Dan … didn’t. Dan’s family are lovely, really lovely, but they’re a sensible, modest family. Dan’s father was an accountant and he’s very big on saving. Very big. He started saving for his house deposit when he was eighteen. It took him twelve hard years, but he did it. (He told me that story the very first time I met him, and then asked if I had a pension.) He would never whisk the whole family off to Barbados on a whim, like my father did once, or go shopping at Harrods.
And don’t get me wrong: I don’t want trips to Barbados or shopping trips to Harrods. I’ve told Dan that a million times. But still, Dan is a bit … what’s the word? Prickly. That’s it. He’s prickly about my background.
What’s frustrating is that he wasn’t like that when we first got together. He and Daddy really got on. We’d go out sailing, all four of us, and have a great time. I mean, Daddy was obviously far better at sailing than Dan, who’d never done it before, but it was OK, because they respected each other. Daddy would joke that he could do with Dan’s eagle eye overlooking his accounts team – and he did genuinely ask Dan’s advice a few times. We were all relaxed and easy.
But somehow Dan got pricklier as time went on. He stopped wanting to go sailing. (To be fair, it was harder once we had the girls.) Then three years ago we bought our house – using an inheritance from my granny as a deposit – and Daddy offered us a top-up but Dan wouldn’t take it. He suddenly got all weird and said we’d relied on my family quite enough. (It didn’t help that Dan’s dad arrived to see the house and said, ‘So this is what family wealth buys you,’ as though we were living in a palace, not a three-bedroomed house in Wandsworth on a mortgage.)
After Daddy died, everything was left to my mother and she offered us money again – but Dan wouldn’t touch that, either. He was even more prickly. We had a bit of a row, in fact.
I can understand that Dan is proud. (Sort of. Actually, I don’t relate to it at all, but maybe it’s a male thing.) What I do find hard, though, is the way he’s so defensive about my father. I could see their relationship becoming strained, even when Daddy was alive. Dan always said I was imagining things – but I wasn’t. I just don’t know what happened or why Dan got so tentery. (That’s when I invented the word.) It was like he began to resent Daddy, or something.
And even now, it’s as if Dan still feels threatened. He’ll never sit down and reminisce about my father – not properly. I’ll sit down and start scrolling through photos, but Dan won’t focus. After a while he always makes an excuse and moves away. And I feel a little ache in my heart, because if I can’t reminisce about my father with Dan, who can I? I mean, Mummy … She’s Mummy. Adorable, but you can’t actually have a conversation with her or anything. And I don’t have any siblings.
Being an only child used to bother me. When I was a child I pestered and pestered Mummy for a baby sister. (‘No, darling,’ she would say, very sweetly.) Then I even invented an imaginary friend. She was called Lynn and she had a dark fringe and long eyelashes and smelled of peppermints and I used to talk to her in secret. But it wasn’t the same.
When Tessa and Anna were born, I watched them, lying face to face, already locked into a relationship no one else could penetrate, and I felt this huge, visceral pang of envy. For all that I had as a child, I didn’t have that.
Anyway. Enough. I’ve long got over being an only child; I’ve long grown out of my imaginary friend. And as for Dan and my father … Well. I’ve just accepted that every relationship has some little fault line or other and this is ours. The best thing is just to avoid the topic altogether and smile when Dan calls me ‘PS’ because what does it actually matter?
‘Yes,’ I say, coming to. ‘I’ll go and see someone. Good idea.’
‘And we’ll decline this.’ Dan taps the Sky Garden invitation.
‘I’ll write to David Whittall,’ I say. ‘He’ll understand.’
And then Tessa spills her milk, and Anna