The Four of Us

by Margaret Pemberton

  Primmie collapsed into giggles, Kiki cracked with laughter and Geraldine chuckled, saying, ‘That’s pragmatism on an almost French scale, Artemis. I couldn’t do better myself.’

  ‘Everything is all absolutely, perfectly, wonderfully organized for tomorrow, isn’t it?’ Artemis said, turning her attention to a subject that really mattered. ‘I know the church is looking magnificent, because I went there on the way here. The flowers are breathtaking, Primmie. It’s a veritable bower of lemon and white.’

  ‘And as Hugo has made all the arrangements for the reception, down to the last detail, you don’t have a thing to worry about,’ Primmie said, lifting a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket. ‘Especially as the Tregenna Castle Hotel is well known for the immaculate smooth-running of its functions.’

  ‘And Brett booked the bus that is to take everyone who hasn’t a car from the church to St Ives,’ Kiki said. ‘And if you’re thinking of opening that champagne yourself, Primmie, don’t. Give it to someone who has the experience. Geraldine or me.’

  ‘And the cake?’ Artemis said, too anxious about the arrangements for her big day to take offence at being judged as inexpert as Primmie where the opening of champagne bottles was concerned. ‘It has six tiers. Do you think the caterers are going to be able to transport it safely?’

  ‘Relax, Artemis,’ Geraldine chided. ‘Tomorrow is going to be flawless. Now, have you all got your champagne flutes at the ready?’

  As the three most important people in the world to her nodded their heads, she released the cork with a wonderfully festive bang and poured the fizzing contents of the well-chilled bottle into their proffered glasses.

  ‘A toast,’ Primmie said, raising her glass high. ‘To Artemis and Hugo.’

  ‘No.’ Artemis’s free hand flew high to forestall them. ‘There will be lots of toasts to Hugo and me tomorrow. Tonight needs a different toast.’

  Not about to argue with her, Primmie, Kiki and Geraldine waited, glasses raised.

  ‘To the four of us,’ Artemis said, her eyes aglow, her face radiant.

  ‘To the four of us,’ they all said in heartfelt unison.

  It was, Primmie thought, as they clinked glasses and drank, a moment never to be forgotten. A moment when they were all deeply aware that, though they had lost each other once, nothing in the world would make them lose each other again.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The next morning Primmie was awake by six o’clock as usual. Before she did anything else she pulled back the curtains to see what kind of a day it was going to be. There had been plenty of April showers over the last few weeks but now, the 1st of May, the early morning sky was crystal clear, promising a cloudlessly warm day.

  Her relief was vast. Artemis may have coped with almost unnatural calm over the news of Sholto’s relationship with Serena, but she would never have taken rain in her stride on her wedding day.

  Quietly, so as not to disturb Geraldine, she dressed in a comfy corduroy skirt and, to combat the dawn chill, a polo-neck sweater. Artemis’s wedding day or not, there were daily tasks that couldn’t be skipped. Her animals had to be fed and Maybelline and Black-Hearted Alice milked.

  She always milked Maybelline first, because it was such a pleasant task. ‘This is a very wonderful, special day,’ she said to her, pouring barley meal into her manger. ‘Ruthven is going to be en fête and you are going to wear a big blue bow.’

  Maybelline mooed agreeably and then mooed again as Primmie pulled her milking stool close to her side.

  Milking Black-Hearted Alice was always a very different kettle of fish. First, she had to be coaxed into position with feed, for as far as Alice was concerned, no feed, no milk. This meant that milking her was always difficult, for only when Alice was well into her stride eating would she remain still.

  ‘Come along, Alice. No tantrums this morning,’ Primmie said in her best businesslike voice. ‘I’ve got one of Maybelline’s cow cakes for you and a new salt lick, and in return for these treats, I’d like you to allow me to put a bow on you.’

