Lily followed me out of the barn, but Rosemary was nowhere to be seen, and no one else seemed to know where she was either.
‘I can’t believe she got it wrong.’
‘She does seem a bit stressed.’
‘She’s an islander woman, relinquishing control of one of the most important days of her daughter’s life. You bet she’s stressed.’ We wandered around the side of the barn towards the house, Lily suggesting Rosemary might have nipped back for something, but Celine caught up with us on the front yard.
‘Iris wants you for a bridesmaid photo,’ she said, slightly breathless. ‘Hey, Emmie. Looks like you’ve been slaving away, bless you.’
‘Hi.’ I glanced down at my sweaty T-shirt and resisted the urge to redo my ponytail, hoping she couldn’t see me quaking as I forced myself to look at her.
However firmly I told myself that today was about Iris and Hugh, not some preposterous grudge, it didn’t make it any easier to stand in front of the woman who was trying to bully me away from Pip and off the island and pretend I didn’t know that she must know full well I knew it was her.
Celine looked as gorgeous as I’d have expected in a sleeveless, lemon, A-line dress and strappy heels, the top half ofher hair twisted into plaits like a laurel wreath, the rest loose waves. Her smile innocent, if a little tense.
Lily briefly explained the timing issue with the pasties as we walked over to where Iris and Hugh were still under the tree with the photographer, Violet waiting to one side with her nieces.
My heart lurched to see Pip, fiddling with the posy in Flora’s hair, in a moss-green suit that fitted perfectly. I couldn’t have felt more like a sweaty, scruffy outsider amongst all this wedding finery.
Then he turned towards us, eyes widening in surprise when he saw me. The expression on his face made none of that matter. He looked as though he didn’t see the messy hair and rumpled clothes, but the actual me, underneath all of that. And as if he thought that person was as lovely as a bride in her wedding dress.
I could have stood there, gawking back at him, until the pasties had all gone stale. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do anything else, until Celine stalked right up to him and brushed at something that wasn’t there on his lapel, breaking the moment.
‘Emmie got the times wrong, so we need to hurry up with the photos,’ Celine said, once she’d thoroughly wiped off the imaginary whatever it was.
‘Um, no she didn’t,’ Lily corrected. ‘It was Ma who told her three-thirty.’
There was a brief discussion, whereby Iris and Hugh happily agreed to one more posed photo with the bridesmaids while Pip rounded up the waiters and I raced back to the kitchen to start serving.
‘There we go, issue solved, potential disaster averted,’ Lily said, so pointedly that I wondered if she also suspected some sort of interference. As I hurried past the barn, I considered stopping to ask Rosemary if Celine had been the one to tell her the time had changed. No one else had a reason to, and shehad the least to lose if the food was lukewarm or dry. However, Rosemary was chatting with a group of people I didn’t know, so I decided not to bother opening that can of worms unless I needed to – which I very much hoped I wouldn’t.
As I started transferring the first batch of pasties – maybe a few minutes past their peak, but thankfully still utterly delectable – onto a platter, I couldn’t shift the sense that something wasn’t quite right. The trolley, which I’d positioned ready by the table, was now a couple of feet away. While I wanted to believe that someone probably nudged it as they moved past to get to the bathroom, I would have been naïve not to consider that it might have been moved for more sinister reasons.
With dread pounding in my chest, I broke open a random pasty and checked through the contents, including a good sniff and a quick taste.
‘Quality checking, or unable to resist the best pasties in the universe?’ Pip asked, appearing in the doorway.
‘I don’t normally, but timings are never the same in a different oven. And, well, it is a special occasion.’
‘You really need an independent opinion, then,’ he said, walking over and breaking off a piece, then waving it underneath his nose. ‘Hmmm. I’m getting hints of mole, maybe a smidgen of cowboy hat, classic literature, and chicken feathers. Do I detect overtones of interference from my bossy big sister?’
‘If you want to be useful,’ I said, unable to help laughing, ‘you can unload all the veggie pasties from the Aga onto that dish.’
For the next few minutes, we worked as quickly as possible to load up the platters as the waiting staff bore them away to the Old Barn. Even with the door and windows open, it was sweltering work, and, despite having ditched his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves and undone the top two buttons of his white shirt, Pip looked as hot and bothered as me by the time we’dfinished. Hot, bothered and that dichotomy of dishevelled-man-in-formalwear that did nothing to help me cool down.
‘This is genius catering,’ he said, leaning back against the table and wiping his face with his pocket square. ‘Twenty minutes of hard graft, but then it’s all done.’
‘Um, quite a few hours of hard graft over the past few days. And it’s not done; there’s a pile of baking trays to wash, and the cake needs serving.’
‘The cake!’ Pip’s face lit up at the thought. ‘Have you seen it? Mammaw was being all secretive about the design. She finished the icing while we were setting up this morning.’
‘It’s in the fridge.’ Aster had lived up to her reputation as the best cake-maker on the island. The two tiers were decorated with edible sunflowers, a pair of yellowy-green siskins nestled together on the top. The sides were edged with waves of piping to represent the sea, and the overall effect was sweet and yet exquisite. ‘I’m under strict orders to keep it on the middle shelf until the cake-cutting in about half an hour, but I won’t tell anyone if you sneak a peek.’
Pip opened the fridge door a few inches and winked at me before pressing one eye against the gap.
I turned away with a smile and started filling the sink with hot water.
‘Emmie.’
