‘Mum says Terra’s too young to get married,’ Zac says.
She smiles. ‘Well, Mum may be right about that,’ she says. ‘But don’t ever say that to anyone else. Someone told me that on my wedding day, and they were right – I was too young. But that didn’t stop me being upset because someone had said it. So, especially don’t say it today, OK?’
‘OK,’ Zac says. ‘My lips are zipped.’
‘Good. You’re a good boy, really, aren’t you?’
‘Does everyone have to get married?’ Zac asks as she continues to click through the photos. ‘Will I have to get married?’
‘Not at all,’ she tells him. ‘Grandad and I aren’t married.’
‘Why not?’ Zac asks.
‘Well, I was married to Grandad Ian, once upon a time. And then we got divorced so that he could marry Grandma Linda and so that I could be with Scott. And I just felt like I’d been there and done that. Does that make any sense?’
‘Uh-uh,’ Zac says, frowning and shaking his head as he starts to stab randomly at the screen again. A selfie of her and Scott appears. In it, she’s standing beside Scott in the garden of this very house. Scott has a hosepipe in one hand.
She can remember the day clearly. It had been after Zoe and Nick had decided to come back from France, and she and Scott had just had a conversation about where to put them up once they arrived. Scott had said, quite casually, as if it was nothing, ‘Why not lend them your place?’
‘Sure, but where would I live?’ she’d asked.
‘Well, here, of course,’ he’d said.
‘Oh, OK,’ she’d replied. She was hating her job in Nottingham anyway. Plus, time spent apart from Scott felt like physical pain, while time spent with him felt like joy. So it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Neither of them had hesitated. The decision had been made in that instant and she’d taken a selfie in order to remember it. She’d wanted to remember how ordinary yet monumental the moment had felt.
‘Sometimes people love each other so much that all they want to do is get married,’ she tells Zac. ‘And other times people love each other so much, they’re so sure that they’re with the right person and that they’re going to be together for the rest of their lives that there doesn’t seem to be much point getting married at all.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense either,’ Zac says.
‘No,’ she agrees. ‘No, you’re right. It probably doesn’t.’
She glances at the clock on the refrigerator. ‘Now, do you want to do something for me?’ she asks. ‘Do you want to go and wake Jude and Jessica up so they’ve got time to get ready for Terra’s wedding?’
‘Mum says people don’t get up at crazy o’clock,’ Zac tells her. ‘Only you.’
‘Well, it’s actually gone eight o’clock and the only people I know who think that’s crazy o’clock are your mothers. Plus, Jude needs to iron a shirt and Jess, her hair. So can you do that for me, do you think?’
Zac nods and jumps down from her lap.
‘Do it gently,’ she tells him as he leaves the room. ‘Don’t jump on them or anything, OK?’
‘OK, Gran,’ he says, climbing the stairs one by one.
‘And knock on the door first!’ she calls out after him. She grimaces vaguely to herself. ‘Maybe not your best idea, Grandma,’ she mutters. Grandma, she thinks. Jesus, when did that happen?
She clicks again on the photo of Scott looking gorgeous in a suit and then remembers other moments from Jude and Jessica’s wedding in London, where the photo had been taken.
It had seemed, initially, as if convincing Zoe to come back for a surprise appearance at the wedding hadn’t been her best idea either.
Jude, who’d dropped in unexpectedly the evening before the wedding, had turned quite green once he’d discovered Zoe sitting in the hotel lobby. He’d caused quite the scene, screaming and shouting as he furiously told her that she’d ruined the first fifteen years of his life and that she wasn’t going to ruin his wedding as well.
Mandy had spent hours calming Zoe and persuading her not to leave. However, just as she had managed to do so, Ian and Linda had appeared, ready to check in, and Zoe had fallen apart all over again. But Ian had surprised Mandy, because for once he’d lived up to the requirements of the moment.
He’d asked Linda to retire to their hotel room and sat with Mandy to help calm Zoe down. He’d admitted for the first time ever that everything that had happened was at least partly his fault. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Zoe. I was a selfish bastard,’ he’d told her. And then, as Zoe had collapsed into his arms for the first time in years, he’d peered over their sobbing daughter’s shoulder at Mandy, looked her straight in the eye, and croaked, with a gentle nod and a long, slow blink, ‘I’m sorry for what I did to all of you. I really am.’
Mandy had replied with a simple but heartfelt, ‘Thank you.’
Finally, once Zoe’s tears had ceased, Ian and Scott had taken a taxi over to Jude’s flat, where they’d spent half the night talking him down.
Things the next day had remained nerve-rackingly edgy – it had felt as if a row could erupt at any moment – but they had somehow all got through the service without a major incident.
At the reception party, a pretty drunk Jessica, sick to death of the tension, had demanded that her husband make up with his sister. Zoe and Jude’s dance together had begun frigidly, under duress, but had quickly morphed into a tearful hug that made all the onlookers well up, too. Pretty soon, Ian had invited Mandy to dance and Scott had asked Linda, and so mixed-up couple by mixed-up couple, the dance floor had become filled with teary parents and wet-eyed brothers and sisters, and half-brothers and half-sisters, until they had all, as if drawn magnetically together, ended up in a big, emotional family crush in the middle of the dance floor. Though no one had thought to take a photo, it remains, to this day, one of the most beautiful moments of her life.
She glances back down at the PhotoMat, at Scott, suited, in his mid-thirties, and then clicks again on the photo of him gardening bare-chested. She growls quietly once again and then, laughing at herself for staring at a photo when she has the real thing outside, she rolls up the PhotoMat and slides it back into the tube.
She crosses to the kitchen door and peers out.
In the garden, Scott is watering the vegetable patch, playfully arcing the jet of water so that the droplets sparkle and glitter in the sunlight. Her eyes mist up again. Weddings, damned weddings . . . they always make her feel emotional.
Still, today is a good day, she thinks. She’s got her whole family around her and they’re off to Manchester to meet the other half of the Fuller clan. She’s had bad days and good days over the years. Actually, she’s had some bloody terrible days, way back when; of course she has. But what followed has reduced them to the status of footnotes, thank God. The twenty years she’s spent with Scott have made the eight years they spent apart feel like nothing more than a blip.
And yes, today is going to be a good day. She can sense it in the morning air, just waiting to be picked and peeled and enjoyed, like ripe fruit hanging from a tree.
She opens the door and calls out, ‘Scott? D’you want some coffee?’ And when he looks up and smiles at her, when he nods enthusiastically and winks, her eyes mist all over again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Lolo, Charlie and Titou for the mad brainstorming session during which the ideas for this novel hatched. Thanks to Rosemary for being my writer’s touchstone. Thanks to Apple for making reliable work tools and, above all, thanks to everyone at Lake Union for all their hard work on this novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Rosey Aston-Snow
Nick Alexander was born in 1964 in the UK. He has travelled widely and has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and France, where he resides today. Nick is the author of fifteen novels, including The Other Son, named by Amazon as one of the best fiction titles of 2015; The Photographer’s Wife, published in 2014 – a number-one
hit in both the UK and France, and The Half-Life of Hannah, the fourth-bestselling independently published Kindle title of all time. Nick’s novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Turkish and Croatian. Nick lives in the south of France with his partner, three friendly cats and a few trout.
The Road to Zoe Page 30