White Wedding (36 page)

‘All this stuff makes you happy, Max. But it doesn’t make me. We want different things. We have for a long, long time, really, if we face it. I don’t want to live here any
more. I don’t want to take second place to your work, I don’t want to drive around in a car you’ve bought for me, I don’t want to eat alone at night, I don’t want to
spend weekends by myself . . .’

He picked up the suitcase that was out of sight behind the breakfast bar. Max’s hands flew up to her face.

‘Stuart, don’t be daft. You will be at the church tomorrow, won’t you? You wouldn’t let me down.’

‘Max, you want the wedding, not the groom,’ Stuart said, and he walked out and left her sobbing into her perfectly manicured hands.

Violet rang Max just before she went to bed.

‘You all right?’ she asked. ‘Nervous?’

‘I’m cool, calm and collected,’ said Max, trying her damnedest to press down on the wobble in her voice. ‘I can’t wait for tomorrow.’

‘Well, just thought I’d give you a quick ring before I turn in. Has Bel phoned you?’

‘She texted.’

‘So, see you bright and early at yours. Sleep well.’

‘Mwah.’

Max put down the phone and switched off the light. She would be glad to see the back of that day. As far as tantrums go, that was Stuart’s finest hour and he had worried her for a while.
But she knew he was at Luke’s because she had driven past and seen his car there. And his hired wedding suit had gone, so he had taken it with him. He would be there at the church tomorrow
having slept on things, she was sure of it. He’d shake his head at her dress and the cake, but he’d pose for photographs and eat the lovely food and be happy because she had written an
extra chunk of her vows that evening and she would promise never again to take over from him and alter his plans. She’d learned a big lesson today.

No way
would he really walk out on her the night before their wedding, she was sure of that. After seventeen years, she knew him inside out.

While the others were changing into their pink dresses upstairs, Freya was lacing Max into her dress from the back. Her hips were padded with special cushions that Freya had
made for her because the weight of the dress would have scarred her otherwise. She had twenty-five petticoats on underneath her gypsy wedding gown and Max wished she’d asked Freya to make her
a pair of wheels as well as she hadn’t a clue how she was going to walk in it. Max’s dad was waiting patiently in the kitchen with the shock-prescribed scotch that he needed when he saw
the colour of his daughter’s skin, which wasn’t dissimilar to their walnut wardrobes at home. Not mentioning those eyelashes.

‘Stuart stormed out on me yesterday after a row,’ Max suddenly blurted out in a momentary lapse of self-control. ‘I’m only ninety-nine per cent definite that he will be
there today. Does that happen a lot?’

‘The day before a wedding is often a very precarious time,’ said Freya, pulling hard on the ribbon. ‘People’s fears about change are at a high. Even if they’ve
lived together for years, the feeling of uncertainty is thick in the air.’

‘Pre-wedding nerves?’ asked Max, fishing for hope.

‘Sometimes,’ replied Freya.

‘What if he jilts me?’ said Max, forcing bravery into her voice.

‘Then he’s the wrong man for you. Now, try to sit down on this chair, please, and check I haven’t laced you in too tightly. You do still need to breathe.’

Freya picked up the operating box that switched on the lights under the dress and attached it with clips to Max’s left fingerless lace glove. Then she put on Max’s wedding boots for
her and buttoned them up. They were four-inch-heeled, stiff white silk and embroidered with M & S in pink stitching. Then Freya took out the towering twinkling tiara and threaded it carefully
into Max’s Marge Simpson-high wig.

‘I’m scared, Freya,’ admitted Max, pushing down hard on the tears that threatened to dampen her enormous eyelashes.

Freya walked round to the front of Max and placed her warm hand on Max’s cheek.

‘This day, this wedding, will make you realize what is truly important in life, I promise you that. You must hold your head up high and own your wedding. Be that gypsy bride of your
fantasies in this dress and see where it leads you.’

Max felt a surge of strength blast through her. Freya was right. The only way through today was to brazen out whatever came her way, like a strong gypsy woman. She’d have her big fat
over-the-top day. She had wanted it for too long.

For over two hours the previous evening, Luke had made Stuart sit on his huge leather sofa while he tried to drill some sense into him.

‘It’s not love, it’s infatuation,’ he said about Jenny.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Stuart adamantly. ‘And, anyway, Jenny is just a part of it. Even if she doesn’t want me, it’s over between me and Max.’

