“I know Paul coached rugby at their boarding school.”
“Right. So you know they all made friends there.”
“Of course.” Emily’s aware of this but only the bare details. She’s never felt curious enough to ask Paul more. What she knows is that Paul met the others via Mark, a talented player who he mentored, but Paul didn’t stay at the school long because he quit to take the plunge and open his first bar. And the rest is history.
“Okay,” Jayne says. “So I have a theory as to why they’re all so close. I think it’s a boarding school thing. Kids at boarding school make extremely close friendships and in their case the intensity of that was magnified because their parents were all teachers at the school, so they didn’t fit in with the other kids. They weren’t posh or rich enough. It made them stick together.”
“But what’s that got to do with Paul? He wasn’t a pupil there.”
“Because he, like them, lived at the school all year round, on site. Have you ever been there?”
Emily shakes her head.
“It’s really isolated. Not quite as remote as here, but not far off. Paul wouldn’t have had a chance to meet many other people.”
Ruth says, “And I think when Edie arrived, she made things even more of an emotional hothouse, because they all fell in love with her. She was the only girl in the whole school. They only let her into the sixth form because they were desperate to hire her mum to teach art.”
It makes sense of Edie’s confidence in herself, Emily thinks, if literally hundreds of schoolboys lusted after her when she was still a teenager.
“I bet she relished the attention,” Jayne says.
Ruth thinks about it. “I don’t know. To be fair, she probably didn’t enjoy it all the time. It was probably a bit unhealthy for her.”
“Paul never fancied her,” Emily says, because he’s assured Emily of that, but Jayne talks over her. “Oh, Edie was precocious even then, everybody says so. That’s why they all assumed she’d end up with Paul. Because he was that much older and more worldly. She bloody loved having them all dote on her; you know she did.”
Emily doesn’t bother to repeat herself. She’s not sure she even wants to know any of this, let alone get stuck talking about it now.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I really want to try to call Paul. Will someone come with me? Please?”
“Sure,” Jayne says.
“I’ll stay. Somebody needs to unpack the food,” Ruth says.
There are two overstuffed cooler bags on the kitchen floor.
“You sure?”
“Absolutely. I’ll get everything put away. But if you find a signal, can you call Toby for me? I’m not actually worried, but it would be nice to know . . .” Her words trail off. She will put away the food, but what she’s thinking about most of all is the bottle of vodka hidden in her bag.
“That he’s okay. Of course, I will.” Emily hands her phone to Ruth and asks her to save Toby’s number into it. Ruth has a moment of hesitation, a dropping feeling in her gut. She doesn’t want Emily to have Toby’s number. She’s so young and so pretty.
“Don’t you have his number?” Ruth asks Jayne.
“I might do, I’m not sure. My phone’s in my coat.”
Ruth looks at Emily’s phone. She doesn’t know how to refuse to give out Toby’s number without it sounding weird, or offensive, so she types the number in.
“Can you call my mother, too?” she asks. “Just to make sure that Alfie’s okay?”
She tries to smile, not wanting to reveal how deeply anxious she feels, but it’s a watery effort.
“Of course,” Emily says.
As soon as Jayne and Emily have left the barn, Ruth goes to the upstairs landing where John Elliott has left their baggage and kneels beside her bag, delving into it until she finds the bottle that she slipped into an inside pocket.
The warm vodka feels like sedation as it runs down her throat.She breathes slowly, savoring it, takes another long sip. The hardwood floor is uncomfortable on her knees, and she relaxes to sit more comfortably, her back against the landing wall, her toes pressed against the banisters. All the spaces in this house are tight. Above her, the glass in the skylights looks as if it’s liquidizing in the rain. The others will get very wet. She allows herself one more draft, screws the lid back on the bottle. It dangles from her hand.
I should have gone with them, she tells herself. Because of Alfie. In case Jayne is wrong. She looks at the bottle, suddenly consumed with loathing for it and for herself. What kind of mother prioritizes drinking over hearing the voices of her family in an emergency? What was she thinking?
