We Are Family Read online

  At nine thirty Sam was standing on the Angel’s fly bridge. A citronella candle burned in a windproof holder at his side, making the air smell like the lemon groves he’d used to walk through near Deià. He nodded his head, feigning interest in a discussion taking place between Ararat’s Parisian property lawyer, Luc Laporte, and the island’s biggest yacht broker, Jamie Dodd, about the relative merits of two competing motor-yacht designers.

  Sam sailed himself but, unlike Jamie and Luc, was no diesel-head. He had a schooner named Flight. It was small enough for him to crew on his own, to rig out and tack across the bay. Doing that on a clear day, with the sun on his skin, the wind pressed tight to the sails and the muscular flex of the sea on the tiller in his hand, he sometimes found himself overwhelmed by the simple harmony of it all.

  Happiness, he thought at such times, was not thinking at all. Happiness was being. Being in the right place. Or with the right person. But not needing to question it all. Which is what he’d caught himself doing daily – even hourly – of late.

  The last time Sam had been here on the Angel, he’d been with Tony. It had been lunchtime and they’d been planning ways of getting themselves a decent foothold in the burgeoning Croatian tourist industry. Everything had seemed so much simpler then. Certainty had seemed so attainable. Now, as Sam sipped desultorily at his champagne, he thought of Tony and wished him well.

  Tony had loved this boat. Or being seen on it at any rate. Sam smiled, remembering how his father-in-law would happily burn up a thousand bucks of fuel to hop between Palma and Ibiza old town, where he’d have the Angel moor up alongside Rachel’s favourite seafood restaurant, and wait there until he and Rachel had dined, before bringing them back home.

  Sam was the opposite. Whenever he could dissuade Claire from the city lights, he’d drive her to one of the island’s less fashionable hilltop restaurants, where they could sit and eat without being disturbed. He and Claire talked then, he felt, about themselves in a way which they never did otherwise. It was like the only way they could catch glimpses of the people they’d been when they’d first met, was by sweeping aside the clutter of the life they’d built together since.

  ‘The point being, Jamie, now is exactly the right time to invest,’ Luc was saying, ‘because that’s what no one else will be doing.’ Ash crumbled from Luc’s cigar on to the deck. ‘What do you think, Sam?’

  Both Luc and Jamie looked to him for support. Sam guessed the conversation had moved on to something other than boats, but was clueless as to what.

  ‘I think it’s a tricky one,’ he equivocated. ‘But go on,’ he said to them both, ‘I’m interested in hearing what the two of you think.’

  Nodding to the boat’s stewardess for more champagne, Jamie picked up the conversational baton. ‘It’s too big a risk,’ he declared. ‘I think it’s much safer to . . .’

  With a look, Sam warded off the stewardess from topping up his own glass. He didn’t want to drink. He felt no cause to celebrate. And he needed to remain alert. Looking back down the stairwell which led to the aft deck, he saw that Laurie was still there, being busily interviewed by a gaggle of Claire’s chattering friends. Where they, like Claire, were dressed in uniform black, Laurie wore a simple white dress. He’d watched her kick off her flat white Birkenstocks as she’d stepped aboard. He found her more beautiful than any of them, more beautiful than Claire, and hated himself for thinking it.

  She glanced up at him, before returning to her conversation as if he’d been no more than a shadow.

  Revenge? Malice? Entertainment even? Sam ticked off the boxes. Because it could have been any of them, Laurie’s motivation for being here. He didn’t believe for a second that she’d come to Mallorca to work. Not like Rachel did. And Claire now claimed to as well.

  ‘She is family, after all,’ Claire had told him as she’d swatted aside his protest over having invited Laurie to the party. ‘And it’ll also mean I can keep a close eye on her,’ she’d added, more realistically. ‘And, besides, Rachel asked me to.’