  From the milking stand that Brett had made, Alice glared at her. Without too much hope of her entering into the spirit of the thing, Primmie began milking her. The rhythm that was so relaxing with Maybelline was a time of great tension with Alice, for the second she’d finished eating she would begin kicking and skittering to be off the stand.

  Today was no exception and by the time she left Alice and went to let Ned out of his stable and into the paddock, she felt as if she’d done three rounds with Lennox Lewis.

  With Ned happily ambling free, she set off for the cove. It was after seven o’clock now and as she began slithering down the shallow dunes, the sea flashed and glittered in the sunlight, shifting in colour from serpentine green to a silvery steel-grey.

  Reaching the sliver of sand that was Ruthven’s beach, she breathed in deep, blissful breaths of crisp, salt-laden air. The day was still untouched and hers alone, the silence profound.

  Wishing Rags hadn’t so easily accommodated himself to sleeping on Brett and Kiki’s bed in the caravan and was, instead, with her, she walked along the shingle, her face lifted to the sea breeze, counting her many blessings one by one.

  The instant she returned to the house with the milk, there was no further time for quiet contemplation. Artemis had been adamant that she was going to leave for the church from Ruthven and was already there, eating a scrambled egg breakfast, her cheeks flushed with excitement.

  ‘Kiki’s blowing up balloons and is going to tie great clusters of them on Ruthven’s gates,’ she said, her eyes glowing. ‘And Geraldine is finding me something old, something borrowed and something blue.’

  The something old that Geraldine found was a length of white satin ribbon it was decided could be used to decorate Artemis’s posy of lemon roses and gypsophila. The something borrowed was a lace-edged handkerchief and the something blue was a garter Geraldine had bought especially for the occasion in Paris.

  ‘The Claybourne rang this morning whilst you were out,’ Kiki said, entering the kitchen holding a dozen balloons in either hand, rather like a hip Mary Poppins. ‘Just as they don’t send the same children year after year, they don’t send the same carers, and as this year’s care-worker doesn’t drive, the driver accompanying her is going to need accommodation. They said not to panic. If we don’t have room for him, he’ll put up at a bed and breakfast in Calleloe.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have room for him,’ Primmie said, refusing to be rattled, ‘but as the summer season hasn’t started yet, he’ll have no trouble finding somewhere to lay his head.’

  Later, as countdown time to the two o’clock wedding began in earnest, Geraldine came into the bedroom where Primmie and Kiki were dressing and said, ‘For the first time in her life, I think I can truthfully say that Artemis has chosen a dress perfect for the occasion.’

  Kiki grinned. ‘You mean it’s not white organdie with a train and a veil?’

  ‘No, thank God. It’s a mid calf-length dress and floaty jacket in cream silk and antique cream lace. She’s wearing her favourite three-stranded pearl necklace with it and diamond and pearl drop-earrings and she looks, I might add, absolutely stunning.’

  So did Geraldine. Striking and understated as always, her night-black hair was looped into a glossy knot on top of her head and her narrow emerald crêpe de chine sheath dress and bolero jacket were a masterpiece of French designer fashion.

  ‘You are not,’ Geraldine now said in horror, seeing Kiki’s nails for the first time, ‘going to wear blue nail varnish?’

  ‘I am, as it goes,’ Kiki said, steelishly mulish. ‘I’m keeping Artemis happy by wearing a dress that pleases her, not me. And, as the dress is pale lemon, the blue varnish will look stunning, not tarty. Also, it will match my mascara.’

  Geraldine’s eyes flew to Primmie’s for help.

  ‘It could be worse,’ Primmie said philosophically. ‘At least the dress covers up the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder.’ />
  Her own wedding-day outfit was far more modest than Geraldine’s or Kiki’s. She was wearing a long floral skirt in shades of soft pinks and soft greens, a white lace-edged blouse and a grey velvet jacket that she had found in one of Helston’s excellent charity shops. Her wide-brimmed hat, in the exact same pink as the roses on her skirt, was a present from Geraldine.

