White Wedding (10 page)

Shaden didn’t react – or maybe she didn’t hear what Bel had said because she was busy primping herself in Bel’s huge wall mirror. She adjusted her neckline to make sure
her red bra didn’t show. Then she adjusted it again to make sure it did. Bel knew that the cogs were turning in her brain and any moment now her lovely cousin would realize that there would
be lots more attention on her if the bride looked such a dog.

‘Would you like some champagne?’ asked Bel.

‘Oh yes, just a glass,’ said Shaden.

Bel popped the cork out of the bottle of waiting Cristal and filled up two long flutes. Just as Shaden was about to take a sip, Bel stopped her.

‘Before you taste, you have to toast,’ she smiled. ‘Now what are you going to say?’

Shaden thought for a moment, then her scarlet lips curved upwards and a light bloomed in her big brown eyes. ‘To Richard’s fabulous wife. May every good thing in life land in her
lap.’ She chinked her glass against Bel’s and drank. That knocked Bel a little because Shaden’s toast had sounded very heartfelt and genuine. She took a long drink of champagne
herself and shivered as it slipped, cold and fizzy, down her throat.

They both heard the sound of a car pull up outside. Shaden went over to the window and saw the white Rolls-Royce.

‘The car’s here,’ she said, returning to the mirror to check her make-up. Once upon a time she didn’t know what a mirror was, thought Bel, harking back to the days when
they were both in dungarees and sliding down the long polished banister in her dad’s old house. But those days were so long gone they might as well be wrapped in dinosaurs’ bog
roll.

Trevor pushed open the door, full of smiles.

‘Hello, love, you look beautiful. That dress doesn’t half look different on you to how it looks on the hanger.’

‘It’s not the same dress, Uncle Trevor,’ tutted Shaden with a tone in her voice that intimated her uncle must be simple. Bel felt herself rearing in daughterly defence, then
she took in a very big breath and counted to ten.

‘Right, I’ll be off, then,’ Shaden said, putting down the unfinished glass of champers. ‘See you in church, coz. Break a leg.’ She blew a kiss in Bel’s
direction, then she was off out of the door, her high heels clicking on the ground, and into the Rolls en route to the church.

‘Where’s your mother’s dress, then?’ asked Trevor, giving her a kiss.

‘I can’t wear it, Dad,’ said Bel, pushing down the tears that were getting harder and harder to stem. ‘I ripped it . . .’ She couldn’t elaborate on the lie.
Not to her dad. Especially as he put his arm round her and gave her a squeeze.

‘You look lovely, anyway,’ he said. ‘And it’s not the end of the world.’

Oh Dad, it is, she wanted to say. I don’t know where I am.

Trevor pulled her at arm’s length and looked down into her face. He was a foot taller than her, groomed and still so very attractive despite the advance of the years. She knew how lucky
her mum had been to marry him.

‘I need to have an eleventh-hour talk to you, my darling,’ he said. ‘You are absolutely sure you want to marry Richard? Because if you aren’t, you must not be afraid to
say it. No one will judge you. And if they do, they’ll have me to answer to.’

Bel formed her next words very carefully. She had been prepared for this question and she knew how to answer it and look someone straight in the eyes while she was doing so.

‘Dad, I want to walk down that aisle today more than I want anything else.’

But Trevor wasn’t having any elusiveness. ‘I didn’t ask that. I asked if you want
to marry Richard
.’

He was looking at her with such tenderness that she wanted to crumble against him. But she had come this far. Her blinkers were on. She knew what she had to do and she had to stick to it because
it was the only path she knew now.

‘Yes, Dad. I love Richard.’ And boy, was that true. That’s why she was a jelly inside her iron-like exterior. She would have made a great Dalek.

‘Oh my love,’ sighed Trevor, cupping her face with his hands. ‘I hope you’re as happy as Faye and I are.’

Faye
. Bel didn’t want to hear her name today. Why couldn’t he have said ‘as happy as your mum and I were’? That was her signal to leave his embrace and pull the
veil over her face. The Rolls would be coming back in five minutes. Richard would be waiting for her at the altar with his seedy brother, their sour-faced parents sitting behind them. And at the
other side of the church were the Bosomworth lot and a load of people she neither knew nor cared about. And very shortly all of them were going to see a wedding as they’d never seen one
before.

