He’d had trouble warming to her after that. They chafed at each other like mismatched cogs, always missing the connection. She talked too much, and Henry, especially in the absence of Grace, was not a talker. He felt trampled by Esme’s enthusiasm. All it served to remind him was how his own small well of ebullience had long run dry. It had not helped when poor health collided with reduced circumstances, and Henry, thanks to a run of bad investments handled by his neighbor’s son-in-law, a trust fund manager with a well-disguised gambling problem, had had no alternative but to sell his Kent cottage and settle his debts.
Esme, he knew, had been distressed beyond measure at his obvious loss and embarrassment, insisting he move in with them as she was dying for want of a decent house-sitter. Hugo had been more fretful than she, and he had even overheard his daughter-in-law sternly reminding his son that this was what families were for and if they could look after Granny Mac, who was rude and insolent, they could certainly look after a gentleman like Henry.
But his pride was hurt, his dignity mulched, and he had not had it in him to accept her kindness. Through all they had suffered, he had held himself at bay and he did not like himself for it. But there was no going back. He was trapped in his own grief and remorse and could not claw his way to freedom. He did not know how to rebuild the bridge between himself and the next generation.
“I didn’t know that,” Pog said, eyes on the horizon, confused and awkward in such uncharted territory. “About Mum. And the beach.”
Henry said nothing. He wanted to reach out further, but it was simply beyond him. He looked across the pebbles at Rory, his bright red hair pinging off the blue sea behind him as he ran through the surf, white foamy chunks flying in the air in front of him.
And his heart, which nursed such pain and bitterness, swelled with love for the boy. Rory he would not disappoint.
Chapter 5
I just can’t stop thinking about her,” Esme was saying the following Saturday, as she took refuge in Granny Mac’s room waiting for Charlie to arrive. “She’s got three children all named after magazines! There’s dear sweet lovely little Cosmo, then there’s a boy called George Quentin—or GQ—who loves mathematics and is going to be in banking, and the eldest is this poor little creature called Marie Claire who is going to be a model once she loses her puppy fat and gets her ears pinned back and her teeth straightened. That poor little girl, Granny Mac. Imagine having Jemima for a mother.”
“Esme, will you stop banging on about Jemima Jones. Honestly. You’re doing my head in.”
“But, Granny Mac, it’s just that—”
“It’s just that nothing. Leave the poor woman alone.”
“The poor woman? Oh, I’d like to have her problems!”
“You can’t face your own problems, Esme, let alone anyone else’s.”
“Stop picking on me!”
“Stop asking for it!”
Esme was stunned. In the twenty-nine years since she and Granny Mac had moved in together, they had never argued. In fact, they rarely disagreed on anything. In Esme’s teens, they even had a running joke picked up from an interview with an aging rock wife and her daughter that they were “practically sisters.” Quite a ridiculous notion between one generation and the next, totally barmy between one generation and not the next one but the one after that.
Only once had they had an even slightly hurtful exchange, and that had been after thirteen-year-old Esme had been teased at school about not having parents, but rather a dowdily dressed eccentric old woman who picked her up in a motorcycle and sidecar and gave her peppermint chocolate sandwiches for lunch.
“You don’t like the sidecar?” Granny Mac had asked her weeping granddaughter, amazed. “Well, a bus ticket or two can fix that pretty quickly. Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” Esme sobbed. “Don’t argue with the teachers about how clever I am. I’m not that clever. Normal mothers tell their daughters to buck up their ideas, they don’t tell them to ignore the teachers because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Well, excuse me,” Granny Mac had said. “What terrible, terrible problems you have, Esme. I wonder would you be better off in the home for unwanted ginger children?”
Esme’s tears had dried and she had sniffed loud and long at this suggestion. It had hurt her to be mocked by her peers at school and had felt better to share that pain with her grandmother. But once it was expunged, she could see that having a guardian who drove a motorbike and put chocolate in sandwiches and thought you were brilliant was not really undesirable at all.
She was one out of the box, was Granny Mac.
