The House on Willow Street. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ of man would assume that she’d be happy to be at his wedding to the woman for whom he’d dumped her? But perhaps Jack could assume that.

      She hadn’t had tantrums when he’d left. She’d taken it like a grown-up. Dignity was the preserve of the ordinary girl, she’d decided.

      ‘Why isn’t it me here tonight?’ she asked now as, from inside, she could hear the wedding band strike up another tune.

      ‘Ah, Mara, now’s not the time for this—’ Jack began.

      He had his tormented face on. Mara knew his every expression. The sallow handsome face could take on so many different looks, and she’d seen them all.

      ‘Now is exactly the time,’ she said quietly. ‘Tell me – what does she have that I haven’t?’

      The instant the question was out, she regretted it. The answer could have been eight years, bought breasts and much longer legs.

      Jack reached into the jacket of his suit and took out a single cigarette. He was supposed to have given up. Tawhnee was very anti-smoking. Nothing had convinced Mara that she’d lost him as much as Jack’s agreeing not to smoke any more. If Tawhnee could do that, she could do anything.

      ‘It’s only the one,’ he muttered, cradling his fingers around a match to light the cigarette, then inhaling like a drowning man reaching the surface.

      ‘You’re a great girl, Mara …’ he said.

      ‘Why do I think there’s a but coming?’ she said with a hint of bitterness.

      ‘You know me so well,’ he said, laughing softly.

      ‘Not well enough, apparently.’

      ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with Tawhnee,’ Jack said, after he’d smoked at least half of the cigarette.

      ‘It just happened,’ Mara said. ‘That is such a cliché, Jack.’

      ‘That’s me: Mr Cliché,’ he joked.

      ‘Very funny. So what’s the BUT. The but that I don’t have.’

      She wanted him to say it. Because you were never The One, Mara. Because I was continually looking over your shoulder and then Tawhnee came along … She wanted him to tell the truth instead of the lies he clearly had been spouting when they were together.

      ‘There’s no “but”. You’re perfect,’ Jack said.

      ‘If I’m perfect, why didn’t you stay with me?’

      ‘I don’t know. She came to work for us, she’s stunning – not that you’re not stunning too,’ Jack said hastily.

      ‘You told me you liked the way I looked, and then you go and fall in love with a woman who is the complete opposite of me,’ she said. Except for the boobs, she thought grimly. In addition to her supermodel sleekness and legs up to the armpits, Tawhnee had gravity-defying boobs. The office women were convinced that Tawhnee had had a boob job. The office men didn’t care.

      Jack said nothing.

      Mara wasn’t to be deflected. ‘I want to know why,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Why you’ve married Tawhnee when, despite two years with me, you never even so much as asked me what I thought about marriage? It’s because I wasn’t the one, isn’t it? I was simply the one you could play around with while you waited for her to show up.’

      It wasn’t as if Mara had been pinning her hopes on a wedding, but the longer she went out with Jack, the more she began to think that such an event might happen one day. She was sure that he loved her as much as she loved him. That Jack Taylor, a man who could have any woman he wanted, had really chosen a petite red-head who’d thought she was ordinary for years until she’d met him, and he’d told her she was special. She’d begun to believe all the things he’d said.

      That she was the sexiest woman he’d ever met. And the funniest. And the most beautiful … Except he’d never asked her to marry him.

      Four months after she’d found out he was cheating on her, he’d announced his engagement to Tawhnee. Today, a mere two months later, they were married.

      ‘You didn’t talk about marriage either,’ he bleated. ‘I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who’s into all that sort of thing’.

      ‘What gave you that idea?’

      Jack had one last card. ‘Tawhnee said she wanted to get married. She said it on our first date.’

      ‘Really?’ said Mara, sigh and word wrapped into one.

      Was that what it would have taken? If Mara had told Jack she was the marrying kind of girl, instead of the let’s-go-to-bed-and-have-fun sort of girl, would it have been her today in the long white dress?

      ‘Give me that cigarette.’

      She plucked it from his fingers and took a long drag. She wasn’t actually a smoker, not really. When they’d been together, she’d had a few when they were out partying. Liking the idea of taking a cigarette from his mouth. It was such an intimate thing to do. But tonight, she wanted to do something self-destructive, and letting nicotine hit her was the only thing to hand. She’d promised herself she would not drink too much: to turn into the drunken ex at a wedding would be too humiliating.

      She coughed and felt her guts loosen.

      ‘Yeuch.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on the balustrade.

      ‘I hadn’t finished with that!’ wailed Jack.

      Mara patted his cheek. ‘That’s precisely what I said to Tawhnee, but hey, that’s life.’

      Mara left him standing there. She collected her handbag from her chair, and smiled at the people at her table. They were colleagues from work and most of them had been so sweet to her.

      ‘Jack’s a fool,’ Pat from accounts said for about the fifth time that evening.

      ‘I’d go out with you tomorrow,’ slurred Henry, who sold higher class properties because he’d been to all the right schools and looked immaculate in navy pinstripe.

      His wife, a frosted blonde who was equally posh and very kind, slapped him gently. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry. What about me?’

      ‘You could come too,’ Henry said happily.

      ‘I’m going to head off,’ Mara interrupted, before Henry could get on to the subject of threesomes.

      ‘Good plan,’ said Veronica, who worked with Mara and had her junior doctor fiancé in tow. He was asleep in his chair and someone had put a garland of flowers on his head. ‘You’ve done your bit.’ She got up to hug Mara. ‘We all think you’re so brave for coming,’ she whispered. ‘At least you’ve got two weeks before they’re back from honeymoon. Apparently, Tawhnee will carry on working with Jack for the next year, so you’ve got some breathing space to get your head around it all.’

      Mara inhaled sharply. ‘Nobody told me that.’

      Tawhnee СКАЧАТЬ