The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [1]
I smiled. Jack, my nephew, one of the six or seven teenagers in the front pew, the sun from a stained-glass window shining through his ears, making them glow pink, his red hair dishevelled and hanging over the collar of an uncharacteristic tweed jacket, had the grace to turn and flash me a grin. When he'd cycled into college one day to see us and I'd casually enquired as to his motives, he'd replied in surprise, ‘Oh, you get terrific presents. Hugo Palmerton got a diving watch, and his godfather gave him a digital camera.’ As I'd raised faintly startled eyebrows he'd rushed on, ‘And obviously I believe, and all that stuff. And it's a good idea if you want to get married.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Saves a lot of hassle.’
I had an idea he was confusing confirmation with baptism, but grasped the general sentiment. He was getting something under his juvenile belt, another notch on his list of ‘must dos’: get GCSEs, play in the cricket team, snog a girl at a party. Getting confirmed, whilst not necessarily up there with the snog, was still a rite of passage to be doggedly manoeuvred. He was at a particular stage on his greasy pole, as I, I supposed, glancing around, was on mine. There was a time when I used to go to church for weddings, Saturday after Saturday, and then christenings, Sunday after Sunday. Now, with unerring regularity, it appeared to be first communions. Next, I imagined, with a jolt of surprise, it would be… yes. Well. After all, there'd been one of those already, hadn't there? Dad's. One box ticked. One box that had gone up the aisle, containing a supposedly hale and hearty man, a florid-faced, larger-than-life man, in this, our village church, whilst we'd all sat in this family pew, hankies clutched to mouths, shocked and silent: the remains of the Milligan family.
Family pew. An anachronism, of course, but one that Caro maintained rigorously, referring to it loudly, as Mum and Granny never had, as if we were the ancient descendants of some aristocratic lineage, instead of impoverished farmers who'd managed, by the skin of their teeth, to hang on to a certain amount of dubiously infertile land and a crumbling old farmhouse.
Caro leaned in to me now. ‘No Ant?’ She glanced around, as if perhaps expecting him to slide in, having parked the car. I swallowed my irritation.
‘No, I told you, he's taken Anna to a clarinet exam.’
‘Ah, yes,’ she said vaguely. She had a faraway look in her eye, as if in some dim, distant conversation I had mentioned it, when in fact I'd made a point of ringing her and apologizing profusely, knowing what store Caro set by family occasions.
‘Does she still enjoy it?’ she whispered incredulously.
‘Loves it,’ I hissed back, as we were enjoined, at that moment, to get to our feet and sing hymn number 108.
Yes, that was always the implication, wasn't it, I thought as I added my low warble to Caro's reedy treble and joined the debate as to whether those feet really did walk upon England's mountains green: that my overstimulated, hot-house flower was wilting under the pressure of academia and music exams and pushy parents, whilst her ‘brood’, as she always referred to them – as if three were a cast of thousands, for heaven's sake – got out into the fresh air and had a ‘proper childhood’; as if, somehow, Anna's was improper. My blood simmered away for a bit, but then, as the hymn came to rest in a green and pleasant land and we were bidden to pray, I tried to, not have green thoughts, but pleasant ones.
After all, she was not only my sister-in-law, she was my oldest friend. I was guiltily aware that at one point ‘oldest’ would have been substituted by ‘best’. Certainly years ago, at school, when we were pretty much joined at the hip and lived in each other's houses. Which was probably where the trouble had started. She'd taken one look at my rambling old farmhouse in its idyllic riparian setting, the river threading through the willows in the bottom pasture, observed the big family meals in the farmhouse kitchen, the laughter, the noise, the sense of history, and thought: I want some