The Best Man

by Dianne Blacklock

  ‘They don’t have to call me uncle,’ he said. ‘Unless that’s a respect thing you’d prefer,’ he added quickly.

  ‘Oh no, whatever you’d prefer, Aiden.’

  ‘It’s your home, your rules . . .’

  Madeleine was going to need a bucket soon. She stepped forward and planted a kiss on her sister’s cheek. ‘I’m going to find Henry.’

  Scooping Declan up into her arms, she carried him on her hip down the long hallway and out into the massive family room at the back. The house had been sympathetically renovated by the previous owners. They hadn’t gone with the postmodern trend of sticking a big box – however artfully – up against the old structure, but instead had simply opened up what was there, reproducing the same features and details, and echoing the elegant proportions of the existing rooms. It really was a lovely old house, and Genevieve had done an amazing job decorating it so that it was comfortable for adults without being too precious for the kids.

  Henry was over in the kitchen when she entered; he was standing at the island bench, occupied with some kind of food preparation, Madeleine assumed. He looked up but didn’t say anything, just gave her a nod. Yikes. He wasn’t happy. And making up was going to be nigh impossible today, with everyone around. So she just said, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hello, Maddie darling. You made it.’ Her mother went to get up off the sofa, but Archie was blocking her, busy piling toys onto her lap.

  ‘Don’t get up, Mum,’ Madeleine said, as she deposited Declan back onto his feet. He immediately scrambled up onto the sofa and snuggled into his nan. Madeleine bent to kiss her on the cheek and then crouched down to Archie’s height. ‘Hello, gorgeous boy!’ she said, giving him a gentle poke in the tummy. ‘Look at you, getting bigger all the time!’

  He turned a very snotty, tear-streaked face towards her, showing the remnants of the crying bout they had heard through the door, but he seemed contented enough now. He gave Madeleine a big cheesy grin and leant towards her as though to kiss her.

  ‘Hold on, you don’t want to smear that face all over Aunty Maddie,’ said Margaret, wiping his cheeks and nose with the magical appearing tissue mothers always seemed to have at the ready.

  ‘Arn Maddie!’ he exclaimed, throwing his arms around her neck.

  Madeleine hugged him tight; at least the youngest males of the family were pleased to see her. Archie was a sunny-natured little charmer – how could Genevieve have wanted anyone but him? She looked over his shoulder at her mother. ‘How are you, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, not too bad. My back’s playing up again. Why, hello there.’

  Madeleine turned. The star had entered the room, and even her mother was bedazzled.

  ‘Mum, this is Aiden Carmichael,’ she said. ‘He’s going to be Henry’s best man at the wedding.’

  Aiden walked over to join them. ‘Please don’t get up,’ he said to Margaret, then, ‘May I?’, indicating the sofa next to her.

  ‘Of course, please, take a seat.’ Was her mother blushing? Not her too.

  Aiden sat down, taking her hand in his. ‘Mrs Pepper, it’s such a pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘You can’t be calling me Mrs Pepper, you’ll make me feel old. I’m Margaret.’

  ‘And who is this little man?’ he said, as Archie toddled over and grasped onto his knees. As natural as you please, Aiden scooped him up onto his lap. And Archie didn’t protest a jot.

  The Aiden factor clearly worked across all demographics. They would all be occupied for a while, basking in the warm glow of their mutual admiration session, so Madeleine pulled herself up and meandered over to the kitchen to face Henry.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, leaning over the bench to see for herself. He was peeling prawns. Her sister had given him the worst job. ‘Do you want some help?’

  He shook his head. ‘No point in us both stinking of prawns. I just want to keep going until I finish and I can wash my hands.’

  ‘Genevieve’s been keeping you busy, then?’ said Madeleine, walking around the bench to join him on the other side.

  ‘I had to do something.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m sorry we were late.’

  He nodded, intent on pulling the head off a prawn. Madeleine came right up beside him. ‘Don’t I even get a kiss hello?’ she said in a low voice. There was a burst of feminine laughter from across the room. ‘No one’s paying any attention to us.’

