Kate's Wedding

CONTENTS

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Chrissie Manby 2011

The right of Chrissie Manby to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN: 9781444733662

Book ISBN: 9781444733655

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

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London NW1 3BH

To Josephine Annabel Christine Hazel

To the two little girls waking up in their caravan that morning, 29 July was going to be a bit like Christmas. All the usual rules were to be suspended on the day when Lady Diana Spencer married her prince. Even though they were holidaying in a caravan at a Caravan Club rally held on a sports field, the young sisters were going to be allowed to dress up. The bridesmaids’ dresses they had worn for the wedding of their mother’s younger brother had been brought all the way from Birmingham for this very special second outing.

Kate, who was, at nine, the elder by two years, was first to get out of bed.

‘I’ve made a royal wedding breakfast,’ her father, John, called from the awning. He had draped a Union flag over the little fold-up table. There was bunting hanging from the guy ropes that held the brown and orange awning in place.

‘Red strawberries, white cream and blue—’

‘Pancakes!’ Kate squealed. ‘The pancakes are blue!’

‘Food colouring,’ her father explained. ‘I don’t suppose even Prince Charles is eating such a patriotic breakfast today.’

Tess, just seven, refused to eat anything that wasn’t its
proper
colour. The girls’ mother, Elaine, was dispatched to make some toast.

The whole campsite was beginning to wake up now. After weeks of speculation about the weather, the sun was shining like a smile. Everyone had a greeting for their neighbours as they went about their business. After breakfast, Kate accompanied her father to empty the chemical toilet. The festive mood prevailed even by the cesspit, where several other fathers admired John’s Union Jack shorts.

Around the camp leader’s caravan, preparations for the celebrations ahead were well under way. There was to be a huge buffet lunch in lieu of the street parties people were missing back home. Every caravan had received its instructions: each person should bring their own chair, a plate, a knife and fork, and a teacup; Kate’s parents had chipped in for their family’s allocation of barbecue food.

Dressed in her bridesmaid’s finery, Kate turned cartwheels in the middle of the field while she waited for something to happen. Tess tried to follow suit, but she could just about do a forward roll. Meanwhile, John and Elaine carried chairs and beer and wine bottles to the trestle tables by the camp leader’s caravan. In return for three bottles of cider, a colour television with a remote control had been borrowed from a house that backed onto the campsite.

The morning dragged. Kate turned more cartwheels. Someone’s radio played ‘songs for a princess’. Every tune had something royal in its lyrics or music. Until at last, at last, the montage of scenes from the lives of the Prince of Wales and his future wife was replaced by live footage. The royal wedding had begun.

Just before eleven twenty, Kate and Tess joined their parents in the circle that had formed round the borrowed television. Kate climbed onto her father’s lap. The sun was shining so brightly they could hardly see the screen. Kate struggled to the front of the circle and the shade of the camp leader’s awning to get a better view.

Up and down the country, millions of loyal citizens watched Lady Diana Spencer glide up the aisle of St Paul’s on her father’s arm, to the sound of the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’. In her dress, with its yards of taffeta, Diana was the embodiment of every little girl’s dream. She was celebrated that afternoon with toasts of champagne, of cider and of dandelion and burdock. On the campsite at Littlehampton, there was dancing until dawn.

Kate Williamson fell asleep beneath a trestle table. Her father scooped her into his arms to carry her back to the caravan. Halfway across the field, she stirred into wakefulness.

‘One day,’ she told her father, ‘I’m going to marry a prince.’

Chapter One

It was much too cold and wet to be standing in a queue to go up the Eiffel Tower, but Ian was insistent. How could you go to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower? Especially as, Ian reminded Kate, he had never been to Paris before. That was a sore point. Ian had been so proud of organising this surprise mini-break in the City of Light. He was gutted when Kate told him that not only had she been to Paris before, she had actually stayed in the very hotel where he had booked a junior suite.

Kate stopped short of telling him that on her last visit – just two years before – she and Dan had stayed in the hotel’s
honeymoon
suite. Not that there was ever any chance of a honeymoon with Dan, as he had somehow managed to be involved in complicated divorce proceedings for the entire four years Kate was with him, despite having officially separated from his wife two years before Kate arrived on the scene.

So Ian had sulked all the way from St Pancras to Gare du Nord. He seemed set to keep sulking all day. At the Hôtel Renoir, Kate prayed that the receptionist would not recognise her, as she had recognised Dan two years earlier. How awful that had been. Putting two and two together to make five, the receptionist had greeted Kate by Dan’s ex-wife’s name.

‘We have put you in your favourite room, Mrs Harper,’ the girl said.

That was how Kate and Dan came to be in the honeymoon suite. She told him it was one thing to be taken to the hotel where he and his ex had tried to save their marriage – on several occasions, as it turned out – but it was something else to have to sleep in the same bloody room. Dan was forced into a hasty upgrade.

Despite that inauspicious start, Kate had liked the Hôtel Renoir and for that reason she persuaded Ian that there was no need for them to find a different hotel for their mini-break.

‘This trip is already a hundred per cent better than the last time I was here because I am with
you
,’ she assured him. ‘Everything is different.’ That much was absolutely true.

Neither did she mind doing the tourist sights since Dan, of course, had been to Paris dozens of times with his Francophile wife and so refused to spend even a minute of Kate’s birthday weekend queuing to see the
Mona Lisa
. Kate wanted to see the
Mona Lisa
. She also wanted to see the Venus de Milo. She wanted to go to the Musée d’Orsay and see the Impressionists at the Orangerie and have her picture taken beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The Eiffel Tower, however, had never been high on Kate’s to-do list. Given her slight fear of heights, she had no particular desire to spend an hour getting to the top of the thing to spend five minutes looking at the ground. Especially on a wet, grey day like this. What would they be able to see, anyway? They should go to Saint-Germain instead, she suggested. Find a little bar and get quietly hammered on pastis.

‘No,’ said Ian, digging in his heels. ‘I’ve always wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower.’

And so they went up the Eiffel Tower, squashed into the lift with a group of American tourists who were commiserating with one of their number over a handbag snatched. At the top, Ian pulled Kate away from the crowd. At least, as far away from the crowd as was possible in one of the world’s most visited monuments. There was no hope of being entirely alone.

‘Shame about the weather,’ Ian muttered.

‘Hmm.’ Kate looked out over the city towards the fairytale white domes of the Sacré-Coeur, barely visible through the mist. She was remembering standing in front of that cathedral, hearing Dan say that even now his divorce was through he wasn’t sure that he was, you know, ready to ‘move on’ and make their relationship permanent, when Ian interrupted her reverie with the question she should have known to expect.

‘Sorry?’ Kate didn’t quite catch what he’d said.

‘Will you marry me?’ he asked again. He looked so scared. He was actually shaking, though maybe that was only through the effort of
half
sinking to one knee. Ian didn’t want to put his knee down properly because the floor was wet and his trousers were new. Kate asked if he was joking.

‘No,’ he said, ‘of course I’m not joking. Kate Williamson, will you marry me?’

Two of the American matrons from the lift were watching.

‘Oh God,’ said Kate, so intensely aware of her audience that she caught the cat’s-bottom tightening of lips her blasphemy elicited. ‘I mean, yes,’ she said, and it was as though she’d said it as much to appease the American matrons as to please Ian. She hadn’t had time to consider whether it pleased her. This was all so sudden.