Chapter 6
‘Jake! It’s about time.’ William answered the door, an apron tied around his waist. ‘I was just about to send out a search party,’ he joked.
‘I had some things to finish at the office,’ Jake said apologetically. The intended half day had been anything but.
‘Nobody spends Christmas working, Jake.’ William looked over Jake’s shoulder. ‘You drove? You could have caught a flight to Scotland from London City Airport. There should be a law against driving while looking as tired as you.’
Jake stood on the front step, looking at his shoes, feeling like he was all of five years old again. ‘I know, but I preferred to drive myself this time. It helped me to unwind.’
‘It’s Christmas Eve. You normally travel here together the night before by sleeper train. I was surprised when I got a text from Eleanor to collect her from the train station and she mentioned she’d travelled alone.’
‘Typically, something cropped up at work. Nothing to worry about, but I didn’t make the train, obviously. How was her journey?’
‘Sounded okay. She got off the sleeper this morning in Aberdeen. I was there to collect her. We were back at The Lake House for a morning coffee and a lovely fruit scone. Shame you didn’t make it.’
Jake sighed, thinking, don’t remind me . By the time he’d arrived home to the apartment the night before, he’d missed Eleanor, and the Caledonian sleeper train they always took together from London to Edinburgh. She’d taken the sleeper on her own. He was pleased to hear she’d got straight on the connecting train and William had picked her up from the station.
William grasped his shoulder. ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Get yourself inside, son.’
Jake walked into the hall. The first thing he noted was that Eleanor was not there to greet him. ‘Ellie around?’ Jake glanced at the doors leading off from the hall, expecting her to make an appearance.
‘I must say, I was surprised she took the train overnight on her own and didn’t wait for you to travel up together, even if it wasn’t your usual arrangement, coming by car. Got tired of waiting for you, did she?’
‘Something like that.’ Jake had kept meaning to speak to her. It had been like a game of phone ping-pong. She rang and he was in a meeting, he rang and it was just the answer phone. Eventually, after leaving a dozen or more messages, apologising that he wasn’t going to make it home until late, and saying that they might have to rearrange their travel plans and go to Scotland the next day, he’d started to wonder if she was not answering the phone on purpose. If he wasn’t going to be there to take her call, then she wasn’t going to hang on the end of the phone for his. Tit for tat. She could be so stubborn sometimes.
After work he had found himself in the apartment – alone. She had packed his bag but had clearly got tired of waiting. He’d looked at the time and thought who can blame her? She had left a message to say she’d meet him on the sleeper train.
‘She’s still out,’ said William.
‘Out where?’ They didn’t have any friends in the area, so where could she have gone at this late hour?
William shrugged. ‘Last-minute Christmas shopping, I imagine. Here, let me take that.’
Despite Jake’s protestations, William bent down and wrestled Jake’s overnight bag out of his hand, getting his long apron entangled in the straps.
‘Grace!’ He called for his wife as he tried to disentangle his apron from the bag while simultaneously lugging it down the hallway. The bag brushed the seven-foot Christmas tree, which had pride of place in the middle of the hall. It began to topple as William strode by.
Jake darted forward and made a successful grab for the tree, pushing it back to an upright position. He shook his head. Sometimes it was hard to believe that his father-in-law headed a multi-million-dollar corporation. William was loud, brash, clumsy and forgetful; not exactly the image one conjured up of a CEO. But Jake loved the big bear of a man with his deep Scottish burr.
‘Ah, there you are.’ William poked his head around the lounge door, unaware of the near-calamity behind him. ‘Is Ellie back yet? Jake has arrived.’
Jake walked into the lounge, plucking a pine needle from the palm of his hand.
Grace was sitting on a chaise longue, her long slender legs reaching almost to the end. An old black-and-white movie was playing on the widescreen – the actors instantly recognisable, although Jake couldn’t have named them if his life had depended on it. But Grace could; every actor, actress and movie from that golden era.
