“A brew. Sorry, no other drinking vessels available.” Poppy placed a large steaming mug on the pile of yellowing paperbacks next to Stevie’s bed. The mug was one of their mother’s old fa- vorites, wrapped in a quote by Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differ- entiate me from a doormat.” It was a mug that usually made the sisters roll their eyes—they had yet to encounter a woman less like a doormat than their mother—but Stevie was too tired for sisterly collusion today.
“Thanks, Poppy.” Stevie took the mug, aware that her sister was far more deserving of tea in bed. She walked back to the bed, sat down, and sipped the tea, feeling the too-hot sip burn its way down her throat and tunnel deep inside to where anxieties churned. She rubbed her eyes. “I feel like how I look, Pops.”
“Oh, don’t worry. Weddings wreak havoc with one’s beauty sleep,” Poppy said, leaning into the radiator, pressing her bottom into its warm ridges. “I was a right case before mine, do you re- member?”
“Insufferable.” Stevie smiled, pushing the hedge of wavy brown hair away from her face. “But at least you were organized.”
“Retentive, you mean? Oh, I accept that.” Poppy laughed, peering
out of the sash window into her parents’ garden, her belly pressing against the cold glass, a ring of condensation misting its circumfer- ence.
Stevie gazed fondly at her sister, who looked more fecund than ever this morning, her cheeks rhubarb-pink, her pregnant belly high and round beneath her crisp white Boden nightie, like a large pudding bowl under her skin. She looked so happy, so light, al- most airy despite her girth. Poppy was never happier than when she was pregnant. And it suited her. Stevie was certain that when she was eighty she’d be able to remember her sister exactly as she was now—flip the image up like a favorite old photo—and immedi- ately transport back to this morning at her parents’ house, the air thick with pre-wedding tension and the smell of burning toast. “Poppy, sorry if I sound a bit neurotic, but does my wedding have the air of disaster to you?” she appealed to her sister for reassurance. “A fairground crash in slow motion?”
“No!”
Poppy laughed, twisting her milkmaid-blond hair over one shoulder. “Don’t worry about all the details. Mum’s in control.”
“Exactly.” But Stevie knew she had to take responsibility. She’d shirked too many of the preparatory nuptial duties and taken up her mother’s offers of help fully aware of the risks. For the last six months, she’d felt unexpectedly dislocated from the experience. Sometimes it felt like the whole bride thing was happening to someone else.
“You know, what I didn’t realize,” said Poppy thoughtfully, plaiting her hair loosely with slim, tanned fingers, the pea-sized di- amond on her engagement ring projecting rainbow rhomboids against the white bedroom wall. “. . . is that the interesting stuff happens
after
the wedding.” She looked up from her plait and grinned. “Here’s to you getting up the duff.”
Stevie raised her mother’s mug in a mock cheers. Not for the first time, part of her wished the roles were reversed, as if she’d upset the natural sibling order in some way. It would be nice to occasion- ally be in the position of dispensing sage womanly advice to her younger sister.
“When are you going off the pill?” pursued Poppy, circling her belly with a flat palm that didn’t indent the flesh in any way, sug- gesting it was hard as a rock. She never flinched from asking her sister the most personal questions.
“Imminently. Jez is keen to populate the planet as soon as possi- ble.” Fully awake now that the hot dark tea had kicked in, Stevie recalled the website’s conclusion about her age. “Don’t look so ex- cited, Poppy, I’m bound to take decades to conceive.”
“Oh, rubbish! Piers barely had to touch me.” “You were twenty-six.”
In hindsight, although it had seemed a rather dull choice at the time, Poppy had done the sensible thing. She had eschewed the cre- ative vanities of publishing and PR and gone to work in a male- dominated industry at a city accounting firm, much to her mother’s incomprehension, where, at the age of twenty-three, she’d swiftly met the handsome, dependable corporate lawyer Piers. They’d mar- ried two years later, in clouds of white pleated chiffon, at Piers’s family’s church outside Winchester. The wedding breakfast, held at Piers’s parents’ large country house—geographically, just outside her mother’s influence, thus allowing Poppy to organize
her
day without the intrusion of incense sticks or lentils—involved salmon, a chocolate fondue, and two hundred guests, not one of whom did Stevie manage to snog because, even back then, they were all—bar the odd, bald, and boring—in couples. Poppy’s first child, Sophie, darling in every way, was conceived on the Tuscan
honeymoon four-poster. Finn came along exactly two years later, as planned. And now there was another Fitzpatrick kicking his heels in Poppy’s womb, another perfectly timed sibling.
