Heather snorted.
He tried to defuse the situation. ‘Good use of blokes there, Hayls.’ It didn’t work.
‘We’ll have phones …’ Her voice trailed off in frustration. She sounded like she might cry.
After a period of silence, she tried again.
‘I’ll be the only one who isn’t there?’
‘The only one? Really?’
‘The only one of my friends.’
Heather looked at Scott. He put his hand on her knee.
‘It’s taken me long enough to get in with them. You have no idea how hard it is to break in when you’re late starting. No idea … I’m finally in. I have real friends. And you want to make me different again.’
Heather was quiet.
‘That’s cruel. Don’t you think?’
Scott squeezed her knee.
The car spoke next: Your destination is ahead on the left.
Saved by the sat nav.
‘Shall we shelve this for now?’ He didn’t want to arrive mid-row. ‘We’re very nearly there.’
Heather put her hand across his on her knee and squeezed back, then turned to Hayley and took a deep breath. ‘You can go.’
‘Really?’
‘You promise me – you promise me you’ll be careful?’
‘I promise. You’re serious, right? This is amazing.’
Heather smiled. ‘Serious.’
Then she shook herself. ‘Right. Game faces on. We’re there.’
When Heather hugged Charlie, he smelt gardenia, powder and health. She was wearing a sleeveless pink top, and he thought her biceps, smooth and golden, were probably bigger than his.
He deliberated about kissing Hayley and Meredith, decided to go with one on each cheek, no body contact. Daphne would have folded them into her ample bosom, complimenting, relating and loving. But he wasn’t Daphne.
Everyone, even the girls, exclaimed gratifyingly, at once, about the house. Except Arthur, who whinged gently. ‘He’s just woken up. He’s always grumpy, when a nap gets cut short,’ Nick explained, as he reclaimed him.
‘Him and me both,’ Charlie joked.
‘So quaint.’ This, of course, was Heather. Only Americans described Georgian houses as quaint.
‘You going to give us the tour, Dad?’ Laura asked.
They filed in through the sage green front door with its brass bee knocker, luggage forgotten for now, leaving Charlie to bring up the rear. His heart felt full. They were here. They were all here. Almost all here. The someone who was missing was still his everything, her absence, still, always, a gaping hole.
25
They needed organizing but so far so good. They seemed to like it.
‘Oh, my God! This place is spectacular!’ Heather was the most vocal, and Scott slapped his back. ‘Good job, Dad.’
Bea and Delilah pulled at Nick’s arms. ‘We wanna see the pool, Daddy.’
‘Yes, pool, pool, pool! I brought my armbands. Are you gonna come swimming, Granddad?’ Delilah couldn’t stand still, but bounced from one foot to the other in excitement.
Meredith had crouched down to Arthur’s level, and been rewarded by the chubby arms around her neck, so she had him proudly on one hip as they all followed Charlie around the ground floor.
‘That fabric is darling!’ Heather exclaimed, over a sofa in the sitting room. Laura rolled her eyes. Scott caught it and raised an eyebrow in warning. Nick saw the eyebrow and gurned at his sister. Heather remained oblivious. ‘I just love the ticking, too.’
Charlie didn’t know what ticking was. But he was glad she loved it.
Outside, the group split – Nick and Meredith succumbing to the children’s squeals and heading to the pool, the others beyond it to the tennis court.
‘Wow. This is great!’
‘Full-sized and floodlights! Amazing!’
Charlie flicked the switch proudly. When one light failed to come on he felt a sense of personal failure.
Upstairs, the bedrooms were, as he had hoped, more or less self-explanatory. Heather had murmured appreciatively at hers, and more specifically at its bathroom’s reassuring-looking plumbing. Cases were unloaded from cars and carried upstairs, and someone made tea.
And then it became clear that they needed organizing. This would have fallen to Daphne, and she’d have done it so stealthily that no one would realize they’d been organized, just let themselves be suffused with her calm certainty that everything was running smoothly. Meals would appear as if by magic. The car would have been full of brownies and fruit cakes and piped meringue nests. For years he had laughed at her, setting off on self-catering holidays with jars of spices. How he missed it. Charlie had arranged for caterers to come in and serve two dinners, one on his birthday, the other on the last night. He’d done his best, and all his children could see how much the holiday meant to him. But there were eleven people to feed, breakfast and lunch and supper, for a week, and the charming Fortnum’s welcome hamper provided just Earl Grey teabags, rose petal jam, biscuits for cheese, some shortbread and a bottle of claret.
