A Perfect Family

She glanced at the motorway sign by the side of the road. ‘Only another couple of exits now,’ she told him, ‘then we’ll be home.’

As she concentrated on the traffic, she didn’t notice his small frown as he heard her say the word ‘home.’ To him, home was wherever he happened to be living at the time. But to her …

She had come to mean a lot to him, this pretty, clever Englishwoman, who in some ways seemed so much younger than her American contemporaries and in others so much more mature. Unlike them, she seemed instinctively to put him first and that was very important to him—a legacy from all the years as a child when he had felt more like an unwanted parcel being passed from one parent to the other than a loved and wanted child.

Families—he was instinctively suspicious of them, but thankfully this visit would only be a short one and then he and Olivia would be leaving for America and their own life together—just the two of them.

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‘Do you think the weather will stay fine? It will be awful if it doesn’t, everywhere muddy and wet, and with a marquee out in the rain.’

Jenny Crighton looked up from the guest list she had been checking to smile at her sister-in-law.

‘With any luck the weather should stay fine, Tiggy,’ she reassured her. ‘But even if it doesn’t, the marquee will be heated and—’

‘Yes, but people will have to walk across the lawn and—’

‘The marquee people are putting a walkway down from the house to the marquee. It will be covered and quite dry,’ she promised her patiently as though this had not been a subject they had discussed many times before.

It had come as no surprise to her to discover that although Tiggy had spent a good deal of time on the telephone talking about what hard work organising the joint fiftieth birthday celebration for their husbands had been, it was she, Jenny, who had been left to do the actual work. But then, that was their relationship all over, she acknowledged wryly. Tiggy had always been the glamorous one of the two of them whilst she was the more homey, hard-working one.

People made allowances for Tiggy and for her vulnerabilities; men were bedazzled by her even now when both of them were in their forties, and Tiggy, because she was Tiggy, could never quite resist her need to respond to their admiration and soak it up and feed on it. She meant no harm, of course. She adored David, everyone knew that, and he clearly worshipped her.

Jenny could still remember the look of pride and dazed awe in his eyes that summer he had brought Tiggy, his bride, back home and introduced her to them all. David—how everyone loved him—his father, the clients, his friends, the children, everyone, but no one so fiercely nor so determinedly as her own husband, Jonathon, his twin brother.

It had been Jonathon’s idea that they should have this double birthday celebration and combine it with a grand family reunion.

‘Dad would love it. You know how much the family means to him,’ he had told Jenny when they were discussing it.

‘He may well love it, but he will carp like mad about the cost,’ Jenny had warned him dryly, ‘and it will be expensive if we are to do it properly.’

‘Of course we are and Dad won’t mind … not if it’s for David.’

‘No,’ Jenny had agreed, but she had had to turn her face away so that Jonathon wouldn’t see her expression.

She knew, of course, why so much family emphasis was placed upon David; why her father-in-law was so determined that these twins of his should be so close, so supportive of one another, or rather that Jonathon should be so supportive of his brother.

Ben himself had been a twin but his brother had died at birth, and that loss had marked and scarred virtually the whole of his life.

Jonathon had been brought up knowing that in his father’s eyes he should consider himself most fortunate to have such a twin there in life beside him.

Only once had Jenny seen the fierce pride in Ben’s eyes turn to disappointment and that had been when David had left the set of chambers where he had been in training for the Bar, following a career pattern that had been laid out for him from the first moment of his birth.

‘Well, I hope you’re right about the weather,’ Tiggy was saying fretfully now. ‘My shoes still haven’t arrived, you know, and they promised that they would be here. It’s far too late to get another pair made and dyed and—’

‘They’ll be here. There’s still plenty of time,’ Jenny soothed her.

Tiggy had been a model in the sixties and she still had the same haunting, high-cheeked beauty she had possessed then, although the years of dieting and worrying about her weight had, in Jenny’s opinion, left her too thin. Her almost waiflike appearance, so appealing in a young, immature girl, somehow, to Jenny at least, seemed oddly jarring in a woman of forty-five.

