The Dinner Guest Read online

  I assumed an unconvinced expression and Matthew rolled his eyes and went back to his seat.

  My mood didn’t improve much when we landed. As we walked out into the afternoon New York heat, I noticed Rachel slip on some stylish shades, no doubt bought by her employer, or by the sizable paycheque she was receiving for basically just organising a few hair appointments. ‘Meryl’s only seventy, only a little older than you,’ I murmured to my mother as we waited in the airport for our luggage to be brought to us. Rachel and Meryl had nipped to the bathrooms, leaving Matthew talking to my father about tailoring; Titus was on one of the chairs engrossed in a novel, and my mother was deciding which magazines to discard. ‘What has Meryl’s age got to do with anything?’ my mother asked, distracted, now reaching for her phone and turning it on.

  ‘Why does she need someone to help her when she’s on holiday? I mean, it’s not as if we have to do anything for ourselves; we’re taken everywhere and every bag or drink or meal is brought to us. Why does she need someone to do it for her?’

  My mother frowned at me. ‘That sounds a little insensitive, Charles. People need others at different points in their lives. Hasn’t it occurred to you that Meryl might be lonely?’ When I didn’t reply she turned and looked around at the sun-drenched first-class arrival zone. ‘Shouldn’t you be Instagramming or something?’ she said, as if suspicious at how little I’d been using my phone recently.

  ‘I’m not in the mood,’ I said, noticing Meryl and Rachel coming out from the bathrooms and over towards us. I quickly moved over to join Matthew and my father in their less than thrilling conversation about the decline of the businesses on Jermyn Street in recent years.

  We were staying in a large house in the Water Mill area of The Hamptons – a property we’d booked a couple of years running now, since it suited everyone with its proximity to nearby restaurants, beaches, and shops whilst remaining pleasantly quiet and secluded. The building formed a square around the pool, with each side of the house functioning almost as a separate villa in itself. Matthew and I took one side, my parents the other, Meryl and Rachel had one of the smaller ends on the right, and Titus on the left. The main way back to the front of the house was an archway-shaped corridor that entered and ran through the villa Matthew and I were in.

  The days that followed progressed fine, and in spite of my close eye on her, I didn’t see anything particularly strange in Rachel’s behaviour. She continued to talk to Titus, but no more than the rest of us – except me. She kept her distance from me – not that I was complaining. I much preferred not having to be polite to her or pretend to be interested in her stories about her past job as a photographer or views on whatever pretentious award-winning tome had been selected for the upcoming book club – a copy of which I had guiltily forgotten to pack.

  On the fifth night – halfway into our stay – we went out to dinner at the Nick & Toni’s restaurant in East Hampton. Rachel and Meryl decided to remain at home, allowing me and Matthew, Titus, and my parents time to breathe and be ourselves. Or perhaps that was just how I felt. While we were waiting for our antipasti, my mother mentioned how much she was enjoying Rachel’s presence. ‘Our world can be so insular,’ she said, taking a sip of her wine. ‘I feel we sometimes exist within an echo chamber and it’s refreshing to listen to views and experiences from someone who’s lived quite a different life.’

  I saw my father’s mouth grow thin and tense, a key indicator that he didn’t agree. ‘A little too left-leaning in a naïve sort of way,’ he said.

  ‘I’m left-leaning,’ Matthew said, sounding mock-offended.

  ‘But I don’t think you’re naïve,’ my father said with a slight smile, ‘whereas she has all the fervour of the Daily Mirror but no facts to back it up.’

  ‘But that’s my point,’ my mother said. ‘No matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, any left-leaning principles we might harbour are based on compassion and sympathy, not experience. Rachel has experience. It’s so devastating she had to close her photography studio and gallery because the arts grants helping it were cut.’

  ‘Maybe people just didn’t want to see the artwork and photographs she was showcasing,’ I said.

  I saw Matthew turn to look at me and frown. ‘You do realise a lot of the operas, plays, and ballets we go to see wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for arts funding?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

  ‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘that doesn’t surprise me.’