Someone needed to go to the supermarket.
‘I’ll go.’ Laura hadn’t grasped how quiet her life had been lately. The kitchen was cacophonous, and suddenly a potentially quiet Sainsbury’s seemed quite appealing.
‘I’ll come with you.’ Nick plonked Arthur into Charlie’s arms. ‘If someone can watch my kids …’
Meredith practically bounced. She already had Delilah’s hand in hers, and Bea was hovering nearby. ‘Me. I can. I will.’
Heather nodded at him, letting him know that Meredith might think she was in sole charge but she wasn’t, and he smiled gratefully at her.
‘Do we need a kitty?’
Scott shook his head. ‘Just keep the receipts. We can sort it out afterwards.’
‘Are we going to take turns to make a dinner?’
‘Yeah, that’s fair on Nick. Arthur can peel the veggies.’
‘Good point. All hands on deck, then.’
Scott opened the back door. ‘Sounds good. Is there a barbecue? I’m good with fire.’ He pounded his chest with his fists, Tarzan-like. This was a lighter, funnier Scott, Charlie thought, which augured well for the week. He seemed more like his siblings than he had done in ages. Or, at least, more like they had been before …
‘There’s a huge one. Very superior-looking, round there on the terrace,’ Charlie told him.
‘Great.’
‘I made brownies.’ Heather was holding several large Tupperware containers. She opened the larder cupboard and put them down. She reminded him, in that moment, of Daphne. A pair of feeders. The thought made him smile.
‘There’s a fruit cake in this hamper.’ Ethan had burrowed through the packaging and emerged with it held aloft.
‘Right. Eat cake. Make tea. Oh, have you got milk?’
‘Yeah. In those old-fashioned bottles in the fridge – it’s really cute. And I think it’s organic. Must be from a local farm.’
‘Okay. Good. We’ll be back with the wherewithal to cook tonight and all day tomorrow. I can’t think further ahead right now.’
‘Get ice cream.’ This was Bea, but Ethan nodded enthusiastically.
‘Ooh, and those pod things for coffee – there’s a machine.’
Hayley tutted, with all the sanctimoniousness of youth. ‘They are so bad for the environment.’
‘Not as bad for the environment as your mum is if she doesn’t get a strong mug of coffee in the morning.’ Scott slung an arm around Heather’s shoulders, and kissed her cheek.
‘Hey!’ She fake-slapped him.
Hayley conceded. ‘He’s right. Bring capsules. Lots of them.’
‘I did already.’ Heather was triumphant. ‘I have a case of them in the car. I saw the machine in the brochure.’ Daphne again. Organized. Efficient.
After the noise in the house, it was wonderfully quiet in the car. For the first five minutes, by unspoken agreement, neither Nick nor Laura spoke much beyond
the simple decisions on which way to go. The metallic voice of the sat nav sent them left out of the driveway, then three miles on the straight before the next turn. Nick drove country-lane slowly, and Laura forced herself not to want him to speed up. She was always in so much of a hurry, so quickly frustrated or enraged by other road-users. And Nick could drive as slowly as he wanted, she reminded herself. If what had happened to him had happened to her she might never have sat in a car again.
When Nick began a conversation, there was a hint of forced gaiety. ‘Bit of a turn-around, huh? You and me on our own, Scott playing happy families.’
‘I’m glad for him.’ The enormity of Nick’s aloneness was not easy to make light of, if you weren’t Nick, and no one would have believed him if he’d tried.
‘Me too. It’s just weird …’
‘I know what you mean.’
Nick took his eyes off the road to glance at his sister. ‘How come you didn’t tell me yourself about Alex?’
