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‘That’s what you turned up for today, Jack. Were you expecting a hog roast? A cat’s birthday? Circumcision?’
‘Haha. You will never lose your ability to shock, E.T.’
This annoyed Edie, too. Unwed Jack never found her ‘shocking’. He found her interesting and funny. Now she was some filthy-mouthed unmarriageable outrageous oddball. Who nobody chose.
‘Anyway,’ Edie said, sweetly but briskly. ‘Time we went back inside. You can’t miss the most expensive party you’ll ever throw.’
‘Oh, Edie. C’mon.’
‘What?’
Edie was tense again, wondering why they were stood in the gloaming here together, wondering what this was about. She folded her arms.
‘I’m so glad you came, today. You don’t know how much. I’m happier to see you than pretty much anyone else.’
Apart from your bride? Edie thought, though she didn’t say it.
‘… Thank you.’
What else could she say?
‘Please don’t act as if we can’t be good mates now. Nothing’s changed.’
Edie had no idea what he meant. If they were always just good mates, then obviously marriage changed nothing. It struck her that she’d never understood Jack, and this was a problem.
While she hesitated over her response, Jack said: ‘I get it, you know. You think I’m a coward.’
‘What?
‘I go along with things that aren’t entirely me.’
‘… How do you mean?’
Edie knew this wasn’t the right thing to ask. This conversation was disloyal. Everything about this was grim. Jack had married someone else. He shouldn’t be saying treacherous things to a woman he worked with, by some shrubbery. There was nothing, and no one, here of value to be salvaged. She’d known for some time now he was a bad person, or at least a very weak one, and this behaviour only proved it.
But Jack was dangling the temptation of talking about things she’d wanted to talk about for so long.
‘Sometimes you don’t know what to do. You know?’ Jack shook his head and exhaled and scuffed the toe of a Paul Smith brogue on the grass.
‘Not really. Marrying is a pretty straightforward yes or no. They put it in the vows.’
‘I didn’t mean … that, exactly. Charlie’s great, obviously. I mean. All of this. Fuss. Oh, I don’t know.’
Edie sensed he was several degrees drunker than she’d first realised.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Edie said, with as little emotion as possible.
‘Edie. Stop being like this. I’m trying to tell you that you matter to me. I don’t think you know that.’
Edie had no reply to this and in the space where her answer should be, Jack murmured, ‘Oh, God,’ stepped forward, leaned down, and kissed her.
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She almost reeled with the surprise, feeling the soft brush of his freshly shaven jaw against hers and the pressure of his warm, beer-wet lips on hers. The ‘Jack kissing her’ information was so huge, it didn’t get through to her central cortex in one go. Full comprehension had to be delivered in stages.
1 1. Jack is kissing you. On his wedding day. This does not seem possible?! Yet early reports are it is DEFINITELY HAPPENING.
2 2. Is this going to last longer than a peck? Was it a mistake? Was he aiming for your cheek and missed?
3 3. OK no, this is definitely a KISS-kiss, what the hell? What the hell is he doing?
4 4. What the hell are YOU doing? You now appear to be responding. Is this definitely something you want to do? Please advise.
5 5. ADVISE. Urgent.
Seconds lasted an age. They’d kissed. Edie finally had a grasp of the magnitude of the situation, and her part in it, and pulled back.
There was movement to her right and she saw Charlotte behind them, her white dress glowing like exposed bone in the encroaching darkness. Jack turned, and saw her too. They made a bizarre tableau, for a split second, looking at each other. Like seeing the lightning crack and only hearing the thunder roll a second later.
‘Charlotte …’ Jack said. He was interrupted by screaming or, more accurately, a kind of low howling, emanating from the new Mrs Marshall. ‘Oh, Charlotte, we’re not …’
‘You fucking bastard! You utter fucking bastard!’ Charlotte screamed at Jack. ‘How could you do this to me? How could you fucking do this to me?! I hate you! You fuck—’ Charlotte sprang at him and began hitting and slapping him, while Jack tried to grab her wrists and stop her.
Edie watched blankly with a sudden, intense desire to vomit.
