The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [17]
In time, Felicity included Mum in her invitations too, asking her first one Christmas, for lunch.
‘So that everyone can be together, and you and Tim don't have to flit from house to house?’ she'd asked me anxiously, soliciting my opinion first, when we'd met for lunch in Browns. ‘What d'you think, Evie?’
‘I think it's a brilliant idea,’ I'd said. ‘If she'll come.’
To our surprise, she did, and a surprisingly jolly Christmas Day was had by all. The first for many years, I'd thought as I'd caught Tim's eye over the turkey, wondering if he remembered the one when Mum had chased Dad round the table with her Christmas present to him, an electric carving knife.
And Felicity had a way of getting the best out of people: of getting Dad to be garrulous and genial, Tim to be amusing and a chip off the old block, Mum not to be too embarrassingly wacky but charmingly eccentric, and even Caro… Caro I'd looked at with new eyes that Christmas Day as she'd recounted losing her shoe in Cornmarket, putting it on again and getting home to discover she'd got one blue and one brown. ‘I swear,’ she'd insisted, wide-eyed around the table as we'd all roared with laughter in our paper hats, ‘I'd got someone else's shoe!’ I'd remembered what fun she could be and had caught Tim looking at her too, remembering why he'd married her.
Yes, Felicity had been the cement our family needed, no one doubted that, and no one had been surprised when she and Dad eventually tied the knot. Even after he was married Dad couldn't stop parading her like a prize heifer; proudly showing us the new research book she'd written, pointing out the letters after her name, teasing me that I wasn't the only one in the family married to an academic. He'd happily host faculty dinner parties for her too, pulling corks and grinning benignly as molecular science chat went on around him.
‘Mum would have loved all that,’ I'd said wistfully to Ant in the car on the way home from one such dinner.
‘All she wanted was a bit of culture in the house.’
‘That's not culture,’ he'd smiled. ‘That's scientists.’
I'd dimly grasped the distinction, but all clever people were cultured to me. I think of all of us, though, Ant had been slightly suspicious of Felicity to begin with and I'd wondered if there'd been a tinge of rivalry, both coming from the same University pool. In time, though, he'd warmed to her too, seeing what a profound difference she made to Dad, who bounded around the farm like one of his young calves, like a new man. Which was why, one bright August morning, it was such a shock that he was a dead man.
Grief-stricken as we all were, we knew immediately it was Felicity who needed help. After the funeral she retreated to the farmhouse, pulling up the drawbridge, putting the answer machine on, hunkering down for days. We'd worried and rallied, Caro and I bringing lunch to the farm on Sundays, which she usually cooked so effortlessly, trying desperately to keep some semblance of normality going, some cheerful banter as she sat, toying listlessly with her food, or not sitting at all, shuffling around in the background as we ate – no clip-clopping now – sifting through letters of condolence, looking pale. After a few months it was no real surprise when, one Sunday, she announced the house was too big for her and held too