Page 8 of An Unholy Affair
He stopped outside the front door of his parents’ house. Small, neatly clipped yew trees stood on either side of the entrance. The house was modest, and as clean on the outside as it was on the inside. His mother and father knew how to keep up appearances and attempted to force their children into doing the same. He scored his fingernails across his scalp.Painkillers, then sleep.
His mum opened the door. ‘Jack!’ She clung to him, crying.
This was new. Patricia Newton was normally as affectionate as a barbed wire fence and as emotionally available to her children as a cuckoo. In her late fifties, she was small and pretty, with a usually immaculate brown bob. Now her hair was unbrushed, and she was wearing a pair of huge black sunglasses.
‘Mum? Why the shades?’ he asked, rubbing her back.
She pulled away, sniffing. ‘You smell dreadful. You could have at least tried to make an effort.’ She smoothed her hair and adjusted the glasses. ‘I had my second cataract operation yesterday.’
Jack followed her inside, immediately coming face-to-face with what he and his sister referred to as the ‘ugly-mug wall’. It was every school photo they’d ever had, chronicling just how overweight, spotty, and awkwardly unattractive the two of them had been.
‘I, er—’
‘Howwouldyou have known? You never keep in touch. Neither of you do.’
In the living room, Patricia collapsed onto a chintz sofa and sobbed. Dropping his bag, Jack sat beside her and took her hand.
‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m here now. For whatever you need.’
An alarm sounded. She fumbled for her phone on a low coffee table and peered at it.
‘My eye drops. You have to put them in. I can’t do it on my own.’
‘Of course. Where are they?’
‘On the sideboard.’
Jack retrieved them and read the instructions as his mother lay her head on the back of the sofa and took off her sunglasses. He could see which eye had been operated on, as the surrounding skin was puffy and red, and the pupil was still dilated.
‘I have to use them for the next six weeks and I’m not allowed to drive.’
Six weeks?His heart sank.
‘You stink,’ his mother continued. ‘You maylivein France, but you don’t have to smell like you were born there.’
He ignored her, trying to steady the tiny bottle over her eye.
‘Simon Little is coming by this morning. You have to get yourself cleaned up before he arrives. You remember Simon? Old friend of your father’s from church. Lost his wife, Rosalind, three years ago.’
Jack squeezed the bottle and missed.
‘No! Do it again.’
He tried.
‘No!’
Third time lucky… He let out a held breath.
His mother’s tears began flowing again. ‘I need your father.’
Jack looked around the room for the box of tissues that was always kept inside a frilly holder. He passed it to his mother as the doorbell rang.
‘That will be Simon. Can you answer it? I must brush my hair.’
Jack exited the room and rubbed his hands over his face. He remembered Simon. The man was cut from the same cloth as his dad. Both were opinionated, self-righteous, pompous arseholes.
Opening the door, he sagged with relief. It was his younger sister, Emily, with her wife, Steph, holding their two-year-old daughter, Betsy.