‘Because she invited a few of your relatives to watch you get wed?’

‘You know it’s more than that,’ Stuart said. Luke had never seen his friend as calm nor as resolute. ‘We’re too different, Luke. You’re more her type than I
ever was. You both want the same things: big houses, fancy jobs.’

‘She’s a fantastic girl, Stuart. They don’t come along like Max every day.’

‘I know that,’ said Stuart. ‘But I can’t help what is going on here,’ and he banged his chest with a closed fist. ‘Max doesn’t make me feel like a
man.’

‘And Jenny does?’ spat Luke.

‘Yes, she does. She makes me feel protective and big. Max is too independent; she doesn’t need me. She can provide everything she wants herself. And I need to feel needed.’

‘Max loves you so much.’

‘I think she will find that she doesn’t. She’ll miss me being around, being a presence in the house, but I don’t think she will miss
me.
’ He stood to
leave.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Luke. And because Stuart didn’t answer straight away, Luke knew where he was going. To Jenny.

Luke’s heart felt like a heavy stone inside him because he knew without any doubt that Stuart had made up his mind. But Luke was so dreadfully fond of Max and he didn’t want to see
her humiliated and destroyed.

‘Oh mate, I don’t know what to say,’ he sighed. ‘Promise me you’ll sleep on it. You may feel differently in the morning. I’ll ring you at eight.’

Stuart laughed at his friend’s attempt to try to the last. ‘I promise you I’ll sleep on it, but I won’t feel any differently. And I’ll tell you why. Because
tomorrow morning Max will get dressed in her fancy frock and arrive in her Cinderella coach at the church because she will have no doubt in her head that I’ll be there. She will always
believe that she knows best and will get her own way. She won’t cancel everything and arrive on my doorstep and ask me to run away to Gretna Green with her. Just her and me.’

Luke leaped on the note of hope. ‘And if she did?’

‘She won’t.’

‘But if she did?’

‘It wouldn’t make a difference. I would tell her she’s too late. But she won’t.’

In the church there was a very strange atmosphere. Only a few of Stuart’s relatives were there and they were looking around in confusion for the groom and his immediate
family, who were a no-show. The best man was there in his suit, pink rose in his lapel, talking to the vicar and then dashing anxiously out of the church doors.

‘Why is the best man hopping from foot to foot?’ Bel asked Violet, recognizing him from photos Max had shown them. He was hard to mistake with his grey-white hair and incredibly tall
physique. She climbed out of the Rolls-Royce that had picked them up from Max’s house. ‘Aw, aren’t those bells lovely? Hi, there. It’s Luke, isn’t it? Everything
okay?’

Luke came bounding over. At any other time he would have made polite introductions but he was in too much of a flap.

‘He’s not here,’ he said. ‘Stuart isn’t here.’

‘Where is he, then?’ asked Bel with a lopsided grin. ‘Stuck in the toilet getting rid of some brown nerves?’

‘Ugh,’ said Violet. ‘How can you look all ladylike in that dress and have such a sewer-mouth?’

‘When I say “he isn’t here”, I mean I don’t think he’s going to come.’

Bel and Violet looked at each other, then back at Luke.

‘You aren’t saying what I think you’re saying, are you?’ asked Bel.

‘He came round to see me yesterday and told me that the wedding was off. But I asked him to sleep on it.’

‘Wedding was . . . Why?’ Bel was clutching her bouquet so tightly that her knuckles were white.

‘It’s complicated,’ said Luke.

‘“Another woman complicated”? Please say no,’ said Bel.

Luke didn’t answer that question directly. ‘Stuart found out about all Max’s plans yesterday. He hit the roof and told her it was the last straw and that the wedding was off.
He’s not answering his phone and I don’t know where he is.’ Luke didn’t think it wise to mention Jenny. He was still hoping that Stuart would realize he had been gripped by
a temporary madness and arrive better late than never.

‘What do you mean, “he told her the wedding was off”?’ Now Bel and Violet really were confused. ‘She
knows
? She can’t know. She hasn’t said a
word to us.’

‘He said this might happen,’ said Luke, rubbing his forehead. ‘He said she’d think he would give in and turn up. And if she did, that would say it all.’

