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*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.42 a.m. To: Cass
No, Cass I can’t bring you back bulk order of Kiehls body lotion.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.46 a.m. To: Cass
Yes I do know it’s pounds for dollars.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.48 a.m. To: Cass
BECAUSE AM STUCK IN MIAMI WITH NO PASSPORT, NO HOTEL ROOM, 26 QUID IN MY CURRENT ACCOUNT, EXACTLY 17 DOLLARS IN MY WALLET AND HURRICANE APPROACHING.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.53 p.m. To: Nora
Crisis averted!!! Am spending night bunking down inside Miami Dolphins Football Stadium.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.55 p.m. To: Nora
Is fine, honestly. Everyone being very friendly. Have met nice family from Arizona who have lent me sleeping bag and are cooking me hot dog on their portable bbq. Is actually all very jolly and Blitz-spirity at moment!
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.57 p.m. To: Nora
No. He’s still not answering his phone.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.01 p.m. To: Nora
The row? Nothing, really.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.06 p.m. To: Nora
Yes, all right. It was because he was flirting with another girl.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.08 p.m. To: Nora
Norwegian swimsuit model. But not sure that’s really important right now.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 8.44 p.m. To: Nora
OK, am getting small suspicion lovely family from Arizona may belong to fanatical doomsday cult into which they are trying to indoctrinate me.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 8.56 p.m. To: Nora
Yes, they definitely belong to fanatical doomsday cult into which they are trying to indoctrinate me.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 21.22 p.m. To: Olly
Am OK. Have to admit is getting a tiny bit scary here now. Winds are starting to make a hell of a noise outside stadium. Also might have accidentally joined fanatical Doomsday cult. Seemed like small price to pay for sleeping bag and hot dog at the time, but am starting to have serious regrets.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.23 p.m. To: Nora
Shit Nora this is getting scary now. Winds are getting up. People crying. Praying. Not just fanatical Doomsday cult but normal people too. Signal keeps cutting out. Will message as soon as I can. Love you. Sorry about all this. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.26 p.m. To: Cass
Cass. Am slap-bang in middle of worst hurricane to hit Florida in 2 decades. Don’t know when, if ever, will be getting out of here. So no. I won’t be able to meet you at Selfridges today to go shoe shopping.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.29 p.m. To: Cass
No, Cass. It doesn’t even come close to qualifying as a disaster.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.31 p.m. To: Olly
I love you, Olly Lx
*
(#ub576a2c4-fcb7-5472-93df-927fe1587185)
It was a big moment, last night, when my grandmother knocked on the door of my hotel room and handed me this box containing about seventeen layers of tissue and, beneath them all, her wedding veil.
A massive moment, actually.
She’s not the most warm and fuzzy of grandmothers – nobody on Dad’s side is warm and fuzzy; in fact, come to think of it, nobody on Mum’s side is all that warm and fuzzy either – but I’ve always worshipped her a little bit. For her to hand down her wedding veil to me … not to any of Dad’s brothers’ daughters, but me … well, it makes me feel special. Which is nice, for a change.
And all right, it would have made me feel even more special if she hadn’t added, as she watched me open the box, ‘I’d give you my wedding dress, too, Libby, darling, but I’m afraid you don’t have quite the tiny waist I did when I wore it.’
But still. A big moment. A symbol of my super-glamorous grandmother’s esteem.
And then there’s the fact that it’s absolutely stunning.
Seriously, there’s no way you could find anything like this in any bridal shop across the land: hand-stitched, palest ivory lace, with a gauzy elbow-length piece to cover your face at the front and an almost ten-foot drop at the back. (Grandmother only got married in a small village church in her native Shropshire, but she was modelling her entire wedding ‘look’ on her movie idol, Grace Kelly, hence the dramatically long veil, carried up the aisle by her – eight – bridesmaids.) It makes me look stunning, and not just because the gauzy lace covering my face is the equivalent of smearing a camera lens with Vaseline to blur out imperfections. Something about the way the veil hangs, the way my hair is half pulled back to accommodate it, the flattering ivory shade, perhaps … whatever the reason, I feel a bit ravishing, to be honest with you.
