The Best Thing I Never Had (24 page)

Leigha and Sukie were sharing the space in front of an age-spotted mirror, smoothing away invisible imperfections with their hair and makeup. Nicky focused on her hands again, her pale white hands on her soft white dress and the darkness of the parquet floor beyond.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, such an innocuous question. The three pairs of eyes swivelled to her expectantly. ‘Do you guys… like Miles?’

There was a moment of bemused silence as her question sunk in, before the protests started, each girl talking over the two others.

‘What a stupid question,’ Sukie scoffed.

‘Miles is great!’ insisted Harriet.

‘Of course we do! Why are you asking this?’ said Leigha, with a shrewd look. ‘You’re not getting cold feet are you?’ Leigha’s eyes widened as Nicky hefted her shoulders in a miserable shrug. Sukie laughed mirthlessly.

‘I’ll go back up to the room and get Demi’s car keys,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘And we’ll make a dash for the borders, eh? Or maybe we can get you a horse Nic? Julia Roberts in
Runaway Bride
style.’ Leigha shot her an impatient look. ‘What?’ Sukie said, defensively. ‘Go big or go home, right? Anyway, it’s only a joke…’ Sukie’s protestations faded away at the sight of Nicky’s expression. ‘You are joking, aren’t you Nic?’

‘I’ve just been thinking…’ Nicky managed, her voice reedy.

‘Bit bloody late for that!’ Sukie frowned. A silent Harriet put all her fingers to her lips, her eyes full of concern.

‘Maybe I… maybe I shouldn’t have gone away, with Miles, after graduation,’ Nicky continued, still staring down at her white dress. In her peripherals though, she caught all three girls exchanging worried looks. ‘Maybe I should have gone to France.’

‘Yeah, Nic, maybe,’ Leigha said, carefully. ‘But you did. You did move away with him.’

‘Come on, what’s this really about?’ asked Sukie.

‘Do you not love him?’ questioned Harriet.

The starkness of the question pulled Nicky up short. Of course she did, of course she did. ‘Of course I do,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s just… I’ve been thinking,’ she repeated. Again, those askance looks between the other girls.

‘So you said,’ said Harriet, warily. ‘But Nic, that Wedding March is going to start in about five minutes, so you’d better think fast.’

‘Do you need me to go stall? Talk to Miles?’ offered Leigha.

‘Do you need me to get working getting on that horse?’ asked Sukie, unhelpfully.

‘Where has this come from, in all seriousness?’ pressed Harriet.

‘It’s just…’ Nicky began, frustrated at how tongue-tied she was. ‘I can’t help but realise, especially lately, that… Miles met this girl, right? This nineteen year old, who had dreams and friends and went out and had fun and had interesting things to talk about.’ Now the dam was broached, the words were falling out of her in a nonsensical rush. ‘And now he’s about to marry me, this twenty-six year old, who hates where she lives, hates her job. I have no friends, I never go anywhere, never get to do anything. I‘m nothing like the girl he met.’

‘Oh, Nicky, you have friends,’ Sukie protested, shocked into uncharacteristic gentleness by Nicky’s words. Nicky uttered a little scoff of disbelief.

‘I haven’t seen you two for years. I’m lucky if I get a Happy Birthday on Facebook, or a forwarded email joke.’ She looked searchingly at Leigha and Sukie as she spoke. Her words were plain but without malice. ‘And I see you, Harry, what, once a year?’ Harriet opened her mouth in protest but Nicky kept talking. ‘And I know, it’s my fault. I moved away and I made my whole life about Miles and I never made an effort to see you guys. And now, now I have no life
but
Miles. And it’s just that I’ve been thinking…’ Nicky’s voice had dropped to a murmur, ‘that that’s not a very good reason to be marrying someone. Because they’re all you have, I mean.’

The room lapsed into silence, the noise from the chapel beyond the door swelling to fill it. Wordlessly, Leigha lifted one of Nicky’s cold hands and held it between her own. ‘Oh, Nic,’ was all she said.

‘Who wants to get married so young these days anyway?’ Nicky continued, blustering now, the embarrassment at being so honest starting to ache.

‘I want to,’ said Sukie, simply, surprising them all. ‘I’d love to have what you have, Nicky, what you’ve had for years. You are so lucky.’

‘You two have been loved up for so long,’ Leigha agreed.

‘Real, grown-up love, from the very beginning,’ Harriet said. ‘And you may hate your job and you may hate your flat, but you can’t tell me that you hate Miles.’

‘No,’ Nicky agreed, squeezing her eyelids tight; she refused to get weepy and send her mascara smearing; what a cliché. ‘I love him.’

