I forced a smile. ‘Thank you, honey.’
‘My pleasure. Now, does birthday girl want her present now, whilst she’s eating her breakfast, or later?’ Martin liked to refer to me in the third person.
‘Ooh, I think now.’
‘Good choice.’ Martin reached deep into his dressing gown pocket and produced an envelope wrapped up in red ribbon. Martin was always an excellent present-wrapper, unusual for a man I’d always thought. A momentary flurry of hope: tickets to the theatre perhaps? Beauty Salon facials? A voucher for John Lewis? It didn’t really matter since I’d already decided I won’t be able to keep it.
‘Come on then, Caro, the suspense is killing me. Aren’t you going to open it?’ he said, eyes glistening.
I opened the envelope, my hands shaking. A leaflet with a picture of a tree in full autumnal blaze on the front.
‘Your Guide to the National Trust', it read in an uninspiring font.
Membership to the National Trust? I momentarily had to catch my breath. If it was membership of the National Trust at thirty-two, what would it be at forty? His-and-her flasks? The Vicar of Dibley box set? Jesus Christ, I was about to marry my dad. (If my dad were a normal sort of dad, which he isn’t).
‘So do you like it? he said, nudging closer whilst I held the membership card in my shaking hand. ‘I thought after the honeymoon, when weekends are more free, we could start with the Stately—’
‘Course I like it!’ I cut in, and then an awful, awful thing happened. I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.
Martin peered at me, alarmed.
‘Caro, what on earth is the matter?’ The membership leaflet was damp with tears now. ‘Please. Tell me. What on earth is wrong?’
And that’s where it ended, in what should have been our marital bed. Martin, the only man I had ever known, really, the man who had loved me for more than a decade, who had talked about having children with me, who had held me whilst I sobbed through no end of twenty-something self-esteem crises, who had listened to me moan about my parents and my mental family, who knew the best of me, the worst of me, the ugly truth of me and yet accepted me more than anyone else in he world, was lying next to me, shushing me, stroking my hair.
And I was about to break his big heart into a million different pieces.
CHAPTER ONE
Early June 2009
I suppose you could say that things had barely moved on in my life, nine months later, when my seventeen-year-old sister turns up on my doorstep and I am drunk, alone, on a Sunday afternoon.
When I say drunk, I don’t mean staggering-all-over-the-place drunk. God no! That would have been humiliating. It was more like two-large-glasses-of-wine drunk. Okay, possibly half a bottle, exacerbated by two fags and the dregs of a bottle of Prosecco. I’d say, on alcohol consumption alone, I would have just about got away with convincing someone I wasn’t drunk. If I hadn’t been crying. Or if I hadn’t answered the door with said bottle of Prosecco. Or if I wasn’t standing barefoot on my doorstep at 4 p.m. on a Sunday wearing a wedding dress and a tiara.
It had been raining, sheeting it down for hours, but was on the verge of brightening up so that the sky glowed, making the row of white terraces behind where Lexi stood and the trees of Battersea Park – full as broccoli florets in the height of summer – look unreal, like a stage set.
She was carrying a trolley case with fuscia-pink lips all over it and was wearing gold leggings, and a silver headband, Grecian-style, around her forehead. In the luminescent light, I thought how lovely she’d become, a modern take on Wonder Woman, with her gamine crop and kittenish eyeliner. I, on the other hand, must have looked like a contestant for Trailer-Trash Bride of the Year.
‘Hi! It’s me, Lexi.’
Did she think I had dementia? That I needed to be reminded of who she was before being escorted back to the church where I would get on with the wedding I had clearly wandered off from?
‘Sorry, is this a crap time?’
I leant one hand on the top of the doorframe, but missed, so that I stumbled forward and ended up doing a strange unintentional dance on the front step.
‘Er … no.’
‘Right, it’s just you –’ I was aware I was swaying, that the trees were moving although there was no breeze – ‘look like you’ve been crying. And you’re wearing a wedding dress.’ I looked down. This was no word of a lie. ‘And a tiara. And you’re holding an empty bottle of wine.’
‘It’s Prosecco, actually.’
Overlooking the empty bottle of Prosecco and the fact my house stank of booze and fags and the fact I had Pat Benatar’s ‘Love is a Battlefield', blasting from the stereo, I think I styled it out well. It was regrettable that my wedding dress had a four foot train and so could not be passed off as evening wear, but like I say, all this was exacerbated by the fact I was drunk and it was the middle of the afternoon.
‘So how long are you planning on staying?’ We’re standing in my kitchen now and I’m trying to sound as breezy as possible.
Lexi leans against the doorframe and looks around her.
‘Um, well, I thought maybe the summer holidays …?’ she says, hopefully.
The summer holidays? I almost heave.
‘What? Like, the whole summer?’
‘Er, yeah.’ She smiles. She still has the same rosebud mouth she had as a baby. Pouty and cherubic. A real Drew Barrymore mouth. ‘Why, are you going somewhere?’
‘No.’
‘Cool,’ she says brightly, like, that’s that sorted then.
She sits down at the kitchen table, helps herself from the bowl of pistachios. Inside, I’m beginning to panic – this is all a bit sudden, isn’t it? A bit unexpected. She’s been here half an hour now and I don’t feel we’ve quite got to the bottom of why she is.
‘Look, Lex …’ I say, gently. She looks at me with her big, brown eyes – there’s something hopeful about them, so innocent and trusting and I already feel awful. ‘I’m more than happy to have you for a while but you have to understand, I have a job, a really demanding job. I’m out all day …’
‘I’m very resourceful.’ She shrugs. ‘I’m used to amusing myself.’
That’s what’s worrying me.
‘I often have client events at night.’
‘Seriously? Cool. Maybe I could come to a few?’
I sigh. My stomach shrivels like a mollusc into its shell.
‘Or help you out at work? I’ve decided I want to go into business, actually – sixth form’s not for me. I was thinking, because I really love shoes, like seriously have a passion for them, that I could be a shoe designer. I could design the shoes here, I mean dead funky ones, much better than the pap that’s in the shops now,’ she says, in her flat Yorkshire accent. I’ve pretty much lost mine, after someone once told me I sounded like Geoff Boycott. ‘I could draw them – Art’s my best subject – send the designs to China where a team of people would make them, then get them sent back here!’
She looks at me as if to say, ‘Genius, or what?’ and a strange nausea passes over me, like this is already becoming more surreal than I can handle. Thankfully, then, there’s a noise like a lion roaring. Her mobile. Again.
She picks up. ‘Yo.’
She said that last time they called, so I assume it’s the same person.
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m here now.’ Pause. ‘Yeah, she’s cool, yeah, I think so …’ She looks at me and grimaces, apologetically – so she clearly told whoever’s on the other line of her plans to come and ‘surprise me’. Just not me.
Her voice grows quieter.
‘Yeah, I know Carls, I know. I’ll talk to him at some point.’ So, boyfriend trouble?
She rolls her eyes and makes a blah-blah-blah sign with her hand. There’s a long pause, then a gasp and a ‘No way!’ then an even bigger gasp and a ‘What, like permanent-permanent?!’
