“Just go get in the shower, Gareth.”
*
Gareth showers and puts on the clothes that Rachel has very unsubtly laid out on the bed for him. There’s a pair of linen trousers and a cornflower blue shirt which is Gareth’s favourite because Rachel loves it and touches him a lot when he wears it. Still buttoning up the shirt, he hurries back to the garden, looking forward to a second glass of wine before the visitors arrive. He is surprised to find they must have arrived while he was in the shower and are already seated in the garden.
He sees the way Jocelyn looks at his unbuttoned shirt, his bare chest and uncombed hair and tuts. Feeling like an errant schoolboy he does up the rest of his shirt buttons, runs his fingers through his hair, before finding his manners and bending to kiss Jocelyn’s proffered cheek, shake Nicholas’ hand.
“Welcome, welcome. Good to see you both. Where’s my niece?”
“Grace has already been whisked away by Eloise to check out her new bedroom,” Jocelyn says.
“Better hope she doesn’t come back down with her hair dyed black and a piercing then!”
“I sincerely doubt it,” Jocelyn says, primly. “Grace is very particular about the way she looks.”
“Takes after her mother then.” Gareth claps his hands and then rubs them briskly together, something he does only when feeling very uncomfortable.
Rachel sees the sign and hurries into the kitchen to collect the starter. “Dig in, everyone,” she says, placing a large wooden board in the centre of the table, piled high with olives, sun dried tomatoes, mozzarella, Parma ham, melon chunks and fresh, ripe figs. “Lots of ciabatta bread to go with this if you want it.”
Jake, who up until this point has been playing quietly in the sandpit, waddles over. He loves olives and hoists himself up on his father’s knee to grab a handful from the board.
“Did he wash his hands?” Jocelyn points at Jake.
“On his way between the sandpit and here? Er, no. We’re fresh out of bathrooms in the garden.” Rachel’s irony appears to be lost on Jocelyn.
“Best give the olives a miss, Nicholas,” Jocelyn says loudly. Nicholas who is about to pop one into his mouth lowers his hand and looks nervously around for somewhere else to deposit it.
Gareth reaches over, plucks the olive from Nicholas’ fingers and puts it in his own mouth. “How about I fetch you and Nicholas a little pot of olives just for the two of you? There’s plenty more and I promise to wash my hands. I’ll bring us another bottle of wine too, this one is almost empty. Mind yourselves while I’m gone though. Jake loves Parma ham too.”
Gareth roots around in the fridge for the oversized plastic tub of olives they always have on the go. He stocks up on these tubs when he and his mother go on their quarterly lunch date to Costco. Gareth and his mother are in their element scouting out bargains at Costco and can spend hours browsing the shelves and cooing at the savings to be had. They are both expert at calculating VAT in their heads.
He ladles olives from the industrial plastic tub into some little terracotta pots his parents brought back as a gift from a holiday in Majorca. They look suitably artisan and authentic and will make Jocelyn and Nicholas think the olives came from a local deli. He also retrieves another bottle of Sancerre from what they affectionately call the cellar, which is their old fridge, pensioned off from food duty due to a tendency to grow mould and stuck in what was once a coal shed. He is about to go back out into the garden when he hears his phone ping, out in the hallway. Ordinarily Gareth ignores his phone on Friday evenings but he is perfectly happy to have a valid excuse to postpone joining the others a bit longer so he checks his messages.
There is an email from Cassandra Taylor.
“Following on from our meeting yesterday, I wonder if you can join me for a series of meetings with potential business associates in London next Tuesday from 9.30am to 6pm. I’m sorry it’s such a long day but I have limited time available before I go back to Canada. We could then go out for a spot of dinner if you are free? Let me know.”
He starts typing a response immediately.
“Tuesday is good for me and dinner afterwards would be good. Please advise where to meet.” His fingers feel thick and clumsy and he checks the message for errors. Before pressing send, he thinks better of it and deletes what he has typed, replaces it with, “I can make the meetings but will need to get away afterwards, sorry. Let me know where to meet.”
