“That’s the nice thing about Fee,” said Matthew. “She lets us get on with our life instead of trying to impose her own ideas.” He grimaced apologetically. “I think I’m going to be luckier in my mother-in-law than you are in yours.”
Matthew’s mother was a difficult woman, bitterly divorced from Matthew’s father, and demanding of Matthew, her only child.
“Caroline’s all right,” said Emma. “She’s quite nice to me, actually.”
“Well, of course she’s nice to you!” Not a man given to poetic flights of fancy, Matthew nevertheless had yet to identify a serious flaw in Emma. “She’d be mad not to be; you’re the daughter-in-law of anyone’s dreams.”
“That’s no guarantee,” said Emma. “I have friends who are as nice as me who have terrible mothers-in-law. Rosie at work’s mother-in-law is awful to her. Caroline could be a lot worse. And, anyway, I’m not marrying her, I’m marrying you. And very much looking forward to it, by the way.”
It would be a good marriage, she thought an hour or so later, still smiling to herself as she strolled up Upper Street to her parents’ house for brunch, while Matthew stayed at home to catch up with his month’s paperwork. They were a good fit, they two, sensible and intelligent, neither of them dramatic, but both, in their own way, romantic; they both shared a good heart as well as good sense, qualities which they had both seen and loved in each other immediately, and were such as would hold them strong against all the tempests that life might throw their way. A good marriage, its tone set from the start by a wedding that would be not a spectacle of excess but a quiet celebration of two people who did not need extravagance to prove their own worth. Sophie might bemoan the lack of horse-drawn carriages, but there were other things, Emma thought, still smiling, that were almost as lovely as a wedding and certainly more lasting, to spend their money on, too. First, there was a fridge to buy … then there would be holidays to be taken, and possibly the car to trade in for a newer model … One day there would be a house to move into with a garden for children to play in. People smiled at Emma as she walked along in the sunshine, and she smiled back at them, loving her life, and the kind warmth of the summer morning, and the swish of the skirt about her legs.
Halfway along Upper Street she passed a small flower shop and stopped to enjoy the display—windows bursting with delphiniums as blue as the June sky, and early hydrangea as white as the small fluffy clouds that scudded cheerfully across it. She had not yet hired a florist for the wedding: maybe during the week she would go into the shop and check out their prices, although she thought they would probably be out of her range. Upper Street had changed since Emma had been a child: the small family-run shops and workmen’s cafes where Emma remembered her mother taking her to buy ballpoint pens and notebooks for school, vests, and thick pajamas for the winter, and sweets and giant cream buns for a treat, had mostly gone, edged out by fashionable restaurants and upmarket stores selling expensive designer clothes and housewares. Shops that thrifty Emma could not aspire to shop in, but nor, she thought now, did she especially care to. Saving up for a fridge at John Lewis was far more her speed, thank you.