It was Alex’s aunt, the woman she had seen him with in Prague, looking, if anything, even more soignée and elegant now than she had done then. The exquisite tailoring of her charcoal-grey suit made Beth sigh in soft envy. If she had only added a picture hat and a small toy dog on a lead she could have posed for a Dior advertisement of the fifties. Very few women of her own generation could boast of having such a lovely neat waist, Beth acknowledged as Alex’s aunt waited for the van driver to open the shop door and then stand back, allowing Alex’s aunt to sweep through.
‘This is very good,’ she told Beth without preamble. ‘Alex told me that you had a good eye and I can see that he is right. That is a very pretty display of pieces you have in your window, although perhaps you might just redirect the spotlight on them a little. If you have some ladders I could perhaps show you...’
Beth was too bemused to feel affronted, and besides, she had come to very much the same decision herself only this afternoon.
‘I have brought you your glass,’ she added, and then said more severely, ‘I hope you understand that we do this only as the very greatest favour because it is for family. It has been very expensive to pay the workpeople to work extra and push your order through. I have a rich—a very rich—oil sheikh who right at this mome
nt has had to be told that his chandelier is not quite ready. This is not something I would normally like to do, but Alex was most insistent, and when a man is so much in love...’
She gave a graceful shrug of her shoulders.
‘I have come here with it myself since we do not normally sell our glassware to enterprises such as yours. We sell, normally, by personal recommendation, direct to our customers. That is our...our speciality. We do not...how would you say?...make so much that it can be sold as in a supermarket.’ She gave another dismissive shrug. ‘That is not our way. We are unique and...exclusive.’
‘Yes, you may put them here,’ she instructed the van driver, who was wheeling in a large container. ‘But carefully, carefully...
‘Oh, yes, I thank you. I nearly forgot...’ She thanked the chauffeur as he followed the van driver in and handed her a large rectangular gift-wrapped package.
‘This is for you,’ she told Beth, to Beth’s astonishment. ‘You will not open it yet. That is not permitted. You will open it with Alex—he will have one too—when you are together. It is a gift of betrothal—a tradition in our family.’
Betrothal!
Beth stared at her. Alex’s aunt was so very much larger than life, so totally compelling that Beth felt completely overwhelmed by her. By rights she ought to be telling her that there was no way she could accept the order she had just brought. She just couldn’t afford it. And she should also tell her that she resented Alex’s high-handed attitude in giving his family an order on her behalf without consulting her in the first place. And as for his aunt’s comment about a betrothal...
‘It is also very much a tradition that the men of our family fall in love at first sight. My husband, who was also my second cousin, fell in love with me just by seeing my photograph. One glimpse, that was all it took, and then he was on his way to my parents’ home to beg me to be his wife. We were together as man and wife for just two years and then he was killed...murdered...’
Beth gave a small convulsive shiver as she saw the look in the older woman’s eyes.
‘I still feel the pain of his loss today. It has been my life’s work to do with the factory what he would have wished to be done. One of my greatest sorrows is that he did not live to see our family reunited. Alex is very much like him. He loves you. You are very lucky to have the love of such a man,’ she told Beth firmly.
Beth simply had no idea what on earth to say to her, much less how to tell her that she had got it all wrong, that Alex most certainly did not love her.
‘This is good,’ she informed the van driver, who had now brought in what Beth sincerely hoped was the last packing case. There were six of them in all, filling her small shop, and she dreaded to think what the cost of their contents must be. Quite definitely much, much more than she could afford, with her empty bank account and her burdensome overdraft.
‘I really don’t think...’ she began faintly. But trying to stop Alex’s aunt was like trying to stop the awesome magnificence of some grandly rolling river at full flood—impossible!
‘You will please remove the covering,’ Alex’s aunt was instructing the van driver, waving one elegantly manicured hand in the direction of the boxes.
Beth didn’t dare look at him. This was an egalitarian age, an age of equality in which, Beth suspected, the last time a man had removed something from its packing for her had been when her father had opened her last babyhood Easter egg. But to her astonishment, far from reacting with the surly resentment she had expected to Alex’s aunt’s request, the van driver immediately, enthusiastically complied. Beth acknowledged the uneasy suspicion crowding her already log-jammed thoughts: he must have been promised an extremely generous tip indeed.
‘No. No more,’ Alex’s aunt commanded, once the lids were removed and the van driver was about to delve into the polystyrene chips surrounding the contents.
‘First we must have champagne,’ she told Beth firmly. ‘I have brought some with me and we shall drink it from proper glasses. It is a small ritual I always insist on when we hand over a completed order...a superstition we have that it is bad luck not to do so.’
‘Er... I...’ Beth had some pretty champagne flutes made of the same glass and in the same style as her new window display. Quickly she went to get them, reflecting ruefully that it would be far more appropriate to be using Waterford crystal—only her personal finances did not run to such luxuries.
Although Alex’s aunt did raise her eyebrows a little at the glasses Beth produced, to Beth’s relief she did not raise any objections.
This whole situation was completely surreal, Beth decided dizzily as Alex’s aunt uncorked the champagne with a deftness that left Beth in awe. The van driver and the chauffeur had been dismissed, and only the two of them were left in the shop.
‘You will open this first box,’ Beth was instructed as Alex’s aunt removed the top package from the nearest packing case.
Obediently Beth did as she was told, her fingers trembling slightly as she eased the carefully wrapped glass out of a box of six.
The theatricality with which Alex’s aunt was surrounding the whole event was impossibly dramatic. Beth could just imagine the chaos it would cause if she were to react to every delivery they received like this. But once the glass was free of its covering, and she could see it properly, any irritation she had felt at Alex’s aunt’s high-handedness was banished.
A soft breath of pure, awed appreciation slid from Beth’s parted lips as she drank in the beauty of the glass she was cradling. The shop’s lighting made every cut facet sparkle and shimmer with the rich cranberry colour of the goblet-shaped bowl, its stem clear and pure and worked with the most intricate design of trailing ivy and grapes.
Here was a reproduction Venetian glass of truly outstanding authenticity, a fruitful marriage of ancient and modern. Wonderingly Beth ran her fingertips over it. It was, quite simply, one of the most beautiful glasses she had ever seen, if anything even better and richer than the original antique she had been shown by the gypsy.