  He gave her a glance that was somewhere between awkward and irritated, she suspected. Quite possibly Henry didn’t even know what he was feeling, so she had to build the bridge.

  ‘I missed you.’ She reached up on tiptoes and pressed her lips against his cheek, holding them there until he gave her something. He finally paused, resting his hands on the edge of the bowl and leaning into her. Madeleine put her head on his shoulder and drew her arms through the crook of his elbow.

  ‘Did you have a good time last night?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘It was nothing special,’ she said. ‘You didn’t miss anything.’

  He turned his head to look at her properly. Madeleine saw his eyes had softened as he opened his mouth to speak, ‘I was just –’

  ‘So, Darrow, what’s cooking over there?’ Aiden called loudly from the sofa.

  Madeleine felt Henry stiffen immediately, and she released his arm, stepping back. ‘I’m just the unskilled labourer,’ he said. ‘Genevieve’s the chef.’

  ‘All right,’ Aiden said, turning to her. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘No way, you’re the guest of honour,’ she insisted.

  ‘You have to let me do something. What if I pour the drinks?’

  ‘Drinks!’ Genevieve exclaimed, holding her hands to her face. ‘I’m so sorry, Mark usually takes care of the drinks.’

  Though Mark usually wasn’t here.

  ‘Then that’ll be my job today,’ Aiden said, getting to his feet. ‘Now, I know Madeleine’s having a beer, what are you two ladies drinking?’

  ‘You’re having a beer?’ Henry frowned, glancing at her.

  Before she could speak, Aiden answered for her. ‘A little hair of the dog, old man. Your betrothed had a big night last night.’

  Madeleine drew her breath in sharply, turning her face away from Henry and glaring at Aiden. What the hell?

  ‘I mean, it was all my fault,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m afraid I led her astray.’

  Was that supposed to make it better? Now everyone was looking uneasy.

  Aiden took a breath. ‘What I’m saying is, we only had a few drinks,’ he explained. ‘Poor thing’s obviously not used to it, so she was feeling a little worse for wear this morning. I suggested that a beer might help. So what’s everyone else having?’ he finished, clapping his hands together.

  Lunch was a convivial affair. Genevieve always put on a good spread: she had the hostess thing down pat, and she never did anything by halves. So even for a Saturday lunch with the family she had arranged an extravagant centrepiece of fruits and flowers, and each linen napkin was tied with a twist of the same flowers, like a corsage. The food itself was fit for a restaurant. It was, as Genevieve put it, ‘only’ salads and cold meat, but she was also a fabulous cook, so the ‘salads’ weren’t your standard tomato and lettuce variety, and the ‘cold meats’ hadn’t come from the deli at Woolies that morning, but had been marinated and roasted in her own kitchen the day before, then carved and presented on platters as though they were going to be photographed for a magazine shoot. Her attention to detail was, frankly, exhausting.

  Madeleine was glad to see that her sister had mellowed nicely after a while, with the help of a couple of glasses of wine and the fact that little Archie had obliged by going down for his nap without a fuss, just before they sat down to eat. After the older boys were fed, they happily retired to the far end of the house to watch a DVD. Madeleine herself hadn’t indulged in more than that one beer. It might have helped a little, but the thought of wine turned her stomach.

  ‘So you grew up on Long Island,
Aiden?’ Genevieve was saying. ‘In the movies it always seems like such a glamorous place.’

  Aiden smiled. ‘Everything seems more glamorous in the movies, but really it’s just regular suburbs. When you get up to the Hamptons, that’s where things get fancy. Henry has a place up that way.’

  But no one was much interested in Henry; he was old news, which was just the way he liked it. He had remained stilted during lunch, and hadn’t so much as touched her – not that he was ever very demonstrative, particularly in front of her family. If Henry’s arm brushed up against hers and he let it linger, it was almost the same as someone else making out in public. She wished he would just relax. No wonder Genevieve thought he was a stick in the mud.

