Sophia

ONE

'A wedding present for dear old Clare,' Sophia thought. 'Why doesn't she have a list like everyone else? At least, then I could just phone in my order.'

She took off her sunglasses as she went down the ramp that led to the car park, took her ticket from the machine and looked around for a space on the ground floor. As usual at this time of day there was none so she moved on to the basement and - without bothering to check this level too closely - continued down to the lower basement where there were always spaces. She parked close by the elevator and went up to the fourth floor, where the kitchenware department was located.

'Everyone needs to eat,' she thought drily.

'And drink,' she added quickly. 'I'll get them a coffee grinder. A fancy one - so we don't look like skinflints.'

There was a surprisingly large selection - with items of different shapes and sizes from Sweden, Italy and Japan. In the end she plumped for a sensibly sized one from Italy.

'You can also use it for grinding sesame seeds if you want to make tahini', offered the sales assistant, in an effort to be helpful.

'Remind me not to drink your coffee,' Sophia shot back.

Seeing the crestfallen expression on the saleswoman's face, Sophia added quickly, 'It's meant in jest. I'm not going to report you to your superior or anything.'

Her mission accomplished, she treated herself to a smoothie in a little shop she liked to use and checked her phone for messages.

'Why am I a member of these damned WhatsApp groups?' she asked herself, as she pored through the latest banal or confusing offerings from people she didn't consider her friends. 'They haven't yet invented the Smileys I would like to use! Maybe there's an opening there somewhere...'

Her ramblings were cut short by the sound of a woman speaking with a French accent, ordering something or other. The counter was behind her and she didn't bother to turn round. Now that she thought about it, though, Sophia realised that it must have been this woman who had been responsible for bringing the scent of what she took to be an expensive perfume into the shop. An infusion that had fought a battle for supremacy with the pervading aroma of coffee and only narrowly lost out.

Sophia thought no more of the newcomer until she was about to leave, when she became aware of a presence -

her

presence - behind her. This time she had no option but to turn. They say first impressions are important - that they last. Perhaps Sophia hadn't fully appreciated this until that day.

The woman was striking - attractive more than beautiful perhaps - late thirties, Sophia estimated, and very well dressed.

'Well, she

is

French,' Sophia thought, but said nothing.

The French woman, however, was unfazed and struck up a conversation as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

'It is a lovely day, no?' she said, with a slight inclination of her head towards the chair opposite Sophia.

'Oh, please, yes, of course,' Sophia responded, with considerably less sangfroid than she might have hoped for.

'Would you care for another of whatever you were having? I could certainly manage another coffee. For an English coffee shop, this place is actually not bad at all.'

'Well, if you will twist my arm, I wouldn't say no to an espresso.'

The French woman waved an arm in the direction of the barista. Either she ignored her beckoning or she was too absorbed in what she was doing behind the counter. Either way, Sophia thought it only neighbourly to point out to her new acquaintance that this was very much a self-service sort of place, however much it might have pretensions to the French style in other ways.

'How silly of me,' the woman said, rising to place her order at the bar.

'She will meet me half way,' she whispered conspiratorially in Sophia's ear when she returned. 'She says she will deliver the drinks to our table.'

'You are clearly a very persuasive person,' said Sophia.

'I normally get what I want - yes,' returned the French woman.

For some reason, Sophia blushed. Realising this, she attempted to cover her confusion by moving quickly to the introductions part of the conversation. It turned out that the woman's name was Veronique. Originally from south-west France, she had spent much of her life in Paris, as well as in the East. Not Vietnam, as Sophia suggested, but Hong Kong and Bangkok. Sophia had no idea what she did and didn't feel any burning need to make enquiries.

In turn, Sophia shared the bare bones of her story: she taken a degree in finance and then done the Common Professional Examination on the way to qualification as a lawyer. She was not currently working per se, as most of her time was taken up with looking after two young children. On weekday mornings she got some respite, as they went along to pre-school.

'So, you feel fulfilled as a woman?' Veronique asked, with a Mona Lisa-esque smile.

