Married By Christmas (2 page)

Almost One Year Later

Chapter One

Something was not quite right, Liv thought, as she watched Tom squirming in his pale gold upholstered Queen Anne chair while Anna fretted. Anna was dressed as immaculately as ever, her blonde hair tied in a chignon at the nape of her neck, her taupe patent leather heels exactly the same shade as her skirt suit. Liv thought – as she often did – that Anna looked like a cross between Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe, though she had been as careful as ever to attempt to hide her bombshell curves behind sophisticated clothes. Anna always worried that people would think she was nothing more than a dumb blonde, but it was a foolish person indeed that made the assumption.

Liv glanced down at her own pair of grubby Converse and wondered, not for the first time in her life, how it was Anna always managed to look like a princess in waiting, no matter what the occasion, while Liv always looked – as her mother had persisted in telling her fondly, since she was about five years old – like she had been dragged through a hedge backwards. Really it should have been the other way around. Anna was the one who had turned up at school halfway through the autumn term, aged nine, having been taken into care and placed in a local kids’ home. While Liv’s family was like one out of a storybook: her parents owned a large detached house with a big garden, were kind and loving and would do anything for her. Liv had grown up with the sure and certain knowledge that she would almost always get whatever she asked Santa for (except for the pet python – she never did get that).

Liv still remembered vividly the day that Anna had arrived. Before the new girl had been brought into the class, their teacher had given them a long speech about sparrows. It had been something to do with a flock of brown sparrows, who one day were joined by a single white sparrow, who, because it was a bit different and not brown, they eventually pecked to death, for reasons that were decidedly unclear. Neither Liv nor any of her other classmates could work out what this possibly had to do with them, until eventually their weary and sparrow-pecked teacher came straight out with the news that Anna was living in a children’s home. Thirty nine-year-olds had all but rubbed their hands together with glee as they anticipated the arrival of their new disen-franchised victim, who was bound to be a target for torment if ever there was one. But when Anna arrived she hadn’t been anything like what they were expecting, even then, fresh from all she had been through.

Yes, her uniform was worn out and second-hand, and her shoes had clearly been bought from a supermarket, but with her long golden hair rippling down her back, Anna had stood tall and proud before them, as Miss Healy introduced her, radiating a mixture of sadness and dignity that had made all the boys fall in love with her at once and all the girls want to be her best friend. Why Anna had picked Liv for the latter position, Liv still didn’t know. Liv had never looked like a storybook princess. At age nine, her thick, unruly dark-brown hair had been cut short and spiky like a boy’s by her own stubby nail-bitten hands, after deciding she longer wished to brush her hair. Her school uniform was always awry and her expensive shoes always scuffed two minutes out of the box. Yet she would be eternally glad that Anna had chosen her to be her friend. That morning at break the two of them had formed an instant and indestructible bond, which had lasted their whole lives since, eventually resulting in them becoming more like sisters. Chalk and cheese they might be, but Liv knew Anna would do anything for her, and she would do the same for her friend, no matter what it cost her. Which was why Tom’s strange and distinctly un-Tom like behaviour today worried her deeply. The wedding was imminent. If anything were to go wrong now, well, Liv was sure that Anna would never recover.

As Anna waited, tapping one perfectly manicured forefinger on the arm of her chair, for the venue’s flower arranger to present her with her vision for the table arrangements, Liv knew that Tom’s discomfort wouldn’t have escaped her notice. And that as they sat here, in the very room where in a little over a week’s time they would all be toasting Anna and Tom’s union, she was more than aware that Tom looked restless, anxious, like he had somewhere much more important to be. Which didn’t make sense, Liv thought, uneasily. Tom adored Anna. He had done since the moment he’d set eyes on her, around eighteen months ago when Liv had invited her new friend from her kick-boxing class to her birthday party. And it was hardly surprising – most men, when first confronted with Anna’s mass of thick golden hair, her curvy figure and long legs, were usually blown away. Then when they got to know her they’d find she had intellect and humour in equal abundance. But then soon after that, that she was obsessively organised and a little bit controlling. Actually extremely controlling. Not that it was Anna’s fault really. It was her way of adjusting to the chaos of her childhood, Liv understood that, but until Tom there had never been a man in Anna’s life who got it.

