The Family Holiday

by Elizabeth Noble

  Now she’d have to tell him that Alex had left her for another woman. That she was a single mother to Ethan. That her husband didn’t love her any more.

  But not just now. She didn’t have to tell him this morning. Ethan wasn’t here. It would be Alex nagging him to get out of bed, to put his breakfast things into the dishwasher, and answering the usual questions about football socks. If he bothered to do any of those things. She could go back to bed, pull the duvet over her head, and stay there for as long as she wanted …

  3

  It was lunchtime when Heather called. Scott was in New York, six hours ahead. She called on her way home from the gym or the school run, almost always from the car, on speakerphone. Scott hated speakerphone. Heather shouted at him, broke off from shouting at him to shout at other motorists, and went back to shouting at him. Heather was a Jersey girl – New Jersey, that was, not the island next to Guernsey, and never more so than while she was driving when she could, and frequently did, ‘go full-on hoodlum’, as she called it, at the slightest provocation. He loved his wife, God knew he did, but he did not like being shouted at. Or other people being shouted at in his presence. Even when every sentence ended in ‘honey’ or ‘sweetie’, pronounced ‘sweedy’, it still set him on edge.

  He’d been an Englishman in New York. She’d been a Jersey girl in Surrey. A pair of aliens. An odd couple. At forty-three, Scott was still almost surprised on a daily basis to find himself married, a stepfather to her two daughters, an ‘instant-family’ man, although it had been more than a year now. That his wife and stepdaughters were American was nothing short of stupefying. He’d been travelling between his firm’s offices in London and New York for almost twenty years, spending up to five days at a time in the Big Apple, sleeping in a nondescript hotel in Midtown, working long days in a behemoth of an office at 39th and Lexington, and Heather was the first American girl to show him the vaguest interest. He’d been taken aback – neither his teeth nor his hair fitted the New York aesthetic, the former being uneven, overlapping in places and more ivory than bright white, and the latter crawling slowly but inexorably back towards the top of his head.

  She’d gone for him. As predatory as a big cat. That was what his New York colleague Matthew had told him one evening after work in a crowded Irish bar, with characteristic bluntness. He’d known it before Matthew had said so, although he appreciated the concern. He’d known it, and he’d absolutely let it happen.

  He was lonely. She was pretty, in a wholesome, obvious way – all blonde waves and blue eyes – and she’d seemed kind, and if it was a gamble to assume that this was the real her, not just the act of a calculating, mercenary female, then he reasoned the gamble was worth it. He’d made a pretty successful career of gambling. Was this so different?

  ‘So there’s a big fat envelope here addressed to you, Scottie. Should I open it?’

  No one else called him Scottie. He wouldn’t let them. Even with her, it had taken a while to get used to. Now he liked the way it sounded – ‘Scoddie’ – all ds, no ts – in her husky, warm voice. ‘Go for it.’ He heard the tearing of paper.

  ‘It’s a brochure … for a holiday place. Looks like the Cotswolds. Hold on … there’s a note. It’s from your dad.’

  Scott was genuinely surprised. ‘What does he say?’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll read it …

  Scott and Heather,

  I would so love it if you and the girls would join me and the rest of the family at this place in August to celebrate my eightieth birthday. I’ve chosen somewhere that hopefully has enough stuff to keep teenagers amused and, of course, Ethan will be there, I hope, so they shouldn’t get too bored. You can even walk into the village, where there’s a bit to do. It would be very good to have the opportunity to get to know Heather, Hailey and Meredith better. I know it’s probably rather short notice for you, but I shall keep my fingers crossed you can make the time work. Let me know.

  With love,

  Dad xx

  ‘Below his name and the kisses he’s written something else. It’s in a different pen, like an afterthought. It says, “Your mum would want us all to be together. She’d want it to have happened far more than it has. Maybe that’s my fault. It would mean a lot to me if you would come, son.”’

  ‘Bless him, that’s sweet.’