'Wow! What a question,' Sophia replied, somewhat taken aback but exaggerating the effect of the Frenchwoman's words on her, like a ham actor.

'I am sorry. I see I have discomfited you.'

'Are you always this direct?'

'Only when I see no reason not to cut to the chase. It is not very English, no?'

'Oh, I wouldn't exactly say that,' said Sophia, regaining some of her lost equanimity. 'Some of my friends make Alan Carr look like a shrinking violet.'

'Alan Carr? I do not know this man.'

'You haven't missed a lot. He's a television celebrity of a kind. Does chat shows. That kind of thing. He's very camp.'

'Camp?'

'Well, he's gay and proud of it, and very happy to flaunt it.'

'Do you think there is anything wrong about that?'

'Being gay or flaunting it?'

'Either.'

'Of course not. That's just how he is. Plus, of course, it gives him a niche and that niche translates into career success.'

They talked about other things for some time until Veronique said she had an appointment and must be going. She bent down and for a moment Sophia thought she was going to kiss her French style, with a cheek kiss, but instead she took hold of her hand and spoke her parting softly.

'I'm sure we will meet again.'

TWO

The summer had arrived and with it the offer of a job for Sophia. She was surprised but gratified that she had been hunted down. A job as legal counsel to a medium-sized Japanese bank was not the type of thing she had imagined herself doing, but the more she thought about it the more she liked the idea. It would be a steady job in her field, offering a decent income without the pressure of billable hours. The post would not become available until October, which suited her down to the ground, as this meant she could arrange for help to be employed. They wouldn't need anyone to live in - just a nanny who could do some cooking and cleaning. Even after Brexit, there were quite a few Europeans in the market, looking to earn money before continuing their studies. Friends had employed them and spoke highly of the arrangement.

In the meantime, there were two major items in the diary: the wedding in Norfolk and their family holiday in Majorca. While the latter had been booked up months in advance, the former required a bit of thought and negotiation. Peter and Sophia had even thought of ducking out of the thing altogether, since it fell on pretty much the only Saturday this year that Peter would be expected to work, with Head Office bigwigs flying in from the States for an extended weekend. In the end, it was decided that Sophia should go alone - it was

her

schoolfriend, after all - and stay the night locally. She called her friend accordingly and asked her if she could make the arrangements. With the wedding only a fortnight or so away, Clare told her it might be difficult to fit her in at the nearest place - the village inn - but she would do her best. Failing that, she'd get on to the Holiday Inn, which was about 20 minutes away on the coast.

Those two weeks were not spent idly. Sophia signed up for yoga classes, got serious about the gym and treated herself to some new clothes. It was not like her existing wardrobe was seriously in need of an overhaul, rather that she needed some clothes for her new job. And first of course there was the little matter of an outfit for the wedding. What would go best with her ash blonde hair? Her search was not to prove an easy one. In the end, she decided to make the short trip up to London to a boutique that had been recommended to her by a friend.

She had almost despaired of finding anything she liked when the assistant asked her if she would be willing to go beyond her stipulated price range - 'significantly' beyond it.

'No harm in trying,' said Sophia, who was not the world's most natural or devoted shopper.

She liked the colour from the moment that she first saw the dress, as it was taken out of its box. It was an old gold off-the-shoulder knee-length dress with a subtle polka dot pattern. She took it with her into the dressing room.

'My God!' she breathed as she looked at herself in the mirror. 'It certainly has a healthy

décolletage.'

Even the assistant was impressed by the vision that Sophia presented.

'Wow! I envy the lucky guy - or girl - that this is intended for.'

'I told you it was for a wedding, silly! Do you think it's too much?'

'Not if you don't mind upstaging the bride. But, look, you'll need some shoes.'

'It's days like this that I regret turning down that sugar-daddy. My husband will kill me.'

'Why does he have to know? And you could always sugar the pill by saying you're wearing it for him.'

'He won't even be at the wedding. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Oh, sod it! You only live once. Show me the shoes!'

As Sophia returned on the underground with her swanky bags - thankfully the most recent batch of strikes had recently been concluded and services had returned to normal - she felt like a million dollars.

