by Anne Weale
‘Don’t you mean high and dry?’ he said, smiling. ‘A mermaid can never be out of her depth.’ Before she could answer, he went on, ‘That’s the way I feel too. I like my father, but when I was small I hardly ever saw him. We didn’t play games together. He didn’t shape my ideas. There’s not the strong bond between us that you have with Bart and I’d like to have with my children. The only place I felt I belonged was at Orengo.’
‘When will you be there again?’
‘I’m not sure. There’s some sorting out still to do, but it’s hard to get away right now. When’s the next time Bart will be there?’
‘Next month probably. I hope I can get some more time off to go down and see him. You know how it is with him...always a bit of a worry.’
‘I know, but don’t worry today. Don’t let anything spoil the wedding for you.’
Did he but know it, his advice rekindled the other worry which had been weighing on her mind since the day of her arrival. From the moment he came towards her, looking so dashing, she had temporarily forgotten the existence of his other guest, the one whose arrival might dash her hopes for ever.
But would he have kissed her wrist in that tender, erotic way if Emily Lancaster was the woman he wanted?
The door opened and Mrs Carlisle came in.
‘Do you know where your father is, Van?’ she asked, as he stood up.
‘He went to see about coffee.’
He did not compliment his stepmother on her outfit, Anny noticed. It was rather over the top. Tricia Carlisle must have been exceptionally pretty as a girl. But now, in her middle fifties, her face was becoming the mask of a woman who couldn’t accept that youth was behind her. Her elaborate hairstyle, her dress, her long scarlet nails and her rings all advertised her status as a woman who could spend hours and thousands of dollars on her appearance. It was impossible to imagine her in a kitchen or gardening apron, her hair even slightly dishevelled, a smudge of flour or soil on her cheek.
‘I could do with a glass of champagne. Organise it, will you, dear?’
As Van left, she took his place, her heavily made up green eyes noting the details of Anny’s appearance.
‘Kate has been in a dream since they announced their engagement. If I hadn’t taken charge, I don’t know what would have happened.’ She glanced at her expensive gold and diamond watch. ‘Alida and Guido will be arriving soon. They’re coming from New York and spending tonight at the country club. You haven’t met Van’s mother, have you?’
Anny shook her head. She had been surprised to hear that Edward Carlisle’s first wife and her second husband would be among the guests. But perhaps in a culture where divorce and re-marriage was commonplace, the meeting of current wives and ex-wives was not the social dynamite it would be in France where a blind eye was turned to amours provided they didn’t disrupt family life.
‘Kate invited her,’ said Tricia. ‘I didn’t think she would come, but perhaps she has heard an intriguing rumour that Project X is not her son’s only obsession.’ After a pause, she added, ‘Alida is very Italian. She and Edward are opposite poles. Van is the strangest mixture of her emotional temperament and his father’s shrewdness and discretion. As you’ve mixed with a lot of Continentals, I’m sure you’ll get on with her.’
At this point the men returned, Van carrying a tray with a coffee pot on it and his father bearing a bottle in an ice bucket.
Anny’s thoughts were in a whirl. What had Tricia meant by that remark about an intriguing rumour? What or who was Van’s other obsession? Was he suspected of being in love with Emily Lancaster? Had the kiss on her wrist a short while ago been merely the Italian in him performing an impulsive gallantry, one which it wouldn’t occur to him she might take seriously?
The library had a drinks cupboard stocked with glasses including crystal flutes. After half a glass of champagne, Anny found it easier to look as if she were enjoying herself. But she couldn’t help wishing they were on the deck of Sea Dreams, drinking Spanish cava from cheap glasses bought from a market.
The journalist in her found being with these people interesting in the same way that a zoologist could spend hours studying a group of animals. But in her private persona she knew this wasn’t her sphere. It couldn’t compare with Orengo with its wild, tangled garden and damp-spotted looking glasses reflecting deserted rooms filled with shadowy golden light diffused by the peeling shutters.
The windows at the far end of the library overlooked the drive. Presently a limousine could be seen arriving.
‘That will be your mother, Van. You say hello to her first and then bring her here,’ Tricia instructed. ‘We have at least half an hour before the others start arriving.’
To Anny’s surprise, Van took her glass from her hand and put it on the small table beside her chair. ‘Come and meet my other parent.’
In the corridor outside the library, she said, ‘Don’t you want to have a little time alone with your mother?’
He was holding her lightly by the elbow, the touch of his cool, strong fingers sending a current of pleasure up her arm.
‘Because you never knew your parents, you have a lot of illusions about family ties and family life. My family’s relationships aren’t the way you imagine them. We sometimes come together for rites of passage like weddings, then we go our separate ways again.’
‘But Tricia said—’ She stopped short.
‘What did Tricia say?’
‘That your mother was very fond of you,’ she improvised.
‘Tricia claims to be fond of her children. I suspect it’s only as long as they behave in the way she wants them to...being a credit to her,’ he said cynically.
They heard the front door bell ringing. One of the white-overalled helpers appeared from the other side of the spacious hall, saw them and went away.
