The Son-in-Law (24 page)

Ben’s voice behind me made me jump. ‘Wow. Theo is in
big
trouble this time.’

‘Maybe,’ I replied absently.

‘Can I read you a story, Hannah?’

He had a dozen first reader books clutched in his arms. I couldn’t resist such an appeal. We sat on the sofa and read stories to one another, though my mind was elsewhere. Ben’s legs stuck straight out in front of him, and he held the books up like a pompous schoolmaster. He could manage the simpler words. I was willing to bet most four-year-olds couldn’t do that. I’d taught him to write his own name, too. One of our all-time favourite books had wonderfully quirky illustrations. It was about Boogie the dog, whose appetite was forever leading her astray.

This is Boogie. Boogie is a big brown dog.

What is that good smell? It is sausages in the shop. Boogie
likes sausages.

Look! Boogie has a sausage. She is running.

‘Stop!’ shouts the man from the shop. ‘Stop that big brown
dog!’

Boogie runs very fast.

The man runs very fast too.

He huffs and puffs, but he cannot catch Boogie.

Boogie runs all the way home. She is very happy.

Greedy Boogie.

The story was far beyond Ben’s reading skills, but he’d learned every word by heart. He seemed intrigued by the penultimate picture, in which a florid butcher in a striped apron galloped after a high-tailing, tongue-lolling dog.

‘Boogie was naughty,’ he remarked thoughtfully.

‘Mm, yes, but we like her, don’t we?’

‘The man is very cross, look at him. His face is red.’

‘Well, I expect I would be cross if a big brown dog stole a sausage from my shop.’

Ben smacked his palm down onto the dog in the picture. ‘The shop man should bash Boogie with a big stick—whack, whack!—and call the policeman and take her away to jail.’

I was taken aback. ‘Really? But she only stole a sausage. That’s what dogs do. They like sausages. We wouldn’t want anyone to bash poor Boogie, would we?’

Ben’s soft features had become pinched. ‘Theo bashed me. If you call a policeman he will take Theo away and put him in jail.’

‘Sweetie,’ I suggested wearily, ‘would you like to watch
Fireman Sam
?’

So I settled him down with a biscuit and a cup of hot chocolate beside him. Then I made a pot of tea and took some up to Frederick. He was just rolling off our bed, his narrow feet bare and blue-veined.

‘Tea,’ I announced. ‘Did you get any shut-eye?’

‘I can’t find my jacket.’

‘The children are all churned up.’ I put his mug on the bedside table. ‘Damn and blast Joseph Scott.’

‘Hannah, I can’t find my jacket.’

‘Your tweed one? Okay—well, where did you leave it?’

He patted the bedspread, looking dismayed. ‘I left it here, on the end of the bed. Just here, you see? Now it’s gone. Did you take it?’

‘Whatever would I want with your jacket?’

He lowered himself painfully onto all fours and peered under the bed. ‘Somebody’s stolen it. Somebody must have been in here while I was asleep.’

‘Of course they haven’t.’

‘But I left it here on the bed! Who would come in while I was sleeping? Who would do that?’

That dreaded day had taken on a nightmarish quality. To humour him, I searched around the room. I soon spotted his jacket, carefully folded and jammed onto a shelf of the bookcase. ‘Here it is!’ I cried, shaking out the creases. ‘What on earth did you leave it there for?’ I held out the garment and he pushed his arms into the sleeves.

‘Where was it?’

‘In the bookcase. Funny place to put it.’

‘What’s it doing in the bookcase?’

‘Well, you must have put it there. Now drink your tea, for heaven’s sake.’

He sat down again. I moved quietly around the room, hanging up clothes and straightening periodicals on the bedside table. ‘They’re all at sixes and sevens,’ I said. ‘The children.’

‘Are they?’

‘One hour with their father, and they’ve unravelled. Scarlet’s shut herself in her room. Theo’s walloped seven bells out of poor little Ben.’ I began to hang a pile of Freddie’s cotton shirts in the cupboard: pale blue stripes, smelling of soap. Smelling of Freddie. ‘Everything we’ve worked for. It’s all coming apart at the seams.’

When he still didn’t answer me, I looked around. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped in his lap. His gaze was fixed blankly on the wardrobe doors in front of him. He looked terrifyingly old.

‘Freddie?’ I said sharply. ‘Are you still with me?’

He turned his eyes up to mine. His seemed to have faded in the past hour, as though some light had dimmed. Those same eyes had bowled me over forty years ago, bright with humour and understanding. Now I saw only a horrible emptiness.

