Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Sarah comes up with the plan over afternoon tea.
“I think we should invite Dean over for dinner tonight without telling him why.” Her voice carries an enthusiasm I can only imagine comes from having endured her fair share of pranks from her older brothers over the years.
“Josh is in Dublin on holiday, so telling him is going to have to wait, but we can definitely spring this on Dean.”
“Well, I would like to meet Dean,” I say. “And unfortunately, we have to head back to London in the morning, so tonight might be the only chance. I mean, on this visit.”
It’s only after the words are out of my mouth that I realize how presumptuous they are. I’m assuming there will be future visits.
However, no one bats an eye at my assumptions.
“Great, I’ll message him now.” Sarah pulls out her phone and begins typing.
“Is it fair to tell him without any kind of warning?” Margaret asks.
Sarah pauses in her typing to look at her mother. “Come on, Mum. Do I have to remind you of the time Dean sent Dad a fake letter from the golf club committee about his conduct on the fourteenth? He’d already rung his solicitor before Dean confessed.”
“She does make a good point,” Grant says with twinkling eyes.
Sarah returns to her typing. “I’m telling him that a relative of Dad’s has turned up unexpectedly and he’s invited to dinner tonight to meet him.”
A minute later, her phone beeps.
“He says he can get here by seven p.m., after his football training.”
She breaks out into a huge grin.
“So, I think we should just act like everything is completely normal and wait until Dean explodes.” She rubs her hands together with glee. “It’s going to be so much fun.”
And that’s how Callum and I wind up spending the afternoon in the Thompsons’ kitchen, helping Margaret and Sarah cook a roast dinner.
It’s actually a brilliant way to get to know my new family. Working side by side, peeling potatoes, snapping the ends off green beans, while the radio plays softly in the background.
Grant hovers, but it’s obvious he’s typical of men from his generation, who don’t know how to do much in the kitchen. Eventually, Margaret gives him the job of folding napkins. He sits at the table folding napkins with the furrowed forehead of a man desperate to be useful.
Sarah relaxes to the point that she mocks Callum for his confusion about what a parsnip actually is. “How have you never seen a parsnip? What do you people eat at Christmas? Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear about whatever Americans do to a turkey.”
“I don’t know if we do anything particularly different to a turkey. We do put marshmallows on sweet potatoes though.”
“That sounds disgusting.”
He shrugs and gives her a smile. “I prefer to call it efficient. It’s a casserole and a dessert, all in one.”
Sarah laughs.
Callum meets my glance and gives me his sunshine smile. I can almost read what he’s thinking. This is what has been missing from our lives. This grounded, ordinary, chaotic warmth of a family kitchen.
Callum and I both grew up far away from palaces, but neither of us experienced this in our upbringing, a bustling kitchen with five people cooking a meal together.
“Right, so we have to all be seated and eating by the time Dean arrives,” Sarah instructs.
Sarah apparently has no qualms about bossing around royalty. The more I get to know my younger sister, the more I’m scarily reminded of myself.
“It will totally freak him out if we’re just acting like there’s absolutely nothing unusual going on,” she adds.
So that’s what we do. Callum helps Margaret carry dishes through while Grant pours wine and Sarah keeps one eye on her phone, tracking Dean’s location like a military operation. And then we all take our places at the dinner table.
“He’s here,” Sarah says finally.
My heart begins to race. I’ve been so caught up with Sarah’s scheme that I haven’t really processed that I’m about to meet one of my brothers for the first time.
But there’s no time to worry about it.
The front door slams and there’s the sound of someone kicking off trainers in the hallway. Then a guy appears in the doorway, slightly out of breath, still in muddy shorts and a football shirt.
“Sorry I’m late. Football training ran long.” He grabs the back of a chair to pull it out and then stops, registering Callum and me with the blank expression of someone whose brain hasn’t caught up with his eyes yet.
“This is Ollie and Cal, our long-lost relatives who’ve come up from London,” Sarah says to her brother, buttering a roll like this is the most boring Sunday of her life. “This is my brother Dean.”
I stand, offering my hand to shake.
“Hi, I’m Ollie. Nice to meet you, Dean.”
And I shake my brother’s hand for the first time in my life.
Dean’s smile disappears halfway through shaking my hand. His gaze flicks to his parents and sister, all wearing nonchalant expressions.
