Launch Code

TWO

The bath was great. Toby could extend his six-foot-long body, the water was hot, the taps were big and silver and powerful and it was placed right under a window with a view of the pale-blue Norfolk sky, framed by the dead leaves of a climbing rose knocking gently on the glass pane in the breeze.

He was going to enjoy the weekend.

Toby was an only child. His mother was a nurse in a GP’s surgery in North London. Toby hadn’t seen his own father for six years; he was a failed property developer who now lived in the Algarve with a third wife from Leicester who was only five years older than Toby himself. Toby was close to his mother, and saw her regularly, but since his grandparents had died the two of them didn’t really seem like a family, more a partnership.

Whereas the Guth family was a real family. And a family that was happy to include him.

It was one of the many reasons he was glad to have married Alice.

‘You took your time,’ she said when Toby eventually appeared in the kitchen. Bill was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee. Megan was nowhere to be seen.

It occurred to Toby, not for the first time, that Alice was replacing her mother at the centre of the family, and that Bill was content to let her do it. ‘Replacing’ wasn’t exactly the right word. And it certainly wasn’t ‘displacing’. It was more that Alice was taking on her mother’s tasks, her obligations, in memory of her. Honouring her. Toby had the impression that Alice and her father had developed an unspoken ritual, which Alice was happy to follow.

‘How’s it going?’ Toby asked her, kissing the top of her head as she bent over a mixing bowl.

‘Just making the stuffing. The turkey should go in in about twenty minutes.’

‘I was just telling Alice,’ Bill said. ‘There’s a guy coming to see me from Newcastle at four this afternoon. A historian. Wants to talk to me about the Navy in the 1980s.’

Toby knew that Bill had served on nuclear submarines before he and Alice’s mother had married.

‘Is that stuff still secret?’ Toby asked.

‘Most of it. I’ve told him there’s a limit to what I can say, but he still wants to meet me. Would you like to sit in on it?’

‘You should,’ said Alice. She had a small smile of pleasure on her face. ‘Dad can’t talk about it, but the historian probably can. I think you’ll find it interesting. I’d like to be there myself, but this turkey needs my attention.’

Toby felt like he was being cut into a family secret. He liked that. ‘All right, thanks.’

‘You can report back,’ said Alice. ‘Tell me all about it.’

‘What about me?’ said a voice at the door. It was Megan. ‘Can I be there too?’

Toby felt a slight pause from both Alice and Bill. An unsaid shared pause of disapproval.

Megan stared at her father and smiled. A smile of defiance. A what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it? smile.

‘Sure,’ said Bill slowly. ‘That would be great.’

Megan’s smile gained a note of triumph and she left the kitchen.