The Family Holiday

by Elizabeth Noble

  For some people, Heather’s daughters might have seemed like baggage. For Scott, who hadn’t even known what was missing from his life, the girls were a bonus. He’d assumed, before he knew her, and he didn’t really know why, that she was single and childless.

  She’d told him almost straight away. If he had noted brief surprise at his own reaction – that it made her more interesting to him – he hadn’t questioned it. But she’d waited months to introduce them, until she was sure of him, he reasoned, and he understood. He remembered being nervous. He’d made up his mind about Heather by then. He needed them to like him. He wanted to like them. They’d gone to Rye Playland, one late-spring Sunday – an amusement park upstate from Manhattan, by the sea, where the rollercoasters and cotton candy were ready distractions. Sitting at the top of one steep swoop, Heather and Hayley in the car in front, Meredith beside him, she’d slid under his arm for comfort, and he’d felt such a jolt, such a rush of something he couldn’t quite name.

  His brother Nick was a born father, so at ease with and delighted by his children that he looked like that was what he’d been put on earth to do. Laura was a completely devoted mother. They’d been raised by Daphne, the most passionate, adoring, fiercely supportive and protective mother. But Scott had never really thought about parenthood for himself – about whether having children was important to him, a priority, or whether not having children was a mistake he’d regret in later life. He’d never had a girlfriend serious enough to make him think about it. If he’d had a biological clock, he’d never heard it ticking. Marriage, mortgages, children – that had been the stuff other people did. He’d always imagined someone would push over the first domino for him and trigger the change. No one had. Through his twenties there’d been girls – one or two had even tried to goad him into things, but he’d found it relatively easy to resist: no woman had moved him, not really. He was a logical man. Seismic shifts were caused by earthquakes, not tremors.

  Laura had asked him about them, back when he’d been just getting to know them, as surprised, perhaps, as he was that he was suddenly a stepfather. He’d defined them to his sister: Hayley, he’d said, was like a cat, more aloof and less obviously affectionate, circumspect and careful, while Meredith was a puppy, boisterous, playful, desperate to love and be loved. Meredith might have been easier to win over, but that made his victories with Hayley far more valuable.

  And now here they were, his three girls, sitting around the kitchen table, their knees up, eating pancakes with just a fork. If he thought sometimes that his mum would have loved them, he had to concede she might not be so wild about their table manners.

  ‘Delicious.’ Meredith pushed her plate away and rubbed her belly.

  ‘Not as good as toast with Marmite,’ Scott teased.

  ‘Ew! Yuck! Don’t even say Marmite.’ Meredith groaned. ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘Better Marmite than “yeast spread”,’ was Hayley’s sarcastic rejoinder. She arched an eyebrow, and Scott laughed.

  Heather, sexy in tight jeans and a white blouse, had taken the family calendar off the wall and was going through it, a pen in one hand, a mug of black coffee in the other. Hayley read dates off her phone for her mother to write down. Matches, speech day, exam timetable. Meredith rolled her eyes at Scott, who gurned back.

  ‘Okay. It’ll be over soon, baby.’

  Hayley sighed. ‘It’ll never be over.’

  Scott laughed. ‘I remember that feeling. It will. I promise. And, believe me, the freedom, once you push back the chair after that last exam, it’s the best. You’re going to have the best summer.’

  ‘You sound American.’ This was Meredith, teasing. ‘We always say everything is “the best”.’

  Scott pushed her arm playfully, and it slipped off the edge of the table. A rogue piece of pancake fell onto the table. Heather frowned. Scott grabbed and ate it. Meredith giggled.

  ‘It is the best feeling.’

  ‘Speaking of summer …’ Heather attempted to bring the chaos to order. ‘We’ve had a lovely invitation.’

  ‘To where?’ both girls asked simultaneously, Hayley sounding sceptical, Meredith excited.

  ‘To spend some time with Scottie’s family.’

