Chapter 9
9
W hen the weather rarely deviated from the mid-twenties, summer in London could be a real treat. Every weekend, Cassie’s friends gathered in tiny gardens and backyards for a barbecue. It was getting to the stage where Cassie expected all her food to be served on a skewer and taste mostly of charcoal.
She’d even had a week away in Cromer, staying at her great aunt’s static caravan in a holiday park with her aunt Emma and her two little boys, as her partner Luca couldn’t get time off work. It hadn’t been relaxing, Rafe and Angelo were at an age (ten and eight respectively) when they were constantly fighting, but the beaches were sandy and as it was the only holiday Cassie could afford, she’d made a determined effort to enjoy herself.
Work was relatively stress-free, which was rare and welcome. Cassie didn’t have any events planned for the whole of August because most potential attendees were on their holidays, as were most of her clients.
She even got to work from home a couple of days a week and made sure that she took a proper lunch break, usually walking to Ally Pally to sit on the grass with a sandwich. Being in nature and an hour’s walk a day was good for Cassie’s emotional wellbeing. But she could spend every waking hour walking in nature and it still wouldn’t be enough to counteract the debilitating effects of Heather and Davy in the group chat.
Neither of them had paid the deposit, yet they were still adamant they should have the cottage in the grounds instead of their luxuriously appointed room with ensuite bathroom. In addition, Heather’s dietary requirements changed by the hour. At any one time, she was gluten free, dairy free, swerving alliums but could force down the odd tomato as her nutritionist had decreed that nightshades were OK in small quantities. She’d also requested oat milk, then soy milk but was now wanting nut milk. Not even easily sourced almond milk; ‘preferably macadamia but I could have cashew if the worst comes to the worst’.
Cassie had worked with celebrities and very demanding fashion people – she’d once organised a sit-down dinner attended by Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld, who’d both made fewer demands than Heather.
Then there was the side chat with Marc. Which had unexpectedly become the friendliest interaction they’d ever had.
Marc: This movie-themed fancy-dress nonsense …
Cassie: Lucy ADORES fancy dress. You’re not wriggling out of it.
Marc: Have you sorted out your costume?
Cassie: Weeks ago. Have you?
Marc: What if I had a doctor’s note saying that I have a medically proven intolerance to fancy dress?
Cassie: Like Heather and her alliums?
Marc: Genuinely the most annoying person I’ve ever encountered.
Cassie: She’s claimed my title?
Marc: Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but you never even made my top ten.
Cassie was sitting at her desk, the very picture of a diligent and dedicated Director of Experience, but she had to duck behind her laptop screen because the casual ‘sweetheart’ had thrown her for a loop. Even if she was offended that she hadn’t made his top ten of most annoying people. Had all her efforts been in vain? Surely she was in the top five. Maybe even the top three. Clearly, he didn’t want to flatter her.
Anyway, she had lots of important things to do rather than side-chatting with Marc Lacourt.
But that evening, as she gave herself a pedicure and tried to keep Koita away from the freshly painted nails on her right foot, her phone chimed.
Marc: You never said what your fancy-dress costume is.
‘Honestly, Koita, if you don’t get away from my foot there’ll be no more Dreamies for you. Ever.’
Koita twitched his tail in annoyance but decided that Cassie’s threat was real because he stopped trying to bat her foot with a paw and jumped onto the sofa so he could drape himself over her shoulders. As per Castiel’s instructions, Cassie was still mostly sitting cross-legged on the floor, though it continued to play havoc with her hips.
She screwed the top back on her cuticle oil and picked up her phone.
Cassie: It’s a surprise.
Surely he was meant to be busy disrupting the status quo, tech bro-ing and whatever else it was that Marc Lacourt did, but his reply was instant.
Marc: Nowhere on the infamous itinerary does it say that the fancy dress is meant to be a surprise.
Cassie: Implied innit?
Marc: Did you really just innit me?
Cassie: Sorry. That’s more something someone would do if they were in your top ten of most annoying people.
Marc: Feeling left out?
Cassie : Undermarked. But whatever.
Marc: You’ve certainly moved up the list in the last five minutes.
