Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [32]
She stood in the doorway of the main bedroom with Wendy.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said, and waited.
Wendy knew she should protest, that they should argue for some minutes until she finally persuaded Ruth that this was her big holiday, it was her daughter’s wedding, and insist that all Wendy’s own life she had had the chance to travel the world and stay in beautiful rooms like this, and now it was Ruth’s turn.
But they leaned there looking into the room, at the simple double bed with its pale blue sheets and the white curtain at the window where a single shutter slanted open, allowing a sliver of bright light to fall across the Turkish kilim on the wooden floorboards, and suddenly all the hours since they left home came crashing down upon Wendy, and all she craved was to lie down, immediately, upon that square of clean sheets.
‘Thank you,’ she said to Ruth, and marched into the room.
Wendy woke with a start in the darkened afternoon. From outside, beyond the shutters, came the sharp clapping of a child’s rubber sandals running along the shallow steps outside the house. A woman’s voice shouted in Greek and the child shouted back, all sound carried perfectly, crisp and audible, along the tall stone corridors.
She turned to look at the little yellow Tupperware container on the bedside table. It was from an old, old picnic set. The ageing plastic was crazed with fine dark lines of age. She had snatched it up in the last minutes before the taxi came, and scooped the ashes in with a teaspoon and jammed down the greying lid before popping it into a zippered compartment of her handbag. She had held her breath each time the handbag went through the X-ray machines. She had no idea what she would have said.
She knew it was ridiculous. Or deranged, or something.
She heard Ruth’s mobile telephone ring, her shy, hesitant voice, and then its relief. Wendy sat up, throwing off the sheet in a buff of sweet cool air. Leonie and the groom, Jeremy, and their friends were staying all around the island, in various houses.
Wendy sat listening, waiting for Ruth to call out to her that Leonie wanted to say hello. But after a while she realised Ruth had stopped talking, and then she heard the shower running downstairs.
She lay back down in the bed and drew the sheet up beneath her chin.
When Leonie and Paul were little, Wendy and Jim would bring them presents from their travels—a fur-lined hat made of yak leather from Nepal, or wood-and-paper parasols from China. Of course Wendy knew the children would rather a Barbie doll or an Action Jackson, but she knew too that the hats and parasols—and the folklore books, and the French stockings for Leonie as she grew older, and the cufflinks from New York for Paul—all of these were investments in her future with her sister’s children. They were learning about the world and all its wild, colourful possibilities, something they would certainly never glean from their own parents, from Wendy and Jim.
She was never pushy. Neither of them were. She and Jim lived their own lives, with their own friends and jobs and travel. And then, drawn by this richness, sometimes one or other of the children would come and stay for a weekend or a week, or visit for an afternoon for photography lessons from Jim, or be taken for a ritual expensive restaurant dinner with a friend of their choosing when each of them finished high school. Wendy felt that, by example, she had taught them to cook and to travel; she gave them Marquez novels in their twenties and Elizabeth David cookbooks for their wedding presents.
Wendy knew Ruth and Alan did not think much of her. She thought they might describe her to their friends as hoity-toity.
Once she had walked into Ruth and Alan’s living room in Thornleigh when the children were in their early teens to find the whole family sitting on their ugly, squashy