Max sat in church between Stuart and Violet. Glyn hadn’t come, which was a shame because Max was dying to see what he was like in person. From what she knew about him
already, she didn’t think she’d have a lot of patience with him; he sounded a bit wimpy for her tastes.

‘You really should get out more,’ Violet had told him as she was pinning up her long hair. ‘It isn’t doing you any good being inside all the time. You should try and come
with me today.’

‘Why would I want to go and make small talk with people I don’t know? Do you have to go?’ Glyn whined.

Violet was horrified he even had to ask that. The look on her face made him retract it immediately.

‘Sorry, of course you do. Oh forgive me, Violet.’ He reached for her hand and kissed it. ‘I get myself in such a stew sometimes. I know you won’t be long.’

‘Well, I’ll be back tonight,’ corrected Violet. ‘I’m not missing the reception.’

‘No, no, of course. Not too late, though? I’ll wait up.’

Violet didn’t say that he didn’t have to; she knew he would, anyway.

‘Isn’t this a gorgeous church?’ Max said to Stuart as her opening gambit. Her eyes roved over the stained-glass windows and the long, long aisle. She imagined her gypsy train
trailing down it, her bridesmaids behind, their dresses trailing too.

‘It’s all right,’ sniffed Stuart. ‘If you like churches.’

‘I do like them, very much,’ said Max. She knew that with her big fat gypsy frock on she would have to be married with some pomp and ceremony and church music and an aisle to walk
up.

The bells started another ringing session.

‘Ah would you listen to that,’ sighed Max, when they’d finished pealing. She sounded like gypsy Margaret’s Irish mother. ‘Wedding bells. A wedding just isn’t
a wedding without that sound, is it?’

Stuart didn’t react, but Max knew he had heard her. She was just hoping one of these seeds she was planting would start to germinate. She didn’t have a lot of time to play with.
Forty-two days, to be precise.

Violet twisted round in the pew to see if there was any activity at the door. She could see flashes of Shaden’s red dress as she walked up and down impatiently outside.

‘There’s a real wedding feel in the air in this church, isn’t there?’ Max asked Stuart, as they listened to the organist begin to play. He laughed. He wasn’t daft;
he knew what she was up to.

‘More than there would be in a registry office, you mean?’ he answered.

‘I can’t imagine a registry office would have any sort of atmosphere. It’s just an office really,’ said Max. ‘It won’t have that slightly damp churchy smell
and the flowers . . . hang on, where are the flowers?’

She had known there was something missing as soon as she walked into the church, but only now had her finger fallen on what that was. There were no displays of flowers on the end of the pews or
by the altar. Not so much as a leaf. That was weird because she was certain that in one of the first conversations they all had, it was evident how much Bel loved flowers and that she intended to
festoon the church with them for the ceremony.

It was something Vanoushka had noticed too. She had been smirking to herself about that.

‘This is what happens when you don’t take control,’ she had told her sister. ‘No flowers at a wedding, how preposterous. And did Belinda book a photographer? I
haven’t seen one.’ Then she tutted for so long that she sounded like a morse-code message coming through.

The organist stopped playing the church musak and the opening bars of ‘Here Comes the Bride’ speared the air.

‘She’s here,’ said Max, flapping her hands. She turned round to see a small woman in white in the doorway. ‘Hang on, what’s she got on?’ It certainly
wasn’t her mother’s beautiful silk and lace dress, which she had been led to believe Bel would be wearing. For a moment Max thought another bride had turned up at the wrong church.

Violet had also noticed the dress; it was nothing like the description Bel had given of it. Her feelings that something wasn’t quite right about this wedding were prickled awake again. She
hoped she was wrong. And when Bel swept past them, eyes intently forward, Violet could have sworn there were nettles sitting among the spray of red roses.

Whereas Trevor walked slowly and proudly down the aisle, grinning, Max and Violet saw that underneath her veil Bel’s face was expressionless – as though carved of stone.

Big nerves
, thought Max.

What’s going on, Bel?
thought Violet.

Max and Violet were particularly keen to see Shaden. She was every bit as golden and glossy as Bel had reported her to be. Oooh but she looked a madam, they both decided. They watched her
swagger down the aisle with her Pippa Middleton bum. She totally outshone the bride – and she knew it.

