Mad About You Read online

  MAD ABOUT YOU

  Mhairi McFarlane

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2022

  Jacket design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  Cover illustration © Maja Tomljanovic

  Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008412456

  eBook Edition © February 2022 ISBN: 9780008412463

  Version: 2022-02-28

  Praise for Mad About You

  ‘My heart always soars at a new Mhairi novel, I love, love, love her. She’s so great at treading the narrow line between humour and loss. I read this with delight and envy’

  MARIAN KEYES

  ‘Gorgeous, funny, life-affirming’

  JENNY COLGAN

  ‘Funny, charming and smart, a plot that gets under your skin, and one scene in particular that will have women everywhere cheering out loud’

  LUCY DIAMOND

  ‘Funny, poignant, full of insight, Mad About You is a triumph’

  KATIE FFORDE

  ‘A compelling, clever story, while still being so ridiculously funny and heartwarming’

  LUCY VINE

  ‘I adored it! It was so funny, so sad in parts, and just so sharp and heartwarming. Mhairi at her absolute finest with an exquisite balance of light and shade’

  LIA LOUIS

  ‘Witty, moving and original. I will read anything Mhairi writes, she is the master of thought-provoking romantic fiction and I adore the characters she creates’

  SOPHIE COUSENS

  ‘An absolute joy of a book: funny, sad and entirely unputdownable, full of compassion and hope, and blissfully, wonderfully romantic’

  CRESSIDA MCLAUGHLIN

  ‘Laugh-out-loud funny, devastatingly moving, and delightfully swoony, all at once. McFarlane is in a league of her own’

  LOUISE O’NEILL

  ‘Hilarious, wise, and clever with twists and turns and packed with heart and chemistry that sizzles off the page … she’s brilliant and untouchable’

  JUSTIN MYERS

  ‘It’s so funny, so moving, so perfectly paced, so everything. She is absolutely brilliant, the kind of writer you feel lucky to be around at the same time as, and I’m in awe of her talent. I can’t wait for this one to be out in the world so I can press copies on everyone I know’

  EMMA HUGHES

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book so much. A hero and heroine to root for, a plot that races along with the pace of a thriller and the heart of a romance, and an ending I will never forget’

  GILLIAN MCALLISTER

  Praise for Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘Gorgeously romantic, as well as a story about friendship and grief and loss; I never wanted it to end’

  BETH O’LEARY

  ‘An effortlessly brilliant read – will have you laughing when you shouldn’t and sobbing when you least expect it’

  GIOVANNA FLETCHER

  ‘A luminous, heart-achingly beautiful love letter to friendship’

  JOSIE SILVER

  Dedication

  For Shelley Summers & Jennifer Lee

  soulmates

  Epigraph

  All the days you get to have are big

  Self Esteem

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for Mad About You

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  Also by Mhairi McFarlane

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  ‘Hi, you’re the best man? Is it Sam? I’m Harriet, I’m the photographer today.’ She raised the Nikon D850, round her neck on a strap, by way of unnecessary corroboration. ‘Is the groom around?’

  The best man looked at her with an expression of taut desperation. He was coated in a pastry glaze of sweat, like he’d been brushed with an egg wash and would form a golden crust at 180 degrees.

  A very awkward pause ensued, where Harriet wondered if he could speak.

  ‘He’s gone, Harriet,’ Sam croaked, eventually, with wild eyes. He uttered it with the kind of brokenness and weight people usually reserved for when they meant: passed to the other side.

  ‘Who’s gone?’

  ‘The groom!’ The best man gestured with both arms outstretched at the empty space next to him.

  Harriet checked her watch. Ten minutes to the official kick-off.

  ‘Get him back, pronto, or she’ll arrive without him here,’ she whispered urgently.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ said Sam, who looked as if he was having an anaesthesia-free foot amputation aboard a haunted boat in a storm. ‘He’s gone-gone. For good.’

  ‘What? Gone? As in …?’

  ‘As in has departed the premises, is declining to get married,’ Sam said under his breath, eyes bulging.

  ‘What the fuck!’ Harriet hissed. ‘Did he … say why?’

  ‘I told him he didn’t have to do this if he wasn’t sure, sort of as a JOKE, and he said seriously do you mean that and I said why? He said because I don’t want to do this, and I said is this nerves
? and he said no, did you mean it when you said I didn’t have to do it? And I had to say well yeah I guess so? and he said OK I’m going then please say I’m sorry.’

  Sam said this all in one galloping breath and had to pause to suck in air. He put a steadying palm on his chest, on his pristine white shirt, and when he moved it there was a tragicomic sweaty handprint on the cotton.

