Bride's Dilemma Read online

  “You’ll need a hairdo,” Gaye said. “No, I’m not suggesting anything drastic, just a soft upsweep for your rose to nestle on. How does that sound— will your lord and master approve?”

  Swift color ran up Tina’s slender neck to the roots of her hair. She had no defence against such references to John, and Gaye gently laughed at her and gave her an understanding hug. Downstairs in the boutique Gaye Chose a couple of youthful perfumes, a selection of cosmetics, and various other knick-knacks, then they drove in a taxi to the Copper Grill and ate delicious steaks in a quiet, oak-panelled dining room hung with antique copper and porcelain ornaments.

  It was over coffee that Gaye said: “You love John a great deal, don’t you, Tina?”

  Tina, shy in her love, uncertain of how much real happiness she could give him, lowered her eyes and nodded wordlessly.

  “He’s lucky to have found you,” Gaye remarked with sincerity.

  “I’m not used to his kind of life,” Tina faltered. “I—I worry dreadfully in case I make blunders and give people room to—oh, you know what I mean! His first wife was so lovely—I know she was. How can I hope to compete?”

  “Don’t try, my dear.” Gaye reached over and patted her hand. “Just be yourself and everyone will love you. Sophistication isn’t a thing to strive after, and you obviously have what John wants in a wife. Chuck and I are thrilled that he’s marrying again. He’s a nice person, and Liza needs a mother.”

  “I hope the child won’t resent me in any way—” Then Tina gave a half ashamed laugh. “There I go again, finding something else to worry about.”

  “It’s true children sometimes resent a stepmother,” Gaye agreed, “but Lisa was only a toddler when Joanna died, so she isn’t in a position to make the comparisons you obviously feel John and other people are going to make. You’re different from Joanna. Quite frankly she was incredibly lovely to look at, but if John had wanted a reflection of her—well, there’s her cousin, Paula Carrish, who lives on the island. It’s never been a secret that for years she has cared for him. She—”

  There Gaye broke off and frowned thoughtfully at Tina. “Do you know the details of Joanna’s death? Has John talked about it to you?”

  Tina, her heart thudding in her breast, shook her head.

  “You should be told.” Gaye poured herself another cup of coffee and fed sugar into it. “She fell over the side of a friend’s yacht and drowned. She could swim like a seal, but she cracked her head on a reef of underwater coral. Paula was with her, right beside her when the accident occurred. She was hysterical for hours afterwards. John saw the accident from a beach near Blue Water House and he swam out to try and save Joanna. He tore open the side of his leg on the coral and was attacked by a barracuda—all in all it was a very tragic business, with John nearly losing his own life and a lot of rumors to scar his mind as well—”

  “Rumors?” Tina whispered.

  “Yes, about him and Paula. There was nothing in it, of course, but you know what people are. She used to model for him, you see, but the rumors were ridiculous in view of how he felt about Joanna. Anyway,” Gaye broke into a quick smile, “that’s all over with. He’s about to start a new life with you, and I’m sure it’s going to be a happy one.”

  Tina forced her mouth into a smile, but her heart was heavy. Ste. Monique was haunted not only by a lovely ghost, but a woman named Paula lived there who for years, Gaye said, had cared for John. She had been with Joanna when she died. Already for Tina, who was to be the second Mrs. Trecarrel, she was a faceless enemy.

  Outside the restaurant Gaye spotted a flower barrow massy with deep violet lilac, and exclaimed that she must have a bunch. “I can’t resist it!” she told Tina. “May is the month for it, of course.”

  May! The proverbially unlucky month for entering into matrimony. Tina stood on that London pavement, the scent of the lilac drowning her as Gaye piled her arms with it. In fear, in supplication almost, Tina buried her face in the lilac. Gaye was gazing at her when she raised her head. “Look, why don't you spend the next few days at our flat?” she suggested. “We have a guest room and it will be nicer for you than being among strangers at that hostel. I mean, a girl is always a bit nervy before her wedding. Do you like the idea?”

  “I love it!” Tears of quick gratitude sprang to Tina’s eyes, which Gaye tactfully ignored as she flagged a taxi.

