The Family Holiday

by Elizabeth Noble

  They’d blue-lit her to the hospital. But she’d been dead when they arrived. She might have been when they put her into the ambulance. Maybe it was important to try, or just to be seen to try, when it was a young mother, like Carrie. Or maybe there had been a chance. If the crash had happened a mile closer to the hospital, or at five miles per hour slower, if the doctor had been less tired or just a better doctor. If, if, if. Ifs tortured him with their possibilities. With their different endings.

  But there was just this one ending.

  Another driver had hit Carrie’s car on a junction. He wasn’t drunk. He was late. He knew the road, but he misjudged the lights, and didn’t have time to slow down. The front of his car hit the side of theirs where the driver sat, far too fast. He killed Carrie. He didn’t kill Bea or Delilah. Just their mother. Catastrophic internal injuries.

  The other driver had killed himself too: he was declared dead at the scene. Consolation? Frustration? Neither. Totally irrelevant. His survival would maybe have meant a charge, a trial, a devastatingly light sentence: someone to be angry with. Sometimes Nick longed for that complication, because it would have been somewhere to channel rage. More often he felt no rage at all. Just sadness.

  At the hospital, he didn’t have to make heart-rending decisions about which bed to sit beside. There was no long wait, no time to pray or weep. Carrie was dead and the children were fine, physically at least. Bea and Delilah were fine. They’d evidently both been asleep. The motion of the car had always worked like magic: he’d spent hours driving around when they were small, at night, lulling them to sleep in third gear. Their bodies hadn’t braced for the impact, and their high-tech car seats had saved them from so much as a scratch. The first people on the scene had taken them out, away from their mother, held them and cooed while the ambulance came. They didn’t know anything about Arthur. There was no baby. No car seat. For a couple of minutes, Nick’s mind raced with the unbearable ifs.

  It was Bea who’d solved the mystery, pale with shock, and so small on a gurney meant for an adult. ‘Arthur went to play at Susie’s.’

  Carrie’s phone was in her handbag: 25 per cent battery charge, which was typical of her. He’d bought her a powerbank recently, and there was a cable permanently in the car, but she didn’t always remember to use it. Recent calls. Susie. He didn’t really know Susie. They’d met a handful of times at drinks or dinner. He’d had to call her and tell her. She was the first person he’d said it out loud to. Carrie’s dead. Before Carrie’s parents, even. ‘Carrie’s dead. Will you please bring Arthur to the hospital?’ And Carrie had looked fine, lying like Sleeping Beauty from the Disney film of a hundred sleepy Sunday mornings, peaceful, still and beautiful. This time he’d kissed her mouth, not her forehead.

  Surreal. It all had been surreal. He’d called them next, Ed and Maureen. Then Charlie. He’d asked Charlie to call Laura and Scott. Then he’d called Fran, because he truly didn’t know what to do next. And that was his life now. Knowing what to do next – or, rather, not knowing what to do next – had become an everyday state of being for him.

  19

  Coming home at the end of a long day, when signalling failures at Waterloo had meant a crowded train with standing room only, even in first class, Scott registered more shopping than normal cluttering the hall. There was a pile of boxes just inside the front door.

  Heather came towards him with a crystal tumbler of malt whisky. She did this most days when she was at home, with only a touch of irony. She called it her Mad Men move, or her Good Housekeeping circa 1960 technique. He rather liked it.

  ‘This is a lot of packages, even for you.’ He gestured at the pile.

  ‘Hold on – I didn’t order some of them. Most of them, actually. Maybe even none of them.’ She considered.

  ‘Who did, then? Have the girls got to my Amex?’

  ‘They’re gifts, hon. Hashtag gifted.’

  ‘Gifted from whom?’

  She adopted a patient tone. She’d explained this. ‘Companies who want me to promote their products to my followers.’

  ‘Always makes me want to laugh when you say “followers”. Like you’re some cult leader.’

  ‘It isn’t funny. It’s a job.’

