Daughters (39 page)

‘Katie,’ called the caterer. ‘
Katie!
’

There was the sound of running feet and a white shape glimmered through the darkness. A figure skittered into a beam of light. It was wearing a white dress, and a torn white veil drifted out behind it.

Lara’s heart somersaulted.

She hurried down the steps in pursuit. As puzzling and elusive as her dream, the white figure flitted this way and that. Lara ran after it, her feet stirring up eddies of dust. Sharp and offensive, ever stronger, the fox’s odour sifted through the warm air. Lightning snapped in the sky overhead. Ever faster, the girl in white ran past the wild-flower area towards the clump of beeches …

Without question, she followed, drawn by a compulsion, astonished and a little frightened.

What phantoms were hissing to the surface? What manifestation of her secret life? What grief (and, sometimes, near madness) had Lara kept captive in her inner life, and struggled to hide?

The ease with which she was moving through the dark
was astounding – it was as if she had followed this path many times. Beyond the wild-flower patch and the beeches, Lara could see the shimmer of the stream.

Breathing was beginning to hurt.

‘Katie! I’m going home now,’ echoed the impatient call from the marquee.

Ahead of Lara, the white vision slowed abruptly, swayed and appeared to fall to the ground.

Within seconds, Lara had caught up.

She discovered a little girl, who looked much smaller than the apparition she had chased. Nine? Perhaps ten? She was wearing a grubby white cotton frock, which was too long for her, and a veil attached to her hair with a pink plastic slide. Close up, it was a cheap and tacky thing sold in toy shops.

She had fallen over and her knee was bleeding. ‘Ouch.’ She tugged the veil off her head and dabbed at the wound with it. Crimson seeped on to the white and flowered, like spots of birth blood on hospital sheets.

The phantoms.

The ones that wouldn’t leave her alone.

Flashback.

She lies in the bed in the hospital ward and watches sunlight inch its way across the windowsill. My baby will be born soon. There is a flurry, and urgent voices issuing orders, faces she doesn’t recognize materializing in and out of her vision, the cold, swimming sensation as the drugs kick in. Red blood pooling into the white hospital sheet. Soon she is floating above the bed. Don’t go, commands the voice in her head. Stay. Later, the feel of Louis’s skin against hers. Skin-to-skin was what the midwives had advised before the birth. But now
they say, Let us wrap him first. She is hysterical, demanding that they place his still, damp, cooling little body against hers.

A strange sound?

Bill weeping.

Lara managed, ‘Are you all right? Who are you?’

‘I’m Katie,’ the child replied. ‘I’m the bride.’

Lara said, ‘
Of course
you are. I hope I didn’t frighten you. I didn’t know who you were.’

Katie threw her a child’s look: patronizing and long-suffering. ‘No.’

‘There you are, Katie!’ Her mother, who had been calling for her, hurried into view. ‘Now, what have you been and done? I told you not to wear that here.’ She bundled up the veil and put it into her bag. ‘We’re late. Katie loves dressing up,’ she explained to Lara. ‘I couldn’t get a babysitter.’

She grabbed her daughter and they hurried towards the cars parked in the drive.

Lara was shaking. The bride, the baby that never lived … They had harried and haunted her.

It was time for them to stop and she must send them away.

She drifted towards the stream and watched the moonlight spread and contract over its moving surface. Dew was forming on the grass. Behind her, the light from the marquee streamed across a black lawn that was fretted here and there with reflections from the gathering moisture.

The old sensations – despair, rawness, disbelief. What did she teach her patients? Events that happen beyond
your control are beyond your control. Deal with them. That was the clue to survival.

There was a touch on her arm. ‘Lara?’

‘Bill,’ she responded, half sobbing.

‘Hey, what is it?’ The dark made him appear bulkier than he was. ‘Did I frighten you?’

‘I think I’m haunted,’ she said. ‘But I’m going now. I’ll get out of your hair.’

He leaned forward and his breath touched her cheek. ‘You haunt me, Lara. In so many ways. You shouldn’t but you do.’

She was appalled, embarrassed.

Sweet
memory.

Inadmissible
memory.

‘Eve said you were in the garden. She said you wanted to do something.’

‘I should have asked you. But I wanted to cut a sprig of myrtle to put in her bouquet. It’s traditional, you know. But I got waylaid …’ she managed a wry smile ‘… by a bride.’

