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It was fortunate that whoever had been playing the part of Tom’s wife until now had a logical, tidy mind, because that made it easy for Juliet to find the cutlery and crockery for supper.
Juliet looked up from arranging the knives and forks as Tom came in from the garden via the conservatory.
“I suppose I’d better let the wine breathe. You know what a stickler Father is for the temperature of his red wine. Not that Mum cares a jot as long as she has her gin and tonic before supper.”
As he strolled past her, he ran a finger affectionately down her spine and she shivered.
Standing back to check the place settings, Juliet decided the table needed something extra to finish it off. A trill of birdsong from the garden drew her attention to the curvaceous borders, immaculately weeded – they must surely have a gardener – and brimming with summer flowers ripe for plucking: roses, stocks, wallflowers and lavender. In the far corner stood lilac trees heavy with blossom.
She found a collection of vases in the oak dresser and selected a heavy cut-glass number with a splayed top that would allow lilac branches to spread out and exude their heady perfume into the warm evening air. Soon she’d filled it with a fistful of branches of deep purple lilac. The crevasses of the vase sparkled beneath the clusters of tiny petals.
“You’re always so good at this,” said Tom, returning from the cellar – yes, they had a cellar! – with a bottle of red wine in each hand.
Juliet wasn’t used to receiving compliments. “Good at what?”
He produced a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and selected the corkscrew.
“Oh, you know, homemaking.” With skill born of long practice, he eased the cork out of each bottle and set them open on a small silver tray. “I feel sorry for men whose wives are too distracted by their jobs to take care of them properly at home. I bet plenty of working women would swap places in a heartbeat with a lady of leisure like you.”
A lady of leisure? Although Juliet had occasionally craved a sabbatical when the children were tiny or poorly, she’d never longed to give up work entirely. Even in a house as big and as comfortable as this, would it really be possible to fill her days without a paid job? Wouldn’t she be lonely, especially with the children at boarding school? She loved her job at the library. How would she fill her time without it? Even she wouldn’t be contented to read all day, every day.
Judging from the packed wardrobe she’d just raided, Tom’s wife filled her free time with clothes-shopping.
Leaving Tom to choose the appropriate wine glasses from the backlit display cabinet, Juliet returned to the kitchen, lifted Eleanor’s casserole out of the fridge and slipped it into the hottest oven of the Aga. She was grateful to Eleanor for making the evening’s catering easy for her. Juliet had never used an Aga before. She wasn’t sure she’d even seen one in real life, only in her mind’s eye through the novels of Katie Fforde and Joanna Trollope, and in glossy lifestyle magazines at the hairdresser’s.
Rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, she found appropriate serving dishes for the sorbet and shortbread. Goodness, having to sift through so many dishes made life unnecessarily more complicated than it needed to be. It was much easier in her own house, where they ate whatever was on the menu off the same sturdy crockery they’d had since they were married, using the same simple set of knives, forks and spoons. Now she had access to steak knives, fish knives and forks, and some long skewer-like gadgets that she could not identify.
The casserole had plenty of gravy. She decided to add soupspoons to the place settings to be on the safe side.
Returning to the dining room and straightening the crockery and cutlery on the table for the third time, she was conscious of her heart pounding, so she decided to put on a calming CD. In the rack beside the fancy wall-mounted player, she found Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, an old favourite that always made her relax and went down well as background music for public events at the library. Candles were soothing, too. She fetched from the sideboard two large ones in decorative glasses with fancy brand labels she couldn’t pronounce and set them beside the lilac, whose perfume was already filling the room.
Just then she heard a key at the front door. Puzzled, she glanced towards the garden, where Tom was strolling around the lawn, a glass of Scotch in one hand, a slender cigar in the other. She hadn’t realised Tom smoked. He was never one of the gang smoking behind the bus stop after school.
Multiple footsteps in the hall told her more than one person had let themselves in. It could only be Tom’s parents. Tingling with anticipation, Juliet took a deep breath.
“Tom, darling! We’re here!”
Juliet was just wondering whether Tom had heard them when Mr and Mrs Jenkinson stalked into the dining room. For the first time, she realised how much Tom took after his mother in appearance, with her doe-like brown eyes and dark curls. But in Veronica, there was a harshness about her straight lips. Her cynical stare fell upon Juliet.
“Where’s my dear boy?” she asked in a tone that blamed Juliet for his absence. Behind her, Tom’s father Henry raised his eyebrows at Juliet in a helpless apology.
“He’s in the garden.” Juliet forced a conciliatory smile. “Shall we go out to join him? It’s a beautiful evening.”
Henry obediently started to make for the patio. Veronica paused to appraise the table setting and pointed accusingly at the vase.
“Don’t you know it’s bad luck to bring lilac indoors? It’s a portent of death.”
“I thought that was peacock feathers,” Juliet ventured weakly.
Veronica rolled her eyes.
“I hope you’ve none of those either. And have you nothing better to spend Tom’s money on than those extravagant candles?”
Juliet thought fast.
“They were a gift.”
They might have been for all she knew.
Veronica inspected the CD player on the wall and sighed.
“I thought so. The piece chosen by everyone who knows nothing about classical music, but wants to make it look as if they do.”
Juliet gritted her teeth to prevent herself answering back.
Hearing Veronica’s strident tones, Tom flung his half-smoked cigar into the shrubbery and strolled up the lawn to the patio. As he entered the dining room, Veronica’s demeanour changed entirely. Suddenly, she was all charm, just like Tom.
“Thomas, darling!”
“Hello, Mother.” Veronica allowed her son to sweep her into his arms and kiss her on both cheeks.
Tom acknowledged Henry with a nod of the head.
