It was Amanda who rang the first alarm bell after Alex had left with Jamie to join the other men in the wedding party. While I was hustling Alex in and out of the shower and collecting the clothes he’d need for the day, Jamie was downstairs eating what was left of our toast and jam and spending time with the others before he got sucked into the maelstrom of his wedding day. As Al pulled on a pair of jeans and the black Shetland wool sweater from the other day, I trudged down the hallway with his garment bag and satchel, nearly tripping over the same occasional table that had come close to relieving Will of his balls the night before.
At the sound of my “oof,” Sasha peeked her head up the stairwell. “Christ, Mel,” she tsked as she sprinted up the stairs to snatch the heavy twill garment bag from my arms. “He can do these things himself. Let Alex make himself useful once in a while. He’s been babied enough.” Sasha blew an errant honey blonde lock of hair out of her eyes as she shifted the bag over her shoulder. “Come down, Jamie’s with the others, fretting. He needs someone who actually went through a wedding ceremony to tell him to keep his shirt on, or I’m going to have to punch him.”
“Sash,” I warned as I followed her down the fifteen stairs. “I’m not exactly the model of marital harmony. Why should Jamie trust a word I say on weddings of all things?”
As we were about to round the corner to the library, Sasha turned about so smartly that I almost trod on her feet. “You may have had a miserable marriage, but you had a marvelous wedding. You and Julian looked relaxed and so joyful, like there was nowhere else you’d rather be, and no one else you’d rather be with.” I caught sight of something in her grey eyes, not romantic regret, since she’d never loved Jamie that way. “If he’s really going to do this, he needs to remember why he’s marrying that sow.”
Dropping Al’s bag on the floor unceremoniously, she reached one long arm out towards the study door before I stopped her hand on the doorknob. “Wait. You’re not going to drop that on me and pretend you didn’t say it.”
Sasha flicked her head around to answer, nearly whipping me in the face with her long hair, but as she began to answer the door jostled open from the inside. Jamie. Sasha shot me a look: After he leaves.
“Mellie Mel!” Jamie crushed me in his arms to his chest and spun me in a circle so that I could see over his shoulder the rest of our crew lined up on the beige and floral sofa, looking more than a little like they wanted to be anywhere but in the library with him. Miranda’s feet were pointed at the door and Charlie fiddled with the buttons on his cuffs, while Will pulled repeatedly at his collar.
As he set me down on the floor, Jamie apologized for barely speaking a word to me last night, at the rehearsal or the dinner that followed. “I’d underestimated, I suppose, quite how much work all of this wedding business is. Bex made it seem so easy the past few months — all I’ve had to do so far is taste cakes and dinner courses.” His eyes bore the bruises of an ill-slept night and his chapped lips peeled slightly — not the cheery-faced joker I was used to. “I’m kind of over it, truth be told.”
Behind Jamie, Charlie sipped from his teacup before clearing his throat. “Mel, we thought you might be able to…” Charlie looked to Miranda, who shrugged, raising her arms in frustration.
“James has cold feet, the tosser,” Will grumbled. “Brings us all out here to the blasted end of fuck all and then thinks, ‘sod it.’ Sound about right, J?”
“That’s not exactly it.” There must have been something fascinating in the design on the threadbare rug beneath our feet that I couldn’t see, since Jamie couldn’t raise his eyes from it. He’s a very tall man, taller than Alex by two or three inches, but broad-shouldered where Al’s slim. Coupled with his freckled cheeks and sun crinkles at his eyes, he always looked a bit to me what the Jolly Green Giant might resemble if the giant were actually a white, ruddy-cheeked, brown-haired man wearing cords and a polo neck jumper.
“No, I think that sounds exactly it,” Miranda piped up from the sofa. “You selfish prat.”
“Not helping, Ran,” Charlie warned her. “Mel, how did you feel when you were about to get married?”
What a loaded question, and not one I could answer completely honestly without making this moment all about Alex and me. I wasn’t about to tell everyone that I’d spent the morning not in the sort of “quiet reflection” Julian had suggested to Bex the night before at the rehearsal. I’d screamed at Rachel about the flower arrangements for the tables being more Christmassy than I wanted (someone at the florist had had the brilliant idea to swap out the forest green velvet ribbon wrapping the necks of the vases with a hideous tartan that I knew Julian would never let me live down). I’d had a very contrite Jen showing up in my bridal suite at the Beverly Wilshire with her maid of honor dress and a bottle of Fireball, ten days after she’d quit my wedding and forced me to draft in my sister to perform her duties. Caitlin’s dress barely fastened in the back despite her promise to me she’d improve her diet of Burger King and Totino’s pizza rolls. On top of it all, I had Alex texting me every fifteen minutes from four floors below, half-joking, half-begging me to join him for a cocktail in the downstairs lounge before we ran away to Mexico together.
