The legacy, p.9
The Legacy, page 9
‘What?’ Noah’s head was banging. Dehydration and Liv’s voice were making it worse.
‘I’m suggesting we work out what to give them on a pro-rata basis.’
‘Fuck me, Sis. I thought you were a doctor, not a sodding accountant.’ She really was something when she got going.
Chloe winced. ‘Noah. Shush. Hear her out.’
Liv ploughed on. ‘I think it might be a fair way of deciding things, and it has the benefit of taking the emotion out of it. Megan is entitled to something, there’s no point arguing about that – we just have to work out what.’ She pulled a piece of paper towards her. ‘Mum and Dad were together how long?’
Noah shrugged, genuinely at a loss. It was Chloe who came to their rescue. ‘They were married in the summer of 1979.’
‘Do we know when they actually first got together?’ Liv asked.
Once again Chloe proved to be the reliable family archivist. ‘1977. Mum said they met when she was in her second year at uni, so we could check precisely, but they must have been together for the best part of forty years.’
On her piece of paper Liv wrote: Mum x 40 yrs and Megan x 5 yrs. ‘So if we used the time they each spent with Dad as the basis of our calculation, that would mean Megan would get roughly one-eighth of whatever we give to Mum, out of whatever lump sum we decide to set aside for them.’
Noah, whose head felt like it might crack in half, said, ‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’
Liv bristled. ‘I know it seems a bit simplistic, but we weren’t getting anywhere earlier; we were just going round in circles, trying to second-guess what proportion of the estate Dad intended to go to Megan and Mum.’
‘Oh, and this is your big idea?’
‘Noah. Don’t.’ Liv’s voice went up a notch.
‘Don’t… don’t me! Are you seriously equating Mum and Megan? A marriage and a midlife crisis.’
‘I’m only trying to come up with a workable solution.’
‘Okay.’ He stood up, suddenly agitated. ‘Let’s give your solution a whirl. In fact if we’re going do it, we might as well go the whole hog.’ He grabbed the piece of a paper and the pen and scored through the number five, hard. ‘Best start by being accurate. We “found out” about Megan the Christmas of 2014, but that’s not when it started. He’d been shagging her for more than a year by then, so, if you want to be wholly accurate, we owe Megan another few per cent.’
Chloe cleared her throat as if she was about to say something, but then seemed to think better of it.
Noah ignored her. ‘And, dear Sis, you’ve missed us off your list. If this is going to come down to the numbers, then you need to factor us into your equations.’ He bent over the piece of paper and scribbled their names down, then added a number beside each. ‘That gives Liv – thirty-seven; me – thirty-four; and I’m sorry, Chloe, that puts you on twenty-six, though given that your birthday is next month, Liv might be kind and let you have twenty-seven.’ He shoved the paper back across the table at Liv. ‘There! You can crunch the numbers on that for us, and we’ll see where we end up. It’s interesting to note that this impartial system of yours means you come out on top. Who knew?’ He gave a cartoon shrug.
Chloe finally spoke up, but so quietly that neither Liv nor Noah heard her.
‘What?’ Noah snapped.
She had to repeat herself. ‘How do you know how long he’d been seeing Megan for? You just said Dad had been sleeping with Megan for more than a year before we found out. How do you know?’
Liv joined in. ‘Yes, Noah, how the hell do you know that?’
Noah cursed himself for his slip. Now it would become a whole other thing. God, families were sometimes more trouble than they were worth. There was a clatter in the hall. Then another. The noise scraped across his already frayed nerves. His sisters were both staring at him. He was left with no choice. ‘Dad told me.’
‘When?’ Liv and Chloe chimed together.
‘I don’t remember exactly. One evening.’
‘Recently?’
His attempt at a nonchalant shrug didn’t quite work. ‘Does it matter when he told me?’
They both stared at him. Liv answered. ‘Yes, it does. You’re saying that you’ve known details about his affair for ages, and yet you never said anything to either of us.’
‘I didn’t think it was something Dad wanted broadcasting.’
‘So why did he tell you?’
Noah took offence at that. ‘Perhaps because he wanted to talk to somebody he knew would listen, not judge him.’ This comment was met with a hostile silence.
