‘I believed him, Cait,’ said Marnie, tears racing up to her eyes. ‘He was so convincing. There’s no love without trust. So I trusted him.’
‘You’ve trusted them all,’ said Caitlin, wearily. ‘Don’t you have any BS detector? Haven’t you learned anything from being dumped on over and over again?’
‘Do any of us?’ Marnie returned, a little annoyed at Caitlin’s judgement. ‘Maybe we only see it for other people, Cait.’ They’d always said to each other that it was the world’s easiest thing to give advice but much harder to take it. In the past they’d accepted they weren’t the wisest girls when it came to men. One of Caitlin’s exes left his own engagement party to nip over for a bonk with her before racing back to it FFS. She hadn’t had a clue that he was even seeing anyone else.
‘But this is stupid,’ Caitlin came back at her. ‘You must have known. The signs were obvious. More than obvious. Even to someone in a coma. Don’t lie to yourself and me. You knew.’
‘He said he and his wife were consciously uncoupling. I might have been frustrated about the lack of speed of that process, but no – I didn’t know.’
‘Did you question him properly? No – you didn’t, because you didn’t want to face up to what you really knew. You never do. You don’t learn. No wonder I—’
She pulled up her sentence short and shook her head, continued down another path. ‘You’ve caused untold damage now, to yourself and others.’
Untold damage? Since when did Caitlin Tyler say untold damage? But Marnie was more concerned with what Caitlin had been about to say after the ‘no wonder’ line.
‘No wonder I what?’ she looped the conversation back to it. ‘What were you going to say?’
Caitlin shrugged. Then she looked at her watch. Then she stood up from the sofa, carefully, like a model afraid that a paparazzo would shoot his camera up her skirt. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m going to have to go . . .’
‘No wonder I what?’ Marnie was insistent. ‘Just tell me.’
Caitlin sighed, then looked Marnie straight in the eye and quirked a perfect left brow, as far as the Botox would allow her to.
‘Okay then, I was going to say . . . no wonder I didn’t bring Grigori with me.’
What did that even mean, thought Marnie.
‘Grigori? What’s he got to do with any of this?’
Caitlin’s hands fell onto her hips in a stance of meaning business.
‘Marnie, you aren’t interested in men unless they have some complication, some baggage. Think about it – every one of them,’ Caitlin picked up her handbag, a very nice Lulu Guinness with a pair of red lips as a clasp, not unlike the lips on Caitlin’s face, which were plumper than Marnie remembered them ever being before.
‘And what the hell has that to do with Grig—’ Then the icky penny dropped. ‘Oh please, tell me that you’re not suggesting I’d be after Grigori. Please don’t tell me you keep us apart because you’re afraid I’d try and steal him from under your nose.’ Marnie let loose a shriek of disbelieving laughter, expecting Caitlin’s to join it. Expecting Caitlin to tell her not to be so bloody daft.
‘Yes, if you must know, that’s exactly what I think.’ Caitlin’s expression remained stony.
‘Really?’ Marnie’s jaw dropped so low, she could have fitted a football between her teeth.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s what I think.’
Marnie stared at the woman in front of her and knew that there was nothing of her old friend left in that Caitlin casing. She was an alien, a stranger. That her best buddy could think so badly of her flooded her body with a horrible cocktail of upset and anger which spilled over into words.
‘I wouldn’t touch that chinless wonder if he peeled his skin off and he was Ryan Reynolds underneath.’
‘But you did, didn’t you?’ Caitlin threw back at her. ‘He told me what you did on the staircase at Lucy’s wedding.’
‘What I did? You mean when he stuck his disgusting tongue in my mouth and I shoved him off and he fell down the stairs and called me a—’
‘Oh, listen to yourself, Marnie,’ spat Caitlin. ‘He couldn’t stick his tongue in your mouth from a distance, could he? He’s not a fucking lizard,’ – Marnie huffed loudly at that –‘you’d have had to get up close and personal first. Don’t you think I’ve thought it through?’
Marnie threw up her hands. ‘You’d believe him over me? He was plastered, I was sober for a start and I would have never, never have done that to you. What a prick. He’s had you changing the way you dress, how you speak, how you laugh and now you tell me he thinks he’s so drop-dead gorgeous your best friend would come on to him?’
‘And that is precisely why you are not invited to our wedding,’ said Caitlin, taking her car keys out of her bag.
Marnie blinked in shock. She wasn’t sure if she was most stunned by the fact that her so-called best friend – her oldest friend – was getting married and hadn’t told her, or that she was marrying one of the biggest turnips on the planet. Or that Caitlin had believed her capable of such deception. They were all vying for top position. And all of them were winning.
‘Happy fucking birthday. Don’t bother buying me anything for mine. Let’s end it there,’ said Caitlin, dropping both the gift bag she brought in with her onto the sofa and her posh accent too. She sounded like the Caitlin of old for those few seconds before she speed-walked on her red-soled shoes towards the front door, slamming it hard behind her.
The bag fell off the sofa and the box inside slid out. It was an M&S toiletries gift set.
HISTORY OF WYCHWELL BY LIONEL TEMPLE
with contributions by Lilian Dearman.
There are presently twenty-four residences (including four derelict ones) in Wychwell plus an eight-bedroomed manor with its own boating lake, the Wych Arms pub, a post office-cum-general store, a village hall and a mobile library, which is a caravan in the church grounds. Also the church of St Jude the Apostle (patron saint of hope and lost causes). The Reverend Lionel Temple was born into the position as his father, Lionel senior, was also the resident reverend until his premature death aged only fifty-seven. Wychwell occupies 3,015 acres of land and woodland which surrounds the village on all sides.
The names of the cottages were chosen by the present Lady of the Manor, Miss Lilian Mathilda Dearman after the death of her father in 1988, as she felt many of the present names were too morose for such a pretty village and this process helped to put her unique stamp on Wychwell.
Every year on May Day weekend, the village honours the poor soul of Margaret Kytson and her unnamed child with a medieval fair. A May Queen is crowned. Sadly the fairs are poorly attended. Another tentacle of Margaret’s curse, perchance?
Until the 1930s a ‘Wychwell Pie’ was made, each attempt aiming to be larger than the previous one, an idea borrowed from the famous Denby Dale Pie events in West Yorkshire. This tradition ended with the death of Lilian’s grandfather Erasmus Fortescue Sutton Dearman and it proved too unpopular to revive.