Chapter Fourteen
Myles
‘We didn’t get far last night, son.’ Ian sat at the dining table next to the kitchen countertop in Myles’s apartment. He’d taken off his coat and hung it on a hook along with his scarf, and Myles sat opposite him as though they were at a board meeting rather than two members of the same family at a special time of the year.
‘I don’t understand all the fuss,’ Myles argued. ‘I’m in New York because it was a strategic career move for me.’ But even as he spoke, Myles knew that wasn’t why his dad was here. He wasn’t sitting across from him now to reprimand him for leaving the country, but Myles didn’t want to hear the words, he didn’t want to acknowledge his mum hadn’t changed and had found solace in the bottle, yet again. He didn’t want to talk about the problems that had hovered among them for far too long.
‘Your mother…’
Myles stood. He couldn’t do this. This conversation was never going to reach a satisfying conclusion, a solution, like he could find in a business meeting when clients and the business aligned and identified a way forwards. This family had been in trouble since his childhood and it was going to take a lot more glue than a few words exchanged across a wooden table.
He walked over to the window, reached out a hand and traced it down the ice-cold glass. Hard to believe it was around zero degrees outside when it was so warm in here.
‘Martha isn’t coping.’ His dad spoke softly, out of character for a man so authoritative and used to commanding respect.
Myles felt his insides curdle in sympathy. But it didn’t last long. ‘Winston seems to think she’s drinking again.’ The lack of denial from his dad confirmed it.
When they’d been through this before, many years ago, his father was hardly ever there. The boys had got through the days with each other to lean on. It was amazing they’d come out as unscathed as they actually had. This would be the first time Ian Cunningham had really had to deal with his wife’s problems, because they were well established last time, before he even realised. He’d worked away so much, building a life, giving her the big house and a gardener, a cleaner, the life he thought they all deserved.
Myles looked up as far as he could at the Manhattan sky. You couldn’t see much, not right now. Clouds thickened overhead in the small space available to see between the rows of brownstones. When he’d first arrived in the city he’d been to the Top of the Rock, and up to the highest level you could go at the Empire State Building. He’d thought of the sky as limitless, fresh and full of possibilities. And that was his father’s problem. He’d always looked one level above and never really thought about what was going on in his world right at eye level.
‘Why is she drinking again?’ Myles demanded without taking his gaze away from the outside.
‘Son, would you please look at me.’
‘I can’t, Dad. I’ll talk to you, but looking out the window stops me from being so angry.’
‘I can understand you’re upset.’
Myles clenched his fists tight, released them, still looking outside. ‘This isn’t a counselling session. I also have a lot of work to do so please get to the point.’
He heard his dad sigh, another out-of-character mannerism he’d rarely heard growing up. It seemed to be something that had come with retirement. As though he’d finally been allowed to take a breath and let it out slowly, as if at last he could focus on everything as a whole rather than the tiny parts of their lives that should slot together easily.
Myles heard the kettle go on but still he didn’t move. And when a brew appeared in his father’s hand at the side of him, the steam wafting towards his face, he began to laugh.
‘What’s funny?’ his dad asked.
‘The English think all problems can be dealt with by making a cup of tea.’ He slurped the top of the hot liquid. ‘Thank you.’
Ian nodded.
He felt a sense of calm wash through him as he drank. ‘They don’t drink a lot of tea over here.’
‘I remember it well,’ said Ian, still beside him at the window.
Myles wondered if all New Yorkers looked outside as they were doing. He’d certainly done it a lot since he’d arrived. It helped him think. It was either that or look at the inside walls which he knew would slowly drive him crazy.
His dad reminisced about his own work life, the offices he’d been to, the cities he’d visited all over the world. It was a topic Myles and he were both comfortable with and Myles knew he was doing it as a distraction from the real reason he was here.
‘I’m surprised you have a tree,’ said Ian, turning to look at it.
‘It was put here for me and I guess I’ve kind of got used to it.’
‘It’s a nice touch. The Inn will have a lot of custom if they add extras like that.’
‘You should tell Darcy, she’ll appreciate hearing that.’
‘She’s very young. Does she own the place?’
Myles cradled the remaining half cup of tea between his palms. ‘She’s managing it for a couple of months while the owner is in Europe. The owner is the mother of her best friend, as far as I know.’ He added the last part because he was sounding as though he knew this girl way too intimately. Which was a possibility, or at least he hoped so. For the first time he’d been pondering how it might feel to have someone like Darcy by his side. Maybe he was getting old. At almost thirty-four years old, perhaps it wasn’t only the odd grey strand of hair he noticed, but a softening of his ways and his heart.
