Mark and Grace were dancing now, their bodies melded together.
“And forget about my brother once and for all,” Rosie added, the rather stern command tempered by a caring hand on my shoulder.
Ah. Maybe my acting skills weren’t going to earn me an Oscar anytime soon after all.
“I’m thirty-five, not thirteen,” I told her.
Rosie just lifted her eyebrows at me.
“D’you think your parents will be too upset if I don’t come for Christmas this year?” I asked, imagining what it would be like with Mark and Grace freshly back from their honeymoon.
“You know Mum needs ten months’ notice if you’re going to miss Christmas. Of course they’ll be upset. Anyway, what else are you going to do? Volunteer for sick-dog duty?”
Volunteering to take care of the dogs and cats who were too ill to be sent home from the veterinary surgery where I worked was exactly what I had intended to do over Christmas. I hadn’t said anything to my boss yet, but I knew he’d be only too ready to bite my hand off if I offered.
“Sorry and all that,” Rosie said, “but you have to come. Unless you want Mum’s bitter disappointment on your conscience all over the festive period.”
She was right, of course. If I didn’t join them all, I would feel bad. When someone’s done as much for you as Richard and Sylvia had done for me, it’s not right to disappoint them. I just hoped I could handle it.
I felt exposed and vulnerable when Rosie went off to the loo shortly afterwards. Looking round to check on Mark’s whereabouts, I spotted him with Grace’s grandmother. She was seated, and he was squatting so that their heads were on the same level, clearly listening to what she was saying with complete attention. He was like that with everyone—always making you feel as if you were the centre of his universe when you spoke to him. It might have felt affected, I guess, but it didn’t. As Rosie had pointed out, Grace was clearly very close to her grandmother. I’d met her parents earlier, and they had seemed so cold and stiff that this wasn’t surprising.
Someone else came to speak to Grace’s grandmother, so Mark gave her a kiss on the cheek and got to his feet. When his gaze started to roam around the room, I moved quickly—too quickly, as it turned out, because when I launched myself towards the buffet table as if I hadn’t eaten anything but a green salad all week, I was so focussed on not making eye contact with Mark that I ended up barging straight into somebody else.
“God, I’m sorry,” I said, gazing with horror at the coleslaw which had shunted onto the man’s suit from his plate.
“That’s all right,” he said, putting his plate down on a side table and getting busy with a paper napkin. “It’s only my second-best suit.”
I looked up to see an attractive man about my age. He had curly light-brown hair and hazel eyes, which were quite twinkly, considering the coleslaw belt.
“You didn’t think this wedding warranted the best, then?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“I wore that suit to the divorce courts. It didn’t seem right to wear it today.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Oh.” He stuck his hand out. “I’m Jaimie. Jaimie Faulkner.”
I shook his hand. “Beth Bailey. Sorry about just now. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. Are you a friend of the bride or the groom?”
“The groom. You?”
“Bride. Grace and I used to teach together.”
I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “Grace was a teacher?”
“For a little while. It didn’t really suit her.”
I could imagine that. Grace and I had met only a couple of times, but she just didn’t seem the teacher type.
“What about you? Did teaching suit you?”
“For quite a while, yes. Then I got restless and jacked it in to renovate houses. More money in bricks and mortar than in Shakespeare.”
“You were an English teacher?”
“I was. Grace taught business studies. She was a big help when I was setting my business up. What about you? What do you do?”
“When I’m not attacking people with coleslaw? I’m a veterinary nurse.”
“Are you? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
I considered him. “Why’s that? Because I haven’t got a litter of puppies poking out of my handbag?”
“No, because you look . . . I don’t know, more glamorous than I’d expect a veterinary nurse to look.” He pulled a face. “That sounds a bit cringeworthy, doesn’t it? I’m out of practise at talking to pretty women, I’m afraid. Sorry, more cringe.”
I shrugged. “It’s okay. All this vanishes in a puff of smoke at midnight anyway. I’ll be out there on the dance floor in my scrubs and latex gloves.”
He laughed. “You’re funny.”
I could have told him I hardly ever got round to wearing makeup. That today I’d had a pressing need to look as amazing as possible. That my makeup was just like my banter and bonhomie—a self-defence. But I didn’t. I smiled instead. “I try.” I indicated his abandoned plate. “Look, don’t let me stop you eating. After all, you nearly died for that coleslaw. I’m just going to grab something myself.”
As I loaded up my plate, I risked a glance across the room. Mark was safely ensconced with Grace again. Good. If I could get through the evening without being alone with him, I might be all right.
2
It was Donna Baker who first woke me up to my feelings for Mark.
I was eleven years old, and I’d been in high school for six months. My Aunt Tilda was away for a few weeks, and I was staying with Rosie’s family while she was gone. It was winter—a bleak February morning just before half term, and we were in the girls’ changing room after hockey. I’d never been into sports and spent the whole time on the hockey pitch chanting inside my head: Don’t pass the ball to me. Don’t pass the ball to me. Fortunately, everyone knew how useless I was, so they rarely did.
If Rosie had been there in that changing room, she’d have alerted me to Donna’s approach—a nudge of the elbow, a hissed warning. But Rosie wasn’t there, because we hadn’t been placed in the same class when we started at the school. So no warning was forthcoming. I’d just looked up from trying to do up the buttons of my school shirt with my frostbitten fingers to find Donna in front of me.
Donna, who had the annoying habit of jumping up and down in front of the changing-room mirror to make her breasts bounce, turning all of us developmentally challenged girls into pools of inadequacy, usually kept to her circle of jeering, loud-talking friends. Together they focussed their attention on rolling up the waistbands of their skirts to see how much leg they could get away with revealing before one of the teachers “had a word” or sent a letter home to their parents. They certainly didn’t usually waste their time talking to the likes of me—a relative ant in the arena of their attention, and one Donna would have no qualms about squashing under her borderline regulation shoe if she felt like it.
I looked at her, my face reddening before she’d even said anything, my body as aware as my mind that anything Donna said to me wasn’t likely to be pleasant.