Chapter Nineteen 2020 #2
There was an awkward silence. It was an odd story for Louis to choose, because it captured our family in all its weirdness and dysfunction.
Nanny-reared children who thought the supermarket was exotic.
A sad little kid who sensed she was worth less than her sibling.
My texting spree on Annabelle’s phone would have gone down much better.
Louis was ordinarily so good with civilians.
He had Mum’s gift of bewitching them while bonding with them at the same time. Then I realised this story was for me.
Jack laughed, breaking the silence. “That’s not a bad story,” he said. He had an innate sense of the collective mood and a knack for shifting it back into cheery territory whenever it drifted. “That’s Lexi, being brave and selfless.”
Paula circled the table, topping up everyone’s glasses.
She placed a gentle hand on Louis’s shoulder as she filled his flute.
It was a mother’s touch, warm and unheeding.
Paula wore her hair down to her waist. She had tattoos and multiple piercings.
But there was something about her that always reminded me of Mum. Louis’s eyes met mine again.
“What a strange way you two grew up,” Paula mused. “Now tell us all about the wedding. Are they letting your fiancée have any Hindu traditions during the ceremony?”
The next day, we drove down to the peninsula to camp for a few days.
Paula held Ragu by the collar as he watched us pile into the car and drive away without him.
Jack’s aunt lived on an acreage that overlooked the sand flats of Bellettes Bay.
She spent most of the year travelling abroad and encouraged us to use the beach whenever we liked.
It was technically a coastal reserve, but since it could only be accessed by the sandy path from her property, the beach was as good as hers.
We packed our things into her wheelbarrow and ambled down the tree-lined slopes so that we could set up our tents on the water’s edge.
Pine trees planted a couple of centuries ago had begun to yield to the shifting sands.
Their great trunks swayed towards the water and their roots rose up like the tentacles of an enormous sea creature.
When the tide was out, the vast beach was like an unfamiliar planet.
Creatures skittered around our feet. Strange craters pockmarked the sand where stingrays once burrowed.
Birds arrived for their evening feast. All around us were the haunting hills of the Tasman Peninsula.
The pale trunks of the gums looked like skeletons in the distance.
Whenever I was here, I thought of the men who dared to escape the penal colonies to try their luck in the southern wilds.
How frightening it must have been to walk into the ancient forest with no food and no plan.
What horrors awaited them if they chose to remain in the convict camps.
It was strange to see Louis and Jack together.
They were the two halves of my life, and now they were building a fire, discussing the best options for kindling and fuel wood.
I could tell that they liked each other, and I was inexplicably relieved by this.
Finn and I made dinner while Louis and Jack tended the fire and talked.
We had gone to the farmers market the day before so we could make fresh pasta with smoked mozzarella and tomatoes from Paula’s garden.
We ate by firelight and the fading summer sun that refused to set until 8 p.m.
“This is good, Lexi,” Louis said, surprised. “How did you learn to cook?”
“It turns out cooking is chemistry.”
I had been nervous about him seeing this life of mine, in which I worried about bank overdrafts and filed tax returns and tried to remember how long it had been since I’d been to the dentist. But he was here, and he was getting on with the two most important people I had.
“Once we were walking the Overland Track and possums broke into our stash and ate all the food Lexi had insisted on bringing,” Jack said.
“Oh, yeah, we had to have pasta with olive oil and salt,” I said, remembering the driving rain and clinging mud of our seven-day odyssey through the bush. “Honestly, it’s still the best meal I’ve ever had.”
“It was so good,” Jack agreed, his face a marvel in the campfire’s flickering light.
“Pretty sure we were just starving, guys,” Finn said around a mouthful of linguine. He turned in his camp chair. “Where are you going for your honeymoon, Louis?”
My brother looked up. “Oh, uh, South Africa. Amira’s family has a hunting lodge there. It’s our favourite place. It’s totally isolated, and there’s a waterhole. You can watch animals gathering at dusk. It’s pretty great.”
Amira cared little for the lodge. I would have thought she’d want a honeymoon in the Maldives or Bora Bora.
But I had also assumed she wanted a husband who would have sex with her, and I was wrong about that too.