  Hayley’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s in England. A beautiful country house …’

  Hayley pushed her chair back from the table, visibly disgruntled. ‘Ugh. English summer weather.’ Last summer hadn’t covered itself with glory. There’d been so much rain. So much. There had been a lot of black humour about webbed feet and building an ark. When Heather had come home – unironically – with one of those SAD lamps, for people who couldn’t cope without sunlight, and confessed she was pining for the New Jersey shore, Scott had booked a holiday in Turkey. The day they left, a ten-day heatwave started. It had ended the day they flew home.

  ‘Come on, now …’

  ‘Like last summer?’

  ‘It might not be. It isn’t always raining, you know.’ Scott smiled.

  Hayley wasn’t convinced. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Well, it means a lot to Scott that we’re there.’ Heather’s tone was decisive.

  ‘Who else will be going?’

  ‘Well, it’s Charlie’s birthday. He’ll be eighty.’

  ‘Great. An octogenarian’s birthday celebration.’ But Hayley’s expression wasn’t quite as truculent as her tone. Scott winked at her.

  Heather missed the wink and ploughed on. ‘Laura will be there, and that means Ethan. You remember Ethan, from our wedding? And Nick, with all the children.’

  ‘Aw. Cute.’ This was Meredith’s first pronouncement.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Hayley persisted: ‘What’ll we do? Apart from babysit?’

  ‘Who said anything about babysitting?’

  ‘I really want to babysit. Do you think Nick would let me?’ Meredith directed her question to Scott, since her mother was glaring at her sister.

  ‘I’m sure he’d love some help with the little ones. There’s a tennis court, and a swimming-pool …’

  ‘Wetsuits provided?’ But Hayley was almost smiling now.

  ‘Hayley!’

  ‘Mum! Scott was just talking about how amazing the summer was going to be. You know those kids from school have invited me to the Reading Festival. And I really, really want to go.’

  ‘You said. Several times. This isn’t then. This is before that.’ But Hayley was Heather’s daughter, a good negotiator.

  ‘So can I go?’

  And Heather knew blackmail when she heard it.

  And Scott could only marvel at the mistresses of negotiation going head to head. No boardroom he’d ever been in stood up to the kitchen table right now.

  14

  Ethan wished there was someone he could talk to. He didn’t know what to do with all his feelings. His soul or his heart or whatever part of him it was – a part he’d only really been aware of in the last little while – felt like it was too big for his brain, too big for his body. He felt a ball of something pressing on his lungs, his stomach, his mind, like he might burst with it all.

  Life was bad enough, hard enough. The exams weighed on him like a heart attack. So many balls in the air: Shakespeare and the periodic table and irregular French verbs and ox-bow lakes and equations. Everyone’s expectations of him were high – Mum and Dad’s, his teachers’ – and it felt suffocating sometimes.

  He didn’t sleep a lot. Not when he was supposed to be asleep. He watched one a.m., two a.m., three a.m. on the ceiling, projected there by the clock, his mind and heart racing. At eleven a.m. all he wanted to do was put his head on the desk, like they used to in Kindergarten, and close his eyes.

  He was often tearful, and he hadn’t cried since he was a little kid. It made him feel ashamed and furious. He cried in bed at night alone. Snotty, harsh, sobbing tears under the duvet. Hated himself for doing it, for the weakness it showed.

  Even if there was someone he could talk to, what the
hell would he say? He couldn’t even order the thoughts to himself.

  He was angry. Mostly, that was it. Angry and sad. Angry with his mum and dad. Especially Dad. They said kids were the selfish ones. He couldn’t think of anything more selfish than what his father had done. What a fucking awful year to make this particular decision – to blow the family life wide apart. He had exams. He had big decisions to make. Even he knew he needed stability, for Christ’s sake. Stuff happened – he knew that too. A mate of his from football, who was in the year above, had had all this crap going on in his GCSE year because his mum had breast cancer. Someone else’s dad had lost his job, and that had messed everything up – they’d had to move house and stuff. But his dad could have bloody waited.

  He told himself it was Mum Dad didn’t want any more. Sometimes he whispered to himself that she’d asked for it – she could be such a grumpy bitch. Then he was horrified at his own disloyalty. And he knew that it was both of them Dad couldn’t be bothered with now. Mum and him. He felt abandoned.

