Nick Wharton logged into his work email. There was always lots to attend to. Through the window in front of him he could see his two daughters splashing in the pool, trying to push each other off the big inflatable dolphin, a toy owned and played with for so long it was a wonder it stayed afloat. The house was solidly built, double-glazed against the winds that could pick up suddenly across the Cape. It reduced his daughters’ joyful shrieks to muffles, contributing to a sense of cocooned solitariness that Nick found he couldn’t quite enjoy in spite of having sought it out. Donna was under the parasol at the table, busy on her iPad, a bottle of one of her expensive mineral waters parked in an ice bucket beside a tall lead crystal glass. She had made the most of the hot January weather by swimming and was wearing a white muslin kaftan recently bought from one of her favourite designer outlets in the Waterfront mall. It looked fantastic against her olive skin and with the black lines of her bikini peeking through the mesh.
Bored by the correspondence most in need of attention, Nick scrolled back to the emails he had been firing off to old acquaintances in the weeks since his milestone birthday and the various replies. It had been enjoyable as well as reassuring to find how easy it was to track people down and to hear news of their busy lives. It had also made him realise, a little wistfully, how far he had moved away from his early doctoring days in England. Coming across what Kat Keating had written back the weekend before, he paused, skimming again through the sentences. The tone was typical Kat, he decided – exuberant but faintly dismissive, skating over the surface of things, not wanting to get stuck in. She had seemed such an alluring locked box of a girl, but when you got close it was like there was nothing to come out, or at least nothing she was prepared to give. And, of course, someone like that had landed squarely on her feet, back in the Home Counties, a rich husband in tow. He would have expected no less. A golden couple with a swanky country house. No wonder the email was so light, so watertight, so insouciant.
Through the window, Donna caught his eye and held up her arm to tap the silver bracelet-watch on her wrist. The pool was now empty, the dolphin abandoned, bobbing in a far corner on a jet from the filter. It was time for him to take Natalie to her dance class. His wife had her sunglasses on, but Nick didn’t need to see her expression to know she was irritated. He held up his hand, spreading the fingers to indicate five minutes, and moved on through the correspondence to another reply, a very funny one this time, from a man with whom he had spent many happy youthful hours – good old Peter Whycliffe, erstwhile eccentric student, now a professor of cardiology, making life-and-death decisions in an Oxford hospital. It seemed ridiculous they had ever lost touch.
Nick began to type a funny letter back until a tapping made him look up again.
Donna had taken her sunglasses off and was using them to rap on the window. ‘Now,’ she mouthed at him, stretching her beautiful curved Cupid’s bow lips into an angry O, her blue eyes flashing.
Nick nodded, leaving his desk and putting his head out into the hall to call upstairs. ‘Nat? Are you ready?’
‘Nearly,’ she yelled. There was the squeak of bare feet scampering along the wooden landing floor, followed by the slam of a door. ‘Sash has taken my shoes.’
‘Have not!’ yelped her younger sister.
‘Sort it, you two,’ Nick warned, adding, ‘Five minutes, tops.’
He turned back to his laptop, reluctantly closing down the tabs. When he glanced up, his eldest daughter was lolling in the doorway, her ballet kitbag slung over one shoulder. Noting his air of preoccupation, she shot him a look of wary puzzlement.
‘What? We’re not that late, are we?’
Nick closed the lid of his computer. ‘No, we are not. And you’re a good girl.’ He kissed her head and picked up the ballet bag, whistling and tossing his keys as they made their way out to the car.