Two weeks before her wedding Stevie has got the jitters. Is she finally growing up or compromising horribly? In love or in denial? Yes, there are good reasons to get married. Babies. Sex whenever she wants it. A justification for staying in without feeling like a loser. 

And there are very good reasons not to get married. Never sleeping with anyone else again. His mother. His new bald patch. Being called 'my wife'. And the disconcerting reappearance of a former major crush, a reminder of everything fiance isn't. As the clock ticks, a shocking secret threatens to bring Stevie's future crashing down around her. 

One

Stevie Jonson switched on her laptop. Wobbling on the shelf of her bent knee, its glow washed her round, pale face with green light, leaving the rest of the bedroom in shadow. It was one-twenty-three a.m. She knew what would happen if she shut her eyes. Her wedding – since midnight, only thirteen days, fourteen hours away – had assumed a voice of its own and it was a voice that grew louder as her head sank pillowwards, whispering questions about monogamy and seating plans or humming an unbearable rotation of late-eighties wedding disco classics. It hung above her head like a cloud made from thousands of tiny black question marks. And she hadn’t slept properly for days. Unable to face another insomniac night, Stevie decided to push her tiredness to the limits and stay up as long as possible. This way she would, surely, eventually fall asleep, exhaustion the stones in her pockets that would plunge her into mercifully blank depths.  In the meantime, alcohol would help. She leaned over to the side of the bed, picked up the glass from the side table and took the last gulp of gritty red wine. It mixed not unpleasantly with the aftertaste of toothpaste in her mouth. Feeling fortified, she checked her emails; nothing interesting. She foraged among eBay’s handbags; nothing interesting. She mouseclicked on an intriguing site she’d bookmarked earlier that week, Work Out Your Real Biological Age in Ten Minutes; possibly amusing. The health interrogation took forever.  Finally, she ticked the last box. She stabbed the cursor key.  The modem whirred. The website did its maths. Her biological age was . . . thirty-seven. Oh. Not so amusing. Stevie was thirty-four years old.

She slumped heavily on to the pillows, pushing them down into the dark, draughty gap between bed and wall. Blasted computer. She now felt older than thirty-seven. She felt fortyseven.  No, eighty-seven. She was mortal. She was going to die – probably prematurely. She attempted to work out what she’d done so wrong. It was like trying to recall drunken antics at a party the morning after. OK, hands up, she’d been partial to a Marlboro Light in her twenties, but hadn’t everyone?  Skinny jeans weren’t an option but she certainly wasn’t obese, a size twelve or fourteen, depending on the shop and the season. She didn’t bake – there was little incentive when the sun just dot-to-dotted her freckles – so why did she need a preservation order? Stevie sucked in her breath, locking it in her throat as she read. OK. Aunt Sue’s breast cancer;

Grandfather’s mid-life stroke; caffeine and sugar intake; aversion to gyms; irregular flossing. Oh, and the fact that she hadn’t breastfed a baby. Funny that.

Stevie slapped the laptop lid down hard. Biology was blunt, tactless. And it was beginning to seriously piss her off.  Only last month her GP, forgetting his bedside manner during a routine contraceptive assessment, drily informed her that at ‘her age’ (antique, obviously) she should perhaps be more concerned about declining fertility than avoiding conception.  As if childlessness was a ‘lifestyle choice’ as opposed to the way life turned out. In response she’d shrugged like a defiant schoolgirl and, in her eagerness to leave the surgery’s steely statistics, snatched her contraceptive prescription renewal out of the doctor’s scrubbed-pink hands, their fingers touching fleetingly, somehow inappropriately, before leaping apart.  With cruel synchronicity, that night she’d found her first grey hair, pale and curly as an alfalfa sprout.

Two

‘Sleep well?’ Poppy whooshed back the blue balding velvet curtain, disturbing a ballet of dust particles.  Stevie squinted as daylight flooded the bedroom. ‘No.’ She smiled sleepily at her younger sister, pregnant and mother of two children under five. ‘But I don’t expect sympathy.’ Yawning, she clambered out of bed, one bare foot, then the other, softly slapping the gnarled pine floorboards. At the basin, she splashed cold water on her face and inspected her reflection in the round toothpaste-speckled mirror: a pillow mark bisected her left cheek like a scar; tired pollen-brown eyes; hair fuzzy with the static of sleep and dreams. In fact she looked as though she had been on some kind of adventure during the night and had just managed to scramble back to bed before dawn. Which in a way she had, she thought, patting her face dry with a towel, wishing she could shake the remnants of last night’s dream from her head like water.  It was a recurring, unsettling dream, which had woken her up with a start a few seconds before Poppy had pulled back the curtains and broken its spell. It hadn’t involved the wedding, or even the website. It had involved Jez’s lip. In particular, the way his upper lip got stuck to his front teeth first thing in the morning. He’d smile and the lip would stretch and pale. It ignited a disproportionate reaction in her, making her flinch away as if assaulted by a particularly fetid blast of breath. And now the lip seemed to have penetrated her subconscious. When had she first started noticing the lip?  The last four, or five months, possibly. Had the lip always stuck to the teeth? It seemed rather unlikely that this was a new phenomenon. Relationships are destroyed by details.  Could the lip be the tipping point?

‘A brew. Sorry, no other drinking vessels available.’ Poppy placed a large steaming mug on the pile of yellowing paperbacks next to Stevie’s childhood bed. The mug was one of their mother’s old favourites, wrapped in a quote by Rebecca West: ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.’ It was a mug that usually made the sisters roll their eyes – they had yet to encounter a woman less like a doormat than their mother – but Stevie was too tired for sisterly collusion today.

‘Thanks, Poppy.’ Stevie took the mug, aware that her sister was far more deserving of tea in bed. She sat down and sipped the tea, feeling the too-hot sip burn its way down her throat and tunnel deep inside to where anxieties churned.  She rubbed her eyes. ‘I feel like how I look, Pops.’ ‘Oh, don’t worry. Weddings wreak havoc with one’s beauty sleep,’ said Poppy breezily, leaning into the radiator, pressing her bottom into its warm ridges. ‘I was a right case before mine, remember?’

‘Insufferable.’ Stevie smiled, pushing the hedge of wavy brown hair away from her face. ‘But at least you were organised.’ ‘Retentive, you mean? Oh, I accept that,’ laughed Poppy, peering out of the sash window into her parents’ garden, her belly pressing against the cold glass, a ring of condensation misting its circumference.

Stevie gazed fondly at her sister, who looked more fecund than ever this morning, her cheeks rhubarb-pink, her pregnant belly high and round beneath her crisp white Boden nightie, like a large pudding bowl under the skin. Poppy was never happier than when she was pregnant. And it suited her. Stevie was certain that when she was eighty she’d be able to remember her sister exactly as she was now, would be able to flip the image up like a favourite old photo and immediately be transported back to this strange heady May morning at her parents’ house, the air thick with pre-wedding tension and the smell of burning toast. By the age of eighty she’d know for certain whether, in her own lifetime, she’d managed to capture that same pregnant physicality, the secret galaxy pushing out the belly button, the genetic legacy assured. The thought made her panicky, prickling her mood further.

