The Last Weekend (28 page)

‘That can’t be right,’ I said, disputing the escape theory, not (as I should have) the entire story. ‘You’ve always said he loved you and your mother.’

‘He loved us but he felt trapped. They found a twenty-pound note in the inside pocket of his trunks. Why was that there?’

‘By accident.’

‘Or to start a new life.’

‘You can’t start a new life with twenty pounds.’

‘My father could. I’d let him down, you see.’

‘He was proud of you, you told me.’

‘It was our last day — the bank holiday Monday — and we’d planned an early-morning swim. But when he came into my bedroom, I didn’t feel like it and pretended to be asleep. He stood there saying my name then gave up and went alone.’

‘If you’d gone you might have drowned too.’

‘Rather that than him dying alone.’

‘But if you’d died there would have been no Daisy in your life, or Archie, or a career or …’

Something bright — a sword-flash — lit the room from outside, then came an explosion to waken death.

‘What the fuck?’

I heard the girls screaming outside, then adult laughter and the clip-clop of two doors being closed.

Rain at last.

Thunder was just the start of it. For the next two hours the house was a ship at sea, timbers creaking, deck sloshing, the horizon lost behind spray. Silver pitchforks flashed through
the air then tossed us into darkness. You’d have thought a pantiled roof would be secure, but it drummed and rattled like a shanty hut, helpless against the chiding rain. A dozen leaks sprang from the eaves, the worst of them in our bedroom: I stuck a bucket underneath and let the drips slowly change their tune — ping, prang, sprong, shlung, sklish, shoosh — as the water rose towards the brim. Em was out of bed by then, coming down to watch the spectacle with the rest of us. What a picture we made, seven faces lining the windows while the terrace turned to rapids and the field ditch overflowed. I fixed my eyes on a plastic fertiliser bag — its neck open and its body slashed — as gusts bullied it about the orchard. Even the bales out in the meadow looked ready to take off. Under the French windows, sandbagged with towels, a pool seeped across the floor tiles. And still the storm bawled and tantrumed outside, our house the centre of its rage, the nails shrieking in the weatherboarding as the wind wrenched them like a crowbar.

I stood next to Daisy. One kind look would have cured me. But she refused to acknowledge me and disappeared upstairs.

It occurred to me that Milo was responsible for her moodiness — that when they were walking on the beach he’d upset her again and that, rather than be angry with him, she was punishing me. I decided to have a word with him, man to man. He was in the snug down the corridor, where Natalie and Bethany, tired of watching the rain, had unearthed a heap of board games. With no Em to deputise — her head was still bad and she’d gone back to bed — he was playing snakes and ladders with them. Pressed, I agreed to play a round or two. It was difficult to be candid when Natalie and Bethany were present, so for a while I gave myself up to the game and taught them the difference between ‘die’ and ‘dice’ ('you can have any number of dice but you can’t have more than one die'), while my niftiness with the cup-shaker secured me three
victories in a row. Bored of losing, the girls went off to find Rufus. It was then I seized my chance.

‘I’m sorry to hear about you and Bianca,’ I said, placing the counters for another game.

‘It’s for the best,’ Milo said, after a pause. ‘If we were going to break up, better now than later.’

‘There’s no one else involved, then?’ An obvious question, I thought, but he seemed taken aback. ‘If that’s not too intrusive a question.’

He picked up the two dice and shook them in the cup.

‘There wasn’t. But Bianca’s started seeing someone in New York.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m in no state. It’s far too soon.’

‘A good-looking bloke like you — you could have your pick.’

‘The girls come first. All my energy goes into looking after them.’

‘You’re making a great job of it,’ I said, though it was Em who’d looked after them all weekend.

‘I do my best. Us breaking up is hard on them.’

‘On Daisy, too,’ I said.

‘Daisy?’

‘She told me about you moving to New York. It’s unsettled her. She’ll miss you.’