Cassie: I should think so too.
Marc: So, fancy dress. Can you give me a hint?
He was definitely in her top three most annoying people, but lately it was more of a good-natured kind of annoying than a ‘making her dig her nails into her palms so hard that the little half-moon marks took hours to fade away’ kind.
Cassie: Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. White shirt, black trousers, Chanel Vamp nail polish, all of which I already own, and a cheapo wig off Amazon. Job done!
Marc: Not sure I can pull off the nail polish and the wig.
Cassie: If you steal my fancy-dress costume, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born.
And that really was enough of that. Marc obviously thought so – or, like Koita, he decided that Cassie’s threats were real, because though she was twitchy as she waited for her phone to ping again, he’d stopped playing.
There was one solitary ping before Cassie went to bed but it wasn’t Marc.
Lucy: Just got in. Plane delayed four hours. Absolutely knackered. Let’s talk tomorrow. Maybe come round for dinner? xxx
Cassie: That sounds awful. Pleased you’re back safely. Dinner would be great but OK if you’re too shagged. I’ll see you at the weekend instead. Xxx
Then Cassie put her phone under her pillow, even though she knew she should have it in another room while she was asleep. Or tried to sleep.
Cassie had already woken up a couple of times and tried to slow-breathe her way back to slumber when her phone rang.
She groped for it and planned to switch it off because it was most likely to be someone on another continent trying to scam her, but when she glanced down at her screen with bleary, sleep-encrusted eyes, she saw Lucy’s number.
‘Hello? What’s up? Is everything OK?’ Cassie asked, the fear, cold and metallic, immediately seizing hold of her.
‘No. It’s Russell. I phoned triple one and they said to call an ambulance. Oh God, Cass, I don’t know what to do.’ Lucy’s voice was hoarse and panicked. ‘Could you … I know it’s so late but the girls …’
Cassie was already out of bed. ‘I’ll be at yours as soon as I can.’ She paused to take a couple of deep breaths. ‘It’s fine. Will everything be fine?’
‘He’s got chest pains and he’s this awful grey colour. It’s all my fault because I said we should fly but …’
‘It’s not your fault.’ Cassie stuffed clean underwear and the dress she’d worn that day into her tote bag. ‘Have you called the ambulance?’
‘Yeah, but is it quicker to drive to A even a fifteen-year-old had a bigger bed than she did, Cassie thought despondently, half-heartedly dipping digestives and pretzel thins into the ice cream.
With a girl curled on each side of her, Joni hiccupping out a sob every now and again, in a strange way it was like old times.
When Lucy had unexpectedly got pregnant on her honeymoon, then gave birth to Joni at twenty-four, she was the first of her friend group to have a baby. Unlike Cassie’s family and the friends she’d grown up with, privately educated girls with a university degree waited until they were at least thirty before they started a family.
Cassie knew from experience that after Lucy had Joni, their friendship, which had been unlikely right from the start, would dissipate rather than deepen. People who had babies gravitated towards the other new parents they met at their NCT classes or at Tumble Tots.
Cassie had left it four weeks after Joni’s arrival before she popped round, as she’d hadn’t wanted to intrude before that. At the time, she and Lucy were living around the corner from each other, Cassie in a shared house in Camden, quite the party house, and Lucy and Russell in their small third-floor flat in Primrose Hill.
It had taken long moments before Cassie was buzzed in. She staggered up the stairs with a bag of posh ready meals from M a week before the birth, when he’d been delightedly listing all the ways he was going to be the world’s best dad.
‘Hi Cass,’ he whispered, with a wary glance at Joni who’d given up trying to stay awake and was now sleeping as Cassie swayed from side to side, sterilising the bottles. ‘Is she all right in that thing? Is her neck supported?’
‘She’s perfectly fine. All swaddled up – babies like to feel secure.’ Cassie had turned to face Russell. ‘Did you two go to NCT classes?’
‘We did but we practised on dolls, not on a real baby.’ Russell held up his hands. ‘I’m so much bigger than her and I’m so clumsy, Cassie. I’m always breaking cups and glasses. What if I break her?’
‘Babies are tougher than they look. As long as you try not to drop her on her head, you should be OK.’