‘Poppy, sorry if I sound a bit neurotic, but does my wedding have the air of disaster to you?’ she appealed to her sister for reassurance. ‘A fairground crash in slow motion?’ ‘No!’ Poppy laughed, twisting her milkmaid-blonde hair over one shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about all the details. Mum’s in control.’

‘My point exactly.’ But Stevie knew she had to take responsibility. She’d shirked too many of the preparatory nuptial duties and taken up her mother’s offers of help fully aware of the risks. For the last six months she’d felt unexpectedly dislocated from the experience. Sometimes it felt like the whole bride thing was happening to someone else – her mother? – and she was watching it late at night on a fuzzy satellite channel.

‘You know, what I didn’t realise,’ said Poppy thoughtfully, plaiting her hair loosely with slim tanned fingers, the pea-sized diamond on her engagement ring shattering rainbow rhomboids against the white bedroom wall, ‘is that the interesting stuff happens after the wedding.’ She looked up from her plait and grinned. ‘Here’s to you getting up the duff!’ Stevie raised her mother’s mug in a mock cheers. Not for the first time, part of her wished the roles were reversed, as if she’d upset the natural sibling order in some way by not being the first to pop out the first grandchild. It would be nice to be in the position of dispensing sage womanly advice to her younger sister occasionally.

‘When are you coming off the pill?’ pursued Poppy, circling her belly with a flat palm that didn’t indent the flesh in any way, suggesting it was hard as a rock.  ‘After the vows. Jez is keen to populate the planet as soon as possible.’ Fully awake now that the hot dark tea had kicked in, Stevie recalled the website’s conclusion about her age. ‘Hold off on the Brora cot blanket though. I’m sure it’ll take decades to conceive,’ she added drily.  ‘Oh rubbish! Piers barely had to touch me.’

‘You were twenty-six.’

In hindsight, although it had seemed a rather dull choice at the time, Stevie mused, Poppy had done the sensible thing.  She had eschewed the creative vanities of publishing and PR and gone to work in a male-dominated industry – a city accounting firm, much to her mother’s incomprehension –where, at the age of twenty-three, she’d swiftly met the handsome, dependable corporate lawyer, Piers. They’d married two years later, in clouds of white-pleated chiffon, at Piers’ small family church outside Winchester. The wedding breakfast, held at Piers’ parents’ large country house – geographically just outside her mother’s influence, thus allowing Poppy to organise her day without the intrusion of incense sticks or lentils – involved salmon and a chocolate fondue. Of the two hundred guests, Stevie hadn’t managed to snog a single one, because even back then they were all – bar the odd, wet and boring individual – in couples. Poppy’s first child, Sophie, darling in every way, was conceived on the Tuscan honeymoon four-poster. Finn came along exactly two years later, as planned. And now there was another Fitzpatrick kicking his heels in Poppy’s womb, another perfectly timed sibling.

Stevie tried very hard not to be jealous. She was not always successful. But she consoled herself that fulfillment couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. And with the fact that Poppy and Piers were exactly the kind of people –socially responsible, intelligent and solvent – who should reproduce. They deserved a government subsidy – their children were hardly destined for ASBOs. Well behaved and charming, both had inherited Poppy’s benign temperament, the same sane sky-blue eyes, unsullied by any disappointment, so unlike her own odd yellow-brown ones which her father always said were ‘far too knowing’, and used to get her into trouble at school for ‘insolence’. In her dark period –aged thirty to thirty-two – after a particularly long romantic drought when she’d begun to seriously doubt she’d ever marry or have children or, indeed, ever have sex again, it had occurred to her that evolution had cunningly deselected her, satisfied that her sister was doing her bit in continuing the Jonson line.
‘I’m afraid the mug of tea came with an ulterior motive, Steve. Would you do me a favour?’ Poppy broke her prettiest smile. It made her look about fifteen years old. ‘We’re attempting a tantrum-free trip to the Natural History Museum. I’d kill for a shower first so I don’t get mistaken for a lump of prehistoric taxidermy. Would you mind shepherding Finn for a bit?’

‘Seems like a fair exchange for a cup of tea.’

‘Thanks, sis.’

Piers poked his head round the door. A tall and tubby thirtysomething in pale Gap jeans, he sported the kind of inoffensive English good looks advertisers used to sell branbased breakfast cereals. ‘Poppy, can we make a move, darling? Please.’ He tapped his chunky diver’s watch. ‘I’ll see you downstairs in ten?’

‘Sure, sure.’ Poppy scanned the room. ‘Where the devil is he? Finn!’ A toddler was on the loose.

‘The artist in residence.’ Stevie laughed and nodded towards the hall annex, which Finn was creatively redecorating with orange crayon.

‘Christ.’ Not seeing the funny side, Poppy lurched towards her two year old and scooped him up, Finn’s stout fat legs –half baby-half boy – kicked, rigid with defiant energy. She arrested the crayon. ‘Go sit with Aunt Stevie, darling.’ ‘Don’t wanna.’

Stevie tried not to feel hurt. He was two, for God’s sake. It didn’t amount to rejection.

Then Finn spotted his aunt’s laptop, wedged between bed and wall where she’d let it slump when she’d fallen asleep. It was blinking irresistibly, a call to mischief. He waddled towards the bed. ‘Wanna.’

‘Here, Finnballs sweetie.’ Stevie pulled back the bed covers, the covers she’d had since she was twelve years old, the colour dragged out of the patchwork by her mother’s accidental boil washes. Like a comfort blanket, she slept better under this ratty bit of faded cotton than any of her own crunchy White Company sheets back home at the Bayswater flat she shared with Jez. As the sun beamed dusty rays against her face, she suddenly felt very glad she’d come back to her parents’ for the weekend to finalise the wedding plans. It was nicely cyclical somehow. Finn dug under the duvet and reached up to the laptop prize, releasing a condensed-milk smell from the folds of his Power Ranger pyjamas.  ‘Step away from the technology.’ Stevie swiped the computer out of his reach, ruffled his curls. Thwarted, Finn sulkily picked at the bedroom wall, digging his fingernails into buttons of Blu Tak, curly-edged old school photos, a starburst of peeling Wham stickers and a hard ancient pink Hubba Bubba globule that she’d stuck there during a teenage sulk sometime in the late eighties.

‘Make sure he doesn’t catapult that stair gate, won’t you?’ Poppy shouted behind her as she clattered downstairs. ‘And watch the window that doesn’t lock . . .’ Finn listened warily to his mother’s retreating footsteps. He stamped a salivary finger on an old dappled school photograph.  ‘Aunty Stevie.’