‘And I’ll miss her,’ he said. Then, in case I got the wrong idea, which was probably the right idea, he added, ‘I owe her a lot.’

I ran a finger down a snake. Blue eyes, long lashes, boyish cheeks, chest hair sprouting from his open collar: I wanted to slap him down, to crow that I’d had her and he hadn’t. But what if he had?

‘All I’m saying is be nice to her,’ I said.

‘I hope I am being.’

‘Of course. But you know how sensitive she is. She feels rejected.’

‘She shouldn’t.’

‘You can’t be too attentive. She needs all the love she can get.’

The girls returned at that point, and demanded another game. But I’d said enough to get the point across. At the end of the game, which after my three earlier wins I didn’t mind losing, Milo caught my eye and nodded, as if to say
Thanks, mate. That’s good advice.

To encourage him to pay court to Daisy went against the grain. But with any luck it might cheer her up.

In the living room, Daisy and Ollie sat in silence by the window, watching the rain. As I hesitated, wondering whether to join them, Em appeared, her headache seemingly cured.

‘Poor Archie,’ she said, taking my arm, ‘out in this.’

‘I’m sure they have tents,’ Daisy said.

I squeezed Em’s arm, as if to say
What parenting! If it were our child out in a storm we’d not be so laissez-faire.
But Daisy had a lot to take on board. Last night with me had blown her world apart.

‘Drink anyone?’ said Ollie, who had clearly had several.

‘Just a small one,’ I said, reluctant to put a damper on the evening.

No one felt like cooking. We were too tired, too lazy, too enthralled by the weather. And the drink we got through as we watched — even Milo’s girls were treated to sips of wine — only increased our torpor. At 7.27 (a good time in my book) the rain finally stopped. Still no one talked about supper, till Milo’s girls began to whine and he promised them scrambled egg if they changed into their nighties.

‘While Milo’s cooking for the girls,’ Daisy said, ‘I’ll make something for the rest of us.’

‘That’ll be nice,’ Milo said.

I could see Ollie clocking them both and wasn’t surprised when he suggested a takeaway instead.

‘You’ve done enough entertaining for one weekend, darling,’ he said.

An ancient card was pinned to the noticeboard with a phone number for a restaurant called the Indian Pearl, and, unlikely though it seemed, someone answered immediately and took our order. The place was a twenty-minute drive, Ollie said. Since he was way over the limit I volunteered to do the driving. With Em and Milo absorbed in the girls, it was a chance for Ollie and Daisy to talk. Maybe he would confront her with his suspicions and Milo would be asked to leave.

Outside, the rain had eased off, not snare-drumming now but pinging like pebbles in a pan. I slammed the car door and was already turning into the drive when Daisy appeared, flagging me down.

‘Ollie said you’d need a hand,’ she said, climbing in beside me.

There’s something I haven’t told you which I ought to confess, even if it makes you think worse of me. It’s about the debt Em and I were in. I say ‘we’ but we’ve always had separate accounts, so officially I was the one. I didn’t tell her because it would have worried her and I thought I’d have the problem sorted soon enough. I’ve had such crises before. Something always turns up.

There’s nothing wrong with gambling. People in the City are
paid
to do it and the money’s not even their own. I’ve often envied them that power and freedom. With my head for numbers, I could have made a brilliant hedge fund manager. And I’d not have fucked up like the bankers and brokers in the City have done. Betting’s the basis of our whole economy.

But you have to work to a system. And you can’t take stupid risks when it’s other people’s savings you’re playing with.

At least I’ve no one else’s losses on my conscience. Still, I do feel bad about what happened. Back in January Em and I agreed to start saving for IVF, in case the traditional method for impregnation continued to fail. We gave ourselves a year: by putting aside a regular sum each month, we’d have saved enough for a first (and we hoped last) round of IVF by Christmas. The best way to proceed, I argued, was for Em to pay the household bills while I accumulated capital in my savings account. She had her doubts but in the end I talked her round. There was a principle at stake: I wanted to prove she could trust me. No more websites.