He was puzzled. She explained and he laughed. ‘We could pick the myrtle in the morning. It would be better then anyway. Fresher, sweeter.’

‘We?’

‘We.’ He put a finger under her chin and forced her to look up at him. ‘That’s what I wanted to say and it would seem to be the moment. I wanted to put what we could to rest … and since it’s Eve’s wedding, I wanted to thank you. For looking after Eve and Jasmine. Bringing them up. I never got to tell you how much I appreciated it. I should
have done and I’m very conscious of that. I also wanted to say … I’m sorry.’ He dropped his hand and shoved it into his pocket. ‘I’m sorry about a lot of things.’

A breeze shivered through the warm air. She glanced up at the sky.
No rain, please.

He was puzzled by her silence. ‘What do you say, Lara?’

‘Go on.’

‘When grit gets in, it rubs and rubs until there’s nothing left. I haven’t been the best at forgetting, but so much is in the past. Let’s keep it there.’

They turned and fell into step as they walked up towards the drive.

‘I always blamed you for making me leave,’ he said.

‘Nothing could have been further from what I wanted.’

‘My thoughts were skewed at the time. I couldn’t reason any more. I know you didn’t make me leave, and I don’t ever think that now.’

They had, she thought, found the easy vocabulary. At last. All the familiar phrases they used to exchange, the jokes, were still there, waiting for recall. They had built the edifice of the marriage and allowed the earthquake to topple it. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘it was both of us.
Neither
of us could deal with Louis so the marriage couldn’t survive.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

She looked at him – the big, kindly, stricken man whom she had once loved and who had once loved her. That would never return and the memory of their mistakes was still there. Of course. But they had lost their sting.

They had reached her car. He opened the door and
waited for her to get in. ‘We can pick a sprig of myrtle for Eve’s bouquet. Right?’

‘Right.’

The alarm sounded and Jasmine woke. She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow.

Eve was getting married today.

Her next thought was for Duncan – and she wished it wasn’t. He would be at the Turnpike, with Andrew and his family.

They had not seen each other. They had not spoken since his phone call a week ago.

‘Jas, don’t hang up.
Listen
to me.’

‘It’s over.’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’ Cross and slightly menacing (which he could be).

‘Give me one reason why it’s ridiculous to expect to continue a relationship with someone I can’t trust …’

‘But you can …’

She pressed her face deeper into the pillow.
Confession
. As the weeks had gone on, it had become harder. Was this a usual pattern? Did the mind ever stop? If only it would. She might go mad with thinking, with
if only
, with the emptiness, the futility, the starting-all-over-again.

For God’s sake, it wasn’t as though she had had to fight a war.

Someone knocked at the door. Eve stuck her head
around it. ‘Do you mind?’ Paler than she should be. Or perhaps that was how brides
should
look on their wedding day. This bride was dressed in jeans and damp plimsolls that shed flecks of grass as she walked across the carpet.

‘Oh, God,’ said Eve, noting her debris trail, and pulled off the plimsolls. She scrubbed at a green patch on the carpet. ‘You’re very beige,’ she told it. ‘You could do with gingering up.’

Jasmine grinned, and pulled herself upright. ‘Hey. You’re supposed to be in bed being pampered.’

‘Couldn’t. I’ve had breakfast.’ She went over to the window.

‘Weather?’

‘Beautiful. As I ordered. I saw a dragon-fly on the stream.’

A dragon-fly, Jasmine thought.
Good image
.

Eve said softly, ‘Andrew left a pair of earrings on my breakfast tray, which was lovely of him.’ She plumped down on the bed. ‘So, here we are.’

They exchanged a look.

‘So here we are,’ Jasmine agreed. ‘Happy?’

‘Of course.’ After a second, she added, ‘
Very.
’

‘Did you see Andrew last night?’

‘Very briefly.’

‘Eve, you
do
love him?’

She flicked a look at Jasmine:
No further
. ‘Oh, yes.’ She got up and retrieved Jasmine’s dressing-gown from the floor and draped it around her sister’s shoulders. ‘You’ll get cold.’ Then: ‘Actually, I do feel a bit odd.’

Jasmine leaped out of bed and drew Eve close. She
smelt of grass and country things. But she felt fragile and underweight. ‘You have been eating?’

‘Sure. All brides lose weight.’

‘You’ll have to fatten up on honeymoon.’

