32

Lauren, 2019

Lauren hears the loose floorboard squeak outside her bedroom door. A second later, Flora bursts in then stops, her gaze pinning to Lauren’s fingers on the desk drawer’s knob. ‘Oh. I didn’t mean to interrupt …’

‘You haven’t!’ Lauren quickly shuts the drawer. She’ll write to Gemma later. ‘I just got out of the shower.’ But the ocean cold is still fizzing under her skin, lodged in her bones. She rather likes it. ‘Come in, come in.’

Flora steps into the room, glancing around, as if mentally taking notes. She has a jangly, slightly manic energy. Her hair is dishevelled, and it makes her look younger. ‘I’ll swim with you and Kat tomorrow. A final hurrah on our last day,’ she says, steely, as if trying to talk herself into it. ‘Before we all hit the road. It’ll be …’

‘Like the old days,’ Lauren says, smiling.

‘Yes,’ says Flora, less certainly. ‘Maybe it will.’

Lauren unwraps the towel turbaned over her hair, pulls on her Fair Isle sweater. Emerging, she shoots Flora a puzzled smile. ‘You okay?’

‘I just had a set-to with Angie.’ Flora flops onto the bed, kicks up her feet. The soles of her white socks are grubby, an unlikely sight somehow. ‘I spoke my mind, Lauren. I doubt I’ll ever be forgiven.’

‘Reckon Angie can probably take it,’ says Lauren, intrigued. She digs a finger into her pot of Vaseline and balms her lips, noticing the nail polish she applied in London has chipped, other parts of her too.

‘I’m done, Lauren.’ Flora tips onto her side, props her head on one hand. Her gaze grows bold, direct, no longer evasively fixed at a mid-point above Lauren’s eyebrows. ‘I can’t do nice and polite any more. Maybe I’m not that nice person.’ She pauses. ‘Maybe I never was.’

Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, disarmed, unsure what to say. A breath of wind moves the curtain on its pole, a familiar childhood sound, cloth and air and metal curtain rings, weather working its way inside.

‘I’m sorry, Lauren,’ Flora says quietly. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t the best sister.’

‘I didn’t have any sisters, and then I got you and Kat.’ She lies next to Flora on the bed, as they used to, and it doesn’t feel like any time has passed since those teenage summers, and she has to resist the urge to reach over and start braiding Flora’s hair. ‘You weren’t the sisters I’d imagined, but I wasn’t an only any more either. And that was and is amazing to me. Honestly.’

‘That makes me feel very happy and totally wretched at the same time, Lauren.’

Their father’s baritone rumbles towards them: ‘Flora!’

‘Eek. Listen to him. Fuming. This reunion has all gone wrong. And it’s going to get more wrong.’ She flicks a button on the duvet back and forth with one finger, then looks up sheepishly. ‘You see, I answered Kat’s phone while you two were in the cove. It was Kofi.’

‘Sorry?’ Lauren thinks she’s misheard.

‘Kofi’s name flashed up … I couldn’t help myself. I know, I know,’ she says, as Lauren winces. Kat will go ballistic. Kofi, even as a conversation, is off limits.

‘And Kofi told me …’ Flora edges even closer, the sour smell of last night’s wine on her breath ‘… Kat’s been hiding something, she’s …’

‘Flora!’ Charlie shouts again.

‘We’ll talk later.’ Flora pops into the room next door and tells Raff to stay put while she has a grown-up chat downstairs. ‘Will you come with me?’ Returning, Flora reaches out her hand. ‘I’m going to need you on my side.’

‘I’ve always been on your side,’ Lauren says simply, letting her sister tug her off the bed.

The kitchen is a Dutch interior painting, rich, full of shadows. Outside the windows, the late-morning sky is low and white, as if holding a belly of snow. Angie and Charlie’s interlaced hands are plinthed on the table, a declaration of intent. Also, bread. A jar of ruby-red jam. A brick of butter. The glint of Granny’s tarnished silver cutlery.

‘Sit,’ says Charlie, gruffly.

Lauren lowers herself into Grandpa’s captain’s chair, its seat polished from years of his thick corduroy trousers, and slides her hands along the smooth armrests, just as he once did.

‘This discord has to stop. And stop now.’ Charlie looks crumpled, his shirt done up on the wrong buttons. But everyone’s been rapidly unpicked by the last couple of days at Rock Point, their edges frayed by salt and damp. Lauren didn’t have so far to fall.

‘If you look for my shortcomings, girls, you’ll find them. Rest assured I have further untapped reserves.’ He pauses theatrically. ‘However, if you look for common ground between yourselves and Angie you’ll find that too.’

Kat snorts, leaning back against the butcher’s block island, her fingers resting lightly on her phone, as if it were a gun she might have to pull at any moment. Her buoyant post-swim mood seems to have switched to something defensive and brittle, and involves frequent dark glares at Flora, sitting nervously on the edge of the rattan sofa. Lauren shifts in her chair, suddenly wishing she were outside, stomping across the cliff tops.

‘We all know this is not about who gets to take my mother’s frocks home, only to discreetly dispatch them later to an obliging charity shop.’ Charlie drops a glob of jam on a bit of bread and mashes it in with the back of a teaspoon. ‘It’s about the past,’ he growls, ‘which we can’t undo.’

