Seven Days of Us(22)



She found Phoebe on the floor of the Porch Room, surrounded by carrier bags, chocolates, paperbacks, and beribboned soap.

“OK, here’s what I’ve got,” she said. “This is Mummy’s pile.” She pointed to the frothier and pinker of two heaps. “And this is Daddy’s. We’re short on non-edibles for him. It’s, like, practically all condiments. He’s so hard to buy for.” She sighed dramatically. “Annoying we can’t just go to Holt and buy extra stuff.”

Did Olivia detect a hint of reproach? She sat down beside Phoebe, inwardly calculating that each pile probably cost over a hundred pounds.

“Wow! Good job, Phoebs,” she said. It felt outrageous to be fussing about an adult man’s stocking, when forty-eight hours ago she had been comforting an orphaned toddler. She thought of Sean, and felt like someone was slowly, slowly squeezing her insides.

Phoebe looked up, her eyes suspicious. “What did you get?”

“Just these,” said Olivia, unwrapping two wooden bottle stoppers, carved into a giraffe and zebra, that she’d bought on a rare weekend off with Sean in Fish Town. They looked incongruous among the luxury littering the floor. Their paper bag still smelled of the spices that had hung in the air that Sunday.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“OK. What are they for—wine?”

“Yeah, just, for bottles, I guess. Any bottle.” She hadn’t really thought about what they were for. Sean had been buying them for his parents, so she’d followed his lead. How could he be interred in a Trexler tent now?

“Are they, like, safe?”

“What? Yes! They’d need to have been in a Haag patient’s bed to be a risk.”

“OK.” Phoebe took them in a pincer grip, added one to each pile, then swapped them, then swapped them back again.

“Yeah, I think that’s right. Zebra for Mummy,” she said to herself, frowning.

“Sorry I didn’t have a chance to shop,” said Olivia. “It was pretty full-on out there.” She needed Phoebe to register that she hadn’t just been on holiday. “You’re so good at this stuff, though. You’ve done really well,” she added, in the voice she’d perfected as a trainee at Great Ormond Street.

Phoebe said nothing and kept tinkering with the heaps.

“I did get these,” said Olivia after a long silence, bringing out the six DVDs she had ordered, almost at random, last week. It was all Sean’s idea. He’d insisted she use his Amazon Prime account to deliver to Weyfield, when she admitted she hadn’t bought any proper gifts. “I was going to put them under the tree, but have them for the stockings if you need them.”

“You can’t have more than one DVD in a stocking.”

“Why not?”

“Because. It’s not balanced, it’s too many. And they watch stuff on Netflix now. Anyway, what will you give them for their main presents?”

“I’m sure they’ll manage without. And they’ll still be getting them, just not under the tree.” This conversation needs to end, she thought. She suddenly felt very tired. Phoebe studied each DVD case, took two, and began silently stuffing the pair of long woolly socks on the bed without looking at her. At first, Olivia tried handing her gifts, but with each offering Phoebe said something like: “No, I’ve just put a soap in. We need something edible,” so she gave up and sat watching, until the stockings bulged like just-fed pythons. This, thought Olivia, was why she avoided Christmas at Weyfield.





Andrew


THE SMOKING ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 11:00 A.M.

? ? ?

Emma was evidently more anxious about Haag than Andrew had realized. She had barged into the smoking room earlier, jabbering about the unfortunate Irish doctor who had the virus. Trying to explain that this didn’t mean Olivia was next was a lost cause. Emma kept saying, “But Andrew, she knew him. I met him, at Heathrow, when I fetched her.”

“And did she know him in the Biblical sense? Did you lick his eyeballs? Did Olivia bid him a passionate farewell, with tongues?”

“Don’t be facetious. This is serious.”

“I’m deadly serious. Haag isn’t an airborne pathogen. You need to exchange bodily fluids to contract it. And the other person needs to be symptomatic—I presume he wasn’t foaming at the mouth? Weren’t they all checked on arrival?”

“Well, yes, but the whole airport stage seems terribly badly organized. I can’t think why he was hanging about waiting for a follow-on flight? Surely he should have flown directly to Ireland in the first place?”

“Well, I doubt he had a choice. I don’t imagine Aer Lingus lays on daily flights to Liberia.”

She didn’t look convinced. It still mystified Andrew how he—a rational, broadsheet journalist—had married a woman who leaped on any scare story the tabloids dreamed up. Besides, he had his own real crisis to deal with. Jesse Robinson had e-mailed again this morning. Worse, he was actually here—in Norfolk. In this second message, Jesse politely mooted the possibility that his first e-mail hadn’t arrived, reintroduced himself, and then explained that he was staying in Blakenham. At first Andrew read this as some kind of frightful, Shakespearean coincidence. But the next line revealed that Jesse knew Andrew “holidayed” near Blakenham and had taken the liberty of “booking a trip” there, adding an implausible excuse about a documentary he was researching. Why were all young men obsessed with documentary, wondered Andrew. Jesse even went on to suggest meeting at Weyfield or “taking a walk on the beach.” What had possessed the man to fly all the way here after receiving no reply? How did Jesse know about Weyfield? How much else did he know? Bugger the Internet. Had anything wrecked families, relationships, bloody normality more efficiently than the Internet? Andrew didn’t think so. He made a mental note to write a column on this one day. Then he remembered that, over the years, he had probably divulged all the information any estranged child could hope for in The World—freely available online. Had he mentioned Weyfield by name? Google revealed that, yes, he had, on numerous, rather boastful, occasions. Also online was that God-awful Country Living shoot that supplied the exact location of the house. He was sunk. He really ought to reply. The trouble was, the Haag excuse sounded terribly unlikely. Besides, what if Jesse decided to risk Haag and join them in quarantine? It was a distinct possibility. He seemed pathetically keen. If Andrew was to protect Emma and the girls from the whole business, the only sensible option was not to reply at all. He deleted both Jesse’s e-mails with a swift tap and stood up. He needed to get out, to escape the house that had caused this mess—and he was damned if he was going to pace the grounds like a prisoner. Surely a stroll along the coast road would be safe. They were miles from anywhere. He walked quickly to the hall, grabbed a coat, and left, just pulling the door to so that the others wouldn’t hear. Then he slipped back in and pulled on an orange balaclava, knitted by Emma in the eighties. He squinted into the mirror by the door—he looked mad, but unrecognizable. Should he be unlucky enough to encounter Jesse Robinson (he didn’t put it past fate these days), at least the man wouldn’t clock him.

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