‘Come on. Let’s yomp. Mindfully.’ She unclipped Hector, her Irish setter, from his lead. He bounded off excitedly. Mel put her arm through Laura’s, and marched off in his general direction.
She fixed Laura with a penetrating stare. ‘So, apart from you not sleeping and, clearly, not really eating either, what’s new with you?’
‘Is it that obvious?’
Mel squeezed her arm. ‘Only to me.’
‘Bollocks. I look like death warmed up, I know.’
‘You’ve looked more radiant. Not gonna lie. Jack says that all the time. That he’s not gonna lie. Does Ethan do that? Like there’s no presumption of honesty in our relationship, and he needs to qualify every bloody thing that comes out of his mouth.’
Laura laughed. ‘All the time.’
‘Idiots.’
The first part of the walk was quite steep. They concentrated, in silence, as they climbed. Laura felt her lungs tighten. God, she was unfit. She stopped as the ground flattened, staring through the trees at the horizon. Mel stopped too, picking up and throwing a stick for Hector.
‘And, speaking of idiots, how is Alex?’
Laura snorted. She loved that. No pussy-footing around. Absolutely no attempt at even-handedness. It was glorious to have someone 100 per cent on your side. ‘He’s an arsehole.’
‘No argument there. What’s he up to?’
‘Oh, nothing new …’ She paused. ‘Winning Ethan.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s like … He’s got this new place, and it’s all cool and I don’t think there are any fucking rules there at all, and Ethan wants to be there. Of course he does. Why wouldn’t he?’
‘Has he moved out?’
A wry laugh. ‘God, no. I’d like to see Alex’s face, if Ethan suggested that. I’m still doing all the damn washing and form-filling and homework-nagging. It’s just that he’ll go there any chance he gets. Alex bought him an Xbox, for fuck’s sake.’
Mel took a deep breath. ‘You’re not to take that personally, Laur. Honestly. Jack would sell me for a bag of chips, let alone an Xbox. They’re teenage boys. All the blood’s rushed to their groins. They grow about an inch an hour. They’re completely unreliable. They’re lumbering through the torture of their adolescence like lanky, spotty, slightly smelly and very clumsy Bambis, and they have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the finer feelings of their parents. None of them. Let alone being able to conceive of how to hurt them deliberately. Honestly. Trust me.’
‘Okay. Wow. I wouldn’t go into teenager PR if I were you.’
Mel laughed. ‘Oh, they’re great too. If Jack takes the bins out without me asking, I practically weep with joy. He told me I looked knackered the other day and made me a cup of almost drinkable tea. I nearly bought him a car, I was so excited and proud.’
She beamed at Laura, then wagged a finger at her. ‘And then he produced a letter from school saying he was in detention all week for some transgression. He only showed me because I had to sign the thing. Amazed he didn’t try to forge my signature.’
‘Ethan makes me tea.’
‘See? Be pitifully grateful for that. He’s not trying to hurt you. He’s just trying to get through.’
‘I know it’s unfair to mind.’
‘Ah, it’s inevitable, lovely. I get it. But it’s Alex who deserves your anger.’
‘Trust me, Alex’s quota of my anger is not a worry.’
‘And how are you channelling it, that anger?’ Here came the challenge. ‘Got a forensic accountant yet?’
Laura shook her head.
‘I’ve told you, you need to stay mad, at least where he’s concerned, at least when you’re talking to him or his lawyers. He’s counting on your being broken. He needs you to be weak and weepy when all this is negotiated. That’s what they do. Be broken inside. Be broken with me. And your family. But you be coldly, furiously, productively enraged with him, and you let him get away with nothing.’
‘Your divorce wasn’t like that.’
‘So I’m the exception. I actually left a nice guy. My bad. Trust me, you never know a guy until you’ve met him in court.’
‘Isn’t it “You’ve never known a woman until you’ve met her in court”? I think Norman Mailer said it.’
‘Yeah, well, he was absolving men. Hell hath no fury and all that. Plus ça change … I’m more Ivana Trump, “Don’t get mad, get everything!”’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Except that you only get everything by BEING MAD and STAYING MAD.’
