sizes but all in the same (tasteful) shade of pink were waiting for them. Nathan had refused point-blank to be a page boy. Jackson didn’t blame him.
‘She’s your sister,’ Julia had cajoled.
‘Half-sister,’ he corrected her. ‘And I hardly know her.’ Which was true and something that Jackson regretted. ‘I suppose there is quite an age gap between them,’ Julia said, but there’d been an age gap between Jackson and his sister and that hadn’t stopped them being close. She should have been there, he thought, sitting in the front pew, wearing an unflattering hat and an outfit that aged her, looking round, trying to get a first view of her niece as she progressed along the aisle towards her future.
Except apparently there was to be no progression and the future was about to be changed.
‘I don’t think I can, Dad,’ Marlee murmured as they arrived at the church.
‘I know you think I’m too young,’ Marlee had said. ‘But sometimes you just know when something’s right for you, you know?’
And then a bit later you know it’s wrong for you, Jackson thought, but buttoned his lips tightly so the thought couldn’t escape into the refined air of the ‘shoe floor’ of the London department store to which he had escorted his only daughter a month before the ‘big day’. (Every day’s a big day, a greeting card in Penny Trotter’s shop said.) It was a far cry from the Clarks of Marlee’s childhood where Jackson had occasionally been press-ganged into attendance by Josie.
The shoe floor was so big that Jackson thought it probably had its own postcode. You could be lost in here for days and never be found. The sound of one shoe dropping. If a shoe drops in a shop and there’s no one to pick it up … but there would be someone, because the place was overrun with assistants wanting to serve them. The shoes were tended by a fleet of Prince Charmings of one gender or another (and then another, ad infinitum nowadays, it seemed to Jackson. He remembered when it was just men or women. The cry of Luddite! could be heard in the distance, growing nearer).
Shoe-shopping (wedding-shoe-shopping, just to add an extra layer of neurosis to the affair) was his punishment for being an inadequate father and not taking enough interest in Marlee’s pre-wedding plans. And probably for not paying for the wedding either.
‘What can I do to help?’ he’d offered when they had met in London. (‘Just the two of us – lunch,’ she’d said. ‘It’ll be nice.’)
‘Well, I’m still fretting about shoes,’ she said. ‘I’ve left them until the last minute.’ The last minute for Jackson would have been literally the last minute, popping into a shoe shop en route to the church, not a month before his nuptials. ‘You could come with me and help me choose,’ she said.
‘Well, I don’t think I’ll be much good at the choosing part,’ he said, ‘but I’m very happy to pay for them.’ A brave offer, it turned out. They cost not much shy of a thousand pounds. For shoes! They looked uncomfortable. ‘Are you sure you can actually get down the aisle in them?’
‘It’s like being the Little Mermaid,’ she said lightly, ‘suffering for the love of my life. I know you don’t really like Jago, but I do. And he’s a good person, he really is. Give him a chance, Dad,’ she said when they had finally retired from the retail fray and were having tea and cake in Ladurée in Covent Garden.
‘You’re just so young,’ he said helplessly.
‘And one day I won’t be and that’ll make you worry as well.’
‘I’ll be dead by then, I expect,’ Jackson said. ‘Nathan thinks so anyway.’ He watched her cut a delicate religieuse in half. It was not a masculine cake.
She was a clever girl – private education, sat the Baccalaureate, Law degree from Cambridge, and now she was planning a career as a barrister. She was only twenty-three, too young to settle down. Too young to buy into the whole traditional path. Degree, marriage, children. (‘What in God’s name is wrong with that?’ Josie had asked. The argument had spread. ‘Do you want her hanging about on a beach in Bali or in a drug den in Thailand?’ Of course not, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want his daughter to spread her wings and live a little. Live a lot, in fact. Not constrained by other people’s expectations. By Jago’s expectations. By the