  ‘Is it, though?’ He cocked his head to one side.

  She punched his nearest arm playfully, then gestured expansively in the direction of the boxes. ‘Free stuff.’

  ‘We so need more stuff! And is it free if you have to post something about it?’

  She parroted back the line he’d heard before: ‘All endorsements are genuine. All opinions are my own. I have to protect my brand.’

  He resisted rolling his eyes at the mention of her brand. ‘How many followers are we talking now?’

  She drew herself up proudly. ‘Fifteen thousand last count. And new ones every day.’

  He was secretly impressed. ‘How the hell …?’

  ‘Other people recommend your page … stuff like that. People get to know what you’re about.’

  ‘So you’re all in on it?’

  ‘I suppose. It’s a very supportive community.’

  ‘Is it, though?’

  ‘Stop saying that.’ She imitated him, her head cocked just like his. ‘“Is it, though?” You cynic.’

  He loosened his tie and undid his top button. ‘So what’s in all of these?’

  ‘Not sure yet.’ She sat down on the floor, cross-legged. He hadn’t noticed she had a pair of scissors. ‘Wanna open them with me?’

  He couldn’t resist her. She made things fun, and it felt good. He kicked off his shoes, and sat beside her on the floor. ‘It’s like Christmas. Or a wedding list.’

  ‘Ah, we didn’t register for our wedding.’ She made a mock-angry face. ‘Call this making up for that.’

  ‘We didn’t need to register for our wedding. We already had most stuff. We weren’t kids. And, besides, we weren’t American.’

  ‘You guys have wedding registers.’

  ‘I know. God knows I know. I must have bought a hundred bloody toasters in my time for couples I barely even know.’

  Heather giggled. ‘So you’re the guy who buys the toasters? I always wondered who did.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, a toaster doesn’t exactly scream imagination and romance, now does it?’

  He poked her in the stomach. ‘I’m sorry. Should I have bought the satin sheets and furry handcuffs?’

  She grabbed his hand, laughing now. ‘Whose weddings were you going to?’

  ‘Besides, toasters can be very romantic. If they’re used to make breakfast in bed …’

  ‘I see what you did there.’ She slid one blade of the scissors along a strip of tape, and pulled back the cardboard edges.

  ‘Exactly – imaginative and romantic. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.’

  ‘And how many times, since our wedding, when no one bought us a toaster because we didn’t register –’

  ‘Because I already had a four-slice stainless-steel Dualit toaster,’ he interrupted.

  ‘– since our wedding, have you made me breakfast in bed, mister?’ She’d put the scissors down now, and scooted across the floor the short distance between them. He put his arm around her and pulled her to him.

  ‘Ah, trick question. You don’t like crumbs in the sheets.’

  ‘You got me. Can’t stand them.’

  He tipped her face upwards and kissed her, the boxes forgotten.

  Theirs had been a small wedding. Laura and Alex’s had been a Hugh Grant-worthy affair – village church, marquee in the garden, Mum in a state of high excitement for nine months, and a vast hat for nine minutes, after which she’d promptly removed it because she said she couldn’t properly kiss people, and there were a lot of people who needed kissing. Dad choked up all day, terrified about giving his speech. Nick and Carrie had done a similar thing in Cumbria, with their own bohemian spin on it. Carrie had worn Converse All Stars under her cobwebby lace dress and dan
ced all night in a circle of friends. Scott had been an usher at both, in morning dress for Laura, and a brown suit with drainpipe trousers that matched the other attendants’ at Nick’s, and he’d been equally uncomfortable in both, not quite at home in his outfits or in the saccharine soft focus of the days.

  He and Heather had married at Chelsea Register Office at midday on a Tuesday. Just the two of them, Nick and Carrie, heavily pregnant with Arthur, Laura and Alex, Ethan, Charlie, Meredith and Hayley. Nick and Laura had acted as witnesses, and Carrie had collected petals to shower them with on the steps. Heather had worn a white trouser suit, declaring herself to be channelling Bianca Jagger, and he’d let himself be talked into a suit in a blue far nearer to cobalt than navy. The wedding had cost about thirty quid, the whole thing, and it took about ten minutes.

