‘Dinner’s ready.’ Sofia knocked without expectation on the study door.
‘Hugo?’ she knocked again. ‘The kids have got something to…’
She looked at the ceiling for support, puffing a frustrated breath of air up past her nostrils. It was pointless. She couldn’t penetrate his concentration when he was in this state – making final revisions to his upcoming conference papers, to be delivered in the States again in twenty-two days’ time. It had been six weeks now since he’d surfaced voluntarily to eat.
‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! You need to come down for something, quick!’
Tim and Isaac had instant access, barging past and heaving back the door. She tried not to mind as he turned to them with a gaping, caveman grin, locking his screen and spinning the office chair away, hoisting Isaac in a fireman’s lift and gathering Tim like a battering ram under his other arm. They yelled and giggled as he heaved them up and marched them, airborne and wriggling, right down the stairs.
‘Happy birthday, Dad.’ Florence was in the kitchen lighting the final candle on the cake, a shop-bought sponge taken up largely with two bloodshot monster eyeballs, made with ready-roll icing shot through with redcurrant jelly, and a pair of scientific goggles formed from thick black liquorice. They sang the words as the sides dripped horribly with lashings of lurid green.
‘Wow, a mad scientist cake! Is it Frankenstein? In his younger days of course,’ said Hugo as he blew out the four candles.
‘It’s you, Daddy!’ shrieked Isaac, unable to believe he couldn’t tell.
‘Isaac wanted to put the right number of candles on,’ said Tim, ‘but Florence said she thought it was a health and safety hazard.’
Hugo let his jaw drop in a mock-offended look.
‘And we’re eating it first, like a starter,’ interrupted Isaac, ‘before the green all melts.’
Hugo looked at Sofia. She turned to switch the heat off for the pie inside the oven.
‘Can I cut it? Can I have an eyeball? Can I have the one with the most blood?’ Isaac was dancing up and down, his chin butting the table.
‘Don’t eat so much you can’t manage your main…’ Sofia began, pretty much to herself.
‘It’s Dad’s cake,’ said Tim. ‘He should have first dibs.’
‘I think I’ll start with a touch of retina,’ said Hugo, slicing off the back of the right eye, ‘with a garnish of green goo.’
Isaac watched approvingly. ‘That’s the one I did, Daddy. And I put the jelly in the eyeballs. Can I have some? Can I have some now, now that we’ve all sung.’
Hugo handed out slices of eyeball to his three offspring.
‘Sofia – can I tempt you?’
She took a section – vitreous cavity made of sponge – and nibbled at it, observing the festivities from beside the fridge.
‘This is for you from me, Dad.’ Isaac had made a monster out of egg boxes and yoghurt pots, its construction prompted and overseen by Florence.
‘Incredible,’ Hugo enthused. ‘Those alien eyes are frighteningly convincing. I’m going to put that in my lab at work for everyone to see.’
‘They go round and round,’ said Isaac, twisting some pencils stuck in at the back with Sellotape, to make the eyes rotate.
‘Amazing,’ said Hugo. ‘Like the Mona Lisa on amphetamines.’
‘I gave him the idea,’ said Tim. He had completely forgotten that today was the day.
‘This is from Tim and that’s from me,’ said Florence, saving him. She handed Hugo a carefully wrapped book and DVD.
‘Oh, Tim,’ said Hugo, stroking the commemorative Pratchett. ‘That’s fantastic. Thank you. My absolute favourite. I’ll enjoy reading that again.’ He had at least three copies but not a gilded hardback one like that. ‘I hope you didn’t spend a whole heap of pocket money on it.’
Tim gave Florence an urgent look. He would pay her back.
‘And what’s this?’ Hugo chuckled as he tore the paper off a DVD of Breaking Bad. ‘Is this entirely suitable, Flo? I hope your chemistry teachers aren’t doing a side line in crystal meth.’
‘It’s morally justified. He does it to save his family from distress.’
She knew he’d love it and almost certainly let her watch it with him, studiously failing to notice it was certified eighteen.
Sofia left the room, returning with an enormous package she had clumsily wrapped the night before. They were playing with the remains of the eyeballs and the liquorice glasses, holding them against their eye sockets and jiggling their heads from side to side, as she came back in. She put it onto the table right in front of him.