‘Yes, that’s me! About a hundred years ago. Very well spotted.’ She kissed his head, staring at the photo. Yes, she was an awkward-looking teenager, with not nearly enough confidence to inhabit that chunky ‘big boned’ body. Over the years she had pummelled her figure into better shape with gym classes, lifting her flat, rather square bottom half an inch and further cinching in her fifties-housewife waist. But the photo caught her stocky teenage silhouette, the one hardwired into her self-esteem at the impressionable age of fifteen in chilly school gym changing rooms and verruca-infested municipal pools. In her own mind, no matter how slim she got, she’d always be the girl at school boys teasingly called ‘pudding’. And pudding would have been grateful for her fiancé: strawberry blond (verging on ginger), warm-hearted, colourful and handsome, even if he had recently acquired a tummy that shuddered on his middle like an underdone poached egg.

‘Stevie. Jezzy. Wedding,’ said Finn solemnly, as if assimilating the news for the first time.

The word ‘wedding’ was destabilising. Stevie felt herself tense.

Finn looked up, blue eyes wide and unblinking. ‘Want wedding cake.’

She smiled. ‘I would feed you creamed meringues for breakfast if I had any in the near vicinity. But I haven’t. Cake, later.’

‘Later,’ parroted Finn, a little sadly, as if later was forever away. ‘Wedding, later.’

Stevie bit off a branching split end of hair – recently missed by her hairdresser – and, in a disciplined fashion, tried to conjure up the gooey fondant feelings of the proposal, to compensate for the unsettling and wholly inappropriate feelings of negativity.

She closed her eyes. April. Friday night. Jez had spent the majority of that day with his father playing golf. When she’d met him, at about six p.m., beneath a spectacular gun-metal sky, he’d looked unusually flushed and insisted on taking her to supper at The Wolseley. By that point, she realised now, their relationship had needed good restaurants, theatre, cinema, external drama of some kind, because it had hit a plateau; the initial moving-in-together excitement had faded and the future remained unlabelled and uncertain.  In the restaurant, encased beneath the vaulted ceilings and black columns and shouting above the resulting bad acoustics, they’d discussed Jez’s recent promotion at YRBrand.  Jez had told her off for not being more excited for him. He’d paid the bill, which was unusual since he was usually happy to split. After two years they’d got to that stage too. Hand in hand, they’d walked through the West End and over Waterloo Bridge, London’s lights splattered like fireworks in the oil-black Thames water, the city throbbing with noise and crowds. The usual vague whisper of violence carried on the wind with the fast-food litter. A gust skimmed across the water from the south, sticking hair to her glossed lips. She remembered cursing for not going to the toilet before they left the restaurant and wondering if she’d be able to endure a Tube journey home when Jez grabbed her suddenly, pincing her elbows tight, pulling her towards him, thrusting his tongue into her surprised mouth. ‘Marry me!’ he’d said, coming up for air. ‘Marry me, pumpkin.’ He’d looked as shocked as she, as if the proposal was entirely spontaneous, a bodily function he couldn’t control.

Of course Stevie had said, ‘Er, yes.’ It was the affirmative answer she’d rehearsed as a little girl. Jez had caught her unawares – she had no idea he was close to proposing – and at a vulnerable moment with Perrier Jouet coursing through her veins, the wind rolling over the Thames and tossing her hair from her face like a romantic heroine from a BBC drama.  And in that one-syllable puff of air, scented with goat’s cheese crostini, both their destinies changed for ever.  Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, she could now see that there was a subtext to her ‘Er, yes’. At that point in her life, as she’d crossed that particular bridge into her mid-thirties, Stevie had begun to suspect that she just wasn’t marriage material. She’d voiced her concerns to her father. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much. Marriage is an overrated institution anyway. It suits girls like Poppy,’ he’d said distractedly, hole-punching a wad of lecture notes. ‘I’m not sure it would suit you.’ Her spirits had plummeted. She’d always feared that in love’s game of musical chairs she’d be the one left standing. She’d had boyfriends, of course. Not loads of them, just enough to make a regular bikini wax worthwhile. But the relationships hadn’t gone anywhere. It was hard. But she’d accepted the consoling drinks with girlfriends (which always made her feel more like a victim somehow) and put herself in the ex’s Dunlop Green Flash trainers and realised that things were slightly different if you were male, heterosexual, over thirty and living in London.

And then there were the Tube bombs, she reminded herself.  The worst could have happened, would have happened, had Jez not lost his striped Paul Smith socks that morning and had his mother not phoned to complain that they weren’t visiting his father on his birthday that weekend, had he not been running so late. Had Jez’s coordinates matched the bomber’s, then all the possibilities of her life would have blown apart too. And that made her love Jez more, need him more, in a visceral sniff-his-neck kind of way. They’d surely been given a second chance, for a reason, she’d rationalised.  At that time, that hot, dirty London July, everything felt fragile, vulnerable. The bombs made both of them cling together.  It made them want to commit. It had been hard to tell what was love, what was insecurity. Now nearly a year had passed without incident and things felt rather less fragile. Armageddon had been postponed. The future could last for another fifty years quite easily, Stevie thought, burying her nose in the dandelion clock of Finn’s hair, a swell of sadness rising in her throat.

Still, facts were facts. She was thirty-four, going on thirty-seven.  She was not suited to single life in the twenty-first century, loathing the idea of speed dating, internet dating, plotting her social life around the likelihood of meeting single guys as if she were a dog on heat that needed studding, hanging out in bars, being overlooked by men for her prettier friend, when she’d rather be at home reading or watching her Lost box-set. And as for the endless, painful, waiting by the phone, well, she wouldn’t do it. She hated that prescribed passivity. So she’d made a habit of phoning men to ask why they hadn’t phoned her. Disastrous move, always. So, yes, as her grandmother had declared over a tea-dunked custard cream at the announcement of her engagement, Stevie was lucky. She had managed to get under the wire, just in time.

‘Cuggle,’ demanded Finn, sensing her attention wavering.

‘Want cuggle.’

A what? Stevie looked down. A cuddle? How lovely. Of course. Her body ricocheted with endorphins as she pulled her nephew towards her, kissing him behind his ear and inhaling deeply. Only like this, she realised, buried in her nephew’s infant deliciousness, could she exist solely in the moment. Only like this did she feel quiet inside, as if suspended in a kind of happy hormone soup. Only like this did she feel that there was a point in anything. It was all very weird. Shit. She was broody.