  ‘He spelt “Hayley” with an i.’

  ‘Heather …’

  ‘I know. I don’t mind. At least, I mind less than I mind that we’re supposed to be going to Mykonos in August …’

  ‘Have we booked?’ By which, of course, he meant had Heather booked. She had a black Amex card now and she knew how to use it. She was, in fact, really, really good at using it. Not that he minded. There was plenty of money, and it made him happy to see her happy. There had never seemed much point in having it before.

  ‘No. But I had the most darling place all lined up. I was going to show you when you got back tomorrow. It’s in Condé Nast Traveller magazine’s top-ten places in Greece. It’s pretty much carved into this rocky cliff. But you can walk to the town. Which has shops, restaurants, bars … There are only about thirty rooms, and a gorgeous restaurant.’ Her voice dropped an octave, into the sexy range of which she was a mistress. ‘And every room has its own pool …’

  He didn’t doubt its gorgeousness for a moment. And Scott had absolutely no problem with a little pool attached to every room. There’d been one at their honeymoon hotel in the Maldives, and Heather had shagged him in it at least once every day of the ten they were there. Which had been more than worth the sunburn he’d got on the small bald patch at the top of his head.

  ‘Can’t we go after? Or before?’

  ‘We could. The girls start school at the very beginning of September.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be able to take the time off for two holidays in August?’

  ‘Definitely.’ He wasn’t sure but he’d worry about that later.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise. We should go.’

  ‘Do you think it will be fun?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said we should go.’

  ‘I hardly know your family.’

  ‘Dad’s point exactly. This is your chance to charm them all like you’ve charmed me, darling.’

  ‘Flatterer.’

  ‘Truth-teller.’

  ‘Do we have to go for the full ten days?’

  ‘We can say yes to the full ten days. And I can invent an excuse to get us out of there after a few if it’s a nightmare.’

  ‘You’re a genius.’

  ‘That’s why you love me.’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons.’

  And he believed her, though he knew others might not.

  Afterwards, while he ran his usual 7.5 kilometres on the treadmill at the gym near the office, facing screens showing Bloomberg, Scott tried to remember the last time he’d been on holiday with his brother and sister, Laura and Nick. And he really couldn’t.

  They’d never fallen out. No big Jeremy Kyle-style fights – no great wrongs done. He’d drifted away and, untethered, they either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t minded. They were siblings, not friends. Laura and Nick were friends. He’d always been different. Always felt left out. They’d made him feel dull and wrong when they were all young. It was easier to drift. Maybe it was time …

  4

  Nick’s left arm was going to sleep. As was he. Room on the Broom was spread on his chest, unfinished. He knew its rhymes and cadences by heart now, and didn’t need to read, but the children loved the pictures, followed the words on the page, and knew if he skipped a spread.

  All the running on blustery Primrose Hill this afternoon had done its work. Delilah and Arthur had gone floppy and heavy within his embrace well before the end of the story. Across from the small bed the three of them were lying on, Bea, his big girl, was already spark out on her own, duvet kicked back as per normal, arms above her head in surrender pose. Nick eased his arm o
ut from under the children, and picked Arthur up, laid him gently in his cot, then turned back to Delilah. He lifted her legs, pulled the cover back and over her, deftly and quickly, so as not to rouse her. He made a token effort to extract her thumb from her mouth, but at that, she resumed the strong rhythmic suck that would keep it there a while longer, and he smiled. Stubborn even while sleeping. Arthur yawned noisily, and turned onto his stomach, raising his bottom and scooting his knees up to under his chin. He kissed his elder daughter’s warm cheek, smoothing her curls. Then he stood still in the middle of the room, and waited a minute, gazing at his babies, before he bent down and switched off the light by Delilah’s bed. The room was still illuminated, by two small nightlights plugged in at the skirting, and by the neon stars stuck to the ceiling in a pattern approximating the solar system.