  No, Sam didn’t know why Laurie was here. What he did know, however, was that he wasn’t going to allow her to cause a scene. Not in front of all these people. Nor plant herself on this island – his island – like some rumbling epicentre threatening to rip his world apart. The circle of women around her opened up as Claire pointed to the bow of the boat. Laurie walked that way, out of Sam’s line of sight. He waited for Claire’s back to turn.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me, gentlemen,’ he then said.

  He hurried down the stairwell and then towards the bow. The chattering voices from the party faded behind him. Then, suddenly, he stopped.

  There she was, standing alone on the vessel’s prow, looking out to the harbour entrance, silhouetted against the shimmering Mediterranean night sky. Popular cultural references flew at him – Titanic, The French Lieutenant’s Woman – all of them romantic, and all of them doomed.

  He wanted to go to her, to get this over with as soon as possible. But there was too great a chance of being discovered there together, bathing in the moonlight like the lovers they’d once been.

  He ducked out of sight and sank into the shadows cast by the empty wheelhouse to wait.

  Alongside the Angel, another party was taking place on a boat called Moondance. Sam watched its immaculately attired skipper, resplendent in peaked cap and glistening epaulettes, standing by the passerelle and welcoming guests aboard. The two boats’ music mingled between them in a heady fusion, salsa from the Moondance and Parisian loungecore from the Angel, as chosen by Claire.

  Everywhere Sam looked – on the Moondance and back towards the Angel’s aft deck – he saw people smiling, crystal champagne flutes being raised, canapés being eaten and cigarettes burning like fireflies against the still dark sea.

  When finally he did hear Laurie’s footsteps padding softly towards him across the teak deck, he stepped from the shadows and into her path.

  Startled, she held up her hand to her chest. As she recognised him, her expression turned to bitterness.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘You know we do.’

  ‘What about?’

  Even now as he spoke, Claire could be walking up behind him unseen. ‘Us,’ he hissed.

  ‘There’s an us?’

  ‘Yes. No.’ He didn’t know what to say. ‘There was,’ he answered, ‘once.’

  Her expression gave nothing away. ‘Only from the way you acted at my uncle’s funeral, I was assuming that you and I had never met before.’

  A sense of unreality reigned over the situation. Just as he’d initially refused to believe what he’d seen with his own eyes as he’d stood at the lectern at Tony’s funeral, so a part of him persisted in refusing to believe it was possible that Laurie could genuinely be related to Claire. Or even be standing before him now. But it was true. And nothing was going to change it. Like it or not, this was the hand that fate had thrown him, and now it was up to him to deal with it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Even to him, the words sounded hopelessly inadequate.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About pretending you didn’t know me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’ For the first time, she’d raised her voice.

  ‘Listen . . . can we –’ He indicated the open wheelhouse door at his side.

  She completed his sentence for him: ‘– finish this discussion inside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why should I? You finished whatever we had a long time ago, Sam. What on earth makes you think I’ve got anything more to say to you?’

  ‘There are still things I need you to hear.’

  ‘So that you can feel better about yourself? Forget it.’

  She tried to push past him, but he stood his ground.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ she said.

  Without th
inking, he gripped her wrist. ‘Please . . . just for a minute.’

  ‘Let go,’ she warned him, ‘or I’ll scream.’ He recognised in her eyes a hardness he was only used to seeing in business rivals. He worried that it was him who’d put it there. Maybe he’d been crazy to think he could simply persuade her to go home quietly and walk back out of his life. But maybe crazy was how he’d always acted around her.

  ‘That’s what you’re here for anyway, isn’t it?’ he said, determined not to give up, determined at least to make her see what it was that she was about to do. ‘To scream: to get your own back on me: to let everyone know what a shit I am: to ruin me.’

  ‘Would you blame me if it was?’

  ‘No.’ He said it without hesitating. He said it because he knew that after the way he’d treated her she had every right. ‘But I wish you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ll give you two minutes,’ she told him, brushing past him as she stepped into the wheelhouse.

