Echoes of Family

by Barbara Claypole White

  Gabriel snapped out of his reverie. “Marvelous job, everyone. Marianne? See you later?”

  Outside he took a deep breath of muggy August air. In the horse chestnut tree at the edge of Bill Collins’s garden, a blackbird sang.

  “You might want to rethink your assessment of the drummer,” Hugh said. “Matt’s hardly as you described him, shy to the point of being nonfunctional.”

  “It appears I was wrong.” Gabriel swatted away a bluebottle. “About that and my concern they’d pick on EmJ.”

  “And Marianne? Very impressive, I have to say. Those teenagers were eating out of her hand. This could be exactly what they both need. Did you see her face when EmJ started singing?” Hugh opened his car door. “I think something very opportune is unfolding in the Newton Rushford village hall this afternoon.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Gabriel said. He glanced at Bill Collins’s front door, which mercifully stayed shut. Something huge had just happened, he wouldn’t disagree with Hugh on that score, but the word opportune did not sit well in his stomach.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  GABRIEL

  Supper cleared up, Hugh and Gabriel sat under the pergola. From the open windows above, a duet—one voice sweet as a thrush, the other more folksy, more Celtic—drifted down to the garden. The singing stopped, and EmJ giggled. She had a quiet, sweet giggle. Hearing it for the first time along with more of Marianne’s singing? He could get used to both sounds filling his house. Gabriel stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles.

  In the navy-blue sky the last of the swallows circled. Soon they would be gone, and the hours of evening twilight on the patio would be replaced by curtains drawn at four p.m. The months of short gray days had never bothered him before. Every season had its own beauty. But this year when winter descended, he would be sealed inside his house, alone. And Marianne and EmJ would likely be in North Carolina with Darius and Jade.

  “That was a rather big sigh,” Hugh said. “Not enjoying the music?”

  “I’m inhaling your secondhand smoke.”

  Romeo and Juliet cigars were Hugh’s other guilty pleasure along with pear drops.

  “I’m not losing my hearing yet, old chap. That was definitely not an inhale.”

  “This evening has taken me a bit by surprise, that’s all.”

  “You were expecting female hysterics, not heavenly music?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  Marianne called out words of encouragement. “You have a beautiful voice, rock it!” Followed by, “What’s your instrument? I can’t hear you. Louder! What’s your instrument?”

  “My voice,” EmJ shrieked.

  “Louder! Take up space! Be heard!” And they both started laughing again.

  “They have such lovely voices.” Hugh tapped his cigar in the glass ashtray Gabriel kept especially for him. “Different but equally lovely.”

  Gabriel rested his head on the back of his chair and watched for Venus on the horizon. “Marianne always had an amazing voice. She snagged all the solos in the church choir.”

  “You were in the choir with her?”

  “With my voice?”

  “That doesn’t stop you from belting out U2 most enthusiastically.”

  “You’re on thin ice, my ABBA-singing friend. But no, I didn’t make it into the choir. The choirmistress refused to take me after I gave an abysmal rendition of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ We auditioned together, Marianne and I. It was the first time I realized she would, one day, leave me behind.”

  That was more than he’d meant to say, but it was too easy to lower his guard with Hugh. Gabriel sat up and stared into his chipped coffee mug, purchased from the bring-and-buy stall at the last Christmas bazaar. It was hard to support all the village fund-raisers on his salary, but he did his bit. Mainly he bought loads of rubbish he didn’t need and provided prizes for the annual teddy bear jump from the church tower—a decent little fund-raiser for the leaking-roof fund. As opposed to the save-our-organ fund, although they were making progress with the heritage lottery people on that one.

  Hugh puffed a thin column of smoke into the evening air. “And how are you doing with all this Marianne business?”

  The light was fading fast. In Dead Woman, an owl hooted.

  “Me? Not bad. A bit tired.” Gabriel turned toward him.

  “You put up a good front. Always have, always will. But this? This would be outside anyone’s norm. The woman whom I suspect was your one great love pops back up after thirty years; has a psychotic break, which rebounds on you; and now appears to be living in your house with a teenager who has nowhere else to go. Have you thought about where this will lead?”