‘It’s not his fault that you’ve made your life so small, Nic hun,’ Leigha said gently. ‘Have you ever even talked to him about how you feel?’

‘No,’ Nicky admitted. ‘I didn’t… I don’t want to upset him.’

‘Now his PhD is over, can you guys come back to London? Can you maybe look into a teacher training course?’ Sukie asked.

‘I guess I always thought we’d discuss these things, you know, once his PhD was over,’ Nicky said. ‘But since he handed his thesis in, he’s not really said a word.’

‘Aside from to ask you to marry him,’ Sukie pointed out, bringing a small smile to Nicky’s face.

‘Apart from that,’ she conceded. ‘He’s just really happy where he is. I just… don’t want it to be 2007 all over again, where I’m worried I’m going to lose him because we don’t want the same things.’

‘Maybe he’s only happy up in Bath because he thinks you’re happy,’ Harriet reasoned. ‘You really need to talk to him.’

‘You really should have talked to him before,’ Sukie pointed out. ‘You see this? And this?’ She gestured to Nicky’s wedding dress and at the door to the chapel beyond. ‘This is D-Day, Nic.’

‘Nicky, you are so lucky to have Miles,’ Leigha reiterated Sukie’s earlier words. ‘Out of all the millions of people in this country, the millions and millions of people in the world, and you find someone you can love, and he loves you too? That’s like magic at work. And you’ve already come through so much, the two of you. I wouldn’t be your friend – we, wouldn’t be your friends – if we let you be silly now.’

‘But, equally,’ Harriet said, ‘we’re happy to smuggle you out the back door and deal with the aftermath for you. If that’s what you really want.’

‘If that’s what you really want,’ Sukie echoed.

The noise in the chapel reached a different pitch, the air was charged with a new expectancy; Miles and his groomsmen must have taken their place at the altar. Harriet reached for Nicky’s free hand, Leigha kept hold of the other.

‘Listen,’ Sukie said, with urgency. ‘I know I’m no loss to the world of public speaking and I know I’m not being much help. It’s not that I’m particularly mad for Miles myself, I mean, I certainly wouldn’t marry him. No offence.’ Nicky managed a weak smile.

‘Well I haven’t married him. Not yet.’

‘But I really don’t see that you can blame him for your being unhappy,’ Sukie continued. Leigha nodded in agreement.

‘You’re just stuck in a rut,’ she said. Nicky laughed.

‘In films,’ she said, tone exaggeratedly critical, ‘the minute the bride starts saying she’s not sure, the bridesmaids all rally round, tell her they’ve always thought the groom is a prick, and that she’s doing the right thing to call it off.’

The three bridesmaids looked at one another uncertainly.

‘Well, we don’t think Miles is a prick…’ Leigha said. ‘He’s a good man. He’s always been good to you. Good
for
you.’

‘So we don’t think calling it off is the right thing to do,’ added Harriet.

‘We think you’re having a funny five minutes. At the worst possible time.’ Sukie moved closer and put one hand where Leigha grasped Nicky’s left hand and the other where Harriet was holding her right. ‘Okay, you’re not happy with the way your life has gone.’

‘Who is, these days? Completely, anyway?’ Harriet added quietly.

‘But the thing is, Nic, it was all your choices that lead to this life you‘re living,’ Sukie said, not unkindly.

‘And if you’re now making the choice to… you know… make different choices, better choices?’ said Leigha, pulling a cross-eyed face at the inelegance of her phrasing. ‘Then that’s fantastic. But right now, the choice you’ve got to make is whether or not you want Miles in your life.’

‘Because he loves you, sweetie, you’re everything to him,’ Harriet said. ‘But you can’t just leave him waiting at the altar and expect him to be okay with that. This is a big deal.’

Nicky was silent, staring down at the triangle of hands. Although she had provided the bridesmaids’ dresses, the girls had been told to wear whatever shoes they wanted. Harriet wore traditional nude-coloured peep-toes, Leigha stilettos in a cartoonish, high-gloss red and Sukie in patent black wedges with a clasped bar ringing her ankle. Such disparate personalities, how had these girls ever been such close friends? It seemed so unreal, so long ago, like a story she’d once been told, rather than something she had lived, back in that house of fairy tale yellow.

Nicky’s bridal shoes too seemed to speak volumes, plain white with a respectable heel, so obvious, without a shred of personality, like she wasn’t really a bride at all, just done up as one for fancy dress.

