Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [61]
Grace said nothing as she listened to Bella’s comments. It wasn’t the first time today that her cousin had criticised Alan’s parents to her and Grace wondered how she would feel if she was marrying someone whose mother she disliked as much as Bella disliked Alan’s mother.
Bella opened the pretty little satin bag that matched her wedding dress and withdrew a packet of Sobranie cocktail cigarettes and a holder, her actions making Grace’s eyes round. The only time she had ever seen anyone smoking the coloured cigarettes or using a holder had been in a film.
Bella extracted one of the five pastel-coloured cigarettes and inserted the gold filter tip into her smart cigarette holder and then lit the cigarette.
Bella had changed so much in the short time she had been engaged. Grace felt that she barely knew her any more.
‘God, doesn’t Trixie look dreadful? I can’t imagine what on earth Alan ever saw in her. Poor thing, she’s so dreadfully plain. Ugly really, almost.’ There was satisfaction as well as malice in Bella’s voice.
Alan might have chosen to marry Bella, but he was still spending rather a lot of time talking to Trixie and her parents, Grace noticed, but then they were seated at a table in the ballroom with Alan’s own parents, who Bella had studiously ignored from the minute the formal wedding breakfast had finished.
The newly married couple were only having a short honeymoon, ‘because of the war’, as Bella had put it, pouting when she had informed Grace that she had wanted to honeymoon in Paris but was having to make do with a few days in Blackpool.
‘You’ll have to change into your going-away outfit soon,’ Grace reminded Bella, mindful of her bridesmaid responsibilities and duties.
‘In a minute. I want the photographer to take another photograph of me standing on the stairs in my wedding dress first. Go and find him, will you, Grace?’
Grace couldn’t help thinking that in Bella’s shoes she might have been feeling more eager to be alone with her new husband, but then Bella’s dress was gorgeous and she did look beautiful in it, Grace acknowledged generously.
‘Bloody army,’ Charlie swore as he threw down his cigarette stub and then ground it out beneath his shoe. ‘Christ, I haven’t had a drink in two weeks.’
Charlie was certainly making up for that now, Luke recognised as he watched his cousin summoning a waiter to order yet another G and T.
‘Want another yourself?’ Charlie asked.
Luke shook his head. He had barely touched his shandy. He had been too busy studiously avoiding looking at his father.
Luke wasn’t sure what he had been hoping for when he had arrived back home this morning, later than he had hoped because of the problems he had had making his way from his camp in Northern Ireland back to Liverpool, but it had made his heart sink with misery when the first thing his dad had done when he had seen him had been to turn his back and ignore him.
When he had told Grace she had suggested that it might have been better if he had changed into his civvies before going home, because seeing him in his uniform was bound to make their father feel that Luke was deliberately making the point that he had joined up.
Luke grimaced now, thinking of Grace’s sisterly advice. Changing into civvies had been the last thing on his mind as he had battled to leave the camp in time to catch the train for the ferry, standing up all the way and then having to stand again on the packed ferry. It had been touch and go whether or not he had made it at all, and the truth was that he had got home feeling more like going to bed and catching up on the sleep he had missed over the last forty-eight hours rather than going to a wedding.
Luke had missed his family, and especially his father, a very great deal, even if he still believed that he had had no option other than to join up and did not regret doing so for one minute. He was with a good bunch of lads,