A Bad Bride's Tale (6 page)

“Oh!” Stevie’s eyes opened quickly, but the registering curl of her smile was pleasurably slow. “You.”

“Didn’t mean to disturb.”

“I nodded off. Just trying to escape the family asylum.”

Sam scuffed his trainer into the grass. “I’m going to stay with some friends in London. I thought I’d pop over before I braved the A40 to give you this.” He held out a package wrapped in leopard- print paper. “It’s not much . . .”

Stevie looked at the hard, rectangular package. “You didn’t have to . . .” She tore off the paper respectfully, in small crackling strips, to reveal a pad of top-quality homemade drawing paper, thick and fibrous, and a sheaf of charcoal pencils.

“For the honeymoon . . .” Sam realized this sounded presumptu- ous, as if she wouldn’t have better things to do. “Well, whenever, really. To keep you drawing. Don’t worry, it’s not your wedding present.”

“That’s so sweet.” Stevie blushed. “Thank you! You are about the only person in the world who likes my drawing . . .”

“Oh, I remember you at life class in school.” “Yeah, yeah. My woman with three nipples?”

“She that launched a thousand schoolboy fantasies.” Stevie laughed. “I’m very flattered.”

“Use it or lose it,” he said, hating himself at that moment for spouting a silly cliché.

To her horror, Stevie felt tears start to well up, and composed herself by intent study of the paper, its confrontational blank whiteness.

There was a pause. Sam shifted from one Nike to the other. He dug his hand in his jeans pocket and fixed Stevie with eyes so liquid she could see a reflection of the cumulus clouds drifting behind her. She hoped the weather would hold for the wedding. Shit! She was conflicted. On one level, she wished something dreadful would happen to disrupt the wedding, put it off. She could break an an- kle, get measles, or something. On the other hand, she was now starting to succumb to a bride’s anxious excitement.

“Guess this is it, isn’t it?” Sam said, not consciously intending to ask something that sounded so loaded.

Stevie hesitated, aware that this was the full stop between them. It was the end of any possibility of a relationship. At school, Sam had been one of the
it
boys—brainy, sporty, and not too cocky, his darker skin marking him out in a largely Anglo but liberal school, as both exotic and hip. By sixth form, they were in different cliques. Stevie was part of the nerdy, slightly gothic, not hugely physically attractive group. Sam was the alpha teenager. Still, on weekends, and in pubs in town, Sam and Stevie discovered that they had more in common than their opposing shoes—Sam, Adidas; Stevie, buck- led black boots à la the Cure’s Robert Smith—might suggest. They shared an interest in art. They made each other laugh. Their moth- ers were good friends. They had a connection of sorts.

But in their twenties, they had drifted apart. Sam spent a year in America, becoming, in Stevie’s eyes, more cosmopolitan and worldly and glamorous than ever. Then he returned to London to study law, before chucking it all in and getting a job as a photogra-

pher’s assistant at a top London studio. (Like everyone else, Stevie was surprised by this particular career choice. But Sam was full of surprises.) Meanwhile, in her parallel, rather less eventful life, Ste- vie traveled around Europe, got terribly sick in Prague, fell in love in Berlin, and returned, earlier than planned, broken-hearted about a man called Hans with a Jon Bon Jovi fixation. She went to a B-list art college up north, before starting on her magazine design career in London. When they were both in London, she and Sam would still meet up. As friends. Romantically, Sam had always been out of her league. Sam went out with girls like Katy—all legs and eye- lashes. Bloody Katy Norris.

Of course, Stevie wondered. She wondered whether her doubts about her own attractiveness had made her colder, more asexual in her behavior toward Sam than she should have had she been more secure. She’d never even flirted with him, never wanting to ruin their friendship by overshadowing it with unrequited lust. But equally, she’d never imagined there would be a finite amount of time. She thought there would always be summers when they were visiting their respective parents when they would bump into each other on Port Meadow or perhaps meet up for a quick drink at Jeri- cho in Oxford or in London’s Soho, that little bar off Romilly Street that had a good house red. It seemed impossible that one of them would ruin the possibility of anything happening by doing some- thing as scarily grown-up and final as
marrying
someone. And now . . . Stevie sighed.

Her fingers explored the paper pad, stroking its pages, testing the ridge of its spine with her thumb. They had spent too long be- ing friends, she thought. It would have been incestuous. Besides, here she was about to promise herself
forever
to another man. Guess

this is it? Indeed. She almost said, “Don’t make it sound so final,” but something stopped her. She suspected, just for a second, what Sam meant. “I guess this is it.”