Laura shrugged. She’d been half expecting the question. She assumed he knew the answer – shame, embarrassment, humiliation, exhaustion, the inability to talk without sobbing or hissing …
‘Have I been so far up my own arse that you couldn’t tell me?’ There was a note of genuine hurt in his question. They’d always been the closest of the three, more alike than they were to Scott. Ripples of damage – things like this caused small waves of ever-diluting pain around everyone involved, however peripherally. The collateral damage of pursuing your own happiness without regard for the happiness of other people. Selfish, selfish bastard.
She smiled weakly. ‘No. Of course not. Not that you aren’t completely allowed to be, by the way. I’ve been that much up my own.’
‘I’m really sorry about it.’
‘Are you?’ She didn’t mean to sound so arch. She wondered what Dad had told him, how much detail he knew.
‘Shouldn’t I be?’ Nick wasn’t pulling any punches.
Laura sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ Which was honest at least.
Another mile of silence. She knew Nick was giving her room to speak, but she had nothing to say.
Changing the subject, at last, she asked, ‘How are you doing?’
‘Don’t you do that.’
‘Ask how you are?’
‘Ask how I am in that voice. The one dripping with pity.’
She punched his arm. ‘It’s dripping with sympathy.’
‘Is that significantly different? Really?’
‘I think so, yeah.’
‘Then I’m doing okay, thanks.’
‘Don’t you do that.’ She smiled sideways at him. ‘Are you okay-okay or okay-shitty really?’
Nick blew out his cheeks out and exhaled slowly. ‘Depends on the day, Sis. Or the time of day.’
She nodded understanding. It was like that, grief. Tidal. Seasonal. ‘The kids look fab.’
He laughed grimly. ‘Oh, I’ve mastered the hair and co-ordinating outfits. You could check behind their ears and you wouldn’t find dirt. They brush their teeth for two minutes too. I have an egg-timer in the bathroom. I can even do plaits.’ Fran had taught him, early on. She’d used the long macramé strings from a hippie-ish dreamcatcher Carrie had loved and he had gently mocked, when she’d bought it to hang in Delilah’s nursery. Over a bottle of red, Fran had taught him patiently how to pull the strands over each other until he could do something resembling the styles Carrie used to create for Bea each morning before school. They still weren’t great, but they were plaits. A piece of simple mechanical continuity for Bea, who couldn’t see the wonky results, just felt his brush and his hands in her hair in the morning.
‘That stuff matters.’
‘I don’t know if it does.’
‘It does. Routine does. They’re not just neat, Nick, your babies. That’s not what I meant. They seem good. They’re … smiley.’
She would never forget the tiny pale faces of Bea and Delilah, when it had first happened. They hadn’t come to the funeral. She remembered that he’d worried himself sick about whether they should be there or not – read conflicting advice, canvassed opinion. In the end, he didn’t take them for the one simple dreadful reason that he didn’t trust himself not to weep, and he couldn’t bear them to see that. Almost went back for them once or twice. They’d stayed with a coterie of kind, appalled mothers from school, who’d brought their own children around to cocoon them in something approximating normal. But, tiny as they were, they knew it wasn’t.
Today’s little girls had been in better shape than that, much better, wonky plaits notwithstanding.
‘They’re wildly excited to be here.’
‘And you?’
‘Truth: I’m not wildly excited by anything any more. But I know I could use the break from all the single-parenting. Keeping all the balls in the air because I’m so bloody terrified of dropping one. I’m knackered. Deep-down-in-my-bones tired. The idea of having some help with the kids …’
‘I get it. I could sleep for a week.’ It was a different kind of grief, and there was the fear, too, about Ethan. She couldn’t tell him, and she’d never compare, but she understood. The net result was evidently the same. A fatigue so profound it couldn’t really be described. ‘Do you think anyone would mind?’ She laughed.
‘With Heather chuntering on, it’s possible no one would notice.’ Nick sniggered.
Laura was glad to move on to a lighter subject. ‘Still not quite sure what to make of her … She’s so shiny.’
‘Do you think we’ll get to see her without hair and makeup this week?’
‘I reckon she sleeps in it.’
‘Nah. There’ll be, like, a twelve-step cleansing routine. And flossing. Lots of flossing.’
