As Janice gets a bit bigger, she starts to feel sicker, so I stay at her flat until the day of the wedding, only popping to George’s for recipe books and to feed the cats. Anyway, I’d rather not be at theirs at the moment. After all, it is bad luck for the bride to see the groom before the wedding. And the last thing I need is a visit from the Home Office.
I also hope that the constant company and girlie chatter will take my mind off Sam. But it’s wishful thinking. After three days of convincing myself I hate him, I decide I have to try and talk to him.
Because I don’t hate him. Not at all. And I can’t bear to leave it like this.
I slope round the corner to his house and ring the bell. I push my hands in my pockets. I can’t help being nervous. My heart is lodged in the pit of my stomach and I feel sick.
It takes him forever to open the door. But finally, I hear footsteps in the hall and the door is pulled open.
By Pussy.
‘Oh.’
‘Hi.’ She smiles sweetly.
‘Er. Hi.’
‘Did you want something?’
‘Is Sam here?’
‘No,’ she smiles again, ‘he’s out.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘Did he tell you we’re back together?’ she asks.
‘No.’
I feel as though I’ve been kicked. In the stomach and from behind. The shock of hearing that Sam’s gone running straight back to Pussy is almost too much to bear. He can’t have loved me at all if he can do that.
Can he?
I don’t bother to say anything else to Pussy. Can’t even hide how upset I am. I leave, with tears in my eyes, a lump the size of Jupiter in my throat and my dignity in tatters. Then I leg it back to Janice’s without even stopping at the Dog Shop for chocolate and fags.
One look at my face sends Janice waddling to the Dog Shop for chocolate and fags.
‘Bastard,’ she says when I tell all.
‘Bloody bastard,’ I agree.
‘Bloody, fucking bastard.’ She wipes my face with a hanky. ‘I really didn’t think he was like that.’
‘Of course he’s like that.’ I slurp at my teary top lip and have a good blow. ‘He’s a bloody bastard bloke.’
‘True enough.’
On the morning of my wedding to David, Janice and I watch videos to calm my nerves, a glass of Bolly each in one hand and a handful of caramel popcorn in the other. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, on the other hand, is slapping lurid zebra-striped wall-paper all over the oak-beamed walls of an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Shropshire.
‘Not wishing it was a case of Changing Grooms, are you?’ Janice squeezes my hand.
‘Changing Wombs, more like,’ I blurt. ‘I’ve got period pain like you wouldn’t bloody believe. I must be the only bride in living history to be jamming on her wedding night.’
‘Just as well the groom will be spending it shagging someone else, isn’t it?’ She giggles. ‘You can swap wombs with me if you like. Mine’s getting a bit full.’
‘Still, I’d rather be marrying David than that chintz-loving, frock-coated twit any day.’ I nod in the direction of the telly and take a huge gulp of champagne as if to quash any doubts I might still be having.
‘So would I,’ Janice admits. ‘No regrets then?’
‘No regrets,’ I say. ‘I’ve never kept a New Year’s resolution in my life, so I don’t see why I should start now. And I’m not really getting married, you know. Not in the true “strap a mattress to my back and tie me to the kitchen sink with a wooden spoon in my hand” sense of the word. In theory, I’ll still be Young, Free and Single.’
‘Old, Feckless and Stupid, more like.’ Janice smiles, taking a big swig of her own champers (‘one glass only, mind’) and turning her attention back to the screen, where Linda Barker is rough-plastering the kitchen walls of a tenth-floor council flat in Ilford with a fetching terracotta colour to make it look like the interior of a Tuscan villa.
‘But I wasn’t talking about you getting married.’ Janice puts an arm round my shoulders. ‘You know what I mean. I’m not talking about breaking your daft resolutions. I’m asking if you’re wishing you’d held out a bit longer for Mr Diet Coke Break?’
‘You mean Sam?’
‘Exactly. Or someone like him.’
‘Not really,’ I tell her. ‘At least I found out what he was like. I can’t believe he just went straight back to that stupid little cat. Anyway, I’m doing my bit for true love, keeping David in the country so that he and George can be together. David’s the first person George has loved you know, apart from himself. And his mum. It would be so unfair if he was thousands of miles away cracking open cold tinnies on a beach on his own.’