The plan worked like a dream. Free of domestic expenses – the gas, electricity, council tax, water and groceries — I saved over £400 a month. It’s important to have some independence in a marriage and Em’s not the kind of person to go looking at my bank statements (which I keep locked in a filing cabinet, just in case). But if she had looked she’d have seen not the usual fluctuations but steady growth. By the end of June, my account stood at £2,518.23.

Then the trouble broke at school. It’s no excuse but when people are stressed they sometimes relapse. Not that I thought of it as a relapse at the time. The plan made sense. We had exceeded our monthly target, so where was the harm in rounding down the sum in my account and gambling the rest? The sum was modest, a mere £118.23. If I blew it, nothing was lost; if I got lucky, we could use the winnings for a holiday. I felt elated to renew old friendships: Mister Wheel, Mrs Fruit, Master Poker and Miss Slot. And to begin with I was — which you can be, believe me — a prudent gambler. Through skill and guile, I was up £500. But then my winnings went, through unbelievable bad luck, in less than fifteen minutes, late at
night. In the old days I’d have had to wait till the banks opened before I could resume. It’s not like that now, thanks to credit cards, debit cards and the Internet. Four hundred pounds, a month’s savings, which I could soon make up, seemed a reasonable extra outlay. I had no intention of gambling the other £2,000. But. What more can I say? You know the rest.

Frankly, I despise myself at times.

If I tell you that by late August my debts stood at £9,700, I am of course including the £3,200 towards IVF treatment that would and should have been in my savings account by then: on paper, my various overdrafts and IOUs amounted to only £6,500. That still sounds a lot to you, I dare say. It does to me, too. But there are always people out there who’ll lend you money, at a price. I’d been thinking of resorting to them but thanks to Ollie’s impulsive bet I now didn’t need to: £10,000 was in my grasp. The neatness of it — down to the £300 surplus I could gamble with — seemed preordained.

Perhaps then you can understand why, despite the shame and guilt swirling through me that Sunday evening, I also felt optimistic. 1—1, with tennis to come, and Ollie the better player, didn’t look promising. But since we’d first agreed to the bet, several things had changed. First, if Ollie was dying he wouldn’t need my money. Second, even if his tumour was benign, Daisy might decide to leave him and if she did, and we were living together, she would settle the debt for me. Third, more immediately, Ollie was drinking heavily: at this rate, he’d be in no condition to compete.

I had those three reasons to feel hopeful, plus one more. If Ollie won, he would be too much of a gentleman to insist I pay him; and if he lost, he would be too much of a gentleman to wriggle out of paying me. Till the weekend, I’d feared losing
everything — my house, car, computer, job and wife. Now I stood to secure them again. With luck I might even upgrade them.

I left the Indian Pearl with two large brown bags, goo soaking through the bottom. Though the roads were still wet, the sky had cleared to the west, and behind, in the wing mirror, the dusk turned from salmon to tangerine. Daisy was sleeping, or pretending to, as she had on the way, her hunched body turned towards the nearside window. I knew she had come reluctantly, at Ollie’s insistence, because — stupidly jealous as he now was — he didn’t want her being around Milo in the kitchen; since she’d got in the car, we’d barely spoken. I felt cheerful, nonetheless, as if restored to her favour. Whether as a friend, lover or future husband didn’t matter so long as I was somewhere in her life.

The rain began again as we left the main road, sloshing across then pounding at the windscreen — like the rinse cycle of a washing machine. I turned my headlights on and upped the tempo of the wipers, to no effect. The road became a river, the banks either side our only guide. I could imagine the engine dying and a tide rising high between the hedges, the car surfing over them on the crest of a bore and riding out through the meadows to the sea. Love for Daisy flooded through me. I felt elated rather than scared.