‘Well she seems a fine young lady,’ said Ian.
‘She is.’ Myles felt his jaw tighten. ‘Come on, Dad. Enough about the Inn. Why are you really here?’
Ian sat at the table again and gestured for Myles to sit in the seat opposite. It was as though the man couldn’t do a conversation without the horizontal security of a piece of wood between them.
‘Your mother thinks I’m here for a reunion with my old firm. They operate out of New York now.’
‘But she booked you in here.’
‘She did, and I think she was hoping we’d spend time together. But she has no idea that you’re the only reason I came.’
Myles was stunned. Although his father hadn’t mentioned the fake firm reunion before, he hadn’t believed that he was only here to see him. He’d suspected there’d be another part of the schedule somewhere – perhaps a lunch with his former colleagues, tourist highlights, a stopover before he went to see relatives in Boston.
‘You’re not heading to Boston to see Auntie Pat?’
‘Not this time, son. I have more important things to do.’
‘How long are you here for?’
‘Only a few nights. I’ll be home for Christmas, like I always am.’
‘Well that’s not strictly true.’ Myles couldn’t help it.
‘I guess I deserved that.’ Ian pushed his empty cup away. His palms spread out on the wooden table in front of him, his fingers evenly spaced, his gaze on the age spots peppering the skin now. ‘I wasn’t always there, son. Nobody knows that more than I do, believe me.’
Myles stayed quiet.
‘I see a lot of myself in you, too much sometimes, it’s quite confronting. And I can’t go back and fix what I did wrong, but what I can do is stop you doing the things I did. I had the career, I always pushed you boys to do the same. We’re Cunningham men. Cunningham men are providers, they’re responsible, they’re strong. Somehow Winston got it exactly right. Goodness knows how he’s managed it. I think he got half my genes, half your mother’s.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘I suppose I’m here to try and bring you back into the family and to stop you making the biggest mistake of your life before it’s too late.’
‘What mistake am I making, Dad? Come on, you seem so sure, but I have no idea. I’m excelling at work, which is something you admit drumming into each of us boys, so is it marriage you’re alluding to?’
‘Not just marriage.’
‘Then what?’
‘A happy, functioning, two-way marriage, son. Your mother and I, we were a team, but I never gave her enough credit. She supported me, I excelled, but nobody was there to support her. She raised two healthy boys, but she largely did it alone. And when she was in trouble, when she needed me, I wasn’t there.’ His voice caught.
‘We drove her to drink.’ Myles looked at his feet, remembering the first time he’d smelt alcohol on her breath, the first time he’d realised what the strange overpowering smell was. ‘I heard other boys at school talking about drinking and how it made you forget things, and I assumed that’s what Mum did. She wanted to forget her life, her role as our mum. It would’ve been too hard for her raising us boys alone.’ Tears appeared in the corners of his eyes and he refused to let them fall.
‘She never once regretted having you boys.’
Myles harrumphed. ‘Then why?’ Myles had never questioned why one moment his mum wasn’t drinking and the next she was. He’d never asked himself if there’d been one particular event that started it.
‘Do you remember Grandma Cheryl?’
Myles warmed at the thought of her. His grandfather had died when he was too little to remember him and most of his and Winston’s memories came from Grandma Cheryl. ‘Of course I do, she was a big part of our childhood for a while.’
‘Your mother was a lot like her. She had this energy, this sense of fun.’
The day Grandma Cheryl died, it was like a light had gone out in Myles’s world. It was the first funeral Myles had ever been to and he’d hated every minute of it. He’d watched the coffin being lowered into a big hole in the ground, he’d listened to men of the cloth spouting words that were of no comfort to him or his brother because they made no sense.
Myles felt like a little boy all over again as his voice wavered. ‘I never forgot her, you know.’
‘That’s because she stepped in when your mum started having problems. Sometimes she spent more time with you than either of us did.’ Ian looked at his hands clasped in front of him. ‘Your mum’s problems all started when I was away on a work trip and the house was broken into.’
