As she lay on the bed in her towel, trying to empty her mind and exist in, if not a sexual mindset, at least not a stressful one, Maxi also started to cry.
“My mummy,” he sobbed. “My mummy.”
Quietly, illegally, she opened the interconnecting door.
“No,” she heard Adam say in a tone of infinitely weary stubbornness, “mymummy.”
She got dressed and went in to comfort her son. Adam left without a word. When she crept back into their room, he was asleep, his face toward the wall.
Two further nights passed. Then it was time to go home.
She almost cried with relief when they flew into Gatwick, with its small M&S full of expensive, environment-destroying plastic pots of fresh fruit. But as they rode the crowded train, more broken after the holiday than before it, her blissful return was ruined by a text.
Coralie, it read,arriving London Heathrow this Thursday 0500 hours. I will drop bags at my accommodation and arrive your place 0800. Jenny is not with me. We have parted ways. Please share with Daniel, as I do not have his UK number. Best wishes, Roger.
After a moment, a second text arrived:(Dad).
20
2022
Christmas 2017 had been the last time she’d seen him, tanned and vigorous in his belted slacks and tucked-in navy blue polo shirt, his remaining hair white and close-cropped, the very model of a retired major general. He was now seventy-three, an old man. Coralie was nearly thirty-nine, a grown adult with a home and family of her own. There was no need to wake before 5 a.m. every day, trembling and breathless, dreading her father’s reappearance in her life. Yet that was where she found herself. Her shoulder was so high from the stress that she gasped when she caught a glimpse of her reflection. Her eyelid began to twitch.
In some magical world, the world of text-based Instagram therapy posts, Coralie could have said:0800 hours, or eight a.m., as normal people say, doesn’t suit me or my young family to receive you, as that is just before our finely calibrated Montessori and school double drop-off, where every second counts.But honesty, negotiation, and compromise take place betweenpeople. In the beginning was the word, and the word wasRoger: Her father wasn’t a person; he was the law. At precisely 0800 hours on Thursday, she heard the rumble of ablack cab and the crunch of footsteps up the path. The bell rang. He had arrived.
Coralie opened the door, but it was Adam he greeted first, lunging forward with a handshake so firm it made his sinewy bicep perceptibly bulge. Over his checked shirt he was wearing what she always thought of as a right-wing jumper (lambswool, with a quarter zip and a ribbed collar; Tory Tom often wore one). Instead of his old R. M. Williams boots, he’d actioned a smart traveling sneaker in a soft brown leather. (“Your father has no problem spending money on himself,” she remembered her mother once telling her.)
“Bloody awful,” he was saying as they embraced.
“Oh, the flight?”
“Coughing and spluttering up and down the plane. If I didn’t have Covid before, I do now. Gosh, London’s changed, hasn’t it?”
“Oh?” This was almost certainly a comment about racial and ethnic diversity. “Well, how long has it been since—”
“Hello,” Roger cut her off. “And who’s this?”
Florence, flushed and giggling, was peeping through the open door to the sitting room.
“This is Florence, isn’t it, Flo-Flo?” Adam held out his arm. “Come and say hello to Grandad.”
“Florence. Well, aren’t you a looker? What a stunner. Where did that come from?” He scrutinized Coralie and Adam, searching for the source of her beauty and evidently not finding it.
Florence faltered, unable to match up what sounded like a compliment with Roger’s accusatorial tone. Where was Max? “Minnie!” Coralie called.
Roger stared at her. “Who’s Minnie?”
“Max? Maxi? It’s a nickname.”
“Why?”
“Oh, because—”
“Max! There you are, mate!” Max was bouncing in the hall on his tiptoes. “Hold on.” Her father stared at him. “Are you a boy or a girl? He’s a boy, isn’t he?”
“He’s a boy!” Florence said.
“I just thought, because of the hair…”
