The Family Holiday

by Elizabeth Noble

  He opened the cards far faster than he might have chosen, the little ones egging him on impatiently, and Hayley stood them up one at a time along the deep windowsill. Then his presents: wine, whisky, a book about Churchill, a linen shirt with a small print of bright flowers Daphne would have been proud of, tickets to a sold-out show (‘and we’ll take you to dinner afterwards, Dad – anywhere you like’), and to Lords for later that month. Some pebbles painted by the tinies to resemble ladybirds and bees (‘To stop your papers blowing off your desk in the wind, Granddad,’ Delilah patiently explained).

  They’d planned the day, they said. There was to be a picnic, and they’d found some local cricket match, which would keep several of them out of the way while tonight was made ready. Heather was to stay behind (‘not because I don’t love cricket cos, wow, that is one exciting game’) to oversee proceedings.

  He was genuinely touched. While the others were clearing breakfast away, he sought Hayley out. He’d bought a card, and a small gift – some pretty-looking bath products in a set, modern and age-appropriate, not old-lady stuff – from a gift shop he and Heather had been in yesterday. He’d wrapped it in his room last night. He didn’t have any idea whether she’d like the smell, but she looked pleased, as much at the thought as at the present, kissed his cheek and said he shouldn’t have, so he was very glad he had.

  They got back from the cricket at around five, in time to shower and dress for the evening. It had been a suitably gentle and happy afternoon. Scott had sorted out some really comfortable folding chairs, and he, Ethan, Charlie and Nick had watched a few overs of pretty decent cricket, although Charlie had drifted off for a few balls somewhere in the middle. Laura had read, and then slept across the picnic blanket, arms crossed on her chest, like a painting he remembered of Ophelia. Charlie was glad to see her rest. Hayley and Meredith kept the little ones amused with piggy-backs and roly-polys around the boundary, and, when they got bored of that, ice lollies and Disney on the iPad in the shade of Scott’s big car.

  When they got back, the caterer’s van was parked in front of the house. Heather had banned them all from the long, thin room behind the pool until they were summoned, which they were, just before seven. She’d done a beautiful job. There were fairy lights wound around the oak posts of the building’s frames, and the flowers she had bought the day before with Charlie had been supplemented with greenery from the garden and were arranged into pretty sprays all down the centre of the table. Tea lights glittered in mercury glass containers. The balloons had all been collected from the kitchen and allowed to float in the new space, and the overall effect was very pretty.

  ‘It looks beautiful, Heather,’ Charlie exclaimed, genuinely appreciative.

  ‘Do you like it? I’m so glad.’ Heather hugged him, delighted with the compliment.

  ‘And don’t we all look glamorous?’ Even Nick was in a suit, and Ethan’s white shirt was tucked in for once, trousers resting on his jutting hipbones, emphasizing his slender frame. Bea and Delilah had pretty dresses in sugared-almond colours with tulle skirts. Heather and her girls were a rainbow of chiffon. Laura looked as pretty as he’d seen her so far. She’d caught the sun, like Ethan, snoozing on the blanket this afternoon, and her slim shoulders were golden in a black halterneck dress. Her freckles – which she had inexplicably hated all her life – were out, and made her look five years younger. Charlie had on a bow-tie with his jacket. Daphne would have approved.

  ‘Don’t scrub up badly, no.’

  ‘We need to take a picture.’

  ‘I’ve set up a place, here.’ Heather led them out onto the terrace where she’d put two benches that had been along the back wall of the pool. ‘I figured the light would be good here, and if we put the kids up front, adults behind …’

  They arranged themselves as she instructed, standing back to appraise them, telling the back row to leave a space for her between Scott and Charlie. Then, once they were as she wanted, she called one of the caterer’s waitresses to come out and shoot the picture, and told them all to say, ‘mozzarella’. There were four cameras, and the girl patiently snapped with all of them. Heather checked, rearranged, and they went again. Then she pronounced herself happy with the shot. She showed Charlie, who couldn’t see quite as clearly in the small camera screen as he pretended he could. They were all just a bit of a blur.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ he said, though. He was sure it was.

  ‘Can we get a bloody drink, now?’ Scott mocked.

  ‘You can. Champagne this way.’

