FROM: Andrew Birch
TO: Sarah Gibbs
DATE: Mon, Dec 26, 2016 at 10:05 a.m.
SUBJECT: RE: copy Dec 27th
Sarah,
I’ve just seen my proof for the 27th—too late, I might add, to have any input. May I ask why subs (I’m presuming it was Ian Croft) saw fit to remove the word “briny” from the phrase “flap of briny irrelevance”? I need hardly spell out that, without the adjective, the entire sentence falls flat. It pains me to have to explain that I paired “briny” and “flap” precisely because, as a couple, they convey a certain double entendre (pertaining to the female genitalia). “A flap of irrelevance” is meaningless—and, as such, entirely unfunny.
I work extremely hard to write prose that people will want to read, and then reread, and I don’t appreciate it being mucked about with. If you absolutely need to cut words, as a fit issue, then please e-mail me and I will gladly oblige. What maddens me, Sarah, is having my words butchered by illiterate subs. No doubt, in this instance, someone decreed that only the sea, or contact lens solution, may be accurately described as briny. Which is why their powers should be limited to hyphenation.
I know you will think me precious. But what you all seem to forget is that it is MY byline on the page. The buck stops with me, as dear old Barak might have said.
Happy Christmas,
Andrew
PS: Not wild about the schmaltzy headline, either. What about the quarantine angle?
He pressed send and waited to feel better. He’d been on edge all morning, after a clammy dream about Jesse Robinson shinning down the chimney, dressed as a sniper Santa Claus, and shooting Phoebe. Preposterous, but the fear it had triggered had been all too real. Looking at his desktop calendar, he remembered that today was Jesse’s birthdate, according to Leila Deeba’s letter. The letter—the attic! They were all up there, rifling through everything. Bugger. Andrew shot up the stairs. He needed to get to the briefcase before Emma or his daughters. Bounding up the final narrow flight, he heard everyone in the biggest room, and burst in to find his daughters convulsed with laughter. It was so unlike them that he was momentarily distracted. And then he saw Emma, holding his briefcase and adeptly flicking the locks.
Emma
THE ATTICS, WEYFIELD HALL, 11:00 A.M.
• • •
Emma relished Boxing Day. The buildup to Christmas was such fun, of course, but it was always a relief to collapse in an armchair on the 26th. This was the day when everyone could potter about, read their books, and help themselves to leftovers. It saddened her that Andrew never seemed to embrace it, as she did. The year Phoebe was born he’d gone haring off to Beirut on the 26th. They’d had a vicious row as he left for the airport, and she had placated Olivia with Frosted Flakes so that she could scream into a cushion unseen. She remembered ranting to Nicola about how everything fell to her, and how Andrew had taken no interest in Olivia’s presents, and Nicola saying that perhaps she felt “abandoned” (this was when Nicola had begun couples therapy). Looking back, Emma saw it had just been his incurable restlessness—and his discomfort at Weyfield. They didn’t fight like that anymore. At some point she had accepted she couldn’t win, and so the shouting had stopped, along with the kissing and making up, and the holding hands, and the talking in bed. They still had a few shared jokes, always instigated by Andrew, usually at someone’s expense. But when she’d mentioned this to Nicola, hoping for approval, Nicola had said that humor was a defense mechanism—a way of keeping emotion at arm’s length. She was right, Emma feared. Andrew’s irreverence only seemed to highlight the gulf between them. Even her book club knew more about her daily concerns than her husband did.
She had woken feeling more than usually tired. She prayed it had nothing to do with the lump, knowing it almost certainly did. Dr. Singer had classed her asymptomatic, and she clung to this like a buoy in choppy water. She might have cancer, but she didn’t feel like she had cancer. She didn’t even look cancerous. Although what one thought of as “looking cancerous” came later, she supposed, with chemotherapy. She had lain in bed for ages, fighting the fatigue that seemed to have settled behind her knees and shoulder blades, before wrenching herself up. If she collapsed in an armchair, she might stay there indefinitely, so she had rallied the girls to tackle the attics. She had been longing to have a session up there for ages, since both girls seemed to use Weyfield as an unofficial storage hangar. She was so glad she had—even though they kept getting sidetracked. Phoebe and Olivia were truly laughing together. She realized she hadn’t seen them like that for years. She watched them doubled up with giggles over some box of treasures and found her eyes blurring. When she died, and left them to fend for themselves, she needed them to be each other’s family. She hoped they realized that. What if she had just had her last Christmas?