  “No. I learned a long time ago not to plan my life around Marianne. I’m here for as long as she needs me. I have every assumption that, at some point, she’ll return home.”

  “To her husband.”

  “If you have a point to make, Hugh, please do so.” Gabriel put his mug down on the table between them.

  “I know you would never compromise your faith, but Marianne is a married woman.”

  “Yes, I am fully aware of that fact.”

  “And unless I’m very much mistaken,” Hugh continued, “earlier today she alluded to the fact that the two of you had had a sexually active relationship.”

  Gabriel crossed his arms and listened to the boom-boom, boom-boom of his heart pumping blood.

  “Have you considered what could happen if she decides she’s still in love with you?”

  “Marianne is not in love with me. And I sincerely doubt she ever was, given what happened with my brother.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Thank you, Hugh,” Gabriel said, “for questioning my understanding of my own past.” Although he had been doing exactly that since the day Marianne had appeared in his church.

  “You have to admit, this refusal to see Darius.” Hugh shook his head. “Very strange.”

  “She has her reasons. That’s all I need to know.” Gabriel reined in his voice. He would not lose his temper. “And I’m continuing to offer counsel that encourages her to contact Darius and save her marriage. My mind is perfectly clear on this issue. I appreciate your concern, but I do not need your guidance.”

  “Gabriel,” Marianne called from inside the house. “We need to use your computer to help EmJ find her front-woman style. We can’t decide whether to go for the androgynous look or punk princess.”

  “It’s all yours,” he called back.

  “Exceptional circumstances and all that, though,” Hugh said.

  “There are no exceptional circumstances. I’m thankful that we’ve been able to reconnect. And I’m thankful I’ve had a chance to help her. The end.”

  “Not the beginning?”

  “No.” Gabriel stood up and pushed back his chair. It grated on the concrete. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and check that my houseguests are not deleting my half-written sermon.”

  As he walked through the living room, his landline rang. A London number flashed up, not one he recognized, and Darius’s voice blasted onto the answerphone.

  “Marianne? I know you’re there. The hospital told me you’d gone home.” He spat out the word. “Pick up. Pick up the goddamn phone.” Darius paused, and the machine recorded his breathing.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  GABRIEL

  Gabriel tugged on the locked bottom drawer of his desk and, against all reason, kept tugging. Tremors scurried up his arm and into his jaw, rattling his teeth. He knew the blasted thing was locked; there was no need to double-check. Unless he was running short on trust.

  Retrieving his glass from on top of his printed-out draft, he stuck his bare feet up on his desk and leaned back in his chair. Marianne might be the reason he’d locked away his stash of alcohol, but she was not the reason he’d poured the second pink gin, the one that signaled death to the evening’s sermon writing.

  He glanced at his silent mobile phone. Ja
de hadn’t called the night before and had remained quiet all day. No texts, no emails. Not so much as a smoke signal. Was this because she knew Darius had returned to England? Or had she been swamped running a business without her boss, the man with a rather nasty temper who was a forty-minute train ride away?

  Chattering female voices filtered under his door. Marianne was giving EmJ another singing lesson, but in here, it was just him. Alone with his foul mood and his illicit booze. He should add gin to his shopping list. It might be a good idea to stock up. His cache was pitiful even for a bachelor: a bottle of sherry for the organist, whisky for Hugh and the churchwardens, gin for himself and his parents, although they visited less and less. Traveling had become increasingly difficult for his father. Mind you, that was probably a blessing. His mother’s new confrontational personality seemed ill-suited to driving. A week earlier she’d been involved in an incident of parking rage at Tesco that had involved the police.

  Gabriel picked up a biro and scribbled “Call Mum’s Dr.” on the back of his hand. It seemed his note-taking was slipping. Quite a bit had slipped in the last twenty-four hours.

  He texted Jade again. We need to talk. Urgently. Please call.

