She turned round to check on the children, looking at them one by one to reassure herself they were still breathing. This was, after all, the land of roadside serial killers, Freddie Krueger and gruesome urban myths. Satisfied they were alive, she leaned over and, not as gently as she could have, shook Marcus awake.
‘How far have we got to go?’ she asked.
He rubbed his eyes and instinctively checked his reflection in the rear-view mirror, rearranging his thatch of red curly hair. ‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stay awake …’ he said.
‘How far?’ she said again.
‘About fifty miles? I’m not sure, I—’
‘Oh, I’ll drive,’ Lara said. She got out to walk around to the driver’s side, slamming the door rather too noisily. Bella sat up, blinked, asked if they were nearly there, then turned and closed her eyes again. Lara pulled the car out into the dark, tree-lined road. She noted that Marcus, having manoeuvred himself over to the passenger seat, had also gone straight back to sleep.
It took a few minutes to get used to everything being on the wrong side of everything else, but Lara quickly began to enjoy herself. Sitting up in the lorry-height driving seat of the Chevy, she experienced an almost-forgotten sense of power and possibility.
She clicked the car into cruise control and set off, down the northern slopes of the Catskills towards Trout Island. Six weeks, they were going to have here. Six weeks, removed from all contexts. Clarity and determination were not Lara’s default mode, but, as she sat there at the helm, this much she knew: anything was possible, and she was going to do everything in her power to get her feelings, and her family, back on track.
‘WE’RE THERE!’ LARA SAID AS SHE FINALLY TURNED ON TO MAIN
Street, Trout Island, upstate New York.
It had been a long fifty miles since she had taken over the wheel, supplemented by a full circle around a reservoir thanks to a missing signpost. James’s emailed instructions had been precise in all the wrong places and vague where it most mattered. It hadn’t helped that, although it was only about nine in the evening, Lara’s brain told her it was two in the morning.
The family stirred. Bella prodded Jack awake. Disoriented, he started to grizzle, but she found his dummy and he calmed down.
‘Can you get me to the theatre?’ Lara asked Marcus, shoving the sheets of barely useful directions into his lap.
‘OK, OK, so it says here …’ Marcus fumbled in his jacket pocket for his reading glasses. ‘“After the turn, drive straight down Main and take a left at the crossroads. You can’t miss us.”’
A few minutes later, they turned on to a quiet, moonlit street. To their right stood a building so tall as to appear cartoonish. Square white columns, as high as Lara imagined redwoods must be, soared up from a hundred-foot-long veranda to a pointed, pedimented gable. It looked like a clapboard Parthenon.
‘I guess that’s the theatre, then,’ Olly said, peering out of the car window, up through the curtain of his fringe.
Lara pulled the Chevy in and they got out, surprised by the sticky warmth of the night after the icy air-conditioning inside the car. The street was deserted except for a couple of parked cars, but the air clattered with the sound of crickets, underscored by an electric buzzing. In the distance, several dogs barked. A heavy, musky scent hung in the night, a little like fox, Lara thought, but more burned. Like the inside of a new rubber glove.
‘What do we do now?’ Bella said. Having unstrapped Jack, she had him leaning against her, clinging on, a sweaty, sleepy limpet.
As if to answer her question, the door to the tall building opened with a clatter and a large man ran down the steps from the veranda, arms flung wide, white cotton shirt flowing behind him like a flag of surrender.
‘You got here!’ he cried as he streamed across the lawn and threw himself at Marcus.
‘James!’ Marcus said, returning the giant bear-hug. ‘How the devil are you?’
‘Rehearsed near to death, but all the better for seeing you, my love,’ said James, stepping back and taking them in. ‘And here’s all the little family! Delightful. Welcome all.’ He sweatily pumped their hands, then planted a wet kiss on Lara’s cheek. ‘Lara, darling. It’s been ages. Not since this one –’ he bent to flash his blinding white teeth at Jack – ‘was barely toddling. Aren’t we a bit old now for a binky?’ He raised a mock-stern eyebrow at the little boy. Jack folded himself further into his sister’s leg, the playfulness of the reprimand lost on him.
‘Come on in!’ James straightened, swept his arm around Marcus and steered him up the steps to the building. ‘Your journey was OK, I take it. You need something to eat. A beer.’
The others made to follow, but Jack, put out by all this late-night ebullience and strangeness, hung back, pulling on Bella.
