My Husband's Lies Page 23

  Anna squirms and giggles. ‘But you’re already married, Uncle Will.’

  ‘Oh, darn, so I am.’ He looks over his shoulder. ‘Do you think your mum might allow you half a glass?’

  ‘Buck’s Fizz,’ Jen calls from the other side of the room. ‘Three quarters orange juice please.’

  Will winks at the girls. ‘I think that means half and half. How’s the guitar practising going, Holly Golightly? I always fancied being in a band. Even bought myself a mega expensive electric guitar. Never really learned how to play it, but you should see my Liam Gallagher strut and stare.’

  ‘Who’s Liam Gallagher?’ Anna asks. ‘Is he Liam from One D’s dad?’ and the girls giggle at Will’s mock-aghast face.

  Jen is looking away, but Dan knows that she’s listening.

  ‘Thanks for bringing the champers,’ he says to Nick. ‘It’s going to my head already. I haven’t drunk a drop of alcohol for two weeks. Funny how your body forgets how nice it tastes.’

  Nick doesn’t appear to hear. His head is turned to Lisa, watching Will top up her glass. His face clears when he looks back. ‘Oh, no problem.’ He lowers his voice. ‘We need to wet the baby’s head properly soon. Get really, and I mean really, pissed.’

  ‘That bad?’ Dan asks, his mind fleetingly touching on the last time he was pissed.

  Nick looks at his glass. ‘No, not really. Just adjusting, you know?’ He drops his voice again. ‘Maybe you did the right thing, you and Geri, you know, deciding just to live together.’

  Dan nods, though it wasn’t a decision as such; they moved in together, but he never proposed. There didn’t seem to be a reason to; he’d never felt that need to own or possess Geri, which he supposed you needed to take that step further. Besides, they rubbed along smoothly, they rarely argued, they were happy, still are.

  Nick lifts his head as though to say more, but changes the subject as Jen joins them. ‘Bloody hell, you’ve lost weight, Jen,’ he comments. Then flushes slightly. ‘But you look great!’

  Jen pulls a wry smile. ‘Hmm, delicately put, Nick. Now I’m not sure whether to be pleased or offended.’ Her eyes flash towards Will and the girls before reverting to Nick. ‘Turns out you lose weight when you stop eating cakes. Who’d have thought?’

  Will joins them with a grin. He does the motion of catching a low cricket ball with his hands. ‘So, was it a good catch with your safe hands, Dan?’ He lifts his eyebrows. ‘The, er, little sailor boy?’

  Dan shakes his head, smiling. ‘He decided not to come out that way,’ he replies. ‘He was breach, so they ended up doing an emergency section. I was bloody petrified, I can tell you.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Geri says, approaching. ‘Dan was fantastic. He took control with his I mean it voice. Demanded that the consultant on call come in to do the surgery himself even though it was the dead of night.’

  ‘Not the old He-Man Maloney—’

  ‘Don’t get me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,’ Will and Nick say in unison.

  Geri looks surprised. ‘Does Dan get angry?’ she asks, then turns to the sound of the doorbell.

  ‘Not often, but when he does—’

  ‘Boom!’

  Jen tilts her head and looks at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Pent-up emotion, I reckon.’ She softly taps his temple. ‘What goes on in there, I do wonder.’

  The A Team continue their banter about Nick and a road- rage incident with a man ‘the size of a gorilla’, but Dan is listening to a conversation from the hallway. It’s a voice he recognises.

  ‘Congratulations, Geri. I expect you’re going to kill me for this,’ the voice says. ‘But I saw it in a toy shop window in London and I couldn’t resist. I always wanted one this big when I was a kid.’

  ‘Seb!’ Will turns and calls. ‘Bloody hell! Trust you to bring something flash.’

  ‘You can tell he’s single with bags of space in his home,’ Jen says wryly. ‘But it is really cute, I have to say. Anna will be jealous. She still reads the Paddington books.’

  Stepping towards Dan, Seb Taylor holds out his right hand. His hair has grown a little longer, his face is clean-shaved, the tattoos all gone. ‘Congratulations, Dan,’ he says with a polite smile. ‘Hope you don’t mind me turning up. Jen gave me a bell and said there’d be food.’ He holds out a rectangular parcel held together with string. ‘Here’s something from Mum. She’s been working on it for weeks. And she sends you her love.’

