White Wedding (35 page)

Max answered the door when Violet arrived, and Violet jumped back in shock.

‘Blimey, I thought you were Sinitta,’ she laughed.

‘Ha, bloody, ha,’ Max did a comic snarl. ‘Right, now you’re here, let’s go and sort out my cake.’

When they arrived at Higher Hoppleton Hall, Shelley’s Shellybrations van was already there. There was a Luton van as well, as Shelley couldn’t fit it all in one vehicle.

‘Who the frig is going to eat all this?’ asked Bel, in a state of total disbelief as she watched a procession of people bringing in huge cake pieces and assembling them into one
giant edible 3D jigsaw puzzle. The pink palace cake filled a seven-foot-long, five-foot-wide table. It had taken Shelley over an hour and a half already to assemble and deftly cover up cracks in
the icing and disguise joins with yet more icing. Meanwhile one of her assistants was busy sticking flags in the turrets. Each one had a coat of arms on it and the initials M & S. (It was
either that or S & M.) Then Shelley began to position the guests made out of icing. A dark-haired bride in a huge white dress carrying pink flowers stood with a brown-haired groom on the
drawbridge. Behind her were two bridesmaids in frilly pink dresses.

‘Who’s this meant to be?’ asked Violet, pointing to a very tall grey-haired icing figure in a pink suit.

‘It’s my mum,’ said Max. ‘I gave Shelley some photos so she could make as accurate a model as possible.’

‘I’m surprised you haven’t got Stuart throwing himself into the moat,’ said Bel.

‘Oh bugger off,’ laughed Max.

‘Was Glyn okay when you got in last night?’ Bel asked Violet when the cake duty was over and they were driving off to Nail Diamond.

‘Fine,’ said Violet, excusing him. ‘Well . . . he was having a bit of a bad night.’

‘I’m sorry about slagging him off,’ said Max, giving her a nudge. ‘I was out of order.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Violet with a kind smile.
They know I’m not happy
.

An hour and a half later and Violet and Bel were reading magazines and flashing off their lovely silver-tipped pink-gel nails; Max was sitting in a chair having false lashes glued on to her
eyelids while diamanté hearts and tiny pink roses were being applied to her new two-inch talons.

‘They are so gorgeous,’ said Violet, marvelling at Max’s hands.

‘Not exactly understated, are they?’ chuckled Bel.

‘Gypsy-chic,’ said Max.

‘Your mum and dad won’t even recognize you,’ said Violet.

Max laughed. ‘Mum and Dad gave up on me being low key long, long ago.’

‘Can’t wait to see your eyelashes,’ said Violet.

‘Just on the last few,’ said Jane, the eyelash-fitter. ‘They’re really something.’

‘I’ll bet,’ nodded Bel. She was expecting to see someone resembling Danny La Rue any moment now.

‘O-kay,’ said Jane a few minutes later, reaching for a mirror and readjusting Max’s chair to an upright position. ‘What do you think?’

‘Shift the mirror out of the way, Max, I can’t see,’ said Bel impatiently.

‘Hang on,’ said Max.

Then she moved the mirror and grinned at her friends. Two feathery bats appeared to be fluttering their wings on her eyelids.

‘Christ on a bike,’ said Bel. ‘They are big.’

With her stained skin, big nails and flappy eyelashes, Max really was morphing into a gypsy bride. And what’s more, she was loving every minute of it.

Stuart knocked back some extra-strength ibuprofen to counteract yet another migraine that was prodding at his temple. He looked at the clock in the kitchen as he lifted a glass
under the cold tap. He had twenty-two hours of being a single man left. If Jenny Thompson hadn’t blasted into his life he would be happy now, looking forward to a life with lovely Max. And
she was lovely . . . fun, kind, big-hearted, sexy: the complete package. So what was his brain playing at? Maybe everyone was right and this was an extreme case of pre-wedding nerves. Oh God, he
wished it was, but he knew deep down that it wasn’t.

The house phone rang as he was scrubbing the kitchen wall again because it still had a distinct whiff of cider about it.

‘Hello, love,’ it was his mum. ‘You all right today? Do you need anything?’

‘No, I’m fine, ta.’

‘Your dad has just taken the cake to the Lamp.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Do you want me to drop all your wedding presents off or will you collect them?’

Stuart laughed. ‘
All
. You make it sound like there are loads.’

‘Well, there are quite a lot, yes.’

‘Who from?’

‘All the family. And quite a few neighbours.’