I wasn’t indulging in the sort of maudlin rituals I’d once envisioned in my adolescent dreams, either. Had I been 17 and about to float down the aisle to marry Josh (I had once believed this would happen, though it terrified me and excited me in equal measures), I might have scrubbed my skin the night before in the bath with pearl powder, smoothed my body with almond oil and slept with a scrap of paper with my birth name written on it. I would have risen with the birdsong, thrown open the bedroom window and let in the chill of the pre-dawn dark. The scrap of paper would be consumed in the Bath & Body Works cherry blossom candle by my bedside, its ashes shut up in the gold Victorian locket Josh gave me for my birthday. My bridesmaids — the Jen(n)s and Caitlin, naturally — would then join me in my room to brush out my hair and dress me in the Empire-waisted gown Josh had selected for me, with its puffed cap sleeves and scarlet ribbon beneath my breasts. (Yes, Josh really had sketched this dress for me, so convinced was he that we’d marry one day.)
Sometimes lying is the best course of action in difficult circumstances, particularly when it has the ring of truth about it. “Me? I won’t lie.” (Liar.) “I was scared shitless. Like, oh shit, everything is happening and I just want to slow it all down.” (I wanted it to be over and for there to be no turning back, no excuse to run off to Baja with Alex and a bottle of champagne filched from the kitchens.) “But it’s totally normal to feel terrified, like you’re living out that horrible dream where you’re driving a car and you discover the brakes don’t work and you’re barrelling down a hill.”
“Yeah?” Jamie took my hands where I’d offered them to him. He was comically tall next to me. Part of the reason Miranda ended their romance years before was their height difference, which totally creeped her out. “Al I could deal with, mostly because he weighs nothing,” she’d mentioned to me at Lucy’s christening during our pre-gaming session at the pub. “Jamie made me feel like I was in one of those bloody ‘Barely Legal’ pornos when we were in bed. Foul.”
“Yeah.” I squared my shoulders slightly to make myself feel like I actually believed what I was about to say. “But once I realized I was more worried about was how I was going look to everyone, and what people would think about the flowers and the food and the order of service, and less about the person I was getting married to, I relaxed. I mean, who cares what anyone else thinks?”
I was really warming into this now, almost enjoying spinning a complete fable of my wedding day, and steered Jamie into one of the leather chairs in front of the fire. Throwing myself into the chair across from him in what I hoped was a nonchalant pose, I continued, praying I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. “All of that is just a sideshow. The main event is what you are doing in that ceremony. You are saying, this is my person, world. Try and stop me. You are making the two of you into one person. It’s really rather amazing and crazy and mind-blowing. Focus on that, and about all the cool and weird and fun stuff you and Bex will get up to in the future. All of this, today?” I swept my arm before me in an arc. “It’s for everyone else.”
Sasha had plunked herself in Jamie’s lap and slotted a small snifter of brandy in his hand by the time I reached the end of my little soliloquy. I wasn’t completely sure what she was up to, but she had the look about her of the wicked fairy godmother who had cursed the Princess Aurora at her christening. Well, she wasn’t sporting dramatic black robes or wearing horns on her head, but there was something brewing in those cold grey eyes. “You don’t have to do this, Jim,” she mused as she clinked glasses with Jamie. (Only Sasha can call him Jim.) Across the rag rug separating our chairs, I shot her what I felt must have looked like a frosty glare.
“The question Jamie should be asking himself,” I butted in while I still had the bulk of Jamie’s attention, “is whether he would marry Bex today without any of the wedding. If he can’t see life without her in it, and without her being his wife.”
Sasha returned the glare, though there could be no doubt about the sub-arctic vibes of hers. “If he’s having any doubts about it, surely he should wonder if it’s the right thing to do.”
Out of nowhere, I caught sight of Miranda’s arm flash out from behind the chair across from me and swat Sasha on the arm. “Can it, you meddling idiot. Not helping.”
“Ow!” (Miranda always has been one for a pinch or a punch, and not just on the first of the month.) “I’m only looking out for our Jim.”
Jamie’s laugh in response sounded close to genuine. “Thanks, Sash. I think.”
