Revenge of the Wedding Planner (19 page)

‘I’m so sorry I had a go at her in the snack bar,’ I said quietly during a gap between sobs. ‘Was all of this something to do with me? Did I trigger it?’

‘What have
you
done?’ Alexander asked me, his eyes blinking non-stop to hold back the tears.

‘Did she not say?’ I muttered, trying to sound all innocent and clueless.

I hadn’t told Alexander about the disastrous meeting with Emma at the university. I hadn’t told anyone. Secrecy again, you see. I was becoming very secretive. That’s one of the peculiar things about getting older – you simply don’t feel any great need to explain your actions to other people. Younger women will blab everything to anyone who’ll listen, but we more than make up for it when we hit forty.

‘I tried to persuade her to start eating normally, son,’ I told him in a soothing voice.

‘You what?’ he yelped.

‘I said she needed to focus on the pregnancy and that we’d support her any way we could, and we’d help her to find a good therapist. I had no choice, Alexander. She was in denial about her anorexia.’

‘No, she wasn’t anorexic,’ he said crossly. ‘She was doing her best to be healthy, that’s all. She was eating crackers
and soup instead of fast food. Sometimes, when she’d been working out more than usual, she ate a whole salad.’

Bill and I exchanged looks. Alexander was in denial too, by the sounds of it. I wondered how he’d ever found Emma attractive in the first place, but I daresay the boys are affected by all this ‘heroin-chic’ bunkum as much as the girls are.

‘Thank you so much for coming over to tell us,’ I said to Emma’s parents, after we’d just had the longest cup of tea in history. I’ll never forget the strangled gulps we all made as we sat around staring at my Gothic candlestick collection. Now I was fidgeting to get them out of the house so I could mull over my own thoughts in private. ‘We all hope she gets better soon.’

‘Can I visit her?’ Alexander said as they were getting into their car.

It had begun to pour with rain and there was even a touch of thunder and lightning.

‘I’m sorry, Alexander,’ said Emma’s father sadly. ‘Emma doesn’t want to see anyone at the moment. She says she’s too fat for visitors.’

Fat?

Bill closed his eyes.

‘Oh,’ Alexander said lamely. ‘I see. Well, tell her I said hello, won’t you? And do tell her I love her more than anything in the world. And if she wants to get back with me, she can still live here in the drawing room as we planned. Mum and Dad won’t mind. Will you?’

He looked at us with tears in his eyes. We both nodded enthusiastically.

‘Thanks, Mum. Thanks, Dad.’

Alexander looked so pleased. As if he were giving Emma the moon on a stick. With his parents’ permission too! As if our drawing room was the equivalent of a four-bed villa with sea views, and the sheer luxury of it all would bounce Emma clean out of her eating disorder.

Bill hung his head in shame. I knew what he was thinking. If it were him, he would have got the address of the clinic out of Emma’s dad at knifepoint, if need be. And gone straight over to London and got himself arrested, trying to break in.

‘The thing is,’ Emma’s father said, ‘the doctors don’t want Emma to see anyone she cares about for the time being. She’s channelling all her energy into telling lies, they say. And really, she ought to be given “time out” to realize that telling lies to everyone about her food intake won’t actually save her from starving to death. Neither will wearing baggy shirts or drinking lots of water before she’s weighed.’

I could have told them all that months ago. I was out a fortune on bottled water when Emma and Alexander first got together. Emma wouldn’t drink tap water in our house in case it was contaminated with chemicals or, even worse, sugar.

The rain was coming down in sheets by this stage so Bill dragged Alexander and me back to the house. We stood in the doorway and waved Emma’s parents off like it had all been a jolly-old, happy-old, ordinary visit.

‘Cheerio and drive carefully! By-eee!’

I tidied away cups and saucers and wiped crumbs off
my nice blue butler’s tray, far too upset to cry or give out to anyone. Wishing with all my heart I hadn’t got our old cot down from the attic and cleaned it up a few weeks earlier. Maybe I’d cursed the pregnancy by preparing the cot in advance, I thought to myself. Like the wicked fairy in one of those hackneyed old stories they keep printing because the copyright ran out centuries ago. But I didn’t say anything to Bill about my superstitions. He would have thought I was crazy. After all, he is a ‘no silly nonsense’ Protestant.

