I was last to arrive. It was another warm day, and I could hear them all in the garden when I got out of the car. Laughter and chatter floated to me on the breeze as I made my way round the side of the house clutching the peony and a bottle of red wine, my stupid stomach fizzing with nervousness.
I emerged into the garden and saw Rosie and Giorgio, Mark and Grace, a sprinkling of friends and neighbours with their children, and of course, the happy couple—Richard and Sylvia.
“Beth, darling,” Sylvia greeted me, rushing straight over to give me a hug.
“Happy anniversary,” I said, kissing her, holding the plant out to one side so it wouldn’t get crushed.
“Hello, love,” Richard said, also coming over to kiss me.
I kissed him back before presenting them both with the peony. “It’s a ‘Burma Ruby’ peony,” I said. “I hope you can find somewhere in the garden for it. I admit, I mainly chose it for the name.”
“We love peonies, don’t we, Sylv?” said Richard, looking genuinely delighted. “Thank you. Come and let me fix you a drink. You’ve met Giorgio, haven’t you?”
“Just the once,” I said, smiling at Giorgio.
Giorgio had his arm looped around Rosie’s waist, but he disentangled himself to kiss me. “Ciao, bella,” he said. “Your boyfriend, he is not coming?”
I hugged Rosie. “No, sadly he has to work today. He sends his regards to you all.”
“What’s he doing that’s so important?” Rosie asked.
“Supervising the installation of a spiral staircase in the house he’s renovating.”
“Rather him than me,” said Mark, who would be hard-pressed to put up a shelf, let alone make an entire shelving unit, despite Richard’s best efforts over the years. I smelt something smooth and spicy on his skin as he bent to kiss me.
Grace was next, with a kiss, kiss on either cheek. “Hello, Beth.”
“Hi, Grace. How are you?”
Grace was wearing red too. Great minds think alike, as they say.
“Good, thanks. It sounds as if Jaimie’s latest project is going very smoothly, from what he says. Have you been over to see it?”
“Yes, he took me a few weekends ago.” It was the garden I remembered from my visit there—hopelessly overgrown but filled with birdsong and flowers. Jaimie had cleared part of it to put down gravel for an extra parking space. All very practical, of course, but I’d felt a bit sad to see so much of that romantic tangle hacked away.
“Everything okay?” Rosie asked me in a moment when we were alone. “You’re not cross with Jaimie for not coming?”
“Of course not. This was the only day the stair guy could come. He’d have been here if he could.”
It wasn’t true, not entirely. I wasn’t cross with Jaimie for not being here today—of course I wasn’t. But I was disappointed. Here I was, alone again, at Richard and Sylvia’s house—the scene of my hopeless, unrecognised love for my friend’s brother. If Jaimie had been here with me, I’d have been fine. But as it was . . .
I fixed a smile on my face and took Rosie’s arm in mine. “I’m fine, honestly. Aren’t your parents lucky with the weather? What a fabulous afternoon.”
If Rosie gave me a look because I was talking to her about the weather like some old biddy on a bus, she let it go and led me over to talk to Giorgio. Giorgio, being the charmer he was, soon had me laughing, and I sincerely hoped my friend knew how lucky she was to have found him.
A little while later, I found myself standing next to Grace again.
“How is your family, Grace?” I asked, deciding to try to have a proper conversation with her.
She shrugged. “They’re okay. My sister’s pregnant with baby number three. Mum and Dad are over the moon, of course.”
Had there been a slight edge in Grace’s voice as she said that? I looked at her, but there was no clue in her face, so I pressed on.
“That is good news. And how about your grandmother? How’s she?”
Now there was a definite change in Grace’s expression. She looked quickly away, over at the flower border. “Oh, Nanna had to go into a care home recently,” she said, her tone carefully casual. “Everything suddenly got a bit much for her.”
I remembered the smile on Grace’s grandmother’s face as Mark spoke to her at the wedding and was genuinely sorry. She’d seemed like a real sweetheart. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
When Grace looked at me again, her expression was back in neutral. “Well, Mum did choose the best home she could find. More like a hotel than a home, really. I visit her there often.”
I nodded, disappointed to be faced with Grace’s force field. Again. How she really felt about her grandmother being in a care home was anyone’s guess, though surely nobody would be exactly pleased about it, would they? But Grace’s stilted sentences were designed to shut me down rather than to invite follow-up questions.
“Well,” I said lamely, “just as long as she seems happy.”
“She certainly wasn’t happy at home. It distressed her—not being able to cope with things. As Mum says, at least at Kenwood Place she has delicious meals cooked for her.”
I wondered whether Grace had clashed with her mother about her grandmother going into a home. I also wondered why the name of the care home seemed familiar to me. But then I was distracted by the sound of a child’s excited laughter and looked over to see Mark playing with the children of Richard and Sylvia’s neighbour—hide-and-seek, by the look of it. The garden was quite large and divided into different sections with lots of shrubs and trees, so it was perfect.
I smiled, remembering umpteen games of hide-and-seek during my childhood.
“Hide-and-seek was one of Mark’s favourite games when we were kids,” I told Grace and laughed. “I remember one time he hid behind some stacked sheets of wood—it wasn’t here, it was in the house in London. Anyway, it took me and Rosie ages to find him. And then, when it was his turn to hide again, he hid in the exact same place.” I laughed again. “Rosie and I didn’t think to look there because he’d hidden there the last time.”
I could still remember Rosie’s frustration at not being able to find her brother and our joint disbelief when we discovered him behind the wood sheets for the second time. The smile from the memory was still on my face when I turned to look at Grace. Only Grace wasn’t smiling. Not at all. In fact, she looked . . . well, resentful. As if she hated me having a shared history with Mark. Was it possible that I made Grace insecure? Surely not. She always seemed so strong and together.
“It was a very long time ago,” I said, but before I could say anything else, Josie, Richard and Sylvia’s neighbour—the mother of the boys—joined us and spoke to Grace.
“That husband of yours will make an excellent father one day.”
I returned my attention to Mark and saw he was running after the boys now, making them squeal delightedly as they tried to evade capture.
A familiar pang constricted my chest. Josie was right. Mark would make an excellent father. But I’d always known that, hadn’t I? He was the sort of man who would read his kids bedtime stories even if he was tired after work. Stand in the rain to watch them play football. Get stuck in with the nighttime feeds and the nappy changes. It was all too easy to imagine Mark carrying a sleepy child up to bed, their arms curled trustingly around his neck. Or giving a child a piggyback ride, galumphing along like a crazed pantomime horse.