“Father.”
“Thomas.”
Juliet was startled to realise this was the first word Henry had spoken since his arrival.
“Drinks on the terrace OK for you, Mother?” Tom led her by the arm like an ambassador escorting an elderly duchess into a banquet. “I’ve got your drinkies ready for you, just how you like them.”
Tom had set up the makings of gin and tonic on a circular bottle-green cast-iron table, around which were ranged four matching chairs. It wasn’t just any old gin and tonic, but fancy gins and upmarket mixers too posh for the pub Juliet had worked in.
While Henry followed his wife and son, Juliet lingered behind. She couldn’t bear to discard the vase of lilac, so she took it upstairs to the master bedroom and placed it on the dressing table. At least when she and Tom went to bed, the room would be filled with the seductive fragrance: sweet revenge on Veronica. Putting off the moment when she had to join her in-laws in the garden, she returned to the kitchen to check on the casserole.
By the time she entered the garden, Juliet was more than ready for the generous drink Tom had poured for her.
“We’re just talking about where to go on holiday this summer, darling,” Tom said as she sat down beside him. “Father favours Tuscany, but Mother favours Bavaria. You know how much we all enjoyed the Rhine cruise last summer.”
“But it is my turn to choose, darlings,” put in Henry.
Wary of saying the wrong thing, Juliet let them continue their debate, which was a token argument. She soon gathered that wherever Veronica chose, Henry eventually accepted, and it was understood that Juliet, Tom and the children would go with them. It turned out they had spent every vacation together as an extended family group. When Edward was a baby, Veronica had announced her presence would give Tom and Juliet a rest, an argument repeated on Eleanor’s arrival two years later. As Veronica and Henry had paid for every holiday, it had become a family tradition.
With Veronica still extolling the virtues of Munich, they moved inside to eat. Veronica and Henry sat at each end of the table, with Tom and Juliet on either side, as if they were guests rather than hosts. Juliet was grateful that the self-contained one-dish meal should make serving everyone relatively fool-proof.
As Juliet filled her mother-in-law’s plate, Veronica picked up her soup spoon and held it aloft.
“Have you forgotten to bring the soup as a starter?” she demanded.
Juliet almost dropped the ladle in surprise. “No, there isn’t any starter. The soup spoon is for Eleanor’s casserole, along with the knife and fork. There’s a lot of gravy.”
“I see,” said Veronica, in a tone that suggested she didn’t. “So Eleanor made this casserole?”
“Yes,” said Juliet, cautiously. “Yes, she made it for you.”
Veronica brightened.
“Then I’m sure it will be delicious.”
Compared to how it would have been had I cooked it? thought Juliet. Would the lilac have passed muster had Eleanor picked it, and the candles if a gift from Edward?
“So how are the little lambs getting on at school this week?” asked Henry as Juliet set his plate of casserole in front of him.
“Oh, fine,” said Juliet quickly, hoping Tom would elaborate, but he wasn’t listening, too preoccupied with tasting the red wine.
The reason for Henry’s question soon became clear.
“We’ve had a very long email from each of them, haven’t we, Henry?”
Tom smiled. “Sending you regular updates is the least they can do considering you’re paying their fees, Mother. Although I’m sure they’re also messaging you because they miss you.”
He cast Juliet an encouraging smile.
Juliet thought quickly. “I don’t know how anyone pays school fees without grandparents’ help these days,” was the most diplomatic thing she could find to say. Not that she had any idea how much private school fees cost. When Jessie and Jake were at school, forking out for uniforms, sports kit, book bags and other paraphernalia had been a significant drain on her budget, even buying everything from the supermarket.
“The weekly boarding seems to be paying off, Dilly,” replied Veronica.
Juliet looked around, wondering how another woman had crept into the room uninvited and unnoticed, but she refused to let this Dilly person distract her from the fact that her mother-in-law had paid to remove her children from her care during term-time. Now was her chance to protest.
Henry sensed Juliet’s disquiet before she could speak.
“Of course, we’re glad to be able to do it for them,” he put in. “We only wish we could have sent Tom to boarding school instead of that dreadful state comprehensive. No offence, Juliet, it probably suited you well enough. But he got there in the end. To a proper professional career, I mean.”
Juliet remembered now that Henry was a very successful barrister, which was odd, considering he could scarcely stand up to his wife. As a teenager, Tom had told Juliet that there was no point in him visiting most of the stands at the school careers fair, as his parents had declared the only routes open to him were the professions: law, medicine, dentistry, engineering, or accountancy. What about teaching? the careers advisor had asked him. Or librarianship? Juliet suggested. Not enough money or status, Tom had replied, channelling his mother. Juliet wondered what Veronica and Henry had thought of their son marrying a lowly librarian without a degree to her name.
“As did Simon,” Veronica was saying. Simon was Tom’s younger brother. “Of course, Dilly II went to Benenden before her medical training.”
Juliet blinked. Another Dilly? How many women called Dilly were in the family? God forbid there should be a second Veronica.
“Yes, Sarah says Bedales suited her two down to the ground,” said Tom. “Though I wouldn’t want to send ours so far away.”
When Tom raised his eyebrows questioningly at Juliet, she murmured agreement, sensing that if she tried to make a case for the local state school, he would not support her. She looked away.
Then it dawned on her. If Simon’s wife was called Sarah, then Dilly must be a pet-name. But why the number? No, not a pet-name – an acronym, for convenience. Dilly – DIL – daughter-in-law. Suddenly, Juliet realised that all evening, Veronica hadn’t once called her by name. To Veronica, she was just Dilly I – her daughter-in-law whose prime purpose and only value was to produce her precious grandchildren.