  Tina collected her belongings from the hostel that evening, for she wanted to say goodbye to Tessa Neal. Tessa was thrilled by her forthcoming marriage, but she took it for granted Tina had known her fiancé much longer than a week. Tina didn’t enlighten her. She knew it would strike other people as little short of madness that in the course of a week she had fallen in love and pledged her future to a comparative stranger.

  It was fantastic, she admitted to herself. A sort of landslide that was carrying her willy-nilly with it. She couldn’t fight or scramble clear of the exciting, gathering momentum . . .

  The following day she went with John to an exclusive Bond Street jewellers, where at a table covered in dark velvet, satin-lined trays of rings were laid out so that she might select her engagement ring. They were all equally lovely and dazzling, and Tina hardly dared select one in case it was an exorbitant price. She sat there in a straight-backed chair, John standing beside her, bending with a quizzical smile over the rings.

  “Come on, darling,” he urged, “what do you fancy? That sapphire solitaire is rather stunning, or how about this emerald-cut diamond?”

  But her fingers, as though they couldn’t help themselves, were hovering above a half-moon hoop of small, glowing, deep red stones. The ring hadn’t the dazzle of the others, therefore she felt sure this couldn’t be as expensive. “This is rather nice,” she murmured.

  “Then let’s try it on you.” John took it out of its satin bed and slipped it on to her finger. It fitted perfectly and the glow of the stones was intensified against the whiteness of her hand. “It is pretty,” John gripped her hand and smiled down into her eyes. “Do you want it?”

  “Please!” She nodded eagerly.

  The manager of the shop let out a small satisfied sigh. “The young lady has exquisite taste, sir,” he remarked. “I think one might say that rubies are the loveliest of the more precious gems.”

  Rubies! Tina glanced up at John in a quiet panic, but his smile was still easy and indulgent. “Now we’ll see some wedding rings,” he said. “Gold, eh, Tina?”

  She nodded. It was just beginning to occur to her that John must have quite a bit of money, and she hoped that he didn’t think she had chosen her ring because it was expensive. Oh dear, the simplest things seemed to have the costliest price tags, like some of those dresses at the fashion house yesterday. Her wedding suit, for instance, had cost far more than the gold faille or the white lace.

  An assistant brought a tray of wedding rings to the table and it was John who selected her ring, a fairly wide band delicately engraved with a blossom design. She tried it on, her heart suddenly melting and warm inside her. John must care a little for her. His fingers, as she held out her hand to survey its gold and ruby burdens, were gripping her shoulder. She glanced up at him, and happiness ran out of her heart. His smile had gone and there was a strange tinge of whiteness about his mouth.

  He was remembering that other wedding ring, the one he had bought for Joanna, the one that had glittered on her hand as she sank below the coral reef beyond Blue Water House . . .

  Tina slipped the rings off her finger and laid them on the dark velvet.

  “Put your engagement ring back on,” John said sharply.

  But she stared at it. No, she wanted to say, no, you don’t love me. I can’t wear it—I can’t marry you.

  “Put it on,” he said again. His blue eyes challenged hers. He seemed to know what was screaming through her heart and her mind. “Come, let me put it on.” His voice, his touch, were abruptly gentle and the ring was back on her hand—like a shackle, she thought wildly.

 
She watched him as he wrote out a cheque, then, followed by the effusive good wishes of the manager, they walked out to the street. Silently, side by side, they made for the meter where he had parked the car. This isn’t how it should be, she told herself tearfully. We should be walking arm in arm, his fingers over mine, skimming little side smiles at each other ...

  “I’m glad you’re staying with Gaye until the wedding,” he remarked. “It was good of her to suggest it.”

  “Yes,” Tina agreed. “She’s very nice.”

  “Everything has happened almost too quickly for you, hasn’t it, Tina?”

  She knew his glance was upon her, but she kept on looking straight ahead. If I look at him, she thought, I’ll disintegrate into a mere throb of love, there’ll be nothing of me left, and it isn’t fair that this should happen to me when nothing like it happens to him. Why does he want me? Because I don’t chatter, because I don’t intrude? No, I’ll never intrude on his love for Joanna. He can take me or leave me, and that’s why he wants me!

