From The Heart (10 page)

‘Over?’ said Tom.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Cheryl realises that you and she don’t have a long-term future together and on her behalf I’m saying that she’s prepared to never see you again.’

‘Hang on,’ said Tom. ‘Who the hell are you? I don’t know any Natalie.’

‘There’s a lot of things about Cheryl you don’t know,’ I told him sweetly.

He spluttered and I closed the phone, cutting him off.

‘Natalie!’ Cheryl stared at me. ‘I didn’t want you to do that. And now he thinks . . .’

‘Who cares what he thinks?’ I demanded. ‘Besides, you didn’t try very hard to stop me.’

‘No,’ she said in wonderment. ‘I didn’t.’

I slid my phone across the table. ‘Speed-dial three,’ I told her.

Cheryl phoned Ian. I was a bit surprised he answered it at all because he had a habit of letting it ring until it was diverted to his voice-mail. But he picked up and she told him not to bother bringing back the present from Milan because it was OK, I’d wised up, it was over. And I rather think he spluttered a bit too as she cut him off.

‘So that’s that,’ I told her. ‘We’re two single women again.’

‘Yes.’ She grinned. ‘And tomorrow I’m going to do a brilliant interview and you’re going to go for that promotion in work you were talking about and we’re going to cop on to ourselves about men and not let ourselves get walked on any more.’

And guess what? That’s how it turned out.

Well, almost. Cheryl didn’t get the job but she was offered a different one which worked out even better than she’d hoped. She’s still waiting for the right man to come along but she’s having a great social life in the meantime. I spent three whole months cultivating a more mature image at work and at the end of it I was promoted. Then I was transferred to Human Resources. Where I met Larry. He’s a decent bloke, Larry. He’s doesn’t play rugby, he likes me being possessive and when he had to go to a business meeting in London he brought me along for the weekend. Which was much better than Ian bringing back a fake Prada key ring from Milan, I thought.

I don’t know whether or not we’ll last the pace. But I hope so. I never take phone calls from him on the train.

This story is the sequel to Sheila O’Flanagan’s popular bestseller
Isobel’s Wedding
. We recommend reading the novel before starting
Isobel’s Reunion
to avoid spoiling any surprises . . .

Everyone was talking about the wedding incident. The fact that the girl chickened out at the last minute and that all the planning – the gorgeous dress, the bower of palms and brightly coloured tropical flowers, the Caribbean band, the photos on the fine white sand – all of it had come to nothing because none of it was going to take place now. It was the hot topic of conversation around the hotel and I wasn’t one bit surprised. Everyone was speaking in hushed tones and saying how sorry they felt for the groom, who’d waited patiently for nearly an hour in the gazebo at the edge of the turquoise water for his bride to show up before realising that the wedding wasn’t going to take place. Sympathy was very definitely on his side and I understood that, of course I did. He’d been humiliated in front of loads of people. As for her – well, everyone agreed better now than later, but there was a definite feeling that she could at least have gone ahead with it given the amount of planning that had gone on and just have it annulled afterwards.

Despite the wedding fiasco most of the guests had made the best of it. At first they’d disappeared from the bar and foyer where wedding guests normally gathered, but later that evening a group of them had arrived down to dinner and had partied afterwards to the sounds of the calypso band. The reluctant bride had apparently headed off to a different hotel with some of her closest friends, so I suppose the remaining guests felt as though they might as well get what they could out of the evening, safe in the knowledge that she wouldn’t reappear looking pale and wan and devastated.

I felt sorry for her, though, no matter why she’d done it. I couldn’t help it. I knew exactly how she was feeling because I’d felt that way myself.

People really don’t know how to treat you when you’ve abandoned your fiancé with minutes to go before tying the knot. They’re a little bit scared of you, tread warily around you, talking about something completely different but wanting only to ask you why on earth you did it. Maybe they feel that the kind of girl who would leave a bloke sweltering in his tux on a tropical island in front of a gaggle of interested spectators, or the kind of girl who’d leave a bloke standing at the altar in front of a packed church while fleeing down the aisle before leaping into the waiting Merc, is the kind of person who’d do anything. And they’re afraid that you might do anything in front of them. That’s my theory anyway. That’s the reason why I didn’t think that girl’s life would ever be the same again. That’s the reason mine wasn’t either, after I dumped Tim at the altar.

