Page 46 of The Mother-in-Law

When Gerard appears in the foyer of his office, Ollie, Nettie, Patrick and I are in opposite corners of the room. The arrival of Gerard, however, brings a welcome focal point and we shuffle together.

‘My condolences,’ he says.

‘Thank you,’ we mutter.

Gerard went to school with Tom, but they were probably more acquaintances than friends. Ollie and Nettie have met him many times, and I’ve met him briefly once or twice. He’s always seemed harmless if a little dull. I have a vague memory of Tom once telling Diana that he’d invited Gerard over for a Christmas drink and Diana groaning. Clearly she thought Gerard was dull too.

Gerard ushers us into his office and then, noticing we are two seats short, pops out into the hallway again. Ollie, Nettie, Patrick and I remain in the room in excruciating silence, looking everywhere but at each other. Nettie, I notice, doesn’t even look atPatrick.

‘Right then,’ Gerard says, returning pushing a wheelie chair, ‘thank you for coming in. Usually we mail out letters to our clients letting them know they are the beneficiaries of an estate, but I wanted you to come in to the office because this estate is a little more . . . Yes, in here, Sherry,’ he says to the flustered middle-aged receptionist who appears pushing a second wheelie chair. She stops it in front of Ollie and scurries out again. ‘Thanks, Sherry. Sorry, as I was saying, your parents’ estate is a little more complicated than most.’

We nod. This isn’t news to us. An estate as large as Tom and Diana’s is bound to be complicated. It’s the reason, I assume, that Tom had Gerard act as an executor, rather than Ollie or Nettie.

‘Why don’t you go ahead and sit?’ he says to Ollie, who is still standing despite the chair in front of him.

‘I’m good here,’ Ollie replies.

‘As you like. Anyway, as you know, Tom and Diana have a sizable estate. There are the properties, the cars, the boat. There’s the share portfolio, the furniture, home décor, jewellery and personal effects. And there is a not insignificant amount of cash.’

‘Tom mentioned this once or twice,’ Patrick says with a chuckle.

Gerard folds his hands in front of him and sits forward, as if steeling himself. ‘Yes, well . . . as it turns out, Tom’s will named Diana as sole beneficiary of his estate. In the event of her death, the estate was to be divided equally between Ollie and Antoinette. However . . . a few weeks ago, Diana came to see me about making some changes.’ Gerard rubs his brow, his face becoming pinched for a second, as though he has a migraine. His eyes remain lowered. ‘During that meeting, Diana requested to name her charity the sole beneficiary of the estate.’

The room becomes so quiet I can hear the traffic outside, the clock ticking, even the receptionist scratching around her desk outside, filing, stapling, typing.

‘Dianadidsay she was going to communicate the change to you, but it was made so recently, she obviously didn’t have the chance.’

I feel Ollie shift behind me and I spin to face him.

‘Hang on. Diana’s charity is the beneficiary of . . .’ he starts.

‘All of it.’ Gerard glances up, locking eyes with each of us under his thick grey eyebrows. It is a look that tells me there is no joke, no misunderstanding, no confusion. ‘The houses, the cars, the share portfolio, the cash.’

Nettie inhales sharply. Patrick rises to his feet. Ollie’s head is cocked and he is squinting a little, the way he does when Edie is trying to tell him something and he just can’t understand her. We all look around the room and, for the first time since arriving, everyone meets each other’s gaze. Several seconds pass. But no one speaks.

25

LUCY

The past . . .

Ihave two kids strapped into the back of the car, one of them wailing (Harriet), the other (Archie) trying to stick a grape up his nose. We’re stopped at a busy roundabout while the woman in the black SUV in front of us hands a tennis racket through the window to her sullen-looking teenage son and then proceeds to start a conversation with him with no regard for the growing line of cars behind her.

Harriet lets out another wail.

This kind of thing is rife in Diana’s neighbourhood. We’re headed to Diana’s now—on Tuesdays I drive them to her house at 10 am, where they stay until 2 pm when I pick them up again. We’ve moved out of our workers cottage to a bigger rental house in Hampton for more space, and one of the upsides is that it’s just a short drive to Tom and Diana’s place. Harriet is six months old now, and while I loathe the process of strapping both kids into the car, driving them there and doing the reverse journey again a few hours later, I am not so pig-headed as to refuse free childcare. Even from my impossible mother-in-law.

‘Archie, can you put Harriet’s dummy in?’ I say, glancing in the rear-view mirror. The dummy is in his mouth and the grape is nowhere to be seen. ‘What happened to the grape?’

‘I ate it,’ he says, taking the dummy from his mouth and pushing it right into Harriet’s mouth. I try not to think about the streaming cold he has now almost certainly passed on to Harriet. It’s some consolation that she stops crying immediately.

‘Are we at Dido’s house yet?’

‘Nearly,’ I say, and he settles down. As irritating as it is, he loves his grandmother. She’s good with him in her own Diana sort of way. She doesn’t marvel over his artwork or beg for cuddles, but she does other things that seem to rank highly with kids . . . like looking him directly in the eye, challenging him, turning the television off and playing with him. And, of course, there’s the packet of Tim Tams on her kitchen counter that is always full when he arrives and empty when he leaves.

It’s a few minutes to ten when I pull into Diana and Tom’s pebblestone driveway (which I hate because Archie stuffs the pebbles into his pockets and they end up all over my house). There’s a battered yellow Volvo parked by the front door. One of the cleaners, I decide. I park behind it and hoist Harriet’s baby seat out of the car. Archie unclicks himself and launches out of the car, immediately grabbing a fistful of pebbles. I walk up the steps and set the baby carrier down on the landing. The front door is ajar and an unfamiliar male voice comes from somewhere nearby.

‘We have an expression in Afghanistan: “In an ant colony, dew is a flood.” It means . . . a small misfortune is not small for one in need. I applied for many jobs, each time not even a response. So what you did, this is not nothing. This issomething.’