Scott closed the door to their bedroom, and moved towards her. When he answered, he whispered, ‘He’s my nephew, for God’s sake.’
‘And they are my daughters.’
And there it was. There it always would be. When she needed it to be that way, Hayley and Meredith would always be her daughters. He remembered their first conversation about Ethan.
Heather almost, but not quite, wished it unsaid the moment the words were out. She saw exasperation, then hurt pass over Scott’s face, and the mirror pain of having caused it rippled through her own sternum.
She hadn’t meant it. She hadn’t. Except she had. She wondered briefly if she would ever be able to make him understand that the same distinction absolutely applied to their biological father. They were hers. She had grown them inside her own self, she had laboured to bring them into the world, and she had laboured ever since to keep them safe, to keep them right. She was their mother and she outranked anyone and everyone else.
And Ethan troubled her.
Scott’s eyes examined her face. ‘Where is this coming from, Heather?’
‘What do you mean?’ She didn’t meet his gaze.
‘It all seems just a bit …’ he searched for the right word ‘… a bit disproportionate.’
Heather sank onto the edge of the bed. Her voice was very soft. He almost strained to hear her. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew.’
‘Knew what?’
She shook her head.
‘Talk to me, Heather. Knew what?’ He knelt on the floor in front of her, and took her hands.
She looked at him with her big, wide eyes. Deciding.
He wanted to ask again, but he made himself keep quiet.
She seemed to make up her mind. She slid off the bed onto the floor beside him, and let him hold her for a moment.
‘I think you need to tell me something. Please. Trust me and tell me.’
He made himself sound calm, held her chin with his finger to make her look at him, smiling reassuringly, as though nothing could be as bad as all that, although he felt oddly panicky.
‘Something happened to me. I should have told you before.’
‘You’re telling me now.’
‘I’ve never spoken about it.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ He clasped her hand tightly.
‘When I was fifteen.’
He was frightened now. He almost wished, for a second, that he didn’t have to hear this. Nothing that started in that way was going to be remotely okay. He felt a rush of protective love for his wife, and a lump formed in his throat.
‘At a party. A party I was too young to be at, really. I had this friend …’ She paused, shook her head a little. ‘Anyway, I went with her.’
He nodded, encouragingly.
‘And I knew almost right away that I shouldn’t be there. They were college kids, all older. Drinking. Smoking. Cigarettes and weed. I was out of my comfort zone, you know. But my friend, she was really into it, and I didn’t wanna leave on my own, because that didn’t seem safe. It was late.’
He wanted to ask about her parents. Almost as if she knew, she continued: ‘My parents, they thought I was sleeping over. Not that they were, you know, vigilant. They pretty much didn’t seem to care where I was, what I did.’
He thought about the kind of mother she was to her girls. It went one of two ways, didn’t it? You did what had been done to you or you did it so completely differently it was unrecognizable. You did it the way you wish it had been done for you.
A small sob broke her voice. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’ He felt out of his depth. He wanted her to spit it out now. To see how bad it was.
She was struggling to carry on.
‘Were you …?’
The prompt helped. ‘Raped? No.’ The relief he felt was enormous. A surge.
‘I guess I was assaulted. This guy, he – he touched me. He frightened me. He … I thought he was going to rape me. I think maybe he would have done, but someone came in. He was drunk – really drunk. Maybe he wouldn’t even have been capable of it.’
‘Did you know him?’
She shook her head. ‘I’d never seen him before and I never saw him again.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’
Again, the small shake. ‘No. I was embarrassed. I felt … foolish. I didn’t want to talk about it … ever. I wouldn’t have known who to tell. I actually never have. Then to now.’
‘Heather …’
‘It messed me up quite a bit. It was years before I could … be intimate with a guy, sleep with someone. I would start, you know, but all this weird stuff, these memories, would come back. I could smell him, cheap cologne, cheap cigarettes, booze. I could see him. I could feel how he felt. I could even hear the damn song that was playing when it happened. It was Journey. Something like that. A guitar solo.’
