Milly Johnson is the sparkling and irrepressible author of six bestselling novels. She is also a columnist, greetings card copywriter, poet and after-dinner speaker. Her books are about the universal issues of friendship, family, betrayal, babies, rather nice food and a little bit of that magic in life that sometimes visits the unsuspecting. Find out more at http://www.millyjohnson.co.uk or follow Milly on Twitter @millyjohnson.
Also by Milly Johnson
The Yorkshire Pudding Club
The Birds & the Bees
A Spring Affair
A Summer Fling
Here Come the Girls
An Autumn Crush
First published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2012
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Milly Johnson 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Milly Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
PB ISBN: 978-0-85720-896-5
EBOOK ISBN:978-0-85720-897-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset in Bembo by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
This book is dedicated to all the wonderful staff at Shawlands Primary School in Barnsley, especially Dave Lucas, Fiona Taylor, Lisa Hepworth, Louise Barradell, Alison Asquith, Joanne Prigmore, Sue Clark, Linda Adam, Wendy Lindsay, Jane Williams, Jean Thickett and Headmistress Jill Brookling who will be long remembered with smiles and fondness. You have all given us and ours such wonderful happy years and treasured memories. Precious lifelong friendships have been made at your gates and within your walls. You all went the extra mile and beyond for our children and we couldn’t have wished for a more wonderful school.
Thank you all.
Contents
Prologue
Belinda’s Wedding
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Max’s Wedding
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Violet’s Wedding
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Epilogue
Prologue
‘Oh hello again,’ said Max McBride, looking across as the shop door opened with a tinkle and seeing an increasingly familiar face. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’
‘I think you’re stalking me,’ replied the tiny, spiky-haired Bel, coming inside quickly to escape the February chill. ‘Either that or I’m stalking you.’
The two women smiled at each other. Five times they had visited this White Wedding bridal shop now and on every occasion it was to find the other one there. It was only a wonder that the third lady who also seemed to move in their orbit was absent – the pale woman with silver-blonde hair, whom Max was certain had gone to her school. She remembered a girl in the year below whom the other kids used to call ‘Ghost’ because of her unusual colouring.
‘What are you looking for this time, then?’ asked Bel.
‘I’m only browsing really,’ Max answered. ‘We’re having a small wedding, no fancy frills. But I just can’t help myself looking.’ That was the truth of it. Her fiancé, Stuart, wasn’t a man for fuss. Plus, as he said, a wedding ceremony should be about two people and their vows, and though Max had nodded in agreement, her head had immediately started building up a list of embellishments; dress, cake, veil, flowers . . .
‘What about you?’ Max asked.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ smiled Bel. ‘I was just passing and thought I’d call in and see if anything took my fancy.’
‘Are you having a big wedding?’
‘A hundred or so guests,’ said Bel. ‘Although it started off as fifty and will probably end up as two hundred.’
The more the merrier, she thought with a little kick in her heart. Her wedding day couldn’t come quickly enough for her now and she wanted the whole world to hear her say the words ‘I do’ to Richard. She couldn’t wait to be his other half, ‘her indoors’ – his wife. Recently, she thought she might burst open with joy at the thought of becoming Mrs Belinda Bishop.
‘Are you both all right or do you need some help?’ asked the shopkeeper as she approached them. She was a tall, elegant lady: grace personified. She exuded an air of calm that spread through the lovely shop and made it an almost magical place to mosey around. She wore a name badge – Freya – above her left breast. It seemed too modern for a lady of such advanced years, yet at the same time the delicate femininity of it
fitted her exactly.
‘I’m okay, thanks,’ said Bel. ‘I’m just looking. Again.’
‘Me too,’ added Max, with a little sigh in her voice. She could buy half of the stuff in this shop if she let herself off the leash. It was torture really, trying on tiaras and headdresses, knowing that she would end up wearing a plain beige functional two-piece suit for the registry office service that would bind her and her partner of seventeen years together. But ever since she discovered this shop quite by chance a few weeks ago, she hadn’t been able to resist coming in. It was princess-heaven for Max to wander up and down the long, narrow shop that was packed to the gills with all manner of wedding paraphernalia. Her childhood bedroom had been filled with boxes of play jewellery, crowns and frilly dresses and when anyone asked her what she was going to be when she grew up, her answer was always ‘a princess’.
