Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
JULY 2012
Through a crack between the heavy cream curtains, I could see Kate, Rowan and Abbie, all crowded together around the tall, gold-framed cheval mirror. Next to them was a little splayed-leg table holding a bottle of champagne and four glasses; on the other side, its twin held a vast arrangement of fleshy white lilies.
Abbie was wearing jeans and a jumper. She had her back to me, so I could see the hole in one of the elbows – I remembered her telling us that she and Matt had recently been fighting the equivalent of the Cold War against a plague of clothes moths, and it looked like the Iron Curtain wasn’t going to be lifted any time soon.
But speaking of curtains… I peered again through the gap. Abbie turned around, her face shifting from the delighted smile I’d seen in the mirror to a worried frown. I yanked the gap closed and turned back to the smaller mirror in the cubicle.
Kate and Rowan had both looked gorgeous. The strappy lilac satin dresses suited them perfectly with their dark hair, even though their skin tones were quite different.
I, on the other hand…
‘Nome?’ Abbie called. ‘Are you okay in there? Is the zip stuck or something?’
‘I’m all right,’ I managed to say, turning away from the mirror.
But it was no good. I knew what I’d seen, and I’d see it again when I came out.
And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. This was Abbie’s wedding, her and Matt’s big day, and as one of her bridesmaids, I had to wear what she’d chosen, like it or not.
No one will care , I told myself firmly. It’s not about you. Suck it up, buttercup.
Taking a deep breath, I parted the curtains and stepped out.
There was a moment of silence. I forced myself to smile.
And then all at once, we started to laugh. Abbie came over and hugged me. Kate and Rowan pressed their hands over their faces like kids watching a particularly scary bit of Doctor Who , occasionally peering between their fingers and then laughing some more.
The sales assistant hurried over, tape measure looped around her neck, to see what all the commotion was about.
‘Delightful!’ she cooed. ‘I always think that a soft, cool pastel suits everybod— oh.’
‘Oh my God,’ Abbie said, when eventually she could breathe. ‘I’m so sorry, Nome.’
‘You look like you died a couple of weeks ago and someone just dug you up,’ gasped Rowan.
‘I know we shouldn’t laugh.’ Kate grabbed a tissue from the box on the table, presumably intended to mop up the joyful tears of overcome mothers-of-brides, and wiped her eyes. ‘But Naomi – you just – you poor thing.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter, honestly. I’ll wear it. It’s fine.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the kind.’ Abbie had stopped laughing now; she looked absolutely mortified. ‘Seriously, Nome, I just didn’t think. I’ve never seen you in lilac before. I didn’t know…’
‘That she’d look like something on the mortician’s slab in CSI ?’ suggested Kate.
‘I mean, I should have known there was a reason you never wear it,’ Abbie went on, ‘but it didn’t occur to me. Mum said, “How about lilac for the bridesmaids? It’ll look so fresh,” and I agreed without thinking.’
‘Fresh like something on ice at the fishmonger,’ giggled Rowan.
‘You can’t change the whole colour scheme just for me,’ I said.
‘Can’t I?’ Abbie argued. ‘Just watch me. What are a few flowers and table napkins compared to my best friend feeling like shit on my wedding day and looking like a corpse in the photos? Of course I’ll change it.’
‘Ah, it’s the photos you were worried about,’ teased Rowan. ‘“Who’s that woman who came back from the dead for your wedding, Matthew?” everyone would ask for ever more.’
‘Stop it,’ Abbie scolded. ‘Get these off and we’ll try something different.’
The sales assistant looked at us, her head on one side. ‘How about a nice fuchsia? That would warm your skin tone up beautifully, and it always suits dark-haired girls, too.’
‘Fuchsia sounds great,’ agreed Abbie. ‘Let’s give it a go and if it works I’ll get Mum on the case with the florist. Come on, all change, please.’
Half an hour later, we were all sitting around a table in a nearby pub, already a bottle of wine down, a waiter placing steaming plates of sausages and mash in front of us.
‘Crisis averted,’ Kate said, topping up our glasses. ‘Strong work there, Abs. I do risk management for an actual job, and you handled that like a pro.’
‘It’s not that big a deal.’ Abbie forked up a mound of mashed potato and peas. ‘Not nearly so much as having one of you not being comfortable on my big day would have been. I mean, that’s partly why…’
‘Why what?’ I asked.
Abbie took a breath. ‘Why when I kind of asked Zara if she could be a bridesmaid too and she said she was too busy, I didn’t push it.’
I swallowed, the piece of sausage I’d been eating suddenly feeling like a golf ball in my throat. ‘You asked her? I never knew.’
‘I’m sorry, Nome.’ Abbie smiled. ‘I know I should’ve checked with you first. I knew you wouldn’t be comfortable with it, after what happened. But it felt like the right thing to do. I’d have felt awful not asking, and I was ninety-nine per cent sure she’d say no, so I took the risk.’
‘You see?’ Kate said. ‘Handled it like a pro.’
‘What would you have done if she’d said yes?’ asked Rowan.
‘I honestly don’t know. But she’s in New York now, apparently, so there’s no way she could have come out for the hen night and dress fittings and everything. I was pretty confident.’
‘I…’ I took a breath and admitted, ‘I don’t know if I could have gone ahead with being a bridesmaid if she was too. I’m sorry, Abs. I’m glad she couldn’t. It would have been just… too awkward.’
‘Because of Patch?’ Rowan asked.
‘Of course. But also – the way she was the last time we saw her, it was like she hated me. Hated all of us. Even if we’d all apologised and hugged it out and stuff like that, I still feel like – like we can’t be friends in the way we were before. Not ever again.’
