by Amanda Coe
The next day, the Shads arrived nearly two hours before they were expected, while Patrick was having his study-based nap. Louise and Jamie had left for the hospital, and in any case were neither expected nor asked to play any part in the socialising. Mia answered the door.
‘Wonderful journey, we just cruised straight through, didn’t even stop for a pee!’ announced Dodie, foursquare on the doorstep. She was a tall woman, extravagantly layered against any defining assessment of her large body. Clumped mascara framed her sentimental blue eyes, which blinked through a girlish ash-blonde fringe, so that the top of her face in no way corresponded to the swags and puckerings of age further down. She offered a warm hand, armoured with rings.
‘You must be Mia.’
Mia smiled and withstood the frank scrutiny of both Shads. Lucas, smaller than his wife, stepped out from behind her, armed with a bottle that he forced into Mia’s hands as he lunged in for a double kiss. He was dapper, smoothly bald. Mia hadn’t been prepared for a friend of Patrick’s to be black. (His Wiki entry said a lot about a small magazine, and jazz; she had skimmed it without looking up any images.)
‘Where is the old bugger?’
Mia told them that Patrick was working, and apologised about the kitchen, where drilling whined through the walls. While Lucas went to find Patrick, she led Dodie upstairs with their bags: Mia had decamped back to Patrick’s bedroom to make way for their guests.
‘Absolutely desperate for a pee, we were so determined not to stop,’ said Dodie, disappearing into the bathroom on the way. Mia carried the bags on into the bedroom for her. They were of unremarkable quality, she assessed, neither the cheapest nor shabby with age. Going by these as well as their car, the Shads weren’t rich, but they didn’t look to be strapped, either. Dodie took so long in the bathroom that Mia went back downstairs, where Patrick was already shuffling around in search of a drink.
‘House is in a bloody uproar,’ he complained to Lucas, who sat in the spare chair, legs urbanely crossed to reveal burgundy socks and skinny, hairless shins. Mia intercepted the Basics whisky bottle and asked Lucas what he would really like.
By the time of their dinner reservation, everyone except Mia had been drinking for hours. Although Lucas showed no signs of being affected by the gin and tonics that kept pace with Patrick’s scotches, Dodie was slurring her words and repeating herself, with an increasingly irritating habit of buttonholing Mia every time the conversation between the two men became interesting. Fortunately, the older woman seemed to be seeking an outlet for monologue rather than an actual conversation, so after a couple of frustrating interchanges, Mia was able to tune her out and listen to the men. She relished the opportunity to eavesdrop on Patrick, performing the way he had on the phone to Dodie, all frailty banished. He was exactly the way she had imagined he might be before she met him.
It took some chivvying to get the uproarious trio of them moving in time for dinner. The Shads, supported by Patrick, were adamant that there was no point paying for a taxi when their perfectly good car was parked outside. When Mia protested that Lucas was over the limit, he flourished his car keys and suggested that she drive. She decided to take Dodie’s breezy assurances about the scope of their insurance coverage at face value.
‘What a shame we couldn’t get into the old place,’ sighed Dodie, as Mia parked. Mia had twice explained to the Shads, as well as Patrick, that the old place was defunct.
‘Never liked it!’ said Patrick. ‘Manager was a cunt. Came from Guildford and wore a fucking beret.’
Mia was relieved when the waiter settled them at a back table, away from draughts, as Dodie demanded, and with sufficient space around them to avoid disruption to the rest of the tamer and mainly younger clientele. Did old people really speak more loudly because they were deaf, Mia wondered, or just because they had the kind of voices no one had any more? Dodie had imparted early in her monologue that she had trained as an actress in the 1960s.
‘Julie Christie was in my year at RADA.’
Mia hadn’t asked her who Julie Christie was. She could look it up later.
Lucas ignored the menu being placed in front of him and buttonholed the waiter for a bottle of house red. Dodie, once she had retrieved her reading glasses from the chain where they rested on her mounded bosom, compensated by taking a beady interest in her own menu’s contents. She read most of it out loud, relishing a couple of spelling mistakes and deploring a comprehensive lack of accents and circumflexes.