Earlier in the day, Louis had described his abhorrence at brides involved in procedural admin of any kind on their big day. They should float on stardust, and anything like work was earthbound and tawdry. ‘You shouldn’t see the ballet dancer sweat.’ Edie had thought he sounded like he’d swallowed a copy of The Lady.
However, there was something particularly aberrant about seeing someone in such glamorous, feminine attire having a full-tilt barney. There was Charlotte, hair in French roll, shimmering collarbones, princess skirt rustling like tissue, lamping her new husband with manicured hands, one of them bearing the giant sparkling engagement ring and fresh white-gold wedding band.
‘It wasn’t what it looked like!’ Edie said, hearing her voice say those words, as if listening to a stranger. It looked like what it was.
Charlotte paused momentarily in her grappling with Jack and snarled, her subtly made-up, lovely face contorted with rage: ‘Go to fucking hell you fucking bitch.’ There was no comma or exclamation mark in that statement, only certainty.
Edie wasn’t sure she’d heard Charlotte swear before. Edie realised she’d not moved from her position because of a strange conviction it’d make her ‘look guilty’ and she should stay and explain.
Having realised the lunacy of this idea, Edie finally moved. As she charged back towards the hotel, the first few people were looking over in curiosity and confusion as the voices drifted across the lawn.
OK, first things first, Edie was definitely going to be sick. Not in the general toilets; too conspicuous. She’d have to get to her room.
Edie dug the hotel key with the metal fob out of her bag with shaking hands as she did a quick swerve towards the main entrance. Fewer people to pass, that way.
Her only object right now was making sure she boaked the chicken dinner that was on its way back into the world into an appropriate receptacle. She knew after that a horrible, terrible, bleak immediate future would open up. One thing at a time.
As she bolted up flights of stairs, and along the quiet hotel corridors, it seemed impossible to Edie that time was still stubbornly linear, and that this alternative universe was in fact implacable reality. That there was no breaking a magic stopwatch open, twirling the hands and stopping this whole lurid saga from unfolding.
That Edie couldn’t un-decide her choice to walk out into the gardens. She couldn’t scroll back, like rewinding old video tape, and say something different to Jack, stalking away as soon as he started uttering gnomic, meaningful things. Or simply have stood somewhere that she could see Charlotte walking toward them, wedding gown draped over one arm, wondering why Jack was gossiping with Edie, wanting to tell him it was time to cut the cake.
No. Edie was the woman who kissed the groom on his wedding day, and there was no way of changing history. Right at that moment, if she had a Tardis, there was no way that Hitler was getting assassinated as a first item of business.
She burst into her deserted hotel room, its disarray reminding her it was so recently the scene of innocuous hair-straightening and full-length-mirror-checking and tea-with-UHT-milk-making. She locked the door and pulled at the handle, rattling it to make sure she was safe, kicking off her shoes.
Edie made it to the loo, held her hair out of the way and retched, once, twice, three times, and sat back up, wiping her mouth. When she came face to face with her reflection, arms braced on the sink, and could barely stand looking at herself.
The bargaining began.
Charlotte knew Jack had followed her, though? That he’d kissed her? But she couldn’t make that case. It was up to Jack to explain.
Edie thought about what was going to be said. She had to leave. Now. She made herself steady and check her watch: 9.14 p.m. Too late to get a train? Could she get a taxi? To London? At no notice? That would be insane money. Still, she’d pay it. Only she considered she’d have to pass through reception with her luggage when it arrived, a walk of shame if ever there was one.
There was only one option left: going to ground. Staying barricaded in here.
The size of what had occurred kept roaring up, fresh waves breaking against her. The disco reverberated below, the tinny squeals and squelches of Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’ mocking her predicament. Time goes by, so slowly.
This was now a horror film, where the arterial splatters and screams are ironically juxtaposed with the sitcom laughter track of whatever show the unwitting victim had been watching.
Edie wrung her hands and ground her teeth and paced the room and vacillated about going back down and facing people down, shouting, ‘It was him!’ while knowing nothing could dissolve the Dark Mark now upon her.
When she risked peeping out of the window, the gardens were spookily empty.