  ‘Is Orlando here yet?’ came a frantic cry from the bedroom Artemis was using. ‘It’s one thirty. He should be here by now. Try his mobile again for me, Kiki.’

  ‘No need,’ Kiki said, as they heard the sound of Orlando’s BMW speeding up the track to the house.

  ‘Is Artemis going to let us have a look at her dress before we leave for the church?’ Lucy called up to them from the bottom of the stairs, where she had been helping Joanne put the final touches to Millie’s complicated hairdo.

  ‘Tell her no,’ Artemis shouted from the bedroom. ‘No one sees the bride’s dress till she enters the church. That’s traditional and I’m sticking to it.’

  Prudently keeping quiet about the fact that Geraldine had already seen the bride in her wedding glory, Primmie relayed the message downstairs. ‘And it’s time the three of you were on your way,’ she added, as Orlando, looking as handsome as a film star in his cutaway coat, grey striped trousers and grey waistcoat, squeezed past them to run up the stairs, grey gloves and top hat in one hand.

  Five minutes later, she and Geraldine were driving down the track and across the headland to the church, in the Ferrari.

  ‘Let’s hope Hugo and Matt are in situ,’ Geraldine said wryly as they bumped to a halt on the rough grass outside the lych-gate. ‘I don’t think Artemis’s nerves will take it if she arrives here before them.’

  ‘They are. That’s Hugo’s car parked the other side of the vicar’s car and Matt’s truck is squeezed between Joanne’s car and Peggy Wainwright’s Mini.’

  They stepped out of the Ferrari, put on their hats, smoothed their skirts and walked into the tiny church.

  Organ music was already being played. Through the stained-glass windows, shafts of jewelled sunlight illuminated a packed congregation of family and friends. Sholto, in a morning suit, was seated in the front left-hand pew. Brett and Francis, jaw dropping in their formal dress, were acting as groomsmen.

  Josh, wearing a light-coloured suit she had never seen before, looked incredibly handsome, seated between two of his sisters. Lucy was resplendent in a simple white dress, her long fair hair held away from her face by an Alice band.

  Joanne was wearing a pale blue suit with a knee-skimming straight skirt and a breath-takingly dramatic wide-brimmed black hat.

  For one panic-stricken moment, as she walked down the aisle with Geraldine to take her place in the pew behind Sholto, she thought Millie wasn’t in the church.

  ‘She’s over there,’ Geraldine said in a whisper, reading her mind. ‘On the right-hand side of the church, seated next to one of Hugo’s nephews.’

  Primmie turned her head, saw that the nephew in question was somewhere in his late-twenties and good looking in a rather flashy way. She heaved a deep sigh. If Millie had been unencumbered by an extramarital relationship when she arrived in Cornwall, she had a shrewd suspicion the situation would have changed by the time Millie returned to London.

  Jon, too, had elected to sit on the groom’s side of the church, presumably because Lucy was hemmed in by the wall on one side of her, and Josh on the other.

  Having checked that all her family was safely present, Primmie turned her attention to Hugo and Matt, who were standing only yards in front of her, talking to John Cowles.

  Hugo, of course, looked as if he had been born to wear nothing but formal day wear. His morning coat fitted in a way that no hired morning coat could ever do. Rather touchingly, he looked nervous. It was Matt who made her suck in her breath, though.

  In his hired morning suit, Matt looked magnificent.

  The organist fell silent. There was a sense of charged anticipation.

  Then the stirring, magnificent opening chords of Handel’s ‘Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’thundered through the church.

  Primmie turned to see Artemis’s entrance, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up, her throat tightening with emotion.

  Artemis looked breathtaking. The delicacy of her cream silk and lace dress set off her classic English rose beauty to perfection. Her china-blue eyes shone. Her barley-gold hair was swept upwards in undulating waves beneath a glorious hat drowning in pink rosebuds and swirls of veiling.

  Kiki, in a floaty lemon silk dress, a gardenia tucked behind her ear, a posy of them in her hands, looked almost conventional until she moved the posy, revealing midnight-blue nails.

