One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [2]
I smiled; could just picture it. Mum and Laura, both tall, blonde and gorgeous. Laura in jeans and T-shirt, Mum in Bond Street’s finest and, now that it was back in fashion, fur-trimmed too, around her collar, cuffs, tops of boots… As Dad said, it was only a matter of time before it made it to her eyebrows. And boy, they’d be busy. Hastening around the Abbey shiny-eyed, discussing, conferring, holding up rolls of silk, Mum running to the lavatory when the excitement got too much for her middle-aged bladder, both thrilled to bits to be finally getting their hands on the pile, which Hugh’s parents had finally vacated, allowing Hugh, Laura and their three children to move from the tiny cottage in the grounds where they’d spent their first fifteen years of married life.
‘And it was only supposed to be five,’ Laura had complained to me once when she’d come to see me at my shop in London. ‘When we got married, Hugh’s parents said five, or maybe six years max, then we’ll swap, it’ll be too big for us. And, Hattie, I could have handled eight years, even ten. But now I’ve got two hulking great teenage girls hitting their heads on the beams and throwing Ugg boots up on sofas, and Charlie’s bouncing off the walls, and we’re still in the cottage!’
Maggie had been crouched in the shop window at the time, pretending to polish a ball-and-claw sofa foot. She’d made a ‘lucky-you-to-have-a-free-cottage’ face at the floor as she’d rubbed. But I’d felt for Laura, actually. To be fair, apart from this little outburst, she’d sat firmly on her resentment as her eighty-year-old parents-in-law rattled round an enormous twenty-room house, and whilst a family of five, plus dogs, squeezed into a tiny three-bedroom lodge at the entrance to the estate.
‘Well, why don’t they move then?’ had been Maggie’s exasperated reaction when Laura had gone. She sat back on her heels in the window as she watched my sister go off down the street, blonde hair swinging. ‘Why don’t they buy their own house, like everyone else does?’
‘Because every time they decide to do that, Hugh’s parents get all batey. His mother starts muttering about family loyalty and Hugh’s father flies into a towering rage, so Hugh says they must stay a bit longer. Not upset them.’
Maggie had harrumphed at that and resumed her dusting with a vengeance, muttering darkly about people not having enough backbone to lead their own lives. But I’d ignored it.
I’d also looked at Laura that day, as she’d sat in the back room of my shop in Munster Road, on a shabby Louis Quinze chaise longue Maggie and I had recently hustled back from a brocante in Paris and lovingly re-covered in a few yards of thin but exquisite tapestry found in a flea market, and wondered how we’d ever reached this juxtaposition. My big sister: blonde and beautiful beyond belief, who, in June 1992 had graced a cover of Vogue that bore the legend: ‘Britain’s latest beauty’ – oh, yes, seriously good-looking. Who’d given it all up to marry Hugh; who’d said goodbye to the photo shoots and the catwalk to live in the country and have children. Who’d made a resounding success of her life; and here she was, pouring her heart out to the one who’d made pretty much a bish of everything. The one who’d failed to marry at all, let alone successfully. The one who’d scuppered her chances early on in her twenties by adopting an orphaned boy from Bosnia, thereby accruing baggage ‘no sane man would want’, as my mother had put it crisply at the time. Who’d poured any paltry money she had into a risky and competitive business – the French Partnership wasn’t the only French décor shop in Munster Road, let alone in London: French Dressing, French Affair and Vive La France all prevailed. Who lived in a tiny terraced house with a crippling mortgage at the wrong end of Lillie Road, and yet here was my sister, blue eyes filling as she sat in her Marc Jacobs coat, fiddling nervously with the socking great diamonds on her fingers, insisting she’d been the one to bog it.
As a tear rolled down her cheek