Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [38]
She had done something terrible, something she had believed she could never, ever do. She had separated herself from Jim. Distracted by trivial, selfish pleasure, she had forsaken him.
She wanted to be sick.
As the car moved Ruth said, ‘What a marvellous day!’ and through the window Wendy saw a pile of the orange garbage bags slumped against a wall in the heat. Three hungry cats licked at a torn corner of a bag, where filth and decay spilled onto the old stone stair.
At the wedding reception it was Ruth who looked as if she had lived in Greece for half her life, and Wendy was the tight-smiling outsider, sitting at the end of the table with some old people, friends of the groom’s parents who had travelled from England.
A man next to Wendy was from Oxford. He leaned across and said, ‘I hate Greek food. I don’t know why they can’t serve it hot, do you?’ And then sneered, showing his yellow teeth.
Sitting across from Wendy was Derek.
She watched her sister down the table. Ruth wore a white silk blouse and chocolate satin trousers, and her brown hair was swept up glamorously. Wendy had never seen Ruth with her hair up. She looked twenty years younger. And she wore Wendy’s earrings, citrine and peridot drops, which glinted and shimmered as Ruth turned her head, chatting merrily with a young man in a beautiful green shirt. A woman on the other side of Ruth put her fingers up behind the earring, remarking on it, and Wendy watched Ruth absently finger it and say, Citrine, from Greece actually. She didn’t even look up the table to Wendy when she said it.
The man from Oxford saw Wendy watching Ruth and the man with the beautiful shirt, and he said in his loud English voice, ‘I didn’t know so many of Jeremy’s friends were homos, did you?’
Across the table Derek sniggered into his glass. He was wearing the suit again, but without the woollen tie. He drank a lot.
A little boy dashed between the tables, dumping plates of food in the centre. Mit mit! cried the boy, when he set down the meatballs, and Feesh feesh! when the plate of little fried fish came.
The man from Oxford had turned away to talk to someone friendlier. Derek looked at Wendy, and asked, ‘What are you doing up this end?’
He was tugging at his left nostril with his thumb and forefinger. It was quite disgusting, but she liked him.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said gallantly. ‘They have to put people somewhere, don’t they? I suppose they think old people have things in common. Why are you here?’
He snorted unattractively. ‘Ah. They put all the misfits up here.’
She didn’t like him so much now. She watched him drain his glass of the pale red wine they were serving. He reached across his neighbour for the jug and filled his glass to the brim.
Wendy drew the jug towards her then, and filled her own.
She understood, as she sat back in her chair, that it wasn’t just Derek’s drinking that had seen him relegated to this end of the table; everybody was drinking a lot.
It was that sad people were not really wanted at weddings. That was why she had been put up here with Derek.
The man from Oxford turned to her again. She smelled his sour breath.
Long after the speeches Wendy sat, not listening to the man from Oxford’s voice drilling into her about his shares, the plummeting price of something or other.
The sun had set, and in the dusk the awning of the little taverna swung with coloured lights.
Down the long table, Ruth was surrounded by Leonie’s friends, attentive and sweet, their heads bent towards her and eyebrows raised, smiling expectantly if she began to speak. Now and then Wendy could tell from the friends’ expressions that Ruth had said something ignorant, or mean, but Leonie’s friends did not remark on it; they quickly regained their smiles and changed the subject. Everybody knew their roles here, at a wedding. And the bride’s friends knew Ruth was the bride’s mother, must be cared for and cosseted. So they reached for glasses for her,