The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,8
was responsible for the fact that she’d even looked twice at a man whose world was about as far from hers as you could get.
‘We had to get married,’ Graham continued, looking at his children in turn, ‘otherwise your grandparents would never have had me.’
Henny looked up from her lunch. ‘I hope you’re not insinuating that you wouldn’t have married me given the choice. Because if you are it’s a bit late to say so, but not too late for me to pack a suitcase for you and send you off to the Sea Salt Guesthouse.’
‘Of course not,’ Graham said with an indulgent smile at his wife, whose nostrils flared in a way that reminded everyone forcefully that she had once been very posh indeed, and that, in the end, the apple never really fell that far from the tree after all. ‘You know I was head over heels with you. Everyone knew it. You were the one making sacrifices, my sweet. You could have been married to some toff now, living on a country estate instead of working the boat with me every day.’
‘I happen to like working the boat,’ Henny said stiffly, though it was clear that her husband’s silky words had worked their magic and the offence she might have taken at his previous statement had well and truly dissipated. ‘And I never wanted a toff.’
‘Well that’s alright then,’ Graham replied cheerfully. ‘Because it won’t be changing any time soon, not unless we win the lottery… or your parents decide to help us out a bit.’
‘We don’t need their help,’ Henny said, again with the kind of haughtiness that reminded everyone of the ‘good stock’ she’d come from. ‘I told them the day I left home that we’d stand on our own feet.’
‘As I recall,’ Graham said with a faint smile, ‘what you actually said was that they could stick their inheritance.’
‘That was because they were being ghastly to you,’ Henny said. ‘You know that. We soon made it up when Ewan was born. They travelled down to see him straight away and they’ve doted on all the children. And they helped us buy this house, don’t forget.’
‘As if I’d forget that,’ Graham said with an unmistakeable wryness in his tone.
Sadie exchanged a look with Ewan but said nothing. Doted was perhaps a bit strong a word to describe how Henny’s parents felt about Sadie and her siblings. Tolerated was more like it. Sadie couldn’t recall ever receiving a single hug or compliment or kind word from Henriette’s mother and father, not as a child and certainly not as an adult.
‘But even after all these years they haven’t changed their mind about me,’ Graham reminded her.
‘Regardless, we’ve stood on our own feet and we’ve made a success of it. We don’t need their money now and I would never ask.’
Graham smiled at his wife, so obviously full of pride and affection that it warmed Sadie to see it. Her parents were, perhaps, the biggest single reason why she herself couldn’t find the right man. Even the one time she’d come perilously close to ‘the one’, ultimately he just hadn’t been able to measure up – or, at least, Sadie hadn’t been able to get past the perfect example she was so determined to live up to. Her parents’ relationship appeared so faultless, their beginnings so dreamy and romantic, that Sadie had grown up increasingly invested in the notion that all love affairs were the stuff of fairy tales like that. At least, if they were worth having at all. If there were no fireworks, no Romeo and Juliet moments, no all-conquering love against the odds, then it couldn’t be right, could it? This conviction hadn’t been helped by the fact that Grandma and Grandpa Schwartz had also been completely devoted to each other, not to mention that her brother had been swept off his feet by the beautiful and practically perfect Kat.
Sadie could only thank her stars that good old Lucy who, despite offering to fix Sadie up with an eligible New York bachelor, was herself still happily single. Otherwise she might have started to think that there was something terribly wrong with her for not yet being embroiled in the love affair of the century herself.
‘I don’t know what on earth started all that anyway,’ Henny said. ‘If we give another minute’s conversation to my silly parents I’m quite sure every bit of food on the table will suddenly go rancid.’