A Groom With a View (9 page)

An hour later, I was shivering in the changing rooms as I peeled off my work clothes and struggled into my brand new Lycra garments from TK Maxx. I don’t know who designs sports bras, but I’d bet good money that they’ve never tried to put one on. I tried doing up the hooks first and then pulling it over my head, and after ten terrifying minutes thinking I would be stuck half-in, half-out of it forever, managed to escape and attempted to put it on the normal way, which was more successful, except I got hideous cramp in my shoulder and broke two of my nails. By the time I was ready to start my workout, it was almost eight o’clock and I was hot, out of breath and thinking that this really hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

Clutching my towel and water bottle, I entered the holy of holies, the cardio room. I’d just cycle easily for twenty minutes on an exercise bike, I told myself. No point overdoing it the first time. And if I positioned myself in the corner at the back, I’d be suitably inconspicuous, so all the lithe, athletic girls wouldn’t be subjected to the sight of my arse spilling over the saddle, and I’d be able to check them out and imagine what I’d look like when my new fitness programme had worked its magic. And, of course, I’d be able to watch the hot men.

Like that one over there, I thought, settling myself on to the bike and starting to pedal gently. He was wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt, worn so thin it was almost transparent in places, and it clung to the lean V of his torso. I could see the muscles in his legs bunching and extending as he ran, and his tight bottom. . . Hold on. It was Nick. There I was, perving away like a dirty old woman over my own boyfriend.

I abandoned my exercise bike (not without a certain feeling of relief) and went over to him, just as he reduced the speed of the treadmill and slowed down to a walk.

“Blimey, Pippa,” he said, his breathing only slightly harder than usual, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Well, you know,” I said, “pre-wedding fitness mission.”

“Good for you,” he said. “But if you’re done, maybe you could reward yourself by accompanying me to the pub?”

I paused for a moment, torn. Did five minutes count as a workout? Probably not. But then, getting dressed had been exhausting. And I’d walked all the way round TK Maxx. And, of course, it was vital to keep the flame of passion alive in our relationship and that, surely, meant going to the pub together? “I’m done,” I said. “Shall we go home and shower?”

But I didn’t make it as far as the shower. When we got home, the first thing I saw was Spanx asleep on the sofa, blissfully cuddled up to a large, white plush rabbit.

“What the hell’s this?” I said.

“It came by courier today,” Erica said. “There was a card with it, but of course I haven’t opened it, it must be for you and Nick.” She passed me an envelope. On it was written, ‘ABRACADABRA!’

I peeled open the flap and took out a card in the shape of a black top hat. On the back was printed, “Hocus pocus and shazam! Congratulations on booking The Amazing Archibald. Your event is sure to go with a bang!”

I passed the card to Nick. “Do you know what this is?” I said. “Is it meant for the neighbours? If so we’d better get their bunny back to them before it gets even more ginger fur on it.” Spanx opened his amber eyes and gazed at me reproachfully, as if to say, “But this is my new friend.”

“No, don’t worry, Pip, it’s absolutely fine,” Nick said, but I couldn’t help noticing that he looked a bit guilty. “It’s just the entertainer guy I booked for the wedding. It’s quite a cool marketing idea, don’t you think?”

“But we don’t need an entertainer. Why would we want an entertainer? It’s not like we’re having kids at the. . . Nick? We aren’t having kids at the wedding, right?”

Erica retreated tactfully to our bedroom and closed the door.

Nick was suddenly showing great interest in the tops of his shoes. “Well, we’re inviting your friends Jack and Julia,” he said. “They’ll bring their baby, won’t they?”

“Iris is six months old,” I said. “The only entertainment she needs is Julia’s boobs and maybe a rattle or something. Nick, look at me. We’re not having kids at the wedding. Tell me you haven’t invited kids to the wedding.”

“There are a few,” he muttered.

“How many is a few? And whose are they? This is about your cousins, isn’t it?” My legs suddenly felt a bit shaky. I sat down and pulled the bunny on to my lap. Spanx followed, purring thunderously.

“Okay,” Nick said. “We’ve got about thirty children on the list. Probably they won’t all come. I think there’ll be twenty, maybe twenty-five. And they’ll need something to keep them occupied. So I booked an entertainer. He sounds really good. He does magic tricks and face-painting and plays games with the kids and makes balloon animals.”

“Balloon animals. I see.”

When I was working as a trainee in restaurants, I was on the receiving end of some epic temper tantrums. I won’t name any names, but one celebrity chef actually used to pelt eggs at waiters who displeased him – a totally pointless exercise, because they’d have to spend ages sponging themselves down and it caused absolute carnage during a busy service. Another’s speciality was a sort of icy rage, which was, if anything, more terrifying. I resolved back then that when I was running my own kitchen, I would never be like that. I would reason, calmly and quietly, with my team. I would engender respect. But I was kidding myself, because the truth is that when I get angry, I just start to cry. I could feel tears stinging my eyes now, and my nose was beginning to run.