Three

‘Kiiiiiiiidz, lunch!’ yelled Stevie’s mother, Patti – abbreviated from Patricia after a drug-enhanced encounter with Patti Smith at a party in Paris, 1969 – her husky voice soaked up by the crowd of coats in the hallway, the unravelling Egyptian tapestries on the wall, the dusty weeping figs and African statues, limbs long since amputated by her son Neil’s marble shooter. ‘I’m not running a bloody hotel!’ In different corners of the large Victorian house, members of the Jonson family prepared themselves for interaction.  Stevie, wondering if her mother would stop referring to her as a kid once she was married, jumped out of the bath, towelled herself down quickly, scrabbled in her old bedroom wardrobe for some clothes that weren’t too hideously dated – ancient bootleg jeans, Topshop Charlie’s Angel T-shirt – and thundered down the stairs, hand on the once-grand curving wooden banister, skipping the third step where the carpet runner had been shredded by the family’s cat in an artfully toe-catching way. Her father had ended up in John Radcliffe’s A&E last year. But then he was generally too preoccupied to complete basic physical tasks – walking, eating – without incident.

At this point – her holey socked foot hovering above the second-to-last step – Stevie had no idea that downstairs, beneath a framed poster of a fifties housewife-type in an apron and a Lichtenstein-style speech bubble declaring ‘Fuck Hoovering!’, sat thirty-five-year-old Sam Flowers, straddling a pine dining chair and picking at pistachios from a misshapen hand-thrown earthenware bowl, curling his tongue into the cradles of their shells, sucking off the salt.  Sam’s dark eyes flicked from pistachio bowl to Patti, observing her intently as she bustled about the kitchen, long amber beads swinging above the volcanic casserole that spat fatty, rosemary-scented pellets of stew across the kitchen.  Obviously once very beautiful – in the hall there was a picture of Patti in a fedora in the seventies looking like Jane Birkin –she was now startlingly handsome, her patent-black hair still thick, long and swishy, framing the kind of cheekbones that defied age, creased only with laughter lines. She had a surprising beauty. Just like Stevie’s.

‘I insist you drink some wine, darling.’ Patti filled Sam’s green Moroccan tumbler, her widest, most winning smile stretched across her face like a hammock. ‘Or vin, should I say?’ Sam smiled. ‘Twist my arm, Patti.’

‘It’s so good to see you again.’ Patti bent over and kissed Sam lightly on his stubbly cheek. She couldn’t help but adore this young man, the one-time schoolboy who’d shot up fast as bamboo and developed this delicious throaty laugh that sounded like it came from a place deep inside, like an earth tremor. There was nothing faux about Sam. No posturing.  No brisk masculine ticks like her son Neil seemed to have, revealing what she suspected was insecurity in the company of powerful women. (She feared that inviting her hairiest feminist friends to her son’s birthday parties in the eighties might have been counterproductive.) And she couldn’t help but be impressed by, and slightly in awe of, Sam’s ethnicity, his dark-gold skin and springy curly hair – half afro, half Botticelli angel – which she longed to ping. His father, by all accounts a bit of a scoundrel, was American-Irish and was now settled on Long Island. His mother Pearl, dear Pearl, was part French, part Caribbean (Jamaica? Dominica?). Sam was a walking global melting pot, a Benetton ad made flesh.  Much as she adored her own children, they had come out exceptionally Anglo Saxon-looking, like Pears babies, despite her ancient American-Indian roots (that’s if you believed Grandma Yates’ version of familial genealogy, which she most certainly did). ‘To think that we haven’t seen you for over a year, or is it two now? Goodness, doesn’t time just march on heartlessly?’

‘Two years, I guess.’ Sam was only half listening, focused instead on the postcard-studded kitchen door and the fuzz of long brown hair emerging from behind it.  When Stevie entered the room she visibly started. ‘Sam?  What . . .’ Her pale, creamy skin flushed. She looked down at the floor, collected herself and smiled shyly. ‘Hi.’ ‘Patti invited me over,’ Sam explained apologetically, tucking a pistachio shell discreetly into the corner of his cheek with his tongue and wondering when he’d have a chance to spit it out. ‘I’ve been hanging out at Mum’s.’ ‘Right.’ Stevie knotted her hands together. There was a pause. She tried to think of something to say to fill it but couldn’t.

‘Thank you for the wedding invitation by the way.’ Sam rubbed his jaw, in his louche, almost sleepy way.  ‘You’re coming?’

‘Of course.’

‘Really? Oh, wow. I am so pleased. I hadn’t heard. I assumed . . .’ Stevie flicked an airborne globule of lamb stew off her arm and grinned. The day was improving. ‘When do you go back to Paris?’

‘C’est fini. I’ve taken my last Eurostar.’

‘Really?’ Was his French girlfriend here in Oxford? Had they split up? Stevie blushed again, fearing her thoughts transparent. ‘How come you’ve . . .’

‘Oh, Paris,’ interrupted Patti, voice swooning then rising.

‘Paris, Paris. How I love that city. The little macaroon shops.  The Left Bank. The riots. It’s one of the few places in the world where people are willing to stand up and say, “No more globalisation. Enough!”’
Enough indeed! Stevie glared at her mother. When would she stop interrupting? Her mother’s habit of inviting her – Stevie’s –friends over without warning had always really pissed her off.  (All her friends adored Patti, always had. She was one of those mothers – fabulous if they’re not yours.) And she really would have appreciated some forewarning this time. In Sam’s unexpected presence, she cared that she was wearing a T-shirt with white deodorant stains under the arms, part of her old Oxford wardrobe that was left at her parents’ house and consisted of clothes too tattered or unfashionable to wear in London. She did not want Sam to think she was letting herself go just because she was getting married. Like all her male friends, she wanted him to feel at least a pang – preferably a large, painful one – that she was marrying, a sadness not to have snapped her up while available. ‘You’re staying here? In Oxford?’ Sam raised his eyebrows and laughed. ‘No. Next stop, New York.’

‘America? Well, well.’ Patti frowned and shook her head.  ‘Still, New York’s not like the rest of the country. Greenwich Village. I had a wonderful time there. Have you heard of the Village?’

‘Mum, of course he has.’

‘I’m here for a couple of weeks first.’ Sam fisted his hands together at the edge of the table, bent forward and pressed his chest against them, tensing. ‘Nana’s not well.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ So was the French girlfriend relocating to New York too? Stevie smoothed down her bed-frizz hair with the palm of her hand and sucked in her tummy.  ‘It’s crap being that old, man.’ Sam shook his head. ‘You know what my nana’s like, teenager trapped in a ninety-four year-old body. She wants to go back to St Elizabeth, hates being dependent.’

‘Run me under the bus when the time comes, Stevie,’ said Patti, shutting her eyes for comic import, revealing lids shimmering with leaf-green eye-shadow.

‘Will do.’