Not that Jenny would ever voice such views. She was well aware of how others judged her and her relationship with Tiggy, and those, apart from her closest friends, could interpret it as envy, as those same critics judged Jonathon as being jealous of David.

Her normally mild brown eyes showed a brief flash of emotion before she controlled it and turned her attention back to the large area of lawn in front of them. It had taken quite a bit of diplomatic manoeuvring to get her father-in-law, Ben, to agree that the birthday festivities could be held here.

He had grumbled as Jenny had known he would about the cost and the inconvenience, but of course, when the time came he would rise to the occasion as the convivial patriarchal host, accepting the admiration and praise of their guests without a flicker of conscience.

There had been battles over each and every stage of the preparations for the weekend’s celebrations, which was no more and no less than Jenny had anticipated, but the irony of it was that Ben would be the first to complain if even the slightest detail fell short of his exacting standards—a fact that he was as well aware of as she was herself, Jenny acknowledged.

Of course, she had had to use diversionary and indeed, at times, almost underhanded tactics to get her own way on some points. A reminder that at his own insistence, members of the Chester side of the family had been invited to the event and had to be impressed had proved a handy tool for digging out his deepest-rooted objections about cost and one that Jenny admitted she had wielded shamefully at times.

Not that she minded; indeed, she positively enjoyed the challenge of doing battle with her formidable father-in-law. Conversely, she knew that whilst in public he paid lip-service to the conventional view that Tiggy, on account of her looks, must take precedence in his affections and approval, privately, she was the one who had his respect.

Oh yes, men respected her, liked her, trusted her, turned to her for advice and comfort, but they did not flirt with her or see her as a desirable, sexual woman, a situation easy enough to smile over now, but not so easy when younger.

Jenny could still remember how she had felt the first time she had met Tiggy. She and Jon had been married for four or five years at that time and had been trying for a baby without success for the last two. The sight of Tiggy blooming with David’s love, basking in both that and her discreetly evident pregnancy had caused Jenny more than one pang of pain and self-pity. She had hardly been able to bring herself to look at Jon, and when she had, the withdrawn look in his eyes as he deliberately avoided looking at Tiggy’s pregnant body had made her bite her lip in a mixture of guilt and despair.

Jenny’s heart had sunk when they had received the telephone call summoning them to Queensmead to meet David’s new bride officially. It had been one of those sticky hot summer days when even the air they breathed had seemed heavy and tainted and somehow lacking in life-giving oxygen.

The partnership had been going through a rather lean time and Jon had quietly accepted his father’s decision that he should draw only a very small salary. David’s allowance was a large drain on the partnership’s profits but Jenny knew that Jon didn’t begrudge it any more than his father did. Luckily she was a careful housewife, scrupulously saving money where she could, especially when it came to spending money on herself, and she certainly had nothing in her wardrobe remotely suitable for the garden party-cum-belated wedding breakfast Ben was insisting on throwing for the newly married couple. In the end, having stubbornly refused Jon’s tentative suggestion they use some of their savings to buy her a new dress, she decided to make her own.

‘Get yourself something pretty,’ Jon had tried to coax her, but she had shaken her head, stubbornly folding her lips into a tight line, which he had interpreted as disapproval but which, in fact, had been her defence strategy against the tears she had been fighting not to let fall as she reacted to the unsubtle message his suggestion had concealed—that she was so plain that she needed to wear something eye-catching enough to draw attention away from that plainness and, even worse, that Jon was embarrassed by it.

She felt she was letting him down not just by her homely appearance but by the fact that she had not conceived another child. After all, she had fallen pregnant easily enough to David but that was something she refused to allow herself to think about even in her most private thoughts and it was certainly not something she could ever say to Jon. How could she? It would look as though she was comparing the two of them and finding Jon wanting. It didn’t need much intelligence to know that in the eyes of Jon’s family, and she suspected almost everyone else, David and Tiggy would be very much the golden couple whilst she and Jon were very much the dull also-rans.