‘Does Mum know he spoke to you?’ Chloe asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘So… no!’
‘Correct, Chloe! I did not have a heart-to-heart with our mother about our father’s illicit affair with a woman half his age.’
‘What did Dad actually say?’ Liv wanted the details. She obviously couldn’t bear the thought of Noah knowing more than her.
Noah rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Not much.’
‘Go on.’
‘Look, we were having a drink together one night, around the time things were really rocky with Mum. She was out, so it was just the two of us in an empty house, with a bottle of Scotch. He was in a bit of a state. Not like his usual self at all. We drank… a lot. We talked.’
‘And?’
‘And he told me what had been going on.’ Noah regretted getting into this, but it was too late now. Liv and Chloe both looked appalled.
‘So, go on. What did he say?’ Liv pushed.
Noah felt no desire to share the details of his father’s single-malt-laced, self-pitying monologue with his sisters – not least because he didn’t want them to feel the same disappointment he had, at the realisation that their dad was no different from the next guy. Nor did Noah want to dwell too much on the sympathetic ear that Jonathan had automatically assumed would be forthcoming, when he confessed to his relationship with Megan. In choosing to unburden himself to Noah, his father had seemed to be including him in a club that Noah had no desire to be identified as a member of. So instead what he said was, ‘He obviously felt guilty. Wanted to explain his actions.’
‘That was it? He felt guilty?’ Liv was like a woodpecker stabbing away at a tree.
‘More or less.’ Their silence forced him to elaborate. ‘He talked about how he’d really fallen for Megan. How it had surprised him that he was still capable of falling in love, at his age.’
‘He never talked about any of this to me.’ Chloe sounded aggrieved. There it was again, their desperate jockeying to be the chosen one. It was pathetic really.
‘And what did you say in response?’ Liv pecked on and on – it was amazing that her beak didn’t snap clean off.
Noah felt his headache pulse. ‘I don’t really remember.’ Liv snorted. ‘I didn’t excuse him, if that’s what you’re implying. I was shocked and mad with him. But at the end of the day, it was his life.’ He wanted to get off the topic of his father’s infidelity and the sticky subject of secrets. ‘What can I say? It was one booze-soaked conversation, a long time ago. I didn’t think there was any point mentioning it.’
The noise in the hallway was back, adding yet another layer of irritation to what was turning into a fairly exasperating morning.
‘But if you’d told us, we might have been able to do something!’ Liv just wouldn’t accept that shit happened. You couldn’t always fix things.
‘So their divorce is my fault now, is it?’ He heard the anger in his voice.
‘I’m not saying that,’ she snapped back.
‘It sounds to me like you are.’ They were like kids again, bickering and scoring points. ‘I didn’t think it was my place to go wading into our parents’ marriage, pointing fingers and blaming Dad for fucking it all up. Besides, if you want someone to blame, how about Megan? If she’d walked away at the first sign of something between her and Dad, then he would very probably have stuck with Mum and we could have stayed one big happy family!’
There was a beat while they all took a moment to contemplate how far away from a big happy family they were at that precise moment.
Liv held back for all of two seconds before opening her mouth again. ‘Is this why you’re so set against Megan getting a decent share? You want to punish her for seducing Dad?’
Noah sighed. He felt exhausted and it was only 11.15 a.m. ‘Do I need a rational, reasoned argument for why I don’t feel predisposed to give away my inheritance to the woman who wrecked our parents’ marriage?’
‘No.’ Liv and Chloe together, this time.
‘Good!’ Finally something they agreed on.
‘So…’ Noah rubbed his forehead, trying to scrub away his headache, ‘given that we now have Liv’s patented algorithm to settle this, why don’t we let her do her stuff with the maths? You give us a shout when you’ve got the final score on the doors worked out, and we can reconvene and start arguing again.’
Chloe’s plaintive ‘We’re not arguing’ went unheard, or at least uncommented on.
Noah stood up. He simply couldn’t stand being in the room any longer. ‘If we’ve nothing else to discuss, I’m off for a shower and something to eat.’ He walked over to the door.
