A Bad Bride's Tale (7 page)

Unfortunately, the horrifying tick of the Heal’s clock on the wall was the one thing she couldn’t control. The rest of her life she could box up neatly: career—decent job, tick; family—healthy relation- ship with Dad since Mum’s death, tick; health—Pilates and yoga and normal pap smears, tick; home—great place with Mathew Hilton armchair and Arco lamp, tick; and boyfriend—city job and handsome and er . . . 3,500 miles away. Needing reassurance, she held up the hand mirror again. No, she no longer looked twenty-

five. She’d managed, rather heroically, to hang on to the looks of a twenty-five-year-old well into her thirties, but this year, nature had overridden Crème de la Mer. And as she got older, more lined around the eyes, slacker around the jaw, she was aware that she didn’t cause such a devastating impact when she walked into a room (despite the fact that she compensated for the loss of youth’s flush with particularly attentive and expensive grooming). This re- ally upset her. Inside, she was the same Katy, right?

Or not? This year, a seedling of a notion had begun to push up through the sunblock creams and anti-aging peptides on her skin: could it possibly be that the responses she once imagined were re- sponses to the inner “Katy”—fascinating, charismatic woman about town—were really just responses to her youthful beauty? It was a terrifying prospect.

Thirty seconds to go. Katy took a sip of Fiji water. The timing was unfortunate. If only the whirlwind of her relationship hadn’t subsided to a gentle breeze—the shag-fest was over—at exactly the same time she’d started to hurtle toward her forties. In her twen- ties, early thirties, even, she’d have blown the closing-time whistle by now and moved on to the next handsome, amusing man with a full head of hair and a large bank account. She had been ambivalent about children then: Why sacrifice a lifestyle? Her priorities had only begun to change in her thirties. And, at times, it filled her with a horrible neediness, a vulnerability buoyed up by a sense of entitlement, which turned to resentment when Seb didn’t express a desire for the same thing. Their relationship balance of power shifted. He now held all the aces. In her blackest moments, in the early hours of the morning after a few lines of Colombia’s best the night before (it wasn’t so pretty doing drugs in your mid-thirties, but she carried on anyway as compensation for not being married or

having children), she reeled at the unfairness of it all. She hated the fact that she needed Seb to secure her future. She hated being the unrequited lover rather than the beloved.

Seb was no longer the gawky, slightly square guy who wore em- barrassing colorful socks beneath his Saville Row suits. He’d grown into his looks, his job, and, yes, quite definitely, his money. If they were to split, or, as was more likely, drift apart on different sides of the Atlantic, Seb would have no difficulty in procuring another woman. A wife. Probably a younger one. As a woman, even a beau- tiful one, her hand was weaker. She had a finite amount of time left. He didn’t. Period. As every month went by without a diamond ring or
even
a nuptial conversation, she felt a little more panicked, a little more needy. And she resented this. Hugely. She had never been needy. She’d always been the one who dumped men. She’d had more admirers than any woman she knew and yet, and yet, here she damn well was.

Katy leaned farther back on the cushions and admired the trian- gular gap between her thighs, so sculptural in her skinny dark denim. She pulled a cigarette out of a packet, failed to light it off the joss stick, lit a match, inhaled, and exhaled, holding her arm above her, admiring the sinewy form that was the prize for all that ashtanga yoga. God knows, she tried to preserve herself.

If Katy wanted this relationship to continue—and she really couldn’t face starting a new one now—she needed a strategy. She must make Seb desire her again. She must make him jealous. He needed to see other men desired her. Wasn’t that what desire was about anyhow, for men at any rate? Acquiring something that their peers desired, being on the winning team. Simple souls.

Shit, it was time. With one hand over her mouth, Katy peeped at

the test.
No
line. No damn line. She tossed the stick into the silver retro wastebasket and it clattered against the bottom. Shit. Pulling herself out of the valley of cushions, she hunted down her sexiest look-at-me acid green Miu Miu heels, and, rather than mess up the kitchen by tackling the coffee maker, went out of the house to buy a skim latte to help her strategize.

SEVEN
Æ

lara froze mid-bite. she put the croissant back
on her plate. “Say it again. I’m confused. You’re not sure you want to get married because of some charcoal pencils and, what did you say, a
lip
?”

