She knew what people thought of her. Gold-digger. Airhead. Opportunist. She didn’t care. All this loveliness – the home, the holidays, the handbags and the diamonds – this was frosting. She wouldn’t pretend she didn’t like it, because she did. She really did. For the first time in maybe for ever, she had exhaled, and she didn’t wake up worried at three a.m., and who wouldn’t want that? But whatever they thought, any of them – colleagues, family – she knew Scott was the cake.
11
‘Ethan? That you?’
The front door closed. Laura was in the kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge, wondering what to make for dinner. She was a good cook, or at least she had been once – experimental, enthusiastic – but food was uninteresting to her now. Ethan seemed just as happy with a short rotation of nursery meals – spag bol, gammon, chips and eggs, breaded chicken – as he had ever been with her more varied and adventurous efforts. He’d been an Annabel Karmel baby – she’d put every fruit and veg you could think of through the Mouli and then into a thousand little ice-cube trays, and she’d congratulated herself on a job well done until he’d turned two and begun ruling out flavours one by one. By the time he was three he was eating an almost completely beige diet.
‘Oh, give it up, Laur,’ Mel had scoffed down the phone. ‘Jack is eighty-five per cent chicken nugget, he’s on the umpteenth centile and hasn’t missed a day of nursery this year.’
This unimaginative repertoire suited Ethan perfectly. Things you could eat with just a fork, leaving one hand free for whatever electronic device you were using – a teenage dream. At this point, her spice drawer probably had cobwebs.
He hadn’t answered. Probably had his headphones on. She slammed the fridge door shut and shuffled into the hall, right into Alex.
He shouldn’t do that. Shouldn’t just come in. This wasn’t where he lived any more. Acutely aware of her messy hair, and her not-quite-fresh baggy cardigan, which she now pulled around herself defensively, Laura felt her heart race, and hated him for it.
‘Sorry.’ He wasn’t. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘Where’s Ethan?’
‘He went straight up. Some physics homework or something.’
That felt bloody disloyal of Ethan. Making it seem like he wasn’t bothered about seeing her. He’d been gone all weekend. She tried to channel Mel, and not mind. ‘What do you want, Alex?’ She knew she sounded testy. She should have challenged him on just bowling in, instead of giving him this crotchety-old-woman impression.
Alex had the audacity to look taken aback at her tone. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the summer.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is this a good time?’
So polite. So considerate. So fucking fake. She mumbled that it was fine, and stood aside so he could walk into the kitchen. He looked around, then leant against the counter opposite the French windows.
They’d spent years in this kitchen. Cooking, eating, bickering, laughing. They’d fought here, kissed here, fed their baby in his high chair here. She’d folded a million pairs of his socks in this room, Jenni Murray for company. And he’d stood right there, near the windows, when he’d told her he was going and not coming back. How dare he lean there now, like he still belonged? Like this was his home still.
There was no rulebook for this stuff, no code of etiquette for how to talk to someone you’d loved and lived with, had a baby with and now regularly fantasized about kicking until they begged you to stop, but whom you had to talk to because they were the other parent to that baby, who had gone straight to his room.
She folded her arms across her chest and stared at the floor. There was a row of crumbs along the skirting.
‘We’d like to take Ethan to Greece.’
And there it was. The ‘We’. Innocuous word. Did he do it deliberately or unconsciously? It was a red-hot poker either way.
‘It’s a week. A flotilla holiday. Lots of boats, sailing together.’
‘I know what a flotilla holiday is.’ She’d rather have died than admit she didn’t.
‘Of course.’ He was on his best behaviour.
‘He gets seasick.’
Alex laughed dismissively. ‘He did. When he was small. Surely he’s grown out of it by now.’
She didn’t know. She remembered a cross-Channel ferry, a whole pack of wet wipes, a green toddler.
‘There’ll be other young people. He’ll love it.’
‘Have you told him?’ She corrected herself. ‘Asked him?’
‘No. I wanted to talk to you first.’
‘When is this holiday?’
‘First two weeks of August.’
‘No.’
That shocked him. ‘No. That’s it?’
‘No. He’s with me then.’
‘What are you doing?’
There was a note – a tiny note you’d probably have to have spent half your life with him to hear – that said, ‘What could you possibly be doing that would be better than what I’m proposing?’ The merest, faintest sneer in his question. You might say, if you didn’t know, that she was paranoid and neurotic. If you didn’t know.
She wanted to say it was none of his business. ‘It’s a family holiday. All of us. For my dad’s eightieth.’
‘Gosh. He’s eighty already. Of course. Sounds lovely. Well, perhaps we should ask him, Ethan, I mean, ask him what he’d rather do.’
She wished she could be sure of what Ethan would say. She wished she’d already mentioned his grandfather’s birthday celebration to him. She’d been waiting. She didn’t even know why. Maybe because she suspected he wouldn’t want to go.
‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare put him in that position.’
Alex raised his hands in a way that said he thought she was unhinged and he couldn’t talk to her while she was in this frame of mind. ‘Look, Laura –’
‘No, Alex. You look. I’ve said yes already for both of us. We’re going. It’s important. You need to change your dates.’
He shook his head. ‘There are lots of people involved.’
‘Well, then, perhaps you’ll have to go without him.’ She imbued the ‘you’ with all the weight his ‘we’ had carried.
‘He’s not a pawn, Laura.’
‘I’d like you to go now.’
‘That’s not very grown-up, is it? It’s been months. We should be moving on. We should be able to be civilized. We need to be able to talk about these things without every conversation degenerating into a slanging match.’
She knew he was right. And she knew she wasn’t ready. ‘I’m sorry I’m not moving at the speed you want, Alex.’ She heard sarcasm dripping from her words. It was a struggle to keep her voice quiet. She wanted to scream.
Ethan’s heavy footfall on the stairs drew their eyes to the doorway. He still had his headphones on – those stupid big Beats. He glanced from one parent to the other as he pushed them off his ears onto the back of his neck. He looked discomforted, and she hated that they were doing this to him. ‘Didn’t know you were still here, Dad.’