“Little errand? I thought you were DEAD!” She collapses into racking sobs, and Dad throws his arms around her.
“Jane,” he croons. “Jane, my love. Jane, don’t worry.”
“How can I not worry?” Mum’s head jerks back like a cobra’s. “How can I not worry? I’m your WIFE!” She swings her arm and slaps Dad across the cheek.
Oh my God. I’ve never seen Mum hit Dad before. I feel quite shocked. Thankfully, Minnie is playing with the beaded curtain, so I don’t think she saw anything.
“Um, Minnie,” I say hastily. “Grandpa and Grana need to…er…talk.”
“Don’t you ever, ever disappear again.” Now Mum is clinging to Dad, tears running down her face. “I thought I was a widow!”
“She did,” confirms Janice. “She was looking up her insurance policies.”
“A widow?” Dad gives a shout of incredulous laughter.
“Don’t you laugh at me, Graham Bloomwood!” Mum looks like she might wallop Dad again. “DON’T YOU DARE!”
“Come on, sweetheart.” I grab Minnie’s hand and push through the beaded curtain, my heart still thumping. A moment later, Janice joins me and we look at each other in disbelief.
“What’s up?” says Suze, turning from the front desk. “What’s your mum yelling about? She’s not on about the correct pronunciation of ‘scone’ again, is she?”
Mum once took Suze and me out to tea at a posh hotel and had an altercation with a member of staff about how to say “scone,” and Suze has never forgotten it.
“No,” I say, feeling almost hysterical. “She’s not. Suze, you will not believe this….”
—
It takes two large Arizona Breezes to calm me down. (Gin, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice—delicious.) So God knows how many drinks Mum will need. Dad’s here. We’ve found him. After all our searching, all our angst…he was just calmly sitting in an armchair, reading the paper. I mean…what?
I can barely sit still. All I want to do is go back into that seating area and quiz Dad relentlessly, till I understand everything: every single tiny little thing. But Suze won’t let me.
“Your mum and dad need space,” she keeps saying. “Let them alone. Give them time. Be patient.”
She won’t even let me creep past them to go and check out the famous Rebecca. Nor has she run in to demand news of Tarkie. So we’ve all come outside onto the front veranda of the hotel and are sitting on wicker chairs, swiveling round sharply whenever we hear a sound. I say “all,” but, actually, Luke has gone off to the business center to catch up on his emails. The rest of us are sitting here, though, feeling like life has been put on hold while we wait. It’s been half an hour, at least—
And then suddenly there they are, swooshing back through the beaded curtain. Mum looks like she’s run a marathon, while Dad seems startled to see the assembled group and flinches as everyone starts exclaiming, “Graham!” and “Where’ve you been?” and “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he keeps saying. “Ah, yes. I’m fine, we’re all fine….Goodness! I had no idea….Well, here we are, anyway. Would anyone like a snack? Drink? Ah…shall we order something?” He seems pretty flustered. Which is also unlike Dad.
When we’re all seated with drinks and snacks and “light bites” menus, the chatter dies down. One by one, we turn again toward Dad.
“So, come on,” I say. “Why did you dash off? Why the big secret?”
“Why couldn’t you just tell us what was going on?” says Suze tremulously. “I got so worried….”
“Oh, my dear Suze.” Dad’s face creases in distress. “I know. I’m so sorry. I had no idea….” He hesitates. “I simply came across a huge injustice. And I had to right it.”
“But, Graham, why was it all so cloak and dagger?” says Janice, who is sitting beside Mum. “Poor Jane’s been beside herself, thinking all sorts!”
“I know.” Dad rubs his face. “I know that now. I suppose I was foolish enough to think that if I told you not to worry, then you wouldn’t. And the reason I didn’t tell you the whole story at first…” He gives another sigh. “Oh, I feel so ridiculous.”
“The Big Bonus,” I say, and Dad nods, without looking up.
“It’s a fine thing,” he says heavily, “to be caught out in a lie like that at my time of life.”
He looks really unhappy. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for him or angry.
“But Dad, why?” I can’t help my exasperation slipping out. “Why did you tell us you were earning consultancy money? You didn’t need to invent a Big Bonus. You could have told us it was money from Corey. It wouldn’t have mattered!”
“Darling, you don’t understand. Not long after you were born, I lost my job. No reason in particular: It was a time of general cutbacks. But your mother…” He hesitates. “She didn’t react very well.”
He says this with typical Dad understatement, but he probably means, She threw the crockery at me.
“I was anxious!” says Mum defensively. “Anyone would be anxious! I had a little one; our income had plummeted….”
“I know,” says Dad soothingly. “It was a worrying time.”
“You coped very well, love,” says Janice, putting a supportive hand on Mum’s. “I remember that time. You did wonders with mince.”
“I was out of work for a few months. Things were tricky.” Dad takes up the story. “And then, out of the blue, I received a letter from Corey. Not just a letter, a check too. He’d been making an income for a while, but suddenly he was into serious money. He remembered our jokey deal and he’d actually honored it. He sent me five hundred pounds. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“You have no idea what five hundred pounds was in those days,” chimes in Mum eagerly. “You could buy…a house!”
“Not a house,” corrects Dad. “Maybe a secondhand car.”
“That money saved our lives,” says Mum with typical drama. “It saved your life, Becky love! Who knows if you wouldn’t have starved to death?”
I can see Suze opening her mouth to protest something like, Surely there was a welfare system, and I shake my head. Mum’s in the moment. She won’t want to hear about welfare systems.
“But that’s when I made my huge mistake.” Dad is silent for a long moment, and we all wait, hardly even breathing. “It was vanity,” he says at last, “sheer vanity. I wanted your mother to be proud of me. Here we were, not long married, new parents, and I’d gone and lost my job. So…I lied. I invented a piece of work and told her I’d earned the money.” His face kind of crumples. “Stupid. So stupid.”
“I remember you running round to see me, Jane!” Janice’s face brightens. “I was hanging out my washing, remember? You came sprinting in, saying, ‘Guess what my clever husband’s done!’ I mean, we were all so relieved.” She looks around the group. “You don’t know what the strain had been like, what with Becky’s arrival and bills going up every day….” She leans across and pats Dad’s arm. “Graham, don’t blame yourself. Who wouldn’t tell a little fib in those circumstances?”
“It was pathetic,” says Dad, with a sigh. “I wanted to be the savior.”
“You were the savior,” confirms Janice firmly. “That money came into your family because of you, Graham. It doesn’t matter how.”
“I wrote back and said, Corey, you’ve just saved my marriage, old friend. He replied, Well, let’s see if I can do the same next year! And so it began.” Dad takes a slug of his drink, then looks up at Mum and me. “I meant to tell you the truth. Every year. But you were both so proud. It became such a tradition for us to spend the Big Bonus together.”