From above our heads, Alex’s heavy-footed stomp clomped down the hallway and the stairs before he crashed open the door. “Right!” He rubbed his hands in front of him before slicking them through his still-damp curls. All yours, I thought. That beautiful man is all yours. “Morning all. Drinking without me before 10? Not on, you lot.” He clicked his tongue before scooping me out of the chair to perch me on his knee. “Now, who’ll be mother and pour us all a tot before this moron seals his fate?”
This idiom had flummoxed me when I’d first come to Britain — what does a mother have to do with tea? — but given Minty’s preference for serving booze from teapots (“makes it seem a little more jolly, you know”) it had taken on a new meaning for us all over time. Reflexively, I rose from Alex’s lap — serve or swerve, still my first response — before Alex clamped a hand over my middle. “Not you, hen. Will, you look decidedly parched. Pour us all a nip,” Al ordered.
Grousing about Scottish toffs under his breath, Will painstakingly poured out a measure for each of us not already cradling a glass. His complaint was rather rich, given that Will’s own mum is from Western Scotland and rather smart herself. “A toast for Jamie. Hear hear!”
“Hear hear!” we all exclaimed, holding out our glasses towards the groom, who ducked his head slightly and turned a salmon pink under our good wishes. If he was like this before us six, I worried what he’d be like under the glare of the 300 guests due to swarm the manor house outside of Crowborough later this afternoon.
And then it hit me hard, a sickening gut punch of betrayal I might not have forgiven, had it not been Jamie on his wedding day. Perhaps, I thought, his engineering of a meeting between Alex and Julian was for this very reason: to keep the spotlight off of himself as much as he could. He could count on Bex to have his back. I knew she loved him, or at least I believed she did, enough to find both the humor in the singular discomfort of two former best friends being brought together at a wedding, of all places, as well as the distraction that discomfort would bring so her groom might hover at the edges of his own big day.
From behind me, Alex nuzzled my head. “He’s going to be fine. I’m going to be fine, sweetest.”
“Once more unto the breach,” I sighed, tipping my head to one side into the scratch and cigarette-stenched fug of his sweater.
“Aye.” He brushed his lips over the crown of my head. “The best way out and all that.”
Jamie shifted a grouchy Sasha off his lap as he remarked on the lateness of the hour, and how they’d best be off to get through the very few requirements made on the groom and his party. “Not much, really, but Julian’s brought us a bottle of Macallan 25, the show off. Thought the five of us might work our way through some of it.”
Will looked close to apoplectic on the sofa, his fair face blossoming in indignation as Jamie and Alex made their farewells. “The bloody cheek! Not thinking to invite Chas and me too.” He grasped one of the sofa cushions tight to his broad chest and dropped his chin upon its edge in a great sulk.
From the window of the library, I watched as Alex hefted his bags into the back of Jamie’s decrepit ’80’s Range Rover, the same one he’d been driving at uni. As the only one of us with wheels back then, he’d been everyone’s hired hack at one point or another, ferrying people to the giant Asda out at Cribbs Causeway to stock up on cheap booze, or weekend visits to distant relatives’ empty country houses, or even just for Sunday rides out through the Somerset countryside, stopping at pubs for pints of scrumpy and a ploughman’s. He’d never bothered to repaint where the 10 of us had scratched our initials on the tailgate at the end of term — the car was already something of a cosmetic disaster, so it was no disfigurement. 10 pairs or triplets of letters, slanting and looping and marching across and into the burgundy paint, worn down but still visible.
Sasha joined me at the window, placing one hand on the pane of glass as we watched the car slowly rumble across the white gravel of the drive and bounce its way down the short lane to the main road. “She doesn’t love him enough to trust me,” she said flatly as she pulled her index finger through the condensation she’d breathed onto the glass.
“Is that what this is all about?” I saw in the set of her mouth a hardness I’d rarely observed in my beautiful friend. Sasha would be the first to tell you that she’s no great brain, but she compares herself to Miranda, which is hardly fair, and Alex, which is certainly not. She’d come to Bristol through a fluke — her three B’s at A-level shouldn’t have been enough to get her on the Education Studies course, but she’d interviewed well, talking about her challenges with dyslexia and a family that expected her to have a “little career” as an interior decorator, or party planning. She wanted to teach other girls like herself to think outside the darling little picture frames that their families and teachers and society placed them in, practically from birth. Everyone had underestimated Sasha from girlhood, and she wanted to help other young women escape from low expectations of their worth beyond raising families and supporting men and looking delightfully well turned out.