I’d told no one of their arrangement, even as the carefully arranged paparazzo set-ups gave way to a formalised agreement that was taking them all the way to the altar at Westminster Abbey.
The deliberately grainy photos from Patagonia had escalated into handholding on ski slopes and kissing on the dancefloor of Mahiki.
Like almost everyone else in the world, Jack and Finn believed Louis had fallen in love with my best friend.
I had learned Louis and Amira were engaged along with everyone else when they posed for photographs at Wolseley House. Amira looked radiant on Louis’s arm, dressed in a forest-green Victoria Beckham dress that perfectly offset Mum’s hunk of emerald on her finger.
But the ring belonged to me. The terms of the will stated that it be kept in a safe deposit box until my own engagement or until I turned thirty—whichever came first. The palace had told the tabloids that I had been so overjoyed my twin was marrying my best friend that I immediately gifted him the ring.
When it suited them, I was the selfish, preening princess who refused to speak to her poor family for reasons unknown; the next week I was a cherished sister who handed over one of the few reminders of her mother in support of her brother’s marriage.
I had never seen myself as the marrying kind, but in the weeks after the engagement announcement, I found myself googling photos of the ring on Amira’s hand, pinching and zooming in so I could get a better look.
I wondered whose idea it had been to undermine Mum’s will yet again—Papa’s or Louis’s—so they could deny me one more piece of her.
At first, I’d refused to have anything to do with the wedding, ignoring Stewart’s quiet inquiries about whether I might be willing to be Amira’s bridesmaid.
But a few weeks later, I found myself in need of his help.
Finn and I had met Jack and Georgia at a pub in town for drinks, and when we came out a few hours later, a photographer was waiting for me on the kerb.
Most of the men who followed me used long lenses and hid behind trees and postboxes, but this one rushed forward, blinding us with his incessant flashes.
“On the turps again, sweetheart?” he said. “Making Daddy proud, are you? Nasty little tart.”
I was more ashamed than afraid, but the lights were making me dizzy, and I nearly stumbled over. Finn grabbed Georgia and me by the hands and pulled us away.
“Off you run, you stupid bitch!” The photographer laughed. “I know where you live.”
Dazed by the cameras, it took us a moment to realise Jack wasn’t with us. When we went back, he had the photographer pinned to the wall of the pub. Jack’s eyes were blazing, and the man gasped and struggled in his grip.
“Stay away from her,” Jack seethed. “If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”
A week later, a police car had pulled up at the vineyard.
The photographer wanted to press charges, and the investigation had got far enough that they were going to check the pub’s CCTV cameras.
When Jack started looking for a lawyer, I called Stewart, who had a knack for making problems disappear.
In exchange for settling matters with the photographer, Stewart asked that I come to London in a few months’ time and hold Amira’s train while she walked down the aisle.
I never admitted to Jack that I had struck this bargain to keep him out of trouble.
But Georgia was clearly suspicious when the charges were dropped on the same day the palace announced that I was to be Amira’s bridesmaid.
Georgia and I had been friends for years, but she suddenly became distant, and then cold, and finally outright hostile.
She and Jack began to argue constantly, and when she asked him to move to New York with her, the atmosphere in the cottage went from uncomfortable to unbearable.
I hated the idea that he might leave, though I pretended to be agnostic about the decision he had to make.
Two weeks before Louis’s visit, I’d been getting into my car as Georgia stalked across the gravel towards her own.
She said nothing, but she looked at me with such barely contained hatred that I knew she and Jack had just broken up.
She moved to New York alone, blocked my number and never spoke to me or Jack again.
I wasn’t sure if Louis knew how my presence in the wedding party was secured, but I was hardly going to ask him about it when he’d come all this way to see me.
After dinner, we listened to Louis’s stories from his travels.
He had taken up extreme sports—cave diving, heli-skiing and whitewater rafting.
“I really want to try volcano boarding next,” he said. “They do it in Indonesia and Vanuatu—nice and close if you ever wanted to do it. It’s supposed to be an incredible rush.”
“Wait, so you snowboard into a volcano?” Finn asked.