And won’t discuss, thinks Lauren.

‘I dare say those daft notes haven’t helped the party mood either,’ he adds, as Angie leans over and flicks a crumb off his shirt.

‘Or the slashed tyre. Or the psycho driver, funnily enough,’ Kat says.

In the tightening hush, Lauren listens to the metallic squeak-squeak of Bertha’s cage swing. Her thoughts tip back and forth, uneasily, heatedly, to Jonah, the familiar stranger from the train whom she keeps spotting around and about, head down, hood up. She doesn’t understand how someone she’s just met has worked under her skin so quickly. Every time she looks out of a window, she cannot help but scout for him. The black dot of his dog. After today, frustratingly, she won’t get a chance to find out what he’s playing at. If he wrote the notes, or why.

‘Whoever it is, whatever their motivation, it smacks to me of someone who is refusing to move on.’ Charlie takes off his glasses and squeezes the bridge of his nose, leaving fingerprint marks. He looks directly at Lauren. She’s shocked to see his eyes are rheumy with tears. ‘Your mother’s death taught me a lesson, Laurie. For thirty odd years there wasn’t a day that went past when I didn’t regret …’ He stops. Angie is staring at him guardedly, as if she might not have heard him admit this before, ‘… well, spectacularly screwing up. But Dix died.’ He clicks his fingers. ‘And that’s it. Grade four. Gone. No possibility of redemption. No rekindling.’

Lauren blinks, astonished. Her parents, the most unlikely couple, only grew more unlikely as the years passed. Had he really fancied they’d get back together three decades on? Unimaginable. And yet there was always a change in Dixie’s eyes whenever Charlie’s name was mentioned, a light that would come on, a light that didn’t shine for anyone else. And she never did settle down, instead clinging to her independence, scared of being hurt and let down again. Lauren swallows hard, floored by the wastage: the union of her parents, which she’d longed for as a little girl, had been possible yet never realized.

‘I won’t make that mistake again.’ Her father turns and rests his hand lightly on Angie’s cheek.

‘Nice to know you loved our mothers too, Dad,’ says Kat, frostily. Flora stares down at the floor, biting her bottom lip.

Old rivalries rush back into the room, a reminder that, however much Dixie wanted Lauren to reach out to her sisters, a part of them will probably always pull away. A buried resentment, too deep to unpick.

‘Oh, I did, of course I did,’ Charlie says, softly, sincerely. ‘You were conceived with love. That’s all that matters.’

Kat raises an eyebrow. ‘Is it? You do let yourself off lightly.’

‘Oh, quit it.’ He’s lost patience. ‘You would never interfere in each other’s relationships.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ Kat glances pointedly at Flora, confirming she knows Flora has answered her phone and spoken to Kofi. Flora colours. Lauren can feel the fractious energy forking between her sisters. And so can Bertha, who starts squawking.

‘Huzzah.’ Kat smiles at her mobile, reading an incoming message. ‘Confirmed. I’m on this evening’s flight.’

‘But – but …’ stutters Flora, aghast. ‘You’ll miss our last night.’

‘What’s this, Kat?’ Disappointment crashes across their father’s face. ‘When the hell did you book that?’

‘Just now. Scarlett, my PA, did.’ Kat knifes a look at Flora.

Charlie leans forward, palms spread on the table, a slighted patriarch. ‘It’s bad manners to leave early, Kat,’ he thunders.

‘Dad,’ says Kat, more affectionately, ‘you frequently don’t turn up at all.’

‘Well, fine. Suit yourself.’ Charlie leans back in his chair and crosses his arms with a harrumph. ‘Have you fought out who gets what?’

‘Post-it note system,’ says Flora, with a sniff. ‘And we’re going to need a man with a van to collect it all. I can’t fit a tall-case clock in the boot.’

For a moment, Charlie looks daunted. Doubtful, even. Lauren wonders if the reality of clearing his parents’ things has suddenly hit home.

‘I know people,’ Flora adds. ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll sort it out.’ She glances at the dresser, mentally sieving something. ‘But I will wrap the crockery tonight. Take that with me tomorrow. You don’t want any, do you, Lauren?’

Lauren hesitates, torn. ‘No. You take it, Flora.’

A percussion of little footsteps. Raff charges in, looking pleased with himself, his hands held behind his back.

‘Why, hello, Indiana Jones.’ Their father’s face erupts with a smile. ‘Now have you found any cool things to take home?’

Raff nods. Lauren makes a note to tell Flora she’s raised a wonderful boy. A special boy. Whatever the legacy of this reunion, whether it brings them all together or blows them apart, or ends up in a fist fight in Las Vegas, she’s glad she came, just to have spent time with Raff, a tonic after weeks of being steeped in illness and grief.

‘Raff has found a present,’ he says proudly, his chest swelling. ‘For Aunty Lauren.’

‘Me?’ Lauren says with a surprised laugh. Her heart melts. She hears Flora murmur, ‘Oh, Raff. No.’ Time slows. Flickering. Buffering. The William Morris tablecloth, the pea-green dresser, the moth-pale faces, all slip into a blurred slurry, everything reducing to Gemma’s woven bird in Raff’s palm. Then black.