A Groom With a View (12 page)

I blushed. The truth was, I hadn’t actually had a boyfriend since him. I’d had a long succession of one- and two-night stands, but I’d stayed resolutely single, determined not to have my heart broken again.

“Not right now,” I said. “You?” I was confident that his answer would be no too, because otherwise why were we here? Surely he could feel the same, incredibly powerful sense of connection I felt, the sense of coming home?

But he said, “It’s kind of complicated.” And then he told me about Bethany. Bethany, who played in a band and loved football and sounded like the coolest of cool girls.

They’d been going out for about a year, he said, on and off. The on was because he really liked her – he didn’t have to say it, I could tell by the look on his face when he talked about her, a kind of hurt that made me twist inside with jealousy, and at the same time wrap my arms around him and make it all better. And the off was because Bethany was, as he put it, a free spirit. It didn’t take much questioning to learn that this meant she was chronically unfaithful.

“Why do you put up with it?” I asked.

“I don’t,” he said. “I tell her it’s over, but then she comes back and tells me she loves me and she’s sorry, and I end up forgiving her.” He shrugged. “What a mug.”

“So, like, right now, is it on or is it off?” I said, emboldened by three pints of Stella. “Because, Nick, the thing is, when I saw you the other night, I felt. . .”

“I know,” he said. “I felt it too. And as of now, it’s off. The other night, when I saw you, I ended it.”

He wasn’t lying – Nick’s never lied to me, as far as I know, in all the time we’ve been together. So we started seeing each other again, just casually, testing the water, seeing whether what we’d had when we were teenagers could be made to work again, in our new, grown-up lives. We met up for drinks a couple more times, we saw a movie and afterwards he came back to my shared hovel and had coffee, but he didn’t stay the night. And I believed him when he told me that Bethany had come back yet again, wanting to be taken back, and he’d said that this time it wasn’t going to happen, because he’d met someone else. I believed him because when he told me about it, he also told me he’d slept with her.

“I’m so sorry, Pippa,” he said. “I’ll totally understand if you want to call it off. It was a shitty, stupid thing to do. It’s inexcusable.”

He’d called me at work, asking to see me about something important, and I’d met him during my break from work in a branch of Caffè Nero on the Strand. The table where we sat was so tiny our knees were touching, and the room was so crowded I couldn’t move them away, so I stood up, leaving my coffee unfinished.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s inexcusable. Now I’m going to go back to work.”

And I did. Nick didn’t contact me, apart from a text saying again that he was sorry. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him. We hadn’t actually been going out, I reasoned. He hadn’t cheated on me, as such. And I missed him. Those few meetings, dates, whatever they’d been, had brought back such a torrent of longing for him, a tap that, once opened, couldn’t be turned off. I waited a week, then another, to see if I’d stop thinking about him, stop missing him, stop longing for his touch and his smell. But I didn’t, so I gave in and called him.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s give this a go, if you still want to.”

I spent that night at Nick’s flat, and never really left. For the first couple of months we were together, I was on high alert all the time, constantly worried that she was going to invade our life like some tousle-haired, Converse-wearing Visigoth and steal Nick back again. I combed the flat obsessively for reminders of her, and found a handful of photographs, a demo CD for her band, and a stash of her Calvin Klein toiletries in the bathroom, and threw them all in the bin as soon as they came to light.

And I snooped. Looking back, I can remember the shame I when I accessed Nick’s email to see if she’d contacted him, picked up his phone if a text message arrived when he wasn’t in the room, to see who it was from. But she never did contact him, and as the months went by I began to feel more secure, more confident that I was the one Nick wanted to be with, and eventually, I reached the point where I simply stopped worrying about her.

There were a few moments, like when we were packing to move to our new home, and I found a gorgeous silk scarf crumpled up at the back of a drawer, still bearing a hint of scent, and realised it must have been hers (and consigned it to the charity shop bag without a backward glance). When Iain told us he’d heard that Bethany had moved up to Edinburgh, and Nick said, “Oh, really?”, and I wondered if he was just pretending to be indifferent or really was. And when her wedding photos appeared on a mutual friend’s Facebook feed and I couldn’t resist looking at them and spending a few minutes torturing myself with her effortless, cool beauty. But apart from that, I barely thought of her, and I had no reason to believe that Nick thought of her either, until now.