“Well, if you’re going to be like that,” Esme sniffed, “I’ll leave you to your own devices. I don’t know why I’m sitting here in this dark smelly room talking to you in the first place. It’s ridiculous.”
“Oh, cheer up. It’s nothing that a lot of expensive therapy won’t fix,” her grandmother quipped. “Although I’ve always been, as you know, personally myself, a great believer in the healing properties of the prune.”
“That’s not funny about the therapy, Granny Mac,” Esme said, standing up and turning to leave.
“Aye, and I’m not joking about the prune juice either,” a voice chirped drily behind her.
Outside the room Esme bumped, literally, into Henry, who was returning from dropping Rory off for his regular playdate with Annabelle Ashton, the only child his own age in whom he showed the slightest bit of interest. Henry looked over Esme’s shoulder and she reddened as Rod’s insistence that tonight was the night squeaked out from beneath the door.
“You should do something in there, you know,” Henry said gruffly, starting up the stairs. “Open it up. Let some fresh air in.”
“Shut your CAKEHOLE!” Esme distinctly heard Granny Mac roar from behind her bedroom door, but the meaty growl of an expensive car chewing up the gravel outside seemed to drown her out.
Esme bustled outside in a swish of petticoats, her doubt temporarily in remission, to see Charlie sitting in the driver’s seat of a black Audi convertible gawking up at the House in the Clouds.
“Bloody hell, old girl,” he cried, impressed. “It’s positively phallic. Did Hugo choose it or did you?” He pushed his expensive sunglasses up on his head and flicked his eyes over her as she ran toward him.
“You look fantastic as always,” he said, jumping out of the car and squeezing her in a fierce hug, mock spitting her hair out of his mouth. “God, it’s good to see you, Esme.”
Esme pulled back. “You’re looking pretty bloody gorgeous yourself,” she said. His hair was long and blond-tipped and fell boyishly across his forehead, the neatly tanned skin around his eyes only just beginning to pucker and crinkle. He looked, it struck her, like a younger, taller, more handsome version of Hugh Grant. “Is that Prada?” she gaped. “Head-to-toe? My God, you are a loss to the heterosexual world, Charlie!”
“But darling,” Charlie said with a wicked grin, “I am a gift to the other side. Try thinking of it that way.”
“Still beating them off with a big stick, eh?” teased Esme. “Is there a big chunky gold medallion under that shirt? Shouldn’t you be undoing a button or six and getting your chest wig out?”
Charlie laughed and put one long arm around her shoulders so she could nestle into his armpit where they both knew she fit. “Now are you going to ask me in or up or whatever you do to get into this monstrous abode—or not? What on earth compelled you to move to this creepy little town, Es, it’s like something the brothers Grimm might have dreamed up, all twisty and windy and things not the right size.”
Esme laughed. What was it with men and Seabury? The great lumps seemed so threatened by anything slightly imaginative or out of the ordinary. She ignored Charlie’s question and gave him a grand tour of the property, starting with the dysfunctional pets and unconventional vegetable garden.
To her amazement, he seemed quite excited by the prospect of Pog’s shed.
“You
mean it’s just for him and no one else?” he asked, impressed. “Sounds smashing. And does he spend much time in there?”
“He’s usually in there all weekend,” Esme told him. “But he’s got some big project on the boil at the moment so he’s at work today.” She realized she had been so distracted by her own anxiousness that she had not asked Pog exactly what his project was. He’d been working a few Saturdays lately, she supposed.
The crunch of tires on gravel turned her attention to a van load of elderly people from a retirement home two towns to the south as it pulled up in the lane on the other side of the garden fence. A common enough occurrence, Esme carried on, pointing out where the world’s largest pumpkins grew as the retirees snapped happily with their cameras; but Charlie was agog, especially when Gaga came out of the windmill and started shouting and waving a tea towel.
“What the hell is going on?” he wanted to know.
Esme wrinkled her nose and grimaced at Gaga. “She’s lost her marbles, poor thing,” she said. “Thinks the twinkie-mobile is coming to get her so she throws a hissy fit every time she sees one.”