She turned her head and smiled at Jake. Her ash-blonde hair had given way to grey long ago, but no one would have guessed, for it still shone unnaturally blonde, thick and straight, curling out just above the shoulders in a perfect kink.
‘Jake, darling.’ She moved her legs smoothly off the chaise longue and stood up.
Jake was, as always, taken aback that in all the years he had known her – he was taller than her now, but only just – she never seemed to lose any of her stature.
‘Finishing school, my dear,’ she had said to Jake when he had complimented her on it one day. ‘Deportment keeps the head high and the back straight.’
It was complete rubbish, Jake knew. ‘Finishing school, my ass,’ William had scoffed. ‘She didn’t even finish school.’ He had winked at Jake. It wasn’t said in a mocking, malicious way, though; instead, it was said with a fondness that surprised Jake.
On paper, they should have been a match made in hell; William, a no-nonsense, down-to-earth Scot was so different to Grace, who purported to have come from a wealthy, privileged background. Of course, it wasn’t true; it was a fantasy created to hide the humble background she had come from, probably because she felt her origins would spoil her carefully cultivated public persona. That was what Jake knew Eleanor thought.
Some people, like William, never forgot their past and the hardships suffered, especially when they became successful in later life. Grace was the opposite, never wanting to acknowledge her true roots. Despite her privilege and wealth, and all the potential she had to work for charities – something that Jake knew Eleanor spent most of her free time engaged in – Grace was quite content to live out her little fantasies. It was something Jake would never understand. His eyes flickered to the television. He liked living in the real world.
And so did Eleanor.
He loved the character traits she had inherited from her father, her earthiness, her compassion. If she had been anything like her mother, then the world would have lost a beautiful soul, and Jake a wife; he would never have married someone whose fundamental concerns revolved around her next manicure or pedicure or whatever the hell it was. He had never wanted a trophy wife.
Jake watched Grace glide towards him. Her dress, gold satin, was sleek and slim-fitting on a slender body that was – Jake didn’t doubt – the envy of women half her age. She had always been a stunner.
She rested her hands lightly on Jake’s shoulders and leaned forward, air-kissing next to both his cheeks.
Jake rolled his eyes. At least he was used to it now. When he was a kid, familiar with his mother’s great big bear hugs and huge sloppy kisses, Eleanor’s mother had seemed quite strange.
She drew back to look at Jake. ‘You look tired.’ She glanced over Jake’s shoulder. ‘Are you working him too hard?’ she demanded in a raised voice.
There was no answer from William; just muffled sounds coming from the kitchen at the back of the house.
‘I’m fine, really,’ said Jake, staring at her wide, mesmerising blue eyes. She looked like an ageing movie star from the silver screen. She could have been the Lauren Bacall of her generation if she hadn’t met and married William, which she was wont to remind people. Still, her marriage had its compensations; she had wanted to be a film star all her life, and in a peculiar way, that was exactly what she had become – dressing up, living a luxury lifestyle, playing the parts she adored on screen for real.
Jake couldn’t help wondering whether, if she hadn’t married William, she would indeed have become that movie star. He wondered if she had any regrets. For some reason, Eleanor came to mind. Was she having regrets? Was that what this was all about? Had this pregnancy ignited Eleanor’s worst fears – that her life was turning into a carbon copy of her mother’s, revolving around the company, her husband, and the children?
But that was absurd. Where Grace spent all her spare time shopping, Eleanor spent hers working for charitable organisations. So much so that Jake was convinced she was putting in almost the same hours he was. He wondered where on earth Eleanor would find the time to fit in a baby.
Jake suddenly felt the urge to talk to Eleanor, to reassure her that she wasn’t turning into her mother. Maybe she should have used her college education and pursued what Jake had always believed to be her first love – interior design. Maybe if he hadn’t been so selfish, putting his own career in the company first, she could have had a chance to pursue her career – that is, if they’d stayed in the UK permanently. At the back of his mind was the life she might have had planned; the life she might have led if he hadn’t proposed to her before she started college.