I hadn’t intended to dump him, of course. Right up to the moment where the priest asked ‘Do you Isobel take Tim’ I’d fully intended to say yes, even though I’d spent the night before with my mind in a whirl about my whole life up to that point. I wanted to be sure that I was marrying Tim for the right reasons, because I loved him, and not simply because I’d finally caught him again after he’d chickened out of our wedding the first time. And after all of my agonising I really was sure. Until the priest asked the question and then, all over again, I wasn’t. You’ll think that this makes me a particularly flaky person but I’m not really. I never was. I’m the most ordinary person in the world. I’m the girl who just dreamed of getting married, having a breathtaking wedding, and living happily ever after. Naturally I’ve changed a bit. But I don’t think there was anything so terribly wrong about the dream! Don’t we all want to live happily ever after? Don’t we all want one day to be the most important day of our lives?

That was the nub of the problem as far as Tim was concerned. He called it off that first time (with only two weeks to go, so let’s face it, he humiliated me first) because he thought I saw the wedding as being more important than him. And he had a point. I was wedding-obsessed. Menus, flowers, colour schemes, music, scattered rose petals on the tables . . . there was nothing too trivial as far as I was concerned to need my undivided attention. So every time I met Tim I talked weddings until he felt that he’d become a bit player in the biggest day of our lives.

It’s funny how things turn out, isn’t it? If I hadn’t been so manic about the whole wedding thing in the first place then maybe Tim and I would’ve got married on the day that we’d chosen and none of the rest would’ve ever happened. And now I’d be Isobel Malone, married with a couple of kids and happy as a sandfly just like I’d always expected. People wouldn’t think of me as flaky. Nor would they wonder if my whole agreeing to the second attempt at a wedding wasn’t just a pretext so that I could dump Tim publicly in a much worse way than he ever dumped me.

I worried about that for ages. I worried about what people thought. I worried about what they were saying. I worried that I’d forever be defined as Isobel, the girl who’d run out of her wedding. But, you know what, even though I worried about it, I didn’t really care. Because in the time between the first wedding and the second, in the time when I’d missed Tim dreadfully and felt unwanted and unloved; in the time when I’d also gone to Spain and found a new job (and a few short-term lovers to make me feel wanted), I’d managed to add a new dimension to Isobel. I’d got an interesting job and made new friends and carved out a life that didn’t revolve around getting married and having kids and feeling that if I didn’t do all that there was something wrong with me. So although I worried about these things I also knew that they didn’t really matter in the whole fabric-of-life stuff and the most important thing was that I hadn’t married Tim for the wrong reason and that I’d actually realised that in time.

But abandoning him like that did define me in people’s eyes. And that wasn’t something that I could deal with easily.

I’d dealt with Tim’s original dumping of me by running away because I just couldn’t cope with being in Ireland any more (and because most of the people I knew, my ex-boss included, couldn’t cope with me either). But my new job in Madrid, with a corporate training company, had been wonderful. The people were great and my boss, Gabriella, was one of the most supportive people I know. It was the first time I’d ever truly enjoyed going to work for the work itself instead of for the gossip and meeting people and complaining and waiting for the weekend! And it was the first company in which I’d ever been promoted and given real responsibility. I’d thrived there and sometimes I think that it was because of the person I’d become then that I’d had the nerve to walk out on my wedding later.

When I’d come home from Spain to get married to Tim I’d been much more upbeat about the sort of job I could get back in Ireland and my confidence wasn’t misplaced. I managed to land a position as the administrator of a private college, less frantic in some ways than with the Spanish company, but equally busy. I started there a week after the walking-out-on-the-wedding débâcle.

