The legacy, p.10
The Legacy, page 10
Angus smiled. ‘Stop worrying. If Noah’s happy to keep Freddie out of our hair for a few hours, and Freddie’s happy to be with his favourite uncle—’
‘His only uncle,’ Liv chipped in.
Angus finished his sentence, unperturbed, ‘Then I, for one, am not going to complain.’ He fished a handful of cutlery out of the dishwasher and walked over to the drawer. Each knife and fork was individually dried and polished before being put away. A marriage of opposites. Angus deliberate, unhurried, placid. Liv, well… Liv knew that she was none of the above.
She stretched and laid her hands on the counter, relishing the cool granite against her palms. Angus continued with his task, methodically. It felt odd to Liv to have so much to do and yet be sitting around doing nothing, but there was nothing she could do until Noah deigned to re-engage with the small matter of their father’s will. She was stuck – because, for the first time in many, many years, she was dependent on the cooperation of her siblings. What the hell had her dad been thinking?
In place of being able to move forward, she went back to nibbling away at her suspicions about Noah. ‘Has he said anything to you about why Josie’s not here?’
‘You mean, man-to-man?’ Angus raised his eyebrows, mocking. ‘Since when did your brother confide in me?’
Liv acknowledged with a shrug the unlikeliness of such a heart-to-heart taking place. Noah and Angus weren’t close. They were too different – in personality and tastes and morals, and football fandom and, well, in everything really. Liv also recognised that her husband’s view of her brother had, very probably, been badly skewed by her own fraught relationship with him.
She picked an apple out of the fruit bowl and rolled it from hand to hand. She had no intention of eating it. Her stomach was already fighting with the sandwich she’d forced down at lunch. ‘You’d think Josie would want to be here – be involved in the decisions, I mean, even if it is just being in Noah’s ear, calming him down.’
Angus had moved on to the glassware. ‘Text her, if you’re that bothered.’
‘And say what?’
It was Angus’s turn to shrug. ‘No idea.’
Liv’s gaze flicked around the kitchen. The units, lighting and decoration were new, but it was the same layout as in her childhood. The fridge still opened awkwardly; it was positioned too close to the back door, and the floorboard that ran down the middle of the room still didn’t lie flush, thereby creating a tiny but very real trip-hazard. And much of the crockery was the same. Last night’s meal had been eaten off the same plates they’d had their teas off as kids; only the lumpen bowls were new. And there were fewer of those now – after Chloe’s little accident.
Her eyes snagged on a bundle of letters wedged in the rack on the countertop near the microwave. Death generated a lot of correspondence. Angus’s presence prevented her from standing up, fetching the stack and flicking through it. She had no intention of reading the contents of any of the letters addressed to Megan – obviously – but it would be helpful to know which of the banks and financial institutions were represented in the pile, just to double-check that the solicitor’s list was complete.
‘Liv?’
‘Sorry – what?’
‘Are you all right? I know how difficult all this is for you, on top of grieving for your dad. You can talk to me: offload some of it, if you want to. It is what a husband is for, you know – apart from the other thing.’ Angus grinned, amused by his own joke.
She smiled at him. ‘Thank you, but I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes, honestly,’ she lied.
Angus’s smile faded and he looked serious for a change. ‘You look tired,’ he persisted.
‘Gee, thanks,’ she countered.
‘You know what I mean. I worry about you. About the stress of it all.’ Did he? Liv wasn’t too sure. Angus was an optimist by nature. He truly believed that most things worked themselves out in the end, and that worrying was wasted energy. It was an attitude that Liv envied. He came and put his arms around her. ‘Okay. I’ll take you at your word.’ She was glad he couldn’t see her face. ‘But how about some fresh air before you get stuck into round three? Why don’t we walk down to the front? We can take Arthur. Maybe meet up with Noah and Freddie? Have a romp on the beach? Do something nice together for a change? It might help.’
Liv nodded. Perhaps it would.
