‘Does Mum know he spoke to you?’ Chloe asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘So… no!’
‘Correct, Chloe! I did not have a heart-to-heart with our mother about our father’s illicit affair with a woman half his age.’
‘What did Dad actually say?’ Liv wanted the details. She obviously couldn’t bear the thought of Noah knowing more than her.
Noah rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Not much.’
‘Go on.’
‘Look, we were having a drink together one night, around the time things were really rocky with Mum. She was out, so it was just the two of us in an empty house, with a bottle of Scotch. He was in a bit of a state. Not like his usual self at all. We drank… a lot. We talked.’
‘And?’
‘And he told me what had been going on.’ Noah regretted getting into this, but it was too late now. Liv and Chloe both looked appalled.
‘So, go on. What did he say?’ Liv pushed.
Noah felt no desire to share the details of his father’s single-malt-laced, self-pitying monologue with his sisters – not least because he didn’t want them to feel the same disappointment he had, at the realisation that their dad was no different from the next guy. Nor did Noah want to dwell too much on the sympathetic ear that Jonathan had automatically assumed would be forthcoming, when he confessed to his relationship with Megan. In choosing to unburden himself to Noah, his father had seemed to be including him in a club that Noah had no desire to be identified as a member of. So instead what he said was, ‘He obviously felt guilty. Wanted to explain his actions.’
‘That was it? He felt guilty?’ Liv was like a woodpecker stabbing away at a tree.
‘More or less.’ Their silence forced him to elaborate. ‘He talked about how he’d really fallen for Megan. How it had surprised him that he was still capable of falling in love, at his age.’
‘He never talked about any of this to me.’ Chloe sounded aggrieved. There it was again, their desperate jockeying to be the chosen one. It was pathetic really.
‘And what did you say in response?’ Liv pecked on and on – it was amazing that her beak didn’t snap clean off.
Noah felt his headache pulse. ‘I don’t really remember.’ Liv snorted. ‘I didn’t excuse him, if that’s what you’re implying. I was shocked and mad with him. But at the end of the day, it was his life.’ He wanted to get off the topic of his father’s infidelity and the sticky subject of secrets. ‘What can I say? It was one booze-soaked conversation, a long time ago. I didn’t think there was any point mentioning it.’
The noise in the hallway was back, adding yet another layer of irritation to what was turning into a fairly exasperating morning.
‘But if you’d told us, we might have been able to do something!’ Liv just wouldn’t accept that shit happened. You couldn’t always fix things.
‘So their divorce is my fault now, is it?’ He heard the anger in his voice.
‘I’m not saying that,’ she snapped back.
‘It sounds to me like you are.’ They were like kids again, bickering and scoring points. ‘I didn’t think it was my place to go wading into our parents’ marriage, pointing fingers and blaming Dad for fucking it all up. Besides, if you want someone to blame, how about Megan? If she’d walked away at the first sign of something between her and Dad, then he would very probably have stuck with Mum and we could have stayed one big happy family!’
There was a beat while they all took a moment to contemplate how far away from a big happy family they were at that precise moment.
Liv held back for all of two seconds before opening her mouth again. ‘Is this why you’re so set against Megan getting a decent share? You want to punish her for seducing Dad?’
Noah sighed. He felt exhausted and it was only 11.15 a.m. ‘Do I need a rational, reasoned argument for why I don’t feel predisposed to give away my inheritance to the woman who wrecked our parents’ marriage?’
‘No.’ Liv and Chloe together, this time.
‘Good!’ Finally something they agreed on.
‘So…’ Noah rubbed his forehead, trying to scrub away his headache, ‘given that we now have Liv’s patented algorithm to settle this, why don’t we let her do her stuff with the maths? You give us a shout when you’ve got the final score on the doors worked out, and we can reconvene and start arguing again.’
Chloe’s plaintive ‘We’re not arguing’ went unheard, or at least uncommented on.
Noah stood up. He simply couldn’t stand being in the room any longer. ‘If we’ve nothing else to discuss, I’m off for a shower and something to eat.’ He walked over to the door.
He was behaving like a bit of tosser and he knew it, but he felt no inclination to stop. He blamed his banging head and the not sleeping; and the twenty unanswered calls to Josie; and bloody Liv with her stupid idea about divvying up the estate according to time served! And that damn noise. He couldn’t believe Liv and Chloe hadn’t noticed it. An erratic clatter followed by quick thudding footsteps, then another clatter, then another. It sounded like something being dropped or thrown, repeatedly. It was irritating, and very distracting.
He stood up, walked over to the door. And then, for old times’ sake, Noah found himself unable to resist having the last word. ‘Cheer up, Liv, at this rate we’ll be through by lunchtime.’ He yanked open the door and stepped out into the hallway – where the mystery of the noise was finally solved.
Arthur was posed, halfway up the stairs, his arm raised, mid-throw. Noah tried to moderate his tone to be child-friendly. It wasn’t the little guy’s fault that his mother was an uptight, anal control-freak. You can’t pick your family.
‘What are you up to, Buddy?’
‘Just playing?’