‘And make sure I’m wearing decent underwear.’ ‘Yes, Mother.’ Stevie exchanged a ‘nothing changes’ look with Sam and sat down next to him. He poured her a glass of water from the chipped blue glass jug. A sense of déjà vu clicked in her head as decisively as a camera-lens shutter. She could be eighteen. Twenty-four. Thirty. It was the same scene:
Sam and various family members around her parents’ kitchen table, the same conversations, the little-evolved tensions, the same chipped, badly washed-up blue jug. (To her parents, dishwashers amounted to inexcusable consumer decadence.) What was it about being with friends from your home-bound teenage years? They made you feel reassured, that nothing had changed. And Sam, in particular, would always remind her of being the young, free-wheeling teenager who rambled on Oxford’s Port Meadow and wove daisies into her hair and screeched with delight when the mud sucked her Wellington boot from her foot and Sam had to pull and pull it out of the mud and they’d fallen back laughing with a muddy squelch and run home to Sam’s mum’s house like swamp monsters and Sam’s mother had fed them hot banana chip-like things and lent her an orange dress to wear that smelled like her own mother’s Body Shop coconut body creams. Of course, now things had changed irretrievably. Her life was about to take a sharp left turn.

‘Wedding plans going well?’ asked Sam, negotiating a gritty lump of organic home-made bread. He winked at Stevie. ‘You’re all still talking at least.’

‘It’s going to be wild,’ said Patti.

Stevie rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not Billy Idol, Mum.’ ‘Oh, darling. Chill. Have a glass of wine. Now, who’s your plus-one, Sam? The lucky lady?’ purred Patti, as if barely able to restrain herself from claiming the role.  ‘Minus-one now, I’m afraid. Camille and me finished last month.’

Stevie felt instantly uplifted by this news, then, a few moments after, disappointed in herself. She wasn’t single now.  She should be more generous. But the idea of Sam’s French girlfriend – surely an Emmanuelle Béart lookalike who lived on steak tartare and Gauloise – had irrationally irked her when news of his Gallic bliss had filtered through the London grapevines last year.

‘Oh, I am sorry, honey.’ Patti put an arm around Sam’s broad shoulders, thrusting his curly head against the soft crepe of her décolletage. ‘But if it ain’t right, it just ain’t right.  You can’t force it.’ She looked thoughtful. Then a light-bulb smile. ‘But hey, wait a minute! I have an idea. The scrumptious Lara! Lara is a great friend of Stevie’s, Sam. A journalist. Terribly glamorous. She’s staying for the weekend.  You simply must meet her. You two will get on famously.

Darling, where is she?’

‘Meeting whatisname at Balliol or something,’ said Stevie.  The whatisname in question was Jake, twenty-two, blond, with a rower’s shoulders and a devastating knowledge of post-war American poetry, which he quoted like a kind of open sesame to access women’s underwear. He was the brother of a friend from London who Lara befriended at a fancy dress party in a Shoreditch loft last month. He was dressed as Simon Cowell, she the fairy queen from Lord of the Rings; unlikely bedfellows. ‘Should be back later.’ ‘Yes, of course, of course. Brain like a colander. Now, where are my boys?’ Patti flipped the salad with determined flair, lollo rosso leaves flying, silver bracelets crashing. ‘Neil.  Is that you?’

Accompanied by a loud flush of the toilet and a pungent farmyard stink – like his washing, her brother saved his stools for their parents’ house – Neil ambulated in, navigating the flap of his parachute-baggy combats and dragging the smell of stale pot into the kitchen. He collapsed on an old pine chair, as if exhausted from a day of hard physical labour, and poured himself a glass of Merlot. As the last-born in the family by some years (an accident – Patti forgot her pill one month), Neil acted up the part of perennial adolescent, testing Stevie’s tolerance. He treated his childhood attic bedroom – all ornamental bongs, posters of Pirelli girls and murdered American rappers – as a pleasant second home, a retreat from his permanent residence, a squat in a large, fully furnished Edwardian house in east Oxford. Stevie had already noted his attic bedroom’s distinct soupy sock odour seeping through the floorboards into her room earlier that morning.  ‘Why don’t you ever come when I call? I’m losing my voice, Neil,’ said Patti, exasperated.

‘I was listening to Cent.’ Neil yawned and stretched his arms above his head. ‘When are we eating, Ma? I’m marvin.’
‘We’re waiting for your father. Oh, here comes his lordship. . .’

Chris, a bespectacled, still-handsome, stooped sixty-something, with a grey-string mop of hair and bushy excitable eyebrows, appeared in the kitchen doorway. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed the pinch-pink mark on the bridge of his nose. ‘Hello, family.’

Patti moved more quickly around the kitchen now, energised by annoyance at the sight of her husband. She prodded his tummy with a salad server. ‘Chris, we need to talk about Jez’s mother.’

Chris looked up, aware that this was a siren call to realign his coordinates to the unexpectedly time-consuming ‘wedding matters’, not the socio-economics of eastern Asia, despite the latter being more interesting and demanding less fiscal resources. ‘Yes, Patti,’ he said, as he had said trillions of times during the tempestuous course of their twenty-odd year marriage. ‘What is it?’

‘The question is . . . please do not eat bread like that, Neil, you’re not starving . . . is the spare bedroom on the first floor suitable for madam? I don’t want to cause friction here.’ ‘Friction?’ Sam smiled.

‘It’s fine,’ said Stevie, stealing a glimpse at Sam, the way his smile curled up at the edges exposing just a slither of pinky brown gum. ‘Leave it, Mum.’

Patti didn’t leave it. She fluttered her long black lashes.  ‘The Lewises are just not – how to put this, Sam? – our kind of people, that’s all. I fear the furniture, what remains of it after your party, Neil, will not be to Rita’s fragrant taste.’ Stevie resented her mother hamming up Jez’s family for comic effect, showing off in front of Sam. ‘They’re from Amersham, Mum, not San Francisco. Get over it.’ ‘Darling, I’m trying here. I’m trying not to be an embarrassment.’ ‘Yeah right,’ mumbled Neil, fork in one hand, new camera-phone in the other, as he thumbed a text message beneath the table. ‘That’d be a first.’

‘Tolerate your mother, children,’ said Chris. ‘Lord knows, she is trying.’

Sam put his hand over his mouth, trying to suppress a laugh. He loved this family.

‘All Rita and Colin need are clean sheets and a vase of flowers and no new-age nonsense, Mum,’ instructed Stevie, aware of Sam’s amusement and playing up to it herself now.  ‘Rita won’t like the incense. Colin won’t like the home-made muesli.’

‘Not unless he’s got the jaws of a Rottweiler,’ muttered her father.

Patti ignored her husband. ‘Sam, have you met Jez’s folks?’

‘No.’

Stevie looked at the table. She’d felt weird introducing Jez to Sam for some reason. She’d sensed they may not end up best friends. She’d sensed right. They’d met two or three times, bristling encounters in which Jez had found opportunity to oafishly boast about something – his job, the excessiveness of the last restaurant bill – in a fit of macho bravado. Sam made him nervous.

‘Fucking uptight, the Lewises,’ Neil mumbled through a small stoned gap in his mouth, like a ventriloquist. ‘Making Jez and Stevie sleep in separate bedrooms.’ ‘Neil,’ Stevie sighed. Was nothing sacred in this household?  ‘Let’s hope he didn’t go home after the stag night last weekend. Colin would have loved that. Oh, man . . .’ Neil let a chuckle whistle between the gap in his two front teeth.  ‘What happened?’ asked Sam, eyes widening white.

