The Accidental Family (21 page)

“Come on, you,” she said, hefting him up. “There’s a cab.”

“Where’m going?” Seth asked her in a blur. “Don’t make me go back there, cos if he’s there I’ll—”

“No, you’re coming back with me,” Sophie said.

“Results,” Seth said, grinning at her as she folded him into a cab.

“Not in
that
way. I live in a B and B. I’ll put you in one of the free rooms so you can sleep it off, and if you want we can talk in the morning.”

“Or we could just kiss now,” Seth said, sliding his hand up her
thigh as she got in the cab next to him. “I like older women, I like older women a lot.”

“Seth.” Sophie removed his hand from her thigh. “Just so we are clear, I am absolutely, categorically in no way going to kiss you, ever.”

“We’ll see,” Seth said, that same sweet smile curling his lips. And then he passed out.

“That him?” Grace Tregowan asked Sophie as she deposited Seth with some difficulty and a minor back injury onto Mrs. Alexander’s rose-printed sofa in the sitting room. “The love child. He’s a looker, isn’t he? Perfect opportunity for you to trade up.”

“Mrs. Tregowan!” Sophie exclaimed. “He’s barely more than a boy.”

But still it was hard not to admire the sweep of his dark lashes as he lay there with his eyes closed, and the fullness of his lower lip, his mouth slightly open as he slept.

“I tell you,” Grace said with a wink. “If I were sixty years younger, I’d teach him a thing or two …”

“What are you still doing up anyway?” Sophie whispered as Grace padded after her into the kitchen in her pink fluffy slippers. Sophie planned to risk Mrs. Alexander’s disapproval by brewing a strong pot of coffee that was really only meant for the breakfast service (instant after 11
A.M
. was the rule).

“The older you get, the less you sleep,” Grace said. “I think it’s because you know that death is getting closer, and the closer it is, and the less of life you have left, the less of it you want to miss dreaming about times gone by.”

“You are going to live forever,” Sophie said as Grace settled herself a little stiffly on one of Mrs. Alexander’s kitchen chairs. “Hot chocolate?” Sophie offered.

“I shouldn’t,” Grace said, drawing her bed jacket a little tighter
around her shoulders. “But that’s never stopped me before, so go on then.”

As Sophie switched on the coffee percolator, she took the tub of chocolate powder down from the shelf and heaped several large spoonfuls into two of Mrs. Alexander’s mugs.

“How are your wedding plans going?” Grace asked her. “Are you coping with all of the love-child shenanigans and the other thing too?”

“The other thing?” Sophie asked as she took some milk out of the fridge.

“The wondering. Wondering if you’re doing the right thing by marrying Louis. That thing.”

“But I haven’t been wondering about it, not at all,” Sophie said as she heated a pan of milk. “If anything, I’m the one who wants to get married, most especially now …” Sophie trailed off and thought of the brochure for Fineston Manor, in the drawer with the unread bills. “The funny thing is,” she said thoughtfully as she watched the milk, waiting for bubbles to break out on the peaceful surface, “that since all of this happened, I’ve felt that I might lose him.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” Mrs. Tregowan said. “You met him in a stressful situation, you fell for him during difficult times. When everything seems settled and peaceful, when you have a chance to really listen to your heart, that’s when you have doubts. Now everything is kicking off again, there’s another drama and another woman to boot, you don’t have time to listen or think, and that suits you because now all you have time to do is to try and fix things for him and try to keep him.”

“I can’t work out if you think that is a good thing or a bad thing,” Sophie said, setting Mrs. Tregowan’s chocolate on the windowsill to cool. Mrs. Alexander had told her that last year Grace had burned her stomach badly on a drink that had been too hot
and too heavy for her arthritic hands. So Sophie and Mrs. Alexander always took care to fill her cups only halfway and wait for the beverage to cool before they gave it to her.

“Well, it’s a good thing if you just want to marry him and hang the consequences,” Grace said. “But then to feel happy, you’d have to create yourself a drama every few weeks just to drown out your real feelings, and you’d end up on morning telly with that bloody awful man shouting at you.”

“That doesn’t sound so good,” Sophie said, sitting down opposite Grace with her own chocolate as she waited for the coffeepot to fill.

