Prologue
The Invitation
The wedding invitation was a card fronted by that first photo of the Robicheaux girls, a picture as vibrant as it had ever been: four young women sitting on a back porch of the sprawling Sorrento Hotel, the girls lined up in age, smiling at the camera with the clear gazes of youth.
Even though it had been taken in black and white, colour seemed to leap from the photo, particularly from those young faces.
The twins were in the middle: just seventeen, lean and athletic, almost identical with what people knew was long strawberry-red hair, faintly curling around their faces. But they weren’t identical, if you looked closely enough.
One had a dreamy gaze and fewer freckles, as if she stayed inside with her head in a book, lost in her imagination. She was twirling a strand of strawberry hair in one hand. Fey, you might say. Savannah.
Her name suited her, made her sound like a sweet-natured girl who’d lie on the grass with her friends and discuss what shapes the clouds made.
Her twin, Eden, looked altogether more knowing, as if books were the last thing on her mind. Eden Robicheaux was anything but fey. She wore very tight jeans and her shirt – the photographer had apparently insisted they all wore shirts and jeans – was opened just down to her breast bone from where perky, Wonderbra’d breasts pushed up.
Eden had nearly been expelled twice from the local school. She was on her last chance, by all accounts, but the arrogant look in her curious sea-green eyes made it obvious that she didn’t give two hoots.
At the other ends, were the youngest and oldest of the girls.
The youngest was an altogether stockier girl of perhaps fifteen, who was staring at the camera with ill-disguised irritation: Aurora, who never answered to this fairy-tale name. She was Rory, she insisted.
You could easily imagine her snapping, ‘Can you get a move on, Steve?’
She had a clear gaze, dark straight hair, wasn’t yet as lovely as the others, if you wanted to be pedantic.
Steve Randall, the photographer, had taken a photo of the sisters every year since then: same positions, same simple outfits.
Steve had exhibited his photos – they were mildly famous in photographic circles, those Robicheaux girls, famous in a quiet sort of way for the twenty-something portraits of them as they grew up. Age, life, sisterhood in elegant black and white. The people who lived near the Sorrento Hotel who knew Stu and Meg, sometimes laughed that the Robicheaux clan were infamous.
At the time of the very first Four Sisters portrait, the photographer, Steve, was dating the eldest sister, the one on the far right: Lucinda or Indy Robicheaux, the one who looked like a model but wasn’t one. Very tall, twenty-one, fair-haired, annoyingly exquisite in the eyes of any woman who wasn’t born with limbs like a ballerina and the huge eyes of a startled deer in the forest. They were incredible eyes: a sea-green colour like her sisters’ but with an explosion of amber around the pupils.
Kaleidoscope eyes, someone said. Or central heterochromia, as Wikipedia called it.
The photographer had married the stunning Indy.
Of course he had, the men thought. You’d marry that just to stamp your name on it: ‘She’s mine. Hands off.’
Now Indy was a midwife; she had two children, and yet she still looked as if she might slip onto a Milan catwalk at a moment’s notice. No early-forties’ weight gain there. Steve was a carpenter these days. The photography hadn’t worked out but they seemed like a couple who’d found that elusive happiness in marriage, which annoyed everyone who hadn’t found it.
One of the twins, Savannah, was married to somebody very rich, some clever advisor person – whatever that meant.
Money, the husbands said enviously. Money is what it meant. They lived in a big house with a guest bungalow and an indoor pool, and he drove a classic Jaguar. She had a business too – something to do with perfumes and candles, but he was obviously the real brains behind it all, people said knowingly.
Savannah was still fey and other-worldly – and thin, very thin. As if she might float away like dandelion fluff.
It was probably all the stuff for magazines – she was in papers and in articles a lot, so she’d have to be thin, wouldn’t she?
The other twin, Eden, despite the up-for-anything look in her eyes in that first photo, had changed beyond all recognition in that she was now in local government, of all things, wore long, ladylike skirts and was to be seen on the television talking about green issues. She was a stalwart of kindly liberal politics, having married into a political family who owned half the pharmacies on the east coast. Her husband, who ran the pharmacies, was a hunky, smiling sort of guy, dependable and decent, not the wayward boy people imagined Eden would have hooked up with.
His father was the famous Diarmuid Tallisker, one of the elder statesmen of politics. She’d fallen on her feet marrying into that family, people said.
Luckily for Eden’s political career, old boyfriends had never come out of the woodwork to talk about wild deeds, although there were certainly wild deeds in there somewhere, according to anyone who’d been to school with her. Mention her wild youth at your peril.
Eden Tallisker had never had her twin’s dreamy eyes – she’d always looked like she had a taser on her person and knew how to use it.
As for the youngest one, still insisting on being called Rory, which was a boy’s name, she worked in advertising but she said she was a writer first and foremost and that being a copywriter was just her day job.
What was the difference between the two types of writer, people wondered? Rory looked contrary, they decided. Her girlfriend, a petite girl who worked in a chichi boutique, was a sweetheart. Nobody could ever have called Rory a sweetheart. Plus, who wouldn’t want to be called Aurora?
