LITMIR.BIZ

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blowing on his fingers beneath the Healey bonnet. She picked the picture up from the top of her grand piano: her and her fiancé sitting on some hard-baked earth, in fatigues and with packs on their backs, smiling. She smiled back as she looked at it.

      She said, ‘Sometimes it’s really useful to have a dead fiancé, Riley.’ She put the picture back on the piano top, turned to look at me. She said, ‘This is a small town, Riley. I don’t know why but some people just seem happier if you can give them a good reason why you’re single.’

      That day I heard my mother call Olive a ‘skinny sex-starved old woman’. I saw my father’s hands clench and unclench at his side. There was a set look on his face and, spying from the top of the stairs, I thought he was going to hit her. But then he went to the sink, turned on the tap, began lathering his hands under it. When he spoke his words were very clear and very cold and deliberate.

      He said, ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Barbara?’

      That was how it was at home when we were kids. A terrible ongoing argument that raged along like a swollen stream, all the time underground but sometimes bursting out above the surface.

      Meal times were the worst. Our father could be cruel and very cutting.

      ‘Maybe you could tell your mother to pass that grey slop she likes to call mash,’ he said once. Another time, tasting one of her stews (and they were pretty bad), he strode to the sink and spat it out. ‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he said, ‘are you trying to poison us?’

      The serving spoon was still in her hand. She held it up as if wanting to strike him with it and her eyes were white with fury.

      ‘I wish I could. I tell you, I wish I could poison you. It would be worth going to gaol for.’

      Once, when they were arguing, Cass put her hands on the side of her head. She must have been about eight; I was three years younger. She began screaming, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it …’ over and over.

      In the end our father jumped up and put his arms around her. Tears ran down his face. He nursed her, crying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cassie.’

      Mostly I solved the problem by eating very fast, throwing it all down, getting down from the table as soon as possible.

      It’s a habit that continues to this day. I still eat far too fast. I remember it was one of the things Nathan noticed about me. That first time he took me out for a meal he stared curiously across the table.

      ‘You eat like a caveman, Riley,’ he said. ‘You throw your food down. You must hardly taste it.’

      When he said it, I felt the tears prick behind my eyes. I picked up my napkin, slapped it petulantly down on the table.

      I said, ‘Don’t criticise me,’ and he stretched a hand immediately across.

      He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m just interested, that’s all. I wondered why you ate so fast.’

      But it’s too early for Nathan.

      More, much more about Nathan later.

      Cassie and Fergie’s wedding was my last outing as a bridesmaid. It was a wedding much of its time. Proof of this is the photograph that stands on the mantelpiece of their front room, a courageous act, bearing in mind the presence of their two children.

      ‘God, you look bad, Dad.’

      ‘Thank you, son.’

      He does too, clad in the sort of cheap-looking white suit with a width of flare and lapel that could only have been expressly designed to engender scorn and derision from any fruit of the loins that would follow him.

      Not so Cassie and I. In fact we look pretty good, both of us in Biba, with big floppy hats, Cass in cream and me in that unsurpassable Biba mulberry.

      Fergie likes to say that his father would have paid Cass to marry him. A bewhiskered old major-general in the old tradition, he sent Fergie to boarding school in the same way he’d been sent. In the same way, Fergie was as thoroughly miserable.

      According to Fergie, it left him with the same inability to communicate with women that had afflicted his father, which is why he still regards himself as being rescued the day that new art teacher Cass Gordon turned up in the staff room of the local comprehensive where he was already teaching science.

      ‘No sooner looked than they loved … no sooner loved than they were screwing like bunnies.’

      ‘Yes, thank you, Archie.’ This from my sister, Cass.

      ‘Such a charming sentiment and written in such large letters, as I recall, on the wedding card Fergie’s mother opened.’

      True too. Fergie and Cass moved in together a bare few months after they met, a radical thing in our Land That Time Forgot back in the early seventies. A year later the major-general died so that Fergie was able to put down a deposit on a rambling cottage in Haviatt, a small village several miles to the west of our loony tune town, all of this occurring while I was out of the country on my travels.

      They were married a year later in their local parish church, St Michael’s where, thirty years on (God, can it be that long?) Fergie is now Tower Captain. On practice nights during the summer I sometimes bike out, and sit on the wall beneath the shadow of the church to listen to the bells and watch the evening fall on the mellow mustard-coloured stonework. Afterwards Fergie and I walk across the fields to the pub where the talk will be of the mystery of sallies and bobs and touches, bell-ringing being a foreign language to those who don’t speak it.

      From this you may deduce that I delight in the company of my brother-in-law, that I love him close on as much as I love my sister. I could call him a big cheese in his home village of Haviatt, only this would be a terrible pun on account of the fact that the place is famous for its prizewinning Cheddar. A parish councillor, Fergie also runs the pub skittle team and its folk club. This last I refuse to attend on account of a congenital dislike of beards and sandals, but, more importantly, miserable one-hundred-and-eight-verse ballads where women no better than they should be get rolled in the hay, and pregnant and/or dead afterwards. (Fergie says it’s not like this any longer but I’m not willing to take a chance on it.)

      It was a lovely wedding at St Michael’s, I’ll say this – although weddings are definitely my least favourite ceremonies – a balmy late September day with a first fine twinge of autumn about it.

      I liked Fergie from the first; not so Archie.

      We met at the rehearsal the night before. His first words, having been told of my travels, were; ‘So, Bangkok,’ this with a distinctly lecherous look in his eye. ‘Was it like Emmanuelle, then?’

      Scarcely have a best man and a bridesmaid had so little to say to each other at a reception. Forced eventually on to the dance floor with him, I said – rather cleverly, I thought – ‘Fergie’s such a nice guy. How come you ended up friends?’

      He just grinned, refusing to be insulted. ‘Cut and thrust of the rugger field, darling,’ he said. ‘All that male bonding in the showers.’

      Archie was delighted to learn this was my seventh outing as a bridesmaid. Flapping his hands and faintly bending his knees in what passed for dancing in the period, he said, ‘It’s a curse.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Absolutely. Only one way to get rid of it.’

      ‘Surprise me.’

      ‘Violent sexual congress with the best man at the immediate conclusion of the reception.’

      As Fergie revved up his battered old Ford Capri in the fond but as it turned out faint hope that it would actually carry them as far as Scotland, Cass hurled her posy in the traditional devil-may-care manner back over her shoulder. Archie, towering above the rest of the crowd of well-wishers, caught it, neatly deflecting it into my accidentally upraised hands. In a moment my mother was upon me cooing.

      ‘Oh, darling

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