After Hello Read online

  Her dad looks worried. Caroline and I are laughing as the doors open and we have to concentrate hard on keeping faces straight during our lock step down the aisle. The room looks incredible: the sunken tiled space has been decorated with bundles of red Amaryllis, LED candles and tangles of clear fairy lights in glass vases.

  A string quartet, stationed to the left of the registrar, strike up Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’. (Apparently they compromised on wedding music: Mindy gets her choice during the aisle walk and register signing, Ivor picked the first dance. A lot of couples find merging their music collections tricky; with Ivor and Mindy it was implosion on contact.)

  We reach Ivor, in his ink-blue suit and red tie, looking incredibly un-Ivor-ish both in his smart clothing and rictus terror. We grin foolishly and supportively. When he sees Mindy behind us, the look on his face is … I struggle to find the word. Rhys would say sappy. I would say: I didn’t even know he had that expression in his face’s repertoire. Absolute joy mixed with incredulity she could be about to marry him.

  You know, now our generation doesn’t have to get married – and thank goodness for that – it’s easy to think it’s a superfluous nonsense, and sometimes weddings are. But it’s also easy to forget how absolutely fantastic they can be. This isn’t just one of the best days of Ivor and Mindy’s lives, it’s one of the best days of all of our lives.

  15

  After sausages and mash; after the signature cocktail of the reception (passionfruit Martinis, so sprightly tasting and more-ish, so likely to induce a state of ‘have a judge declare me legally dead’ tomorrow); after the tables are cleared away and Mindy and Ivor perform an energetic first dance to Billy Ocean’s ‘Red Light Spells Danger’ … after all of that, the ballads-for-couple-waltzing starts.

  Ben appears at my side at the dancefloor, half-cut, Paul Smith suited and booted and pleased with himself.

  ‘Hello. Would you like to dance? I’m hoping to pull a bridesmaid tonight.’

  ‘Oh really,’ I say, allowing myself to be swung on to the floor to the Stone Roses’ ‘Ten Storey Love Song’.

  ‘Do you know if the blonde’s single?’ Ben says, nodding his head towards Caroline. ‘You look exceptionally beautiful,’ he says. ‘Even if your flower’s drunk now.’ He puts his hand up to adjust my wilting rose.

  ‘Ah, well. Might as well make the most of it. Always the bridesmaid …’

  Ben’s eyes narrow. ‘Oh, come on …’

  ‘… Aiming for a sexy Miss Havisham feel. It’s exciting to think I’m still on the market.’ I pull a face.

  ‘You’re not on the mar …! Oh you’re a bugger, you really are,’ Ben huffs. ‘Are you harking back to a conversation we had when you heard Rhys was getting married?’

  ‘Yes. It’s cool.’ I glance around the room with an exaggerated sigh, ‘It’s only rigmarole.’

  Teasing Ben about this has an edge. I should let it go. I am a little sad, though.

  ‘You said you weren’t arsed about marriage,’ Ben says. ‘Being Angry Rachel, like I remember from university. I remember you drunk on cider in the Union once, telling someone a wedding veil is like a burqa.’

  ‘Hahahaha. Did I?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I was always so fun. I’m not bothered, really. It’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember that time you asked me at university? As a joke? You had your late essay? You got down on one knee in front of the tutor.’

  ‘Hah. Yes. It didn’t work, the bastard threatened to fail me.’

  ‘Part of me hoped you might do that again someday.’

  Ben casts his eyes to the ceiling, full of white balloons.

  ‘You’re being exasperating.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Distinctly.’

  We do a few turns to the music and I lean my head on Ben’s shoulder.

  ‘Did you really think I’d want to make a verbal agreement in principle to marry?’ he says, above me. ‘I’m a lawyer for a living, not in my private life.’

  ‘No, ’spose not,’ I mumble.

  ‘And did you think I wanted to make that verbal agreement in the context of competing with news from your ex?’

  ‘I dunno …’

  ‘Didn’t you notice your parents couldn’t pour enough whisky down me, the last time they came for lunch?’

  My head jerks back as I look directly at him. ‘Eh?’

  I thought that was because Dad was driving.

  Ben grips my hand tighter.

  ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t have called your dad to ask for permission, not because we need it, but because I knew it’d give me a great quote for the speech, then asked your mum’s advice on rings, then scoured Manchester’s jewellery shops to find something suitable for an ex-Goth and hidden it in the case for the Black & Decker drill, which is the perfect place to hide it from you, although being fair, it’d be the perfect place to hide something from me, too?’

  ‘Wait, wait. You …?’

  ‘Yes. You effing idiot. Sorry if my attempts to fob you off on the topic weren’t the most tactful but you caught me by surprise and I had to put you on delay somehow.’

  I am completely and totally wrongfooted. I stop dancing and stare at him. ‘But …? You said? You didn’t want to …?’

  ‘Yes. I said that. I wanted my proposal to be exciting and unexpected, if at all possible. Turns out it isn’t possible.’

  I didn’t know I was welling up but I can feel a tear slide through my inch of panstick. Ah, fuck. Oh me of little faith.

  ‘So, well done, you’ve ruined the surprise now. I’m not doing the one-knee thing here and I don’t have the ring.’ Ben leans in so no one can overhear. ‘But Rachel Woodford, will you marry me?’

  I simultaneously cough, choke and laugh and can’t get the words out. My heart rate’s all over the shop.

  ‘Er, no,’ I say when I get my breath back. ‘Not yet. We’re stealing thunder from this wedding. Ask me again, how you originally planned, and my answer might change.’

  Ben smiles. ‘Talk about high maintenance. OK. Third time lucky. Want to know something ridiculous?’

  I nod.

  Ben leans in. ‘I meant it the first time.’

  THE END

  Keep reading for an exclusive extract from Who’s That Girl? or click here to buy now

  978-0-00-752501-0

  1

  Life through a phone is a lie. Edie imagined the process like a diagram from physics lessons, the one on that Pink Floyd album cover – a beam of white light refracted in a prism, splintering and fanning out as a rainbow.

  I mean, how much artifice, she wondered, was crammed into this one appealing photograph? She gazed at its seductive fictions in the slightly greasy, warm slab of screen in her palm as she queued at the hotel bar.

  Activity in the room whirled around her, messy unkempt sweaty reality, soundtracked by The Supremes ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ In this still life, everything was forever image managed and perfect.

  Untruth number one: she and Louis looked like they adored each other’s company. In order to squeeze into the frame, Edie had rested her head against his shoulder. She was coquettish, wearing a mysterious smile. He was doing the self-satisfied, slightly 007 quirk of the lip that conveyed hey life is great, no big deal. It really wasn’t a big deal.

  They’d spent five hours as platonic plus ones – the wedding planner had demanded pairs, like Noah’s Ark – and now they were grating on each other, in heat and booze and wedding clothes with waistbands that had got tighter and tighter, as if inflating a blood pressure cuff.

  Edie’s heels had, like those high enough for special occasions, moved from ‘wobbly and pinchy, but borderline tolerable’ to stabbing at her viciously like some mythic pain where she’d given up her mermaid tail for size 4s and the love of a prince.

  Falsehood number two, the composition. Twinkling-happy party girl Edie, looking up through roadsweeper-brush-sized false
lashes. You could glimpse the top half of her red dress, with nicely hoisted pale bosom, stomach carefully held in. Louis’s cheekbones were even more ‘killer in a Bret Easton Ellis’ sharp than usual, chin angled downwards.

  This was because they’d held the lens at arm’s length above their heads and discarded five less flattering images, bartering over who liked which one. Edie had eye bags, Louis objected he looked gaunt, the expressions were slightly too studied, the shadows had not fallen in their favour. OK, another, another! Pose, click, flash. Half a dozen was the charm: they both looked good, but not too much like they’d tried to look good.

  (‘Why does everyone do that expression now, like you’re sucking on a sour plum?’ Edie’s dad asked, last time she was home. ‘To make yourself look thin and pouty, I suppose. But you don’t look like that face you pull, in real life. How strange.’)

  Louis, an Instagram professional and very sour plum, fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings. ‘Now to filter ourselves to fuck.’

  He selected ‘Amaro’, bathing them in a fairytale cloud of lemonade fog. Complexions were perfected. The mood was filmic and dreamy, you’d think it captured a perfect moment. You had to (not) be there.