When Van opened the door, a couple were standing in the imposing open porch with its two carved stone benches today ranged with baskets of white and yellow carnations.
‘Giovanni!’ The woman surged forward to embrace him.
‘Good to see you, Mamma.’ Van stooped so that she could kiss him, then extended a hand to her companion. ‘Ciao, Guido. Come va?’
His stepfather wrung his hand and clapped him on the shoulder. He was a head shorter than Van and of a burlier build.
‘Mamma, this is Annette Howard.’
‘I am delighted to meet you. Kate calls you “Giovanni’s mermaid”. You have known each other since you were children, I believe?’
‘I was a child when we met. Giovanni was almost grown-up.’ Anny used his full name in deference to his mother’s preference for it.
‘Please...don’t remind me how old he is. It makes me feel middle-aged. Of course I was very young when he was born, but even so one prefers not to count the years. This is my husband. We also knew each other in our youth, but it was many years later that we came together.’
Guido bowed over Anny’s hand. When Van explained that their hosts were waiting for them in the library, he and his mother went ahead and his stepfather walked with Anny, responding to her enquiries about their journey. His command of English was not as good as his wife’s. When he discovered that Anny spoke Italian, his face lit up with relief that there was somebody present with whom he could converse in his own language.
From then, when it wasn’t discourteous, he seized every chance to chat to her. Anny didn’t mind being monopolised. Even though, when the other guests started arriving, they all took the trouble to seek her out and be nice to her, like Guido she felt an outsider in a large family group.
Almost the last to arrive was the other outsider, Emily Lancaster. By then the Carlisles were stationed in the hall, receiving, and the house was full of people drinking champagne and circulating, or admiring the display of wedding presents in the large room where the family watched television.
With Guido beside her, Anny was near the foot of the flower-garlanded oak-panelled staircase when a striking woman with a cloud of r
ed hair came through the open front door to shake hands with the Carlisles.
She was wearing a very simple ankle-length dress of pale green jersey, the colour of asparagus stalks, with several long ropes of jade beads. As she stood talking to her hosts, Van came out of the living room, moving swiftly towards her. Clearly he had been watching for her arrival and was delighted to see her.
Equally clearly the pleasure was mutual. She sensed him coming and turned, her lovely face lighting with gladness.
Watching them embrace, Anny felt all her hopes crumbling to dust. They looked right together. No wonder they were the subject of an ‘intriguing rumour’. She turned back to Guido, asking him if he knew any of the ports in southern Italy which she and Bart had visited in their meanderings.
Guido did not. A son of the prosperous north, he had a low regard for the poorer regions of his country. Extolling the beauty of the Italian lakes, suddenly he stopped short. At the same moment Anny felt a touch on her arm. Turning her head, she found Van and the redhead beside them.
‘Emily, I’d like you to meet my friend Anny Howard and my stepfather Guido Rossi. Lady Emily is English but has spent a lot of her life in the States,’ he explained, for Guido’s benefit.
If they had met somewhere else, knowing nothing about each other, Anny knew she would have taken an instant liking to the other woman. Her freckled face and the warmth of her smile were irresistibly charming.
They had only a few minutes’ conversation before it was time for everyone to find their places in the rows of identical gilt chairs, provided by the caterers, set out in the so-called living room, actually a room designed to accommodate large social gatherings.
The Rossis were in the front row with Tricia Carlisle, the bridegroom’s parents and other important guests.
Anny’s place was in the second row, next to Van with Emily on his other side. Music chosen by the bridal couple and recorded was playing softly as a background to the buzz of conversation. When the volume of the music rose, people lowered their voices but did not stop talking altogether until those with the best view of the staircase saw the bride and her two attendants appear round the bend in the stairs.
At the foot of the stairs, her uncle was waiting to offer her his arm. Soon everyone could see them, advancing slowly along the aisle to join the bridegroom and the minister conducting the service.
Because he was a head taller than most of the people around him, Van was among those who received a smile from the bride as she passed.
Of all the women he knew, Kate and the two women watching her from either side of him were the three he liked best. They had little in common with each other, but all had strong links with him.
Towards two of them, his feelings were fraternal. The other one occupied most of his thoughts not centred on his work. He wanted her with increasing impatience but knew the time wasn’t right. As yet he had nothing to offer her.
Soon, if his hopes were realised, and he was confident they would be, he would be able to hand her the moon on a plate. Not that she would want it. His mother and stepmother and most of his other relations, with the honourable exception of Kate, were acquisitive statusseekers, women defined by their husbands’ standing and by their worldly possessions.
His future wife wasn’t their kind of woman. Her values were not their values. She could stand on her own feet. She shared his view of the world. This wedding was not an occasion she would greatly enjoy, but it had been an opportunity to spend a little time with her at a stage of his life when he couldn’t see her as often as he wanted.
When the service came to the point when the bridal couple were exchanging their vows and some of the women present were beginning to sniff and fumble for handkerchiefs, he glanced down at her rapt face. Engrossed in the ceremony, she seemed unaware he was watching her. He wondered if she had any idea how much he wanted her.
Not wanting her to look up and catch him with his feelings revealed, he looked at his other guest. She was equally intent. Perhaps all women identified with the bride on these occasions.
