White Wedding by Milly Johnson Read Free Book Online

Bel.
    ‘Oh. Right.’ Bel heard Pip’s pronounced gulp.
    ‘Can it be done?’
    ‘Yes . . . yes, of course. If that’s what you want.’
    ‘It’s what I want,’ said Bel.
    ‘Definitely?’
    ‘Oh absolutely,’ said Bel. ‘You’ll do it?’
    ‘I will if that’s really really what you want.’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    ‘Well, then, I’ll do it,’ agreed Pip, still not sounding convinced. She had done cakes for some wild and wacky occasions but this one would take the biscuit.
    After Bel ended the call, she scratched hard at the skin on her arms where it had grown increasingly flaky over the past few weeks, like a nervous-eczema flare-up. She’d be a pile of
powder by the time she got married at this rate. They might as well cut to the chase and do the ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ service.
    The house phone rang again, just as she turned away from it.
    ‘Hello, darling,’ trilled the merry voice of her stepmother.
    ‘Hi, Faye,’ returned Bel.
    ‘I thought I’d let you know, I’ve just picked up my outfit for the wedding. It had to be taken in a bit at the waist – I must have lost weight.’
    ‘That’s nice,’ said Bel, wishing she could get off the line to open a very early bottle of red wine.
    ‘And Aunt Vanoushka will be in Dior.’
    Step-Aunt Vanoushka. Owner of a barn conversion with five bedrooms, each with an en-suite (which she pronounced enn-suit), as she told everyone, and a hot tub in her Swedish garden summer house.
Every pretension that it was possible to have, Aunt Vanoushka had it, from her Louis Vuitton set of luggage to her garden ‘moat’, which encircled a small island where she’d had a
dovecote erected. She had a Lhasa Apso stud dog called Arctic Master of the Polar Hunt for the Sun – which made as much sense to Bel as the lyrics to ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’.
Thanks to the three tons of Botox she’d had injected into her head, Vanoushka’s expression would remain the same if she lost all her shares in a market crash or won the Euromillions
lottery. And recently she’d had her lips so inflated that she could have rented them out as a bouncy castle. It wasn’t hard to see what Shaden was going to turn out like in twenty-five
years’ time.
    There was no doubt that Vanoushka would have another expensive top-up of rubber-face before the wedding. Something Bel was trying hard not to think about: how much time and money were being
spent on her behalf for this wedding. But if she didn’t push such thoughts to the back of her mind, she would never be able to do what she had to do.
    ‘Dior? Oh will she?’ Bel attempted to sound impressed.
    ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you arrange things?’
    ‘No, it’s all done, thank you,’ said Bel, wishing she had a pound for every time Faye had asked her that question. She knew how much Faye would have loved to help her; but Bel
was independence personified and had insisted on doing everything herself. Plus, Faye wasn’t the real mother of the bride. That woman had been snatched away from her baby daughter and it
would have been the ultimate betrayal to her mother to have another woman step in and help with table plans and menu choices. If her real mother wasn’t around to help, no one else would
do.
    ‘Okay, darling,’ said Faye, managing to cover ninety-five per cent of her disappointment. ‘We’ll see you for the family dinner on Thursday, then. Just call me if you need
anything.’ She emphasized the last word and she meant it.
    Bel knew she had been unfair to Faye over the years. Her stepmother had done nothing other than be a secretary who had fallen in love with her widowed boss, then married him after a whirlwind
romance and been kind to his daughter.
    Bel went upstairs and opened her large French wardrobe door to look at her mother’s beautiful dress hanging there, freshly dry-cleaned for her by Faye, altered to fit her small waist and
waiting for her to wear. It was so beautiful: a dress