  And then flattered. When he did see Dad, he treated him more like a mate, bent all the rules Ethan had known all his life, granted freedoms and liberties. But in darker moments, Ethan knew it to be disinterest, disengagement. Dad couldn’t be bothered to apply all the usual guidelines and consequences. He didn’t want to be his father.

  His protectiveness of his mother sat uncomfortably alongside his weird and messed-up feelings about Dad’s new girlfriend. She had small, high tits, and she wore tight jeans with high-heeled boots, and he didn’t know where to look when she was there – aroused and repulsed in equal measure. He was painfully aware that his father was having sex with her, hideously embarrassed because she was too young.

  This happened to other people. Loads of them. He had mates it had happened to. Why didn’t they seem so messed up by it? Were they all crying, like babies, in bed, and wanting to punch windows and walls the whole time, or was it just him?

  His limbs were too long for his brain to control them adequately. He felt clumsy everywhere. He was still plagued by spots but he had stubble too. He stank if he didn’t shower. His hair wouldn’t lie the way he wanted it to, and he was still wearing the retainer the orthodontist had prescribed once he’d taken off his train-track braces last year.

  He couldn’t drink as much as his mates did without puking, and cigarettes made him feel sick, although he refused to let that stop him smoking.

  He didn’t know what to do with this self-loathing, and he couldn’t imagine an end to it. How he would ever be okay with it all – how he would get through the exams, and even if he did, there were A levels, then UCAS, then uni, then a job hunt. Life lay ahead like a series of opportunities to fuck up. How Mum would ever stop being so destroyed by Dad going. How he would ever stop getting an erection when Genevieve bent over to put something on the lower shelf of Dad’s fridge.

  And then, when he thought he was just about as low as he could go, as irredeemably, miserably, unreachably a mess, she’d just happened. That was precisely, almost to the day, when Saskia had slid into the seat next to him on the coach to the last geography field trip, a day visit to windswept and freezing Chesil Beach.

  She’d moved to his school at the start of year ten, and they’d never really spoken. She was in a few of his classes, but the cliques were formed, and the battle lines between the sexes pretty well drawn by then, so there’d been no real chance. She was dark blonde, and pretty, but in a very quiet way – not the orange-tinted, eyeliner flicking, go-on-I-dare-you way the really popular girls were. He wasn’t sure she wore makeup at all. She had a nose stud, a tiny sparkly one, and he’d always thought it seemed intriguingly out of character, speaking of a wild streak that had, outwardly, no other signs.

  She’d smiled at him, and for some reason – vestiges of politeness, maybe – he’d felt obliged to push off his headphones. She’d asked him what he was listening to, and he’d said Oasis, and instead of scoffing at his old-school tastes, she’d turned out to know all the words to ‘Wonderwall’, although she preferred Pulp and Blur, she’d said. And just like that, maybe, she was going to be the one to save him, he thought.

  15

  Yoga helped. It actually did. Who could have predicted that? Laura had spent a lifetime avoiding strenuous exercise, believing herself to have been born without the endorphins other people always talked about. There’d been netball at school, and hideous hockey, of course, and she’d briefly flirted with university rowing, mainly because of the social life to which it offered access. But for its own sake, for its positive benefit on one’s body, let alone on one’s mind, she’d had a lifelong cynicism about exercise. She’d even been a bit judgemental – shock, horror – about other people’s devotion to it. Her brother Scott’s daily gym visit, his new wife Heather’s insistence that reformer Pilates had completely changed her life. Even Nick, jogging in ancient, holey shorts and a T-shirt. They all seemed to her, well, just a bit self-absorbed. Naturally and effortlessly slim, she’d never seen a reason or felt an urge to start. Sometime around their collective mid-thirties, mothers at the school gates had gone from wanting to meet for coffee and cake to charging off to boot camp on the common, beginning their King Canute attempt to hold back time, and she’d felt bewildered by it, when coffee and cake was so much nicer, and time’s winged chariot was unstoppable anyway. Then even Mel had betrayed her, insisting she try yoga, with her typically blunt brand of advice: ‘It’ll help suppress your inner bitch, Laur.’

