The Nearly-Weds (11 page)

He smiles at me. It’s a strange, almost humble smile. A smile that seems to indicate appreciation of my understanding and discretion.

I find myself mesmerized by it, unable to move or say anything. I’m transfixed by his eyes as they gaze at me, for the first time, without a combative edge. Without the frown, he’s so much more alluring, so much more captivating . . .

‘Night then!’ I say cheerfully.

‘Sure,’ he replies. ‘G’night.’

When I get to my room, I snuggle into bed and contemplate the whole Ryan business. My theory is this: the low-key attraction I have developed towards him is a defence mechanism. Having suffered the worst rejection possible – abandonment on my wedding day by a man I am truly, madly in love with – I’m latching on to the first good-looking bloke I come across, although he is arrogant, emotionally detached and permanently angry.

I suspect I go weak at the knees when Ryan looks at me because I’m trying subconsciously to prove to myself that I
am
capable of fancying a man other than Jason. That’s it. It’s
got
to be.

I’m now as convinced by this explanation as I am that my infatuation with Ryan’s upper arms will pass as quickly as it developed. I pick up my Jackie Collins book, reassured that this is part of an emotional healing process. It might have been nice if my subconscious had picked on someone rather more appropriate than my boss.

I’m just about to get stuck into Chapter sixty-four, when my phone rings. It might be Trudie. She said she’d call this evening to talk about potential outings with the kids tomorrow. As I go to pick up, however, I catch a glimpse of the number flashing on the screen and gasp.

Because it isn’t Trudie. It’s a UK number – and one I know very well.

I haven’t heard a peep out of Jason for months, despite my best efforts to contact him in the early days. Yet here he is, apparently phoning me now.

With my hand over my mouth and my heart racing so fast I’m surprised my bloodstream can keep up, I stare at the phone.

Christ – do I pick up?

No, no, I can’t.

But I want to . . .

No, you bloody well don’t, Zoe Moore. This is a man who not only jilted you but didn’t have the decency to explain why. So don’t be ridiculous. Really.

But I love him . . .

My finger hovers over the little green button, but before I can press it, the ringing stops. My mind is a whirl and I’m gripping the phone so hard my knuckles are white.

Okay, Zoe. Stay calm. Stay cool.

The best tactic here is to check if he’s left a message. If he hasn’t, it’s essential I don’t give the incident a second thought.

I dial my voicemail fourteen times.

And each time it responds with the same five, unforgiving words: ‘You have no new messages.’

I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to work out what to do. Every cell in my body is urging me to pick up the phone and ring him back. But something stops me. Is it pride? I don’t think so. I lost all that after our wedding day, when I continued to phone him, refusing to listen to what everyone else was telling me: Zoe, he doesn’t want you any more, so you’ve got to forget him and move on.

It wasn’t easy. It took every bit of will I had to book that airline ticket to New York and tell myself I had to accept that I’d never see him again. That I had to build a new life without him.

That
’s the reason I mustn’t phone him back: I’ve come this far without him and I’ve got to keep going. It’s a question of self-preservation. I have no idea what he wants to say to me, but one thing I am certain of is that it will take me back to square one, back to the days of emotional turmoil when crying was the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing I did at night.

I switch off the phone decisively and, wrapping my sheet round my shoulders, shuffle to my open window. A warm breeze dances across my skin as I look up at the moon, so bright tonight that the trees are almost floodlit.

I try my absolute best to stop thinking about what happened. But my thoughts are dragged, kicking and screaming, back to Liverpool, back to everything it represents.

I glance down at the windowsill as a tear splashes on to it, followed quickly by another. With hot eyes and a lump in my throat, I know I’ll never sleep.

Chapter 23

After I’d been told outside the church that my husband-to-be had stood me up, the rest of the day was a bit of a blur.

I remember the bridesmaids and ushers squabbling about who was to blame, and Win walloping her boyfriend with an already wilting bunch of calla lilies after he enquired whether the reception was still on.

I remember them nominating each other for the job of informing the hundred-odd guests that the show was over before it had begun.

I remember poor Dad wanting to stay with me, but finally being persuaded to go and break the news to Mum.