  ‘I’m going to have to tell Kit he’s jilted her. Oh my fucking life!’

  ‘He’s definitely not coming back?’ Harriet said.

  Sam said, closing his eyes, clearly wishing himself able to teleport from this church in the Gothic revival style, on the outskirts of Leeds: ‘Nope.’

  Harriet had no protocols for this whatsoever. She was hired to take pictures, from the soup to nuts of bridal prep through to the first dance. It didn’t always go to plan – best men got so drunk they slurred the speech, DJs played the uncensored version of the track and a chocolate fountain once broke and appeared to be pumping out a mixture of kibble and raw sewage. But the knot always got tied. A runaway prospective husband-to-be was off the map, as far as crises went.

  ‘Did he tell the vicar?’ Harriet said in hushed tones, through a placeholder gritted smile, in case they were under observation.

  ‘Yes. He told him at least,’ Sam said.

  ‘Where’s the vicar now?’

  ‘Round the back, having a cigarette.’

  ‘What? Are vicars even allowed to smoke?’

  ‘I don’t know, but under the circumstances, I didn’t feel I could tell him not to.’

  Harriet nodded. One for God to judge.

  ‘Did I cause this? With my stupid line about how he didn’t have to do it?’

  Sam genuinely looked like he might cry.

  ‘No!’ Harriet said, in an emphatic whisper. ‘This isn’t exactly something you’d do purely through the power of suggestion.’

  ‘I should walk out to meet her, shouldn’t I?’ Sam said. ‘It’ll be worse if she gets to the door?’

  ‘Oh God – definitely,’ Harriet said. The public humiliation would surely be unbearable if everyone saw her in her finery. If they realised at the same time she realised. The Kristina who’d hired Harriet didn’t seem the type to take any disappointment well, let alone catastrophe. She was doll-tiny, with jet-black hair and a self-assured, borderline haughty demeanour. The groom had been too busy to meet Harriet during the standard planning stages, and now she was wondering if that was significant.

  ‘If he’s definitely, definitely not coming back?’

  Sam’s face was panic and agony. ‘He’s not.’

  ‘I can’t believe he’s done this to you. And to her,’ Harriet said, aware that it was a slightly odd statement given she didn’t know the tosser. I can’t believe [a total stranger] would behave this way!

  She glanced at the good-natured, expectant hubbub behind them, feeling crushed on their behalf.

  ‘I’ll walk out with you,’ she said, and Sam nodded thank you in gratitude.

  Heads down, they strode purposefully down the aisle, out into the churchyard and down the path, among the mossy gravestones. As they neared the road, Harriet saw a beribboned white Rolls-Royce slide up alongside the pavement and felt physically sick. Poor, poor Kristina.

  And poor Sam. He blew his cheeks out and exhaled, windily, stuck his fingers into his wild mop of curly hair, then seemed to remember it was tamped down with gel.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Harriet said, and Sam nodded, no longer able to communicate.

  ‘Wish me luck,’ he said eventually, in a pinched voice, as he left Harriet’s side.

  ‘Good luck,’ Harriet said, quietly, though as the words hung in the air they sounded violently tasteless.

  She realised she couldn’t bear to even look, to see the moment the bride crumpled, and it was clear Harriet’s contribution to the day was over. She strode briskly in the opposite direction, staring down at her cherry red Doc Marten shoes in the fallen cherry blossom on the pavement, silently counting the steps to busy her mind, one – two – three – four – five – si—

  Harriet heard a scream rip through the air and stopped dead in her tracks, her heart pounding.

  She turned to see Sam being punched square in the face by a five-foot-four-inch woman in an exquisite mermaid gown of ivory satin.

  Sam reeled back, clutching a bleeding nose. The father of the bride exited the car like a gorilla escaping a safari park, and the shouting began.

  1

  One month later

  ‘Read me the menu again would you, I’ve totally forgotten what we’re having for main course,’ Jonathan said, swinging his gleaming silver Mercedes lustily around a corner, precariously close to a dry stone wall.

  It always took Harriet aback that Jon’s driving was completely out of step with every other aspect of his demeanour. Put a steering wheel in his hands, and mild-mannered, cautious Jon became flamboyant, even cocky.

  Harriet unlocked her phone, scrolled to the relevant page and read aloud.

  ‘… Aged Yorkshire venison … heritage carrot … ramson … miso cashew cream.’

  ‘What’s a ramson when it’s at home? And I’m pretty vague on the properties of miso cashew cream, truth be told.’

