LITMIR.BIZ

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him a grateful smile. ‘Have you managed to sort out the music – you know, with everybody’s choices?’

      ‘Yes, Max helped me make a playlist.’

      Max. Josh’s childhood friend, whose mum died when he was five years old, who’s been part of our family ever since, a second son to me and Adam, a brother to Josh and Marnie. Max, who for the last six months I’ve been avoiding.

      ‘I bet there were some weird and wonderful requests.’

      ‘You could say that. It was always going to be an odd mix with such a big age range,’ he says, poking my arm gently to let me know he’s joking. He takes the vase from me. ‘Where do you want this?’

      ‘On the side for now, so that I can enjoy them. Tea or coffee?’

      ‘Tea. I’ll make it.’

      I sit down at the table. Josh is right, there are a lot of generations coming tonight, from Nelson and Jess’s daughter Cleo, who’s nineteen, to Adam’s parents, who are in their seventies. I want there to be something for everyone, so I asked each person to let Josh know their favourite song, which he’ll play during the course of the evening. Part of the fun tonight will be trying to match the guest to the music.

      ‘How’s Amy?’

      Josh leans back against the worktop. ‘She’s good.’

      ‘She still can’t make it tonight?’

      He gives his chest a scratch. ‘No. But I can understand that, in her parents’ eyes, her grandfather’s eightieth is more important than your fortieth.’

      ‘True.’

      He brings over a mug of tea. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

      ‘Thanks. I’ll wait until your dad comes in. He said he’d make breakfast.’

       ‘You don’t mind if I start without you?’ Josh goes to the cupboard, finds the cereal, pours himself a bowl, adds milk, grabs a spoon from the drawer then leans back against the fridge and starts eating. He always seems to be leaning against something, as if his body can’t quite hold itself up. The slightly brooding look on his face as he thinks about Amy not being able to come tonight doesn’t make him any less handsome. He looks so much like Adam did at that age.

      I stifle a sigh. It isn’t just the fact that Amy’s not able to come tonight that’s bothering him.

      ‘When are you going to speak to Dad?’ I ask.

      ‘Soon.’

      ‘You need to tell him,’ I say, horribly aware of the underlying hypocrisy of my words.

      He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I know.’

      ‘He’ll understand.’

      Josh shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says sombrely. ‘I don’t think he will.’

      10.00 A.M. – 11.00 A.M.

Adam

      I’m on my way back to the house from my shed when, through the window, I see Liv chatting to Josh in the kitchen. They’re not standing close to each other – Livia is sitting at the table, Josh is leaning against the fridge – but I feel like an outsider looking in. Maybe this is how Josh feels when he sees me and Marnie together, I realise. I always thought he chose not to join in because he didn’t want to give me the pleasure of thinking he’d forgiven me. But maybe he feels like I do now, that his presence would be an intrusion.

      As I watch, uncomfortable at this odd voyeurism but not able to stop myself, Livia throws her head back, laughing at something Josh said, and I smile in response. I love to see Livia happy, especially as I know how much it affected her when her parents told her she never would be, the day she told them we were getting married. I’ll never be able to understand their rejection of her. It breaks my heart each time they don’t turn up to something she’s invited them to, because although she tells herself that they won’t come, the expectation is always there. I’ve often wanted to jump on my motorbike and go and hunt them down in Norfolk, tell them what they’re missing out on, not just in relation to Liv but also in relation to Josh and Marnie, the grandchildren they’ve never wanted to meet. I want to tell them how amazing Liv is, how happy we are, how much I love her. But I’ve always been worried that it would make things worse.

      I realised recently that there is no worse, not for Livia, which is why I decided to write to her parents and ask them if they could find it in their hearts to come to her party tonight. I said that I understood how disappointed they must have been when Livia became pregnant, but over twenty years have gone by and that it’s time to forgive. I used Josh and Marnie as leverage, rather than Livia, telling them that we’d always regretted them not knowing their grandparents. I sent a photograph of the two of them sitting on the wall in the garden, taken just before Marnie left for Hong Kong and wrote long paragraphs about them, about their lives and what they’ve been doing – I even told them that Marnie was flying back from Hong Kong especially for the party as a surprise for Livia, hoping it might persuade them to come. I fully expected Livia’s father to write straight back, telling me never to contact them again. The fact that he didn’t gives me hope that they might actually turn up tonight.

      My phone buzzes in my pocket, breaking the moment. I check the window to see if Liv and Josh have caught me staring, but they’re still deep in conversation. I take out my phone, wondering if it’s an update from Marnie. But it’s Nelson.

      ‘Sure you don’t need any help today? Please… the kids are driving me nuts!’

      Last weekend when we went to see them, Nelson was trying to talk to me about his work while his four-year-old twin boys swarmed over him, and his little daughter decorated his beard with clips and ribbons. I love Nelson but there’s something supremely satisfying about the tables having turned.

       ‘You and I both know you’re on babysitting duty today. Kirin would kill me. Sorry!’ I text back.

      I carry on to the house, already preparing myself for the sense of – I suppose ‘loss’– that I feel whenever I’m with Josh. On the face of it, we get on fine. But there’s something missing, a closeness that I’m not sure we’ll ever have, not now.

      I’d always been aware of the distance between us but the first time it was really brought home was the day he left for university, in Bristol, where I’d hidden from him eighteen years before – trust me, the irony isn’t lost on me. Nelson and Kirin were round at ours and when it was time for Josh to say goodbye, he shook my hand, then went over to Nelson, who enveloped him in a hug. What shocked me was the way Josh hugged him back, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It almost felt as if Nelson was his father, not me.

      I know I concentrated too much on Marnie during those early years, and I’ve tried to make it up to Josh since, but it’s difficult. It’s why I’m stupidly proud of having found the New York internship for him. When you’re a carpenter, there aren’t many strings you can pull for your children. Not that I really pulled strings, I just happened to be chatting to an American friend of Oliver, one of my clients, who’d come to my workshop to see if I could make a bespoke piece of furniture for his home in Martha’s Vineyard. He’d seen a piece I’d made for Oliver, and wanted something similar, but three times bigger. We were talking about our lives and our children and I happened to mention that for the last year of his Masters, Josh needed to find an internship, preferably in Digital Marketing.

      ‘Has he thought about coming to the US?’ he enquired, and explained that he was CEO of Digimax, a large digital marketing company based in New York, which offered internships to Masters students. To cut a long story short, Josh sent off his CV, had a couple of phone interviews with someone from the New York office, and ended up being offered a place. He’s really excited about going and it’s great to see him making the most of opportunities that I never had.

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