It was impossible not to look online, as much as she didn’t want to, with every fibre of her being. On her four-poster bed, she sat staring grimly at the moon glow of her phone. Every time she clicked, she thought she might be sick again. So far, nothing.
The calm before the storm. Tagged photos of the aisle walk, or smiling, signing the register, a status from Charlotte saying, ‘Champagne for my nerves!’ with scores of Likes. What would people say? What was happening downstairs?
‘Edie? Edie!’ a sudden hammering of a fist at the door had her fear-pulsing heart stretching right out of her chest, like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
‘Edie, it’s Louis. You better let me in.’
It was only then that Edie realised the music had stopped.
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Louis’s unusually twitchy demeanour did nothing to make Edie less panicked. She hoped against hope he’d sail in and say, It’s blown over, what are you doing up here?
She let him pass, walking on weak, pipe cleaner legs and re-locked the door behind him, as if there really was a murderer loose in The Swan. Louis surveyed her as if suddenly in the presence of a notorious individual. He put his hands on his hips, under his suit jacket.
‘Er. So. What the HELL happened?’
‘Oh God, what’s everyone saying happened?!’ Edie wailed.
‘Jack and Charlotte,’ Louis paused, unable to keep himself from the stagey pause, as if he was announcing the winner on a talent show, ‘they’ve split up.’
Edie gasped and sat back down on the edge of the bed, to steady herself. She was trembling, almost juddering. She knew she’d ruined their wedding day. But to cause them to separate, during it? It didn’t seem feasible. It wasn’t a thing that could happen.
‘This can’t be real,’ she mumbled.
‘Charlotte’s gone back to her parents’ house,’ Louis said, enjoying himself now. ‘And Jack’s somewhere here I think, holed up with a bottle of whisky and his stag-do lads. There was a screaming match, total hysteria. It was chaos. Charlotte threw her wedding ring at him.’
Edie closed her eyes and held on to a bed post with a clammy palm, as the room swam and shifted. ‘What are they saying about me?’
‘That Charlotte caught you together. That you’ve been having an affair.’
‘We haven’t been having an affair!’
‘What happened then?’ Louis said.
It was the first time Edie had recounted it out loud and she hesitated.
‘I went into the garden and … he kissed me. Just for a moment.’
‘Wait, are you saying you weren’t shagging?’
Edie’s jaw fell open. ‘Shagging? No?! Of course not! How could we have been … Are you winding me up?’
‘Some people are saying you were, you know. At it. Or on the way to being at it.’
Edie knew Louis was prone to exaggeration and amping up drama but she had no way of telling if this was what he was doing. She could well imagine the Chinese whispers were out of control. As if the truth wasn’t terrible enough.
‘We were only a few yards from the hotel!’
‘Yeah, I did think that’s more the sort of encounter that happens on a car bonnet, after midnight. And usually, y’know. Not with the groom. So he kissed you?’
Edie nodded.
‘But you are having an affair, yeah?’
‘No!’
Oh God, this was agony. Everyone thinking the last thing she’d want them to think, ever. If she could be granted the option of being forced to streak, instead of this kind of exposure, she might just take it.
‘Erm, OK, darl. So out of the blue, Jack was like, “Are you enjoying my wedding day oh and also my tongue”?’
‘He started saying I meant a lot as a friend, he was very pissed I think, and the next minute he’s kissing me.’
‘And you didn’t kiss him back?’
‘No! Hardly. I mean, I was shocked.’
‘Mmm. Kind of odd you were hanging around out there alone? How did he find you? Sure you hadn’t texted him?’
‘I’d gone to take a photo. I can show you the photo!’ Edie waved her phone at him. ‘Also, no texts on here!’ As if there’d be a court case, and she could put her phone in a Ziploc evidence bag. It was the court of public opinion. She’d do much better from the former kind of trial.
‘Louis, think about it,’ Edie pleaded. ‘Why today, of all days, would I try to get off with him?’
‘Why would he try something like this, out of nowhere? You’re leaving something out, Edie. You must be.’
‘We messaged at work. Chatted. That was all. We were friends. Nothing more.’
‘You flirted?’