Myles froze. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘You boys were in bed at the time, but Martha woke up. She made it downstairs but before she reached the alarm the intruder found her. He punched and kicked her as she tried to block the way to the upstairs. She hadn’t cared about what he stole – if he’d asked she would’ve given him her entire jewellery box, the keys to the Porsche sitting on the drive. She just didn’t want that man anywhere near her boys. You and Winston were both going through a stage of getting up at random times during the night. You’d go wandering. We called you our little sleepwalkers even though you were both awake every time. We even had to install a toddler gate at the top of the stairs because we were scared one of you would be so sleepy you’d fall down them in the middle of the night.’ He lost himself in another memory. ‘Martha was terrified you’d get up that night and the intruder would start on you.’
‘What happened after that?’ He swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.
‘She got away from him and pressed the panic button on the alarm. The intruder came at her again and got a few more punches in. She made it to the kitchen with the alarm wailing. She grabbed a knife and he ran off. She was still clutching the knife when you came downstairs to see what the noise was.’
‘I really don’t remember any of it.’ Myles shook his head through tears. Brave wasn’t a word he’d ever associated with his mum. He had a few other adjectives to describe her but as his father recalled what had happened all those years ago his perception began to alter.
‘Martha told me you were awake, but rubbing your eyes.’
It was a small detail but it somehow made Myles feel close to this mum he didn’t really know anymore.
Ian had more emotion on his face than Myles had ever seen before. ‘It was so dark you couldn’t see the blood on her face, the way she was walking funny from where she’d been kicked in the hip, and she somehow got you up to bed, where you fell straight back to sleep. The police came, she gave a statement, and by the morning she’d cleared up the house so you had no idea.’
Myles could remember the toddler gate, he could remember getting up in the night on so many different occasions. But he berated himself for not having noticed anything else, because it felt like he’d failed his mum.
‘I came straight home and stayed almost a month,’ Ian went on. ‘We updated all the locks, had a panic button put in upstairs in the bedroom, but I don’t think she ever slept well without me at her side.’
‘But you were barely there.’ Myles got up and fixed himself a glass of water. He made one for his dad too, but Ian didn’t touch it.
‘When I met your mum she was a slip of a thing: delicate, fine features, pale skin, but with a warmth that was addictive. She’d never been a drinker. She’d have a small glass of wine with dinner, never much more. We used to joke that I had a full-time dedicated driver when I went to client dinners and took her along. But she never minded. I’d laugh at home if we ever had a few drinks because she’d fall asleep moments after, her head on my shoulder as we watched the television or sat talking when you kids were in bed.’
‘I don’t remember you two ever being like that.’ Myles had only known them as being at the helm of a dysfunctional family. He’d never understood that they were a couple too. Once upon a time they would’ve done what every couple did, looking to the future, making plans. When had all that changed for them?
‘After the burglary she started having nightmares.’ The pain on Ian’s face showed. ‘They were terrible. She’d be up in the night, paranoid at every little sound. It was at the time when I was barely there. My career was going well, better than ever, and she insisted it was the way it should be and that she’d be just fine.’
‘But she wasn’t.’
Ian shook his head. ‘Of course not. She’d lost her mum, she’d been beaten in her own home, all in the space of six weeks. She started to have a large brandy before bed, just so she’d sleep, and for a while I think it worked. It knocked her out until the small hours. But then one brandy turned to two, then three, then I caught her once having got up at four in the morning and she was having another glass to send her back to sleep.’
Myles shook his head. ‘Didn’t you think at that point that she might need help?’ He didn’t mean to sound angry, but somehow he did.
‘I suggested she see a counsellor. I wasn’t blind, I could see what she was doing wasn’t normal, that she wasn’t coping. But she brushed the suggestion off. She said to give her a couple of weeks and she’d see how she went. I took time off work and I whisked you all away to the Cotswolds for a week.’
‘I remember.’ Myles smiled fondly. Even though his grandma had died and they were all still so very sad, he recollected his parents being together, his brother and himself making up the family of four. It was one of the last genuinely happy family holidays he ever remembered. They’d eaten at a pub in the village, he and Winston feeling grown up as they were allowed to order from the big menu not the children’s. They’d come back to the holiday house and played table tennis, his mum with an uncanny knack for whacking the ball as hard as she would do in tennis. They’d lost four ping-pong balls in the garden next door and no amount of crawling through bushes had found them. But they’d all laughed hysterically and it had been one of the best days Myles could remember.
‘Your mum didn’t drink a drop on that holiday,’ his father told him. ‘She refused wine at dinner, she was sleeping the entire night, she was happier than I’d seen her in a while. We’d even cuddled together on the sofa and talked about Cheryl, about the good times and the loss. She cried, something she hadn’t done since the funeral, and she’d talked about the burglary and how she felt good with the panic button upstairs in the house. She said it gave her peace of mind and she wouldn’t hesitate to use it.