Bel had just picked up a pair of tiny silk boots when the doorbell tinkled again and in walked a woman with long silver hair and deep-violet eyes.
‘Well, blow me,’ laughed Bel. ‘How weird is this? We were just wondering if you’d turn up.’
‘Fancy meeting you two here,’ said the pale-skinned lady with a chuckle.
‘We’ve done that line,’ smiled Max. ‘Anyone fancy a coffee across the road when we’ve finished shopping here?’
Belinda’s
Wedding
Chapter 1
Three months later
‘Oh my GOD, look at that.’
‘Yep, I’ve seen it.’
‘And that. Oh look at that.’
‘If she says “look at that” once more I think I just might murder her.’
‘Look, LOOK at that.’
‘Right that is it.’ Bel picked up a small cushion and launched it at Max’s head. Her mouth was so wide open she could have swallowed it whole had it landed on target.
But Max was too mesmerized by the world of the gypsy brides on the television screen to react when the cushion bumped into her shoulder. She had never seen anything like it. Those huge crinolines that the bride and her twenty-five bridesmaids wore, the Cinderella coach, the cake – bigger than the house she was born in – it was all so over the top, unbelievable . . . fabulous. It poked at the place inside her brain that still kept safe her latent fantasies about growing up and becoming a princess and dressing every day in a sparkling tiara and a swishy long frock. ‘Look at that as well.’
‘Can’t you say anything else but “look at that”?’ Bel pretended to be exasperated with her.
Violet half chuckled, half sighed. ‘Do you know, Max, I’ve known you for only a few weeks but I wouldn’t have thought you’d ever be the type to be lost for words.’
But Max still wasn’t listening. She sat entranced as a huge cloud of white net squeezed out of the Cinderella coach. The train went on for ever. The narrator was reporting that there was over a mile of material in the petticoats alone.
‘Fill up, Lady V?’ asked Bel, tipping the bottle neck towards Violet’s glass.
‘I shouldn’t really,’ Violet replied, not taking a breath before adding, ‘Oh go on, then, if I must.’
‘Good girl, and yes you must. This is my official hen night, after all. I’m not counting the family “ordeal” on Thursday.’
Bel lifted her lip in an Elvis sneer. She was looking forward to having a meal with her dad, and Richard would be there of course, and her cousin and bridesmaid, Shaden; but so would her Botox-frozen-faced step-aunt, Vanoushka, and her husband, slimy Martin, with his sausage fingers that were magnetically attracted to women’s arses. Her stepmum, Faye, would be there too, naturally, making sure that the evening was as flawless as possible. The one thing Bel would wholeheartedly credit her for was her hosting skill.
‘This must be a bit of a shit hen night for you,’ said Max, giving her friends some attention while the adverts were on. ‘I thought you might have wanted to go to a club with loads of your mates.’ Not spend it cooking chilli con carne in your apartment for two women you barely know.
Bel shrugged her shoulders. The truth of it was that she didn’t have any real friends. One by one, they had dropped away over the years; Sara had married a German, moved to Frankfurt, turned into an earth-mother and churned out five children, possibly more by now. Though they had been inseparable through their childhood and teenage years, they didn’t even swap Christmas cards any more. Bel knew deep down that her inability to bear children and Sara’s fecundity had sadly got in the way of their relationship. Amy had moved to London and got in with a weird bohemian crowd, and Shaden . . . well, suffice to say that she and her cousin had grown very far apart in adulthood.
‘Couldn’t be arsed going out. I just fancied a quiet night in with a bottle and a bit of light company,’ sniffed Bel, knocking back half a glass of wine in one. Max and Violet exchanged a quick secret glance, both suspecting what the other was thinking: that this wedding-uninterested Bel was very different to the woman they had first met at the White Wedding shop, the one who walked on air, smiled a lot and said ‘Richard’ a damned sight more than she said it these days.
‘Are you all right?’ Violet asked, but tentatively, because she had picked up very early on that Bel was a woman who played her cards close to her chest.
‘Yes, I’m perfectly fine,’ said Bel with a firm nod.
‘I expect you’re knackered, aren’t you?’ asked Max. Maybe that would explain the tired circles under her new friend’s eyes.
‘Totally,’ Bel affirmed and poured herself another wine.