  And then there was the caption. The biggest deception of all. Louis tapped it out and hit ‘post.’ ‘Congratulations Jack & Charlotte! Amazing day! So happy for you guys <3 #perfectcouple living their #bestlife.’

  This was mostly for the benefit of the rest of the Ad Hoc agency, who’d all found elegant excuses not to travel from London to Harrogate. Nothing tested popularity like several hundred miles of motorway.

  Like after admiring Like rolled in. ‘Sigh. You two are another #perfectcouple!’ ‘Shame I’m a bender!’ Louis replied. That’d be the least of our problems, Edie thought. They’d all done the arithmetic with Louis, that if he slagged off everyone else to you, he slagged you off, too.

  And of course, Louis had not stopped grousing under his breath about the ‘amazing’ wedding. Edie thought criticising someone’s big day was like making fun of the way they ate, or the size of their ankles. Good people instinctively understood it was not fair game.

  I really thought Charlotte would go for something more clean, minimal. Like Carolyn Bessette marrying JFK Jnr. The crystal beading on that gown’s a bit Pronuptia, isn’t it? Even women with taste seems to lose the plot and go Disney disaster in a bridal salon. I am so over those rose bouquets with pearl studs and white ribbon round the stems, like a bandaged stump! Once a WAG has done something, it is DONE. And sorry, but I find a tanned bride vulgar. Ugh, two sips of that Buck’s Fizz and it was into a plant pot. I can’t bear orange juice used to hide cheap champagne. Look at the DJ, he’s about fifty in a blouson leather jacket, where did he get that from, 1983? He looks like he should be on Top Gear. It’ll be rocking out to Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ and Toni Braxton for the erection section. Why can’t weddings be more MODERN?

  The Old Swan in Harrogate was not, as the name suggested, modern. It had the exciting association of being the place Agatha Christie disappeared to during her ‘missing days’ in the 1920s, even though there was probably nothing exciting about being in a confused fugue state.

  Edie loved it here. She wouldn’t mind absconding from her life into one of its rooms with four-poster canopied beds. Everything about The Swan was comforting. The ivy-clad frontage, the solid square portico entrance, the way it smelled like cooked breakfasts and plushy comfort.

  It had been a blistering high summer day – Haven’t they been lucky with the weather becoming the go-to banal conversation opener – and the French doors in the bar opened on to the honey-lit rolling gardens. Children in shiny waistcoats were zooming around playing aeroplanes, high on Coca Cola and the novelty of being up this late.

  Nevertheless, this was, for none of the reasons Louis described, the worst wedding Edie had ever been to.

  Giving her order at the bar, she found herself next to a group of women in their seventies and possibly eighties, dressed as flappers. Edie guessed they were here for a Murder Mystery weekend; she’d seen a coach from Scarborough pull up earlier.

  There was a ‘suspect’ with no legs, sitting in a wheelchair. She was wearing a feather headband, long knotted beads and draped in a white feather boa. She was sipping a mini bottle of Prosecco through a straw. Edie wanted to give her a cuddle, and/or cheer.

  ‘Don’t you look lovely,’ one of the group said to Edie, and Edie smiled and said, ‘Thank you! You do too.’

  ‘You remind me of someone. Norma! Who does this lovely young lady look like?’

  Edie did the fixed embarrassed smile of someone who was being closely inspected by a gaggle of tipsy senior citizens.

  ‘Clara Bow!’ one exclaimed.

  ‘That’s it!’ they chorused. ‘Ahh. Clara Bow.’

  It wasn’t the first time Edie had been given a compliment like this. Her dad said she had ‘an old-fashioned face.’ ‘You look like you should be in a cloche hat and gloves at a train station, in a talkie film,’ he always said. ‘Which is appropriate.’

  (Edie didn’t think she talked that much, it was more that her father and sister were quieter.)

  She had shoulder-length, inky hair and thick dark brows. Their geometry had to be aggressively maintained with threading, so they stayed something more starlet than beetling. They sat above large soulful eyes, in a heart-shaped face with small mouth.

  A cruel yet articulate boy at a house party told her she looked like ‘A Victorian doll reanimated by the occult.’ She told herself it was because she was going through her teenage Goth phase but she knew it was still applicable now, if she hadn’t had enough sleep and caught herself glowering.

