Angus’s mother, sitting next to him, coughed, and he nearly jumped. Shit, he’d been totally ignoring her. And Max, on her other side, had also got up to go somewhere, presumably also the loo. The two of them had been chatting away for pretty much the whole meal, which had meant that Dan had had the perfect excuse to spend the entire time talking to Evie without it looking like it meant anything. But now poor Helen looked a bit lost.
‘This is a delicious meal, isn’t it, Helen?’ he said to her.
As he listened to her telling him about the cruise she and her husband had taken around the Balkans recently, it was a struggle not to keep looking over to see whether Evie was on her way back.
In the end, she came back with Max, who could hopefully take the reins on the Helen conversation again.
‘So I had a really good chat with Max and Greggy outside the loo,’ Evie whispered after she’d sat down, shaking her napkin out in her lap. ‘They told me about getting engaged last month but not announcing it yet until Sasha’s wedding’s over. That’s so lovely. So you’re going to have another family wedding next year.’
‘It is lovely.’ Dan nodded. ‘Greggy’s perfect for Max.’
‘Max has actually got the perfect life when you think about it.’ Evie looked up at the waiter as he placed her dessert in front of her and said thank you with a big smile, which made the waiter nearly drop his tray.
‘Got it?’ Dan straightened the tray in the waiter’s hands and turned back to Evie. She hadnoidea the effect she had on people. ‘Yes, he and Greggy are perfect together.’
‘Not just that,’ said Evie, taking a small mouthful of her crème brûlée. ‘Everything. His job. They’re talking about adopting together. I always get the sense that he’s so happy in his own skin.’
‘Really? I don’t think so.’ God, he hadn’t meant to sound so harsh. Evie was staring at him, her eyes wide open.
‘I’m sorry?’ she said.
Dan suddenly wanted to explain.
‘How can he be happy in his own skin and in his job?’ he said, doing his best to keep his voice low. Max was sitting only two seats along. ‘He should have been a top athlete. A star. He was a great footballer and he was also on course to make the GB athletics team. The Olympics. And instead he walks with a limp and he’s physiotothat team, to people he used tobeat.’ And all of that was Dan’s fault.
‘But he’s got a great career now and when he talks about it he’s so animated, and he has so many plans for the future. Andsomany athletes and sportspeople get injured at a crucial moment and it’s all over. If he hadn’t had that accident it could easily have been something else. Like that girl Sasha used to play netball with who fell off a kerb and twisted her knee the day before her England trials and never got to play for England even though everyone said she was the best wing defenceever. And, even for the tiny number of people who make it to the top, elite sport doesn’t last long. You need another career afterwards. And Max has a fantastic career.’
Dan shook his head. Evie was wrong. ‘But all he ever wanted to do was get to the GB team. I ruined that for him.’ God. What had he just said? He never talked about this. He looked down at the table, put a couple of sugar lumps into his cup and stirred his coffee very deliberately.
‘Youdid?’
‘The accident was my fault.’ That was only the second time he’d ever said that out loud. He looked up from his coffee cup to see how Evie was reacting. She had her eyes fixed on his face and she looked… sympathetic. Well, that was the wrong reaction. She should be condemning him.
‘Dan. I’m so sorry. What happened? If you’d like to say? I never heard exactly.’ That was because no-one knew the exact details, not even Lucie and Sasha. Their mother had shut them all down and never talked about it.
He shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t feel sorry for me. You’ve misunderstood. It wasmyfault. We’d been drinking. We were jostling in the road. I gave Max a big shove and he tripped, and a car came round a bend and hit him.’ It was strange saying this out loud. Straight after the accident, at the hospital, he’d told his parents. His father had told him he was a moron and his mother had hugged him and said he should never ever say again that it was his fault, because it wasn’t. That was the kind of thing that mothers said, and when you were little it helped, but when you were sixteen, and you knew they were wrong, it didn’t. The one thing Dan had gained from what she’d said that day was the understanding that she definitely couldn’t deal with talking about the accident. So he’d never mentioned it again.
He added another two sugar lumps to his coffee and stirred some more. This time he couldn’t look at Evie. He didn’t want to see the sympathy in her eyes change to condemnation.
‘Oh my goodness.’ Bizarrely, her voice had softened. ‘Dan, you can’t think that that was your fault. Presumably you didn’t know the car was coming. Presumably he’d been shoving you too. Presumably it was all good-natured.’
‘No, it wasn’t good-natured. We were properly arguing. About our father and his affairs.’ Dan looked up at Evie again. ‘We were really angry with each other. Max wanted to tell our mother and I didn’t. He was right, of course.’
‘I’m not sure he was necessarily right – I don’t think it would ever be that clear-cut? She might already have known and not wanted to be pushed into acting on it. And it would be unbelievably hard to hear that from your child, surely. But more importantly, did you want to injure Max severely?’
‘Well, no, obviously not long-term. Not severely. But in that moment I wouldn’t have minded giving him a nosebleed. I absolutely acted in anger.’
‘Everyone gets angry sometimes, though. You clearly didn’t want anything really bad to happen to him. Was he equally angry with you?’
Dan nodded but didn’t say anything. He didn’t really have his voice enough under control to speak.
My first point—’ Evie tapped one of the fingers of her left hand with her right forefinger ‘—is that if you were equally angry and a bit drunk and you were shoving each other in anger next to a road then either one of you could have got injured in many different ways. Arguably you’re both lucky that nothing worse happened.’ She tapped another finger, hard. ‘Secondly, to my eyes, Max is genuinely really happy in his life now, maybe happier than you seem to be right now. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Maybe life as a top GB athlete wouldn’t have been for him. I mean, he loves his lazy weekends with Greggy and his social life and his cooking and his career and his curries. I mean, all sorts of things that he wouldn’t have got to do if he’d been an athlete all the way through his twenties. Have you ever talked to him about it?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you should. Maybe you’d discover that I’m right.’
Dan added two more lumps of sugar to his coffee and did some more stirring. ‘I guess you do have a point,’ he said. Really just for something to say, because he didn’t know what he thought about what Evie had just said. If she really did have a point. While she was talking, it had sounded like it made sense. Except heknewthat it didn’t. Heknewthat it was his fault.
