‘I was worried that you wouldn’t have any money to pay for the parking.’
‘Dad dealt with that,’ I said quickly. When I had driven to the barriers, the overdue realisation that I would have to pay for the privilege of parking my car had felt like a complete surprise – and yet it was something I had done many times before, a ritual that most people would perform as smoothly as breathing. Well, it didn’t matter, I told myself as I busied myself with untying my boots. Anyone could make a mistake. Despite my thoughts, my fingers were stiff and clumsy with the laces and, for just a second, before everything snapped back into focus, I felt as if I were being confronted with some incomprehensible, soaringly complex mathematical puzzle that I would never be able to solve, that made no sense at all.
I followed Laura into the kitchen, which was thick with the smell of roasting meat. As she lifted the lid off the largest saucepan, clouds of potato-scented steam billowed forth, clinging to our hair and clothes. Laura was a good plain cook, but she was an obsessive checker, barely able to go a minute or two without testing the status of everything she was cooking, with the result that she slowed down the progress of every meal she made. It was already almost half past one and nothing seemed to be ready, despite her pleas before I left to be back on the hour. I watched her turn to the pan of broccoli. Anxiously she fumbled with the oven gloves, tipping the lid to the side, releasing the heat, and my hand itched to reach out and slam the burning lid back on, no matter how much it hurt. But of course I didn’t. I did nothing at all. My limbs felt heavy and hopeless.
‘Did Dad say anything about the trip?’ she asked presently, addressing the vegetables rather than me. The concentration with which she avoided looking at me betrayed the casualness of her tone.
‘No,’ I said truthfully. Since he had retired from the law firm to which he had given over forty years of ruthlessly efficient service, Harvey occasionally took a fortnight alone away from home, usually to somewhere hot and mildly exotic: Spain, Greece, Bulgaria. The trips were usually taken without much in the way of prior warning, or indeed of explanation. On a practical level, it was almost impossible to imagine what Harvey actually did on these jaunts away. The idea of him sunbathing on the beach was ludicrous; even in my mind’s eye, I could not strip him of his suit and tie, and the image of him sitting primly on a sunlounger, fully dressed, briefcase in hand, was one that alternately amused and confused me. Of course, it was none of my business. It was difficult to begrudge him a bit of solitude, particularly as it was bought with the money he had earned, even if in his absence the house did feel even emptier and bleaker than usual. All the same, I knew that Laura wondered and worried. She didn’t like him out of her sight, or more precisely, I suspected, she didn’t like herself to be out of his.
‘He seems rested, anyway,’ she said, nodding with an air of finality. I knew that she would never ask Harvey directly about his trip; incredibly, my one-word answer seemed to have got the curiosity out of her system. All the same, I thought I saw a fleeting sadness cross her face as she turned back to the stove.
‘He does,’ I agreed, although in reality I wasn’t sure. If an alcoholic stopped drinking, he was just an alcoholic without a drink, and if you allowed some of the tension to relax from a coiled spring held between your hands, then what you were left holding was still, after all, just a coiled spring.
‘I think this is ready,’ Laura announced cautiously now. Her hands fluttered around the pots and pans as if she were trying to calm an angry mob. ‘Will you help me dish up, or would you rather go and sit with Dad?’
It didn’t matter. Surely even she could see that. I knew what she was trying to do: give me decisions, give me back some responsibility. It was a pity that she thought I was capable of so little. But look what happened when she trusted you to drive to the airport, the voice at the back of my head hissed. You panicked, you forgot your money, you could barely even lift your hands off the wheel. This is about your level. I bit my lip. I helped Laura dish up, and she was disproportionately grateful.
Harvey was sitting at the head of the dining table, his back ramrod straight, the newspaper he had brought from the plane held up before him. He was frowning and intently scanning its pages, seemingly totally absorbed. It was only in the second in which he folded it and smoothly returned it to the floor that I saw that it was in Spanish, a language he didn’t even speak.
‘This looks excellent,’ he said to Laura, bestowing one of his tight smiles on her. His eyes travelled over the dishes of pulpy vegetables, hard little bullets of potato, anaemic meat carved and carefully arranged on a platter. It was impossible to tell whether or not the compliment was sincere. With a flash of clarity, I suddenly saw the meal as it would appear to someone outside our enclave; joyless and functional, a means to an end. Harvey had once been something of a gourmet, if not a gourmand. That was lost now, like so much else, and bizarrely, the thought made my chest constrict for a second. I sat down, keeping my eyes on my plate.
Laura sat down last, clearing her throat. Her hands drifted together, clasping loosely as she bowed her head. ‘Lord,’ she said quietly, ‘for the food we are about to receive, may You make us truly thankful. Bless the land from whence it came and all those who receive it.’ She paused, took a breath. Staring at my plate, I felt all the muscles in my neck tighten. Don’t say it, I thought. The vague, blurred discomfort I always felt at these moments had inexplicably sharpened today into a fury that I found I could barely contain. The pale blue swirls around the rim of my plate started to go bright and fuzzy before my eyes. For a moment I thought that Laura would break the habit of the past nine months, raise her head and go on with her meal. But of course she didn’t. ‘And, Lord, please bless Jonathan,’ she quavered, her voice bending with that predictable crack. ‘Commend him to Thy spirit and let him watch over us.’
She wiped each eye in turn with the tip of her finger, laid her hands flat down on the tabletop for a moment, and then rose to serve the vegetables. As I had waited for the inevitable words, I had genuinely thought that when I heard them, I would jump from my seat, slash my arm viciously across the table and send the dishes smashing to the floor. Instead I nodded when Laura asked whether I wanted broccoli, sat quietly and chewed my way numbly through the meal. Inside, I turned this new rage over and over in my mind, examining it, exploring it. At its core was something very simple. I didn’t want Jonathan’s name trotted out over the dinner table as if it were public property. He had been mine as much as theirs. Maybe more. I wanted some choice in when he was spoken of. I wanted some ownership, some right to him.
Our past is so real to me that I can’t see it as something dead and gone; it’s always there waiting. I can picture myself there in the office with him as clear as day. Whenever he comes near me I feel my skin prickling all over. Air rushes into my lungs and makes me gasp, my heart thudding against my ribs like a crazed demon trying to rip its way out through my skin. Surreal bright spots pop, tiny fireworks at the corners of my vision. I know that this is lust, but it feels more like danger, and it frightens me. I’m barely eighteen, and this is too big for me. I can’t rein it in.
My desk is barely fifteen feet from his. I file papers, forward emails, take messages, all the things a secretary is supposed to do, but my real job is watching him, nine hours a day. Most of the time it seems he barely notices that I’m there at all. Even when he speaks to me his eyes are elsewhere. I watch him flicking through files, frowning down in concentration at the bright white sheaths of paper. When the sun shines through the window behind his desk, the light that bounces off these papers sparkles across his face and I ache at the way it illuminates his bones. His dark golden hair is always perfectly smooth; he wears dark expensive suits that look as if they were lovingly fitted to every line of his body; his lips are full and almost feminine. He’s so nearly a dull, passionless prettyboy, and yet there is something in the set of his shoulders and the hard slash of his jaw that tells me otherwise. He looks…I think, the unfamiliar