  I wasn’t keen on his tone, and I should have changed the subject in order to avoid things getting awkward, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to twist the knife a little. ‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit patronising, us adopting Rachel as if she’s one of us? She’s not a puppy. And anyway, she’ll never fit in, not really. It’s not our business to try and raise her up into a world she would never be able to get into on her own merit.’

  I hadn’t meant it to come out so savagely, and I saw the hurt bloom in Matthew’s face. ‘Not one of us? Can you hear yourself?’

  My mother looked similarly unimpressed. ‘Charlie, I hope you’re not getting prejudiced prematurely. Your father was at least forty before he started blaming the poor for their own troubles.’

  Before I could reply, Titus offered up a contribution.

  ‘I like her,’ he said, simply.

  ‘I do too,’ said Matthew. ‘And I think only a snob would take against her presence.’

  ‘I feel she understands me,’ Titus continued, as if Matthew hadn’t spoken.

  I looked over at him. ‘What does that mean? How can she understand you? She barely knows you.’

  It was Titus’s turn to shrug. ‘I don’t know. I just feel she … cares. When I’m talking to her, she really cares about my opinion on things.’

  This was outrageous; the idea that Rachel could possibly care about Titus any more than we did was offensive to me. ‘I think that’s preposterous,’ I said.

  Matthew held up a hand. ‘It’s not preposterous. It’s good that Titus gets on with her.’

  I spluttered in exasperation. ‘Why are we all talking about her as if she’s now part of the family? She’s only here while Meryl works through some late-life charity complex. Once she’s got bored of her, Rachel will be back living amongst the hoodies in a council high-rise somewhere violent.’

  Matthew put down his wine glass so hard I was impressed it didn’t shatter. ‘I think you’re wasted on advertising; perhaps you should start blogging for the alt-right.’

  My father let out a low chuckle.

  ‘And if you think that’s true,’ my mother added, ‘then you really don’t know your godmother well at all.’

  I couldn’t think of an immediate response to this. Our food arrived seconds later and it was a good few minutes before conversation started up again.

  It was later that night that things became very strange. We’d stayed out late, ordering more wine, with conversation flowing onto easier topics. At one point, Matthew had to nip off to take a work call, and when I went off to find the bathroom a few minutes later, I was irritated to find him leaning up against the wall near the restrooms, typing away on his phone. He looked startled when he saw me. ‘Hi, sorry, I am coming back. I just needed to reply to a few emails.’ Part of me wanted to ask more, but instead I just let myself into the bathroom and left him to it outside. Half an hour later, back at the table, I noticed Titus looking sleepy. I suggested we head back to the house. He objected to being the one who caused an end to the night, saying he wasn’t a child anymore and we could no longer use him as an excuse for wanting to get to bed ourselves.

  Once back at the house, we walked through the main entrance together then at the pool divided across the square into our separate living spaces. As I said goodnight to my parents, I noticed a light on to our left. Either Rachel or Meryl was awake, and if it was the former, I was keen to get to bed before she tried to come out and make conversation with us all.

  It wa
s very warm that night, and Matthew was fiddling with the air-con controls on the far wall. ‘Just so long as it doesn’t become fucking arctic,’ I said as I took off my shirt and chinos and got under the covers. It was too hot for pyjamas and the cool, clean sheets of the bed felt heavenly against my skin. Matthew then joined me in bed and we ended up having sex for a bit, but I could tell he wasn’t really into it and we both gave up and lay back to go to sleep without speaking. There was something distant about him – there had been for a while now – although I was struggling to put my finger on it. It was like he was in a boat, floating out to sea, and I was on the shore, trying to hold a conversation with him as he slowly glided away on the still surface of the water, further and further, until eventually neither of us could hear the other.

