Kate's Wedding (7 page)

Kate actually passed over Ian’s profile the first time she saw it. He hadn’t included a photograph and the computer declared them to be just a 20 per cent match. Despite such a damning assessment, Ian wrote to her anyway, and through his emails he soon set himself apart from the crowd. He was polite and thoughtful. There was none of the innuendo that she had come to expect. He didn’t seem to be trying to gauge whether she might be up for a one-night stand. Ian said in his profile that he was looking for a serious relationship and he approached their early acquaintance accordingly. Kate was glad. The week before Ian started writing to her, she had become embroiled in a furious email slanging match with a man who accused her of being a ‘frigid bitch with an agenda’ because she asked if she could have his phone number in preference to giving him hers for the sake of personal safety. In that context, perhaps it was easy for Ian to seem refreshingly normal. Whatever, by the time Ian let Kate see his photo, she was already sold. She knew she would definitely meet him.

Ian’s behaviour on their first date was equally gentlemanly. He was waiting for her when she arrived at the bar where they agreed to meet for a drink. He said he had been there for fifteen minutes already to make sure she didn’t find herself alone. He didn’t want her to feel awkward. Kate appreciated that. She had chosen a drink at a bar as the safe option. As a veteran of Internet dates, she knew only too well that what seemed promising online could quickly turn into a nightmare when you brought it into the real world. She was determined not to be stuck spending a whole evening with a man whose conversation began and ended with the Inland Revenue, for example, as had happened the month before.

So Kate had made sure she had another appointment lined up. She had arranged to meet Helen for dinner at a restaurant close by. If this meeting with Ian went badly, then at least she and Helen would have something to laugh about later. So Kate was pleased and surprised to find that she and Ian had far from run out of conversation by the time the moment to leave rolled around. Quite the opposite, in fact; it was hard to drag herself away. Over dinner, she found herself telling happily married Helen that she thought she might have met someone
really
nice.

‘Oh, yeah? You thought Dan was “really nice” at the beginning,’ Helen reminded her. Helen had held Kate’s hand through her many break-ups from Dan, from the first one, which had only lasted for a week, until the last, which had been surprisingly permanent. Kate often wished she’d taken Helen’s advice to give Dan up as a lost cause far earlier.

‘No, really. He is nothing like Dan.’

‘Well,’ said Helen, ‘I’m glad to see you looking so excited. Just promise me you’ll be careful. Take it easy. At least make sure he’s not married before you sleep with him.’

‘He’s definitely not married,’ said Kate. ‘I think he’s just a straightforward nice guy who’s been too busy setting up his career to settle down. He’s the kind of guy you always said I should look for.’

Helen picked up her glass. ‘I’ll raise a toast to that.’

The second date, for which Kate allowed a whole evening, was just as lovely. Kate was impressed by Ian’s modesty, even though throughout the course of the meal it became clear that he had done some pretty impressive stuff with his life. He was very successful in his career. He was a partner in a big accountancy firm. He had grown up in Telford and was the first member of his family to go to university. He hadn’t forgotten his roots, though. He saw his family often. He doted on his nephews, his sister’s boys.

By the end of the second date, Kate knew that she really,
really
liked this ordinary man and would definitely be seeing him again. It was just so easy to be with him. Dates three, four and five totally restored her faith in single men.

With Ian, there was none of the usual trauma she associated with early dates. He called when he said he would. He always wanted to know what she was doing at the weekend. This experience was a world away from the nightmare of the early days with Dan. Kate remembered one horrible Sunday when she and Dan had arranged to have lunch together. He had promised to call first thing on Sunday with the plan. He didn’t call until two o’clock, by which time Kate had already made herself a sandwich. Dan blamed his flakiness on the trauma of his divorce.

‘I find it very hard to be pinned down,’ he said.

‘It’s hardly being pinned down,’ Kate tried. ‘If you ask someone to have lunch on a Sunday, they in return expect you to call and tell them when and where before one o’clock on the Sunday afternoon.’

