A Catered Affair (17 page)

“I want to be on my own.”

“No, you don’t. Not really. Now, come on. Open up.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Sorry, no can do. I’m staying here until you let me in.”

“You’re so bossy—d’you know that?”

“Yep. It’s why you love me. Now, open the door.”

I pressed the RELEASE button. A few moments later, Rosie was presenting me with a bunch of wildly clashing orange and fuchsia gerberas. “Thought these might cheer you up,” she said.

“They’re gorgeous,” I said, giving her a hug.

“So, how you doing? No. Stupid question. Ignore that. You feel like total crap.”

I managed a smile. “Pretty much.”

“So have you heard from the bastard?”

“Uh-uh. All I know from his cousin Napoleon is that he got cold feet and has run away to Edinburgh.”

“No other woman, then?”

“Apparently not.”

“I guess that’s something.”

We went into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

“What a coward,” Rosie said. “To leave you at the altar like that. God, I have so had it with men.” She put her arm around me and gave me another squeeze. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” I said. “By the way, you looked fabulous on Sunday. I can’t believe you got your figure back so quickly after having Izzy.”

Rosie gave a half laugh. “It’s all the worry. The amount that Dan gives me in child support is barely enough to pay the bills. I need to go back to work, but I’m just not ready to leave Izzy. She’s so tiny and she’s still breast-feeding.” She paused. “God, you look awful.”

“Cheers.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Sunday morning, before my nonwedding. I think I may have nibbled on a
pain au chocolat
.”

Rosie got up and headed into the kitchen. “I’m assuming you’ve got eggs and bread?”

“Yeah,” I said, wandering in after her. “Bread might be covered in blue bits, though. But I’m really not sure I can manage anything.”

“Well, you have to try. You need to keep your energy up.”

I managed a smile. “God, now who’s being a Jewish mother?”

Rosie stuck two slices of dry but blue-bit-free bread in the toaster and took a couple of eggs from the fridge.

“Fried, scrambled or boiled?”

“Um—boils, please.” It’s what Scarlett and I used to call them as kids.

“With Marmite soldiers?”

“OK, if you’re offering.”

“Coming up.”

I put the kettle on for coffee.

We sat at the kitchen table, Rosie watching me wolf down my breakfast. I had no idea how hungry I was.

“By the way,” I said, my mouth full of eggy, Marmitey toast, “I slept with my wedding caterer.”

“Excuse me?”

“OK, I’m winding you up. It wasn’t quite like that.” I explained how I had done the sleeping (not to mention vomiting) and Kenny had stayed up all night, looking after me.

“Are you sure he wasn’t hoping to take advantage of a defenseless woman?”

At this point, I decided not to tell her how I’d propositioned him. Rosie meant well, but being a teacher, she had a tendency to pontificate. I wasn’t up for a finger-wagging lecture on the dangers women faced when they made themselves vulnerable to potentially violent predators.

“Hello . . . he held my head while I threw up. Does that sound like he was trying to take advantage?”

She said that she guessed not. “So he was a bit of a knight in shining armor. You don’t come across too many men like that.”

I agreed that you didn’t.

“Right, changing the subject,” Rosie said. “You have to move in with me. No arguments. You can’t stay here on your own—particularly with the builders pulling the place apart.”

“Rosie, don’t take this the wrong way and don’t think I’m not grateful, but I think I might find it a bit much being around kids and babies just now.”

“I get that, but where else will you go?”

“I’d ask Scarlett, but she and Grace have only got one bedroom. So I’ll probably go to Mum’s.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

I said I was. “You know,” I went on, bringing the subject back to Josh, “I wasn’t picking up the slightest vibe from him that he was getting cold feet. I just can’t get over what he did. It was so brutal, and I loved him so much.” I could feel my eyes filling up. “He was just so perfect. Everything about him was perfect. And then this.”

Rosie looked like she wanted to say something but was holding back.

“What?” I said.

She shrugged. “I dunno . . . Was Josh really so perfect?”

“He left me on our wedding day, so I guess not.”