  When they all had a flute, and the children a cup of elderflower cordial, Scott raised his glass to his father. ‘Happy birthday, Dad. Here’s to you.’

  ‘Hear hear!’ they chorused, and drank.

  ‘And thank you for all this.’ That was Laura.

  He raised his own glass. ‘I’d like to drink to all of you.’ He turned towards Hayley. ‘Especially to you, Hayley, and happy birthday again, birthday twin. I’m so happy you and Meredith and your mum have joined the family. Delighted to have two new granddaughters. Really.’ Both girls smiled at him, pink-cheeked. Scott put his arm around Heather and she grasped his hand. ‘And I’d like to drink to your lovely mum and granny, my Daphne. She would have wanted, so very badly, to be here with us all tonight. She would have made a speech, and she’d have been so much funnier and more touching than me, so I’m not going to try to compete. You know, I think, how much she’d have loved it. I can tell you that she would have been very, very proud of each and every one of you.’ He said each word slowly and carefully, scanning the gathering to make eye contact with all of them.

  Laura’s eyes had filled with tears, and he couldn’t meet her gaze for long. He so didn’t want to blub tonight.

  Nick took up his toast, nodding briefly at Charlie. ‘To Mum.’

  Scott poured himself a glass. He’d pushed his chair back from the end of the table, and was watching everyone, suffused with a feeling of well-being and plenty of good red wine.

  Heather was deep in conversation with Nick, their heads mirroring bobs of agreement. Ethan and Hayley were looking at Hayley’s phone, while Bea and Delilah diligently collected streamers from the floor, draping them across the teens, who were managing to indulge and ignore them simultaneously. Arthur was asleep on Laura’s lap; she was sitting within the crook of their father’s arm, and Charlie was smiling beatifically as he surveyed the whole tableau.

  It couldn’t have gone any better.

  Meredith suddenly appeared from under the table, the cloth around her head like a scarf. She’d been playing there with Nick’s kids. Scott took her hands and she pulled herself up, then leaned against him. ‘Had a good time, kiddo?’

  She nodded enthusiastically. ‘I like being in a big family.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I really, really do.’

  Scott kissed her forehead. She looked up at him through her big blue eyes. ‘Thank you, Scott.’ Then rested her head against his shirt. ‘I’m glad you’re my dad.’

  The lump in his throat was instantaneous. The tear he wiped away came just a moment behind it. She’d never said that before. He held her close. ‘I’m glad that you’re my daughter.’

  Almost as if she sensed the magnitude of the quiet exchange, Heather looked up at them, and he held his wife’s gaze, their eyes locked in understanding and emotion across the long table.

  35

  The caterer and her team had cleared up so effortlessly and silently that Laura barely realized they’d gone. The little kids had been in bed for hours, and the big kids, too, had crept away – there’d been talk of a Netflix horror film. Hayley seemed to have decided that she liked Ethan and was engineering spending time with him, and Laura was grateful to her. He’d looked less stricken today, she thought. He had resisted all notion of sunscreen, and his nose was sunburnt after the cricket.

  Heather had excused herself on the second passing of the port, kissing Charlie as she passed his chair, and whispering a last ‘Happy bir
thday.’ He felt a rush of affection for her.

  Perhaps it was always going to be maudlin – just the four of them left at the table with Daphne missing and too much wine drunk. A few minutes after Heather had gone, he pushed his chair back and stood up, reluctant to let the magical day end but suddenly exhausted and longing for bed. ‘I’ve had a lovely day. Thank you all for all the hard work and effort.’

  ‘One for the road, Dad?’

  ‘The stairs!’ He laughed, and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve had quite enough. I’ll start weeping, and you’ll all rather I hadn’t. I’d rather I hadn’t. I’ll quit while I’m ahead. You stay.’ He stopped and touched each of them as he left – shook Scott’s hand until his son pulled him into a brief embrace, kissed Laura’s cheek, put his arm around Nick’s shoulders. His babies.

  ‘And then there were three.’ Nick filled everyone’s glass.

  Laura tried to put her hand across the top of hers at the last moment, but misjudged it and got port on her fingers.

  ‘Oops. Sorry.’

  She licked them. ‘You’re pissed.’

