‘I don’t get it.’
‘Their mother was my best friend,’ he said simply. ‘We were mates from pre-school, right through med. school and beyond. Never lovers, though. Claire had appalling taste in men, from the time she kissed Terry Hopkins behind the shelter sheds when she was ten. Hopkins used to squash snails down girls’ dresses. Why did she not see that could only end in tears?’
‘She married a snail-squasher?’
‘She escaped Terry Hopkins but she did worse. She married a serial cheat and a bully. Claire’s parents are loaded. Her father’s something huge in the financial world. My parents are wealthy enough, but they’re nothing compared to Claire’s. Steve took one look at only-child Claire’s inheritance prospects and moved right in. But as soon as they were married he reverted to the slimeball he was. He had affair after affair, treating Claire like dirt.’
‘Which left you as a friend.’
‘I’m godfather to each of them,’ he said, trying to eke out his beer to last through a bleak story. ‘And they’re great kids. Claire and I worked in the same hospital as interns. It was easy to help her out in emergencies. I didn’t mind taking them to soccer on Saturdays, doing the occasional childminding. It was even fun.’
‘Until…’
‘Until.’ He gave up on his stubby, planting it in the sand. It was still a quarter full but maybe he’d need it at the end.
He usually hated telling this story, but he glanced at Rachel and saw only casual interest—the sort of interest a doctor might show a patient describing symptoms. She wasn’t emotionally involved. She was simply a colleague who was…asking.
Strangely, it made it easier to keep talking. Every one of his friends had reacted to his story with dismay, horror, sympathy. Rachel was asking—because she’d like to know? Or because she thought she ought to ask. The differentiation was hard to make but somehow he appreciated it.
Her detachment made the story easier to tell.
‘Claire was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy when Henry was two,’ he told her. ‘She collapsed at work. Dramatic. Awful. If she hadn’t been in a hospital when it happened she would have died but she pulled through. Just. By this time Creepy Steve was almost a thing of the past and her illness was the last straw. He never had time for the kids and when Claire fell ill, when her parents made it clear there’d be no money for him, ever, he signed over rights to access to his kids and was heard of no more.’
‘Which left Claire alone.’
‘Yeah.’ He stared into the middle distance, remembering her terror. Remembering his own fear. ‘She had irreversible pulmonary hypertension, a contraindication for a heart transplant, but a transplant did end up buying her enough time to think about the boys’ future without her. While she was ill her parents took her and the boys back into their home. She had enough time to accept the boys could never be happy with her parents as sole carers.’
‘Why not?’ Weirdly, once again she seemed detached. The way she was, he wouldn’t be surprised if she produced a clipboard from her beach bag and started taking notes.
But her detached manner helped. He found himself wanting to outline the events that had propelled him here.
‘Her parents are…overpowering,’ he told her. ‘Because we’d been friends for so long I already knew that. Claire had been pushed as a child, really pushed. Ballet, piano, violin, gym—polo, for heaven’s sake—and she was expected to be brilliant at everything. To be honest, I suspect that’s why she fell for Creepy Steve and the other creeps before him—it was a dumb attempt to rebel. I gather, after she fell ill, the relationship with her parents grew more strained. Anyway, even before she had the transplant she knew the odds—she knew she wasn’t going to be around long-term for the boys. In the end she was desperate for me to have some influence in the way they were raised—so she asked me to marry her and adopt them.’
What followed was silence. Normally friends or colleagues jumped in at that point in the story. Not Rachel. She seemed to be taking her time to think it through.
‘That was some ask,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t imagine how it made you feel.’
‘We were good friends,’ he said diffidently. ‘And it wasn’t as if marrying and settling down was my style.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘I worked, I surfed, I had fun. Family wasn’t on my radar. And we thought—Claire and I both thought—that it’d be simple enough. If by some miracle she survived long-term then we’d divorce. If she died, then her parents would do the hard yards of parenting—they saw the boys as their responsibility and had already made it clear that’s what they wanted. I’d just be around on the edges, giving them another long-term person for security, but with enough legal authority to step in if her parents pushed too hard.’
‘Still, it’s a big deal.’
‘You wouldn’t have done it?’
‘You said marrying wasn’t your style. It’s so far off my radar it’s another world. That kind of involvement—any kind of personal involvement—isn’t my scene.’
‘Really?’ He eyed her curiously and once again that sense of a clipboard between them came into his mind. ‘Yet last weekend you were there for me.’
‘There wasn’t a choice. Not that I minded. It was a finite commitment with the end in view. What you’re describing… Long-term involvement seems a given.’
‘There was no way I thought it’d interfere with my Friday nights though,’ he said with another rueful look down at his beer. ‘But look at me now.’
‘So what happened?’
‘She died,’ he said simply. ‘She tried for another transplant, which went horribly wrong—she was never going to be strong enough to deal with it and she knew it, but her parents were fighting with every means they had. When it was over the boys stayed living with them and I tried to take up where we’d left off, seeing them occasionally, taking them to soccer. Only it didn’t work. The kids got quiet. You know the rule in Emergency? Triage? A kid comes in screaming its lungs out and a kid comes in limp and silent. Which one needs attention? The limp one every time, and they were limp.’
‘So…a problem.’
‘Claire had given me custody in her will,’ he said. ‘She didn’t think I’d need it. All she’d asked is that I accept the power to override her parents if they did anything I knew she’d hate. So I kept hanging out with them, being a mate rather than a dad. But the months wore on and they kept getting quieter. I knew things weren’t right, but I couldn’t nail it.
‘And then one night I went around and they’d just brought their school reports home. School reports for kids. Henry was in infant class. You know the kind of report? Henry: A+ for finger painting, A+ for tying shoelaces. But Kit, who was two years older, had a slightly more precise report. Kit is struggling a little. B-for reading. The housekeeper let me in, and I could hear a row. I walked into the study and Claire’s dad had them lined up, waving reports in his hand and blasting Kit. Almost spitting into his face. “You let a five-year-old beat you. What are you? A pansy? You take after your no-good father. No grandchild of mine lets a five-year-old beat him, you good-for-nothing little…”’
He fell silent, remembering the sick horror as he’d realised what had to be done. By him.
Friday nights were the least of it.
‘They’d been authoritarian with Claire in her childhood,’ he said, speaking almost to himself rather than Rachel. ‘That’s why she worried, but she knew they loved her, and she thought they loved her boys. But when she died… I think their grief has left them a little unhinged. It doesn’t help that the boys all have Steve’s red hair—they look like him. I’m no