  Despite feeling exhausted, sleep didn’t come, although I could tell Matthew had drifted off straightaway. I got out of bed to walk around and considered taking a midnight swim to clear my head. Just as I was trying to locate my swim shorts, something made me stop. Matthew’s phone was resting on the long desk-like table at the end of the room. It was on charge, connected to a lightning cable plugged in at the wall. Without allowing myself to think about what I was doing, I marched forward and picked up the phone. The screen lit up as I held it and I quickly toned down the brightness and turned on ‘night mode’ so that the harsh white-blue glare of the screen was replaced with an easier, warmer glow. I could see on the lock screen that he had three unread WhatsApp messages, but he’d changed the settings so it just said ‘Notification (3)’ rather than displaying them all as-written.

  I looked over at him, apparently sound asleep on the bed. I didn’t know his passcode; I’d only very rarely seen him using it, usually just opening it up when the device recognised his face or his thumbprint.

  His thumbprint.

  My heart pounding, I disconnected the device from its cable and carried it in my hands as if it were a precious stone, over towards my sleeping husband. I was tempted to just hold the screen in front of his face to see if it unlocked it then, but I worried that shining a light in the eyes of a sleeping person, no matter how low, was probably asking for trouble. Instead, I slipped back into bed and, very gently, moved my body up against him, as if we were snuggling down together affectionately. I sought out his arm and moved my hand along to take it. He allowed me to, responding in his sleep to my touch with slow, vague movements, his hand settling into mine as if pleased by the contact. I was starting to worry how I would isolate his thumb from our bunched-up palms in order to unlock the phone but then something happened that made the whole exercise pointless.

  A shout – no, more like a scream – met our ears, coming from outside our room, over by the swimming pool. I jolted upright, Matthew doing the same, and in the midst of our sudden movements I felt the phone leave the grasp of my spare hand.

  ‘What was that?’ Matthew asked me.

  Another shout sounded out, this time containing more words, two of them unmistakably being ‘get out’.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, breathing heavily from the panic of almost getting caught. ‘But it sounded like … Titus.’

  He didn’t need telling twice. He leaped out of bed, pausing only to pull on some tracksuit bottoms, then flung open the door and ran out onto the poolside. I did the same and followed, running after Matthew as he disappeared into Titus’s room, a light now shining brightly from behind the curtains of the French windows.

  The sight that met us inside was one even I couldn’t have predicted. Titus was standing on the other side of the room. He was completely naked, his hands shielding his frontal nudity from view, his face the picture of confusion – perhaps even fear. And on the other side of the room, over near the far wall was…

  ‘Rachel?’ Matthew said, clearly baffled. ‘What … what’s going on?’

  Rachel was dressed in a cream-white bikini, an outfit she’d sported a few times during our days spent by the pool. I looked from her and her outfit over to Titus and his vulnerable, naked body, backing away from her. ‘What the fuck did you do to him?’ I shouted at her.

  Matthew walked towards Titus. ‘Are you OK?’ he said, bending over to pick up a pair of boxers from his discarded clothes on the floor. He tossed them over to the boy, who turned around as he pulled them on. His confusion and fear seemed to be giving way to embarrassment and anger now. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, almost roughly, ‘I was just … it just made me jump, that’s all.’

  ‘What made you jump?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘And why’s she in a bedroom with a naked child, dressed as if she’s auditioning for fucking Baywatch?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ Titus snapped.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Rachel said. She looked as if she was about to cry. ‘I … I got the wrong room.’

  ‘What?’ I shouted back, disbelieving.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and properly started to cry now.

  ‘Charlie, please,’ Matthew said, shooting me a warning look. He went over to Rachel and said in a kind voice, ‘Can you just explain to us what happened?’

  ‘Maybe we should be asking Titus that,’ I said, rounding on him. ‘Titus, what happened? Did she touch you? Where did she touch you?’

  ‘Just my face…’ Titus began to say, and I saw Rachel look over at him, as if mortified he’d offer up such a detail so readily.