“Aside from that.”

I asked her what she meant.

“Well . . . he could be pretty snotty—often to the point of rudeness—especially with your mum and Nana Ida, and it was clear your nana in particular adored him. It really upset me, seeing that.”

“I know. It got to me, too, and we did discuss it, but he was always under so much stress at the hospital, and you know how over the top Mum and Nana can be. Sometimes it got too much for him.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re still making excuses for him. Has it occurred to you that maybe you admired Josh the healer and humanitarian so much that you put him on a pedestal and didn’t see the real man?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe.” I wasn’t up for self-analysis right now. Instead I changed the subject and asked Rosie how the writing was going. I knew that her parents were still with her—the renovation work on their ancient barn of a house had hit problems and was taking forever—so she was able to take a bit of time away from Izzy and Ben.

“Not bad,” she said. “I’ve been putting in a few hours each day. As soon as I’ve finished the chapter I’m working on, I’ll let you see it.”

I forced my mouth into a smile. “Great. I can’t wait.”

Rosie said that she had finally shown her work to Mary, the unpublished fiction-in-verse crime-thriller writer. Apparently she’d loved it and described it as “a philosophical allegory for our times.”

After Rosie left, I sat down with my laptop and got up the prologue to
The Sand Collector’s Daughter
. I needed to reread it, to reassure myself that I hadn’t made some hideous error of judgment about her writing. I’d just started when the phone rang. It was Scarlett.

“Hey, how are you?” she said. “We’ve all been so worried about you. Why haven’t you called anyone?”

“You got a sec? I need to read you something.”

“Tally, I just asked you a question. Are you OK?”

“I’m coping, I guess. But there’s something else on my mind right now.”

“What?”

“OK—you read proper books. Tell me what you make of this . . . ‘Common sand is made up mostly of quartz. Quartz. Hard, weather-resistant quartz. Kw-or-tz . . .’”

I continued for a couple of minutes until Scarlett interrupted.

“This is brilliant. Utterly brilliant.”

“Really? You think so?”

“Absolutely. It’s a fantastic parody of the literary novel. Where did you find it? You have to Facebook it.”

“No way. Rosie wrote it. It’s the prologue to her novel. It’s called
The Sand Collector’s Daughter
and it’s meant to be serious literature.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Blimey. OK, you have to tell Rosie the truth before she shows it to somebody who thinks it’s just a joke. It’ll break her heart if that happens.”

“And it’ll break her heart if I tell her. She’s got no husband, no money and two tiny children. All her hopes are on this book.”

“I admit that it isn’t going to be easy, but you have to do it.”

“I know. I can’t keep putting it off.”

“So, sweetie, come on—how are you?”

“I dunno. Sleeping a lot.”

Scarlett said it was only to be expected as I was still in shock. “I take it there’s been no word from Josh.”

“You take it correctly,” I said.

“Bastard.”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Tell me honestly. Do you think I put Josh on a pedestal? Rosie thinks I was so in awe of Josh the doctor that I lost sight of the real person.”

“OK, if I’m honest, I think that maybe you did look at him through rose-tinted specs. When he got irritable with Nana you’d tell him off, but at the same time you’d make excuses for him.”

“I guess I didn’t want to see his bad points. I was so blinkered.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. When you’re in love it’s easy to miss the bad stuff.”

“I get that, but I still feel stupid. Maybe I also missed the signs that he wasn’t over his commitment phobia.”

“It’s possible there weren’t any signs. I suspect that he kept things bottled up.”

“Maybe.”

“And it’s possible you may never get to the bottom of why he really left.”

“You could be right. I think that’s going to be very hard to come to terms with. But I don’t have much choice.”

“I know. It’s not going to be easy . . . So, changing the subject, you and Kenny Platters seemed to have a lot to talk about the other night at the hotel.”

“You saw us? I thought you went straight home.”

She said that Nana had left her bag on one of the tables. “I came back to get it.”

