Mum glances at Dad, then clears her throat. “Well, we weren’t sure whether to mention anything...”
Tash and I share a look. A film reel of mortifications spools through my mind.Oh God. What are they going to say? They’re not nudists, are they? Was it a sex party? Please don’t let it have been a sex party.
Mum and Dad are sitting very close together on the sofa, holding hands. It strikes me that I haven’t seen them do that in a while. The last eighteen months have been tough for them—I know Dad’s suffered from some bad migraines lately, and talk of redundancies at his company has started up again.
“This weekend... we were at a marriage retreat,” Mum says. The words come out in a whoosh.
Mum’s had a funky new haircut recently, and I realize as she speaks that she’s wearing lipstick, which she never normally does. Dad’s got a new hairstyle too, but his is a bit more cabin-in-the-woods.
“What’s... a marriage retreat?” (Tash is clearly also thinkingsex party.)
Mum glances at Dad. “It’s where you go... to work on your marriage.”
“Why do you need to work on it?” Tash says, with about as much tact as Dylan when he asked where babies come from.
Next to me on the sofa, Max shifts. “Do you want me to—”
“No, stay,” I whisper, squeezing his hand.
“We’ve been having some...problems, and we decided... this was our last shot.”
“John and Roz recommended it,” Dad chips in, like we’re talkingabout a box set, or the best place to buy lawn mower parts. “You know, with—”
“Yes, yes, John-and-Roz-with-the-barge,” Tash says, irritably.
Mum turns to me. “We actually want to thank you, Lucy.”
“Me?”
“Yes. What happened last night... It’s put everything into perspective for us.”
“I don’t follow.”
Mum’s face brightens suddenly, like her favorite band have just walked onto an invisible stage. “We’re going to do somethingwild. Aren’t we, Gus?”
Dad beams at Mum. I haven’t seen him look so happy in... well, a really long time. “Yep. We’re going to take advantage of being nomads. Give married life another go.”
“What do you mean, another go?” Tash says, her voice becoming more and more agitated. “You’re already married. And I don’t understand what all this has to do with Lucy, or nomads, or—”
“Losing everything in the fire... it’s made us reevaluate,” Mum says. “And we realized... we don’t want to lose each other.”
“I’m going to take voluntary redundancy,” Dad says. “And we’ll bank the money from that, and the insurance, then do something crazy with it.”
I notice Simon meeting Max’s eye with the shadow of a smile. I’m pretty sure they’d get on, if they officially had permission to—Simon knows now about what Max and Tash did one night before he’d even met her, and to his credit, he seems entirely unfazed by the whole thing. There is a level of understanding there, perhaps, reminding me—not for the first time—of Andrea. Maybe, because Simon did something stupid once too, he refuses to judge Max for having done something similar.
“Crazy’s about right.” Tash is leaning forward now, her blond bob dancing in front of her face. “Listen. I think you’re both in shock—”
Mum doesn’t blink. “Actually, this is something we’ve been thinking about for a very long time.”
“Thirty-five years, in fact,” Dad says.
I feel Tash glance at me, perhaps for support, but I can’t take my eyes off Mum and Dad. They’re gleaming like two kids in love, flushed with excitement. I haven’t seen them like that in so long.
“You don’t know this, but when we met on holiday in Menorca, when we were twenty,” Mum says, “we actually spent the fortnight talking about wanting to sail around the world.”
“You can’t sail,” Tash points out.
“Tash,please,” says Simon, uncharacteristically sharp, like she’s talking over all the good bits in a film.
