Chapter 19
19
‘I thought you said left!’
Lucie felt as if all her energy, all her patience, was completely used up and she was going to crack.
‘No, second left… after this one,’ Zoe insisted.
Lucie manoeuvred the great big car into a three-point turn in the narrow lane, then came out onto the main road again.
‘So next left?’
‘Yes…’
It was just twenty minutes before the wedding was due to start. Everyone in the car had been through every emotion – from hope and elation, when the traffic freed and they could pick up speed, that they were going to make it on time, to despair and frustration when they hit yet another stretch of congestion.
Now, there was just tension mixed with a wearied acceptance that maybe this event, which they’d been thinking about and planning and travelling towards for days, maybe they weren’t going to go to it after all. Or in Lucie’s case, maybe she wasn’t going to manage to get them to it. According to the map, there were still four kilometres to go and the minutes were ticking down with alarming speed.
‘So down this road,’ Lucie said as they turned into another narrow road, ‘and the venue is off this one. This should be the final stretch?’
‘Yeah,’ Zoe confirmed.
‘Foot down!’ Deva urged.
But it wasn’t that kind of road. These were tight corners where you could meet someone hurtling the other way, or a tractor tootling along at 10 mph, or even worse, a deer… a rabbit.
Lucie did the best she could, even taking one corner at a speed that made them all lurch to the right in their seats.
‘Mum! I did not know you could drive like this!’ Zoe blurted.
‘Well, maybe you don’t know every single thing about me, Zoe. Now, shush, I’m concentrating on getting us to bloody Miles’s bloody wedding.’
Green verges, hedges and tall poplars passed by. The miles between them and Jacasta’s ‘magical French ceremony of love amidst the peonies’ began to close. Meanwhile, Deva, having instructed them not to turn around, eased the Chanel lace from up over his head and arms, folded it tenderly into a little bundle and then began to put on the sober white shirt, black jacket, trousers and even gold-coloured tie that his mother had picked for him for the event.
‘My shoes are still in the boot,’ he said. ‘But otherwise, I’m good to go.’
‘Fantastic,’ Zoe told him. ‘At least one of us can head straight for the ceremony. But I am not going to be able to slither out of this dress and into the fuchsia pink marquee I have rented for the occasion. My slithering days are over, for the time being.’
‘Fuchsia pink?’ Lucie asked, because she didn’t know anything about Zoe’s wedding guest dress. ‘That sounds gorgeous. That will light up your beautiful face.’
‘I am so tired that nothing short of floodlights is going to light up my face, and there’s absolutely no disguising the bus-sized bump at this point. So might as well go big. Wait till you see this dress.’ There was a momentary hit of energy and excitement in her voice. ‘It has a huge flower at the front, all in fuchsia fabric – Carrie Bradshaw, eat your heart out. I love it. It would have been lovely to have had slightly more than a handful of minutes to get dressed though. I thought I’d be putting my hair up, curling the front strands… I mean, these are family wedding pictures. They’ll hang around.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Lucie said.
‘Oh… not your fault. None of us expected to run into two refugees with one in need of urgent medical help. Has anyone heard from Pete?’
When the answer turned out to be no, both Zoe and Deva sent him messages.
‘There!’ Deva shouted, as he spotted the sign ahead. ‘Maison Violette on the right!’
Lucie gave a glance at the dashboard again… Eleven minutes to go. She turned right and drove, as fast as she dared, up the driveway towards the beautiful French mansion house ahead. As they approached it, Lucie wondered where she should put the car. Was there a car park? And where should Zoe rush to change? Where was Deva supposed to go to head straight for the ceremony? And how could she turn around and get out of here just as fast as humanly possible? As all these thoughts were flying through her mind, a man in a white suit ran past, then stopped in his tracks, turned, looked at the car and began to run towards them.
Just as he broke into a broad smile of welcome, Lucie realised it was Miles.