And now, looking soft-focus himself from behind all this lace, here comes Olly, striding towards me. He reaches out with both hands, folds back the veil so that he can see my face, and smiles down at me. His eyes look exceptionally soft, and he doesn’t speak for a moment.
‘What on earth,’ he says, when he finally speaks, ‘are you wearing this for?’
‘It’s Grandmother’s. She came round with it last night.’ I pull the veil back down, keen to retreat behind the Vaseline blur again, just for one blissful moment. ‘Does it suit me?’
‘Wonderfully. But – and don’t bite my head off here, Libby – don’t you think maybe you ought to stick to just a simple hat, or something? It isn’t your wedding, after all.’
‘I know that,’ I sigh. I steal one final glance at myself, a vision of Grace Kelly-esque (well, Grace Kelly-ish) bridal loveliness, in the full-length mirror in the corner of my hotel room. ‘And obviously I’m not going to wear this to Dad and Phoebe’s wedding. Though, to be fair, I don’t know if Phoebe could actually object – I mean, Grandmother did offer it to her for the day, and she turned it down …’
This doesn’t at all take the shine off Grandmother offering me the veil afterwards, by the way. I mean, all right, she was in a bit of a grump about her soon-to-be new daughter-in-law refusing to wear the veil because it would swamp her rather fabulous figure, but that wasn’t why she came to my room late last night and handed it over to me instead. She’d only have let Phoebe borrow it – her Something Borrowed for the day – whereas I’ve actually been bequeathed it … if that’s the right word to use when Grandmother is still very much alive.
‘Still,’ says Olly, with a grin, ‘I’m not sure if Phoebe would be all that thrilled at a guest turning up in a ten-foot lace veil on her wedding day. Especially not her new stepdaughter.’
I wince.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ He holds up both hands. ‘I know we’re not calling her your stepmum. My bad.’
Because it’s not as if I don’t have enough problems with the one actual mum I’ve already got. Not to mention the fact that Dad has never really been enough of a dad for me to call the woman he’s marrying my ‘stepmother’. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got no objection to Phoebe whatsoever, who seemed a pleasant enough woman during the ten-minute chat we had when Olly and I arrived at the hotel last night. But I think we’ll all be much more comfortable, once today is over, if we just go back to being polite strangers, exchanging Christmas cards and the occasional text. Which, where Dad is concerned anyway, would be a massive improvement on the last twenty-odd years.
‘Anyway, we should probably be heading down to the orangery now, don’t you think?’ Olly asks as – a little bit reluctantly – I start detaching the veil from my hair and folding it back into its slim cardboard box. ‘I know your dad said it’s all very informal, but I doubt if that extends to us arriving after the bride and groom.’
‘Well, it’d be a bit ironic of Dad to suddenly start deploring lateness right now,’ I say, ‘given that he only remembered my eighteenth birthday two weeks after the event … but, you’re right. We should get going.’
I head back over to the mirror and look at our joint reflection. Now that I’ve taken the veil off, all I’m wearing is a cap-sleeved silk dress and matching suede heels that, both in charcoal grey, feel more wedding-appropriate than my usual head-to-toe black. Olly is looking dapper, and astonishingly different from his normal self, in a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt and striped tie. It’s been ages since I’ve seen him in an outfit that wasn’t either chef’s whites or, ever since he started doing up his own restaurant a couple of months ago, a paint-spattered T-shirt and baggy jeans, so it’s a bit of a surprise to look at him now and remember how well he scrubs up.
‘Do we look all right?’ I ask, meeting his eyes in the mirror.
Olly studies us both for a moment.
‘I think we look pretty bloody good,’ he says, meeting my eyes in the mirror, too. ‘You in particular. I really like that dress.’