And I remember, while chaos broke out around us, Jessica shoving me back into the car and instructing the driver to hit the accelerator as if she’d just won a bit part in
The Sweeney
. ‘What a bastard!’ she kept exclaiming. ‘A complete and utter bastard! I can’t believe it. I mean . . .
Huh!
The
bastard
!’

Then she paused. ‘Sorry,’ she said, momentarily sheepish. ‘I didn’t mean to rant. You’re the one who should be ranting, not me. Although . . . what a
bastard
! I just can’t believe— Oh, sorry. You okay?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, so numb I felt anaesthetized. I remember thinking I wasn’t crying so perhaps I must be okay.

‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘anyone who does this sort of thing really isn’t someone you want to be married to, Zoe. What was he thinking? He mustn’t have been thinking.’

I glanced down at my dress, my beautiful ivory silk dress that had come at such an eye-watering price that they should have thrown in a bottle of Optrex. There was a tiny snag on the skirt, right at the front. I picked at it with my middle fingernail and pulled gently. The fabric bunched.

‘It’s not as if he hasn’t had years in which to dump you,’ Jessica babbled. ‘He could have done it six months ago and not put you through this. Or at least waited until after the honeymoon when he could have done the decent thing and got a divorce. It’s not like it’s hard, these days.’

I stared out of the window and suddenly wondered what poor Mum was doing. Probably shrieking loud enough for people sitting down to lunch in Newcastle to hear.

‘I am going to
kill
Neil when I get hold of him,’ Jessica huffed. ‘As best man, it was his job to get the groom here – even if that meant binding and gagging him.’

Her phone vibrated. She had it slammed against her head so rapidly I didn’t see her hand move.

‘
WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU
?’ I could picture Neil cowering at the other end of the phone. To say that Jessica wears the trousers in their relationship hardly covers it. I don’t think Neil even has any trousers.

‘More to the point,’ she continued, so forcefully it must have singed the hair round his ears, ‘where’s that bastard friend of yours?’

I couldn’t hear Neil’s response. But, as it turned out, I didn’t need to.

‘What do you
mean
you’ll tell me about it later?’ Jessica sounded one step away from ordering him to be beheaded. ‘Tell me
now.
Neil? Neil! Don’t you put that phone down – I mean it. I’ve never meant anything more in my life. If you put the phone down on me I’ll—’

He’d put the phone down on her.

‘Soddit,’ she said. ‘Soddit, soddit, soddit.’

We looked out of the window in silence.

‘Was he with him?’ I couldn’t help asking, eventually. ‘Jason, I mean.’

She sighed and nodded. ‘He didn’t tell me much. In fact, he didn’t tell me anything. Oh, I’m sorry, love, I really am. This is horrendous. Absolutely bloody horrendous. I don’t think I’ve ever known—’ She wiped away a tear and sat, shaking her head and muttering like someone in the early stages of post-traumatic-stress disorder.

When we got to the house I realized, as I put my key in the front door, that I needed the loo. In fact, I was desperate. I’m talking every muscle in my pelvic floor working so hard it felt like a competitive sport. I remember wondering how I would have handled it had I been standing where I was supposed to be standing at that moment.

Going to the loo took longer than I’d anticipated, courtesy of my four-foot train and so much skirt it almost filled the room. As I was about to step out of the bathroom, I heard people coming in downstairs. My mother’s voice was the loudest: ‘What a pillock!’ she bellowed. ‘What a bloody, bloody pillock! And what a selfish bloody pillock at that! I suppose in Cheshire it’s no big deal if a hundred and twenty-two asparagus tartlets go to waste. Or a hundred and twenty-two lemon mousses with curry.’

‘Coulis,’ corrected Desy.

‘That’s what I said!’ snapped Mum. ‘The point is they’re all sat in a room along with a three-hundred-and-fifty-pounds-a-night disco man and twelve completely bloody useless cava lily centrepieces.’

‘Calla,’ corrected Desy.

‘What?’ said Mum.

‘It’s
calla
lilies,’ Desy repeated.

‘And that’s before we even get on to the peach sugared almonds,’ Mum continued, ignoring him. ‘What exactly is our Zoe supposed to do with a hundred and twenty-two bags of peach sugared almonds?’

