‘I’m sure that was a punishment and Mum was with you. It’s not as if you were left on your own at the mercy of pervy guests.’
‘True, Mum was good that way.’
‘And Lori.’
‘Oh Lori, she was brilliant.’
Lori had lived in for seven or eight years and had practically taken over when their mother had broken her arm. She’d been cook, cleaner, general factotum, and had looked after the girls too.
‘Lori never wanted bleach or anything like that in the hotel. It was all natural stuff,’ Eden remembered.
‘Yeah, said Indy, ‘she was a bit of a hippy, ahead of her time in terms of climate and everything.’
‘And she fancied Dad.’ Eden laughed at the thought.
‘No, she didn’t,’ said Indy, too quickly. She remembered Lori and her father laughing. Lori’s slender arm lying upon her father’s. Lori always had brightly painted nails, impossible colours, sky-blues when nobody wore blue nail polish. And her hair, jet-black and glossy, rippling down her back.
‘She was very young, wasn’t she?’ Eden was saying. ‘Probably only in her late twenties.’
Indy didn’t want to talk about Lori.
Eden was continuing with her trip down memory lane. ‘And she left the summer after you met Steve? Or was it the year after?’
‘We weren’t friends at first, you know.’
‘What you mean is you weren’t his friend, but he seriously wanted to be your friend,’ teased Eden.
The two of them had always got on brilliantly teasing, joking, like delicate fencing, never hurting, just fun.
‘Lori, she was very beautiful, wasn’t she?’ Indy felt herself tear up. Lori, dear gorgeous Lori.
‘Yeah, I suppose,’ said Eden.
Indy finished her coffee, put it back in the car and opened the boot.
‘I suppose we’d better get these boxes inside,’ she said.
The boot contained the remainder of the boxes of hand-sewn flowers all looped together with ribbons to form great garlands. It must have been back-breaking work to do more. No wonder poor Vonnie’s back was gone.
But Indy wasn’t thinking about Vonnie’s back now: she was thinking about Lori, how she’d been young and beautiful and definitely in love with their father. Indy didn’t want to think about it. It was a long time ago when she’d imagined love at every corner. She hadn’t been in love with Steve when Lori was first on the scene but she had seen him, noticed him, wanted him to like her. It was like she wanted him on a string in the distance so that if she pulled, he would come. She’d forgotten that: it had got lost the way the truth sometimes did get lost. The truth got lost in the stories people told themselves, she realised. In the story of her and Steve, they’d fallen in love at first sight, but it hadn’t been like that. And there’d been so much going on that summer. She didn’t want to look too deeply into those years.
Indy and Eden walked up to the shop where Chantal worked.
‘You’d know it was run by French people, even if it didn’t have the sign,’ said Eden, looking up at the sign now:La Mode.
‘Yeah,’ said Indy, looking at the window which was so beautifully understated that only the very discerning customer would enter into the shop.
Indy had had some experience of clothes shopping in France when she’d gone on holidays with Steve pre-children. Everyone had been terribly nice to her because she had been beautiful and had clearly looked like a model. But she’d seen other people being given the Parisian shop-assistant treatment. Whereby it seemed as if said assistant did not want to sell anything, purely because the customer didn’t look like they deserved it. Steve had thought this was hilariously funny. Eden would kill them, he’d said at the time and Indy had agreed. Luckily, they were now in a shop where their sister-in-law was running things. Chantal had both exquisite taste and the absolute charm that meant she was very keen to make a sale. She hugged both women when they came in.
‘I have put some stuff aside in the large changing room,’ she said.
‘You mean beautiful, gorgeous, elegant stuff that will make me look fabulous and ten pounds thinner,’ said Eden.
Chantal laughed. ‘You don’t need to be ten pounds thinner,’ she said. ‘You are beautiful.’
‘Oh, I love the way you say that,’ sighed Eden, and she went over to a rail where sparkly things dangled.
‘No, no, that is not for you,’ said Chantal sternly. ‘They are for thejeune filles, not for a grown-up. The young girls who come in here, they can wear that sort of thing, but we must go with elegance and gravitas.’
