A huge marquee was going to be erected in the grounds; Sophy’s wedding dress, which had come from the Emanuels, was hanging upstairs in one of the guest room wardrobes, and the Lord Lieutenant and his lady had deigned to accept their invitation. In fact, the Lord Lieutenant had actually agreed to give Sophy away, much to her mother-in-law-to-be’s delight.
The last thing her mother really wanted was her help, Gemma recognised, remembering ruefully down through the years how often she had heard the same plaintive sound in her mother’s voice, and how often her childish heart had leapt with delight at the thought of being able to help her.
It had taken her a long time to learn that her mother did not really want her help; that she didn’t want anything from her, in fact, other than her pretty obedience. To her mother she was a toy to be shown off and paraded before her friends, not a human being at all. Just as David had been brought up as the son of the house, his father’s heir, a proper manly little boy, so she had been brought up as a shy, pretty little girl.
Only she had broken free of that confining image to make her own life.
She came out of her reverie to hear her mother saying her name rather sharply.
‘Gemma, you were miles away. I was telling you about the guest list. I want you to go through it for me, and help me with the table plan. The place cards will all have to be written out, too, by hand—typing them is so common.’ She made a face, a pretty moue, that grated on Gemma, although she didn’t let her feelings show.
‘You’re looking so tired, darling.’ He mother’s concern held a faint edge of bitterness. ‘Daddy and I can’t understand why you insist on working at that dreadful place. Daddy could have got you a job much closer to home at a far nicer school.’ She gave a tiny shudder of distaste. ‘Some of those dreadful children you teach aren’t even clean.’
Compressing her mouth against her mother’s distaste, Gemma wondered what on earth her parents would say if she told them that she would ten times rather be with her unclean, ill-educated pupils than here in her parents’ luxurious home.
Long ago she had decided that she wanted to teach; that had been something that was always there. Her desire to teach those who most needed the benefits that education could give, and who were least likely to receive them, had come later, growing gradually, and so far she had no regrets at all about her choice of career.
Of course there were heartaches and problems; days at a time when she ached for the sight of green fields and trees; weeks and months when she battled unsuccessfully against the oppressive weights of poverty and suspicion; nights when she lay awake, aching beyond sleep for the hopelessly narrow and deprived lives of her pupils. For some of them, from the moment they were born, the odds were stacked against them. It was her job, her private crusade, to offset those odds. When she had first arrived at the grey, depressed inner-city school the other teachers had warned her that she would soon lose her bright optimism, that she would be victimised and even physically abused by some of the children. She had been told she was too young and too pretty to teach the adolescent boys, many of whom could and did try to harass their female teachers. But even after three years of enduring all that Bower Street Comprehensive could throw at her she still held true to her original ideals. If she managed to open the gate that, via education, led to an escape from the grimness of his or her life for only one child, then she had achieved something.
This inner need to help and encourage these children wasn’t something Gemma had ever discussed with anyone else. The other girls at the university with her hadn’t shared her views on teaching, and her colleagues were often as ground down by the harshness of their surroundings, and the pressure of living in an area where so few of their pupils would ever be able to get even the most menial of jobs, as the pupils and their parents were.
‘Gemma, you aren’t listening to a word I’m saying.’
Gemma looked up and saw that her mother was frowning at her. How different this pretty, floral sitting-room was to her own grim flat. This room was her mother’s alone. It had french windows opening out on to a York stone-paved patio with tubs of flowers, beyond which stretched lawns, and trees. Her father had designed and built this house twenty years ago, with the proceeds from his first successful contract.
Since Christmas the whole house had been redecorated and refurbished in readiness for the wedding, Gemma thought wryly. Her mother’s sitting-room, which she had last seen decorated in soft creams and pinks, was now all delicate yellows and french blues. A pretty floral fabric of a type often featured in glossy magazines hung at the windows and covered the plump settee. A huge bowl of yellow roses filled the marble fireplace, and the antique sofa table that her father had bought for her mother several years ago was covered in silver-framed photographs of the family. The entire ambience of the room was subtly expensive, faintly ‘county’, and Gemma stifled a faint sigh as she looked through the windows to the gardens beyond.
She missed this view more than she ever wanted to admit; she missed breathing clean, fresh air, and looking out on to green fields and tall trees. She knew that it wasn’t possible for all people to be equal, and she also knew that her father had worked extremely hard to get where he was today. She didn’t think it was wrong that her parents should have so much while others had so little, but she did think it was criminal that they should be so little aware, so little caring, of the reality of how other people lived.
Her mother had been shocked and disgusted on the only occasion she had visited her daughter in her small north Manchester flat, Gemma remembered. She had hated the narrow mean street, and the towering blocks of council flats; she had done everything she could to persuade Gemma to get another job, to come home and allow her father to use his influence to find her something more suitable, more acceptable to their friends, perhaps teaching small children at the local village school. Her father’s company had a contract to build an extension on the local comprehensive and they had also given generously to the appeal to raise money for a swimming pool for the school, she was sure that …
Gemma had cut her off there. She didn’t want to change her job, but trying to explain that, and to explain why, to her mother, had just been impossible.
‘David and Sophy have gone round to the house. It really is lovely, Gemma. You must go and see it. Your father had it built for them as a wedding present. It’s just a nice size for a young couple: four bedrooms and a pretty nursery suite. I do hope they won’t wait too long before starting a family …’
Gemma let her mother chatter on as she tried to suppress her own growing feeling of alienation and tiredness.
‘Of course your father had to invite him, but I was hoping that he wouldn’t accept the invitation. He’s not really one of our set, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he and your father do business together, I wouldn’t invite him here at all. It’s amazing that he’s done so well, when you think how he started, but I must confess that I never feel comfortable with him. The problem is that since he isn’t married, where are we going to seat him?
‘Businesswise, his company is now much bigger than your father’s, and your father won’t want to offend him, but he’s hardly the sort of man one could put on the same table as the Lord Lieutenant, is he?’
Gemma frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I missed half of that. Who are we talking about?’
‘Oh, Gemma! Luke O’Rourke, of course.’
Luke O’Rourke. Gemma felt the room sway crazily round her, and she gripped hold of the chair back in front of her while her mother carried on, oblivious of her shock.
‘Good heavens, you haven’t met him yet, have you? I’d forgotten that. He was away at Christmas—I think he went to the Caribbean or somewhere on business—but you must have heard me mention him? He owns O’Rourke Construction—they practically built most of the latest stretch of motorway network round here. I’m not really quite sure how he and your father met, but over the last couple