Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues Read Free Page B

engaged … yet we haven’t even tied the knot yet!’
    ‘That’s what comes of living with a man before the ring’s on your finger,’ Aunt Nan said severely. ‘They’ve no reason to wed you, then.’
    ‘Things have changed, Aunt Nan – and I do have a ring on my finger.’ I twiddled my solitaire diamond.
    ‘Things haven’t changed for the better, and if he wants a family he should realise that time’s passing and you’re thirty-six – starting to cut it close.’
    ‘I know, though time has slipped by so quickly that I’ve only just woken up to the fact.’
    ‘I don’t know why you didn’t marry long since.’
    ‘Neither do I, though Justin does seem to have a thing about my weight. I thought he was joking when he said he’d set the wedding date when I was a size eight, but no, he was entirely serious! Only my diets always seem to fail, and then I put a few more pounds on after each attempt.’
    ‘He should leave well alone, then,’ she said tartly. ‘You’re a small, dark Bright, like me, and we plumpen as we get older. And, a woman’s meant to have a bit of padding, not be a rack of ribs.’
    ‘It’s not just my weight, but everything about me that seems to irritate him now. I think his mother keeps stirring him up and making him so critical. For instance, he used to say the way I dressed was eccentric and cute, but now he seems to want me to look like all his friends’ wives and girlfriends.’
    ‘There’s nowt wrong with the way you look,’ Aunt Nan said loyally, though even my close friends are prone to comment occasionally on the eccentricity of my style. ‘He can’t remodel you like an old coat to suit himself, he needs to love you for what you are.’
    ‘If he does still love me! He says he does, but is that the real me, or some kind of Stepford Wife vision he wants me to turn into?’ I sighed. ‘No, I’ve been drifting with the tide for too long and after Christmas I’m going to find out one way or the other!’
    ‘You do that,’ Aunt Nan agreed, ‘because there are lots of other fish in the sea if you want to throw him back.’
    I wasn’t too sure about that. I’d only ever loved two men in my life (if you count my first brief encounter as one of them) so the stock of my particular kind of fish was obviously already dangerously depleted.
    ‘If I want to have children, I’ve left it a bit late to start again with someone else,’ I said sadly, ‘and although Justin’s earning a good salary he’s turned into a total skinflint and says we can’t afford to have children yet – they’re way too expensive – but then, I expect he thinks our children would have a nanny and go to a private school, like he did, and of course I wouldn’t want that.’
    ‘He doesn’t seem much of a man to me at all,’ Aunt Nan said disparagingly. ‘But I’m not the one in love with him.’
    ‘He has his moments,’ I said, thinking of past surprises, like tickets to see a favourite musical, romantic weekends in Paris, or the trip to Venice he booked on the Orient Express, which gave me full rein to raid the dressing-up box …
    But all that was in the first heady year or so after we fell in love. Then the romance slowly tailed off … How was it that I hadn’t noticed when the music stopped playing?

Chapter 2: Frosted Knots
     
I’ve had my share of sorrows, of course, but I’ve never been one to dwell on them. Mother always said we should strive to be like the words carved around that old sundial in the courtyard, remembering only the happy hours, though I think being so old it actually says ‘hourf’ and not ‘hours’. The courtyard used to belong to a house that was where the Green Man is now, but lots of houses went to rack and ruin after the Great Plague visited the village, because it wiped out whole families. and there’s nothing of it left now bar the sundial. You know about the Lido field turning out to be a plague pit, don’t you, dear? It was quite providential in