Miles in a white suit, Miles with lashings of black hair, Miles with a too-deep-to-be-true tan, Miles, minus at least half a stone of weight on the last time she’d seen him.
Bloody Miles and his bloody, bloody wedding.
He was speeding towards their car, mercifully heading for Zoe’s side.
‘Hello, hello!’ he was shouting out. ‘You made it! Oh my goodness, you made it. How fantastic! How absolutely amazing! Jacasta is having kittens about Deva not being here to sing. And I didn’t want to get married without you there, Zoe, sweetheart.’
As Lucie pulled to a stop, Zoe flung open her door and he was there, her ex-husband, leaning in to kiss his daughter and greet them all.
‘Hello, Deva, good to see you, and hello, Lucie…’
His smile tensed just a little as his eyes met hers.
‘What a journey you’ve had by all accounts,’ he went on. She gave a polite smile in reply.
There he was, Miles, looking like a low-rent imitation of Piers Brosnan, she decided on the spot. Really, it was quite easy to channel all her anger, annoyance and disappointment at him when he was making such an obvious twerp of himself.
‘Well, they’re here now, thank goodness,’ she said stiffly. She knew she was over an hour’s drive from the hotel she’d booked for herself on the coast, and she was wondering where she could find a stiff gin and tonic and whether she could somehow sleep it off before driving to the sea.
‘You look exhausted, Lucie. Why don’t you come along?’
‘Come along where?’
‘Come to the wedding? Have a few drinks, meet Jacasta, have dinner… and the Wilsons, remember them? They cancelled at the last minute, so there’s even a room for you, if you want it.’
Before Lucie could even begin with why she definitely was not coming to the ‘Ceremony of Love Amidst the Peonies’, Zoe and Deva both turned to her and began a chorus of… ‘Please’, ‘Yes, definitely’, ‘Muuuuuum’, ‘Auntieeeee’, ‘You’ve got to come’, ‘You’ve got to see me sing’, ‘And the fuchsia dress!’ ‘And you’ve come so far, might as well stay for the best bit’.
‘But I don’t have anything to wear to a wedding,’ Lucie said, deciding that this might be the simplest way to get out of it.
‘Well… you do, actually,’ Deva admitted, a little shamefaced. ‘I’ve borrowed… well, quite a few of your Chanel things, which are in the duffel bag in the boot. Including shoes…’
‘Well, there you are then,’ Miles said. ‘Dress up in the finery and come along. You’ll love it, Lucie. So many old friends, old faces for you to catch up with.’
Bloody Miles…
‘C’mon, Mum, we’ve got about five minutes to get gussied up.’
‘Deva,’ Miles urged his nephew, ‘we’ll get ourselves over to the marquee, get everything delayed for just a few minutes and give these ladies a chance to freshen up.’
‘But where do we go?’ Lucie asked, already vaguely furious with Miles as soon as she had accepted the invitation. How dare he commandeer her, tell her where to dress, what to wear, and, worst of all, refer to her and Zoe as ‘ladies’. Ugh, for some reason that just tipped her over the edge. She could still leave. She could still get in the car and go. Head for the sea… be sipping a cocktail on her own by the beachfront, talking to her dad by sunset.
But… Zoe, Deva, so many others – God, even Miles – were her family. Not going would be like missing a major family milestone. And maybe she could enjoy a family event even more if she wasn’t Mrs Miles. Whatever annoying, irritating, downright embarrassing things Miles did, they didn’t have anything to do with her. She would be free of having to worry about him. That was now Jacasta’s problem.
And didn’t she want to see some of this ceremony after she’d heard so much about it? #Loveinthepeonies or whatever it was. Plus, she was just a guest… She could drink a few cocktails at Miles and Jacasta’s expense, maybe even consider letting her hair down. Not that she was entirely sure what that would involve.
‘Ask Marcel,’ Miles replied, gesturing to the vast house. ‘He’s knocking about downstairs.’
