Anne Weale - Worthy Of Marriage

As she had put on a dress to go to church, Lucia had worried that her jeans might be too informal for today’s lunch. To her relief, her benefactor’s daughter was also wearing jeans, though her top was recognisably one of a famous designer’s expensively beautiful knits and Lucia’s was a schoolboy-sized shirt she had found on the men’s rail in a charity shop.

Before Rosemary could introduce them, her daughter jumped up, put out her hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Jenny…and you’re Mum’s unlikely-looking jailbird. Nice to meet you. This is my husband Tom.’

A thickset man with a receding hairline and kind blue eyes offered his hand. ‘Hello, Lucia. I’m an architect…married to a woman who prides herself on her outspokenness which is why some people cross the road when they see us coming. The first time we met she told me I stank of garlic.’

‘But I liked him so much that, despite the garlic, I kissed him goodnight…and he came back for more and here we are twenty years later,’ said Jenny, laughing. ‘What are you going to drink, Lucia? White wine?’—with a flourish of her own glass.

‘Yes, please.’

Grey was in the act of handing a Campari and soda to his mother. He glanced at Lucia. ‘Jenny likes her wine sweet. Would you rather have something dryer?’

At first she had been taken aback by Jenny’s immediate reference to her imprisonment. Now she was grateful to her for bringing it into the open so quickly, and to Tom for picking up what some would regard as his wife’s indiscretion and capping it in an amusing way. It was immediately obvious that they were very happy together.

‘What Jenny is drinking will be fine.’ Smiling at his sister, she said, ‘Drinking anything alcoholic is a major treat for me. There was some illicit alcohol available in prison—at a price—but I wasn’t desperate enough to risk it.’

‘Was there anyone like yourself in there? Anyone you could be friendly with?’

‘In prison, you’re grateful if anyone will be friendly with you,’ Lucia said quietly. But she knew it was next to impossible to make people who had never been there understand how it was ‘inside’.

Jenny started to ask something else but was stopped by her brother saying, ‘Don’t start grilling her, Jen.’ Putting a glass of wine into Lucia’s hand, he said, ‘My sister was once a journalist…more precisely a junior reporter on a small town weekly. It was going to lead to a glittering career in London, but she met Tom and changed her mind.’

‘And have never regretted it,’ said Jenny. ‘I enjoyed my three years on the Gazette, but I like being my own boss better. Now that the children are launched, I may try a spot of freelancing.’

‘Did you read the article in yesterday’s paper…?’ Tom took charge of the conversation and steered it in a more general direction.

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