look beautiful tonight,” I say to her. She too is in a floor-length dress, hers black velvet, highlighting her silver hair. She’s got about twenty strands of pearls around her neck. Okay, not twenty exactly, but there are a lot. What can I say? Much like the Queen, she’s a woman who’s fond of pearls.
“Thank you, Emma,” she replies stiffly. “You do look quite enchanting in that dress.”
I blush at the unexpected compliment. Geraldine approves of something about me! “Thank you so much,” I gush. “I feel like a princess in this.”
“I imagine Jilly did, too, when she wore it to the Windsor gala evening last month.”
Shot down.
“Right. Of course.”
Sebastian kisses me on the cheek. “She looks gorgeous, Granny, and you know it.”
She ignores his response. “My grandson tells me you’ve booked us a car. I had rather expected you’d want us to take the train and the Tube. I thought maybe public transport was more your speed, Emma, what with being an American tourist here.”
I ignore the jibe. “Nothing but the best for us tonight.”
Sebastian slips an arm around my waist. “Emma’s not a tourist, Granny. She lives here now.”
Granny’s jaw tightens a fraction. “Of course.”
“Shall we go? The car should be here any minute.”
Luckily for me, it arrives as we step out of the house onto the front steps. Sebastian helps his granny into the car, and together the four of us are driven into the bright lights of the city. I sit holding my fiancé’s hand as Jilly chats away to Geraldine about people I don’t know.
“This is such a kind thing to do for Granny,” Sebastian says quietly to me, his breath tingling my neck. “I know opera is hardly your thing.”
“Who knows? It might be after tonight. I’m super keen to get in her good books.”
“Oh, I’d say you’re doing that tonight.”
I shoot him a grin. “I hope you’re right.”
The car pulls up by the theater, and I gaze up at the building with its unlikely combination of traditional classical architecture and modern glass. “Wow, this place is amazing,” I exclaim. Because it is. The old part of it looks like something from Roman times, even though I can tell it’s in much too good a state to be two thousand years old. The rest of the building is all modern glass, the interior lights glowing inside.
“It is quite something,” Sebastian says.
“It’s preposterous what they’ve done with all this glass,” Geraldine grumps. “This is an opera house, not Kew Gardens.”
“Ignore her,” Sebastian says to me. “My grandmother has got something against buildings made of glass. Haven’t you, Granny? You think it should be the preserve of glasshouses in order to grow plants.”
“Quite,” she replies.
We join the throngs as they enter the building, and I notice many people are dressed in smart casual, but there are a bunch who are dolled up like us. And Geraldine seems to know each and every one.
“Darling, how are you?” Geraldine air kisses one woman who is so elderly and frail, she makes Geraldine look like a sprightly youngster. Well, relatively speaking. The woman is eighty.
“You would not believe how happy I am to see you well after all that frightful television business,” the woman replies. “Did it take a dreadful toll on you, Gerry?” She glances up at Sebastian. “Oh, Sebastian. You’re here. Are you quite recovered, too?”
“There was nothing to recover from, Lady Kirkpatrick.” He greets her with a kiss to the cheek, and I swear the woman blushes. “I’d like you to meet Emma Brady, my fiancée. Emma, this is Lady Kirkpatrick.”
Her barely perceptible eyebrows ping up as she regards me through widened eyes.
“How do you do, Lady Kirkpatrick,” I say as though I’m Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady practicing her best rounded vowels. It sounds weird, even to my ears, and I catch Sebastian’s lips twinge in amusement out of the corner of my eye.
“Oh. You’re American,” she replies.
So much for Eliza Doolittle.
“She is American, Mary. You are quite right,” Geraldine says. “Sebastian met her on that television show.”
Her eyebrows leap up again to join her thinning hairline as her eyes bulge. Any more surprises and I suspect Mary Kirkpatrick’s eyeballs will pop clean out of her face and slap onto some unsuspecting theatergoer. Keeping her focus on me, she clutches onto the suit fabric on one of Sebastian’s arms.
“Are you quite all right, Lady Kirkpatrick?” he asks.
She pulls him down to her height—which is waaay low for the guy—and says, “My granddaughter, Bexley, has