‘Oh, thank you, darling.’ He stopped laughing, put the eyeballs down and wiped his sticky hands on his trousers, reaching over to plant an appreciative kiss upon her cheek.
‘It’s just a little something – practical. I wasn’t sure what to get.’
He made a systematic start on finding entry to the Sellotape-swaddled package. It went quiet, as the laughter fell away with the wrapping paper.
A holdall.
Not monogrammed. Not expensive. Plastic wheels along the bottom. No ball-bearings. Khaki, not unlike the bag he’d given her.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise and gratification. ‘Oh, that’s great, darling. That’s-that’s really smart.’
‘It’s a smaller one, to fit better when you’re on the plane.’
He was looking inside to investigate the inner compartments. She recalled now with a sinking feeling the reason why he always took his saggy briefcase as hand luggage, banishing his holdall to the cargo hold. Whilst the leather was exhausted – wrinkled and patchy with use – it was still more resilient than a cloth-based bag, with its three stiff compartments for keeping papers back to back, and was eccentrically recognisable on the baggage reclaim rack.
‘No, that’s great, Sofs. The one I had was much too big, really. Yeah, I think I can flatten out my papers on the bottom bit – that’s quite hard.’
It wasn’t. It was supported by a thinnish sheet of plastic.
‘Sorry, it’s probably not actually what you—’
‘It’s great, Sofs, really useful. I’ll take it with me next trip.’
‘Mum, what’s that smell?’ Isaac was scrunching his nose up.
She jumped around and pulled the burning pie out from the top shelf of the oven. She must have overturned the dial instead of switching it off. She placed it, smoking, by the remains of the cake.
‘It’ll be all right, Mum,’ Florence said, picking the black edges off in two long brittle curves. ‘You’ll never taste it with the gravy and the mash.’ The runner beans in the steamer were limp now, crumpled in the bottom like dead soldiers in a trench.
Sofia served everything up, and they ate obediently, industriously enjoying it. There wasn’t any pudding now that they had had the cake.
‘You haven’t opened your cards, Dad,’ said Isaac, ‘except the ones from us. There might be money inside.’ His own often contained the disappointment of book tokens or cheques.
Hugo used his thumb to unseal the five envelopes on the table. Cards from his mother, Sofia’s parents, his two sisters and Mark from university.
‘Well, thank you, everybody, for all the lovely stuff. I’m honoured and touched and will now retire happily full of monster flesh and chicken pie.’
‘What’s retire?’ said Isaac.
‘I must return to my abode, young humanoid. I have a mission to complete.’
‘Can’t you stay downstairs with us?’
‘I can’t, but I can transport you at the speed of light to bed.’
Singlehandedly impersonating all the aspects of a major rocket launch, he counted down, whirled and lunged around the kitchen table and scooped them up again, dragging them delightedly back up the stairs.
Florence was already gathering up the dirty plates. Looking for something to do, Sofia picked up all the wrapping paper, and the torn envelopes, and opened up the back door to put them in the bin. It was already almost filled right to the brim with crushed cardboard box files, old journals, draft conference papers and discarded manuals. He’d had to have a clear-out to find an abstract from a paper he’d written years ago, as part of preparations for his latest trip.
As the security light flipped on, she noticed a bright blue C5 envelope sticking out from the side of the pile, caught by just one corner, bending down as if just about to jump onto the gravel. She knew the writing on it, intimately, but for a moment couldn’t place it, couldn’t link it to a relative or a friend. Sofia slid it out and scrutinised it for a moment. Then she dropped it with sickened recognition back onto the heap.
It was her hand. The hand that wrote with such assured affection, such tender dependency, such impassioned desperation in the letters she had found. Now sending him birthday wishes he did not want Sofia to see.
Had they been in touch all this time?
Staring at the postmark, she tried to make sense of it. Maybe she wrote to him every birthday. Sofia would have sent a goodwill card to Jim, after all, if they’d been civilized enough to keep each other’s details afterwards. It wasn’t a birthday card though. The postmark was much earlier – 12 February.
No wonder he had buried it in an earlier layer of paper sediment.
She pushed it back where it had come from, stuffed the evening’s crumpled wrapping paper onto the top and calmly, forcefully, pushed down the lid.