Chapter 20
THE AMUSEMENT arcades never seemed to change, and that’s why Noah loved them. The mad syncopation of a thousand jewel-bright bulbs. The cloying sweetness of candyfloss cut with the mineral smell of coins. The carpet – the less said about the mash-up of colours and stains, the better. And the sounds! The mechanisation of fun: clicks, clunks, whirrs overlaid with cheap pop music and the regular evocation of joy and despair. They were good places to lose yourself for an hour or so.
Noah always closed his eyes for a few seconds when he first stepped inside. It was an involuntary reaction, a reboot back to his factory setting – child mode. It felt good.
Simple actions and reactions. Risk and reward. You anticipated winning. You won. Then you lost. It was so gloriously, addictively straightforward.
Freddie poked him in the thigh, bringing him back to the moment. ‘What first, Uncle No?’ His eyes were bright, reflecting the glare.
‘First, young man, we need to get you loaded up. This way.’ Like a sensei guiding his pupil, Noah led Freddie over to the big yellow change machines. ‘Now, how much have you got on you?’
Freddie put his hand in his pocket and produced two one-pound coins. Jesus, Liv was such a tight-ass!
Noah smiled. ‘That’s a good start.’ He took out his wallet and extracted a tenner. Freddie’s eyes widened. ‘So if I give you this, how much will you have to spend then?’
Freddie did the maths in his head, then grinned. ‘Twelve pounds.’
‘Correct. All you have to do is decide how many ten-pence, two-pence and pound coins you want. Take a pot – that’s for your change.’ Freddie grabbed one of the branded plastic tubs and Noah showed him how to feed the machine. Freddie’s delight as the cascade of ten-pence coins crashed down the shoot into his pot was infectious.
The next half-hour was filled with the delight of a hundred small decisions: which game to play, which horse to back, which motorbike to race on. They made three trips back to the change machine, replenishing their pots. Freddie was cautious at first, feeding his two and ten pences – and the occasional big spender pound – into the slots slowly, taking his time choosing which machine looked ready to pay out. But under Noah’s tutelage, he quickly lost his caution and began to play instinctively, happily. His favourite game turned out to be the classic coin drop. A good choice, in Noah’s estimation. The illusion of skill, the tantalising piles of ten pences just ready to fall into your clutches, with the judicious insertion of the right coin into the right slot at precisely the right time. The series of small wins, the coins cascading into the metal-lipped pocket with a satisfyingly loud, soul-pleasing clatter. The smell of arcade money on your fingertips. Noah was so enthralled himself that he didn’t realise Freddie’s luck had taken the inevitable turn for the worse and his pot was nearly empty, again.
‘These are my last two, Uncle No.’
‘You’d better make them count then, Buddy. There’s no more when they’re gone.’
Freddie held his penultimate coin to the slot and waited, his eyes focused on the slide, then he committed and pushed it in. The ten pence dropped, rolled into the space, wobbled, fell on its side – way too far to the left to make any difference. His mouth pinched into a frown. He took his last coin and lined it up with the slot, waited, breathing through his pursed lips. He waited for three moves before sending his final lonesome offering on its way. It dropped, rolled, fell and landed perfectly on the ledge, slap-bang in the middle. It had to be a win. The shelf moved forward, Freddie’s coin joined the others, pushed against the pile, edging at least a quid’s worth of winnings towards the lip, then withdrew. Noah and Freddie waited, but nothing dropped. Game over.
‘That’s not fair,’ Freddie wailed.
‘That’s how it goes, Bud.’
‘No!’ Freddie’s face flushed red. He raised his fist and thumped the glass, leaving a small smudge of rage.
‘Whoa, there, Freddie. You can’t go round lamping the machines. You’ll set the alarm off, and the police will come and take you away.’ Freddie’s expression immediately switched from anger to anxiety and, before Noah could take back his flippant comment, his nephew burst into tears. Not again? His track record with his nephews was beginning to follow a depressingly familiar pattern. Noah was mortified, but also slightly irritated by Freddie’s display of histrionics. Learning to lose gracefully, to be told ‘No’, to have things not always go your way were all essential life skills that Arthur, and Freddie, were going to have to master sooner or later.