The thing is, a lot of other people were more upset by the wedding thing than me. My mother (poor Mum!), who’d gone through the whole trauma the first time, was absolutely gutted the second. Tim’s mother was, understandably, furious with me and vented her spleen on Mum. The two of them had never really hit it off together, and as far as Denise Malone was concerned, I was nothing but a selfish cow who’d made a fool of her darling son. Apparently the ding-dong battle between the two of them took place in the car park outside the church – a kind of flowery pastels-at-dawn type of confrontation. The entire congregation had – after their moment of stunned silence – rushed out after me but of course I’d nabbed the Merc and was instructing the driver to put his foot down and get me the hell out of there. So Mum and Denise had their set-to in the wake of the departing car while Dad and Mr Malone tried to keep the peace even though Mr Malone was fuming too. Meantime Tim stood there beside his best man and muttered ‘bitch, bitch’ over and over again. My sister Alison, who’d never really got on with him, told me afterwards that she’d barely been able to contain her glee. It was, she informed me, the very best wedding she’d ever been at.

After my mother and Denise were prised apart, Mum (with remarkable if belated sang-froid) invited anyone who wanted to come back to the hotel for the meal. After all, she told them (her voice breaking at that point), it was all paid for and there wasn’t much point in letting it go to waste.

A surprising number of people, mainly from my side of the family – we’re all good trenchermen when it comes to our food – headed off to the hotel, where the staff took my non-appearance in their professional stride, and it seems that a really good time was had by all. Thing is, most of my family thought that my marrying Tim was a mistake. So they were happy to celebrate my great escape even if none of them actually approved of the way I’d done things.

Oh, look, I don’t approve of it myself. It was a rotten thing to do. But it would have been more rotten to have married him for all the wrong reasons and to have the whole thing unravel messily a few months later in hot tears and stinging recriminations. I did the right thing. I just should have done it earlier.

There are, of course, drawbacks to running away in a long white dress and veil. I lost the veil on Howth Hill when I let the breeze catch it and carry it out to sea, but there wasn’t much I could do about the dress. When I got back to the car the chauffeur looked at me enquiringly and asked where I wanted to go next.

Home was the obvious answer, and so he dropped me back to our house in Sutton where I then realised that nobody was there and that you don’t bring your house keys to your wedding. So I went around the back and sat like an idiot in my long white dress in the garden (where only a few hours earlier Dad had taken photos of me in all my finery) while I waited for someone to turn up.

Alison and Peter eventually showed. Alison hugged me and said that she’d been trying my mobile but, of course, you don’t bring your mobile to your wedding either. At first they’d thought I would come to the hotel (although she had wondered whether I might make some kind of extravagant gesture like rush to the airport and go back to Spain), and then they decided that I’d probably prefer to be at home, so they’d volunteered to come looking for me. I informed her tartly that, along with not bringing your mobile phone, you also don’t bring money or your passport to your wedding and so I couldn’t have run away to Spain again. She laughed at me and then rang the hotel to let Mum know that I hadn’t thrown myself off Butt Bridge or anything equally dramatic and informed me that (after the initial fracas) everyone was being remarkably calm about it all.

And then she let me into the house, where I took off my lovely (second) wedding dress and changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

‘You are such a fool, Issy,’ said Alison kindly. ‘But you did a brave thing. Really.’

For the next few weeks that was pretty much what everyone said.

I got used to living with the tag of being the girl who’d run out of her wedding and with the whole flaky thing, and because my job at the college was going quite well, I was able to rise above it. Sort of. But I didn’t really settle back in Dublin. I’d come back because of Tim. Now, because of Tim, I didn’t really want to stay. All the same, I couldn’t run away again. There’s a time for running and a time for staying put, and besides, where could I run to this time?

The answer came about six months later. From Gabriella. She’d been at the non-wedding, along with some of my ex-colleagues from the Spanish training company. She hadn’t been crazy about the wedding to Tim either, although that was partly because she knew I’d been seeing a guy in Spain while I was there and she didn’t think I was properly over him. Gabriella believed that Nico and I had a real thing going. A part of me had thought that too, but when Tim and I got together again I decided that Nico and I were just a passing whim. (Well, passing whim isn’t fair. Nico meant a lot to me. But I had no future with him.
Isabella querida
. That’s what he used to say. As though he meant it. But he didn’t. Not really.) Anyway, Gabriella called me up one day and asked how I was doing, listened to me wittering on about how great my life was, and then offered me a job. As always with Gabriella, she pretty much got to the point straight away. Her company, the one I’d worked for, was based in Madrid but they’d bought another smaller training firm, in Alicante. They were looking for someone to head it up. She’d thought of me.