The House We Grew Up In (17 page)

He was wearing one of his trademark brightly coloured polo shirts with the striped collar, 501s, trainers. His hair was still wet from the shower and he had Alfie in his arms, facing outwards, the way Vicky had noticed that men always held their babies, like football trophies, for the world to admire.

‘Good morning, everybody!’ he boomed in his public-school accent roughened up from his years dealing with artists in edgy corners of London.

Meg came in behind him, holding a bag full of Easter eggs and wearing bunny ears. Her mouth opened wide at the sight
of her little brother at the table and she squealed, dropped the bag of eggs, darted around the table and threw herself at him. Vicky’s heart sang a little song. Families should always be together, she thought, especially families who’d been through what this one had been through.

‘Bill,’ called Meg, holding Rory’s hands in hers, ‘Bill! This is Rory! Look. It’s actually, really Rory. Molly! This is your uncle, this is Uncle Rory. You know, from Spain.’

‘Uncle Rory,’ said Rory, looking slightly puzzled by the concept.

‘Makes you sound like an old perv,’ said Kayleigh. ‘ “
Come on, sit on Uncle Rory’s lap, little one, I’ve something in my pocket for you
.” ’ She acted this out in the voice of an elderly man.

Vicky laughed out loud. She felt she had to, as she knew nobody else would.

Molly looked at Rory, aghast, and hid her face between Bill’s solid thighs. Rory laughed. ‘Look what you’ve done now, Kayleigh,’ he teased.

‘It’s probably for the best,’ she jested, ‘you know, in the
long term
. What with your being a paedophile an’ all.’

Vicky laughed again, so loud that she almost made herself jump.

‘Kayleigh,’ said Rory, taking her hand in his, ‘this is my big sister, Meg.’

‘I have heard
a lot
about you,’ said Kayleigh, not rising to greet Meg, but absent-mindedly putting out a limp-wristed hand as though handing a soiled stocking to a housemaid.

‘Likewise,’ said Meg, taking the hand firmly and smiling slightly – it had to be said – imperiously.

Vicky held her breath. Meg and Kayleigh. The queen bees. This was a match worth watching.

‘And look at the size of you!’ said Kayleigh, eyeing Megan’s bump with a strangely hungry look. ‘You are the ship in full sail, you really are.’

Meg squeezed in next to Rory, and Vicky saw Bethan move along to make space for Bill on her side of the table, smiling shyly at him. Bill leaned across the table with his hand extended. Rory met him halfway. ‘Nice to meet you at last,’ said Bill. ‘After all these years.’

‘Same here,’ said Rory. ‘We just missed each other, didn’t we, back in, when was it …?’

‘Ninety-five,’ said Meg. ‘Nineteen ninety-five. Just before Molly was born. You went then.’ She smiled tightly and continued, ‘
Literally
three weeks before my due date.’

Kayleigh pulled a face. ‘Uh-oh,’ she said, ‘we’re in trouble.’

Meg laughed. ‘Hardly,’ she scoffed. ‘It was just a pity, that was all, to have missed the birth of your first niece by three weeks.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Kayleigh, answering once again for her boyfriend, ‘you know, they’re all very dinky when they’re new, all little tiny teeny, but they’re much more interesting at this age. Big girls are much more interesting than boring little babies. All boring little babies do is piss and shit’n’ scream. Isn’t that right, Molly?’

Molly stared at her and then stared at her mother for direction, which did not come. Meg had been rendered speechless.

‘Ah, bless her,’ said Kayleigh, ‘she’s adorable. Isn’t she, Rory?’

Meg’s face softened and Rory nodded and Vicky felt it was time to gently prise the conversational reins from between Kayleigh’s fingers.

‘So’ she said brightly, slapping her hands down upon her lap. ‘Who’s ready for an egg hunt, then?’

Across the table she caught Lorrie’s eye. There was a hint of dark resentment there. Vicky caught her breath. She’d gone too far, she’d crossed a line. It was always such a blasted balancing act with Lorrie, between caring for her, picking up the slack, and disempowering her, and she was
always always
getting it wrong. ‘Lorrie,’ she soothed, ‘darling. Egg-hunt time! Over to you.’

Lorrie’s dark look diminished and she smiled girlishly, delightedly.
Clap clap
went her long bony hands,
clap clap
, and there it was, sunshine, literally, not figuratively; the sun appearing from behind the thick wall of cloud, casting its good mood across the room, across the family, across Easter.

