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She gives him a pinched look. “You’d be surprised.”
He chuckles. “No. Wouldn’t fancy my chances with you in a dark alley—” He glances at my mum playfully. “Or you, but maybe for different reasons.”
Harley and Bridge eat that right up. Mum’s thrilled.
“God—” She shakes her head. “If I was a few years younger.”
I give her a look.
“Or perhaps, you know, he and I weren’t together…”
Both Bridget and Julian look over at me.
His eyebrows are a bit up, and his face is doing a terrible job of concealing his surprise.
My cheeks go pink.
“You know what I mean,” I mumble.
“Anyway,” Marsaili says, clearing her throat and trying to throw me a line, “you two know each other—” She points to Julian and my father.
“Through work.” Julian nods.
I grab Marsaili’s arm quickly. “Fear not — we are not from dirty money. Well, actually…” I think for a second. “You’re not from any money, really, you just married in, so…”
Julian presses a knuckle into his mouth, suppresses a laugh.
“Do you know what I will say though, Harley.” I look over at him. “Their house in Italy is much bigger than ours.”
“We don’t have a house in Italy,” Bridget tells me.
I nod, unimpressed. “Much to my point.”
She rolls her eyes.
Mum beckons over the waiter and waves her hand around the table.
“Should we get some vodka for the table?”
Bridget squints over at her.
“Table vodka?” My sister blinks.
“Mm.” Our mother nods and smiles.
Jules watches her for a second and I think I see his face soften a little, like he’s sad for her. Then he nods emphatically.
“Absolutely. A bottle of your best table vodka.”
He looks over at me, gives me a small wink.
My mother bats her eyes over at him and I wonder if we should be worried. Mum’s been quite a figure on the London party scene lately. It’s not my favourite phase of hers. I much preferred it when she went through the Goop phase. It was more wholesome. There was a lot of hemp around the place, a bit too much flaxseed for my liking, but a lot of organic wine. That was nice. Always sandalwood burning.
This party phase, it’s messy and it feels to me like she’s trying to prove to everyone that she’s having fun, but I suspect she isn’t really having any. She’s partying harder than the best of us. And she’s always partied some, her and my father. The reason we even hired Marsaili in the first place was so they could party hard and not come home sometimes without being charged with parental negligence. Mum usually goes hard on her birthday weekend, maybe a few other times throughout the year, but this feels different. Constant. I have the niggling suspicion that this is all rooted in some kind of sadness about losing my father.
I don’t really understand it.
I don’t know that I’d ever have looked at them as being genuinely in love, but maybe I know less than I think I do. Or maybe she’s reckoning with the fact that it just never stops feeling terribly impossible to watch someone who once was yours be with someone else.
