36. Chapter 18
HEATHER
Heather takes a pause in the present opening (the sprouts won’t peel themselves) to peruse social media and consider the implications of Scott-Bloody-Reynolds helping her set up a new business. It’s ages, if she’s honest, since she’s used his hyphenated name.
Can she trust him?
What would it mean if they were to get closer as a result?
She can’t help but admit she finds the idea of working with him exhilarating.
Those biceps. But might she be committing the first cardinal sin of relationships; the thing she’s worked so hard to avoid since Dougie, then years later with Paul?
She knows this already – men abandon you.
They wait until the worst possible time, then step back and leave you in the lurch.
It’s bad enough when there’s a romantic relationship in play.
She can’t imagine how devastating it would be if Scott were involved in her new professional endeavour. She’s forty-eight. She ought to know.
Is she being smart?
‘Mum?’ Georgia’s at the kitchen door, tinsel wrapped around her neck and a laptop mouse in her hand. ‘We’ve set up the MacBooks. Are you coming back to finish the presents? There’s still lots under the tree.’
Heather gathers up the kitchen waste, wipes her hands on her apron and submerges the peeled sprouts in cold water.
‘Coming,’ she says.
The next round of presents is distributed by Georgia and Brianna, who take it in turns to pass each gift to the intended recipient, whilst gathering up the accumulating rubbish in a large black bin liner.
‘What’s this?’ Heather asks as she opens an envelope with her name on it.
‘Just open it!’ Georgia rolls her eyes.
It takes a few moments to read and process the card inside.
‘It’s a voucher for open water swimming lessons,’ she croaks eventually. ‘How did you know I wanted to learn?’ She glances across at him. Scott’s smile is a weird mixture of bashful and smug and his blue eyes twinkle.
‘Don’t you remember telling me?’ he asks. Heather shakes her head. ‘On Georgia’s birthday?’
Her brain shoots back to the vague memories of the evening and the ensuing horror afterwards. Her cheeks begin to burn.
‘I don’t remember a huge amount about that night,’ she says sheepishly.
‘You were so wasted, Mum,’ Georgia laughs.
In fact, they all laugh and reminisce about how terrible Heather had been at that memory game and how many shots of Georgia’s birthday vodka were drunk by her mum that evening.
‘We saw some open water swimmers when we were walking to the bus stop,’ Scott says.
He’s smirking! She’s right. He’s definitely smirking. He’s remembering it, too. How she’d lifted his t-shirt and caressed his chest. It's a perfect fit, she’d said.
‘The lessons are on Portobello beach with an approved instructor. It might give you the confidence to join the swimming group and even go out on your own a few times in the summer.’
There’s no denying it’s a thoughtful gift. She blinks the sudden tears away before anyone sees them.
Her gift to Scott is next. He guffaws when he pulls the wrapping paper to the side to reveal the book she’d carefully chosen for him: “A universe of data: how numbers rule the world”.
‘I thought it might help you come up with more of your useful statistics,’ she says teasingly. ‘You know: you’ve got a such-and-such chance of this and a such-and-such chance of that.’
‘Oh my. You’ve never forgiven me, have you?’ he laughs.
The girls, desperate to be brought up to speed, squeal in horror when Heather tells them about Scott’s first communication with her. ‘I honestly spent the first few weeks paranoid I was going to end up on anti-depressants, and you were going to drop out, Georgia,’ she says.
‘Ah,’ Scott says with his finger in the air, ‘there’s still time for that yet.’
Heather’s not quite sure how it happens, but somehow, she, Georgia and Brianna end up rugby tackling Scott to the floor and punishing him for his remark through a mixture of tickles (Georgia), kisses (Brianna) and playful poking (her).
‘Take it back. Take it back,’ Brianna shouts.
‘No. No. No,’ he screams through the pile up of bodies. ‘Data is key. The data never lies.’
Afterwards, when they come up for air as a tangled mass of bodies and limbs, Scott is forced to withdraw his statement. ‘Well, maybe now I know you both, it seems like the data might need to flex a little.’
‘Loser!’ Georgia shouts.
‘Yay!’ yells Brianna.
‘What? What? What?’ Scott holds his hands as though at gun point. ‘This is allowed. You get anomalies to any rule.’
Heather sees the wink that’s directed towards her. The girls don’t.
Fraser’s presents to Heather and Georgia mark a change in the dynamic: Cashmere scarves in the Campbell family tartan.
‘Campbell?’ says Scott. ‘Not McVey?’