  Until yesterday he’d taken their brothers-in-arms mentality for granted: I’ve got your back, you’ve got mine. And without warning she’d cut him off at the knees. The possibility of their friendship had become a closed door with laughter on the other side.

  The landline rang, and he swallowed a huge gulp of gin before snatching up his handset.

  “Evening, sexy,” Jade said. “Sorry for the radio silence, I’ve been underground with a new band.”

  Gabriel shot back in his desk chair, then wobbled to regain his balance. “Ow.”

  “Everything okay there in rural England?”

  “Not quite the greeting I was anticipating.” He rubbed his anklebone. “Bashed my ankle on the edge of the desk in the shock.”

  “Your fault. You told me not to call you Father, so I’m trying something new on for size. And you are quite sexy, except when you wear that dress on a Sunday.”

  He took another gulp of gin. This was not how he’d planned to start the conversation.

  “Right. Thank you. Sexy is an upgrade from my usual compliments of ‘Good sermon, Reverend.’”

  “What’s the emergency? You sound a little off-kilter.” The fun had gone from her voice, but then again, she’d proved her skill at adapting to any situation. Or mood.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I think you’ll find we are, by most people’s definition.”

  “Right.” More gin. His computer screen became a little fuzzy; so did the room beyond. “What I meant is that I’d like to talk to Darius. Is he there?”

  Brilliant, that was not what he’d meant to say, either. An honorable person would have let her explain, given her an out, not chosen the one question that cornered her in deceit.

  Jade seemed to turn away momentarily to talk to someone. “He’s not here right now.”

  “Don’t you share an office space with him?”

  Jade said nothing. A very long nothing.

  “Jade?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Distracted by work stuff. Yeah, yeah I do—share a space with him. But right now we’re working on different projects.” She paused. “He’s freelancing off-site. I can have him call you.”

  “From London?”

  “You know, then.” Her voice was small and distant.

  “When did he arrive?”

  “Gabriel, please don’t ask me to betray a confidence.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m asking when he arrived.”

  “Can we let this go?”

  Normally he would respect that phrase, Can we let this go. Gabriel flopped back into his desk chair. He’d engineered his life so it wouldn’t be this way, so he didn’t fill up on petty emotions. It was as if the last three decades fell away, and he was, once again, the jealous seventeen-year-old. As always, life circled back to Marianne when he’d hoped for a different story. Certainly one with a better ending. But this was a ruddy big roadblock.

  “No, we can’t. You neglected to tell me something, which, given Darius’s combustible personality, I should have known. I thought we’d become friends.”

  The church clock struck the hour, and she gave a sharp laugh that was anything but funny. “Yeah, well, so did I. And now you’re what, putting me in the witness box for a grilling? Life isn’t tied up into good and bad, Gabriel. Sometimes we have to go outside our comfort zone to protect the people we love. My loyalties, in case you need a reminder, are to Marianne and Darius. No wiggle room in that mind-set. When it comes to them, I do what they need me to do. So take a number, why don’t you.”

  His study was no longer fuzzy. It was a one-dimensional wall. In the distance, a horn blared on the A428, the road that sliced its way through the heart of the village.

  “Is Darius in London?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “You just did.”

  “What do you want from me?” Jade said. “You want me to rat out my family? Since we barely know each other, I’ll cut you some slack, but it’s pretty fucking obvious that you don’t understand the first thing about me. You want honesty? Here it is: the real reason I didn’t call last night was because I wanted a break—from you, from Marianne, from Darius, from all of it. You think I’m having a rave over here trying to hold everything together? So here’s the truth, Father. Last night I was out getting shitfaced with girlfriends, because I have a life that doesn’t include you or running this studio. And today I’m juggling work with a motherfucker of a hangover. And wanna know what else? Nightjar has been mine since the day I flew home, because Darius didn’t just arrive in England, you jackass. He never left.”

  Then she hung up, leaving him no one to apologize to.

