39
He probably shouldn’t have told her. She didn’t, after all, need to know. Scott could have cut out his tongue. It had all been going so well.
If he was honest, he’d been rather enjoying being the most functional of the three of them. Maybe that wasn’t very kind, but it made a change. For years, he’d been the anomaly: occasions like this, Christmas, Easter, for the longest time it had been Mum and Dad, Alex and Laura, Nick and Carrie. And Scott. He hadn’t quite fitted. Scott, who didn’t have girlfriends. Scott, who made a fortune at work – but who else understood what he did and, anyway, what did it matter how much you earned if you never had any time to spend it, no one to spend it on?
If he had been self-indulgent enough to recline on some expensive therapist’s Corbusier lounger, he suspected he’d discover it went further back than that. Laura and Mum had always been a double act, tight. Nick was so much more like Charlie than Scott was and, if that wasn’t enough, he was Mum’s precious baby, too. Laura and Nick were closer. It was always him, vaguely on the outside, just different enough to feel a bit strange. He had never for a second doubted that his parents loved him. That they were proud of him. He just wasn’t entirely sure they knew what to do with him. Perhaps he’d always been on a quest to please them.
But he wasn’t self-indulgent enough to recline on an expensive therapist’s Corbusier lounger. Heather had taught him, was teaching him, to be more open, more emotional … but he was still mostly comfortable doing that with her, through her. He’d been trying it out, though, on the others. The other day, in the pool with Nick and the kids, he’d felt a closeness he hadn’t been aware of with his brother. After Carrie had died, he’d tried, but each time he saw or spoke to Nick, he was left with the feeling that he wasn’t getting it right – that he hadn’t said quite the right thing. But, when he’d scooped Arthur out of the water, and then they’d all gone in dressed and been silly and loving and fun, he’d felt very close to him.
He’d remembered something he hadn’t thought about for years. A family holiday in Cornwall. Maybe Devon. There’d been a lot of those. They’d been on a beach with lots of rock pools, and Dad had bought them all nets and buckets, although Laura hadn’t been that interested. Scott had been earnestly crabbing, photographing his catch with the Kodak camera he’d been given for Christmas. Nick had been following him, clad in his terry-towelling poncho and nothing else, while his trunks dried on the windbreak. His brother had been a shadow that summer, a little boy wanting to be bigger, and Scott had found him annoying. He’d fallen off a slimy rock into a pool that turned out to be quite deep, face first. Scott had jumped in after him, hooking him out by the hood of his poncho, splashing his camera. He’d worried he’d damaged the camera, and he’d lost a particularly interesting-looking crab. But he’d been proud of himself for ‘saving’ Nick. He hadn’t hesitated.
The conversation after dinner had probably only happened because the three of them had had so much to drink, but he couldn’t honestly say he was sorry it had. The next morning, when she’d first seen him, Laura hadn’t said a word, but she’d come to him, where he was standing, propped against a cupboard in the kitchen, and leant her head very briefly against his chest, slipping her hand into his for just a second.
It had all been going so well.
Heather really was working her magic on all of them, exactly as he had hoped and believed she would. He’d watched her pick them off one by one – Charlie, Laura, Nick – talk to them with her own brand of warm, relatable straightness. And win them over. Even prickly, brittle Laura seemed to have softened in the last day. The kids were easy, of course, the easiest of all. They wanted to be mothered, and she was very good at that. Earlier, he’d watched them make jam tarts in the kitchen. She’d got them all in little gingham aprons she must have bought in town, and stood them on the chairs around the table, rolling pastry and spooning jam. If she’d deliberately put flour on their cheeks and photographed them for her Instagram account, Nick hadn’t seemed to mind. Some people were very uptight about social media, and he’d thought his brother might have been too. He could almost hear him complaining about people living their lives through a lens under false pretences, or refusing to let his children be treated like catalogue models. Maybe he would have done, once. But not now. Some of that fight – that posturing – had gone out of him. Hashtag family.
Ethan was the only one he hadn’t seen Heather charm. Laura’s explanation of what was going on at home had shone a light on his nephew’s closed-off quietness. He knew Nick had spoken to him. He didn’t feel quite that he could, although he’d been looking for an opening. And now he’d told her.
They’d been squeezed together in the middle of the vast bed in a soporific after-sex glow. He was new to the charms of quiet-cos-we’re-in-a-busy-house-and-these-doors-don’t-lock sex, and, somewhat to his surprise, he was a big fan. She’d laughed throatily when he’d confessed to finding it thrilling, the idea of being interrupted, gently scratching his chest through the greying hair, saying if he liked danger sex, she might have some other suggestions for him. He was immediately aroused again.
They were whispering about the others when he’d spilt the whole story of Ethan to her. As he spoke, he felt her back stiffen, and she stopped scratching his chest. She moved away from him in a sudden movement, and pulled the sheet around her, bringing her knees to her chest. The moment for more sex had most definitely passed.
‘Oh, I don’t like that.’
Scott was confused. ‘Which part?’
‘The underage-sex part.’
‘Oh, come on, Heather. According to Nick she was only a few weeks off her sixteenth birthday.’
‘Which, by the way, is still too young so far as I’m concerned. But she wasn’t sixteen, was she? She was fifteen. Fifteen, Scott.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ For a moment, he thought she must be. Of the two of them, she was by far the most relaxed about sex. The most experienced, and the most adventurous. Two minutes earlier she’d been stroking him and talking about the benefits of doing it in the Jacuzzi. He was genuinely confused.
‘That’s younger than Hayley.’
‘We don’t know this girl. Maybe she seemed older.’
‘And that’s the point, is it? If she seemed older, it’s fine.’ She was almost hissing at him now.
‘No, I’m just saying …’ Scott was struggling to organize his thoughts. This reaction had been so far from what he’d expected. He felt wrongfooted.
‘Eyeliner and high heels and miniskirts might make you look older, Scott. They don’t make your mind or your body older.’
‘I know that.’
‘I’m not kidding. Look at my girls.’ He heard the word, the slight change of tone. ‘Do you think they are doing it?’ She spat ‘doing it’. Made it sound dirty.
‘No. I mean, I don’t know. Are they?’
‘Of course they aren’t.’
‘I didn’t mean Meredith.’
‘Neither of them is.’