“Wouldn’t that be strange?” Callum picked up his youngest daughter, Lark, and put her on his knee. She looked so much like my second, Niamh, had at that age it was spooky. “Someone goes in there and it’s like the lost children of Southwark?”
Victoria frowned. “Out of everything, I didn’t expect you to all be most bothered about a room with no windows. What happened in there?”
I looked around my siblings. What hadn’t happened in there? I’d cried in that room over boys – including the boy I was now married to when I thought he had a girlfriend (I’d been fifteen and too young anyway). I’d had sex there with that boy a few years later, and only a couple of years ago too, because it was the best place to escape to during a dinner party for a quickie.
Victoria stared round at us. “Seriously? This is the quietest I’ve ever seen you.” She looked longest at her husband, my older brother, the boy who’d led our gang of lost children until Marie had appeared.
He shrugged. “It was part of our childhood, like a treehouse, we did all the things you might do in a treehouse.”
“What do people do in a treehouse?” Lucy, his eldest stared at him. “Did you play in there?”
He nodded. “We did – play – in there. Seph turned the room intoStar Wars.Ava used to set all her dolls houses up in there too.”
I’d tripped over one of those once. It’d been fecking painful.
“Is that the big thing about the house?” Vic pushed. “It’s just that room you’ll miss?” She took a decent glug of her red wine.
Max shook his head and put down his cutlery. It seemed he was done stealing Seph’s food. “No. It was our first proper home. I hate saying that because it suggests that our mum – mine, Jackson’s, Claire’s and Cal’s – didn’t give us that. She did, but she wasn’t well and it was fleeting. When we were living in Oxfordshire we were wild. Dad was away all the time and we could go three weeks without him being there. Mum stayed in her room most of the time and left us to the nannies and housekeepers that she employed, so we never had to do anything and no one ever told us off. Then Mum – Rachel – died and there was no one.” He stopped almost abruptly, looking around at the rest of us to see whether or not he should carry on.
I nodded. Everyone was listening, bar the youngest of the kids, who’d slipped away from the table to play a game of something they were making up, which was fine. That was what we encouraged them to do. The older kids – Rose, Eliza, Teddy – were all spellbound.
Those days, before Marie, were rarely spoken about, even with Seph and Ava and Payton. Yet those were the days that haunted the four of us.
“We weren’t doing well at school and there were mean things being said about Rachel. We all got into trouble, apart from Callum, who was too little to be in school. When we were home we were together all the time and it was Max who made sure we ate properly and had baths and did some tidying up after ourselves. Then Mum – Rachel – died and we just had peoplepaid to look after us.” I carried on the story, aware of Max’s pain at what happened and how he’d struggled to leave it behind.
“Marie changed everything. The house in Oxford was really old fashioned and was full of reminders of Rachel for us. Callum was too young to remember her.” I looked at him and found him smiling, nodding slightly. He was okay with this now, especially since his and Wren’s first babies were born. He live closed to Marie and Dad in Oxfordshire and saw them regularly, having more of a relationship with Dad than the rest of us had, just because of proximity.
“Within a week we were in London and it was utter chaos. They were buying the house here at the same time as starting a renovation project in Oxford. We were living out of a hotel and it was fun – for the first time it was fun because we were altogether and we didn’t really know what was happening but we were together and that was what mattered. We knew we’d be living in the house on Bletchley Road and going to school nearby, but for that entire summer we explored London, all the parks and the zoo and the shops. Marie didn’t try to be our mum but she was. We knew what we could get away with and there was this unspoken rule that we could try and get away with all sorts but when she said no, that was it. We never pushed her.” I’d fallen in love with Marie within days. She’d braided hair and given hugs and let me cuddle her with Callum in the evenings like it was perfectly normal. Rachel hadn’t liked to touch us or have us near her, wanting us to be managed by a governess and only seeing us once a day. It was harsh and cruel and the only people I’d been loved by or loved had been my three brothers.
“When did you move into the house?” That was Wren. “When I knew you all kind of living there, it felt like that was the place you’d always been.”
“I think it felt like that because we helped choose everything, all of the furniture, apart from Mum and Dad’s bedroom. Wewere almost allowed what we wanted in our rooms and even in the lounge and the dining room. That’s why the dining chairs are mismatched.” Callum grinned, looking over at Jackson and then Max. “You two used to fight over the chair Jacks chose because Max preferred it. We should take those chairs with us. The people buying the house won’t want them anyway because they’re not a matching set.”
“I always wondered why it had different chairs.” Killian looked at me from across the table, Orla on his knee, half asleep. She was unusually tired and I was half worried she had a virus or a bug on the way, or she’d not slept much while camping.
“Seph and Payts and Ava all picked their own chairs when they were old enough. It became a tradition.” I remember the days they’d chosen them, a rite of passage almost. “But we all swapped around. So if we take them, who has what?”
“Maybe we do a draw for them and at Christmas, wherever we’re going, we take the chair.” That was Ava’s solution.
“Or we insist they go to Oxford altogether and replace the chairs there.” Jackson leaned forward, his hand holding Vanessa’s on the table. “Then they stay together.”
We were all quiet, nods of agreement the only movement. Even the tweenagers had nothing to say, which was most unusual.
“I’m going to go back tomorrow,” Max said. “I’m going to take Lucy and the boys and see if there’s anything they think we should bring back home. Anyone else joining us?”
More nods. A whisper from Lucy to her mother and then to Eliza. Rose watched, interested, her hair, redder than her mother’s, catching the sunlight as it fell through the window.
“Would Gran and Grandad mind if we had tea there?” She asked, looking grown up all of a sudden.
There was no way any of us would ever have said no, so it looked liked we’d be creating another memory in the house before we said goodbye to it.
Or maybe it was another memory for us.
MEMORY FOUR
GRANT
For once, I didn’t sit on the edge of my bed and count exactly what was wrong with my life. I didn’t ruminate on my brood of children or the death of their mother or how the fuck I was going to sort my life out or find a school for Max.