Men’s minds were differently geared. Some of them would be looking forward to some more of the vintage champagne his father had laid on. Those not happily married would be pitying the bridegroom for putting his head in the noose a second time. Others who, like himself, were tired of being bachelors, would be envying Robert the pleasures of his honeymoon.
As he watched Kate and Robert exchange their first married kiss, Van felt a powerful impulse to let his heart rule his head by declaring his feelings immediately and sweeping his love off somewhere for an unofficial honeymoon.
As the bridal couple disappeared in the direction of the hall where the guests would file past to offer congratulations, Anny decided that, at some point before their departure for the airport at Hartford, she must manage to catch Kate alone and ask her to explain the ‘intriguing rumour’. If it was what she thought it must be, she would rather have it confirmed than live in agonised suspense until the public announcement.
At the luncheon, she found the wedding seating repeated, except that Van was on the end of the table with Emily and herself opposite each other. Next to Emily was an elderly man with his wife beside him and Anny had a similar couple next to her. As the two couples knew each other, they talked among themselves about golf and bridge, leaving the trio at the end to do the same on other topics.
‘The last wedding I went to was in Florida,’ said Emily. Speaking to Anny, she went on, ‘When I arrived in America, I was thirteen. My tutor and I lived in a lovely house called Dance of the Sun on the Gulf Coast of Florida. There was a swimming pool and all sorts of other luxuries we hadn’t been used to in England. The pool was cleaned by a guy called Skip and I fell madly in love with him. I stayed that way for a long time. But eventually it wore off and last year he asked Summer and me to his wedding. Summer being my ex-tutor. As she’s married to my uncle now, we still see a lot of each other.’
‘D’you think first love always wears off?’ Van asked her.
‘How can it not? A thirteen-year-old’s ideal is light years away from the man she would choose at my age. Skip looked like a blond Tarzan, swam like a dolphin and was a really sweet guy. But he didn’t have any ambitions beyond joining the family business. After a while I realised what he needed was a small-town girl whose idea of a good time was a barbecue with the neighbours. I’m not knocking people like that. But it’s not the right life for me.’
She then stopped talking about herself and drew Anny out about her career and ambitions, listening to her answers with unmistakably genuine interest.
Anny already knew that Emily was staying for the dance. Like several other guests, she was overnighting at the country club founded by one of Van’s ancestors and, on occasions such as this, used by various prominent local families as an annexe to their houses.
Their conversation was brought to an end by the speeches for which many people turned their chairs towards the top table. Welcoming the guests, Mr Carlisle mentioned that they included two from Italy and ‘Lady Emily Lancaster from England’.
Glancing at her as he said this, Anny knew intuitively that Emily didn’t like being singled out because of her title and preferred to be known for her own achievements rather than those of her ancestors.
Anny turned her attention to the bride who had chosen not to wear white. Kate’s long dress was a very pale green patterned with sprays of mimosa and her off-theface hat was made from sprays of mimosa sent from a shop in Paris which specialised in exquisite silk imitation flowers.
She wasn’t a pretty woman but her face reflected the warmth of her nature and today she was lit up by happiness. Watching her as she listened to Robert replying to the toast to the bridal couple, Anny wondered if she had the moral fibre to bear up as bravely as Kate had if the same thing happened to her and Van married someone else, more than likely the elegant redhead on the other side of the table.
After the speeches and the cake-cutting ceremony, everyone left
the dining room to return to the living room where the gilt chairs had been removed, or they went outside to admire the garden while the bride was changing into her going-away clothes. At Kate’s wish, the usual time-consuming group wedding photographs had been waived in favour of a video taken by a friend who was a professional photographer.
Leaving Van and Emily together, Anny excused herself to go to her room. She did spend a few minutes there, brushing her teeth—the pudding had been a death-by-meringue bombe—and retouching her lipstick. But her purpose in coming upstairs was to talk to Kate.
Before she left her bedroom, she spent a few minutes at the window watching people strolling along the paths and sitting on the seat encircling the trunk of a large tree.
As she watched, Van and Emily appeared from the end of a pergola. Her gestures suggested she was telling him a funny story. Moments later he threw back his head and laughed. They looked very good together. A perfect match, she thought dully. Was there any point in asking Kate to explain the ‘intriguing rumour’? Wasn’t the answer self-evident?
All the same she went to Kate’s room. The door was closed and the murmur of voices from within put her off knocking. What she wanted to know couldn’t be asked in front of other people and probably Kate’s two close friends who were acting as her attendants would stay with her till she was ready.
At four o’clock the newly-weds left in Robert’s car. They were honeymooning on Cape Cod in a friend’s summer cottage. When they had been waved on their way, tea and wedding cake was served in the garden. About five the guests began to leave, most of them to reconvene at the dance a few hours later.
On returning downstairs, Anny had been waylaid by Guido who confided that he found it tiring to be surrounded by strangers, none of whom spoke his language.
‘Weddings in Italy are more emotional,’ he told her. ‘When the bridegroom leaves, his mother breaks down and all her friends sob in sympathy.’