Kate's Wedding (22 page)

‘Actually,’ said Kate, ‘the wedding’s been put back. It’s 30 April now.’

‘Good job.’

Kate must have looked hurt.

‘Now, I know that what I’m telling you might sound a bit upsetting, but I really am only saying it for your own good. You’ve got more than two months. I’ve seen girls lose a stone a month before their weddings from all the stress. You can do it if you try.’

Kate couldn’t remember when anyone had last spoken to her in such a patronising tone. When was the last time someone had told her she could do something if she tried, as though she were a child learning how to play scales on piano and work out long division?

‘I don’t think I’ll be losing a lot of weight before the wedding,’ said Kate firmly. ‘You’ll have to let the bodice out.’

‘It’ll spoil the line,’ said Heidi.

Kate almost said, ‘I don’t care.’

‘I understand,’ she said instead, ‘but I’ve got a lot more to think about right now than losing a few pounds for the wedding.’

‘It’s up to you,’ said Heidi. ‘It is the most important day of your life, not mine.’

Kate balled her hands into fists as Heidi yanked on the ribbons at the back of the bodice again.

‘Have you practised peeing?’ Heidi asked.

‘What?’

‘Peeing? I know it sounds funny, but I say it to all my brides. You’ve got to practise going in your dress, otherwise you’ll get yourself into a right old state on the day. You’ve got a maid of honour, right?’

‘My sister, I suppose.’

‘She’s going to have to help you, I’m afraid. If you go into the cubicle front ways, she can hold up the back of the skirt, so you need to practise mounting the loo the wrong way round, facing the cistern. Have you got a long dressing gown? You could have a go in that. Doesn’t matter if you get it a bit wet.’

Oh God. Kate grimaced at the thought.

‘Shall I give you a demonstration?’

Kate looked away as Heidi squatted over a chair.

The list of premarital humiliations seemed to be endless. From the very first dress fitting, Kate had come to feel like an animal being prepared for slaughter. All those people talking about her as if she wasn’t there, the pulling and the prodding, the tutting about the size of her waist. Everyone seemed to think that her engagement gave them the right to comment. Was she on a diet? Did she have an exercise plan? They suggested so much preparation: waxing, varnishing, hair practice, make-up practice, even bloody peeing practice now.

Ian was not going through any of this. Kate was pretty damn certain of that. This upcoming wedding had hardly impacted on his life. All he had to do was put on a suit and turn up at the appointed place. Kate knew for a fact that he wasn’t even going to get his hair cut.

Peeing practice. It was just too much. To hear Heidi talk about it – and, boy, did she want to talk about it at length – it sounded like an arcane ritual, something akin to foot-binding. It made Kate feel less than the woman she considered herself. She was a bloody partner at a law firm. She owned a flat. She paid her own bills. She was equal to any man and now she was being told how not to get wee on the skirt of a frock. Why was she wearing such a big bloody skirt in the first place? It was bondage, that was what it was.

Kate clamped her jaw shut.

It got worse.

‘Don’t forget to buy a crochet hook to do the buttons,’ Heidi continued. ‘Your sister’s going to be at it all day otherwise.’

Heidi was oblivious to Kate’s expression of horror as she continued to fuss with the hem, arranging it just so.

‘Ideally, what you also need is someone to get you out of the dress at the end of the day. Is anyone in the wedding party pregnant?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Kate asked.

Heidi had perfected the drape of the hem over the shoes. She stepped back and admired her handiwork.

‘A pregnant guest won’t be able to drink and you need someone sober to get these hooks undone. If your husband tries to do it, he’ll only pull them all off in his excitement. Not a great start to your wedding night.’ She gave Kate a faintly obscene wink. ‘Oh, yes, the number of brides I’ve had who lost all their buttons . . .’ Heidi continued. ‘If you haven’t got a pregnant guest, ask someone like your mum to stay a little bit sober, then she can accompany you up to the bridal suite and hubby can wait outside while you get ready.’

