The Park Bench Test

Contents

Sarah Lefebve

Dedication

AUTHOR NOTE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

KATIE

FIONA

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

CAROLINE

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

GEORGINA & TARA

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

JO

STEPHANIE

AUDREY

CATHY

BEV

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

GRAHAM

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

NATALIE

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

CHAPTER FIFTY SIX

CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN

CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

CHAPTER SIXTY

CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

CHAPTER SIXTY TWO

CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR

CHAPTER SIXTY FIVE

CHAPTER SIXTY SIX

CHAPTER SIXTY SEVEN

CHAPTER SIXTY EIGHT

CHAPTER SIXTY NINE

CHAPTER SIXTY SEVENTY

CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE

CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO

CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE

CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR

CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE

CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX

CHAPTER SEVENTY SEVEN

Love Romance?

About HarperImpulse

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sarah Lefebve

There is one word to sum up my life – chaotic! I have two small children who, though I love more than life itself, have an amazing capacity to create untold mess, laundry and general havoc. I have a very untidy self-employed husband whose ability to leave stuff literally all over the house knows no bounds. I have two step-sons whose love of lego has left me many a time nursing bruised feet and cursing those little plastic bricks and I have a love of both red wine and Cadbury’s milk chocolate – frequent large helpings of which force me to the gym on a regular basis.

I also obviously have a passion for writing – so when I am not tidying up after my family or dashing to the gym that’s what you’ll find me doing. I just wish there were more hours in a day!

For Ruth, my oldest friend, who found her Mr Right.

And for Tom, my brother-in-law, who always wanted to know when this book would be published.

Well here it is!

AUTHOR NOTE

In The Park Bench Test the heroine Becky needs to find out how you know you’ve met Mr Right. As I was single when I first started writing the novel (I am now married with two small children!) I was blissfully unaware how you knew when you’d found “the one”! To give the story a bit of authenticity, therefore, I interviewed my own friends, family members and colleagues on this issue. In other words, the interviews in The Park Bench Test are genuine – and not a figment of my imagination! Names have been changed to protect the innocent!

PROLOGUE

Love flies, runs and rejoices; it is free and nothing can hold it back.

Thomas À Kempis (1379-1471)

When I was eight years old Ken asked Barbie to marry him.

Barbie said yes.

I wanted to know why.

I wanted to know everything when I was eight. I wanted to know why I had two eyes and two ears, but only one nose and only one mouth. I wanted to know why grass was green and why sky was blue. I wanted to know why my eyebrows didn’t grow to be as long as my hair.

And I wanted to know why Barbie loved Ken.

It was the first day of the summer holidays and my best friend Emma and I had laid on a lavish wedding for our bride and groom – in a marquee made out of four plastic tent poles and a pink lacy pillowcase from Laura Ashley. It was the place to be that Saturday afternoon, with an enviable guest list that included four other Barbie dolls, My Little Pony – who’d plaited her mane for the occasion, Paddington Bear – minus one wellington boot which Emma had dropped out of the window while she was showing my mum the flower we’d forced into his buttonhole, and a naked Tiny Tears, all of whom were treated to a wedding breakfast of chocolate digestives and Love Heart sweets.

It wasn’t the first time they‘d got married but it was the first time we ever questioned why Barbie wanted to marry Ken. Not that we thought there was anything wrong with Ken – he was quite cool really, particularly in the white sparkly trousers we had made for him out of one of my dad’s old handkerchiefs, some Pritt Stick glue and a pot of blue glitter.

My mum was helping out at the village plant sale, so it was my dad who had drawn the short straw.

“Daddy,” I said, my tone giving away the fact that I was about to ask a question he’d rather I had saved for my mum.

“Yes Rebs,” he replied hesitantly, over the top of his newspaper. My dad still calls me Rebs. Everyone else calls me Becky – or B. He likes to be different.

“Barbie loves Ken, doesn’t she?” I asked, pulling off the bride’s luminous green swimsuit, which probably convinced my dad he was about to have to deliver his “birds and bees” speech a little earlier than expected.

“Yes that’s right, love.”

“Why does she?”

“Why does she what, love?” he said, half listening, half reading his newspaper.

“Why does she love Ken? Why does she want to marry him?”

Of course, the answer was obvious – Barbie was marrying Ken so that Emma and I could get our hands on enough chocolate digestives and Love Heart sweets to make ourselves sick. But my dad chose to overlook this minor detail.

