The ghost raised his hand to his face and ran it along his jaw, obscuring his mouth. Noah matched his father’s gesture by raising his glass to his lips again and finishing off his drink. Jonathan looked away, staring out at the night, ignoring Noah’s questions. His face, in profile, was calm, untroubled.
‘Dad!’ Nothing. Noah ploughed on. ‘If she didn’t have a clue, then I don’t know what we’re supposed to make of that. Is it some sort of message? Because if it is, it would have been a lot simpler to bloody tell us!’
Jonathan didn’t respond to his son’s raised, slurred voice. Noah could hear his words sliding and colliding into each other. Maybe he wasn’t making total sense. Maybe he wasn’t as articulate and restrained as Liv, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have the same right to express himself. No one could stop him talking. Not Liv, or his father, or Josie!
‘And what about Mum? Thirty-five years of marriage: doesn’t that count for anything? Cos that’s the real nastiness in your weird little plan, treating her as if she’s on a par with Megan. Not even a mention in the will. I know you two weren’t close any more. Who am I kidding? “Not close” – you couldn’t stand each other by the end, could you? But she’s still our mother. She still loved you, and honoured her vows to you for all those years, before you shat on your marriage from such a great height with your grubby little fling. Which apparently wasn’t a fling! Which was… true lurve. Or so you claimed.’ Frustration, coldness and fatigue mixed with Scotch, even a ten-year-old malt, were not conducive to coherence. ‘And yet…’ Noah refilled his glass, not spilling a drop, despite the buzz in his head and the tremble in his hand. ‘Here’s the final slap in the face: there’s five thousand pounds for the carer! A total fucking stranger gets more than Mum. That was very generous of you, Dad. And totally effing vindictive!’ He raised his empty glass to his father again, this time in mock salute. ‘This Lisa Browne woman must have been something quite special to warrant such a big chunk of change.’
Jonathan continued to stare out at the darkness, unmoved by Noah’s appeals and accusations. Impervious as ever.
Noah realised it was pointless. His father was never going to answer his questions, because this wasn’t a real conversation. It was a figment of his tired, alcohol-soaked imagination, and his anger. In direct response to this sober thought entering his head, the image of Jonathan faded, leaving an empty chair.
‘Sod you, Dad!’
All their cosy chats, all the banter, all the joking and the joshing before he died. His father had known he was dying. They all had! Surely it had been the perfect opportunity for some home truths. But not a word about any of this. Not an ounce of trust. No honesty on either side. Just two blokes meeting up every month or so, drinking expensive Scotch, telling each other self-aggrandising tales! Cricket, work, politics – safe topics, nothing personal. No weaknesses, no failures, no fears; just a studious, complicit avoidance of anything that was difficult.
Their list of no-go topics had been long.
The affair – never mentioned, unless by an awkward slip. The fiction being that the marriage had been coming to an end anyway. That Megan simply happened to come along at the right time. That his father wasn’t just another randy old bloke with an insatiable hankering for a younger model.
Then there was Megan herself – typecast as the home-maker, not the home-wrecker. A person who always had to be treated with respect and deference, while their mother was only spoken of obliquely, with a dismissive icy politeness, as if she was a vaguely remembered distant relative.
And finally – the biggest charade of them all – Jonathan’s illness: only ever discussed as if it was an adversary that could be beaten by superior wit and cunning. Or, even more ludicrously, as nothing more than a minor inconvenience, with comic ‘anecdote-rich’ side-effects.
What a steaming pile of horse shit! It was always a performance of a conversation, based on artifice and avoidance rather than real communication. Well, it was too late to call out his father now.
Noah’s throat hurt and his chest felt congested. When he tried to clear his sight by wiping his face with his sleeve, he was confused to find it wet.
He felt ill. His head hurt and he was cold and sweaty. The thought of hauling his aching body upstairs was too much. A small, soft, deep-buried part of him wanted to wail like a baby. Instead he swayed over to his father’s bed, dragged back the duvet and collapsed, face-down on the mattress. As the world rocked and tilted around him, indifferent to his distress, Noah rolled onto his side, pulled the covers around him like a cocoon and waited for unconsciousness to ease his symptoms.
Chapter 39
CHLOE HAD wanted them to have a nice evening together, as a family, just like in the old days.
It hadn’t panned out like that.
They had all been out of sorts. Megan had been as vague as ever, Liv totally distracted and Noah prickly. The way he kept upping and walking away from the dinner table had bordered on downright rude. Even her suggestion of them each picking a memento of their father – which she thought would be a nice trigger for some positive memories – had somehow soured the atmosphere even further. Chloe had hoped their mother’s presence might change the mood, stir up some of the affection that used to bind them so tightly, but Eloise had seemed disinterested or, if not exactly disinterested, then indifferent. It was as if she had lost patience with them, and yet she’d only been in Scarborough for a