‘Thanks, Ol. Oh, and I apologize in advance,’ I say, linking my arm through his and starting to head for the door, grabbing my hat and bag and pashmina as we go, ‘if any of my relatives mistakenly think we’re a couple. I haven’t told them we are – I mean, I never see any of them from one decade to the next, obviously – but you know how people jump to conclusions …’
‘There’s no need to apologize.’
‘… and some of them might even remember you from when you came with me to my granddad’s funeral eleven years ago, so they’ll probably ask all kinds of questions about why we’re not married yet …’
‘Well, it would be a perfectly legitimate question. If we really had been together all those years, I mean.’
‘… but you should be able to fob them off easily enough without even having to tell them we’re just best friends. Shove a drink in most of their faces and they’ll forget they were even talking to you, anyway.’
‘Don’t worry, Lib. Fobbing off intrusive lines of questioning from well-meaning relatives is pretty much a speciality of mine.’
And Olly holds open the door, impeccably mannered as always, for me to walk out ahead of him.
*
I’m so, so grateful to Olly for agreeing to be my date for Dad’s wedding.
I mean, I know it’s just about the last thing he wants to do with his weekend: schlep all the way up here to Ayrshire, where Phoebe originally hails from, just to keep me company at my father’s wedding. It’s not as if, what with his restaurant opening at the end of this coming week, he doesn’t have plenty to be getting on with in his own life.
And I suppose I could always have asked Adam to accompany me. Given that he and I really are a couple.
But Adam and I have only been an item for about eight weeks. Yes, things are going terrifically well between us – I mean, seriously well – but it still feels a bit soon to be subjecting him to the cauldron of awkward encounters and complicated emotions that are guaranteed to mark Dad’s wedding for me. Anyway, Olly agreed to come with me today as soon as I mentioned the surprise (OK, shock) arrival of the invitation, three months ago, and there’s not a person in the world I’d rather have as my wingman.
(Not to mention the fact that I’ve been keeping quiet about the fact that Adam and I are, to put it in nice, clear Facebook terminology that never quite translates to real life – not my real life, at any rate – ‘in a relationship’. I haven’t even mentioned it, yet, to Nora, my other best friend and Olly’s sister. As I say, it’s still really early days and … well, the last relationship I had ended in such unmitigated disaster – quite literally – that I’m a bit wary of announcing that I’ve headed down that route again, even if it is with a man who’s the polar opposite of my ex, Dillon.)
My gratitude to Olly, though, however much I thought I’d already realized it, was made even more obvious to me when Dad walked back down the aisle with his brand-new wife, Phoebe, roughly fifteen minutes ago.
I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly felt this massive lump in my throat, and not in a wedding-y, happy-tears sort of way. So it was lovely to be able to reach to my right-hand side and fumble for Olly’s hand to grab on to, and even lovelier to realize that I didn’t need to do much fumbling, because he was already reaching for mine.
It’s a good thing that Grandmother, who was on my other side, didn’t notice our brief-but-meaningful hand-squeeze, because I’m pretty sure she’s already getting all kinds of ideas into her head about me and Olly.
And now I’m absolutely sure she’s getting all kinds of ideas, because we’ve all just milled from the orangery, where the ceremony took place, into the sunny-but-chilly grounds of the hotel for an alfresco drinks reception, and she’s just this very minute seized my arm and said, ‘Libby, darling, your Olly is absolutely wonderful.’
‘I know.’ Thank God Olly has just taken his absolutely wonderful self off to find a glass of champagne for us all, so I don’t have to make I’m really sorry faces at him and hope Grandmother doesn’t see. ‘But he’s not my Olly, in fact, Grandmother. He’s just a friend.’
‘Oh.’ Her face, miraculously unlined for her eighty-odd years (and, fingers crossed, another thing I’ll inherit from her apart from her veil) falls slightly. ‘That’s a pity. I remember him from your grandfather’s funeral. And he wrote me the sweetest condolence letter afterwards. So if he’s just a friend, tell me: what’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing. God, absolutely nothing at all! He’s just … we’re not together,’ I explain. Or, to be more accurate, I barely explain. So I go on. ‘Do you remember my friend Nora? We came to stay with you for a week one summer when we were fourteen or fifteen? Well, Olly’s her brother.’
