The House We Grew Up In (18 page)

How do people do this?
she thought to herself. And the world seemed to be full of people doing this. Every time you switched on the TV or opened a newspaper, someone was having an
affair with a married man. They all made it look so easy. Bill made it look so easy. It was not easy. And now this: Kayleigh. She threw herself back on to her bed and mouthed the word, ‘
Fuck
.’ Then she mouthed it again. ‘
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
.’ Silently. There were too many people in this house, too many pairs of ears. She punched the mattress with both her fists.

Jesus.

Kayleigh, there, in the dark, listening. Knowing. This woman she knew nothing about. Would she tell Rory? Would she tell Meg? It had been worded as a friendly warning, not a threat. How much had she actually heard anyway? Beth couldn’t remember what they’d said. She knew she’d been whispering, but Bill was incapable of whispering. What had he said? She flinched as she remembered that he’d used the words ‘in the act’.

If she stopped now, right now, it would be almost as if it had never happened. They’d only been doing this, this affair thing, for a couple of months. She’d only had sex with him a handful of times. If they could stop it now, grow a thick layer of skin over the memory of it … there was no paper trail, no physical evidence, they could pretend it had never happened. No one would get hurt.

But she already knew she couldn’t do that.

She couldn’t stop now. After all, they’d only just begun.

‘How come you’ve got signal in here?’ said Molly, waving her phone around, pointing it towards the window.

‘No idea,’ said Meg. ‘Let’s go, shall we. Let’s go and check into the hotel.’

‘Oh, yes, please!’

The hotel had been half the lure to get Molly up here. She hated skiing and had been angling to stay in London with her best friend Georgia instead. Meg had not been happy about the prospect of worrying about her teenage daughter for fourteen days and fourteen nights and had been playing mental tug of war with herself over whether or not Molly was ready to be left. Then they’d had the phone call about Lorelei, and Bill had said he’d take the boys skiing on his own and Molly had said, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure,’ when Meg had asked her if she’d come with her, so Meg had found the cutest, plushest, bijouest little boutique hotel on the Mr and Mrs Smith website and said, ‘Look, I’ll be staying here, are you sure you don’t want to come?’ and Molly had said, ‘Cool! Yes! I’ll come with you!’

Molly had always loved – what she used to call when she was small – ‘fancy hotels’. When she was eight she’d had it all decided that she would be a hotelier when she grew up. She would draw intricate sketches of her hotel; there would be real palm trees in the bedrooms and buttons you pressed to get champagne out of the walls and a menu for choosing the exact colour of bath towel you required. Nowadays her ambitions lay in ‘something to do with
television, maybe producing or directing or something. You know.’

The journey back through the house, like all return journeys, felt shorter and less convoluted, the sense of knowing how long the tunnels were and where they ended up was reassuring and for a moment, Meg could almost feel the security that her mother would have felt, passing about here in the warm corridors of her self-created warren.

Meg locked the back door behind them and tucked the key into her pocket. She regarded the door pensively for a moment and then turned to greet the outdoors; this sweet expanse of space with its smell of air and its noises of traffic and everything being as it should be. Molly waved her phone about again and said, ‘Still no signal.’

‘I’m sure you’ll pick one up, once we’re on the road.’

Meg was quite glad there was no signal. With a signal Molly would be lost to her, the car would be filled with the teeth-achingly irritating noise of not-that-bright teenage girls talking rubbish to each other, or the sound of text messages pinging back and forth every ten seconds. Without a signal they could sit, side by side, appreciate the scenery and maybe even talk.

Meg started the engine and Molly stared at the house through her Ray-Bans. ‘So weird,’ she said. ‘Just to think, you lived there, all of you, you were all just, like, normal kids, going to school and stuff, having friends and then, one by one you all left her and she died, you know, completely alone in, like, the Worst House in Britain, or whatever.’ She shook her head solemnly. ‘Weird,’ she said again. ‘I mean, can you
imagine that happening to us? Like, seriously? All four of us just leaving you there and all falling out with each other and Dad going off with some crazy woman and you just going completely mental and not letting anyone in and building, like,
tunnels
, out of, like
newspapers
. Think of our house. Our lovely house, with all its lovely things in it and yeah, OK, it’s a bit too tidy for my liking, but, you know, it’s a really nice house, and we all live there and we’re so happy and everything. And when I’m an adult I want to see my brothers all the time, you know, I want to go to their houses and stuff and have my kids play with their kids. I mean, you haven’t seen your brother and sister for, like,
five years
. Your actual brother and sister. Who you used to live with. And see every day. I mean, I just don’t get it. How can things go, like –’ she turned to stare at Meg with wide blue eyes – ‘so
wrong
?’

