It is a glorious afternoon. A pearly sky and a benign sea, the surface a silky skein reflecting the whole colour chart of blues, from the clearest turquoise to the deepest inky indigo. The Scilly Isles are at their most alluring.
Kit might be enjoying this out on the skiff – delicious solitude! Or he could be walking and musing, nodding to hikers, ‘A nice day for it, yes!’ all that is required of him. Or sitting in the pub garden enjoying a few cold ones, the odd comment about cricket drifting over him. As it is, he’s enduring a forced bonhomie akin to that displayed by the band on the Titanic, sitting alongside his mother with not one, but two of the bride’s dowager aunts in attendance. A very particular circle of hell. No wonder his father bailed.
If the weather holds, he might go out on the boat tomorrow, although he needs to collect his supply box from the office first. These treasure troves are where the family store items they only 36use on the island: wetsuits and hardcore wet-weather clothes; sunhats, deck shoes, walking boots; his father’s fishing equipment; his own painting gear; his mother’s IOS rugby shirt in pale violet and the bright fuchsia waterproof she acquired earlier this year – In a sale, darling. Couldn’t resist! – which, thankfully, he’s never seen her wearing. How old does the woman think she is? Twelve?
Kit’s daydream of escape is cut short because Bobby is now ambling over to their table, enquiring, ‘Everything going well here? All good food-wise?’
‘Oh yes, Bobby darrrling,’ slurs Aunt One. ‘Organ Morgan has whipped it out!’ She titters.
Morgan, the new head chef, has catered the event. He is very Welsh and very red in the face. His nickname has nothing to do with his musical skills, rather a long story involving a pair of obscenely short shorts.
Kit cringes. His mother rolls her eyes. Aunt One is veering towards the acutely embarrassing stage, and they’ve not got to the speeches yet. He averts his eyes from her performance, staring hard at the remains of his duck confit as if it might contain the secrets of the universe.
He tunes out. They have been blessed with the weather. It is balmy rather than scorching, but Kit is already a little sunburnt on his nose and forehead, while his mother is perfectly florid. Dowager Aunt Two, sitting next to him, is daintily perspiring into her pale grey linen. She is a drab sparrow against Aunt One’s showy purple plumage.
There is an arrangement of strange spiky pink flowers on the table. He pokes his finger to the darkness inside and is surprised to find it soft as a bird’s feathers. 37
‘Protea neriifolia,’ announces Aunt One, as if addressing a rally. ‘Beautiful isn’t it. Twenty thousand varieties of plant in the Abbey Garden, from eighty thousand different countries!’
Kit wasn’t aware that there were that many countries, but he says nothing to disillusion the woman, who is already tilting at least fifteen degrees to the perpendicular.
His mother sighs.
A loud hoot from the visiting vicar is accompanied by a tinkling of laughter from the top table in the garden. The clergyman, who usually oversees a parish in Barbados (where the bride met her groom during one rather splendid Christmas getaway), is the only black person at the occasion. ‘Oh, what a pity for the photos,’ whispered Aunt Two as they sat squashed together in the island’s small but perfectly formed church. ‘Contrast,’ she’d added hastily, noting the outrage in Kit’s expression.
Now Aunt One suddenly leans over her plate to grab Bobby’s arm and announces, in a booming stage whisper, ‘Give the chef all my compliments. Tell him …’ She straightens, smiling and fluttering what must be assumed to be a saucy twinkle, ‘Tell him I am very particular about what I put in my mouth, but he will be granted entry any time.’ She stifles a small burp. ‘Any time at all!’
A smear of jus remains on the brocade covering her left nipple. Kill me now, thinks Kit.
His mother unfolds her long legs from beneath the table and re-crosses them as she turns away from the aunts. Kit gets his height from her, rather than his father – one of those compact, bolshy trader types who delights in his elegant wife; one who towers over him in both height and class. Or rather he used to delight in her.
‘Pure gold, your mother,’ was one of his father’s sayings when 38Kit was a child. This view has since tarnished somewhat. His parents have been leading separate lives for years.
Kit has reached a level of mandatory drunkenness required to survive any wedding reception, but his mother has become tight-lipped. This is one of the tiny outward signs that she may be heading towards her own version of alcoholic Armageddon. At this rate she may not last the night and he’ll not only have to haul the aunts back to their own holiday home, them squawking protests all the way, but he may also have to deal with one of Beatrice’s moods – doleful eyes, heavy exhalations and barbed comments – behaviour which he finds draining.
Bobby is attempting to prise Aunt One’s talons off his arm just as Jane the bride slinks by, gracing Kit with a radiant smile as she heads inside to the toilet. She can afford this generous display of no hard feelings now she has Glorious Greg in the bag. Their break-up, instigated by Kit some years ago, was not taken in the same spirit.
Bobby somehow manages to deftly disentangle himself without breaking the aunt’s knuckles and moves on to glad-hand a couple from Chesterfield at the next table. Kit has heard the rumour that these friends of the mother of the bride are thinking of buying a timeshare in Barn Owl for the Easter holidays – a whopping thirty-year commitment. This is a particularly lucrative period, rarely available, which has only recently come up for grabs due to the tragic yet rather convenient death of a former QC, his widow retiring to the Mijas mountains of Spain with a dapper antiques dealer from Brighton, with what some have judged as indecent haste.
These potential buyers are not to know that Bobby has flirted with three other interested parties in as many weeks, according 39to those in the know, talking up the rarity of the opportunity. He seems rather desperate to bring in a good offer.
Aunt One suddenly makes a lunge towards the wine bottle, startling Beatrice, who tuts threateningly. Kit resolves to leave the women to their imminent downfall and head to the pub as soon as is socially acceptable.
Aunt Two starts questioning Kit on his future plans. Not having any, his will to live seeps further away as he tries to answer in polite generalisations, and when that fails, he trails off, falling into a silent funk.
He is wondering whether he might get a chance to do a little painting while he’s here this time, when Jane swoops by again just as his mother knocks her wine glass flying. It is already empty, so there is that, but Kit is forced to grab Aunt Two’s arm to stop her hurtling onto the grass after it.
‘I’ll do it!’ trills the bride, curtseying prettily in her gown to scoop up the glass, knees demurely together, which is a first, thinks Kit unkindly. ‘Intact!’ she crows, which is more than can be said for Kit’s temper.
‘Oh, Janey!’ sighs his mother. ‘You are incandescent, my darling. This silly oik must rue the day he let you slip through his fingers!’ She lays a perfectly manicured hand on her son’s chest, murmuring, ‘Silly, silly boy!’
As Jane faux toasts his mother, Kit has an overwhelming urge to snatch the glass from the bride’s hand and smash it into her smug face, then grab the stupid fascinator from his mother’s stupid head and ram it into her stupid mouth.
The best man chinks a glass to announce something or other, shattering the image, and Kit grits his teeth so hard the neighbouring guests might hear them splinter.