‘Going to give the old girl a quickie?’
‘What?’ Douglas, flushing, stared at his father, who had appeared unannounced at his shoulder. His small wiry frame stood characteristically straight in his morning suit, his weatherbeaten, normally watchful face softened by alcohol and pride.
‘Your mother. You promised her a dance. She fancies a quick whirl if I can get them to strike up a quickstep. Got to meet your obligations, my boy. Your car will be here soon, after all.’
‘Oh. Right. Of course.’ Douglas stood, struggling to regroup his thoughts. ‘Athene, darling, will you excuse me?’
‘Only if your gorgeous father promises to give this old girl a quickie too.’ Her smile, flickering behind innocently wide eyes, made Douglas wince.
‘Delighted, my dear. Just don’t mind me if I wheel you past old Dickie Bentall a few times. I like to show him that there’s life in the old dog yet.’
‘I’m heading off, Mummy.’
Serena Newton turned away from her wiener schnitzel (beautifully done, but she wasn’t sure about the creamed mushrooms) and looked with surprise at her daughter. ‘But you can’t leave until they’ve gone, darling. They’ve not even brought their car round yet.’
‘I promised Mrs Thesiger I’d babysit for her tonight. I want to go home first and get changed.’
‘But you never said. I thought you were coming home with Daddy and me.’
‘Not this weekend, Mummy. I promise I’ll be back in a week or two. It was lovely to see you.’
Her mother’s cheek was soft and sweet and lightly powdered, the texture of marshmallow. She was wearing her sapphire earrings, the ones her father had bought in India, when they had been posted there in the early years of their marriage. He had ignored the advice of the gemstone cutter, she always said proudly, bypassing the supposedly more valuable stones in favour of two that he declared exactly matched Serena Newton’s eyes. Surrounded by diamonds, the sapphires still held an exotic, expensive depth, while age and now a lingering worry had caused their inspiration to fade.
Behind her there was a round of applause as the young groom took his bride on to the dance floor. Vivi, glancing away from her mother’s enquiring gaze, didn’t flinch. She had got rather good at hiding her feelings, these last months.
Her mother reached out a hand. ‘You’ve hardly been home in ages. I can’t believe you’re rushing off like this.’
‘Hardly rushing off. I told you, Mummy. I’ve got to babysit tonight.’ She smiled, a broad, reassuring smile.
Mrs Newton leant forward, placed a hand on Vivi’s knee and dropped her voice: ‘I know this has been terribly hard for you, darling.’
‘What?’ Vivi couldn’t hide her sudden colour.
‘I was young once, you know.’
‘I’m sure you were, Mummy. But I really have to go. I’ll say goodbye to Daddy on my way out.’ With a promise to telephone, and a twinge of guilt at her mother’s hurt expression, Vivi turned and made her way across the room, managing to keep her face towards the doors. She understood her mother’s concern: she looked older, she knew she did, loss etching new shadowy echoes of knowledge on her face, grief sharpening its once puddingy outline into planes. It was ironic, really, she mused, that she should start acquiring those characteristics she had so desired – slimness, a kind of jaded sophistication – through losing the very thing she had wanted them for.
And, despite being naturally home-loving, Vivi had done her best to return to her family as little as possible over the last few months. She had kept her telephone conversations brief, avoiding all references to anyone outside the family, had preferred to contact her parents through brief, cheerful despatches on jokey postcards, had insisted time after time that she couldn’t possibly come back for Daddy’s birthday, the village fête, the Fairley-Hulmes’ annual tennis party, pleading work commitments, tiredness, or an illusory round of social invitations. Instead, having found work in the offices of a fabric company a little way from Regents Park, she had thrown herself into her new career with a missionary zeal that left her employers astonished daily at her capacity for hard work, her babysitting families grateful for her perpetual availability, and Vivi frequently too exhausted, when she returned to her shared flat, to think. Which suited her just fine.
After the hunt ball, Vivi had realised that whenever she mentioned Douglas’s name with anything but sisterly interest her parents had gently steered her away from him, perhaps knowing even then that he had longings she could not fulfil. She hadn’t heard them; perhaps, she concluded afterwards, she hadn’t heard him. He had never given her any indication, after all, that his affection for her held anything more than the most innocent brotherly interest.
Now, having seen him look another way entirely, she had resigned herself to her fate. Not that she was going to have to find someone else, as her mother had repeatedly suggested. No, Vivi Newton now knew herself to be one of an unlucky minority: a girl who had lost the only man she would ever love, and who, having considered the alternatives carefully, had decided she would rather not settle for anyone else.
It was pointless telling her parents, who would fuss, protest and assure her that she was far too young to make such a decision, but she knew she would never marry. It was not that she was so hurt she could never love again (although hurt she had been – she still found it difficult to sleep without her ‘little helpers’, the prescription benzodiazepine) or, indeed, that she had some idea of herself as a doomed romantic heroine. Vivi had just concluded, in the fairly straightforward manner that she concluded most things, that she would rather live alone with her loss than spend a lifetime trying to make someone else match up.
She had dreaded this trip, had considered a thousand times what legitimate excuse she could find for not coming. She had spoken to Douglas only once, when he had arranged to meet her in London, and found his patent happiness and what she could only imagine to be his new air of sexual confidence almost unbearable. Heedless of her discomfort, he had held her hands and made her promise that she would come: ‘You’re my oldest friend, Vee. I really want you there on the day. You’ve got to be there. Come on, be a sport.’
So she had gone home, cried for several days, and then been a sport. She had smiled, when she had wanted to wail and beat her breasts like women in Greek tragedies, and pull the brocade drapes and wedding banners from their hangings and scratch that awful, awful girl’s face and take swings at her head, her hands, her heart to destroy whatever it was about her that Douglas loved most. And then, shocked that she was capable of thinking such dark thoughts about any human being (she had once cried for an entire afternoon after accidentally killing a rabbit), she had smiled again. A bright, benign smile, hoping against hope that if she presented a peaceable front for long enough, if she kept persuading herself to keep living a seemingly normal life, one day at a time, some of her apparent equilibrium might become real.
Athene’s mother had caught her daughter smoking on the stairs. Dressed in her bridal gown, legs splayed, puffing away like a charlady, with a cigarette she had solicited from one of the bar staff. She informed her husband of this discovery in quietly outraged tones, and managed to surprise even him when she told him of Athene’s colourful response. ‘Well, she’s not my responsibility now, Justine.’ Colonel Forster leant back on his gilt chair, and tamped tobacco into his pipe, refusing to look his wife in the face, as if she, too, were complicit in this indiscretion. ‘We’ve done our duty by the girl.’