So Zoe and Lucie, with a small bag each, plus the bag Deva had given Lucie, headed as quickly as they could to the enormous wooden door of this three-storey mansion, so high and so wide, it cast a shadow from quite a distance away. There was the most incredible purple and white wisteria growing up the front, but as they got closer, they could see it was all artificial silk blooms.
‘Someone’s been watching Bridgerton …’ Zoe commented.
‘That may explain this entire wedding,’ Lucie said.
And to her relief, Zoe started to giggle at this.
‘Are you at all annoyed, Mum, that he’s having such a lush party when you guys had something much more modest?’
‘No, that is not annoying. If I were going to get remarried, which is hard to imagine?—’
‘Not at all,’ Zoe insisted.
‘Nice of you. I’d go all small and bespoke and bijou. How about you? And that’s not in any way a loaded question,’ she added quickly as they hurried through the front door and into the reception area.
‘I’m picturing a garden, trees, greenery, calm, lovely, and yeah, on the small side.’
‘I absolutely love you, Zoe,’ Lucie blurted. ‘Thank you for forcing me to drive down here. I think we both needed to talk about things…’
‘Yeah, thanks, Mum. I’m sorry you’ve been so sad and so upset. I hope you’ll be able to think about what you want on your little holiday by the sea.’
‘I will… definitely.’
There was no one in sight downstairs in the impressive reception hall of the Maison Violette, which was all wood panelling, flowers and more flowers and the scent of lavender, but there was a door open onto a small sitting room abloom with chintz curtains and chintz-covered sofas, so they decided to hurry in there, shut the door, then strip off, rummage about in their bags for clothes, and do the quick change needed to get to the wedding before curtain up.
‘At least you know what you’re wearing, that is a major advantage. I’m just playing lucky dip in here,’ Lucie said as she opened the bag Deva had handed her.
‘Oh my God…’ Zoe held up her silky, fuchsia concoction. It was horribly crushed from two days in the bag in a hot car, and the big flouncy flower sewn on to the front looked wilted and dejected.
‘That is such a beautiful dress,’ Lucie soothed. ‘Look, pop it on for now, with your lipstick and earrings, then after the service, come back to the house, find Marcel, find your room and ask him for an iron. And when you come back down to join us, you and the dress will be all perked up and refreshed. Is that a good plan?’
‘Yeah, that will have to do.’
‘It’s a gorgeous dress,’ Lucie told her, ‘I can’t wait to see you in it.’
‘Thanks, Mum. And what about you? What’s in the bag Deva packed?’
One by one, Lucie pulled out the clothes. On top was the lace dress Deva had been wearing until he’d changed in the back of the car.
‘Black floor-length lace?’ Zoe asked.
‘No, that looked amazing on Deva… I can’t live up to him in that.’
They both smiled.
Next came the creamy tweed jacket with the oh-so-distinctive black edging around the collar, cuffs and jacket edges that Deva had worn to climb to the top of the statue on Bastille Day. Followed by the matching creamy tweed skirt.
‘These are beautiful and appropriate, but I will boil alive out there,’ was Lucie’s verdict.
‘Agreed. Come on, Mum, we’ve got about thirty seconds left,’ Zoe reminded her as she pulled her own pink dress over her head, smoothed it down and began to fix her hair into the hurried version of the up-do she had planned.
Another tweed jacket, a silky pussy-bowed blouse, the creamy handbag, a little battered from its rough-and-tumble in the village square, then she was nearing the bottom of the pile. There were some strappy black heels down there, and her black version of the classic Chanel 2.55 quilted handbag.
‘I just don’t want to wear my Chanel things,’ she complained, ‘They’re unhappy memories now.’
‘Crack on Mum, no time…’ Zoe insisted.
And there, down at the bottom of the bag, as soon as she touched the fabric, she knew.
