You Me Everything Page 9

  But I can see immediately that it’s just a black car, similar to Adam’s but a different make and model. “That’s not him, sweetheart. But don’t worry—he’ll be here.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we are still outside. I’ve now told William not to worry approximately twelve times, so often that he appears not to be. Which is more than can be said for me. I glance at my phone, but there’s no response to the message I sent. I briefly consider walking to the château to look for him, but unless we go along the road—which takes longer than the footpath—he could already be on his way and we’ll risk missing him. I try dialing his number, but it goes straight to voice mail.

  “Can I have a quiz while we’re waiting?” William asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “A quiz.”

  “Oh, okay.” William is a big fan of quizzes; at least he is when he gets all the questions right. He’s not old enough yet to have mastered his good loser face.

  “What’s the capital of Spain?”

  “Madrid,” he tuts. “You already knew I know that one.”

  I start pacing up and down. “What’s the longest river in the world?”

  “That’s another geography one.”

  “So?”

  “So you’ve just done a geography one. Can’t we have something else?”

  “Does this mean you don’t know the answer?”

  “No, it’s the Amazon. Can I have another question now?”

  I look at my watch and decide that if it gets to nine o’clock and he still hasn’t shown up, I’ll wake Natasha up to stay with William, and I’ll go off looking for Adam.

  “Mum?”

  “Er. Okay. Spell hydrochloric.”

  “Oh, not spelling,” he groans. “What about movies?”

  “Right,” I sigh. “What was the name of Superman’s father?”

  “Jor-El.”

  “Well done.”

  Natasha appears at the door in an oversize T-shirt stretching languorously. “I’m glad you’re up. Will you wait here with William in case Adam arrives?”

  She rubs her eyes. “I’m not going anywhere. William and I will sit here and have a chat about . . . What would you like to chat about, William?”

  “Can you give me a movie quiz?”

  “Excellent idea!” Natasha says. “Right: name one of the lead actors in Hitchcock’s 1963 version of The Birds.”

  Chapter 20

  I emerge from the woodland pathway and head straight to the château’s grand doors. When I can’t find Adam in any of the obvious places, I discover Ben on reception.

  “He did mention that he’d taken the day off, Jess—and that he was going to the Vézère Valley.”

  My shoulders relax. “He’s definitely going then. William seemed to think that he was being picked up forty-five minutes ago, and I can’t get hold of him.”

  “Have you tried his cottage?”

  Adam lives five minutes from the château, away from the guest accommodations, in a small cottage on the edge of the grounds. He tried to show me round a few days ago, but I only glanced in to be polite, uncomfortable with this level of insight into the life he lives these days.

  His cottage is rougher around the edges than any for the guests, with a stone roof, a peeling blue door and weathered walls surrounded by swishing grasses and wild orchids. From what I saw, inside looked lived-in too, with overflowing bookshelves, stacks of letters, a well-stocked wine rack and old photographs fighting for space on an ancient-looking mantelpiece.

  As I arrive at the front, my pulse is racing out of proportion to my levels of exertion. I hesitate before giving a sharp knock, only realizing as the door nudges open that it’s unlocked.

  “Adam? It’s me.” I push through and step in.

  Then I shriek. Or possibly yelp. Either way, it’s louder than I expected. But when you’ve walked in on a woman whose blouse is wide open, exposing a lacy, barely there bra, it’s difficult to know what is the appropriate response.

  Adam leaps away from Simone, as she turns away to button herself up. Then he starts blustering and puffing and demanding to know why I didn’t knock.

  “I did knock!” I protest, my cheeks glowing crimson. “You’d left the door open!” I hold my hand over my eyes, a reflex action that is hopelessly ineffective at unseeing a single thing I’ve just seen.

  “That must have been me, sorry.” Simone smooths down her skirt and straightens her hair, acquiring an air of such angelic innocence you’d think I’d just walked in on her giving a Bible reading.

  “It’s . . . Look, it’s fine,” I say, backing out of the door, unable to look either of them in the eye. “Thank God I didn’t send William though. I’d only come to see what time this rafting trip was taking place. The poor kid seems to think you should’ve been there nearly an hour ago.”

  “I can’t take him rafting today,” Adam replies. “I’m having a day off with Simone.”

  Simone folds her arms with a satisfied smile as I feel my chest stiffen.

  “But you and I discussed this trip yesterday, Adam. You just can’t say these things to a ten-year-old, then change your mind.”

  “I’ll take him rafting at some point, but not today,” he continues, breezily. “I can’t today.”

  “But you said you could!” I argue.

  “No, I didn’t.” He shakes his head as exasperation grips me by the throat.

  “You did, Adam.”

  But he refuses to rise to an argument, despite the angry heat of Simone’s glare. “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Jess. William came to ask me about this trip when I was fixing a leaky pipe in one of the bedrooms. It was about to destroy a carpet I’d only recently paid through the nose for. I was distracted.”

  All I can think about is William, sitting on the step outside our cottage, clutching his backpack, tired but buzzing after a sleep fragmented from excitement. And how on earth I’m going to break this to him.