“Right.” Sam zipped up his jacket sharply. “Well, I’ll see you in two weeks. On the ‘big day,’ ” he said, glancing at his watch. “Is that the time? Better shoot. The nursing home calls. God, I’m glamorous.”

“You are good.”

“I’m not. I hate it, really. I mean, I love the old dear, don’t get me wrong. But, man, that place.” Sam whistled. “It smells of piss or death or, well, something pretty bad. Last time a lady, ancient old bat, died in her wheelchair. Everyone thought she was sleeping. We got to dessert before the staff realized and wheeled her out.”

“The last supper.”

Sam laughed, bent down, and kissed Stevie’s soft cheek. “Good luck with everything.”

“You sound so somber.” Sam frowned.

“Don’t look like that. What, Sam?” “Tell me to shut up if . . .”

“I will. Go on.”

“But this wedding, it’s what
you
really want, isn’t it?”

Stevie jolted. She dropped her eyes to the grass, studied a daisy. “I think so.”

The muscles in Sam’s shoulders constricted. “Shit, I’m sorry. You’re not someone to shriek it from the rooftops . . . not your style, is it?”

“No.”

“I will shut up, then.” Sam scuffed at the grass with his trainer. “Better shoot.”

“Wait.” Stevie stood up and pulled Sam toward her, his hair springy against her neck, his skin smelling vaguely of cologne and hot, fried things. She felt it was like hugging part of her twenties good-bye, hugging all the men she’d liked but never explored, all the paths not taken. She watched as he walked—now in his thir- ties, Sam no longer felt the need for a hip-hop swagger—with the sun on his boyish back, up the stony garden path, past the newly tended beds and the apple and pear trees, to the door to the steamy kitchen, where Patti lay in wait with a box of organic Medjool dates.

Stevie curled her legs beneath her and sat cross-legged on the bench, examining the thick pad of paper. She picked out a pencil, satisfyingly sharp and unused like a new lipstick, and dragged it across a creamy page. Head clearing of thoughts, in a trance-like state, Stevie drew. And she drew Jez. Those pale blue eyes. The bubble curls of strawberry-blond hair. The robust nose. The angu- lar fifty-pence-piece cut of his jaw. The mouth . . .

No, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t get the mouth right. Every time she sketched it, it would be wrong, too cruel, too unforgiving. And then she thought maybe she couldn’t draw his mouth because she didn’t like his mouth. Because she no longer liked what came out of it. She put the pencil back in the packet. Could she no longer draw Jez because Jez would never have bought her those pencils? Jez would have bought her a bottle of perfume that she’d never worn before.

“Is it what
you
really want?” Sam’s words looped around her head. A 747 rumbled across the sky. A warm wind rustled the hon- eysuckle. These were the sounds of her Oxford childhood, and they were getting louder and louder until the whole garden seemed to vibrate and hum and resonate in her ears with unavoidable truth,

like one of her mother’s pre-breakfast “Ommm” exhalations. Stevie gripped the arm of the bench to steady herself, squeezed her eyes shut, and felt herself whipped and turned around a dark, emotional vortex. And then, suddenly, peace. She opened her eyes. The wind stopped. The garden was still. The outline of everything— dandelion, apple tree, blade of grass—was as clear and certain as a drawing, and Stevie felt the exhilarated release of a decision reached.

SIX
Æ

katy norris reread the pregnancy test instruc-
tions. Three minutes? She could wait. Besides, even though she’d missed a pill, it would still be a near miracle if she were up the duff. Since Seb had started the contract with the New York bank, they were rarely in the same place long enough to share a meal, let alone bodily fluids. But what if she
was
pregnant? Her augmented lips curled. How would Seb react? Surely with joy, even though he’d al- ways said he wanted to be married before he had children. Not wanting to appear a psycho thirtysomething, she’d agreed with him and waited for her proposal. And waited and waited.

A couple of months ago, she’d worked up the courage to ask her doctor, “How long have I got left, exactly?” The doctor had looked her up and down and told her that yes, fertility fell off a cliff at about her age and that, ideally, she should gain a few pounds to en- hance her chances of conceiving. Oh, yes—and they should be hav- ing sex every three days. She’d laughed and explained her situation—the clash between her ovaries and their careers and Seb’s rather non-urgent romantic scheduling—and asked if,
in theory
,

because they weren’t planning anything now, but just so she knew for the future, was it possible to pencil in a course of IVF sometime later next year, just after her thirty-seventh birthday, just to leave nothing to chance? The doctor thought she was joking.