‘Listen,’ Sukie said, impatience creeping back into her voice as time continued to slip away and Nicky still stood in a stricken silence. ‘The way I see it, right, you have three options, yeah? Option number one. Just carry on. Go out there, marry Miles, and go on not telling him how you feel or not doing anything for yourself. Maintain the status quo, if you will.’

Nicky pulled a face to show exactly how unappealing option number one was.

‘I thought not. Option two,’ Sukie continued. ‘We get you out the back door and onto any mode of transport – vehicle or equine – you desire. You don’t marry Miles. You probably only ever see him again to argue about which one of you gets to keep the cat.’

‘We don’t have a cat,’ Nicky protested feebly, but her expression was sick with horror at the finality of said second option. Sukie waved her hand dismissively.

‘Whatever. You get the point. Option number three. Marry Miles and then, you know, talk to him. Job hunt. Ley will help you, she can market and sell most anything.’ Leigha beamed encouragingly. ‘Visit us more. We’ll visit you. Make new friends, go new places, yadda, yadda, yadda. You know?’ Sukie raised her hands expansively. ‘Be happy and also be with Miles. They’re not mutually exclusive, no matter what you’re thinking at the moment.’

‘You all – all three of you – independently told me that I was making a mistake moving to Bath with Miles after third year,’ Nicky told them, staring at them accusingly, each in turn.

‘Yes Nic, we did, but you
did
move to Bath. Not because Miles gave you an ultimatum, because – very reasonably – he was willing to go long distance…’

‘That’s right,’ Leigha nodded.

‘But because you
loved him
so goddamn much that you couldn’t be apart from him,’ Harriet concluded. ‘So what the hell has happened there?’

The soft knock at the door sounded like rapid-fire gunshot; all four girls jumped out of their skins. The blonde events coordinator poked her inappropriately sunny face around the door.

‘We all ready to go in here?’ she asked, cheerily.

Nicky looked away from her, looked back down at her perfect white shoes, so stark against the darkness of the parquet tiled flooring. She pictured Miles waiting, just a short walk away, handsome and tall in his grey morning suit, Adam and Johnny standing flank with yellow carnations in their buttonholes and soft smiles on their faces.

And she realised – just in time – that although she would change almost everything about her life if she could, she wouldn’t change Miles. And so there was her answer.

‘Yes,’ she told the woman, her voice surprisingly clear. ‘One minute.’ The woman nodded and slipped away, leaving the door ajar; the noise from the chapel beyond buzzed demandingly.

‘Thank fuck for that,’ Sukie said bluntly.

Leigha pressed her palms to her collarbones. ‘You really had me worried there.’

‘I’m so sorry you got like this, Nic,’ Harriet said, squeezing her hand. ‘You should have told me. To be fair, I should have asked,’ she conceded.

‘You really must talk to him sooner rather than later,’ Leigha said sternly. ‘Don’t put it off. Or else we’ll be forced to tell him, and we won’t pull no punches.’ Harriet and Sukie nodded in mute agreement.

‘I will,’ Nicky swore. Her fingers flew to her throat as the unmistakeable opening chords to the Wedding March resounded from beyond the chapel door. Harriet squeezed her hand again.

‘You okay?’ she asked. Nicky nodded. ‘Are you sure?’ Harriet pressed, and Nicky didn’t know if she meant about being okay, or marrying Miles.

‘Yes,’ she said aloud, because it was the answer to both.

‘Bugger me,’ murmured Leigha, poised to be first out the door and down the aisle. She carefully gathered up her little white and yellow bouquet from its nearby vase. ‘Quite nervy, this, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, wish we had a hip-flask,’ Sukie said, for the second time.

With a flash of a smile over her shoulder, Leigha slipped out of the door and away. With one final, searching look at Nicky, Sukie followed suit. Harriet’s grasp loosened and dropped away as she completed the triad of bridesmaids moving at a stately pace down the aisle.

With one final deep breath Nicky collected her large bouquet and centred it on her torso as she stepped through the door. A hundred pairs of eyes swivelled to face her, cameras flashing, murmurs hushed. The already cacophonous music seemed to amplify, to swell, even though Nicky knew that it wasn’t possible.

Leigha was just reaching the altar and was moving into position to stand opposite the front pew. Nicky focused on emulating her elegant gait; right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, listening to the tempo of the music:
Here, comes, the bride, all, dressed, in white.

She was about halfway when Miles suddenly turned in his place to see her, almost guiltily, as if he’d been told by someone that he wasn’t allowed to look at her until she’d arrived beside him at the end of the aisle. His smile as he took her in was ten times brighter than any memory of yellow walls, any fantasy of French sunsets.