‘We returned home and had a lovely couple of weeks before I went back to work. My next stint was in Singapore and I was so worried about leaving her again, but she had you boys and you were her world.’
‘When did you realise she’d turned to the bottle again?’
His dad hesitated. ‘It was near Christmas, the year you turned nine. I came home a few days before and there was nobody around. Your mum had left a note in the kitchen to say you’d all gone out for ice-cream but you wouldn’t be long. I was on a high at how happy my whole family was. I couldn’t wait to see you all. I stood by the Christmas tree in the lounge. It was bare, stretching from floor to ceiling. The tip was even bent over at the top it was so tall, and I laughed remembering how you’d told me that very thing when we’d talked on the phone. You’d promised me that nobody would decorate it until I came home because it was a family tradition and I shouldn’t miss it.’
‘I remember.’ But Myles’s smile faded because he also remembered what happened afterwards. It was the Christmas that had changed everything.
‘The boxes were all lined up ready to go. I could imagine your face, and your brother’s. You’d both be desperate to decorate it, rooting through boxes, unearthing decorations from previous years. When the door went you both came running through, ice-cream smeared on your faces.’
‘You’d been shocked we were allowed to eat it in the car,’ said Myles.
‘As soon as your mum walked into the lounge, her arms outstretched to me…’ His voice wobbled. ‘I knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘That she was still drinking.’
‘How?’
‘I just knew. It was the way she sauntered, the smell of mouthwash rather than ice-cream on her breath when she leaned in for a kiss.’
His father’s mood that night was beginning to make sense. ‘You sent us to do our teeth. You said you were too tired to do the tree.’
His father looked down at the table, at the knots running through the otherwise smooth wood that had been varnished over to cover them up. ‘I was angry, and I didn’t want you to see it. She’d driven her boys, my boys, all over town to find an ice-cream shop that was open in the winter at that time of night. And she’d done it when she was drunk.’
Myles sat back in his chair, raked a hand through his hair. His mum had hidden her drinking well in those days. It was as they’d got older that she hadn’t tended to bother. And now, he knew how the bad Christmas memories had started. They’d decorated the tree the next morning, with tension lacing every conversation. He remembered his dad looking tired, he’d assumed it was because he worked so much, but perhaps it was trying to support his family financially and pick up the pieces of the life that seemed to be crumbling around his wife.
‘Christmas was never the same after that,’ said Myles. ‘She always drank, more and more every time, and if she ever helped with the tree it would end up a mess or she’d break something. A few years later, the tension reached an almost unbearable level, and I think I began to realise just how bad things had become.’ A muscle in his jaw twitched. He felt sorry for his dad, but, still, he’d been the kid not the parent and he and his brother hadn’t deserved their lives falling apart either. ‘You’d come home really late Christmas Eve, flying in from Geneva. I remember because my friend Matty had come over for the afternoon and he was obsessed with the jet-set lifestyle you led.’
‘Didn’t he become a pilot?’
Myles shook his head and laughed. ‘He did. No surprise there, eh?’ Back to the topic of conversation, he said, ‘You and Mum got up to see us open our presents and I remember hoping that this year it would be different. We’d all be a happy family and Mum would only drink grape juice not alcohol.’
Ian shook his head. He knew what was coming.
‘I smelled it on her breath when she hugged me. I suppose I should be grateful she even did that.’
‘She loves you, always has.’
‘I’m not disputing that. But love also has to be earned in return, and my love was tested to the limit that year.’ He took a deep breath as memories assaulted him from every angle. ‘Every year Mum bought a huge turkey, and I’d seen it waiting in the fridge. I also knew that she usually took it out an hour or so before it needed to go in the oven. Something about bringing it to room temperature – I’d heard her talking about it with Grandma Cheryl once. But Mum was slouched in the armchair by the tree by then so I asked Winston to help me get the turkey out and put it on the table. It was so heavy I didn’t trust my arms to be strong enough to lift it out without dropping it.’
‘I thought you boys wanted to cook the Christmas lunch.’ Ian’s eyes glistened with the horrid realisation that that hadn’t been their intention.
‘We pretended that’s what we wanted to do when you finally came downstairs after your sleep. We knew you’d worked hard and were tired. We didn’t want another family argument, not on Christmas day.’
