Jessie Keane: Jail Bird

Incredible to think that Saz was twenty-one years old, astonishing to think how fast the years had flown by; how one minute she’d been a bewildered and grief-ridden nine-year-old child, and then the next, pow! All grown up. And so eerily like Lily, too.

‘Oh Saz! I think you look lovely,’ said Maeve, choking back a tear.

She was determined to make this a happy day for Saz, the best of her entire life. She thought of what Si had told her last night, about his brother Freddy kicking off because Lily was out. Maeve thought that Freddy was mental, a bit of a mouth-breather. Si and Leo had always been the brains of the outfit. No one had told Saz that Lily was out. Si would have thrown a fit if they had. He had discussed it with Maeve, of course he had; but they’d agreed it was best that she didn’t know.

‘Do you think the veil’s too much?’ asked Saz.

‘No, it’s perfect,’ said Maeve.

She thought that Saz couldn’t have looked more exquisite if she’d tried. Money was no object, of course; never had been, not in the King family. If a King woman wanted something – a swimming pool, a diamond necklace, a designer wedding dress, voilà ! It appeared as if by magic.

Saz was turning and preening in front of the mirror, smiling secretively at her reflection as sunlight poured through the big balcony windows, highlighting her shimmering loveliness in fairy motes of gold and silver.

‘You got your garter on?’ she asked.

Saz smiled and raised the ruffled hem of the dress to reveal white silk Jimmy Choos, white stockings and a blue berib-boned garter. ‘Right here,’ she said.

‘Don’t let him twang it,’ warned Maeve with a laugh. ‘That’s a family heirloom, that is.’

Think your mother wore it too, shot through her brain, then she wished it hadn’t. She frowned. Why did she have to keep thinking of Lily today?

The answer was simple: she was taking Lily’s place; so, even if Lily wasn’t here, her spirit was hovering over the proceedings like a rotten odour. They’d all moved on with their lives. Maeve and Si had become guardians to their two nieces, and to lessen the upheaval for the girls they had rented out their own place just up the road and moved into The Fort. They had never used the master suite; too many memories, and all of them unsettling.

‘Where’s the car? Isn’t it here yet?’ Saz was now demanding fretfully, going to the window, looking out.

Saz might look like Lily, but deep down she wasn’t like her mother at all. Saz was quicksilver, but Lily had been like rock: calm, immovable, a bit of a house mouse really, but with an aura of stillness and strength about her. Maeve could still remember the first time she’d ever seen Leo weave his testosterone-and-bling-laden spell over Lily. They’d all been crowding around his flash car after school – they’d all been mates, all familiar with each other – and the other, bolder girls, Mary and Becks, Adrienne and Julia, had been all over Leo and his pals like a rash: teasing, flirting, flashing their big smiles, their coltish legs and their pert, perfect teenage boobs. Maeve had joined in a bit, although she was no beauty, not like some of the others; but Lily had hung back, uninterested.

Maeve shook herself.

This was Saz’s big day and she was going to make sure that she enjoyed it. It was not Lily standing there, but Saz, Maeve told herself firmly. But Maeve remembered that she had been a bridesmaid when Lily had married Leo in eighty-seven. Maeve had thought Lily might go for a Princess Di-type thing, all puff sleeves and full skirts, but Lily had stayed true to type and worn a simple ivory shift – with a large bouquet of cream roses to conceal the bump of her pregnancy.

And here was the result of that pregnancy, standing before Maeve now. A beautiful full-grown woman who shared her mother’s bone-deep and effortless brand of glamour. Lily had always looked good – Maeve had envied her that. Maeve had to work hard at looking good, particularly now an early menopause had hit her like a ton of shit and she’d gained two stone almost overnight.

Maeve had made a special effort today, because she was acting as ‘mother of the bride’, wasn’t she? Today of all days, Maeve had to look good. So she had squeezed her short, dumpy form into pull-in pants and a fuchsia pink silk dress and matching jacket, with a little ‘fascinator’ clip-on waterfall of feathers and flowers sitting atop her streaked blonde new Judy Finnegan-type hairdo.

But looking at her lovely niece she had to admit that, beside Saz King, she just looked like mutton done up as spring lamb.

Jesus, just look at her, she thought.

Saz was wearing a tight-fitting pearl-studded gold satin bodice that showed off her full breasts to their best advantage, tapering down to display a neat waist before flaring out into a huge, impossibly full skirt that was a cascade of opulent cream silk ruffles. The train was small, balancing the massive length of the skirt. Saz’s long blonde hair was swept up behind a pearl-encrusted tiara. Her face, with its neat nose, large, serious, navy blue eyes (now those weren’t like Lily’s, and thank God for it) and wide, smiling mouth had been professionally made up. She glowed with radiance. Suddenly she turned to Maeve and grinned.

‘It’s here!’

Maeve looked out. The Rolls-Royce Silver Phantom, cream and decked out with white ribbons, was coming up the drive.

‘I’ll give your Uncle Si a shout,’ said Maeve, and took herself off to find him.

‘And where the hell is Oli?’ Saz shouted after her.

‘You’re not supposed to do that,’ said Oli King sternly, pushing her dark curling hair out of her eyes and ignoring the almost unbearable, palpitating heat of desire that was sweeping over her. She sneaked a look out through the stable door when she heard a motor passing. ‘And look, there’s the damned car and I’m supposed to be in there helping Saz…no, don’t do that…’

Oli was eighteen to Saz’s twenty-one, and she thought that her sister Saz had been born old. She, however, had not. She wasn’t planning on getting married, settling down, all that boring load of bollocks, not ever. She planned one day to live on the Left Bank in Paris and have a lot of lovers. Beyond that, she hadn’t planned much at all. But then…then she had met Jase.

‘Do what?’ asked Jase, his fingers busy inside the terracotta-coloured silk bodice of her bridesmaid’s dress.

‘ That, ’ she snapped, although the rough touch of his hands against her cool-skinned breasts and hard, urgently aroused nipples was driving her insane. ‘Stop it. Or I’ll tell Uncle Si on you.’

Jase worked for Si. Doing what, Oli was never entirely sure.

Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies : that was the family motto. Obviously it was Jase’s motto, too, because whenever she’d tentatively skirted around the subject of what he actually did for Uncle Si, Jase was always evasive. He was

Head of Security at the family club, she knew that, but that wasn’t all he did for Si and Freddy, she just knew it. There were too many nights away, too many hushed phone calls and delivering packages, too many times when he was distracted or distant.

Jase was gorgeous, though. Curly dark hair, big shoulders, narrow laughing dark green eyes. He looked great in the morning suit he was wearing, a white carnation in the buttonhole. He’d said she looked great in the terracotta-coloured dress, too, and had promptly brought her in here and tried to get the damned thing off her.

Oli hated dresses anyway. She lived in jeans and t-shirts. High heels killed her. It was all very well for Saz, poncing about like Lady Muck, but she hated all this show. She was happier here, in the old disused stables, with Jase. If only he’d behave.