  Dan takes his warm hand, thinks about the razor and Seb’s broken face. ‘Course not. Good to see you. That’s really kind of Yvette.’ He nods to Geri who’s holding an enormous soft toy. ‘And thanks for the teddy bear. At least I think so!’

  As the minutes fall by, Dan walks from person to person and chats, aware of Seb’s presence like ice on hot skin, talking to Lisa and Penny, laughing with Nick and Will, cradling his son.

  ‘Should we be eating by now, Dan?’ Jen asks at some point. ‘I’ve taken off the cling film and foil. Everything’s ready …’

  Will tops up the adults’ champagne glasses and they stand back in the burgundy room to allow Jen’s daughters to help themselves to food first, then they tuck in to meat and cheese, to sausages and savoury pastries from blue paper plates.

  ‘This is fun. It feels like a baptism celebration,’ he hears Lisa say.

  ‘Do you know, I’d really like that,’ Geri replies.

  ‘Yes, do it! I flipping love a party. Though can you? With not being married?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Geri says. ‘A blessing, maybe? Some churches aren’t all that strict. Do you know, I’m going to look into it.’

  ‘Nappy change needed!’ someone calls. ‘Where’s the Daddy?’

  Dan carries Teddy upstairs to the nursery, the smell of fresh paint reminding him of a shameful memory he tries hard to forget. He feels sluggish and tired from too much champagne and too little sleep. Surprised and unsettled at Geri’s suggestion of a baptism too. She’s never said anything to him.

  ‘Need any help?’

  ‘No, everything’s in hand, thanks,’ he replies without turning from his task.

  ‘It wasn’t what you thought, Dan. Come and see me at the apartment and I’ll explain.’

  ‘Look, it’s fine. Everything’s fine. It’s all forgotten.’ He looks up and meets Seb’s intense stare briefly before looking away. ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he? My son? But he takes up all our time, so—’

  ‘At work, then. In your lunch hour.’

  ‘I’m only back in tomorrow after two weeks off. Salim is hopeless. I’ll be mad busy catching up.’

  ‘OK, fair enough.’

  Dan changes Teddy from the sailor outfit to a stripy blue sleepsuit knowing Seb is still there. He hears him clear his throat.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he repeats. ‘But if you change your mind, anytime, it would be great to see you.’

  The door finally clicks to and Dan breathes, letting out a gulp of air he didn’t know he was holding.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Nick

  Nick is eating his lunch early, just because he can. It’s a bowl of spicy prawn and feta salad, bought from the sandwich shop below his office. The double-glazed window blocks out the sound of busy traffic below, but bright sunshine creeps through the slatted blinds, highlighting a few grey streaks in his hair.

  His mobile trills from the desk drawer. He considers for a moment not answering, then pulls it out with a sigh and looks at the screen. To his surprise the call isn’t from Lisa.

  ‘Hello love, it’s Mum. We’re at the hospital. It’s Dad’s hip. He fell and, well, I’ll let you know the details when I see you, but Dad needs you to go to the house—’

  He pulls away from his game of laptop Sudoku and frowns. ‘What? You’re at the hospital. How did you get there?’

  ‘I was going to drive, but Dad was in a lot of pain, so I called an ambulance—’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ He almost says, ‘or Patrick’, but his mental
image of Patrick’s distress the other week puts paid to that.

  ‘Well, I knew you’d be at work, love. I didn’t want to worry you …’

  Nick closes his eyes, quelling the urgent need to shout. He’s bloody thirty-four, not thirteen. He’s a grown man, perfectly capable of dealing with fucking worry.

  ‘So why are you calling me now?’ he asks, visualising his mother’s undoubted panic as she searched for the keys to the front door, then the embarrassment of having to try each key to see which one fitted in the lock as the ambulance people waited through the obscured glass.

  ‘Dad says we need the paperwork for his private health policy. I don’t really understand it, but he needs to see if he’s covered for his hip. Something about pre-existing conditions, he said.’

  ‘OK,’ Nick says as he reaches for his jacket. ‘I’m on my way. Now start from the beginning as I walk. When exactly did Dad fall?’

