Leaving my parents—Rose in Betty, Harry in his boiler suit, both of them waving me off from the driveway—I headed back to the city, letting myself into the flat and throwing my keys on the hallway table.
A white envelope sat in our mail basket, with embossed and scalloped edges, two wedding bands in the corner, and my name in a silver pen across it.
I picked it up, running my fingers along the scalloping, as Ben entered the room.
“Hi.” He smiled. “So who’s the lucky couple this time?”
“Not sure,” I said, although I had known straight away, recognizing the familiar, broad loops, “but I think it might be Josh and Annabelle.”
I opened it, and one tiny, perfect, blush-pink rosebud fell out.
Annabelle and Josh, the card said, were getting married on August 27 at 5:00 p.m. at Saint Alban’s Church in Juniper Bay, and afterward, guests were invited to join them for a party at the Hotel du Laurent.
They had booked the entire hotel out for the night, so everyone was also invited to stay for a celebratory breakfast the next morning.
There was a note as well, which I didn’t read then, not in front of Ben, but saved for later, when he had finally left the apartment to meet some friends from work for a drink and had stopped looking at me from every angle, checking if I was all right but never asking.
When I was sure he was gone, listening for the click of the downstairs door, I went to our room, lay on the bed, and took it out.
Tallulah, Annabelle had written, I hope you will come, we would really love you to be there, but if you can’t for any reason, I want you to know we completely comprestand. Love always, A.
I put the note down on the bedside table, rolling the tiny rosebud between my thumb and my finger.
Stupid really, to feel like this, as though someone had, as Rose would say, “knocked the wind out of my sails.”
But I did feel like that, I felt stupid, and foolish.
I turned my face, buried it deep into the pillow, and let go of the stupid, bloody rosebud.
What had I been thinking? That Josh would leave Annabelle for me? That Annabelle would leave Josh for me? That they would take me with them wherever they traveled to next? That they would realize that out of all of us, I was the one worth hanging on to?
No, but they would love me to come, and if I didn’t, they would completely comprestand.
Well, how very genanimous of them.
I turned off the light and closed my eyes, hearing Ben come in a couple of hours later to lie beside me and say with his beery breath that he understood why I was “a bit upset.”
“We don’t have to go, Lulu,” he said. “I’m in Hong Kong that week, anyway, you could come, bit of retail therapy.”
But I had already made my decision.
“You can’t go, Lulu,” Stella said, “it will only upset you.”
“Jesus, Lulu, why don’t you just wear a sign that says KICK ME, and save yourself all the trouble?” said Simone, somewhat less diplomatically.
“Just come with me,” Ben tried again.
“You have to go, Lulu,” Rose said firmly. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“I think you should do want you want, love,” Harry said.
“You could always poison her at her bachelorette,” Duncan said.
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, I didn’t really have time to think about it; I was too busy trying to calm down Duncan—who, unsurprisingly, was not going gently into that good night.
He had begun to rail against his treatments, refusing to have any more chemo on the grounds that he was not going to lose one more single strand of hair—“A man’s hair is his strength, Lulu, look what happened to Samson”—demanding I come to the island, announcing that no, he was better off alone, then summoning me once again, meeting with Andrew Lyons, his longtime lawyer, to sort out the minutiae of his life to such an excruciating degree that the usually indefatigable Andrew had taken some stress leave.
Duncan would be serene one minute, agitated the next, panicking wildly over the smallest things: “Lulu, I can’t find Barney’s striped rubber ball; we’ve got to find that ball for him,” he urged one day, and sent me down to the beach to search for hours. When I finally returned, sunburned and empty-handed, he had looked at me and said dismissively, “What are you so upset about, Lulu? It’s only a ball.”
He was losing weight and had taken to tying a bit of rope around his falling-down tracksuit pants to hold them up; his skin was sallow and his step unsure; sometimes when he opened the door to me I would wonder who this old man was.
But other times, if one of his former wives or colleagues—especially if it was a former colleague—visited, the slackness of his jaw would tighten, the roped tracksuit pants would be replaced by a pair of perfectly ironed jeans, his back would straighten, his hair would be concealed by a white cricketing hat, his smile would be welcoming, and he would become the suntanned retiree, hale and hearty and stronger than any of the winds that whipped at Lingalonga.
He would walk on steady legs beside his guests on the sand, arms out wide, face turned toward the sun, an old conjurer pulling out one last hoax from his bag of tricks.
When the children came—and they came most weekends—he would rest in his bed right up until the minute he heard the car in the driveway and then be at the door to greet them as they tumbled out of their mothers’ cars: Duncan Junior, Rhees, Jasmine and Jarrod, racing to get into the house first and the room with the bunk beds in it.
“Bags it,” Jarrod would shout from the top bunk.
“You did not, I got here first.”
“That’s not fair, you always get it.”
“Da-aaad!”