“Better to find a quiet place, away from all of this, and give yourself a chance to listen and feel, because the thing is, Sophie, I don’t doubt that you love Louis—it’s just that what with all this rushing and panic and drama I don’t think you really believe it yet.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Sophie said thoughtfully, tasting the thick chocolate that coated her tongue. “Maybe it would be a good idea for me to get away for a bit. But I don’t want it to seem as if I’m running out on him, leaving him and the girls when they need me.”

“It would only be for a few days, the girls would barely know you’d gone,” Grace said. “And as for Louis, give him a chance to miss you. It never does them any harm. I left my third husband for three months, went to Morocco with this charming young man I met in the supermarket. Meat aisle, it was. I can tell you that Donald appreciated me more than ever when I got back. Every time he looked at me, he thought of me and that young man, which made him really jealous, which in turn made him want me even more. It worked wonders, I can tell you.”

Sophie spent several seconds trying to think of something to say, but for once Grace had left her entirely speechless.

“So did you leave this Donald for your last husband then?” she asked, because Grace’s love life seemed to cover every kind of marriage there could ever be and Sophie was finding it an invaluable resource when it came to working out what her own marriage would be like.

“No.” Grace’s smile was rueful. “He had a heart attack in bed one night. I missed him, the poor old bugger, but it was the way he would have wanted to go. I had ten wonderful, passionate years with him, so I can’t complain.”

“So you would say that you can base a marriage on passion alone?” Sophie asked, thinking that certainly the last few months of hers and Louis’s relationship had been based on just that.

“Yes, as long as one of you dies before you stop fancying each other,” Grace said. “Otherwise, once the passion wears off, you usually find you hate each other’s guts and have nothing to talk about.”

It wasn’t exactly the answer Sophie was hoping for.

“I’m going to take this coffee to Seth,” Sophie said, filling the largest mug she could find. “Want a hand getting to your room?”

“No thank you, love.” Grace smiled. “I can get around perfectly well. But if you could hand me my hot chocolate before it goes stone cold that would be lovely.”

Sophie paused and looked at Seth, sprawled on the sofa, his head tipped back, his mouth open; he looked disconcertingly like Bella when she was in a deep sleep, given over to unconsciousness with such abandon that you could almost believe she lived her real life in dreams.

“Seth.” Sophie crouched down and shook his shoulder lightly. “Seth, I’ve got you some coffee.”

His eyes flickered open and then fixed on her.

“Am I really at your place?” he asked her, his voice dry. “Or did I dream that?”

“You are at the B and B I stay in,” Sophie said, setting down the coffee, taking his hand, and pulling him into a near sitting position. “I’ve booked you a room for the night. You can go and talk to your mum in the morning, when you’ve got a clear head.”

Carefully she handed him the hot coffee. “I put sugar in it, I hope that’s okay.”

Seth took a sip of the coffee, his hand cupping the mug like Izzy’s did when she was drinking hot chocolate. “That’s perfect,” he told her. “You are very nice, you know. You didn’t have to rescue me. You could have left me in the gutter to sober up. I’ve done it plenty of times before.”

“I couldn’t do that,” Sophie said, smiling, settling into a kneeling position on the floor, leaning her elbow on the seat of the sofa. She had seen two sides of Seth, flirtatious, then angry, and now she was seeing a third. He looked very young, like a blank page, and vulnerable, unprepared for what life might write on him. “Besides, can you imagine if Louis found out that I’d walked away and left you in that state? I’d be so chucked.”

Seth sipped the coffee in silence for a moment, looking around at Mrs. Alexander’s sitting room through half-closed eyes. Sophie guessed that it wasn’t easy to embrace a hangover in a room decorated with flower prints and a menagerie of china animals.

“Why are you going to marry him then?” Seth asked. “I mean, you are a very beautiful, lovely, kind, proper woman. What did he do to get you?”

Sophie mused for a moment on what the phrase “proper woman” meant, but decided it probably had something to do with her age, so she decided not to ask.

“I was looking after his children, my best friend’s children. Carrie—my friend—she died and I was the girls’ guardian. Louis had been overseas in Peru—”

“Ran away from the kids then,” Seth surmised.

