White Wedding (2 page)

‘This must be a bit of a shit hen night for you,’ said Max, giving her friends some attention while the adverts were on. ‘I thought you might have wanted to go to a club with
loads of your mates.’
Not spend it cooking chilli con carne in your apartment for two women you barely know.

Bel shrugged her shoulders. The truth of it was that she didn’t have any real friends. One by one, they had dropped away over the years; Sara had married a German, moved to Frankfurt,
turned into an earth-mother and churned out five children, possibly more by now. Though they had been inseparable through their childhood and teenage years, they didn’t even swap Christmas
cards any more. Bel knew deep down that her inability to bear children and Sara’s fecundity had sadly got in the way of their relationship. Amy had moved to London and got in with a weird
bohemian crowd, and Shaden . . . well, suffice to say that she and her cousin had grown very far apart in adulthood.

‘Couldn’t be arsed going out. I just fancied a quiet night in with a bottle and a bit of light company,’ sniffed Bel, knocking back half a glass of wine in one. Max and Violet
exchanged a quick secret glance, both suspecting what the other was thinking: that this wedding-uninterested Bel was very different to the woman they had first met at the White Wedding shop, the
one who walked on air, smiled a lot and said ‘Richard’ a damned sight more than she said it these days.

‘Are you all right?’ Violet asked, but tentatively, because she had picked up very early on that Bel was a woman who played her cards close to her chest.

‘Yes, I’m perfectly fine,’ said Bel with a firm nod.

‘I expect you’re knackered, aren’t you?’ asked Max. Maybe that would explain the tired circles under her new friend’s eyes.

‘Totally,’ Bel affirmed and poured herself another wine.

‘That’s good, then. That you’re all right, I mean. Not that you’re totally knackered,’ Violet said. Yes, that made sense. Bel had arranged her whole wedding alone,
so she must have the energy levels of a dying sloth at the moment.

Bel smiled at their sweet concern. She had grown to like these two women enormously in the relatively short time she had known them. So much so that she wished she hadn’t been so impulsive
early on and invited them to her wedding. Still, she couldn’t think about that now – what was done was done and she had to keep her head focused and her heart totally out of it.

‘I thought we might meet your bridesmaid tonight,’ said Max. It was a little odd that the maid of honour wasn’t at the hen night while she and Violet were.

‘She was supposed to be here but alas she’s got a cold and didn’t want to pass on her bugs.’ The lie fell effortlessly from Bel’s lips.

‘Poor thing,’ said Violet.

‘Yes, she’s so considerate of my feelings,’ nodded Bel.
Dear Shaden
. The thought of her cousin punctured a dangerous hole in Bel’s composure.

‘I hope you’re having those nails done before next Saturday,’ noted Max, nudging Bel.

Bel curled her bitten nails away from sight. She had gnawed them down to the quick and they throbbed.

‘How’s your new ice-cream parlour coming on?’ asked Bel, batting attention away from herself before she said something she regretted,
before she let them in
. Violet was
leasing a recently built small shop more or less across the road from White Wedding.

‘Oh it’s perfect,’ sighed Violet with a beaming smile. ‘I can’t wait to open up. I’m just sad that Nan won’t be able to work in it with me. She loved
helping me in the old place that I ran.’

Violet had told them all about her beloved Nan, sadly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Nan lived with Violet’s mum, Susan, who was her widowed daughter-in-law. ‘Mum found
her slippers in the fridge the other day.’

Violet laughed a little, but there was a very sad quality to the sound. The old lady, once so sparky and fit, seemed to be getting frailer by the day – physically as well as mentally.

‘Oh bless,’ Bel wrinkled up her nose sympathetically.

‘When’s the grand opening?’ asked Max. ‘I love ice cream.’

‘Well, the space is completely plastered and whitewashed now,’ Violet bubbled with excited glee, ‘so I put an advert in the
Chronicle
last week for an artist to paint a
mural on the wall. I’m meeting one up at the shop tomorrow afternoon, actually. I reckon that I should be open for business by early August.’

‘Who’s going to work with you if your nan can’t?’ Bel muffled, through a mouthful of tortilla chips.

‘Glyn?’ Max suggested. ‘Or is that a really bad idea?’