Her thoughts were interrupted by footsteps on the stairs, and Andrew charging in. “Emma!” he barked.
“What? What’s happened?”
“Nothing, just, I just—would you like coffee? I was about to make some,” he said, sounding short of breath.
“Isn’t that mine?” he added, looking at his old briefcase in her hands.
“Yes, you don’t still need it, do you?”
“Well—I can’t chuck it! It’s practically an artifact now. A museum piece. Christ, to think we all carried these!” he said, grabbing it off her. “And now it’s just God-awful iPads.” He stood, clutching it to his chest.
“I was just about to see if there was anything in it,” said Emma.
“There’s nothing. I remember emptying it when you first stowed it up here. It was a seminal moment. This case came everywhere with me.”
So he still hadn’t forgiven her, thought Emma, as Andrew skulked off to one of the side bedrooms with his precious case. She crouched over a box of old kitchen gadgets, but she couldn’t concentrate.
When Andrew quit his Beirut post in 1987 and became so chippy with her, she had blamed motherhood. He minded her shift in priority, she’d told herself. But she could see, now, that his real gripe had been her insistence he come home. It was galling to think he hadn’t accepted it, after all these years. She resented being cast as the party pooper—particularly since she’d sacrificed her own career when Olivia was born. She could have made quite a success of catering. She’d had dreams of launching her own company, Emma’s Eats, or just Emma’s. The fact that Andrew had never become a household name as a columnist wasn’t her fault.
Andrew
THE ATTICS, WEYFIELD HALL, 11:15 A.M.
• • •
Hugging the briefcase, Andrew sat on Emma’s school trunk in the garret where he had hidden on Friday. His fingers shook as he unlocked the catches and tucked Leila’s letter into his breast pocket—vowing to burn it on tomorrow’s bonfire. Thank God he’d got up there just in time. Waiting for his pulse to slow, he saw a stack of old copies of The Times in a box by his feet. The top one had his byline on the front page—a 1985 report on Hezbollah and the hostage crisis following Alec Collett’s abduction. He read it hungrily, and the others beneath. This was the stuff he should have kept writing, not drivel about tasting menus. He had known so much at that time, had been so intent on getting the truth published, read, understood. The idealism of youth, he supposed. He finished the last cutting and delved deeper. At the bottom of the box was a bundle of old-fashioned blue Airmail letters. Half were in his own handwriting, half were in Emma’s. He unfolded one of his:
April 4, 1981
Brown-Eyed Girl,
I’m writing this from the camp, where we’ve been holed up for forty-eight hours. Our usual crummy hotel would be unimaginable luxury by comparison. We’ve been on rations for two days, nothing but crackers and boiled water and dehydrated astronaut food. I ought to be filing a piece on the Mujahideen, but all I can think about is you. It�
��s hopeless—even when the editor chases my copy, I just think how much I need to hold you again, to kiss your elegant neck, to feel you beside me. I want to be touching you, always. I miss you so much, Emma. And I want to show you off. I wish I’d never broken the Bunty story, that we’d never got into this secret mess. You were right, we should have told your parents at the start. Now I’ve made everything more complicated. What do you think about the Royal Wedding idea? We could start over, they needn’t ever know about last year. You will wait for me, won’t you? I have nightmares that you’re going to go off with some chinless baronet your parents would approve of. You won’t, will you?
Oceans of kisses,
A x
PS: Your royal English rosiness would need a lot of sun cream here. It’s just as well you’re safe at home in darkest Battersea. I’m not going to give up on moving you north of the river, by the way. One day, you’ll see the light.