‘Is this daytime-TV wisdom?’
‘Rude.’ Mel put her hands on her hips indignantly. Then she smirked. ‘Some of it. Girlfriends. Lots of girlfriends getting divorced from shits. Books. Life. You need to listen to me.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘I know it is. And it’s hard for you to hear.’
Laura smiled ruefully. ‘Will you come with me? To the next lawyer’s meeting?’
‘You know I will.’ Mel mimed an undercut punch.
Laura did. She could almost feel sorry for Alex, confronted by this energy and will, and she felt a sudden rush of love for her friend.
They’d been walking the whole time, and they were suddenly at the top of the hill. The trees had given way to a clearing, and the view was distractingly wide and far. Laura stared out at it, and breathed.
Next to her, Mel nodded decisively. ‘Okay. End of sermon. Back to the car or down the next hill to the teashop. More walking, but with cake.’
‘Cake. Definitely cake.’
‘You have to have some too. You can’t just watch me eat it. Promise.’
‘If they’ve got lemon drizzle.’
Mel smiled. ‘Oh, they will. Come on.’ She strode off confidently, yelling for Hector.
9
He was going to be late for the childminder. Again. He never meant to be. He set an alarm on his watch and on his laptop. He started every day with the best of intentions. It was just that stuff came up when you were trying to be all things to all people. You couldn’t just drop everything in the middle. Important phone calls and deadlines mattered, and they took precious little account of the fact that Arthur had to be collected from the childminder before Delilah and Bea from nursery and school, or that if he wasn’t, the entire routine was shot, and Nick would collapse on the sofa, or back at his desk when the last of them fell asleep, and feel that he’d completely and utterly failed. Today it was a pernickety client, making changes and tweaks for the sake of it, demanding to see a finished piece of artwork now when tomorrow would almost certainly have been fine. Nick had made two, three, four changes, each one, in his opinion, detrimental, each one bringing him perilously closer to his deadline for leaving the house. No fight left in him for what looked best, he pressed send on the final version, and switched on his out-of-office reply angrily. He was going to be late.
Karen was kind, and he knew she was incredibly sympathetic to his plight. He didn’t necessarily enjoy being the subject of her pity, but it was helpful sometimes. It was Karen’s retired and omnipresent husband, James, who often stood behind her at the door, with a countenance that said he shouldn’t play the young-widower card, at least not on Karen’s time. Fran had helped him find Karen in the dreadful weeks after Carrie’s death. Carrie would have liked her, she said, and the way she ran things. Karen had raised three kids of her own, fostered a handful more, and was unflappable and competent but, far more importantly, fun as well. He still felt as if he was abandoning Arthur, the first time he handed him over, although Arthur, oblivious, had beamed at Karen and immediately started trying to gnaw at the large amber beads she wore around her neck.
He would always be oblivious, baby Arthur, to the tragedy of losing his mother so very young. Bea had clear and definite memories of her. Delilah would think she had, her subconscious weaving together fragments of what was real with photographs and pieces of video. Arthur could barely even pretend to remember her. It was crazy – what they had shared, in those
brief weeks and months after his birth, was entirely central to his very being: she had delivered him, fed him, rocked him against her chest at dead of night. And he wouldn’t have any recollection of her at all. The sadness he felt for himself was sometimes dwarfed by the sadness he felt for his poor motherless children. He’d had her for years and years, Arthur for no time at all, really.
If it wasn’t for Carrie’s intensive campaign, there’d have been no Arthur. Nick had been very happy with his two girls. A colleague at work had said something in passing about two kids being manageable and three tipping him over the edge, and another knew someone who’d gone for just one more and fallen pregnant with twins. There was so much that could go wrong. He’d been ignorant of all that stuff the first time, then sleep-deprived and unaware of the risks at the second. Now he felt wide awake to them. What if something went wrong? What if it was twins?
