A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George

went back to calling herself India Elliott after that, something that Charlie discovered when he phoned the clinic. He’d been upset—“Come along, India. What man
wouldn’t
be?”—but she’d held firm.
    That was before his mother showed up. Cleverly, Caroline had made an appointment at the clinic. More clever still, she’d made it under the surname MacKerron, which India glanced at but didn’t twig to as she took the folder from the holder mounted on the treatment room’s door, opening the first in prelude to opening the second. C. K. MacKerron was the patient’s name. New, she saw. Married, she saw.Female, she saw. Forty-nine years old and a martyr to unspecified hip pain.
    She said, “Mrs. MacKerron,” as she entered, and then she stopped on the threshold with the doorknob still in her hand.
    Caroline’s first words were, “Please don’t be angry, India. I thought you might not see me if I used Goldacre. I’ve had to come to London for an event with Clare, so I decided . . . Well, you see.” She was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the corner of the treatment room. The light was dim, as it would be in a clinic built from what remained of the ruin that had been Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding of an ancient Saxon church. Destroyed in the Blitz, what had been the church was a garden now defined by concentric circles, a fountain to dull the roar of traffic from Lower Thames Street, lush plantings, and ancient walls reaching upward, unroofed, to the sky. Only Wren’s original tower remained and in this was the clinic. Small rooms and few windows defined the space.
    India didn’t know what to say, so she went with, “I’m not at all angry,” which was the truth. She wasn’t sure what she
did
feel at this unexpected sight of her mother-in-law, aside from surprise at the amount of weight Caroline was continuing to gain, but the heartbeat that tapped lightly behind her eardrums told her it was something and she would do herself a service to know.
    She set the patient folder on a counter. She herself sat on the physician’s stool. The treatment table stood between them.
    Caroline said, “You’ve done yourself up. Your hair, the new cut of it and the colour, the makeup as well . . . I don’t quite know what to say about it. It’s unexpected. You were always so natural.”
    “Indeed. I was.” India didn’t add what she could have. That her natural look had been manufactured, at Charlie’s insistence and to please his mother. Caroline Goldacre didn’t like to see young women who—as she put it—felt the need to alter their “native” looks. What Charlie had never been able to explain was why his mother felt like that when she herself was so thoroughly dyed and painted. But she’d cooperated with Charlie—had India—even to the extreme of going au naturel on her wedding day. What on earth had she been thinking? India asked herself now.
    Caroline opened her handbag, and for a moment India thought she was going to bring forth a gift, which she was going to have to refuse. But it was a packet of tissues, and Caroline opened it and took one, as if knowing it was going to be needed in the next few minutes. She said, “She told me you’re India Elliott now. Over the phone when I made the appointment and said Goldacre, they said it’s Elliott now. What am I to take it that means? He’s devastated already. This will probably kill him. No, don’t say anything. Just listen for a moment, and I’ll be gone.”
    India knew where this meeting would head. She already felt wretched about leaving Charlie, as if she’d stamped on someone who was already lying wounded in the street. But she’d also done everything she knew to do in order to help him recover from his brother’s death, and they’d reached a point where Charlie himself had to do something, which he would not.
    Caroline seemed to read this response on India’s face because she said, “There’s no timeline on grief. You