Daughters (22 page)

Jasmine tucked an escapee strand of hair under the turban. ‘Do you know why we have bridesmaids?’

‘No, but you’re going to tell us,’ murmured Maudie.

‘They were decoys for the devil, who had wicked designs on the bride. In the old days, they wore the same dress as she did to dupe him.’

‘You’ll keep me safe, then?’ asked Eve. ‘Won’t you?’

Maudie sat upright.

‘Of course, darling,’ said Jasmine. Impassioned and quite determined.

Maudie caught Jasmine’s eye. What
was
Jasmine trying to convey? A question mark, a worry? She couldn’t work it out.

Back into battle. ‘Eve … I’m trying to tell you I’ve got the interview for Harvard.’

‘
What?
’

‘That’s great, Maudie,’ Jasmine said.

Yet another of the sleek women sashayed out of the room, and three more drifted in. They were talking loudly and the steam room began to feel crowded.

‘But that means …’ Eve put two and two together.

‘Eve …’ Maudie was aware she was failing to tackle the subject head on. ‘I’m far too big to be a bridesmaid, anyway.’ She spread out her hands. ‘Look at me.
Huge.
And you’re so delicate.’

‘Don’t do yourself down,’ said Jasmine, and then proceeded to put her own self down. ‘Eve, I’m too old to be a bridesmaid.’

‘Well, matron-of-honour, then,’ said Eve.

They were flushed from the heat. Even so, a wave of additional colour swept over Jasmine’s features. Maudie slipped her arm around the slender, slippery shoulders. ‘And a beautiful one.’ Eve had been tactless. Even an idiot could work out that Jasmine was touchy about being the unmarried older sister.

‘Matron-of-honour is good.’ Jasmine being Heroic. She was brilliant at Heroic.

The war heroine … Jasmine, codenamed Violette, slipping under cover into occupied territory, the Sten tucked under her arm …

Later, they sat on loungers by a turquoise pool, flanked by tropical plants. High above, suspended from the ceiling, there was a cage of parakeets, and the atmosphere was the hot, saturated one of the tropics. Jasmine’s phone beeped. ‘Sorry, have to answer this. Client.’ Talking into it, she got up and moved away.

Eve was silent. The towelling turban stretched her face. Scrubbed of makeup, she was vulnerable. ‘Do I get the feeling no one wants to be my bridesmaid?’ she asked Maudie.

Maudie shrugged. ‘Eve, if … if I get a place … look, it’s not of my choosing.’

Eve sent Maudie a long, cool look. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘You really would miss my wedding.’

‘I’ve thought and thought,’ said Maudie.
Those who dare win.
Even so, her stomach heaved. ‘I know it’s your big day, of course it is, and I’ll be desperate about missing it. But isn’t the marriage what’s important? And I plan to be around for a lot of that.’

Eve stared at her. ‘You’ve said that before.’

‘So I have.’ Maudie fiddled with her towelling turban. ‘If there’s a choice to be made, and I don’t want to make a choice, but if I have to, I feel it should be to the advantage of my life. Just like you’re making your choice.’ She added, ‘I
know
it sounds dreadful.’

‘You’re right,’ said Eve, and the hand resting on her knee trembled. ‘It sounds
dreadful
because I thought the whole point of a wedding was that everyone was there to participate in it. You make an effort.’

Jasmine sauntered back, dropped on to her lounger and closed her eyes. ‘I could stay here for ever.’ Then she murmured, ‘I
am
staying here for ever.’

‘Maudie’s just told me that if she gets a place at Harvard she’s finally decided that she won’t be here for the wedding.’

Jasmine opened her eyes wide. ‘Maudie, is that true?’ She sat up and slipped into the eldest-sister straitjacket. ‘Have you thought out all the implications?’ She didn’t appear to be hostile. In fact, the reverse.

‘What else can I do?’

‘I can think of an alternative.’ The comment slid sarcastically off Eve’s tongue.

I’m less brave than I thought
. Maudie swallowed. The fissures in the family rock ran down the years. Eve walled up in her cardboard-box houses: ‘Maudie Keep Out.’ Eve and Jasmine’s togetherness. It was never mentioned but she knew that those two felt differently about her. She had envied her stepsisters. They had an aura of tragedy –
lost their mother, poor darlings. Tinies
. They had confidence. They
had purpose. They had togetherness. Doused in untouchable suffering, they were special.

But …

Observing Eve’s obvious hurt was difficult. But (she prayed) Harvard beckoned (and pink meringue repelled). What price one’s own desires against another whom – shameful confession – she did not love as much as some she could name? Quickly, so as not to weaken, she said, ‘Please, please, forgive me, Eve. It might not happen but I had to say something.’