Stevie shook her head, trying not to laugh. ‘Shut up, Neil.’ Neil, always keen to impress Sam – a dude in his eyes, being almost black and having a groovy and vague kind of non-job as a photographer – ignored his sister’s pleas for dignity.  ‘We went out in Brighton, dosed Jez up on Viagra, man.

He was walking around with this big . . .’ ‘That was bang out of order, Neil. Totally tragic,’ Stevie said, wondering why being in the company of her younger brother made her regress to her teenage vernacular. ‘Let’s not relive it.’

‘Getting him in training for the honeymoon!’ Neil quipped.

Stevie fired a withering look at her brother. ‘Oh, please.’ ‘Don’t overreact to, like, everything, Stevie. Aren’t you meant to be loved-up or something? I keep forgetting. It’s like having a hormonal pit bull in the house.’ Neil picked out a cherry tomato from the salad with the yellow tipped index finger and thumb normally reserved for rolling joints.  ‘Anyhow, I’m sure Rita – monster-in-law – didn’t figure it out.’

‘Neil! Would you stop winding your sister up,’ said Patti.  ‘It’s a stressful enough time for Stevie. And let’s not be nasty about the Lewis family. It’s not . . . not cool.’ Stevie looked at her mother, surprised. Yes, she really was trying. Her mother had obviously got over last Christmas, finally. The Lewises had come to stay and embraced the household like a bout of flu. Rita had complained that the turkey was under-cooked – ‘I prefer it dry myself’ – and that the music –Sinatra – made her head hurt. While Colin had taken refuge in a bottle of port and an ancient book on Second World War ships, talking only to chastise Jez for his bad language or lack of success in becoming the next Tory prime minister, or at the very least a doctor or lawyer.

‘Jez is all right.’ Patti put an arm over her daughter’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘Stevie’s chosen well.’

Chris put down his fork, rearing up a little as a mouthful of over-spiced stew settled in his stomach. ‘Jez better be more than all right,’ he said, turning to Sam, green eyes twinkling.  ‘This wedding is taking over our lives, Sam. It’s like a strange virus has entered the household, turning sensible people into jibbering buffoons and my wallet to mulch.’ Stevie felt a pang of guilt. For all the blustering and joking, she knew her parents were really feeling the pinch of this wedding. (‘There goes my Five Rhythms dancing retreat,’ she’d heard her mother sigh to Dad shortly after she’d announced their engagement.) She’d wanted to put money in the wedding pot herself as the transaction seemed inappropriate at their age, and with Jez and her combined salary being larger than that of her parents’. But her mother had refused and said she’d just take on more counselling work or add a bit to the mortgage. (Stevie knew that this refusal meant a no-frills wedding.)

Neil blew his fringe off his face. ‘It’s, like, totally unfair, mDad, being a boy. All Mum’s talk about equality, I don’t see me getting thrown, like, shit-loads of money for basically a party.’

Patti looked sympathetic. ‘If you like, sweetie, you can invite some of those nice boys from the squat.’ ‘No he will not!’ said Stevie.

‘Or a nice girl.’

Neil, who hadn’t had a girlfriend since school, glared at his mother.

‘All I can say is that it’s going to be one fabulously groovy party.’ Patti winked, sending an avalanche of green eyeshadow on to her left cheekbone. ‘I’ll see to that.’ Stevie’s heart sank. What was her mother going to do, arrive on a white stallion à la Bianca Jagger?  Chris brushed a stray chunk of over-cooked carrot off his tweed jacket. ‘It’s perverse that we’ve spent years conjuring up highly creative excuses to avoid all the relatives and then, suddenly, we’ve invited them – en masse – to this house. It’s going to be . . .’

Stevie deflated. The chipped blue jug swam in front of her eyes. Shit, it felt like there was a flood of tears inside her ready to seep out of the nearest available orifice. Maybe she was premenstrual. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe she was over-emotional at seeing Sam again after all this time.  Sam touched her lightly on her pale freckled forearm.

‘Great. It’ll be great, Stevie.’

‘Ab-so-lu-ment!’ exclaimed Patti, thick silver Rajasthan bangles clattering like a parade of Hari Krishnas. ‘Anyway, folks, no going back now!’

Four

A green VW Golf screeched to a halt on the Cowley Road, etching a scar of stinking black rubber across the tarmac.  The driver stuck a furious bald pink head out of the car window. ‘Fucking look where you’re going, woman! You nearly got yourself killed!’

‘Sorry, sorry.’ Stevie walked shakily over the road, grateful as her foot – still attached – hit the kerb. Since moving to London ten years ago, she treated all provincial roads like rustic bridleways.

‘Hey!’ someone shouted.

She jumped. What had she done now? But thank God it was Lara, smiling and waving, wearing a fitted black sixtiesstyle dress and red-patent wedges, incongruously glamorous in this part of laidback Oxford student-land.  ‘Christ, Stevie. I saw that,’ Lara said, wide-eyed with concern.

‘Are you OK?’

‘A bit wobbly, but no radical changes to the wedding dress necessary.’

Lara kissed her on both cheeks. ‘You’ve got to look where you’re going, hon.’

‘I know, I know. But I was checking out that cloud, the big grey stormy one up there.’ Stevie craned her head back. ‘Isn’t it spectacular?’

‘Fuck, you almost joined it.’ Lara shook her head.

‘Anyway, forget the damn cloud! This is very, very exciting.’ She banged out a drum roll with her hands. ‘Ta-da! Are you ready for the final dress fitting?’

‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’

‘Let’s go then, missus.’ Lara slinked her arm through Stevie’s and the friends walked along the Cowley Road until they got to James Street.

‘Turn left. Dressmaker’s this way,’ said Stevie, her pace slowing, feeling a growing sense of trepidation. It all felt a bit final. ‘That’s Gina’s house, the one with the green door.’ As they rang the doorbell, Lara squeezed Stevie’s arm.  ‘Don’t be nervous. You will look drop-dead gorgeous in that dress, I just know it.’

Gina, a dressmaking member of Patti’s book group, had agreed to alter a satin 1930s design that Stevie had unearthed from the dusty basement of a vintage shop on Portobello Road. A neat needle-thin woman in her sixties, she showed them into the studio-cum-living room with long slim hands.  ‘Girls, I’ll leave you to try them on. Lovely, lovely. Call me when you need adjusting.’ She closed the door behind her with a smart click.

‘You first,’ said Stevie. ‘I insist, because I’m the bride.’ Lara stripped down to her matching polka-dotted turquoise-and-pink underwear. ‘I am so grateful you haven’t made me wear a shapeless sheaf of lilac,’ she said, stepping into a pale-grey prom-style dress, mid-calf, full fifties-style skirt, its silk layers rustling against each other like summer leaves. ‘It’s sadistic when brides do that. Zipper me up, love.’

