The Last Weekend (31 page)

‘Or in the middle of nowhere,’ Daisy added. ‘Why didn’t someone give you a lift?’

‘Dunno. Too busy.’

‘You could have got lost. You could have been wandering round till morning. You could have …’

Archie’s face was so wet and blotchy it took a while for me to realise he was crying. It was impossible for Daisy to cradle him while standing up, so they dropped to the sofa, where she held his face to her breasts as he sobbed about a fight at the house and having to leave and being given directions to Badingley but missing a turning and floods and strange sounds
from the fields and a car crawling by with a staring man in it and how he
had
phoned and
had
texted but there was no fucking reception was there so what was the fucking point. While he sobbed into the V of her dressing gown she gave Ollie a look that said
Don’t you dare say a word — let him cry all he likes.
I doubt Ollie would have spoken anyway. Archie might be overdoing it, as he had when the tennis ball hit him, but even Ollie seemed touched, and plonked himself the other side of Archie, stroking his hair and rubbing his back. I too was moved — by Archie’s head shamelessly nuzzling his mother’s breasts, as I’d done, on the same sofa. He was her son. He’d every right. But I felt usurped.

Mouthing goodnight, though it was morning, I left them to it, slipping back along the tiled corridor and up to bed.

Some minutes later I heard footsteps on the stairs, then two doors closing, one after the other. Archie, exhausted, would be asleep at once. Not so Ollie and Daisy, who had outstanding business from last night. Though their voices didn’t carry, it was easy for me to imagine the row. Arms folded, her hair swirling angrily around her, Daisy would be giving Ollie hell.

How dare you treat a guest like that! How dare you imply that something’s going on between me and Milo!

Ollie, unfazed, indeed annoyed with himself for not speaking more plainly at dinner, would have his answer ready.

Why do I think there’s something going on? Because you dragged him up here when we’re on holiday. Because you’ve been all over each other all weekend. And because of the tissues.

She would shake her head at that point, bewildered.

Which tissues?

The tissues in the waste bin.

What about them?

You know what I’m talking about.

I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.

I’m talking about you and Milo having sex.

Hearing which, outraged, Daisy says: If you believe that of me, you can forget about the wedding.

Fine, Ollie replies, since I can’t trust you any more, I don’t want to marry you anyway.

Then I’ll marry someone who does want me.

Who, Milo?

Not Milo, Daisy says, someone else.

I listened as they argued in my inner ear, knowing Daisy would be too discreet to mention what had happened between us. That could come later, when she confessed (to herself as well as to him) that she was in love with me. For now all that mattered was to get through the weekend.

Someone else? Who?

None of your business.

Slipping from bed, I crept to the bathroom in the hope their voices might breach the lath-and-plaster partition. I put my ear to the wall tiles as I pissed: nothing. But as I pulled the chain, the sound of Daisy laughing carried through. Laughter wasn’t in the script. Perhaps I’d imagined it. But as I crossed back to the bedroom, a second laugh, Ollie’s, floated along the landing, and then Daisy’s voice saying:
We should never have invited him.
Or if not those words exactly, something very like them.

They’re talking about Milo, I thought, climbing back into bed. But why would they laugh about it, after the tensions over dinner last night? Then an ugly thought struck: that it was me they were talking about; that Ollie had used me to justify his suspicions; that Daisy had mocked me when he did. The dialogue was easily reconstructed.

It was Ian who put the idea in my head.

Ian! Why would anyone listen to Ian, you know how jealous he is.

Jealous of who?

You, me, Milo, everyone. I know he’s your friend —

Your friend too.

He’s not my friend, not after this weekend.

Why? What’s he done?

You don’t want to know.

Tell me.

Put it this way: we should never have invited them. Em’s all right. But he’s a nightmare.

Laughter from Ollie: I know what you mean.

Incidentally, do you know what Em told me about him? Well …

So that was why they were laughing at me. I lay on the sheet, sweatily reviewing the finale of the night before. While I’d been there to listen, Em had described our fertility problem as a mutual one. But then the two of them had gone off in the car. In my absence, there was nothing to stop her telling Daisy the truth. The full works. Every shameful detail. Now Daisy, in turn, was telling Ollie. Hence the laughter, as he delighted — they both delighted — in my humiliation.

I didn’t expect them to understand. No one does. If you say you’re infertile, people assume you can’t get it up. Daisy knew that was untrue. But she could hardly tell Ollie
how
she knew. All she would have told him was what Em had told her. That I’m deficient. A sub-prime sperm producer. That I shoot blanks.

It didn’t seem that way when we first visited the clinic. The doctor spoke of ‘non-specific infertility’ and it was Em — less physically fit than I am — who did the initial tests. They showed she was ovulating normally. More from pride than fear, I stalled on my tests, allowing her to think I’d done them when I hadn’t and, then, worse, when I
was
tested, lying to her about the results. I now knew it was one in ten million she’d get pregnant through ‘unassisted intercourse'. But I’d had outside bets come home before and I kept on plugging away. Eventually
the clinic had us in together and the truth came out. Em felt too sorry for me to be angry for long but she bemoaned the delay: if I’d been honest, we could have begun saving for IVF six months earlier. In penance, I agreed to start saving up – from now on we’d put a hefty sum aside each month. But as I’ve confessed already (by now you know every sad truth about me), the savings are no longer there.

To Em, my condition is a medical fact, not a matter for shame. Many times in recent months she has urged me to ‘talk to someone', and maybe I will one day. But the thought of Ollie and Daisy knowing the truth, and laughing together in bed about my inadequacy, stirred memories of past suffering at their hands. As I lay there with my head under the pillow, I told myself to calm down: I mustn’t let my mind run away with me. But I couldn’t now unhear what I thought they’d said.