“No, well, not exactly—it’s a really long story, but the short
version is that I thought that about him too. I thought he was a good-for-nothing, low-life loser who abandoned his wife and children and then just turned up years later, thinking everything was going to be all right because now he was ready to play daddy. But then I got to know him, and I found out about his story—his reasons for doing what he did. I realized that he is a great person, a wonderful person. And his daughters found that out too. I think the three of us fell in love with him at the same time.”

“He’s got you properly taken in,” Seth said, shaking his head. “You look so clever too.”

“Clever?” Sophie questioned him.

“I mean, you don’t look like the sort of woman who’d end up in some backwater, living in a B and B, following a man around. You look like you’re your own person.”

“I
am
my own person,” Sophie insisted. “I chose to come here. It’s not like Louis hypnotized me to get me down here.”

“That you know of,” Seth said, his eyes widening. He and Sophie smiled at each other for a second.

“Let me ask you something,” Sophie said. “Louis didn’t leave you, he didn’t even know about you—not until really recently, and as soon as he knew, he wanted to meet you, he wanted to work out how to be part of your life. So how can you hate him?”

Seth shrugged. “I’ve never had a dad, not really. Oh, there was Ted, the bloke who was stupid enough to marry my mum, but he didn’t stick around for long. And I’m fine about it now, I actually don’t give a toss. When I was a kid, that’s when it was hard to cope with. You know, the fathers’ race at sports day, or the other kids going off to a football game or on a camping trip with their dads? I had my granddad, and he did his best, but it wasn’t the same—you know? Not the same as having your own dad around.”

“I know,” Sophie said, remembering her first Christmas without her dad. But at least she had known exactly what it was that
was missing from her life. Seth had never had a chance to understand that.

“Anyway,
that’s
when it hurt, back then. But I got on with things. Mum did her best, never let me go without, and Nan and Granddad were always there. I got used to it, came to terms with it. But I couldn’t help but think about him, this man—my father who Mum told me she had loved very much and who had loved her back. I used to lie in bed at night and try and imagine him and wonder why on earth he hadn’t come to find Mum, the woman he loved so much, and his son. I used to wish for him to turn up at the school gates one day or be on the doorstep, out of the blue, on a Christmas morning. And he’d fling his arms round Mum and kiss her and he’d look at me and he’d say, ‘Son, I’m never leaving you again.’ And I wondered and wondered if he was lying awake staring at his ceiling wondering about me too.

“But he never turned up at school or came round on Christmas, and as I got bigger I stopped thinking about him. I worked out for myself how to be a man. And now I’m fine. I got my own place, I got college, I got the band, my mates, and as many women as I can get my hands on. I’m happy. And then suddenly there he is, my dad. There he is suddenly turning up, just like I always wanted him to.” Seth’s laugh was mirthless. “And it turns out that not only has he not been thinking about me, or wondering about me, it turns out that he didn’t even know I existed until a few days ago, and that all of those hours and days I spent wishing for him as a kid meant nothing because I didn’t even exist for him. You ask me how I can hate him, and the answer is, I don’t know what else to feel about him, not now. All this, it’s ten years too late—I don’t need a dad now and I’m not going to pretend that I do to make him, my mum, or even you happy.”

“I can understand that,” Sophie said, resting her chin on her hand as she looked up at him. “You’re in shock, you haven’t really
had time to take in what’s happened. But you might change your mind if you think about it …”

“I don’t want to,” Seth said with a shrug.

“But you don’t know anything about him, not really,” Sophie said.

“I don’t want to,” Seth said, draining the last of his coffee.

“For example,” Sophie pressed on, “when he was in Peru he was working for a children’s charity—”

“So what if he couldn’t be bothered to look after his own kids,” Seth interjected.

“And he likes to surf, I bet you do too—”

“Hate it.”

“Well, you’re studying art, aren’t you? Louis—your dad—is building up a photography business. Portraits, landscapes, weddings …”

“Weddings? Sellout.”

“And he is a good dad …his daughters …your half sisters, really love him.”

“They really love him now, after he comes back into their lives after years of leaving them on their own? They’re kids, they don’t know any different.”

He looked at Sophie again, narrowing his eyes slightly as he examined her. “I bet you had a lot to do with that. I bet you got the kids to like him again, you fixed that mess for him and now you want to fix me, don’t you?”