  As he waits for the lift, his mum explains that his dad didn’t fall as such, but when he got out of bed this morning he collapsed on the carpet, screaming out in pain. She thought it was the usual, Harry griping over nothing, so she said that he’d have to wait until she was dressed and she’d take him to the doctor’s in the car. Naturally she didn’t want to make a fuss by calling an ambulance. But when she got back from her shower Harry’s face was white with the pain; he’d tried to move and said something had popped. Of course she phoned 999 then. An ambulance car came within minutes with a lovely paramedic who said it was Harry’s hip and that the proper ambulance would be just a few more minutes. He was put on a stretcher later, Nick should’ve heard the cursing! Still, he’s settled now. They’ve given him pain relief and he’s back to telling her that he knew all along something was wrong, so he’s perfectly well in his head.

  Nick cuts the monologue short, feeling the rage hot in his chest as he flags down a black cab outside the office building. He’s still having nightmares, waking from them in the early hours with a thrust of relief, but unable to sleep again. The dreams are always violent and he lies there feeling guilty for the retribution he extracts. Against his mother, and now Patrick. He doesn’t need a psychologist to tell him he’s angry. He’s perfectly aware of that.

  He and Lisa argued on Sunday night. Not just the usual sniping or pointed comments, but full-blown shouting. They’d come back from wetting the baby’s head at Dan’s house and admittedly he was moody. He’d watched her drink the champagne steadily all through the afternoon and into the early evening, but of course couldn’t say anything in front of the other guests.

  ‘Why are you so grumpy?’ she asked when they got home, but in a playful way. ‘I know what I can do to cheer you up.’

  Perhaps at another time he would have welcomed her inebriated advances, but at the party Jen had asked how things had gone with Patrick, whether he’d found out anything more about Patrick’s twin and how was he feeling about it. He’d managed to shelve the whole question of Susan after the awful embarrassment of the road trip, but Jen’s questions, and the loving way she’d asked them, brought it all back.

  So he stopped Lisa at the zip of his flies and pulled away. ‘I was thinking about Patrick and what he meant—’ he managed before Lisa verbally lashed out. It was obvious to everyone except Nick and his stupid bloody parents that Patrick was ‘on the spectrum’, she yelled. ‘What spectrum?’ Nick asked, genuinely bewildered. ‘The autistic spectrum,’ she replied, rolling her eyes. She went on to say in a patronising voice that everyone knew about autism these days. Asperger’s Syndrome? Didn’t he read any books or the newspapers? There was a novel and even a flipping play about it. If he didn’t have his face stuck to a computer all day, or occasionally just listened, he’d know more about the world.

  Lisa stomped to the kitchen and snapped open a bottle of white wine then. Nick asked why she was drinking like a bloody fish when she wanted to get pregnant. Fat chance, she replied, with Nick’s current libido, and anyway, why would she want a Quinn child, they were all crackers. She was sick of his weird family, sick of his obsession with the whole sister thing and sick of him.

  He’d never felt so enraged. ‘Well thanks very much for your support, Lisa,’ he said sarcastically through gritted teeth. ‘A good job I have Jen Kenning to talk to.’ That’s when Lisa threw the wine glass.

  ‘Twelve pounds forty, please.’

  The taxi driver’s voice brings him back to his parents’ house. It looks like a scalene triangle; he’s never noticed that before. He takes out his wallet, then looks up. The driver is squinting at him through the car mirror. ‘Are you all right, mate? You’ve some blood …’ He demonstrates on his chin and Nick feels his own. The small cut from the wine glass bled like buggery on Sunday, but had scabbed since then. He must’ve been picking at it absently.

  He unlatches the side gate and strides across the grey flags to the back door. Lifting up the outdoor mat, he scoops up the key, as ever wondering about the way his parents’ minds work; two locks and a chain on the front door, a free-for-all at the rear.

  His throat clogged with heat from the burning radiators and the taste of prawns, he bolts up the stairs two by two, hoping his father isn’t in too much pain. His artificial hip had snapped out of its socket, his mum had said, ‘no wonder it hurt’. He’d been given morphine, so was ‘happy as Larry’ for now while the staff worked out if he was covered for private treatment. But still, Nick wants to hurry; the memory of each time he chivvied or ignored his father’s complaints about ‘this damned hip’ feels like a small dig in his gut.