Even the word ‘hubby’ set Kate off that morning. She felt a bubble in her ribcage. Was that her stomach lurching in the confines of the bodice? A picture flashed into her mind, a scene from a ballet – she couldn’t remember the title – in which a newly married girl submits to having her hair cut off by her older wedded sisters. Only too clearly she imagined herself kneeling at the bottom of the marriage bed being unbuttoned by her mother and Tess while Ian waited outside with a hard-on straining the front of his best suit trousers.

Kate abruptly stepped down from the crate. Heidi’s mouth formed a horrified ‘O’ as she raced to check the back of the skirt for damage.

‘You could have put your heel through it!’ she said. ‘What on earth are you thinking?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate. ‘I’m a bit distracted. I’ve got to get to the hospital for my mum.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Heidi, softening her expression from bulldog to shih-tzu, ‘now I remember. You’re the one whose mum’s got cancer.’

Don’t talk about it, Kate begged Heidi silently. Please don’t talk about it now. Heidi launched into a long speech about a friend’s husband who’d died three weeks after getting the all-clear.

‘It’s easier for the man to be left,’ she concluded. ‘Men are never on their own for long. Not like Melanie, who owns this place. She’s been a widow for thirteen years.’

Kate zoned out while Heidi finished unhooking the dress.

That half an hour with Heidi made accompanying Elaine to her first radiotherapy session seem a complete doddle to Kate. At least no one in the hospital was looking at her arse. While her mother was in the waiting room, Kate popped out into the hospital car park to call Ian. She told him what the bitch at the bridal shop had told her, but if she was hoping for sympathy, she was unlucky.

‘Well, I suppose most women do go on a diet before their wedding, don’t they?’

‘Do you think I should go on a diet?’ Kate asked.

‘That wasn’t what I said. It’s just that most of the girls in the office . . .’

‘If you think I need to lose a few pounds, then why don’t you just come out and say it?’

‘I don’t think you need to lose weight,’ said Ian. ‘Unless you do.’

It was the wrong answer. Kate hung up on him. And then she called Matt to see if he still wanted to go for a drink.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

That night’s quick drink with Matt lasted from eight until closing time. They talked about Kate’s mum and the radiotherapy, then moved quickly on to other things. Matt’s Christmas: ‘Just terrible.’ Kate’s postponed wedding: ‘A relief.’

Matt raised an eyebrow.

‘I just mean a relief in that I don’t have a lot of time to devote to wedding-planning at the moment. There’s so much to do at work, and I want to be able to come down and look after Mum, and—’

‘You don’t have to explain anything to me,’ said Matt. ‘I know how stressful these things are, and coupled with your mum being ill and starting a new job . . .’

‘Take my mind off it,’ Kate begged him.

‘With pleasure.’

Matt brought the subject back to their college days. Kate was relieved to be laughing about old times again. Matt had always had a skill for mimicry and when he impersonated their college friends, it was as though they were right there in the room. He did an especially wicked impersonation of Helen.

Kate felt like she hadn’t laughed so hard in a long while. She felt like her old self again. Happy-go-lucky and not in the least bit prone to worrying about her parents, her job or her weight. She wanted the evening to last for ever. It might have done, had Kate not faced a crack-of-dawn drive back to London in the morning. She couldn’t afford to be late when she was still so unproven at her new firm.

‘But we’ll do this again,’ said Matt as she was preparing to leave.

‘At the weekend,’ Kate promised. ‘I’ll come down again on Friday night.’

There was a West Ham home game on Saturday. Ian would not be coming with her. Matt had stopped asking when they would be introduced.

In her rush to get ready to meet Matt, Kate had left her phone at her parents’ house. She got back that night to find several messages from Ian.

‘I know I said the wrong thing this afternoon,’ he told her voicemail. ‘You don’t need to lose any weight. That woman in the bridal shop is a body fascist. I love you just the way you are.’

But as she listened to Ian’s message, Kate remembered the way Matt had taken hold of one of her wrists that evening, looping his thumb and forefinger round it to see if the wrist still fitted neatly inside. It did.

‘You haven’t changed at all.’

He said he had always admired her fine features and delicate bones. Seeing his hand next to hers sent a shiver through Kate’s body as she remembered what it had been like when they made love. They locked eyes for a moment and she knew that he was remembering the same thing.

