Page 56 of Annabel and Her Sisters

Ah yes, Piers. You see, we’d all met him prior to the wedding, for lunch.

When I say all, not the grandchildren. Just the happy couple and their grown-up children and partners, we’d decided.

Don’t overcrowd him. So we were twelve in all, including Piers’s sons and their wives, who assured us they were delighted and looked it, too.

A lot of discussion had been had about the location: various restaurants had been mooted, but in the end we went to Ginnie’s house for a barbecue in her garden, which we felt was relaxed.

Mum had been nervous, both before and during the lunch, but oh so happy.

The shiny eyes gave her away, and those eyes darted around a lot, checking, monitoring, but a huge smile split her face all day.

And Piers… well, Piers was lovely. A tall, broad man, very erect, who’d run his family brewing business for years but was now long retired, twenty years, he told me; both his sons ran it now.

He had a shock of white hair and bushy white eyebrows, and a round, smiley face, a bit like Father Christmas but without the beard or the pot belly.

More different to my father he couldn’t have been, who was slight, bespectacled and cerebral.

But Piers was also mild-mannered and gentle and asked questions and then listened properly to the answers, which, in my experience, not all men do.

Sorry to be sexist, but there it is. Often it’s back to them: what they’ve done with their lives.

I liked him. And I realized I didn’t have to try to like him just for Mum’s sake.

I’d caught her eye as she’d looked anxiously across the long garden table– he was between me and Ginnie, the three of us were all talking together– and I smiled back and she knew.

Genuine approval. She knew us so well, you see, she would pick up anything with her eyes.

Sometimes the familiarity between mothers and daughters is a terrible and beautiful phenomenon to watch, because nothing goes unobserved.

Clarissa watched, too, and was pleased. After that display of emotion in my kitchen, she’d reverted to saying nothing much at all, as ever, except to observe to Hugo, beside her, that she’d noticed he’d put some sheep in a field that last year was down to winter wheat and wondered why.

They chatted about that. Were they similar, Clarissa and Piers?

Not startlingly so. The build was the same, but Piers had a milder manner, and as I say, he was a listener.

But perhaps Clarissa was also a listener but kept all that she heard to herself?

Digested it, but didn’t respond? Her outburst in my kitchen had proved that emotionally she’d been no fool in our younger days– and look at the lasting love she and Derek had for one another.

Imagine the discussions they must have had…

We’d misjudged her. It occurred to me that I would have to get to know my sister all over again– as well as her father– now that I viewed her through a different prism.

I mentioned this to Ginnie and she agreed.

She suggested we take a girls’ trip to Morocco, where a friend of hers had a house.

We’d voiced it with great trepidation to Clarissa, who very surprisingly had said– yes, why not?

She preferred to call it a holiday, though, if it was all the same to us, rather than a girls’ trip. Ginnie and I smiled, as did Clarissa.

And actually, when I saw Clarissa and Piers again, which was at my wedding reception some weeks later, chatting together in Joan’s back garden, I saw more resemblances.

The large, slightly opaque blue eyes. The wide mouth.

The heavy chin and nose, which suited him.

Perhaps less so my sister, but hey, didn’t she look happy?

As did my mother, who’d wandered across to join the two of them by the freshly planted herbaceous border she was creating out of Joan’s beds.

Piers put his arm around her waist to draw her in and I watched, breathless.

Then I gulped and turned away. But I was pleased for her, I realized with surprise, not hurt or bitter.

Unlike me and Ted, they’d decided to keep separate houses, because Piers only lived around the corner in Regent’s Park.

‘We’re a bit too set in our ways,’ Mum told me quietly. ‘But maybe later.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed faintly, thinking, golly, later . They were eighty-two. And Ted and I thought we were over the hummock. You had to hand it to them. And like Mum, he looked lively, Piers. Very quick on his feet, in fact.

‘Oh, thanks,’ he looked delighted when I mentioned it. He’d nipped back inside for more champagne when someone said we were running short and was back in moments, clutching bottles. ‘I did a half marathon, actually, two years back, on my eightieth.’ He made a face. ‘Never again, though.’

Ted and I boggled when I bustled over later to tell him.

‘They’re younger than us,’ he whispered. ‘Physically and spiritually.’

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ I muttered back. ‘Pretend we’re in training.’

They also intended to travel a lot. Go on cruises. Visit the Great Wall of China, Piers told me eagerly when he came round with the bottle to top us up, my mother on his arm. ‘I’ve always wanted to walk at least some of it,’ he said. ‘The Galapagos Islands too.’

‘Oh yes, I’d love to see those!’ my mother said with shining eyes, the dogs circling at her feet. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ She turned to Ted.

Ted hesitated. ‘Long way to see a tortoise?’ he ventured.

We all laughed. Everyone knew our propensity– as much as it had been established in a few short months– for short journeys: a long weekend away was perfect, a bit of art, a few churches, good food.

‘Not your thing either, natural history?’ Piers asked me with a smile.

‘Brings me out in a rash,’ I told him truthfully. Ted declined to look at me in case I hunched my back and mimicked holding a pair of binoculars to my eyes.

‘So,’ Luke said suddenly and loudly. ‘A toast, I feel.’ I glanced around at him, delighted, as everyone did.

We’d said no speeches, but a toast– why not?

The young were already clustered around him, grinning widely, glasses of champagne at the ready, and I realized that he, Polly, Lucy and Kit had pre-arranged this: that it had already been decided it should be Luke, the eldest child of Ted’s and my collective brood.

‘To our parents, Annabel and Ted. And to them finally seeing the light and getting it together!’

A roar of approval went up and then someone piped up from the back:

‘Silly arses!’ Pammy, naturally.

‘Silly arses!’ roared the rest of the garden, which went up in a huge cry as the official toast, and then everyone fell about laughing, glasses raised.