‘Are you up to the entrecôte, Paddy?’ Dodie asked. ‘Or entrecoat, as I suppose it’s prounounced . . . it was always your favourite at the other place.’
‘You know what I like,’ Patrick told Mia, as uninterested as Lucas in the prospect of food.
Dodie, with a practised shoulder turn, appealed to the gallery. ‘What’s a “steak-cut chip” when it’s at home?’
‘At least they’re not “fries”.’
Mia was aware that Lucas was staring at her as he spoke. She smiled at him politely. He batted Patrick.
‘You old dog, look at her!’
When the wine came (‘About bloody time,’ said Patrick, as Lucas dismissed the waiter’s offer of a taste and indicated that his glass should be filled immediately), Dodie insisted on a toast.
‘To Mia, and new beginnings.’
Mia accepted the tribute; Patrick had told them, then, about the proposal. (She couldn’t properly call it an engagement, with no ring to show for it.) Dodie hoisted her glass again, shushing the men.
‘And to dear Sara, and times past.’
Her voice faltered, eyes swimming. Patrick was already lifting his own glass to drink, so that Lucas, attempting to slosh his glass against Patrick’s for the second toast, instead tipped wine on to the tablecloth. The waiter came and blotted a folded napkin over the purple stain.
‘What’s a steak-cut chip?’ Dodie asked him, with a flirtatious shift in tone. The waiter struggled to explain.
‘It’s just a chip then, that you eat with steak,’ she declared, projecting to the room with the confidence of delivering a killing bon mot. The waiter agreed, flicking a look at Mia that appealed both to their similar age and Mia’s implied role as carer. She was surprised to intercept an equally complicit eye roll from Patrick, uniting himself with her against Dodie. She lengthened the smile she had produced for the waiter to include him, surprised. This was a new alliance between them. Or was it? Seeing Patrick turn back to Lucas, her faint surge of affection ebbed. It hadn’t been meant for her, that look, just aimed at the hole that she filled. Dear Sara and times past. Don’t look in the box, she admonished herself. Deal, or no deal. Sara was only a person, like any other, and what do people matter?
Mia decided she’d better stop drinking. The food arrived. She had ordered fish for Patrick, knowing steak was beyond his teeth. The men progressed to their second bottle of wine, but Dodie, belatedly recognising her own limit, left her glass untouched. From time to time, she and Lucas looked at each other and smiled.
You never know what really goes on inside a marriage, babe. When her dad had said this to her, as a teenager, Mia had assumed that it was meant to dismiss mysteries of sex too uncomfortable to discuss between a father and daughter, particularly the irreconcilable mysteries both of sex between her parents and sex between her father and his new girlfriend. It seemed, though, that sex might be the least of it.
‘Oh no, I can’t eat this.’
Dodie was giving her chicken the same critical attention she had beamed on the menu.
‘It’s full of something. I simply can’t eat it.’
Lucas’s face jumped into loyal dismay. ‘No good?’
‘Tarragon.’
‘Tell the man!’
The waiter was forbearing. Presently, Dodie was brought a plain grilled chicken breast, which she pronounced dry, incorporating a shrug of martyred forbearance into the thorough chewing of each morsel. While she finished it, Dodie resumed an earlier monologue about the festival in Padsto
w where Lucas was scheduled to speak, which seemed largely to concern a historical grudge with the organiser, whom she referred to as Cruella de Vil. Mia drifted in and out, thinking about the unit handles for the kitchen. Was brushed steel really the best option, or verging on outdated? Perhaps tongue-and-groove might have been better for the units themselves. A contemporary kitchen might just look plain wrong. Anyway, she consoled herself, whatever she did and whatever Louise thought about it, it was bound to be an improvement.
‘. . . loved Paddy to have come along, but Sara absolutely forbade it, of course.’
Mia tuned in. ‘Sorry?’
‘Sara. Cruella would have adored Paddy to make an appearance, but he could never get permission from home, could you Paddy?’
Patrick turned his attention from his wine glass to Dodie.
‘Padstow,’ she reminded him. ‘Sara wasn’t keen.’
