Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

the licensed grocery which her mother ran with a hand of iron and in which she was relegated to the role of mere shop assistant. ‘I could be as good a businesswoman as Mother if she would let me,’ she wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield, ‘but she never gives me any responsibility.’ The business was destined to be Gordon’s and as soon as he finished school the Widow made him wrap himself up in a white grocer’s apron and was very annoyed when he sneaked out of the house at night to go to classes at the technical institute in Glebelands. ‘Everything he needs to know is right here,’ the Widow said, pointing to the middle of her forehead as if it were a bull’s-eye. Uncomfortable in his grocer’s apron, Gordon stood behind the polished mahogany counter looking like he might be living a quite different life inside his head.
    Then another war came and changed everything. Gordon became a hero, flying through the blue sky above England in his Spitfire. The Widow was excessively proud of her fighter-pilot son. ‘Apple of her eye,’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield. ‘Blue-eyed boy,’ Madge-in-Mirfield wrote back. Gordon was not blue-eyed. He was green-eyed and handsome.
    Eliza was a mystery. Nobody knew where she came from, although she claimed it was Hampstead. She said Hempstid the way royalty might. She indicated, although not in a way you could pin down for certain, that there was blue blood, if not money, somewhere. ‘The ruddy silver spoon’s still in her mouth,’ Madge said to Vinny when they first met Eliza. Her accent was odd, very out of place in Arden with its nicely buffed-up northern vowels. Eliza sounded stranded somewhere between a very expensive boarding-school and a brothel (or to put it another way, upper-class).
    The first time that any of Gordon’s family met the not-so-blushing bride was at the wedding. The Widow had been hoping for a nice quiet wife for her baby boy – drab with brown hair and an ability to budget. A girl who hadn’t been too educated and with ambitions that stretched no further than a local public school for the clutch of Fairfax grandchildren that she would produce. Whereas Eliza was a – ‘Vamp?’ Madge supplied eagerly.
    For her wedding, Eliza – as slender as a willow, as straight as a Douglas fir ( pseudotsuga menziesii ) – wore a navy-blue suit with a tiny pinched-in waist, with a white gardenia in her buttonhole and a little black hat made of feathers, like a ballerina’s headband. The bad black swan. No bouquet, just crimson fingernails. The Widow gave a not-so-discreet little shudder of horror.
    With her long steel-wool hair wired back in a bun, she looked like a Sicilian Widow rather than an English one. Her feelings about the wedding might be deduced from the fact that she had chosen to dress in black from top to toe. She watched intently as Gordon (‘my baby!’) slipped the wedding ring on to the finger of this peculiar creature. You would almost think she was trying to will Eliza’s finger to drop off.
    There was something odd about Eliza, they were all agreed, even Gordon, although what it was no-one could quite say. Standing behind her in the register office, Madge experienced a convulsion of envy as she noticed how thin Eliza’s ankles were beneath her unpatriotically long skirt. Like bird-bones. Vinny wanted to snap them. And her neck like a stalk. Snap.
    The Widow had insisted on paying for the reception at the Regency Hotel in case anyone thought that the Fairfaxes couldn’t afford a proper wedding. It was clear that no-one on Eliza’s side was going to turn up, let alone pay. Eliza, apparently, had nobody. They’re all dead, darling, she murmured, her dark eyes tragic with unshed tears. The same tragedy seemed to have infected her voice, throaty with notes of whisky, nicotine, velvet. She was Gordon’s treasure, found accidentally, Gordon plucking her from the wreckage of a bombed building in London when he was there on leave, even going back