“Charlie’s out in the kitchen,” Jeffrey explained, leading them to the couches and directing them to take a seat. “He’s in heaven. You’d think with three restaurants to run that he’d be sick to death of cooking at the end of the day. He’s not. This is the kind of entertaining he loves to do, but I’ll let you in on a secret. He borrowed one of the sous chefs and a server from the catering company to come over and help out for the day. That way he could dodge some of the prep work, all the serving, and a lot of the cleanup. Now, what can I get you to drink?” Jeffrey went to a small and almost invisible wet bar that was tucked into an alcove by the dining room.
“Scotch,” Leland said at once.
“Single-malt or blended?”
“Definitely single-malt. Neat.”
“And you?” Jeffrey asked, turning to Ali.
“I’ll have mine blended,” she said, “and if you’ll excuse the impropriety, I prefer lots of rocks.”
He smiled at her. “Very well,” he said. “I have some Famous Grouse 18 that should be just the ticket. I understand it’s Prince Philip’s favorite, you know, and I’ll join Uncle Leland here in a dram of Glenmorangie.” Once the drinks were poured into cut crystal Waterford glasses, he brought them back to the sofas and settled down opposite his guests, raising his glass in a toast. “Welcome.”
“Glad to be here,” Ali said.
Jeffrey beamed at his great-uncle. “And I’m so proud to be the instrument that has brought you back to us.”
“How exactly did that happen?” Ali asked.
“I found one of my Great-grandmother Adele’s letters among my father’s papers after he died. In it she said something to the effect that she had already lost one son, and she would not lose another. That piqued my curiosity, because I didn’t remember anyone mentioning that my grandfather had any other brother besides Lawrence. No one ever spoke about the existence of a third brother. I asked Aunt Maisie about it. She won’t let anyone call her Great-aunt Maisie because she says being called great anything makes her feel ancient. She’s the one who told me that the missing brother’s name was Leland and that he had run off to join the Royal Marines.
He turned his attention to Leland. “When I heard that, my first thought was that you had died in the war, but Aunt Maisie insisted that you had returned unharmed from wherever you were posted. That bit of information is what sent me searching through the Mathison family papers in the library in Cheltenham. That’s where I saw the letters you wrote home to Great-grandmother Adele from Korea. Armed with that, including the fact that you were with the Royal Marines, I then used their veterans’ organization to track you down, and here you are.”
“Yes, we are,” Leland agreed, looking around the beautifully appointed room and deftly changing the subject. “You have a lovely place.”
Jeffrey nodded and smiled. “It’s lovely now,” he agreed, “but you’re seeing it after the construction project. I didn’t think it was ever going to end. It’s been nonstop for the better part of two years. We bought
two flats, you see, this one and the one directly below us, both in desperate need of refurbishing. We kept this one as our primary living space so we’d be able to take full advantage of the view. When it isn’t the dead of winter, we have a fabulous view of the park. Putting in the staircase was a nightmare, but we’ve converted the flat downstairs into what we like to call our bedroom wing. That way, if we have wild parties—which Charlie and I have been known to do on occasion—there’s no one directly below us to be bothered.”
Looking back toward the entryway, Ali realized that she had been so focused on the rest of the room that she had failed to see the polished wood banister leading to the lower unit. Prior to the trip, she had spent a little time cruising the pricey world of London real estate, so she had some idea of the going rate for single units in the area. The fact that Jeffrey and Charlie had purchased two units—fixer-uppers or not—left Ali duly impressed. In view of her hosts’ upscale circumstances, Ali was glad she had insisted that she and Leland stay at the Langham. She didn’t want anyone looking down their proper British noses at Leland as some kind of poor relation.
The door from what was evidently the kitchen swung open into the dining room. A dark-haired man several years younger than Jeffrey hurried into the room, smiling as he came. He was of Asian ancestry, with handsome good looks that were at odds with the studied plainness of Jeffrey, who was still dressed in a suit and tie. There was an intensity about Charles that wasn’t softened by the colorful Hawaiian shirt he wore. Several inches shorter than Jeffrey, he moved with a peculiar catlike grace.
So maybe opposites do attract, Ali thought, taking Charlie’s proffered hand.
