‘Are you going to tell Mummy I was naughty?’ he asked.
Noah jiggled Freddie’s arm, pushing his nose into his cone. ‘Course not. What do you take me for? A snitch?’
Unity restored, Freddie impressively licked the ice cream off the tip of his nose. He grinned when Noah tried to mimic him and failed. They had a happy few minutes comparing tongue lengths, and listening to the seagulls screaming above their heads, before Noah decided to do his bit for his eldest nephew’s moral education.
‘It’s normal to get a bit ticked off when you don’t win, Fredster – I get that.’ The nickname was designed to soften the lecture. He didn’t want to sound too much like his father. ‘But you’re going to lose sometimes. It happens to us all. And it’s good to get used to the feeling and to know how to handle it.’
Freddie squinted at him, serious. ‘Why?’
‘Well, because…’ Noah didn’t really have a good answer for that, so he went for an honest one, ‘people will like you more if you’re a good loser.’ Freddie carried on licking his ice cream, and Noah felt the pressure to reclaim some street-cred with his nephew. ‘Besides, you aren’t ever going walk out of an amusement arcade with more money than you went in with. It’s not the way it works.’
Freddie stopped slurping his ice cream and asked, ‘Then why try?’
The boy was just one long series of awkward questions.
Noah decided it was time they headed home.
Chapter 21
THERE WERE good reasons why no one in their right mind did any gardening in December. The ground was unyielding and every plant seemed to be armed with spines or thorns. But to Megan, crouching in the big flower bed, her fingers turning blue, it was still preferable to being inside the house. With each handful of dead foliage she ripped out, she felt both better and worse. She was aware that she was casting herself as the victim and that her prostration, alone in the bleak garden, with the wind off the North Sea scouring her skin, verged on attention-seeking behaviour. But as there was no one watching, it was a performance that was doing her very little good. The thought of them pecking over the details of Jonathan’s legacy, as they had picked their way mindlessly through the lunch she’d prepared, made her angry. She grabbed another handful of dead peony leaves and yanked. She should have cleared the garden in the autumn, but that had been impossible. Her every waking hour, or so it seemed, had been dedicated to caring for Jonathan by that point. As a result, the garden had run wild. Her desire to tame it now was illogical. The way things were going, it seemed highly unlikely that she would be around to see the fruits of her labours.
The sound of a car engine broke into her thoughts. A dark-red BMW turned off the main road into the drive. Megan leant back on her heels and watched as it drove down the slope and stopped in front of the house. What now? Or, more accurately, who?
Another adversary?
The driver’s side door opened and a pair of elegant female legs clad in smart black boots appeared. Then, like a character out of a TV ad for something upmarket and expensive, Jonathan’s ex-wife Eloise emerged from the car.
She stood and looked up at the house.
Megan knelt on the frozen earth and watched her. She wanted to laugh at the contrast between the two of them. Eloise – smart, stylish, feminine, ‘dressed for the occasion’, but an occasion that was far more glamorous than the one she was gatecrashing; and Megan – bundled up in Jonathan’s waterproofs, an asexual lump of green and brown, crouched in the mud like a character in a Bruegel painting.
Eloise didn’t move. The drizzle dusting her dark hair gave it a silvery shimmer.
What was she waiting for?
Eloise had walked out of The View for the last time five years ago. A departure that Megan had not been present to witness. At the time she’d been glad to be as far away from the drama as possible, but there was escaping the fact that it had been her actions that had driven Eloise out of The View: the place she’d no doubt been carried over the threshold by a young, virile, vibrant Jonathan; the house she’d returned to after the births of three children; and the home where she’d raised those children and watched them grow. The View was where Eloise had lived with Jonathan, where she’d loved him and where she’d discovered he had betrayed her. And it was the place, according to Jonathan, that Eloise had vehemently sworn she would never return to, ever again – not over Megan and Jonathan’s dead bodies.
Maybe it was the memory of that curse that was causing Eloise to hesitate now.
One out of two. She hadn’t quite got her wish.
After what felt like for ever, Eloise finally headed up the steps and, to Megan’s shock, walked straight through the front door into the house.
Chapter 22
ELOISE HAD had absolutely no intention of coming to Scarborough.
And yet here she was.
Back home.
To her relief, no one appeared to welcome her when she stepped inside the house, which gave her a few moments to acclimatise. She examined her emotions and found, to her surprise, that she felt totally calm. She would need to be, judging by the increasingly strained pitch