Alexander was flat-lining with depression that night and, strangely enough, so was Bill. He wept and wept for hours in our ivory bedroom and said it was all his fault for not being more supportive at the time. If only he’d bought the mini-kitchen and the compact bathroom sooner, Emma might have calmed down a bit, Bill said. If only we’d all left her alone and not watched every mouthful of food she ate, he fretted. I told him it was inevitable Emma would lose the baby when she wasn’t eating properly and it was a miracle she ever got pregnant in the first place.

‘There was nothing we could have done to help her,’ I said sadly. ‘You can’t command a person to stop thinking they’re fat when their ribs are sticking out like plates. Can you? It’s just not going to work. I don’t know why I even bothered trying to talk to her in the university canteen that day. She should have had professional help a long time ago, darling, and at least now she’s in a safe place and hopefully she can start to make some progress.’

‘Do you think the pregnancy would have made her even weaker?’ said Bill.

‘I really don’t know. I expect it would have been very tiring.’

And so on. But the truth was, the baby was gone and Emma might soon be going the same way herself. And for what? Fashion? So she could fit into a pair of jeans designed for a seven-year-old child? God almighty, it’s pathetic. What sort of an achievement is that, for heaven’s sake? Is it really the so-called fashionistas that are to blame for this nightmare trend? Or was Emma just depressed and stressed out with life in general? And she’d channelled her anxiety into food issues when really it could have been anything. OCD, shoplifting, alcohol, premium-rate psychic chatlines? God be with the days when all you had to do was scrape a couple of ‘C’ grades in your A levels and fill in the entrance form for Manchester Polytechnic. And remember to line your stomach with a lamb kebab before downing seven pints of cider in the Students’ Union. I mean, we had stress back then too, but there was more of a feeling of camaraderie. You know, more ‘power to the people’? Now, everything has become so disjointed.

Bill and I climbed into bed and he laid his head on my chest and cried until he fell asleep. It’s quite alarming when a man cries, isn’t it? I mean, really lets rip and sobs his heart out? Women can go psycho every day of the week and nobody bats an eyelid. We’re all used to it. But grown men gasping for breath between racking great wails? No way. We’re not used to seeing our menfolk displaying raw grief in this country. I kept telling Bill everything would be all right but we both knew I was bluffing. I massaged his lovely, dome-shaped head and
his shoulders and after a while he calmed down and drifted off. I lay awake for hours, though, with a worrying sensation in my heart, as if it might stop beating if I stopped concentrating on it. Eventually, as the dawn was filtering through the bedroom curtains, I fell asleep too.

Alexander went to our family GP for anti-depressants a day or two later but the doctor told him his depression was reactionary, not clinical, and that time would heal him instead. Wise words from the good doctor but unfortunately Alexander decided he’d had enough stress for the time being. There was a bout of work experience coming up and he said he just couldn’t face it. He dropped out of university the following week, saying what was the point in designing beautiful buildings when the world was so messed-up and horrible? Bill told him that was okay. Alexander could give up his architecture degree if he wanted but would he mind going along on a plumbing job now and then to help out? It was Bill’s way of reaching out to his eldest son, I suppose. And so began Alexander’s apprenticeship as a plumber.

Grimsdale & Son.

It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

13. Rock Chicks and Vampires

So while Alexander was fighting off black despair and Alicia-Rose was making her plans to fly the nest, what was Julie doing? Well, you might ask! She was diligently nursing Gary in the farmhouse each evening, working mornings in the lighthouse with me and spending her afternoons asleep in a multiple-orgasm-induced coma at her all-mod-cons apartment in Saintfield. She and Jay were completely obsessed with one another by then.

‘We did it standing up in Castle Court shopping centre yesterday afternoon,’ she told me one day, carefully unwrapping a cinnamon bagel.

‘Did you?’ I said. ‘Was Jay overcome with lust in La Senza?’

‘Yeah, he was, actually. How did you know? In the car park, it was. In a darkened corner on the fourth floor. There was no one about and we just thought, why not?’

They’d only gone in to buy a new duvet.

‘We’re just like you and your Bill when you first got together,’ she kept saying. Like it was a competition or something.

‘Maybe you are,’ I said, thinking,
if
we’d had a luxury shag-pad of our own back then. Which we hadn’t, sadly. I didn’t see Bill naked until we were already married and living in that little terrace on the Ormeau Road. I was
eight months pregnant. I remember it like it was yesterday.