'And I haven't even spent a fraction of that today, so I must be in credit in overall terms.'

An if that's how a financier rationalises things, who are we to argue with them?

THREE

Clare had rung to say that there was no room at the inn. Well, not in the village inn at any rate, only in the Holiday Inn. This was a bit of a bummer, as it meant she would have to get a taxi to the coast after the wedding reception, which probably wouldn't be over until the early hours of Sunday morning. The accommodation was also a bit naff, Sophia thought, but then she'd left the arrangements late and had no one to blame but herself.

At least she would have the car for the drive up to north Norfolk. From their place in Barnes, it shouldn't take too long on a Saturday morning, and she wouldn't need to leave too early, since the church service started at two o'clock. Clare had sent her the order of service and she was pleased to see that it would be the good old short-and-sweet Prayer Book service, with no unsufferable singing to sit through during the signing of the registry. Instead, the order of service said simply 'Organ music.' Good old Clare! You can't put a value on good breeding in the age of Instagram and Twitter.

On the eve of her departure she almost had to cancel her trip, when Chloe, her two-and-a half-year-old, went down with a tummy bug. But, by the Friday evening, she was showing signs of recovery and the help she had arranged to stay over the weekend was as luck would have it a midwife, who was between jobs with

Médecins Sans Frontières and happy to earn a few pounds before her next assignment in South Sudan. Why anyone would want to work there was beyond Sophia, but she had used Yvonne before and she was very good with the children in her no-nonsense way.

On Friday evening, she packed an overnight bag and took that and the box containing her dress down to the car. She always liked to do things in advance. More than once when going for a job interview, she had staked out the building before the day of the interview - 'doing a recce', as her father used to say. She checked that there was enough petrol - that electric car would have to wait until they designed vehicles that had a longer range - and topped up the windscreen wash water along with a dash of washer fluid.

'That reminds me,' she said to herself. 'I must take a bottle of water and maybe a Gatorade, if I can find one in the kitchen.'

She made one last phone call to Clare, making sure she could use her house to change into her wedding dress and with a final check on Chloe went to bed, taking half a sleeping tablet just for insurance. She usually slept okay, but when she was nervous or excited she sometimes struggled. And was she nervous or excited, she asked herself. And if so, what was exciting her nerves? She reckoned it must be Chloe's health, upon which note she drifted off into a deep sleep - like all her sleep, not dreamless, but at least that night the dreams were to be harmless enough. And not memorable too, which was how she liked them.

She made such good time on the drive up that she was able to break her journey for a coffee before she reached Norwich. By the time she got to Clare's place, mother and daughter had locked themselves away to make final preparations according to Clare's stepfather Andrew, who was dressed up in his morning coat finery.

'Very fetching, I must say,' said Sophia. 'And very Clare.'

'Actually, the morning dress was my idea. She wanted to go for grey lounge suits, but I thought that was overdoing the minimalism somewhat. In truth, I liked the idea of wearing a topper, as I could hide my bald patch.'

'No flies on you, Andrew!'

'Anyway, you will be wanting to get changed into your outfit there, won't you? Sorry we couldn't put you up, but a tribe of Annabel's cousins have flown in from the States. They've just gone off to the pub. They're dead set on experiencing everything British. I think they imagine it will be like something from

Four Weddings and a Funeral

.'

'Well, just so long as you haven't hired a dreadful duo to sing "Stand by your man" at the reception, things should be fine.'

'Can't have anyone dropping down dead during the Best Man's Speech either,' Andrew retorted.

When Sophia came down, Andrew had disappeared and Sophia thought she'd fill the time before the service - the church was literally next door, this being the old rectory - by wandering about in the garden. A marquee took pride of place on the main lawn, where years before Sophia had played croquet with Chloe and her brother Adam.

Holding her black Elisabetta Franchi clutch bag with an old gold clasp, she would have been an adornment to any wedding, and turned a few heads among the catering staff who were making final preparations for the wedding 'luncheon', as someone had insisted on calling it on the invitations. The use of this pompous word instead of plain old 'lunch' was one of Sophia's bugbears, along with the Latinate 'commence' for 'begin' or 'start'.