Stevie tried very hard not to be jealous. She was not always suc- cessful. But she consoled herself that fulfillment couldn’t have hap- pened to a nicer person. And Poppy and Piers were exactly the kind of people—socially responsible, intelligent, and solvent—that
should
reproduce. They deserved a government subsidy. Well- behaved and charming, the Fitzpatrick children had inherited Poppy’s benign temperament, the same sane sky-blue eyes, unsul- lied by any disappointment, so unlike her own odd yellow-brown ones, which her father always said “were far too knowing,” and used to get her into trouble at school for “insolence.”
“I’m afraid the mug of tea came with an ulterior motive, Stev. Would you do me a favor?” Poppy gave her prettiest smile. It made her look about fifteen years old. “We’re attempting a tantrum-free trip to the natural history museum. I’d kill for a shower first so I don’t get mistaken for a lump of prehistoric taxidermy. Would you mind shepherding Finn for a sec?”
“Seems like a fair exchange for a cup of tea.” “Thanks, sis.”
Piers poked his head into the room. A tall and tubby thirty- something in pale Gap jeans, he sported the kind of inoffensive En- glish good looks advertisers used to sell bran-based breakfast cereals. “Poppy, can we make a move, darling? Please.” He tapped his chunky diving watch. “I’ll see you downstairs in ten?”
“Sure, sure.” Poppy scanned the room. “Where the devil is he?
Finn!
” A toddler was on the loose.
“The artist in residence.” Stevie laughed and nodded toward the hall, which Finn was creatively redecorating with orange crayon.
“Christ.” Not seeing the humor, Poppy lurched toward her two- year-old and scooped him up. Finn’s stout fat legs—half baby and half boy—kicked, rigid with defiant energy. She took the crayon. “Go sit with Aunt Stevie, darling.”
“Don’t wanna.”
Stevie tried not to feel hurt. He was two, for God’s sake. It didn’t count as rejection.
Then Finn spotted his aunt’s laptop wedged between bed and wall, where she’d let it slump when she’d fallen asleep. It was blink- ing irresistibly, a call to mischief. He waddled to the bed. “Wanna.” “Here, Finnballs, sweetie.” Stevie pulled back the bedcovers— covers she’d had since she was twelve years old, the color beaten out of the patchwork by her mother’s accidental boiling washes. Like a security blanket, she slept better under this ratty bit of faded cot- ton than any of her own crunchy White Company sheets back home at the Bayswater flat she shared with Jez. As the sun beamed dusty rays against her face, she suddenly felt very glad she’d come back to her parents’ for the weekend to finalize the wedding plans. It was nicely cyclical somehow. Finn dug under the duvet and reached up to the laptop prize, releasing a condensed-milk smell
from the folds of his Power Ranger pajamas.
“Step away from the technology.” Stevie swiped the computer out of his reach and ruffled his curls. Thwarted, Finn sulkily picked at the bedroom wall, digging his fingernails into buttons of Fun- Tak, old curly edged school photos, a starburst of peeling Wham! stickers, and a hard, ancient pink Hubba Bubba globule that she’d stuck there during a teenage sulk sometime in the late eighties.
“Make sure he doesn’t jump that stair gate, won’t you?” Poppy shouted behind her as she clattered downstairs. “And watch the window that doesn’t lock . . .”
Finn listened warily to his mother’s retreating footsteps. He stamped a salivary finger on an old dappled school photograph. “Aunty Stevie.”
“Yes, that’s me! About a hundred years ago. Very well spotted.” She kissed his head and stared at the photo. Yes, she was an awkward-looking teenager, with not nearly enough confidence to inhabit that chunky, “big boned” body. Over the years, she had pummeled her figure into better shape with gym classes, lifting her flat, rather square bottom half an inch and further cinching in her fifties-housewife waist. But the photo caught her stocky teenage silhouette, the one hardwired into her self-esteem at the impres- sionable age of fifteen in chilly school gym locker rooms and bacteria-infested municipal pools. In her own mind, no matter how slim she got, she’d always be the girl at school boys teasingly called “pudding.” And she was still grateful for her fiancé: strawberry- blond hair, warmhearted, colorful, and handsome, even if he had recently acquired a tummy that jiggled on his middle like an un- derdone poached egg.
“Stevie. Wedding,” said Finn solemnly, as if assimilating the news for the first time.