‘Oh, we’re horrid. Are we so small-minded that we can’t get our heads around Scott being married after all these years? Or a stepfather. Or are we just jingoistic? Is it because she’s a foreigner?’
‘No. God, no. We’re not those people. I think it’s because we don’t entirely trust her motives.’
‘Where do we get the nerve? That means we don’t trust Scott to make smart decisions. He’s spent his life making smart decisions. Unlike me.’
‘Didn’t mean that.’
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? None of you ever really liked Alex.’
Nick took a moment to speak. ‘That’s not fair.’
Laura glared at him, and he squirmed, then conceded. ‘Okay. Not a lot.’
‘I gave up work, all my independence, everything when I married him.’
‘Oh, come on. You make that sound unusual. Millions of people do it. And millions of people get divorced.’
‘You never would have done, would you?’
Nick pursed his lips. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine. You don’t have to treat me like I’m breakable. I’m still here, so I can’t be. So, you’ve split up. I’m a widower. Net results the same. Us, alone. Scott, loved up. He can’t keep his hands off her – did you see?’
‘Ew. Maybe we’re just jealous.’
‘Oh, I’ll hold my hand up to that. I’m so, so, so bloody jealous.’
‘Do you hate being alone?’
‘I hate being without her. I don’t know if that’s the same thing.’ Nick thought, very briefly, of Fran, and how she’d felt in his arms outside the restaurant.
He banged the steering wheel. ‘Enough! Enough of this maudlin crap. The sun is shining. Let’s not do this now. Let’s put the radio on and pretend we’re happy.’
Laura fumbled with the knobs, unfamiliar with Nick’s car. She hit the right one, and music filled the car. Nineties Queen. They spontaneously started shouting along, windows down, pretending.
26
Meredith and Heather had taken Nick’s three to the climbing frame in the garden. Scott and Charlie were fiddling with the barbecue. Nick and his mum weren’t back from the supermarket yet. Upstairs, Ethan lay on the narrow single
bed in the twin room he’d been allocated, his hands behind his head. He’d thrown his bag onto the other bed. They were meant for kids, the beds. Little kids – his feet were almost hanging off the end. The duvet cover was kiddish too – bright stripes, like a deckchair – and there were hooks on the back of the door like dog tails. The floor below, where everyone else was sleeping, was for the grown-ups. He was sentenced to what he thought of as the nursery floor. He could hear the little kids through the window, and the low murmur of his granddad speaking with Scott. It was incredibly quiet here. They were miles from anywhere. His room was at the top of the house, and the ceiling sloped so he could stand upright only in part of the room. Scott’s stepdaughters were in an almost identical room opposite, and there was a bathroom between the two. That meant sharing, a thought he didn’t relish. He’d barely even met them. Now he had to share a bloody toilet with them.
They’d both said he had to come, Mum and Dad. He didn’t know where to put himself, so he might as well put himself here. Mum had had to come – she’d promised Granddad. And Dad was away with Genevieve on some fancy Italian holiday. The subtext was that they wouldn’t dream of leaving him home by himself. So here he was.
My wild summer, he thought ruefully. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of babies and relatives. Woo-hoo. Home for results. The Reading Festival was ‘under discussion’, whatever that meant. He had a ticket – he’d bought it before everything had gone off. He just didn’t know if they were going to let him use it.
The exams had gone by in a weird blur, in the end. You thought they’d never be over and then they just were. God only knew what he was going to get. Study leave had been self-imposed exile. His mates had suggested getting together to run through flashcards or, more likely, to play Call of Duty. He never told his mum anyone invited him anywhere, and he’d lied to his mates, telling them she was being a total bitch and not letting him go out at all. They’d more or less stopped asking. She didn’t want him studying alone up in his bedroom so they’d made half of the kitchen table a desk he didn’t have to clear at the end of the day, and he’d worked there. Sat there, at least. She’d fed him endless snacks. She’d kissed the top of his head nearly every time she walked past, and although he often brushed the kiss away, like swatting a fly, he was glad of it. He was her project again. He knew how worried and protective she was, and while on one level he was sorry he was putting her through that, he secretly liked the feeling of being at the centre of her universe again. It was comforting and familiar.
The Family Holiday Page 13
