Now
I arrived home just in time to see Ethan wrapping his arms around Madison. She was holding a croquet mallet and he had his hands over hers, guiding her swing. She was wearing a pair of denim shorts cut so tight I worried for her bacterial levels. I thought about going to get some cranberry juice just to be on the safe side.
‘See?’ he was saying, ‘It’s easy. It’s just a little back and forth motion.’
‘Is that what you say to all the girls?’ I called out as I walked up the drive. You are a fortress, I thought to myself. You are cool as a cucumber.
Ethan dropped his arms and stepped away. A small smile pushed at the corner of his mouth, as if in spite of itself.
‘Ethan was just showing me how to play,’ Madison said. Her hair had fallen in the sort of long, tousled waves that fashion magazines describe as ‘beach hair’, even though everyone knows that beach hair consists of a topknot slicked in sun cream.
‘I didn’t know you were a croquet expert,’ I said.
He took a swing and hit the ball with a sharp clack. It sailed through the wire hoop. ‘Simon le Bon taught me the last time we were at Babington House.’
‘Of course he did,’ I muttered.
‘I love Babington House!’ Madison cooed. ‘We did a whole shoot there last year. Such a cool place. But who’s Simon le Bon?’
I stifled a laugh at the look of horror that flickered across Ethan’s face. ‘I’ll see you guys inside,’ I said, moving swiftly past. ‘Careful of your back, old man.’ Score.
Taylor appeared in the doorway. ‘Guys! Dinner’s ready! Ethan, you’re sitting next to me since Madison has been hogging you all day. I have, like, a billion questions to ask you about outreach conversion.’
We found the rest of the group huddled around the heavy oak dining table, listening nervously to pots and pans clattering in the kitchen. Mrs Willocks was in the final throes of preparing dinner and, from the sound of it, it wasn’t going down without a fight.
I slid into the empty chair next to my father. ‘Kiddo!’ he beamed. ‘You’re back! Where’d you go? Did you see anything good?’
‘I just wandered around for a while. I found this amazing spot at the top of the hill – the view is just incredible. There was this bench up there . . .’ I realized that my father had stopped listening and looked up to see Mrs Willocks carrying a tray of pies, the steam still rising from them. ‘I hope everyone’s hungry!’ she trilled, setting the platter down with a proud flourish. ‘I’ve brought a nice variety for you all to try,’ she said. ‘There’s steak and ale, chicken and leek, and plain old pork.’ She sliced into each of them, the shortcrust flaking before yielding under the knife.
She slid slices of each pie onto our plates, all of us eyeing them greedily. ‘Thank you, Mrs Willocks!’ we chorused. I took a bite of the chicken and leek: it was incredible. I’d never been much for savory pies before, but this woman was some kind of pie sorceress: I already knew I’d be going back for seconds (and adding push-ups to tomorrow’s workout).
‘And I’ve done something special just for you,’ Mrs Willocks said, turning to Piper. She returned from the kitchen holding aloft a plateful of very brown food. ‘Liver and bacon,’ she explained, ‘as I know you can’t eat pastry because of your . . . disposition.’
‘Liver? As in the organ?’ Piper asked, eyeing the plate Mrs Willocks placed before her queasily.
‘That’s right, love. Full of iron for you, and it’s completely gluten free – I dialed it up on the Internet and checked!’
‘Great,’ Piper said weakly. I had to feel for her – as delicious as the pies were, nothing – not even Mrs Willocks’s wizardry – could make a plate full of liver and bacon appetizing. ‘Do you have any vegetables?’ Piper asked, a panicked note in her voice. She was regarding the congealing slab of liver, which was modestly draped in a slice of bacon, with unvarnished horror. ‘I definitely need to eat vegetables, or my alkaline levels will be, like, dangerously low.’
‘Of course, pet! Coming right up!’ Mrs Willocks dashed into the kitchen and returned with a bowl piled high with roast potatoes. ‘Can’t have liver and bacon without the veg!’
Piper made a small mewling sound, like a cat in distress. ‘What am I going to do?’ Piper hissed when Mrs Willocks had returned to the kitchen for more gravy. ‘There is no way I can eat this!’
‘Piper, chill out. I think it looks pretty good,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.’ And that, ladies and gentlemen, is love.
True to his promise, Charlie polished off the liver and bacon after quickly dispatching his own plate of pie. Mrs Willocks looked like she wanted to kiss him when he asked for seconds, not knowing that Charlie had spent the afternoon getting quietly stoned with the gardener in the shed at the top of the garden. Taylor and Madison gleefully spooned roast potatoes onto their plates and asked Mrs Willocks for more gravy, taking full advantage of their twenty-three-year-old metabolisms (which no amount of juicing could replicate). Ethan whispered something to them and they burst into fits of laughter, revealing rows of even, pearly-white teeth. I pushed my plate away: I’d finally lost my appetite.
Dad polished off the last of his pie and pushed his chair back from the table, placing a protective arm over his generous stomach. ‘That was just wonderful, Judy!’ he called to the kitchen. Leave it to my father to be on first-name basis with Mrs Willocks after a day and a half. ‘Now, who’s up for a little whisky and a game of charades? What do you say, kids – just like when you guys were little!’
‘Dad, no! ’ Piper and I groaned in unison. We didn’t agree on much, but we were of the same mind when it came to charades. We had spent our formative years watching Dad contort himself into ever more unlikely shapes, gesticulating madly before eventually – inevitably – blurting out the answer when we failed to guess correctly. The thing was, he was terrible at acting, and we were terrible at guessing, and yet somehow it was the game he always wanted to play. It always ended in someone stomping off in a rage, so adding whisky to the equation felt doubly risky. Besides, I never drank whisky.
‘C’mon, it’ll be fun!’ he insisted.
‘I love charades!’ Taylor announced, jumping up from the table and skittering towards the drawing room on her baby colt’s legs.
‘Me too!’ Madison chimed, following close behind. ‘This is so old school, guys! I love it!’
‘Well, I don’t see the harm in it,’ Bob agreed. ‘I’ll bring down a bottle of the good stuff, Alec.’
‘I’m in if you are,’ Ethan said, turning to me with a smile. ‘What do you say?’ It was an act of breathtaking cruelty – he knew just how much I hated charades. But there was no way that I was going to let him show me up like that.
‘What the hell,’ I sighed, and followed the rest of them into the drawing room. I’d already suffered a lifetime of humiliation that day – what harm would another few hours be?