Ian had no psychological excuses for bad behaviour because, it seemed, he simply had no intention of behaving badly.

After they’d been dating for about three months, Kate and Ian went on a mini-break to Copenhagen. They spent three nights in a charming hotel right by the port.

‘This is the first time we’ve spent three nights in a row together,’ Kate pointed out. ‘Do you think we could go for four?’

‘I think we could go for a whole lot more than four,’ said Ian.

Kate had forgotten – or perhaps she had never really known – just how easy a relationship could be. Ian was constantly thinking of ways to amuse her. One morning, having stayed over, he left a note in her fridge, on a Post-it stuck to the milk.

‘You are lovely,’ was all it said.

It was such a simple little gesture, but it reduced Kate to happy tears. There were so many moments like that.

Kate hadn’t really expected to find love through a website. It seemed too clinical a medium ever to inspire grand passion. She had thought that Dan was the love of her life. Certainly, no one had ever brought out in her such a range of emotions. However, as time passed, she began to realise that as far as Dan was concerned, her overriding emotion had actually been frustration. Frustration that he just didn’t seem able to move their relationship forward. Frustration that after four years he still hadn’t introduced her to his children, who were by that time seventeen and nineteen, and doubtless had much more to worry about than whether or not their father was dating again.

Ian would not make Kate feel frustrated. At least, not in the same way.

There was only one small seed of doubt in Kate’s mind: Ian was very different from the men Kate had dated before. Her preference had always been for tortured, soulful types. By contrast Ian was remarkably simple. His approach to life was in fact so simple that about six months in, Kate wondered if she would be bored, but as Tess pointed out, she’d had an awful lot of practice with the tortured, soulful types and none of it had got her anywhere near the altar.

‘Easy is good. Just go with it,’ Tess had advised her.

Almost a year after their first date, Kate was still going with it and it was working out very well indeed.

For once she was glad she had taken her sister’s advice.

Chapter Twelve

Diana thought that people who had to resort to Internet dating must be profoundly sad. She couldn’t begin to imagine how terrible it must be to have to sift for a partner among strangers online. She herself had never had a problem finding a date. At junior school, she was always the first girl in her class to get a Valentine. One year, she had seven. The trend of adoration continued when she moved up to a private secondary school. At the end of her second year there, Diana was voted ‘Most Beautiful Girl in School’ by the boys in the year above.

Diana’s only problem was that a girl with as much to offer as she had needed a really special man. During Diana’s teenage years, boyfriends were picked up and discarded for all manner of reasons: not good-looking enough, not rich enough, not well connected enough in the nightclubs around town . . . Very few lasted for more than a month. From the age of twenty to twenty-three, Diana dated a nightclub promoter, but she dropped him when he said he had no intention of getting married before he hit fifty. (He was twenty-five.) Diana was not prepared to wait around.

She had hoped that ditching the promoter would be the wake-up call he needed. When he didn’t immediately give in to her demands, Diana knew she needed a different strategy. The strategy was to make him jealous. The man she intended to use to make him jealous was Ben.

Diana had been aware of Ben for years. He’d been in the year above her at secondary school. She’d seen him making gooey eyes at her in the corridors. She’d never returned the honour, because back then he just wasn’t cool enough to warrant her attention, but now Ben was back in Southampton after three years away at university and three years working in London and the geeky boy she remembered had blossomed into an altogether more attractive prospect. Having gained experience while running the student union, Ben was promoting a new club to rival Diana’s ex-lover’s. Diana and Nicole went along to the opening night and Diana quickly made her interest known.

Having reintroduced herself to Ben and spent half an hour putting in the spadework of making sure he knew that he might be in with a chance, Diana set about leading him a merry dance, which included insisting on a rendezvous at her ex-boyfriend’s club night. Mesmerised by any hint of attention from the most beautiful girl in school, Ben would have followed Diana anywhere. It took three months for him to get her into bed. The very next day, Diana had Ben take her for Sunday lunch at her ex-boyfriend’s local. She just about managed to hide her fury when her ex told her, ‘I’m glad you’re moving on.’