‘You and Winston always did work well together.’
‘We still do, Dad.’
Ian nodded as though glad something had turned out right.
‘I tried to wake Mum,’ Myles went on, ‘but she was comatose. It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning and she was out for the count. You’d gone back to bed so Winston and I got to work. We’d helped out with roast dinners before, we knew Mum always had her cookbooks out on the bench when she made Christmas dinner and she’d written out a menu plan the day before when she clearly had more intention of cooking it for us, or at least with us. The turkey was easy enough. We filled part of it with stuffing and collapsed into laughter not knowing whether we had our hands down a turkey’s neck or up another part.’ He almost started to laugh. Winston had been by his side for years and he loved his brother without question. It helped that someone else had been through the same crap as he had and at least one of them had come out the other side normal, and strong.
‘However did you know how to make it all?’ his father asked him now.
‘Winston and I were both top of the class in maths so calculating cooking time was easy. Winston drew diagrams for each stage and we worked out the timings for when everything should be prepared. We looked at what was in the fridge to work out what vegetables we needed to prepare and we found cooking times for each of them. We tried to be quiet so as not to wake you upstairs and by then we didn’t want Mum to wake either. Our best bet, we knew, would be if the dinner was almost done and she woke up, sobered up as much as was possible, and you woke up to be none the wiser about her behaviour.’
‘I knew, son.’ Ian rubbed the back of his neck with a hand that showed his age. The grey hair had come in his early fifties and Myles was used to it, but when Myles saw the backs of his dad’s hands, not quite as steady as they once were, and wrinkled more than any other visible part of him, it reminded him of the reality. His dad wasn’t getting any younger, and he’d had hard years just like Myles had. And here he was asking for a chance to put things right.
‘When did you know?’
Ian grinned. ‘Sorry, it’s not funny, but I knew when I saw the gravy.’
Myles burst out laughing as he remembered. ‘We made it too thick.’
Ian’s laughter filled the apartment, his eyes gleaming as much as the shiniest bauble on the Christmas tree as he shared a less tense moment with his younger son. ‘I tipped the jug up to pour it over my turkey and nothing came out for a while. It was like sludge.’
‘I could almost cut it with my knife and fork.’
Ian’s laughter increased. ‘I remember boiling the kettle, adding water to the gravy to make it palatable.’
‘Or at least thinner so we could pour it.’
‘It had a good flavour, I’ll give you that.’
‘We may have added a considerable amount of gravy powder,’ Myles admitted.
They let the memory settle between them and the laughter died down.
Myles’s smile had faded. ‘It was hard work for two little boys. I don’t mean the cooking of the meal: it was more the stress of whether their mum was going to drink the rest of the day; whether their dad was going to have fun with them or focus his attentions on a huge row with his wife.’
‘I tried to get her help.’
‘You got us a nanny!’ Myles was incredulous, the merriment gone from the room.
Ian shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. I paid for private counselling for your mother – she went once and then refused to go again. I tried to talk to her, but she didn’t want me near her. She alienated friends along the way.’ He spoke fast as though desperate to make Myles understand. ‘Her own mother wasn’t there to talk to, and I think that was the hardest thing for her. Somehow she’d got on this nightmare carousel with alcohol and couldn’t see a way to get off. I despaired. I had to work, I had to keep the house we were in up and running, I had two boys to feed, clothe and send to school. I had to pay a nanny because I couldn’t trust my own wife with our sons. I didn’t want her to drive you all over the county to sports tournaments, pick you up from school, or, heaven forbid, have to react in an emergency. She loved you, but she was a drunk.’
The D word stung the most, but it was completely true.
‘I did my best, Myles.’ His father looked right at him, his bottom lip wobbling.
Myles had never seen him look so fragile and in that moment he knew his dad was telling the truth. For years Myles had laid the blame largely at his mum’s feet, but he’d blamed his dad too and never once seen what the situation had been doing to him.
That Christmas he and Winston cooked, his dad really had been the life and soul of the party. There hadn’t been a massive row as he and his brother had anticipated. His dad had been there for them, played board games, they’d been outside for a long walk wishing it would snow instead of rain. His dad had been with them all day long until the moment their heads hit their pillows, exhausted. His dad hadn’t once focused on the fact that his wife had drifted off, away from the festivities, by mid-afternoon and found her solace in another bottle.
His sons had been Ian Cunningham’s focus, and Myles felt shamefaced he hadn’t realised.