The Youngest Bridesmaid Read Free

Piers know he ’ s to be responsible for, your trousseau as well as our debts? ”
    “ I haven ’ t asked him. Still, darling, you ’ re arranging all the sordid details of this business, aren ’ t you? ”
    “ Within reason. You haven ’ t told me where you ’ ve been. ”
    “ Shopping , precious, ” Melissa said, her blue eyes wide and disingenuous. “ We ’ re shocking poor Lou, you know, with all this blatant talk of money. She ’ s been brought up to believe that the trousseau and the wedding breakfast are matters for the bride ’ s family, haven ’ t you, Lou? ”
    Her cousin, Lou suspected, was deliberately proffering a red herring for her mother ’ s distraction, but all the same she was aware that Melissa could never resist her little dig at what she termed bourgeois standards.
    “ I ’ ve never thought about it, not having been a prospective bride, ” Lou replied, and her cousin pulled a small grimace.
    “ Put in my place, you see, ” she said to her mother, “ or could it be that my youngest bridesmaid is a tiny mite envious? Blanche darling, I ’ m dead to the world. Is Piers really coming tonight? Could I go to bed with a headache, do you suppose? ”
    Mother and daughter wandered together across the hall, tall and slim and coldly beautiful, their golden heads identical, thanks to an excellent but unimaginative hairdresser, their clothes differing hardly at all in design and elegance. Lou watched them, feeling gauche and alien. If they thought of her at all, they labelled her dull and ingenuous, she knew, the little cousin to whom one threw careless crumbs when she might prove useful, but whose feelings and opinions mattered nothing at all. Well, thought Lou, as the drawing-room door closed behind them, shutting her out, w hy should she care?
    She had been snatched up into a kind of fairy tale, thanks to the bridesmaid who had developed mumps, and if she did not altogether like what she found in this utterly foreign way of life, she could marvel and admire and store up the color and the strangeness against the drab monotony of the office to which she would eventually return.
    II
    Each day Lou awakened to the small luxury of early morning tea, curtains drawn back by a maid, and all the unfamiliar attentions which she herself had never known but which for the Chaileys were presumably commonplace. Sometimes Melissa would come and share the tea, sitting on the bed while she smoked her endless cigarettes, lovely even in the cold early light, with her hair still fastened up in pin - curls and her young face shining from last night ’ s cream.
    There had never been any opportunity for the two girls to become intimate, neither, thought Lou, would Melissa have shown much interest in the rather dull little cousin who could not be expected to share in her own conception of what constituted a good time, but Lou had admired and been humble at so much careless perfection. Watching Melissa now, and listening to accounts of parties, admirers, and the latest fashions, Lou sometimes wondered if her cousin merely wanted to impress or whether there was something on her mind which she wished to unload on to someone who was outside her usual run of intimates. If this last were true, Melissa certainly never got around to unburdening herself, and indeed, thought Lou, what could possibly be amiss in such an advantageous marriage to a man who, for so long, had been a prize just out of reach? She said as much on one occasion and was abashed by her cousin ’ s rather cynical response.
    “ Oh, yes, he ’ s a catch all right, ” she replied. “ Blanche played her cards very well—all the same, she would find herself in the soup if I ratted, wouldn ’ t she? ”
    “ Ratted? You mean if you found you didn ’ t want to marry him, after all? But surely— ”
    “ Surely my happiness would come first with my mother, you were going to say, weren ’ t you? Well, darling, the financial angle might be a bit tricky,