return to the house after a day spent working on the farm, her mother towelling Gerry by the stove, her sisters laughing upstairs as Iris cycled through her repertoire of impersonations (an irony, really, that Iris had grown up to become that most imitable of all childhood’s figures, the headmistress); the transition point when the lights came on inside, and the house smelled of soap, and the big oak table was laid for dinner. Even now, Laurel sensed, quite unconsciously, the natural turn of the day. It was the closest she ever came to feeling homesick in her own place.
Something moved in the meadow out there, the path that Daddy used to walk each day, and Laurel tensed; but it was just a car, a white car—she could see it more clearly now—winding up the driveway. She stood, shaking out the last drips from her glass. It had turned cool and Laurel wrapped her arms around herself, walking slowly to the gate. The driver flickered the headlights with an energy that could only belong to Daphne and Laurel raised a hand to wave.
Six
LAUREL SPENT a large part of dinner observing her youngest sister’s face. Something had been done to it, and done well, and the result was fascinating. ‘A fabulous new moisturiser,’ Daphne would say if asked, which, because Laurel didn’t fancy being lied to, she refrained from doing. Instead, she nodded along as Daphne tossed her blonde curls and enthralled them all with tales from the LA Breakfast Show set, where she read the weather and flirted with a newsreader named Chip each morning. Breaks in the garrulous monologue were rare and when occasion finally presented, Rose and Laurel leapt at once.
‘You first,’ said Laurel, tilting her wine glass—empty again, she no- ticed—towards her sister.
‘I was just going to say, perhaps we ought to talk a little about Mummy’s party.’
‘I should say so,’ said Iris.
‘I’ve some thoughts,’ said Daphne.
‘Certainly—’
‘Obviously—’
‘We—’
‘I—’
‘What were you thinking, Rosie?’ said Laurel.
‘Well—’ Rose, who’d always struggled in the sibling press, started with a cough—‘it will have to be in hospital, more’s the pity, but I thought we could try to come up with ways to make it special for her. You know how she feels about birthdays.’
‘Just what I was going to say,’ said Daphne, catching a small hiccup behind baby-pink fingernails. ‘And after all this will be her last.’
Silence stretched between them, with the rude exception of the Swiss clock, until Iris broke it with a sniff: ‘You’re very … brash, now, aren’t you?’ she said, patting the blunt ends of her steel-grey bob. ‘Since you moved stateside.’
‘I was just saying—’
‘I think we all know what you were just saying.’
‘But it’s true.’
‘Precisely, some might argue, why you needn’t have said it at all.’ Laurel regarded her tablemates. Iris glowering, Daphne blinking with blue-eyed chagrin, Rose twisting her plait with an angst that threatened to sever it. Squint a little and they could have been their childhood selves. She sighed into her glass. ‘Perhaps we could take in some of Ma’s favourite things,’ she said, ‘play some of the records from Daddy’s collection. Is that the sort of thing you meant, Rosie?’
‘Yes,’ said Rose, with unnerving gratitude, ‘yes, that’s perfect. I thought we might even retell some of the stories she used to invent for us.’
‘Like the one about the gate at the bottom of the garden that led to fairyland—’
‘And the dragon eggs she found in the woods—’
‘And the time she ran away to join the circus.’
‘Do you remember,’ said Iris suddenly, ‘the circus we had here?’
‘My circus,’ said Daphne, beaming from behind her wine-glass. ‘Well, yes,’ Iris interjected, ‘but only because—’
‘Because I’d had the horrid measles and missed the real circus when it came to town.’ Daphne laughed with pleasure at the memory ‘She got Daddy to build a tent at the bottom of the meadow, remember, and organised all of you to be clowns. Laurel was a lion, and Mummy walked the tightrope.’
‘She was rather good at that,’ said Iris. ‘Barely fell off the rope. She must’ve practised for weeks.’
‘Or else her story was true and she really did spend time in the circus,’ said Rose. ‘I can almost believe it of Mummy.’
Daphne gave a contented sigh. ‘We were lucky to have a mother like ours, weren’t we? So playful, almost as if she hadn’t fully grown up; not at all like other people’s boring old mothers. I used to feel rather smug when I had friends home from school.’