Beth lay in the hammock, contemplating her feet. She had never before thought of her feet as alluring in any way. In fact, she’d never really thought about her feet at all. They had just lived quietly on the ends of her legs; a narrow size six, slightly sinewy, sometimes with coloured nails, sometimes not. But she looked at her feet now and tried to see what he saw, tried to see them as objects of sensual, remarkable erogenousness. He had told her that her feet were beautiful. And maybe they were. She wanted to believe every word he said.

She turned her head to look up towards the house. She could hear the clatter of things being put into the dishwasher,
other things being placed on shelves, children fighting, adults laughing. She heard her mother call out, ‘Oh, Meg, it was nothing like that, nothing at all!’ She heard the back door opening and closing and then she heard the sound of Bill’s voice. She heard him say, ‘I’m off for a smoke, Meg, keep the kids away.’ She smiled. Bill’s children didn’t know he smoked.

She looked up again, into the sky. It was lilac, veined with jet trails and wisps of cloud. Then she peered down, into her dress, plucked at the top of her bra, gazed at her breasts. Her lovely firm, youthful breasts (he’d told her that too). She thought of the way he grabbed them as though they were handfuls of dough, the way he licked them and cupped them and held himself between them. She shuddered slightly, with a kind of awful disgust. And then she heard his feet against the grass, soft and strong, and there he was, standing alongside her, pulling a pack of Camels from the back pocket of his jeans. He offered the pack to her, silently, with one eyebrow raised.

She plucked one out and let him pull her to a sitting position.

‘Well,’ he said, lowering himself gently down alongside her. ‘That was …
different
.’

‘Kayleigh, you mean?’

‘Christ above, what a piece of work.’

Beth laughed. ‘She is that.’

‘Poor Rory,’ he sighed, lighting Beth’s cigarette for her. ‘She’s got his balls in a vice.’

Beth smiled and didn’t say, ‘
Haven’t they all?
’

They smoked their cigarettes in silence for a while, enjoying the proximity of each other’s bodies, knowing that there
was nothing more for them here than this, smoking cigarettes, chatting in the dusk. There were other places for the rest of it. This was not one of those places.

‘He’s very different, isn’t he?’ said Bill, bending down to grind his cigarette out in the grass. ‘Different to the rest of you?’

Beth put her hand up the back of his T-shirt and ran it up and down the small of his back, his satin skin, the points of his spine. He arched against her touch.

‘We’re
all
different to the rest of us,’ she said. ‘We’re like a badly planned dinner party.’ She turned her fingertips into claws and scratched at his skin.

‘Ooh, yes,’ he said, ‘just there, just
there
, no, there, there, up a bit, just to the left, to the right, back to the middle, ooh, yeah, yeah, right there,
right there
!’

Back-scratching was one of their things. Along with foot-kissing and breast-licking and a special position that they honestly believed they must have invented because they’d been through the Kama Sutra more than once and failed to find it. Beth had always thought she didn’t like sex. Bill was doing everything in his power to prove to her that she did. She was still only half convinced. She still couldn’t really work out what the point of it was. But it made Bill happy and as long as she was making Bill happy, Beth was happy.

Beth quickly snatched her hand from under his T-shirt at the sound of a voice in the top garden. They both sat straight-backed, unnatural.

It was Vicky.

She smiled when she saw them there. ‘Hello, you two!’ she boomed, zipped up snugly inside a purple Boden
body-warmer, her strong arms swinging at her sides. ‘What on earth are you doing out here in the half-dark?’

‘We’re
dissecting
,’ said Bill.

Vicky looked from Bill to Beth and then back again. Beth gulped and felt her skin prickle all over with guilt. Bill was so good at this, so blasé.

‘She’s a pill, all right,’ said Vicky, leaning against a tree trunk and tucking her hands into her pockets. ‘She just told me that I’m not really a lesbian.’

‘What!’

‘Yes, and – I will not attempt to do this in her accent – she said, “You’ve just decided to be gay because you wanted your feet under the table here.”’ Vicky hooted loudly. ‘Outrageous! The girl doesn’t know the first thing about me.’

Beth smiled tightly. She had no idea if Vicky was a real lesbian or not, and she was still too uncomfortable sitting here, squashed up against her sister’s partner, in a hammock, in the dark, even to begin to join in this conversation.

‘What the fuck is a “real lesbian” anyway?’ said Bill. ‘It’s all shades of grey.’