“Are you okay, Pip?”

“No,” I sniffed. “I’m not okay. I’m bloody pissed off, Nick, because I don’t want children at the wedding and I thought we’d discussed you not inviting all your cousins. How many people is that? How many are on this guest list?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” Nick said.

“Of course you’re sure,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re not sure! You’ve planned every single stupid thing about this wedding. If I asked you how many fucking sugared almonds you’d ordered, you’d tell me, or you’d have it on a spreadsheet somewhere.”

“Right,” Nick said. He sat down next to me and put a placating hand on my knee. “I do know. We haven’t sent the invitations out yet but there are two hundred and fifty people on the list. Of those, eighty-five are my family and as I said, thirty of them are under twelve. Three are our flower girls and our pageboy, like you agreed. Are you satisfied now?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not, and I won’t be until you do what you said you’d do and sort this out. I don’t want loads of people at the wedding who I haven’t met, and I don’t want to have children there, except close friends’ babies and the pageboy and flower girls, and quite honestly I’d be happy not to have them either. And if you’ve booked this Amazing Archibald guy, unbook him. I’m going to bed.”

And I picked up Spanx and the bunny and flounced off. After a bit I heard the shower running, and then Nick and Erica went out.

When I finished shaking and crying, I fell into an uneasy sleep, but I woke up when Nick came to bed, much later. I put my arms round him and buried my head in his chest.

“I’m sorry I was such a bitch,” I said.

“I’m sorry too, Pip. I love you,” he said. And we had silent, surreptitious sex so Erica wouldn’t hear us and then Nick went straight to sleep. Although I was relieved we weren’t rowing any more, I was horribly aware that things were far from resolved. I lay awake most of the night worrying and when I eventually slept, I had a dream that I was plating up food for the cameras in South Africa and when I took the cloche off the roast springbok, it had turned into a fluffy white rabbit.

CHAPTER NINE

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Pre-wedding drinks

Hi Justine and Gerard

I hope you’re both well and the garden is standing up to the frost! So sorry I missed you when you were in London the other day. I’m getting in touch because Mum has suggested a bit of a get-together to celebrate our engagement, and for you to get to know one another better. Although you met at Pippa’s and my housewarming, that’s a good few years ago now! I also thought it would be a good idea for the two sides of the family to talk about plans for the wedding – register-signing, readings, speeches and so on.

I know you’re both really busy with rehearsals but please let me know if you have an evening free in the next couple of weeks, before Pippa flies off to South Africa. I’m really looking forward to catching up and so is Mum.

Love

Nick

PS – I was thinking it would be fun to make the party a surprise for Pip, so please don’t mention it to her!

It was like a particularly horrible episode of déjà vu. Here I was again, in another bridal shop with Katharine. This one aimed for more of a boudoir effect, with lots of peach chiffon draped everywhere, tasselled standard lamps, oil paintings of brides that looked like they’d been created with the aid of Photoshop effects, and the dresses concealed in white-painted armoires. But apart from that it was much the same.

The consultant this time was an older woman, who’d introduced herself as Valerie. She was Chelsea, only without the eyelash extensions and with the addition of a ruthless, headmistress-like demeanour that I suppose she’d acquired through years of persuading indecisive brides-to-be that not only were they going to buy a dress, they were going to buy one today, from her, and she was going to extract the maximum commission out of the transaction.

Katharine’s manner was different, though. Although she’d met me with her usual bright smile and upbeat demeanour, I got the sense that her heart wasn’t in it.

“Today’s the day, Pippa!” she said. “Today, we’ll find your dress. I’m feeling it!”

But I detected a hint of desperation underlying her relentless positivity.

“Now, my dear,” said Valerie. “I’ve been matching brides with their dream dresses for almost thirty years, and I pride myself on taking a different approach to it all. Even a radical one! I think it’s very easy for girls to get a bit mixed up if they try too many things. Dress fatigue, I call it! So I believe in providing a bit of firm guidance.” She guided me firmly to a fitting room.

“You are a lucky, lucky young lady. You have the classic hourglass shape. Your skin is just radiant! We need to work with these qualities and enhance them. If you’ve been spending too much time reading wedding magazines, you may have had your head turned by trends.” She wagged a scarlet-nailed finger at me. “A wedding dress should not be a trend-led purchase! It should be chosen to make the most of
you
. You should wear the dress, not the other way around. Am I right or am I right?”

I expected Katharine to bristle in the face of this hard-line approach, but she nodded meekly. I nodded meekly too.

