But her relationship with Sunny was not the most important thing in Mary’s life. Nor, any longer, was her relationship with her husband, Fin Butler. Several times she had considered divorce. But although she had long ago realised that she did not love her husband, she nevertheless still felt friendship and affection for his bumbling way through life. And divorce seemed to Mary’s essential kindliness, too harsh a comment on their admittedly not very satisfactory life together. For Mary, Fin Butler remained an adjunct, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes convenient, a man she shared her bedroom but not her thoughts with, a figure of no vital importance in her life.
Nor was money of any importance to Mary Page Butler. She was not really rich, at least not super-rich, but she had had, all her life, sufficient money to do what she wanted. Five generations of Pages of Meyerick County had seen to that. Her great-grandfather had built railroads in South America; her grandfather had been a banker; her father had speculated in property.
Her aspirations were not high: the eight-bedroom old Rectory in the favoured southern part of Meyerick County; a few dozen acres, paddock and stables; two or three hunters and a groom to look after them. Nothing more than what she already had.
No, Mary Butler’s overwhelming concern was now different. It was age. She had been an attractive womanly woman since her early twenties, well shaped, not too tall, with pleasant features and thick brown hair. Not a showy looking woman, but distinctively well dressed all the same with clothes from New York and London, rather than Paris and Rome.
But she was now entering her fiftieth year. She exercised regularly in her own small gym and at the club pool – she had grown up to consider it vulgar to have a pool of one’s own. She still commanded the occasional appreciative glance of younger men. But she knew that she was now of an age when very soon it would be possible only to be thin or fat. The rounded slenderness, the aura of sensual warmth she had always exuded, was now on the way to being lost for ever. She was, in every way, ripe for an affair. Furthermore she was already pretty sure who it would be with.
Her sister, almost as if she were following Mary’s thoughts, touched her arm. ‘You’re looking great today,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the prettiest geriatric at the luncheon, darling.’
Mary glanced sideways at her, grimacing. Yet Sunny was not trying to be cruel, she knew that. It was simply a category Sunny liked to place her in. Not just her elder sister. A different generation. At the age of thirty-four Sunny Stevenson still looked on Mary as more a mother than a sister.
‘Geriatric? Not very kind, Sunny,’ Mary said mildly. And by God, she thought with a guilty start, after last Thursday evening, not very true either.
Sunny slid down lazily in her seat belt and watched the rain storm clearing over the rolling downland ahead. ‘So you’ve decided to resign from the Fund committee?’
‘I was a founder member, you know,’ Mary said, her eyes on the road. ‘Nearly twenty years. It’s enough.’
‘Cy won’t be pleased.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘You’ve always been a loyal supporter.’
‘Not an uncritical one at times,’ Mary said with a hint of sharpness. She hated the idea of being taken for a pushover.
‘Who’s going to take your place,’ Sunny asked, not really interested.
Mary sideglanced her. ‘We need young blood. Not another geriatric.’
‘Sorry.’
Mary smiled. ‘Just evening the score. How about you?’
‘For the committee?’
‘Why not?’
‘To be candid it bores me.’
Mary drew in her breath, sharply disapproving. Sunny shrugged, reached over and patted Mary’s hand. ‘What I love about you, Mary, is that you have inherited the old Page conscience. Enough for both of us.’
Was that it? Mary wondered. Was that why she couldn’t quite feel towards her sister as she should, because of that smug, myopic certainty which made her incapable of realising that life could deliver blows, that fortunes could be lost, people she loved or at least liked mangled in car accidents? Perhaps the simple truth was, Mary told herself, that Sunny just wasn’t very bright. Or was maybe just plain lazy about the way she thought of others, about the way she took them for granted. Perhaps Mary should have handed her out a few sharp lessons years ago.
Of course it was too late now. A sharp lesson. A shock.
It would be if she knew! Mary felt a thrill of excitement pass through her as the image of that brief, improbable moment on Thursday night again invaded her thoughts. A thrill of excitement and a flush of guilt.
They drove on in silence until they breasted the last hill and the Meyerick Country Club lay below them, its low building and stone tourette set in well-kept lawns and gardens, with yew hedges discreetly surrounding shale tennis courts and swimming pools. Even from the hill the parking lot was barely visible behind the line of pine trees that acted as a shield.
Mary waved her hand towards the valley. ‘Don’t you ever feel slightly uneasy about all this, Sunny?’
Her sister’s eyes were closed. ‘About what?’ she said without opening her eyes.
A surge of anger passed through Mary. ‘About having all this. About having life so easy.’
Sunny opened one eye and grunted a negative. ‘Not when my husband’s charging them two hundred and fifty dollars a plate for this lunch.’ She struggled upright in her seat. ‘And at least that much for the tombola unless they want to look cheap.’
They drove into the parking lot and found a place beside Fin Butler’s green Jaguar.
Sunny slipped her seat belt. ‘God,’ she said, ‘I hope there are not going to be too many drunken speeches. Or too many drunks.’
‘Keep an eye on Fin for me,’ Mary said as they walked across the gravel to the striped awning.
‘Why?’ Sunny asked laconically. ‘Who will you be keeping an eye on?’
Did she mean that?
They gained the shade of the awning and were welcomed by the Irish doorman. ‘Some party today, ladies! And the prizes for the tombola are enough to make your eyes pop.’
They smiled politely and moved into the main clubroom. The long room was set with tables in a squared off U-shape. The sunlight shafts touched the glasses and cutlery and deepened the wine red upholstery of the chairs. Maids in black skirts and white blouses moved back and forth across the room. Vic Impari and his red-coated bar staff clustered round the side table from which the selected wine would be served: an old dry Amontillado sherry would accompany the lobster bisque; a Chateau Rabaut Promis, a Sauterne, was, in the new French manner, to accompany the foie gras; and a 1982 La Lagune claret had been chosen for the quail. There would be one of the newly acquired Burgundies for the cheese and a vintage champagne to finish the lunch. None of this, Vic Impari was thinking, included the whiskies, martinis and gin and tonics which would prepare the guests for their gastronomic ordeal. Vic Impari swallowed his resentment.
As the old bell from the long demolished Meyerick court house began to toll in its new resting place high in the tourette, the club members and their guests came in to take their places. There was much banter and a mock jostle for position. What had been for deadly real were the struggles over the last few weeks of each member to make certain he or she was sitting beside someone they wanted to sit with. Now it was the time among the ladies of the club for low, whispered comment or a show of surprise as they were led to their places.
Mary, between Colonel George Savary and a New York bond salesman from the north end of the county, was content enough. Her husband, Fin, was not yet in his place. But sitting there at the top end of the table between the wife of a State senator and a modestly successful actress from New York, Cy Stevenson looked good. A handsome figure.