Tom though had stuck around, and the more he had gotten to know Anna, the more he liked her. Anna’s lists, her plans, her constant striving for perfection and her need to control almost everything around her, frightened most men off within weeks, despite how beautiful she was. And if she’d been asked to put money on it, Liv would have thought that sporty, but super easy-going and relaxed Tom would have been running a mile from her obsessive compulsive friend within weeks. Instead, he’d seemed intrigued by her, in turn fascinated and amused. Gradually, Liv had watched her new friend fall in love with her oldest and best friend. Aware that their lives were about to change for ever, Liv had done her best to conceal her mixed emotions as Anna and Tom grew ever closer, knowing that if anyone deserved a man like Tom, it was Anna. They were so good together, everybody thought so. So why did Tom now seem so distracted so near the wedding?

‘So,’ Jean the florist was telling Anna, as she opened a rather dog-eared and aged-looking photo album. ‘For a Christmas wedding, my brides usually love this combination of holly, ivy and mistletoe displayed in this fishbowl vase. It looks very very festive and yet modern and chic.’

It was Liv’s turn to squirm as she watched Anna stare blankly at a photograph of someone else’s wedding.

‘I don’t think,’ Anna said very slowly and sweetly, ‘that flowers in fishbowls are
quite
for me, not that they are not lovely for some people. It’s just that if you remember my email, sent to you on the eighteenth of November at fifteen forty-eight, you’ll recall that I asked for roses? Big fat red roses?’ Anna unleashed her best smile, reserved for the people that were testing her compulsive need to have everything exactly the way she wanted it the very most. ‘Here, let me give you a copy, because sometimes those pesky little emails just wander off and go missing, don’t they?’ Anna produced her wedding folder, an orange highlighter pen from her special highlighter-pen pocket in her bag, and retrieved a copy of said email from the dated files marked ‘Correspondence (Venue)’ which she passed to Jean. ‘So let’s just go through this, shall we? As you can see, it’s composed in easy-to-read bullet points …’

Jean blinked at Anna, and closed her photo album with a distinct slap, clearly offended that her trademark ‘festive plants in fishbowls’ weren’t considered to be up to standard. This was her fault, Liv thought, momentarily distracted from Tom’s odd behaviour by Anna’s anxiety. Not that Anna’s face wasn’t a picture of serenity. But Liv knew the signs and knew the murderous thoughts that were almost certainly running through Anna’s head. She should have made her delegate more.

‘You can’t try and do everything,’ Liv had told her the day Anna had broken the news of the wedding. It was last New Year’s Eve. Liv had got back to the flat first, glad to have escaped her lovely, but energy-zapping family, and to finally be back home with a precious week off work to do nothing but watch bad TV and eat the poor quality junk food that she would never in a million years dream of admitting she loved. She’d just put the kettle on, and lined up a family-sized bag of Wotsits, when Anna let herself in the door. For once she had been without Tom.

‘Happy New Year!’ Anna had said, bounding into the kitchen. ‘How’s the family, did they miss me? I missed them. Tom’s family is lovely, but it’s an awful chore having to be on my best behaviour for all those days and not reorganise the kitchen or colour code their airing cupboard.’ Liv had been about to respond when Anna had hugged her literally off her feet and spun her round. ‘Why am I wittering on, Liv … this is going to be the best year ever because … Oh Liv! I’m getting married! To Tom! He asked me to marry him and it wasn’t a joke or anything, he meant it and everything and I said yes!’

‘Wow!’ Liv had said, her eyes widening as the news slowly sunk in and she got a breath back. ‘Wow, Anna. Wow.’

‘Are you pleased?’ Anna had asked her, not able to fail to notice the distinct lack of enthusiasm in her ‘wows.’

‘I am, of course I am,’ Liv said, willing herself to catch up with the news. ‘It’s just … Oh that’s amazing news. I’m so happy for you. You’re going to be married! To Tom!’

The two women had hugged again, and the second time Liv put on a much better show of being pleased, because this was Anna, and she wanted to be pleased for Anna.

‘I know,’ Anna had said, skipping a tiny bit. ‘And there is so much to do! Think of the lists! And the pie charts, and I’m certainly going to need a spreadsheet and maybe a PowerPoint presentation!’ She rubbed her hands together in glee. ‘I’m going to need millions of Post-it notes, all the colours!’