‘Aw, why did they do that?’ sighed Stuart. ‘I thought people only bought presents when they were invited to the wedding.’

‘Well, they are, aren’t they?’ said his mum, without thinking. Stuart heard her slight gasp of panic and picked up on it straight away.

‘Who’s invited?’

There was a suspicious silence on the end of the phone now.

‘Mum?’

‘Oh I wish I hadn’t rung now,’ his mum’s voice was shaky.

‘What’s going on?’ said Stuart. ‘Mum?’

‘I’m not supposed to say anything.’ His mum sounded really flustered now.

‘Mum, I’ve got too much on my mind for games so please just tell me, will you?’ said Stuart, trying to keep calm. He heard his mum give a resigned sigh.

‘Max invited a few extra people to the wedding, that’s all. As a nice surprise for you.’

‘For me?’ Stuart laughed drily. ‘No, Mum, she didn’t do it for me. How many
extra
people did Max invite?’

‘I don’t know,’ said his mum. ‘Auntie Maggie and Bob are coming, Cyril, Phyllis, Kevin, our Sandra and Ken, the Robinsons, the Jacksons next door . . .’ The list
went on and on and on.

And, knowing Max, she’d have balanced that out with numbers from her side of the family.

‘Don’t say I told you,’ said his mum. ‘Please. I feel awful. I only rang to ask you about what to do with the presents.’

Stuart injected as much calm into his voice as he could. ‘It’s fine. I shan’t say anything.’ But Stuart didn’t feel calm at all. He felt cold rage shudder through
him like an earthquake. He should have known.

He put down the phone and made for the study, where he dragged out that pink file from under Max’s desk and snapped off the lock with his bare hands.

Stuart lifted up the bill and tried to absorb the words he was reading.

A seven by five FOOT cake
? And why the fuck was it being delivered to Higher Hoppleton Hall? He found the answer to that in the thick pile of invoices – all paid in
full. Higher Hoppleton Hall-headed notepaper: a reception for fifty people. And how many bottles of pink champagne? Then there was an invoice for flowers: displays to be delivered to Higher
Hoppleton and the church; two trailing pink bouquets and one giant JEWEL-ENCRUSTED teardrop bouquet destined for their house on the morning of the wedding. An invoice for a spa-weekend honeymoon
package, a receipt for a wig, a photographer, balloons – bloody balloons? Then an invoice for three dresses for
HOW MUCH
? He looked at the total on the White Wedding invoice and
winced. But even that was aced by the next invoice in the pile: a Cinderella coach and six white horses. Then he saw the Polaroid of Max and Bel and Violet in their gigantic dresses and the
long-dormant volcano inside him finally erupted.

That was it. The end for them. His anger left him in a flash and was replaced by a composure that was unreal. His migraine cleared up like magic. He could have laughed, really. She’d done
his dirty work for him. Calmly Stuart went and packed a suitcase and waited for Max to come home.

There were fifteen missed calls on Max’s phone when she retrieved it from her bag after she’d paid the Nail Diamond bill. Violet had to access the voicemail for her
as she couldn’t press the small buttons with her new long nails.

‘Ring me urgently,’ said Jess’s breathless voice. ‘Whatever you do, don’t use the medium/dark San Maurice spray.’

With the aid of Violet again, Max rang Jess.

‘Jess, what’s up?’

‘Max, tell me you haven’t used that spray yet,’ Jess pleaded.

Max felt cold dread drench through to her bones. ‘Why?’

‘Oh God, you have, haven’t you? Oh shit. Okay, okay, don’t panic,’ said Jess, panicking.

‘Jess, what’s wrong with it?’

‘Okay, okay, keep calm, keep calm,’ said Jess on the verge of hyperventilating. ‘That box of sprays I brought up to your office has been flagged up as a faulty
batch.’

‘Faulty how?’ Max was confused. She looked in the mirror and everything appeared fine. It hadn’t streaked, it hadn’t come off on her clothes . . .

‘It’ll get darker over the next forty-eight hours. Much darker.’

At her end of the line, Jess waited to hear Max explode. She didn’t expect to hear her chuckle and say, ‘Excellent.’

‘Max, did you hear me? I said . . .’

‘Cool your jets,’ said Max. ‘Obviously I’m glad it’s been spotted, and of course we’ll have to recall any product that has left the
warehouse—’

‘None has yet,’ Jess interrupted. ‘We’re safe.’

‘But, as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine,’ said Max. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror. It looked as if she was going to get the third coat that Bel banned,
after all.