Katy checked her Hermès watch. Two minutes to go. She won- dered what her other half was doing. Seb must be up now, she sup- posed, stretching his arms, muscles flexing, looking for a tie and shirt. Behind him, midtown Manhattan would be winking awake behind the vertiginous sheet-glass windows that made her soles tingle and filled her with a strange longing to fling herself out like a rag doll. Did Seb miss her? Did Manhattan compensate for the more domestic environment of Notting Hill? She knew it wouldn’t work for her. New York was the only place in the world she felt un- attractive; the only place in the world she stepped into a party and felt that she could never eat again.

Katy walked across her large living room, her pedicured toes sinking into the two-inch-thick cream carpet, to a mound of plumped silk cushions, piled extravagantly against an antique Chi- nese tea chest. She lay down, mentally checked her thigh circum- ference, and, as if Seb were watching, arranged herself in the most photogenic pose, one leg slightly bent leaning across the other straighter one, like a typical Elizabeth Hurley stance, but rotated. She lit a Space NK joss stick, breathed deeply, closed her eyes, and tried to conjure up some kind of inner Zen. But it didn’t work. She didn’t feel relaxed. It was hard for a woman of thirty-six to relax when she had been living with a guy for two years and he hadn’t proposed.

Katy’s eyes rested on a photograph of them on a windy sand- duned beach in Île de Ré, France’s answer to the Hamptons. Exactly three years ago, next week. They’d just met. How happy (and thin

and young) she looked then, sarong billowing behind her, Seb’s tennis-honed arms around her waist, both beaming. Next to that picture should be the logical progression, Katy thought, a wedding photograph: ivy-hugged walls, a rose garden perhaps, flower girls in white tulle, daisies tucked into their curls, little hands clapping. One would just be able to see the lace of Katy’s Vera Wang dress, caught on a breeze, her smile, and . . . and, well, probably the car- buncular profile of Seb’s father and the upholstered, floral-sprigged bosom of his wife, swelling with disapproval.

No, Seb’s parents had never thought she was good enough for their youngest son. That couldn’t have helped speed things along. She hadn’t gone to the right schools. She hadn’t come from a par- ticularly wealthy background, but a stolidly aspirational middle- class one, that neither Seb nor his mother made a pretense of being interested in. Katy also worked as a booker in a makeup-artist agency: even in the twenty-first century, a career translated as “pushiness” to Seb’s mother, who’d never had to work. And, yes, she was far too old and, with every noncommittal month that passed, getting older.

Katy checked her watch again. One minute, thirty-one seconds. One minute, thirty-one seconds before her life could change. She dug around her Gucci handbag for a lip gloss and dragged it slowly across her lips, trying to distract herself from the white stick with its totem-like life-changing powers. She checked her face in her hand mirror, gazing back critically at the reflection: the clear, honeyed Scandinavian skin (she had a Swedish great- grandmother to thank for that); the slightly slanted curaçao-blue eyes; the wide, high cheekbones that meant she always did good photo.

Katy had been beautiful for as long as she could remember.

In fact, her first memories were of people telling her blond toddler self that she was the cutest girl in Reading. She’d been christened May Queen at school, three years running. While she wasn’t hugely popular with girls—jealousy, her mother had explained— Katy’s looks nonetheless inspired a certain reverence in them. For a long time, her beauty made her self-conscious, but it protected her from social isolation.

Life improved further when she developed small bosoms with upturned nipples, coltish legs, and hair that swished and curled into breaking waves like Daryl Hannah’s in
Splash
. At discos, she was first in line for slow-dance requests. The boys had pressed their bony pelvises hard against hers, wispy jaws against her cheek, breathing in jerks. (She’d hummed along to “True” and pretended she was dancing with Tony Hadley.) By the age of fourteen, Katy realized she’d been dealt a good hand, even if she disliked her nose. She also realized that beauty was a currency. It was a means of transaction, and only the dumbest blondes thought otherwise. All women were born equal, but they mostly married and mated ac- cording to their waist/hip ratio. Men were biologically driven to se- lect beautiful creatures for their wives, and mothers of their children. It made evolutionary sense. She’d kept her part of the bar- gain.