He remembered writing it at the camp where he’d briefly been stationed during the Soviet-Afghan War, instead of his usual post in Beirut. He opened up the next one, from Emma.
April 10, 1981
Dearest Andrew,
I adore posting letters to you, it feels so romantic and old-fashioned. And I love getting your spidery handwriting back—I think your t’s and k’s look like you, all tall and skinny. I should be quick because I have to get to the kitchens in a second (Arabella and I are doing a swanky kiddy party tomorrow and they’ve requested Mr. Men chicken Kievs), but I had to answer your poor letter—is it swelteringly hot? Are you really living on Ryvita and Cup-a-Soup? I can’t bear it! Shall I send you something nice to eat? What shall I send? I can’t wait for you to come home. I miss you so much, too. I wish you were kissing me RIGHT NOW. I can’t concentrate at work because of it, either. I nearly made meringues with salt yesterday, and it would have been all your fault.
Please be careful, won’t you.
All my love X
PS: Let me think about the wedding idea. Wouldn’t it be better just to tell the truth? Maybe Mama and Papa won’t mind about Bunty?
PPS: I won’t go off with a baronet. I hate baronets, chinless or otherwise.
PPPS: I’ll never be persuaded up to Camden.
There were several boxes of them, dating from 1980 to 1984, when Olivia had been born and the letters had been replaced with sporadic, distracted phone calls. By the time he’d read the whole lot, his neck was stiff and his foot was fizzing with pins and needles. He felt as if he was surfacing after hours underwater. Emma must have kept the letters—he hadn’t seen them since they were written, though he vividly recalled their composition in the shimmering heat, and the thrill of ripping open a blue envelope from Emma. So why did he feel as if he’d been reading about a pair of strangers?
Phoebe
THE KITCHEN, WEYFIELD HALL, 5:00 P.M.
• • •
It had been nice to laugh with Olivia for once. Phoebe remembered giggling with her sister when they were children. But their private jokes had stopped around the time Olivia got all tall and lank-looking. Phoebe wasn’t sure how exactly, though she remembered her sister getting more earnest with every birthday. Even at fourteen she had been permanently outraged about climate change, until her laugh had come to sound like a rusty, rarely used machine—surprising everyone, including Olivia. Phoebe’s own memory of her teens was one long paroxysm of stifled hysterics—mostly in the back row of lessons, lolling against Saskia and Lara. She didn’t laugh so much now, she realized. But perhaps that was just being a grown-up.
They’d carried on sorting after lunch, not talking but occasionally showing the other something funny that set them off again. It had taken her mind off non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, too, which was a relief. George was right—there was no point in worrying when there was nothing she could do. He had come up to the attic at midday and stood in the doorway looking blank, until Phoebe reassured him that he wasn’t needed. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to hear the Sugar n Spice tape or see her frizzy-haired school photos. They didn’t quite reflect the image she’d painted of her teens, as a wild day school girl (still, incomprehensibly, an exotic concept to George). When the sky outside the dormer window turned yellow, she and Olivia had gone downstairs—a satisfying mound of stuff on the floor for the bonfire.
Phoebe hoped Olivia would come and sit with her in the kitchen, but when they got to the top of the back stairs Olivia said she had to check her temperature first. Phoebe made a pot of jasmine tea and took three sticky Medjool dates from the box on the side. She added a vintage tiara to the mood board. It would have been easier to do it on Pinterest, but seeing all her collages and drawings up in the attic had reminded her how much she used to love crafty stuff. Art was the only subject she was good at—or better at than Olivia anyway.
Olivia came in, her brow furrowed. She stood over the table, flicking impatiently through The Financial Times Magazine. The mood from the attic seemed to have evaporated. “Why do they get this?” she said, looking up at Phoebe. “It’s obscene.”
“Daddy needs it for work. I should read it too; I’m meant to read all the papers. But my brain can’t handle financial stuff. It’s like it releases some anti-economics hormone.” This line always made her father and George chuckle, but it didn’t mollify Olivia—even though she openly despised bankers.
