Seven Days of Us(67)
“You did, didn’t you? This is your little ‘public schoolboy’ fantasy!” Phoebe interrupted.
He could feel all their eyes on him, trapping him in a mess he had created. An old, familiar indignation came broiling up—the hot temper he’d tried to purge for years.
“Don’t shoot the messenger!” he said, way louder than he meant to. “It’s not my fantasies you need to worry about. It’s your fiancé’s!” He knew he’d passed the point of no return. They were all staring at him.
“Don’t shout at me!” Phoebe screeched back. “You have no idea what you’re talking about! Why don’t you piss off back to Minnesota?”
The angel chimes dinged in the shocked pause.
“What is he even doing here?” she said, turning to Andrew. Jesse felt like they were acting a scene.
“Phoebe, calm down,” said Emma. “Jesse, perhaps we might have a minute?”
He stood up, legs weak as a string puppet. “Sure,” he said, taking his still-full plate to the sink and trying to walk normally. He felt them all watching his back, waiting for him to go.
For a moment, he stopped in the dark passage behind the kitchen wondering if anyone would say something about him. But there was just the sound of Phoebe bursting into noisy tears again. His skin pricked with mortified sweat. He took the oak staircase three steps at a time—as if this might help him escape the house and everyone in it. The long corridor upstairs felt oppressive, and his room horribly foreign. He lay on his side in bed. He had destroyed everything. He had only himself to blame. It was like the oversharing—he’d always struggled to contain his thoughts, his emotions. He’d trained himself to act so grounded the whole time, but then his feelings came spewing up, like a geyser—regardless of where he was or who he was talking to. They would all hate him now, even Andrew. His birth father was bound to be on Phoebe’s side. This wasn’t how it was meant to be.
Emma
THE KITCHEN, WEYFIELD HALL, 2:30 P.M.
? ? ?
“Let me do the dishwasher, sweetie,” said Emma to Olivia. Her daughter was putting everything away in the wrong place—no doubt a misplaced effort to make Emma relax.
“It’s fine, Mum. Why don’t you sit down, or go and check on Phoebe, or something?”
“Seriously, Wiv, it’s no trouble. I like to know where all my bits and pieces are. You go and sit down.” The last thing Emma wanted was to cede control of the house now that her diagnosis was out. Sometimes it felt like the kitchen, her realm, was all she still had to herself. At least Andrew had slunk off after the unpleasantness at lunch.
Olivia put a spatula into the pot of wooden spoons by the AGA, and Emma moved it to the drawer where she kept spatulas.
Olivia sighed, as if Emma was a contrary child. “OK,” she said. “Shout if you need any help.”
“I’m fine, Wiv,” said Emma. People never understood how domesticity could be soothing. She couldn’t have abided her grandmother’s Weyfield with servants doing everything for her.
She carried on clearing up, mulling over George’s horrid note, and the quarrel, just now, with Jesse. Poor Phoebe had been inconsolable afterward. Emma had seen a new side to Andrew’s handsome son—at best idiotically insensitive, at worst, a stirrer. She’d always had reservations about George, but he’d never struck her as in the closet. What Emma couldn’t get over was how the note had come with no warning. Just this morning George had seemed his usual (admittedly slightly obnoxious) self. She thought of the squabble over the banana. It was rather frightening that someone could carry on as normal, cool as a cucumber, when they were planning such a thing. Sociopathic, almost. Surely that was the problem, not his being gay.
With the dishwasher purring, Emma went upstairs to call Nicola. She’d had a long chat with her only last night about Jesse’s arrival, swearing her to secrecy for the time being. Nicola’s view on Jesse (typically) had been that Emma must “talk her emotions through” with Andrew. All very well in theory, but easy as talking to a donkey in practice. Nicola had also kept asking if Andrew had been “behaving at all unusually,” as if Emma should have seen all this coming. Rather tiresome, but then Nicola was tiresome—in the sweetest possible way. It was only because she cared. Emma dialed her number, barely waiting for Nicola’s too-loud “Hullo?”
“Nic, it’s Emma. The wedding’s off. George has left Phoebe.”
“What? He’s left? No! Oh poor little Phoebs! What happened? It never stops at Weyfield, does it?”
Emma explained about the note, and the cross words at lunch.
“Well, George might be gay, I suppose,” said Nicola. “And Jesse might be more able to pick up on it than Phoebe—or you lot.”
“D’you think? He’s not the least bit effeminate. Though gays can be very macho, too, can’t they?”
“Isn’t he rather homophobic?” said Nicola. “There might well be an element of denial.”
“But why would he propose, if he wasn’t sure?”
“Well, presumably he doesn’t want to be gay—if he is. That’s the problem. Otherwise he wouldn’t have spent all this time with Phoebe. Do you know if their sex life was fulfilling? Did Phoebe ever talk about it?”