  In the room above, music started playing. As always, Marianne had turned it up too loud. He should remind her, for the umpteenth time, that Phyllis next door liked to fall asleep to BBC News at Ten, not the heavy thumping of Media Rage. Gabriel got up and walked slowly to the door but stopped by the mantelpiece to pick up the glass angel ornament with the damaged wing. He’d snapped part of it off, accidentally, that first Christmas after Simon’s death, a grim affair short on presents and cheer. He had never attempted to mend his broken angel. It always reminded him of everything he’d survived, despite himself. Of the strength faith gave him. But sometimes—he dusted the angel gently with his hand and put her back—friendship mattered as much as faith. And sometimes, no mattered what you believed, you couldn’t save yourself from your own stupidity.

  TWENTY-NINE

  DARIUS

  A Berklee College of Music alum, with a master’s, who’d once had Keith-fucking-Richards on speed dial, and his life had boiled down to chrysanthemum tea. Fifty years of sucky decisions and this, surely, was an all-time low.

  Darius snapped the lid off his recycled paper cup. Flower heads bobbed in the no-longer-hot water. Yup. Losing his teeny-tiny mind. And if this crap was meant to help lower blood pressure, it wasn’t working. His heartbeat was still a constant rhythm of stress, stuck in the hypertension zone according to the blood pressure cuff in the local drugstore. Marianne could, quite possibly, be the death of him.

  Darius dumped out the tea in the long grass filled with jumping insects, missed, and got it all over his Dr. Martens boot. His favorite Dr. Martens. Tomorrow he was going back to espresso. If he was going to collapse with a heart attack, let his body at least be caffeinated.

  The beautiful au pair, the one who kept trying to talk to him, waved. He raised his hand and looked away. Hampstead Heath was teeming with kids on tricycles and bicycles, kids flying kites and tossing Frisbees, kids eating ice cream cones stuffed with swirls of vanilla ice cream and Cadbury Flakes sticking out of the top—chocolate flakes, best food invention since espresso gelato—and this was so not his world: kids, parks, and fucking dogs. Literally, there was a dog
to his left humping another dog.

  Fear of dogs was a shared fear, and the one part of her inner psyche Marianne had shown him. Damn his insistence, when they got hitched, that their pasts stay buried. It had all come back to fear. Fear that he didn’t deserve their life at Nightjar, that he wasn’t good enough for her. Fear of losing her love. She was the first woman who had never wanted anything from him. Even when he was a teenager, his sisters had carved out his role: you’re the man of the family, you deal with Dad. Just because he was physically able to haul a drunk up the stairs didn’t make him the right family member for the job. And after his sisters left home, he’d helped his mother perpetuate the pretense that his father wasn’t a drunk. Did that bring him back to being an enabler?

  A color-coordinated jogger trotted past. He should probably return to a regular exercise regime. Elevate that serotonin level; get those endorphins flowing. Maybe if he worked his body to exhaustion, it would forget to crave. Marianne was his drug; he’d known it from the first time he’d woken up in her bed. And this was where it had led—to a strange limbo of oversexed dogs and the obsession devouring his insides: he had never been the love of her life. That role belonged to Gabriel.

  At least on Hampstead Heath the abundance of professional dog walkers meant the mutts were mostly controlled. Thankfully the humping and the being-humped dogs were on leashes while their owners discussed the chore of sewing name tags into school uniforms. Also, the mom on the left had a huge crush on her kids’ piano teacher. This was his life now: eavesdropping on the humdrum existence of others to take his mind off the implosion of his marriage. Divorce the first time around had cost him a fortune in therapy and acupuncture. Divorce the woman he loved? He couldn’t go there. But he was out of options and tolerance. The proverbial straw had broken the proverbial camel’s back, and it was time to stop acting the fool and grow a pair.

  Marianne had been released from the hospital two days earlier and still refused to see him, talk to him, listen to him. Not one day but two. Two. Was it too late to become a monk? Not really an option for an atheist. But he’d walked away from his life once, started over. Doing it a second time should be a breeze. Especially since he’d been offered a lucrative gig in London that could take him out of circulation for six months.