Читать книгу All She Ever Wished For - Claudia Carroll - Страница 17

July 2001

With just a few weeks to go to the big day, as you can imagine for a wedding on such a titanic scale as this one, it had been panic stations. Kate and Damien’s wedding was to be held at Castletown House, which had been gifted to Damien as a twenty-fifth birthday present and which could comfortably seat a guest list of three hundred with ample room to spare. Which was just as well given that the final, confirmed list of guests was rapidly escalating by the day.

Damien was not only an eldest son, but also the first of the King siblings to get married, so his family were determined to really push the boat out. The President was expected, along with no fewer than four other members of cabinet as well as the country’s honorary consul to Monaco, where the Kings held a villa purely for ‘tax status’.

A giant marquee was to be erected on the sprawling south lawn at Castletown House for the reception and local florists in County Wicklow were working on high overdrive to have everything ready in time. Not only that but Robbie Williams, Damien’s favourite singer, had been booked to play at the reception.

Meanwhile, about a week before the wedding, Kate herself was just in the middle of a pre-nuptial panic attack over her wedding dress. She’d lost so much weight in the run-up to the big day that during her final fitting the dress almost threatened to drown her. The dress was utterly stunning in every sense; a close replica of the wedding dress worn by Princess Grace on her marriage to Prince Rainier, made of crushed cream silk taffeta, encrusted with delicate pearls and with a twelve-foot lace veil, held in place with a simple wreath of cream tea roses.

Next thing, out of the blue, Damien’s father called her.

Instant panic stations. But then ever since she’d started dating Damien, Kate had only ever met his father on a handful of occasions. On every one of which he was dismissive of her almost to the point of rudeness. And never once had she been invited to call him by his first name, Ivan, so of course in her head she immediately gave him the nickname Ivan the Terrible.

‘Mr King, is that you?’ she said, answering her mobile in a froth of underskirts and taffeta at the designer showrooms where she was having her fitting. ‘How are you?’ Her tone was so respectful and over-polite that to hear her, you’d swear she was on the phone to a mortgage arrears company she owed a fortune to.

‘Kate, there you are,’ her father-in-law-to-be said gruffly while she strained so she could hear him properly. There was the deafening sound of engines roaring in the background, as if he were calling her from the airport.

‘How are things with you, Mr King?’ she asked nervously, not having the first clue what this could be about, and almost feeling like she might need to sit down to take this call. Ivan King terrified her, as he did most people. But of course that was something she could never even discuss with Damien, who idolised his father and who wanted so badly to emulate him. In fact you could almost say that everything Damien did and every success he scored in business was done with the sole purpose of impressing his dad.

‘I’m fit and well,’ Ivan said gruffly, ‘but then I’m always well. In fact, I’ve just touched down at Dublin airport and I’m on my way to see my solicitor in town. I’d like you to meet me there in one hour, please.’

There was no ‘are you free?’ or ‘does that even suit you?’ Just the presumption that she’d drop everything and rush to meet him. Which as it happened was exactly what Kate did, too terrified not to.

Exactly an hour later, with many rushed apologies to her designer, Kate found herself pulling up at McNally Ross solicitors just on the quays, right across the river from the Four Courts in the heart of the legal district. For about the fifth time, she tried calling Damien, to alert him to what was going on and to see if he had any idea what all this might be about. As bad luck would have it though, he was away in Brussels on business and his phone had been switched off all morning.

Ivan the Terrible was already in the solicitor’s office ahead of her, waiting in the conference room, sitting at the head of the table as if he owned the place. Which, knowing him, he probably did. A grey-looking, bespectacled lawyer was introduced to Kate as a Mr Ross and Kate was invited to sit down in front of a legal document, with a pen strategically positioned right beside it.

‘You’re exactly seven minutes late,’ said Ivan the T, who Kate knew to be notoriously punctual and highly intolerant of anyone who didn’t meet his exacting standards. Mealtimes at the Kings’ house were a bit like an army drill, according to Damien.

‘I got here just as quickly as I could,’ she said politely, determined not to feel intimidated. ‘In fact, I rushed out on a designer friend of mine, just so—’

‘But you’re a model,’ Ivan the T interrupted her. ‘It’s hardly life or death stuff we were interrupting, now was it? What were you doing anyway, strutting down a catwalk or something?’

‘As a matter of fact, no, I was—’

‘I’m afraid Mr King can only spare us a few moments,’ the solicitor interrupted, ‘before he has to leave for the airport again. His time is very precious and we must all respect that.’