Her reply comes straight back.
“Thank you. We can do dinner another time. Meet at Perfect’s London office, 12 Bathurst Mews, near Hyde Park, W2 at 9.30am.”
He turns his phone to silent and slips it in his pocket. Perfect is a great new client to land and if his client wants him at meetings all day, then he will go to those meetings. But he won’t be risking going to dinner with Cassandra Taylor, not next Tuesday, not ever. The way she makes him feel is dangerous and he knows he must not let it take hold. He has always been dismissive when people say that they didn’t mean to have an affair and that things just happened and they fell in love. Meeting someone might just happen. Finding them attractive – that can just happen too, as he has recently found out. But after that, it comes down to making conscious decisions – spending time with someone, making arrangements to meet, leading on to secret phone calls and from there to secret sex. A lot of lies. Just as people decide to do these things, they can just as easily decide not to do them. Rachel always says that if people put as much effort into their marriages as having an affair requires, divorce lawyers would be a lot less busy. Going to dinner with Cassandra Taylor would be foolish.
“Are you having to crush the grapes for that bottle of wine or what?” He hears Rachel calling from the garden. He gathers up the olives, tucks the bottle of wine under his armpit and hurries out to the garden to top everyone’s glasses up.
“Shall I finish making the spaghetti carbonara Rachel? You stay out here and catch up with your sister. It won’t take a minute.”
“I’ll skip on the carbonara thank you Gareth,” Jocelyn says, “I’m low carbing at the moment. Could you fix me some scrambled eggs instead?”
“Sure!’
Back in the kitchen Gareth shouts loud enough to be heard in the garden.
“Iris! Can you come downstairs and do me a favour! I need you to pop down the Spar and buy some more eggs. Aunty Jocelyn is on a diet. And ask Nora to come to the kitchen. She can help lay the table.”
Seating nine people for dinner is not a problem for the Maddox family. They regularly have people over “for food” as Gareth calls it and their large, battered, pine table can seat up to 14. None of the chairs match but Rachel says that’s trendy these days.
“Yeah right, for a collection of antique church chairs maybe,” Gareth always teases her, “but not mismatched Ikea.”
Twenty minutes later, at Gareth’s bellow of “FOOD!” from the bottom of the stairs, Eloise and Grace troop into the kitchen. It is the first time Gareth has seen Grace for some months and he is always uncertain how he should greet his niece now that she is 16 and he can no longer throw her up in the air and give her a big hug. Should he shake hands? Kiss her cheek? Grace looks equally uncertain and at one stage Gareth thinks she may be contemplating a curtsey. Finally he holds up his hand for a high five and Grace lightly taps her fingers against his.
“You’re so down with the kids Dad,” says eleven-year-old Iris, who is helping her father serve up. She is wearing jeans, a FC Barcelona top and Adidas trainers. Her hair which is the least red of everyone in the family, blonde really, is cropped short. She serves up hearty portions of carbonara for everyone else while Gareth places a plate of (non-organic but don’t tell her) scrambled egg in front of Jocelyn. Oscar takes up his usual position under the table to wait for falling scraps.
“Can I have a glass of wine Dad?” Eloise asks.
“If you give Jake his milk and put him to bed after dinner you can.” Eloise rolls her eyes but then nods and Gareth pours his daughter a glas
s of wine.
“What about Grace?” says Eloise, “is she allowed one?”
Gareth looks at Nicholas and Jocelyn.
“Absolutely not,” Jocelyn replies, making a face like Gareth is Count Dracula and is suggesting pouring her daughter a goblet of fresh blood. “She’s underage. They’re both underage!”
“They’re 16 and 17! Don’t you remember being that age Jocelyn? Drinking cider down the park with your mates?”
“Drinking cider in the park is not something that happens in Bucks. You obviously had a very different upbringing to Rachel and me.”
“Really? I’m surprised. Francesca loves a drink doesn’t she? Last time she and Felix were over they’d cracked open the gin and tonic by 5pm most nights.”