A jolt of recognition that he sounded like his father softened Noah.
The bribe of an ice cream got Freddie out of the arcade, and the addition of sauce, a flake and sprinkles stopped the sniffling. Armed with their 99s, Noah led Freddie across the road. They climbed through the railings and settled, side-byside, on their backsides on the cold concrete of the sea front, their feet dangling above the damp sand. It was only when Noah passed Freddie his ice cream that he realised his nephew was still clutching his empty change pot. They made their exchange in silence. The ice cream and the stiff North Sea breeze seemed to revive Freddie’s spirits.
‘Are you going to tell Mummy I was naughty?’ he asked.
Noah jiggled Freddie’s arm, pushing his nose into his cone. ‘Course not. What do you take me for? A snitch?’
Unity restored, Freddie impressively licked the ice cream off the tip of his nose. He grinned when Noah tried to mimic him and failed. They had a happy few minutes comparing tongue lengths, and listening to the seagulls screaming above their heads, before Noah decided to do his bit for his eldest nephew’s moral education.
‘It’s normal to get a bit ticked off when you don’t win, Fredster – I get that.’ The nickname was designed to soften the lecture. He didn’t want to sound too much like his father. ‘But you’re going to lose sometimes. It happens to us all. And it’s good to get used to the feeling and to know how to handle it.’
Freddie squinted at him, serious. ‘Why?’
‘Well, because…’ Noah didn’t really have a good answer for that, so he went for an honest one, ‘people will like you more if you’re a good loser.’ Freddie carried on licking his ice cream, and Noah felt the pressure to reclaim some street-cred with his nephew. ‘Besides, you aren’t ever going walk out of an amusement arcade with more money than you went in with. It’s not the way it works.’
Freddie stopped slurping his ice cream and asked, ‘Then why try?’
The boy was just one long series of awkward questions.
Noah decided it was time they headed home.
Chapter 21
THERE WERE good reasons why no one in their right mind did any gardening in December. The ground was unyielding and every plant seemed to be armed with spines or thorns. But to Megan, crouching in the big flower bed, her fingers turning blue, it was still preferable to being inside the house. With each handful of dead foliage she ripped out, she felt both better and worse. She was aware that she was casting herself as the victim and that her prostration, alone in the bleak garden, with the wind off the North Sea scouring her skin, verged on attention-seeking behaviour. But as there was no one watching, it was a performance that was doing her very little good. The thought of them pecking over the details of Jonathan’s legacy, as they had picked their way mindlessly through the lunch she’d prepared, made her angry. She grabbed another handful of dead peony leaves and yanked. She should have cleared the garden in the autumn, but that had been impossible. Her every waking hour, or so it seemed, had been dedicated to caring for Jonathan by that point. As a result, the garden had run wild. Her desire to tame it now was illogical. The way things were going, it seemed highly unlikely that she would be around to see the fruits of her labours.
The sound of a car engine broke into her thoughts. A dark-red BMW turned off the main road into the drive. Megan leant back on her heels and watched as it drove down the slope and stopped in front of the house. What now? Or, more accurately, who?
Another adversary?
The driver’s side door opened and a pair of elegant female legs clad in smart black boots appeared. Then, like a character out of a TV ad for something upmarket and expensive, Jonathan’s ex-wife Eloise emerged from the car.
She stood and looked up at the house.
Megan knelt on the frozen earth and watched her. She wanted to laugh at the contrast between the two of them. Eloise – smart, stylish, feminine, ‘dressed for the occasion’, but an occasion that was far more glamorous than the one she was gatecrashing; and Megan – bundled up in Jonathan’s waterproofs, an asexual lump of green and brown, crouched in the mud like a character in a Bruegel painting.
Eloise didn’t move. The drizzle dusting her dark hair gave it a silvery shimmer.
What was she waiting for?
