The Love Letter (2 page)

Allegra North breathed in deeply as her sister hauled at the corset laces in the satin bodice. As her waist narrowed, her chest expanded and her white bra rose out of the square Elizabethan cleavage and burst through the delicate lace bib like airbags popping through a car windscreen.

‘I knew you should have put on the whalebone basque.’ Ros’s reddened face appeared over her sister’s shoulder as Legs crammed the offending spheres back in and peered down at the broken stitching.

‘I can’t believe you thought this would fit me. You were only a size eight when you married. We all remember the raw fish diet; you were sucking Smints all the way up the aisle.’

‘But it was worth it,’ Ros sighed, glancing down to her size fourteen curves before gazing wistfully at her sister’s reflection in the mirror ahead of them. ‘I love this dress.’

Legs also regarded the huge meringue that she was now uncomfortably sporting, modelled on the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I. It had never been to her taste, especially the high lace ruff and wired collar which she’d secretly thought made her sister look like Cruella de Vil posing as a butterfly when Ros had married Will twelve years earlier. But it was undoubtedly a spectacular creation, meticulously hand-embroidered. Now, carefully released from the plastic cocoon in which it had been resting on the back of the spare room door for over a decade, it had just been lowered onto Allegra with the reverie of a queen’s coronation robes being fitted to a maid to enable a royal escape from treachery. She was at least a dress size too large and six inches too tall for the made-to-measure creation, and her familiar
pink-cheeked outdoors complexion looked faintly ridiculous peering into the mirror above such delicate stitch-work and intricate detail. She fingered one of the embroidered flowers, seeded with pearls, which had been a labour of love for the designers who’d attached two hundred of them ready for The Big Day.

Ros swatted her hand away from the precious little four-petal motif and then reached behind her sister to tuck the corset laces into the skirt waist.

‘I so love this dress.’ She sighed again as she began buttoning up the lace panel over the stays. ‘I’d always hoped you might want to wear it when you and Francis …’ She stopped herself, face ducking out of sight behind the huge ruff. ‘You do look beautiful in it.’

Rosalind’s wedding day had been a no-holds-Bard Elizabethan extravaganza. Despite marrying into one of London’s oldest Catholic families whose heritage dated back to before the Reformation, she’d somehow pulled it off. If they could have feasted on roast swan, Legs knew her sister would have ordered it. The occasion had been spectacular, theatrical and fun, as so much surrounding Ros had been in those days. A vivacious, clever musician still studying at the Royal Academy, Ros had been playing harpsichord in the foyer of the Barbican when Will Herbert first spotted her, her energy and passion causing him to miss the play he was supposed to be reviewing for
Time Out
and ask her for a drink instead. A year later, they were married at Brompton Oratory and Allegra and Ros’s father Dorian had literally sold the family furniture to pay for it, some of the best pieces he’d collected over the years suddenly finding themselves relocated from the family’s tall, Victorian Kew townhouse to his Richmond antiques shop in what he had tactfully referred to at the time as a ‘much-needed declutter’.

The dress Legs was now sporting had cost Dorian a matching pair of George III Sheraton armchairs and a marble-topped Louis XV bombé and had been just as awkward to fit in the back of a vintage Rolls Royce.

Still only nineteen at the time, Ros had been a radiantly happy
bride, her conversion to Catholicism as all-consuming as her love for Will. That day, bursting with joy, the new Mrs Herbert performed in public for the last time. As a personal gift bestowed from wife to husband alongside the wedding list dinner service, silverware and crystal from their guests, Ros insisted that she must give up her musical training and dedicate herself to becoming a home-maker.

To bridesmaid Legs, poised to begin studying for her A levels amid dreams of globe-trotting and career-building, such devotion to domesticity had been anathema and she’d dived out of the way when the skilfully tossed pomander bouquet had flown in her direction. But Ros firmly believed that the holy trinity of happiness lay between the altar, the kitchen sink and the font.

