Losing Nicola by Susan Moody Page A

teachers.’
    â€˜But not any other Mr Eliases.’
    Orlando looked at me oddly. ‘Who are we going to ask to your party?’
    I didn’t want Nicola to come, but Fiona had other ideas. ‘You can’t leave the girl out,’ she declared, when I showed her my list. ‘It would be unkind not to invite her.’
    â€˜I don’t really want her to come.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜She’s . . .’ Dangerous, was what I wanted to say, but if I did, I knew my mother would want to know what I meant. And I wasn’t prepared to mention the shoplifting, or Bertram Yelland. Or the way she had tried to damage Sasha Elias. ‘. . . not really my sort,’ I muttered.
    â€˜Really? I wouldn’t have guessed.’ Fiona’s glance was too shrewd for comfort. ‘I like her mother well enough, but I agree the girl is a bit of a menace. Still, since you insisted on being around her so much this holidays, you can’t very well leave her out, so you’ll just have to put up with it. Obviously we’ll invite Louise Stone, and isn’t there a brother? Maybe they’ll be able to keep some kind of a check on her.’
    â€˜Check?’
    â€˜This is your party and I’m not prepared to accept any . . .’ My mother wasn’t usually at such a sustained loss for words.
    â€˜Any what?’
    â€˜Anything untoward.’
    â€˜What does that mean?’
    â€˜Never mind.’
    â€˜If she comes, I shan’t,’ I said sulkily.
    â€˜Don’t be silly, darling.’
    â€˜I mean it!’
    But both of us knew that I didn’t. Parties were a rare enough event in our lives; a party in our own house was unheard of. We were such a large group that we rarely needed further company. Julian, Nicola and the rest spent time in our house, as we did in theirs, but for the most part, we remained self-sufficient, disconnected from the world beyond our own. Even when my father was home from Oxford, we never had people to dinner. Occasionally one of his undergraduates would show up, taking a detour from cycling round Kent or visiting Canterbury Cathedral. Sometimes my big brothers would bring home a friend from university or medical school, and very occasionally my mother would suggest I might like to invite a girl from school down for part of the holidays. The girl was always Erin Carpenter, an American from Boston. She spelled a kind of freedom – one quite different from Nicola’s wildness. I breathed more deeply when I was with Erin, saw the world in brighter colours, sensed wider horizons spreading below the edge of my own sea-encompassed limits.
    â€˜Wow!’ she would say. ‘Great!’, ‘Ok
aaaa
y!’, the second syllable floating endlessly from her wide mouth, giving it quite a different sound from the word we had been forbidden to use. Mediated through Erin, America with its spacious skies, its purple mountains, seemed boundless, munificent, a land of plenty.
    But Erin was in California, staying with her divorced father, and wouldn’t be able to come. A disappointment, especially since Fiona had promised that, as the party was partly to celebrate my birthday, I could have a new dress.
    â€˜Can it be pink?’ I said.
    â€˜Pink?’
    â€˜Oh,
please
. . .’
    â€˜I’ll see if I have something by me.’ This was a good start: Fiona nearly always had something by her.
    And indeed, a few days later, she showed me a length of pink silk brocade. ‘What do you think, darling? I saved it from before the war,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful colour?’
    â€˜Pink,’ I breathed.
    â€˜Not pink, Old Rose.’
    Old Rose. My mother’s words transformed the cloth into something magical, straight from the middle of a fairy-tale forest full of white harts and questing beasts, where a sleeping princess lay in a golden castle deep at its crimson heart.
    â€˜And Ava’s going to