“Let’s get you out of those jeans. And if you could just help Pippa into this, dear, I’ll be back in a moment with a few styles that I know will work for you.” ‘This’ was a strapless, boned contraption that looked like it would do a pretty decent job on a construction site. “A good foundation garment is the single most important part of your wedding attire. I’ll be back shortly.”

Headmistress-like she may have been, but once Katharine had wrestled and hooked me into the foundation garment, I realised Valerie knew her stuff. It may have been a particularly unattractive surgical-stocking shade of beige, but the scaffolding did its work. I immediately looked taller, straighter-backed and slimmer, and there were no bulges where bulges had been before. However, I couldn’t imagine being able to sit down, dance, eat or laugh, such was the garment’s constraining effect on my hips and diaphragm. Even breathing was something of a challenge, and I imagined that when I took it off, it would leave fetching red welts on my skin.

“No one ever has sex on their wedding night,” Katharine said, as if she’d read my mind, “so you may as well submit to the killer corsetry.” I was about to remind her of her famous sex diet, which she’d promised would have us swinging from the chandeliers the second the register was signed, when Valerie bustled back through the curtains bearing an armful of dresses.

“This is just a small selection to get us started. But I suspect your dress may well be one of these. I don’t have thirty years’ experience for nothing!

“Now,” she said, “first of all, just to make sure we’re on the same page, here’s an example of the sort of dress I believe you should
not
be considering.”

With a flourish that would have done credit to The Amazing Archibald, she whisked a frock off the rail. It was gorgeous. The full skirt fell in a cascade of ivory tucks and folds, with extravagant silk roses holding up the gathers.

“I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking, this is a fairytale dress. And it is. But it’s a dress for tall, big-boned brides. Pop it on and you’ll see I’m right.”

And she was. I’m no delicate little sylph, but the dress swamped me. I looked like a six-year-old trying on her mother’s eiderdown.

“See? Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s have a look at the kind of style I believe will work on you.”

The next dress she produced couldn’t have been more different. I felt almost disappointed looking at it. It was just simple – a straight white column with a bit of beading on the wide shoulder straps, and a little puddle of a train.

“Now don’t you dismiss it until you’ve tried it!” Valerie manhandled me into the dress and spent a few painstaking minutes doing up the row of tiny pearl buttons down the back. I looked at Katharine to see her reaction, but she was distracted, her hair falling over her face as she tapped away at her phone.

“Let’s have a little look.” Valerie led me out of the fitting room towards one of the huge cheval mirrors, with Katharine following in our wake.

And she was right. It suited me. It was a good dress. I did a few turns in front of the mirror, waiting for the magic to happen. It hadn’t, exactly, but it was definitely a dress I could wear. Alexa Chung, no. Me in a wedding dress, yes.

I’d noticed when Valerie had brought the dresses, that they’d all had price tags discreetly attached to them with bits of satin ribbon. But now the price was concealed somewhere next to my spine, beneath the pearl buttons.

“I don’t think you mentioned how much this costs,” I said to Valerie.

“Ah, now, let me see,” she said. “This is one of our exclusive, limited-edition designs by Angelo Venetti – you’ll have heard of him, of course – and so it’s at the upper end of the range, price-wise.”

And she named a figure that would have taken my breath away, had the foundation garment not done so already. It was more than Nick and I earn a month, put together. It was more than we’d spend on a holiday. But then, it was my wedding dress. Most of the women featured in
Inspired Bride
spent this much, some even more. If Katharine okayed it, I’d buy it, I decided. To hell with the cost. I’d stick it on a credit card. At least it would mean never having to try on another wedding dress.

I turned to Katharine. “What do you reckon?” But she was looking down at her phone again, and as I watched, a huge tear splatted down on to the screen.

“Just give us a moment.” I hustled her back into the cubicle and closed the curtain. “Katharine! What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, don’t worry. This isn’t about me. We’re supposed to be buying your dress.”

“My dress? Fuck the dress, Katharine. I’m buying you a drink.”

Valerie may have been finding perfect dresses for brides for thirty years, but I bet she’d never seen anyone get out of one as quickly as I did. I shoved my jeans, jumper, coat and boots back on, left the good-enough dress on the fitting room floor along with the punishing foundation garment, and hurried Katharine out, my arm tightly around her shoulders.

“I’ll be in touch. Thanks, sorry, we have to dash,” I said to Valerie, and we left her gaping like a headmistress in the process of mutating into a goldfish.

I didn’t say anything more to Katharine until I’d got us ensconced in a booth in the pub across the road with two huge glasses of red wine and a stack of paper napkins. Then I said, “Tell me what’s going on. It’s Iain, isn’t it?”

