‘OUCH.’
I rubbed my arm, scowling at the corner of the kitchen worktop, then made my way unsteadily to the sink, reached for a glass on the shelf to the right, and turned the tap on. The water splashed noisily into the sink, and I moved the glass under the stream of water, catching a little before glugging it down and returning the glass for more.
‘Flora? You OK? What are you doing in here in the dark?’
It was Greg, and suddenly the kitchen lights blazed.
‘Urgh, too bright!’ I said, turning to squint at him across the room. He was leaning on the door frame, looking fit and lean in a close-fitting long-sleeved navy T-shirt, looking me up and down with an amused smile.
‘You sound like Gizmo. From Gremlins? The film?’
He paused, as I stared at him, not understanding. Then he frowned.
‘Flora … are you … are you drunk?’
I put the glass down and took a step towards him, staggered a little, then stopped again.
‘I’m … I’m not drunk, exactly. I may have had a glass of wine. Or … two, or … look, it’s allowed, isn’t it? I’m not working today.’
Oh dear, I thought. I am drunk, aren’t I? What on earth possessed me to open a bottle of wine in my room after I got back from Cheltenham? Greg was right … I was definitely rather drunk.
‘Well, yes, of course it’s allowed. It’s just not like you, that’s all. It’s not even eight thirty. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you even remotely drunk before. Are you all right?’
He was crossing the room now, the amusement on his face turning to concern, and suddenly, to my horror, I felt tears sliding down my cheeks. I brushed them away fiercely with the backs of my hands, but he’d already noticed.
‘Flora! What is it? What’s wrong? Come here.’
With one swift movement he took me by the shoulders and pulled me into an embrace, one arm moving downwards to wrap around my waist, the other gently patting my hair. For a moment I rested my head on his hard chest, enjoying the comforting warmth of him, the soft murmurings of: ‘Hey, don’t cry, it’ll be OK, whatever it is.’ Then I pulled away, embarrassed.
‘Greg, I’m sorry … I saw Thea today. She asked me to go and see her, to talk through what happened, you know, when Zander … and it’s just upset me, that’s all. Going back there, remembering …’
‘Talk through it? Why? What’s to talk about?’
He was frowning now, his face darkening.
‘Oh, she says she’s remembering things, her memory is starting to come back and she’s remembering it differently to how she thought it all happened … she wanted to see if I could help shed any light on it, but I couldn’t, not really. Excuse me …’
I turned away, intending to get a piece of kitchen paper from the roll on the wall to wipe my face, but Greg grabbed my arm, pulling me back towards him.
‘God, that woman. She’s crazy. We all know what happened, and it wasn’t fair of her to upset you like this,’ he said quietly. He cupped my chin in his hand, tilting my face upwards, and before I could think or move away again he had dropped a quick, soft kiss onto my lips.
‘I hate seeing you upset, Flora,’ he whispered.
‘Dad? What’s going on?’
We both jumped as Oliver suddenly appeared in the doorway, and I took a step backwards, shocked. How much had he seen?
‘Olly.’
Greg turned and smiled at his son, then gestured at me.
‘Flora’s just a bit upset. She … bumped into Thea Ashfield today. It brought back bad memories, you understand?’
There was a suspicious look on Oliver’s face, but he looked slowly from his father to me and back again, then nodded.
‘Sure. Zander and all that. Sorry, Flora. Hope you’re OK.’
‘I’m fine, thanks, sweetie,’ I said. ‘Just a bit embarrassed your dad caught me having a sniffle. I think I’ll go upstairs and have a bath and an early night.’
I turned back to Greg, not quite meeting his eyes.
‘Thanks, Greg, for being so nice. Goodnight.’
‘’Night, Flora. Take it easy.’
His tone was light, casual, and I slipped gratefully out of the room, patting Oliver on the arm and smiling at him as I passed. He smiled back, and I was relieved to see that the look of suspicion was gone. Maybe he hadn’t seen the kiss, after all? Shit, why had Greg done that? And why hadn’t I stopped him? What was it with these bloody men?
