luxurious it was, it was still two weeks on holiday with her extremely powerful, successful mother-in-law. Amanda would have preferred a trip alone with Phillip. But Phillip liked the family vacation, especially spending time with his siblings, and even Amanda had to admit that the Lady Luck looked spectacular.
As she read through the e-mail, with her mother-in-law’s note of invitation, Amanda started thinking about the wardrobe she would need. She knew that her sister-in-law Liz would share a trendy wardrobe with her daughters, who seemed to dress out of one suitcase, even if the clothes looked too young on Liz, but she had a good body and could get away with it. John’s wife looked like the college professor she was, no matter what she wore. Her wardrobe always looked like hand-me-downs from her students. And Olivia would wear linen dresses, colorful silks, and Lilly Pulitzer. She was well dressed and age appropriate but never showy.
Olivia’s interests lay in business and not fashion. She was far more avant-garde in the furniture designs she chose than in her wardrobe. Her hair would be perfectly cut before the trip, in her signature snow-white bob, and she would wear the string of pearls Joe had given her to mark the early success of their business, which she had never stopped wearing since, out of sentiment. She still wore her narrow gold wedding ring fourteen years after his death, and other than that, simple earrings, and a gold bracelet she wore every day. It was all very modest. But if Amanda was going to go on vacation in fabulous locations against her will, she was going to dress for the occasion, not the company at hand.
None of the Graysons felt a need to show off or be pretentious, which Amanda never understood. With the kind of money they had, why not spend it? It was an art she’d been teaching Phillip since they had married nineteen years before. She was forty-four years old, and they had met when Phillip was at Harvard Business School getting his MBA, and she was at Harvard Law. Amanda was unashamedly ambitious about her career. They had married when she graduated, and she immediately joined a prestigious law firm. She rose to the top quickly, and had been a partner for a dozen years. She made an excellent living on her own, but she would never make the kind of money that Phillip would inherit one day and had at his disposal now. His father had invested conservatively and brilliantly and set up trust funds for the children. Phillip’s siblings lived comfortably though modestly, and their mother had a handsome house on an estate in Bedford, but they were not given to random displays of money, unless they had some purpose, like an important charitable donation.
Amanda had been working on Phillip for years to enjoy his money. They had bought a town house in the East Seventies, and she had filled it with beautiful antiques, many of which they had bought in London. And Phillip had a small but elegant sailboat that he kept at a yacht club in Southampton, where they had a small house. Their careers were the main focus of their lives, Amanda was deeply concerned with their social life, and they had no children. She had told him right from the beginning that children would distract them from their goals and sap their funds and energy. She didn’t want them and had convinced Phillip he didn’t either. More important, she said they didn’t need them, they had each other and a wonderful life. What more could they want? Children would only be an interference.
Phillip had no regrets about not having children. His sister Cass had had none either, for the same reasons he hadn’t. Their memories of their childhood were of being deprived of their mother. He had no desire to do that to someone else, and Amanda had no urge to be a mother and never had. It wasn’t in her DNA, nor in his. There was an icy coolness to her that Phillip had always found enticing. Her seeming lack of emotion, on every subject except her own career, was a challenge to him. He wasn’t overtly emotional or demonstrative either, but he had moments of deep affection for Amanda, which she rarely reciprocated. She was the original ice maiden, and when he’d met them, her parents were no different. They were distant, ambitious, self-centered people. Both her parents were attorneys. And they