  This was Bea’s room. Delilah’s, slightly larger, was next door, and Arthur’s was the box room across the landing. Bea’s had been the first to be decorated when they’d moved in – sunny yellow with bright primary-coloured furniture and a rainbow rug. Delilah had crawled defiantly in the direction of pink and sparkly the minute she’d graduated from the nursery so her room was an unabashed temple to girliness. And the nursery had been repainted sky blue in the excitement post-scan when they’d found out Carrie was carrying a boy.

  The rest of the house was a symphony of tasteful greys and soft accent colours – almost out of a magazine in its compliance with trend and fashion. But Carrie had gone to town in the kids’ rooms and they were characterful, vivid and fun.

  Moving them all in together had seemed the right thing to do, after their mum had died. His friend Fran had suggested it. Carrie had met her in a yoga class when she was pregnant with Bea, and Fran with Fred. She’d been the first person outside family to ring the doorbell after it had happened, laden with casseroles and toilet rolls, and pretty much pushed her way in, because she had loved Carrie too, and keeping busy helped, and because she knew that Carrie would have wanted her to brush the tangles out of Bea’s hair and Dettox the kitchen surfaces.

  In the first strange, wretched days, Carrie’s parents had been there, white-faced and zombied by grief, but at least there’d been three of them at bedtime. One to settle each distraught child. When they’d gone, as they’d had to, back to their farm in Cumbria, Nick had moved between the rooms, running on empty, soothing and holding his babies in turn. The plaintive sound of one, heard in the background to the sobs of another, tortured him. Fran had helped him move Arthur’s cot and Delilah’s tiny bed in there, shifting the displaced doll’s house and toy shop into the space vacated in Delilah’s room. It had worked, too. They’d started sleeping, comforted, somehow, by the presence of each other. He’d wanted to sleep in there with them. Had done, in fact, for a few weeks. Not that he’d slept. He’d lain on a flimsy air mattress for a few hours at a time, not sleeping. Fran had put a stop to that. She’d deflated it and forced him back into his own bed, where she’d also changed the sheets and removed Carrie’s hand creams and eye serums from her bedside table.

  Downstairs now, he poured a glass of wine and put Muse on the speaker, quieter than he’d have liked so he could hear the kids if they called. He unloaded the dishwasher and, checking a laminated sheet of A4 paper fixed to the fridge door with magnets, took Bea’s PE bag from a hook in the utility room and checked that her shorts and polo shirt were in it, along with a pair of black plimsolls. He put it by the front door and, while he was there, collected the small pile of post from the brass basket attached to the letterbox. Interiors catalogues. For months he’d been cutting out the small address boxes on the back pages of these, all addressed to his wife, and returning them, but still they came, interiors catalogues, with their embroidered cushions and their seed-pod chandeliers and their carefully curated accessories. She’d call them her porn, poring over them with a huge mug of mint tea, the paper tab of the teabag dangling over the side, sitting at the kitchen table. He’d given up on the cutting and posting. He had less energy, it seemed, than he had done in the beginning. Now the catalogues made the journey from brass cage to paper recycling without anyone daydreaming about owning anything in them. The brown A4 envelope almost did, too, but Nick saved it at the last minute.

  Nick,

  This is booked, paid for, and happening. I’ve invited Laura and Scott, and their families. We’ll be a gang. A dysfunctional, not entirely simpatico gang, maybe, but a gang nonetheless. So please, please bring B, D and A with you and just come. Be with us. We all love you so much, you know. I haven’t seen nearly enough of you since it all happened. I know I’m not your mum, and she’d know better than me how to help you, but I do care so very much. And it’s my birthday, so you can’t say no, really. It may be blackmail, but there it is …

  Dad xoxo

  Nick smiled, and flicked through the brochure, with its sunny, stylish pictures, not so very different from all the damn catalogues. And then he cried. It wasn’t unusual. He cried most nights. It was just as much a part of his routine as checking Fran’s laminated lists, and flossing his teeth.

  5

  Scott was the first to confirm. Charlie imagined himself on a neat to-do list, being ticked off.

