Kate's Wedding (26 page)

Matt poured two glasses of wine.

‘How was your hen night?’ he asked.

‘Quiet, calm, relaxing. Except when a fight kicked off in one of the aerobics studios. Apparently, another bride ended up scrapping with a burlesque dance teacher.’

‘Now that I would have liked to see,’ Matt told her.

‘Well, God knows what it was about, but you could hear the shouting from miles away. It made it rather difficult to concentrate on the whale music in the massage rooms. I hate whale music,’ Kate added. ‘Makes me think of the dentist.’

‘Don’t mention dentists,’ said Matt. ‘Are you nearly ready for the wedding?’

Kate looked down into her glass.

‘Not really. I mean, there are all sorts of silly little things to be done.’

‘I know. I think the week running up to my wedding was one of the worst of my life. You’d think we were planning to invade another country.’

‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’ Kate asked.

Kate had come to Matt because she didn’t want to think about the wedding at all. She wanted to have an evening without wedding talk and without thinking about the marriage ahead of her. For just one night she didn’t want to sink into a sofa next to Ian and bite her tongue while he flicked between channels like a child. She didn’t want to look at his bald patch and wonder if the next forty years would all be downhill. Her mother’s illness, her father’s fear in the face of it and Ian’s seeming inability to understand why such things had affected Kate so badly had left her feeling tired and pessimistic. Her new job was more stressful than she had imagined. She wondered if she had bitten off more than she could chew.

Matt was a link to a better, more optimistic Kate. He was a link to a Kate who didn’t snap at the juniors in the office because they happened to walk in right after another frustrating conversation about radiotherapy or RSVPs. She wanted him to make her laugh again. Until Rosie came along, they’d had such an easy rapport. They’d always had such . . . chemistry.

‘Are you OK?’ Matt asked. He put his hand on her hand again. Kate felt heat flood her body. She looked up into his eyes and saw her own thoughts reflected back at her. She knew that if she closed her eyes now, he would take it as acquiescence. He would take it as a sign that he should kiss her. His eyes flicked from her eyes to her mouth. She licked her lips, sub-consciously making them glossier and more inviting.

‘Kate.’ Matt pronounced her name urgently. ‘Kate . . . we . . .’ He squeezed her fingers tighter. It was as though that pressure on her fingers broke the spell.

She looked at her watch. ‘My God, is that the time?’ she said, all false jollity. ‘I ought to go. I’m keeping you up.’

‘You don’t have to go on my account,’ said Matt.

It was precisely because of Matt that Kate had to go.

Ian was already in bed when Kate got back. He barely stirred as she tiptoed into the bedroom. She crept under the duvet and pressed herself against his back. She breathed in the smell of his freshly washed hair and the aftershave balm that she liked so much. She prayed that when she woke up next to him the following morning, those happy feelings of love she’d felt in Paris would be back again.

But the next day, Ian admitted that he had been unable to find the time to organise their honeymoon. It was the one and only significant job on the groom’s side of the to-do list.

‘It’s fine,’ said Kate, full of guilt from her late night at Matt’s house. ‘I’ll do it.’

That Sunday afternoon, she Googled hotels in Barcelona. They had left it much too late to find a bargain. It seemed that half the nation was going to be taking advantage of the extra bank holiday for the royal wedding to go on a spring holiday. Kate lost patience as she checked hotel after hotel in the city and found all of them booked or only having their most expensive rooms available. If Ian had only admitted that he didn’t have time to sort out a honeymoon, Kate could have been doing this search months ago. Now she was just getting more and more angry as she realised that there was little chance of the five-star start to her honeymoon she had hoped for. Kate tried four more hotels.

Ten minutes later, she was Googling ‘quickie divorce’.

Chapter Forty-Five

Two days before her wedding, Kate travelled down to the south coast to stay with her parents and make the final preparations for the day itself. Kate’s mother had a long list of items that still needed to be checked off.

‘Does the florist know that two of these buttonholes need to be smaller than the rest for Ian’s little nephews? Have you spoken to the cake lady? Does the hotel have the music you want for your processional, or will we have to take a CD?’

