Eliza would be there soon. Lilia thought that they’d sit under the apple tree. It was shady there and she liked to listen to the sleepy buzzing of the bees and smell the warm grass, like hay. Eliza always had tea with Lilia on Saturday afternoons. Salmon and cucumber sandwiches and lemon-curd tarts. Thank heavens the tuna fish and banana fell out of favor eventually. It was a Saturday afternoon when she had brought Lilia’s invitation to the wedding, and she had asked Lilia then what her mother would have thought of Henry; would she have liked him and would she approve of their marriage? Eliza had looked so young in spite of her overdone hair and her stiff, new clothes, so anxious for approval, and so keen for someone to reassure her that this would be the “happy ever after” that she was longing for. Lilia had been a coward. She had lied.
Henry turned and saw his bride creeping nervously down the aisle and smiled. But there was no tenderness softening his face. It was the smile of a man taking delivery of a smart new car; not that of a groom melting at the sight of his beloved bride. As she arrived at his side and her father placed her hand in his, Henry looked smug; he approved. The vicar announced the hymn. As the congregation struggled through “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer,” Lilia could feel the panic bubbling inside her like jam in a saucepan about to boil over.
Lilia always used the best china tea things on a Saturday, and the lemon-curd tarts always perched on a glass cake stand. The sandwiches were ready and the kettle had boiled, ready to warm the pot. It was their own little tea party and they had been doing it since her mother died. Today Lilia had a present for her.
A hush is a dangerous thing. Silence is solid and dependable, but a hush is expectant, like a pregnant pause; it invites mischief, like a loose thread begging to be pulled. The vicar started it, poor chap. He asked for it. When Lilia was a little girl during the war, they had a house in London. There was an Anderson shelter in the garden, but they didn’t always use it. Sometimes they just hid under the table; madness, she knew, but you had to be there to understand it. When the doodlebugs were raining down, the thing they all feared most was not the bangs and the crashes and the earsplitting explosions, but the hush. The hush meant that that bomb was for you.
“If any person here present knows of any reason why . . .”
The vicar launched the bomb. There was a hush, and Lilia dropped it.
As the bride swept back down the aisle alone, her face was lit by a beaming smile of relief. She looked truly radiant.
Eliza had given him back the ring. But the ruby had fallen out on the day of the wedding and they never found it. Henry was livid. Lilia imagined his face the color of the lost stone. They should be in Marbella now. Eliza would have preferred Sorrento, but it wasn’t smart enough for Henry. In the end, he took his mother with him instead. And Eliza was coming to tea with Lilia. On her seat was her present. Nestled in silver tissue paper and tied with a pale blue ribbon was the Schiaparelli. He never loved her anyway.