Page 10 of The Mother-in-Law

Rhonda goes to her computer and taps away for an unreasonable amount of time. Apparently, at bridal stores, providing a price is incredibly complicated. I turn and pretend to look at satin-covered wedding shoes. Peter is paying for the dress as well as the wedding and has turned down every offer from us to pay half. Tom, predictably horrified, practicallybeggedhim to reconsider, until I convinced him Peter might find it insulting. Besides, Lucy and Ollie are planning a very low-key wedding, to my relief, so I’m confident that Peter should be able to stretch to cover it. That is, until I hear Rhonda whisper an amount that could purchase a brand new family car.

The colour drains from Peter’s face.

‘Oh, God,’ Lucy says. ‘Really?’

Rhonda nods earnestly. ‘Those are real Swarovski crystals. And it’s a ball gown, so there’s a lot of material.’

‘I’ll try something else,’ Lucy says immediately. ‘Something off the rack or a sample—’

I pick up a wedding magazine and focus on it intently.Thisis why mothers-in-law aren’t invited to this sort of thing. Peter will feel incredibly awkward with me here to witness and will feel backed into a corner. If Tom was here, he’d be on his feet, holding out the black Amex, forcing Rhonda to take it. My style would be to suggest to Lucy that there must be a perfectly nice dress that isn’t the same price as a down payment on a house.

I think of Amina, whom I visited in her home earlier today. She arrived from Sudan three months ago, pregnant with twins, with three more children under the age five. This morning I brought her a well-used double pram and she broke down in tears and asked Allah to bless me and my family. She was going to use it to push her youngest two kids to the supermarket, she said, because usually her two and three year olds had to walk and their little legs got terribly tired. Some days, she told me, it took them an hour to make the one kilometre walk.

‘This is the one you really want?’ Peter says.

‘Dad . . . are you sure? It’s a lot of money.’

‘I’ve only got one daughter,’ he says. ‘And you’re only a bride once.’

‘Will you be wanting the veil as well?’ Rhonda says, a vulture circling. ‘I just ask because this is the last one we have in stock. I can give you ten per cent off,’ she says, and begins tapping on her computer again. After a moment or two, she announces a price that makes my eyes water.

‘No, I don’t need the veil,’ Lucy says.

‘But it really does cap off the look, doesn’t it, Mum?’ Rhonda says, dragging me into her ugly plot. ‘And it’s a small price to pay when it comes to giving your daughter the perfect wedding, am I right?’

Rhonda has taken on a new level of evil in my mind. Guilting a poor father into buying a veil he can ill afford. Encouraging me to join her side and gang up on the man. Insinuating that if he doesn’t buy the ludicrously overpriced piece of lace, it means he doesn’t love his daughter or want to give her the perfect wedding. If it were up to me, the woman would be taken out onto the street and horse-whipped.

‘Frankly, I don’t think anyone outside the royal family would consider that amount a small price to pay,’ I tell her. ‘It’s daylight robbery and you should be ashamed of yourself. I don’t know how you sleep at night.’

Peter and Lucy turn to stare at me, and Rhonda adopts the sullen face of a teenager who feels like the world is against her and nothing—none of it—is her fault.

‘And one other thing,’ I say, since I have everyone’s attention. ‘As I’ve pointed out several times, I’mnotLucy’s mother.’ I fold my hands in my lap. ‘I’m her mother-in-law.’

5

LUCY

The present . . .

‘Would anyone like tea?’ I ask.

No one responds but I head to the kitchen anyway to put the kettle on. My thoughts skitter about. Diana is dead. Intellectually I understand this, but somehow it doesn’t feel true. This peculiar, anesthetised feeling is familiar, it reminds me of the days following my own mother’s death, when I walked around oblivious to the day of the week, the time of day. It wasn’t until days later that the pain hit, fast and hard, as if it had been loaded into a slingshot and fired at me. It was during my mother’s funeral that I finally broke under the weight of it, sobbing so hysterically my poor father had no idea what to do.

I slide the mugs off a high shelf and line them up on the counter. The sky beyond the window is black. Patrick, Nettie and Ollie are in the living room, spread across furniture, staring out in different directions. I get the feeling that Patrick and Nettie would like to leave but they feel they shouldn’t, as though it might be considered dismissive to Diana. This is, after all, a time for family to be together.

Simon and Stella left over an hour ago, leaving behind two shiny business cards and a sober atmosphere. Since then Nettie appears to have rethought her initial embrace with Ollie and has perched herself as far away from him as possible whilst still remaining in the same room. Patrick sits right beside her, patting her leg, sincere but unemotional. Tears stream from Nettie, filling and falling without much apparent effort on her part.

Ollie is surprisingly dry-eyed, and seems to be an impossible combination of bewildered and irritated, alternately shaking his head no, then nodding it yes, whatever that is supposed to mean. Peculiarly, it’s exactly how I feel.No, Diana can’t be dead, followed by,Yes, she is and it isn’t the worst thing in the world. After all, I’ve never made a secret of my dislike for Diana. Our relationship was volatile. It was even, at one point,violent. I wonder if the police will discover this while they are investigating Diana’s death.

As I get down my ‘visitor tea’ (I’m getting the feeling that Nettie might do well with chamomile), I can’t help but think of the day Tom died. We’d all been called away from home and work midmorning to say our goodbyes, but by midnight he was still hanging on. It wasn’t the first time we’d got the call. We’d given our teary farewells twice before, only to have Tom battle on, but this time, the doctors told us, wasit. Apparently.

After twenty-four hours, as Tom continued to hang in there, Ollie asked the nurse if there was something she could give Tom to ‘end his suffering’. When the nurse explained that there wasn’t anything, and that it could take as much as a few days before Tom died, Ollie reached for a cushion and announced that he’d like ‘a few minutes alone with Dad’.

Everyone had become slightly feverish with exhausted hilarity—even Diana amazingly, smiled as she explained to the nurse that, obviously, her son was joking. But there are no jokes to be had today. Everything is utterly sombre.

I take the tea into the living room and hold out a mug to Nettie, but she doesn’t seem to notice. After a second, Patrick takes it and sets it on the coffee table.

‘I guess it’s too early to talk about the funeral,’ I say. Itistoo soon, but I can’t bear the silence any longer and what else are we supposed to talk about? Nettie stares at the blank television screen. Ollie looks at his shoes.