White Wedding (47 page)

Bel ran down the hallway in pursuit, just in time to see her mother climb into the taxi.

‘Mum,’ she yelled, springing over to it, her fingers just managing to touch the glass of the window before the car pulled away from her and was gone. Helen didn’t even wave
goodbye.

Bel hadn’t a clue what she felt as her mother disappeared from her life a second time. Her head was thrown into momentary panic and distress, mixed in with confusion, grief and a childlike
desire to sink to the ground and howl, yet she remained standing and silent. The long-held image of her perfect mother had gone for ever and never again would Bel think of her without also
remembering how Faye had moved in to protect her, like a caramel-haired lioness squaring up against a bulky, nasty rhino.

Bel walked back inside the house to find it in a state of pandemonium.

‘My nose, my lovely nose,’ Shaden was screaming. ‘It’s broken.’

Vanoushka was trying to apply the tea towel that Faye had just run under the tap to Shaden’s nose, but she was pushing her mother away, shrieking in pain and anger.

‘Shouldn’t someone ring for an ambulance?’ said Vanoushka.

‘Richard can drive me. It’ll be quicker,’ said Shaden.

‘Oh no, he can’t,’ snapped Faye. ‘I’ll take you, if I have to, you little bitch.’

Vanoushka gasped. She had never heard her sister talk with such venom.

‘Oh yes, because it was ALL my fault, wasn’t it?’ snarled Shaden. ‘He was the one getting married. I was single.’

Richard suddenly straightened up.

‘Okay, let’s bring this down,’ he said, attempting a peace mission.

‘I’m ashamed that I’m related to you, Shaden,’ Faye went on. ‘You’d better stay right away from other people’s husbands from now on.’

Despite her pain, Shaden appeared to be smiling. Dangerously, like Caligula. ‘Are you going to tell them, or shall I?’ she said to Richard.

‘Shaden, I’ll get you another nose,’ he said, his voice full of desperation. ‘Just don’t. Please, I’m begging you.’

‘Don’t what?’ said Faye, her eyes slits of suspicion. ‘What is this?’

She grabbed her niece and shook her hard by the shoulders and Shaden shrieked. ‘What’s all the secret code going on between you and Bel’s husband?’

Shaden shook herself free. ‘Bel’s husband? Precious Belinda’s husband? He’s not
her
husband,’ she said, loading the ‘her’ with enough poison to
bring down a blue whale.

‘Shaden, noooo . . .’ yelped Richard.

‘He’s my husband,’ said Shaden, so slowly and deliberately that each word seemed to last for minutes.

Behind them Richard groaned so low and long that he sounded like an inflatable airbed with a slow puncture. Everyone else could have been musical-statue champions.

‘I think you’d better explain yourselves,’ said Vanoushka eventually, her eyes flicking repeatedly between Richard and Shaden as if she were watching a tennis match.

‘He took me to Vegas for the weekend,’ said Shaden imperiously.

‘I know,’ replied Bel with the hint of a yawn. That would take the wind out of her sails.

‘Do you know that we also both got pissed and married? No, I bet you didn’t. Ha.’

A nuclear silence landed on the room. It was so intense that it set Shaden off giggling, happier than ever that she had made such an impact.

‘Yeah, it seemed a good idea at the time,’ she added casually.

‘It seemed like a good idea?’ said Trevor, unable to keep the furious incredulity out of his voice. ‘It seemed like a good idea?’

‘We didn’t know it was legally binding,’ said Richard with a desperate tremble in his voice. ‘It was just a drunken prank.’

‘Elvis married us,’ said Shaden, thoroughly enjoying the destruction she was causing, which offset the pain of her pretty new nose being smashed all over her face.

Bel threw her hands up in the air. As if today wasn’t bizarre enough already with a dead mother coming back into her life and nutting the cousin who had bonked her husband, she now
discovered that the husband in question, currently fondling the blood circulation back into his nuts, wasn’t her husband after all.

‘When exactly were you going to tell me?’ Bel asked Richard, hearing her own voice slow and calm despite the turmoil going on inside her head.

‘He wasn’t,’ smiled Shaden smugly. ‘We were going to have a quiet divorce, then he was going to set you up to renew your vows and hoped that would be enough.’

‘And he paid you enough money for a new nose to keep quiet?’ It was a question, but Faye already knew the answer.