‘Shit.’
‘Even with the girls’ father it was never really okay. I never … liked it. Sex. When we broke up, he threw it back at me.’
‘But …’ He didn’t know how to say it.
She took his face in her hands. ‘I know what you’re going to say. But it’s always been different with you. That was one of the ways I knew. I just … With you, I always knew you would take care of me, that you wouldn’t hurt me. Do you remember the first time, with you and me?’
Scott nodded. Of course he did.
‘I was waiting … waiting for all that crap to start up. It never did. You were … you were reverential. Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘Not to me. I felt the same. I worshipped you from the start. I still do.’
‘And so you fixed me.’
‘You didn’t need fixing.’
‘We all need fixing, Scottie, in some way …’
He kissed her gently.
‘I wanted to tell you at the beginning. I felt like I should. But what we had … it was so … I don’t know, it sounds stupid. So pure. Clean. I felt better. I didn’t want to dirty us up with it.’
‘I wish you had.’
‘And I’m sorry I didn’t.’
‘And Ethan?’
‘I don’t know. He scared me. That stuff with Arthur. The running away. What happened with that girl …’
‘We talked about that.’
‘I know it isn’t the same but … all that irresponsibility. That loose-cannon thing. It scares me. It scares me that young men can get like that.’
She spun around, her face earnest. ‘You see, I don’t think the guy who did that to me at the party was “a bad guy”. I bet you he’s a responsible citizen now. Probably married, probably a father. Probably pays his taxes and coaches Little League and gives to good causes. I think he was out of control. I think he was colossally, dangerously out of control. That’s the part that frightens me. I think good people do bad things, and I think bad people do good things.’
Scott understood.
‘So I don’t think Ethan is a bad kid. I think he’s at risk of being a good kid doing bad things. That’s what frightens me.’
‘I get it.’
‘Do you? Do you?’
He held her close, like he’d never let her go, murmuring into her hair that he did. She relaxed and grew heavy in his arms, but he leant back against the bed, and held on.
45
Charlie slept fitfully, and rose early, troubled by the events of the last couple of days. Things had started so well, and he’d been so pleased. Now the cracks were starting to show, and he felt like he was losing control of everything, not succeeding in any of his objectives. He found Laura in the front garden, where the early sun was strongest. She was sitting on a teak bench, still in her pyjamas, her legs clutched to her chest, her dressing-gown wrapped tightly around her, her chin resting on her knees. He’d seen her through the window, as he came down the stairs, and ached on her behalf. He went into the kitchen to make two mugs of tea.
Outside, he put a hand on her shoulder. She laid her cheek on it. ‘Hi, Dad.’ Her voice was quiet
, tired-sounding.
‘Hi, love. May I sit?’
‘Please.’ She smiled at him, and took the mug he offered her. ‘Thanks.’
For a moment, they were quiet, listening to the birdsong.
‘Not for the first time, it must be said, I do so wish your mum was here.’
She didn’t answer straight away. Then, ‘Me too.’ Laura’s words almost caught in her throat. Emotion was terribly close to the surface.
Charlie turned his head and watched her precious face. ‘You miss her almost as much as I do, I think.’
‘Oh, Dad.’ She slumped into his side, like a little girl.
He put an arm around her, making himself as strong and firm as he could. He thought she might be crying. ‘Do you think she’d know what to do?’
Laura raised her head and smiled, but her eyes were full of tears. ‘I think she’d know what to say …’
Charlie saw the distinction. ‘She was like a sorcerer. That’s how I thought of her. Or some kind of sage. There were times when I was in real danger of not being able to make a single decision without her – except at work – and I just deferred. Deferred like I breathed. Why wouldn’t I? She was invariably right. And just wiser than me. She’d be doing stuff around the house, you know, cooking and cleaning, or we’d be walking … and she was always thinking, always problem-solving. Whether it was about one of you kids or something else. I swear to God, if she was in charge of the country, we wouldn’t be going to hell in a handcart.’