  She certainly wouldn’t be thinking that about Aiden. He continued to hold the floor throughout the meal while Genevieve conducted an in-depth, 60 Minutes–style celebrity interview. They learnt that Aiden had an older brother (Owen) and a younger sister (Abigail). That his father (Sheldon) was an investment banker, but his mother (Cindy) was a former schoolteacher, so that kept her husband honest. Cue laughter. Aiden skirted around it, but Madeleine knew he came from money, Henry had told her that much. After Henry’s mother died, he was invited to the Carmichaels’ house for the first time, for Thanksgiving, and he said he’d never seen anything like it. It was an estate, not a house. Aiden did not live in ‘just the regular suburbs’.

  They also learnt that on graduation, Aiden didn’t follow his brother into the family business, but according to him no one was really too bothered. ‘Lucky for me, my brother was your garden-variety eldest child, he got all the ambition and sense of responsibility,’ he told them. ‘And my sister – well, what can I say, she was the baby and the only girl.’

  He’d demonstrated some aptitude with computers and technology, so his father took advantage of connections and secured him an internship with one of the big tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was during the boom years, so Aiden stayed on, but he eventually grew bored with the work. He was more of a people person, an observation Genevieve and Margaret enthusiastically seconded, despite only knowing him for about five minutes.

  ‘I just hated being cooped up in an office all day,’ said Aiden. ‘Then a chance came up to represent the company as part of a delegation to Africa. They were investigating ways to bring the wonders of the internet to the poorest communities. It changed my life. I realised there were bigger issues to work on than the next new operating system. Fortunately for me, my employer was keen to be part of the brave new world of venture philanthropy.’

  ‘You’re kidding – is that what they’re calling it?’ Genevieve asked.

  Aiden nodded. ‘I’ve also heard “philanthrocapitalism” bandied about.’ He grinned.

  ‘That’s not a word,’ Madeleine scoffed.

  ‘But it is a PR opportunity,’ said Aiden. ‘This was all before the crash. A lot of these corporations were swimming in money, and people were starting to feel uneasy about it. To be fair, even some of the head honchos were. Bill Gates – or maybe I should say his wife – was setting a pretty impressive precedent. So no corporate entity wanted to be seen as a greedy holdout. As fast as I could put together proposals, projects were greenlighted, and before long it became a full-time job.’

  ‘I think it’s a little more than a full-time job,’ said Madeleine, drawing on her Google research. ‘You head up their entire global benevolent fund.’

  Aiden shook his head. ‘Ha, there’s a CFO behind a desk somewhere at headquarters making all the important decisions and moving the money around,’ he said. ‘I just do the legwork, on the ground, and get a fancy title.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re being modest,’ said Genevieve.

  ‘I assure you I’m not.’

  ‘So what do you love most about what you do?’ said Margaret, who had seemed mesmerised throughout.

  Aiden hesitated only a moment. ‘I guess it’s being in the position to make a difference. I mean, doesn’t everyone want that?’

  Madeleine was intrigued. He was giving no hint of the disillusionment or frustration he’d expressed more than once to her. She thought that maybe he was so used to keeping up a confident mask for the sake of the cause that he could rarely let his guard down the way he had with her. After all, if the people out there ‘on the ground’, as he put it, stopped believing in what they were doing, how could they ever keep the world at large interested and reaching into its collective pocket? It was spin, but if you were going to be a spin doctor, it might as well be for a worthy cause.

  ‘You know what I don’t get?’ Genevieve said, looking at Aiden.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘How a man like you is still single. You must have had women throwing themselves at you all your life.’

  ‘Not so much,’ he said with a modest shrug.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Well, maybe I just haven’t met the right girl.’

  Genevieve lifted an eyebrow. ‘What, never?’

  Aiden paused for a beat. ‘There was one girl,’ he said with a sly look in Henry and Madeleine’s direction. No, was he really going to make up a story like he did the first night? After telling her it was just a line to get sympathy, and even get him laid?

  ‘Go on.’ Genevieve propped her chin in her hand and leant towards him, intent.

  Aiden drew a deep breath. ‘I met her at college . . .’

  Henry shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He must have heard Aiden’s stories countless times. This was clearly a variation on the theme.