He was behaving like a bit of tosser and he knew it, but he felt no inclination to stop. He blamed his banging head and the not sleeping; and the twenty unanswered calls to Josie; and bloody Liv with her stupid idea about divvying up the estate according to time served! And that damn noise. He couldn’t believe Liv and Chloe hadn’t noticed it. An erratic clatter followed by quick thudding footsteps, then another clatter, then another. It sounded like something being dropped or thrown, repeatedly. It was irritating, and very distracting.
He stood up, walked over to the door. And then, for old times’ sake, Noah found himself unable to resist having the last word. ‘Cheer up, Liv, at this rate we’ll be through by lunchtime.’ He yanked open the door and stepped out into the hallway – where the mystery of the noise was finally solved.
Arthur was posed, halfway up the stairs, his arm raised, mid-throw. Noah tried to moderate his tone to be child-friendly. It wasn’t the little guy’s fault that his mother was an uptight, anal control-freak. You can’t pick your family.
‘What are you up to, Buddy?’
‘Just playing?’ Arthur lowered his arm and held his hand behind his back. He looked guilty.
‘Playing what?’
‘Flying races… like in the dragon book.’
‘Races, eh?’
Arthur nodded, seriously. ‘I’m seeing which one the flies the best.’
It was only then that Noah noticed the scatter of chess pieces across the hallway floor. The frustration of the past twenty-four hours boiled over. ‘Whatever you’ve got in your hand, I want you to give it to me!’ Arthur blinked in shock at Noah’s raised voice. ‘Now!’
Arthur held out his fist and uncurled his fingers. And there, resting on his sweaty, chubby palm, was the white queen. Noah lunged up the stairs and snatched it from him. Then returned to the hall and started collecting up the other pieces, checking each one for damage as he did so.
‘These aren’t toys, Arthur. Anyway, you shouldn’t be throwing things around, especially things that do not belong to you! You could have broken them.’ Noah was too focused on his task to see Arthur’s lip wobble, and the appearance of an audience for their altercation.
Angus had emerged from the kitchen, mug of coffee in his huge paw of a hand. ‘What’s going on?’ Mild-mannered Angus. A man so laid-back that the desire to smack him in the face was occasionally overwhelming.
Liv appeared in the dining-room doorway. This was turning into an unfunny farce.
On seeing his mother, Arthur decided that he was, on reflection, really upset and promptly burst into tears.
His sobbing only served to wind Noah up further. ‘He was chucking these around the hall. Where did you get them from?’ He knew he was barking at his nephew and he should stop, but he couldn’t. He was mad; why not direct some of that anger at a child, especially one who had no respect for other people’s property?
Arthur, who was by now wailing as if mortally injured, ran over to his mother and buried his face in her stomach. Liv immediately went into full-blown Mommy Bear mode. ‘Noah! He didn’t mean any harm. You need to calm down.’
Noah got up from the floor, his hand full of chess pieces, not knowing who to shout at next.
Angus instinctively, and gallantly, padded across the hall and slid in front of his wife and child. Deflect-and-distract tactics. ‘It’s my fault, Noah. We found them in the chest upstairs. We were playing with them in bed this morning. Arthur liked the shapes. He must have gone upstairs and taken a handful when we got back from the park. Sorry, mate. I didn’t realise they had any sentimental value.’
God, he really did need a punch. That would wipe the placatory easy-going smile off his stupid face. Sentimental! How dare he? It was such a reductive word, so at odds with the emotions careering around Noah’s body. They were all staring at him – none of them kindly. ‘Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let the boys have every sodding thing they ask for. It wouldn’t hurt them to hear “No” every now and again.’ Ignoring his crying nephew, Noah swept – as imperiously as he could manage, for someone who had just bawled out a three-year-old – up the stairs, leaving them free to talk about him behind his back.
The biscuit tin containing the other chess pieces was, as Angus had said, lying open on the floor of his old bedroom. Noah retrieved it, and the board. He took everything into his room and closed the door. He wiped the board with his sleeve and put it on the chest of drawers, then carefully laid out the pieces, polishing each one on the hem of his jumper before putting them in place. Black first, then white, as family tradition dictated. He was relieved to discover that none of the pieces had been lost.