  “I hope you aren't getting cold feet,” he drawled, touching her elbow with light fingers as they crossed a road. “The announcement’s in The Times. I’ve cabled Liza, and fixed our splicing date for Friday. All right?”

  She nodded. They passed a record shop, and Stranger on the Shore wailed out. The melody caught her heart in a fist. She would marry John, but she knew that her love would never be strong enough to keep him from wandering “the silent shore of memory.”

  Chapter Three

  TINA discovered in the next few days that you didn’t just board a plane and fly to the Caribbean. There was her passport to see to, and she was also compelled to have a vaccination against smallpox —a slightly unnerving business, offset by a visit to Gaye’s hairdresser, where her hair was sham¬pooed and styled into a soft, silvery upsweep. Tina gazed at herself in the mirror, feeling strange and abruptly stylish. Her cheekbones had a softer definition, owing to the little fluff of a side fringe she had been given, while the hairdresser lightly touched her earlobes and said affectedly that she should never hide her ears because they were one of her best features.

  A grin touched Tina's lips. The vanities of high fashion and the beauty salon struck her as rather superficial and she was certain women submitted to these various tortures merely to compete with each other. She had noticed that as each customer walked out of the salon, complete with a glistening hairdo, the eyes of those awaiting their turn followed narrowly, critically. She was treated to the same examination and heard a stout, carroty woman hiss at her companion: “That must be a new silver dye Jacques is using. I wonder if it would suit me?”

  Out on the pavement Tina and Gaye broke into laughter. “Cheek, do I look dyed up?” Tina exclaimed.

  “Of course not,” Gaye assured her. “Natural blondes are rather rare, and people always go jumping to the conclusion it’s out of a bottle. You’re lucky to have kept so fair, Tina. It's a color that doesn’t often last beyond childhood.”

  The evening before Tina and John were married, Gaye laid on a small dinner party for them. She had invited a few other friends of John’s, and Tina, eager for him to be proud of her, put on one of her new dresses, a mimosa satin with a design of feather-like motifs in diamante and sequins covering the bodice and slowly fanning into the full skirt. She dabbed mimosa perfume behind her ears, ran caressing fingers over the hoop of rubies on her left hand, then rustled into the stylish lounge of the Lannings’ flat.

  Chuck was still dressing, while Gaye’s voice drifted in from the kitchen where she was making the sauce for the toumedos. Tina gazed around the room, hardly able to take in the fact that after tomorrow she would have an attractive home. She would arrange dinner parties, and in a bedroom next to her own her husband would whistle a tune to himself as he brushed his hair and put on his tie.

  She wandered about the room, wrapped in prewedding dreams, a bud of a nerve opening and closing in the pit of her stomach. One moment she felt like laughing, the next like crying, and she almost dropped a piece of Capo di Monte pottery when the front door chimes pealed through the flat.

  “I’ll go,” she called through the serving-hatch, and with a fast beating heart she crossed the lounge and went out into the white-painted hallway. Behind the spotlight-glass of the front door she could see an extra tall figure, and the very lobes of her ears were rouged with her shy blush as she opened the door to John.

  “You’re looking very vampish this evening,” he smilingly murmured. “I hardly recognized my Tina of the flyaway hair and the big, searching eyes.”

  “Your Chorley goose is there, John, under all this fine plumage,” she replied, her hands lost in his.

  This reply brought a fleeting smile of tenderness to his face and he carried her hands to his lips and gave them a light kiss.

  The evening that followed was a delightful one, and all too soon it was over. John was the last guest to leave. The marriage ceremony, he reminded Tina, was arranged for eleven o’clock at the Chelsea Register Office, then after a wedding luncheon with Gaye and Chuck at Claridges, he and Tina would drive to a Surrey inn he knew of, where they would spend the night before catching their plane for Ste. Monique.

  “You won’t mind honeymooning on the island, and sharing me with Liza, will you, Tina?” he asked, more out of politeness than anything else, she felt.

  “No,” she said, but in her heart she knew she would have preferred to be alone for a while with John before plunging into her role of stepmother. But it couldn’t be helped. The child came first with him, and she must learn to accept the fact.