Bel’s eyes were fixed on Richard at the head of the aisle. He was looking impossibly handsome in a black morning suit, a red rose in his lapel, and beside him his brother, who carried a
chip the size of Wales on his shoulder because he hadn’t got his brother’s height, looks or charm. Bel despised Liam. Strangely enough her hatred of him restored her strength, which
seemed to have been seeping from her legs with every passing second.

The vicar welcomed everyone to the church, then announced the number of the first hymn.

‘“Fight the Good Fight”?’ Max whispered to Stuart. Considering the number of heads that were turning towards each other and the ripple of comment from many of the guests,
she wasn’t the only one who found that odd.

Violet couldn’t relax. There really was something not right here. She could hear her heart thumping in her chest while the couple took their vows. Richard was respectfully serious but Bel
was delivering her lines like a constipated robot, staring up at Richard intently, repeating everything the vicar said in a flat, but firm, tone. Violet was dreading the bit about ‘just
impediments’, because that was the moment she
knew
something pivotal was going to happen.

It didn’t.

The moment passed. The guests turned to the next hymn – ‘Oh God of Truth’. Only the die-hard churchgoers seemed to know it; the rest just mimed, moving their mouths over the
words like marionettes being worked by a crap puppeteer.

‘Bit of a boring wedding, isn’t it?’ whispered Stuart, playing right into Max’s hands.

‘And a wedding shouldn’t be boring, should it, Stuart? It should be memorable. I would never have thought that Bel was the type of person so have such a dull wedding as
this.’

‘But, you don’t know her all that well really, do you?’ he answered.

‘I wouldn’t feel properly married if I had a boring wedding,’ said Max, forcing a tremble into her voice.

‘Hmm . . .’ said Stuart. Max sat back in her pew so he wouldn’t see her smiling. It was the sound he made when he was deep in thought and it usually preceded the words:
‘Okay, Max, maybe you’re right.’

The organist began to play again as the happy couple emerged from the vestry arm in arm and walked back down the aisle, although ‘happy’ didn’t really cover it. Bel had a fixed
smile on her face that was as fake as Jordan’s boobs. Behind them Shaden sashayed in her gorgeous
strawberry
dress, pouting as if she had graduated with honours from a Victoria Beckham
mouth-arranging institute.

Outside, people loitered and waited to have their photographs taken, until Trevor regretfully announced that the photographer hadn’t arrived. Vanoushka flashed a superior look at her
sister again. One thing was for sure: Shaden’s wedding – when it happened – wouldn’t have much to beat.

To further the disappointment, Bel got straight in the Rolls rather than pose for guests to snap shots with their personal cameras, dragging Richard behind her. Some people hadn’t even
left the church when they realized that the bride had gone ahead to the reception. There were a few murmurings about this being a very odd and cold wedding, and not at all what was expected of
people with such wealth to their name.

The Bishop elders kept a quiet dignity about the proceedings, but it was quite obvious from Madeleine’s face that she was furious. Her scowl was even more pronounced than usual – and
that was saying something. She had spent a fortune on her navy outfit and was wearing a hat the size of a spaceship. She made Vanoushka in her Dior look like Bob Geldof climbing backwards out of a
hedge. For all the expense she had gone to, she wanted to be immortalized in her son’s album and be the talk of the neighbourhood. She was also absolutely disgusted about the non-presence of
any press. Typical of commoners, she adjudged. Still, there was always the hope that this farce might be the first step towards a divorce.

‘Well, if this is what a “plain” marriage is like, I’d rather not have one,’ said Max outside the church. ‘That has to be the most miserable ceremony
I’ve ever been to.’

‘Hmm,’ said Stuart again, climbing into Violet’s car.

It was a short drive to Maltstone Lodge, where the reception was to be held. Dark-pink cocktails with sugared rims were waiting for the guests.

‘Bloody hell, that’s strong,’ said Stuart, coughing as the alcohol hit the back of his throat. He made Violet laugh. She had liked his smiley, warm self on sight.

‘What is it?’ She took a sip and nearly choked. Blimey, more than one of these and she wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere for a fortnight.

‘It tastes of vodka and some more vodka,’ said Max, licking her lips.