Carrie wasn’t done, she said. She knew she had one more baby in her. Nothing would go wrong, she promised. She was still only thirty-four, fit as a flea. Two straightforward pregnancies and two perfectly healthy babies. Far from agreeing with him that these were two good reasons not to push their luck, she saw it as proof that they were lucky and that the luck would hold for one more baby. She didn’t need it to be a son, she claimed, when he took that tack. She just knew that their family wasn’t complete yet. One more baby. She’d seduced him when his guard was down, and fallen pregnant almost at once. She’d taken a test before she was technically supposed to, but he already knew – something softened in the curve of her face almost on conception, and she’d started to look just like she had when she was carrying Bea and Delilah. Her complete joy had swept away his reservations, because it would have been churlish not to let it do so. One more baby.
That one more baby was making life very complicated. Karen answered the door almost simultaneously with his knock, ready. Mercifully James was elsewhere this afternoon. He apologized as usual, even though she always told him it was all right, grabbed Arthur and his changing bag, and bundled him into the car seat without interacting with him beyond a quick, dry kiss on the top of his precious head. He thanked God, not for the first time, that Arthur was such a genial and easy-going baby. He chuntered away incoherently in the back. There were interminable three-way temporary traffic lights on his usual route. If the car in front of him had just gone a tiny bit quicker, they wouldn’t have changed to red, he’d have got through and he wouldn’t have been late for Delilah. Nick smashed the steering wheel with an open hand, much harder than he’d meant to, and caught the horn unintentionally. It blared, loud and unnecessary, harmonizing with his mood, so that two mothers pushing buggies alongside the traffic jumped in fear, and turned to glare at him. He shrugged his apology. In the back Arthur, who had his limits, scrunched his face, ready to cry at the discordant sound.
‘Sorry, mate. I’m sorry. Don’t cry.’
It was too late. Arthur whimpered pitifully. Still in neutral, Nick reached around to squeeze Arthur’s foot, murmuring to him that it was all right. He suddenly remembered Carrie, when Bea was so small that he was actually frightened of holding her, murmuring to him that babies could feel what you felt, so when you touched them, you had to be calm and relaxed so that you didn’t communicate negative emotions to the child. He let go of Arthur’s foot. He wanted to cry himself.
Ed and Maureen were right. Daphne would no doubt agree. He needed help. He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t good enough to do this by himself.
10
Heather sat up in the middle of the massive bed, her back against the upholstered headboard, and arranged the soft white sheet around herself. The cup of black coffee Scott had made her before he left, and put gently on the side so as not to wake her, was still warm, and she cupped the mug in her hands. The bed faced two large windows onto the garden at the back of the house, and the sunrise was just beginning outside, black giving way to a delicate coral pink, the trees at the back of the plot silhouetted dramatically. It was still early – Scott typically left, silently, for his train at around six, and she needn’t get up for the girls until seven or so. It was six twenty now. The next thirty or forty minutes were hers. In her Insta-life, the one she shared, she would probably call it meditating. Mindfulness. Maybe yoga. But in truth, and in private, this was Heather’s ‘pinch me’ time.
Everything about being here surprised her. Being married to Scott, being in England, in this extraordinary home, being comfortable … it was all so new. Most of all, it was being safe and feeling secure that dazzled her.
For so much of her life, she hadn’t been. She’d been born to an angry father, who drank too much, and a mother who lived in fear of his drunken tempers, in a rented home, where money was usually in short supply, seldom spent on shoes and heating, more often on booze and all too brief treats to make up for the booze. Heather’s childhood had been shadowed by anxiety.
None of it had been dramatic. There was never anything to alert the teachers, the authorities or the neighbours so no help ever came. There was no one to see that it might be needed. Her parents never had any friends, and the neighbours were wary. It was a solitary, strangely quiet childhood. Her father growled rather than shouted; her mother used silence as a weapon against him. And Heather was mostly irrelevant. She wasn’t starving. If she was sometimes hungry, it was because, often, no one bothered to cook, not because there wasn’t any food in the cupboard. That was why she had learnt, balancing on a chair in front of the stove, when she was seven or eight. No one ever hit her, barely threatened to, but they didn’t hug her either. That was why she’d started having sex with boys when she was sixteen. She was smart enough, always, to recognize and understand that sex wasn’t love, and that those boys didn’t care about her. But the exchange was worth it to her for the brief moments of contact: the sensation of being held, of being important, at the centre of things. You could tell yourself almost anything in those moments, and believe it.