‘Not my sort of thing.’ He pushed his plate away, conclusively. ‘Anyway, she liked having me at home.’
And now Mia witnessed a marital look between the Shads, surprisingly acute despite its buffer of alcohol. This one again, it said. Yeah, right.
‘You could go with Lucas, check it out,’ Mia suggested, but Patrick was too soaked in booze to absorb anything else that night.
He hadn’t been wrong about the bill. Lucas and Dodie’s failure to display the merest flicker of acknowledgement when the waiter placed the leatherette wallet on the table suggested a prior agreement between them to ignore it. The card Mia took out to pay was Patrick’s, although she punched in the PIN.
In the car on the way home, Dodie finally lapsed into queasy silence beside Mia as she drove, allowing her to digest the evening. She liked having me at home. The look shared by the Shads during the Padstow conversation either meant that they thought Sara’s behaviour, or Patrick’s defence of it, was bizarre. Given Louise, and the condition of the house, it wouldn’t be surprising if Sara had been a bit of a fruit loop. She had certainly been nothing like Mia, whatever Louise’s psychic claimed. As far as Mia was concerned, Patrick was welcome to go to Padstow any time he liked. She’d drive him there herself.
Beside her, Dodie belched richly.
‘Of course she stopped him—stopped him writing,’ she slurred, as though Mia had already put a question to her. ‘Lucas says he’ll never forgive her for that.’
‘Stopped him? Sara?’
Dodie gathered her layers around her, as though this indiscretion had accidentally tumbled from her clothing.
‘Not my place to say, darling.’
‘But how could she have stopped him—’
‘Hush. Or you’ll bring down the wrath . . .’
Dodie jerked her head at the back seat, where Lucas and Patrick dozed. A trailing snore came from one of them.
‘The wrath is mighty, when it descends, I’m sure you know . . .’
‘They can’t hear you, they’re completely out of it.’ Mia glanced at Dodie, deciding how to play it. ‘He said she liked having him at home. Wasn’t—’
Wasn’t that so he could write, she was about to say, but Dodie leaped in. ‘I’m not sure she did, quite honestly. Dog in the manger, darling.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ Mia told her.
Authoritative, Dodie shook out a layer.
‘She was a tricky one, Sara. Lovely, of course. But hard to fathom sometimes. Not like me—I’m an open book! What you see is what you get, absolute heart on sleeve. I was fond of her—don’t get me wrong . . . But Paddy. Well. Tell it not in Gath, but I’m not sure she wanted him, really. Him. But she certainly didn’t want anyone else to have him.’
For the rest of the journey Dodie remained silent, misty eyes on the black road being gulped by the full beam of the headlights. When they arrived at the house, Mia had to wake Lucas and Patrick to help them both, stumbling around the obstacle of Louise’s parked car, inside. Dodie waited by the front door. With an air of long practice, she deftly took some of Lucas’s weight, while hooking her free hand on Mia’s sleeve.
‘You do know what you’re doing, dear, don’t you?’
At first Mia thought Dodie meant getting Patrick up to bed. Then she realised; she meant marrying him.
‘I think so,’ Mia said, disengaging herself from Dodie and steering Patrick to the stairs.
You never know what really goes on inside a marriage. Sitting on the bed, it took Patrick the same time to toe his shoes off from the back, blundering, pissed, as it did for her to get undressed and hang up her clothes. What was she doing? He was a million years old. Him. The way Dodie had said that, it was as though she had fancied Patrick, once upon a time. Was that what had happened, she’d had a go, and Sara had seen her off? It seemed incredible now, listening to Patrick coughing volcanically all the time she was brushing her teeth. He was still coughing when she came back into the bedroom, struggling at his pyjama buttons. Really, she should fetch him a glass of water. Slipping first under the duvet, Mia decided to let him wait until he woke in the night with his drinker’s thirst. Or, if he was desperate enough, he could go and get one now. There was no point giving in to him; he had to learn to do things for himself. She wasn’t Sara.
Your agent’s office phoned. An assistant called Jay or Jake?? (sounds very young!) returning your call to Peter, says sorry it’s been so long. It’s a no from radio people.