Heather shakes her head, worried about where this conversation is going.
‘Campbell’s my family tartan,’ she says.
‘It’s my dad who’s a McVey,’ Georgia interjects. ‘I looked him up, you know.’
Heather’s eyes speed across the room towards her daughter.
‘You did?’
‘Yeah. Flo from the Genealogy Society helped me track him down. He lives in Toronto.’ She grabs her new MacBook and opens the search engine. ‘Look, he’s even got his own Wiki page.’
Georgia taps a few times on her keyboard, then passes her laptop to Heather.
Douglas John McVey’s pompous smiling face flashes back at her.
“CEO of Davidson and Drummond Architects 2004 - 2006. Later re-branded as Apex Urban Designs Ltd. Now Managing Director of Apex International, Toronto,” she reads. Her jaw tightens. She hasn’t seen a new image of him for nineteen years.
‘Grandad worked in Davidson and Drummond,’ says Georgia, ‘didn’t he?’
Heather feels herself thrust into yet another conversation she’s avoided for years.
‘Your dad was your grandad’s boss,’ she says gently. ‘There was a bit of a falling out.’
She sees Scott pull his lips into a wince. He definitely understands the subtext, she decides.
Now, the manifestation of that drunken decision twenty years ago is playing out in front of their guests’ eyes.
‘Why don’t we see them?’
‘Your Grannie and Grandad?’ Georgia gives Heather a vulnerable nod. ‘Your Grandad said he didn’t want to see us anymore, honey. I’m sorry.’
Georgia frowns. ‘Uncle Fraser still sees them, though.’
There’s a plaintiff bleat in her daughter’s voice. Heather inclines her head.
‘Yes. Uncle Fraser does see them,’ she says quietly. Occasional updates from her brother are the only information Heather gleans about her parents these days. Despite the history, it’s contact she cherishes.
The conversation stalls for a few moments. and the Christmas music in the background suddenly sounds artificially upbeat.
Brianna breaks the silence.
‘My mum’s twin still lives in Stratford-Upon-Avon,’ she announces.
It’s now Scott’s turn to look perturbed.
‘I haven’t seen her, or my cousins, since Mum died, and we moved away. Seven years.’
‘Perhaps it’s time I put on the potatoes,’ says Heather.
‘I’ll help,’ shouts Scott and together, they stand and leave the room. ‘Bloody Genealogy Society,’ he mouths to Heather as they shut the door.
SCOTT
Is it just him or is there something oddly intimate about being in a woman’s kitchen on Christmas day, a sharp knife in one hand and a bag of carrots in the other?
Scott’s instinct to leave the room when Brianna began exposing uncomfortable truths about the family was so automatic, he’d given the alternative no thought whatsoever.
Only now he’s thrust into the alternative: cooking with Heather, him wearing a comic Christmas jumper and a lop-sided hat, her elegant and classy in a sheer satin dress.
Despite their conflicting interpretation of today’s dress code, being here with her feels entirely natural.
But also completely discombobulating. Because no matter how he looks at it, preparing vegetables for Christmas dinner alongside Heather is most definitely not protecting himself from becoming attached.
It feels like the complete opposite. And the room is so quiet, it emphasises the fact it’s just the two of them in the kitchen.
Together.
‘So how do you normally do these?’ he asks, the potato peeler in his hand.
Heather looks over from the streaky bacon she’s wrapping around tiny butcher’s sausages. ‘Roasted,’ she says, ‘along with the parsnips, maybe?’
‘In some butter with cumin seeds?’ he suggests.
Heather’s mouth twitches. ‘That would be lovely.’
Scott begins to peel. He sneaks a glance at her. She’s curled her hair and applied a sliver of green eye shadow to her lower lid. It looks incredible. Is it for him?
‘I don’t know about you, but it feels as though the past is beginning to catch up with me,’ she says as they work.
Scott fights the urge to drop the peeler and turn to face her full on. Because the comfort in knowing he’s not the only one feeling vulnerable in this way is so reassuring, it takes superhuman effort to maintain the required distance between them.
‘There’s so much I’ve not told Georgia about her dad.
And her grandparents,’ Heather continues.
‘I thought it was the right decision, protecting her. But what if it’s not?
What if she’s been curious her whole life, and it’s been stymieing her progress?
Maybe that’s what was behind the sulks and mood swings when she was at home. ’
The silence that descends indicates there’s a requirement to reply.
Shit.
‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think Georgia is holding grudges. And she doesn’t seem stymied. Just curious. And I guess it’s to be expected. Maybe they’re egging one another on with this genealogy stuff?’
‘My dad was old-school,’ Heather says. ‘He found it so hard when Dougie bought the company out. He felt he was being victimised and sidelined. Struggled to keep up with the new targets. He blamed Dougie for everything that went wrong in his life for a good few years. Sometimes, I think I was just the pawn in what happened between them. They both ended up abandoning me and Georgia in the end. It’s what I’ve tried to protect us from ever since. ’
Scott gets a tiny glimmer of what it must have been like for Heather as a new parent, abandoned by her husband, having difficulties with her father and forced to change career to allow her tiny family some security. No wonder a fear of abandonment has driven her adult decisions ever since.
‘You said as much in the hospital.’
Heather sprays oil on the baking tray and carefully lines the sausages up in columns. Scott finds the uniformity strangely comforting.
‘I did?’
‘You told me you needed to be always on your guard to protect yourself and Georgia from being abandoned.’
She stays silent for a moment. ‘Right.’
Heather begins wiping the kitchen surfaces and Scott takes the baking tray of sausages and the porcelain dish containing the carrots and parsnips and places them both in the smaller of her two ovens and sets the timer.
‘Mum! Scott!’ Georgia’s yell pierces the atmosphere. ‘Trey’s on a video call. Come on. We need you to say “hi”.’
Trey’s riding a camel on a sand dune in the middle of the Sahara desert. He has a bright blue nomadic scarf wrapped around his head in a turban and draped across his shoulders to protect his nose and mouth from sand and wind.
Three camels strut behind him, and a group of five walkers stand on the sand below.
Trey turns to catch the eye of one of the walkers and encourages them to wave in the direction of his phone.
Scott recognises the mother and son from their FaceTime chat at Thanksgiving.
Heather yells, ‘Say hi to Bethany for us. And to Mason. Tell them Happy Christmas.’
‘I will. Mum keeps threatening to come back to St Andrews with me, so you might see her sooner than you think.’
The figures in the background lift their hands above their heads and wave.
Trey readjusts the screen towards himself. His face, exposed now his scarf has fallen, is visibly grimy.
‘We’ve been trekking for days,’ he says, rubbing his eyes. ‘Everything feels gritty. But we're loving it. The camping's great, but it’s kinda weird using the toilet tent. It’s just a tiny rectangle placed over a hole in the sand with a shovel in the corner.’
‘Gross.’ Brianna and Georgia share a grimace. ‘Looking forward to seeing you at Hogmanay.’ Brianna has already begged to be excused from the now-traditional New Year’s Eve celebrations in St Albans in favour of a traditional Scottish Hogmanay in Edinburgh.
‘So have you got the mistletoe I sent you?’ Trey winks down the phone at the girls.
Georgia pulls a branch of green leaves and tiny white berries from the pocket of her fleece and brandishes it at the camera. The girls had each unwrapped a sprig from Trey earlier in the day.
Trey, meanwhile, rummages in his jacket pocket and produces a branch of his own. Then he and Georgia lift the branch above their heads and pout in a kissing motion towards the camera. Brianna follows suit, and the two girls give each other a peck on the cheek before kissing their parents.
‘Parents turn?’ Trey says.
Heather and Scott send each other a horrified look. Scott notices the blush of red on Heather’s cheeks and stiffens. Brianna and Georgia begin to clap. ‘Parents. Parents. Parents.’ They chant.
It seems churlish to refuse.
A quick peck is all that’s required.
Trey is making whooping sounds on his camel in Morocco.
Heather laughs, shrugs and leans in towards him.
There’s nothing more he can do. Despite the warning in his head to not let this particular woman get too close, Scott mirrors the action.
Their lips skim for perhaps two hundred milliseconds.
No time at all to effect change in the world, you would think.
But of course, that’s not the case, is it?
As any decent scientific or mathematical analysist would attest. How long does it take for lightning to strike?
For a bullet to pierce? For a car to spin on black ice?
Because the jolt between them is like twenty thousand volts.
It doesn’t feel at all incongruous that their kiss should be followed by the alert of a sharp alarm which pierces its way into the lounge from the kitchen. Heather lurches away from him.
‘Oh. Gosh. Sorry. That’s the oven,’ she says. ‘Happy Christmas, Trey. See you next week.’
She springs from the sofa and practically sprints from the room.
Scott watches her go.
He’d follow had his limbs not decalcified and his brain turned to mush.