‘Frederick?’ I persisted. ‘For God’s sake, say something.’

‘Hmm?’

I came closer, staring into his face. It was happening. It was happening. My mother had predicted this when first we became engaged. ‘He’ll be an old man when you’re still young.’

At twenty-four, such horrors seemed so absurdly distant as to be irrelevant. I distinctly recall laughing.

‘I love him,’ I told her. ‘I am going to marry him and be happy until death do us part.’

She sniffed. ‘You’ll end up acting as a private nurse till death do you part.’

As the years passed, and mortality began to leer through aching joints and fading eyesight, I’d remembered her words. Fear had begun to gather in the dark corners of my mind.

‘Freddie?’ I said now. ‘Knock-knock, anyone home?’

A sudden smile transformed him; a sunrise of a smile. I breathed again, as light returned to his face. ‘Sorry, my darling,’ he said. ‘Still half asleep, silly old fellow.’

‘All right?’

‘I just need to drink this lovely witch’s brew.’ He reached for the mug.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Stop fussing, woman.’

Sitting there, sipping quietly at his tea, he became Frederick again. Some quality fluttered down, landed on him and made my man himself once more—what was it? The set of his shoulders, the gleam in his eyes, the strength in his voice. He watched me folding clothes and opening and shutting drawers.

‘Don’t fret, Hannah,’ he said. ‘It’s just the lost sleep making me a bit slow.’

‘Hmph. And I know why you’re not sleeping. That man.’

‘I used to work and party for seventy-two hours straight, and still function. Ha!’ It was a classic Frederick Wilde laugh: a sudden bark, sharp and dry. ‘Can’t do twelve anymore.’

‘Come on downstairs. I need you to have a man-to-man talk with Theo about his behaviour. He’s beyond the pale.’

Freddie tutted when I described Ben’s injuries, but when I got to the part about Theo calling me a fat old cow before fleeing behind the shed, he began to shake with laughter.

‘It’s not funny!’ I raged indignantly. ‘How
can
you laugh, Freddie Wilde?’

He wound his arm around my waist and leaned his head against mine, still chuckling weakly. ‘Oh, my darling. You aren’t fat, you aren’t old, and you certainly aren’t a cow. It really isn’t amusing at all and I will have a very stern word with him. It’s just that I remember calling my mother precisely the same thing. The exact same words. I was seven years old and I was furious! It was the most cutting insult I could muster. Then I ran like hell, straight into the arms of my father who’d just strolled in from work. I got the slipper.’

‘Well deserved,’ I pronounced sourly. ‘Horrid little boy.’

As he followed me downstairs, I persuaded myself that my Freddie was all right; just stressed and sleep-deprived. God knows, we both were. Raising three young children was a challenge at the best of times but Scott’s return had stretched us to our limits. Life goes on: washing to fold, mouths to feed, assignments to mark. The kitchen was chaotic and my pot plants wilting for lack of water. With a sigh, I began to empty the dishwasher.

Freddie helped. He’d stopped laughing. I knew he was about to say something I wouldn’t like. I knew it from the pattern of his breathing—a series of deep inhalations, as though he was rehearsing lines. I knew every inch of him, every nuance of his body and breath. I think I knew him better than I knew myself.

‘Spit it out,’ I ordered.

He lifted those elegant shoulders. ‘Look, Hannah, I think we may have to let this thing with Scott unfold. We can kick and scream, or we can help the children through it. Do we have a choice?’

I knew we hadn’t, and the knowledge left me tight-lipped.

‘What would Zoe want us to do in this situation?’ asked Freddie.

‘She’d want revenge.’

‘Really? Was she so unforgiving? Look at it like this.’ He ticked the numbers off on his hand. ‘One—Scott’s back in our lives, whether we like it or not.’

‘More’s the pity.’

‘Two—you and I are not getting any younger.’

‘Speak for yourself!’

‘I
am
speaking for myself. I’m a real old codger. You’re a young codger. The world’s changing so fast that we can’t keep up. We don’t speak the same language. We don’t know about apps and iTunes.’

‘I’m hip! I have a Facebook profile.’

‘Which Scarlet set up for you. You have never posted anything, ever. You don’t know how. And you have a grand total of three Facebook friends.’

‘Hmph. So what’s your point?’

‘We can’t give them parenting. We can only give them grandparenting.’

‘It’s all I have to offer,’ I muttered, and tipped the cutlery haphazardly into its drawer.

