champagne and my face would probably be a pleasing match. I hoped I’d be beyond caring by that stage.
A queue had built up to congratulate the happy couple and observe at close quarters who out of the two mothers had won the competition for the largest and most spectacular hat. One of Rose’s brothers had opened a book to see how long his mother could keep on smiling while her new in-law kept on repeating to the guests, supposedly sotto voce, ‘Yes, such a pity they insisted on having the reception here. At Moor End Hall there wouldn’t have been a need for a marquee. The ballroom holds five hundred.’
I waved at Rose, whipped a glass of champagne off a tray held by a middle-aged woman dressed in severe black, and went out through the French windows to the despised marquee erected on the tennis lawn. The sun shone down out of a cloudless blue sky on to a garden where every bloom was at the height of its perfection. Helped, of course, by a dash to the garden centre yesterday and the purchase of a carload of pot plants to fill in the gaps in the flowerbeds and the orchard where the family mutt had been busily boring for bunnies. Rose’s mother wanted the wedding to take place in June, when the roses were at their best, but Jeremy, who as the possessor of a degree from Cirencester takes his responsibilities to the workers on his estate very seriously, flatly refused to get married when he should be supervising the haymaking. The result was what looked almost like indecent haste for the pair of them to get married in time to fit in what Rose called a decent honeymoon. In spite of this perfectly reasonable explanation for engagement to marriage in under three months, Rose complained that a lot of people were taking a keen interest in her waistline, hence her eye-wateringly small corseted waist today.
I’d been too busy coping with Rose to attend to lunch, so I wandered into the pink-and-cream tent to see if I could snaffle some of the eats before the rush started. Unfortunately, the huge silver salvers of little sandwiches, vol-au-vents, smoked-salmon pinwheels and asparagus rolls laid out on the bank of white-covered tables down one side of the tent were still covered up with cling film and the only waitress on food duty was wearing a grim air that suggested she wasn’t prepared to have her immaculate arrangements disturbed yet. A posse of well-covered elderly men, looking as if they were probably major-generals of industry, came in with their smartly dressed wives and began waving their empty glasses around in a hopeful way. The waitress sighed slightly, picked up a napkin-covered bottle and bustled up towards them. I backed up to a table and, trying to look as if I was gazing admiringly at the huge arrangements of pink roses and gypsophila in front of each ribbon-decked tent pole, reached behind me and eased up a corner of cling film. That egg sandwich was delicious. And so was the next one.
‘Here, Susie, you might find it easier if you pile them on this.’
I jumped and swore in embarrassment as I dropped the third sandwich, tomato this time I saw regretfully. Hamish Laing was holding out a plate, and looking odiously amused. ‘No thank you,’ I said stiffly, horribly aware my face was probably the same colour as my dress. I don’t think I’d been caught sneaking food since I was in single figures. ‘I’m not hungry any more.’
‘You must have a very small appetite,’ he said calmly, helping himself to several sandwiches. It’s one of the great unfairnesses of life that it never seems to matter when men are seen grazing on anything edible that comes within their re
ach, in fact, it’s accepted as being quite normal to continually feed the male appetite. Certainly, the middle-aged waitress, who had been distantly pretending not to notice my ham-fisted pilfering, instantly raced forward and with a distinctly soapy smile said, ‘Is there anything else you would like, sir? The hot sausages will be here in a moment if you’d like to wait for them.’
‘These will do just fine, thank you very much,’ Hamish said with a smile.
The waitress’s well-upholstered bosom swelled with pleasure as she beamed back. I glanced at him curiously, wondering what had produced this effect. I supposed that his sort of rumpled, slept-in face was attractive if you liked that sort of thing. The waitress certainly seemed to and proffered a dish of stuffed quails’ eggs, saying she was sure Hamish would like these. He glanced down and one thick eyebrow rose as he caught my eyes still fixed speculatively on his face. Damn! I thought crossly. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t take that to signify some form of interest. Actually probably not, for he’d stopped paying attention to me and was looking down the length of the tent, a distinct frown between his brows.