She nodded miserably and blew her nose.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Katharine shook her head and pressed a napkin to her face. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, her voice muffled, “because that would make it real, and I can’t bear for it to be real. We’ve only been married two months. I was going to take him to The Mortimer for our anniversary. It’s paper, you know. Well, two years is, but I was thinking laterally. I was going to print out the booking and surprise him. And then,” she took a big gulp of wine and almost choked, “Oh, God, it’s all shit.”

“Katharine, whatever’s going on, there are two things you need to know. First, it’s not your fault. Second, whatever it is and however awful you feel now, you’ll get through it. Is he. . . is there someone else?”

She nodded miserably. “How did you know?”

I thought, because I’ve known Iain for a long time. I know he’s got form for this kind of thing. He’s a man of many talents but keeping his dick in his pants isn’t one of them. But of course I didn’t say that to her.

I said, “It kind of had to be that. You wouldn’t be so shattered by a normal row. But are you sure you haven’t got it wrong?”

“As sure as I can be,” Katharine said miserably. “I’ve been so fucking stupid. It’s been going on for months: suddenly needing to work late, spending the evenings when he was at home constantly texting, getting a new mobile ‘for work’. I told myself it was fine, that there was no way he’d marry me if he wasn’t being faithful. But it looks like I was wrong.”

I poured us both some more wine. “But hold on. People do work late. When Nick and Iain started the agency they worked stupid hours. We hardly saw each other. And Guido has two phones – it’s not that unusual a thing to do.” I didn’t tell Katharine that the real reason for Guido’s second phone was so he could avoid Florence when he was at work. “So what’s suddenly changed?”

“Nookie,” said Katharine miserably. It took me a few seconds to remember that this was her twee term for sex. “We did the sex diet thing, remember I told you? For two months before we got married I said no nookie, so that the wedding night would be extra special. And it would have been, if Iain had been less pissed. And then on honeymoon I was so shattered, to be honest, all I wanted to do was lie in the sun all day and go to sleep straight after supper. So once we stopped doing it, we never really started again, except for a couple of times.”

I thought, I knew this sex diet malarkey was a shit idea. In fact, it was beginning to sound to me as if deciding to get married had been when things began to go wrong for Iain and Katharine. “But all relationships go through dry patches,” I said. “It’s totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all.”

Katharine took another gulp of wine, blew her nose and said, “Pippa, I checked his credit card statement. I know it’s wrong to snoop, but I did. I would have checked his phones, but it’s like he’s surgically attached to both the stupid things, he even takes them to the loo with him. And he’s changed the password on his email, so I couldn’t check that either. So I looked at his Mastercard bill. It was grim, I felt so furtive, like every single cliché of the suspicious wife. I steamed open the envelope and glued it closed afterwards, and everything.”

I was uncomfortably reminded of how I felt looking at Nick’s blog, as I found myself doing more and more often, and wondering again who ‘B’ was, with her kisses and promises of private messages in the comments. “And what did you find?”

“Oh, God. This is so pathetic, isn’t it? He’s spent four hundred pounds at Myla, and five hundred at Netflorist, and almost a grand at Pandora. And I haven’t seen a single flower or pair of knickers and certainly not any jewellery.”

“But couldn’t they be Christmas presents for you?” I said.

“I’ve been with Iain for four years now, Pippa. The first six months, he bought me flowers every Friday. I got a Tiffany bracelet for my birthday, and on Valentine’s Day he took me to Agent Provocateur and did that thing of watching through the peephole while I tried stuff on. Since we got engaged, he’s given me Lakeland vouchers for every single Christmas and birthday. That stuff is not for me.”

“Have you talked to him?” I asked.

“I haven’t had the, ‘Are you fucking someone else?’ conversation, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “I just can’t face it. I’ve asked him what’s wrong, like, a million times, and he just says he’s busy at work. And it’s true, he is busy at work. But I think he’s also fucking someone else.”

I squeezed her hand. “I just don’t know what to say. It’s awful.”

Katharine said, “You know what, if I could turn back the clock and not have that stupid, ridiculous, excessive fucking wedding, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Every single gold chocolate dragée and piece of organic rose-petal confetti and pair of bridesmaids’ knickers – I actually bought them vintage-style silk pants to match our colour theme, Pippa, how fucking obsessed was I? – every single one of those things took chunks of my life that I’ll never get back. They took time I could have spent with Iain, going to gigs with him or watching
True Blood
or sucking him off. Instead I spent it wrapping up miniature bottles of Moët for favours. There were two hundred of those stupid things left at the venue after the wedding. Two hundred. We told the waiting staff to take them.”

I squeezed her hand again. We’d left our Moët miniatures behind, I remembered. I felt a bit guilty about it now.

“I put everything I had into that wedding and now it’s all fucked.” Then she seemed to remember who she was talking to. “It won’t be like that for you and Nick, obviously. You’ll be really happy, I’m sure. And your wedding’s going to be lovely.”