‘He had purchased two tickets in your names for a cruise on the Crystal Serenity. Around the Caribbean. For two weeks in January.’
‘Ah, no,’ Mr Ross said, shaking his head sadly. They look down at their hands. After a pause, he continues, ‘It’s not our way. We’re not fancy people. We don’t like restaurants and cruises and all that kind of thing. Jonno was always buying us that kind of thing and—’
‘We didn’t want him to,’ Mrs Ross says.
Davy had looked up the Crystal Serenity online, its ￡17million refurb complete with retractable roof above the Trident Grill, its seahorse-shaped swimming pool and on-deck golf course, a seemingly endless roster of dining opportunities. Something about it had the ring of battery-chicken coop. He could picture himself pressing his face against the cabin glass and screaming to be let off. ‘Enough with the langoustine fricassee!’ He couldn’t picture these two, who seemed more the cheese-on-toast kind, browsing the on-board diamond emporiums.
Ross’s father sighs. ‘We’re not … comfortable in those situations. It sounds ungrateful now I say it.’
Mrs Ross says, ‘We felt he was always trying to impress us, to shower us with gifts and whatnot. We didn’t know how to say that he was enough in himself. We were so happy to have him.’ She doesn’t gasp or sob, but the tears leak from the edges of her eyes. Her quietness fells Davy. ‘You see, we thought we couldn’t have any children. We were married for twenty years and nothing at all happened. We were devastated by that but we’d come to terms with another sort of life. Then, when I was 42, Jonno came along, out of the blue.’
Davy nods, swallows.
‘But children are only on loan,’ Mrs Ross is saying. ‘You can’t keep them. We hoped he would have his own child one day, so that he might realise what we feel … to love someone not because of what they do but because they are. That they exist is wonderful, they don’t have to do much more to make you proud.’ Mr Ross takes her hand. She is quiet, thinking. Then she says, ‘But somehow – and we don’t know how this happened – it was as if the way we were, the sort of people we are, well … it wasn’t the way he was going to be. And all these gifts, all these luxury things, were his way of saying he wanted us to be different. Oh I’m not making any sense. I’m just trying to describe the place we were in, with Jonno.’
It is not Davy’s place to tell them about Solomon Bradshaw, much as he would like to comfort them with a grandchild they are not yet aware of. That’s Ellie’s job.
Instead, Davy says, ‘Jon-Oliver, as I’m sure you’re aware, was a rich man. He had moved a sum of money, rather a large sum of money, into a company registered offshore. Do you have any idea who the beneficiary of that company might be?’
Mr Ross is shaking his head. ‘I know he had a few bob, but I didn’t understand his work. I don’t understand about wealth management, couldn’t get to grips with what he did. I make furniture for a living. Tables mostly. I take pieces of wood, and I sand them and turn them and create joints, and when they’re made, someone pays me for them, and they take the table away. And that I can understand. I used to ask him again and again, but his work stayed a mystery to me.’
Manon
‘Oh God, you need wine,’ Manon says, pouring Sauvignon Blanc into a glass and handing it to Ellie, who’s sitting at the kitchen table pushing a balled tissue into a nostril. Her eyes are red, her lips cracked. She takes the glass gratefully. ‘Hang on,’ says Manon, making for the doorway, ‘right back …’
Out in the hall, she calls ‘Fly! Fly?’ up the stairs.
No response. She can hear the bath running, knows what they’ll be doing up there. Fly will be lying on his bed reading his latest Anthony Horowitz novel, imagining himself a teen spy, while Solly squats on the carpet constructing the same dinosaur puzzle he works at every night: repetition being a source of unalloyed joy for the 2-year-old.
‘Fly!’ she shouts, a notch louder and with more irritation.
She weighs up her exhaustion and desire to talk to Ellie versus the need to intervene. She very much doesn’t want to heave her bulk up those stairs but knows that Fly’s total immersion in his book means Sol could be drawing on the walls while the bath overflows. Her belly creaks, she yawns, thinks, fuck it. ‘Turn the tap off!’ she bellows, her parting shot as she returns to her sister, whose floodgates have re-opened.
These are feelings entirely not put to bed, Manon thinks, looking at Ellie’s dissolving face.
‘Sorry,’ Ellie says.
‘Don’t be.’
‘It’s just … it’s just … there’s no chance of anything now,’ she says in a watery voice, plucking another tissue from the floral cube beside her, ‘for him and Solly. No chance of a father for Sol. That’s going to be a loss all his life. It’s a fucking tragedy.’ She breaks down again. ‘It, it, it can’t be undone. I can’t ever make this better for him.’
‘His parents are here, did Harriet tell you? There’s a chance to give Solly some grandparents. We should invite them to stay.’
‘I did,’ says Ellie. ‘They didn’t want to but they’re coming to meet Sol tomorrow.’
‘Is part of it,’ Manon begins, girding herself, ‘that there’s no chance for you and Jon-Oliver now?’
‘No. No, it’s definitely not that, not even in my unconscious. I’d never have gone back to him. Jon-Oliver was a great one for fresh starts, saying he was going to change, but you’d have been a complete moron to believe him. You know, when he first reappeared in the summer in London, he said, “I want to be good. I want to be a good father.” And I said, “Right, and you think Solly’s going to make you good? That’s a lot to ask of a 2-year-old.” He said, “I just think I can be a different person if you and Solly were in my life.’’’
‘So he wanted you back? What did you say?’
‘Told him he could leave me out of it.’
‘Are you hungry?’ asks Manon. ‘I could make the tarragon chicken thing.’
‘Christ, is that a threat?’
‘Crisps?’
‘Go on, then.’
In the getting up, opening a cupboard, emptying the Kettle Chips (sweet chilli flavour) into a bowl, Manon says, ‘What was it like with Jon-Oliver?’ Of course they’d discussed it in the past, but never in detail.
Ellie sighs. Sips her wine. ‘He had this slept-in face – and my God he could be funny. Slightly dangerous-funny – irreverent, bit close to the wire. We’d come home from a night out, he’d mix some cocktails and then we’d go out again. And the sex—’