Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [30]
When Ruth saw the terracotta pot on the telephone desk a few months ago she’d said, ‘Why’ve you got your salt there?’
Wendy told her, and Ruth screeched. ‘Ugh! I don’t know how you can do that! How horrible!’
Wendy had a great desire to rush across the carpet and smack her sister’s face.
Wendy assumed she would be the only one of her generation to go to the wedding. In a private part of herself she hoped she was the only one invited, but of course Leonie would have to ask her parents. But they didn’t like travel. And Alan’s prostate procedure was scheduled only weeks before the wedding.
So it was a surprise when Ruth, who had been to London once at the age of twenty-three, and came back quick smart, declared that she would go to the Greek island too, with Wendy.
Sisters! she cried down the phone. It will be a sisters trip!
On the plane they fastened their seatbelts, and Ruth leaned to one side, scoping the aisle. She had filled the empty seat between them with things she had bought at the airport, scurrying around the shops while Wendy read. The seat was filled with magazines, a leopard-print velour U-shaped neck cushion filled with polystyrene beads, a pink shawl that Ruth called a pashmina. It was not really a pashmina, it was synthetic, but Wendy didn’t say anything. She had left her own real pashminas at home.
Ruth, leaning sideways, kept glancing up the aisle and then nodding conspiratorially at Wendy. ‘Only a few people now,’ she whispered, trying to suppress a triumphant smirk. ‘It’s unlikely.’
Wendy wished Jim were here. He had been dead two years but she wished, so often, that he were here.
Once, in the dark hours, with the plane’s dull roar hurtling them through the black skies and everyone else asleep, Wendy looked up to see Ruth swaying down the aisle on her way back from the toilet. She took little steps in her thick pink socks, peering down at the seats as she went, trying to find her home. She looked old, teetering there in the gloom.
At the little airport on the island a grizzled young man wearing a shoddy grey suit and a crumpled yellow woollen tie held up a piece of paper with their names handwritten on it in small unsteady biro.
‘Oh dear,’ muttered Ruth. They were both exhausted. Wendy did not want to admit it, but the plane travel—first to Athens, and then to the island—had been ghastly. Eventually, she had found, it was difficult to distinguish the smell of the food from the smell of the other passengers. Her back ached. But she saw with satisfaction that although Ruth was eight years younger, she walked equally stiffly along the grey linoleum of the airport.
Still. Wendy did not wish to agree with Ruth that this forlorn young man looked disappointing, so she took charge. She strode over to him, smiling. ‘Kalimera,’ she called in a clear voice above the airport hubbub.
He looked alarmed. ‘I’m Australian,’ he said.
Ruth pushed past him towards the carousel. ‘Oh yes,’ she called over her shoulder to Wendy. ‘That’s Jeremy’s friend.’
Out in the car park Wendy stood by, being gracious, while the young man—Derek—hoisted the women’s suitcases into the back of his small four-wheel drive. Derek had lived on the island for some years. Ruth’s gaze flicked up and down him, contemptuous of his nerviness and dishevelment. And as soon as she heard the central locking clunk open she clambered surprisingly nimbly into the back seat, pulling the door shut behind her.
Wendy turned to reach for the front passenger door handle and then saw—suddenly, unbelievably—they were here. A Greek island.
She took a sharp breath, and stood for a moment in the hot still air, gazing up to the hill above them. The town was white and brittle and frilled like beach coral against the hard blue sky. The sudden beauty of it unbalanced her. She and Jim had never travelled to the islands, only to Athens. She felt her eyes water—she wished Jim were here squeezing her hand, wished they were both thirty and breathless with this shock of splendour and each other.
But Ruth scowled at her through