She made her way through the rose garden past the sundial to the gate leading into Church Lane. From here it was only a minute or two to the church entrance. Entering the 12

th

century building, she looked around for someone she might know but the nave was still sparsely populated, as late arrivals made their way to the church from the field on the edge of the village where they had been directed to park. In the end, she chose a place towards the end of a pew in a centre row. Now, she only had to pray that her view of proceedings wasn't ruined by expansive headgear. Perhaps the majority of the women would be wearing fascinators this year - they seemed to be in fashion with Kate Middleton, as Sophia still called the Princess of Wales ('Well, she's so down to earth'), a high-profile supporter of the more modest approach to accessorising. She herself had chosen not to wear a hat because she didn't much like wearing them and you had to look after the thing once you had taken it off. Plus - and this was the real reason - she had had her hair done specially for the wedding and everyone had been raving about it. Her hair after all was her crowning glory.

By the time the service was due to start, the church was pretty much standing room only, with the Americans - who she could hear loud and clear, even though they appeared to occupy the back rows - ensuring that the bride's side was perhaps half as full again as the groom's. The playing of Mendelssohn's Wedding March signalled the start of the procession from the bell tower at the back of the church. Sophia stood and turned to watch her friend come down the aisle on her stepfather's arm, followed by the flower girls and a solitary page boy. As Sophia was about to resume her seat, she was stunned to the quick. Involuntarily, goosebumps stood up on her arms and she felt the blood rush from her neck to her cheeks. There at the back, on the other side of the church, under one of the Romanesque arches, stood Veronique. She was dressed, as she had been on that day in the coffee shop, in black - an unusual choice for nuptials, Sophia thought. Her broad-rimmed hat all but covered the upper part of her face but Sophia could have sworn that the Frenchwoman's eyes were fixed on her.

'How does she know Ed?' she thought. 'I wonder if she is an old flame. Does Clare know about her? And why am I behaving like a schoolgirl with her first crush on her account?'

At the end of the service, Sophia decided to delay the inevitable by engaging the people in her pew in conversation. This, despite the fact that she had merely nodded towards them and muttered a few words when they joined her before the service, pretending to be engaged in urgent mobile phone messages. After a few minutes, the congregation filed out for the ritual of the wedding photographs - Sophia had been surprised but pleased that no photographs or video had been taken during the service. Well, actually, not too surprised when she considered how 'old school' Clare and Ed were.

She had decided while engaging in small talk with her 'pewmates' that she would take the bull by the horns and bounce up to Veronique and say hello as soon as she set eyes on her again. Play it cool. Well, not cool so much as if it was absolutely the most normal thing in the world to bump into this woman she had met once in a café in Richmond at a wedding 150 miles away.

'I mustn't look around for her,' Sophia told herself. 'Act normally; totally normally. I wish I had a hat. At least that would make me a bit more incognito.'

Of course, when she got outside and milled about, moving her eyes about without moving her head, Veronique was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she was only there for the ceremony and had to rush off somewhere. After a few minutes, Sophia was called for photos with the bride and groom, as well as for some with Clare alone.

'Wonderful wedding!' gushed Sophia. 'You must be knackered.'

'I'm floating along on some adrenaline rush,' the bride replied with a broad smile on her face. 'Haven't slept in days.'

'I don't believe a word of it. You look fabulous. You have a job to do. I'll catch you later.'

What Sophia wasn't to know was that her words were to prove less than prophetic. Unless you take 'later' to mean an interval of several years.

'You look gorgeous by the way,' Clare called after her.

'Who are you dressing up for?!' she added impishly.

As Sophia moved away from the area the photographer had commandeered, she was hailed by a family she had known when she used to visit Clare all those years ago in her school holidays. Together, they sauntered out of the churchyard and down the lane to the old rectory. She realised she hadn't seen them since before she got married, as they quizzed her about her children and her husband's job.