‘How are the preparations going?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been helping, but…’
‘But nothing. You can’t be scurrying around a marquee in your gown, making sure that everything is all right! I know you’re nervous—I was awfully nervous on my wedding-day—but there are enough hands downstairs making sure that nothing goes horribly wrong. The caterers have been wonderful, the food looks delicious and the guests have now started trickling in. Your father’s holding the fort with Aunt Emma and your cousins. Telling his usual jokes. You know.’ She was smiling, her eyes distant and full of affection.
The perfect family unit, Isobel thought. Except nothing was perfect, was it? As she had discovered to her cost.
‘Has Jeremy arrived yet?’ The question almost strangled her, but she kept right on smiling and looking happy.
‘Due shortly.’ Mrs Chandler started moving towards the door slowly. ‘Darling, I shall have to go and help your father. He’ll come and fetch you in a short while, when everything’s about to start.’ She paused by the door. ‘I’m so happy for you, my dear. I know we both said——’ she spoke carefully, seriously ‘—that we were a little disappointed that you didn’t finish your university education, but I’m sure, seeing you now, that it’s all for the best, and you knew what you were doing.’
She left and Isobel sat on the bed. Now that there was no one in the room, she felt free to stop smiling. She wished that her mother had not brought up the subject of university. She had had to swallow many bitter pills for this marriage, and that had been one of them.
She sighed, and across the room her eyes caught her image looking back at her from the full-length antique pine mirror in the corner of the room. Never mind the years slipping past; that didn’t worry her. What worried her was the prospect of the future hurtling towards her.
She slipped on her high, satin shoes. They felt uncomfortable. She was a tall girl and accustomed to wearing flat shoes, but this dress needed high ones. They completed the image, and there was no doubt that the image was a remarkably beautiful one.
Her mother had once told her, rather proudly, that she had been striking even as a baby, and Isobel had never had any reason to doubt that. She only had to look in the nearest mirror to see that those striking looks had never abandoned her.
Her waist-long hair was like finely spun silk, black silk; her skin was ivory-white and her features were perfect. From a very young child she had known admiration, and over the years she had become accustomed to it, even though she felt that her beauty had been a blessing, but in the end it was an irrelevance. Beauty, after all, was transitory, and sometimes, quite frankly, it could be a terrific disadvantage. It opened doors, but the reception waiting at the other end was not always the one you had hoped for.
She walked across to the window and stared down into the huge back garden which her parents had diligently cultivated ever since they had moved into the house. In a few years’ time they would have to get a gardener to help them out, or else convert some of the land into pasture, if that were possible, but of course they would defer that until the last possible moment. Her mother had been told at the onset of her illness that her condition would worsen, but Isobel knew that she would continue to tend her garden, lovingly if not as thoroughly.
From here she couldn’t see the arriving guests. They would be entering through the front door. Relatives, some of whom she had not seen for a long time; her university friends, who would probably gape and feel dwarfed by the dimensions of her parents’ house, because she had never let on just how wealthy her background was; and of course schoolfriends, hers and Jeremy’s, shared friends whom they had known from the year dot—just as they had known each other from the year dot.
She gazed down into the garden and attempted to speculate on their reactions to this marriage. Most, she supposed, would see it as a sort of natural conclusion, something expected, but some, her closest friends, had already expressed their horror at the match. She had always been the high achiever, the girl with everything, and they had told her, with varying degrees of tact, just how amazed they were that she was throwing it all away, throwing away a medical degree, for God’s sake, to settle down and get married. Naturally she had said nothing. How could she?
Her parents had been disappointed as well, even though they had taken great pains not to condemn her choice. The fact was that they had instilled in her from day one the importance of education, and they had been bewildered when she had arrived home six months previously, sat them down and tonelessly announced her decision to marry Jeremy Baker.
Their immediate concern was that she was pregnant, which, Isobel had thought at the time, had been the only amusing thing about the whole sorry affair.
‘It’s just that it’s all so sudden, darling,’ her mother had said, frowning and trying to make sense of the impossible. ‘I didn’t even think that you and Jeremy were that close. I thought…’
Isobel had known what she had thought, and she had cut in hurriedly, with some nonsense about deciding at last where her heart lay.
‘But can’t it wait?’ her father had asked in a concerned voice, and she hadn’t been able to meet his eyes.
‘We feel that this is the best way for us,’ she had mumbled, and later, when they had gently asked her about her medical degree, she had fudged and muttered something about blood and guts not really being up her street after all.
In the end, they had left it, and her mother had embarked on the wedding preparations with zeal.
Her father was an influential man in the community and strings had been pulled so that everything fell into place with the perfection of an event that could have taken years in the making. Nothing was too small or too great for their daughter, and from the sidelines Isobel had watched and choked back the sickening misery that had threatened to overwhelm her at every turn.
She was consulted on the design for the wedding-invitations, the serviettes, the colours of the flowers which hung in profusion downstairs in the marquee, every conceivable shade of yellow because, her mother had decided, spring was yellow and so the flowers would all represent spring. Frankly, winter would have been more appropriate but she had bitten back the caustic observation and gone along with the general flow.
She began pacing about the room, glancing at the reminders of her childhood which still clung here and there: adventure books which she had devoured in her youth, before biology texts became much more fascinating, a doll which she could remember being given to her as a birthday present from her parents when she was five, a picture of her family which she had done when she was four and which her parents had proudly framed—three figures with odd shapes and stick-like fingers. Her parents had been immensely proud of that picture, but in fact art had been just about the only thing that had eluded her. She had a mind more attuned to the logical.
Ironic, she thought now, that her life, which had been cheerfully pacing towards the most logical conclusion in the world—a degree in the subject she had adored, a career helping people—had petered out into the most irrational ending.
That made her think of Jeremy, and she swallowed down the bitter resentment rising up her throat.
In less than one hour’s time she would be his wife, and there was little point in constantly whipping herself with the insanity of it when there was nothing she could possibly do to remedy the situation.
She heard another knock on the door and stiffened in alarm. Surely not her father. Surely not yet. She looked at her watch, which showed that she still had at least forty-five minutes left of freedom, and said, ‘Yes? Come in!’
If was probably her mother with some detail that needed sorting out, or eIse Abigail, the least tactful but closest of her childhood friends, who would no doubt launch into another lecture on the stupidity of the marriage.
‘Fine,’