“Oh, Sandy!” I said into her snow white hair, “It’s been so long!”
“Oh!” She sobbed, “It hasn’t been a day!” She pulled back and looked at me. Her face was wrinkled like an old piece of parchment, “Look at you! Silvia Cotton! All these years and you’re still beautiful! Hardly a wrinkle! And you’re wearing the hair clip I gave you at school!”
“Of course I am! Did you think I’d lost it?”
“I didn’t think you’d still have it!”
“A gift from my best friend? It’s a treasure!”
“Oh, Sil!” She threw her arms around me again. “My best friend!”
Oliver stood patiently to the side. When Sandra finally looked at him, he flashed that charming smile, “Sandy Ashby! The Grand Trumpeter of Bennington Palace!”
That was a nickname he had given her first year when she passed gas during a timed exam.
“It was so loud it echoed!” She had told me one night after lights out, “And it was just me and Ollie in the back of the class. So everyone turned and looked at us. I was dying from embarrassment, but Oliver just got that nutter grin and he said, ‘What? They give us a decent amount of fibre in our meals!’ Oh my God, Sil! He took the bloody fall for me!”
We had laughed so hard about it that the Professor McClellan came into our room and told us if she heard another peep again we’d both be in detention.
“Oliver,” Sandra was positively beaming at him, “Do you want the first thing I say to you to be shut up? Oh, do come here!”
He lifted her off the ground with a hug. “Ah, Sandy, it’s good to see you after all these years! You look well.”
“You look old,” She teased, “And so do I! Enough of your politeness! Come on, you two! Come inside! Have you eaten?”
Sandra brought us up into her mansion and introduced us to a few members of her staff. “They’re at your disposal,” She told us, “You can pick up any phone and dial 9.” Oliver and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. Neither of us had ever been in a home so fine.
Sandra seemed to think nothing of the surroundings. Her husband had left her the manor years earlier in exchange for her not divorcing him. “He owed me more than this,” She told me with the look that only another woman could understand, “But I took it anyway. He’s dead now, did I tell you?”
“No, you didn’t mention it.”
She nodded. There was not even a hint of emotion in her voice, “Yes, well, you know he was considerably older than me. He died in Hawaii, of all the places he could have been wasting his last moments, with his newest mistress. As if a twenty-nine year old divorcee with three children was in Hawaii with a seventy-nine year old man because she loved him!”
She glanced at Oliver, who was noticeably bored. “Ollie,” She prodded him gently, “Do you still like to golf?”
“I don’t golf, Sandy. I whack golf balls. I find it much more therapeutic than driving myself mad trying to knock a walnut into a tiny hole. Alexander is the golfer.”
She laughed, “Well, my husband was a golfer and there is a nine hole course in the back. Or, if you’d rather, you can just go whack some balls. We have plenty of grounds, I’m sure you won’t bother anyone.”
“Wicked!”
“I’ll have Jacob get you the clubs. You’re a bit taller than John was, but they should be all right.”
Between whacking golf balls and borrowing a fishing pole to fish in her stocked pond, Oliver more or less disappeared for the next week and stayed gone. It left Sandra and me alone to laugh and talk for hours. It was just like we were girls again.
She and I took a long walk on the grounds the day Oliver and I left. The conversation turned to old classmates.
“You know, Meredith Ainsworth died at Christmas. She had a nasty fall from a horse about a year before and broke her spine. She wasn’t paralyzed, but she never got back up on her feet very well. It was all downhill from there. She was my husband’s cousin’s wife. Did you know that?”
“You never told me that! I think of her from time to time. I supposed she’d married some Greek oil tycoon or a prince or something.”
Sandra laughed and shook her head, “No, not a prince, just an heir to a great fortune! James is a good man and he gave her a good life. They had five daughters, can you imagine that? Beautiful girls. Bitches all of them, but they adored her. She was a wonderful mother, too. It was effortless for her. She loved them all so much. They had a yacht and sailed all over the world together with their children.”
“Wow. I’m glad for her.”
Sandy nodded, “Meredith never changed. She never got a clue in her head and she never gained an ounce of fat on her body. Her husband absolutely adored her. He gave her everything she wanted. She had a stable full of beautiful horses, Arabians and Andalusia’s. The last time I was at her estate she asked me if I still talked to you. She wanted to know about you and Oliver, about how you two had got on after Bennington. Then she wanted to know all about Alexander. She wanted to know how he was and what had happened to him, if he was happy. When I told her he’d married Lucy she was relieved. ‘He can’t take care of himself,” she said, ‘He absolutely could never make it alone. I’m so glad he married someone who’d do it all for him so Silvia didn’t have to take care of them both’. She really did love him once. As much as she claimed to hate him after Easter that year, the way she talked about him to me that day was as if he was the one that got away.”
“For her, I’m sure he was. I don’t know what it was about them, but they were kind of special together. Still, he treated her so awful in the end.”
“Actually, she told me that after graduation he phoned her and they talked it out. She thought that there might even be a second chance, but it never came about. She thought that he was in love with you.” Sandy paused, as if waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, she continued, “I told her that was silly, but she didn’t think so. She said you, Alex and Oliver were a bizarre triangle and she knew she could never make it into a square, so she gave up hoping. She said she couldn’t compete.”
“The three of us have always been close, but I’m sure none of us ever intended on excluding her.”
Sandy smiled, “Well, she was very spoiled. Being as she was not the centre of attention, she probably felt excluded. But speaking of Alex and his exes, I saw Sarah Farnsworth not long ago in Belfast and she’s looking quite sprite. She looks ten years younger than any of us,” Sandra drew a deep breath and sighed, “When I think of us from Bennington, I still think of us all as being so young. Those are the pictures I have in my head. Us, just kids, making our way through school. We really looked out for each other, didn’t we?”
“Always. We were a family.”
“It’s hard to believe that any of us have died,” She wiped tears from her eyes. “Poor little Meredith.”
“She was sweet in her own way.”
“She was! Oh, how I hated her once! And why? In the end, we were in the same family. Cousins. We were friends,” She sighed, “And then there’s Lance. Did I ever tell you that I had a crush on him?”
“Of course you did.”
“He didn’t find me attractive. I was too tall,” She smiled. What she said was true. Lance liked Sandra, but she was not at all his choice in women being as he only stood to her chest. “But I thought he was one of the most handsome boys at Bennington.”
“He was a bit of a cutie in his day.”
“I’m just so glad I knew him. Merlyn, too. Merlyn was a nice boy. He used to help me with my luggage the first and last days of school. It was like a tradition, him helping me haul them out of the car and through the gates. I was always forgetting my code, you know, to get in, so he’d wait for me and punch his in. I don’t know why he did it,” Sandy wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on something far away.
“He did it because he liked you. Merlyn wouldn’t have stood there waiting for just anybody.”