  It got considerably more expensive afterwards, when they went to Claridges in a series of limos for a five-course lunch with a wine flight. He’d made a short but sincere speech, which he’d found surprisingly easy to write, in which he said he’d never entirely understood love until he’d met Heather, who held his hand, her eyes bright with tears throughout. And then they’d stayed the night in a vast art-deco suite, with the girls down the hallway in a slightly less vast twin room, ordering room service and watching movies. Laura had offered to take them with her but Heather had wanted to keep them near, and he hadn’t minded. He understood already how it worked. The girls came first. They always would.

  It had been a lovely day.

  It had threatened, briefly, not to be. The phone call giving the family two weeks’ notice of the wedding was literally the first any of them had heard about Heather. Until he’d had something concrete to offer, he hadn’t known how to tell them, which he knew was pathetic, but also understood was just how he was. He’d never really told them stuff. Less so, even, since Mum had died. She had had a way of getting him to spill beans – a knack that his dad didn’t have or seem to want to learn. Apparently it was weird. That was what Laura had said to him, anyway. She seemed excessively irritated by it – he remembered not understanding that at all. Nick was rueful, and Charlie made no attempt to hide his naked hurt. Scott had meant it to be a nice thing, having them all there, and it had seemed anything but. He wondered if they should have eloped, said their vows on a Maldivian beach instead.

  They’d rallied, of course. Carrie’s warmth had permeated the day, as it always did. She was an unstoppably energetic, radiating force of goodness, who brooked no nonsense, and seemed incapable of negativity. Nick was a lucky man. At least, he had been. Scott had always seen what Nick saw in Carrie. Alex he got less. There had always been something almost sneering about him, even as a young, unproven man with a shaving rash and a florid complexion. And he was a vicious drunk, always had been, and that was a red flag to Scott. There were too many of those guys in the City. Guys whose human suit slipped off when they were in drink and revealed a reptilian underneath. He understood Laura’s extreme reaction more, now he knew she and Alex had been having problems. And Heather had explained to him how that would have impacted on how she behaved and how she felt about their getting married.

  Perhaps he’d suspected their questions about Heather. Maybe that was why he’d presented her as a fait accompli, all dressed up and ready to marry. Perhaps that, too, was just how he was.

  It wasn’t fair on Heather. They barely knew her. Since the wedding, they’d only been together as a family once, at Carrie’s funeral – that most dreadful, unspeakably sad of days – so it hardly counted. None of them could speak properly: that day had been a series of murmurs and choked sobs.

  Now, suddenly, among the freebies, he was worried about her. ‘Are you nervous about the holiday?’

  She had returned to the packaging, but she paused, scissors in mid-air, her face confused. ‘Should I be?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I just mean … you don’t know them very well, my family. And they don’t know you.’

  ‘So, that’ll change, right?’

  He chuckled. ‘I guess it will. Ten days in close quarters.’

  ‘How come you make it sound like a jail sentence, not a holiday?’

  ‘I don’t mean to.’

  ‘Are they crazy?’

  ‘Aren’t all families a bit crazy?’

  ‘Sure. I know mine was.’ That was how she always spoke about them, in the past tense, although as far as he was aware they were alive and well and living in New Jersey. She’d never wanted to talk about them, and she’d never offered to take him there to meet them; they were compartmentalized in her past, the door firmly closed. ‘Sounds like you’re more worried about spending time with them than I am.’

  ‘It’ll be strange, is all. We haven’t done anything like this, without my mum.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘Oh, God. Years ago. After Laura married Alex, and Ethan was born. Carrie and Nick were going out, I think, but she wasn’t there … They weren’t that established. Mum and Dad rented a villa with a pool – Portugal.’ He couldn’t remember the year. ‘Ethan was just a toddler.’

  ‘And how was that?’