Deeply grateful that the girls were in bed and that Annabelle had gone to the cinema with some of her mummy friends, I climbed the stairs to my room, locked the door and ran a deep, bubbly bath. I stayed in it for nearly an hour, topping it up at regular intervals, feeling my muscles finally relax and the tension in my neck and shoulders ease.
I’d have a little chat with Oliver tomorrow, I thought – get him on his own and make sure everything was OK. I was pretty sure that even if it wasn’t, even if he had seen something of what had just happened with Greg, I’d be able to make it all right. I knew how to handle Oliver. But Greg … I wasn’t so sure how to handle Greg. Keeping away from him was the obvious answer, but it didn’t seem to be that easy. I was still pretty certain he didn’t actually fancy me, though, despite what he had done tonight. It was like the last time, when he’d got me alone in his study. He wanted to know what I knew. He was scared, and that made him dangerous.
I wriggled my toes against the tap and thought back to the night I found out. It was a Friday night, and Rupert was away on business – or, more likely, away shagging bloody Mia, again – and Thea had called to say she was stuck on a slow-moving train from Glasgow, where she’d been on a buying trip to a kilt factory or sporran shop or some such thing. Isla had arrived early evening anyway, as she did most Fridays, so once the kids were in bed we’d ended up chatting in the lounge, over a bottle of Prosecco. And that’s when she told me.
To this day, I don’t know why she did – it’s not like we were the best of friends – we got on OK by that point, but not to the level of sharing our deepest secrets. I found it weird, how even though she and Thea were so close, obsessively so at times, she would sometimes say really nasty things about my boss. I’d thought about it a lot, trying to apply what I’d learned in my psychology classes at uni to Isla and Thea’s relationship, trying to analyse the complexities of it. And I’d come to the conclusion that Isla’s feeling of no longer being number one, of coming in fourth in Thea’s affections behind Rupert and the children, was sometimes hard for her to handle, and that her way of dealing with this perceived snub, this demotion, was to occasionally let rip at Thea, try to humiliate her. To her face, now and again – I’d heard a few bitchy, vicious remarks being exchanged between them, although their rows never lasted long – but more often, behind her back, to me or even to Rupert, who would be taken aback on occasion to find Isla backing him against her friend. That night, though, she dropped the bombshell.
‘We were out, Thea and I, and we were on one of our biggest ever benders. I mean, we can both drink, but that night we were so pissed. I mean, properly pissed. Rupert was away, and Nell was at a friend’s for the night, and I don’t remember where you were. It wasn’t long after you’d started working here. Anyway, we were in All Bar One, and …’
And she told me the whole story. How two men had come in, acquaintances of theirs, both out without their wives, and how the four of them had carried on drinking together until closing time, and then somebody had suggested, half-jokingly, that it might be fun to get a hotel room and order room service and have a bit of a party, and how they’d ended up getting not one hotel room but two, and then the obvious had happened. And how Isla had actually ended up dating her guy, Alan, for a month or two afterwards – ‘well, I say dating. Having an affair with, more accurately,’ she said – but how it had then fizzled out, and she hadn’t seen him since. But how things had turned out a little differently for Thea. Because, a few weeks later, Thea had discovered she was pregnant. She’d hoped, prayed, that the baby was Rupert’s, even though she’d had a feeling, right from the beginning. But when Zander was born she’d managed to do a sneaky DNA test, and her fears were realized. The baby wasn’t Rupert’s. He was the child of the man she’d had the one-night stand with. Horrified, she had told nobody except Isla, desperate to stop Rupert finding out, and as far as I knew he still didn’t know, still thought Zander had been his baby. She didn’t tell the biological father either, Isla said.
‘But I’m pretty sure he suspects, Flora. Because just look at him. Look how like his real dad Zander looks.’
And she was right. Zander looked exactly like his real dad. That hair, those eyes. The likeness was, when you thought about it, unmistakable, and it still astounded me that, even now, it seemed that nobody else had ever guessed, or even suspected. How nobody else knew that Zander was, quite, quite obviously, Greg Garrington’s son.