Flawless. Sara Craven

Susan? Resting for the big occasion?’

      ‘She’s gone with Anthony to look at the house his father is giving them as a wedding present. Apparently it needs a great deal doing to it, and work will have to start almost at once if it’s to be ready for them to move into after the wedding.’

      ‘Have they set a date yet?’ Carly asked casually. ‘I’ll need to know fairly well in advance.’

      ‘I believe they’re thinking of October,’ her mother returned. ‘I know Susan wants to talk to you about it,’ she added, after a pause.

      ‘Oh, good.’ Carly drank some of her coffee, feeling another silence about to press down on them all. She decided to prevent it. ‘How are James and Louise?’ she asked her aunt.

      ‘They seem happily settled. The farm is not too isolated, fortunately, so Louise can get into the nearby town for shopping, and other essentials. She is expecting another baby in July.’

      ‘So soon?’ That made three in just over five years, Carly thought, blinking. ‘Maybe Louise should consider spending even more time in town,’ she joked feebly.

      ‘Caroline, dear,’ her mother said repressively, while Aunt Grace looked more forbidding than ever.

      ‘I’m sorry.’ Carly drained her cup, and rose to her feet. ‘I’ll go and unpack. Am I in my old room?’

      ‘Well, actually, dear, I was wondering if you’d mind using the nursery—just this once, of course. Jean and Arthur Lewis found they could come, after all, and as it’s such a long way for them to travel I did offer …’

      ‘… my room to them.’ Carly completed the hesitant sentence. ‘Of course they must have it. They’re such old friends, after all. I quite understand. Well—I’ll see you both later.’ She paused at the door. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help, you only have to ask.’

      ‘That’s very sweet of you, dear, but everything’s under control.’

      ‘Yes,’ Carly said gently, ‘I’m sure it is.’

      Susan’s engagement to Anthony Farrar, the son of a local landowner, had been hoped for and planned for over a very long period, she thought with irony as she climbed the broad sweep of stairs. Susan had first met Anthony at a hunt ball when she was eighteen, and had made up her mind there and then to marry him. Everything that had happened since had been like a long and fraught military campaign, with triumphs and reverses in almost equal proportions.

      Carly herself had wondered more than once if Anthony was worth all this agonising over. He was attractive enough in a fair-haired, typically English way—certainly better-looking than either of his sisters, she allowed judiciously—but she’d always found him humourless, and suspected as well that he might share his father’s notoriously roving eye.

      But Susan clearly regarded her engagement as a major victory, Carly thought wryly, as she went up the second flight of stairs to the old nursery quarters. So, heaven forbid that she should be a dissenting voice amid the jubilation.

      Not that Sue would listen if I was, she thought with a sigh, as she opened the nursery door.

      It was hardly recognisable as the room she and her sister had once shared. All the old furniture had gone, and so had the toys—the doll’s house, the rocking-horse, and the farmyard animals. It was now, very obviously, a very spare bedroom, she thought, dumping her case down on the narrow single bed, furnished with unwanted odds and ends from the rest of the house. Only the white-painted bars across the windows revealed its original purpose.

      She opened her case and put the few items it contained into the chest of drawers.

      The photograph, as always, was at the bottom of the case. She extracted it, and placed it carefully on the dressing-chest next to the mirror.

      She stood for a long moment, staring at it. The child’s face looked back at her, its eager brightness diminished by the heavy glasses, and the protruding front teeth that the shy smile revealed.

      Slowly, her hands curled into taut fists at her sides, and as gradually relaxed again.

       An object lesson in how not to look.

      And one, she thought, that she would never forget.