His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  ‘The bathroom’s very nice,’ I said.

  She frowned, sat up, took one earphone out, asked me to repeat myself. Then she said, ‘So it should be. This little trip must be costing Mark the earth.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you start getting ready?’

  ‘In a minute. You might be all keen to play happy families, but I’m not.’

  She put the earphone back in and sank back down onto the bed.

  ‘You know, if you’re not careful Mark’s really going to end up hating you,’ I said, thinking that she either wouldn’t hear me or would pretend she hadn’t.

  ‘He won’t,’ she said without opening her eyes.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  She sat up again and took out both earphones. She looked really irritated now. ‘Because he can’t afford to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they have news for us, dummy. Big news. Or little news, depending how you look at it. They’re probably going to tell us tonight.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You think you’re so smart. You figure it out.’

  She put her phone and earphones down on the bedside table – however annoyed she got, she was always careful with her phone – and stalked off to the bathroom. The door shut firmly behind her. Not a slam, but a warning. The lock clicked into place.

  Why did I have no idea what she was talking about? Why did I never know anything… until it was too late?

  I went over to the wardrobe to pick out an outfit for that evening’s meal. It was going to be three courses in the hotel restaurant, which I’d admired in the brochure: it had rose-coloured walls and fancy lights, and round, tablecloth-covered tables. I was a bit apprehensive, but mostly I was excited. Why did Ava have to go and spoil things? And why did she always have to be so superior?

  Big news or little news. It didn’t sound like bad news, anyway.

  Maybe it wasn’t Mark who was going to end up hating her. Grown-ups didn’t hate children, anyway, they were past that kind of thing. It was children who hated grown-ups. Or each other. And Ava was still young enough to count as a child, whatever airs she might give herself.

  Maybe the person who was really going to end up hating Ava was me.

  Ten

  Ava

  Even though I was pretty confident that I’d figured out what was going on, I was much less sure about when they were going to tell us. Left to herself Mum would probably have broken the news fairly quickly, but Mum with Mark was a different ball game. They’d have to agree. Mum wasn’t running the show any more, and she wouldn’t want to upset him, especially not now. Whatever he felt would be the best timing of the announcement, she’d probably go with.

  In the end, they told us that first evening on the balcony.

  Mum was waiting out there when we arrived. She was leaning against the balcony and looking out at the view, and she was wearing a blue dress I hadn’t seen before: it was a loose but flattering cut and made her look slim, and I wondered whether I’d got it wrong. She really did look pretty good for a woman with two kids who worked all hours and spent them on her feet.

  Then I saw the way Mark looked at her – really soppy, and really, really pleased with himself – and I decided I had it right after all.

  They didn’t launch straight into it. First of all Mark fussed around getting us drinks. Ellie had some lemonade from their mini-bar fridge, and I had some of the half-bottle of white wine Mark had ordered from room service. Dad never drank white if he could help it, but presumably Mark wasn’t bothered by its slightly effeminate connotations. Or maybe he just didn’t want any stains on the fresh clothes he’d put on.

  Mark checked with Mum before pouring it for me and she agreed to it as if the risk of me following in Dad’s footsteps and developing an appetite for the stuff was the least of her worries. Which was right, in my view. I liked the idea of pacing myself. A bit like Mark, actually. Dad would’ve polished off that half-bottle pretty much as soon as you could say swallow, whatever colour the wine was. But Mark still had plenty left for me.

  Mum was drinking iced water. No surprise there. I glanced at Ellie to see if she was taking any of this in. She was frowning slightly as if she wasn’t too sure about things, but it didn’t look to me like she’d realised what was going on yet. Sooner or later she was in for a shock.

  Well, I had tried to warn her. Maybe I should have told her what I thought, but how could I when I didn’t know for sure?

  ‘To us,’ Mark said, proposing a toast, and we all clinked glasses. ‘To the holidays.’ Then: ‘Girls, we have some news to tell both of you.’

  OK. This was it. I braced myself. Mark put his arm round Mum and pulled her in close. I’d have been irritated if he had done that to me. Well, maybe not if I was in love with him. Mum didn’t seem annoyed. She looked overwhelmed and hopeful. Like she might be about to cry the way people do when they win something big and it catches them by surprise.

  ‘We’re having a baby,’ Mum said.

  I wondered if they’d rehearsed it. The double act: Mark introducing the topic, Mum following up. There was a short, very intense silence, during which I was mainly conscious of Mark watching me as if I was the only one who really mattered, as if all this had somehow been done for my benefit. Then Ellie squealed and launched herself forward into Mum’s arms, and Mark withdrew his arm from Mum’s shoulders and carried on watching me.

  Ellie buried her face in Mum’s chest and Mum embraced her fondly, but as if there was something else going on that was likely to require her attention at any moment. Perhaps this was how it was going to be from now on. Maybe that was how we would lose her: not tragically, not with any drama, but because she would always be distracted. The new baby would inevitably take over and we, who were old enough to more or less look after ourselves, would fade into the background.