‘That is a really bad idea,’ said Violet, with quick protest. ‘Could you honestly work with Stuart and Richard all day then go home and spend the night with them as
well?’

Bel considered the question and wanted to laugh out loud. Maybe once upon a time she could have, but not now.

They didn’t know that much information about each other’s fiancés yet, but what they had gleaned from their conversations was that Richard was a drop-dead gorgeous high-flying
banking executive who had been in Bel’s life for three years, and Stuart was head warehouse storeman for a local supplier of nuts and bolts who Max had been courting since they were sixteen.
About Glyn, the others knew least of all. Apparently he and Violet had been together for just under a year and a half and he had been off sick from work for most of that time – something to
do with a mental breakdown – so neither Bel nor Max thought it fair to press her for details about him, however much they wanted to.

‘Max, another wine?’ asked Bel.

‘Absolutely,’ replied Max, holding out her glass. ‘I might as well take advantage seeing as I’m getting a taxi home. So, are you going to keep hold of your mother’s
wedding dress for your own daughter, then? That would be fabulous, wouldn’t it? Three generations of women all wearing the same gown.’

Bel had told them ages ago in White Wedding that she didn’t need to buy a dress as she would be wearing her mum’s gown down the aisle. This was especially poignant as her mother had
died after complications in childbirth.

‘I can’t have kids,’ Bel said as undramatically as possible to spare Max’s feelings. ‘I have a rubbish womb. I won’t bore you with the tedious medical
details, blah blah, but it will never happen for me.’ She watched that familiar mask of sympathy fall on to the two female faces in front of her. ‘It’s okay. It’s something
I’ve known from having an operation as a kid. Ironically my stepmother has the same condition. She can’t conceive either. “I can’t have kids and neither can my mother”
– ho ho.’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ said Max. She herself had never wanted children. Her healthy womb was going to be wasted and she suddenly felt really guilty about it.

‘Oh come on, Max, how were you to know? Anyway, having kids is a privilege, not a right,’ said Bel kindly. ‘There’s always adoption for people like me, so don’t
worry. It’s just one of those things that can’t be helped.’ She smiled and sounded a lot stronger than she felt; she always did when she was on that particular subject. She had
honed the hiding of her true feelings about it to a fine art.

‘Oh I see the adverts are over.’ Bel alerted Max to the television in the corner as part three of the gypsy-bride programme started.

‘How can she possibly wee in that frock?’ asked Bel, spellbound by the antics on the screen as the bride’s mother and three of the bridesmaids were lifting the big dress over
the back of a chair so the bride was able to sit down at the top table. Those bridesmaids, with cleavages bigger than Pat Butcher’s backside, were bursting out of their harlot-red corset
tops. Bel imagined that shade of red against Shaden’s golden hair. There was no doubt she’d be the true centre of attention in her strawberry-coloured dress. As she so deserved to
be.

‘Look at the bride’s hair,’ yelled Max. ‘That wig is taller than the Empire State Building. I want one.’ But it wasn’t just the wig that Max wanted, it was
the dress, the flowers, the cake – it was everything. There was a seismic rumble within Max. All those stored visions of her as a princess bride were shaking off their cobwebs and preparing
to burst out of her head into the real world.

‘You’d better tell Stuart to buy a defibrillator then because he’s going to need one if he sees you coming towards him like that when he’s expecting a woman in a beige
suit,’ chuckled Violet.

‘Men are easy to get round,’ said Bel, stuffing in more tortilla chips. ‘Just give them a blow-job and they forget everything they’ve said before.’ She laughed, and
Violet noticed how strangely bitter she sounded.

Max sipped at her wine and thought that in seven weeks exactly this would be her last night as a single woman. That didn’t give her a lot of time to change her plans – a thought that
was both scary and exhilarating at the same time. Max was at her best whenever an improbable challenge lay ahead of her.

‘Violet, are you still going up to White Wedding tomorrow?’ asked Bel.

‘Yep.’

‘I’ll come with you if that’s okay.’

‘Course you can.’

‘Don’t leave me out,’ said Max. ‘The beige suit is toast as from today.’

‘I’ll pick you up at half-past nine, shall I?’ said Violet to Bel. ‘Then we’ll both come round for you, Max.’

‘Don’t be daft. That’s too far out of your way,’ Max protested.

But Violet insisted. ‘No, really. I don’t mind. It’s a lovely drive up there.’