  ‘She was sweet, and very smart,’ Aiden went on. ‘I really thought she might be the one.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Genevieve asked.

  ‘We were in our senior year, both looking at our options after graduation,’ he said. ‘Everything we wanted to do was going to take us in different directions. We had the talk, you know, the one about sustaining a long-distance relationship, and we decided that we could make it work – we could talk on the phone, spend the holidays together . . . So she went east and I headed west. She was the one who drifted first.’

  ‘She was obviously a fool,’ Genevieve declared.

  Henry stood up abruptly, his chair scraping loudly on the polished floor. ‘Would anyone like coffee?’ he said, turning towards the kitchen.

  ‘I’ll help,’ Madeleine said, jumping up and following him. He was already at the sink, filling the reservoir for the coffee machine, his back to her. She had an impulse to press herself into his back and wrap her arms tightly around him, to breathe him in. She felt so disconnected from him lately. They really needed to have sex tonight, whether Aiden was in the house or not. She wasn’t going to let Henry put her off again.

  She suddenly had a flashback to what Aiden had told her this morning, that she had invited him – or rather, tried to pressure him – to share her bed. He’d assured her it was completely innocent, but Madeleine had to wonder if she’d been craving Henry then too, and that in her state any warm body would have done. She really shouldn’t drink so much.

  ‘What?’ Henry stood holding the full reservoir, looking expectantly at her.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ she said blankly.

  ‘You were just standing there staring at me.’

  She smiled. ‘I guess I can’t help myself.’

  He looked faintly embarrassed. ‘Well, you’re in the way.’

  ‘Oh.’ She realised she was leaning against the bench, blocking the coffee maker. ‘Sorry.’ She moved away to fetch cups while Henry set up the machine. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked carefully, lining up the cups along the bench.

  Henry glanced at her. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Just asking,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you, it’s weird being away from you overnight, and then not being able to catch up properly.’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’

  That stung. ‘It’s no one’s fault, Henry,’ she said. ‘You were okay with it last night.’ When he wanted to work.<
br />
  The boys suddenly burst into the room, full-flight and mid-altercation. Declan was wailing at some injustice inflicted by Gabe, but in his heightened distress he couldn’t make himself understood. Meanwhile, Gabe proceeded to defend his actions, presenting his case like a seasoned lawyer. Poor Dec was always at the mercy of his older, more articulate brother. It was another reason Madeleine had a soft spot for him: she could remember Genevieve lording it over her in exactly the same way. The curse of the second-born.

  ‘Keep your voices down!’ Genevieve hissed. ‘If you wake Archie, so help me . . .’

  ‘Okay, boys,’ Aiden said, standing up, ‘outside.’

  Inexplicably, they stopped dead, staring up at him. Declan released a tremulous sigh, his eyes glued to Aiden, as he watched him walk across to the French doors that led out to the garden.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Aiden said, beckoning to them. He opened the doors and both boys trailed him outside without a peep.

  ‘It’s like he’s the Pied Piper or something,’ Genevieve said breathlessly.

  Madeleine carried two cups to the table. ‘Who’s having coffee?’

  ‘Not for me,’ said Genevieve, picking up her wine glass and craning her head to see what they were doing outside. ‘Do you think I should go out there with them?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Madeleine. ‘He works with kids overseas. You can trust him.’

  ‘Of course I trust him,’ Genevieve said. ‘The man’s a saint.’

  There was a sudden loud noise from the kitchen. Madeleine looked across to see Henry banging the filter basket against the sink to empty it.

  ‘Coffee, Mum?’ she said.

  ‘Thank you, Maddie,’ said Margaret, taking one of the cups. ‘I’ll just have this, and then I’ll be on my way. I don’t like driving at night.’

  ‘Mum,’ Genevieve sighed, ‘it won’t be dark for another couple of hours.’

  ‘Dusk is worse,’ Margaret said, stirring her coffee. ‘Late in the afternoon the light is terrible. The sun is so low driving up Park Road I can barely see three foot in front of me.’