  Mark was still watching me. It was too much. It made me want to shout at him. Why did he have to be so intense about it? Did he want me to fall over myself to accept him, like Oh please won’t you be my daddy? If that was what he expected he could forget it. I’d got by for years without a dad around, and I certainly didn’t need a replacement.

  Anyway, surely he’d stop caring now he was having a baby of his own.

  Ellie withdrew and said, ‘It is all right to hug you, isn’t it, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mum said, and stroked her hair – if she had tried that on me, I’d have told her to keep her hands to herself. But then, she would probably have known better than to try. ‘Of course it is,’ Mum went on. ‘You can hug me as much as you like. You won’t hurt the baby. It’s safe.’

  And then she looked up at me and her expression was proud and pleading all at once, and I knew she wanted me to hug her too and say that it was great news and congratulations to them both.

  Which would have been a lie.

  It wasn’t great news. Apart from the mysterious fling or flirtation or whatever it was that had happened between them when they’d first met, Mum and Mark had only been together for about five minutes, and now they were going to be parents, which was running before you could walk with a little new human life added into the mix. Not the best idea. Also, one little sister was quite enough.

  And as for congratulations… who did they think they were trying to kid? They’d either forgotten to use contraception or had decided not to bother, which was exactly the kind of behaviour that people my age were always being warned against.

  But anyway, I went over to her and put my arm stiffly around her shoulders, and the three of us stood there in a little huddle with Mark to one side… still watching me.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘When’s it due?’

  ‘Oh… some time in December.’

  ‘A Christmas baby?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit before that.’

  ‘Is it going to be a girl, or a boy?’

  ‘What a lot of questions,’ Mum said, and I knew I’d wounded her with my lack of enthusiasm.
But really… did she expect me to fake something I didn’t feel? I’d only just found out this baby was going to exist. Maybe when it had actually arrived I’d figure out how to feel fond of it, but for now it was just a tiny party crasher.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ Ellie said straight away.

  ‘We don’t actually know,’ Mum corrected her. ‘We thought it was time to tell you two, but it’s still early days and we need to keep it to ourselves for now. So don’t go telling people at school or anything.’

  ‘It’s not exactly the kind of thing we talk about,’ I pointed out.

  Mum ignored me and carried on. ‘That’s why I’ve been feeling a bit off-colour lately, but hopefully all that will stop soon and I’ll be a bit more back to normal.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ I said, withdrawing my arm. ‘You’re going to be pregnant, and then you’re going to have a baby. That’s a whole new kind of normal. So are we going to move? Because it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of spare room in the flat. Unless you’re going to keep Junior in a shoebox under the bed.’

  Mum’s reaction to this was one of pure, almost comic horror. How can you be so cold? But Mark stepped in before she could reproach me.

  ‘There are a couple of options,’ he said, ‘which we want to discuss with both of you. We want you to feel that your views are being taken into account. That you’re part of this whole thing. But maybe it’s a bit early to get into all of that just now.’

  I folded my arms. ‘I don’t think it is. I have exams to do. Important exams. I shouldn’t even be here. I should be back home, revising. And then I’m going to sixth-form college. I need to know if this is going to affect all that.’

  Mum had her arms round Ellie, as if soothing her, and was gazing across at the view of the sea. Now that Mark had intervened she appeared to have given up on the whole conversation, and was paying no attention to me at all.

  ‘I have a future, too, you know,’ I said.

  ‘Believe me, the last thing anyone wants is for this to disrupt your education,’ Mark said. ‘That isn’t going to happen, I promise you. All the changes are going to be for the better.’

  I scowled at him. ‘How can you say that when you can’t even tell me where we’re going to live?’

  ‘Because I’m going to make sure it all works out for the best. For everyone.’

  Suddenly Ellie piped up: ‘Are you going to get married?’

  That got Mum’s attention. She didn’t look at me, though. She looked at Mark, who was watching me again. His expression was almost pleading, as if he wanted to ask me for permission.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Ellie squealed. Literally. It was the most ridiculous sound of excitement I’d ever heard in my life.

  She said, ‘Can I be bridesmaid?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Mum said. ‘But it’s not going to be a church wedding or anything like that. It’s going to be very small and low-key.’

  I could feel the fight starting to go out of me. There was nothing at all that I could begin to do about any of this. How I felt about it – and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it – might make some difference to them, and even more difference to me. But it wouldn’t change anything.

  Mark was looking half hopeful, as if he thought I might suddenly start being nice to him. He didn’t seem at all bothered about Ellie’s response, but maybe that was because she’d made it so obvious she was thrilled.

  I turned to Mum. ‘Does Dad know about this?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Mum said. ‘Nobody else does. We wanted you to be the first to know.’

  ‘So your ex-wife is in the dark too, still,’ I said to Mark. ‘You only just got shot of her, didn’t you? Whatever her name is. It’s not like you ever mention her. It’s like she never even existed.’

  His eyes blazed and his mouth set in a hard line. Ooh, temper. I smirked at him to annoy him even more. He’d sent Dad reeling down the street dripping blood, wanting nothing more than to get away from us and seek out the haven of the nearest pub. He didn’t deserve to have it all his own way.

