Elle stared at her father, at his smooth blue wool jumper,
immaculately pressed navy trousers, shiny shoes. He looked younger, as he pumped Gray’s arm up and down. She stood on one leg, then the other.
“Can Elle read to me as well?” said Lauren, also standing on one leg and now giving Elle a toothy grin.
“No, Lauren,” Rhodes said, behind her father. “You missed your chance. Elle wants to talk to Grandpa. She hasn’t seen him for ages.”
They were in the tiny sitting room with the low ceilings, the sound of rain pelting outside, through the cream-colored shutters on the bay window, and as Lauren started to cry the five of them, Elle, Gray, Melissa, Rhodes, and John, all looked down at her, the fire casting huge shadows of them on the cream walls, as though they were giants.
“I’ll take you up,” Gray said. He came forward and took Lauren’s hand and she, out of surprise, stopped crying.
“Ah—I’ll come with you, she doesn’t like strangers,” Melissa said. “Let’s go.” She nudged him out of the room.
Left alone, Rhodes, Elle, and their father glanced at each other.
“Well, well, here we are.” John sank into the chair Gray had been sitting in by the fire. “Very nice.” He put his hands neatly on his knees. “Well. Isn’t this lovely.”
Rhodes said, “When was the last time the three of us were together?”
“Mum’s funeral,” Elle said automatically.
“I think,” John said as if Elle hadn’t spoken, “it was Alice’s sixteenth, last summer.”
Rhodes pulled at his wristwatch. “Dad, can I get you a drink? We have wine, a gin and tonic, there’s beer, anything you want. What do you want?”
“Wine, I’d love a large glass of white wine.”
It was so strange, to sit here in this unfamiliar house with
the sound of a strange child shouting upstairs, looking at her brother and her father next to each other, hands clasped between their legs, faces set in the same expression, so eerily similar, though Rhodes was bigger, more ebullient somehow. Her brother slapped his thighs and stood up to get the drinks. John brushed a speck of dust off his immaculate trousers. Elle watched him, remembering how much it used to upset her after he left them, when he’d arrive to take them on day trips, out to Brighton or Hastings for the day, and she wouldn’t recognize his clothes. Every time he came back to Willow Cottage, before they had to move, something would always be different, and it simply rammed home what she tried to forget—that her father had moved on. He had a new life, and it invigorated him. He was happy in a way he hadn’t been with their mother, while she stayed the same, and in the end it killed her.
Elle stared at his polka-dot blue tie tucked neatly inside his jumper, and blinked. “It’s lovely to see you,” she said eventually. “I’m sorry—this is such a rushed work trip. Just not the best time to catch up, that’s why I didn’t suggest coming to Brighton. How’s Eliza? How’re Jack and Alice?”
Her father nodded ferociously. “Eliza’s good, though the surgery’s very busy at the moment. And Alice is loving her A levels. We were worried when she chose Art History, but it seems universities will accept that, and she’s still enjoying the flute, very much so. Yes. Oh, thanks, son.” He took a large gulp from the glass of wine Rhodes offered him. “How’s work, then? When will you be running the entire company? I tell all my friends about my daughter who’s on the board, you know.” He smiled. “They’re all so surprised.”
“Surprised, eh?” said Rhodes, with a chuckle. “That’s nice, Dad. She runs a division, it’s not a fluke.”
“Thank you, Rhodes,” said Elle. “I didn’t sleep my way to the top, you know, Dad.”
John looked shocked. He held up his hands. “Of course you didn’t, I know that. I’m sorry!” he said. “I only meant, perhaps, that I always thought it’d be the other way round, with you two.” There was a pause. “Not that I’m not very proud of you, Rhodes, too…” He trailed off.
The three of them were not a family, they were an uneasy coalition linked by blood and the unspoken tragedy that hovered just outside the room. Rhodes patted his father on the shoulder. “I’ll go and check on the supper, before you say anything really unfortunate, Father,” he said. “Leave you two to catch up.”
Elle watched him go.
Do I actually like my brother?
she found herself thinking.