Stevie gave the zip a sharp tug. The dress’s bodice hugged her best friend’s petite hourglass figure like a violin case. She stood back, nodded approvingly. ‘Knockout.’ ‘Really?’ Lara turned in front of a full-length mirror, twisting to get a glimpse of her backside. ‘A get-laid bridesmaid dress?’

Stevie laughed. ‘Definitely.’

‘I fully expect to be sitting next to someone hot.’ Lara camped up a Joan Collins voice. ‘I don’t do old relatives.’ ‘Don’t worry. You’ve been strategically placed next to Sam.’ Stevie felt a prick of jealousy. She wanted to sit next to Sam, gossip with Lara, drink too much, dance with abandon, be a guest at her own wedding.

Lara inhaled sharply to decrease her waist measurement.  ‘And, yes, before you say it I know there are about two single heterosexual men in their thirties left in the whole of London, so I am honoured. There’s so much competition for the single men at weddings these days. You need to be like that,’ she crossed her fingers, ‘with the bride to even stand a remote chance of being seated at a decent table.’ ‘Oh, I’m good to you, Lara,’ laughed Stevie. ‘I will inflict freshly divorced Uncle Harry – all inquisitive hands and halitosis – on someone more deserving.’

Lara smiled her slightly over-bitten smile and tugged at the fabric around the waist. ‘Gina should nip it in a bit more here, don’t you think?’ She liked to show her figure off.  Stevie took a pin from between her teeth and pushed it into the seam. ‘Sam’s moving to New York too, you know.’ She adjusted Lara’s neckline, pleased about her friend’s prettiness in a dress she’d envisioned. ‘You’ll have stuff to talk about.’

‘Is he? Cool.’ Lara put one hand on the back of a chair to balance and slid one small tanned foot carefully into a strappy silver heel, then the other, and struck a pose. Content with her reflection, she smiled. ‘Your turn.’ Stevie picked up the pile of grey-white satin between forefinger and thumb. It was sheeny and opaque like the skin of a mushroom stalk and seemed strangely insubstantial for its purpose. ‘Not much to it, is there? It’ll be like getting married in nightwear.’

Lara laughed, nudged her friend. ‘It’s beautiful. Put it on.’

‘I must warn you now. I haven’t found the right underwear.

It just redistributes my back fat. I’ve got these, like, bulges.’

‘Curves, not bulges.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Stevie stepped out of her print wrap dress and arrowed her arms above her head as Lara lowered the dress over with reverential solemnity. The satin felt heavy against her skin despite its appearance and took a second or two to settle to her contours. She ran her fingers over her collarbone, exposed by the scooped neckline. ‘Check out this rash, Lara. I noticed it this morning. It started on my chest and now it’s creeping up my neck like rising damp.’ Lara traced the rash gently with her fingers. ‘Yeah, I can just feel it. But don’t fret. It’ll go. Probably stress. Now let me have a good look at you.’ She stepped back. ‘God, you look . . . absolutely stunning. Check yourself out.’ Lara held Stevie’s shoulders with cool hands and turned her round to face the mirror. Stevie stared at her reflection. The dress, cut on the bias, swirled around her ample curves and the satin bounced light into her face, which looked, in this bright afternoon light, pale and round as a plate. Yes, it certainly was a flattering dress: simple, nothing too lacy or Oscar dress-like. It now fitted pretty perfectly. Gina had done well.

‘Look what you’re doing to me. I’ve come over all queer.’ Lara’s eyes glittered with tears. She fanned her hands and made a funny noise, a hybrid between a cry and a laugh.  ‘Sorry, I never thought I’d see you in a wedding dress.’
Stevie snorted. ‘Neither did I.’

Lara stood back, putting a hand on one hip. ‘It’s not that I thought you’d never get married, just that we would always be twenty-two and single.’

‘Aha, I was very nearly thirty-two and single.’ Stevie smiled. ‘But here I am.’ She could hardly believe it herself.  ‘Here you are.’ Lara grinned mischievously. ‘Thank God you didn’t marry any of Jez’s predecessors. Can you imagine?’ Stevie raised her eyebrows. ‘They didn’t ask, actually.’

‘Just as well.’

‘I hope I would have had the sense to turn them down. But you don’t know, do you?’

‘I suppose some people just decide to draw a line beneath the search and commit,’ shrugged Lara.

‘But the problem is that when you do finally commit, you never know if you’d have met someone better, like, if you hadn’t committed.’

Lara threw her glossy blonde head back and laughed.  ‘That’s why we’re all so crap at relationships. Always looking over our shoulders for someone better who might come along.’ Stevie stroked the dress thoughtfully, smoothing out the crease above her belly. ‘But then again, you could wait and wait and never meet anyone you loved more than your first teenage crush.’

Lara rolled her eyes. ‘Stevie, stop it! This is not the time for your morbid introspection. You’re going to get married!’ ‘I know, I know.’ Stevie laughed. She needed Lara. Lara lightened things. She stopped her taking herself so seriously.  ‘Crushes are rubbish indicators of compatibility anyhow. I mean, come on. My most passionate obsessions all had the most hideous traumatic ends.’

Stevie thought of all the men she’d been infatuated with and started to giggle, a nervous giggle rising up from the pit of her churning stomach like bubbling sulphur. ‘Remember Luca?’

‘Luca? What, the old style editor of Pop I-Q? Yes, of course.’ Lara smiled, puzzled. ‘Why do you mention him?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. This wedding business makes me weirdly nostalgic.’ Memories kept popping into her head, yesterday-fresh, sharp as squirts of lemon juice in the eye. It was as if her imminent wedding had turned the binoculars on her romantic past, enlarging it, bringing it into clearer focus: she’d wasted far too much energy on men who’d turned out to mean too little.

‘Ah, Luca. Our gaydars were muted by lust,’ sighed Lara.  ‘But he wore his Evisu so well. Can you believe that was, what, ten? Twelve years ago?’

‘Twelve.’ In August. She was sure of that. The wedding had given her life new chronological definition, highlighting cause and effect, heartbreak and rebound and the people who linked it all together like a thread of messages in an online chat room. How well she remembered her first sighting of Lara that hot, sweaty August in Pop I-Q’s Clerkenwell offices as she peacocked out of the small, dark fashion cupboard, draped in a borrowed gothic black coat by Alexander McQueen, her tiny green court shoes taking fairy steps out of the coat’s dark flapping interior. She remembered the voluptuous brightness of Lara’s blonde hair. Her glass-blue eyes.  The way the air seemed to vibrate around her and how when she laughed the office dynamic changed and everyone found themselves helplessly staring, unable to concentrate, wanting to know what she would do or say next. She and Lara didn’t speak for the first three months. She assumed Lara would be insufferably vain. But she found out she was confident and cocky and they’d bonded over their crush for Luca drunkenly one night, whispering behind their hands during after-work drinks. These days she didn’t see Lara as much as she’d like.  But whenever she did see her there was still that reassuring emotional shorthand. And she was still one of life’s tonics.  Lara looked at Stevie fondly. ‘We braved the singles jungle together, girl.’