The word “wedding” was destabilizing. Stevie felt herself tense up.
Finn looked up, blue eyes wide and unblinking. “Want cake.”
She smiled. “I would feed you meringues for breakfast if I had any in the near vicinity. But I haven’t. Cake, later.”
“Later,” parroted Finn, a little sadly, as if “later” was forever away. “Wedding, later.”
Stevie bit off a branching split end of hair—recently missed by her hairdresser—and, in a disciplined fashion, tried to conjure up
the proposal, to compensate for the unsettling and wholly inappro- priate feelings of negativity.
She closed her eyes. April. Friday night. Jez had spent the ma- jority of that day with his father playing golf. When she’d met him, about 6:00
p.m.
, he’d looked unusually flushed, and insisted on taking her to dinner at the Wolseley. By that point, she realized now, their relationship had needed good restaurants, theater, cin- ema, or external drama of some kind, because it had hit a plateau, the initial moving-in-together excitement had faded. They’d be- come comfortable, maybe too comfortable. They knew how to make each other laugh, exactly how browned the other liked their toast. She knew every whorl of hair on the back of his neck, every bump of his spine, the exact places he liked to be kissed. There were few surprises, few departures from what had already pleas- antly been. By that April, only the future remained unlabeled and uncertain.
In the restaurant, encased beneath the vaulted ceilings and black columns, and shouting above the resulting bad acoustics, they discussed Jez’s recent promotion at YR-Brand. Jez accused her of not being more excited for him. He’d paid the bill, which was un- usual—he was usually happy to split. After two years, they’d got to that stage, too. Hand in hand, they’d walked over Waterloo Bridge, London’s lights splattered like fireworks in the oil-black Thames wa- ter, the city throbbing with noise and crowds. A gust skimmed across the water from the south, sticking hair to her glossed lips. She remembered cursing herself for not going to the toilet before they left the restaurant and wondering if she’d be able to endure a Tube journey home, when Jez grabbed her suddenly, pinching her elbows tight, pulling her toward him, kissing her surprised mouth fiercely.
“Marry me!” he’d said, coming up for air. “Marry me, pumpkin.” He’d looked as shocked as she, as if the proposal was entirely sponta- neous, a bodily function he couldn’t control.
Of course, Stevie had said, “Er, yes.” It was the affirmative an- swer she’d rehearsed as a little girl. Jez had caught her off guard— she had no idea he was close to proposing—and at such a vulnerable moment, Perrier Jouët coursing through her veins, wind rolling over the Thames and tossing her hair from her face like a ro- mantic heroine from a BBC drama. And in that one syllable puff of air, scented with goat’s cheese crostini, both of their destinies changed forever.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, she could now see that there was a subtext to her “Er, yes.” At that point in her life, as she’d crossed that particular bridge into her mid-thirties, Stevie had begun to suspect that she just wasn’t marriage material. She’d voiced her concerns to her father. “I wouldn’t worry too much. Mar- riage is an overrated institution, anyway. It suits girls like Poppy,” he’d said distractedly, hole-punching a stack of lecture notes. “I’m not sure it would suit you.” Her spirits had plummeted: She’d always feared that in love’s game of musical chairs, she’d be the one left standing. She’d had boyfriends, of course. Not loads of them, just enough to make a regular bikini wax worthwhile. But the rela- tionships hadn’t
gone
anywhere. It was hard. But she’d accepted the consoling drinks with girlfriends (which always made her feel more like a victim somehow) and complained that things were slightly different if you were male, heterosexual, over thirty, and living in London.
And then there were the bombs, she reminded herself. The worst could have happened, would have happened, had Jez not lost his striped Paul Smith socks that morning and had his mother not
phoned to complain that they weren’t visiting his father on his birthday that weekend. Had Jez’s coordinates matched the bomber’s, then all the possibilities of her life would have blown apart, too. And that made her love Jez more, need him more, in a visceral kind of way. They’d surely been given a second chance for a reason, she’d rationalized. At that time, everything felt fragile, vul- nerable. The bombs made them insecure. It made them cling to- gether. It made them want to commit. (And she’d been sure that she loved this big grizzly bear of a man with his loud voice, and his clumsy, artless, and generous heart. What else could the feelings be, if not love?) But now nearly a year had passed without incident and things felt rather less fragile. Armageddon had been post- poned. The future could last for another fifty years, quite easily, Stevie thought, burying her nose in the dandelion clock of Finn’s hair, panic rising in her throat.