It sounded so absurd Stevie wanted to smile, but her jaw felt locked—she’d been grinding her teeth in her sleep. Neil’s weed hadn’t helped, either. She knew it wouldn’t, but Lara had insisted and Neil obliged with his best weed because he fancied Lara. A domino of disasters already and it wasn’t even noon. “Sorry, I know it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Not really. But Stevie . . .” said Lara softly. “. . . I do know that you must do what
you
feel is right. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense to me or anyone else.”

Stevie put her head in her hands, her chestnut hair falling for- ward in fuzzy chunks, as if it had been towel-dried after swim- ming. It struck her as somewhat ironic that here was Lara, radiant and plump-lipped after a sleepless night on a single bed in a wood- paneled room somewhere in Oxford being ravished by a horny

twenty-two-year-old. And here was she, bride-to-be, coiled like a spring, with an unsightly skin disease breaking out over her décol- letage, and heart and head locked in mortal combat. “It’s not that I don’t love Jez, Lara. I do. But
something
isn’t right. Something’s missing.” A tear scraped the side of her nose. “Maybe I’ve misled us both. Maybe I
so
wanted it to be right,
so
wanted to put myself into a position where . . . where . . . Oh, I don’t know. Christ, what a to- tal mess.”

Lara, solemn-faced, spoke slowly. “Do you think you’ve confused marriage with the biological clock stuff?”

“Maybe.” But there was no point in pretending that marriage had nothing to do with having a family. It was the natural progres- sion: boyfriend, girlfriend; cohabitation; marriage; baby; more ba- bies; grandbabies; old age; death. A conventional sequence. She wasn’t a freak for wanting all that, was she?

“Don’t cry, hon.” Lara stood up from the armchair and sat next to Stevie on the sofa. “If this doesn’t work out, for
whatever
reason, it doesn’t mean you won’t meet anyone else. You’re hardly over the hill.”

Stevie sniffled.

“Please don’t buy into that thirties panic thing,” said Lara, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s
so
not worth it. It’s a conspiracy to get us all married and breeding and behaving ourselves. Besides, I could name you literally
hundreds
of women who got pregnant in their forties. Think of my sister’s best friend, Lynne. Forty-three. My neighbor was thirty-nine or something. Then there’s Liz Armitage, you know, the columnist. Forty-six!”

“Donor egg.”

“Okay. Still. And then there’s the IVF lot. Christ, you can’t walk in a London park without seeing women old enough to be my

mother pushing Bugaboos full of IVF twins and triplets. I’m afraid, Stevie,” she said with a grin, “you’re just freaking out.”

Stevie smiled. Lara was right.

“Listen, I’m thirty-three years old. I have a better relationship with my dentist than I did with my last boyfriend. In the last two years, none of my relationships have lasted longer than a few months. And you know what? I couldn’t care less. I’m having a blast.”

“You get bored, Lara.” Stevie thought of the carousel of attrac- tive young men who entered, then departed from Lara’s bedroom. “And there was Will. Wasn’t there? That was a proper relationship. You did yoga together for God’s sake.”

“Okay, thirteen months.” Lara frowned. “But we wanted differ- ent things.”

“He wanted you, Lara,” mumbled Stevie, struggling to pay at- tention, but grateful for a strand of conversation that took her away from the tumult in her own head.

“He wanted children. I didn’t.” A flicker of hurt twitched be- neath the muscles of Lara’s jaw. “It’s not a crime not to want chil- dren.”

“It’s not.” But she couldn’t understand it. Since hitting thirty, her urge to have children seemed as natural and unavoidable as the urge to breathe.

“Not having that biological clock thing going on is an advan- tage.” Lara pulled her cashmere shrug tight around her shoulders. “It means I’m not going to compromise. What’s the incentive? For me, dating and mating are unrelated. I’m hardly going to sit around waiting for my prince with my legs crossed.”

A soft breeze blew into the living room through the open garden doors, shaking the long green curtains, carrying happy spring

scents. It made Stevie feel more wretched. This wasn’t the time for maudlin introspection. She was upsetting the happy finale of her own story: all the best ones ended in marriage, like a Shakespearean comedy, order restored, a new spring promised. What the hell
was
she doing?

