The house was still a novelty – bought after they’d married. Home before that (and home was stretching it a bit) had been a smart, cool one-bed flat in a converted warehouse in Shoreditch. All bare brick and 50-inch plasma screen. He’d paid a designer to make it look like he was stylish and modern. He’d never turned the oven on. Now it was an Arts and Crafts country house in three-quarters of an acre in a quiet Surrey town. He didn’t know Haslemere at all. He’d never even been there until the Saturday Heather had produced a plastic wallet with the details of seven potential houses and brought him down. He’d asked for a maximum hour’s commute, and a relatively straightforward airport run, then left the decision to her. She’d been delighted by the look of the place – ‘This is what Americans dream England looks like’ – with its quaint high street, and easy access to rolling hills. It also had a good school for the girls, which was key, he knew, to Heather’s decision.
He kept the Shoreditch place, grateful that he could afford both. The mortgage he’d started with in London had been paid off with bonuses long since, and he could pay cash for Haslemere too. He wanted to be ready with exciting romantic mini breaks when and if the time came to dazzle her. The girls’ school offered flexi-boarding so they could stay a night or two.
So far, she hadn’t seemed to miss the bright lights. There’d been an extensive refurbishment to micromanage, though, so her life had been a whirl of fabric swatches and paint charts and what she called ‘antiquing’. Walls had been knocked down, so the Lutyens-style exterior now gave way to a very American aesthetic inside, all light and airy and spacious. He thought it worked. It shouldn’t but it did. A bit like him and Heather. The kitchen now rejoiced in a four-oven Aga she adored for its Englishness but never cooked on, along with a wall of Wolf appliances and a six-ring gas hob that boasted a pot boiler – a tap that came out from above the hob, with the exclusive purpose of filling pots, as the name suggested – embedded in the herring-boned tiles behind. To Heather it was the ultimate status symbol. She’d babysat for an affluent family in Montclair one summer before college and they’d had one, and she’d dreamt of owning one ever since, apparently. The Haslemere plumber was mildly baffled at the request, but happy to oblige. She was easy on the eye, was Mrs Chamberlain, and grateful, and she gave him real coffee, not instant.
Scott knew nothing about antiques or pot boilers or fabric-covered walls, and if he occasionally balked at an invoice that crossed his desk, and wondered what his mother and father, who had told tales of furniture bought on the never-never, might have had to say about it, he honestly loved the end results. The house, which had previously been in one family, untouched, for thirty years, had been transformed into a stylish, calming, seriously good-looking home where the everyday ovens were turned on most days. It was a ridiculous notion, and one he would never share, but, owning this now, it was almost as if he felt like a grown-up for the first time.
The goal at work had always been to succeed, to make money, to win, to climb the ladder, all the clichés. Since Heather, that had shifted. He still had the hunger – you couldn’t be there if you didn’t have it – but the end game had changed. There was a reason for all of it that there hadn’t been before. It felt infinitely healthier.
‘The girls? How are they doing?’
‘Hayley is all about the studying. They’ve got them so wired about the exams. The GCSEs. Thank God she’s only doing five. Did you know they mostly do, like, ten? Eleven, some of them! Crazy. And Mere made it from the Cs to the Bs in netball, which she was wildly happy about.’
‘Good for her. All that practice paid off.’ He had spent hours with Meredith the weekend before this last trip, throwing the ball, passing, googling the rules. Meredith had been the easier nut to crack. She’d been younger, when he’d come into her life. They’d bonded over The Simpsons, a love of burgers, and his willingness to spend hours throwing balls in the garden – baseballs, at first. She’d seemed happy he was there, almost from the start. They’d been walking to get doughnuts one weekend morning, before he’d started ‘sleeping over’, when he’d spend the evening with Heather, drive her home, go back to work, then to his hotel alone, and drive back for breakfast, and Meredith had slipped her hand into his. He hadn’t made a big deal of it, but he’d found it so moving he’d almost cried.
Hayley had been harder. That bit older, nearer to adolescence. Already testing her mother a bit, she’d viewed him with something like suspicion, something like fascination. Her frank, appraising gaze made him anxious. Maybe he’d pushed a bit too hard at first, trying to establish his credentials, pretending to know more than he actually did about Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
Heather stroked the back of his hand. ‘You star. When you’re twelve, in an English school, that’s apparently like winning the lottery.’
‘And work? How’s work?’ he asked. She threw him a sly glance to see if he was making fun. He sort of was, although in the gentlest, fondest way. It didn’t really seem much like work to him.
This latest project was only a month or so old. The house was finished. The last tradesman – the landscape gardener and his team – had left a few weeks ago. Heather had been looking for her next challenge. Her words. He was pretty sure that, at some point, he’d constituted one. He didn’t mind. More than didn’t mind. Was profoundly grateful to have been a challenge Heather had taken on. But she needed a new one. And then she’d hit on it. She would be, she announced to him, in all seriousness, an Insta-influencer and lifestyle blogger. This, she informed him, was a huge sphere. A brave new world. And right up her alley. If he suspected that it was a new spin on why excessive shopping was justifiable he was smart enough to keep that thought to himself.
Once, at work, when he’d hardly known her except to form the somewhat inappropriate opinion that she was the best-looking woman in the place, he’d expressed surprise and delight that an admin task he’d thought would fill days had taken her just one. She’d smiled at him, her head on one side, and said, ‘I find that the best way to get something done is to just get on with it.’ Never had a phrase so succinctly captured a personality. The laser beam of her diligent attention had moved now from his filing system to him, to relocation, refurbishment and now to the latest project. She was all about the hashtags, the flatlays, the Insta-stories and the artful shots of everything from flowers to food to sunlit corners of their home. Not him. He’d ruled himself out. He had no doubt that she’d grow her modest couple of hundred followers to many thousands of disciples before too long. Whatever that meant.
She spoke for two junctions of the M25 about it. About some new post series she was planning, and a great contact she’d made online. He didn’t so much listen as let her voice wash over him. He was tired. He’d slept as badly as a six-foot-four man usually did on an overnight flight, even in business class. He murmured approval when it seemed appropriate. She didn’t mind.
Then, when they’d turned onto the A3, she asked, ‘Did you speak to your dad? About the birthday thing? Tell him yes?’
‘I did.’ He looked at her but she had her eyes firmly on the road. ‘Is that okay?’