Made in Heaven (2 page)

They were nearly there. The flowerbeds all round the circular drive in front of Charlotte's front door were particularly neat and the lawn looked as though it had been recently brushed and combed. Mauve swags of wisteria blossom drooped languidly around the front door. Camellias seemed to flower earlier and earlier and here they were in May with most of their blossoms already gone. The pink and white petals and dead heads had been swept away. The peonies looked as though they had every intention of being spectacular this year and Joss wondered whether Zannah was going to set a date that would allow her to include them in her bouquet. July? Was that the best peony month? Did peonies ever figure in bouquets? She realized that she was quite ignorant about such things. They hadn't seemed to be of the least importance when she and Bob had married. A pleasant ceremony in the local register office and a pretty bouquet to hold. As far as she remembered, she and Charlotte had simply gone into the florist's shop in the next street and ordered one to be sent to the house on the morning of the wedding. This was going to be quite different: another sort of wedding altogether.

Charlotte's house (detached, Edwardian, double-fronted, with an elegant porch) was imposing without being overwhelming; and when she had lived there as a teenager, Joss used to think the windows gazed out at the world in a friendly and welcoming manner. She still liked them. There was something about the way they'd been set into the surrounding brickwork that pleased her. The proportions were right. She gathered up the filmy dark green skirts of her dress to get out of the car. This whole wedding thing was going to be, in the hideous modern phrase, a steep learning curve. Joss tried to imagine the slope of a hillside, or the sweep of a
wave running to the shore, but that didn't work and the image of a graph on squared paper … exactly the sort of thing that used to terrify her when she was at school … wouldn't go away.

*

Zannah was doing rather well with the introductions. Emily, her younger sister (not exactly hiding away but observing from the window seat) was quite impressed. That sort of thing was always like a dance where no one was sure of the steps. She looked good too, in a dark red linen trouser suit with her reddish-gold hair piled up on top of her head and long, jade earrings a delicious undersea green against the pale skin of her neck. Emily, with her short, spiky dark hair, and her habit of wearing only black or white clothes, knew she wasn't a patch on Zannah in the looks department. I've never minded her being prettier, she reflected. Didn't really mind her being much thinner than me, or taller, or having the kind of small breasts that made clothes hang so well. I must have spent hours, Emily thought, helping her to work out good ways of stuffing her bras even before I was wearing them myself. There's only one thing I envied her for and that was Cal. And they're divorced now, so I'm not even jealous about that any longer. She was determined not to think about her ex-brother-in-law today if she could help it. There was too much going on and she needed her wits about her. Zannah would interrogate her about everything once they were alone at home and Isis had gone to bed. This was something they'd always done, even though she was four years younger than her sister. Emily remembered many nights when Zannah had crept into her room after Pa and Ma were in bed. She used to push back the duvet and say:
You're not asleep, are you?
The standard, jokey answer was:
Not any more
. Emily smiled when she thought now about how they used to sit up for hours discussing this or that young man's kissing technique,
or whether someone's dandruff made them unkissable. And I thought it didn't and Zannah thought it did. Considering how fussy she is, it's a major puzzle to work out why she's got a second fiancé in tow and I've not had a bite of one. Emily wondered whether she was on the shelf. She was twenty-six, for heaven's sake! Well, if she was on the shelf, she wasn't too steamed up about it. Maybe being on the shelf was the new black. Or whatever.

The big round table from the dining room had been set up here in the drawing room, which had been cleared of both armchairs and sofa, leaving only a few hard-backed chairs pushed up against the wall. It was a good idea, Emily thought. This room was the biggest in the house, with a bay window facing the drive and more than twenty feet away, French windows open on to the terrace and the garden on this sparkling day. The damasked cloth, the glasses and cutlery and vases of cream and pale pink roses were good enough to be in a photoshoot. Since she'd started working for a PR firm, she'd become much more aware of the appearance of everything.

Ma, for instance, was looking pretty but flustered. She very often did. Today, Emily could tell, she'd made a special effort to be smart in clothes that wouldn't let down the future mother of the bride. If they were a little on the hippyish side, if she wasn't in the same league as the groom's mother when it came to gloss and polish, her bones were finer and she was more instinctively elegant.