“Yeah, Kenny and I had quite a good chat. Then we slow danced to ‘I’ve Had the Time of My Life.’ I asked him if he would sleep with me. At which point I passed out and he stayed up with me most of the night while I hurled.”

“Hang on. Could you just go through that again?”

“Which? The hurling part?”

“Funnily enough, no. I was more interested in the ‘I asked him to sleep with me’ part.”

Why had I opened my big fat mouth—even in jest? Having avoided a lecture from Rosie, I was about to get one from my sister.

“But hang on,” she said. “I thought Kenny Platters was gay.”

“I was wrong. The bloke he referred to as his partner turned out to be his business partner. So anyway, re asking him to sleep with me—I was off my head. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

“Yeah, I get that, but suppose he hadn’t got it. If he’d slept with you in the state you were in, it would have been tantamount to rape. How could you have made yourself so vulnerable?”

“Because at that precise moment, I didn’t care if he took advantage. In fact, I wanted him to. You don’t know how I was feeling, so please don’t tell me off. Kenny turned out to be a hero. Nothing bad happened. Now, can we just let it drop?”

“Hey, take it easy. Of course we can let it drop. You frightened me—that’s all.”

“I’m sorry. I promise that the next time I get left at the altar I will not proposition the caterer. How’s that? Are we good now?”

She said that we were. Then she said that Nana and Mum were really worried about me and that I should give them a call. I promised I would.

I wanted to move the conversation away from everything that had happened, so I decided to ask Scarlett if she fancied helping me get my flat ready for the builders. I didn’t really need an extra pair of hands, but by now I was in need of some company. Scarlett said she would come over on Saturday afternoon, but she couldn’t stay long because she and Grace were driving to Yorkshire that evening.

“Don’t you remember me telling you? I’m doing a load of gigs in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool and Grace landed another commission from the
Sunday Times
. They want her to do a photo story on northern workingmen’s clubs. We’re renting a house in the Dales. We thought we’d stay on after we’ve finished working and have a bit of a holiday. So we’ll be away a couple of months.”

I remembered now. Scarlett had told me ages ago about her plans, but what with all the wedding preparations, I’d forgotten. I had to admit I felt a bit jealous that Scarlett and Grace were going to spend the next two months in some rural idyll while I moped around Mum’s place.

“Look, I know it’s bad timing after everything that’s happened, but you know that if you need me, I’m always at the end of the phone. And we’d both love you to come and stay. On the other hand, it just occurred to us that maybe you could flat-sit while we’re away. I mean, it won’t be easy living in your place with all the work going on.”

I loved Scarlett’s flat. First, it was in Notting Hill, and there was always a chance of bumping into Stella McCartney or Björk muesli shopping in Planet Organic. Second, it was huge. Well, huger than mine, which didn’t take a lot of doing. Third, it had just been done up and still smelled of fresh paint and new carpet. We agreed that I would move in on Sunday, after the Wizard of Aus had collected all my boxes and I’d seen them safely into the storage place. For the first time in nearly a week, I had a smile on my face.

I decided to send Kenny Platters a bottle of posh Scotch. I went online and ordered a forty-pound bottle of Macallan. I didn’t know his home address so I had it sent to his office with a note saying,
Thanks again. Don’t know what I would have done without you. Tally.

That evening, I called Nana and Mum. Nana cried when she heard my voice and said she was still blaming herself and the Nazi money for what happened. I did my best to comfort her and tell her that Josh leaving me was nothing to do with the Third Reich, but I couldn’t shake her. On the upside, she had gotten together with her friends at the day center and drawn up a list of “nice young bachelors” that I might be interested in meeting.

Mum kept asking me if I was eating. She begged me to come and stay with her and really wasn’t happy when I said I was moving into Scarlett’s flat. “But I hate the idea of you being on your own.”

“Why? I’ve lived alone for years.”

“I’m worried.”

“What about?”

“That you might . . . you know . . . do something stupid.”

“Mum, you’ve been spending too much time pretending to be a Samaritan. I’m miserable and I’m angry, but I’m not suicidal. Josh hurt me, God knows, but I’m not about to end my life over it.”