I attempted to open the bathroom door silently but the hinges had needed a squeeze of WD40 since 1991.

‘Zoe? Zoe! Is that you?’ yelled Mum, hurtling up the stairs, followed by Desy, my auntie Linda and various other members of the Slimming World/step-class posse.

‘Oh,
looove!
’ she yelled, flinging her arms round me and squeezing me so hard she made my tiara fall off.

When she pulled away, her own hat – the Accessorize number that was a dead-ringer for a Philip Treacy – was wonky. It sent a stab through my heart.

My mum is usually nothing less than immaculate. She might be twenty years older than the average Wag, but her approach to self-maintenance would put Alex Curran to shame. I sometimes think she’d prefer to amputate her fingers than be seen in public with no nail polish.

At that moment she wasn’t immaculate. At that moment, when she pulled away from me, grasping my arms as if I was about to abscond, she had so much mascara down her cheeks she might have been experimenting with the Gothic look.

‘Mum, I—’

‘Don’t say
anything!
’ she said, flinging her arms round me again with the grip of a Tae Kwon Do grand master. ‘You don’t need to say anything. That bloody pillock. I knew he didn’t deserve you.’

‘Mum, you loved him until an hour ago,’ I pointed out.

She sniffed. ‘I never liked his hair. Never trust a man who tints his own hair, that’s what I always think. He did tint his hair, didn’t he?’

I sighed and closed my eyes.

I could feel her about to protest again, but then she said, ‘Oh, God, I blame myself.’

‘Why?’ I frowned.

‘I should never have let this happen.’

Desy rolled his eyes and took a drag on his Embassy cigarette. ‘Zoe, how are you feeling?’ he asked, blowing smoke.

‘Me?’ I said. ‘Er . . . I don’t know, really.’

Then they frowned. Had they each been asked to assess my mental state there and then I think I’d have spent the next twenty years locked up in a padded cell. Because, as far as they were concerned, I should have been wailing. I should have been calling Jason a bastard and a pillock and all the names under the sun. With hindsight – sorry, that word again – I was in shock. I must have been, because the tears did come later, buckets of them. All behind the door of my mum’s sweltering spare room, which I moved into, feeling like a pathetic, overgrown teenager.

In the weeks following my wedding day, I did so much weeping my cheeks were as raw as two free-range chicken breasts. I listened to torturous love songs and wallowed in memories of our first kiss, our first weekend in the Lake District, the day we moved into our house.

But I never called him names, not even to myself. Because I still loved him. I knew I shouldn’t. But I did.

Chapter 24

It’s the natural instinct of all British nannies in the States to seek out others of their kind – even if they would make the most unlikely of chums back home. My new friend Felicity Bowdon-Clarke and I undoubtedly fall into that category. In fact, it would be fair to say we have about as much in common as Princess Michael of Kent and Kerry Katona.

I had worked in a lovely but average nursery in the suburb of a provincial city, while Felicity had been employed in super-rich Knightsbridge by the family of an industrialist so wealthy the patterns on their loo roll were probably Picasso originals. As far as I can remember, she’s the first finishing-school graduate and High Court judge’s daughter I’ve ever come across.

‘Now, Nancy, watch carefully, please. Knife like so, fork like so,’ she instructs, in a voice so cheerfully jolly-hockey-sticks that she can get away with saying almost anything.

As Felicity picks up Nancy’s right hand and positions her fingers correctly, I should explain something: Nancy is
not
the five-year-old Felicity is employed to look after but the child’s thirty-nine-year-old mother.

‘Now, the American etiquette, as you know, is to cut a few bite-sized pieces of food, then lay one’s knife across the top of the plate with the sharp edge of the blade facing in,’ Felicity continues. ‘The fork then changes from the left hand to the right, before eating commences.’

‘Uh-huh,’ replies Nancy, studiously.

‘The European style begins in the same way as the American, in that one cuts by holding the knife in the right hand while securing the food with the fork in the left. The
difference
is that the fork remains in the left hand, prongs facing down, and the knife in the right. One proceeds to eat the cut morsels of food by picking them up with the fork still in the left hand. There. What do you think? Easy, yes?’