Immediately, Anna set about making lists, sitting on the living-room floor of the flat they shared, with a newly bought bound notebook and a set of coloured biros, which she must have picked up on the way home for just this purpose.

‘We’re supposed to be going out, remember? Dancing? Bringing in the New Year? Not making lists that can easily wait until tomorrow,’ Liv had said, a touch petulantly. ‘Especially as this will be our last
ever
single girl New Year, Anna.’

‘I know, and we will, I promise. But just let me make a pre-list. A list of lists, please, Liv. You know how excited I get by a new notebook.’

Sighing, Liv had sat down on the floor next to her friend, crossing her legs, noticing a hole in the seam on the inside thigh of her leggings, and tugging at it to make it a bit bigger.

‘I’m really pleased for you and everything,’ she’d said, despite the heavy weight that was descending steadily downwards in her chest.

‘But?’ Anna looked up at her, her pen hovering mid-air.

‘But what?’ Liv asked.

‘That sentence was definitely going to end in a “but”,’ Anna said. ‘“I’m really pleased for you and everything but …” But what? Please, please, don’t say you’re not happy for me and you don’t love Tom, because if you don’t approve you realise I can’t marry him, don’t you? Your disapproval could seriously ruin my life, here.’

Liv had sighed, picking up the blue biro and slotting the lid of the green one onto it, just because she knew it would drive Anna mad.

Honestly, she couldn’t quite make sense of her own feelings at that moment, and although Anna was quite right, there was a ‘but’, a massive huge ‘but’, it wasn’t exactly one that she could communicate then, or indeed ever now that Anna and Tom were forever. Because you didn’t do that, you didn’t tell your best friend moments after they told you they were getting married that you were really pleased for them and everything BUT you’d been secretly in love with their fiancé since the first moment you’d set eyes on him, weeks before he’d even met Anna. Or that you’d only invited him to your birthday party, and made a fool of yourself by wearing an actual dress, because you’d rather hoped that it would be you he’d be kissing passionately on the sofa at ten to two the next morning, and not your flatmate and best friend. (And the person who had always best fitted the description of soulmate.) No, you definitely did not add that particular ‘but’ to the end of that particular sentence in response to that particular announcement. Not unless you were OK for life as you knew it to end for ever and ever less than sixty seconds later.

Liv really had done her best to get rid of her feelings for Tom as he became more and more of an integral part of Anna’s life, really she had. She had told herself it was just another silly futile crush in a long line of silly futile crushes, exactly like the time she’d decided she was in love with Marcus upstairs, even though Marcus upstairs was living very happily and very monogamously with his life partner, Brian. But the truth was the more Liv got to know Tom, the deeper and more hopeless her affections became.

And now it felt like she was losing both the people she most cared about in the world for ever and there was nothing for it but to keep her chin up, have a stiff upper lip, be the kind of best friend that Anna always was to her and continue to let Tom treat her like one of the blokes down the pub, even ever so occasionally giving her short dark hair an affectionate ruffle, like she was his kid brother. There really was nothing else for it but to ride it out until the ache in her heart finally faded, only it was now almost a year on and Liv still felt exactly the same.

‘But …’ Liv had said heavily last New Year’s Eve. ‘If you take on organising every aspect of your own wedding with the same crazy controlling freakery you do everything else, you
will
literally explode. Take it as read that I’ll help you. You just need to concentrate on the things that really matter. Like getting drunk with your oldest friend in about an hour’s time?’

‘It
all
matters!’ Anna had said, distracted. ‘Right, blue for the dress, green for the venue, red for flowers, black for catering, or do you think pink for the dress?’

‘Er, we are caterers,’ Liv reminded her. ‘I’ll cater your wedding. I might even give you a discount.’

‘But you are the chief bridesmaid!’ Anna had exclaimed. ‘You can’t be cooking in puffed sleeves and an Empire line dress!’

‘Firstly,’ Liv had said, ‘thank you for asking me, I’m honoured, and, secondly, over my dead body will there be puffed sleeves and, thirdly, I will plan your menus, I will pay for it, I will prep it and then we can let our loyal staff cook it for you, and come to the evening do. It can be the Simple Pleasures wedding gift to you, after all, without all your hard work I’d still be doing Sunday roasts in a pub.’