“What makes you ask that sweetheart?” he asked instead, buying himself a bit of time to come up with a plausible answer, no doubt, while simultaneously breathing a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to have to explain where babies came from.

“I just wondered.”

“Well,” he ventured, both Emma and I now hanging off his every word.

“Well…he’s her Mr Right, I suppose.”

Hello?

We were only eight years old, dad.

“What’s a misterite?” Emma asked, trying to flick a bit of glitter off her finger.

My dad thought about it for a moment.

“Mr Right is the man a lady loves and wants to spend the rest of her life with. He’s the man she wants to marry. Because he makes her happy. Because they’re sort of meant to be together, sort of, I guess…”

You had to hand it to him – it was a damn good try.

“Does that mean you’re mummy’s misterite, then daddy?” I asked, still intrigued, while Emma, clearly less than impressed with this explanation, had returned to the task of making Ken a sparkly vest to go with his trousers.

“That’s right darling,” dad said, beaming – maybe because he was my mum’s Mr Right, maybe because he’d managed to answer the question without her help, probably a bit of both.

I may have only been eight years old, but I am pretty sure that was the very moment I decided I believed in Mr Right. And that one day I would find him.

I suspect it was also the moment that Emma decided it was absolute bollocks. That there was no such thing as Mr Right. And that the best she could ever hope for was to find someone who’d stick around longer than her dad did.

“But why?” I asked my dad for the third time, buttoning up Barbie’s wedding dress while Ken waited nervously in the marquee. “Why are you mummy’s misterite?”

My dad looked up from his newspaper and pondered the question for a second.

“Because, Rebs. Just because.”

CHAPTER ONE

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours

For one lone soul another lonely soul,

Each choosing each through all the weary hours

And meeting strangely at one sudden goal.

‘Destiny’, Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904)

“Sorry, sorry,” I shout, running down Pretty Street where Emma and Katie are both waiting for me outside the shop.

I look at my watch. I’m 30 minutes late. Damn.

“Sorry,” I say again, trying to catch my breath. I really should work on my fitness.

I hug them both.

“The train was delayed leaving Leeds,” I explain. “And then we had to stop in Grantham to replenish the buffet car. I blame the fat git in coach D – every time I went past him to get to the loos he was scoffing another king size Mars Bar. And then I had to wait 20 minutes for a bloody tube. The underground was packed. Whose idea was it to go wedding dress shopping in London on the first day of the January sales?” I ask. “Oh yes – yours!” I say, grinning at Katie.

“Let’s have another look then. I’ve forgotten what it looks like already.”

She waves her left hand in my face and I throw my head back, pretending to be blinded by the sparkle.

“Gorgeous,” I say, and she beams – which is pretty much all she’s been doing for the last ten days, I suspect.

“Right then. Let’s get this show on the road,” I say, pushing open the door to Maid in Heaven.

“I’m sorry,” a lady with half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose and a tape measure wrapped around her neck tells us when we explain we’ve come in search of a wedding dress for Katie – a little pointless really, given that we are stood in a shop full of the bloody things.

“We’re fully booked,” she says. “You really should have made an appointment.”

I don’t like the way she’s looking at us – like she would look at something sticky on the bottom of her shoe. Lips turned down, nose tilted slightly in the air. I’m tempted to pull that tape measure a little tighter…

“What about this afternoon?” Katie asks.

The woman shakes her head.

“Fully booked,” she repeats. “All day.”

She reaches for a big leather diary from a desk and flicks nonchalantly through the pages until she stops at the first one that isn’t completely obliterated with brides’ names, telephone numbers and dress sizes. She taps the page decisively.

“April the third,” she says, ever so slightly sarcastically. Anyone would think she’s trying to make a point. “I can fit you in on April the third.”

“APRIL THE THIRD?” Katie shrieks. “That’s…” – she counts on her fingers quickly – “…four months away. I want to get married on September the eighteenth. I can’t wait four months!”

“SEPTEMBER EIGHTEENTH?!” the woman shrieks, obviously now in competition with my friend as to who can inject the most alarm into three simple words. “September the eighteenth, this year? In that case you really should have made an appointment.”

Katie looks at Emma and me.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s going to cry.

But of course I do know better. I’ve known Katie for nearly ten years. Katie would never let a nasty woman like this make her cry.

