A Beautiful Day for a Wedding: This year’s Bridget Jones!. Charlotte Butterfield

have all the fun,’ Eve teased. ‘Look Mum, if you really need me to come, I will. It’s in London, and it might actually be quite nice to be at a wedding where I don’t have to do anything.’

      The waiter put down their food and made a subtle retreat.

      ‘Speaking of weddings, I posted my RSVP back to Becca earlier today,’ Faye said.

      ‘Becca invited you to her wedding?’ Eve asked, a little incredulously. Her mum had kept Becca well-nourished during their three years of university and occasionally did her laundry back then, but Eve had thought Becca was trying to keep numbers down.

      ‘Yes, I must admit I was a bit surprised that she invited me, but I was very touched.’

      ‘Did you say yes?’

      ‘Yes, if that’s ok with you? I promise I won’t cramp your style too much.’

      ‘No, it’ll be lovely having you there.’ Eve turned to her brother. ‘So where’s George this evening?’ Adam and George had been dating for nearly a decade, so it felt more like she had two brothers, except George was less rude to her.

      ‘He’s on a work dinner. Some clients are over from Tokyo and they’re all out together. He’ll probably stagger in at 2 a.m. after going to a karaoke bar.’

      ‘We should join them!’ Faye said. Thirty-five years of being a housewife had resulted in a volcano of pent-up enthusiasm for every activity she’d never done before.

      ‘Mum, as much as I love the new you, and good God, do I, there is no way that I want to be singing Neil Diamond at midnight with you, my sister, my boyfriend, his boss and five strange Japanese men.’

      ‘Put like that Mum, he has a point.’ Eve laughed and picked up her wine glass, knocking the side of her soup bowl in the process and sloshing its boiling hot contents right down the front of her bridesmaid dress. The sheer surprise combined with the scalding heat froze Eve in statue-like shock for a couple of seconds. Faye pushed her chair back and stood up, waiters flocked to the table, Eve remained open-mouthed and bright red. And Adam calmly picked up his water glass and chucked the contents all over his sister’s chest.

      ‘I didn’t really like that place anyway,’ Faye said, as they made an embarrassed exit from the restaurant. ‘Really stuffy. Literally and figuratively.’

      ‘What the heck am I going to do about this dress? I’m meant to wear it in twelve days, and it’s ruined,’ Eve cried. ‘This is going to send Tanya over the edge.’

      ‘It’s ok, take it to the dry cleaner’s in the morning. If that doesn’t work, call the tailor’s and see if they can make another one.’

      ‘It’s taken four months to make this one!’

      ‘Four months, that’s crazy. Get the pattern and I’ll whizz one up for you.’

      ‘It’s not from a pattern in a magazine Mum, it’s from a proper bridal designer.’

      ‘Are you sure?’ Adam sneered unhelpfully.

      ‘If there was an award for the worst bridesmaid ever, I would win it.’

      ‘Oh, come on love, it’s only soup.’

      ‘That right there shows just how little you know about brides, Mum.’

      The dry cleaner’s next to work said the same thing as the dry cleaner’s near her flat, who repeated exactly what the launderette said, who parroted what the internet had confirmed last night. Eve was screwed.

      And the lipstick that she’d borrowed from the beauty cupboard turned out to have some long-lasting dye in it, so her lips had an unattractive orange hue to them that no amount of scrubbing in the shower would remove. At least the woman with the half-heart locket was on the train again this morning. That lifted Eve’s spirits a little.

      ‘Kat, I have a monumental problem,’ Eve sighed, flopping into her chair and swivelling round on it to face her friend. The dress lay crumpled in her lap, soup-side up.

      ‘Oh Christ.’

      ‘Exactly.’

      ‘They’re orange.’

      ‘That’s not the biggest problem. Look.’ Eve gestured at the massive stain.

      ‘To be fair, it wasn’t very nice anyway.’

      ‘That’s spectacularly unhelpful Kat! I know you haven’t met her, but Tanya is going to lose the plot over this.’

      ‘Look, we work for a bridal magazine, I’m sure we can pull in some favours and get a new one. Where did she get it?’

      ‘Some fancy Italian designer I think, she ordered them online.’

      ‘Hold it up, let me take a photo of it and get our friends on the fashion desk to try and track it down.’

      ‘See, that’s why I love you.’

      ‘I know. By the way, you were right about Juan. He’s gorgeous, but boy does he hate the female species.’

      ‘I completely forgot to ask, how did it go?’

      ‘He almost killed me, and I’m aching in muscles I didn’t know I had, but it was good. If ever you want to slack off again, I’ll definitely step in.’

      The fashion desk only took half an hour to find the dress in their archives, but it wasn’t from a Venetian atelier, like Tanya had boasted, after all. It was from a Chinese website selling copy dresses. And the big bag of cash that Eve had handed over to Tanya to pay for it came to substantially more than it was selling for online. ‘The cheeky cow!’ Eve said when Kat broke the news. She couldn’t believe that Tanya had charged her more than double what she’d paid for it. ‘What a crappy thing to do. Right, that’s it, I’m not spending a penny more on this wedding. I’m wearing the soup dress. I’ll make a feature out of it.’

      Kat narrowed her eyes at Eve. ‘While I love the new attitude, because you’ve definitely been a pushover for far too long, I’m going to have to step in and say that you can’t wear the soup dress as it is.’

      ‘I’m going to customise it.’

      ‘That doesn’t sound any better. How are you going to customise it?’

      ‘I’m going to find some fabric in the same colour, and cut out the minestrone panel, and sew in the new panel.’

      ‘Eve, can we take a moment to reflect on what you just said. In the time I have known you, dressmaking has never come up as one of the secret skills you have.’

      ‘No, but I can give it a go.’

      Kat just leant her head back against her chair and silently shook her head. ‘Oh God Eve, I can see nothing wrong with that plan at all.’

       Chapter 6

      Becca had offered to give the dress to a colleague of hers that made her own clothes, but Eve refused. How difficult could it be to do a bit of darning? She’d spent years watching her mum work her way through a massive basket of mending in no time at all, and this was one small dress. Too small, but that was neither here nor there.

      ‘Would a glass of wine make this easier?’ Becca asked, standing in the doorway, looking at her friend’s bent head and expression of concentration with undisguised pity. Eve resolutely shook her head. She was already unpicking the stitches she’d done the night before over one glass of wine too many. Repeating that tonight was not an option.

      ‘I’ll have one afterwards to reward myself for my brilliance. You can stick the kettle on though.’

      It didn’t look too bad, Eve thought, holding the dress away from her and squinting through one eye and then the other. In a flash of what she could