‘We’re not doing badly—don’t be cross, Hannah—we’re doing very well.
You
are doing a simply marvellous job and everyone admires you. But the fact of the matter is that we need all the help we can get.’

I clattered plates into a pile, one by one. ‘Not from Joseph . . . bloody . . . Scott, we don’t.’ Slamming the dishwasher shut, I stood with my eyes closed. I was jangling.

Freddie’s voice; Freddie’s beloved calm: ‘You may be right. You generally are.’ He sat down at the table and bent his head over the paper. I turned the radio on and tried to distract myself with the evening’s news while I chopped vegetables.

‘Gerry Mac’s gone, I see,’ murmured Freddie, who derived a smug satisfaction from reading the obituaries. ‘Says here he was a captain of industry and a respected philanthropist.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Bloody fraud. He’s a grubby little oik of a schoolboy at heart, just like me. Inky fingers and socks at half-mast.’

A sigh of wind flicked spots of rain against the window. ‘It’s getting dark,’ I said. ‘Could you pop out and see Theo now?’

Frederick looked up from his paper. ‘Mm? Theo?’

‘Yes, please. It’s raining and the wind’s getting up. I’d really like him back inside soon, before he catches his death.’

‘What’s he doing outside?’

‘He ran behind the shed after our battle.’

Freddie looked mystified. ‘Battle?’

‘I told you,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t you remember?’

My poor Freddie. I could see it all in his face. Incomprehension as he struggled to drag the memory out of hiding; terror at the appalling blank space where it should have been.

‘He called me a fat old cow,’ I prompted. ‘You must remember that!’

‘Ah, yes.’ Freddie sounded doubtful. ‘Of course. Ha! Fat cow, eh? Little so-and-so.’ He got up. ‘Where is he?’

‘Behind the shed.’

‘Where? Oh, right. Well, if I’m not back by tomorrow, send out a search party.’

I watched through the window as his spare figure crossed the lawn; then I shook myself, and began to rinse some rice.

Zoe smiled affectionately down at me from her photo on the shelf. She looked mellow this evening. I longed to talk to her—I
needed
to talk to her. She so adored her father. She would have understood. She would have cared. She would have grieved with me, stood beside me as we faced what was coming.

But Zoe was gone forever. I worked and worried alone. And if I shed a few tears, there was nobody there to witness them.

Twenty-two

Scarlet

The next time we met up with Dad, the sun was bright and piercing. We strolled through York, slip-sliding on frozen patches of pavement. Ben swung on Dad’s hand as though he’d known him for years—which he had, in a way. Mr Hardy tagged along behind.

I barely spoke. It was hard, really hard—but I did it. Poor Dad made a mammoth effort to chat about school, about my week, about the violin, but I gave him one-word answers. I could see he was puzzled, and I felt so sorry for him, but I was determined not to be disloyal to Mum again. She had to come first.

There was a fair on in the town centre. Ben pestered until Dad let him ride on the merry-go-round. My silly little brother sat grinning like a Cheshire cat on a big white horse, waving every time he came around and making us wave back at him. As soon as he got off, he chucked up all down his front. Dad bought him a new T-shirt and cleaned him up in the public toilets.

I went to the toilet at the same time, and when I came out Dad and Ben were waiting for me. Ben was holding Dad’s hand and twittering away.

‘You’re not in jail after all,’ he was saying.

Dad caught my eye, and smiled. He had a lovely smile. ‘Not anymore.’

‘Can we call you on the phone?’ Ben had only just learned to use a telephone, and he was obsessed. He wanted to do it all the time.

‘Um, I don’t think your granny would like that,’ said Dad nervously.

‘She wouldn’t mind.’

Dad was obviously trying to think up excuses. ‘I live on the moors, so my phone doesn’t work very well.’

‘Well . . . can we have your number anyway?’

Dad gave in. He reached into his pocket and scribbled a number on a serviette. ‘Scarlet can look after this,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘But you’d better not phone me. You could try sending a text, and I’ll get it in the end.’

I shoved the bit of paper into my pocket, hoping Ben would forget we had it.

We bought baked potatoes from a stall and ate them sitting on a bench, watching the world go by. The potatoes were steaming, and the smell of melted cheese mingled with the winter air. There were no leaves on the trees. When I looked up, I saw pale blue sky through a mass of twigs and branches. Pigeons flew down to share our lunch, strutting with straight legs like clowns on a catwalk, flaunting their tail feathers and making gentle cooing noises. I love pigeons.