  So she’d gone, because her inner bitch was far more worrying to her than any spare tyre or aching hip flexors could ever have been. And it had been hard and hateful to start with. She didn’t have the right gear, and her T-shirt kept riding up and exposing her bra, and her neglected feet looked awful even to her on the mat when she’d discovered you had to take your socks off to do even the simplest manoeuvre, which had seemed difficult at the beginning. Downward dog made her head feel congested and achy, child’s pose was vulnerable, and full-sun salutation required more arm strength than she possessed. Plus you had to breathe in and out on the motions in the right way, and that felt very much like rubbing your belly and patting your head in synchronicity – impossible to maintain.

  But the teacher had been beautifully patient and kind, as well as firm and insistent, which turned out to be a potent combination. She would stand behind Laura and coax her limbs into places her mind really thought they couldn’t go, and her soft voice and example made the correct breathing come naturally in time.

  And the very best part was the shavasana at the end, when you lay perfectly still for a few minutes, covered with a soft blanket, and a bean bag infused with geranium across your eyes. ‘When thoughts come, do not engage with them,’ the teacher said, and while Laura might have scoffed in weeks one and two, by week three, she was getting better at pushing them away. Now, those few minutes, two or three times a week, suffused her with the most welcome sense of calm and tranquillity, like a natural high. She might even describe herself as evangelical about her yoga.

  She tackled paperwork on yoga days, banking the peacefulness and eking it out on dealing with the crap her divorce generated. For years, she hadn’t done administrative stuff. She’d stopped work when Ethan was born. She might not have done, if she’d loved what she was doing, but she remembered feeling uninspired, stagnant even. In truth, pregnancy and early motherhood offered a way out. Not very PR or girl power, but there you go. Alex had wanted her to, and she’d been happy to comply, besotted with her baby, and feeling lucky that they didn’t require her salary to survive. He’d dealt with the household bills, financial advisers, pensions and savings. She’d handled all things Ethan – school paperwork, holiday bookings, that sort of thing – and all the domestic stuff. Alex had changed precious few nappies, and cooked dinner once in a blue moon. Only when she was ill, come to think of it. He couldn’t have named more than a couple of Ethan’s teachers, or his little friends, and wouldn’t have had a clue whether Ethan had been
given the MMR as a combined vaccination or as three separate shots, or if he’d had chickenpox.

  How had that happened? How had she let that happen to herself? To each other. When had they stopped being an equal partnership? When they’d met, she’d been competent, capable and confident. She’d been bloody good at what she did – practice manager at a firm of architects in the city. He’d fallen in love with someone and gradually, knowingly, turned her into someone else, then been surprised when he suddenly didn’t love her any more. Wasn’t that the stupidest thing you’d ever heard? And she’d let him. Which was even stupider. What had she been thinking? Had she been thinking at all? Had she taken the easiest, laziest route through life and did that make it her fault? Why hadn’t she gone back to work, even part-time – had something for herself? Her own money, clothes in the wardrobe that didn’t go in the washing-machine, something to talk about at dinner besides their child.

  He’d been a good cook when they’d met. He’d done a course at Leith’s. And a season at a chalet in Méribel, cooking three courses plus hors d’oeuvres for posh skiers. He’d seduced her with food in his flat near Balham tube – prawns in garlic butter, a perfectly cooked steak, a chocolate fondant – and she’d thanked her lucky stars she’d found him. Now he barely knew how to switch on the oven.

  She had to find a way out of the hole she was in. She didn’t want him back, even if she sometimes fantasized about him begging her forgiveness. She didn’t wish him well – she wanted to see him fall on his face with Genevieve, wanted the silly girl to wake up to the fact that the man she’d fallen in love with had walked away from eighteen years of marriage and a child to be with her. Or just to realize that he would be old too soon. She wanted Ethan not to forgive him, even if she felt slightly ashamed at the selfishness of that. And, yes, she wanted him to pay. So Mel was right: she needed to buck her ideas up, reawaken the part of her brain that understood numbers and legal speak, and not let him screw her over. Know her rights. Be more angry than sad. More aggressor than victim. Not keep making the same mistake she’d made for too long.