The Perfect Girl

TESSA

The glass of wine that Maria pours me is tiny, because she knows I’m driving. I’m grateful she’s remembered, in spite of what’s going on, because it’s not the sort of thing you can easily bring up in front of Zoe. I take the glass from her and reach for one of the olives.

‘It would be lovely to eat.’

I am hungry actually, but I’d be saying it even if it wasn’t true. I don’t know what Maria’s playing at exactly, but she’s definitely buying time.

Chris, for the first time in my experience, looks lost. Their kitchen is vast, cavernous compared to the small space that Richard and I share at home, and he stands in the middle of it, glass in hand, lit up as brightly as our surgical theatre at work by the halogens, and somehow wrong-footed by Maria’s unexpected assertiveness.

Light glances off every surface in this room, all of them shined or polished or brushed, and I understand why my sister always looks so put together. There’s nowhere in here where you won’t see some version of yourself reflected back at you, nowhere where others will be able to watch you in any way other than forensically.

When I look at Chris, who I’ve always thought of as a benign king of his castle, I can clearly see that he’s wrestling with a dilemma.

I recognise this easily because I see it frequently in the owners of pets I treat. The biggest and trickiest dilemma that many of them face is whether to continue prolonging the life of their animal, or to end its suffering. Some people want me to make the decision for them, though I can’t do that. Some break down, others wrestle silently with it, faces contorted by the effort of not showing emotion in public, knuckles white around a limp dog lead, or on the handle of a cage, objects that might soon just be mementos, and this is what Chris looks like.

Chris’s dilemma is this: to assert himself, or to back down for now, to play a longer game. He has this dilemma because I don’t think he believes Maria.

I wouldn’t.

While he cogitates, Maria takes the lifeline I’ve thrown her.

‘How hungry are you?’ she says.

‘Absolutely bloody starving,’ I say. ‘I could eat a horse.’ This is the kind of joke we unashamedly make at the clinic. Amongst the vets and support staff we have a competition to use as many animal-related sayings as possible.

Chris takes a long sip of his drink and walks over to gaze out at the garden. It looks magnificent. It’s a huge plot for the location, with a couple of fabulous mature large specimen trees and a view from the end of it across the city.

‘I’ll lay the table out here shall I then?’ he asks Maria.

‘That would be lovely. We could use the new lights.’

Chris says to me, ‘Would you like to phone Richard? See if he can join us? That would be nice.’

I’m surprised by this because Chris is well aware of Richard’s proclivity for drink. It’s an open secret in the family. His question gets Maria’s attention too. She looks at him, and then she says, words crisply clear: ‘Richard’s got summer flu. Best let him sleep it off. I don’t want Grace to catch anything.’

Chris’s eyes narrow because all three of us know that the chances of Richard having summer flu are very, very small. I’m sure I’m not the only one amongst us who is imagining Richard right now, passed out somewhere, stinking of booze, and depression; catatonic with it.

‘What about me?’ We all turn to look at Lucas because it’s not often that he addresses a room full of people. Lucas is a one-on-one person. He’s only usually comfortable with an audience if he’s sitting at a piano, insulated by his performance.

‘Doesn’t it matter if I get flu? Or Zoe?’ He says it really deadpan. He has a surprisingly deep voice.

Maria’s eyebrows raise and she exhales sharply.

‘That’s very rude!’ Chris snaps.

‘No, no, it’s OK. It’s a reasonable question,’ Maria says, her hands up, palms outwards. ‘I thought it would go without saying that we don’t want either of you to get sick. Of course we don’t.’

‘Apologise!’ Chris crosses to the table where Lucas sits and leans over it, head hovering closer to his son than it needs to. In the civilised confines of this room, with the smell of oil-brushed baguette toasting and the drifting scent of somebody else’s barbecue through the open doors, this stands out as a gesture of aggression. Lucas’s head jerks back. He reads it the same way I do. There’s surprise on his face.

‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ Lucas says it to her nicely enough but drops his gaze quickly afterwards, and turns his head away from his father a little, and begins to insert candles into their holders, each one making a small sound as it lands. I’ll admit, I’m shocked. Zoe has her back to them at the grill; she doesn’t see it. Maria has been watching with eyes that look blank.

‘Sweetheart,’ Maria says to Lucas, and for the first time I see her composure wobble. Her voice rattles like pebbles in a jar. ‘It’s fine, really. Could you possibly pop those out on the garden table for me when you’re done? It might need a wipe first. And if you’re starving, Tess, I could whip up some chicken Parmigiana? If you’d like that?’

Two things strike me. Firstly, nobody whips up chicken Parmigiana. It’s a beast of a recipe, involving breadcrumbs and eggs and dunking and bashing of meat and then sauces and grilling and baking. It’s a labour of love, to be prepared starting at five in the evening, not late on a Sunday evening. I wonder if my sister can really be trying to cook herself out of this situation, because it’s surely a doomed effort; she can’t keep cooking for ever. My second thought is, it’s my favourite dish, and Maria knows that.

‘That would be amazing,’ I say and she gives a small nod.

‘Great! I hoped you’d want some! We can have an impromptu supper in the garden!’

It’s strange, because I’m not normally the focus of her hostess-charm. It’s a new skill, which she’s developed since being with Chris, and usually I watch her from the sidelines, exempt from being its target myself. The pre-accident Maria ran her household as a ‘take-us-as-you-find-us’ affair, with a shoe-strewn hallway and a kitchen where you’d have to shift the Sunday supplements to find a space to sit. It was relaxed and informal.

It was everything that Chris, bless him, isn’t.