When talent-spotted while eating Nando’s peri-peri chicken with her new roommate Minty one week into her first term, Sasha accepted the modelling scout’s card politely but declined. She would have tossed it if Minty hadn’t dared her to give the agency a ring. What was there to lose, Minty argued, besides maybe the train fare to London?
By the time I met her, Sasha wasn’t a catwalk model or a household name, but she was appearing regularly in Tatler and Town & Country editorial pieces, where she was described as “golden society beauty Oleksandra Yavorska.” To her parents’ horror, she was also occasionally featured in the Daily Mail stumbling out of Raffles or Mahiki, with captions like, “Right on Her Dairy-Heir! Ukrainian oligarch’s leggy daughter Sasha Yavorska takes a pretty tumble into the arms of Fairleigh Farms heir Jamie Fairleigh.”
She never did become a slyly subversive teacher at a girls’ private school. Sasha put herself in the very picture frame she’d wanted to avoid as a means of avoiding having to deal publicly with her sexuality. Why she didn’t want to be out at Bristol remains obscured, to me at least. It’s not like Charlie hadn’t arrived there as a completely out of the closet rugby player, and as far as my straight eye could tell, it was a fairly LGBTQ-friendly campus. But Sasha and I have never been close enough for me to ask if there’s more there than “it would have made modelling difficult,” which is the only explanation she’s ever given. I’ve never dared push on that door.
“Somewhat,” she finally said, turning her back on the window to face the others. Will and Miranda were bickering over “Miss K” again, from the sound of it, with Charlie asking them to take it to the kitchen. “I’ve become a jealous old hag, Mel. All I want is some more of Jamie, not all of him. It’s like sprouting an extra limb that you rather like, and then it gets lopped off and carted away after 15 years.”
Miranda’s phone trilled from the slightly bashed up tea chest serving as a coffee table, and she swiped it before Will could scoop it up and snoop. She shot Will a smug grin of satisfaction before turning her attention to her phone. Slowly the grin dropped, the corners of her mouth sinking lower and lower; three little lines of frustration bloomed between her eyebrows. (Just like I have, Miranda has sworn never to get major work done on her face, but I really should advise her that Botox doesn’t count as work of any sort.) “Shit,” she croaked.
Will angled his shoulders slightly to read her screen — it was telling that she didn’t try to pull it away. His brow shot up towards what used to be a more defined hairline before he let out a low whistle. “Never pegged her as a drama queen.” Charlie snatched the phone from his hand with a little tug.
“Read it,” Miranda moaned.
Charlie’s eyes scanned the message again before he started. “It’s from Amanda,” he began. “‘Disaster. Min says not going today to get makeup done or to wedding at all cos she is too upset if Alex there too. Says wedding makes her sad and Al was her One True Love.’ She capitalized the last three words,” he editorialized, before continuing. “‘Can’t see Al can’t see Mel can’t see wedding dress says she is fat and old. Send help.'”
“Coward.” That was Will, who was twisting another one of Miss K’s hankies between and around his fingers. “Seemed all right to me last night when she was fussing about in the kitchen, making cider for everyone and moaning about Luce. Never mentioned anything about not wanting to be part of today.”
“I believe it,” Sasha broke in. Every head turned slowly to where she and I still stood in front of a now completely fogged window. “None of you have been paying very close attention to Min, have you?”
Miranda sniffed quite audibly. “I speak to her three times a week, which is about three times more than you do, Sash. When was the last time you deigned to bring your arse down to Dorset? You didn’t even show up to Lucy’s birthday.”
“I was in Paris with my grandmother, you cow, and you know that.” Sasha spat her words out. “What, I was supposed to say, don’t mind me, Baba, just nipping out for a six-year-old’s princess party across the Channel, be right back?”
A few silent beats in the room, so quiet it was even more painful than the snipping between the two women. If Charlie and Will had looked ready to bolt before at Jamie’s matrimonial misgivings, both men were practically lacing up their running shoes to exit, stage left, before this exploded further.
“Minty’s sad.” It sounded kind of lame when I said it — “sad” didn’t quite get to what I’d seen in her over the past couple of days. I recognized something of myself in her, what I might have been had Alex not been waiting for me when Julian ended our marriage with his spurious claims of my infidelity. Unloveable, stuck, old. Like I’d followed every rule and lesson and shone as bright as I could, and been a perfect Good Girl, and never asked my husband a second time for something he could not or would not give me. Like I’d pushed whoever Melissa really was so deep down a hole in my core that it felt useless to plumb my depths to find her again. And for what? Why did this man — he’d been my husband — still breathe and greet the sun and feel joy and desire and hunger for more when I was so blasted, so dead?