‘Come on, Jacko,’ Lara said, plucking him away from his sister. Hoiking him up on to her hip, she noted the incriminating squelch and stench of a pull-up in need of a change. Marcus accused her of babying Jack, but her youngest son still hadn’t quite got the hang of bladder control while sleeping, and she hadn’t wanted to take any risks on the long journey.
‘Hand me the Jack bag,’ she asked Olly, who, sighing, reached back into the car to rummage around the footwell beneath Jack’s seat. He lifted out the blue holdall and swung it over to Lara.
The two men, oblivious to the delay, went on ahead, Marcus talking animatedly, James listening intently.
Pretty much par for the course, thought Lara.
By the time she and the children got to the high-ceilinged, wooden foyer, James had laid out drinks and snacks.
‘Welcome all,’ he said, handing round beers. ‘Welcome to Trout Island Theatre Company. I thought we’d have chips and dips here before I took you to your digs. Tuck in, Waylands!’
He was fiftyish, handsome in an overgroomed, pudgy way, and he dressed like someone you might come across on a beach in Goa – Thai fisherman’s trousers, open cotton shirt, Birkenstocks. It was an unsettling look, as if an overfed otter had paid a visit to a beauty parlour.
‘Jack needs a change,’ Lara said to Marcus.
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No it can’t.’
James pointed across the foyer. ‘Use the bathroom, if you will.’
Lara lifted Jack on to the fold-down changing table inside the ladies’. As she rooted around in his bag for a clean pair of pull-ups and wipes, she heard Olly and Bella outside the toilet door. Like ducklings they had followed their mother across the foyer.
‘I’d forgotten what a tosser he was,’ Olly whispered to his sister.
‘Shhh!’ Bella said.
‘Fat old poof.’
‘Shut up, Olly.’
‘Look at him hanging on Dad’s every word. It’s pathetic.’
Lara sighed. Olly was like that. Over the years he had fought so hard for his father’s attention that he found it galling when someone simply swept Marcus away. The last time James had visited them in Brighton, he and Marcus had sat up drinking whisky and chewing the cud after dinner while Olly hung around trying in vain to get a word in edgeways. Defeated, he had sloped off up to his bedroom and plugged in his bass guitar, thumping through the floorboards so fiercely that Marcus stormed up and yelled at him to turn the damn thing off. Once Olly had a grudge, it was hard to dislodge it.
‘You’ve got a rude, moody brother,’ she said to Jack, tickling his ribs so he giggled with pleasure.
She had a pee herself and noticed that the gush of blood from a couple of hours ago seemed to have stilled. She hoped it was nearly all over. As if, now done, it could ever be fully over. Once again, she pushed the hollow feeling aside, stood up and steeled herself.
‘I heard that,’ she whispered to Olly as she came out, Jack beside her, holding on to her index finger.
‘He’s such a twat though, Mum,’ Olly said.
‘Give him a chance, love. He’s just excited to see your dad. We’ll get him back in a bit.’
Olly made a face.
They headed back across the wide, wooden expanse of the hall. James was laughing heartily at something Marcus had said, throwing back his tanned head, his eyes fixed sideways on his ageing protégé.
‘Ah. Refreshed,’ he said, turning to them. ‘You two look so gorgeous.’ He beamed at Lara and Bella. ‘So alike, like a couple of matrioshka dolls.’
‘That’s what you said last time,’ Olly said. Lara leaned on his foot.
‘And you’ve
certainly
grown up, young man.’ James turned his attention to Olly, raising his manicured eyebrows. ‘How old are you now? Fourteen?’
Olly bristled.
‘Sixteen. We’re sixteen,’ Bella said.
‘It’s wonderful to see you again, James,’ Lara said quickly. ‘How’s Betty?’
‘Oh, she’s back up at the farm doing a couple of last-minute rewrites. She sends apols, but things are going a bit tits up with the musical at the moment. We’re having artistic differences with the leads, who have
also
decided to start fucking each other, excuse me children.’ He rolled his eyes. His years away from Britain had given his accent a slightly Australian twang. ‘Super poster though, look.’
He gestured at the lime-green playbills dotted around the foyer. Standing between a bright red, italicised script proclaiming
Trout Island Theatre Presents the World Premiere of a Major New Musical
, stood a highly saturated photograph of a group of uniformed firemen bearing aloft a plumpish besequinned woman. Two of the men, positioned on the far edges, held hoses that gushed at an unfortunate angle. The words
SET ME ON FIRE
! blazed across the poster in flame-serifed capitals and James and Betty’s names featured prominently over the remaining space.