“And this is my husband Cal,” I say.
Callum gives a friendly wave from across the table. “Hey, nice to meet you.”
Dean’s mouth opens. Then closes. Then opens again. He looks like a man who’s walked into a glass door and is trying to work out what just happened.
“Take a seat, love,” Margaret says to Dean.
Dean hesitantly lowers himself into the empty seat next to Callum. His gaze jumps between us, a furrow on his forehead.
“So, anyway, Cal, what do you do for a job?” Sarah asks Callum sweetly.
“I used to work in insurance, but now I mainly do charity work,” Callum says.
Dean is blinking, looking from Callum to me, the disbelief on his face growing.
“And what about you, Ollie?” she asks.
“Is this some kind of joke?” Dean bursts in.
We all turn to him with identical perplexed expressions.
“What do you mean?” Sarah has pumped so much confusion into her voice that I make a mental note never to play poker with her.
“Oh, this is what this is.” Dean leans back in his chair. “You’ve hired actors who look like the Prince of Wales and Oliver Hartwell to fuck about with me. Well played.”
“Language, Dean,” Margaret tuts.
“Oh, we’re not actors,” I say. “I am actually Oliver Hartwell. But I’m happy to go by Ollie here. And to answer your question, Sarah, I’m mainly working in the charity space too now.” I turn to Margaret. “The lamb is lovely, Margaret. Cooked to perfection.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Dean says, his gaze darting between us. “You’re telling me the former prime minister and Prince of Wales just decided to turn up for Sunday dinner at our house in Manchester?”
“What did I say in my message?” Sarah asks sweetly.
“You said a relative of Dad’s was visiting…” Dean trails off. “What the hell? You’re telling me we’re related to…?” His gaze flicks between Callum and me, the cogs turning so hard behind his eyes I can practically hear them grinding.
“Would it help clarify the situation if I told you I recently began a search for my birth father?” I ask.
“Your birth father,” Dean repeats blankly. His mouth moves silently for a moment. “Hang on. Are you saying… Dad is your… That my dad is your dad?” He lets out a noise that’s somewhere between a laugh and a wheeze. “You’re having me on. You have to be having me on.”
“I promise I’m not having you on. DNA doesn’t lie.”
“What the fucking hell?”
Dean whips his head to stare at his father. Grant gives him a slightly sheepish grin.
“I was at a job in Brentwood for a few months when I was twenty-two. The timing lines up.”
Dean’s gaze swings wildly around the table, like he’s searching for someone about to say “gotcha.” But nobody does.
“Bloody hell, everyone always says Josh looks so much like Oliver Hartwell…” He trails off. He looks at Callum as if seeing him properly for the first time. “So that makes you my brother-in-law. The future King of the United Kingdom is my brother-in-law.”
“Yes, I am,” Callum says happily.
“Bloody hell,” Dean repeats. He shakes his head, picks up his wine, then puts it down again without drinking any. “I was at football training an hour ago, arguing about who forgot the bibs, and now the future King is passing me the fucking peas.”
“Language,” Margaret tuts.
“Seriously, Mum, you’re worried about my language right now? This is like…absolutely mental.” He runs a hand through his hair. He looks around the table at his parents and sister. “I can’t believe you lot aren’t freaking out more.”
“We’ve had a few more hours to get used to the idea,” Grant says.
Dean’s gaze narrows at his little sister. “And I can guess whose idea it was to spring it on me like this.”
“Let’s just call it payback for the Barbie decapitation incident of 2006,” Sarah replies sweetly.
He turns to look at Grant. “But I don’t get it. How did you not know about this? Why didn’t Oliver’s mother tell you that she was pregnant with him?”
“Uh…it was more of a one-night encounter.” Grant’s cheeks turn pink. “Full names weren’t exactly exchanged.”
Dean’s expression morphs from shock to triumph in an instant. “So that time you went apeshit at me when you caught me and Jade in your shed now seems a bit hypocritical, doesn’t it?”
Grant opens his mouth, closes it, and sends a desperate glance at Margaret. Margaret raises her hands. “Oh no, you’re on your own with this one, love.”
“That was completely different.” Now the tips of Grant’s ears have gone red. “You were seventeen, and you broke my workbench.”