I saw something of this in Minty, the need to continue being the best little girl in the world, even when its only compensation was Lucy. She never thought she deserved someone as glorious as Alex, Miranda had told me more than once. Min had never stopped thinking of herself as the little dun wren chirping and pecking away at the leftovers after her showy, loud raven of a husband had had his fill of life. Until one day the raven brought ruin to the nest and the little wren flew away with her fledgeling. Any mama bird would.
The only time Minty hadn’t assured everyone “it’s fine!” in the face of disasters large and small was when danger touched her daughter. I’m trying not to get ahead of myself, because I must talk separately about the why of his divorce, but Alex made some very poor decisions around the time Lucy was almost two. As Julian has said, Alex is a master of seeing a fork in the road and choosing the unmarked and jagged path that isn’t even part of the fork. All the Carr folk have a preternatural sense of underestimating hazard and risk and overestimating their skill in managing danger. Fenn thought she could have Julian without breaking her brother’s heart. Cora assumed she would never need to examine the deep seam of depression and anger within both her children. Uncle B knew he’d win back all those losses at the table, someday. And John? Who needs psychiatry — hard work and the bottle will keep it all in check.
Alex’s biggest gamble got too close to Lucy; there’s no denying it. Oh, Lucy was never in any physical danger. Al’s no monster, and his love for his daughter is fierce and profound, sounding like a great bell in a churchtower, or swooping far, far up in the sky and plummeting down in a dizzying display of shimmering light. It’s a pulsing quasar; it’s the irises in a forest clearing, bending under the brush of a hand. It’s the beat-beat-beat of a father’s heart for his bonny dream-child made real. But love, as I have learned more than once, is rarely enough; it is only one brace in a set that might be matched with money or power or safety. In the end, Alex had only love.
As Amanda liked to remind everyone, Minty had been stuck in a tiny village for simply years. I am told by Alex and Will, it’s a sweet and tidy chocolate box of a spot on the map, not even 2,000 souls. Thatched roofs and a medieval church, a couple of decent pubs, and some links to Thomas Hardy (like everywhere else in Dorset, it seems). Safe. Safe for a young mum and her little girl. Miranda frequently uses another word: stultifying. The school is full of well-meaning but clueless young teachers, there’s little culture outside of football and the Women’s Institute, the nearest rail station is 15 miles away, her only “friends” are Lucy’s classmates’ mums, and crucially for our Minty, no eligible second husbands.
I can imagine how I must have looked to her — pampered and unshackled and living in a vibrant city full of music and restaurants and the teeming life of a college town. Able to take off when I please for trips hundreds of miles away, few obligations, the pleasure of the excuse to leave home for a job I enjoyed. Friends I’ve chosen from pleasure rather than proximity. And worse, oh far worse, I have her husband, the magnificent and clever man who’d once chosen her, the little dun wren. Except he’d chosen me for love, not money. It doesn’t matter that he fell in love with her when she was carrying the first baby, the one they lost — I understand. He’d chosen me long before, and had never lost sight of that choice. I was the slow thump in his veins, the heart murmur, the susurration of adolescent desire occasionally breaking into a racket.
So yes, I understood when Sasha said she believed Minty. Jealousy’s an ugly, tetchy thing we don’t want to recognize in our friends, particularly when it’s directed towards us.
“See?” Sasha agreed. “I’m not the only one. It’s not only her being stuck in Dorset — I know I didn’t agree with you for some time about this, but after last night… I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but Amanda’s right. She and Lucy need to be in London.” She flipped the gold Dior bangle around and around her slim wrist once, twice, before looping her arm around my waist. “It can’t help to see Al and Mel together.”
Will gripped the edge of the sofa and made to rise from his perch on the edge of the sofa, but Miranda pushed him back towards the cushions, where he landed with a grunt. “William, sit.”
Charlie’s spoon rattled in his teacup as he swirled a dribble of brandy into the brew that remained in there. “Ran, this one is down to you. Not a better brigadier general amongst us. Get her to come.” Charlie’s never been as close to Miranda as Will has, but there’s an easy respect between them, two nimble minds appreciative of an equally keen study of human nature.