Gaga’s shrieking reached a frightening pitch.
“Shouldn’t you do something?” Charlie asked, wincing.
Esme shook her head. “I tried once and half of my face ended up underneath her fingernails. Jam-jar will come and get her soon. He’s deaf, so it takes a while.”
Sure enough, as they watched, an ancient figure in a ratty cardigan wearing Coke-bottle lenses appeared behind his angry shriveled wife and wrestled her inside.
The old folk in the van clicked their shutters madly and Esme steered Charlie toward the house. “Don’t laugh,” she said. “That will be me and Pog one day.”
She bypassed Granny Mac’s room with a swift, dismissive wave, took him in to say hello to Henry, who treated him with polite deference, then gave him lunch in her kitchen—sourdough and homemade minestrone—which he wolfed down while claiming to feel queasy at the view from the top of the House in the Clouds.
After that, she forced him to walk with her to the Ashtons to get Rory, who had done four paintings, all of them solid masses of very dark brown. He had not spoken a word, according to Peggy Ashton, since he arrived, but had eaten a hearty lunch and stood there placidly as bubbly, blond, blue-eyed Annabelle threw her arms around him and kissed him good-bye.
Charlie seemed at a loss as to what to say to the little boy as they strolled in the sunshine back down the lane to the house. They had not met before, Charlie claiming at news of Esme’s pregnancy to be allergic to small children and backing this up soon after by decamping to the other side of the world. He and Esme had met occasionally over the years for cocktails, usually vanilla daiquiris, during his visits home and had kept sporadically in touch by phone and by mail but he had never before seen her domestically in situ.
“So, is Annabelle your girlfriend, then?” Charlie finally asked, reaching down and patting Rory on the shoulder as they meandered toward home.
Rory squinted up at him. “No,” he said.
“Never too young to start though, eh?” Charlie joked.
“Start what?” Rory asked.
“Start having girlfriends, silly,” Charlie answered.
Rory looked at his mother.
“It’s small talk,” she explained. “It doesn’t really matter. You just sort of go along with it to be polite.”
“Thank you very much,” Charlie cried indignantly.
“Well, there is no point asking a four-year-old about his sex life, Charlie,” Esme hissed.
“If it doesn’t really matter, why would you want to talk about it?” Rory asked.
Esme laughed and Charlie turned to her. “It’s the body of a small boy,” he said, “but the words of an old Scottish woman.” He broke off, suddenly embarrassed. “I’m so sorry, Es—”
“So sorry nothing,” Esme said, breaking into a trot, despite the almost unfeasibly high heels, and grabbing Rory’s hand. “Come on, darling. I think I saw gaudily wrapped gifts in the back of Uncle Charlie’s sports car.”
The gaudily wrapped gifts turned out to be something of an icebreaker in the Rory-Charlie relationship department as three of them turned out to be guns. The House in the Clouds had up until then been a weapon-free environment—all the books said that was the right thing to do—but actually Esme was relieved to see that her son reacted the way any other small boy might react: by getting quite pink in the cheeks and instantly shooting everything including her, the sheep, the bees, Brown and even Henry, who feigned disgust but was secretly impressed at the authenticity of a World War I tommy gun.
The gift-giving did not stop there, either. There was a Paul Smith shirt for Pog, which Esme knew her husband would never wear even though it would look fantastic on him, and for her Charlie had bought a bottle of Must de Cartier parfum and the body lotion (of course, he remembered) she no longer bothered to buy herself. On top of that, he produced two bottles of Cristal and one of the fattest joints she could ever remember seeing—but then, it had been a while.
“Sorry, Es, but I’m only here for the night,” Charlie informed her as he cracked open the first bottle of champagne as soon as the presents were unwrapped. “The Old Boy’s made plans for me and I can’t really wriggle out of them. You know how it is.”
“Oh, Charlie,” Esme cried, disappointed. “I thought you were staying longer. There’s so much catching up to do. I don’t even know what you’re doing back here. I don’t know anything. Can’t you stay at least another night?”
