‘There’s a man who knows his champagne,’ Dad said. ‘There you go, Patrick. Turning the bottle, you say? Well, who knew?’
‘I knew,’ Patrick said. ‘That’s how I was going to do it.’
The champagne was safely popped and poured, and my birthday was toasted.
Granddad called out something that may well have been, ‘Hear, hear.’
I stood up and bowed. I was wearing a 1960s yellow A-line minidress I had got from the charity shop. The woman had thought it might be Biba, although someone had cut the label out.
‘May this be the year our Lou finally grows up,’ Dad said. ‘I was going to say “does something with her life” but it seems like she finally is. I have to say, Will, since she’s had the job with you she’s – well, she’s really come out of herself.’
‘We’re very proud,’ Mum said. ‘And grateful. To you. For employing her, I mean.’
‘Gratitude’s all mine,’ Will said. He glanced sideways at me.
‘To Lou,’ Dad said. ‘And her continued success.’
‘And to absent family members,’ Mum said.
‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘I should have a birthday more often. Most days you all just hurl abuse at me.’
They began to talk, Dad telling some other story against me that made him and Mum laugh out loud. It was good to see them laughing. Dad had looked so worn down these last weeks, and Mum had been hollow-eyed and distracted, as if her real self were always elsewhere. I wanted to savour these moments, of them briefly forgetting their troubles, in shared jokes and familial fondness. Just for a moment, I realized I wouldn’t have minded if Thomas was there. Or Treena, for that matter.
I was so lost in my thoughts that it took a minute to register Patrick’s expression. I was feeding Will as I said something to Granddad, folding a piece of smoked salmon in my fingers and placing it to Will’s lips. It was such an unthinking part of my daily life now that the intimacy of the gesture only struck me when I saw the shock on Patrick’s face.
Will said something to Dad and I stared at Patrick, willing him to stop. On his left, Granddad was picking at his plate with greedy delight, letting out what we called his ‘food noises’ – little grunts and murmurs of pleasure.
‘Delicious salmon,’ Will said, to my mother. ‘Really lovely flavour.
‘Well, it’s not something we would have every day,’ she said, smiling. ‘But we did want to make today special.’
Stop staring, I told Patrick silently.
Finally, he caught my eye and looked away. He looked furious.
I fed Will another piece, and then some bread when I saw him glance at it. I had, I realized in that moment, become so attuned to Will’s needs that I barely needed to look at him to work out what he wanted. Patrick, opposite, ate with his head down, cutting the smoked salmon into small pieces and spearing them with his fork. He left his bread.
‘So, Patrick,’ Will said, perhaps sensing my discomfort. ‘Louisa tells me you’re a personal trainer. What does that involve?’
I so wished he hadn’t asked. Patrick launched into his sales spiel, all about personal motivation and how a fit body made for a healthy mind. Then he segued into his training schedule for the Xtreme Viking – the temperatures of the North Sea, the body fat ratios needed for marathon running, his best times in each discipline. I normally tuned out at this point, but all I could think of now, with Will beside me, was how inappropriate it was. Why couldn’t he have just said something vague and left it at that?
‘In fact, when Lou said you were coming, I thought I’d take a look at my books and see if there was any physio I could recommend.’
I choked on my champagne. ‘It’s quite specialist, Patrick. I’m not sure you’d really be the person.’
‘I can do specialist. I do sports injuries. I have medical training.’
‘This is not a sprained ankle, Pat. Really.’
‘There’s a man I worked with a couple of years ago had a client who was paraplegic. He’s almost fully recovered now, he says. Does triathlons and everything.’
‘Fancy,’ said my mother.
‘He pointed me to this new research in Canada that says muscles can be trained to remember former activity. If you get them working enough, every day, it’s like a brain synapse – it can come back. I bet you if we hooked you up with a really good regime, you could see a difference in your muscle memory. After all, Lou tells me you were quite the action man before.’
‘Patrick,’ I said loudly. ‘You know nothing about it.’
‘I was just trying to –’
‘Well don’t. Really.’
The table fell silent. Dad coughed, and excused himself for it. Granddad peered around the table in wary silence.
Mum made as if to offer everyone more bread, and then seemed to change her mind.
When Patrick spoke again, there was a faint air of martyrdom in his tone. ‘It’s just research that I thought might be helpful. But I’ll say no more about it.’
Will looked up and smiled, his face blank, polite. ‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind.’
I got up to clear the plates, wanting to escape the table. But Mum scolded me, telling me to sit down.
‘You’re the birthday girl,’ she said – as if she ever let anyone else do anything, anyway. ‘Bernard. Why don’t you go and get the chicken?’
‘Ha-ha. Let’s hope it’s stopped flapping around now, eh?’ Dad smiled, his teeth bared in a kind of grimace.
The rest of the meal passed off without incident. My parents, I could see, were completely charmed by Will. Patrick, less so. He and Will barely exchanged another word. Somewhere around the point where Mum served up the roast potatoes – Dad doing his usual thing of trying to steal extras – I stopped worrying. Dad was asking Will all sorts, about his life before, even about the accident, and he seemed comfortable enough to answer him directly. In fact, I learnt a fair bit that he’d never told me. His job, for example, sounded pretty important, even if he played it down. He bought and sold companies and made sure he turned a profit while doing so. It took Dad a few attempts to prise out of him that his idea of profit ran into six or seven figures. I found myself staring at Will, trying to reconcile the man I knew with this ruthless City suit that he now described. Dad told him about the company that was about to take over the furniture factory, and when he said the name Will nodded almost apologetically, and said that yes, he knew of them. Yes, he would probably have gone for it too. The way he said it didn’t sound promising for Dad’s job.