‘I’ve nothing better to do either,’ added Bel.

‘Okay, then,’ said Max. ‘Bel, since this is your official hen night, totally shite as it is, I think we ought to have a toast.’

‘Oh yes, we must toast you,’ agreed Violet, raising her glass. ‘ To our lovely new friend Bel.’

‘To Bel, may your wedding day be one to remember for ever.’

Bel raised her glass and chinked it against theirs. ‘I think I can safely guarantee that it will be,’ she nodded with a syrupy smile.

‘What the heck is that mother of the bride wearing?’ laughed Violet, catching sight of a huge woman on the television in a banana-yellow-and-white spotted dress that barely covered
her knickers. The woman’s spray-tanned skin was the colour of a teak sideboard. ‘Do you think your mum would dress like that, Max, if you really do have a gypsy wedding?’

‘There’s no “if” about it,’ Max said. And once Max had spoken, it would happen – and on no small scale. Max by name and max by nature. When Max put a plan
into action, nothing stood in her way.

She sighed, drifting back into the fabulous world of the young traveller brides. All Stuart’s plans for a small no-fuss registry-office wedding had been blasted into oblivion that evening.
In place of the intended simple suit already hanging in her wardrobe, she was going to source a dress like no other. She saw acres of net and fairy lights that lit up as she glided down the aisle.
She saw a sugar-iced palace cake, Kew Garden-sized flower displays. She imagined herself spray-tanned not so much to a sun-kissed mocha shade but to sun-shagged mahogany, and waving to passers-by
in a carriage led by a team of white horses.

Bel watched the gypsy bride posing for photographs, her dress and flowers filling even a wide-angled lens. As mad as it appeared, it was still a real wedding, for a real bride in real love with
her man.

As for Violet, she gulped at the emotion in young gypsy Margaret’s face as she turned to kiss her handsome floppy-haired Joseph. They looked truly besotted with each other, which was just
as well because they were expected to be together for the rest of their lives. Marriage was for good.
Till death us do part.
Or maybe even for eternity. An ice-cold shiver accompanied that
thought.

‘Where have you been until this time?’ Glyn called, leaning out of the open window.

‘What are you doing, still up?’ Violet raised her hand to wave a small goodbye to the taxi driver then she entered through the security door, taking the stairs at no rushed speed up
to the first-floor flat. Glyn was waiting to greet her dressed in his faithful blue dressing gown, which had been voluminous on him when he bought it last year but now had barely an overlap of
material at the front.

‘You know I can’t sleep until you’re back home safely. There are so many nutters out there. Doesn’t help that I’ve just been watching a
Crimewatch
special
about a rapist on the loose in Sheffield.’ He ushered her in through the door and helped her off with her coat.

‘You worry too much, Glyn,’ said Violet, as he leaned over and kissed her cheek, all smiles now that she was safely back in his world. Once upon a time she used to melt thinking
about how much he cared and worried about her.

‘I’ve just put the kettle on.’

Violet knew that kettle would have been on a constant boil for at least an hour in readiness for her return.

‘Want some toast as well?’

‘No, thanks. We had a Mexican at Bel’s. I’m full to bursting.’

Glyn stuck his head near to her face and sniffed. ‘I know, I can smell the garlic. Lucky for you I like it second-hand.’ He grinned and tweaked her cheek, then went back to the job
of brewing a fresh pot of tea. She noticed he had a huge plate of biscuits waiting on the coffee table as well. These days his life seemed so food-orientated. She often wondered if he was trying to
fatten her up so much that she wouldn’t be able to get out of the door.

‘So tell me all the details,’ Glyn said, taking the milk out of the fridge. ‘I suppose it was all girly wedding talk.’

‘More or less,’ replied Violet. ‘We watched that
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding
programme on the television.’

‘And?’

‘And that was it really. Talked a bit.’

‘What about?’

‘Things.’

‘What sort of things?’

Violet shrugged. ‘Can’t really remember, to be honest. All forgettable stuff.’

Glyn brought the tea into the lounge in his and hers mugs, a present from his mother. ‘Want a biccy to dunk?’

She took the tea. She didn’t want it but it was easier just to accept it and sip at it, otherwise there might have been an inquisition on the subject of why she didn’t want a
drink.