That vintage silver and black cocktail dress! No fancy label, from a secondhand shop. Oh yes, the one that was sleeveless, with thick shoulder straps and a square neckline, cinched in at a high waist, then falling in three, flapper-style tiers to below the knee. That was the one. She’d bought it more than ten years ago for a Christmas party.
‘Silver, gold and black? Not exactly wedding-style,’ she said a little doubtfully, holding up the light, silky, slithery creation.
‘Oh my gosh, that is fabulous!’ was Zoe’s verdict. ‘Perfectly appropriate for you to wear black.’ She winked. ‘It’s a funeral of sorts, your ex’s wedding.’
‘Do you think I can get into it?’ was Lucie’s next concern.
‘Only one way to find out…’ Zoe said.
Lucie fumbled to undo all the many, many buttons down the back. Then with Zoe’s help she got it over her head and down.
She looked down at herself. Definitely not the willowy late thirties she’d been when she bought this. Boobs were bigger, bulge around the middle curvier, arms heavier too. But this was a clever dress. The tight waist was high, close to empire line, and those shifting, shimmering ruffles skimmed the body beautifully. Despite herself, she smiled. There was no mirror in sight, but she suspected this looked pretty OK.
‘You are bringing it, Mum!’ Zoe exclaimed. ‘Can’t believe you’ve kept this locked up in a box for so long! And I am definitely borrowing it when I’m back down to my fighting self again.’
Zoe busied herself doing up the buttons at the back. A few around the bust would have to stay undone, but Zoe provided a drapey scarf to slip over her mother’s arms and hide the situation until there was time for Lucie to change into a camouflaging black bra later.
‘Shoes, bag, lipstick, let’s go!’ Zoe commanded.
So final touches were added and they got out of the room as quickly as they could.
Out in the reception again, Marcel had materialised, a little man, wizened and brown, who sensed the urgency and directed them through the house, out of the majestic wood-and-glass doors at the back and towards the gorgeous silky awning set up in the garden, full of flowers and brightly coloured wedding guests.
Over to the far left, Lucie was aware of Jacasta and her party of wedding girls waiting. So, she sped up towards the tent.
‘You go to the front, to your dad,’ she urged Zoe. ‘I’m going to slip in on a back row.’
For a moment, Zoe looked at her and she thought her daughter might protest.
‘That’s the right place for me,’ she hissed. ‘This is Jacasta’s day. I’m going to be right in the background.’
‘OK, see you after. No crying,’ Zoe said, but this came with a cheeky smile and a wink.
As Zoe hurried down the aisle in full bloom fuchsia, turning all the heads, Lucie located the back row of seats on Miles’s side. Mercifully, there was a spare single seat just a few chairs in, so she only had to ask a few people to stand up and let her through. At a glance, she wasn’t even quite sure who they were, maybe business colleagues she’d met once or twice but didn’t clearly remember. Once she was sitting down, the music continued and she had a few moments to settle and gather her thoughts. She could see Miles, of course, standing expectantly at the front. Beside him was his pompous older brother, Jason.
In terms of Miles’s character development, Jason probably had a lot to answer for. Maybe if Jason hadn’t been such a proud, selfish, bullying alpha-boy, Miles might not have turned out quite the way he had – always thrusting, pushing, trying, never satisfied with his lot.
Oh! And there was Deva, on a seat to the side of centre stage, beside the keyboard player and the violinist, who were busy making soft, relaxing, waiting-room style mood music. Deva in a black suit, white shirt and tie, looked buttoned up and tense. Even from the back row, she could see that he looked strained and his face was a little shiny with nervous sweat. Now and then he tugged at the tie, ran his fingers round the collar and shrugged his shoulders in his suit, as if he couldn’t wait to throw off this constricting contraption.
Then the music stopped and that expectant hush followed as people stopped talking, heads turned and everyone waited for the bride to enter to her bridal theme tune.
The opening chords of something soft and familiar were struck… Oh, Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. That was a classy choice, Lucie had to admit.
