Kate's Wedding (6 page)

‘Finished.’

Diana hung her final plastic ring on a dress by Giovanni Lucciani.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said her mother, admiring the multicoloured ribbons at the back of the bodice. ‘Really classy.’

Diana turned to Rat Face with a velociraptor smile. ‘Of course, in the end, the way a dress looks is really all about the class of the bride.’

Chapter Ten

While Rat Face and Diana had their wedding-frock face-off, Kate was already being helped into her first gown. Heidi explained that they would try the least voluminous dress first and gradually build up to the monster frock that Kate had only really chosen to make her mother smile and her sister laugh out loud.

‘We have to do it that way, otherwise you’ll be too shocked by the girth,’ Heidi explained.

Kate was pleasantly surprised by gown number one, which had been chosen by her mother. It wasn’t really much more extravagant than the average evening dress. Had it been in black instead of off-white, Kate might have thought it suitable for her law firm’s Christmas ball.

‘This is nice,’ said Kate as the skirt settled around her feet.

‘Come out into the main room,’ said Heidi.

‘Oh, no . . . I thought that . . .’

‘Your mum and sister want to see the dress, don’t they?’

‘I suppose.’

It was the other brides and their families that Kate didn’t want to show off to. Still, she shuffled out into the main salon. Her sister and mother made approving noises. The two other brides’ supporters seemed pleasantly surprised too.

‘I chose that one,’ said Elaine proudly. ‘I knew it would suit her.’ The other mothers praised Elaine’s taste.

But Heidi was shaking her head. ‘Makes you look enormous here and here’ – she indicated Kate’s thighs with the aid of a stiffened tape measure – ‘and yet you’re like a Biafran up here.’ She indicated Kate’s décolletage. Kate looked down at her chest in disappointment. She knew she wasn’t exactly blessed in the breast department, but . . .

‘Now that you’ve got this dress on, I can see that your figure is what I would call a wooden spoon. You’re skinny as a stick down to your waist. Then . . . whoompf.’ Heidi made the sound of a hot-air balloon inflating prior to lift-off. ‘Completely out of proportion. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I get the idea,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll try something else, shall I?’

‘Yes. Bigger round the bottom,’ said Heidi.

Kate was just grateful that the third bride, the one that Tess had dubbed the ‘Mean Girl’, hadn’t been around to hear such a damning assessment.

Heidi refused even to let Kate out of the changing room in dress two.

‘No, no, no, not with your saddlebags.’

Saddlebags?

Heidi made what she must have thought was pleasant chat as she helped Kate get back out of that frock. ‘Doesn’t matter how much you exercise, I know – you can’t get rid of them. I’ve got a friend who had liposuction. It’s the only thing that works.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Kate.

‘She still didn’t have the figure to get married in a straight skirt, but I didn’t dare tell her. I always try to be honest with my clients about their figure faults, though. I don’t want you coming back here and saying, “Heidi, you let me look like the back end of an elephant on the most important day of my life.” I may sound harsh, but it’s for your own good. You’ve got to keep imagining what you’ll look like from behind.’

‘Thank you,’ said Kate.

Kate refused to show anyone dress three, which was practically see-through. Dress four, which passed the saddlebag test, was nonetheless met with instant disapproval by Kate’s sister.

‘Makes you look three months pregnant,’ said Tess.

Kate’s mother pricked up her ears.

‘I’m not,’ said Kate, as hot embarrassment crept up her neck.

‘Ah, well,’ said Heidi, ‘there’s plenty of time . . . or IVF. I know a girl who had triplets on her eighth try.’

Kate couldn’t wait to get back into the changing room.

Meanwhile, the girl with the pointy face and the Mean Girl were preening side by side in the floor-length mirror. Though they were objectively both pretty enough girls, their attitudes made them look like Cinderella’s two ugly sisters getting ready for the prince’s ball. Kate didn’t even bother to try to get a better look at the dress she was wearing, to see if Tess was really right. She followed Heidi back to the changing room feeling enormous relief that the next dress was to be her last. She’d try it on, whip it off and hurry to get back into her jeans. Then she was outta here. Why had she ever let herself be talked into this in the first place? There was only so much she could put up with in the interests of making her mother happy and her sister snigger.

Ian had texted.
Are you having fun?
he asked.