Meg flicked on her indicator and glanced in the wing mirror, her hands balanced on the steering wheel. ‘Sometimes, darling,’ she began, pulling the people carrier out into the road, ‘I simply do not have an answer.’

Meg squirted suncream on to her fingertips and slicked it over the limbs, shoulders, noses and knees of the three small children lined up before her by the pool. Molly received the application of suncream as if it were an expensive spa treatment. She stood straight and solid, fingers splayed out, eyes closed, turning on command. Alfie received it more like a
spiteful punishment, wriggling and grimacing and wailing, ‘Why, Mummy? Why?’ Stanley, the baby (walking, already, at ten months! That had not been the plan when they’d booked this holiday six months ago. He was supposed to have been a baby still, portable and immobile, not this toy-sized human running about in proper leather shoes) took it more as a game, smiling coquettishly at his mother as he tried to avoid her touch.

Three children down the line, a four-year-old, a just-three-year-old, a very-nearly-one-year-old, Meg was military when it came to this kind of thing. Bill, the self-appointed civilian, lay across from them prone on a lounger, holding a paperback spread wide open above his face to keep out the fierce rays of the Greek sun.

‘Need any help?’ he said, at the precise moment that she had screwed the lid back on to the tube of suncream. She smiled bitter-sweetly at him and said, ‘No, darling, I’m fine, you just relax.’

He knew she was being facetious but he also knew that if he wanted to be able to carry on lying there reading a book, he should not acknowledge this.

‘Can I swim now?’ asked Molly.

‘No, darling,’ said Meg, ‘you have to wait for the cream to absorb.’

Molly tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘How long will that take?’

Meg smiled wearily. ‘About ten minutes.’

Molly tutted and rolled her eyes again.

Meg crouched by the side of the pool and dunked Alfie and Stanley’s inflated armbands into the water, then she squashed
them up their arms. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘let’s all have an ice cream. By the time you’ve eaten the ice cream it’ll be OK to go in the pool. OK?’

They all nodded, three small heads, the pale-brown curls of her daughter and the amber-red helmets of her sons.

‘Can I have some money?’ She turned to ask Bill.

‘Hmm?’ He looked up at her from his paperback as though he’d just that minute remembered she was there.

‘Some money. I need some money. For ice creams.’

‘Oh, yes, sure. In my shorts pocket, over there.’

She pulled a handful of coins from the warm depths of Bill’s empty shorts and took the children to the kiosk on the other side of the resort pool.

‘Can you get me an espresso?’

Meg gazed at him in awe. They needed to work on this, she mused, they needed to acknowledge the fact that they had three children, that there was not a network of fairies and elves fluttering around behind the scenes getting everything done as Bill appeared to believe there was, and work out some kind of timetable. Some kind of schedule so that Meg could maybe, just maybe, read a book, too.

The choosing of ice creams turned them briefly into a small circus. Molly couldn’t decide and became very cross with Meg about it, Alfie decided too soon and changed his mind the moment Meg had pulled the wrapper off, and Stanley dropped his on the floor and screamed. A woman appeared behind them in the queue, a serene creature in a white dress, tailed by two immaculate sylphlike daughters, all blonde, all legs. Meg glanced briefly at them, then at her raggle-taggle
mismatch of screaming infants, Molly in last year’s chlorine-stained swimsuit because they hadn’t started selling swimwear in the shops yet, the boys in cheap blue things from Woolworths, freckled backs and chocolate-smeared faces. She thought of herself, a size fourteen to sixteen now.
Fourteen to sixteen
. And all on her hips and thighs, not an extra ounce on her boobs. She thought of her unwaxed bikini line (she simply had not had the time, she’d had to shave instead and had given herself a rash), her sensible swimsuit, her latest, not entirely successful haircut (she’d had the baby on her lap and hadn’t been concentrating on what the hairdresser was saying – it was very short). She thought of the past five sleepless nights all squashed into what had laughably been described as a ‘family’ suite but was in fact a normal hotel room with a travel cot and two camp beds packed into it.

And then she smiled tightly at the mother behind her and said, ‘Sorry about this travelling circus, we’ll be out of your way any minute.’

The blonde mother with her feline features and long hair and finely turned ankles smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine, we’ve all been there.’

And Meg laughed drily and thought,
No, we haven’t. Or, if we have, some of us have taken a very different route through it
.

She collected Stanley into her arms and helped him hold his replacement ice cream. He was slick with suncream and she almost lost him through the space between her arms. But somehow she managed to keep hold of both him and his ice cream and she carried them and Bill’s fucking espresso back past the pool, past the sunloungers full of people lying down,
reading books and sipping cocktails and, more gallingly than anything, sleeping.
Bastards
.