Within weeks, she’d fallen pregnant amid frantic nesting in the Fulham flat the newlyweds shared. When Nico was two, the family moved to a Regency villa in Ealing, meaning that Will forfeited his dreams of freelancing while writing a novel, and instead let the Herbert family pull one of their many old school ties to secure him a well-paid editorship of a worthy but dull financial journal which bored him rigid but paid the monthly mortgage interest. Once Nico started school, Ros took on private piano tuition to help ends meet, but the money and the marriage wore increasingly thin, and that Elizabethan feast which had united writer and musician seemed a world apart as husband and wife slowly became affection-starved enemies under the same roof.

The cherished wedding dress had remained in the house long after Will’s tenancy ended. Five years earlier, he’d run away with the part-time nanny (and tenant of their ground floor flat), struggling scriptwriter Daisy, this betrayal made more awkward still by the fact that Daisy was a family friend who had been thick as thieves with Allegra since childhood. After a brief spell of utter disbelief followed by inconsolable fury, Ros had retreated into martyrdom, a state in which she still existed, refusing to acknowledge the second life her son now had with his father and his half-siblings.

These days, Will and Daisy lived in glorious chaos in Somerset with two more children and a third on the way, their rural idyll funded by Daisy’s runaway sitcom success
Slap Dash.
Although Will picked up occasional freelance work in between cooking, childcare and chicken rearing, this house-husband role was a cause of much criticism from Ros, who thought he’d ‘wimped out’. His income barely covered the maintenance, and finances remained the biggest clash-point between the sparring ex-spouses – and they were the reason Ros had decided to clamp her younger sister in the dream dress today.

‘I knew it would suit you perfectly,’ she sighed, on tiptoes again and looking over Legs’ shoulder, their matching dark grey eyes lined up, Ros’s features sharper and framed with hair the colour of cinnamon roast coffee beans cut into a neat urchin bob like a principal boy, making Legs resemble a rather blousy Cinderella by contrast, with smudges of last night’s mascara beneath her wide eyes and her cloud of wild blonde hair on end, showing too much dark root.

‘It’s a bit short.’ Legs peered at her flip-flopped feet poking out, complete with the three star tattoos on the left ankle she now regretted getting during her first term at university. Francis had made such a fuss when he saw them. At the time she’d been rebelliously unapologetic, but now she hated them, their zig-zag blue permanence a perpetual reminder of her unofficial catchphrase, that if you live for the moment, you also have to live with the consequence.

She’d been determined not to think about Francis, but now that she did, his face appeared beside hers in the mirror, seeing her in a wedding dress, blue eyes softening with pride, blonde hair swept back from that fallen-angel face. He’d make the most debonair of bridegrooms, so tall and handsome and charming. Ever since they’d first got together as two dare-playing teenagers who’d agreed to practise their kissing techniques on each other, she’d been fantasising about their wedding, remodelling it in her mind
as the years passed. At first, it had been a sparkling Cinderella dress and a horse-drawn carriage; in her later teens the plan had changed to rock and roll Chelsea Registry Office and clubbing around London all night; then when they travelled together after university, she’d fallen for exotic white sand beaches, sarongs, sandals and simplicity. A decade after their first kiss, Francis had made the fantasy real by popping the question in the tiny Ladbroke Grove flat they shared together, both by then carving careers in publishing. Together, they had planned a simple ceremony in the chapel at Farcombe within earshot of the Celtic Sea off the North Devon coast in which they had swum together since childhood, the gulls calling above the cliff walks they’d known all their lives and the coves they’d spent so long exploring. In the evening, they planned to host a huge party in the main hall, Francis’s childhood holiday home, with his father playing the bassoon and Ros the piano, other musician friends joining in, the arts-festival crowd adding eccentricity and colour, their school and university friends, the families that knew one another so well, village pub the Book Inn running the bar and the locals from Eascombe and Fargoe invited, all hell-bent on enjoying the celebration of the decade. It would be a party never to forget, and it was several years in the planning, with the couple’s families eagerly adding their input, including the offer of the dreaded Ditchley dress.

Legs looked at her reflection again, the dress totally unsuited to her, its corset now so tightly laced that her waist was freakishly pinched above the farthingale and her face was turning red. She looked like a wild poppy drooping in a square jewelled vase.