‘Oh Bel,’ Richard limped forward with one hand cupping his groin. ‘Don’t let this spoil things between us.’ He threw a pointed finger at Shaden. ‘You evil
bloody cow. You’ve ruined everything. Bel put her wedding ring back on tonight. It was all okay again and if you—’

‘Actually,’ Bel butted in, ‘it wasn’t okay again. I only wore the ring because that way I’d remember to give it back to you.’ Bel twisted the ring from her
finger and popped it into the breast pocket of Richard’s suit.

‘It wouldn’t have worked,’ she said. ‘I thought it might have, but then you didn’t do it.’

‘What?’ squeaked Richard. ‘What didn’t I do?’

‘You didn’t have cake,’ said Bel. And she turned and walked out of the door.

When Bel went back to her father’s house later that night, she didn’t ring the bell, she walked straight in and found Faye putting newly washed covers on the sofa
and her dad helping. She’d always resented them being so ‘together’ and yet now the sight of them made her fill up with nice tears. They both looked shocked, but delighted to see
her.

‘Hello, love,’ said Trevor, straightening up to give her a hug. ‘We’ve been worried where you got to. Again.’

‘Oh Dad, you know I have to go and hole myself up and think things through.’

‘You’ve had such a rough time. I’m so sorry.’

Bel gave her dad a quick kiss then turned to Faye.

‘You’re a peach, Faye,’ she said. ‘And I’ve never said.’

She closed her arms round her stunned stepmother and when she pulled away it was to find that Faye’s eyes were dripping with tears. Faye’s hand came out to rest on her cheek.

‘You’ve always been so precious to me,’ she said. ‘We never wanted you to find out the truth about your mother.’ Bel fell back against her. She was wearing another
one of her soft fluffy jumpers and smelled of her familiar Guerlain perfume. Faye Candy was a gentle constant presence with a hidden backbone of steel. Bel hoped she could make it up to her for all
the years of not appreciating that.

‘What about the wedding dress, Faye?’ Bel asked, as Trevor poured them all a reconstituting brandy.

‘Well, all little girls want their mother’s wedding dress, don’t they? We were in Berlin and I saw this tiny wedding-dress shop –
Hochzeit in Weiss
– it was
called. I’ve never forgotten it. The woman who owned it was just putting the most beautiful dress in the window and I suddenly had the idea of buying it for you and
pretending—’

Bel had heard enough. She could guess the rest.

‘Oh Faye, it’s such a shame you never had kids of your own. You’d have made such a lovely mum,’ smiled Bel, hugging her again. ‘You
are
a lovely
mum.’

And that was the last remaining secret, but this one would stay a secret. Faye wasn’t infertile, but when she and Trevor married she convinced Trevor that they shouldn’t try for a
child. She knew that the strange little girl she had taken on needed to be the sole focus of their attention. Underneath her feistiness, Faye recognized a child who needed a hell of a lot of love
and reassurance. And now, with the daughter she had always wanted clasped in her arms, Faye knew that her decision had been the right one.

The next morning, Violet double-checked that she had her Maestro card in her handbag before she set off for the White Wedding shop. She would have to pay for the dress that was
destroyed – she knew that and it was only fair, especially after all the kindness that Freya had shown her.

When she pulled up in front of the shop it was to find the usually decorated bay window empty and a man about to nail a wooden board in front of the glass.

‘Excuse me,’ said Violet, getting out of the car. ‘Isn’t it open?’

‘No, love,’ said the man. ‘It’s for lease. I’m going to put up the sign after I’ve boarded it up.’

‘Where’s the woman who ran it, do you know?’ asked Violet.

‘Dunno, pet. I just go round doing this.’

Violet peered through the glass in the door. Sure enough, except for the built-in rails and the central counter, there was nothing but bare walls, floor and ceiling.

Bel took the next day off work and drove up to the moors. She had owed it to herself to try to mend her marriage but she knew, when Richard refused to go into the cake shop,
that she might as well try to knit smoke. There was no fun in him, no little boy who occasionally made a giggly appearance. He was all grownup – inside and out. They never laughed in or out
of bed, he never giggled, he never bashed her with a cushion or had tickling fights. All those revelations came to her in a rush when he said that he didn’t want to go in for cake; it just
took her brain a little time to work that out.