“I think it’s all under control now,” Charles Chan said. “You must be Ali. I’m Charlie.” Once the introductions were complete, Charlie sat down on the other couch while Jeffrey hurried back to the bar, then returned with a glass of white wine that he handed over to Charlie. “What have I missed?” the new arrival asked. When Charlie spoke, Ali
thought she detected a hint of an accent that wasn’t British, although it wasn’t one she was immediately able to identify.
“Not much,” Jeffrey answered with a laugh. “I was just giving them a blow-by-blow description of our two-year construction war.”
“Oh, that,” Charlie said, taking a small sip. “It’s not over a moment too soon. They’ve only just finished painting the nursery, and the baby’s due in less than a month.”
Leland blinked at that bit of news. He took a quick sip of his drink, leaving Ali to field the ball Charlie had casually whacked into the air. “You’re having a baby?” she asked. Looking around that elegant room, she wondered how the gorgeous furniture and the exquisite wallpaper would survive assaults from an active toddler, but neither Jeffrey nor Charlie seemed dismayed in the slightest by the prospect of raising a kid who might turn out to be your basic human wrecking ball.
“Not us, of course,” Jeffrey interjected. “We’re using a surrogate. It’s a boy. We’re naming him Jonah, after your father,” he added in Leland’s direction. “We haven’t broken the news to all the relatives yet, especially the aunties. We’re planning to unveil him officially at the family reunion in Cheltenham next summer.”
“The aunties?” Ali asked.
“That would be Leland’s cousins, the twins—Maisie and Daisy, Adele’s sister’s daughters. You’ve yet to meet them,” Charlie said to Ali. “They’re the family’s self-appointed resident busybodies. Rather than telling them about Jonah in advance and letting them get all hot and bothered about it, we decided we’d spring him on them as a fait accompli this summer and count on the baby to provide enough charm to win them over.”
“The twins,” Leland repeated, shaking his head. “I had almost managed to forget about those two. Whatever became of them?”
Jeffrey turned to Ali. “Are you familiar with the family tree?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Maisie and Daisy Jordan,” Leland explained. “My mother, Adele
Mathison Brooks, and theirs, Beatrice Mathison Jordan, were sisters. The twins were about ten when I left home. Their family was somewhat better off than ours. Whatever became of them?”
“They both married,” Jeffrey said, picking up the thread of the story. “Maisie is Maisie Longmoor now, and Daisy’s married name is Phipps. Their younger brother, Billy, was never quite right in the head. He was a late-in-life baby with Down syndrome. He lived at home with his parents his whole life and died of pneumonia in his twenties.”
“I didn’t know there was a brother,” Leland said.
Jeffrey nodded. “It was a tragedy. He was never able to look after himself, and taking care of him was a terrible burden on his parents. They died just a few years after he did, in their late sixties, and within a few months of each other. When their parents died, both twins happened to be at loose ends. Maisie had recently divorced her husband, and Daisy was widowed. When they inherited their folks’ place in Bournemouth, they decided to pool their resources. They changed the place into a B and B—using the term loosely—and call it Jordan’s-by-the-Sea. Guests stay in the main house, while the two sisters live in the carriage house out back and oversee the running of the place.”
“What a shame,” Leland said. “I believe we’re booked into the Highcliff up on the bluff. If we’d known about this, we could have stayed there.”
Charlie laughed aloud. “Don’t give that idea a moment’s thought,” he said. “To hear the aunties tell it, Jordan’s is everything in luxury, but don’t be fooled. It’s not. I’ve read some of the online reviews. Dreadful is more like it. That’s one of the reasons we’re having next summer’s family reunion in Cheltenham, home to the Mathisons, rather than in Bournemouth. We didn’t want having to stick visiting guests in Jordan’s-by-the-Sea.”
“And we didn’t want to have to explain to the aunties why no one wanted to stay there,” Jeffrey added.
Charlie looked down at his watch. “It’s probably about time,” he said. “I’ll go check on things in the kitchen while you open some wine.”
“White or red?” Jeffrey asked.
“Let’s live dangerously,” Charlie told him. “Open a bottle of each.”