“What’s the FT got to do with reality television?”
She sensed Olivia wanted a fight, and more annoying, she could feel herself rising to it.
“It’s not reality, it’s dramality. We don’t just rig up CCTV; some creative thought does go into it.”
Olivia didn’t seem to have heard. She was looking at the mood board.
“I thought you weren’t getting married till next Christmas?”
“Yeah. But that’s quick. Loads of people take eighteen months, or longer.”
“Why?”
“’Cause there’s, like, a million things to sort out.” Surely Olivia knew this stuff. She had friends, she went to weddings, didn’t she? Or did she? Phoebe didn’t know much about her life beyond her work.
“For a party?” Olivia said “party” as if it disgusted her.
“Yeah. Venues get booked up way in advance.”
“I thought you wanted it here?”
“I do, but—look, it’s just normal for a wedding to take a year to plan. You don’t have to make me feel like I’m doing something terrible!” The last word came out with a babyish tremor. Tears, when she was angry, had always been her Achilles’ heel.
“Normal? You think this is normal?”
“Yes! If you were more normal, you’d get that.”
“I’m so sorry I’m not ‘normal’ enough for you, Phoebe,” said Olivia. She cut a ragged hunk of panettone and walked out, muttering, “For the record, this house is not normal.”
“I didn’t mean this house,” shouted Phoebe. “I meant wedding planning.” It sounded so silly out loud that she was glad Olivia didn’t answer.
“Whoa! All clear?” said George, emerging from the larder with a plate of Stilton and Bath Oliver biscuits. Phoebe started; she hadn’t known he was in there.
“Sorry about that,” she said, propping her chin on the table and looking up at him. “She can be so weird.” He sat opposite her. With his elbows out he seemed to fill half the table.
“Sounded pretty savage,” he said, through a mouthful.
“We were actually having fun just now, in the attic. You’re so lucky you’re close with Matt and Tommo. Me and Olivia are too different. It’s like our childhood is all we have in common.”
“Cabin fever. You’ve been stuck here too long,” he said, reaching for her hand and kissing it, leaving a tiny crumb of Stilton on her knuckle. Ever since he’d shown up yesterday he’d been unusually affectionate. They’d had sex this morning as well as last night, which was unheard of. George didn’t wan
t sex as much as her exes. But, as she’d told Saskia, the one time she’d discussed it, wasn’t sex about quality, not quantity? Saskia had inquired after the quality. Phoebe had said she “didn’t have complaints.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie, but made it sound better than it was.
“You need to get out, Phoebles. Charlie Ingram’s having a party tonight,” said George. “He’s only in Glandford. We could walk.”
“Bae! We’re in quarantine.”
“Come on. Really? You said before this whole thing is OTT.”
“I know. But we can’t just leave. Olivia would go psycho.”
“Why can’t we? Seriously, I don’t get how it works,” said George. “She walked through a massive airport and then drove all the way here, right?”
“Yeah, but that was unavoidable. She had to get home somehow.”
“But if it was genuinely a public health risk, surely they’d quarantine her in Liberia?”
George leaned forward, looking at her intently and playing with her left hand. His signet ring gleamed on his little finger. His dad had got them made ten years ago.
“I guess. But—”
“But what? Clearly your sister doesn’t have Haag. So what’s the problem? Why put yourselves through quarantine when no one’s ill?”
“Isn’t there, like, the incubation thingy?”
“Fuck that. I need to get out of here. Your family’s intense.”
“You go, then.” How come he was allowed to comment on her family, when she never criticized the Marsham-Smiths? Not to his face, anyway.
“I can’t go without you! I want everyone to see my stunning bride. Pleeease.” He opened his pale eyes wide, so that he looked like a photo in negative.
“Maybe,” she said, but already she could feel herself giving in. She felt like flirting and getting drunk, forgetting about cancer. Andrew always said parties were her oxygen.
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