  ‘So are you.’ It was true. She had drunk more than she had in ages. She felt incredibly heavy and slow-moving.

  When he’d charged everyone’s glasses, Nick made them clink. ‘Come on.’

  ‘What are we drinking to?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘Let’s drink to three days down and not a cross word.’

  ‘Bar set low, bro.’

  ‘What about you, Laura? What do you want to drink to?’

  ‘Let’s drink to love and marriage.’

  Her brothers eyed her warily.

  At home, drinking alone, which she’d done rather too much of lately, Laura could let rage and hurt make her a bitter (then nauseous) drunk. She knew she was doing it. Here, she didn’t seem to have the energy for it. Acutely conscious of Scott’s happiness, even more aware of Nick’s grief, it wasn’t appropriate. Even through the champagne and wine haze she knew that. Her face crumpled, and she put down her glass without drinking from it.

  ‘Laura?’

  Her voice was more of a sob. ‘I miss Mum.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Scott drank deeply.

  ‘Mum would have known what to do about all of this,’ she continued, sounding childish, even to herself.

  ‘All of what?’ Nick coaxed gently.

  ‘Oh, all of it, the whole stinking mess.’

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Alex. Bloody Genevieve.’ Then another sob. ‘Ethan.’

  ‘What about Ethan?’

  She’d forgotten, with the booze, that they didn’t know.

  ‘Turns out I’m not only a crappy wife, I’m a lousy mother too.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  Scott wondered if it was too late for him to join Heather in bed, but when he went to stand up, Nick fired a warning glance in his direction and he sat back down.

  That wasn’t entirely fair – Laura and Nick had always been much closer, with a sibling shorthand and in-jokes he’d been excluded from. But he reasoned it wasn’t entirely fair to leave Nick, now, to deal with her on his own either.

  ‘I stopped watching … stopped making him my priority. I had one job, for God’s sake. For months now I’ve been wallowing in self-pity and anger, using all my energy to hate Alex and fight him. Did you know he wants us to sell the house?’ They didn’t. She nodded slowly. ‘Yep. Sell and divide the profits.’ She waved away the statement as the diversion it was. ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Can he make you do that?’

  ‘Yes. No. Probably. That’s not the point. I wasn’t, I haven’t been prioritizing Ethan.’

  ‘He seems okay.’ Scott hadn’t particularly noticed anything. He wasn’t an expert on the habits and behaviours of the teenage boy, but there hadn’t seemed to be an unusual amount of grunting monosyllabic communication, and general squirming. Ethan was a bit Harry Enfield’s Kevin, but that was all. Hayley and even Meredith seemed more grown-up, but wasn’t that normal? Laura had always seemed more grown-up than him and Nick at the same age, hadn’t she?

  Laura rounded on him. ‘He is not okay.’ She shook her head slowly.

  ‘Are you talking about GCSEs?’

  Again the dismissive wave.

  ‘No. I mean, maybe. I have no idea. We’ll find out in a few days’

  ‘What are you talking about, then?’ Nick was contemplating the options. Drinking, drugs, tattoos, trouble with the law? He’d flirted with the lot of them, as the small yet ridiculous Bart Simpson on his left biceps still testified. Scott probably never had. Not Laura either, unless she’d done a great job in keeping it quiet. They were rule-followers, like Dad. He’d definitely been the envelope-pusher in their family.

  Laura took a deep breath, and told them about Saskia, about Rupert, so furious. And Claudia wanting to do the right thing. About the awful limbo they were all in. And her teenage son sobbing in her lap, his heart broken, his faith in adults shaken, his future uncertain. She cried as she talked, snot and tears running down her face.

  When she’d finished, the three of them sat still, slightly shocked. Laura blew her nose violently on her napkin, and looked at Nick. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t need this.’

  ‘Oh, stop it.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You’ve got enough of your own crap.’

  ‘That’s not how it works, Sis. Mine’s a rubbish situation, but it isn’t ongoing. What’s the medical term? Acute, not chronic? Is that it?’ He gave a small, joyless laugh. ‘I’m both. The worst happened. We’ve survived. I don’t know how, but we have. We’re still here. The world turns. I miss her. Every minute of every day I miss her. But it’s done. The rest of it is the fallout. I’m too busy to wallow. I’ve no one to be angry with. I’ve just got to get on with it. Be mother and father, pay the bills, hold it together. I haven’t got time to fall apart.’

