Seven Days of Us(16)
Andrew
THE ATTICS, WEYFIELD HALL, 5:45 P.M.
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After Andrew heard Emma go downstairs (he knew it was her, by the panting), he had stayed hidden for a while. It would be a bore to encounter her on a landing and have to invent a story about why he wasn’t outside getting the tree. While he waited, he looked idly through a kind of portfolio on the floor. It was full of Phoebe’s old drawings and collages. She’d shown promise as a child, but had lacked the focus to go to art school. Now her aesthetic eye was evident only in her extensive wardrobe, and the way she told him which shirt to wear. He recognized a school Father’s Day card that had charmed him at the time. It was titled “My Father the Hero,” and around the edge a seven-year-old Phoebe had drawn different dishes—spaghetti and salad and steak frites, like an illuminated manuscript. The written part read:
My father is a hero because he tests out restaurents, and tells people if they’re good or bad. He also makes people laugh a lot, because he writes very funny things. I often go with him to the restaurents, and he writes down what I say about the things we eat. Last time I ordered a hamberger that was disgusting, and I said it tasted like a plimsoll with ketchup, so he wrote that in the magazine. We also laugh a lot at the other people in the restaurents, and sometimes we speak in a secret code that Mummy and my sister dont understand. I love him, because he is so funny.
It was amusing to see that they’d had shared in-jokes even then. Phoebe might look like Emma, but she’d certainly inherited his humor—and his turn of phrase. He remembered being touched that she’d seen heroism in a food column, while he was still feeling like a sellout for quitting foreign correspondence. But that was always Phoebe’s gift. She could make you feel special—or, at least, she made Andrew feel heroic. Speaking of which, he must go and uproot the bloody tree, before Emma sent out a search party.
Phoebe
THE BACK SITTING ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 6:00 P.M.
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Phoebe lay on the sofa, looking at simpering models in Condé Nast Brides and Wedding. Her mother had bought them as quarantine reading matter, which was sweet, though Phoebe knew she wouldn’t want anything in a bridal magazine. Her plan was a winter wedding this time next year—either all candlelit and Scandinavian and hygge, or brilliantly glittery and kitsch. Whichever, it wouldn’t be at all meringuey. Her mother had been obsessed with a summer date and kept saying, “But you don’t want to wait ages!” which was totally unrealistic. No way was six months long enough to get everything sorted. Besides, Phoebe loved the run-up to Christmas, and, as she’d agreed with everyone, it would make the wedding very “her.” Both magazines had an exhausting “Prenuptial To-Do List” on their back pages, each slightly different. Wedding planning looked like a full-time job—which was just as well because her contract on Dolemates would end soon. Phoebe had been a casual researcher at Bright, a “boutique TV production company,” for a year. First, she had worked on a series about diet and exercise in the Middle Ages, causing her parents much hilarity. Now she was stuck on Dolemates, a dating show for the unemployed. It was a dire blend of Jeremy Kyle and First Dates, and her colleagues found it very funny that “posh Phoebe” was involved. Her mother always made a valiant effort to sound enthused, but usually got the name wrong. Her father delighted in calling it Benefit Cheats, Phoebe’s own joke, and one she went along with to save face. She doubted Olivia even knew about Dolemates. She wasn’t sure if this was annoying or a relief. Olivia probably still thought she worked “in fashion,” because of that beauty internship at Vogue years ago. Her mother appeared in the doorway, looking anxious. “Have you seen Daddy?” she said. “He’s vanished. The tree’s still in the garden. I can’t find him.”
“Maybe he’s escaped. He was in the smoking room after lunch.”
“Phoebe—I’m serious, he’s not there, he’s not outside and he’s not anywhere in the house.” Her voice was getting the panicky note it got in train stations.
The sound of someone yanking the front door, and the scrape of branches against wall, answered her.
“Andrew, thank God, where were you?” she said as he came in, nose red with cold.
“Getting the tree.”
“But when I went out a moment ago you weren’t anywhere!”
“Had to send a text. Bloody Vodafone only works at the bottom of the drive. Now, are you two going to help me?”
For some reason, Phoebe immediately wondered if her father was having an affair—simultaneously feeling disgusted by her own mind. He’d never do that. Though he had seemed a bit weird in the smoking room earlier. Why do you have to think such psycho things? What’s wrong with you? she asked herself. Intrusive thoughts, she remembered Nicola calling them. She hoped she wasn’t going to end up as stressy as her mother.
Once the three of them had got the tree up, slightly lopsided in a copper coal scuttle, she felt better. The drawing room was freezing, as usual, but Phoebe had always loved its terra-cotta walls, rococo cornice, and film-set chandeliers. She and Olivia used to sock-skate across the expanse of polished floor, and set up house in the huge fireplace. It was a shame her parents let the decor at Weyfield get so tired. The house could have been amazing if they spent money on it. She stood by the tree and took a deep sniff, the rush of piney resin transporting her back to seven years old—shaking presents with Olivia and praying for a Sylvanian Families windmill. “Wiv! We’re decorating!” called her mother. The opening chords of “Once in Royal David’s City” rang out from the ancient Hi-Fi, as Emma put on Carols from Kings.