‘Well, yes,’ agreed Vicky, ‘exactly. Who’s to say? I mean, would you decree that a person was not a “proper” heterosexual because they’d once had a crush on the head girl?’ She tutted and sighed. ‘Well, anyway, all I can say is that I’m jolly glad she’s not a permanent fixture. She adds a certain colour but with a rather bad flavour, if you see what I mean.’ She pulled her hands out of her pockets and slapped them against her legs. ‘Well, I’d better get back inside, make sure Lorrie’s OK. Are you coming in?’

She glanced again from one to the other, and then up to the darkening sky. A look passed across her eyes, as though she were doing long division in her head. Beth flinched.

‘Not yet, Vick,’ said Bill. ‘In a minute.’

‘OK, good,’ she smiled. ‘Yes, see you both in a minute.’

They sat and watched her march back up the garden towards the house.

‘She knows,’ said Beth, pulling herself off the hammock and scrabbling to her feet.

‘Don’t be nuts,’ said Bill, lying down in the space she’d vacated, tucking his hands behind his head and staring up into the sky where the stars were slowly starting to reveal themselves like shadows on a Polaroid. ‘’Course she doesn’t.’

‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘the way she looked at us just now. Didn’t you see? She knows. She totally knows. Or
suspects
.’

Bill shrugged. ‘And?’

She put her hands against her hips and stared at him, questioningly.

‘Well, if she
suspects
, then what’s she going to do? Unless she actually catches us
in the act
, she can suspect as much as she likes.’

‘You are so ridiculously cool, Mr Liddington. I honestly have no idea how you do it. It’s scary.’

‘It’s genetic,’ he replied. ‘Runs in the family.’

‘How do you do it? How do you go home to her and pretend that you’ve just been working late? If I had to lie to someone all the time like that …’ She shuddered. The sun had disappeared now, behind the horizon, taking the last caress of warmth with it. ‘I’m going in,’ she said, feeling
suddenly cross with him. She couldn’t find a specific reason for her annoyance, it just sat there on her chest like a heavy book.

‘What’s the matter?’ he called out after her.

‘Shh,’ she hissed.

‘What?’ he called, quietly this time.

‘Nothing, nothing.’

She strode up the lawn, towards the glowing lights of the house. On the grass in front of the house, her mother was doing a cartwheel. Her long greying hair swept the tips of the grass as she turned. When she righted herself she saw Beth and she smiled. From this distance, in this light, she looked all of fourteen.

‘Where on earth have you been, darling?’ she asked.

‘Having a cigarette,’ she replied breathlessly. ‘With Bill.’ Not a lie. Entirely and completely the truth, in fact.

‘I still can’t believe that you took up smoking at the age of twenty-six.’ Lorelei said this sadly.

Beth smiled. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’m such an idiot. I’ll give up soon. I promise.’

‘Easier said than done,’ said a voice behind her. She jumped. She’d thought she and her mother were alone out here. Kayleigh sat on her haunches on the bottom of the slide, staring at Beth through narrowed, enquiring eyes. ‘A bad habit. A
very
bad habit. You need to stop that.
Right now
.’ She threw her a penetrating look of understanding.

‘Do you hear what I said?’ she continued. ‘You need to stop that. Right now. Knock it on the head. For the sake of everybody.’

Beth gulped and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice as solid as she could make it. ‘Yes. I hear you. And I will.’

‘Good,’ said Kayleigh.

‘Kayleigh is absolutely right,’ interjected Lorelei innocently. ‘Thank you, Kayleigh. Do you smoke?’

Kayleigh pulled herself to her feet and smiled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not right now I don’t. But I have done. So I know –’ she looked at Beth again – ‘how difficult it is to give up.’

Beth nodded and turned away. She pushed her way into the kitchen, ignored the scene of social gaiety spread out before her: Colin, Pandora, Meg and Ben loud and exuberant over a bottle of red wine, elbows on the table, scraped-out pudding bowls waiting to be cleared, small children in pyjamas darting about like fish, Rory at the sink washing up and laughing at something someone had just said; she ignored it all and she ran to her room. Still her room. Twenty-six years old and still here. The only time she wasn’t here was when she was there. In London. Having sex with Bill in his office at the gallery. Eating dinner with Bill in unfashionable restaurants where he wouldn’t see anyone he knew. Having sex with Bill in the toilets of unfashionable restaurants. Bill was a family man. There were no overnights, no waking up together – he was unassailable on that point. He slept in his own bed, woke up with his own wife. He’d pick up a taxi, drop Beth off at the station for the last train, take it on home. A five-hour round trip for two hours of him.