  ‘To think you work in the food industry.’

  ‘Not at the miso cashew cream end.’

  Harriet prodded at the handset to google it, briefly bracing her free palm on the car door to ward off motion sickness.

  ‘It is a bulbous perennial flowering plant in the amaryllis family. Garlicky, by the sounds of it.’

  ‘Good-oh. And we told them about my special condition?’

  Allergic to lettuce. Harriet sometimes thought that was Jon in three words. Who on earth is allergic to lettuce? Imagine the shame at the inquest. Cause of Death: radicchio.

  ‘Your mum said she’d do it.’

  And if she decides she didn’t say that, I have the texts as receipts.

  Harriet treated dealings with her in-laws like running Churchill’s War Rooms. You napped with one eye open around Jacqueline Barraclough.

  Harriet pushed her phone back into her handbag and fiddled with the volume on ‘Missing’ by Everything But The Girl.

  ‘Actually, can we have it off, please, Hats? I’m getting one of my headaches,’ Jon said.

  ‘Sure, pull over in a lay-by.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have it off. Never mind.’

  Jon threw her a baffled glance. He was one of those people who thought he had a great sense of humour. His GSOH was more like a burglar alarm: might work if he turned it on, but he often forgot.

  ‘John F. Kennedy had to have sex several times a day or else he got headaches, you know,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Inconvenient, given his workload. Would ibuprofen not do the job?’ Jon said.

  ‘Nope, had to be Marilyn Monroe.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Harriet could tell she was irritating him slightly. She couldn’t say this sort of thing in front of his tightly wound parents, and they were close to entering their planetary atmosphere. Jon, already on his guard, wanted Harriet to behave accordingly. Like an actor getting into character on set, before they shouted ‘action’.

  ‘Presume they’re whipping up chicken nugs and chips for Joffrey Baratheon?’ Harriet said.

  Jon gave her a sideways look, and tutted. ‘Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s twelve soon, entering adulthood! We’re all allowed a grotty phase as a kid.’

  Harriet said nothing more because Jon’s mother, Jackie, his father, Martin Senior, elder brother, Martin Junior, his wife, Melissa and their eleven-year-old son Barty (Bartholomew for tellings-off, which Harriet thought were all too scarce) were all in one big rolling grotty phase.

  Jon dwelt in an odd mental space, as regards his family – he never denied they behaved like an absolute shower, because it was pretty hard to pretend otherwise. But he could never go so far as to attribute malice to them either, which Harriet thought lef
t him a day late and a dollar short in terms of having their measure.

  They always meant well.

  This wishful claim of Jon’s had [citation needed] after it. It was as if their true personalities had locked-in syndrome, in Jon’s analysis, given their tragic inability to make their inherent kindness known.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Jon looked at the clock on the dash. ‘An hour to shower and change, I reckon, and then a gin and tonic in the bar.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Harriet, in tacit peace-making, and Jon beamed.

  In typically generous fashion, Jon had booked dinner and an overnight stay for all of them at a country house hotel in the Dales for his parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary.

  Harriet had agreed to it with the usual sense of dread, but, you know, you couldn’t pick your boyfriend’s family. You also couldn’t stop Jon spending his considerable salary in such expansive ways.

  ‘No roof racks on hearses, Hats,’ he’d say, riffling her hair.

  He was MD of a division of a supermarket chain, developing upmarket ready meals. Harriet’s best friends, Lorna and Roxy, called him Captain Gravy, a nickname he didn’t find funny.

  It’s not just gravy I’ve got responsibility for – it’s all sauces and luxury pouched condiments! he’d lightly fume, bewildered to be increasing their mirth.

  Harriet had never experienced money the way Jonathan had money. It landed in huge snowdrifts in his account every month and could build up to unwieldy, drain-clogging fatberg size if not dealt with efficiently by lashing on Parker Knoll furniture, spendy meals and five-star weekends away.

  Despite his protestations, Harriet had always given him proper rent since she moved into his mansion in Roundhay. She’d maintained basic hygiene and not let him pay for most things – she had her own income, a lifestyle she could afford and self-respect, but with Jon’s profligacy, it was like sharing a bathtub and trying to keep the hot water separate.

  Dating him for the last two years had been an education in good living. Maybe money couldn’t buy you happiness; however, it was still a mood-altering, life-changing, addictive substance. It could purchase you not only pleasure, Harriet had discovered, but ease, patience, convenience. A kind of sunny outlook and frictionless existence where your path through any difficulties could always be smoothed by its liberal application.