On hearing the familiar wail, Duncan would dive in, Barney right behind him, and enter the fray.
When they left, leaving their trail of sand and sticks and half-eaten lollies wrapped in waxy paper stuck under pillows, Duncan would wave them off, turn and go inside, close the door behind him, and sleep for hours.
I spent most of the next month on the island. Ben was away, and Rose, Harry reassured me again and again, was doing well, so I crisscrossed back and forth on the ferry, sipping lukewarm coffee out of polystyrene cups, surrounded by bags of fruit I knew Duncan would refuse to eat and knowing that, no matter how much I wanted to, I could never bring this particular ship home to shore.
Duncan, I discovered, had made a new life on Willow, one that had nothing to do with who he was on the mainland. People always seemed to be popping in and out: Will, the deckhand I’d met on the barge, often sat with Duncan poring over blueprints for goodness knew what—a boat probably—the people from the post office hand-delivered his mail, and a salty collection of fishermen could usually be found there at sunset, waiting at the back gate for a beer and a chinwag with the man with now not-soplatinum tonsils.
I hung around for as long as I could, just drinking Duncan in.
Rose made me a dress for Annabelle’s wedding.
She was not up to coming herself, but had made me a pale pink, knee-length lace shift with three-quarter sleeves and a mandarin collar. It had a matching cream bolero and a pink lace flower I could pin on it, or in my hair—“Whichever you like, darling,” she said—and I knew my mother could not have taken more care with it than if it had been my wedding gown.
Harry and I had mostly listened to the radio on the way to the church, and when we pulled up outside he had given my hand a squeeze and said, “Your turn next, Lulu.”
My father, the man with no idea.
The church was beautiful. Someone—Frank, I thought—had tied bunches of tiny pink rosebuds to every pew and set out sandalwood candles with rings of ivy at their base.
I stood at the door, Harry’s hand on my arm, and took it all in.
“It will be all right, you know, Lulu,” he said as we walked in, and just as we did Josh had turned his head and smiled at me.
I smiled back, and somewhere inside the look that passed between us, I left the church to go to a corner store where my brothers were curled like question marks around my legs, and a boy in a sky-blue T-shirt was pushing the hair from his eyes. Then Harry pulled at my arm, and we sat down between two groups of people I didn’t know. A woman with a red face and a puffy skirt asked me if I was a friend of the bride or the groom, and I told her truthfully that I didn’t know.
A harp began to play on the balcony above us, and Christa walked in, wearing another kimono and a complicated hat, followed by Fergus in a white linen shirt and khaki trousers, Annie in her layers, swaying slightly as she made her way to the front, too much jewelry, too much makeup—too much scotch, everyone would say later.
Josh’s mother, Pearl, walked in quickly and scurried to her seat at the front, not looking at anyone. As she passed I got a strong, sharp whiff of the cigarette she had just put out, her lipstick smudged from its tip.
Then Annabelle, on Frank’s arm, Frank in a suit and his fisherman’s cap.
Beautiful, tall Annabelle in a full-length, aquamarine vintage gown and lilac coat, shimmering in its folds and holding a bouquet of tuberose and ivy. Someone—not her, Annabelle could never be bothered with makeup—had painted her eyes and given her lashes; her curls were dark and loose about her face, and she was as beautiful to me as she was the day she first sat down beside me, one of Sister Scholastica’s finest flowers.
I didn’t really listen to the ceremony; I just sat in the pew with my arm against Harry’s shoulder and passed tissues from my handbag to the woman with the red face who cried noisily throughout.
Then we went to the reception at the hotel, where I smiled and laughed and clinked my glass at the speeches and danced with everybody and spent time with the older relatives and spoke about the flowers, and said, “Yes, they were lovely, weren’t they?” and “No, you wouldn’t think of frangipanis as your first choice.”
I ate the food and the cake and had my photo taken again and again, and my champagne refilled again and again, and not once did I speak to Annabelle or Josh, because I was far, far too busy smiling.
Harry left early; he and Frank were not staying at the hotel, Harry because he needed to get home to Rose, and Frank because he said he needed to not be near the open bar.
So I made my way to my room alone, falling backward on the bed when I got inside and sleeping in my clothes and shoes until a knock at the door woke me.
I got up and looked through the keyhole.
I opened the door.
“Josh,” I said, “what is it? Is everything okay?”
He swayed a little, and smiled a lopsided smile at me, and closed the door behind him.
Then his hands were in my hair and on my face, and I was holding his tie tight in my fist and not letting go when we sank to the floor. And I didn’t care that it was Josh, who shouldn’t have been there, or that Annabelle was somewhere upstairs.
I didn’t care because I felt his skin slip into mine, I felt the bite of his teeth and the breath from his mouth as he said, “Tallulah-Lulu,” his hands retracing the path they had traveled so many times before, and somewhere in the aching I led him all the way home to me.