Then Jacasta entered, looking beautiful in an ivory satin column number, and began her walk down the aisle. Her dark hair was swept elegantly up with a cascade of glossy ringlets at the front, giving Empress Josephine vibes. There were flowers in her hair, and in her hands a trailing bouquet of pink peonies, white roses and sprigs of lavender. The wedding girls behind her were two in pink and two in lilac satin versions of her column dress. All so pretty.
The celebrant was a cheerful looking woman waiting for them at end of the aisle. Miles stepped forward and the smile that he gave his bride-to-be, well… Despite all the angry confusion of emotion rushing around in her head, that smile, to her surprise, it was causing a little lump in the back of her throat. It was a long time ago now, but he had once smiled at her like that. And now she realised that maybe it could be OK to let go of feeling angry with him. She could be happy for him that he had found someone who would hopefully love and cherish him in the years ahead – he’d moved on. Let Jacasta deal with Miles now; she looked more than up to the job. Lucie was free now to spend way less time thinking about them… and much more time thinking about herself and how she was going to move on too.
Turning her attention away from Miles, she began to do some guest-spotting, looking at the heads, shoulders and hats in the audience in front of her. The front row was easy to identify – her ex-mother-in-law, Betty, followed by Deva’s mother, Melissa, then Zoe, then Jason’s wife, Tina. The cousins – Deva’s three sisters in multi-coloured saris and Jason’s two children – were all in the row behind.
In the row beyond this, she picked out various aunties, uncles, and several of Miles’s cousins. It was a surprisingly big family turnout for a wedding which was thousands of miles from home for most of them.
Now she looked in the rows beyond for friends, curious to see who had shown up for Miles. She wondered if this meant they had chosen him and not her after their divorce, or if she would still be able to count these people as her friends after today.
She recognised haircuts and profiles and found it intriguing to see which friends and business associates were here. She’d not been good at keeping up with most of these people since the divorce. Too busy, too traumatised, plus she’d moved much further away from ‘leafy’ Bromley once their house was sold. She’d chosen her father’s town as her first post-divorce base, but not forever, she had told herself when she’d put down the deposit for the rental.
Would these people be pleased to see her, she wondered. Most likely they would be surprised to see her here.
She smoothed down the ruffled tiers of the dress.
Deva would be very pleased to see her in this dress. He would appreciate it to the full. She found herself looking over in his direction, where he still looked strained and nervous. She looked and looked at him, willing him to glance up and catch her eye. When he eventually did, she gave him her warmest, most encouraging smile. You’ve got this, superstar! was what she wanted to tell him. She was sorry that he’d rushed off with Miles, before she’d had time to say those words to him.
He gave a small, tense smile back.
‘…man and wife,’ the celebrant was announcing now.
Really? Already? How had she managed to miss the homemade vows that Jacasta was sure to have penned for them both? Never mind, she could look it up on Insta later, when she was somewhere where she could have a quiet giggle to herself. She wondered if Jacasta fully realised what she was letting herself in for – but then again, different people brought out the best and sometimes the worst in each other. Maybe Miles with Jacasta was a different kind of Miles to the one he’d been with her, especially in those stressed-out, angry, resentful later years.
As the couple stepped over to the side table to sign the documents, that was when Deva stood up and both the keyboard and the violin began to play the opening chords of… She waited for a moment. It was familiar… It was old-fashioned, not what she’d expected for this song. But maybe it had a special resonance for the happy couple: Frank Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly With Me’ .
Frank Sinatra? Really? Maybe it had been playing in the elevator when they’d first set eyes on one another, she told herself with a repressed giggle.
Deva broke into the opening lines and his voice sounded nice… steady, even quite good. But it didn’t feel like full-throttle Deva. It didn’t feel as captivating and glorious as Deva doing The Bangles, arms held out, dripping Chanel lace and belting the words over the barren hillside and into the sunset. No, it didn’t feel like that at all. And Lucie thought it was sad that this audience was getting such a restrained version of the original.
