‘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.’