Faced with that obvious uninterest, Diana convinced herself that she
was
actually moving on. Rather than viewing Ben as a stepping stone to getting her ex back, she started to look for evidence that she had in fact traded up. He was good-looking. He was from a great family. One of his cousins had trialled for the Chelsea youth team. Plus, he was just starting out as a promoter. He had a glittering career ahead of him, she was sure.

But Ben’s club-promotion career never quite took off. There were problems with drug-dealing and underage drinking. The police were there night after night. It was possible that Diana’s ex had set him up. For whatever reason, Ben decided that the life of a promoter wasn’t for him. He diverted more energy into his day job in IT.

When Ben announced that he was retiring from the club scene, Diana was disappointed not to be the girlfriend of a promoter any more, but she decided that being the partner of an IT expert might be just as good. Certainly, Ben made more money at his day job. His bonuses were quite impressive. She was very happy to cruise around town in his big, new Audi. As she entered her late twenties, Diana was increasingly aware of competition in the form of younger girls. It was time to settle down, Diana decided. With her behind him, Ben could achieve great things. They could make it work.

Surprisingly, though Diana had always considered herself to be the ‘bigger catch’, Ben seemed as reluctant to make things official as Diana’s ex had been. Eventually, she persuaded him that it was worth their buying a house. Panicked by the seemingly inexorable rise of house prices, Ben had agreed. However, he didn’t really have enough to buy the kind of place that Diana wanted. It was with help from Diana’s father that they bought a new-build four-bedroomed house at the very height of the market.

After that, Diana concentrated her efforts on getting an engagement ring. She spoke glowingly of the advantages of marriage. She invited her married friends over all the time, as though to prove to Ben that settling down needn’t mean an end to having fun. Still Ben resisted. He said they were too young.

The last thing Diana expected was for her big break to come in the shape of Ben’s infidelity. Had she known how it would play out, she might have tried an ultimatum before. But perhaps it was the fact that her threat to leave Ben was so very real that this ultimatum worked.

‘I was so frightened you’d leave me,’ said Ben when Diana agreed to stay if and only if they got engaged.

Ben had no idea how frightened Diana had been that she would be the one who ended up on a dating site. She was nearing thirty and she had no intention of passing that milestone alone. She was never going to let him go.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Oh my God!’

The busy showroom of Bride on Time was brought to a halt by a scream from the backroom.

‘OhmiGod, ohmiGod, ohmiGod.’

Sarah, who, at twenty-three years old, was the youngest of the three full-time bridal consultants, came out of the backroom flapping her hands and hyperventilating. She couldn’t get her words out. She skipped round the salon three times before Melanie pulled up a chair and pushed her down into it.

‘Whatever’s the matter?’

A bridal consultant gone loopy would not be good for business. The showroom was packed that afternoon. Four brides and their attendants all stopped and stared.

On the chair, Sarah continued to fight to find the breath to speak. She fanned her face with a Pronovias catalogue. She mouthed words but made no sound.

‘Sarah? Sarah? Whatever is up?’ Melanie asked.

‘You’re not going to believe it,’ Sarah said at last. ‘They’re getting married.’

An awful lot of people who came to Bride on Time were getting married, Melanie pointed out. ‘Who?’

‘Prince William and Kate Middleton. There’s an announcement on the
Mail
’s website!’

One of the brides being fitted that afternoon had an iPhone. She quickly tapped through to the
Daily Mail
’s website. It was true. The palace had announced the young couple’s engagement just that afternoon.

‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ said Melanie. The phone was passed around. There was much cooing over the royal fiancée and her prince. The good feeling generated by the news was palpable. There wasn’t a woman in the room who didn’t remember Prince William as the child behind his mother’s coffin and for that reason alone everyone automatically wished him every happiness.