It had taken him until he was seventeen to beat his dad. That’s how much of a purist his father had been. There was no throwing a game to build his son’s confidence, no matter how often their early games ended in strops and lengthy sulks. Yet another life lesson meted out in accordance with Jonathan’s principle that children were not a protected species. As he was very fond of saying, repeatedly, chess was a game of skill and strategy – to get good at it took time and patience; to win, you had to be better than your opponent. Hence Jonathan had merely ignored his son’s angst and his wife’s pleas for a little humility, and had been merciless. At the time Noah had seethed with teenage frustration. They’d go months between games, with Noah refusing to give his dad the satisfaction of trouncing him, again, but eventually he’d always come back, desperate to try and best his dad. He’d secretly spent hours watching online tutorials, and even – though it damaged his street-cred no end – sought opponents at school, and later at sixth-form college, in order to improve his game. Indeed it was probably down to Mr Watson, his history teacher, who was always happy to play a few moves over lunchtime, that Noah eventually beat his dad. The realisation he’d done him, and that Jonathan would have to forfeit the game, was one of the best moments of Noah’s life. The fact that his dad hadn’t been gracious in defeat – he’d actually been really pissed off about it – had only served to make the victory even sweeter.
Noah stood back and looked at the chess set, taking pleasure in the memory. His sisters wanted their recollections of their father to be rose-tinted. Noah was glad his came to him in black and white. It was far more honest. Even aside from the infidelity, Noah knew his dad had been flawed. He’d competed at everything. Aggressively. He’d been a royal pain in the arse a lot of the time. He was unforgiving and opinionated. Argumentative. Often impatient. A tough-love sort of dad.
And Noah missed him more than he wanted to admit.
Chapter 19
LUNCH WAS eaten in relays in the kitchen, no one feeling inclined to accommodate anyone else’s tastes or timings. Having laid everything out ready for them, Megan had disappeared, again. She was like a shoemaker’s elf, silently and, Liv suspected, grudgingly catering for their needs. After they’d eaten, they drifted off into separate rooms. Liv and Angus remained in the kitchen with the washing-up. They couldn’t leave it all to Megan. As they cleared away the plates, Liv became aware of how quiet the house was. ‘Where are the boys?’
‘Noah offered to take them out to run off some energy. His way of saying “sorry”, I guess. Freddie was delighted.’
‘And Arthur?’
‘Oh, you’d have been proud of him. Still holding a grudge. He’s switched allegiance to Chloe. She offered him a game of Snakes and Ladders. I’m not sure he even knows it’s a board game, so I suspect that odd hissing noise you can hear is him pretending to be a python.’
‘Where’s Noah taken Freddie?’ Liv liked to know where her children were at all times.
‘Down to the sea front. Noah said Freddie could spend his pocket money in the arcades.’
‘Where was I when all this was agreed?’
Angus picked another mug out of the dishwasher. ‘You were on the phone.’
Was there a touch of reproach in his comment? Liv suspected there was. She’d been calling work – following up on the staff rota for the coming week. Life didn’t grind to a halt just because they were caught up in some weird Gordian knot of her father’s making. Her irritation with Angus, with Noah, with the whole stressful situation came out in her voice. ‘Oh, great. Life lessons with Uncle Noah, just what Freddie needs.’
Angus stopped drying the mug in his hands and looked at her, his face expressive, and not of agreement.
Liv rowed back on the sarcasm. ‘Sorry.’ She was. It wasn’t Angus’s fault that she had a hundred and fifty things winging around inside her head, instead of the usual one hundred and one. ‘Too sour, even for me?’
The tea towel squeaked in the mug again. ‘A tad. And maybe it’s just what Freddie needs.’
Suitably chastised, Liv pulled out a stool, conceded Angus’s point, but kept the focus of the conversation on her brother. ‘Don’t you think Noah’s behaviour is a bit erratic at the moment? One minute it’s like he’s competing for some Best Uncle award – all the roughhousing and reading them bedtime stories – and the next he’s too hungover to be bothered, or he’s yelling at the kids like a total dick. He’s wired.’