While Heidi prepared dress five, Kate responded.
Oh, yeah. This is about as much fun as being back at school.

Kate had told Ian about the cool girls who had made her teenage years a misery. Even over twenty years on, the thought of them could still make her shoulders slump. The past hour in this stupid bridal shop, with Heidi commenting so candidly on her figure and evil looks from the other brides, was having the same effect as an afternoon in the school gym. The confident Kate her work colleagues knew had all but disappeared.

Kate lifted her arms at Heidi’s instruction while the dress was slipped on over her head.

‘OK,’ said Heidi, surveying dress five, ‘your saddlebags are covered, but we’re going to need the crate.’

The crate.

Moments later, Kate found herself standing back outside in the salon on the crate in question – just a plain plastic bottle crate – while Heidi and another assistant fussed around the enormous skirt of the Giovanni Lucciani dress like a couple of busy elves. Kate, meanwhile, was having an out-of-body experience. Heidi had laced her in so tightly that she could barely breathe.

‘You’re lucky you’ve no back fat to speak of,’ Heidi said when the lacing was done.

Elaine and Tess were less damning in their praise.

‘Oh my God,’ breathed Tess, when she returned from a loo break to see Kate in the final outfit.

‘It’s amazing,’ said Elaine.

Kate, too, was stunned by her reflection. She looked like Cinderella in the last picture in the Penguin fairy-tale book she and Tess had shared as children. At least, from the neck down she did. Her waist was tiny.

‘In comparison to the skirt,’ Heidi kindly pointed out.

‘The back looks wonderful,’ said Kate’s mother.

‘Like I said,’ Heidi chipped in, ‘no back fat.’

‘You look like a princess,’ said Tess.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Kate. ‘You know this dress weighs almost three stone?’

‘It’s my favourite,’ said her mother.

‘I’m getting married in a register office.’

‘I always tell my ladies,’ interrupted Heidi, ‘that no matter where you’re getting married, you want to make sure people know you’re the bride.’

‘I don’t think anyone would make a mistake if I wore this frock. It’s much too much for me. Even Lady Gaga couldn’t pull this one off.’

‘Oh, Kate!’ Elaine suddenly sobbed. ‘It’s so wonderful!’

Kate and Tess looked towards their mother. The Kleenex were out and the waterworks were off. Tess wrapped her arms round Elaine, but Kate, stuck on that stupid crate in a dress that weighed three stone, was powerless to move. She didn’t dare.

‘Oh, Mum,’ she said. ‘Mum. Please. Please don’t cry. It’s supposed to be a happy occasion.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Elaine. ‘I am happy really. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to see you get married. It means so much to me to know that someone’s going to promise to care for you for the rest of your life. I can end my life in peace. I’ve got cancer,’ she explained to Heidi.

‘What?’ said Kate.

The definitiveness with which their mother announced her diagnosis was a shock for both Kate and her sister. Weren’t they supposed to be waiting for the results of the biopsy? Now Tess burst into tears too.

‘I’ve never seen so much crying,’ said Heidi.

‘You look like an angel in that dress, my love. You have never looked more beautiful. I think that’s the one,’ Kate’s mother added before making a trumpeting snort into a fistful of tissues.

‘It is the one,’ Tess agreed through her tears. ‘Definitely. You’ve got to have it.’

And that was how Kate came to be the proud owner of a genuine meringue.

Kate and her family were so busy being emotional that they didn’t notice Diana step out of her changing room in the exact same Giovanni Lucciani dress. Diana’s eyes narrowed as she took in the familiar coloured ribbons on the back of Kate’s bodice. She had assumed something so expensive and intricate could only be a one-off, but no, there was a sample in a large size too, goddamnit. Diana could barely contain her annoyance. First Rat Face and now this. Was it really too much to ask for something unique?

All the same, Diana allowed Melanie to help her step up onto another upturned crate to better show off the skirt. She stood with a dancer’s poise as Melanie pulled the ribbons at the back of the bodice as tight as they would go.

Diana asked her mother for a hair clip from her handbag. With it, she gathered her chestnut hair up into a loose chignon that showed off her well-toned shoulders. Thank you, Pilates. She turned this way and that, checking her reflection from all angles. Susie and Nicole cooed their approval.

‘It’s beautiful with your skin tone,’ said Nicole.

Melanie stood on another crate in order to be able to fasten the cathedral-length veil, the perfect accessory.

