by Jessica Mann
‘Butchering Giles to make a Roman holiday?’ Tamara said.
‘They still have the death penalty for murder in Egypt,’ Hugo replied.
The bride was starting her short journey. Inside her glass show case Polly sat beaming and waving. ‘A beautiful bride,’ the voices were saying in the hotel bar and out on the air. ‘What a lovely bride.’ An instant jabber of analysis began about her dress and veil. Tiaras and lace, buttons and bows fluttered along the sound waves.
‘I heard them,’ Hugo said. ‘I don’t know whether anything could have been done to stop this if I had been able to let you know before. I was on my usual morning jog, a shorter route, though, because I had started late. All this happened just round the corner from the camp. John Benson had followed Giles out. He cornered him to ask for authentications of a whole lot of fake antiquities. Giles refused, Benson said he would tell the world about Polly, and Giles knocked him out. I heard the connection, and then the splash.’
‘But you did nothing about it?’
‘What should I have done? But in fact, I didn’t realise quite what I had heard. It was only later that the sound that preceded the splash explained itself in my memory. At the time I thought Benson was having a well-deserved ducking.’
Polly had reached the church, to a roar of welcome and encouragement. ‘Good luck, girl,’ her well wishers shouted.
‘It’s bad luck on Polly,’ Tamara said remorsefully.
‘She was there at the time too.’
Polly must have seen the whole thing. Hugo thought that she and Giles had gone out together that morning. She could have saved John Benson at least, even if she could not stop Giles hitting him.
‘How do you know it wasn’t Polly who hit him then?’
‘That little creature?’
Polly was three inches taller than Tamara. Her tiara was at about the level of her father’s eyes as they walked slowly up the long aisle, but it did not reach Giles’s shoulder. Giles did not turn to greet her, but waited, face forward, like an ox in a slaughter-house. Only the archbishop’s mitre equalled his height.
‘That can’t all be make-up,’ Hugo said. ‘You would hardly think that it was the same girl. Remember what she looked like when we first saw her?’
‘All girls look good at their own weddings.’
‘Perhaps the stuff Vanessa gave her did the trick?’
‘What stuff?’
‘Some potion for her complexion. It was when Vanessa was talking about their return to England, and what she’d be saying about Polly’s escapade. You know what a cat she was. She said Polly wouldn’t want to appear with all those spots, and what about trying this stuff she imported from Indonesia. Poisonous but effective, she said, don’t drink it by mistake.’
‘I think I had better have another drink,’ Tamara said. Gloomily she listened to the familiar words.
The archbishop whispered his homily to the happy couple. Meanwhile the camera’s eye swooped around the congregation. In the bar, heavy drinkers giggled at the guests’ clothes.
Tamara was tipsy, an unusual state for her; but this was an unusual day. A marriage was taking place between two people who knew the worst about each other; and about whom not much worse could be known.
But mutual connivance or even mutual blackmail might be as good a starting point for marriage as any other reciprocated emotion. It might fasten a tighter bond.
Gold foil and corks were heaped up behind the bar. A quick picture on the screen of the crowds ready to greet the happy couple showed that inhibitions had been relaxed there too.
Tamara lifted her glass of golden bubbles. ‘To a well matched pair,’ she said.
The archbishop had pronounced them man and wife. In a moment Giles and Polly would walk out of the church and into life together. For what Polly wanted, Polly always got.
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