Kate didn’t text Ian back until the following morning.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Ian was not unaffected by the rise in Kate’s stress levels. It seemed that he could barely open his mouth any more without saying the exact wrong thing. Even apologising for those things he wasn’t sure he actually needed to apologise for no longer seemed to appease her. He would never have said it to Kate’s face, but it was as though he was suddenly up against 24/7 PMT.

Was this normal? He’d heard from the girls at work that planning a wedding was the ultimate stressful experience in a woman’s life, but those other girls weren’t like his Kate. They were nowhere near as intelligent and resourceful as she was. He could see how organising a wedding might be beyond their capabilities. Not hers.

Was it still about Kate’s mother, perhaps? Ian couldn’t understand that. Hadn’t the consultant said that Elaine’s treatment was going well? It wasn’t as though she was in hospital as an inpatient any more. There really was nothing to worry about on that front, surely.

Ian wished he had someone to talk to. He just wanted to know if the way Kate was behaving was normal. Alas, his own father was hardly the role model he craved. He’d left Ian’s mother when Ian was just seven. Their father-son relationship had never been the same after that.

Ian had one friend whom he thought he might be able to confide in. Ian felt he could call him a friend after eight years of sitting side by side at West Ham home games. Keith was the season-ticket holder who had the seat adjacent to Ian’s in the West Ham stadium. He was a few years older than Ian. He seemed like a good bloke. Salt-of-the-earth type. Secretly thoughtful. After five years of nodding acquaintanceship, they had started to share information about their lives away from the football. And then they started to share a few beers after the game. The next time West Ham played at home, Ian resolved to ask Keith what he knew about girls.

Ian opened on a jovial tack as they waited to be served at the bar.

‘Women – can’t live with them, can’t live without them.’

Keith nodded.

Ian added, ‘Kate’s been like a bear with a sore head since we changed the wedding to April. I can’t seem to say anything right. You’re married, aren’t you? Can’t you tell me what to do?’

‘Oh, you don’t want to take any advice from me,’ said Keith. ‘I did everything wrong. I got divorced thirteen years ago.’

Ian mumbled an apology. He’d had no idea.

‘It’s not exactly something I like to talk about in between goals,’ said Keith. ‘Even though she said that one of my problems was that I keep everything bottled inside.’

‘Me too,’ said Ian, relieved it might be safe to say more after all. ‘Kate says she just can’t read me. I tell her there is nothing to read.’

‘They’re funny, women,’ said Keith.

Ian agreed.

They ordered drinks and drank in silence.

‘I just want to get things right,’ said Ian. ‘I’m not used to not knowing what to do. I mean, in the office, I know exactly what’s expected of me. I come in, I do my work, and I go home. It’s when I get home that everything goes wrong. I don’t know what she wants any more.’

‘And you’re expected to guess, right?’ Keith observed.

‘Exactly.’

‘I know how that feels. They’re just not like us, women. Sometimes you have no idea whatsoever that something’s going wrong until they serve you with the divorce papers. Want to know how my marriage ended?’

‘If you want to tell me.’

‘On a mini-break in France of all things. She booked this weekend in Paris for my birthday. Now, I wasn’t bothered about going to Paris. It’s a girls’ place, really. Snooty people and fancy food. If I could have chosen where we went for my birthday, I’d have picked Barcelona or Dublin – somewhere the people know how to have a laugh – but I suppose Mel must have wanted to go to Paris, so that was where we were going to go. Anyway, it was quite exciting to go on the Eurostar, I suppose. And the hotel was nice. Right by the Eiffel Tower.’

‘Where I proposed,’ said Ian.

‘I reckon we must have seen at least three proposals while we were up there.’

‘Popular place.’

‘I can’t even see it without feeling ill,’ said Keith. ‘That weekend in Paris will haunt me for the rest of my life. I thought it was going well. We hadn’t had a row since we got on the train at Southampton to go up to Waterloo. I thought that perhaps this was all that we’d needed – just a couple of days away from the stress of the shop and my work. We could just be ourselves again. Then Mel insisted that we had dinner in this place called La Coupole. It didn’t sound like my cup of tea, but Mel said it was a Paris classic.’