‘Sorry, Susie,’ he muttered, straightening himself up. ‘I think that might be someone I know. No doubt we’ll bump into each other later.’
Rose had made several decidedly bolshy remarks over lunch about the prospect of being stuck in the reception line offering platitudes to elderly relations she’d never seen before when she could be having fun socialising in the tent, so I wasn’t surprised to see she’d escaped rather sooner than was usual and was belting over the grass with scant regard to yards of veil and train waving around behind her. She hardly paused to say ‘hello’ and ‘speak to you later’ to various people who were trying to buttonhole her, and beckoned me over into a corner. ‘Have you seen Nigel anywhere?’ she hissed with an anxious expression.
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said truthfully, though I thought I’d caught a glimpse of the fallen angel’s burnished hair a minute ago.
‘He didn’t come down the line - I thought he might have skipped it. It’d be typical of him. As the car was parked right outside the church, he’d have been one of the first to arrive, but if he isn’t in here it probably means he and Luke decided not to come to the reception.’
So his name was Luke. It suited him. I’d always liked the name.
Rose was almost visibly relaxing in front of me, then tensed back into full rigidity as she said, ‘But perhaps he’s here after all and is in the gents.’
‘There’ll be an extremely long queue if he is. If he came straight from the church he’ll have been in there for half an hour,’ I said and added curiously, ‘What is it with you and this Nigel to get the wind up you so much?’
She shrugged in a way that struck me as being distinctly evasive. ‘He’s just an old boyfriend. I was worried he might make a fuss or something. We didn’t part good friends, as they say.’
There was a whole lot more to this. You don’t share a dormitory with someone for five years without sensing when they’re covering something up. Especially as I’d have said Rose and I knew all about each other’s affaires and I’d hardly ever heard her mention Nigel Flaxman, and never anything about a sticky break-up. But a wedding isn’t the place to conduct a full-blown interrogation of the bride about one of her former lovers, especially not when two aunts are within hearing distance, so I said, ‘It’s been a long time, Rose. He’s had plenty of time to embarrass you if he wanted to and, what’s more, he doesn’t look like the sort of person who thinks it good form to make a fuss at weddings. Even if he’s here -’ I’d just caught a glimpse through a gap in the tent of his profile in an animated group on the lawn — ‘I’m sure all he’ll do is show what a good sort he is by handing over a socking big wedding present and wishing you all the very best.’
To my surprise, my soothing platitudes had an effect. Rose began to brighten like a flower given water. ‘You’re right. Clever Susie, of course, he wouldn’t have waited until now... There’s nothing to worry about.’ She smiled brilliantly. ‘You can’t think how it was hanging over me, not much, but just a bit, but now I can enjoy myself properly.’ Picking up her train in one hand she launched herself into the fray, looking every inch the radiant bride.
Fuelled by ample quantities of Rose’s father’s excellent champagne, the reception got into full noisy swing. To my pleasure, I discovered Rose had been right in saying that as a bridesmaid I’d come in for a fair amount of masculine attention. Whilst I can’t say that I was flattened in the rush for my favours, I ended up with a modest stream of men of the right age - over the age of consent and under the age of Zimmerframes, if not always the right height, tall women seem to have a fatal attraction for men whose eyelines are at bust level - who appeared to be happy to chat, fetch me glasses of champagne and even pay me the odd compliment.
Sadly, the real object of my desire was right down the other end of the tent with Nigel Flaxman. That could be because he didn’t fancy talking to Bo Peep; on the other hand, the explanation I preferred, he might not have been able to push through the throng to get down here. Though I daresay the two of them would have cut through a Welsh rugby scrum if it had been Cameron Diaz or Sophie Marceau standing here dressed up to the nines in sugar-pink silk. Those two ladies would even have looked quite nice in it too. On the mountain and Lucifer principle - not that I really enjoyed comparing myself to a mountain, it was too close to home - I started edging my way up the tent, hoping if I got close enough the old bridesmaid magic would start working. It did, but not in the way I’d intended. I kept on being buttonholed by friends of Rose’s parents who’d known me since I first started coming here at the age of eleven and wanted to tell me how charming I looked, how sweet the bridal procession had looked, though only a couple with very thick glasses mentioned what a lovely colour the dress was on me. When I got a chance to do a quick shufty, the two men had wandered out into the garden.