Storms are supposed to clear the air. Afterwards should be like the morning after a death — clean, formal, lucid, empty, fresh. Global warming seems to have changed all that. Or perhaps it was Badingley’s microclimate. At any rate, when I got up a second time that day, around nine, the air was slimy and rank, a cold sweat across the windowpanes, the sky a soiled grey sheet. Leaving Em to doze, I made myself tea and opened the French windows for Rufus. Outside was breathless and clammy. To judge from the beaded grass, the silvered rose bushes, the eucalyptus leaves like laundry dripping from clothes pegs, it had been raining all night. When Rufus returned from his tour of the orchard, he looked like the hull of a boat, tar-blackened halfway up. He shook himself out, hosing the terrace and my bare feet.

I brought a cane chair out and sat with my mug in the soupy light. The garden was spectral. I gazed at it through empty sockets. Bird calls echoed through my skull.

I remembered Ollie saying that the house had no foundations. The fissured earth would be awash now, and if the water pooled, then froze when winter came, surely the bricks would move, the flint crack, the walls give way, the whole ramshackle structure come down.

You build your life on a handful of principles — trust, reason, fairness, love and friendship — and when you find they’re an illusion you collapse.

‘Up already?’ Ollie said, behind me.

‘This is late for me,’ I said.

‘More tea?’

‘If you’re making it.’

‘Anyone else about?’

‘No.’

Perhaps Milo had made an early start and gone home. Two wooden tennis rackets lay twisted on the lawn, where his girls had left them. There’d be no tennis played with them again. By the look of the sky — bulging like a ceiling after a flood — there’d be no tennis for Ollie and me, either.

‘Sorry about the performance,’ Ollie said, handing me tea. I was surprised he could remember any of it, and was about to say so — till I realised he meant Archie’s, not his own. ‘He never cries like that. He was really shaken up.’

‘Useful lesson,’ I said. ‘A shock to the system will do him good.’

‘Do you think?’

‘We all need discipline, Ollie. Surely Sandhurst taught you that.’

‘Parenting’s not like the army. Daisy and I try to be flexible.’

‘There’s your mistake. Why do you think Archie stopped going to school? Because he knew he could get away with it. That there’d be no comeback.’

‘There were other factors. It’s complicated.’

‘You’re making excuses for him.’

‘Am I?’

‘I know it’s not easy,’ I said, backing down. ‘You’ve had a tough few months. I’m sure he’ll be fine in the end.’

Had Em been there, she’d have urged Ollie to be more loving and affirming as a father. Though I stopped short of such soppy nonsense, I tried not to make him feel criticised. We were leaving today. I wanted to depart on good terms.

Swallows chizzled overhead, like wires short-circuiting. Occasional swifts, too, on their long fuse. The air crackled, as if charged. It would rain again any minute.

‘It doesn’t look good for tennis,’ I said.

‘It’ll dry out later.’

‘Em and I ought to head off before lunch.’

‘And miss our decider?’

I expected him to protest at length but he shrugged and sipped his tea.

‘We’ll have to think of an alternative,’ I said, humouring him.

‘Anything to win the bet, eh?’

‘I couldn’t care less about the bet. I’m just trying to honour our deal.’

The leaves on the eucalyptus tree rattled in a sudden gust. Ollie’s indifference shocked me. Was he tired? Hung-over? Afraid of losing? Or after Daisy had told him about my fertility issues did he think me not man enough to be worth taking on? The fucker. I would show him. We’d shaken hands on it. I’d not let him weasel out.

If tennis was impossible, a board game would do. Even better, I had some cards in my suitcase — my own special deck. I was about to suggest I fetch them when a car pulled up in the driveway.

‘Who the hell’s that?’ Ollie said, marching off like a squire to evict the trespassers.

For what it’s worth — one last word on the subject — my sperm count is perfectly normal: four million spermatozoa per gram of testicle per day. The problem’s not numbers, but movement. Motility: the ability of sperm to move by flagellate swimming. Mobility, if you prefer. Where your average sperm goes off like an underwater missile, making straight for the target, mine amble around in circles. They’re clueless, work-shy, undirected — like teenagers who won’t stir from bed. The doctor at the clinic put it more kindly, describing my sperm as ‘hyperactive’ rather than idle: they thrash around, in wildly gyrating patterns, unaware of their purpose. Either way, it’s a judgement. My sperm are just like me.

I’d been wrong about Milo disappearing to London. He’d got up early and driven to Frissingfold with the girls, in search of goodies; his was the car we heard coming up the drive. ‘My contribution to breakfast,’ he said, carrying in croissants, Danish pastries, orange juice, eggs, bacon and marmalade, along with flowers for Daisy and a bottle of whisky for Ollie. The obsequiousness of the gesture — when his only contribution until then had been to ruin the weekend – was transparent. And his knee-crooking gratitude ‘for a wonderful break’ renewed my suspicions: if his relationship with Daisy was innocent, he should be confronting Ollie, not appeasing him. I was surprised Ollie couldn’t see this and appalled to hear him apologising ('Fear I drank too much last night. Hope I didn’t say anything out of order'). As for Daisy, the flowers made her coo and simper: ‘You shouldn’t have.’ Indeed he shouldn’t. It was high time he fucked off.

(It’s true that Em had also wanted to buy our hosts a thank-you present, till I dissuaded her. If Ollie and Daisy wanted flowers or whisky or suchlike, they would buy their own, I said; it wasn’t as if they were short of the wherewithal. Only
an outsider like Milo would resort to empty tokens. Real friends knew better.)