Eve’s fingers crept into hers.
We two
.
Tied together by their genes and by a death. ‘Are you thinking about our real mother?’ Jasmine asked.

Eve’s hand felt lighter than a bird’s claw in hers. ‘Trying not to.’

‘Same here. I sense she’s trying to make her presence felt.’ She splayed Eve’s fingers and inspected her nail polish. Pinky, translucent, as delicate as mother-of-pearl. ‘I can’t help thinking – no,
feeling
– she’s outraged that she never got the chance to bring us up, and never had the chance to interfere.’

Eve gave a sketchy grin. ‘You’re well informed. Does our mother speak from the ether?’

‘Don’t joke.’

‘Might have to, Jas. Otherwise I might weep.’

Jasmine grabbed Eve. ‘Don’t do that. Brides can’t have blotchy faces.’ She searched Eve’s face. ‘You are
all right
?’

Eve put on the face she adopted when her back was against the wall. ‘Nerves. Don’t look like that, Jas. I’m bound to feel a bit shaky.’

Jasmine returned to the subject of their mother. ‘I can’t help also feeling that, if she’s grateful to Lara for bringing us up, she’s angry with her for being alive.’

‘She shouldn’t be,’ said Eve. ‘Lara did her … best.’ In a rare gesture, she rested her head on Jasmine’s shoulder. ‘Ever thought of being a psychic?’

‘I wouldn’t have blamed Lara if she hadn’t loved us, but she did.’

Eve didn’t reply to that. Instead she said, ‘Remember the cardboard houses?’

‘Of course.’

Eve and Jasmen’s Haus. Top Secret.

‘I never allowed Maudie inside.’

‘You’ve probably marked her for life.’

A light buffet lunch had been laid out in the dining room at the White Boar and the wedding party were drifting in and out in various stages of dress. There was cold salmon, salads, plus a good selection of cheeses, to which Bill was helping himself with enthusiasm.

The party included Bill, Sarah, Jasmine and the bride, who had come down from the house, his sisters Frances (the excitable aunt) and Lucy (the calm aunt) and their respective husbands, Richard and Brad, plus a scattering of cousins.

A pale Eve was pushing a tiny amount of rice salad around her plate.

Bill stuck a huge chunk of cheese on a piece of bread. ‘No one told me how nerve-racking it is to be the father of the bride.’

He didn’t look at all nerve-racked.

Lucy broke off her conversation with Sarah. ‘You’d better get used to it, Bill. You have more than one to walk down the aisle.’

Lara shot a look at Jasmine, who appeared to be fixated on a pot of lilies in the corner of the room.

Ferrying plates, pouring drinks, dispensing water and coffee, the staff came and went.

Brad was already sporting a glazed look. How was he going to get through the day? And Richard – browbeaten and depressed – shovelled pills from his pocket. ‘To support the liver and kidneys,’ he explained.

Jasmine murmured to Lara, ‘At this rate, we’ll have to book him into the Priory by the end of lunch.’

‘Pills are his reason for living,’ she whispered back. ‘Think of the Cruel Existence with Frances.’

Lunch over, Lara went up to her room. It was far too warm. Pushing up the window, she spotted a spider’s web slotted into the space between the sill and the brick return. ‘Summer must be dying if you’re here,’ she told it. Then, gazing at the hexagonals and spirals deep in the web, she added, ‘You’re a marvel.’

It was a day tipped with gold. The coinage of early autumn.

A knock on the door. The corsage was delivered: ivory roses, with cream dendrobium orchids and ivy – all of Eve’s choosing.

From room service she ordered mint tea to sweeten her system. (And to remind her of Damascus?)

Hat. Bag. Shoes.

She bathed and dried herself, then drew on her expensive sheer tights – and laddered them. Cursing, she got out the back-up pair and put them on.

She tackled her makeup. The woman in the mirror looked anxious, and she did her best with foundation and eye shadow to smooth her anxiety into an expression suitable for the (step)mother-of-the-bride.

Much thought had been expended on her outfit. It had boiled down to either a peacock-blue silk dress and jacket or an edgier dress in olive jersey. It was a source of exasperation that the old-fashioned colours – bright pinks, oranges and blues – from the fifties suited her better than anything. Vivid peacock added sheen to her looks but the olive made her feel subtler, foxier, more up-to-date. It had also been less expensive. She went for it.