‘Actually,’ Jasmine (war heroine) stepped into the breach, ‘I’d love to be a bridesmaid.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eve. ‘
Thank
you.’

Faced with the fallout from her own self-interest, Maudie was brought up short by the steely power and purity of its opposite.
Lesson to be learned, Maudie
.

‘I’m going for a swim.’ Eve swung her legs off the lounger and moved to one end of the pool, poised herself on the edge and dived in. Her immersion seemed, to Maudie, designed to shut them out.

Jasmine appeared riveted by the spectacle. After a moment, Maudie asked, ‘Are you worried about Eve?’

Jasmine didn’t look at her. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered.

‘A feeling or a fact?’

‘Sort of the former.’

‘You think too much.’

Jasmine turned a fierce face on her. ‘And you don’t think at all.’

The too-sweet smell of stephanotis soap was setting
Maudie’s teeth on edge. ‘Jas?’ She picked up her towel. ‘I’m sorry. Truly.’ Jasmine was now watching Eve arrow through the water, and she struggled to make amends. ‘We could always earmark a dress and buy it at the last minute.’

‘Maybe. Suggest it to Eve.’

Maudie pleated the end of the towel between her fingers. At times like this she minded acutely that she had no proper sibling. If only … If only what? Occasionally she permitted herself to imagine how she and Louis might have got on. Maybe they would have gone go-karting together. Slashed their thumbs with a penknife and mingled their blood. Louis wouldn’t have wanted her to be his bridesmaid. She knew that for sure.

I’m only thinking of
you
,’ Alicia had said when, the previous week, Maudie had had a wobble over Harvard and the wedding. ‘You don’t want to begin at a disadvantage.’

To think she might never have met Alicia – after all, it was only an accident that her aunt lived near the sixth-form college. Choosing a friend gave one an autonomy that was impossible for a child, and she was taken aback by how much pleasure she derived from this (slightly unlikely) alliance. It was a revelation to have one’s future ambitions considered, and reflected on, in such an intense, focused way. In a crazily composed family such as hers, the individual drowned.

‘Never have children,’ she had advised Alicia, who had laughed.

A dripping Eve returned to the lounger and resettled herself, and they switched to discussing practicalities. The
water slapped the sides of the stylish pool and the parakeets screeched, and Maudie broached the idea of having a dress in reserve. The swim had restored Eve’s equilibrium, and she agreed. They thrashed out an
entente
. Jasmine would be chief bridesmaid, Andrew’s two little nieces would be flower-girls and Maudie would step in as the second bridesmaid, if and when.

Eve snapped into Notebook mode. ‘Funnily enough, you both suit the same colours.’ She tapped a biro against her teeth. ‘I was thinking dusky pink.’

Maudie groaned.

Jasmine had attached two tokens to her phone, and they emitted tiny clinks as she checked for messages. ‘Let’s take a day off and mount a dawn raid on the shops.’

‘I’ve already had a look around.’ Eve imparted the information as if she had been engaged on a mission of the utmost mystery and importance.

Maudie prayed hard:
Please, please, may I get to Harvard
.

‘I fear Evie wants me to wear pink,’ Jasmine told Duncan.

‘You fear?’

‘I do.’

For once they were at his flat for the evening and she had rustled up an omelette for supper.

He appraised her gravely. ‘Yup. You look a pink sort of person. She’s got it right.’

She dipped her finger into her glass and flicked water at him. ‘You cannot imagine how I hate the thought.’

‘Let me see. I cannot imagine how you hate the thought.’ He chewed and swallowed. ‘Do you know? I can imagine.
Mainly because in the next few painful months you will tell me over and over again.’

‘Am I that predictable, Duncan?’

‘Yup.’

‘So, do you know what I’m thinking a lot of the time?’ To her surprise, the idea was troubling. The no-place-to-hide sort of troubling.

He looked up sharply, and the tease vanished. ‘Don’t look so appalled. I thought that was what lovers aspired to.’

She put down her fork and pushed her plate aside. ‘They do and they don’t.’

Duncan did the same. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘I really want to know what goes on in your head and it matters to me what you’re feeling.’

She hastened to say, ‘Me, too.’

He stared at her. Then his face cleared. ‘That’s OK, then.’ He got up and came round the table to kiss her. ‘You had me worried for a moment.’

She had herself worried. She had always told herself that her love for Duncan was complete, all-embracing, sealed. But sometimes, just sometimes, she realized that wasn’t the case at all.

