People who’d had unimaginative parents almost wept at the Robicheaux girls and their beautiful, memorable names.
The Marys and Janes felt stony-hearted. A smattering of Conceptas and Attractas were just enraged. The Sadhbhs were enchanted with their exotic Irish name but worried that if they had to go abroad, nobody would be able topronounceit. Anyone could say Eden, Savannah, Rory or Indy.
But Sadhbh … it was tricky.
The Four Sisters’ twenty-plus years of black-and-white pictures just added to their magic. The parents slipped in and out of the photos. For a few years, Stu and Meg together, holding hands, then, after the divorce, just Meg.
Surrounding the photo on the invitation was a hand-drawn golden line, unbroken writing endlessly repeating the wordsStu & Meg. Getting married again after all these years.
Married at twenty-one, divorced at fifty.
And now, when other people were discussing having hips replaced, the Robicheaux parents were declaring their love again with a full court press. A wedding weekend in the place where so many weddings, so many parties, had taken place.
Having the first ever photo of their daughters on the invitation was pure genius: it was like saying: ‘Yes, we know we split up for years, but look – look what we made. These beautiful women. Our remarriage is a testimony to them and to us as parents.’
Meg and Stu Robicheaux invite you to The Sorrento Hotel on Saturday, 29 of June at 3 p.m. to celebrate their marriage. Come as yourselves.
Everyone remembered that house – a big old Victorian pile close to the beach in Killiney. Killiney was a glorious slice of high-priced Dublin set on perilous roads that all led down to a panorama of rocky sea, expensive houses moulded into the cliffs so that the sheltered curve looked like a piece of the Amalfi coast, hence the Italian names running through the area. The family had run The Sorrento Hotel as a two-/three-star establishment for years, ignoring worn carpets because they were antique, damp on the wallpaper because it washand-painted Victorian, for goodness’ sake, and letting the army of delinquent peacocks grow more and more wild till they’d had to be cordoned off for fear of them mounting an attack on unwary guests or their pets. Legend had it that one small dog had had to be Xanaxed back to calm after the peacocks had cornered him. Who knew peacocks could get so inflamed? Or that dogs could take Xanax?
Life was curious.
Many weddings had been held there – Indy’s, for a start – in the huge, mostly manicured gardens where there were Venus de Milos galore, a male nude with his willy long since knocked off, a pond with a giant leaping stone unicorn at its centre, and plenty of bowers in the flower meadow (easy to manage, no grass cutting, as Stu said every year when he threw another handful of seeds into it). There was a box-ball herb garden, also easy to manage as long as you went at it with the secateurs once a month.
The Robicheaux family had held many parties when the hotel was closed in the off season and everyone had at least one story of when the party went wild and when Stu – before he got sober – would get out his electric guitar, coax a song out of it and make everyone dance, even the kids, because what child could sleep with that noise going on?
The trees would be strewn with fairy lights, never taken down. It had all looked like an arty fashion magazine shoot but natural as opposed to contrived. The burned-down candles; throws flung half on, half off chairs; glasses of every stripe on tables along with the remains of the feast; bits of cheese and grape stems stripped of fruit; bowls of Mediterranean dips made by Meg and whatever jobbing chef they’d managed to hold on to at the time. It had been the stuff of magic.
People looked at their diaries when they got the wedding invitation. The 29th of June? They’d be there.Come as yourselves? That was so Meg and Stu. They used to be famous for the fancy-dress parties, Sixties nights, Charleston nights when Stu served all the drink from a bathtub. Were there fire eaters once …? The fire brigade, certainly.
The invited guests put their invitations where they’d be seen – on mantelpieces at the very front, on a large bare bit of fridge held up with the prettiest magnet – and began to think about what ‘coming as yourself’ meant? It was hard to know who you were, sometimes, wasn’t it? The Robicheaux family had always known – that was what drew people to them.
‘They’ll think we’re mad,’ Stu had said the night he’d proposed – again – to Meg.
He’d gone the whole hog this time: a picnic on the beach in the evening, sparkling elderflower pressé, grapes, pears and cheese with real napkins. Rugs for them to lie on, a cushion for Meg’s lower back which could be dodgy on hard surfaces.
And the ring …
The ring had caught Meg somewhere inside her heart, holding it in a tender embrace. They hadn’t managed the straightforward proposal route the first time. She’d been pregnant with Lucinda. The delicate rituals of courtship had been flattened by the pregnancy test with its two blue lines. The urgency and immediacy of it all.
‘We’ll get married,’ Stu had said then, holding her close. ‘We were always going to: it’s just happening sooner, that’s all.’
Stu, whom she’d never really stopped loving even if she hadn’t always liked him, had known how she’d missed being wooed. She’d never told him. Never thrown it back in his face as they were divorcing.
In the last year, when they’d been spending time together, going on dates, letting people guess without actually saying anything, Meg had wondered what it would be like if they were together again properly. Man and wife. Thirteen years after the divorce.
Then he’d taken out the box with the ring in it: no perfect diamond in a loud princess cut announcing both a wedding and a surfeit of cash. This ring was a piece of the goldsmith’s art, with a glittering green amethyst looped into whorls of curved gold, like a ring dug from an archaeological site in Brazil.
‘Will you marry me, Meg?’ he asked hoarsely.
Still, she stared at the ring.
‘It’s a rare stone, connects the heart chakras and is about love,’ said Stu, holding it to her and Meg, who knew that Stu had never been in the slightest bit interested in crystals or stones or anything he couldn’t pawn (his mother’s pearls) for a bet, felt that this was indeed the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. He had changed after all.
‘Yes,’ she said, leaning forward and kissing him.
He slid the ring onto her finger, the one that had been bare for many years.
Then he kissed her fingers, one by one.