Cassie had come round quite a lot after that. Her mother, Alison, had given birth to Ryan six months earlier and was living up the road in Mornington Crescent. She certainly seemed to have taken to motherhood the second time around, and so, with some trepidation, Cassie had introduced her to Lucy.
It was thanks to Alison that Lucy finally became brave enough to leave the flat for walks in Regent’s Park and to attend couple of local mother-and-baby groups. Even now, Alison and Lucy were great friends, which still made Cassie feel a bit … conflicted. She felt less conflicted and more delighted that Ryan and Joni had been best friends for their entire lives.
By the time Fleur arrived a couple of years later, Lucy and Russell were veterans of child-rearing but Cassie was still very much in their lives and delighted to have another Hunter to love and spoil.
‘So, the three of us cuddling up like this, it reminds me of the little flat in Primrose Hill. You probably don’t even remember it.’
Much as she had done as a baby, Joni was fighting to stay awake. She opened her eyes. ‘I remember our place before we moved here.’
Lucy and Russell had moved to a larger ground-floor flat in Islington when Joni was three and Fleur was still a baby.
Cassie lifted her right arm, which was tucked around Fleur, to pick up her phone to check for messages. Lucy had texted half an hour before to say that Russell was a lot better. He’d been given oxygen and they were waiting on a chest X-ray and the on-call doctor.
It was gone four in the morning now and Joni was finally asleep, while Fleur was resolutely wide awake.
‘Do you feel even a little bit sleepy?’
‘I’m too panicky to sleep,’ she said forlornly. ‘Tell me about the time Mum got rid of that awful man you were engaged to. I love that story.’
‘That’s because you didn’t have to live it,’ Cassie muttered, because her friendship with Lucy, and Russell too, wasn’t a one-way street where she was constantly going above and beyond. It worked both ways.
Like when, nine years earlier, Cassie had found herself engaged to a man she’d been planning to dump.
She’d met Tom at the very last Skirt style awards before the magazine folded. He’d got a freebie ticket because he worked in the marketing department of one of their drinks sponsors. There had been a lot of vodka drunk and Tom was cute. Handsome in a boyish, milk-fed way with his floppy blond hair, though now when Cassie thought about him, she had a hard time remembering the exact details of his face. But she did remember the way he’d blushed that first morning when they’d woken up in Cassie’s bed. Not that they’d done anything that night.
Because Tom was an actual nice guy rather than a toxic man who claimed to be a nice guy, he then waited a good five weeks before he ended up in Cassie’s bed again.
They dated for a year, went on holiday a couple of times, were happy to see each other two or three times a week, with no expectation of anything more than that. It was a perfectly fine relationship. But Cassie wasn’t in love and she really wanted to be in love with someone.
Also, Tom had a huge group of friends who he’d grown up with, most of whom had conveniently coupled up with each other, and he always wanted Cassie to socialise with them, rather than making the effort to meet and form bonds with her friends.
Inevitably, one of those couples got married. In a fancy hotel near where they’d all grown up in Surrey. Cassie had forked out for the hen weekend, then on a dress and a present, even though she always felt slightly excluded from the friend group. After the wedding, she planned to gently but firmly break up with Tom, especially as she suspected that he was actually in love with his pal Sophie who was going out with another outsider, Doug, who was also always slightly excluded.
The wedding was the most wedding-y of all weddings. All of the friends were bridesmaids and groomsmen, apart from Cassie and Doug. There were cute flower girls and pageboys. The respective mothers cried. There was a choice between salmon, chicken and a mushroom risotto for the vegetarians. The best man’s speech was a little too ribald and the first dance was to ‘At Last’ which then segued into Bruno Mars’ ‘Marry You’.
So far, so like every other wedding. Until it came time for Harriet, the bride, to throw her bouquet. It was caught by one of her bridesmaids and her boyfriend, one of the groomsmen, promptly went down on one knee and proposed, and she gratefully and tearfully accepted.
Cassie watched all this with a smile. She even wiped a tear away, though if she’d been the bride and two of her wedding party had got engaged and stolen her special-day thunder, she’d have been furious.