Charlie put on his strict, older brotherly look and handed her a glass. “Come on, Es,” he cajoled. “Don’t make a fuss. Can’t be helped and all that. We’ve only got one night so we’d better make it a good one, eh?”
Esme felt schoolgirlishly put out. “Well, I can’t get started on the bubbly this early,” she said, shaking her head at the champagne and refusing to take it. “I have old people to feed and small children to bathe and put to bed.”
Charlie picked up her hand and curled it around the glass. “Don’t be so silly,” he said. “I’ll come back again. Next week if you want me to. I’m based in London now, you know, for the rest of my working days if I can manage it. Don’t make me feel guilty, Es, you know I’m no good at it.”
Esme thawed slightly. “I’m making you feel guilty?” she asked, impressed, taking a firmer grasp on the champagne flute. “You’re losing it, you big jessie!”
Charlie smiled his movie-star smile and charged his glass. “That’s more like it,” he said. “Now have a drink for God’s sake, a man could die of thirst out here in the country.”
Pog got home, just before eight, exhausted after spending the day in a series of very dull informal meetings with different members of the local council, which had, much to his own surprise, awarded him the contract to beautify Seabury’s wobbly main street. It had taken them nearly six months to decide he was the right man for the job, and now they wanted plans and costings within three weeks. By the time he trod home, Charlie and Esme had drunk both bottles of champagne and smoked half of the enormous joint.
They were lying on their backs on the floor in the sitting room, laughing hysterically. Pog quelled the whisper of loneliness that licked at him: He loved to see Esme laugh, after all. He loved to see her happy. He wished it was he who had her rolling on the floor in hysterics but if it was Charlie or nothing, he’d take Charlie.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked after shaking hands with the man and accepting, slightly perplexed, the Paul Smith shirt with which he had just been presented, noticing, as he put it on the sideboard, that it was a size too small as well as being purple, the only color in the world he truly detested.
“I think he went to the pub,” said Esme, sitting up and wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes. “There was a small amount of irritation at having a noisy guest in the house,” she continued as Charlie started to laugh again, “followed by a flow of condescension with a smattering of contempt foreca
st for tomorrow.” Charlie was howling. Pog smiled and Esme felt instantly sober and guilty and mean. It wasn’t Pog’s fault Henry was cranky. And her husband looked tired and awkward. It was not her intention to exclude him. It was never her intention to exclude him.
“Rory’s in bed asleep,” she said, suddenly more sensible. “I think he has a new best friend.”
She looked at Charlie, who smiled winningly up at Pog from his position on the floor.
“Well, I think I’ll join him,” Pog said. “Dad, at the pub, I mean. Help him get home. Let you two catch up. Does that sound all right, darling?” He smiled at her again, and Esme felt almost overwhelmed by an urge to fold herself into his arms and say all the things she knew he needed to hear from her.
“Charlie’s only here for the night,” she blurted out instead. “Just the one.”
Charlie started laughing hilariously again at this, clutching his stomach as he rolled around on the floor.
“He has to be admitted to a psychiatric ward tomorrow morning for immediate testing,” Esme continued. “As you can see he’s not quite right in the head.”
“As long as it’s not catching,” Pog said pleasantly, noticing that Charlie’s untucked shirt as he rotated on the rug had ridden up to reveal a tanned rock-hard belly rippling with muscle. “I’ll see you later,” he said, feeling the porkpie and jelly doughnut he had had for afternoon tea swill accusingly around in his own rather more spongy stomach. “Have fun.”
As his footsteps on the stairs faded away and the front door clicked distantly shut, Charlie sat up and attempted to compose himself. “What appalling behavior,” he said, drying his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. “No wonder the poor chap thinks I am a complete imbecile.”
“Don’t be silly,” Esme said, standing up unsteadily and holding out her hand to her friend. “That’s not why he thinks you’re a complete imbecile.” Charlie groaned and let her help him to his feet.
“Truly? He thinks that?” he asked.