Rosemary Lane
Portia is getting upset. I can hear it in her voice as she calls up the church, the caterers, the photographer. Currently she is on the telephone with the dress shop. "A code word, yes, that's right. In case my mother calls and pretends to be me." Pause. "Actually that is fairly likely to happen." Pause. "Well she wants to change our wedding colours."
This is an understatement. Cathy does not merely want to change the colours of her daughter's bridesmaid dresses. Cathy wants the dresses made in a completely different style, by a different and considerably more expensive seamstress, and she wants there to be six more of them so that all Portia's cousins can be bridesmaids as well. On this last point, it occurs that there is nothing to stop Cathy from simply ordering six extra dresses in the same style and foisting the additional bridesmaids on Portia ten minutes before she is due to walk down the aisle.
I can tell from Portia's tone of voice that the girl on the other end is less than convinced. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility of eight bridesmaids in puce satin.
Portia hangs up. Her finely manicured fingers pick out the next number. I listen as she goes through the same embarrassing procedure with the owners of the reception venue. I am supposed to be helping her make the invitations, but her restrained despair both distracts and amuses me. Besides, Portia's mother has already sent out invitations to ninety of her own guests.
Why doesn't she simply move and not tell her mother where she's gone? But Portia would never leave, and we both know why. Like me, she is a Rosemary Lane child.
Nobody outside the village has even thought about Rosemary Lane for twenty-five years. The building itself is a doctor's surgery now, and they have even changed the name of the road. But Rosemary Lane remains a presence here, like the empty chair at the head of a table. An absence with a shape; a secret nobody talks about and everybody knows. Here, Portia is still special. Here, she belongs.
A new couple tried to move here when I was nine. People still talk about it now. Their daughter was the same age as me. A few years either side and she would have been okay, but I could see the looks our mums were giving her when she turned up at Brownies one week. She was just like us--the same black plimsolls, the same neat hair, the same well-bred Middle English accent--and yet at the sight of this new face, the slim, protective arms of our mothers crept around us for reasons I could not yet understand...
Dramatis personae:
Cathy Rambridge,
Olivia Bishop, mothers
Portia Rambridge
Charmaine Fox
Helen Harding, Rosemary Lane girls
Rachel Fox
Mia Nowak
Frank Hare, Rosemary Lane personnel
Alex Nowak, a schoolteacher
Leonard Appleby, a psychiatrist