Kate Morton - The Clockmaker's Daughter

‘They’re predicting fine weather,’ her father said, at the very same moment Elodie exclaimed, ‘The house has eight chimneys, Dad. Eight!’

‘Oh, lovey.’

‘It’s the house from her story. Look at the gables—’

‘My dear girl.’

‘Dad!’

‘This all makes sense.’

‘What does?’

‘It’s the wedding.’

‘What wedding?’

‘Yours, of course.’ His smile was kind. ‘Big life events have a way of bringing the past back to bear. And you miss your mother. I should have anticipated that you’d be missing her now more than ever.’

‘No, Dad, I—’

‘In fact, there’s something I’ve been wanting to give you. Wait here a minute.’

As her father disappeared down the flight of iron stairs that led back to the house, Elodie sighed. With his apron tied around his middle and his too-sweet duck à l’orange , he just wasn’t the sort of person with whom one could maintain a state of prolonged irritation.

She noticed a blackbird watching her from one of the twin chimney pots. It stared intently before responding to a command she couldn’t hear to fly away. The littlest of the children on the green began to wail, and Elodie thought of her father’s account of her own petulance in the face of his best bedtime story efforts: the years that had stretched out afterwards, just the two of them.

It couldn’t have been easy.

‘I’ve been saving this for you,’ he said, reappearing at the top of the stairs. She had presumed that he was going to fetch the tapes she’d asked him to put aside, but the box he was holding was too small for that, not much bigger than a shoebox. ‘I knew that one day – that the time would be right –’ His eyes were beginning to glisten and he shook his head, handing her the box. ‘Here, you’ll see.’

Elodie lifted the top.

Inside was a swathe of silk organza, light ivory in colour, its scalloped edge trimmed with a fine ribbon of velvet. She knew at once what it was. She had studied the photograph in its gilt frame downstairs many times before.

‘She was so beautiful that day,’ her father said. ‘I’ll never forget the moment she appeared in the doorway of the church. I’d half convinced myself she wouldn’t show. My brother teased me mercilessly in the days beforehand. He thought it was great sport and I’m afraid I made it easy for him. I couldn’t quite believe that she’d said “yes”. I was sure there’d been some sort of mix-up – that it was too good to be true.’

Elodie reached to take his hand. It had been twenty-five years since her mother’s death, but for her father it might as well have happened yesterday. Elodie had only been six, but she could still remember the way he used to look at her mother, the way they’d intertwined their fingers when they walked together. She remembered, too, the knock at the door, the low voices of the policemen, her father’s awful cry.

‘It’s getting late,’ he said with a quick pat to the top of her wrist. ‘You should be heading home, love. Come on downstairs – I’ve found the tapes you were after, too.’

Elodie replaced the lid of the box. She was leaving him to the burdensome company of his memories, but he was right: the journey home was a long one. Besides, Elodie had learned many years before that she was not equal to the task of healing his sorrow. ‘Thanks for keeping the veil for me,’ she said, brushing a kiss on his cheek as she stood.

‘She’d be proud of you.’

Elodie smiled, but as she followed her father downstairs she wondered if that were true.

Home was a small, neat flat that sat at the very top of a Victorian building in Barnes. The communal stairwell smelled like chip grease, courtesy of the fish shop below, but only the merest hint remained on Elodie’s landing. The flat itself was little more than an open-plan sitting room and kitchenette and an oddly shaped bedroom with a tacked-on bathroom; the view, though, made Elodie’s heart sing.

One of her bedroom windows overlooked the back of a row of other Victorians: old bricks, white sash windows and truncated roofs with terracotta chimney pots. In the gaps between drainpipes she could glimpse the Thames. Better yet, if she sat right up on the sill she could look all the way upriver to the bend where the railway bridge made its crossing.

The window on the far wall faced the street, lining up with a mirror house on the other side. The couple who lived there were still eating when Elodie arrived home. They were Swedish, she had learned, which seemed to explain not only their height and beauty, but also their exotic Nordic habit of dining after ten. There was a lamp above their kitchen bench, which looked to be made of crepe and sent light shimmering pinkly onto the surface below. Beneath it, their skin glowed.

Elodie drew her bedroom curtains, switched on the light, and took the veil from its box. She didn’t know much about fashion, not like Pippa, but she knew this was a special piece. Vintage by dint of its age, covetable owing to Lauren Adler’s fame, but precious to Elodie because it had been her mother’s and there was surprisingly little of her left. Surprisingly little of a private nature.

After a moment’s hesitation, she lifted the veil and held it tentatively at the crown of her head. She slipped the comb into place and the organza unfurled over her shoulders. She let her hands fall to her sides.

Elodie had been flattered when Alastair asked her to marry him. He had proposed on the first anniversary of the day they’d been introduced (by a boy Elodie had gone to school with who now worked in Alastair’s firm). Alastair had taken her to the theatre and then to dinner in a fancy Soho restaurant, whispering into her ear as the cloakroom attendant stowed their coats that it took most people weeks to get a reservation. Whilst the waiter was fetching them dessert, he had presented the ring in its robin-egg-blue box. It had been like something from a movie, and Elodie had seen the two of them as if from outside: he with his handsome, expectant face, his perfect white teeth; and she in the new dress Pippa had made for her when she’d given the Stratton Group 150Year Presentation speech the month before.

An elderly woman sitting at the table beside them had said to her companion, ‘Isn’t that lovely. Look! She’s blushing because she’s so in love.’ And Elodie had thought, I’m blushing because I’m so in love , and when Alastair lifted his eyebrows she’d watched herself smile and tell him yes.

Out on the dark river a boat sounded its foghorn and Elodie slipped the veil from her head.

That was how it happened, she supposed. That is how people become engaged. There would be a wedding – in six weeks, according to the invitation, when Alastair’s mother said the Gloucestershire gardens would be at ‘their late summer best’ – and Elodie would be one of those married people who met up at weekends to talk about houses and bank loans and schools. For there would be children, presumably, and she would be their mother. And she wouldn’t be like her own mother, talented and sparkling, alluring and elusive; but her children would look to her for advice and comfort and she would know what to do and say because people just seemed to, didn’t they?

Elodie set the box on the brown velvet chair in the corner of her room.

After a moment’s uncertainty, she slid it under the chair instead.

The suitcase she’d brought back from her father’s house was still standing by the door where she’d left it.

Elodie had imagined getting started on the tapes tonight, but she was suddenly tired – intensely tired.

She showered and then, guiltily, switched off the lamp and slunk into bed. She would start on the tapes tomorrow; she had to. Alastair’s mother, Penelope, had already called three times since breakfast. Elodie had let the calls go through to voicemail, but any day now Alastair would announce that ‘Mummy’ was cooking Sunday lunch and Elodie would find herself in the passenger seat of the Rover, being transported up the tree-lined driveway to that enormous house in Surrey where the inquisition would be waiting.