Kate answered the enquiries distractedly. The whole time her mother was firing questions at her, Kate was simultaneously dealing with a barrage of emails from the office, all of them seemingly urgent. Her new colleagues were desperate to get her attention before she disappeared for her two-week honeymoon. (Kate had found a self-catering flat for that.) She had to try hard not to snap as so many things competed for her time. Her mother had insisted on taking all the little details on and yet there didn’t seem to be a single thing on her list that she could achieve without Kate’s input.

‘Dress fitting at five o’clock,’ was the last thing on the list. There was definitely no one but Kate who could deal with that.

So at five o’clock, Kate was back on the upside-down crate for the last time. Heidi, thank God, was having a day off, so it fell to the proprietor, Melanie, to lift the three-stone dress over Kate’s head.

‘Working here does wonders for your bingo wings,’ said Melanie, as the deceptively heavy skirt fluttered down to the ground. ‘Perfect.’ She gave the fabric another flounce. ‘Absolutely perfect. You look gorgeous, sweetheart.’

Kate looked at her reflection in the mirror. Melanie’s pronouncement was fair comment from the neck down, perhaps. Heidi may have been a cow, but the evil-tongued seamstress had worked wonders with the dress, adding extra boning along the seams that smoothed the line from Kate’s waist to her hip. The saddlebags were hidden as if by magic. The bodice fitted so snugly that Kate began to believe Heidi’s assurance that she wouldn’t have to spend all day hoicking it up. The skirt had been trimmed to the perfect length so that it showed just the toe of Kate’s wedding shoes, some blue brocade Blahniks her sister had found on eBay.

‘Those are the most fabulous shoes,’ Melanie cooed.

‘Thank you,’ said Kate.

Now Kate was taking in her reflection from the neck up. Not so perfect at all. Where had that line between her eyes come from? Though she tried to smile, her eyes simply wouldn’t stop frowning. Had her jawline always been so square? Two muscular points stood out so far she could have done a reasonable impression of blockhead Formula One racing driver David Coulthard. She realised that she was clamping her jaw. She gave an embarrassed start as her back teeth actually slipped and squeaked across each other in a muscle spasm. Melanie didn’t seem to have noticed.

‘You’re all set,’ said Melanie, as she picked a tiny piece of fluff from the bodice. ‘There’s nothing left for us to do except give the dress a final pressing. Your sister is coming to collect the dress on the morning – am I right? Remind her she needs to bring a duvet cover. Doesn’t need to be an old one, because we’re not going to cut any holes in it, but it’s really much better than any of the covers that come with the dresses. They’re never big enough, so the dress always creases. We want you to look as perfect as possible.’

Kate nodded.

‘Do you want me to go through the loops on the back of the skirt one more time?’

‘No,’ said Kate, ‘I think I’ve got it.’

Melanie demonstrated the loops one more time regardless. It was quite a tricky process. The loops were made of fishing wire and were all but completely invisible, as was the white silk-covered button onto which the loops had to be hooked.

‘There you are,’ said Melanie. ‘Now you can dance the night away. Happy?’

Kate’s face crumpled.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Melanie. ‘Are you not happy with the dress? Do you think it still needs taking in or something?’

‘I think I don’t want to get married.’

Balling up the skirt of the ridiculous £2,000 dress as carelessly as though it were a dustbin liner, Kate sat down on the sofa where her mother and sister had sat months before. Outside, life carried on as normal. A post van pulled up opposite the postbox. Half past five. Last collection. A harassed young mum tried to persuade her toddler to keep up. The toddler was poking a stick into some dogshit. An old man tied his dog to the special ring outside the Co-op and informed the cross-eyed Jack Russell that he really wouldn’t be long. The dog whined as though they were to be parted for ever. Kate felt like whining too.

‘It’s natural,’ Melanie began. ‘Everybody gets wedding jitters.’

How many times had Kate heard that now?

‘It’s a big step you’re about to take. You wouldn’t be normal if you weren’t a bit scared. You want the day to be perfect. The thing is, your guests won’t know if it isn’t perfect, because they won’t know exactly what you planned. So if a few things go wrong – if the flowers aren’t quite the right shade – no one will notice. Or the ceremony. If you fluff your lines or something like that, nobody is going to care. Prince Charles fluffed his lines. So did Diana. She even got his name wrong.’

