Seonaid and the boys were home from school when I got back to Gullane. I granted them some Playstation time, then took my daughter’s hand. ‘What would you like to do till Mum gets home?’ I asked her.
‘Story,’ she replied, without hesitation.
Trish, the children’s live-in carer, had a date to meet a friend at Ocean Terminal; I persuaded her to leave early so that it was just the two of us. I was very glad of that; I needed very badly to spend time with my youngest child.
We settled on How the Grinch Stole Christmas and went into the garden room, where she squeezed herself into an armchair beside me, her little face serious as I eased her into the classic yarn. She listened without a murmur, from start to finish, then looked up at me.
‘Have you ever seen a Grinch, Daddy?’ she asked me.
‘I’ve seen a few grumps,’ I told her, ‘and a few groaners, and even some people who looked pretty green, but no, I’ve never actually seen a Grinch.’
‘That’s because he’s not real, silly,’ she laughed.
For a moment my mind was overwhelmed by an image of another child, not too many miles from where Seonaid and I were sitting, probably playing out the same scene with her mother less than twenty-four hours earlier.
To fight it off, I picked up another book, A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six. My daughter isn’t, but as soon as she turned five, she declared herself too old for the companion volume, When We Were Very Young.
‘Let me read you a story about someone who was real,’ I said, and launched into King John’s Christmas. It took me a little while, for I had to stop to explain what ‘supercilious’ means, and to explain why he might have signed his name ‘Johannes R’, but settled for ‘Jack’, and what India rubber was, and why Seonaid couldn’t have a pocketknife that really cuts.
‘Was King John really a bad man, Daddy?’ she asked when the poem was over.
‘That depends on who’s telling his story,’ I replied. ‘I doubt if any king was completely good in those days. But I suspect,’ I added, conspiratorially, ‘that he was a reasonably good man with bad PR.’
To deflect further discussion on the nature of public relations, I fast-forwarded to the tale of The Knight Whose Armour Didn’t Squeak, forgetting that it was about a medieval mugging. She laughed out loud at the tale. I’d only just finished convincing her that the cowardly knight Sir Thomas Tom really wasn’t a good man when Sarah arrived home and gave me the hug that I needed and the one that Seonaid took as her absolute right, which, of course, it is.
‘Bad day, uh?’ she murmured, as she held me close.
‘Bad start,’ I agreed, as we broke the clinch. ‘I thought I was done with things like that. I think I’m magnetic, love. Of all the cars that fu . . .’ Realising that our daughter was still within earshot I stopped myself short. ‘He chose mine; he had to choose mine. I think I must be a magnet for grief.’
‘Nonsense,’ she insisted. ‘To our daughter and me you’re a love machine. You were just unlucky, that’s all.’
‘Not as unlucky as that wee lass.’
Sarah glanced at Seonaid and put a finger to her lips, ending the discussion just as James Andrew exploded into the room with all the energy of a small tsunami. I guessed from his exuberance that he had beaten his brother yet again at whatever game they had played.
‘Where’s Mark?’ I asked.
‘Doing his homework,’ Jazz replied.
I gave him a look that was meant to be somewhere between curious and severe, but probably didn’t make it past amused. ‘Don’t you have any?’
‘Some,’ he admitted.
‘Then wouldn’t it be a good idea to do it before you’re too tired to do it than when you are but I still make you?’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘I suppose.’
If we were negotiating, it didn’t last long. Sarah pointed at the door. ‘Go do it while dinner’s being cooked,’ she ordered. ‘Now. And take your sister with you,’ she added. ‘I want to talk to Dad.’
‘What’s for dinner?’ my son, in the act of leaving, asked me. Since his mother and I got back together, more or less full-time, we take turns in the kitchen. It’s another part of my new life that I enjoy.
‘Tuna steaks on the Foreman grill, potato wedges in the dry fryer, beans and fried onions,’ I told him. ‘A special request by Mark,’ I explained to Sarah. ‘He’s trying to bulk himself up, and reckons that fish is the way to go.’
She grinned. ‘Poor kid. For girls or boys, puberty’s a bastard, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘For lads, it brings a whole new set of personal targets. I still haven’t hit all of mine yet.’
We headed for the kitchen. For some reason Sarah likes to watch me cook; when I’m in my apron she calls me ‘Masterchef’. The wedges were waiting in the dry fryer. I set it for forty minutes and began to slice the onions.
‘What about Seonaid?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got a smaller steak for her. Not that much smaller, though; I think she’s in a growing phase.’
She smiled, and fetched me a Corona from the fridge. I looked at her as she handed it to me. ‘You not having one?’
‘No thanks. I’m on call, and anyway, I don’t fancy beer just now,’ she replied.
‘Wine?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I’ve . . .’ she paused. ‘What’s that Scots saying? I’ve taken a schooner to alcohol.’
I laughed out loud. ‘That would be “scunner”, my darling. And most unlike you.’ A thought came to me. ‘Hey, what is this? This morning you had an uncontrollable desire for lemon drizzle cake. Tonight you have a booze intolerance. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?’
‘Absolutely,’ she replied, but I wasn’t letting it go. I snapped into interrogation mode, looking her in the eye.
‘Okay, there’s nothing you want,’ I stressed the word, ‘to tell me. But is there something that you should?’
‘Fucking cops,’ she murmured, then took the kitchen knife from my hand and laid it on the work surface. She slid an arm round my waist. ‘I’m late,’ she said.
It didn’t exactly hit me like a ton of bricks. Sarah’s mum made a prize-winning lemon drizzle cake, and since her death she’d never mentioned the damn confection, not once, until that morning.
‘How late?’ I asked, not even trying to suppress my grin.
‘Only a week. Too early to be taking it as fact, but you know I’m pretty regular; always have been.’
‘Have you done a test?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Aw Jesus,’ I chuckled. ‘Even I know it isn’t too early for that. Buy a kit, pee on the stick and that’s it.’
‘Maybe I don’t want to know.’
I paused the fryer. ‘Let’s say you are pregnant. How did we get to this?’
‘When we got back together,’ she said, ‘I was off the pill. I went back on it sharpish, and that was okay, but my body didn’t take to it like before. So I switched to what they call the mini-pill; it has only one hormone, progesterone. The problem may be that I didn’t read the advice, that for the first couple of days, you should use a back-up method.’
‘Johnnies?’
She nodded. ‘We could also have abstained, of course.’
I threw her a mock frown. ‘Sure we could.’
She allowed me a hint of a smile. ‘But we didn’t, and so there may have been a very small window of opportunity.’
‘Wow! As marksmanship goes . . .’
‘Yeah, we may have shot the arrow right through it.’
‘Do the test tomorrow. Otherwise you’ll fret for another week.’
‘Okay,’ she conceded. ‘I will.’
‘Good,’ I said, restarting the fryer. ‘Now let me get on with feeding the kids that we have already.’
She fell silent, watching me as I loaded the grill, set the beans to heat, then went to work on the onions in a big frying pan. They were turning a satisfactory golden colour when she spoke again.