Gareth feels his wife’s heel pressing very deliberately and painfully on his little toe. Skilfully, Gareth changes the subject.
“So, a friend of mine has the opportunity of taking a job in Qatar. Would you recommend life out there?”
Rachel barely conceals a snort of laughter. Jocelyn and Nicholas returned from Doha three years earlier and Jocelyn has still to get over the loss. She likes nothing better than telling Doha stories: how much Nicholas earned there, how the expensive private school Grace went to was better suited for her dazzling academic excellence than anything to be had in the UK and how wonderful it was to have live-in Filipina maids plentifully and cheaply available.
“Absolutely. I only wish we were still there. The quality of life Nicholas and I had was beyond compare. And having a maid to do all the domestic chores meant I had time to get to the gym most days. Of course,” Jocelyn says, “to get the best out of the maids, you did have to make sure they knew their place. You never, ever let them call you by your first name. Always insist on Ma’am. Ensures respect.”
This is the point in the Doha stories that usually causes Gareth to leave the table and start clearing up but tonight he just smiles and keeps topping up everyone’s glass of Sancerre until finally Jocelyn and Nicholas announce they are going up to bed because they’ve got an early start in the morning.
“You go on up, too,” Gareth says to Rachel after they’re safely out of earshot. “I’ve given our Filipina maid the night off so I’ll put the first dishwasher load on.”
“Thank you. And thank you for making it easy tonight. I know you find them…”
“Money obsessed? Boring? Snobs?”
“Don’t spoil all your hard work now! We’re in Iris’ bed by the way. She’s gone in top to toe with Nora.”
“Do we get to go top to toe too? If so, I’ll leave the dishwasher till the morning. It is Friday after all.” Gareth grins, pulling his wife towards him and kissing her hard on the lips.
“You’ve no chance mate! I haven’t been able to see straight since before you opened the third bottle. I’ll be asleep the minute my head hits the pillow. Anyway, it’s past midnight. The Friday window has closed. Try not to make too much noise when you come up.”
Gareth stacks the dishwasher. He should really scrub the carbonara bowls first. The dishwasher is of a similar vintage to the fridge in the coal shed and it doesn’t wash egg away, just bakes it rock solid. But he can’t be bothered. All he really wants is to clear enough space on the kitchen table so that breakfast can start sooner rather than later and Jocelyn and Nicholas can get on their way. And a fag. He really wants a fag but it’s too risky to nip out the garden for a sneaky one. He can still hear people moving around upstairs and they are all so proud of him for having finally given up. But he really deserves a cigarette after the evening he’s had.
Oscar! That’s it. He’ll take Oscar for a walk! Oscar will appreciate a walk and a wee before bed.
Oscar is fast asleep in his basket, his border terrier beard greasy from all his hard work under Jake’s high chair clearing up spilled spaghetti carbonara. He opens one eye when Gareth shakes his lead at him but closes it again quickly, pretending to be still asleep. Gareth pretty much has to drag him out the front door. Before they get to the gate, the front door opens again.
“Can I come with you Dad?” It is Eloise. She has her Doc Martens on all ready but her hair is tied back in a ponytail and she has removed all her make-up and jewellery. Gareth feels a twist of joy to see the face of his little girl again.
“What are you still doing up at this time of night?”
“Why are you taking such a reluctant dog out for a walk?”
“Come on then.” He sticks the crook of his elbow out towards her and to his surprise Eloise slips her hand inside.
They walk down the hill from their house to the pebbly beach. By now, Oscar is fully awake and rushing around excitedly sniffing late night smells he doesn’t normally encounter. The beach is lit by the street lamps but there is only a small sliver of moon and the sea is inky black. Eloise and Gareth stand side by side listening to the waves crash. The late night air is cool on their faces and the beach is empty and peaceful.
“Can I talk to you about something, Dad?”
Gareth steels himself. Is this it? Is his first born about to tell him she is in love? Lost her virginity? Pregnant? On drugs? He gathers himself.
“You can ask me about anything El, you know that.”