The next couple of days passed in a blur of sunshine, cooking and frantic note-taking. I was learning all the time, I loved the new people I was meeting and the new ingredients I was tasting and experimenting with. Even Florence appeared to have calmed down and was restricting her calls to two or three per day – or perhaps Guido was just limiting the number he answered. I was busy and stressed, I’d broken four fingernails and was sporting a sunburned nose from a lunchtime spent playing truant in the swimming pool. And I’d managed to put my worries about Nick to the back of my mind.

We landed back in Johannesburg on another brilliantly sunny morning, and Guido announced that we’d have the day off before our flight home in the evening. He was going to meet an old friend for lunch, he said, so I was on my own.

“Go shopping, Pippa,” he suggested. “You deserve a treat, you’ve been working very hard. We need to be at the airport for six o’clock. I’ll meet you there.”

This suddenly seemed like an excellent idea. I entrusted Guido and our driver with my luggage and got in a taxi.

“Take me to the good shops,” I said.

“Sandton City,” said the cabbie. “That’s where all the ladies go to shop till they drop.”

He wasn’t joking. I hadn’t seen very much of South Africa beyond the inside of restaurants, but I had seen heartbreaking glimpses of the poverty in which many people lived: shantytowns sprawling for miles alongside motorways, manual labourers carefully counting their coins before buying roast corn on the cob for their lunch, and women with babies begging for spare change at traffic lights. Sibongile had told me without a trace of self-pity that she was putting her three younger sisters and two brothers through school on her freelance wages.

But Sandton City was all about wealth. It was a vast mall, glittering with Christmas decorations and housing just about every high-end designer store I’d ever heard of, along with a few I hadn’t. Everyone was immaculately dressed and there was just the same air of controlled frenzy you get on Bond Street on a Saturday. I mentally flexed my credit card and entered the fray.

Two hours later, I was buckling under the weight of packets of biltong for Nick, a book of South African poetry for Mum, wine for Dad, scent for Callie, gorgeous tigers-eye necklaces for Tamar and Eloise, a biography of Nelson Mandela for Erica, a giraffe on a stick for Spanx and two pairs of shoes for me. I just had time for a late lunch and a final browse before getting the train to the airport.

I was heading for the nearest coffee shop in the manner of a weary traveller struggling through the desert towards a distant clump of palm trees that might be an oasis or might be a mirage, when I saw the dress.

It was as if the bright lights of the mall had been dimmed and the chattering of the crowd stilled. It was as if there was nothing in the world but me and the dress. It was as if sweet music started to play. . . Okay, it was just a dress. But it was seriously cool. It was the only thing in the window of a little boutique, styled to look like a winter wonderland with sparkly icicles and frosted fir trees, and the dress itself looked like it was made of snow – not the horrid icy, sludgy kind but the soft pillowy kind you want to lie down and make angels in.

I stopped noticing my aching feet and hurried towards the shop as fast as I could. It was only a few yards away, but what if someone else got there first? I was quite out of breath by the time I burst through the door, grabbed the nearest assistant and gasped, “That dress in the window! I have to try it!”

“But, madam,” he looked bemused, “That dress is left over from our winter collection. It’s only in the window for display purposes, it’s not actually for sale.”

“Please!” I said. “It’s so beautiful, and I’m flying back to London tonight and I’m getting married in February and I don’t have a dress, and if you don’t let me try it, I’ll. . . I’ll cry. And you don’t want to make me cry, do you?”

He looked understandably alarmed at the mad English woman who had invaded his store. I could see him wondering whether to call security.

“Please,” I said again, a bit more calmly.

He shook his head. “I’m going to have to call my manager.”

It took him three goes to get through, while I paced up and down, looking longingly at the dress.

“Yes,” he said. “The one in the window, the Trina Joubert. The lady really wants to try it on.” He lowered his voice and I didn’t catch what he said next. I suspect it may have been something along the lines of, “And I’m worried that if I don’t let her, she’ll tear my head off with her bare hands and then go after my family.” But after a bit more persuasion, he said, “Okay. Yes, of course I will. Okay. Cheers.”

“She says yes,” he said.

“Thank you!” I said, “Thank you so, so much. You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met.”