‘Ma, this is Adrian's mother, Mrs … '

‘Maureen, please. We can't be formal if Suzannah's to be my daughter-in-law, can we?' She pronounced her own name in the melodious Irish fashion, with the emphasis on the ‘een', Emily noticed. She insisted on it, according to Zannah. Emphasising the first syllable of the name, she'd decreed, made it sound common.

‘Jocelyn,' Emily heard her mother say, ‘but please call me Joss. Everyone does. And this is Bob, my husband.'

‘Delighted,' said Bob. Emily felt proud of her father, who was not exactly pushing sixty but sort of waving at it as it came closer. He was still quite good-looking, with, as he put it, ‘all my own hair and teeth'. He was getting a bit thick around the waist, and no one could call him really handsome, but he had a pleasant face and Emily noticed that Maureen was one of those women who turn up the wattage when they have a man in front of them at whom they can direct their smiles.

‘I must apologize for my husband,' she purred. ‘You're at the mercy of the system in his work. He's an anaesthetist in a big hospital. I always think that's such a terrifying responsibility.'

‘Yes, indeed,' said Bob, and then, ‘I'll go and get us a glass of wine, shall I? Shan't be long. And I'm sure you two have a great deal to talk about.'

Emily caught the panic in her mother's eyes, but she needn't have worried. Maureen had turned her attention to what was outside the open French window.

‘This is a really amazing house and garden, isn't it? For Clapham … ' Was there a suggestion in her voice that Clapham was some kind of shanty town, Emily thought, or am I being uncharitable and imagining it? No, it was there all right: a badly disguised astonishment that an urban house could be so relatively spacious and have such a huge garden.

‘Charlotte inherited it from her husband, who died about ten years ago. They were devoted.'

Emily noticed that Ma wasn't going into detail about how that husband had been Charlotte's second, and wondered whether Adrian had said anything to his mother. She assumed that Zannah must have told him about Charlotte's past, but maybe not. I'll ask her tonight, she thought. Surely even Adrian with the ‘high standards' he kept going on about wouldn't let something that was
so far in the past and of so little relevance to anything, make a difference to his marriage plans?

‘How very sad!' said Maureen. ‘But this is a splendid house. And so well-maintained … '

She was fishing. Emily could see it in the way she was bending her head, as if she wanted to absorb any information that might be forthcoming. How, it was clear she was longing to ask, did a woman of over seventy manage? The pristine state of the decoration in Charlotte's house had always been a topic of amusement in the Gratrix family. Ma and Pa, Emily thought, believed in basic cleanliness and Ma wanted beautiful things around her and sort of believed in tidiness, but any kind of painting, wallpapering, carpet-laying skills, any DIY know-how whatsoever, had passed them by. The ‘make your house gorgeous' gene was totally missing from their DNA.

Her father had an excuse. He was a professor. Papers and books over every surface was part of the job description. Sheets of notes and tottering piles of books obscured almost the entire surface of his desk. His computer was covered with dust even though it was constantly in use. The joke at home was: you couldn't see Pa when he was typing furiously for the clouds rising from the keyboard. His study had been a no-go area for years. But her mother … well, Joss had very strong views about what was beautiful (she was a poet, wasn't she?) but she could easily get carried away gazing at the heavenliness of a vase of tulips on the kitchen dresser and miss entirely the fact that the whole place could do with a coat of paint. Artistic, imaginative, dreamy but impractical: that was Ma.

‘Charlotte has a lot of help in the house,' she was saying now. ‘One of her lodgers … well, friends really … she has two friends who live here with her, both a little younger than she is. Anyway, one of them, Edie, has a son who's very good with his hands and that's
been useful. And Val … that's her other friend, Valerie … is a passionate gardener herself and gets help with the heavy work.'

‘What a stroke of luck!'