And my time isn’t precious? Kate thought crossly, but stayed tight lipped.

‘So Miss Lee,’ the solicitor went on, ‘if you’d just be kind enough to turn your attention to the document in front of you, then we can proceed.’

‘Oh now, you needn’t look so worried,’ said Ivan the T, waving his hand as if to dismiss Kate’s concerns. ‘This is absolutely nothing to concern you. All perfectly standard. We just need your signature on the dotted line, that’s all. Then we can all get out of here.’

Kate began to read the document, but scanning down through it wasn’t much help to her. It all seemed to be written in the most over-complicated legalese, littered with phrases like, ‘the third party pertaining to the first part,’ and ‘hitherto forth and dated this third day of July, should the marriage come to be terminated …’

This is a pre-nup, she thought, horrified. So that’s why she’d been summoned here, with Damien safely out of the country: to sign a bloody pre-nup. Without her own lawyer present, without any warning or notice. She was about to become Damien’s wife and now the King family just landed this on her and wanted her to sign her rights away?

Well, if they thought that she could just be bullied into putting pen to paper, then they had another thing coming. She had to talk this over with Damien, she just had to. Though instinctively she knew he’d probably laugh and tell her to rip the whole thing up, then fling it in the bin, where it rightly belonged.

‘I’m so sorry to waste your valuable time, Mr King,’ Kate said, standing up to her full height and pointedly shoving the document as far away from her as possible. ‘But there’s absolutely no way I’d dream of putting pen to paper on something like this. What you have to understand is that Damien and I love each other very much. We intend to spend the rest of our lives together and over my dead body would I ever consider discussing divorce before we’re even married. And I’m afraid to tell you, nor would Damien.’

Later on that evening, Damien came back from Brussels and immediately called Kate. They’d been due to attend a movie premiere that night, a new release called Gladiator that was hotly tipped for Oscars, but as soon as Kate told him what had happened, he cancelled. Instead, he whisked her off for a cosy dinner, just the two of them, in l’Ecrivain, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the heart of town where he was a regular.

Still shaky from the whole experience, Kate told him everything and was beside herself with relief when he was just as dismissive of the whole thing as she knew he’d be.

‘Oh, forget about it, I’m sure it’s nothing,’ he’d said, topping up their glasses with a bottle of Cristal Champagne that he’d insisted on ordering. Kate never drank, it was her one and only golden rule, but she was still so shaken after that morning that she made an exception.

‘Just the old man trying to protect family capital, that’s all,’ he went on. ‘In fact he faxed me over the pre-nup this morning too. I’ve got it here in my briefcase. Never even glanced at the thing. Hadn’t the time yet.’

‘Damien! And you didn’t think to call me? Just to give me a bit of warning that this was in the pipeline?’

‘It’s nothing! Trust me, this is just the way my dad is. Practically insists on a blood sample before he’ll even hire a new employee, so you can imagine what he’s like with a prospective daughter-in-law.’

‘It was so scary in there today,’ Kate said, allowing herself a tiny sip of champagne. ‘I was caught completely off-guard, so I had no idea what else to do.’

‘Sweetheart, by walking away from it you did the right thing. Besides, it’s grotesque imagining you and I ever at each other’s throats and screaming for a divorce. As if!’

Kate laughed and drank a tiny bit more.

An hour later, Damien was trying to convince her that this mightn’t be such a bad idea after all and that the pre-nup meant so little, she might as well sign it.

‘After all, sweetheart,’ he said, reaching across the table to take her hands, ‘you and I are never going to divorce anyway, are we? You’re my perfect girl. Why would I ever want to divorce my perfect girl?’

‘And I’d never divorce you in a million years,’ she smiled back at him, randomly marvelling at just how handsome he looked in the candlelight.

‘Well you know something?’ Damien went on. ‘Then what possible difference can this make? It’s just a signature on a piece of paper, that’s all. It means absolutely nothing to me.’

Three glasses of champagne later when dessert was being cleared, he’d got her thinking it was actually all in her own best interests really. And Damien could be so persuasive when he wanted to be.

‘Look at it this way,’ he’d said, eyes glinting in the dim light. ‘If you do sign, then in one fell stroke it proves two things to the old man: firstly, that you’ve absolutely no interest in the King family fortune and never had, and secondly, that you’re marrying for love and nothing else. Plus it would certainly get you off on the right foot with the in-laws, wouldn’t it?’

And by the time they called his driver around to take them home, light-headed from the champagne, Kate had already borrowed a biro from a passing waiter and signed on the dotted line.