Kate's Wedding (34 page)

At some point, Ben knew, he would have to return to Southampton. Though he had dodged signing on the line of a marriage certificate, having bought a house together, he and Diana had at least as many material possessions to divide as any couple who’d been married for five years. For now though, Ben didn’t care. He was starting a new life.

Diana, meanwhile, was plunged into something approaching hell. The television coverage of her runaway unicorns meant that she couldn’t possibly hope to get over her embarrassment quietly. The papers wanted to know the identity of the bride in the carriage. They wanted to know whether she had gone ahead with the wedding after all. When they discovered that Diana’s hell-ride had been topped by a jilting, they had a field day. Diana was quickly dubbed ‘the unluckiest bride in Britain’. Nuptialsnet was abuzz for months with Diana’s humiliation, kept alive by juicy snippets from Nicole, posting as ‘Anon’.

Six months later, Ben left his job and he left Southampton. He accompanied Lucy to see her family in Sydney and never came back. Prior to his departure, Diana and Ben had managed to separate their assets fairly amicably. Diana kept the house, of course, since her father had paid for it. She did, however, have to go back to work to pay the bills. Feeling deeply humbled, she took a job as a personal assistant to a divorce lawyer.

Diana’s notoriety as Britain’s unluckiest bride began to fade and eventually she was eclipsed by a bride whose cathedral-length train caught fire as she walked up an aisle lined with flickering tea lights. (That bride had to strip to her knickers to avoid going up in flames. She escaped with minor effects of smoke inhalation, but the church burned to the ground and her fiancé took it as a sign from God that they should not be married.)

About a year after her big, fat wedding fiasco, Diana started to count herself lucky for having dodged a bullet. A jilting was infinitely better than a divorce, as her boss kept reminding her. He should know. He’d presided over several hundred and had been through two of his own.

Now that she needed to work for a living, Diana surprised herself by coming to take pride in her job. She was not the clueless airhead she had allowed herself to be. After two years as a PA, she trained to be a paralegal. She volunteered at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and was especially keen to help women who had handed over control of their lives and their finances when they embarked upon doomed relationships. As a result of all this enlightenment, Diana took quite some persuading when her divorce-lawyer boss, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, finally asked her to marry him, three years later.

‘Can we get married in a register office?’ Diana asked.

As for Kate and Ian? Well, of course they lived happily ever after.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to my agent Antony Harwood and everyone at Hodder who worked so hard to bring this book together in double-quick time. Especially Carolyn Mays and Francesca Best, who read the first draft during their Christmas holidays, and Laura Collins for her eagle-eyed copyediting. An author could have no better team.

Flatmates

Second Prize

Deep Heat

Lizzie Jordan’s Secret Life

Running Away From Richard

Getting Personal

Seven Sunny Days

Girl Meets Ape

Ready Or Not?

The Matchbreaker

Marrying for Money

Spa Wars

Crazy in Love

Getting Over Mr Right

Raised in Gloucester, Chrissie now lives in London. Her life is a tragic merry-go-round of parties, spa breaks and buying shoes.