Is that actually possible? Strange
.
“What about Jack?” Elle said, turning back to her dad. She wished Gray was here. “How’s Jack?”
“Jack. Ha.” Her father sighed. “Jack’s still the problem child, I’m sorry to say. Very difficult at the moment.” He took a sip of his drink.
“Why, what’s he done?”
John waved his hand. “Oh, Elle, it’s too boring to go into.”
He fell silent, and Elle was reminded of her lunch with Felicity. She had simply stopped talking, and suddenly, she realized this was her father’s way of directing the conversation; using silence as a weapon, so someone else had to speak, to fill the gap. He’d done it all the time with their mother, letting her talk till she was screaming at him, and then he’d just cut her down with one sharp sentence.
He did that all the time,
she thought.
How come I’ve only just noticed?
She didn’t say anything, just nodded expectantly, waiting for him to begin the conversation again.
After a silence that stretched on forever, her father narrowed his eyes and sighed. “He’s been excluded from his school. Yes. They handled it very badly, I must say. Foolish behavior, on
both sides, especially his.” He took another sip. “Forget about that. How’s work?”
“It’s busy, it’s challenging, blah blah,” said Elle. “Come on, what did he do, Dad? Is he OK?”
“He tried to steal a car. One of the teachers’. When he was caught he”—John inhaled, through his teeth—“insulted the teachers, kicked someone. So embarrassing, so stupid. But oh, yes, he’s fine,” he said, with heavy sarcastic emphasis. “His mother and I, however, are fed up to the back teeth with him. Yes, we’ve—we’re reaching a crisis point. It’s stay or go at the moment with him. We don’t know where he is most of the time, what he’s doing, where he’s going. We’ve confiscated his computer, and I’m afraid the next step is to throw him out if he doesn’t listen. A wake-up call. Hm.”
He shook his head, as if Jack’s deliquency was only distantly connected to him, a vague irritant like a car alarm going off further down the street.
“Shouldn’t you talk to him about it?” Elle said.
“Oh, don’t be so American.” John smiled, but he was only partly joking. “He needs to know he can’t carry on like this. Passing out drunk in the hall, calling his mother names I’ve never even heard. He pushed me against a wall once. Bloody hurt. No, it might be time to force the issue.”
A shiver ran over Elle, and she rubbed her arms. She could recall perfectly how intractable her father was, how when Mum would get upset or behave badly he’d just shut off, as if it was nothing to do with him. The time a few weeks after they’d come back from Skye when they’d gone for a picnic concert in the grounds of a stately home nearby, and Mandana had been wandering around, chatting to people. To Elle it was obvious now: she’d been drunk. She’d staggered along, oblivious to the “shhhhs” and hissed orders to sit down and shut up of the other picnickers, and John, instead of marching over, grabbing
her by the arm, and walking her around the car park, had crossed his arms and ignored her, then taken the children, got into the car, and driven off home without her. As if she were a total stranger, a down-and-out on the street.
Rhodes came back in, with a pile of books under one arm and a bottle of wine in the other. “Elle, these are the books I mentioned to you, don’t know why I’ve ended up with them,” he said. He tipped them into her lap.
Elle picked over them. “
Cinderella, Rapunzel, Ladybird Royal Wedding, Sleeping Beauty
…” she read aloud. “
Nursery Rhymes, Little Red Riding Hood
—Rhodes, where did you get these?” She opened the stiff cardboard cover of one. It was covered in her scribbles, some stickers, some random annotations.
“I’ve had them for years, since the clear-out,” he said. “I think you meant to take them with you, but they were just left in the barn, in a pile on the table.”
“Yes,” said Elle, remembering. “I did.” She clutched them to her. “I must have left them behind.
Cinderella
!” she said, picking up the first book. “I can remember drawing in this one. Look at Cinderella’s dress.” She held it open at a scene from the ball, complete with extra felt-tip scalloping around the edge of the dress, an arrow, and “PRETTY” written in huge, mismatched letters.
“Is that how you edit?” Rhodes asked.