“I don’t think we need to continue this conversation with present company,” Margaret says briskly. “Or in any company, ever.”
“They’re family now, Mum. Embarrassing stories are basically a condition of membership,” Sarah says.
I can’t help laughing as the knowledge sits inside me.
This is my family. I’ve been granted automatic entry into this club, with no interview, no references, no waiting list. I spent decades earning my way into rooms, and it turns out one of the most important doors in my life swung open on a blood test and a Sunday roast.
“But it’s share and share alike. They’ve got to tell us some embarrassing stories in return,” Sarah continues.
So over the next hour, we trade stories from our lives.
Sarah tells us about Grant’s fiftieth birthday, when he stood up to give a speech, cried before the second sentence, and blamed it on the barbecue smoke for the next decade.
Dean regales us with the time when Josh, at age nine, wrote to the council to complain that the goalposts at the rec were two inches too low.
He included hand-drawn diagrams, and the council ended up changing them.
Then Margaret tells the story of her and Grant’s first date, which was meant to be the pictures but became four hours in a broken-down Cortina waiting for Grant’s mate to bring a fan belt. Margaret says it was the best audition a husband ever gave.
Meanwhile, Callum and I share our own stories.
Callum tells of the time he greeted the Japanese ambassador with the bow he’d practiced for the Korean delegation, and the time he dropped the ceremonial sword during a Commonwealth ceremony.
I contribute the incident from my first week as an MP, when I locked myself out of my own office and had to be rescued by a school tour group.
Callum and I both help clear the dishes from the table, leading to lots of jokes from the Thompsons about having royalty waiting on them hand and foot.
Dean holds out his glass to Callum with a lordly wave and gets a tea towel thrown at his head for it by Sarah, while Margaret stands in the kitchen doorway looking both scandalized and pleased in equal measure as Callum and I stack the plates in the dishwasher.
But eventually, over dessert, the question I’ve been dreading comes.
“So what happens when people find out about this?” Dean gestures around the table. “Because I’m assuming this won’t stay quiet forever.”
“It doesn’t have to come out at all,” I say carefully. “If you’d prefer to keep this private, Callum and I will respect that completely.”
Grant frowns. “You mean, pretend we’re not related?”
“I mean, protect you from what comes with being related to us. Because the interest from the news media will be intense. I’m talking about photographers outside your house and reporters going through your bins.
Every detail of your lives will be picked apart online by people with too much time and not enough decency. ”
The table goes quiet. Margaret smooths a crease in the tablecloth.
“They’d come here?” she asks. “To Didsbury?”
“They’d camp outside your house for weeks,” Callum says gently. “And even once it dies down, it will never fully go away. Any time there’s a slow news day, they’ll come back.”
Dean lets out a low whistle. Grant and Margaret exchange a look, a whole conversation conducted in a single glance.
“Well,” Grant says finally. “I’ve only just found out I’ve got another son. I’m not about to start hiding that fact. And our first grandchild is due soon. I don’t want to deprive ourselves of that experience just because we’re worried about what a few tabloids will say.”
I’ve been called a lot of things in twenty years of public life. But the words “another son” undo me more than any of them. Grant Thompson has only known I exist for less than a week. He only met me six hours ago, and he’s already claiming me.
“Dad’s right,” Sarah says. “We’re Thompsons. We don’t hide from anything.”
“Speak for yourself,” Dean says. “I hid from Mrs. Crawley for six months after I reversed into her wall.” But he’s grinning. “Obviously I’m in. You’re family.”
I turn to look at Margaret. “What do you think, Margaret?”
She’s quiet for a second.
“I’ve always believed that family is more important than anything.”
She says it like it’s obvious.
My own mother believed family was a resource, something you drew on when funds ran low. This woman has her husband’s forty-one-year-old surprise sitting at her table, eating her trifle, yet she has already decided I’m worth disrupting her life over.
I find it difficult to swallow my next mouthful of dessert due to the lump in my throat.
“We’ll have to get Josh’s opinion, but I can’t imagine he’ll have a problem. The lad’s never backed down from anything in his life,” Grant says.
“I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
Sarah looks at Dean. “You know what’s the best part?”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve still got to work out a fun way to break the news to Josh,” Sarah says with a grin.