For the wedding, Joshua filled the house with orchids.
His sister took an attack of the vapours, fell against the mantelpiece reeling in black satin and swept it clean of most of its objets. She smashed a valuable clock, so that it was stuck forever after at midnight.
Midnight.
We spent the rest of the century, with Katy, on a cruise liner travelling to the most exotic ports in the world and returned just before the New Year.
As fin-de-siecle’s go, it was all right.
They had the Queen Mother installed in her emerald casket in the Greenwich Dome, and this was the spectacle we queued, along with everyone else, to see at the end.
And for a few years after that, life went on pretty quietly.
I was happy.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“No, I don’t want to buy anything. I want to see the manager.”
The woman was holding up the queue. Behind her, teenagers were rapping their empty CD cases on the cash desk. The assistant told her straight. “The manager is incredibly busy. Can I help?”
The woman’s face tightened at this. The assistant winced. You could tell there had been some severe plastic surgery there, the way her skin went tight under her hair. “It is David Moore, isn’t it? Your manager?”
“Yes, but…”
“I want to see him.”
Smiling, the manager let her in. He was in the staff polo shirt, looking slightly older and more careworn since the last she’d seen him. His desk was covered in printout and the fax machine was chattering to itself. “Anne…” he said warmly. “You’ve changed.”
“For the better, I hope,” she said gruffly as she sat down, and poked her legs out before his desk.
“Yes, you look years younger.”
“Good. Now, I heard you were in London these days. Colin told me.”
“Ah yes. Three months nearly.” They had given him the smaller of the Oxford Street shops to manage, and he still couldn’t hide his glee. After Glasgow there had only been one place to move up to. “How is Colin?”
“He’s not too well. Still in Edinburgh.” She gave David a dark look. “But that’s not to be helped. I want you to come by my house for some supper tonight. I need a favour.”
“I can’t, Anne. I’m seeing someone.”
“A man?” she asked bluntly.
“A woman.” He flushed.
“Colin told me about your recapitulation.”
“So I can’t come, anyway.”
“It’s just a small favour,” she said, softening. “I thought, since you were so… successful now, you’d have no trouble fixing it.”
“What is it?”
“My niece’s step-daughter.”
“Wendy’s step-daughter?”
“She needs a job. She’s going wild.”
“I’m sorry, but…”
“Two thousand quid.”
“Anne, I can’t take bribes to…”
“Three.”
“I won’t take your money.”
“Please come, David. Have supper. It’ll be like old times.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Please. For the sake of an old—but still shapely—woman.”
He grinned. “All right.”
Anne jumped up and gave him directions. “Nine o’clock. On the dot. I knew you were a good boy, really, even if you did dash my poor son’s hopes.”
“Anne…”
“I know, I know. I shan’t interfere. Now, be prompt.”
He opened the office door for her and she tugged his ear.
“I knew you were a good’un. Remember, when me and Wendy first went up to Edinburgh together? You were on the same train. Off to find your fortune. Such a roughie-toughie skinhead you looked. I thought you’d go tootling and footling your time away.”
“How is Wendy?”
She sniffed. “As well as can be expected.”
Her rooms were still minimalist, as she still called it, but that was all right because minimalism had recently come back in. In her tucked, trimmed and tautened new body, Aunty Anne was finding herself the height of fashion.
She was an Aunty again, to Lindsey, nearly seven, and Katy, who was sixteen by now and who had left school gladly, against the judgment of her betters. She spent the weekends in Putney with her Aunty Anne, but Anne suspected that because she had friends in the area. Katy was at an age when she soon tired of spending much time with her father and Wendy. They were too intense together, either bickering or clambering all over each other and it turned the girl’s stomach.
“I blame that funny school they had you at,” said Anne that night. “That’s what put you off education. It was all cutting shapes out of paper and dancing around, wasn’t it?”
Katy was bored, tapping at her aunt’s new computer. “Hm.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with dancing. Did you ever see me dance?”
“Yep.”
“But you need to learn more than that at school. That’s your three R’s. Wendy would never learn. That’s how she went the way she did. She left school at sixteen, too.”
“Wendy’s all right.”
“She could have done better for herself.”
Katy went red and didn’t say anything.
Anne thought she might have offended her, and was about to say something else, but was interrupted by the doorbell going and it was Serena. They kissed each other briskly. “Did you get him?” asked Serena.
“Ah-hah,” nodded Anne.
“Get who?” asked Katy, who had come to listen.
Aunty Anne sighed. Katy was in a nylon patterned blouse of red and purple, a miniskirt of green diamonds, and white leather boots. Retro-chic was back in again. Aunty Anne remembered dressing like that to go out dancing at the Troccadero. So she was almost a grandmother after all.
David arrived sweating from work, with a suit jacket pulled over his T shirt. He seemed ready to interview a prospective staff member, but Anne put a gin and tonic in his hand, made him sit, and started working—to Serena’s mortification—on an immense fry-up. David got up to look at the framed photos along one wall.
“Wendy’s wedding?” he called through.
“Yes,” said Serena with a sigh. “It seems so long ago now. You weren’t there, were you?”
“Busy in Scotland,” he said tiredly. “I didn’t even know it was happening.”
He found Colin’s face in a rowdy black and white group picture. He recognised a few other faces. In one picture Anne was hosting up her matron’s dress to show her legs and, beside her, Wendy stood in her vast satin gown and rolled her eyes to heaven,
