Chapter 19
‘Fuck me,’ says Tash, batting her heavy lashes. ‘We’ll get our own reality TV show at this rate. There’s almost too much going on.’
‘Jesus. There’s been so much unnecessary drama,’ agrees Liberty forlornly. ‘Even for us.’
Tash bends down below the table to suck on her vape as though none of us can see what she’s doing.
She springs back up wafting the fumes away.
‘You’re right there, pet. First, Kev nearly chokes to death on a conker, and then his mother trolls me, and then, don’t I only bloody go and bring the wrong size hoop earrings with me?
Talk about drama.’ She rests her fingertips at her temple as though to process the awfulness of it all.
We all pause to let the comparison sink in. It appears no one is in the mood to correct her about the chestnut or to enquire about the hoops.
‘What?’ she huffs. ‘They’re too small for the outfit. My extra-large diamanté triple-looped hoops were supposed to make a statement.’
She’s made a statement alright, and she didn’t need earrings to do it. Poor Sister Kevin. He’s really in the doghouse. But it does remind me that I have yet to find my own missing earring in time for the ball.
‘Yeah. You don’t even get this level of drama on any of the Real Housewives shows, and I watch them all.
’ Cherry glances at Dom. ‘Before you ask, it’s while the girls are napping.
After I’ve done all the housework. And shopping.
And everything else I’m expected to do while I’m on maternity leave and you’re out having a lovely time. ’
Dom stares back in a daze. He’s been nagged to an almost psychotic degree since they arrived.
I’m no longer surprised to see him rise slowly to his feet.
‘I wouldn’t call slaving away at the car factory having a lovely time.
And I wouldn’t need to work double shifts in the first place if you hadn’t spent all our sodding savings on a new pair of boobs that you clearly didn’t need, in my humble opinion, but was never consulted on, and VIP tickets to see Taylor effing Swift, would I?
’ He grabs a bottle of wine from the table and stomps from the room, leaving Cherry open-mouthed.
‘Come and sleep over in Connie’s room with us, hun.’ Tash is quick to console her. ‘There’s plenty of room because she’s got the best room in the chateau. Bring the girls. We’ll make a night of it.’
Cherry nods miserably before glugging down her wine.
It’s uncomfortable viewing. How is this all going so horribly wrong? Matteo blinks slowly. ‘I can’t believe this is happening, can you?’ he murmurs, glancing over to where Eddie and Birdie remain in heated discussion with Jean-Marc and Jules.
‘I swear it’s this house.’ Liberty leans her elbows on the table, her chin resting on steepled fingers. ‘I can practically hear the walls whispering. Playing cruel jokes on us.’
‘Well, I’d certainly prefer not to spend the night alone. We’d… I mean I’d love to join you for a sleepover,’ says Liam quietly.
‘Well, if that’s the case, why don’t we have our Last Hurrah down in the bar?’ Sister Kevin is asking Ged. ‘Dom, Nacho and Matteo can join us for drinks down here while they’ – he swings his finger in our direction – ‘enjoy their sleepover with Connie.’
Nacho is frowning, trying to keep up with what’s happening.
Liberty gives him a hopeless shrug. They watch Eddie talking rapidly to Birdie, who is translating for him to make sure Jean-Marc and Jules know that they will be handing over all the footage to Eddie’s security team immediately.
They will be signing non-disclosure agreements, and they will comply with everything that Eddie says otherwise they will never work again.
Eddie is coming across as quite menacing.
I can see the colour drain from Liberty’s face.
This may be a side of Eddie that she hasn’t seen since Vegas, when we mistook him for a mobster.
‘Maybe I’ll join the sleepover too,’ she says. ‘Eddie looks as though he might need some space tonight.’
‘Good idea, hun. He seems to have a lot of big dick energy going on,’ says Tash. ‘The more the merrier. Sue? Mandeep? Do you fancy it?’
Big Sue shakes her head. ‘Sorry, babe, not tonight. I think Mandeep needs to get some rest ahead of tomorrow and the big day.’
Big Mand blows her a grateful kiss.
When Eddie and Birdie return to the table the atmosphere changes completely. ‘So, whose brilliant idea was the documentary-style wedding?’ Birdie asks Ged directly. ‘No one cleared it with me.’
‘Power down, hun. It wasn’t deliberate,’ says Tash, only to receive a frosty glare from Birdie.
‘You know the house rules. Anything like this needs to be declared,’ she says facetiously.
Matteo sighs. He’s not easily intimidated by Birdie like the rest of us. ‘It was a late development. With everything going on, it slipped my mind.’ He maintains eye contact with her. ‘But it looks as though it’s all in hand now.’
