Made in Heaven Read Online Free Page A

days. I should be the one with a silly salary.’
    â€˜When we’re married, darling,’ Adrian answered, ‘what’s mine will be yours. You can leave your school and become a lady of leisure.’
    The offer, Zannah was sure, was kindly meant but at once she felt a prickle of resentment. ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ she said. ‘I love my job. I love being a teacher and I’d be a useless lady of leisure.’
    â€˜You could paint. You’re always saying you wish you had time for that.’
    That was true, Zannah reflected. She’d married Cal even before she graduated from St Martin’s School of Art, and had then become pregnant with Isis before she’d had a chance to try being an artist. She was pretty sure she didn’t have the talent to make it, but it would be good, she sometimes thought, to have the luxury of trying. Still, as things turned out, she found she
did
have a talent for teaching, and a genuine liking for the children in her care. What she’d said to Adrian was no more than the truth. Her college friends were in advertising and PR, and some were even teaching art, just like her. There wasn’t, as far as she knew, a single full-time artist among them. Only the Tracey Emins ofthe world actually made a living from Art, which, when she thought of it in this context, always had a capital letter.
    Now, she looked at Adrian’s dark, soft hair and his beautiful blue eyes and remembered how that conversation had come to an end: with him pulling her into his arms and with her forgetting everything, as she always did when she was near him. I’m useless, she thought. However high-minded and principled I’m being, I become soft and giddy when he touches me. I wish we could go upstairs right now. I wish we were both naked. She took a deep breath and pulled herself together. This is not the time. This is my engagement party. I’m going to have the best wedding anyone’s ever had. I’m happy. I wish this moment could last.
    *
    The royal wedding had been thoroughly discussed, and Camilla’s dress at the Blessing pronounced both elegant and flattering.
    â€˜And a gorgeous colour,’ Maureen added, ‘though I wonder whether it-wasn’t perhaps a little tactless of the Queen to dress in cream, when she must have known, mustn’t she, what her new daughter-in-law was going to wear to the register office? And,’ she went on, ‘didn’t you just adore those blossoming trees in St. George’s Chapel? If you two got married in the spring, Zannah, you could copy that idea, couldn’t you? I thought it looked wonderful.’
    â€˜We’ve set the date, Mum,’ said Adrian, smiling at his mother. ‘Too late for blossom! You’ll have to have some other bright idea. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.’
    Charlotte caught the look that Zannah sent in her fiancé’s direction and smiled to herself. Adrian was tucking in to his food and missed it entirely but she’d have bet good money on her great-niece putting him straight as soon as she could. Zannah wasn’t someone who’dallow Maureen to decide on the floral arrangements for the wedding, wherever it took place. We haven’t even begun to discuss the venue, Charlotte was thinking, when the doorbell rang.
    â€˜That must be my husband,’ Maureen announced. ‘Better late than never!’
    She’d had a couple of glasses of wine and was smiling a great deal, Charlotte noticed.
    â€˜I’ll go,’ she said. She pushed back her chair, and put her napkin near the plate that now held no more than a few crumbs of pastry from the really rather good
tarte au citron
. She hurried across the hall to the front door and opened it. Standing on the doorstep was a tall, thin man with wavy, browny-grey hair flopping over his forehead and a smile that, with the hair and his horn-rimmed glasses, made him look