It was true. Zara’s dramatic departure from the group had left me grappling with conflicting emotions: fear that she’d somehow return to seek revenge for what I’d done; regret that things had turned out as they had; but mostly, overwhelmingly, relief. I’d quietly unfollowed her on Facebook and although I felt guilty about doing that, it was nothing to the general background noise of the guilt I felt about Patch and me being together.
I’d have said it cast a shadow over our relationship and in a way it did – but it was the shadow of a distant, passing cloud on a sunny day, because I was happier than I’d ever been. Although Patch’s work still took him up to distant Aberdeen for weeks at a time, we texted constantly, saw each other as often as we could, and our reunions were blissful and passionate. Already, we were talking about having a future together, and what that might look like. Lying in bed together, we’d teasingly discussed the names of our future children, where we might live and – with Abbie and Matt’s wedding approaching – had joked about him one day putting a ring on my finger and making an honest woman of me.
‘Has anyone actually been in touch with her, apart from you, Abs?’ Kate asked.
‘Andy still speaks to her sometimes,’ Abbie said. ‘That’s how I found out she’d moved to New York. She’s put so much distance between us – not just physically, you know what I mean. When we used to be so close. And we haven’t done enough to stop her.’
‘Zara’s a complicated person,’ Rowan said carefully.
‘It’s like she was always part of the group, but also kind of separate,’ agreed Kate.
I felt as if we were swimmers taking our first steps into dark, cold water, not knowing how deep it would be, where the current would take us, or whether the others would follow. As a group, we didn’t gossip about one another. I could only recall discussing one of my friends when she wasn’t present on a handful of occasions, and then it had been positively – when we’d agreed on a gift for Kate’s birthday, organised flowers for Abbie’s engagement, or talked about ways we might murder Paul after he and Rowan split up.
‘It must come from having grown up in care,’ I said. ‘Isn’t attachment disorder a thing, or something like that?’
Abbie looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. ‘Zara didn’t grow up in care. Her dad was something massive in the oil industry and she spent her childhood in some kind of palace in Saudi Arabia with millions of servants. Boarding school, yes, but not care.’
My face must have looked just as blank with surprise as Abbie’s had. I remembered how I’d felt when Zara had confided in me about her past – shocked, of course, but also sorry for her, admiring of how far she’d come, proud that she’d chosen me to confide in.
And it hadn’t been true. Or if it was, she’d told Abbie something completely different, which wasn’t.
‘I kind of assumed wealthy parents, too,’ said Rowan, ‘although she never explicitly said. I mean, you have to have money to live the way she does. It’s not like fashion pays well, unless you’re Kate Moss or someone.’
I remembered the seedy hotel in Bloomsbury where I’d dropped Zara off that drunken night. It certainly hadn’t seemed like a place where someone who had money would choose to stay. At the time, my thoughts had been so occupied with questioning the presence of the man I was sure I’d seen there to reflect on what it meant about Zara herself.
‘But it did pay her well,’ Kate argued. ‘Wasn’t she, like, a child star and made a fortune doing that, but then when she was a teenager she was hospitalised with anorexia and had to stop because she nearly died? Or – hold on – was it only me she told that to?’
‘I think it was only you,’ Rowan said, after a moment’s silence. ‘It’s like she – I don’t know – tailor-made versions of herself to tell each one of us, because she knew we’d never talk about her behind her back.’
‘And we never have,’ I burst out. ‘Not until today. Kate, did she make you promise you’d never tell us – tell anyone – about the anorexia stuff?’
Kate nodded. ‘She bloody well did. She swore me to secrecy. I’d have felt bad keeping secrets from the rest of you normally but I went along with it because – you know – you want your friends to trust you. It’s kind of important.’
‘And we trusted her.’ Abbie raked a hand through her hair, like she was trying to reorganise the contents of her brain. ‘We never questioned any of it.’
‘I can’t believe I never asked her about her work in more detail.’ Rowan was looking past me, out of the window, as if it would allow her to see into the past, remember the detail of conversations she’d long forgotten. ‘If I had, I’d have realised things didn’t quite add up. I just took everything at face value.’
‘Why would someone do that?’ Abbie asked. ‘Just why? Did she feel she wasn’t good enough for us, or something?’
‘Did she not trust us enough to tell us the truth about herself?’ Rowan fretted. ‘Whatever the truth is?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever find out the truth.’
We all looked at one another around the table, baffled. The Zara I thought I knew had come from a background of under-privilege and poverty, making her own way in the world, scraping by to pursue the career she loved. The Zara Patch knew had attempted suicide. The Zara Abbie knew had been an entirely different person, cushioned by wealth and luxury.
How many Zaras were there?
‘Okay.’ Kate picked up the wine bottle and refilled all our glasses. ‘If any of you bitches has also been living a double life, why don’t you spill right now? Amnesty time.’
There was a moment of silence, and then we all burst out laughing.
‘That’s it,’ Abbie said. ‘No secrets between us, right? Not any more.’
‘Not ever,’ Rowan promised.
‘No secrets,’ Kate echoed.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.
We all raised our glasses and tapped them together in the centre of the table, as if we were signing a pact in blood, not just toasting with red wine.
Feeling the closeness and love of my friends wrapping around me like a blanket, I felt a new confidence: we could move forward now, a group of four, without Zara. I could be secure in my relationship with Patch, because surely now there could be no question of my having betrayed Zara – not after how she had betrayed us all.
And there was no need for me to break my promise to her and tell them the secret she’d shared with me about her infidelity – even though I was sure that, unlike her other false confidences, this one had been true.