  “So you’re saying you didn’t promise him you would take him today?”

  “No, he did not,” Simone interrupts tartly.

  Adam’s eyes dart sideways. “Well, you weren’t there, Simone, to be fair.” She goes to respond but decides to shut up.

  “Look, Jess, I can’t remember exactly what I said,” he continues. “I did agree we could go rafting—which we can—but I wouldn’t have told him we could do it today, because I’m busy. At the time, I just needed to get rid of him.”

  My incredulity starts to bubble into something far stronger. “What?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Whatever’s been said, the fact is he can’t go, Jess,” Simone shrills.

  “But Adam has promised, Simone,” I say calmly, trying to reason with at least one of them.

  “Well, he’ll have to just get over it, won’t he?” she spits. “Besides, it wasn’t a promise.”

  “Everything’s a promise when you tell a ten-year-old you’ll do something with him,” I fire back.

  A psthhwwhwh sound is released from Simone’s mouth, like she’s got a puncture.

  Adam glances between the two of us, then settles his eyes on me. “Jess. We did the canyoning only two days ago. I had it in my head that I could maybe take him at some point next week.”

  I think of William in his daft swimming trunks last night and feel a surge of fury. “So we’ve come all this way, and he only gets to spend proper time with you once a week?”

  “You can’t even book it at this short of notice,” Adam continues, ignoring me. “I didn’t realize he was talking about today. It was he who suggested ‘about eight thirty,’ and I thought he was talking . . . generally. Which was stupid, with hindsight, but like I say, I was distracted. I’m sorry, but I will take him.” He glances sideways at Simone and adds: “Just not today.”

  I make one mo
re attempt to reason with him. “Adam,” I say quietly, my voice shaking. “It doesn’t even need to be rafting. It can be anything. He just wants to be with his dad. Whom he loves. That’s why we’re here.”

  Adam falters. For a moment, I’m convinced he’s going to do the right thing.

  “If you must know, Jess, we are booked into a Mr. and Mrs. Smith hotel,” Simone announces. “It cost a fortune and takes ages to get a room there. So there’s absolutely no way we can’t go.”

  I stand there, my nails digging into my palms, as I process the news that Adam will be spending his day off in bed with his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend rather than being with William. I suddenly can’t bear to be in the same room as the two of them.

  I spin round and march away. Adam follows me to the door and calls out after me. “I’ll sort something out to do with William as soon as I’m back. I promise.”

  I stop at the end of the path, my veins sizzling as I turn back. And I’m afraid I just can’t help myself. “As I’ve discovered firsthand, Adam: your promises don’t mean a thing.”

  Chapter 21

  I can’t pretend my own father was perfect. But he would have been if it weren’t for one thing. By the time I was a teenager, I could no longer pretend to ignore Dad’s drinking. In between the many times he was wonderful, there were others when he was an utter disaster. And alcohol was always involved.

  There was the day he’d crashed the car into our front wall after convincing himself he was safe to drive to the off-license, or the night we’d found him slumped on the porch, unable to get his key into the door.

  These things didn’t happen all the time; there were long months between his blowouts, not days. But I need to remind myself of them sometimes, when Adam pulls one of his stunts and I am consumed with fury on my son’s behalf. There is a crucial difference though. My dad had his problems, but he did something about them. And he did it for Mum and me.

  My parents had met shortly after he’d qualified as an accountant and got a job at Arthur Mitchell in Manchester, where she had been a secretary since leaving school at sixteen. My mother had always filled her spare time with baking, and every Friday, she’d bring a selection of whatever she’d made that week to work: gooey chocolate eclairs, coffee and walnut slices, zingy lemon-tons with crunchy sugar toppings.

  “I finally asked her out over a Battenberg,” Dad used to joke.

  They went to the cinema on their first date, to see The Evil Dead, which was apparently Mum’s idea, and were engaged four months later.

  It’s not a daughter’s place to assess her parents’ marriage, but there is no question that I assumed it to be happy when I was growing up. I sometimes look back and wonder how I concluded that. Because there were occasions when an objective observer would’ve called it anything but.

  * * *

  —

  When I was sixteen, I won a part in the school play, an ambitious production of Les Misérables. It was a small role—as a tavern wench—with only one line, but I took it very seriously. And on the first night, I found myself anxiously waiting backstage to make my theatrical debut, when I overheard a group of sixth formers laughing.

  “There’s puke all over the boys’ bogs. Mr. Jones slipped in it, nearly went arse over tit. Degsy reckons it was someone’s dad, completely shit-faced.”

  Cold recognition seeped into me. I knew who they were talking about; when Mum had driven me to the performance an hour and a half before it started, Dad had already hit the bottle.

  I stepped onstage with dread eating me up from inside and gazed across the packed assembly hall, as I sought out my parents’ faces.

  I had a single line to deliver, but when I saw my father, the words dried up in my mouth.

  Dad was slumped three rows from the front, fast asleep, while Mum sat stiffly by his side, her face gaunt, her eyes glistening in the stage lights. I got the line out eventually, but by the time the play finished, I felt like the whole school knew what had happened.