She went to school in clean clothes, even if they weren’t often new or ever ironed, but no one read her report card, or helped her with a science project, or made her a costume for a play. That was why she’d worked so hard, wanting to believe that doing better might change things. And always, always dreaming of getting out. Before she even knew where and what out was. As she grew older, she realized that New York was where ‘out’ was. Like it had been for Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, the Hudson river seemed to separate miserable mediocrity from gilded happiness and opportunity.
She knew what she had going for her. Chiefly, an evangelical determination to have a different life. Second, an unshakeable faith in the qualities she possessed and could use to make that happen. She knew, although her parents had never told her, that she was pretty. Pretty enough for girls to be catty towards her. When girls were quite pretty, other girls wanted to buddy up with them. When they were really pretty, they hated them. She knew she was sexy. The rolled-back eyes, quivering spines and moans of more than a dozen boys had shown her that. She was more sharp than clever, more quick than intellectual. She could organize, and she could get people – men – to do things she wanted them to do, and that was maybe the biggest skill of all.
She crossed the Hudson the minute she could, and she didn’t look back. She rented a tiny room in a dive apartment in Midtown East and she went to work, temping in offices and teaching herself business software packages and basic accounting in the evenings, specializing in going the extra mile, until she found a permanent job. Another company, another rung up the ladder, evening classes and diplomas, a bigger room in a less dive-y apartment, it was always less about success and ambition than safety. She saved her pay, the cushion making it easier to sleep. And she dreamt.
The girls’ father was a mistake from the start. A blip. That was how she thought of him. She’d let herself be distracted. Fooled, even. She’d got them. She could never quite reconcile the joy of their existence with the misery of her marriage to their dad. She couldn’t wish she’d never met h
im because without him there’d have been no them, but despite that he remained the biggest mistake of her life. She’d been pregnant when they married at City Hall. Pregnant again before Hayley was walking. She’d had a warm home, and enough money for food, their clothes and shoes, and for a while she’d tried to pretend to herself it was enough. That for a girl like her it should be enough. But it wasn’t.
He was a lousy husband. Controlling, mean-spirited, selfish. And, just like at home, there’d been no outward sign. He’d never laid a finger on her in anger. Or the girls. She’d have killed him for that with her bare hands. He wasn’t even cruel. But there was nothing about him that sustained her. He wasn’t supportive, or kind, or proud. He didn’t seem to know her, or to mind that he didn’t. Like ‘wife and kids’ had been a box he’d thought he was ready to tick.
And when he’d ticked it he’d lost interest.
When she’d finally caught him out in infidelity, she was almost grateful. As hard as it was to raise the two girls, work a full-time job and keep all the balls in the air, she vowed she wouldn’t be fooled again, even if it meant she was alone for ever.
It wasn’t money with Scott, whatever anyone said. There were plenty of guys in New York with money, obscene amounts of it. It was kindness, and manners, and the respect with which she saw him treating people in the office – everyone from the mailroom boy with the metal cart to the receptionist and the boss. He had a gentleness about him and for ages she’d confused it with Britishness. That wasn’t it. One day he’d overtaken her on the sidewalk between the revolving door of the office and the steps down to the subway. She was carrying a large bag of groceries. At first she hoped he hadn’t seen it was her – she tried hard to keep her home life away from work – but the bag was heavy, and she was hot, and tired. Like Melanie Griffith. She’d changed into sneakers, her court shoes on top of the food in her bag. He was walking much faster than her, with his long legs, unencumbered by shopping. He was on his cell phone. But he’d noticed her. He stopped, turned and smiled uncertainly, took a few steps back in her direction. ‘Heather? May I help you with that? It looks heavy.’ And he’d taken the bag before she’d agreed.
The Family Holiday Page 5
