‘Thank you.’ She smiled, too late for him to see it. Liv felt sad – they seemed to spend their lives heading off in opposite directions. For a second she contemplated getting up and going out into the garden with them, but a fat splatter of rain against the window dissuaded her.
A lie-down seemed too much like giving in, but a bath… A bath sounded like bliss.
For a change, there seemed to be lots of hot water. Liv scanned the bathroom shelves and selected a bottle of Radox with a centimetre of dark-green bubble bath in the bottom. That had to have been her father’s. She poured it all in, sluicing out the bottle to get at the last few drops. A strong scent of pine rose from the foaming water – another jolt from the past: the reassuring fragrance creeping under the door into her darkened bedroom, as she drifted off to sleep as a child.
Liv tried to lock herself in the bathroom, only to find that the bolt, which used to provide a sanctuary from the invasions of her siblings, had been painted over. She undressed regardless. They were all out; no one was going to bother her. She eased herself into the running water, relishing the heat. A bath at this time of day – in fact at any time of day – was an indulgence. Liv was, by nature and necessity, a shower person.
But the problem with a bath was that it encouraged reflection.
And there was a lot for Liv to reflect on.
Their mother, for a start. Having her in the house was a fresh complication, but one that, the more she thought about it, Liv welcomed. Eloise had always had an edge of impatience about her, an edge that had been sharpened, not dulled, by age. It was a characteristic they shared, indeed prided themselves on. Strong women – like mother, like daughter. Or at least like one daughter. In the current circumstances, Eloise’s ‘cut the crap’ attitude might come in useful. Something was needed to drag them all out of the morass they seemed to have sunk into. Perhaps her presence would shake Chloe out of her slump, and rein in Noah’s randomness. Perhaps? That Chloe was already monopolising their mother was no great surprise. Old habits died hard. Liv would need to break them up at some point, in order to engineer an audience alone with Eloise. She needed to establish whether Noah’s take on their mother’s intentions, and expectations, was accurate.
That was the problem: if the division of their father’s estate had, as she’d expected, been simply a matter of arithmetic, Liv would have been fine. She was a good administrator – thorough, accurate, scrupulously honest – but it was obviously far more complicated than that. What they each wanted, and thought was fair, was so complex and nuanced that she worried they might never arrive at a solution.
Take Chloe wanting to keep The View, for utterly sentimental reasons. It made no sense. Surely Chloe must know that. As always, she was hanging on to the certainty of the past, because she was frightened of the future. The problem was that Chloe had no idea what sort of future she wanted. She’d never been able to make up her own mind, about anything.
Liv turned off the hot tap and lay back in the water.
At least Chloe wasn’t motivated by greed, unlike their brother. Noah plainly wanted to get as much as he could from the estate – which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given his fluid relationship with money. Noah could be generous, but he was also profligate, always preferring the indulgence over the necessity. Josie had been a stabilising influence on him, but her common sense was a counterbalance, not a cure. She had not, it would seem, managed to fundamentally change Noah’s easy-come, easy-go attitude. He would never be sensible or steady. Perhaps it was his job that gave him a taste for the high life. A job that was, in itself, frivolous and self-indulgent – especially for a man with a family.
Liv’s own thoughts on what to do with their inheritance were a congealed mess. She couldn’t deny that the money would come in useful. It would, for example, cover the boys’ education for years to come. And she had high hopes for Freddie and Arthur; not medicine necessarily, but certainly – with luck and hard work – professional lives filled with value and purpose. Such careers tended not to come cheap. But in truth it was less the actual legacy and more the principles at play that were troubling her. Their father had obviously been trying to teach them something with his will; and Liv, ever the diligent student, wanted to correctly decipher and fulfil his last-ever lesson. If his objective had been to get them to behave at their best, then that’s what she needed to steer her siblings to do.
The problem was Liv wasn’t sure what was for the best. She felt horribly conflicted about Megan and uncertain as to what their mother expected, or deserved. The whole thing was riddled with emotion and irrationality.
But somehow they were going to have to come up with an acceptable solution, and she needed them to do so by the close of play tomorrow at the latest. Because whatever happened, Liv couldn’t tolerate this going on beyond the weekend. She simply couldn’t. She hadn’t the time or the mental energy for it.
Enough! She needed to concentrate on herself – if only for a few minutes.
She stretched out in the hot, pine-scented water and took an inventory. A sight-check first, looking for signs of oedema. There was some around her lower abdomen, in her finger joints and her ankles, but it