But he knew why he had done it – he had been afraid of losing her. He had been afraid that she would grow and change in her years away, meet somebody else and leave him behind to start a new life. And Jake had played on her fears, knowing she harboured the thought that if she didn’t get engaged, one of those society beauties just like her mother would step in to replace her in her absence.
When he thought back, Eleanor had spent her college years flying back and forth to wherever in the world he was working, at every opportunity, leaving her little time to build college friendships or even have a traditional college life. In hindsight, he felt guilty about that, although at the time he’d been selfishly pleased that she had little opportunity to meet somebody else and break off their engagement. He understood her insecurities, but she didn’t realise he had some of his own too.
She’d said it often enough when they’d started dating – why me? Nothing Jake had said or done had seemed to wholly convince her that she was deeply loved until he had proposed. She’d accepted his offer, but her college life – it was all she’d talked about growing up, getting away and pursuing her career – had taken a hit. How could she have a career herself when her husband moved with his work so much? And it wasn’t just that. The company always came first, and although he imagined she’d find it hard to acknowledge, it was expected of her that once she married him, she’d become a company wife, putting the needs of her husband and his career in the Ross Corporation first. Her career, if she’d had one, would not have been on an equal footing with her husband’s in the way he imagined it would be for most other couples who both had careers.
Jake was starting to think it was time they put down roots in one city in the world. Now, with the baby on the way, it was something that Jake was intending to broach with William. He’d had time to think it through on the way in the car. That thinking time had been invaluable. Eleanor in those dungarees came to mind – the ones she wore to paint the apartment. Perhaps they could get a nanny, and she could finally do more than her charity work, and start that interior design business she’d been longing for. Perhaps the thought that she’d not yet had the chance to pursue it was the reason she wasn’t exactly jumping for joy over the baby news. Maybe being a working mum would be the making of her.
Jake was beginning to wonder whether, if he didn’t stop putting the Ross Corporation first, rather than his wife, it would eventually cost him his marriage.
‘What’s it to be, darling?’
Grace held a decanter, about to pour them both a drink.
‘I don’t mind, Grace. Whatever comes.’
She flicked her hair as she handed Jake a glass of bourbon.
He watched her sashay to the sofa and sit as though she was on a movie set and the whole world was watching her performance.
Jake resolved to talk to Eleanor. If she still wanted to pursue a career, then this time Jake was going to sort out his work life so she could have it all – a family and a career.
Jake walked around the sofa, but he was too hyped-up to sit. ‘William said Ellie was out shopping. Any idea when she’ll be back?’
Grace turned her wrist and looked at her delicate gold watch. ‘Soon, I expect.’
Jake frowned. ‘I can’t believe she’s out shopping.’ It was an activity that Eleanor disliked.
‘Yes, neither can I. She’s not really one for shopping, I know, but even Eleanor has to shop for presents at Christmas.’ Grace patted the sofa. ‘Come sit down.’
Jake sat. He downed his bourbon in three large gulps.
‘You know she didn’t even invite her mother?’
Jake wasn’t surprised. They didn’t see eye to eye on anything as far as he could make out. Ellie had said that her shopping trips with her mother were about as much fun as visiting the dentist. But at least the dentist didn’t criticise, she’d said.
Grace continued, ‘When she said she was going shopping, I got so excited, because I thought we might actually be going shopping together , just like my friends go with their daughters. They even spend entire days shopping. Imagine that.’
And that was all she could do – imagine. Jake thought he detected a hint of sadness, perhaps even regret, which made a real change from the usual derisory comments and criticisms that normally followed in the course of conversations with or about her daughter.
Grace got up and poured herself another drink.
‘I’ll have another.’ Jake held out his glass.
By the time William made an appearance, the bottle of bourbon was almost empty, and Jake was fighting to keep himself awake.