Fast Friends (48 page)

Hair dripping, slender body gleaming wet, she stepped out
of the bath and considered her flat stomach with pride. Then her glance
fell upon her watch lying in the soap dish and she
saw
with horror that it was one o’clock. In less than an hour
Nico and Caroline would be arriving to give her – and Lili of
course – a lift to the Register Office. The wedding was scheduled
to kick off
at two fifteen.

No-one who chooses to get married on Christmas Eve has any
right to expect good weather. When the day
dawned frosty-
white, sparkling and sunny, Matt kissed Camilla and said
with a grin, ‘Just lucky, I guess. Someone up there must like us.’

‘
Stop gloating,’
Camilla told him, deftly removing the glass
of champagne from his hand
and placing it safely on the table.
‘Save
your energy for catching Marty. It sounds as if he and
Toby are murdering Charlotte and I don’t want blood
splattered
all over her new dress.’

‘
Ah, this is the life,’
said Matt cheerfully, pinching her bottom
as he went past. ‘My future wife and I, alone together at last.
With three wild children all hell bent on killing
each other.
Bliss.’

‘
Alone together,’ murmured
Matt at two o’clock as they
travelled in the pale grey, chauffeur-driven
Rolls, which he had insisted on hiring, to the Register Office in
Knightsbridge. Onhis left, squeezed between himself and Camilla, sat Charlotte.
Toby was perched on the very edge of the seat
on his right,
polishing his new shoes
with a clean handkerchief. Sprawled
across Matt’s lap and singing a
wordless song at the top of his
voice was
Marty. Across the top of Charlotte’s head his eyes
met Camilla’s and his
heart leapt. He couldn’t wait to marry her and make her noisy, quarrelling,
loving collection of children –
both real and
borrowed – at least partly his own. He couldn’t
wait to make her pregnant and add to the brood. He wanted it
all,
now. He couldn’t wait.

’. . I now pronounce you man and wife,’
concluded the
Registrar
and Marty, who knew only that Matt had at last
released his firm grip on his hand, broke into a fresh
chorus of
song in celebration. Matt burst
out laughing and lifted him
into the air. Suddenly everyone was kissing
everybody else. Charlotte, planting a shy kiss on Matt’s cheek, whispered, ‘Are
you my daddy now?’ and he melted.

‘No sweetheart, you’ll always have the same daddy. I’m
your stepfather, but I think it’s easier if you just call me Matt.’

‘
Oh,’ said Charlotte
thoughtfully. ‘Will you buy me Christmas
presents, though?’

‘Definitely,’ Matt assured her and she brightened.
Initially
truculent, she had metamorphosed
in recent weeks into a kind, if somewhat bossy, ten year old. ‘That’s OK then.
Do you want
me to look after Marty for you so that you can kiss some
more people?’

Nico hung back, wishing that he hadn’t
come. Watching
Camilla marry someone
else – someone who so obviously made
her
happy – wasn’t easy and the fact that he couldn’t find
anything about
Matt Lewis to dislike didn’t help. Besides, he
thought
unhappily, standing witness to all this undiluted joy
only brought home to
him how messed up his own life was. Caroline had made a terrific effort in the
last couple of months
and had been
particularly understanding since he had been
racing to finish his new
album.

The only trouble was, he reflected as
he watched Loulou
fling her arms around
Matt’s neck and give him a noisy kiss, the nicer Caroline was, the more guilty
he felt because he couldn’t love her. If only she would do something
wrong .
. .
give him a reason not to love her . . . it would be so much
easier
.. .

Caroline, at his side, gently nudged him. ‘You haven’t
congratulated them,’ she said in a low voice,
carefully control
led, determined not to betray the fact that she was
desperately
jealous of Nico’s past
relationship with Camilla. Only the fact
that he had been so reluctant to come to the wedding told her
how much he still cared, and that made Camilla far
more of a
threat than Loulou in
Caroline’s eyes. Or she would have been,
if she hadn’t just married that
gorgeous Matt Lewis.

Camilla, who had just dismantled her bouquet of white
roses
and baby’s breath and tucked the
delicately fragrant flowers
into the
hair of first Charlotte then Zoë’s children, Gussie and
Fee, glanced up
and saw Nico making his way towards her. She straightened, felt a moment of
awkwardness and hoped it didn’t
show in her
smile. It had been Loulou’s idea, of course, that
Nico should be
invited. He would be hurt, she had insisted, if he weren’t. And Camilla was
quite unable, without going into very
private
details, to persuade her otherwise. She had half-hoped
that he would
have been unable to attend. Even loving Matt as
much as she did hadn’t killed her feelings for Nico. And after
the way she had treated him she should be
grateful, she
supposed, that he had had the decency to come to her
wedding.

‘Congratulations,’ said Nico, inclining his head and
kissing Camilla’s cheek. She breathed in the familiar scent of his aftershave
and longed suddenly to hug him.

‘Thank you, Nico. And thank you for coming. I’m glad you
did.’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ He smiled, and the lie came easily. ‘We’re
friends, aren’t we? Matt’s a lucky man.’

‘
I’m lucky, too,’ she
told him simply. ‘When you think what
I was like only a year ago.’

And when you think of everything that
has happened since
then . . . the thought
sprang, unspoken, between them both and Camilla smiled, reached out and touched
his hand. The spon
taneous gesture had far
more effect than the sterile kiss which
had preceded it and instantly she regretted making it. Nico
looked
uncomfortable and she drew back, glancing past him at Caroline who had now been
drawn into conversation with Matt’s younger brother, Lloyd.

