Lucy Lord - Vanity

‘Doesn’t our little girl look beautiful?’ said Justin, wondering if he really could make out Poppy’s nipples underneath the embroidery on her dress.

‘You may now kiss the bride,’ said the be-garlanded, white-suited registrar. ‘ Un beso, por favor! ’

Damian clasped Poppy to his linen breast and Bella felt her eyes misting up again at the sight of them, so perfect against the gradated blue of the horizon. She looked around for her boyfriend, Andy, who smiled at her. She smiled back. He looked very handsome and very tall in an olive-green linen jacket over faded Levis. The bright spring sunshine bounced off his oblong specs, which (by luck, rather than design; Andy was not a vain man) emphasized high cheekbones and a strong jaw.

‘I declare this sea well and truly open!’ shouted Poppy, chucking her bouquet over her shoulder and dragging Damian into the water with her. Bella ran to catch the bouquet but just missed it. She picked it up, trying to shake the sand off the pretty yellow and white flowers, and turned to see Andy looking at her again. He wasn’t smiling now. She ran over, slightly embarrassed.

‘Think I’d better ask them to put these lovely flowers in some water.’

Andy nodded. Bella knew he was wary of marriage, but he needn’t be quite so fucking obvious about it.

Soon everybody was dancing in the sea to Groove Armada – singing about sand dunes and salty air – some more careless of their costly garb than others.

Mark had been right about the temperature of the sea, but the mood was infectious and it was ages before they all sat down to lunch.

The meal was typically Ibicenco and utterly delicious. Local ham with rustic bread, aïoli and olives, followed by huge paellas bursting with fresh seafood, peppers, rabbit and chorizo, served from big, hot pans at the tables. Bella squeezed a wedge of lemon over her steaming rice and wiped her fingers on a linen napkin.

She was sitting in the dappled shade of the Arctic camouflage net with Andy, Simon, Natalia, Mark and Sam. The bride and groom were sharing a table with Damian’s parents and Poppy’s mother. Poppy had been heartbroken that her father, in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, was too ill to be at her wedding – whether it had been held in the UK or not. He wasn’t even aware she was getting married, poor old love, despite the happy couple’s repeated and increasingly desolate announcements, complete with ring flashing, at his care home.

The two hundred-odd guests sounded pretty happy with their lot as decibel levels rose with the rosé consumption. At the next table, Bella’s mother, father, Bernie and Jilly were already on their fourth bottle.

‘What a lovely day,’ she said, full of tipsy sunshiny happiness. ‘I just knew Poppy would get it right.’

‘I think she had a lot of help from her devoted friend, no?’ said Natalia, turning her slanting grey-blue gaze on Bella. The diamonds in her ears and scraped-back hair emphasized the height and acute angle of her cheekbones.

‘I guess so.’ Bella grinned, recalling the hours she and Poppy had spent poring over fabric swatches, menus and playlists. ‘But I enjoyed every minute of it.’ She glanced over at the bridal table.

Poppy was throwing her head back in peals of laughter at something Damian had just said. Bella was so happy they were back together. This time for real. Last year, she’d caught Poppy in flagrante with Ben Jones, Bella’s then boyfriend, an up-and-coming actor. At the time, Bella had hated them both with every fibre of her being, and, were she honest, wished them both dead. But Ben went on to cheat on Poppy, who subsequently OD’d on a cocktail of drugs, both recreational and prescription. Despite the Balearic sun, Bella went cold as she recalled finding Poppy unconscious in her flat, surrounded by narcotic paraphernalia. Thank God she’d found her when she had.

Everything’s worked out for the best, she thought contentedly, gulping back her delicious chilled rosé and turning her face up to the sun. She was happier with Andy than she’d ever been in her life. Eight months on, she was still waking every day with an idiotic grin on her face.

Impulsively she leant over and kissed him on the cheek.

‘What was that for?’ He smiled at her.

‘Nothing really. Just thinking how happy I am that everything’s worked out like it has.’

With the crema catalana came balloon glasses half filled with ice and hierbas , the potent local hooch made, as its name might suggest, from mountain herbs.

‘So how are things in the men’s magazine world?’ Andy asked Mark and Simon, who worked alongside Damian on Stadium , the men’s ‘style’ magazine that liked to think it had more substance than the rest. Simon and Damian were columnists, which involved churning out variations on a superiorly misogynist theme, month after month. Mark was the art director, which gave him so much opportunity to ogle naked female flesh you’d think (erroneously) that he could take it or leave it by now.

Andy’s career – he was an investigative reporter for one of the better respected broadsheets – earned him grudging respect from Simon and slight resentment from Damian, who had always harboured ambitions in that direction himself. Still, as Simon said, the perks and parties at Stadium more than made up for a little professional jealousy. Or at least they used to.

‘Not great, to be honest,’ said Simon. ‘It’s a bloody drag. Sales have been hit badly by the recession. The downmarket rags – Nuts and Zoo and now Front ; did they really need another one? How many boobs does the Great British Public need? – are cornering the market.’

Bella nudged Andy. Stadium was not exactly what you’d call a boob-free zone, though the boobs it showcased tended, with the odd honourable exception, to be smaller. Classier, you see.

‘Well that whole bespoke ethos is a bit anachronistic at the moment, isn’t it?’ said Sam, one of the honourable exceptions, in her husky voice, earning a look of surprise from Simon. ‘You should see your face! I’m not that thick, you know, and I’ve been reading Stadium cover-to-cover ever since I first appeared in it. I like to keep up on Marky’s job.’

Sam had taken up glamour modelling to pay her way through London University, where she was studying philosophy and psychology. She and Mark had met on a shoot. Fond though Bella was of Mark, she reckoned Sam was streets ahead of him intellectually. But she was young and easily impressed and Mark was seriously sexy, in a brawny, doltish sort of way. Today he was wearing tight white jeans and a scarlet racer-back vest top, revealing rippling biceps, triceps, pecs and lats in all their worked-out glory. To say nothing of the vast packet. His head was shaved, his smile crooked. When Bella first met him (long before she experienced the full – ahem – thrust of his lust), she’d had her doubts as to whether he was Arthur or Martha.

As if to prove the point, he laughed and kissed Sam way more explicitly than manners dictated, groping her left tit and shoving his tongue down her throat. Bella remembered what it was like kissing him and reached for Andy’s hand, flushing suddenly.

‘Ugh, get a rrrrroooom, please,’ said Natalia, shuddering. Sam pulled away from Mark and laughed.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘He does get carried away sometimes. Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes, surely all that handmade suit and expensive trainers stuff just doesn’t cut it when people can’t even pay their mortgages?’

‘It’s aspirational luxury though.’ Simon stuck stubbornly to his guns. ‘People need things to cheer them up when times are tough. Just look at the Busby Berkeley movies of the thirties.’