He’s right though — if anyone can crack Minty, it’s Miranda. She rarely indulges Min’s wallowing in the fairly comfortable hell she’s found herself in. Minty’s generally not given to amateur theatrics, but she’s perfectly capable of posing herself as a dimpled, slightly pathetic martyr: to motherhood, to matrimony, to what a woman brought up knowing only comfort might cast as penury. Miranda told me Min revels in being the object of well-meaning, interfering older women’s pity in the village. How terrible for poor Minty Bosworth-Carr, her neighbors might say, shaking their heads under their rain bonnets in passing outside of the post office. Her ex was a weak waste of a man who only wanted her for her money in the end. And have you heard about her little Lucy? An odd child, but you know her father abandoned her and moved to America to chase some tart of a Yank. How sad for such a lovely young mum and her child to be tossed away like that. (I could practically hear the scratch of their nose hairs as they sniffed their disdain.)
Miranda will have none of it. Don’t misunderstand me — she’s with Amanda on Operation Straight Outta Dorset. She wants the MAM back together tout de suite. I’ve heard her wheedling Alex to get his daughter back to London for a better education, oh, and Minty can come, too. “Be reasonable,” I overheard her say to him once on a Hangouts call I’d had him take over when I’d gone to the kitchenette to fix more coffee. “A miserable Min means a miserable Lucy. Lou’s too young to know better, but she will soon enough. And think about it this way: the sooner Min remarries, the sooner your spousal support ends. Imagine having that much back in your pocket every month, eh, Al? Bargain. Park her in Fulham, she’ll be fine.” But when it comes to Minty’s tendency towards martyrdom, Ran is having none of it. As she told me herself, “Self-indulgent twaddle is poison for the soul. You didn’t see me having the vapours when I had to get rid of Bob.”
“Fine,” she muttered. “Who thought it was a good idea to put her anywhere near Amanda without me?”
“You,” Will answered helpfully, bouncing slightly on his hands where he still gripped the sofa. “Quite recall you saying, ‘Can’t have her with us if Al’s about, can we?’ Or something like.”
“Charlie,” Miranda announced, shooting Will an absolutely filthy look. “Get your coat and pull your car around. We have an hour until the makeup artists arrive and I am not going to that wedding without Minty or a full face of slap.”
***
“Just call me the divorcee whisperer,” Miranda cooed as we sat side by side in the kitchen on director’s chairs, wrapped in the brightly-colored silk kimonos Sasha had brought for us all as a girly surprise. Chelsea was spraying my face with heavy duty setting spray, while Miranda’s artist was stroking a third layer of waterproof mascara through Miranda’s already-long lashes. On the other side of the room, Kendra had been talked into coating Amanda’s generous cleavage with rose gold highlighter. In the nasty-chintz sitting room, Sasha was blowing out Minty’s hair; they’d be next up in our chairs.
She was lying about the whispering, by Charlie’s telling. When they’d arrived at the other house, Amanda had ushered them into the kitchen where Minty was FaceTiming with her mum, half-cocked on calvados, and weeping about how no one would ever love her again.
“She was making these great gulping sobs, really awfully pathetic,” Charlie explained to me as I used the hair tongs on my own hair in a quixotic attempt to put a wave in it after my time in the chair was over. Sensing that my presence was only going to stir things up prematurely, I’d moved to my bedroom and drafted Charlie in as my hair assistant. “Then Min said something about how she never should have left Alex, and how she knows he would take her back if she asked, and Miranda was having none of it. Swiped the iPhone out of her hand, gave Mrs. Bosworth a brief ‘hullo-goodbye’ and laid into Minty. Called her a mithering ninny, and an ungrateful bitch. Good lord, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call Min a bitch before.”
I’d thought it, though, and I was thinking it as he passed me the Elnett. Minty was slyly avaricious, extracting far more than her generous spousal support (not as generous as mine, to be sure, but more than enough to meet her needs in the back end of nowhere) through “enrichments” for Lucy on top of child support: tiny Burberry macs, matching iPads for both Bosworth-Carr ladies, trips to the South of France and the Amalfi Coast and a cruise down the Rhine. Riding lessons and all the attendant costs of a pony. Guilt at the disasters he brought home still held Al in its gnawing maw, and Alex opened his wallet in an unending apology written in pounds and pence.
Telling Charlie I’d thought it didn’t seem the most politic of moves, though, so I let it pass. “Most importantly, she’s here,” I said, admiring Chelsea’s handiwork in the vanity mirror. Once more, she’d used a deft and light hand on every feature but my eyes. The false eyelashes met a bold black cat-eye flick of liner; my lids were gently gold and bronze. She daubed a rosy-silver highlighter at the corners of my eyes and along my cheekbones, only enough to catch the light just so, and my lips were blotted pinky-red. Like Eve about to take a bite of the apple, if she’d had a confab with Lilith about a strong eye look before tucking in.
