Meg looked mildly upset now and Rory patted her down.
‘Mum, Chantal would prefer to be behind the scenes. I promise you. Now, I only have half an hour because I have a meeting—’
She didn’t get to finish before Indy said: ‘Rory! You’re supposed to be helping.’
Rory held Indy’s gaze for a moment.
Everyone thought Indy was wonderful but she knew what had happened and she’d kept it a secret. In a way, Rory reasoned, the revelations of her book were Indy’s fault.
They’d been so close once because Indy had always mothered her. Being born each side of identical twin sisters, she and Indy had been special sisters. Youngest and oldest.
Until Indy had accused Rory of lying. It had been one of those defining moment of her childhood. A moment where the lovely world of childhood had been pierced by something sharp and painful.
‘I am,’ Rory said coolly to her sister. ‘I wouldn’t be leaving if it wasn’t important. So, show me the list, Vonnie,’ she added.
Chloe was waiting for her at the ice-cream shop on the seafront afterwards. They nearly always met there now because they both loved walking by the sea and there was a glorious little coffee shop that had all the weird milks just a few metres away from the rocky shore.
Chloe had two coffees waiting and an evil-looking almond croissant that would add five kilos from just looking at it, Rory thought.
‘Hi, you,’ Chloe said. ‘Oat flat white with one sugar and a dash of hazelnut syrup.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rory with a sigh, kissing Chloe on the forehead and planting herself in the chair beside her.
When they’d first started meeting, they’d had to search to find a café that covered all Rory’s bases: all the non-dairy milks so she could have oat, almond or coconut, depending on her mood. And an outside area for smoking that was screened so none of her mother’s or her sisters’ friends would see her and tell on her. Dad’s friends were like Dad: they never noticed anything. Some sort of ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ thing operated with them all.
‘How was it?’ Chloe was casual but Rory wasn’t fooled. Chloe was nineteen after all, despite her art-student chic and a studied air of ‘I don’t care what you think about me.’ Rory did a good line in that herself and had used it to great effect as a teenager.
She lit a cigarette to give herself time to think, inhaled deeply then said, ‘Oh fine. Squabbling. Mum wants Chantal to be a bridesmaid—’ Too late, she realised that this might be the wrong thing to say, might highlight what had to be painful for Chloe. ‘She doesn’t want to be, obviously,’ Rory raced on. ‘So, tell me your news. The summer placement in the gallery. I want to hear all about it.’
Chloe, who didn’t smoke, reached out for the pack of cigarettes and took one.
‘Don’t!’ begged Rory.
Chloe glared at her with slitty blue eyes. ‘I can if I want to,’ she said.
Rory shrugged and took up her coffee. She could recognise a self-destructive instinct from fifty paces.
She smoked, drank too much and had written her family’s deepest secrets in a book disguised as fiction. Who was she to tell anyone what to do?
‘The gallery is just about making contacts. If I had the money, I’d go to Italy for the summer to one of the summer schools there. Tell me about the wedding planning?’ said Chloe.
Rory breathed in and out and wished she was better at the whole deep-breathing thing. Mindfulness, yeah: that stuff de-stressed you. She needed a bit of de-stressing because she’d already said the wrong thing to Chloe.
‘Ah, it’s boring,’ she began, hoping to ward Chloe off at the pass. ‘You don’t want to hear—’
‘I do,’ interrupted Chloe. ‘Tell me everything. Everything.’
Rory gave up on the deep-breathing concept, took a slug of coffee and told her everything.
5
Tuesday
Eden
When interviewers asked Eden what it was like being a woman in politics, she always tried to gauge what sort of answer they were really after.
There were, in her opinion, three basic answers the press liked, depending on their readership.