‘Sod that, we survived living together.’

‘Just. You drove me to distraction.’

‘Shit, no wonder we got mice.’ Stevie began to shake with laughter. ‘Oh God, I haven’t changed. I’m going to be the worst wife, ever.’

‘A wife,’ Lara said wistfully. ‘Doesn’t it sound so unbelievably grown-up?’

‘Maybe that’s why this feels like dressing up.’ Stevie smoothed down the folds of satin, warm now from her skin.  Her eyes started to prick. She was all over the place. There was a pause. ‘I just wish you weren’t going to New York so soon after the wedding.’

‘Hey, you’ll be a married lady, won’t need me no more,’ Lara said softly in her best American accent.  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Why did people assume that because she was getting married she’d be able to get all her emotional sustenance from Jez? It hadn’t been true in the past and suddenly seemed rather less likely to be true in the future. ‘I just wish . . . oh, I don’t know. Part of me still feels like I’m not ready to settle, to draw that line. Does that sound ridiculous? I’ve got grey hairs, for God’s sake. If not now, when? Should I wait until I am sixty-five before I shout, “Ready! Any takers?”’ Stevie smiled sadly. ‘But it’s just that when I think about New York . . . Oh hell, why does life have to be so linear? Why can’t we do lots of things at once?’ Lara fiddled with her glossed pink lip, rolling it between forefinger and thumb. It was what she did when she was upset about something. ‘Couldn’t you try to persuade Jez again? You’ve wanted to move to New York for as long as I’ve known you.’

Stevie dug her nails into the palm of her hand. Lara had secured a shiny job as senior editor at a new, as yet unpublished, American fashion magazine, currently coded Project J. She’d offered to pull strings and introduce Stevie to the right people, but Jez had objected. Jez’s career was here. Jez had some really exciting projects coming up at the marketing company, YR-Brand. ‘Anyway, as soon as you sprog, pumpkin,’ he’d said, ‘you’ll be at home with the kid.’ The argument had played out in resentful silence. ‘I’ve tried, Lara. He is so against the idea. You know how he hates New York.’ She shrugged, trying to justify the decision. ‘Besides, slim chance I’d get the job.’
‘You always underestimate yourself, Steve. You’ve got a great reputation.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Why do you look so sad?’ Lara put an arm over Stevie’s bare shoulder. ‘Smile. You must be a smiley bride, my darling.’ Stevie grinned, perking up again. ‘“Bride” is rather nice. I like bride. It’s kind of pastoral.’ She rolled the word around her mouth as if trying to taste it. ‘But wife, let’s be honest, Lara. Wife sounds frumpy.’

‘Could you be over-analysing here, hon?’ Lara sat down on a wooden chair and kicked her feet in the air. ‘More importantly, did you bring those samples to show me?’ Stevie dug into her bag, smiling at Lara’s impetuous enthusiasm.  She could never wait for anything. And she was insistent that all the wedding details be viewed together, with dress, to get the overall ‘look’. Lara hadn’t quite grasped that Patti – who was in charge of decorating the house for the wedding – was a liability wherever a unified ‘look’ was concerned.  ‘Here’s the confetti.’

Lara turned the sample confetti box in her hands, watching the little discs of coloured pastel paper toss about like a snowstorm behind the window of clear plastic. She looked up. ‘Don’t you want rose petals?’
Stevie stared blankly.

‘Real flower petals. A bit nicer, I reckon.’ ‘Shit, you’re so right.’ Stevie scrunched her hands to her face. Suddenly the fact that the confetti was paper not rose petals mattered more than anything in the entire universe.  ‘Crisis.’

‘Breathe, Stevie. Breathe.’ Lara laughed. ‘We can get over this.’

Gina knocked on the door, opening it before they’d answered. ‘Everything OK, girls?’

‘Great, thanks Gina,’ said Stevie. ‘Just give us two minutes.’ But it wasn’t all great. There were problems. Endless problems. She picked up her strappy gold wedding shoes.  ‘See these, Lara. They are too small.’ Her voice was getting higher and higher, as if she’d been sucking on a helium balloon.  ‘Because I bought them half a size too small. I’m not sure why. I walked into Jimmy Choo and tried on hundreds of pairs and I got kind of shopped out, you know, all at sixes and sevens in an ecstasy of indecision, and I bought the wrong pair because they were the only ones left in a size that vaguely fitted and I thought I’d wear them in or something.  How stupid am I?’

‘You haven’t worn them?’

‘Around the garden.’ Stevie cringed. ‘Oh, I know. Don’t say it.’

‘Here, let me.’ Lara held one gold heel in her hands, licked her finger and rubbed it on a scuff mark on the leather sole.  It didn’t budge. ‘Never let the wrong size get between you and a fabulous pair of heels. You only have to wear them for a day. Don’t be a lightweight.’ She put the shoe down on the floor. ‘Now, what about flowers?’

‘Jez’s mum is sorting them out.’ Stevie hung the words out for inspection by her friend. ‘Don’t shoot me that look.’ ‘Isn’t she the mother-in-law that taste forgot?’ ‘Jez wanted her to “feel involved”.’ Stevie’s anxiety was brushing past her tonsils now, drying her mouth. ‘I’m going to end up with yellow carnations, aren’t I? Shit. Shit. Shit.’ Lara tried to help. ‘Carnations are kind of back, if you keep them bunched all one colour.’

‘Well, you’d know.’ Stevie was aware that she’d let things slide, not kept on top of the finer details as much as she’d have liked. And there was so little time left to organise anything.  Now where was that garter? She rummaged in her rucksack and picked out an elasticky band of blue lace, held it between forefinger and thumb. ‘Saucy?’ Lara camped up an eyebrow and grinned. ‘I’d say.’ ‘Do you mind passing those scissors on

Inspirational

Glamour

Poignant and fun

Heat

Fun, laughter and tears blend with love, lust and a tangle of misunderstandings in this splendid romp

She

Read this - a warm story from a bestselling author

InStyle

A cracking read

Sunday Express

An addictive story of love, lost and ovaries that proves Williams is here to stay

Daily Record

A hilarious take on issues facing the women of today

RTE Guide

A poignant novel about love and marriage

The Lady

Sparkling

Hot Stars

Book Club Questions 

Is it plausible that someone could have doubts right up to the moment they get married and still go through with it?

At what point in the novel do you think that Stevie realises that Jez is wrong?

Katy Norris becomes obsessed by fertility panic headlines. Is the press irresponsible in making women like Katy worry about their ovaries?

Should women in their mid or late thirties ‘settle’ for Mr Good Enough if they want children?

Who changes most by the end of the book, Stevie or Katy?

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