It took him ages to make his way through the faux forest and get the dress off the mannequin, while I stood shifting from foot to foot and looking at my watch. I was going to have to get into the frock in record time and make the fastest decision ever, or I’d be horribly late to meet Guido. Eventually it was liberated.

And it was perfect, far better than the last one I’d tried with Katharine. It wasn’t even particularly weddingy, just a lovely column of plain white silk that clung in all the right places and slid forgivingly over all the other bits. It had a low back that was just high enough for my bra not to show. It had sparkly straps almost exactly the same as the ones on my shoes, and it came with a little faux fur wrap that covered my shoulders and would stop me freezing to death. I couldn’t stop smiling as I emerged from the fitting room to give the assistant, who’d told me his name was Valli, a quick twirl.

“Look!” I said. “I’ve found my wedding dress! And it’s all thanks to you!”

“Aww, that’s just beautiful,” he said. “It’s like it’s made for you, hey? And you won’t believe this. My boss called again while you were trying it on, and she said that because it’s old stock, it’s been reduced by seventy five percent. And – this is seriously amazing – Trina Joubert has emigrated to New Zealand and she’s not making wedding dresses any more. So it’s not just a bargain, it’s a one-off!”

By the time I’d paid for the dress, Valli and I were best mates. He told me that he and his boyfriend were getting married next year too. I promised to friend him on Facebook, and gave him one of the bottles of wine I’d bought for Dad. I even told him that if he happened to be in London in February, he must come to our wedding. Then I legged it to the station and flung myself and my legion of shopping bags into a carriage just as the sliding doors were closing.

“Good shopping?” Guido asked, when we finally located each other at the airport.

“Amazing!” I said. “Look at the stunning jewellery I bought for the girls in the office, and the shoes I found. And you won’t believe it, but I’ve finally bought a wedding dress. It was such a bargain and it’s gorgeous. I’ll show you.”

But I couldn’t. The books were there, and the shoes and the wine and all the rest, but not the dress. I’d left it behind, somewhere in the mall or on the train.

When I told Nick about it, I cried. As soon as I got home, he ran me a hot bath with some aromatherapy oil in it, brought me a cup of tea and perched on the lid of the loo.

“So,” he said, “tell me all about the trip. How did it go?”

And instead of recounting all my adventures and waxing lyrical about the scenery and the amazing food and the challenge of it all, instead of telling him I’d read the blog and asking him if he was back in touch with Bethany, I said, “I found a wedding dress. But I lost it.” And I let out a huge, gulping sob, and soon I was having a good old howl on his shoulder, drenching his shirt with jasmine-scented water.

“My lovely Pippa, don’t cry,” he soothed. “We’ll get it back, surely? Someone will have found it and handed it in?”

“They won’t,” I sniffed. “There are so many poor people there, Nick. If they found a dress that cost a month’s wages, they’d keep it. Of course they would. Or sell it. And I wouldn’t blame them at all. It’s my fault for being such a stupid idiot.”

“You’ll find another dress,” Nick said. “I know you will. You know what kind you want now, get Callie to help you look on Google. And anyway, you’re so beautiful, you could get married in your nightie and still look stunning, and I’d still love you.”

I managed a feeble laugh. My nightie is an ancient sweatshirt of Nick’s with a picture of Robert Plant on it and a big hole under the left armpit, and I wouldn’t let anyone but him see me in it.

“Anyway,” I said, “how’s the rest of it going? The wedding stuff?”

“Great!” he said. “Mum and I have done all the invitations, they’re ready to post. I printed some extra ones for you to see, they look awesome. Mum thinks we should send them in batches, in case there’s some sort of terrorist action and our local post box gets blown up. I can’t decide if that’s bonkers or actually quite sensible. And I’ve emailed Royal Mail to ask whether they do first-class stamps in silver, because they’ll tone in so much better with the colour scheme. And then we’ve got our menu tasting at Brocklebury Manor next week. Mum’s going to come along to that, she’s got loads of good ideas about catering for the kids. And Callie says everything’s sorted for your hen night – having it on New Year’s Eve is going to be brilliant, don’t you think? And I asked your mum to make a list of suggested readings for the ceremony, so when you’ve got a second, have a look and tell me whether you like them. . .”