She had loved Richard, but she had loved the idea of marriage and of belonging to someone and living with them more. But she knew now that she couldn’t be truly happy with a man who would
never know the joy of the odd Pot Noodle or giggle about a Bronte-based menu.

Bel wanted to take a last trip up here and remember the mad few days she had spent with a doctor/author who fought with her over a tin opener and showed her what she was missing. Then she would
go back and begin single life again. It was better to have no man than the wrong man.

Richard had tried to call many times but even he knew it had to be over. He didn’t want Shaden, although Shaden was gearing herself up to be evil in the divorce settlement. Faye had made
it quite plain that she would have a relationship with her sister but never with her niece. Even the Bosomworth sisters’ relationship was on a different footing now, with Faye no longer the
underdog.

Bel drove up the lane that would take her to the cottages. It was no longer quiet and deserted up there; she found vans and a cement mixer churning and stacks of bricks and towers of wooden
planks. Bronte Cottages were no longer owned by the Candy family.

They looked so different already. Charlotte’s door had been sealed up and she could see through the window that the walls between her and Emily had been taken down. The noise of hammering
was coming from inside Anne at the end.

‘Hi,’ said Bel, approaching a stodgy little man with a hard hat and an air of authority. ‘My dad used to own this and I just wonder if I could take a last look at the inside.
For old time’s sake, please?’

‘I’ll find you the owner, love,’ he said in a West Country accent. ‘He’s round the back somewhere.’

Bel waited by the car, watching a man bring the old sink out of Anne and dump it in a huge skip.

‘Hi, can I help you? I’m the owner,’ said a voice at her side. A big, gruff, deep Yorkshire voice. The one that he had used to demand back the tin opener.

‘You?’ said Bel with amazed delight. ‘You’re the new owner?’

‘Yep,’ said Dan Regent. ‘That’s me. And this is my writer’s retreat.’

She saw him glance down at her fingers. Then he lifted the left hand and examined it.

‘Didn’t work out, then?’ he said, tapping the third finger.

‘It was never going to work out. He didn’t like cake,’ said Bel, her face beaming as if there was a midday sun trapped behind her teeth. ‘You and Cathy?’

‘It was never going to work out. She didn’t like chocolate,’ said Dan. ‘Or tinned soup. Come in, I’ve got something to show you.’

He pulled her into Emily and foraged in a pile of papers, eventually retrieving an envelope.

‘You’ve saved me a stamp,’ he said, urging her to open it.

Puzzled, Bel pulled out the folded sheet of paper inside. It was a typeset dedication page.

Bel swallowed down a huge lump of rising emotion. Maybe there was a reason why it had been so hard to shift Dr Dan from her heart since she left him: because it was his rightful place and he was
staying put.

‘Wow,’ she said, trying to keep the nervously thrilled vibrato out of her voice. ‘I’ve never been mentioned in a book before.’

‘Care for some Branwell coffee and a Villette Jaffa Cake?’ asked Dan.

‘How about a Rochester soup?’ asked Bel, hardly able to see him now for the water in her eyes.

‘I think I can do better than that, Miss Eyre. How about a Rochester snog?’ he said, picking her up, whirling her round and kissing her until she was breathless.

Nine months later

‘You don’t half scrub up well,’ said Max, grinning at Bel, who was wearing her mother’s wedding dress. At least the dress that her lovely stepmother had
chosen so many years ago from a little shop in Berlin. A dress that fitted her so beautifully it was as if it had been made for her.

‘Ta, that’s good of you,’ tutted Bel, pretending to be insulted.

Violet adjusted the simple lace veil on Bel’s hair. ‘You aren’t going to bugger off at the reception again, are you?’ she said. ‘I’d like one of us to have a
wedding where it all goes perfectly.’

‘Trust me, I won’t be leaving this one,’ Bel said, and she sighed because thinking of becoming Mrs Regent left her weak with delight. She wouldn’t have admitted this to
the others, but she had actually been practising writing ‘Mrs Belinda Regent’ for nearly eight months now. Two months before Dan proposed to her. He left the ring looped on the tin
opener on the first night they spent in the fully renovated cottage.

‘You next,’ said Bel, nudging Violet.

‘We’re happy as we are,’ laughed Violet. It had taken Pav nearly three months after the fire to heal. Then he announced that he was leaving the cottage because he was well
enough and he didn’t want Violet to think he was taking advantage of her kindness. He packed his bags and said he would see her soon, but she didn’t believe him.