He looks over as James and Lauren stroll into the kitchen. ‘You’re actually quite a good photographer, Mum!’ he teases.
‘Oh, thank you, Charlie,’ Lauren says, grinning. He’s right, though. The pictures are beautiful with the soft, wintry light and twiggy trees silhouetted against a pale sky. Lauren really is talented.
Esther doesn’t go home as planned that night. When Charlie’s friend Remy comes round with Freya, his girlfriend, Charlie invites her to have a few beers with them and they all sit up chatting in Charlie’s room.
It’s cosy up there, and kind of magical with the skylight in the sloping ceiling, and the telescope. She has a few drinks and finds herself telling them about Gracie and Jess, her best friends who she misses so much. How, last time she’d called Jess, she’d said, ‘Sorry, Est. Got to go, we’re having a party on the beach. Speak soon, yeah?’
A beach party with her super-brainy university friends. That had sounded fun. Esther had googled St Andrews beach, and as she’d gazed at the wide stretch of golden sand, tears had dropped down her cheeks. Miles had thought she was mad, getting upset over something like that. But her tears had kept falling as if a tap had been turned on. Why hadn’t she gone to college? Why had she gone straight from living with her mum and Luc to her boyfriend’s place with its creepy bat, without sharing flats like her best friends were doing?
She doesn’t tell Charlie, Remy and Freya that part.
Lauren says of course it’s fine for Esther to stay over in the spare room, and when she wakes she’s surprised to hear birds tweeting instead of Miles snoring, then saying in his gruff morning voice, ‘Make some coffee, would you, babe?’
For a moment she actually wishes this washerbed she was lying in, out here in the countryside. Being here feels so good. But of course she has to go home, and she’s aware of a heaviness pressing down on her chest as her dad drives them back to London on Sunday evening. She’shad a lovely time hanging out with Charlie, just chatting about everyday stuff. It’s felt totally unpressurised. She enjoyed meeting Remy and Freya but she actually prefers just being with Charlie really.
Esther could never have imagined being friends with a seventeen-year-old boy. But she already feels that Charlieisher friend. He listens to her. He’s smart and interesting and never talks over her the way Miles does. She’s never met anyone quite like him. For some reason, Esther decides not to mention any of this to Miles. It isn’t that he’d be jealous or even bothered; it’s just, she wants to keep something for herself. Not that it matters, because he’s not really interested. Even when she shows him the new pictures Lauren took of her, he seems distracted.
‘Yeah, nice,’ he says quickly, as if he has other, more urgent matters on his mind. Like attacking the grubby tile grout?Veryoccasionally Esther finds herself wondering what it’d be like to have a boyfriend closer to her own age. There’s been a couple but no one that serious, and no one ever mentioned grout.
She curls up on their bed and goes through the pictures on her own, choosing the best ones. Shoots are so fun and easy now, compared to when Miles took charge of them, getting her to lie on the rug like a corpse and curl up in a little ball in the walk-in cupboard where he keeps a busted old keyboard and some African drums. ‘Let’s make it edgy,’ he used to say. ‘If those jewellery people want boring, happy-smiley stuff, tell them to fuck off.’
He was only trying to help; she realises that. But Esther likes working with Bethani. They’re such nice girls in the London office, and they take her for lovely lunches at a place right on the river, and they’re basically Esther’s main income these days.
She didn’t want to tell them to fuck off. Also, shedoesn’t want Miles telling her what to do, getting involved in her work when he knows nothing about it. And it occurred to her recently that that’s Miles’s default reaction to pretty much any irritating situation she might happen to mention, like back in the summer, when she’d been packing for Corsica and told him, ‘Dad’ll go mad when he sees how much stuff I’m bringing.’
Miles: ‘Tell him to fuck off.’
Me: ‘Miles, that’s my dad!’
Miles: ‘So?’
He hardly speaks to his own dad, who owns half of the West Country and reckons he’s an artisanal cider producer when he’s actually an army guy, a colonel or something, if they still exist. Or a brigadier? Is that a thing, the Brigadier of Somerset?
So no, Esther wasn’t going to tell her dad to fuck off – or the Bethani girls, for that matter. They’ve loved her pictures sinceLaurenstarted doing them. And she suspects that might bother Miles a little bit because later, he grudgingly has a quick look through yesterday’s shoot.
‘Anyone can be a photographer with a phone,’ he remarks, stifling a yawn.
‘Laurenhas proper cameras too,’ she tells him. ‘She’s professional, Miles. She does shoots for newspapers, magazines, websites – all this incredible food photography. It’s just, with a phone there’s that spontaneity—’
‘Ooh, spontaneity!’ he teases.
She glares at him, telling herself not to rise to it. In fact, he too has a proper, very expensive camera, which he’s used once – to take a picture of his own reflection in a tarnished mirror. He has a problem with instruction manuals, he says. He can’t learn things that way. ‘Do a photography course then,’ Esther suggested, but he said he didn’t have the time.
‘You don’t need to feel threatened becauseLauren’s been helping me,’ Esther tries to reassure him. Her therapist said that, when someone is behaving in a way you don’t like, it’s best to try to understand ‘the why’.
‘Why should I feel threatened, babe?’ he asks, looking baffled.
‘I’m saying, you shouldn’t—’
‘I don’t feel threatened byanyone,’ Miles retorts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHARLIE
‘Everyone thinks they’re a photographer now,’ Charlie’s dad announces, his reddened face looming on the tiny screen. ‘They’ve got their phones and filters and that’s it, they reckon. That’s all there is to it. They’re a bloody photographer!’
He laughs bitterly and Charlie waits patiently for him to stop, to ask howhe’sdoing, to try and find out what’s going on inhislife. Charlie would actually love to bore the tits off his dad by telling him about the intricate workings of Brenda’s newsagent’s. He’d like to send him into a comatose state by describing how she likes the magazines to be arranged slightly overlapping each other, and the sweet display topped up at all times with no unsightly spaces.
