“I wonder what Matthew and I’ll be like,” said Fee’s eldest daughter, Emma, now, dreamily, to her mother—she had recently announced her engagement, to no one’s surprise and everyone’s pleasure, to Matthew, her boyfriend of three years, “when we’ve been married as long as you and Dad have. It seems funny now to think that even three years ago we didn’t know each other—I wonder what we’ll be like when we’ve been together for another twenty-five years.”
“I should think he’ll be a wreck,” remarked her younger sister Lulu, who at twenty-four had still not yet grown out of the habit of insulting her siblings. “He’s a brave, brave man, and I told him so only last week.”
“Well, that must be the reason he’s called the wedding off,” said Emma. “Thanks for the explanation, Lu, I’d been wondering. Mom, do you know how many calories there are in this aubergine salad? It looks sort of suspiciously delicious to me.”
“Only one way to find out,” said Lulu. She reached across her sister to grab the container, helped herself to a portion, and immediately puffed out her cheeks into a fat ball. “Ooh, I’ve gained half a stone! I’m enormous!”
Fee poured coffee into her mug and looked across the table at her daughters, wondering, not for the first time, how she had managed to give birth to two creatures, each so comprehensively different from the other. Emma was her model daughter, so perfectly behaved that Fee and David had sometimes worried that she was due for an eruption of repressed misconduct. But the eruption never happened—pleasing people came naturally to Emma, it seemed. She had slept through the night as a baby, had sailed through adolescence with neither spots nor tantrums, had graduated from London University with a good degree in social policy, and now worked in the administration department of a private organization that investigated satisfaction in medical patients.
Three years ago, she had met, through friends, a pleasant-faced young computer consultant called Matthew Hudson; a year later she had moved into his meticulously tidy flat on a narrow street just behind the Angel Tube station, and they planned to marry early in the following year; she had confided to Fee that three years after that, when he would be thirty-two and she thirty, they would start trying for children. Emma had brown shiny hair that no one ever saw unkempt, big blue-gray eyes, and an old-fashioned pink and white complexion. She wore well-cut trousers for work, and for leisure, jeans in the winter or flowery skirts in the summer, which she topped with shirts from Zara or Whistles. She kept her nails short but impeccably manicured and was careful never to gain weight. She would, her mother thought almost wistfully, make the most beautiful bride imaginable.
If Emma was peaches and cream, then Lulu, her mother often thought, was some sort of peppery curry, full of spices and unexpected flavors. A sturdy, untidy girl, with watchful brown eyes and a mane of wild chestnut hair that overwhelmed her features and which she refused to have cut, she stalked through the world where her sister glided, glowered where her sister smiled, and from the beginning, it seemed, had made it a point to challenge convention and confound expectations. At school she had been several times the topic of worried consultations between her parents and her teachers until, suddenly tiring of mischief making, she had surprised everyone by proving to be unusually clever, had gained a first-class degree in biochemistry from St. Andrew’s, and promptly afterwards declared that she had not the faintest intention of embarking upon a scientific career.