She laughed ruefully. ‘You’re right.’
‘When she was dying, I wanted to take notes.’
Laura stared at him. He never talked about that time. Never had. ‘What do you mean?’
‘While she could talk, before she got too addled by the morphine, she was still doing it. Thinking about things. Speaking her wisdom. I did – I wished I’d got a notebook with me.’
Laura remembered the hospice as if it had all happened yesterday. When she’d first been given the news that further treatment would only be palliative, that she was now terminal, Daphne hadn’t wanted to go: she’d wanted to stay at home, and they had promised her that she could. Macmillan nurses came for a while – wonderful, kind women, who’d made the unbearable seem almost bearable. In the end, though, she’d whispered to Laura that she’d been wrong – she didn’t want to die in their home after all. ‘He’ll be staying here, your dad, and I don’t want him seeing my ghost in every corner.’
They’d all dreaded the hospice but, of course, as everyone who used one seemed eventually to realize, the staff were calm and compassionate, in a peaceful place. There was a sense of safety about them. They knew what they were doing. She’d timed it well. Of course. While she remained at home, she was always able to get up, for at least part of the day, to wash and dress, to look and seem much like herself, to drink a cup of tea with visitors who knew not to stay for too long or ask too much. To take Ethan onto her lap and read to him so that he wasn’t afraid of her. Once she entered hospice care, the will to normality ebbed gently away, and within just a week or so, she was sleeping more than she was awake, then unconscious more than she was asleep, and then, so gently that it almost came down to a change in the rise and fall of her chest, and the small change to the sound of her breath, not there at all.
She’d never seemed to be in real pain, not the kind they couldn’t control, and Laura had been so very grateful for that. She wasn’t sure any of them – Dad especially – could have borne to see her live from drug dose to drug dose, wretched with agony, as some people still seemed to have to die even in the twenty-first century. It was more that she had faded.
‘What kind of notes?’
Charlie chuckled softly. ‘Oh, all sorts. Recipes.’ He lost himself in memory. ‘She was worried I wouldn’t eat properly. Reminders. Like I’d never find my way to the doctor or the optician or the dentist without her there to remind me. Random thoughts. What I ought to plant in the spring. How I needed to get rid of socks when they went thin, before they were holey. And she talked about you guys a lot. More than anything else. What she thought. What she wanted for you all. What I was to tell you.’
Laura smiled. It was very Mum. ‘She was a control freak.’
Charlie agreed. ‘Of the very, very best kind. She didn’t want to leave you.’
‘Or you.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, she was quite fierce about that. Didn’t allow herself an iota of self-pity, and didn’t want me to. She said there was nothing less attractive than wallowing.’
Laura knew differently. Even in her last weeks and days, Mum had wanted to shield him. She’d cried, twisting a handkerchief, with Laura. Wished it was otherwise with Laura. Mourned for the old age she wasn’t going to get with the man she adored. Issued instructions about Charlie to Laura. He had just never known. Laura laid her hand across her father’s, keeping the promises she’d made all those years ago, and letting her dad speak his own truth about his dying wife.
‘She said we’d had a good run, her and me. That she couldn’t bring herself to be angry about leaving me.’ He was close to tears. But he shook them away. ‘But, my God, she was angry about all of you. About not seeing Ethan grow up, or Nick have children, or Scott get a blooming girlfriend.’
‘I wonder what she’d make of us all.’
He leant forward, and whispered, ‘She’d be extraordinarily proud of each and every one of you.’