She scanned over the heads in front of her, looking again at the few she’d not been able to place. There was a tall man, two rows ahead, four chairs along to the right. Broad shoulders under a light grey suit, hair a dark steely grey. On either side of him was a blonde woman, one with long, loose curls, the other with her hair done up into a chignon. Even just glimpsed from behind, all three looked totally wedding elegant.
The man happened to glance to the left, so Lucie got a clear view of the side of his face. He was clean shaven and tanned and she felt a strong beat of recognition. Her heart began to pick up the pace. As she took a sharp in-breath, she felt the silk dress tighten around her. She looked – no, she stared. It may have been over twenty-five years since she’d last seen this face, but there wasn’t any mistaking him. She was sure it was Clark, her former colleague, that constantly unavailable, funny, lovely man she’d once thought she was so connected to, so… in love with all that time ago. But what on earth was Clark doing here? At Miles’s wedding. What reason could there possibly be for Miles to reconnect after such a long time? And they weren’t even friends, just slight acquaintances back then. Why was he here? Clark? Clark! Maybe Jacasta knew Clark? Lucie’s heart was drumming rapidly now and she could feel an uneasy blush creeping up from her neck and over her cheeks.
Nothing had ever happened or been said between them, nothing that she needed to feel embarrassed or awkward about. But still, somehow, she was sure back then that he knew how she felt about him. And she’d had the strongest sense that he’d had those feelings for her too. Something a little tense, exciting and physical had always been present between them. One of them taking glances at the other when they thought they were unobserved. Both of them finding reasons to talk, go on site visits together, and always finding it so easy and a little thrilling to talk to one another about anything and everything. And the pain of not being able to say anything, or do anything, because one of them had always been in an on-off relationship at exactly the wrong time. That photo, she remembered, of the two of them talking, laughing, hardly able to take their eyes off one another. That’s how it had felt between them. All the time. Until she couldn’t stand it any more and she had taken a friend’s advice to get out there and find someone new.
Clark had taken off to the US for a work project and she had met Miles. And once she was pregnant and then married, she hadn’t looked back. She’d never looked him up again and hadn’t even allowed herself to think about him. Until Deva had unearthed the photos and it all came flooding back. All that unexpressed want and the deep regret that she might have spent over two decades with the wrong man.
She found herself staring at the two blonde heads on either side of him. Both were facing forward, so she couldn’t tell anything. One was going to be his wife or significant other, surely? And the other maybe his daughter? Or maybe one of those women was here with someone else. Or maybe both were here with someone else… For a moment, she allowed herself the thought that he was here alone, but she immediately squashed it down as completely unlikely. What was he doing here? The complete surprise was making her head spin.
More music was playing as Jacasta and Miles began their walk back up the aisle, smiling delightedly and stopping to hug, kiss and say hello to family and friends. The glamorous wedding girls with armfuls of bouquets followed on behind.
The happy couple were soon out from under the canopied ceremony area and into the beautiful garden, and gradually the guests began to file on out behind them. Lucie realised that in a few minutes, she would be standing outside too. She needed to gather her thoughts. Within moments, she would be greeting her ex-mother-in-law, her ex-brother-in-law, her ex-sister-in-law and all their families, not to mention old friends… and that would all be difficult enough, but she was also about to meet Clark after all this time. And all those emotions from the past year that she’d laid to rest and moved on from – was there any chance that they would all come bubbling up again?
It was a lot, she had to admit, feeling another sharp in-breath; a lot, a lot. She felt a wave of something that took a moment to register. Tension, nerves, almost nausea.
Hello, Lucie, got to get a grip , she told herself. She ran her damp palms over the silky sides of the dress and strangely found herself trying to remember some of Deva’s favourite Chanel facts… It all started with hats, and she gave No 5 away to American GIs after the war.
And breathe slowly in… and breathe slowly out.
You’ve got this , she told herself. Even though she was pretty sure she didn’t.