  Inside, an orange safety light glowed alongside the luminous green and yellow dials, but otherwise the room was a chamber of shadows. Sam was glad he couldn’t see her face. It made what he had to say easier. She stood with her back to the wheel.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘Why are you here, Laurie?’

  ‘Because Claire – your wife,’ she pointedly corrected herself, ‘invited me.’

  ‘No, I mean here on the island.’

  ‘Because Rachel – a member of your family and mine – invited me.’

  Frustration rose up inside him. ‘I mean why are you really here?’ he demanded.

  ‘To work.’ A harsh burst of laughter escaped from her. ‘Or did you think it was because of you?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Makes you feel stupid, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not knowing what’s going on. Not knowing why someone’s doing something. Why someone’s doing something to you.’

  ‘This isn’t a game,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ Here in the darkness, listening to her breathing so close, he could have been lying in bed beside her, wakeful in the middle of the night. ‘But I was, wasn’t I?’ she said. ‘To you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what it felt like, Sam. Afterwards. After you wrote to me. Or don’t you remember? Because that’s the thing about games, isn’t it, Sam? They’re not important once they’re over. You can just walk away from them and get on with real life.’

  But he did remember. It felt like it had happened today. ‘The reason I wrote was because I couldn’t bring myself to speak to you.’

  ‘You couldn’t bring yourself to speak to me,’ she slowly repeated. ‘To come on to me, yes. You managed that OK. And to fuck me. And even to tell me you’d fallen in love with me.’ Disbelief, bitterness, rose up in her voice. ‘But to call me on the phone. A big grown-up businessman like you. You couldn’t bring yourself to do that?’

  But that was where she was wrong. One call . . . He’d known at the time it would have been enough to make him leave Claire all over again. One call was something he hadn’t been able to risk, because one call would have made him the bad man he’d been trying so hard not to be.

  ‘Do you know what it felt like, Sam? Have you any idea what it felt like to be me after you did what you did?’

  He remembered how it had been when he’d first noticed her at Tony’s funeral. The sight of her – that initial glimpse – had filled him with such happiness that he’d wanted to call out to her, to run and hug her there and then. But then – just as fast – he’d remembered how he’d hurt her and he’d burned with shame. ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘We always have a choice.’

  He felt sickened by himself, by what he’d done. He suddenly no longer knew who the worse man was, the one who’d betrayed Claire, or the one who’d betrayed the woman he’d loved.

  ‘You’ve got to leave,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got to leave this boat and you’ve got to leave this island.’

  Silence, then: ‘What I do is my business. You’ve got no right to tell me to do anything.’

  They stared at each other.

  ‘Were you already engaged when you were with me?’ she then asked. ‘Had you already decided you were going to spend your life with Claire?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, and then, before he could prevent himself, out of some desperate need for exoneration, he added, ‘and I wasn’t a father either. I didn’t even know I was going to be. That had already happened, you see, before I met you. But Claire only told me she was pregnant when I got back.’

  ‘Laurie!’ a muffled voice called from outside.

  ‘I did what I thought was right,’ he told Laurie, before opening the door and calling outside, ‘In here, Claire.’

  ‘Well, will you look at you two,’ Claire said, lurching into the doorway and squinting into the darkness, ‘huddled in there together like a couple of old flames.’

  ‘I was just explaining to Laurie here –’ Sam started to say.

  ‘– about navigation,’ Laurie interrupted. ‘He was just explaining to me how you move from one place to the next. And about how easy it all is these days.’

  But somehow Claire missed the underlying anger.

  ‘How terribly dull of you, Sam,’ admonished Claire, slipping her arms around him and kissing him on the cheek. ‘Well, you’ve both hogged each other long enough. Now it’s time to come back and help me get this party really started.’

  Chapter X

  Stepmouth, April 1953

  ‘Boo!’

  Rachel jumped, as Tony leapt out from behind the wall and pinched her waist.