“I’m sorry,” she tells her, instead, “I’m used to shopping in Marks and Spencer and Next, where you don’t have to make an appointment to use a cubicle.” And then she glances over to the rails of dresses on display at the back of the shop, and grimaces.

“In any case,” she says, “I really don’t think you have what it is I’m looking for.”

Emma and I grimace too – just for good measure. And then the three of us leave the shop and leg it back up the road laughing.

The woman at the next shop is not quite so nasty. But she does laugh at us. How rude.

“Have you any idea how many men propose over Christmas and New Year?” she asks.

Katie looks crestfallen. I think she thought it was just Matt – that it was just the best day of his and hers lives – not every Tom, Dick and Harry’s.

“We filled three months of the diary in one week,” she explains.

“Okay. Thanks anyway,” Katie says.

And so we leave shop number two.

Katie looks at her list.

Old New Borrowed Blue is next. But it’s a tube ride away. I’m not sure I can face the underground again just yet. I’ve only just got over the ordeal of being pressed up against Worzel Gummidge all the way from Kings Cross to Knightsbridge. I don’t think I’ve ever held my breath for so long. I almost held the Metro paper between us as a makeshift barrier until I discovered someone had already used it to scrape a bit of chewing gum off the bottom of their shoe.

“Let’s go grab a coffee,” I suggest. I’m a tea drinker actually, but nobody says that do they? – ‘Let’s go grab a cup of tea’ – unless they’re over sixty five and planning on ordering a fruit scone to go with it.

“Good idea,” Emma and Katie both agree.

“So, Emma. Have you changed your mind yet?” Katie asks, before shovelling a huge forkful of chocolate fudge cake into her mouth. She’s as skinny as a rake too. There’s no justice.

“I can’t, Katie,” she says, offering her a piece of double chocolate chip cookie with extra chocolate – presumably in the hope that it will help soften the blow.

Emma is refusing to be a bridesmaid – on account of the fact that it will jeopardise her own chances of ever walking down the aisle.

What can I say? My friends are a little odd.

“Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride,” she told Katie the moment she blinded us for the first time with her newly acquired diamond ring on Boxing Day, when we met at my parents house in Sussex for leftover turkey and recycled Christmas cracker hats.

“You were only five when your godmother got married!” Katie had argued. “And Alison and Paul are already divorced, so that doesn’t count either.”

“Age is irrelevant. And the only way to reverse the curse is to be a bridesmaid another four times. And even if Becky does get off her arse and marry Alex,” Emma had said, looking pointedly at me, “that still leaves me three times short, and I don’t know anybody who’s even remotely close to getting that ring on their finger. Sorry Katie, I can’t do it.”

Personally I think she’s just trying to avoid the humiliation of wearing a peach dress in front of all of Katie and Matt’s friends and family. Not that Katie is planning on dressing us in peach. At least I hope she’s not. It’s every bridesmaid’s worst fear, isn’t it – being made to look like a giant helping of peach cobbler? Or worse still, being forced into some floral number that looks like it has come straight from your Auntie Mabel’s living room curtain pole.

Anyway – a battle ensued, involving a minor strop on both parts and an in-depth discussion on every possible superstition from the importance of good manners when coming face to face with a lone magpie, to the day-long good fortune to be had from seeing a penny and picking it up (frankly I’d be much happier to see a £20 note and slip that into my pocket – but maybe that’s just me).

Katie relented, eventually, and agreed that Emma could do a reading instead – on the proviso that she comes on every shopping trip that involves the wedding in any way, shape or form. Starting today.

She’s not quite given up trying to persuade her yet though.

“I can’t afford to risk it,” Emma explains, for the umpteenth time. “I have such shit luck with men.”

She’s right. She does.

She has no trouble meeting men. And getting them, for that matter. Emma is stunning – with legs up to her armpits, and perky boobs. And the blonde hair. And the blue eyes. And she’s a lovely person too. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?

Men, for Emma, are a bit like buses. Buses which turn up in the most unexpected places. In the baggage claim area at Gatwick Airport following a teachers’ conference in Glasgow, for example. Or the frozen vegetable section of her local Tesco Express. Or the back row of a karate class (the one and only class she ever made it to, I hasten to add, being too busy, as she inevitably was, loved up with the guy from the back row).

Yes – Emma can get the men.

It’s just the keeping them that she tends to have a problem with. Before long, either they lose interest – or she does.