Max screamed when she walked into the kitchen and saw Stuart sitting at the breakfast bar. She ran to the other side of the door and talked to him through it.

‘What are you still doing here? You aren’t supposed to see me. Go away, Stuart.’

‘Max, we need to talk,’ he said, in a level, quiet tone. He didn’t feel dread or fear or guilt. He felt relief, if he was honest. And free.

‘You can talk to me without seeing me,’ said Max, still through the door.

‘Max.’ He drew in the deepest breath his lungs would allow. ‘I can’t marry you.’

There was a long silence, then still through the door came the single word:

‘Eh?’

‘Come into the kitchen.’ Even Stuart marvelled at how collected and in control he sounded.

When Max finally realized that this wasn’t a joke and edged into the kitchen, Stuart saw a woman he didn’t recognize: a dark-skinned woman with eyelashes the size of a flamenco
dancer’s fan. She looked like the stranger she was to him at that moment.

‘Stuart, what’s up with you?’

‘This,’ he said, and he picked up the stack of wedding invoices. ‘This is what’s up with me.’

‘Oh bloody hell,’ tutted Max. ‘Why did you go snooping?’

‘Why did you do it?’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘Why did you take over?’

‘I didn’t take over,’ argued Max. ‘I just added a few bits.’

‘A Cinderella pumpkin carriage and six white horses? A dress that costs more than my wage for two years? Shall I go on?’ He shook the invoices at her. ‘I booked a reception as
a surprise for you at the Lamp and my mother made us a cake.’

‘The Lamp?’

He waited for her face to crease with displeasure. He imagined he saw that it had.

‘Yes, the Lamp. I’m sorry it obviously isn’t good enough for you, Max, but it was good enough for me and just for once we were going to have what I decided on our wedding day,
weren’t we?’

‘I didn’t say that it wasn’t good enough,’ said Max. ‘You’re doing that thing again that you always do: implying that I don’t think anything you do is
good enough when it is. It annoys the hell out of me, Stuart. Why shouldn’t it be good enough for me? My name’s Maxine McBride not Tamara bloody Ecclestone. Why didn’t you tell me
you’d booked a reception?’

‘It was a surprise, Max.’

‘So was Higher Hoppleton Hall.’

Stuart pressed at his temple.

‘You rode roughshod over me, as you always do, Max.’ His calm was slipping. His frustration was starting to ooze out from his pores. ‘What I want and what I can afford
isn’t good enough for you, whatever you might fool yourself into believing. You whip out your Visa and have to alter things to what you want, and you do it every single time.’ He swept
his arm around the room. ‘I didn’t want this house. I wanted the smaller one in the town, but Max has to have her own way. I didn’t want that bloody car, but we have to have his
and hers matching shitting BMWs. And I didn’t want a swanky wedding. I wanted you and me, our closest friends and family and some vows. And you knew that, which is why you arranged all this
–’ he slammed the invoices down on the work surface – ‘behind my back. Because it’s your way or the highway.’

Tears were now glistening on Max’s enormous eyelashes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d do what you usually do and tut and just . . .’

‘. . . Give in? Let you have your own way?’ he butted in. ‘Because that’s what I always do. Good old soft-touch Stuart.’ He shrugged off Max’s hand when she
reached out towards his shoulder.

‘You might as well have cut off my cock.’

‘Stuart!’

He laughed. And it was a hollow, bitter sound. ‘You don’t make me feel like a man. You make me feel like a ponce.’

‘Please, Stuart. Is this pre-wedding ner—’

‘Don’t even think about saying it,’ he covered his ears. ‘Oh God, I wish it were. But it’s not. It’s the tip of a very big iceberg, Max. And it’s sunk
us.’

Max was frightened now. She and Stuart had never argued like this. There was a tone in his voice she hadn’t heard before. ‘Stuart, we’ve lasted seventeen years.’

‘We’ve lasted because I’ve let it last,’ said Stuart. ‘I’ve put myself and my wants and my needs in second place every single time. And you’ve put my
wants and my needs in second place every single time. I don’t think I’ve been happy for a long time, Max.’

‘You don’t think?’ Max snapped in confusion. ‘What do you mean, “you don’t think you’ve been happy”?’

Because I thought I was in love with you until I really was with someone else
, said Stuart inside. But it would have been too cruel to say it aloud. Instead he looked around him at the
swanky kitchen with the designer gadgets and uncomfortable chrome bar stools.