‘You’re saying she should have cancelled the wedding?’ said Bel, huffing. ‘There was a fat chance of that happening, I can tell you.’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying,’ said Luke. Even if Max had cancelled the wedding at the eleventh hour, there was still the subject of Jenny. Was it kinder to let Max
think their ultimate differences had caused the split than to let her know that he had been spirited away by the cleaner’s daughter?

‘Oh shite.’ This from Violet, who hadn’t said ‘shite’ since 1985. Six white horses with pink plumes on their heads were rounding the corner. Bel’s language
was fruitier still. She ran to the coach, which was stuffed full with Max’s dress and bouquet. She could just see the top of a male head in the sea of material and she presumed it was
Max’s dad drowning in a billowing ocean of white.

‘Drive round the block again. Stuart’s not arrived yet.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Max with measured resignation, ‘I know.’

‘What?’ said a male voice from the midst of the dress.

‘Dad, trust me. Let’s just walk down the aisle. Come on.’

‘You can’t have a wedding when the groom isn’t here,’ said her dad.

‘Watch me,’ said Max, sticking one silk-booted foot out of the coach.

In the fifteen-minute journey to the church Max had gone through every dark emotion it was possible for a human to go through; a veritable rainbow of uncertainty, guilt,
anticipation, fear, shock, disbelief, pain, anger. By the time she arrived at the church a vortex of fury and self-preservation was spiralling through her core and it was this that kept her back as
straight as a ramrod as she grabbed her dad’s arm. Today she would show the world just what calibre of woman she was. Well, at least the Barnsley part of the world would be witness to it.

So, after an army of bridesmaids, ushers and church officials had managed to extricate Max from the fairy-tale coach, in a state of high confusion Graham McBride found himself about to walk down
the aisle to an organist playing Mendelssohn and among a sea of bewildered faces, most topped off by very nice hats. He had adopted Max when she was seven years old and so he thought he knew her
pretty well by now, but – as today was showing him – obviously not. For a start, he’d offered to pay for everything but she’d told him that their wedding was going to be so
small that wouldn’t be necessary. It didn’t look small from where he was standing. It was out-blinging Elton John and Lady Gaga combined. And why wasn’t the bloody groom here? The
vicar started to pace towards them but when Max barked, ‘Stay!’ at him, he froze. The organist looked round, stopped playing and then started again. He presumed Luke was the groom.

‘Max . . .’ began Luke.

‘Luke,’ she smiled. ‘Thank you for being here. Now, let me drive this. Bel, Violet, prepare to follow. Dad, let’s go.’

Max switched on her lights. The small butterflies stitched on to her shoulders began to waft their wings and the ones dotted around her voluminous skirt began to twinkle.

The poor photographer hadn’t a clue what was going on but he had been paid to take pictures, so he started snapping.

‘Maxine, what’s happening?’ asked a totally baffled Graham. ‘Where’s Stuart?’ His traditional Yorkshire brain tried to make sense of it all and failed. The
only conclusion it could come to was that it was some sort of modern wedding where tradition went to the wall. Stuart must be following the bride in. He was sure that Max wasn’t that daft as
to walk down the aisle if she wasn’t going to meet her groom at the end of it. Knowing Max, her wedding wouldn’t be a normal carry-on, but this was stretching it, even by her
standards.

Max smiled beatifically as she drifted slowly down the aisle, taking pin steps and savouring every one. She and her dad had to walk sideways like well-dressed crabs because the aisle
wasn’t wide enough for them both. It was barely wide enough for her alone. Her bouquet was a weighty Niagara Falls spillage of bright pink roses and the dress weighed a ton and a half. Gypsy
Margaret wasn’t joking when she said that some brides were scarred for life wearing them. Max spotted her mum open-mouthed in the front pew. She was holding on to Auntie Sylvia’s hand
as if her life depended upon it.

As she reached the top of the aisle, where Stuart should be standing, Max turned round to the congregation and waited for the organist to finish the last bars.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began in a cool, clear, unwavering voice. There was a slight echo as her voice bounced off a nearby pillar. ‘There has, alas, been a change of plan.
There will be no wedding today, because there is no groom.’

‘I knew it,’ said Graham crossly. Although he really didn’t know anything. Any minute now he was going to wake up and find out he was still in a nightmare after having too much
Cathedral City last night.