  John left after giving her cheek a cursory brush with his lips and she said goodnight to Gaye and Chuck. In the guest room she prepared for bed, tired but too tensed up for sleep, curled up on the foot of the bed and buffing her nails when the door opened to admit Gaye. She carried a beaker of Horlicks on a tray. “This should help you sleep,” she said, flickering a look of friendly concern over Tina, who looked very young and innocent in her dolly pyjamas. “I felt awful the night before I got married. I was suddenly certain I didn’t love Chuck and I wanted to call the whole thing off. Here, drink this while it’s nice and hot.”

  Tina sipped at the milky drink, feeling it go down painfully over the foolish lump in her throat. So other girls spent this particular night in a state of panic, certain they were heading for disaster, and compiling a list of reasons why it might be better if they called the whole thing off . . .

  Gaye sat down on the bed and pulled her pastel-flowered wrap over her legs. “Are the butterflies settling down?” she smiled.

  Tina nodded. “Thanks for coming in like this,” She said. “I was beginning to panic.”

  “Well, it’s a natural reaction, Tina. A girl doesn’t get married but once in a lifetime, in normal circumstances, and loving a man is very different from living with him. I always think the courtship is the nicest part of the love game, from a girl’s point of view, and you haven’t had a lot of time in which to get to know John. But take it from me he’s a grand person.”

  Loving a man, and living with him, were two very different things, Tina reflected, but there was something she could be thankful about. Being a widower for eight years might have saddened John, even made him cynical, but he hadn’t turned into one of those stony misogynists. Beneath his air of worldly assurance and occasional aloofness, she had glimpsed a man who needed to be loved. A new, anticipatory thrill ran through her. Out of the strange beginning of their marriage there might emerge something of worth ... a child, perhaps.

  She would like a child of her own. All that she had missed in her own childhood would be lavished on her daughter, or her son. Laughter, understanding, tons of love.

  Gaye touched her arm. “Don't be afraid of not measuring up to Joanna,” she said gently. “When a woman is exceptionally good-looking, she wants a man for his worship rather than his warmth. She likes to be put on a pedestal, and it can’t be exactly comfortable, living on a pedestal.”


  Tina broke into a smile. “I’m glad I was able to stay here with you, Gaye,” she said gratefully. “I feel much better about things now.”

  “Good.” Gaye leant forward and kissed her cheek. “Now you must get some shut-eye. We don’t want the bride yawning through her marriage ceremony tomorrow.”

  A few minutes later Gaye had returned to her own bedroom, and Tina lay in the darkness, listening to the whisper tick of the bedside dock until it lulled her off to sleep.

  She was given breakfast in bed the following morning, coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, then cherry waffles, and all too soon it seemed it was time for her to dress for her wedding. Gaye insisted on a spot of glamor and seating Tina at the dressing-table she applied a cool rose foundation to her face, a hint of turquoise eye shadow, and pink-ice lipstick. They were in the middle of these beauty preparations when the door chimes sounded and Chuck, a minute or so later, put his head round the bedroom door. He was grinning broadly.

  “A package for the bride has just arrived,” he announced. “Shall I toss it in?”

  “Of course, you big lug.” Gaye shook her head at him. “And don’t toss it, it might be breakable.” “I doubt that,” he chuckled. He went away, to return carrying a long white box with the famous name of Woolf stamped across it. Tina turned from the dressing-table, her heart thumping with excitement.

  “You open it for me, Gaye,” she begged. “I’ve got the shakes.”

  Gaye obligingly slipped the ribbon and lifted the lid. She opened folds of tissue-paper, then gave a whistle of delight and lifted into the open a supple, beige-honey mink coat. A card fell from one of the wide sleeves, and Tina’s hand shook as Chuck picked it up and handed it to her.

  On the card was darkly slashed: “Happy wedding day, Tina. John.”

  “The coat’s from John,” Tina breathed, sudden tears clinging to her lashes. “Isn’t it beautiful!” She hugged the coat to her, her face in the soft fur, love for John almost bursting the seams of her hungry young heart. “Oh, he shouldn’t have done it! But isn’t it gorgeous! A mink coat, for me.”