‘That’s good, then. That you’re all right, I mean. Not that you’re totally knackered,’ Violet said. Yes, that made sense. Bel had arranged her whole wedding alone, so she must have the energy levels of a dying sloth at the moment.
Bel smiled at their sweet concern. She had grown to like these two women enormously in the relatively short time she had known them. So much so that she wished she hadn’t been so impulsive early on and invited them to her wedding. Still, she couldn’t think about that now – what was done was done and she had to keep her head focused and her heart totally out of it.
‘I thought we might meet your bridesmaid tonight,’ said Max. It was a little odd that the maid of honour wasn’t at the hen night while she and Violet were.
‘She was supposed to be here but alas she’s got a cold and didn’t want to pass on her bugs.’ The lie fell effortlessly from Bel’s lips.
‘Poor thing,’ said Violet.
‘Yes, she’s so considerate of my feelings,’ nodded Bel. Dear Shaden. The thought of her cousin punctured a dangerous hole in Bel’s composure.
‘I hope you’re having those nails done before next Saturday,’ noted Max, nudging Bel.
Bel curled her bitten nails away from sight. She had gnawed them down to the quick and they throbbed.
‘How’s your new ice-cream parlour coming on?’ asked Bel, batting attention away from herself before she said something she regretted, before she let them in. Violet was leasing a recently built small shop more or less across the road from White Wedding.
‘Oh it’s perfect,’ sighed Violet with a beaming smile. ‘I can’t wait to open up. I’m just sad that Nan won’t be able to work in it with me. She loved helping me in the old place that I ran.’
Violet had told them all about her beloved Nan, sadly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Nan lived with Violet’s mum, Susan, who was her widowed daughter-in-law. ‘Mum found her slippers in the fridge the other day.’
Violet laughed a little, but there was a very sad quality to the sound. The old lady, once so sparky and fit, seemed to be getting frailer by the day – physically as well as mentally.
‘Oh bless,’ Bel wrinkled up her nose sympathetically.
‘When’s the grand opening?’ asked Max. ‘I love ice cream.’
‘Well, the space is completely plastered and whitewashed now,’ Violet bubbled with excited glee, ‘so I put an advert in the Chronicle last week for an artist to paint a mural on the wall
. I’m meeting one up at the shop tomorrow afternoon, actually. I reckon that I should be open for business by early August.’
‘Who’s going to work with you if your nan can’t?’ Bel muffled, through a mouthful of tortilla chips.
‘Glyn?’ Max suggested. ‘Or is that a really bad idea?’
‘That is a really bad idea,’ said Violet, with quick protest. ‘Could you honestly work with Stuart and Richard all day then go home and spend the night with them as well?’
Bel considered the question and wanted to laugh out loud. Maybe once upon a time she could have, but not now.
They didn’t know that much information about each other’s fiancés yet, but what they had gleaned from their conversations was that Richard was a drop-dead gorgeous high-flying banking executive who had been in Bel’s life for three years, and Stuart was head warehouse storeman for a local supplier of nuts and bolts who Max had been courting since they were sixteen. About Glyn, the others knew least of all. Apparently he and Violet had been together for just under a year and a half and he had been off sick from work for most of that time – something to do with a mental breakdown – so neither Bel nor Max thought it fair to press her for details about him, however much they wanted to.
‘Max, another wine?’ asked Bel.
‘Absolutely,’ replied Max, holding out her glass. ‘I might as well take advantage seeing as I’m getting a taxi home. So, are you going to keep hold of your mother’s wedding dress for your own daughter, then? That would be fabulous, wouldn’t it? Three generations of women all wearing the same gown.’
Bel had told them ages ago in White Wedding that she didn’t need to buy a dress as she would be wearing her mum’s gown down the aisle. This was especially poignant as her mother had died after complications in childbirth.
‘I can’t have kids,’ Bel said as undramatically as possible to spare Max’s feelings. ‘I have a rubbish womb. I won’t bore you with the tedious medical details, blah blah, but it will never happen for me.’ She watched that familiar mask of sympathy fall on to the two female faces in front of her. ‘It’s okay. It’s something I’ve known from having an operation as a kid. Ironically my stepmother has the same condition. She can’t conceive either. “I can’t have kids and neither can my mother” – ho ho.’