Married by Christmas by Scarlett Bailey Read Free Book Online

wrong, believing that if she thought of it first, somehow she would stop it happening. There had been only two things in Anna’s life that she had failed to see coming. Her mother disappearing and her fiancé already being married to a Vegas showgirl.
    This was her fault, she told herself, she didn’t have a good enough imagination.
    ‘No, no thank you,’ Anna said blankly, looking at an equally shocked Liv, who was mutely holding her hand, her jaw set tight in an expression of repressed anger, seething to be free, most likely in the form of a swift steel-toe-capped-boot kick to Tom’s more vulnerable parts. Tom sat across from them both, on the opposite side of the table, his palms facing down as he studied the surface intently, struggling to know where to begin, while Martha sat back in her chair, sucking on the end of a biro, like Mae West brandishing one of those old-fashioned long cigarette holders.
    ‘I was twenty-two when it happened,’ Tom began eventually, feeling obliged to fill the leaden silence. ‘Just graduated from uni, full of all these big ideas of how I was going to change to world with my novel. Win the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Nobel.’ He attempted to meet Anna’s eye line and failed, as she continued to examine the tiniest details of the paper napkin that she was folding and refolding with her free hand. ‘You know, Anna. I’ve told you how I wanted to be a novelist, that I never really meant to get into journalism at all, it just sort of happened. Well, back then I was full of it, full of myself and my incredible talent and I knew that I was going to be the next big thing in the literary world, I knew it. Trouble was I didn’t really have much to write about, what with my growing up a vicar’s son in rural Buckinghamshire. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to me was getting so drunk one Saturday night that I fell off a windmill and broke two ribs.’ The briefest hint of a smile crossed Tom’s face before he remembered the exact level of the trouble he was in and continued his story. ‘So, anyway, I decided to have an adventure, strike out on my own, go and search out life and make it happen. I wanted to be crazy, and wild, like all the best writers. I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Brett Easton Ellis, you know. In my head I wasn’t a nice, middle-class Home Counties English boy, I was American and edgy. And so I saved up for a summer, worked in a pub, took out my savings and caught a plane to LA. My plan was to travel across America, take in the sights and sounds, live a little bit dangerously, become a man, I suppose.’ Tom sucked in his bottom lip. ‘To be honest I was a bit of a pretentious dickhead.’
    ‘He so was,’ Martha interjected, cheerfully, pointing her pen at Anna. ‘We went out together for a bit. It was like dating Kafka. All style over substance, darling.’
    Anna opened her mouth and then closed it again. Nothing he was saying made any sense. It was as if she were listening to a completely different person talking from the one that she thought she knew. Tom had never even mentioned his trip to America, let alone his marriage, his showgirl bride. He had never said
anything
about it at all. There hadn’t been one single clue that could have flagged up the possibility that this might have happened. Not even when Anna had told him she was adding Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’ to the DJ’s playlist. How was it possible that her laid-back, easy-going, happy-go-lucky boyfriend, who loved footy and kick-boxing, and Sunday afternoons in the pub, and very occasionally a spot of hang-gliding off the Chilterns, could have neglected to mention a wife. Until now? A mere week before their wedding.
    Wedding, Anna thought to herself, gripping Liv’s hand even harder. There would be no wedding now. How could there be?
    ‘Anyway.’ Tom paused, steeling himself for the next part of the story. ‘I met up with some other travellers in LA and they