Grandmother thinks about this for a moment. ‘Just because he’s somebody’s brother,’ she replies, tartly, ‘doesn’t mean he wouldn’t make a more-than-acceptable boyfriend.’
Which you can’t argue with, I suppose. And certainly I wouldn’t dare to argue with Grandmother, who – for all her Grace Kelly wedding attire – is actually a little more along the lines of one of her other screen idols, Katharine Hepburn, when it comes to spikiness. In fact, she’s dressed rather like Katharine Hepburn today herself, in splendid cream silk palazzo pants and a black kimono jacket and – I’m touched by this, given that we’re not as close as we could be – the beaded lariat necklace I made and sent her for her eighty-fifth birthday a few months ago. (I’m a jewellery designer, I should say, so this isn’t as home-crafty as it might sound.)
‘Anyhow, he couldn’t be any more unsuitable than … what was the name of that chap you’d just stopped seeing the last time I spoke to you?’ Grandmother asks. ‘The one who abandoned you in Mexico in the middle of an earthquake.’
‘It was Miami. And it was a hurricane.’ I can’t, unfortunately, correct her on the ‘abandoned’ part. ‘And his name was Dillon.’
‘Yes. Why should this nice Olly be any worse for you than a man who lets you face natural disasters on your own? You wouldn’t let Libby face a natural disaster on her own,’ she demands, of Olly, who – talk about timing – has just reappeared with three glasses of champagne, two of them impressively balanced in one hand, ‘would you?’
‘Sorry, Mrs Lomax?’
‘You wouldn’t leave Libby in Malaysia with a tidal wave approaching.’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ I say, hastily, before Olly twigs that we’re talking about Dillon. Because Olly and Dillon are not, in any way, shape or form, simpatico. ‘Thanks for the champagne, Ol. Can he get you anything else, Grandmother?’
‘No. But he can dance with me.’
She’s pointing an imperious finger in the direction of a very small octagonal dance floor that’s been laid down on what must usually be a patio. Music, from three exceptionally bored-looking members of a jazz trio, is emanating from right beside it.
‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Grandmother …’ Because I really don’t want her bearding poor Olly in her den and demanding to know exactly why it is that we aren’t a couple. He didn’t sign up for the third degree when he agreed to be my ‘date’ today, after all. ‘Nobody else has started dancing yet … and maybe Dad and Phoebe want to have a dance before anyone else …’
‘Well, I wanted a son who wouldn’t put me to shame by neglecting his duties as a father,’ Grandmother says, sharply, which is the very closest she ever comes to referencing the Great Unmentionable that is Dad’s history with me. ‘But we can’t always get what we want, Libby, can we?’ She hands me her champagne glass and turns to Olly. ‘So, shall we dance?’
Olly looks part-amused, part-terrified, but either way he doesn’t say no. He puts his own champagne glass down on one of the nearby trestle tables that feature the cold buffet nibbles, shoots me an eyebrow-raise, then extends his arm in a gentlemanly fashion for Grandmother to take as they stroll to the dance floor.
I watch in frozen fascination as they start to put together some surprisingly impressive moves. Surprising because Grandmother is an octogenarian with two artificial knees, and because I literally had no idea Olly could dance ‘properly’. The last time I saw him dance at all must have been at his parents’ big ruby anniversary party a few years back, but he ended up pretty drunk that night and capable of little more than cheerful bursts of (what I hoped at the time was) Dad Dancing.
Well, look at him go right now, wheeling Grandmother around that dance floor like a cross between Fred Astaire and Patrick Swayze. And, thank God, they’re dancing too energetically, by old-age-pensioner standards, anyway, for Grandmother to strike up a conversation, so with any luck I might be able to cut in and insist on a dance with Olly myself before she starts any embarrassing lines of questioning …
‘Libby.’
A voice, right behind me, makes me turn round.
