The following weekend Adrian left Luke behind in his flat with precise instructions about feeding the cat, taking phone messages, locking the doors and disposing of rubbish, packed a small bag and headed to Caroline’s to spend the weekend with his three youngest children.
It had been a strange week. Despite their rapprochement in the pub on Saturday afternoon, relations between Adrian and his eldest child remained strained. Luke and he were so completely different. Whereas he was rough and ready, Luke was vain and preeny. Whereas he liked to rise early and spend his mornings listening to the radio and eating toast, Luke liked to spend his fast asleep until precisely five minutes before it was time to leave, whereupon he would start shouting crossly about missing shoes and hair products. Luke had a horrible habit, also, of eyeing him fully from head to toe every morning when he stood to leave the house, half opening his mouth as though about to pass comment on something he’d found displeasing, and then shutting it again. Luke was fussy too, constantly rewashing things in the kitchen that had sat in drawers being perfectly clean for weeks. And sniffing things. Everything. Tea towels. Tubs of butter. The insides of mugs.
“Why do you keep smelling everything?” Adrian had asked eventually.
“I don’t know,” Luke had replied vaguely. “There’s just this smell. In here. This whole flat. It just sort of . . . whiffs.”
Whiffs, Adrian had thought disconsolately. All that money on private school, and that’s what he got for it. A big posh, jobless streak of attitude who used the word whiffs.
On Thursday night he had opened a bottle of wine and attempted to reopen the channels that had closed so quickly after their chat in the pub. “So,” he’d said, “this girl. The one who broke your heart. What was she like?”
Luke, staring blankly at the TV, had said simply, without looking in his direction, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
So it was with a sense of escape and liberation that Adrian left the flat that Saturday morning. The fine start to summer had dripped away into damp disappointment. The sky was limp and grubby and the pavement was full of old puddles from the previous night’s downpour. But he was looking forward to a weekend in Islington: the leafy views from the narrow sash windows; the creak and bang of his children moving from room to room and charging up and down the stairs; the click and scrabble of Caroline’s funny little dogs. Yes, he was even looking forward to the dogs.
Cat greeted him at the door. He was taken aback as ever by the sheer abundance of her. She had put on weight again and had crossed the line now from plumptious to unkempt, highlighted by denim hot pants and a black bandeau top that clearly came from her slimmer days. She hugged him tight and led him to his room for the weekend. Not Caroline’s room. He understood why. It had been their room, where they had slept together, made love, made babies. And now, he assumed, it was the room where Caroline had sex with her toy-boy lover. He was to sleep in the study on a pullout bed thing, on the same floor as Cat and Otis. Otis was on the swivel chair in the study doing something on the PC that he clearly didn’t want anyone to see as he rapidly switched screens when he heard them come in.
“Hello, handsome,” said Adrian, scruffing his son’s hair.
“Hi,” Otis replied dully.
There was a time, he thought, when Otis would have been jumping about like a spaniel at the prospect of his precious dad coming to spend the weekend. Now his presence barely registered.
“Where are Pearl and Beau?”
“Pearl’s skating. Beau’s with them.”
“Them?”
“Mum and Paul.”
“Oh,” said Adrian. “Right. When are they coming back?”
Otis shrugged. “Soon, I guess. They were out pretty early.”
“And what have you been up to then, all alone?”
“Just on the computer. That kind of thing.”
Adrian nodded, but felt quietly discomfited.
Cat stood in the doorway, one bare foot balanced on the other, and said, “He’s an addict. That’s all he ever wants to do.”
“Not when he’s with me,” said Adrian.
“Yeah, well, there’s probably more to do when he’s with you. Round here it’s all skating skating skating.”
“Yeah,” said Otis, without turning around, “and Paul Paul Paul.”
“Come on,” said Cat, “let’s go down and you can make me a coffee. And make him a smoothie.” She nodded at Otis, who allowed himself a smile and logged off the PC.
In the basement kitchen his daughter sat herself on a bar stool and watched him as he knocked old coffee grounds out of the coffeemaker. “So,” she said, “how’s it going with Mr. High Maintenance?”
“Jesus,” he said, smiling. “I had no idea. He used to be so much fun.”
“Yeah. He took a diva pill.”
“What’s that all about?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno. Some girl. And that posh-boy school you and Mum sent him to didn’t help much.”
Adrian sighed. The private school had been Susie’s idea. She’d thought they’d be better placed to deal with Luke’s high-octane personality and superior intelligence. Easygoing, model-student Cat had gone to the local comprehensive and still had a chip on her shoulder about it.
“I pity the woman who takes him on,” he said, spooning fresh coffee into the machine.
“I don’t think such a woman exists.”
There was a commotion at the door and the dogs began to bark and clatter up the wooden stairs.
“I won’t come in,” they heard Caroline shout down the stairs, “but here’s two more for you! Bye! See you tomorrow night!” The door slammed shut and the dogs stopped barking and Pearl and Beau ran down the stairs, both launching themselves into Adrian’s arms with delight. Adrian made smoothies for all three children and handed them out at the dining table by the garden doors. He passed Cat her cappuccino and added a sugar to his own double espresso and sat at the kitchen counter, surveying the scene. So this was it, he thought. This was what he had missed every Saturday morning for the past four years. This is how it looked, the life he’d left behind. Pearl with cheeks still crimson from her training, Otis still in his pajamas at eleven a.m., Beau with a large pink circle around his mouth from the smoothie, kicking his legs under the table and smiling to himself. This was it.
He looked at Cat, adding sugar to her cappuccino, texting someone with the other hand, her enormous breasts barely contained by the skimpy jersey top, her black hair tumbling down around her olive face. And then he looked around the room, this family room he’d designed himself, from what had once been four dank basement rooms. He’d designed it for this, for exactly this, for lazy Saturday mornings, for smoothies and cappuccinos, children and their things in every corner; he’d designed it, built it, filled it with charming clutter and idiosyncratic personalizing touches. And then he’d left.
Beau had still been a baby.
He felt a lump pass up and down inside his throat.
If Maya were still alive he would still believe he’d done the right thing. But without her, doubt flowed through every vein in his body.
He opened his mouth to say the thing that was there, on the tip of his tongue, desperate to be released. Would you all like it if Daddy moved back in? With Mummy? And then he looked at his children again and he shut it.