I reached out my hand to Charlie and watched him grasp it in the mirror, as he leaned down and squinted a bit to consider our reflection. He preened a little, pushing a hand through his thick red hair, turning his jaw from side to side. “She’ll always love him for giving her Lucy. You’ll need to make room in your life for that love, Mel. Be kind to her when she apologizes to you this afternoon, because she will. Don’t brush it off as nothing. You two are more alike than you want to recognize.”
Alike? Hardly, but maybe. Maybe I don’t want to think that Alex chose a woman whose worst character traits were the same as my own: greedy, overly accommodating, submissive, charitable when charity isn’t deserved.
Dark thoughts on a wedding day are unlucky, my Maman told a seven-year-old me at my Uncle Dan’s reception, right before the bride and groom cut the cake. Rachel and I had been snipping at each other all evening over which of us looked prettier in our nearly matching dresses — smocked floral confections, one lavender, one pistachio green. Maman had come by to gather us up to watch Dan and his new bride slice into the four-tier buttercream-frosted tower, when she heard me tell Rachel, “You’re ugly in purple anyway and Daddy loves me better.”
In her only slightly softened French accent, my dad’s mother delivered a stern admonition about attracting evil spirits to the bride and groom. “Melissa, tais-toi. Spirits love a wedding day to make their mischief, and as guests we must do what we can to keep them away. No sour words and no dark thoughts.”
So I lied to Charlie, just a smidge, and patted his hand where it now rested on my shoulder. “I do love Minty.” Al praised her as the best of all parents to his strange little girl, and she’d been a sympathetic, motherly presence in my own life in Bristol, until she blew it up by ratting Al and me out. But she’ll always be joined to Alex through Lucy, always be his first bride, always be the only other woman he’d ever loved. “And she deserves to be happier than she is.”
“Good girl.” It was meant as praise, but the words no give no comfort. I’m tired of being a good girl, a helping hand, reliable, pleasant, true. I looked in the mirror again and saw a flicker of Rachel in myself. A troublemaker. A provacateuse. Or maybe it was just the highlighter.
On the polished oak surface of vanity, my phone pinged. “Alex,” I explained to Charlie. “He says, ‘Jules suspiciously well behaved. Even joined in a toast to our engagement. Psycho. Jamie just said he wants Charlie and Will with us and Barrett too, why not. Love you.'”
As I finished, the echoes of a particularly loud footfall up the stairs was followed by a skid in the hallway and a brief knock on my already open door. “Chas, there you are. Oh, sorry Mel. You look lovely.” Will clutched his large fist to his chest, resting it on the ratty grey Polartec fleece he’d worn for years at the slightest sign of mildish but inclement weather. His light brown hair flopped over one eyebrow. Tenderhearted, broad and safe, our Will. Miss K was missing a trick.
“I just heard,” Charlie said, turning from the mirror to face Will, whose desire to leave this house of hairspray and histrionics. was written clearly in the relief in his smile. “Macallan and Cohibas all round, then.” He gave my shoulder a little squeeze and leaned down to whisper, “I’ll do my part to keep Julian in check, if needed. Your job is to keep Amanda in line. Right?”
I nodded briskly, and shooed them off, wishing them well. Last thing either needed was five women in shifting states of affection and meltdowns around them; their talents were better served as referees in the perpetual Alex v. Julian championship league.
And at last, I was alone in the bedroom, with the ludicrously high bed and the nasty pink chintz chair and the heavy oak vanity. My hair had a semblance of a wave, my makeup glowed like the smoggy magic hour in the Hollywood Hills on a warm August Thursday. On the back of the door Will had just barged through hung my dress, a red Dolce & Gabbana sheath Rachel had talked me into. I hadn’t been sure at the time — as a ginger-adjacent person, I was brought up to be a bit leery of red. Rachel told me it was all a load of bullshit — “Redheads are great in red,” she told me as we checked out dresses online together. (I reminded her I wasn’t a redhead, but she glossed over this minor point.) “And who cares — the question you should ask yourself is, do I look like a hot bitch in this? That’s what I ask myself. Do I look like I could eat every single one of these motherfuckers up in this dress? If the answer is yes, wear the dress, bish.”