Emily thought she detected a note of rather grudging envy in Maureen's voice but perhaps, she conceded, she wasn't being fair. Joss was busy explaining Charlotte's domestic arrangements and making a muddle of it. Emily longed to interrupt and say something along the lines of:
She's got a chap who helps Val in the garden and someone else who comes to clean and Edie's son helps in all sorts of ways. And she manages very nicely thank you, with the money Gus left her and what the others pay her to live here. They play bridge with Nadia who lives down the road and have a whale of a time. So there!

Maureen and Joss had now stepped out on to the terrace, which was always called that and not the patio. Patio, Zannah declared, was too
Brookside
for words. In Emily's opinion, this flagged space was rather small for a terrace but definitely bigger than a patio. Three steps led down to the lawn, which was smooth and unmarked and stretched for quite a long way to the hawthorn bushes blossoming into clouds of pink near the high wall at the end of the garden. The borders were crowded with plants whose names Emily didn't know, interspersed with rose bushes, just on the point of blooming, ceanothus (fluffy flowers exactly the same colour as a blue liquorice allsort) and camellia bushes (some with the odd cluster of pink petals still hanging on but mostly just glossy leaves). It was hard to tell from Maureen's back whether this sight was impressing her. All Emily could see was the rear view of the blue silk jacket she was wearing, and the almost helmet-like perfection of her hair, swept up into a French pleat of totally non-brassy and almost insufferably subtle blondeness. This signalled a fortune spent
at some salon that you had to put your name down for practically at birth. Her own mother's thick, dark, short hair, which was beginning to show grey in places, shone in the sun. It was well, if unimaginatively, cut by Maggie, who'd been doing it in exactly the same style for years and years. From behind, though, Ma seemed much younger than Maureen: almost like a girl with her slim figure and her rather Bohemian style. Maureen looked definitely middle-aged. I'm glad she's not going to be my mother-in-law, Emily thought and longed for the party to be over so that she could discuss her with Zannah.

‘You all right, Chick?'

‘Pa! Stop it!' Emily grinned at her father, who, she knew, had come to her in refugee mode: fleeing the social chitchat he would have had to make with other people. ‘I'm too old for Chick.'

‘Not for me you're not. You're my baby and always will be. How d'you feel about Zannah's wedding faradiddle? Is your nose even the least bit out of joint? Your secret is safe with me.'

‘I'd rather be put in the oven with an apple in my mouth, if you want the honest truth. It's not my thing, but Zannah likes it, so … ' She let her voice fade away.

‘You're being kind and supportive. Good for you.'

‘Well, only up to a point. I'm enjoying my role as Devil's Advocate. I'm the one who points out other things she might do instead of pouring large quantities of money into this wedding. Does she listen? Three guesses. She might look pretty and wafty but you know how stubborn she is. Not in a nasty way, but like a cat. They never do what you want them to do either, do they? But they're so elegant and lovely that you indulge them while they pursue their own furry agendas. That's what Zannah's like. She does what
she
wants, but in the nicest possible way.'

‘She relies on you a lot, you know. So do I. Who else
would sit and sort out bits of old pottery with me for hours?'

‘I don't do that much any more, though, do I? It's hard to sort pottery long-distance.'

‘I know you're with me in spirit,' said Pa. ‘That's the main thing. I'd better go and socialize, I suppose. Much rather stay here with you, but needs must.'

Emily was watching him make his way towards Charlotte (another easy conversational option) when someone touched her shoulder.

‘You're miles away, Em,' Adrian said, smiling at her, ‘but I'm about to make an announcement I'm sure you won't want to miss.'

He was holding out a glass of champagne and Emily took it obediently, then went to stand with everyone else on the terrace. She remembered, with a small twinge of pain, the rowdy evening in the local pub when Cal had told a gang of friends that he and Zannah were about to get married. No fuss, no parents around, and an unassuming agate ring bought from the local health-food shop, which did a cool line in semi-precious stones set in silver. Friends, pints of beer and cider, laughter, casual clothes. Zannah was radiantly happy and I was miserable because I knew that Cal would be out of reach for ever. How awful it had been having to act ecstatic because of not wanting to hurt Zannah.