“Yes, and I always use green felt-tip,” Elle said. Rhodes laughed. “Oh, look, the second dress was always my favorite, not the third one. She’s in blue, it’s so lovely. It goes with her eyes.”
Their father and Rhodes watched her, in some embarrassment. “Look,
Rapunzel,
” Elle said. “Actually, that always annoyed me.”
“They all annoyed me,” said Rhodes. He picked it up. “They’re all a load of rubbish.”
“No, but this one’s a cop-out. Because the prince loses his sight, and he’s completely blind and wandering through the thorny desert.” Elle flicked through the pages. “And she finds him—how does she find him for starters, it’s a huge blimming desert. Anyway, her tears fall on his eyes and suddenly he can see again.” She shut the book with a snap. “I always thought it wasn’t fair. In
Cinderella,
right, there’s magic at the beginning, but in the end the prince finds her by searching high and low through the land and getting everyone to try on the glass slipper. He works for it. This, they just have some magic tears and it heals him and makes everything better. Real life’s not like that.”
“It’s a fairy tale, Elle, dear,” John said. “What did you expect?”
The squashy sofa covered in a pattern of green apples, by the fire at Willow Cottage, her and Rhodes huddled together as Mandana tucked her feet under her and read to them. Elle could suddenly picture it so clearly. She could smell the woodsmoke from the grate, feel the draft on her neck from the loose casement window, see the piles of books on the shelves, the cozy mess that had been their home. She stared at Rhodes. Did he remember it too? They had been happy once, a happy family of sorts, and that was because of Mum, not in spite of her. At the thought of her mother, tears sprang into Elle’s eyes.
“I suppose I expected more,” she said. She put the books carefully in her capacious manuscript bag, looking down, not at her father.
ELLE HAD EATEN
at some of the best restaurants in London on her trips back from New York, but she hadn’t been to anyone’s home in London for she didn’t know how long. She was rarely in houses these days. Everyone in New York lived in an apartment and you never went there—you went out to eat or drink. Once, she’d been to Sidney’s apartment for a drinks party for Elizabeth Forsyte’s new book. And once she’d been to her assistant’s apartment, when Courtney had been struck down with the flu and Elle had taken her some soup. It was a mess, full of girl’s stuff, four different half-empty bottles of shampoo in the shower, tights hanging above the sink to dry, and when she went back to Gray’s immaculate, sparsely furnished apartment that evening, she looked around and thought,
I live here. How nice.
But as she was ushered into Rhodes’s kitchen later that evening, it struck her that his little house was a home. It was cozy and tidy, full of toys and DVDs and cushions, postcards on the fridge, piles of washing by the machine, and upstairs a child sleeping in a bedroom.
“Hey, these are Mum’s plates, aren’t they?” she exclaimed. Rhodes turned round.
Melissa looked up from tossing the salad. “Yes, yes, they are. We thought, since you had taken the sideboard—”
Elle cut her off. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that! It’s just—weird to see them here. Different context.”
“You have a sideboard?” Gray said, sitting down next to her. “This is amazing, folks. When Elle moved in to my place she had nothing. A box, two boxes of possessions, that’s it.”
“Haven’t you shipped the rest over yet?” Rhodes said. “It’s still in storage?”
“Er, yes,” said Elle. “I haven’t—well, we didn’t know if—we
might not be staying there, after we’re married—it’s just never been the right time,” she finished limply, fingering the diamond on her engagement ring. It was sharp at the edges; she liked to press the pads of her fingers against it, see how hard she could push it.
“Elle never liked putting down roots, you know,” John said to Gray. “Before she moved to the States she lived in this kind of studio—my goodness. I went to help her put up some shelves once. What a trip. Empty bottles everywhere. Pictures of old actors on the walls. Stained carpets.”
“Can I just point out the actors and the stains were nothing to do with me, they were there already,” Elle hastily interjected. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” John replied. “I said to her, Gray, I said, buy somewhere new! Put down some roots! But she wouldn’t listen. She was off again.”
Gray rolled his eyes at John, the two of them bonding. Elle stared.