  The first hymn was ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’.

  After it, as Artemis stood at Hugo’s side, looking, despite her above average height and weight, almost diminutive in comparison to him, the Reverend John Cowles said with clear pleasure, ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here, in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony.’

  Primmie listened to the familiar words with a full heart, remembering her own wedding day so long ago, remembering Ted and how she had loved him, and he her.

  ‘I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it.’

  Artemis had insisted that her wedding service be conducted from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and John Cowles had been happy to oblige her. Primmie was glad he had done so. She liked thinking of the long history of the words, and of the countless couples who, down the ages, had heard and responded to them,

  John Cowles was now saying to Hugo: ‘Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded Wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?’

  Hugo’s booming ‘I will’could have been heard in Calleloe.

  Primmie’s eyes moved from the back of Hugo’s head to the back of Matt’s. For a man of sixty-two he had a wonderful head of hair, grizzled with silver, but as thick and curly as a ram’s fleece. Overcome at her good fortune in having had a long and lasting marriage and, as a widow, finding the same rock-solid quality of love a second time round, Primmie listened to Artemis’s responses, wondering how long it would be before she was standing beside Matt, saying the same responses, in front of the same minister, in the same church.

  ‘For as much as Hugo and Artemis have consented together in holy wedlock,’ John Cowles was now saying, ‘and have witnessed the same before God and this company, and thereto have given and pledged their troth either to other, and have declared the same by giving and receiving of a Ring, and by joining of hands, I pronounce that they be Man and Wife together, in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

  While the register was being signed, the organist played ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’.

  Then, after another hymn, a psalm reading and a benediction, Artemis and Hugo turned away from the altar, walking back down the aisle, beaming like Cheshire cats.

  ‘Have you seen the number of video cameras Hugo’s side of the church have with them?’ Geraldine said as they squeezed out of their pew to follow the happy couple. ‘They’re making our cameras look very tame.’

  The crush on the doorstep of the church was enormous. As the professional photographer Hugo had engaged began taking charge, assembling Matt and Kiki at either side of Hugo and Artemis, Primmie manoeuvred her way to the lych-gate, where there was more breathing space.

  As she reached it, she heard the sound of a vehicle making its way down the track towards Ruthven. The minute the vehicle came into view, she knew what it was. It was the
Claybourne children’s minibus.

  She looked to where Artemis and Hugo were still being rearranged by the photographer for photographs with their best man and maid of honour and decided that she had plenty of time in which to bring the children across to the church so that they could join in all the fun of the eventual confetti-throwing.

  As she began taking a short cut to Ruthven’s gates, striding over the grass of the headland, a not very tall, stockily built, fair-haired young woman jumped down from the minibus’s passenger seat.

  ‘Never mind the balloons, Destiny!’ the driver bawled in a south-London accent. ‘Get the bloomin’gates open, gel!’

  Primmie came to such a sudden halt that she nearly fell. Had she heard correctly or had she been imagining things?

  ‘Destiny! Destiny!’ the children hanging half out of the minibus windows began chanting. ‘Can we have a balloon, please, Destiny!’

  The girl at the gates began laughing and untying the balloons, running back to the minibus with them.

  ‘The gates Destiny!’ the driver shouted exasperatedly. ‘Open the blooming things, for Pete’s sake!’

  Primmie didn’t wait to hear any more. Her Destiny had trained as a nursery care assistant and here was a care worker, working with young children, looking as if she were in her late twenties or early thirties, as fair-haired as herself and with Destiny’s distinctive name.

  She began running over the rough grass. Running as if her life depended on it, running as if she had wings on her heels.

  As the young woman registered that she was racing towards her, a look of confusion and apprehension crossed her face.

  ‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered as the children, still aboard the minibus, waved the balloons from the open windows in glee. ‘I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. It’s just that the balloons looked so pretty and the children did so want them …’