‘Lovely,’ chorused Marcus and Lara.
‘It’s by a very gifted kid at the local high school.’ James sighed. ‘There’s such a lot of talent in this community, just waiting to be unlocked,’ he added, popping a blue corn tortilla chip into his mouth. ‘It’s part of our mission here.’
Bella pulled on Lara’s skirt. ‘Mum, I’m really tired.’
‘And our Scottish Play is gonna rock the world, now we’ve got our main man.’ James winked at Marcus. ‘I always said we’d do it again one day, didn’t I?’
‘James directed me in the Scottish Play back at drama school,’ Marcus turned to explain to his family, who knew this already.
‘And the beard’s coming on nicely,’ James said, running his hand along Marcus’s bristled cheek. ‘What does it feel like, having such a
man
for a father, kids?’
Lara leaned her weight once more on to Olly’s foot as she heard him shudder.
‘Where’s Cyril Bear, Mummy?’ Jack said, tugging her finger.
‘He’s in the car.’
‘I want him …’ he whined.
Lara was dizzy with fatigue. She wanted the day over and done with so she could get on with starting afresh in the morning.
‘So!’ James said, picking up on their mood, clapping his hands in the air. ‘Wayland family. You look pooped. Let me take you to your quarters.’
Taking Marcus by the hand, he led them out of the building, towards his little sports car, dwarfed in front of their own monolithic vehicle.
‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to stick him for six weeks,’ Olly grumbled to Lara. She turned and saw that, from the look on his face, he was serious.
And Olly, she knew, was not to be messed with.
JACK’S DESPERATE FIGHT FOR BREATH PULLED LARA FROM THE SLEEP
that had, until that point, totally claimed her. She found him struggling next to her on the double bed trying to get air into his lungs and coughing with a noise like an extended death rattle, louder even than Marcus’s snoring on the other side of her.
Jumping out of bed, she scooped Jack up while at the same time struggling with the odd twisty knob on the bedside light. She rushed him over to where his bag was on the floor and rummaged in it for his inhaler.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Marcus heaved himself to sitting on the creaky bed.
‘Must be the dust,’ Lara said as she gave Jack five blasts of Ventolin. While Marcus watched, she rubbed the little boy’s back until his breathing had calmed to normal, then she fed him an antihistamine pill and bundled him into the bed.
‘Are you all right now, Jacky?’ she asked, leaning over him.
‘He’s fine,’ Marcus said. ‘What he needs is sleep.’
You mean what
you
need is sleep, Lara thought as she settled back down to the useless remainder of the night, where instead of sleeping she would be listening out for every change in Jack’s breathing.
All too soon, a stifling morning light filled the room. Lara couldn’t lie there any longer. She checked Jack’s chest before extricating herself from the tangle of his sticky limbs and leaving him in a sweaty, sheety heap next to Marcus. She fumbled on the floor for her clothes from the day before, then tiptoed down the dusty wooden staircase, across a hallway with an unspeakably filthy carpet to the large living space below they had only glimpsed the night before.
So, she thought, looking around her, this was to be their home for the summer. James had told them the night before that it was an unnoccupied house, newly donated by its well-wishing owner, for the theatre company to house actors in lieu of anything approaching pay. He had made it abundantly clear that the Waylands, being a whole family attached to just one actor, were getting special treatment in having the place to themselves.
A far cry from the gleaming American domestic interiors she knew from TV, the sparsely furnished house was devoid of any of the overstuffed comfort she had been expecting, and a layer of grime covered everything.
Something British in her was pleased by this.
Walking through a vast living room with the same footprint of her entire house back in Brighton, Lara realised what she had assumed to be a rug on the floor was in fact a painted, faux-Persian floorcloth. The antique bookcase leaning against the sloping wood-panelled wall was actually made from MDF, broken down to appear aged. Around the edges of the room stood an assortment of sofas and easy chairs running the historical style gamut from Shakespeare to Ibsen, with a Tennessee Williams side table thrown in for a twentieth-century touch. And wasn’t that sixties circular bamboo chair slightly Pinteresque? Lara smiled. James and Betty had furnished the house with spare set dressings.