Eve’s email:

Flowers and Guest List

Sarah pestered them to come down to Membury to discuss the wedding. ‘She says it’s important to take decisions
in situ
, and there’s a wedding trade fair in the nearby town if we want to drop in on it. I think we have to go,’ Lara explained, when she phoned Jasmine.

Jasmine was mired in a huge new project so hush-hush that it was referred to by the code-name ‘Merlin’. It demanded every ounce of her energy and resources. She protested that she hadn’t time.

‘Hey,’ said Duncan, to her enormous surprise. ‘Not true, babe.’ He insisted they took a Saturday off. ‘I want to see the famed Membury,’ he said. ‘After all, if I’m to transfix the guests as best man, I’d like to see where I’m to do it.’

Bless. Duncan had decided she needed a day off. It was a happy thought and she guarded it carefully.

Here they were, then – Lara, Eve, Maudie, herself and Duncan – eating lunch at Membury.

The kitchen faced north. It was gloomy and smelt of damp, past lives and past meals. It needed fresh paint, a
new cooker – actually, a complete overhaul. It wasn’t going to get it. Bill had made clear that the budget for refurbishment was on hold. What is it that drives people to take on projects they know they can’t manage? Jasmine wondered. Pride? Myopia? Still, if scaling the huge mountain of Membury pleased her father, so be it.

As always, Sarah had done her best. Duncan appreciated the beautifully cooked roast chicken, with red peppers stewed in balsamic vinegar, and asked for a second helping. ‘Sarah, you should be a TV cook.’ Jasmine wasn’t sure if Sarah considered this to be a compliment. But it was plain that she was charmed by his manners and sweetness. Duncan then interrogated Bill, politely but inexorably, on his plans for the garden. Jasmine eavesdropped with awe on his expert filleting of her normally uncommunicative father.

‘Do you have oil seed rape round here?’ Duncan was asking. ‘I’ve read it acts like a magnet for bees. They ignore the apple blossom and race to the big smell.’

Duncan knew nothing, zilch, about bees.

The two men occupied, Sarah was at liberty to pursue her objectives.

She launched in: ‘Eve, about the flowers. I’d like to do them.’ She offered the salt to Lara, who shook her head. ‘I’ve got plenty of ideas. Church, marquee, bouquet. I feel I’ve got my feet under the table in the village so I can get the flower rota on to it.’

Eve was about to have a fit. Jasmine stared hard at her plate.

‘How do you feel about ivy twined around columns?’
Sarah batted on. ‘And for the tables? Ice-cream cartons are useful, the square ones. If you paint them gold or silver, they’ll do as centrepieces. They’d look good with carnations and a nice evergreen sprig of something.’

‘Sarah,’ said Eve, ‘I had other – ’

‘Evie,’ said Jasmine, ‘you eat masses of ice-cream. You could start collecting now.’

She did everything possible to avoid Lara’s eye.

Sarah turned on her. ‘Are you poking fun at me?’

‘No, Sarah.’ But she had been.

‘Carnations,’ repeated Sarah. ‘Long-lasting.’

Sarah had no idea what was going on in Eve’s head. Or what the Notebook revealed. Why should she?

But Jasmine knew. Eve had been thinking chocolate cosmos, hydrangeas, peony roses, mint, marjoram and rosemary. A glorious clutter of English country flowers, rustic
and
contemporary – that had been Eve in full flow to Jasmine. Jasmine stole a peep at Sarah, who was not looking her normal kindly self. From her practical standpoint, Sarah wouldn’t comprehend the depth of Eve’s yearning romanticism. Or that her vision for her wedding was, like all great visions, complete and non-negotiable.

‘Sarah …’ Eve trod carefully ‘… you’re so sweet to be so concerned …’

Her mother was quiet, Jasmine noticed. She was eating little and slowly, chewing each mouthful as if it was an effort. It occurred to her that Lara had lost weight. ‘OK, Mum?’

Lara laid down her knife and fork, leaving half her food untouched. ‘Sorry, Sarah. It was good, though.’

Jasmine fixed on the flower arrangement by the sink. Pale blue irises and florid yellow gerberas had been crammed into a variegated vase. The assembly (dire) contributed nothing to Sarah’s case.

‘Sarah, I’ve got the flowers organized,’ began Eve.

The normally soft and conciliatory Sarah had morphed into an opponent of steel. ‘If you don’t like carnations think about orchids.’ She slotted chicken and potato on to her fork. ‘Green cymbidiums are excellent. And canna lilies come in such strong, dark colours, these days, and their structure holds. We’re going to have a shot at growing them, aren’t we, Bill?’