  ‘Crikey. Whatever time is it there?’

  Scott paused for a moment, checking his screen. ‘Six a.m.’

  ‘And you’re up?’

  Up, done five km on the static bike, showered, dressed and in the office, Scott wanted to say, but he didn’t. Mum used to say the hours required by his work were ridiculous. ‘It’s all machismo,’ she would exclaim incredulously. ‘It can’t possibly be necessary. You’ll all die young,’ she’d pronounce, in consternation. Dad would let her rant, then nod his understanding at Scott. Dad had been a country solicitor. Maybe never once at his desk at six a.m., in truth, but it suited him to indicate that he understood. It was a curious thing, having a child so successful he eclipsed anything you had achieved professionally, engendering a mix of pride and something like embarrassment. Silly. You should choose it that way. Nevertheless …

  ‘There’s a nor’-easter forecast for this afternoon. Might shut the whole damn place down. Thought I’d be in early and see what I can get done before the chaos starts.’

  ‘But it’s meant to be spring!’

  ‘I know. Late. Happens, though … They’re predicting up to a foot of snow.’

  ‘I thought New Yorkers took that in their stride.’

  ‘They do, more or less. I mean, I fly home in three days and I’m not worried about the flight. They’ll have cleared it all up by then. It’s just today …’

  Weather talk. Along with cricket, rugby and football, the safest territory known to Englishmen.

  Scott cleared his throat. He needed to get on. ‘So, Dad. We got your invitation.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Charlie was holding his breath.

  ‘And we’d love to come. It’s really very generous of you.’

  Always that slightly formal tone. It made Charlie sad. He ignored it and injected as much bonhomie as he could into his response. ‘Oh, I am glad. All of you? Heather, Hayley, Meredith?’

  ‘Yes, all of us.’

  ‘I was worried you might have made bookings already.’

  ‘No. You caught us in time. We will have a holiday, the four of us, and no doubt Heather will bring the girls over here to catch up with family at some point. She couldn’t do Easter, with Hayley’s exams, but those ten days work for us. We’ll be there.’

  ‘That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Have you heard from Laura and Nick?’

  ‘No. You’re the first.’

  That wasn’t quite true. Laura had sent him an email, asking to meet him for lunch. They were seeing each other the next day. She hadn’t said, in the two lines, whether she, Alex and Ethan would come.

  ‘Well, I so hope they can make it too.’

  That wasn’t quite true, either, Scott thought. But it was the right thing to say.

  Charlie arrived first, and took
an empty table in the café. He saw Laura coming from about a hundred yards away, before she’d put on her game face. He was shocked at her appearance. She’d lost a load of weight in the long gap since the last time they’d met, and she was pale and drawn, beneath slightly too much makeup, which wasn’t her style. She was a handsome woman, his only daughter: she looked like her mum, and she didn’t usually fuss much with makeup. Her colouring – dark hair, almost olive skin, doe eyes with long dark lashes – didn’t require it, any more than her natural curls needed to be artfully arranged. Today, though, she was wearing blusher, and reminded him of Aunt Susan from Worzel Gummidge. She looked anxious and exhausted. As she got to the café door, she stood up straighter, tucked her hair behind her ears, and rearranged her features into a smile, and that shocked him too: she was preparing to put on an act for him. But no amount of acting could disguise the dark circles under her eyes or the way her cardigan hung from her shoulders.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ He hugged her, feeling her ribs. She’d never been one for physical affection, even when she was tiny. Nick would lie on your lap all day, and even Scott didn’t mind a bit of a hug, but Laura would squirm and wriggle out of an embrace. Today, though, she practically collapsed in his arms, became almost heavier, so he held her, gently patting her bony shoulder, and wondered what the hell was wrong.

  After a long moment, she pulled away, and sank into the chair opposite him. When he took his seat, and looked at her, wondering how much small-talk lay between now and when he might find out what was going on, her eyes filled with tears.