  That weekend, we barely spoke, and I couldn’t look at him. I just lay in my room, listening to rain hiss on the windows, still simmering with fury. Mum tried to convince me nobody knew who it was, but it became evident on Monday, when it was the talk of the school canteen, that she was wrong.

  When I emerged from my room for dinner that night, Dad looked at me nervously.

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay,” he said, as he placed the salt and pepper on the table and Mum walked over carrying a homemade lasagna straight from the oven. “But . . . I don’t think what I did was that bad.”

  Mum froze, incredulity on her face.

  My breath hovered in my mouth as I tried to anticipate what she was going to say. But for a moment she didn’t say anything; you could just see this rage blistering up inside her, fighting its way out.

  “YOU FUCKING IDIOT,” she screamed.

  Then she lifted the bubbling casserole dish and smashed it right across the kitchen. I heard Dad gasp and felt my own jaw drop as we gazed at the wreckage of glass and tomato sauce, hot and thick as it slipped down the wall.

  For a moment, Mum glared at it, her hand trembling over her mouth, as if she simply couldn’t believe what she’d just done. Then she ran out of the room.

  I looked up at Dad, in the mild shock that puts your brain on autopilot. I stood up silently to go and get a pair of rubber gloves. He stooped down with a newspaper and started piecing shards of glass into it.

  And that was when I became aware that he was crying.

  “I’m sorry, Jess,” he whispered, unable to look at me. “I’m so sorry.”

  But I wasn’t ready to let him off the hook. “I’m sure you are, Dad. Just like all the other times. But this is just going to keep happening, isn’t it? You’ll hate yourself for doing this stuff but you never change. You just keep getting pissed, keep letting it ruin—everything.”

  His lips parted, his face wet with tears. He looked crushed by my words, but I wasn’t going to let it go. “I am devastated by you sometimes, Dad. Mortified that you’d behave like this. All for a stupid drink. Don’t you realize what you’re doing to me and Mum?”

  He went to his first AA meeting three days later.

  * * *

  —

  My father’s transition from dysfunctional alcoholic to recovering alcoholic was not easy, but then I don’t suppose it ever is.

  He stuck with the meetings, though don’t let me give the impression that he simply signed up, sat in a circle and saw the light. He had a love-hate relationship with AA and never really clicked with the other members. But he persevered, because he knew in his bones he couldn’t get through without the meetings.

  In the first year, there were times when he seemed to visibly teeter on the edge of slipping. At social events, Mum and I would hold our breath as we watched acquaintances urging him to have a drink, bewildered by why anyone would stick to lemonade at a party. In those days, the look in his eyes seemed to change when he even smelled booze, as if he was frightened of it.

  It was hard to know how to support him sometimes. We didn’t want to be in his face, constantly asking if he was all right. But there were times when I had to tell him how proud I was. That “one day at a time” had added up to something that once had felt impossible.

  We played tennis together one summer evening about eighteen months after he’d had his last drink, and I remember him smashing the ball past me. I didn’t mind losing to him; his rediscovered vitality made me happy.

  “Who’d have thought you’d be this healthy a couple of years ago?” I said. “You’re amazing, really.”

  “Give it a rest, Jess—I’m a middle-aged man with a squidge round my belly no amount of tennis will shift.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  And I must’ve looked slightly deflated, because his voice lowered a bit, and he said: “Of course I do. But amazin
g isn’t the word. I’m just . . . determined not to go back to how I was. So you’ll never need to worry about that. I promise.”

  And I never have. Because he’s been there for all three of us every single day for seventeen years. Supporting us. Loving us. And doing it all completely sober.

  Chapter 22

  I dread telling William that today’s rafting trip with his dad is off. But he doesn’t kick up an enormous fuss, or complain or shout or any of the things he’d be within his rights to do. He simply listens in silence as I conjure up lies on Adam’s behalf.

  “He ended up having to step in and help a family who’d lost their passports,” I say. “They wouldn’t have been able to get home otherwise. He’ll definitely do something with you soon though.”

  His bottom lip tightens as he lowers his head, and when I’ve finished, he leaps up and runs to his bedroom, closing the door behind him. I give him some space for ten minutes, before taking decisive action and organizing an alternative day out with him and Natasha.

  We drive to Lac du Causse, near Brive, about an hour away, where there’s a sandy beach, clear water suitable for swimming—and pedalos.

  “Fancy a go? This is what Grandma suggested,” I tell him brightly.

  “Hmm. Okay,” he says with a shrug, but only because the iPad is out of battery.

  He perks up as soon as we’re on the water. Largely because there’s something apparently hilarious about a grown woman pedaling for her life every time she comes within twenty feet of a windsurfer. By the time we’ve navigated around the lake, my knees are on fire and, nostalgic or not, I’m hugely relieved to be back on dry land.

  As William messes about collecting sticks at the edge of the water, I spread out on a beach towel next to Natasha as she slips into the kind of deep sleep that eludes me these days. We laze in that position for a good couple of hours before returning to Château de Roussignol in the late afternoon.

  It’s as we’re heading into the cottage that Natasha nudges me. “Someone’s waving at you.”