Free Wish You Were Here by Catherine Alliott Page A

where they visited him and where their father had been so resilient, so cheerful. Saying they weren’t to worry. That he had a splendid view of the moor, the smell of heather, just like home. And that the food was better than he’d had in the army, and he was reading loads, making his way through the classics, which was marvellous. He was in charge of the prison garden, too, eating the vegetables from it, and really making the whole experience out to be so much better than it must have been.
    And, meanwhile, the three children were sent to boarding school, and stayed with an aunt – Aunt Sarah, Drummond’s sister – in the holidays and kind friends at weekends. And whilst nine years didn’t exactly fly by, when it became seven – because, of course, he was a model prisoner, Sally said – suddenly, it did. They’d all assumed he would serve the full term, and no one had told them any differently for fear of getting their hopes up. But then, all at once, Daddy was coming home.
    ‘And how did you feel about him?’ I’d wanted to ask Sally, but didn’t. How did you feel about your father
robbing you of your mother with a single shot, which, when I found an old newspaper clipping in a drawer at Brechallis years later, was what had happened. But Sally knew what I wanted to know.
    ‘The same,’ she’d told me frankly, looking at me from the other end of the sofa with those wide grey Murray-Brown eyes, bright in her pretty if increasingly moonlike face. ‘He was still our father. And, yes, we’d lost our mother, but it had been an accident, a terrible mistake. We could either decide to lose both parents, or keep one. Keep Daddy, which we did.’
    They all did. All stood, and have stuck by him, which says a lot for Drummond Murray-Brown, and perhaps not a great deal for Vicky, although they never blackened her name either. Whatever she’d done, she didn’t deserve what befell her. An invisible veil of intractable silence regarding their mother descended on the family, and what remained of them was tight, for obvious reasons. Almost twenty years into a marriage with one of the siblings, I sometimes wondered if two out of the three had ever got over it. I suspected they hadn’t. James was fine, I knew that. I’m even conceited enough to believe that the girls and I had made him so, but Sally and Rachel were not fine, and I think James felt guilty about that. That he’d survived. Escaped, if you like. And they hadn’t. Remained trapped in a house full of ghosts and regrets.
    As I faced him now in our Clapham kitchen, I knew. Knew that their lives were entangled more inexorably than those of any other family. Knew, too, that just as we had always, throughout our married life, spent almost a
month – a long time in anyone’s calendar, my friends were always staggered – with the Brig and Sally and Rachel, so we would now, even in the south of France. It couldn’t be avoided. And it had been foolish – selfish of me, even – to imagine it could. To believe that this summer would be any different.

CHAPTER SIX
    The
ferry crossed the Channel on a rough and churning sea. It felt like a force ten to me, but James assured me it was only a moderate swell, not even a proper gale. You could have fooled me. I’m not one of nature’s travellers, though; in fact, on our honeymoon I notched up motion sickness three times in one day: once on the aeroplane to Athens, once on the boat to Zante and, lastly, in the taxi across the island whilst James supplied me with sturdy paper bags and surreptitiously read
The Times
. This time, however, I was not the only one in trouble. Rory was up on deck beside me, clinging to the rail as the others played Perudo in the bar below, no doubt knocking back the rosé, lurching hilariously this way and that as the boat plunged and soared, roaring with laughter as the dice and the cups rolled off the table. Rory and I couldn’t look at one another, let alone speak. So intense was our mutual