  Louis once said, as if he wasn’t talking about her when they both knew he was: ‘Baby faces don’t age well, which is why it’s a tragedy it was Lennon shot instead of McCartney.’

  ‘Are you here with your husband?’ another woman asked, as Edie picked up her white wine and V&T.

  ‘No, no husband. Single,’ Edie said, to lots more staring and curious delighted ooohs.

  ‘Plenty of time for that. Having your fun first, eh?’ said another of the flappers, and Edie smiled and nearly said, ‘I’m thirty-five and having very little fun,’ and thought better of it and said ‘Yes, haha!’ instead.

  ‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ another asked.

  ‘No. I live in London. The bride’s family are from—’

  Louis emerged from the restaurant, gesturing for her to join him with an urgent circling motion of the hand, hissing:

  ‘Edie!’

  ‘Edie! What a beautiful name!’ the women chorused, looking upon her with renewed adoration. Edie was touched and slightly baffled by her sudden celebrity status. That was Prosecco drunk through a straw for you.

  ‘Are you this young lady’s gentleman?’ they asked Louis, as he joined them.

  ‘No, darlings, I like cock,’ he said, taking his drink from Edie while she cringed.

  ‘He likes who?’ said one of the women. ‘Who’s “Cock”?’

  ‘No. Cock.’ Louis made a flexing bicep gesture that Edie didn’t think made it much clearer.

  ‘Oh, he likes men, Norma. He’s a Jolly Roger,’ said one, casually.

  Attention shifted to Louis, the not-that-jolly Roger.

  ‘I prefer a game of Bananagrams and a hot bath, these days,’ another offered. ‘Barbara still likes a bit of cock, well enough.’

  ‘Which one of you did it, then?’ Louis said, eyeing their costumes. ‘Who’s the prime suspect?’

  ‘There’s not been a crime yet,’ one said. ‘Rumour has it there’s going to be a body found on the third floor.’

  ‘Well you can probably rule her out then,’ Louis said, tapping his nose, gesturing at the woman in the wheelchair.

  ‘Louis!’ Edie gasped.

  Fortunately, it caused a cackle eruption.

  ‘Sheila used to dig her corns out with safety pins. You don’t mess with Sheila.’<
br />
  ‘Looks like she overdid it.’

  Edie gasped again and the old ladies fell about, howling. She couldn’t believe it: Louis had found his audience.

  ‘Great meeting you, girls,’ Louis said, and they almost applauded him. Edie was forgotten; chopped liver.

  ‘Come back to the table. It’s all kicking off big style in the main tent,’ Louis said to her. ‘The speeches are starting.’

  With a heavy heart, Edie excused herself. The moment she dreaded.

  An Audience With The Hashtag Perfect Couple, Living Their Hashtag Best Life.

  2

  ‘Was that free?’ barked the sixty-something man with the hearing aid, dressed as a posh country squire, eyes fixed on the glass in Edie’s hand. Edie and Louis had been put on the odds and sods, ‘hard work, nothing in common’ table. The others had immediately abandoned the hard work and scattered, in the longueur between meal and disco. This sod remained, with his timid-looking, equally tweedy wife.

  ‘Er, no? I can get you something if you like?’

  ‘No, don’t bother. You come to these bloody interminable things and they fleece you like sheep. As if the gift list wasn’t brass neck enough. Four hundred pounds for some bloody ugly blue cake whisk, the silly clots. Oh hush, Deirdre, you know I’m right.’

  Edie plopped down in her banqueting chair and tried not to laugh, because she thought the KitchenAid was a rinse, too.

  She swigged the acidic white wine and thanked the Lord for the gift of alcohol to get through this. The top table passed the microphone down the line to the groom, Jack. He tapped his glass with a fork and coughed into a curled fist. His sleeve was tugged by his new mother-in-law. He put a palm up to indicate, ‘Sorry, in a second, folks.’

  ‘What’s this crackpot notion of wearing brown shoes with a blue suit and a pink tie, nowadays?’ said hearing aid man, of the groom’s attire. ‘Anyone would think this was a lavender liaison.’

  Edie thought Jack’s tall, narrow frame in head-to-toe spring-summer Paul Smith looked pretty great but she wasn’t about to defend him.