Mothers and Daughters by Minna Howard Page A

their daughter they would and they are quite nice to me. It’s almost as if they’re afraid I won’t let them see the children if they’re not, though of course I will,’ she laughed awkwardly. ‘It would give me a break sometimes to send them there and they have a nice house and garden for them to play in,’ she added as if reassuring Alice that that was the main reason she encouraged these visits. ‘But Elspeth,’ she went on, ‘lives in Richmond and she thinks as you will be their step-grandmother you ought to get together and agree on the rules and things for the children.’
    Alice bit back her despair, the feeling of entrapment. She remembered Sybil, her own mother-in-law, so different to Cecily who’d lived such a colourful life. Sybil had married a politician and her life had been taken up with entertaining all sorts of people important to his career. Her husband had died before Alice had a chance to meet him but Sybil devoted the rest of her life to her house and garden, bridge parties and good works and she disapproved of Julian choosing such a young and scatter brained bride. But she and Laura, like countless other women, had to learn to tolerate their mothers-in-law, and now, the thought hit her, she herself was to be a mother-in-law to Douglas and perhaps he was not ecstatic with the idea either. Would she have to conform to these new duties pressed upon her? ‘Wear beige and shut up,’ a friend had once described it, having just become one herself.
    ‘Getting married is always a fraught time.’ Alice remembered her own wedding, her mother geared up into overdrive about flowers, champagne and wedding venues, when all she wanted was to slip away with Julian, just the two of them, alone with their love.
    ‘But it’s going to be hard, without Dad. Who is going to lead me up the aisle?’ Laura’s eyes filled with tears.
    Alice reached out and hugged her daughter, feeling her quivering in her arms, it was on the tip of her tongue to ask if she shouldn’t postpone the wedding a little longer, make sure she really
was
doing the right thing, but before she could think how to put it, Laura said, ‘Douglas suggested one of my godfathers but James is usually drunk, so it has to be Frank. Do you know where he is, we haven’t seen him for ages?’
    ‘I didn’t want to say too much about who to have instead of Dad, as it’s so painful to think he won’t be there, but Cecily brought it up and suggested Frank too – though of course it’s entirely your decision darling who you want to lead you up the aisle. She wrote to him, just trying to make contact with him asking him to get in touch with you.’ she added quickly in case Laura was annoyed she hadn’t been consulted first. ‘We must ask him to the wedding anyway and if you want him to give you away you can ask him yourself, or have you someone else in mind?’
    ‘I do want him, I was thinking about it, there’s no one else I want, but what shall I do if Cecily can’t find him?’
    ‘If there really is no one else then perhaps I could do it. Times have changed now, darling, haven’t they? And I’ve heard of mothers taking the father’s place.’
    ‘Yes but it would be good to find Frank, no offence Mum, but I would like him to do it. Do you think he would?’ Laura said.
    ‘I’m sure if you asked him,’ Alice said, thinking of the last time she’d seen Frank. He’d been a few years younger than Julian; he could be in his fifties now. She tried to imagine him with greying hair, wrinkles and perhaps a beer belly, but all she could see was that image of him in a photograph taken many years ago. A tall, young man with laughing eyes and an irrepressible smile, who thought life, was to be snatched up in handfuls and enjoyed.
    She hoped he hadn’t changed lost that enthusiasm for life. She could do with someone on her side, someone who could show her family and Douglas’s that there was much more to her than just being a