‘And look how that turned out,’ said Kate. ‘I’m not worried about the wedding. Organising a wedding is no sweat for me. I’ve put together much bigger events for work. And I’m not worried about fluffing my lines when I get to the altar either. It’s nothing like that.’

Tears appeared at the corners of Kate’s eyes. Melanie handed her a tissue.

‘If you’re going to cry, you should probably take the dress off.’

Kate was ready to flee as soon as she had her old jeans back on, but Melanie insisted she sat down again.

‘I can’t let you get into your car in this state. You’ll drive into a lamppost. Do you want to tell me all about it?’

Kate looked at Melanie. She seemed nice enough, but Kate barely knew the woman. Perhaps that was what made it easier in the end.

‘I’m not worried about the wedding at all,’ she re-iterated. ‘I’m worried about
being
married. When Ian and I met, everything seemed right in the way everyone always said it would when I met the One. We didn’t go through any of the game-playing. I was so, so happy. I felt comfortable and content. But since we got engaged, I’ve never felt quite comfortable again. I don’t know where my life’s gone. It started the minute he popped the question. Suddenly, I was public property. Random strangers started taking photographs. Though I suppose, since we got engaged at the top of the Eiffel Tower, I shouldn’t have hoped for any privacy.

‘But it started in earnest when we got back from Paris. Immediately the questions began. Everyone at work wanted to know if we were going to have children. It was as though my getting engaged gave everyone the right to ask the most outrageous things. Do you think anyone ever asks Ian whether he’s going to give up his job? Do you think anyone ever suggests to him that it doesn’t matter if he gets made redundant because obviously I’ll keep him? It was as though everyone had been humouring me for all those years when I worked my arse off to become a partner at my law firm. Now that I had a ring on my finger, they didn’t have to pretend to take me seriously any more.

‘And then my mum was diagnosed with a breast tumour. That really pulled the rug out. I know I’m nearly forty, but the thought of losing Mum is terrifying. Everyone kept telling me how lucky I was to have got engaged before Mum’s diagnosis – firstly, because it would cheer her up, and secondly, because obviously now that Ian had asked to marry me, I had someone to lean on through the worst. Except he was far from being the rock that everyone imagined. He was just useless. He froze whenever he saw me crying, like he didn’t want to get involved with such messy emotions. He buried himself in work.

‘It’s like my entire life has been turned upside down. I’m worried about Mum. I’m pissed off about the assumptions people make just because I’m getting married. Even the wedding itself has become one enormous pain in the arse. As soon as Mum got ill, it wasn’t even my wedding any more, anyway. It was all about celebrating the end of Mum’s treatment. I feel like my feelings are incidental.’

Melanie handed Kate another tissue.

‘Part of me tries to be reasonable and keeps saying, “This is just the way it is. This is the way it is for everyone. Getting married is about stepping into a different role and promising to care for another person.” And maybe I have to get used to the idea that caring for Ian means matching his socks and making sure there’s always loo roll in the bathroom cupboard. But what am I getting in return? Ian doesn’t pay my bills, he doesn’t cook my dinner, and yet he gets to determine what happens for the rest of my life. What if I want to up sticks and move to Italy? I could do that, you know. I was thinking about it before I met Ian. I’ve got enough put by. But I can’t do it if Ian doesn’t want to, not if I actually marry him.

‘I hate the way that people always ask
him
what our plans are for the future. On the one hand, I feel as though I’ve been pushed into the role of his mother. On the other hand, I feel . . . I feel infantilised,’ said Kate. ‘I feel like I’ve lost myself.’

Melanie provided more tissues.

‘Do I sound like I’m going mad?’

‘Not at all. When I got married, I felt like I lost myself too,’ Melanie admitted. She took a tissue for herself. Just in case.

‘Oh, Melanie,’ said Kate, ‘I’m sorry. Here I am banging on about why marriage is such a bad deal for a woman. Heidi told me that you were widowed. I probably sound like a spoiled cow to you.’

‘Kate, I spend all day every day acting like getting married is the best thing in the world, but I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m not even widowed. I got divorced in 1998.’