46
Fran’s car was already at the farm when Nick pulled into the car park just on ten a.m. He spotted her by the entrance. She was wearing a red and white spotted dress, with a colourful scarf in her hair, like the girl in the wartime propaganda posters – ‘We Can Do It’. It suited her. He discovered that he was pleased to see her. It had been ages, when they were used to seeing each other so regularly. And when she saw him, and smiled broadly, he was relieved as well. He opened the back door. Bea and Delilah slithered out excitedly, seeing their friends, impatient while he released Arthur from the car seat, then retrieved the buggy from the boot.
She watched him walk towards her, and spoke as soon as they were within earshot.
‘Hey, everyone! How are you? Gorgeous day, huh?’
Kissing and squealing and hugs. So far so entirely normal. So far so entirely lovely.
Nick let Fran sort out tickets, then navigate the entrance and a visit to the loo. Carrie might have raised an eyebrow at his submissiveness, but he’d have told her to cut him some slack.
At the farm it was easy to be carried along by the myriad activities on offer, and there was no time for proper talking. Petting zoo, pony rides, tractor safari … The kids chattered incessantly and pulled them in different directions. Fran stayed on the grass with the buggies and the smallest kids while Nick took the big ones to the top of the wobbly slide and saw them into the hessian sacks in which they whizzed, shrieking, to the bottom. He watched their stuff when Fran climbed into the chicken enclosure with their offspring to look for eggs. They both grappled with the sunscreen and the squirming children, who didn’t want to stand still long enough to have it applied. Fran did her own face and looked at Nick, eyebrows raised, until he held out his hand for some.
At lunchtime, they congregated around a picnic table. Nick bought chips and ice-cold juice boxes from the small restaurant, while Fran unpacked a coolbag she’d brought with her: cheese sticks, crudités and cocktail sausages. They made several attempts to start a proper conversation, then laughed at the continual interruptions, and gave up. He would have quite liked to tell her what had happened, with Ethan and Arthur, and the fallout, but the kids were omnipresent.
When they’d finished the savoury offerings, Bea begged to be allowed to buy ice creams for everyone from the van thirty yards away. Nick gave her a ten-pound note, and he and Fran watched as she led the others in a straggly line to join the queue. She kept turning to look back at her dad for reassurance. He nodded and waved.
Fran waved too. ‘She’s a born mum, that one.’
‘Hey. I don’t think so. She always was, way before …’ Her voice trailed off, then came back. ‘I remember her, from when she was tiny, wanting to look after the others, clucking over them. Don’t you remember how she used to speak for them?’
‘Maybe not a mum – a union leader!’
‘Well, that’d be okay too,’ Fran joked. ‘Girl power!’
‘Absolutely.’
They weren’t looking at each other – they were facing the kids, ever vigilant.
‘So, how’s the big family thing panning out, then?’
Nick considered. ‘Some and some, to be honest.’
‘Okay.’ Fran sighed, and picked at the leftovers. ‘Not exactly all happy families, then.’
There was more, of course, but Nick felt exhausted at the thought of talking about it. He gave a grim laugh. ‘Who’d have ’em?’
Bea had completed her transaction at the van, and had arranged her charges in a circle on the grass to eat their ice creams.
‘That’s adorable. You should get a picture.’
Nick picked up his camera and zoomed in on the group, firing off a series of shots with the telephoto lens. ‘And how about you? What’s going on?’
‘The space has been good.’
He was glad she wasn’t evasive with him.
‘He’s moving out while we’re here. Not stuff, just clothes. We’ve not got to sharing-out-the-records stage yet. It’s him who won’t be there when we get back. I’ve got to tell them.’
‘You haven’t yet?’
‘Nope.’
‘Shouldn’t you do that together?’
‘I wondered that. He says he can’t. He wants me to explain it, and them to have a bit of time to get used to it, and then he’ll come round, once we’re home, and they can ask him questions and things, you know, be reassured that he’s not going far. That he and I are okay in a room together, at least.’
‘Do you think they’ll get it?’
‘Can’t decide. Sometimes I think they’re too young to understand. I tell myself kids are resilient and adaptable.’
The Family Holiday Page 23
