Cecelia Ahern – The Time of My Life (страница 7)
‘Medal?’
‘It’s just an expression. For doing something … amazing.’ I tried to hold back on the bitter sarcastic tone that was just dying to get out. It was on the sidelines warming up, begging me to let it go on as a substitute for politeness and tolerance.
‘Not amazing, just the right thing, Lucy.’
Mum came to my defence. ‘Sometimes girls have babies in their late twenties now.’
‘But she’s thirty.’
‘Not for a few weeks,’ I replied, pasting on a smile. Sarcasm took its training top off, got ready to run on to the pitch.
‘Well, if you think you can have a baby in a fortnight you’ve a lot to learn,’ Grandmother said, biting into her bread.
‘Sometimes they’re older these days,’ Mum said.
My grandmother tutted.
‘They have careers now, you see,’ Mum continued.
‘She doesn’t have one. And what precisely do you imagine I was doing in the laboratory? Baking bread?’
Mum was put out. She had baked the bread on the table. She always baked the bread, everyone knew that, especially my grandmother.
‘Not breastfeeding anyway,’ I mumbled, but it didn’t matter, everybody heard me and they were all looking at me, and they weren’t all happy looks. I couldn’t help it, the substitutes were on the pitch. I felt the need to explain my comment. ‘It’s just that Father doesn’t strike me as a breastfed man.’ If Riley’s eyes could have widened any more they would have popped out of his head. He couldn’t help it, whatever laugh he’d been trying to keep in came out as a bizarre-sounding splurge of happy air. Father picked up his newspaper and cut himself off from the unfavourable conversation. He rustled it open in the same shuddering motion that I’m sure his spine was doing. We’d lost him, he was gone. Lost behind more paper.
‘I’ll check the starters,’ Mum said quietly and gracefully slid from the table.
I didn’t inherit Mum’s gracefulness. In fact Riley did. Suave and sophisticated, he oozed charm and even though he’s my brother I know he’s a real catch at thirty-five. He’d followed Father into the legal profession and was apparently one of our finest criminal lawyers. I’d overheard that being said about him; I hadn’t experienced his talents first-hand, not yet anyway but I wasn’t ruling it out. It gave me a warm and tingly feeling thinking my brother held a get-out-of-jail-free card for me. He was often seen on the news going in and out of court with men with tracksuit tops over their heads and handcuffed to police officers, and many was an embarrassing time when I’d silenced public places to shout proudly at the TV, ‘There’s my brother!’ and when I’d received glares of anger, I’d have to point out it wasn’t the man with the tracksuit top over his head accused of doing inhumane things but the dashing one in the fancy suit beside him but by then nobody cared. I believed Riley had the world at his feet; he wasn’t under any pressure to get married, partly because he’s a man and there are bizarre double standards in my house and partly because my mother has an unusual crush on him which means no woman is good enough for him. She never nagged or moaned but had a very distinct way of pointing out a woman’s flaws in the hope of planting the seed of doubt in Riley’s mind forever. She would have had more success if she’d simply used a flash card of a vagina when he was a child and then shook her head and tutted. She’s excited he’s living it up in a swanky bachelor pad in the city and she visits him on the odd weekend when she gets the opportunity to fulfil some sort of odd thrill. I think if he was gay she’d love him even more, no women to be in competition with and homosexuals are so cool now. I heard her say that once.
Mum returned with a tray of lobster cocktails and after a shellfish episode at lunch in the Horgans’ home in Kinsale, which involved me, a tiger prawn and a fire brigade, she also carried a melon cocktail for me.
I looked at my watch. Riley caught me.
‘Don’t leave us in any more suspense, Mum, what have you got to tell us?’ he said, in his perfect way that brought everyone back from their heads to the table. He had that ability, to bring people together.
‘I won’t have one, I don’t like lobster,’ Grandmother said, pushing the plate away in mid-air before it had even reached the table.
