serious religion called the Church of Social Etiquette. The heads of their church were People. As in, every action acted and word spoken was done on the basis of what would ‘People’ think? Part of that etiquette required you to bring a gift to a person’s house even if that person was family and you were just calling by. But we didn’t just do calling by. We did arranged visits, made appointments, spent weeks, months even, trying to rally the troops.
‘What did you bring?’ I asked him.
‘A bottle of Father’s favourite red wine.’
‘Suck-up.’
‘Only because I want to drink it.’
‘He won’t open it. He’d rather wait until everyone he loves is long dead and buried before he even thinks about sitting in a locked room to open it himself. Bet you ten, actually twenty,’ I needed petrol money, ‘he won’t open it.’
‘Your understanding of him is almost touching but I have faith in him. It’s a deal.’ He held out his hand.
‘What did you get Mum?’ I looked around the entrance hall to see what I could swipe for a gift.
‘A candle and bath oil but before you make a thing about it, I found it in my apartment.’
‘Because I bought it for what’s-her-name, that girl you dumped who laughed like a dolphin.’
‘You got Vanessa a gift?’
We were walking through the endless spaces of the house, room after room of seating areas and fireplaces. Couches we were never allowed to sit on, coffee tables we couldn’t put our drinks on.
‘As a consolation prize for going out with you.’
‘She can’t have appreciated it much.’
‘Bitch.’
‘Yeah, dolphin-laughing bitch,’ he agreed, and we smiled.
We reached the final room in the back of the house. Once Lady Somebody’s drawing room and then Depressed Poet’s rhyming room, it was now Mr and Mrs Silchester’s entertainment room: a walnut built-in bar with beer on tap and a smoky mirror on the back wall. In the glass case along the bar stood the original German beer from the 1800s with a black-and-white photo of the Altenhofen family posing on the front steps of the house. The room had plush salmon-toned carpets that your feet sank into, tall leather-upholstered chairs at a cocktail bar and smaller leather chairs dotted around walnut tables. Its main feature was a bay window which overlooked the valley below and the rolling hills beyond. The garden was three acres of rose gardens, a walled garden and an outside swimming pool with fresh water. The double doors from the bar were open and gigantic limestone slabs led down to a water feature in the centre of the lawn. To the side of the fountain and beside the rush of the babbling brook a table had been set up with white table linen, crystal and silverware. In my family there was no such thing as informality. It was such a wonderful picture. Shame I’d have to ruin it.
My mother was floating around the table in a white tweed Chanel to-the-knee number and monochrome flats, swatting away the wasps that threatened to invade her garden party. There wasn’t a hair out of place on her blonde head, she held the same small smile on rose pink lips regardless of what was going on in the world or in her life or in the room. Pimped-up Range-Rover-owner-slash-reconstructive-plastic-surgeon-slash-closet-boob-job-surgeon and middle child Philip was already seated at the table talking to my grandmother who was sitting poised as usual in a floral garden-party dress, back poker straight, her hair scraped tightly in a bun, her cheeks and lips an appropriate rouge, pearls around her neck, her hands clasped in her lap and her legs joined at the ankles, no doubt as learned at finishing school. She sat quietly, not looking at Philip and probably not listening either while she surveyed my mother’s work with her ever disapproving eye.
I looked down at my dress and smoothed it.
‘You look great,’ Riley said, looking away and trying to make me feel that he wasn’t just attempting to fill me with confidence. ‘I think she’s got something to tell us.’
‘That she’s not our real mother.’
‘Oh, you don’t mean that,’ I heard a voice behind me.
‘Edith,’ I said, before I’d turned around. Edith had been a housekeeper for Mum and Father for thirty years. She’d been there for as long as I could remember and brought us up more than any of the fourteen nannies who had been employed to take care of us throughout our lives. She had a vase in one hand and a gigantic bouquet of flowers in the other. She placed the vase down and held her arms out to embrace me. ‘Oh Edith, they’re lovely flowers.’
‘Yes, they are, aren’t they? I just bought them fresh today, I went to that new market down by …’ she stopped, looked at me suspiciously. ‘Oh, no. No, you don’t.’ She moved the flowers away from me. ‘No, Lucy. You can’t have them. Last time you took the cake I’d made for dessert.’
‘I know, that was a mistake and I’ll never do it again,’ I said sombrely, then added, ‘because she keeps asking me to make it again. Ah, come on Edith, just let me see them, they’re beautiful, really beautiful.’ I batted my eyelashes.
Edith resigned herself to fate and I lifted the flowers from her arms.
‘Mum will love them. Thanks,’ I smiled cheekily.
She fought a smile; even when we were kids she’d found it hard to give out to us. ‘You deserve what’s coming to you now, that’s all I can say.’ Then she returned in the direction of the kitchen, while dread filled inside me to the point of bursting. Riley led the way and I struggled to walk down the wide steps with the bouquet which took two of my strides next to Riley’s one. He was down ahead of me and Mum almost lit up like a firework at the sight of her precious son making his way to her.
‘Lucy, sweetheart, they’re beautiful, you shouldn’t have,’ Mum said, taking the flowers from me and over-exaggerating her thanks as though she’d just been handed the Miss World title.
I kissed my grandmother on the cheek. She acknowledged it slightly with a small nod of her head but didn’t move.
‘Hi, Lucy,’ Philip stood to kiss me on the cheek.
‘We’ll have to stop meeting like this,’ I said to him quietly, and he laughed.
I wanted to ask Philip about the kids, I knew that I should, but Philip was one of those people who actually took the enquiry way too far and would go into the verbal diarrhoea of every single thing his children had said and done since I’d seen them last. I loved his children, I really did, but I just didn’t care so much for what they’d eaten for breakfast that morning, though I’m pretty sure it was something to do with organic mangoes and dehydrated dates.
‘I should put these in water,’ Mum said, still admiring the flowers for my benefit though the moment had long since past.
‘I’ll do it for you,’ I jumped at the chance. ‘I saw the perfect vase for them inside.’
Riley shook his head incredulously behind her back.
‘Thank you,’ Mum said, as though I’d just offered to pay her bills for her lifetime. She looked at me adoringly. ‘You look different, did you do something with your hair?’
My hand went immediately to my chestnut mane. ‘Em. I slept with wet hair last night.’
Riley laughed.
‘Oh. Well, it’s lovely,’ she said.
‘That will give you a cold,’ my grandmother said.
‘It didn’t.’
‘It can.’
‘But it didn’t.’
Silence.
I left, and tottered over the grass in my heels to get to the stone steps. I gave up and kicked off