‘Ben isn’t going to know what hit him,’ said Susie.

‘Especially if I can get those Swarovski Louboutins to go with it,’ Diana agreed. ‘They cost well over a grand.’

‘Your dad will be delighted to get you those shoes, I’m sure.’

‘How much is this dress again?’ Diana asked Melanie.

Diana didn’t even blink when Melanie answered, ‘Two thousand pounds . . . It’s more expensive than the others you’ve just tried on because of the flowers on the bodice. Each one of those roses has to be stitched together by hand.’

‘So you’re telling me that even though that other girl is wearing the same dress, they’re not
exactly
identical.’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK.’

Satisfied that she was wearing a dress better than the older bride, Diana told her mother, ‘This is the one for me.’ While Melanie scuttled off to gather the paperwork, Diana posed for a while longer on her crate, basking in what she perceived to be the envious looks of the other women in the salon. Rat Face, skinny from years of worrying and smoking, could come nowhere near this sort of perfection. Meanwhile, the older bride slunk back into her changing room and emerged in a pair of ill-fitting jeans that showed her big arse in all its glory. Round one of Bride Wars to Diana Ashcroft.

Chapter Eleven

Back in London, Kate wondered what on earth had possessed her to put down a deposit for a dress Richard Branson might have filled with hot air and taken to the moon. She didn’t dare tell Ian what had happened. Though both of them made good money – great money, in fact – she had a feeling that he would be unimpressed by the idea that she had spent the cost of a damn good holiday on a dress she would wear for at best half a day. They were supposed to be getting married at a register office in March and following that with lunch at one of their favourite restaurants. If she told Ian about the dress, he would think she had gone mad. Ian’s theory, casually aired to Kate’s brother-in-law, that inside every girl was a Bridezilla just waiting to come out would be proved to be true.

In any case, there was more to think about than a dress. Kate had just a month left in her current job. There were an awful lot of loose ends to be tied up before she could go on gardening leave. And now there was her mother’s biopsy to think about too. If the news turned out to be as bad as Elaine seemed certain it would be, Kate had a feeling she would be spending much of her gardening leave in Washam. All that seemed far more real than planning a wedding.

It still hadn’t quite sunk into Kate’s brain that she was going to get married. Perhaps it was simply that work and her mother’s health were much more pressing, but perhaps it was that Kate was finding it hard to shake years of not even daring to dream that she would one day find herself engaged. After she and Dan broke up for the last time, Kate had rather given up on the idea of ever being in a long-term relationship again, let alone getting married. But then she met Ian, and now she was going to have a wedding, albeit a full decade later than ‘the norm’.

‘Has hell frozen over?’ asked one of her college friends when she telephoned to tell him the news. Even her very best female friends – Helen and Anne, who had known her since the three of them had rocked up at Cambridge, aged eighteen – agreed that they wouldn’t have put money on this particular outcome, though they were absolutely delighted, of course.

But no matter how often Kate kept pinching herself, expecting the status quo to be restored at any moment, Ian was still there beside her when she woke up in the morning. He had been beside her for only eleven months but already it was starting to feel as though Kate had never been without him. She certainly never wanted to be without him again. Spending the rest of her life with him should be a breeze.

When people asked how they met, Ian would say, ‘In a bar.’ He wouldn’t be drawn any further. Ian liked to keep things simple. Plus, he was slightly embarrassed by the truth.

‘Your version of events makes me sound like an alcoholic nympho who hangs around in public places waiting for unsuspecting men,’ Kate protested, but Ian did not want people to know they had met through a dating site.

Kate had no such qualms, though she found that when she said, ‘We met on Sugardaddy.com,’ people were generally too amused to ask for the whole truth, which was that she and Ian had found one another on Guardian Soulmates. Perhaps it wasn’t as romantic as eyes across a room, but, realistically, where else would she have met her match at such a late stage in the game? The pool Kate could fish from had dwindled dramatically during the four years she had wasted with Dan. She just didn’t meet single men any more. She didn’t have a wing-woman with whom to go clubbing. Most of her friends had long since paired up and were on to their second, third or even fourth babies. Kate’s social diary was all fortieth birthday parties and christenings. She hadn’t been invited to a wedding in years. The choice was simple: it was sign up or never have sex again for the rest of her life.