Mum looked a little disheartened then remembered why we were all there and then looked at Father. Father kept reading his newspaper, unaware that his lobster had even been planted before him. Mum sat down, excited. ‘Okay, I’ll tell them,’ she said, as if that was ever under dispute. ‘Well, as you all know, it’s our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary this July.’ She gave us all a
‘Wow,’ I said.
Many of my friends had gotten married in the last two years. There seemed to be an epidemic sweeping – as soon as one married, a whole load were engaged and sauntering down the aisle like puffed-up peacocks. I had seen reasonable, modern women be reduced to obsessive maniacs hell bent on traditions and stereotypes they’d spent all their working lives trying to fight – I had been a part of many of these rituals in unflattering, cheap off-coloured dresses, but this was different. This was my mother and this meant it would be monumentally, cataclysmically worse.
‘Philip darling, Daddy would love it if you would be his best man.’ Philip’s face reddened and he seemed to grow a few feet in his chair. He bowed his head silently, the honour so great he couldn’t speak. ‘Riley darling, would you give me away?’
Riley beamed. ‘I’ve been trying to get rid of you for years.’
Everybody laughed including my grandmother who loved a joke at my mother’s expense. I swallowed, because I knew it was coming. I knew it. Then she looked at me and all I could see was a mouth, a big smiling mouth taking over her whole entire face as if her lips had eaten her eyes and her nose. ‘Sweetheart, would you be my bridesmaid? Maybe we could do that with your hair again, it’s so lovely.’
‘She’ll get a cold,’ my grandmother said.
‘But she didn’t get one last night.’
‘But do you want to run the risk of her having one?’
‘We could get nice handkerchiefs made up in the same fabric as her dress, just in case.’
‘Not if it’s anything like the fabric of your first wedding dress.’
And there it was, the end of my life as I knew it.
I looked at my watch.
‘It’s such a pity you have to go soon, we have so much to plan. Do you think you could come back tomorrow and we could go through everything?’ Mum asked, excited and desperate both at the same time.
And here came the dilemma. Life or my family. Both were as bad as each other.
‘I can’t,’ I said, which was greeted by a long silence. Silchesters didn’t say no to invitations, it was considered rude. You moved around appointments and went to hell and back in order to attend every single thing that you were invited to, you hired lookalikes and embarked on time travel to uphold every single promise that had been made by you and even by somebody else without your knowledge.
‘Why not, dear?’ Mum’s eyes tried to look concerned, but screeched,
‘Well, perhaps I can come over, but I have an appointment at noon and I don’t know how long it will go on for.’
‘An appointment with whom?’ Mum asked.
Well, I was going to have to tell them sooner or later.
‘I have an appointment with my life.’ I said it matter-of-factly, expecting them not to have a clue what I was talking about. I waited for them to question and judge, and planned how to explain it was just a random thing that happened to people like jury duty, and that they didn’t have to worry, that my life was fine, absolutely fine.
‘Oh,’ Mum said in a high-pitched yelp. ‘Oh my goodness, well I cannot
I looked at Riley first. He was looking awkward, eyes down on the table, while he ran his finger over the prongs of a fork and softly spiked it with each one in a meditative state. Then I looked at Philip; his cheeks had slightly pinked. My grandmother was looking away as though there was a bad smell in the air and it was my mother’s fault but there was nothing new about that. I couldn’t look at my father.
‘You already know.’
Mum’s face went red. ‘Do I?’
‘You all know.’
Mum slouched in her chair, devastated.
‘How do you all know?’ My voice was raised. Silchesters didn’t raise their voices.
Nobody would answer.
‘Riley?’
Riley finally looked up and gave a small smile. ‘We had to sign off on it, Lucy, that’s all, just to give our personal approval to it going ahead.’
‘You what?! You knew about this?’
‘It’s not his fault, sweetheart, he had nothing to do with it, I asked him to get involved. There had to be a minimum of two signatures.’