Letters From Prague Read Online Free Page B

grandparents.
    â€˜We’re off.’ Harriet smiled at her, and at them, waving back, standing near to each other, solid and kind.
    â€˜Goodbye, goodbye.’
    The train swung round the bend in the track. ‘All right?’ she asked.
    â€˜Not yet.’ Marsha sat down again.
    â€˜When will you be all right?’
    â€˜When we get to Brussels. When we see Uncle Hugh and Susanna.’ She unwrapped the straw on her carton of orange juice and began to drink.
    â€˜Yes, I’m looking forward to seeing them, too.’
    In truth. Harriet was a little apprehensive. Did merchant banker brothers really welcome impoverished teacher sisters? Would Susanna, a banker’s daughter who did not, apparently, work, and with whom she had, surely, little in common, find showing them round the city a chore? Despite the fact that she had married her brother, and invited Marsha to be her bridesmaid, Harriet felt she hardly knew Susanna.
    Marsha had been a pleased but somewhat astonished bridesmaid. She had never been to such an event in her life, and was unlikely to do so again, Harriet’s friends being, on the whole, either resolutely unwed; partnered without formalities; or succumbing only as the children grew older, their grandparents sadder, slipping off to the Register Office in the lunch hour and holding a drunken party that evening.
    â€˜So make the most of it,’ Harriet told her daughter, twirling before the mirror of her grandmother’s bedroom, in full-skirted cream silk with a dusty rose sash. It wasn’t a church wedding, but Susanna had said she wanted the chance to dress up, and to dress Marsha up, and Marsha, uncertain at first, had, in the end, enjoyed unheard-of outings to Liberty’s.
    From downstairs came the muted exclamations of aunts, arriving, followed by uncles, clearing their throats.
    Marsha regarded herself in the full-length mirror. ‘I look amazing!’
    â€˜You do look nice,’ said Harriet. Was this pretty child, with gleaming hair and satin pumps, really the one who spent most of her time in secondhand dungarees and trainers, refusing to do things? She held out a coronet of tiny cream silk flowers, with ribbons at the back. ‘Let’s put this on now.’ The gleaming head bent obediently; Harriet settled the coronet in place, smoothed out the pair of cream ribbons. Together, mother and daughter regarded the reflection, and hugged each, other. ‘Perfect. Perfect!’
    â€˜I wish I could be bridesmaid every day,’ said Marsha, and ran to open the door, running along the landing calling out ‘Granny! Granny! Look at me now!’
    And Harriet, following, stopped to look in the mirror once more, and saw there someone else who looked different: a tall dark woman usually in jeans, usually in a hurry, dressed now in midnight-blue linen, with a slender string of pearls, and lipstick, going to her brother’s wedding, by herself; watching her daughter be bridesmaid, by herself.
    So. There had been all that – the arrival at Chelsea Town Hall, the flowers, the photographers; Susanna in sandwashed silk and heavenly cut-away shoes; Marsha, grave and exquisite; the smiles, the tears, the signing of the register; the reception – too many speeches, too much champagne; the waving goodbye, goodbye. Hugh and Susanna, a banker and a banker’s daughter, meeting in Brussels: he, even then, beginning to look middle-aged, but with such a dear, kind face; she all fair hair, slender hands, cool charm, smiling and waving as they climbed into the waiting car in a cloud of confetti, and drove away. For a honeymoon in Tuscany, then back to Brussels.
    Since then, almost four years ago, they’d seen each other only once, when Hugh and Susanna came over for her father’s seventieth birthday, when the house, as for the wedding, had been full of visiting relatives, with little opportunity for real conversation. Susanna, in any case, had seemed