Oh, yes! Saucy moment! I forgot to tell you that when Bill finally saw the tattoo of the angel’s wings on my back he turned into an absolute sex-fiend. Threw his clothes down on the bedroom floor and ravished me there and then. Gosh, if I’d known the effect it would have on him, I’d have had it done a lot sooner. He said it was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen in real life, and we didn’t get out of bed all day. Even Andrew and Christopher were giving us funny looks the next morning when they went to catch the bus into town.

‘What’ve you two been up to?’ Andrew said crossly, hunting everywhere for his wallet. ‘There’s nothing to eat and the house is a mess.’

‘Oh, nothing in particular,’ I said innocently. ‘It’s just that with your father and me being so old and decrepit these days, we felt we needed to have a bit of a lie-down.’

Yeah, right!

However.

Whereas previously Julie had always spared me the gory details of her love life, saving them for the Coven, she now became quite vocal concerning her affair with Jay O’Hanlon, even though I didn’t say or do anything to encourage her. She was determined, it seemed, to tell me everything. For example, in the middle of lunch or when we were on a buying trip, she would just drop a saucy detail into the conversation. And then study my face to see what my reaction was. I think she was trying to shock me. It’s not like she had anything to prove. I mean, I
knew from the start she was a woman of the world and I didn’t care one way or the other. There’s worse things you can be than a lady of a certain age who’s lived and loved and can tell a few tales about it. But Julie seemed to think it was important I knew what she was up to.

‘Very nice touch,’ I said, nodding my head, when she told me he’d covered her nipples in melted chocolate and eaten it all off again when it’d dried. Or, ‘Did he really? How interesting,’ over the revelation he’d once left her tied to the bed (both ankles and wrists) while he nipped to the nearest pub for a pint of Guinness. I mean, what would’ve happened if there’d been a fire in the apartment? Or a burglar? Or if Jay’d been knocked down and killed on the way back? She might have starved to death on her own luxury mattress. But I’d go on sprinkling salt on my soup or whatever and say nothing about the risks she was taking. And Julie would smile back at me like we were two crazy chicks sharing some wild adventure.

They spent hours lying in the outsize bath together drinking ice-cold champagne, she told me. Listening to the Strokes, Jay’s favourite band. Kissing softly under the shower spray, sleeping naked on the fluffy rug in the sitting room with the gas fire keeping them warm, feeding each other chocolate ice cream and fresh strawberries, or salty fish and chips. Watching saucy films together in bed. Taking photographs of each other in various states of undress, various states of bondage. Their best effort was a shot of Julie lying topless on the bed, her wrists tied with a polka-dot silk scarf and Jay’s antique sword laid across her throat.

Utopia, really.

‘This isn’t a Hollywood movie, Julie,’ I said occasionally. When I forgot I was pretending I didn’t care what she got up to with Jay.

‘Yes, it is, Mags,’ she’d say. ‘It’s better.’

‘Don’t you feel guilty
at all
about the way you’re treating Gary?’ I asked her once. And only once. Remember this was Julie Sultana I was dealing with.

‘No, Mags,’ she said. ‘It’s only a bit of fun, kiddo. Lighten up.’

‘But don’t you worry Gary will find out about Jay and your secret apartment?’

‘No, why would he? Gary thinks I’m at work all day. And Jay rarely leaves the building.’

‘But you said you were black and blue from falling out of the shower last week.’ (Jay had squirted an entire bottle of luxury shower gel over Julie’s wet skin and when he grabbed her, she went shooting out of the shower like a torpedo.)

‘Gary never sees me naked these days,’ she said. ‘We can’t canoodle yet because his leg is so tender, still. And I don’t undress in front of him because that would be teasing.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ I sighed.

Well, you’ve got to admire the woman’s logic. I remember thinking to myself that men have been getting away with this kind of thing for centuries. Tasty bit on the side, tucked away in some cosy love nest on the outskirts. Someone interesting enough to chat to after sex but not smart enough to know they’re being taken for a ride. And now Julie was doing it too. Except I felt her affair with Jay was somehow unworthy of her. Simple as
that. She’s a very clever woman, is Julie, and she was only wasting her many talents ducking and diving between her two lovers. It wasn’t as if she was the one in control, it seemed to me. She was trying to please both of them, in a way. Being the brazen love siren Jay expected her to be, doing the splits on a glass coffee table in the afternoon. Then running home to Gary afterwards with a basket full of food shopping and Get Well wishes. Cooking pies for him and plumping cushions for his sore leg. I thought it was all a bit degrading. But then she
had
given me the chance to break it off with Gary and I hadn’t taken it.