Then Harriet took back her bouquet, which seemed odd. She threw it again, which was even odder. It was caught by another bridesmaid and the corresponding groomsman again got down on one knee and pulled out a ring. Twice more it happened. Almost like it had been planned because it had been planned.
Cassie couldn’t think of anything worse than getting engaged in some twee choreographed mass event at another person’s wedding, but tried to smooth out the horrified expression on her face. Jesus, not again, she thought to herself as Harriet once again held her bouquet aloft to big cheers from the assembled guests, even though with the exception of Cassie and Tom, and Sophie and poor Doug, the friend group were now the engaged-to-be-married friend group.
‘Then I suddenly get whacked in the face by Harriet’s bouquet,’ she told Fleur who was giggling now, because she really did love this story.
‘Then what happened?’ Fleur prompted, though she knew full well that …
‘Tom got down on one knee and asked me to marry him and well, I could hardly say no in the circumstances, even though I was sure that when it came to saying our wedding vows, he’d accidentally call me Sophie …’
‘Like in Friends when Ross says Rachel instead of Emily.’ Fleur had heard this story countless times, so she was well versed in all its many facets.
Except, thank God, they hadn’t made it to vows. They had made it to looking around wedding venues while Cassie desperately tried to find the right time to let Tom down gently, By then, wedding fever had seized the whole group and the right time just wouldn’t present itself.
Until one fateful Saturday night when Cassie found herself going out with Tom and his seven closest friends plus Doug and, yet again, talk turned to life after the four weddings. Houses, babies, bigger houses, more babies plus a lot of pressure on Cassie to just make a decision about the wedding venue so that she and Tom could pay the deposit on the twenty-thousand-pound wedding package.
At eight o’clock the next morning, Cassie was standing outside the very house in which she and Fleur were now not sleeping.
On that Sunday morning all those years ago, Fleur and Joni had been parked in front of The Little Mermaid , Russell was out for a run and Lucy was there to provide tea, sympathy and wide-eyed incredulity as Cassie painted a picture of her future as dictated by Tom and his friend group.
‘Even though I’ve got an exciting new job in PR and event planning now that Skirt has gone tits up, apparently we’re going to start trying for a baby right away. Me and my ovaries aren’t getting any younger.’
‘You and your ovaries are positively youthful,’ Lucy smeared cream cheese on one half of a bagel. ‘Do you want smoked salmon?’
‘Yes please. Then once I’ve had the first of what may be two or four children, but not an odd number of children, I’m going to give up work until the youngest is in school.’
‘Do you even want children? I thought you were undecided.’
‘Still am,’ Cassie said, accepting a bagel stuffed with cream cheese and smoked salmon. ‘But not to worry, once I’ve had the first child, Tom is going to add my name to the deeds of his house. The house that we don’t even currently live in together.’
Tom owned a house. A whole house! It was in Parsons Green (one of the reasons why Cassie wanted to dump him was the geographical distance and the District Line between them), which had been secured with a hefty deposit courtesy of his parents and an inheritance.
‘Cass, you have to dump him. This has gone on long enough.’ Lucy’s expression softened. ‘Have you suddenly fallen in love with him?’
‘He’s nice and yes, we both like Arctic Monkeys, Scandi crime dramas and Wagamama but on the big stuff, the inside stuff, we’re worlds apart.’
Cassie took a huge bite of her bagel and ruminated while she masticated as Lucy took a sip of coffee, her gaze fixed on Cassie’s face.
Once Cassie had swallowed, Lucy reached across the table to squeeze her hand. ‘You can’t marry someone – and you especially can’t spend twenty grand on a wedding package – just because you don’t want to hurt his feelings.’
‘Apparently the bride’s family pays for the wedding. I told Alison that.’
Lucy raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh yeah. What did she have to say?’
‘She laughed. Mockingly.’ Cassie allowed herself a faint smile as she remembered Alison’s offer of ‘fifty quid if you catch me on payday’. ‘But also, it’s not just the big stuff,I … I’m just going to say it …’
Lucy gestured with a hand. ‘The floor is yours …’
‘I hate his friends,’ Cassie said in a guilty rush. ‘They’re a judgemental bunch of basics who look down on me and Poor Doug because we didn’t grow up in Godalming and go to the same minor public school as them.’