“It’s about Grace.”
Gareth tries not to let his sigh of relief be a noisy one.
“What about Grace?”
“She’s unhappy Dad. Very unhappy. She didn’t say anything to me but I saw the tops of her arms when she was changing into her nightie. She’s cutting herself. She’s got scars and some new cuts too, all crusty with scabs.”
Gareth doesn’t say anything. He’s not certain what he should say.
“What do you think we should do, Dad?”
“Tell Mum?”
“I knew you’d say that. We can’t tell Mum. Auntie Jocelyn is her sister. She’ll say she has to tell her.”
“But Auntie Jocelyn needs to be told about this!’
“No, Grace needs to tell Auntie Jocelyn about it. That’s a different thing altogether.”
“You’re right there. What do you think we should do Eloise?”
“Thing is, I don’t really know Grace at all. We only see each other about twice a year when they come to visit us or when we all go to visit Grandma in France. We never stay with them in Buckinghamshire because there’s no room for all of us. Our house is always so noisy and Grace is so quiet. We’re cousins but we’re not friends. Not really. We’re not even friends on Facebook. So I don’t know what Grace needs. But if it were me I’d need space to think things through.”
“That makes sense.”
“So… I was thinking I could say to Grace I’d like to spend some time with her, get to know her better, and ask her to stay with us for a couple of weeks. Auntie Jocelyn and Uncle Nicholas could drop her off here on their way back from Pembrokeshire. Grace has got a long holiday now anyway because she’s finished her GCSE’s and my AS levels are all done and there’s only a couple of weeks left in school till the summer holidays, so schoolwork is winding down. If you’re OK with it, Mum will be.”
“And then what?”
“And then we take it from there and see what happens.”
“That means you’ve got to share your bedroom with her and you love having that space to yourself.”
Eloise shrugs. “I’ll have it back to myself eventually.”
They watch the waves together in silence for a little while.
“Can I ask you a question, now?” Gareth asks.
“Fire away.”
“Do you think Iris is gay?”
“What do you think?”
“I think she’s Iris. That she’s my daughter. That I love her. That’s what I think.”
“Then you don’t need to ask the question because the answer doesn’t matter.”
“You’re a very wise and very observant young woman Eloise Maddox.”
“More observant than you think. You can have one of the cigarettes you’ve got stashed in your
pocket, now. I won’t tell Mum.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about. I’ve given up smoking as you well know.”
“Can I have one then?”
“No, you cannot.”
On the walk back to the house, Gareth fishes the cigarettes from his pocket and dumps them in the closest bin. Eloise smiles and reaches out her hand to her father and Gareth takes it. They walk the rest of the way home hand in hand.
Chapter 8
Gareth is woken by Rachel curling herself around him, tucking her knees behind his and kissing his back gently.
“Morning, husband,” she mumbles through the kisses.
“Morning, you. What a nice way to be woken at…” he glances at Iris’ alarm clock, “6am on a Saturday morning.”
“Isn’t it just,” Rachel says, rolling Gareth onto his back to reveal an impressive hard-on. “And I can see that it’s going to get better and better.”
Afterwards, curled up together in Iris’ small bed, Gareth kisses the top of her head.
“We should do that more often. Tell me what I did to deserve it, so I can do it again?”
“You looked hot in that blue shirt last night. You managed not to be rude to my sister the entire evening. You made a mean carbonara.”
“Your sister can come for food – sorry supper – whenever she likes if that’s the pay off,” Gareth grins. “Maybe it could be a new thing for us. The Saturday Shag. It should be a thing for everyone really. It could have its own slot on Saturday Kitchen. After the wine review and before the reruns of Keith Floyd.”
“Are you going to shut up now and go make me a cup of tea?”
“Your wish is my command, my princess.”
“And will you make a start on cooking some bacon for bacon sandwiches?”
“Sandwiches? Jocelyn is low carbing don’t you remember?”
“She can just have bacon then. Or nothing. Who goes low carb on a weekend away to Newport, Pembs anyway?
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