Bridesmaids Revisited by Dorothy Cannell

said, leaning up against the door that had clanked shut behind her. “Ted’s had an accident with the pruning shears!”
     

Chapter Six
     
    “Wicked woman!” A snicker followed this screech. “I know what you did! And I’m telling! I’m telling!”
    Peering through the foliage I spotted a birdcage. Inside was a green-and-yellow parrot of portly proportions, with a furrowed-feathered brow and that barrow-boy voice.
    “That’s what Ted is forever saying to Edna,” growled Thora. “Old Polly there must have heard Ted rant those words a hundred times. He’s always threatening to tell on that woman about something. She didn’t rinse out the sink, she swept the toast crumbs under the carpet, she broke a cup. Poor Edna. She does her best. But she’s seventy. Only a couple of years younger than Rosemary, Jane, and I. But we don’t go out cleaning four days a week. And sometimes she even comes in to work on a Thursday, which is supposed to be her day off. God only knows how she gets through the weekends with Ted.”
     Thora preceded me into the kitchen and sat down at the table that was already laid for lunch. “If I’d a kindly bone in my body, I wouldn’t be talking about him like this. And I’d have gone along with Rosemary and Jane when Tom up the lane offered us a ride to the hospital. Nothing happens around here without one of the neighbors finding out in a flash. Would you like to eat now? It could be a while before Rosemary and Jane get back from the hospital. And you must already be starving.”
    “No, I’m fine. Let’s wait a bit. They may ring to let us know how things are going. Ted’s injury sounded pretty bad,” I said.
    “Could be, but then again you know how men carry on if they knick themselves shaving. Only have to bruise a knee to think their leg needs amputating.” Thora gave a grunt. “Don’t listen to me! Shock myself sometimes. But it gets my goat the way Ted treats Edna. Always accusing her of having some man on the side, because she used to enjoy the lads when she was young. Still, have to hope he pulls through. The man shouldn’t have been climbing up that stepladder to prune that tree. Not that there was ever any talking to him. Odd, though, as Edna kept saying, that he fell with the blades of those shears pointing towards him.” Thora got up from the table and put the kettle on. “Might as well have a cup of tea while we’re waiting for news.”
    So the bridesmaids were in their early seventies. My mother had been eighteen when I was born, and if Sophia had had her when she was nineteen and I was now thirty-four ... the numbers added up. My grandmother Sophia would now have been seventy-one. Not old by today’s standards. What didn’t fit the equation was my mother’s older brother, Wyndom, and her sister, Louisa. I brought up this point to Thora, sensing that she didn’t want to go on talking about Ted, when she returned to the table with our cups and saucers.
    “Peculiar no one ever told you. They were her half-siblings. Your grandfather, William Fitzsimons, was a widower of thirty-five when he married Sophia. Believe the boy was about ten at the time and the girl seven or eight.”
    “I did know that they were several years older than Mother.” I felt as though she needed defending. “We didn’t see a lot of them when I was growing up and it doesn’t surprise me now that she was reticent about anything to do with her past, given her unhappy childhood.”
    “Seems strange that your aunt and uncle didn’t mention at one time or another that their mother and Mina’s were not one and the same.” Thora shook a lock of white hair off her forehead and continued to fix me with her brightly inquisitive gaze.
    “Perhaps you never met Uncle Wyndom?” I asked.
    “Only once or twice, when he was a little boy. Wasn’t at the wedding. Neither of the children came. A hurried affair.”
    She might have said more, but I interrupted her.
    “He grew into a man only