‘No,’ said Meg, ‘let’s go there now.’
She knew what she wanted, always: it was lovely to have reached this stage in her life when she knew what she would and would not accept, what she needed and how to ask for it, simply. More people should try it. Expecting your significant other to be a mind-reader was always a mistake.
Savannah was determinedly keeping her mind off the night before.
The wedding dress: they were picking it up later today. Her mother had gone for something almost Grecian, which would suit her body, with a fall of soft pleats and a knotted snake belt in gold leather around her waist.
Savannah thought that the wedding dress was one of the most important parts of a wedding. Irony of ironies, she could remember her own so well and her joy at wearing it: an Art Deco piece of beauty, a bias-cut silk that shimmered around her hips, falling beautifully to the ground. She wore long pearls, and, of course, the necklace. Hers was a beautiful opal set in gold, worn high on the neck, a delicate little droplet that emphasised her slenderness. She’d worn her hair up.
‘Twirl it like this,’ Eden had instructed the hairdresser on the morning of the wedding. And Savannah had laughed.
‘Eden, you can’t tell her how to do my hair, we’ve gone through this.’
‘Yes,’ said the hairdresser glaring at Eden.
Savannah had smiled. Eden really could drive people nuts because she had to be in control of everything. Savannah and the hairdresser had practised this hairstyle.
‘It really suits you,’ Fiona had said, ‘and it’s in keeping.’
Savannah had gone for pretty jewelled combs in her hair and had worn an old, cloudy veil, that sat at the back of her hair, like a proper 1920s bride. The church had been amazing. She’d felt so lucky to be marrying Calum. Mum and Dad had sat together, not fighting, which was amazing because at that time they did fight a lot, were separated, barely speaking to each other, everyone still stinging over the sale of the hotel. Things like that lasted a long time, Savannah knew. Indy had been wonderful that day. Making everything flow smoothly, because that was the way she was. Even Aunt Sonya had come over from Pembrokeshire, which was a great honour. She hadn’t come over for Eden’s wedding because she had been ill. And Eden felt a needle of disappointment, Savannah could tell. She knew her twin’s face like nobody else did, because they were identical after all. Apart from Eden’s freckles and entirely different way of dressing, they could have got away with swapping out for each other. Not anymore, Savannah thought now as she drove to the shop where they were all meeting to pick up the wedding dress. Now, she was very thin.
Being thin was, at its easiest, something she and only she was in charge of, because there was absolutely nothing else in her life that she felt any control over.
She had long since stopped thinking of her disordered eating as any type of control, it was just the way it was. She rarely ate. She ate to survive and barely.
The thinness had bad points, obviously.
As she drove, she considered her life the way she often did, as if from afar, as if she was telling an audience of people what her life was like.He doesn’t touch me, he just shouts at me, belittles
me, tells me I’m useless and frightens me. Oh, the fear. I fear displeasing him.
I feel his anger and his rage and it comes so quickly now. And I do everything I can to spot it, but it just comes and I can’t stop it, no matter what I do, no matter how I behave. I’m powerless over that. But I have to keep trying because I can’t lose him and he’s there, he’s there for me and Clary. Isn’t he?
But last night … Last night she’d locked herself into the safe place in her head while he’d frightened her, while he pounded into her. It took a while to come out of that place. Like being an animal creeping out of a burrow when the danger was gone.
Her body kept her in a type of fear-ridden stasis and even though she could smile at Clary and talk normally to Marie-Denise, she was acting. With Calum, it was different. She never knew which way it would go, how he’d react after a rage-attack.
He never said sorry. Hell, no. He’d said sorry to her twice in their whole marriage, both times when he was with old school friends and was drunk. He’d had to be out of his head to apologise for what he put her through.
‘Sorry – I can be hard on you,’ he’d said. Or something. She’d been so stunned, she’d almost misheard. Had thought she’d imagined it.
So there would be no apology, no ‘actually, the packaging is good’. Instead, he would punish her for days with his silence. The withdrawal of speech, the silent treatment like a minus-forty wind from across the Arctic.
As she drove to the office after dropping Clary at school, she thought of telling her sisters all this. What would they do? Would they rescue her? Would they tell her she was being stupid the way Calum did? Possibly.
Because, people couldn’t see.
That was the hardest thing, nobody could see into her life. All they saw was her smiling face, Velvet Beauty doing so well and the lovely house. They saw that she wore nice clothes, that Clary went to school and Calum was handsome and smiled at people; he could be charming. That’s all people saw. The dark, scary underbelly, the walking on eggshells: they never saw that.
Eden had a list as long as her arm for the morning. She had a meeting with Diarmuid and the hated Rian. There was a drugs task-force meeting, which she wasn’t looking forward to. Because three young people had recently died from drugs on just one housing estate and Eden had been to visit all their mothers. None of Diarmuid’s preparing her for politics all those years ago had prepared her for that. Agnes, on the other hand, had been the one who’d told her how to handle it.
‘There’s nothing you can say that will take away the pain,’ Agnes had said. ‘They’ve lost their child to drugs or drink or whatever it is. You are there to go and pay your respects. They might hug you, they might tell you their life story, they might shout at you. But you have to go.’
‘OK,’ said Eden.
God she’d been innocent back in the day, the days when she’d thought that politics was about giving interviews to newspapers and pontificating about all the wonderful things she was going to do. She had been so innocent. Now she knew that much of local politics was made up of planning permission and trying to get a homeless person off the streets, organising carers for an elderly lady. Trying to push some sort of legislation through that might get a couple of hundred grand for a special school that was falling apart. That had damp in all the corners. A school where children who had terminal diseases went every day to be looked after. None of it was what she’d expected. This morning there were no devastatingly sad visits to families who’d lost a young son or daughter. There was a visit to a marvellous woman who had just celebrated her one hundredth birthday. The leader of the local Cumann was coming with her to that and they were bringing a cake. Eden was dying to know how anyone lived to be a hundred. The first time she’d had to do a visit like that, she’d expected some delicate little flower of a lady telling her that she’d never drunk, never smoked and had never got married. Instead, she met a very vibrant woman with a shock of silvery white hair with a purple streak in the front, who’d told her that lots of sex was the answer. Everyone had laughed and Eden had laughed loudest.
‘You’re not what I expected at all,’ she’d said.