‘Yes. Thanks to Eddie.’ Birdie turns towards him, beaming. ‘At least someone here knows what they’re doing.’
Eddie frowns playfully back. ‘Is that… a compliment?’
We watch as they exchange flirtatious banter under the watchful eye of Liberty, who is growing visibly more and more uncomfortable.
‘So, erm, what time do we want to begin the proceedings tonight? The sleepover and the one-bar bar crawl?’ I ask to lighten the mood. ‘Straight after dinner, at say nine o’clock?’
‘Yes. Fine,’ snaps Liberty, tiring of being ignored by Eddie. ‘See you at dinner.’
‘I’ll make a move too,’ says Cherry. ‘I need to finish a few bits of sewing for tomorrow. And the girls can have a nap if they’re going to stay up late tonight.’
‘I’ll help you,’ offers Tash, keen to continue ignoring Sister Kevin.
Matteo scrapes back his chair and holds out his hand towards me. ‘Coming?’
‘Actually, can you both pop into our room for a second, please?’ Liam says pleadingly. ‘It’s about the missing rings.’
Oh no. He’s going to need us to run him around in the morning, on Christmas Eve, scouring the whole of the south coast to find a jeweller that’s open and then by some miracle make it back in time to get wedding ready.
‘Missing rings?’ Birdie asks, her attention suddenly drawn away from Eddie. ‘There’s been a theft? First the vase, now the—’
‘No, no.’ Liam holds up his palms to nip this line of enquiry in the bud. ‘One of the kids accidentally swallowed them. We’re just waiting until they… present themselves.’
‘See? This is why we don’t allow children. That is such a bad omen,’ says Birdie, tutting and waving her bony hand around. ‘Maybe it is karma.’
‘Karma?’ asks Liam, the colour draining from his face. We went to extraordinary lengths to make sure the moon was in the right place, the cosmic energy was flowing and their birth signs were lined up ready for the BIG DAY.
‘I can tell you have an inflamed aura just by looking at you.’ She waves a hand over Liam and arches one pencil-thin eyebrow in a patronising way. ‘Maybe you are all being punished for keeping so many secrets?’
Liam visibly swallows.
Honestly, I feel like slapping her.
‘Of course not,’ I snap. ‘Liam, don’t worry about anything. This is a happy occasion. Everything will work out just fine. I promise.’ I sweep my gaze around the table of glum faces. ‘That was a mean thing to say, Birdie.’
If looks could kill… Birdie is fuming. She obviously needs more people in her life to tell her ‘no’ and to treat her ‘normally’. I wonder yet again if she has any real friends.
Liam and Ged follow me and Matteo from the room. It isn’t until we are further down the corridor and safely out of earshot that Ged breathes out noisily. ‘Oh, my fucking word. Why does she make everything so tense and awkward? Why?’
Liam puts a hand to his chest. ‘I feel like she’s going to steal my soul at any moment. If anyone has an inflamed bloody aura, it’s her. She’s like a walking fever dream.’
‘Try working with her,’ Matteo says drily. ‘Day in and day out. She’s a fucking nightmare.’
‘Thank you again for going to such lengths for us,’ says Liam. ‘We really do appreciate it.’
Matteo hesitates before smiling at them both. ‘You’re my family now.’
I take a beat as his words bathe me in a warm, soothing glow. Yes, I’m slightly mad at him for hiding the whole ‘angry mother’ fiasco but I love him so much when he does things like this.
At that moment, Nacho walks up behind him. ‘Family? Sometimes my brother forgets what that means.’ He barges through us towards his room, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Or whose side he should be on.’
There follows an angry exchange in Spanish. Nacho raises his brow at me.
‘You’re his wife and yet you know nothing.’ He shuts the door with a slam.
Oh, my word. I’m not sure I can take any more drama.
‘I’ll go talk to him.’ Matteo gestures apologetically. ‘I’ll see you later?’
I nod. We are like ships passing in the night. Is it always going to be like this?
‘And cut.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ says Matteo as we swing round to see Jules holding a camera, the lens trained on our little group.
All too soon, we are gathered back together in the dining room. The atmosphere is tense to say the least. Lord knows how we are going to erase the footage of Matteo insulting Birdie, but it needs to be done as soon as possible.
Ged and Liam felt instantly sick to their stomachs, fearing that Birdie will throw us all out of the chateau as soon as she gets wind of us slagging her off.
And even though it wasn’t feasible to delete footage from the camera there and then, due to it live-streaming to a digital cloud platform, Jules promised that he would contact Jean-Marc (who had taken the laptop home with him) and make sure the laptop would be immediately available to us before dinner.
Yet even though we were the first to arrive, the laptop had already been taken by one of Eddie’s security team.