  ‘And I’ve had too much time.’

  ‘Stop it. Will you just bloody stop it, Laura?’ This was Scott, who had been very quiet until now, looking from one sibling to the other. Now he’d drawn himself up to his full height in the chair. His voice was louder and stronger than either of theirs. ‘You said you missed Mum, right? Do you know what Mum would have said to you by now?’

  Laura sat upright too, and pushed her hair back from her face.

  Scott didn’t wait for a response. ‘She’d have told you to get a bloody grip.’ Scott swallowed what remained in his glass and stood up. ‘She’d have said you’d had long enough to be pathetic and victim-y. That it was time to stop bloody wallowing. You know I’m right. She’d have said she never really liked Alex. Neither, by the way, did the rest of us much care for the uptight prick. Even me, and I was the most like him. There’s a bit of uptight prick in me too.’

  Nick sniggered at the unintended innuendo. It broke the tension just a little. Scott threw a glance of mock-fury at his brother, and Nick stifled the mirth and sat upright in his chair, accepting the near-reprimand.

  ‘Don’t think I like admitting that for a minute, by the way. Mum would have used her fridge-magnet wisdom on you and you’d have had a big hug and a speech made mainly in fucking aphorisms, and then she’d bloody well have expected you to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get the fuck on with it. Focus on Ethan and this bloody mess he’s in. Get your shit together. And you know it.’

  The outburst was so out of character that Nick and Laura sat in stunned silence for a few seconds as Scott stood over them like a disapproving parent. Then he came and stood between them. ‘I love you. Both. Very much. And I’m going to bed.’ He kissed Laura’s head, and very briefly stroked her hair, then went.

  They watched him as he left the room. Eventually Nick and Laura looked at each other.

  ‘That was a lot of swearing.’

  ‘That was a lot of words – from Scott.’

  The port and the shock and the truth of what he’d said made them childish. They bent their heads togeth
er and giggled.

  ‘Heather really has unbuttoned him.’ This observation triggered fresh guffaws. Crying was never far from laughing, Nick thought. And vice versa.

  They pressed their foreheads together for a moment. Then Nick took Laura’s hands in his own and held them. ‘He’s probably right, you know, Laur.’

  ‘He probably bloody is.’

  36

  The rain started. Anyone studying the sky, or checking their iPhone, would have predicted its coming. The sky darkened suddenly, and a few plump raindrops gave way very quickly to a deluge. Charlie stirred a forbidden spoonful of sugar into his mug of tea and sat by the window, watching rain bounce off the path edging, and pool in the rose petals. He had never minded rain.

  ‘That was summer, then.’ Heather burst into the kitchen in gym kit, dripping, and wiped her face. Rain came down in heavy sheets, from a now positively leaden sky.

  ‘My phone says it’s just this morning. A clearing shower. Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring.’

  ‘Who is Mr Mainwaring?’

  Charlie laughed. He wasn’t sure he could explain Dad’s Army this morning. ‘Long story, don’t worry.’

  Heather peered out of the window. ‘Hope you’re right. Scott’s out in this. I do worry about wet roads – he goes so fast on that bike.’

  ‘Laura too.’

  She took a towel and rubbed her wet hair. ‘God. We worry, right?’

  ‘It’s the price of love. That’s what Daphne always used to say. If you didn’t love, you wouldn’t care so you wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘But life would be pretty empty and meaningless, right?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She nodded, thinking. ‘I like that.’ Already the sun was shining again. ‘Wow. That’s bright. There’ll be a rainbow somewhere.’ She went to the front door and opened it. ‘There is! Charlie, come look!’ It was faint, but definite, framing the view. ‘What a metaphor! I gotta get my phone and post this.’

  Charlie smiled.

  Laura had taken a large mug of coffee and two paracetamol to the garden. Her head was throbbing. She didn’t mind when the rain started. It wasn’t quite the warm rain of the tropics, but it was far from cold, and the drops were refreshing as they hit her face. She tilted it upwards, towards the sky, and let it fall on her.