  Searching for a few moments in the bedroom, he finds the bureau key in his dad’s coin pot, darts back down the stairs, settles himself on the leather chair in the study, then inserts the tiny piece of metal to lower the desk lid.

  The small drawers of the wooden bureau seem to be organised. Top left, insurance. Bingo first time! He spends a few minutes going through the documents. The insurance is current, but he can’t discern from the schedule whether it’ll cover his dad’s hip. Still, it’s Harry who’s the expert; he’ll order a taxi to the hospital.

  Looking down at the green leather chair, he holds onto its padded arms and spins on its wheels for a few moments. When his mum and dad were out, Patrick used to indulge him playing Daleks, pushing him around the carpeted loop between the hall and the lounge. He smiles at the fond memory, remembering the squeal of pleasure he always made during the final fast scoot across the kitchen lino.

  Shaking the recollection away, he checks the time, lifts the desk to close the bureau, then pauses. The thought of a death certificate pops into his head, Susan’s death certificate. Everything is so organised, it’s sure to be there.

  He finds the certificates in the large bottom drawer, neatly folded in an old cigar box. The smell of tobacco hits his nose as he opens it. Harry gave them up years ago, before he was born, but the aroma reminds him of Uncle Derek, who still smokes them occasionally when ‘Iris isn’t looking’.

  His hands tremble as he picks through the parchments. There’s his mum and dad’s wedding certificate and a bundle marked ‘births’, but no death certificate. He feels a jolt of disappointment, goes to put the bundle back, then glances at his watch again. Of course he knows when Susan was born, same date as Patrick, but it would still be interesting to see her name written down. Perhaps it would show who was born first.

  He unfolds the documents one by one. They start with his paternal grandma and go down in order through his parents to Patrick and Susan, their certificates folded together. There’s a wave of sadness as he unfolds the thick paper and reads. Susan Quinn, Patrick’s twin, born eight minutes before Patrick, a long fifteen years before him.

  The thought of Patrick’s school photograph hits him; the way he leant to one side. He hadn’t really focused on the twin aspect before, the special bond from the womb and forever after. How desperate must Patrick have been to lose her. He’d felt responsible somehow, that was clear from his spluttered words in the pub.

&
nbsp; Feeling ashamed, Nick shakes his head. Bad, very bad; it was wrong to have hoodwinked his brother, to make him talk about something he clearly found distressing. He’d make an effort to see him this weekend, go on a genuine road trip and make amends.

  Still thinking about Patrick’s protective love over the years, he idly unfolds the last certificate. His of course, Nicholas Quinn. He stares for a moment, confused. The section for the name and surname of the father is blank. But realisation dawns an instant before his eyes reach the name and surname of the mother. Of course. God, of course.

  Susan Quinn.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Jen

  ‘You haven’t been having illicit sex again have you?’

  Jen looks up sharply from her coffee in the staffroom, but it’s only her pal Clare.

  Clare’s eyebrows are raised. ‘You look more cheery than you did last week. You have colour back in your cheeks. I only saw you from a distance, so didn’t get the chance to ask if you were all right. But looking at you now, you are all right. In fact, better than all right!’ She laughs. ‘Sex, yup, it has to be sex.’

  Clare is only joking, but it doesn’t stop the piercing jab in Jen’s ribs. On the Sunday before Holly’s test results, she made a pact with God in church. If Holly was fine she would never sleep with Will Taylor again. Ever. And Holly is fine; she may be on one, or possibly two medicines to balance her thyroxine production for life, but she is OK. In fact she’s massively picked up already; not as listless as she was, nor complaining about aching legs, she simply looks healthier. She’s also wearing her illness like a badge of honour at school, suddenly popular with the crowd she’d previously labelled the chav and slag group. Maria has been eye-rolling constantly since, but in fairness, she has a point. Jen isn’t sure which will be for the best: Holly’s continued popularity with the chavs and slags but possibly becoming one, or being dumped mercilessly by them and still being her unique little self. Either way it will be one of life’s tough lessons, she supposes.