“I’m like one of those
Daily Mail
scare stories about predatory thirtysomething women,” continued Lara, trying to lighten the mood. “You know, last month I slept with three different men in eight days.” She started a little at how this sounded, spoken out loud. “Everyone tells me that I’ll never meet a man in New York. The single scene is worse than London. And I probably have a bet- ter chance of becoming Anna Wintour than I do of getting mar- ried.” Lara looked up and grinned impishly. “But I wake up in the morning with a smile on my face. I am doing what I want to do. And you
must
do the same.”

“I know.” Stevie nodded, feeling that the crucial issue—whether to cancel the wedding and lose the only man who’d ever loved her enough to marry her—was getting lost here. She wasn’t making a lifestyle choice. This was a matter of love and soul mates . . . or it should be, and perhaps that was the problem.

“My mother was stuck in a small, terraced house washing out dirty nappies from the age of twenty-one. Can you
imagine
? I count myself extremely bloody lucky.”

“Hmmm.” Stevie wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t so sure that choices made things simpler. “So what are you saying?”

“Don’t get married for the wrong reasons.” Lara squeezed Ste- vie’s hand. “But then again, if you decide to sashay up the aisle, we’ll forget we ever had this conversation. It’s your call.” She reached for the plate of pastries on the floor. “Croissant?”

“No thanks.” Stevie got up from the sofa and paced her parents’

living room, stepping over the familiar landscape of her childhood, large African bowls and piles of her father’s dog-eared books on the floor. “I feel so guilty already. Hugely guilty. Apart from wrecking Jez’s life, humiliating him so publicly, I’ll ruin everything for everyone.” Stevie leaned against the wall, the plaster cold on her back, her head screaming with irreconcilable thoughts.

“Stevie!” hollered her mother from the kitchen. “Casanova’s on the phone.”

Stevie and Lara exchanged horrified glances at the normalcy of Jez calling. It suddenly seemed fantastical that Stevie could
think
such a thing as canceling the wedding when the arrangements had been made and her fiancé was on the phone beckoning her back to her safe, mostly happy relationship.

“What the
fuck
do I . . .” hissed Stevie desperately, freezing to the spot.

“Get him down here. Talk things through, hon. Go on . . .” Lara gave Stevie a hug, then a little prod, and set her in motion toward the kitchen, where Patti was sitting on a chair, knees drawn to her chest, telephone cradled between her cheek and shoulder.

“Don’t worry, I’ve organized the music. The band rocks!” (Patti had recently borrowed this expression off Neil, thus rendering it unusable overnight.) “You’ll love them . . . here she is.” Patti passed the phone over to her daughter and mouthed, “In a very funny mood.” She turned Joan Baez down on her ancient cassette recorder and sat down at the table, picking up her Saturday morn- ing task of shelling peas from the garden. Stevie glared and said, “Privacy?” But Patti didn’t take the hint.

“Stevie, Stevie . . .” Jez sounded distraught. “What’s the matter? You sound terrible.”

Jez was choking on his words, trying to speak. Then he took a deep vibrato breath and composed himself. “Stevie, Dad’s dead.”

“Dead?” Stevie’s hands tingled around the telephone receiver.

Impossible.

“A heart attack at Sainsbury’s, about an hour ago,” he said, as if he scarcely believed it himself. “The freezer aisle. He died in the freezer aisle. Before the ambulance got there.”

“Oh, God. Oh, I am so sorry. Oh, Jez . . .” Stevie didn’t know what to say. It couldn’t be. Not Colin. Not now. “I can’t believe it.”

“It feels like a sick joke.” “Oh, Jez . . .”

“Come home.” Jez’s normally booming voice was barely a whis- per.

“I’ll leave now. Hang in there.”

“Hurry up, babe.” Jez sniffed loudly. “I need you. I really need you, right now.”

EIGHT
Æ

despite being locked into his own bubble of
grief, like a hamster in a plastic exercise ball, Jez Lewis couldn’t help but notice the tall, lithe blonde scissoring past him on West- bourne Grove, coffee sloshing from a Starbucks cup as her shocking green heels impacted the pavement. She had a small, hard, firm bot- tom, perfectly molded and separated by a pair of skinny dark jeans. Jez Lewis felt his inner caveman stir. He watched for two more too- brief seconds before he continued his sad amble toward the less fashionable end of Bayswater, near Queensway, to his mansion flat on Moscow Road.

Perfect timing. Outside the flat, turning the key in the lock, was Stevie, hair tousled, in baggy boyfriend jeans and one of her prissy vintage silk blouses. “Stevie . . .”