I shut the door. shucked off my robe and walked over to the wardrobe, where I snagged a pink bra from a drawer. I hooked it in the back, adjusted my breasts in the cups and regarded myself, in much the same way I had the afternoon I’d finally been allowed to have Josh the way I wanted him. A cold appraisal, looking for the faults that made me human and messy and not deserving of the praise given to me. I saw… a woman, 34. Small of stature and frame, freckled on her shoulders. More womanly than at 16, as to be hoped, but young, or young enough. Larger breasts than even a few years ago, the left so slightly sagging now. A flare at the hips where I’d had so little before. I looked powerful in my womanhood, even though it was still uncomfortable for me to remind myself I had power at all, from years of being schooled of my nothingness.
A dress can be power. Makeup can be power. A stance or a gait or a thought or a word can be power. I reached down and adjusted a snap on my garter belt. (A hot little surprise later for Al, who loves to mess about with the fastenings and glide the silk stockings down my calves.) I snatched the crimson frock from the door, shimmied down its zipper and stepped into its silk crepe, sliding its slightly flared long sleeves onto my arms. I was able to close it only so far before I needed an extra hand. In the past, that had been Julian or Rianne, though I was loath to ask for help from our housekeeper. (It reminded me too much that I was the mistress of the house, and she a servant.)
I padded to the door, the plush of the rug cushioning my stocking feet. “Anyone free to help me zip up?” I yelled down the hallway, my voice echoing off the teal blue of its walls.
I heard her feet running up the stairs before I could put a face to my helper. “Here!” Minty’s glossy bronde lob bounced on her shoulders as she rounded the corner into my room. Her lips were a soft rosewood, and her brown eyes were rimmed in greenish-gold. No false eyelashes for her; her own lashes were long enough with a coat or two of mascara. Though not as large as she’d been at Bristol, she was still carrying a few extra baby pounds in her face and around her waist. And yet still, I was jealous of how unpretentious her loveliness was. Not a little dun bird at all, not really. “An English rose,” as Cora had described her former daughter-in-law to me, “as I was myself. Such a lovely girl. I do miss her decency.” (She made the last comment looking right through me — Cora holds what she believes to be my infidelity to Julian against me, even though the other player in this playing away is her own son.)
Trotting in my room in her lilac floral kimono and bare feet, she slid behind me and ordered me to hold up my hair. Up slipped the zipper without complaint, and she caught the hook in its eye at the neck. “All set, turn around. Let me see you.”
Under her warm gaze, I squirmed a little. He chose her first before he chose you — nothing will change that. “That red is perfect on you,” she assured me. “I remember how you were convinced you shouldn’t wear red at all, and then you borrowed that scarlet jumper of mine, and you looked gorgeous.”
What went unsaid was that it was that same jumper at the foot of the bed the afternoon she found me mostly naked and wrapped around Alex in my bedroom. “Would you like me to help you dress, too?” I thought it best to move on as quickly as possible.
“Me? No, nothing to fasten on mine. Just pop it over your head and yoink it down. Quite forgiving where I still have all this –” she gestured back and forth across her belly — “from Lucy. Just won’t budge, I’ve done everything you can imagine, completely frustrating. I asked Al if there might be some money for lipo or that Coolsculpting thingy and he said no.”
I am only a little ashamed to say I was very proud of Alex in that moment.
“But hey ho, what’s an extra ten pounds or so? We can’t help our genetics.” I didn’t want to say it looked more like twenty than ten, and kept my counsel.
We stood together for a few awkward, silent beats, the past and future Mrs. Carrs. I was waiting for her apology, the one Charlie promised me, but none came. “We’re good, right?” I asked, wanting her so badly to tell me once more. “I’m so sorry.” Wait, I was giving the apology?
She opened her mouth to breeze away the pain, as she always did in difficult times, but stopped herself. “Thank you,” she offered in place of her usually sunny dismissal of discomfort.
“Min!” Amanda’s voice boomed down the hall, the slightest slur of champagne softening further its plummy vowels. “Come help me get my frock on. You’re better at these things than me.” I’d seen Amanda’s Roland Mouret dress, and she did need help if she was going to keep her breasts from spilling out of the square neck.
Minty sighed lavishly and shook her head with a wry smile, like Amanda was some dear and petted child, and not a woman who’d turn 35 in a few weeks. “Needs must, and all that,” she chirped before scuttling out of the room.
Needs must. What was the other half of that saying? When the devil drives.
And on that rainy Sussex afternoon, I sensed the presence of those evil spirits, ready to make mischief for the bride and groom, as the devil would drive.
meandering again 