‘Soddit!’ I muttered. It was one thing to linger alluringly near them in the tent, pursuing them outside was altogether too blatant.
‘Hi there, howya doing?’ asked Rose from behind me. She was leaning against a flower-bedecked pillar in a most unbride-like fashion, veil hoiked up over one arm, holding a cigarette, and taking a hearty swig from the glass of champagne she held in her other hand. It took more than a tight corset to keep Rose away from a decent drop to drink. From the way that her new mother-in-law was glaring at her from a few feet away, you would have thought she’d just discovered that her darling son was united with an alcoholic. Or perhaps it was fear for the veil, a family heirloom which she had pressed on Rose, much to her annoyance, that most concerned her. Indeed Rose’s cigarette was waving a bit too close to hundreds of pounds’ worth of antique Brussels lace for comfort.
‘Terrible old bat, isn’t she?’ whispered Rose. ‘And can you believe she’s going to be living with us? Well, in a separate wing actually, and I know that Moor End is a big house -’ about the size of a small village from what I’d heard - ‘but that won’t stop her dropping in uninvited to check that I’m cooking her darling boy wholesome meals.’
It was highly unlikely Mrs Ashton would ever see any such thing. Rose had never cooked anything wholesome in her life. As she said often, Rose reckoned there were better things to do with your time than cook - such as lie on the sofa and read a book, or go to bed with someone. She’d always had plenty of eager takers for this latter option, though as a result she’d had to learn how to do a rudimentary breakfast. Most men, no matter how besotted, eventually get to the point where they need to be refuelled by regular infusions of things like bacon and eggs.
Rose emptied her glass and looked around for a waitress with a bottle to refill it. ‘I’m really enjoying myself,’ she informed me unnecessarily. It was obvious to all and sundry that Rose was having a ball as the centre of attention. She was used to that, but even by her standards today was something special. ‘It’s about time you settled down, Susie,’ she informed me with stag
gering nerve. Compared to her, I had always been positively sedate. ‘Find someone nice, I really recommend it. Forget all about that slimy frog—’
‘He’s not slimy,’ I interrupted, cheeks burning. Rose had wanted to be an actress at one stage, until she realised it would interfere with her social life, and she could still project to the back of a theatre without difficulty. Or, as I feared in this case, around a marquee.
‘OK, he’s not,’ she said amiably, squinting down into her glass. I’ve never been absolutely sure whether Arnaud and Rose really disliked each other or if they both just enjoyed being rude about each other. I suspected the latter. ‘But you’ve been going out with him for years and he’s spoilt you for anyone else. It’s so annoying. You should have hordes of people after you, yet you walk around with a sort of “already taken” sign on you -’ I do? I thought in astonishment - ‘so, of course, you’re putting out the wrong vibes. I happen to know Edward Fairley has been keen on you for ages and you won’t even look at him.’
Like the best of us, Rose has a tendency to get woefully indiscreet when drink taken. But in her case, as I’ve said, she’s indiscreet in a carryingly clear voice with faultless enunciation. If only that corset had been as tight as she said. In fact, if she didn’t shut up, I’d tighten it myself, I thought vengefully. ‘He’s got hairy hands,’ I said coldly.
‘Has he?’ she asked, surprised. ‘I’ve never got close enough to notice. No wonder you won’t let him touch you, I wonder if he’s got a hairy back too. That’s even worse. I’ve got a thing about thick ankles and red beards as well, but what really makes my skin crawl is men with spots on their b—’
Seven Week Itch Page 2