  ‘Good, I think. Okay. We played golf.’

  ‘Really?’ She sounded incredulous. He never played golf.

  ‘Yeah. Me, Nick, Dad. Maybe even Alex. Mum and Laura stayed at the villa with Ethan, who was obsessed with the pool, as I remember.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  ‘All different now, though, isn’t it? Mum’s not here.’ He contemplated. ‘I’m just not sure how we work as a group without her.’

  Heather had her head on one side, listening.

  ‘She ran the show. Everything. Not just the practical stuff, although she did that too. She was the fixer … the glue. None of us have much in common apart from parentage.’

  ‘You grew up together.’

  ‘Of course. But as adults we’ve got such different lives. Such different views. Politics, even. We have that shared history, of course, but it recedes, doesn’t it, when you’re older? She was the common thread.’

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘I kind of think he’s been lost without her. Just treading water.’

  ‘It matters to him, though, this holiday. Why do you think he’s done it?’

  ‘It’s his birthday.’

  ‘I know that. But when did you last spend his birthday with him? All of you?’

  Scott closed his eyes, scanning through the years. ‘Seventy.’ He could see Charlie – there must be a photograph – standing against a colourful border in his garden at home, sheepishly holding two gold helium balloons – a 7 and a 0. Ethan, aged six, was clutching one of his legs. Daphne was stage left, her hands clasped under her chin, beaming at them both.

  ‘Before you lost your mum?’

  ‘Would have been the same year. She got ill that autumn, at least. She died in the winter. January.’

  ‘And not since?’

  ‘Weddings, christenings, funerals.’

  ‘Just the formal stuff?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So this is a big deal. For him.’

  ‘I suppose it must be.’

  ‘So we all have a responsibility. To make it a good one for him. For your mum.’ She laid a hand on his leg, and squeezed gently. He felt a moment of profound gratitude for her. He felt she was adding layers of perception to his life, to his relationships. She had changed everything – all his perspectives, all his priorities. He was a lucky man. ‘God. You are good.’ He put his arms around her. ‘So good. And wise. Did I mention wise?’

  ‘Oh, keep going!’ She laughed, the sound muffled against his chest.

  ‘And smart. You make me more good.’

  ‘Oh, you were already pretty good when I met you. I could see that.’

  Thank God she had. He changed his tone, made it lighter. ‘Can I be one of your followers? Can I, please? Can you influence me? I’m very suggestible …’

  She brought one hand around from his back to prod him in
the ribs. ‘You can certainly make a follow request. I’ll consider it.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll consider it? If it’s good for your brand!’ He flipped her over in a single movement, and lay on top of her on the floor, his arm behind her head to cushion it against the hard surface.

  She laughed with delight. ‘Oh, yeah, baby, only if it’s good for my brand …’

  20

  Ethan didn’t want to talk to his father without her. Dad had to be told, but he wanted the two of them to do it together. Even in the midst of her fear and anxiety, Laura registered that as a good thing for her relationship with her son. He was hers, still hers.

  She didn’t want to do it at home. But she didn’t want to meet in a public place. She texted him that she needed to speak to him, and that she and Ethan wanted to come on a Saturday morning. She hoped she needn’t make the point that Genevieve had better not be there, but in the car on the way over, she rehearsed asking her to leave if she was. They hadn’t met yet, and she was in no hurry for that – and now was most definitely not the time. This was about her family, and Genevieve had no part in it.

  She’d dressed carefully, pulling smarter clothes than normal from the back of the wardrobe – a pair of black cigarette pants and a silk shirt. The trousers were loose around her waist, but if she tucked the shirt in and bagged it out, they didn’t look too bad.

  She dried her hair, curling it under with the brush, rather than scraping it into a ponytail, and put on light makeup.

  Then she stood and looked at herself in the mirror. Older, more tired, ever so slightly scrawny, but she recognized herself from the days when dressing well and being groomed were part of her armour for battles she won more often than lost. Today she needed Alex to be an ally, not an adversary.