  ‘I thought I was moving a pillow across,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t sussed out I’d gone into a different room. They all look identical.’ She then buried her face in her hands and sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry, Titus. I must have given you such a fright. It made me jump too, realising there was a person in what I thought was my bed.’

  I made a noise of disbelief. ‘Regularly go to bed in your swimsuit, do you?’ I asked. My tone was probably a little too nasty, as Titus cut in, ‘Dad, please, she said it was an accident.’

  ‘I was going for a swim,’ she sniffed. ‘It was too hot; I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Matthew said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re right; in the dark everything does all look rather similar.’

  I was enraged that he was believing her preposterous story so quickly. This was something we should at least discuss together before we even entertained the idea that she’d just accidentally been scuttling around a teenage boy’s bedroom half naked.

  ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have yelled,’ Titus said, looking awkward now, bunching his slim, gangly frame as if he was cold. ‘I just want to go to sleep. I’m sorry, Rachel.’

  ‘Stop saying sorry,’ I said. ‘You don’t have anything to be sorry about. It must have been frightening, finding someone crouching over you stroking your hair.’

  ‘I wasn’t stroking him,’ Rachel said, getting up so she could look me in the eye, pleading, desperate, imploring me to believe her. ‘Honestly, it was just a mistake.’

  I stared back at her for a moment, not trusting myself to reply to her directly. Instead I turned back to Titus. ‘Why were you standing naked on the other side of the room?’

  Titus ran a hand through his very ruffled blonde hair. ‘I’d taken my pyjamas off because it was too warm; the air-con isn’t strong enough. When I woke up and saw someone in the room, I thought this was like, well, a home invasion or something. Like that film, The Strangers. So I leaped out of bed.’

  ‘You see,’ Rachel said, her red eyes still on me. ‘It really is all a misunderstanding.’

  To my shock, I heard Matthew chuckle. ‘It really does sound like it. Come on, we should all let our horror-movie addict here go back to sleep. Maybe a few less of the home-invasion thrillers in future.’ He said it jokingly to Titus, but the boy didn’t smile. He just nodded. Matthew started to lead Rachel away, who was still sniffing and taking deep breaths.

  I walked over to Titus and put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  He nodded, looking a bit dazed and sleepy. ‘It just … made me jump, that’s all. I th
ought I was having a nightmare.’

  ‘That’s completely understandable,’ I said. ‘Come on, back to bed.’

  It reminded me a bit of when he was little, when I used to sit on the side of his bed and read him a story. I pulled back the duvet so he could get in, then said, ‘Would you like me to get you anything?’

  He pulled a face. ‘Like what?’

  ‘A hot drink?’

  ‘It’s, like, thirty degrees. And I’m not a baby.’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m sorry. This … we … we all make mistakes, you know. Me and your dad. Because you don’t have any older siblings, it means we haven’t had a chance to perfect our parenting. This period you’re going through … boy to man, that sort of thing…’

  ‘Please don’t,’ he groaned, rolling his eyes.

  ‘I’m just saying that it’s probably going to take some trial and error and you may feel we’re parenting too much or being too controlling; you’re growing up so fast, and to us it’s literally been the blink of an eye.’

  He smiled. ‘Any more parenting clichés? Or can I go to sleep?’

  I smiled back. ‘I’m just saying, have patience with us both. If it feels like we’re still treating you like a kid, it’s probably because we don’t want to let those days go. And because it’s all we’ve known for years.’

  He nodded. ‘I get it, don’t worry.’ He settled back into the sheets as if he were about to fall off to sleep straight away, then said, ‘I think you’re both great, by the way. I mean, some of the others at my school ask what it’s like having two dads, as if it would somehow be strange. Especially the kids from countries where that wouldn’t be OK. And I always say you’re both perfect. Couldn’t be better, really.’

  Disconcertingly, I found myself feeling a little moved, and instead of saying anything in return I just reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. After a few seconds, I got up and said, ‘I’ll let you sleep. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too,’ he said, then, as I was about to close the door, he spoke again. ‘One more thing.’