The wine they served was divine, and dinner was nothing short of delectable. It was impeccably served by a dark-haired young woman who brought dishes in and out, poured wine, and then cleared the table, all without saying a word to anyone. Although silverware was available, so were chopsticks, which Ali and Leland managed to maneuver properly without embarrassing themselves. The centerpiece of the meal was Peking duck, but there were any number of side dishes—spicy noodles topped with grilled shrimp; saffron fried rice flecked with bits of chicken and pork; tangy barbecued ribs; and a batch of spicy bits of beef that would have been welcome at any Mexican food joint on the planet.
Conversation was easy. When Jeffrey and Charlie questioned Leland about what he did for a living, Ali jumped into the breach, explaining that he was the property manager for both her home and her fiancé’s. That took them off into a discussion about B.’s business and into a discussion about B. and Ali’s upcoming wedding. For a dress, Jeffrey recommended the name of a small but exclusive shop on the main square in Bournemouth, Anne’s Fine Apparel. “Bournemouth’s not the best place for world-class shopping, but Anne’s the wife of an old school chum of mine, and her place might just fill the bill.”
It was during the following brief pause when Ali asked Jeffrey how long he and Charlie had been together. The question was casual, the kind of thing strangers ask strangers when they’re trying to get the lay of the land. As a pall fell over the table, silencing what had previously been a carefree conversation, Ali would have done anything to take it back.
“Not quite ten years,” Jeffrey said quietly. This time there was no hint of a smile in his voice or in his face. “We met in Thailand. In Ao Nang on the day of the tsunami.”
While Ali sat wishing to disappear under the highly polished parquet floor, Jeffrey continued, his voice flat and his eyes etched with pain. “We were both there with other people,” he said. “Other partners.
We didn’t know each other then, but it happened that we were all four staying on the sixth floor of a beachfront hotel. Charlie and Michael had flown in the day before after visiting Charlie’s grandmother in Hong Kong. I was there with Philip; we’d been together ten years. We had already been there for the better part of a week, and we were due to come home the following day.
“That morning Philip and I were scheduled to do a climbing expedition on Railay. Unfortunately, Philip and I quarreled that morning. He decided to stay in Ao Nang and maybe do some scuba diving. That’s where Charlie and I met, on the climb at Railay. We were up on the cliffs over the water when we saw the water recede.
“I had never been around a tsunami, so at first I really didn’t understand what was happening. Charlie did. He got on his cell phone immediately, trying to warn Michael and tell him to get to higher ground. The call didn’t go through. We were still up on the cliff when we saw the first huge wave crash ashore. From where we were, there was no way to grasp the size of it or to understand what had happened.”
“By the time we got back down, all hell had broken loose,” Charlie said, taking up the story. “There were six of us in the group—Jeffrey and me and four guys from Sweden, all of us from the same hotel. The guides were too concerned about what had happened to their families to worry about us, so they took off. The rest of us all stuck together. We spent the better part of twenty-four hours making our way back to Ao Nang. The devastation was unbelievable. Cell phones didn’t work. There was no way to contact anyone. When we finally made it back to town, the hotel was standing, but everything on the first three floors had been washed away. Up on the sixth floor, where our rooms were located, everything was just the way it was when we left. The beds were even made. We never found any trace of Michael or Philip. They were just gone. Two of the Swedes were eventually reunited with their wives. The other two weren’t so lucky.”
For a long moment, no one said a word. There was nothing to say.
Charlie took a deep breath. “Because of the restaurants, I had to
come back home as soon as I could catch a flight. Jeffrey stayed on for two more weeks, searching for Michael and Philip. He called me with daily reports, but he never found a trace of either one. When he came back home, we were both in the same boat. No one really understood what we’d been through or what we’d lost.”
Jeffrey nodded. “When you’re gay and your partner dies, it’s not like you’re a widow and all the old family and friends rally round and pitch in, bringing you hot dishes and sympathy. It was more like Charlie and I were stuck together on a deserted island. By the time it was over, we were . . .” He stopped and shrugged.
Charlie looked at him, smiled sadly, and came to the rescue. “We were a couple,” he finished. “It was a year or so later when we moved in together. We’ve been here a little over two years. Doing a live-in remodel may be easier than surviving a tsunami, but don’t quote me on that. The jury’s still out.
“Come on,” he added. “Let’s go back into the living room so Sari can finish clearing up.”