Cassie was dimly aware of the front door opening, which meant that Russell was back, but there were very few things she said to Lucy that she wouldn’t say to Russell.
‘And Tom won’t ever go down on me. He says that “it’s just not his thing”,’ Cassie mimed quote marks. ‘Like, does he think that giving him a blow job is my favourite activity in the world? He can’t just say that it’s not his thing like eating pussy is the same as eating oysters …’
‘I love eating oysters but I’d much rather eat pussy,’ said an awful, horrible, familiar voice from behind her.
Cassie couldn’t bear to turn around to see Marc’s smirking face.
Instead she took another huge bite of her bagel, even though his words had made her stomach churn. She tried not to look at Marc in black running shorts and T-shirt as he then leaned against the kitchen island, his tanned limbs glistening. He even looked good when he was sweaty. He was so annoying.
This was the part of the story that she always glossed over when she was telling it to the girls. Just as she skipped over it now.
‘And then?’ Fleur asked, although her voice was thick and Cassie could tell she was struggling to keep her eyes open.
‘I was meant to be meeting Tom and his friends for lunch,’ Cassie said (at the time, even perpetually good-natured Russell had snapped, ‘God, can’t these people even take a shit on their own?’). ‘Your mum agreed to come with me for moral support.’
Tom had been sitting next to Sophie, surprise surprise, and kept saying, ‘Not now, babe,’ as Cassie did her best to separate him from the pack. So, finally, much as the engagement had begun in front of all his friends, that was also how the engagement was ended.
‘Tom! I have to tell you something,’ Cassie had said urgently. ‘It’s … I’m sorry … I don’t want to hurt you …’
‘Can we do this later? Sophie was telling me that her gran is really ill …’
On Sophie’s other side, Poor Doug shot Cassie a sympathetic look.
‘Tom! This can’t wait. The longer it goes on, the worse I feel …’ Tom wasn’t even looking at her and when Cassie glanced helplessly at Lucy, her friend pushed her out of the way and tapped the nearest glass with the nearest fork to get the table’s attention.
‘Cassie has something to say, Tom,’ Lucy had said in the most chilling ‘I want to speak to the manager’ voice. It was a voice that Cassie hadn’t even known Lucy possessed.
All eyes turned to look at Cassie. She wilted before their collective judgemental gaze. They’d be pleased. All of them. She’d never been good enough for their precious Tom.
‘I … I didn’t want to do it like this.’ Cassie shut her eyes. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this at all but you blindsided me … Oh God, I can’t …’
‘Enough is enough,’ Lucy said sharply, and this time she shoved Cassie behind her and stood there with her hands on her hips.
‘What is it?’ Tom’s boyishly handsome face creased only in mild concern.
‘Cassie doesn’t want to marry you,’ Lucy announced. ‘She likes you but she doesn’t love you and next time you propose don’t just do it because all your friends are doing it. Give him back the ring, Cass.’
The table was silent, the collective stare now positively demonic; only Poor Doug seemed to understand Cassie’s plight.
Cassie tugged off her ring and placed it in front of Tom, who again only looked faintly disturbed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
Then she grabbed Lucy and they pushed their way through the crowded pub. Once they were out on the street, Cassie picked up her pace. It wasn’t until they turned the corner, almost falling over three dachshunds being walked on one lead, and Cassie realised that Tom wasn’t running after her, she stopped running. She was half crying, half laughing; Lucy too, and it …
‘It was the greatest thing one best friend has ever done for another,’ she told Fleur, whose eyelids were drooping. ‘And Tom did marry Sophie and Poor Doug ended up with a totally hot Brazilian woman so everyone lived happily ever after.’
‘Except you,’ Fleur said with a yawn. ‘You’re still single so you haven’t had your happily ever after yet.’
Had all the wisdom Cassie imparted been for nothing? ‘You don’t need to have a partner to have a happily ever after. I’m perfectly capable of providing my own happy ever after,’ she said in a hurt voice, but Fleur was now asleep.