  I said, ‘I take it she’s not going to be invited?’

  ‘Paula won’t be coming to our wedding, no.’

  ‘Are you sure she’s not going to pop up when the vicar gets to “If anyone knows any just cause or legal impediment why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, let him speak now or forever hold his peace?”’

  Mark exhaled, attempted a smile. ‘I think that was the longest sentence I’ve ever heard you say.’

  ‘I’m doing Jane Eyre at GCSE, remember? The one where the guy has a first wife locked away in the attic?’

  ‘Ava, stop it,’ Ellie said. Then, to Mum: ‘What kind of dress are you going to wear? Can I have something matching?’

  And then the fight went out of me completely.

  Ellie had a thing about weddings. She was obsessed, as only girls like us, girls from a broken home, could be. The ones who loved the idea of the big day in white were always the ones whose parents hated each other, in my experience; I was an exception.

  When Ellie was little she’d drawn endless pictures of wedding dresses, each one more ornate than the last. They’d been great big tiered creations like something from the court of Marie Antoinette, with bows and frills and flowery embroidery, painstakingly coloured in around the white of the blank page. She’d asked for the same bedtime story night after night: it was about a little girl who got to be a bridesmaid and was naughty and spoiled her gloves, and was rescued at the last minute when somebody gave her a spare pair. Sit still and look nice, was the moral of the story.

  I was always the one who had to read it to her, while Mum sorted out her appointments diary and checked her supplies and so on. Eventually I got so sick of it I said she couldn’t have it any more, and made her choose something else.

  ‘As long as you don’t expect me to be a sodding bridesmaid,’ I grumbled.

  Mum hugged Ellie close again, as if she was embracing her all the more tightly because I was being so difficult, such a teenager. But why should I be anything else?

  Mark exhaled. The battle was over before it had even begun: I’d capitulated. He turned to Mum and said, ‘I think we should leave it there for now, don’t you?’

  She hesitated. Suddenly it struck me that she looked exhausted. It must have taken it out of her, all this. Figuring out how to tell us. Worrying about it. I felt bad for not having made it easier for her.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of other chances to talk about things,’ Mark said. ‘Everything else will keep. Let’s finish our drinks and go down to dinner.’

  She met his eyes, and that was when I realised for the first time how serious this was. She trusted him. In some way that I didn’t fully understand, she’d given herself up to him. Was this love? Was this what love looked like? My mum, who had always been so independent, was willing to put her life in this man’s hands.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘Good. You look a little bit pale, and it’s been a long day. I expect Junior needs feeding.’

  I sipped my wine. Junior! Probably he was going to talk to Mum’s tummy and all that rubbish. Or already did. Which was really just a way of being smug about having got her pregnant.

  Where could they possibly have done it? They must have done it somewhere. They went on dates all the time, but it wasn’t like he ever slept over. Mum had said he had a house in the countryside somewhere, near Oxford, but that was miles from London.

  Probably he’d impregnated her on the back seat of the Jag. Yeah, right on those leather seats that Ellie and I had to sit on whenever he drove us around.

  Welcome to the world, Junior. What a family. Still, there were only two years to go and I’d be eighteen and adult, and out of it. I could move to the other side of the world if I wanted, or at least to the other side of the country. I would be a free agent.

  Maybe in a way this was a good thing: if Mum had a husband and a new baby, it would be that much easier for m
e to walk away.

  And yet… when it came down to it, how could I leave her? Now she was on the verge of having a new life of her own, I was forced to recognise just how much of a wrench it would be to be parted from her.

  * * *

  Dinner that night was challenging, to say the least. It wasn’t just the situation, it was the setting. All around us there were French people seriously eating, mesdames and messieurs and a few impeccably behaved children, and there were waiters with snowy-white shirts and spotless dark uniforms hurrying about with silver plates and bottles of red wine, as if they were all on a mission of extreme but secret importance.

  The food looked beautiful, though. For my starter I had melon, which came with a pool of blood-red port in the middle, where the seeds had been scooped out. ‘You’ll get drunk,’ Ellie said accusingly, and I scowled at her to make her shut up. Mark had already poured me another glass of wine to follow on from the one I’d had on the balcony, and Mum hadn’t raised any objections.

  Both of them were probably too preoccupied to keep count of how much I’d had. If ever there was an occasion to take the edge off by getting slightly tipsy, this was surely it.

  I was half expecting Mum to get out her phone and start taking pictures the way she’d done when Mark took us out for the first time back home in England, but she didn’t. Her Facebook page had been positively enigmatic over the last month or so. Since she’d realised she was pregnant, maybe? Well, sooner or later she’d have a big double announcement to make. I’m getting married. I’m having a baby. And everyone would say, Congratulations! I thought you’d been quiet lately, and now I know why!

  After the melon I had crevettes, whole prawns in their shells, which I had no idea how to eat. Mark showed me, which he loved doing, obviously. Teach me, Mark. Show me what to do. Why was I being so mean to him, anyway? The wine seemed to make it easier to be nice. Everything was both more vivid and more unreal than usual, and nothing seemed to matter quite so much any more: the colours and textures had taken over.