Eloise had walked out of The View for the last time five years ago. A departure that Megan had not been present to witness. At the time she’d been glad to be as far away from the drama as possible, but there was escaping the fact that it had been her actions that had driven Eloise out of The View: the place she’d no doubt been carried over the threshold by a young, virile, vibrant Jonathan; the house she’d returned to after the births of three children; and the home where she’d raised those children and watched them grow. The View was where Eloise had lived with Jonathan, where she’d loved him and where she’d discovered he had betrayed her. And it was the place, according to Jonathan, that Eloise had vehemently sworn she would never return to, ever again – not over Megan and Jonathan’s dead bodies.
Maybe it was the memory of that curse that was causing Eloise to hesitate now.
One out of two. She hadn’t quite got her wish.
After what felt like for ever, Eloise finally headed up the steps and, to Megan’s shock, walked straight through the front door into the house.
Chapter 22
ELOISE HAD had absolutely no intention of coming to Scarborough.
And yet here she was.
Back home.
To her relief, no one appeared to welcome her when she stepped inside the house, which gave her a few moments to acclimatise. She examined her emotions and found, to her surprise, that she felt totally calm. She would need to be, judging by the increasingly strained pitch of the communications she’d been having with all three of her children. Of course they’d expressed their turmoil very differently. Liv had been cool and contained, her messages informative, detailed – almost as if theirs was a professional rather than a personal relationship. Chloe had been far more straightforward – she was upset, she was lonely, she needed her mum. But it was Noah who was concerning Eloise the most. He’d been in touch far more frequently than usual and, when they’d spoken, he’d been solicitous and affectionate. Eloise couldn’t shake the feeling that he was play-acting, using hackneyed, sentimental phrases that were not his normal way of speaking, or feeling. And woven through his somewhat rambling soliloquies had been a clear message: There’s nothing for you to worry about. Leave it to me – and the girls. We’ll get everything sorted. In other words, stay out of it.
Which was precisely why she’d come.
She put her handbag on the side and glanced at herself in the mirror. She’d made an effort with her hair and make-up, and her clothes. Those efforts had paid off. Though she said it herself, she looked good – far better than the last time she’d passed this mirror.
Then she’d been in no mood for appraising herself; she’d been too side-swiped. Her exit from The View – with her bags packed and her passport in her hand – had been a grand gesture. To this day she was glad she’d topped off their weeks of exhausting soul-searching with a scene. There had been shouting on both sides. They’d let words and emotions erupt that had been smothered for years. The result had been awful and painful and loud, and very undignified. But surely that’s what the end of a long marriage, the end of a love affair, should be! Going out with a bang not a whimper proved you cared, that you still had feelings – despite everything – for the person who had betrayed you. Not good feelings, of course; not a love strong enough to repel the threat of a younger, prettier, no doubt more biddable, adoring life partner, but passion nonetheless.
In reality, what came after Eloise and Jonathan’s showdown had been far harder to deal with: the knowledge that their connection as a couple was broken, irrevocably, that they no longer shared a life. For while it was incontrovertibly true that it had been Jonathan who smashed their marriage, it was she who had stomped on the fragments, ensuring nothing survived. She’d been very thorough: refusing mediation, fighting him tooth and nail over the divorce settlement, extracting her pounds of flesh, chunk by bloody chunk, until there was only the stripped-down carcass left. The last act, expunging him from her life, had been the hardest of all. It had taken discipline and a rigid adherence to her pride, but she had managed it. To weaken and call a truce, maybe even to have found a way back to some sort of diluted, polluted friendship, would have been to let Megan win – and Eloise would not do that.
So effective had she been in erasing Jonathan from her heart that even when he’d fallen ill, she’d held firm. She’d heard about it all, of course, through the children. How hard the diagnosis had hit him, and how aggressive and unrelenting the progress of his condition was. And she’d felt for him, as you would for anyone who’d been dealt such a cruel blow, but she didn’t contact him directly. Didn’t send a letter or a card, or offer to visit. Nor did his diagnosis change how often she allowed herself to imagine how he was coping, how they were coping – well, not much.