  ‘You scared me!’ she said, pretending to be cross, but she could feel her cheeks flushing as she spun round and smiled at him.

  Silently, she slipped the two-day-old note that she’d been clutching into her pocket, amazed that she’d ever doubted that its contents would come to pass. But they had. Tony was here. Outside the Baptist chapel at ten sharp on Saturday, just as he’d instructed in his secret note. He was as good as his word. She hadn’t had to use her alibi of waiting here for Pearl. She hadn’t had to answer any awkward questions. Instead, everything was going to plan.

  Tony had dressed up for the occasion and she was touched that he’d made the effort for her, just as she’d done for him. She was wearing her favourite red skirt and white blouse with a band in her hair. He was wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck and she could see where the wispy hair on his chest started.

  She bit her lip, amazed and ashamed at the level of her desire for him. Would he guess, she wondered, how much she’d been thinking about him, in the agonising three days since their last meeting? Would he know that as she’d spring-cleaned the parlour at home, she’d been doodling his name in the dust?

  Rachel knew that she’d die of shame if Tony knew the extent of her girlish fantasies. Convinced that they must show on her face, she tried to compose herself to look demure, but she couldn’t dampen down the excitement she felt, just seeing him. As if reading her mind, his eyes connected with hers, like magnets too powerful to be drawn apart.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, breaking the moment, ‘before anyone sees us.’

  He took her hand, helping her jump over the wall and then up towards the steep hillside footpath, which cut up through the fir trees behind the Baptist chapel. Rachel hurried to keep up with him, glad that she’d changed into her pumps at the last minute and had left her shoes behind.

  Tony was carrying a heavy grey army knapsack on his back, but he was still fast, hurrying up the hill and over the stone wall at the top. He stopped, waiting for Rachel to catch up and smiling at her, as she bent double, all pride gone, her hands on her knees, as she caught her breath. Then they were off again, down the rutted lane, across the paddock and onwards up again towards the copse at the top of the hill.

  Rachel hadn’t been
up here before, mainly because it had never occurred to her to take a short cut vertically uphill. But that was what it was like being with Tony. Only a few weeks ago, Stepmouth had seemed like the most dull, suffocating place she could imagine, but with Tony as her guide, Rachel had discovered new places in the town of her birth that she’d never dreamt existed.

  At first Rachel had been worried that they’d never get to see each other in private, but Tony had laughed at her, taking her to all his old haunts where they were sure to be alone: the disused gypsy caravan by the viewing gate on Summerglade Hill, the concealed suntrap on the roof of the lifeboat station, the shelter in the cinema car park, the garage behind the bakery and, once, to Tony’s shed.

  Rachel loved every minute of it. While her friends twittered about petty town gossip, Rachel carried herself aloft, aware that in one sentence she could silence them with the biggest bit of gossip of all time. She knew that she’d never let slip, though. Not to anyone. She was bursting to tell someone, especially Pearl, but somehow something stopped her. She knew that if she spoke about it and tried to describe how special what she had with Tony was, it might break the spell.

  She stopped, smoothing out her hair, noticing how the birds were singing all around them, the vividness of the shiny new grass and the scent of blossom in the air. Tony stopped for her, holding out his hand, and she laughed at his enthusiasm, running to catch up with him and place her hand in his.

  It must have taken forty minutes, but it felt like no time before they were at the top of the hill. They were totally alone, apart from the rabbits scurrying for cover behind the birch trees. Rachel glanced at the roof of the Baptist chapel far down below and the town that now looked like a model. With this perspective on it, it felt much easier to have escaped than she would ever have imagined and she couldn’t believe she’d been so worried. She’d told Bill and her mother she was going to Barnstaple with Pearl for the afternoon, which had got her off the hook. Now she said a silent prayer that Bill wouldn’t run into Pearl or her parents and discover Rachel’s lie. She couldn’t bear for anything to spoil today.