Eden and Indy were also supposed to help with the silk flowers Vonnie was making and which were to be draped everywhere in garlands.
As Eden hadn’t been in the Sorrento for years, she wasn’t sure what she was letting herself in for. First up, though, was her speech.
Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, Eden thought and laughed out loud.
How many speeches had she given since being voted onto the local council five years ago? She couldn’t count.
Her father-in-law, a politician who couldn’t pass by a microphone or a camera, had told her that she needed to practise speaking at all times.
‘Talk so that, eventually, your brain and your mouth get connected,’ Diarmuid Tallisker had intoned, in that rich, grave voice of his that called to mind intense news reports on great matters. ‘So many of our colleagues open their mouths, let hot air out and then spend the rest of their career being known for that one, car crash of a moment. Don’t be that person, Eden, please.’
Eden looked down at her laptop and the embryonic speech for Saturday.
Diarmuid would probably delete what she’d written so far – then again, Diarmuid only liked speeches he gave himself.
She closed the file and looked at her watch. Half six. She’d been up with the lark, having showered quietly so as not to wake Ralph, dressed, eaten a small bowl of porridge, made a pot of coffee and gone into her small home office. She wanted to get a start on work before meeting her mother, sisters and Vonnie for the start of the wedding week.
Or, as Vonnie – her mother’s oldest friend, a dizzy, skinny vision with white-blond hair – put it, ‘The Wedding Party!’
Nine in The Beach Hut! Don’t be late, Vonnie had texted them all on the group WhatsApp. Each of Vonnie’s messages was surrounded by hearts, wedding flutes and emoji brides in vaguely Scandi headdresses.
Eden was not going to be late but she had much to do first. Nobody had any idea how many emails were involved in politics. Forty-seven new emails since nine the night before.
What she needed, Eden thought grimly, was a clone of herself to really manage all the admin, even though she had alleged help from her father-in-law’s office. Diarmuid was always too busy feathering his own nest to let anyone help Eden.
He was like the iceberg that had broken the poorTitanic, she often thought: majestic but dangerous on the surface and bloody lethal on the seven-eighths hidden beneath it.
Diarmuid never had a moment for anyone in between all the dodgy property deals he was always doing, even though his public persona was that of much-beloved, white-bearded elder statesman.
If she’d known that politics was so dodgy, would she have got involved?
Yes, she thought with a smile. Politics was said to be showbiz for ugly people but you didn’t have to be ugly, did you?
Eden’s eye was drawn to the photo on her study wall – entirely beloved of the newspapers – of herself in the failed girl band, Allegra, back when she was twenty. She’d been the quiet, leggy one of the three.
‘The quiet but hidden-depths one,’ said Aidan, band manager, a chancer like her father-in-law, who’d failed to make Allegra famous but had managed with his next girl band.
Eden, with her wild red hair teased for the cameras, wearing jeans and tops that only hinted at serious boobage, was never to smile. Janie, who was just as wild but was allowed to be so, was the band’s crazy chick.
‘Why does she get to wear Lycra hotpants and I don’t?’ Eden had whined at the time.
‘You’re the quiet one,’ Aidan had said again. ‘Quiet one, sexy one, posh one.’
‘Eden’s posher than me!’ said Gigi.
‘You went to a private boarding school,’ Aidan pointed out.
‘Only for six months,’ Gigi said, ‘only cos Mum was housekeeping there.’
‘It’s the optics, innit?’ said Aidan, who was from Cork but felt a London accent gave him an edge.
Optics worked just as well for politics, Eden thought, clicking into her emails, and, these days, she was glad she’d been the shy, quiet one which had never been her natural state. Out of the three of the Allegra girls, she’d been the wildest in reality but Aidan had had a plan and now, as a would-be national politician, Eden was glad of it.
Now she could play up the ‘quiet and serious’ version of herself.
She was running for a seat in parliament in September when Fergal Maguire (so rough he was nicknamed Feral) finally shuffled off into retirement. It was a safe seat for the party but still, it would require a lot of canvassing.
Creeping silently so as not to wake Ralphie, who was still asleep, she went into the kitchen to make more coffee.