Either she’s about to add her toothbrush to the pot on their bathroom sink and a spare pair of knickers to their bottom drawer when they give her the elbow or she decides she doesn’t want them anymore, in which case they tend to hang around like a bad smell.

Emma’s last four boyfriends, in no particular order, were:

Greg – who told her he loved her on their third date. He sent her 12 bunches of flowers, 37 voicemail messages and 52 text messages in six days. On the seventh day she dumped him. Good decision, I think.

Dean – who couldn’t get it up. But she really liked him and was prepared to help him through it – and would have done, had she not discovered that he had told all his mates she couldn’t keep her hands off him, that they were at it like rabbits and that they had virtually cleared the local branch of Boots of their entire supply of Fetherlite Durex. She dumped him after six weeks and promptly told his mates exactly why they weren’t at it like rabbits.

Barry – who most certainly could get it up – and did so on a regular basis. Just not exclusively for Emma, as she discovered when she let herself into his apartment to surprise him on his birthday after fibbing that she was busy – only to discover he had already put on his birthday suit for someone else.

And Peter – who dumped her after she discovered he was growing marijuana in his bathtub and suggested he might like to take up a more law-abiding hobby – like draughts or ping-pong.

Emma doesn’t believe in Mr Right. She just wants to meet someone she likes – or loves – enough to want to stick around. When she was seven her dad left her mum for his secretary and moved to the South of France. Maybe that’s why. I don’t think she’s ever got over it.

“So have you made any other plans yet?” I ask Katie, blowing on my tea.

She nods and waves her hand to signal she intends to give details. But her mouth is still full of chocolate fudge cake.

“You don’t have to eat it all in one go,” I tell her. “We’ve got all day, you know. My train doesn’t leave until eight.”

I normally stay the night with Katie and Matt. It’s a long way to come from Leeds just for the day – but I have to go home tonight as Alex and I have a christening to go to tomorrow.

“Well, we’ve set the date, obviously.”

They’re getting married on the anniversary of the day they met – six years ago. September the eighteenth. Nine months from now. She’s assures us that’s coincidental. I’m assuming she’s telling the truth. I’m guessing she wouldn’t choose to give birth whilst walking up the aisle.

“And we’ve booked the venue - a lovely little church in Beaulieu in the New Forest followed by a reception at the Montagu Arms Hotel.”

Matt took Katie to Beaulieu for the weekend when they had been together for a year. Katie fell in love with the place and told him when they got married that was where she’d like them to do it. Even back then she knew she’d met the one.

“You’ll love it,” she says, draining her coffee cup as we get ready to leave. “It’s so beautiful. I couldn’t believe it when they said it was available on the date we wanted. They’d had a cancellation, I think. Obviously someone decided not to get hitched after all,” she grins, pleased that someone else’s misfortune has turned into her own good luck.

It’s also due to a cancellation that we are finally able to make it all the way into a wedding dress shop without being laughed straight back out again. Old New Borrowed Blue has had a cancellation.

“You’re a lucky girl,” the owner tells Katie in a very teachery voice, as if she’s telling her off for colouring outside the lines.

“We’ve just this minute had a cancellation. The bride is sick, apparently.” From the tone of her voice I’d say she doesn’t believe the bride for one minute. I’d say she hears this excuse all the time. I’d say she thinks the bride has actually been dumped but doesn’t want to admit it.

“Great,” Katie says, before realising how that sounds.

“What I mean is, great that you’ve had a cancellation, not great that the bride is sick, obviously … ”

She takes our coats and shows us upstairs to a waiting area next to numerous racks of dresses. There are big comfy sofas, wedding photographs all over the walls, and piles and piles of wedding magazines stacked up on a large glass coffee table.

“Catriona will be with you shortly,” she says. “Feel free to browse.”

We are about to start rifling through the magazines when Catriona arrives.

She introduces herself, before asking: “Which one’s the bride?”

I quickly push Katie forward, before she gets any ideas that it might be me.

“I am,” Katie says, at the same time as Emma says “not me”. You can tell by her tone that what she really means is “not bloody me!”

“Wonderful,” Catriona says.

I like her. She isn’t nasty and she hasn’t laughed at us. Yet. She’s in her mid forties, I’d say. She’s small, and smartly dressed in a navy trouser suit and white top. She looks like she knows what she’s doing. And she’s smiling too. For now.

“When’s the big day?”

“September eighteenth,” Katie volunteers.