Both of them had already been treated to a lengthy outpouring of praise from Ben about Tiggy’s exceptional beauty. So it had been with a feeling of tense trepidation plus the disadvantage of a bad tension headache and the disaster that was the home-made dress she had run up herself from a piece of fabric she had bought in the market that she had reluctantly pinned an unconvincing smile on her face and tried not to look as though she minded when she was finally confronted with Tiggy’s breathtakingly leggy, lithe and oh so slim reality.

Tiggy herself hadn’t quite been able to stop herself from betraying what Jenny had known humiliatingly was likely to be everyone else’s reaction to the difference between them, and her eyes widened just a little before she looked guiltily away from Jenny, obviously unable to meet her gaze as David introduced them.

David, too, managed to avoid meeting her gaze. David was clearly bursting with pride over the reaction Tiggy was causing amongst the male guests. They milled enthusiastically around her and barely had time to do much more than say a very brief hello not just to her but to Jon, his twin, before Tiggy caught hold of his arm and demanded to be told the names of all the men who were so eager to talk with her.

As she reached out to David, she had tilted her face up towards him, throwing her head back and laughing. The sun gleamed richly in the heavy thickness of her glossy hair, and the bones in her shoulders revealed by the cutaway neckline of her brief cotton minidress seemed as fragile and delicate as those of a bird. Jenny had watched her, mute with misery, contrasting her own flushed, shiny, wholesomely plain face with the fine-boned, high-cheeked beauty of Tiggy’s.

Everything about David’s new wife, from the polished tips of her fingernails to the artfully applied fake eyelashes—which, unlike her, Jenny was absolutely sure that Tiggy had little need of—spoke of someone who took it for granted that she was loved and desired. And why shouldn’t she? David was so obviously besotted with her, so completely in love, he couldn’t bear even to let go of her hand, never mind leave her side.

Jenny had felt her eyes start to well up with betraying and self-pitying tears as she watched them. Even Jon, quiet, slightly shy Jon, was watching Tiggy with a bemused and indulgent smile on his normally serious face.

‘Jenny, could you come and give me a hand with the food?’

Reluctantly Jenny had dragged her attention away from the group of enthusiastic admirers thronging round Tiggy and turned to look at Jon’s Aunt Ruth, answering automatically, ‘Yes, of course …’

‘Tiggy is very pretty, isn’t she?’ she had commented quietly to Ruth as they walked across the lawn together. Jon hadn’t even noticed her leaving. He was standing next to David but slightly behind him, slightly in his shadow. Was he wishing that like David he had married someone beautiful and lively, someone who was fun to be with, someone who other men envied him being married to and not …? Her throat, already uncomfortably dry, had become even drier as she added, ‘She and David look so right together and they’re obviously very deeply in love.’

‘Indeed they are,’ Ruth had agreed, but her voice had been wry rather than warm, carrying more of a hint of cynicism than the outright approval that Jenny had been expecting. When Jenny had looked uncertainly at her, Ruth had explained lightly, ‘David and Tiggy are in love, Jenny, but I suspect that both of them are rather more in love with themselves than they could ever be with anyone else. Perhaps I’m wrong … I certainly hope so.’

Jenny and Jon had left Queensmead and gone home shortly afterwards. She hadn’t been feeling very well, the oppressive heat making her feel sick, and she had felt guilty about dragging Jon away especially when she had seen the look of pity that Tiggy had given them both as they said their goodbyes.

As they walked away, she had heard Tiggy saying to David, ‘I can’t believe that you and Jon are twins. He looks older than you but then I suppose that’s because his wife is so frumpy and plain.’

Frumpy and plain. Tiggy hadn’t meant to be unkind, of course; she hadn’t even realised that Jenny had overheard her….