‘There’s probably another wedding party outside, the Regis
trar’s looking twitchy. I think we’d all better
start making a
move.’

Grateful for the change of subject
Nico relaxed, his green
eyes
sparkling with humour as he glanced across at the fidgeting
man. ‘Loulou thinks he’s on speed. Apparently he
officiated at
one of her weddings – it
must have been the last one – and he
was just as twitchy then.’

‘
He probably got
nervous when he saw Loulou,’ said Camilla.
‘Maybe he thought she was
going to get married again.’

Eventually the Registrar’s office was
cleared and everyone
piled into
their cars. Despite Camilla’s horrified protest at the thought of what it would
cost him, Matt had decided that the reception had to be held at the Ritz. He
had also booked a suite there for the week, after wisely informing his
excitable golfing friends that he would be spending his honeymoon at the
Carlton Towers.

Jack, it had been arranged, would turn
up at six o’clock to
take Toby, Charlotte and Marty back home with him. When Camilla had
informed him of her imminent remarriage they
had sat down together to discuss the children’s lives.
Making no
mention of the night he had turned
up with Roz at Vampires,
she had persuaded him that their shared custody
should now become more equal. Jack needed a certain amount of free time and she
needed her children. Now that Matt had bought a large five-bedroomed house in
Belgravia, they were well able to
accommodate
them. She had been terrified that, seeing how
much it mattered to her,
he would create difficulties, but to her surprise and relief Jack had agreed.
Both children, he admitted, had missed her. They weren’t always easy to cope
with, although
he was pleased with the way
Charlotte was maturing. And
besides, he added, he wasn’t one to hold a
grudge.

‘
He
doesn’t hold a grudge!’ Matt had exploded when
Camilla
related the conversation to him
afterwards. ‘How bloody noble
can the lying bastard get?’

It had all been amicably sorted out and Camilla wondered
if it
was possible to be any happier than
she now was. From
persuading Jack to share the children with her, it was
a relatively easy step getting him to accept Marty. Like both Charlotte and
Toby he had had initial reservations, but meeting him swiftly overcame such
flimsy obstacles. With his new, spiky haircut, irresistible, ever-present smile
and gradually expanding vocabulary – he could now say Tom and Jerry, hug me,
hole-in-one,
champion and shit with
embarrassing fluency – he had
bombarded the family with affection and an
infectious giggle.

Marty’s mother, struggling with six
other children and a
‘husband’
who seldom came home, was pathetically grateful to
Camilla for giving Marty the love and attention she was unable
to afford herself. Charlotte wiped strands of
saliva and smears
of chocolate from
Marty’s mouth with the practised ease of a
nurse, assuming as she did so a slightly bossy, long-suffering
air
which reduced Matt to fits of laughter. Toby spent endless hours trying to
teach the distractable Marty how to play football.
‘Mum,’ he complained eventually, ‘Marty doesn’t understand
about goals. He keeps pulling up the posts and
saying
"Champion". He’s even worse at football than Charlotte.’

Camilla watched them now with pride
as they played together
at a
circular table in the lavish, high-ceilinged ivory and gold Berkeley Suite at
the Ritz. The day was perfect and realizing it, tears of happiness sprang to
her eyes.

Hastily blinking them back and taking
a sip of pink
champagne,
she gazed around the room, observing the other
guests. Matt’s parents, Paula and Tom, were laughing at
one of
Nico’s dead-pan jokes. Caroline was
deep in discussion with
Lloyd, not for
the first time that afternoon. Her sleek, honey-
brown head bent close to
his dark one and from time to time she glanced sideways at Nico to see if he
was paying attention. Zoë
and Loulou also
seemed to be enjoying themselves with two
of Matt’s friends. The ultramarine dress Loulou wore was
borrowed,
for hardly any of her pre-pregnancy, notoriously
close-fitting clothes fitted her post-pregnancy chest. Camilla
was
one of only a few people who knew that the nationwide
publicity following Loulou’s donation of ‘all her wordly goods’
to
research into cot deaths had resulted in a wave of smaller donations being sent
not only to the same charity, but also to Loulou herself. Quietly, and without
fuss this time, she had
written to each of these
kind-hearted donors, thanking them
and explaining that while she was
grateful, she was passing the money on to the charity. Not a penny had been
kept back for herself. And Camilla had found
herself
in the happy
position of
being able to lend Loulou her
clothes for a change, their bust
sizes now being almost identical.

Soon, more people would be arriving,
she realized. Half a
dozen or so
of Matt’s closer friends on the international golfing circuit were catching a
flight over from Spain and spending
Christmas
in London. The English family with whom Paula,
Tom and Lloyd Lewis were
staying would be here, as would several of the models from Sheridan’s, with
whom Camilla had
become friendly. Christo was
holding the fort at Vampires
tonight,
but Daisy and Lena had both managed to take the
evening off and would be
arriving at any moment, dressed up to the nines in the hope of ensnaring a
couple of the golfers.

And there was a possibility that Mac
would turn up, too.
Camilla
had phoned him a fortnight ago, mentally prepared for
a curt refusal. He hadn’t seen Loulou
since the morning Lili
was born.
She knew, because Nico had told Loulou who had in turn relayed the information
to her, that Mac was bitter. And if there had been any chance at all of him
forgiving her, it had
apparently been dashed
beyond hope by the news that Loulou
was now living with Christo Moran.