Sorry about this morning. Maybe it’s my age. But talking about things seems completely pointless as far as I’m concerned.
Gone to shops. Sx
Ps. Don’t touch ham, it’s for tonight.
SOPHIE HAD BEEN right in insisting that a pool for the boys was a deal-breaker; when they arrived at the country-house hotel after another tortuously long drive from Surrey, the rain was torrential. The forecasts for their week away were dismal. Fortunately, only Nigel seemed cowed by the prospect.
‘Cornwall,’ said Sophie, with a tolerant, proprietary air, snapping up her umbrella and chivvying the dazed boys across the teeming gap from car to lobby. The weather wasn’t going to put her off, Nigel could see. Despite her first visit being ambushed by the melodrama of Holly’s accident, the second-home bit had never left Sophie’s teeth. Behind the scenes, she had been steadily amassing information and constructing Pinterest boards. Critically galvanised by some Norfolk renovation shots circulated at a recent dinner party, Nigel suspected that Sophie had pushed for this trip mainly because she no longer trusted him to finesse matters with Patrick and Louise without her supervision. And it was true; he’d been avoiding the necessary conversation for so long that, in some unthinkable benchmark of procrastination, Patrick’s solicitor had actually started to call him. Since Nigel never procrastinated, he knew the disposition of the house must be worrying him at some profoundly unreachable level. Whether it was Patrick or Louise he was more fearful of confronting, it was hard to say, but with Holly recovered, there was no longer any excuse not to tackle Louise.
‘Isn’t it called something?’ Sophie asked, during the journey. Nigel told her he’d only ever known it as ‘The House’. Its legal address was 6 Hill Path; ‘Hill Path House’ made you sound like you were trying out dentures, or ordering Thai food. Perhaps there had been a name, historically, and Patrick had got rid of it. He had been very against history, once. When Nigel declared it to be his favourite subject at school he remembered Patrick condemning the way it was taught, along with television, books, sport and the pop charts, as a cultural opiate. Military history particularly got his goat: ‘a wet-dream of Britannia’, apparently.
‘We can always think of a name,’ Sophie had said.
Despite being welded to their DVD players in the back of the car, as before the boys had nodded off for the last hour or so of the journey, which meant that by the time they arrived at the hotel they were bouncing off the walls instead of winding down sufficiently to allow their parents the adult dinner with them asleep at the end of the baby monitor Nigel had been wistfully anticipating. Since they would all be sharing a fa
mily room, he had already resigned himself to the lack of hotel sex; the prospect of a proper meal and an overpriced bottle of wine had been his small comfort. But Sophie ended up ordering grey room-service hamburgers, which they all ate crowded on the big bed while watching a digital repeat of Have I Got News For You, the only programme they could find not wildly unsuitable for the boys, given the lateness of the hour and their enthusiasm for the giant screen. Olly asked so many questions in his struggle to understand that Nigel snapped at him and Sophie got annoyed at him snapping. In the ensuing spat, Nigel was forced to play the working-all-week card.
Finally, but only after Albie had trapped his fingers in the hinge of the wardrobe Olly was repeatedly slamming and wailed himself to sleep in the aftermath, the boys were out for the count. Nigel and Sophie slept turned away from each other until Albie woke in the early hours, disorientated and panicking, and Sophie gathered him in. Olly crept into the bed at his usual time, before six, and Nigel’s remaining sleep was so cramped and fitful that finally he got up, pulled on his kit and ran a three-mile circuit around the sodden hotel grounds. Throughout, he could feel his neck pinching from the tension of his nighttime position. He wasn’t looking forward to the day.
After breakfast (the boys, but not Nigel, were allowed Coco Pops), they set off to the house. Nigel had called Louise to warn her of their arrival, but not that he wanted to speak to her in particular. Sophie briefly rehearsed the pitch with him in the car.
Mia, answering the door, was as pristine as ever, the jeans as snug. As she led them through the markedly tidier hall, Sophie pulled a face of pantomime prurience behind her back and Nigel felt a twinge of irritation at this claim on his marital loyalty. He had, of course, told her about the wedding plans, with an admonition not to let them slip to Louise.