Yet there was something about wearing a wedding dress that suspended her customary sardonic streak and forced a wellspring of sentiment through her protective shield. Just for a moment she let herself imagine the past year had not happened and that she was getting married after all. The thought made her giddy.

‘I was the happiest I’ve ever felt in my life when I wore this dress.’ Ros had tears in her eyes. ‘It makes you feel ethereal, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s not too late to change your mind about it, you know,’ Legs said kindly, reminding herself that any ethereal, giddy feelings were due to lack of oxygen. She was growing increasingly light-headed because she couldn’t breathe properly.

‘Nonsense! The photographer is waiting and we must press on. I’m needed at the abbey to help arrange the altar flowers. What are you going to do about your hair?’

‘What’s wrong with it?

‘You can’t leave it like that.’ Ros reached into a drawer of her dressing table. ‘It’s hanging all over the ruff – here!’ She scraped her sister’s uncombed blonde hair into a topknot and anchored it so tightly with a jewelled scrunchy that Legs winced at the impromptu Essex facelift. ‘Much better. You can go into the garden for pictures I think. You’ll have to bend your knees so those flip-flops don’t show.’ She turned to march from the room, calling ‘Nicholas! Nicho
las
! We’re ready for you!’

Lagging behind and still fighting for breath, Legs picked up her new mobile phone to check whether Conrad had texted yet to say whether he’d make it. He hadn’t. Gordon Lapis, meanwhile, had sent several emails very early that morning, complaining about the Portuguese translation
of Emerald Falcon
and asking her what Julie Ocean’s typical breakfast routine might be.

When Conrad had insisted that the company fund the newest, whizziest iPhone for his PA – quite unprecedented at Fellows Howlett, where one got to take home an office laptop about as often as a school guinea pig and at least one director had yet to go digital at all – Legs had excitedly assumed this meant that he wanted a hotline to her at all times. She now realised that he just wanted to get the agency’s most awkward author, Gordon Lapis, off his back and onto hers.

She tucked it into her sleeve and followed her sister along the landing.

Predictably, there was no answer from the room at the far end of the corridor covered with ‘keep out’ signs.

Ros knocked hard. ‘Nicholas!’ She always pronounced the last two syllables of her son’s name ‘alas’, as though he was something to regret. He’d recently announced that he would answer only to ‘Nico’, a fact his mother chose to completely ignore.

‘I need you to come and take photos of Legs in the garden,’ she insisted.

At the mention of his aunt’s name, Nico unlocked his door and peered out, only one suspicious green eye visible behind a small chink in the heavy brown fringe. Then he reached up to sweep his locks aside and gape at the Ditchley replica.

‘Wow. That’s badass. Is that fancy dress?’

Legs laughed, which was a mistake as her boobs burst up through the lace neckline again, like two lifebuoys bobbing over a wave.

Ros gave the ten-year-old a withering look and gritted her teeth. ‘
This
is the dress in which I married your father, Nicholas. Aunt Legs is modelling it so we can put it on eBay because the bridegroom now pays a pittance in alimony and I can’t afford your schooling without selling things.’

‘I’m on a full scholarship,’ Nico pointed out flatly, eyes glazing over as they always did when his mother started bad-mouthing his father in front of him.

‘That takes no account for all the extras.’ She waved her hand dismissively and started marching towards the head of the stairs. ‘Now I’ll leave you two at it because I’m already late. Nicholas, you’re needed for choir at ten-thirty; the ceremony’s at quarter to eleven. Jamie’s mother will call for you when they walk past. Be sure to wash your hands.’ She marched off, face set hard as it so often was when she spoke about Will, more so today because of the shock of seeing her wedding dress and remembering the hopes and joy that had surrounded the happiest day of her life.

Nico stood in his doorway watching her retreat, his father’s big fawn eyes blinking from his face, accustomed to his mother’s spikiness, that abrupt, no-nonsense tone she used at all times, and at stressful times most of all. Then he eyed his aunt again.