Very Nearly Normal by Hannah Sunderland

Author:Hannah Sunderland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-02-24T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

My family had never been rich. Even the relatives going back hundreds of years had been either scraping by or in the poorhouse and, although we weren’t quite as near the breadline as they had been, we hadn’t moved very far up the financial ladder. I had lived in the same house since I’d been born; a run-of-the-mill semi-detached suburban with two bedrooms and a medium-sized garden. I’d always loved that house, modest and cramped as it was, but as we approached Theo’s childhood home, I saw that modest and cramped were words that had never been mentioned in the same sentence as the Morgan house, if you could even call it a house.

‘Your house has gates,’ I stated, eyebrows well and truly raised. ‘Are you, like, millionaires or something?’

‘Not quite, but we have enough to afford gates.’ He leaned over and popped the glove box, taking out a small black key fob. He opened the window and passed the fob over a reader before the gates opened in front of us like a very middle-class version of Jurassic Park.

‘You failed to mention that you live in a gated mansion.’

‘That’s probably because I don’t actually live here anymore and I’d have sounded like a dick if I’d mentioned it,’ he said as he slowly drove down the rhododendron-lined driveway, the few leaves that were left speckled with rain. I began to feel our mountain lunch repeat on me as we neared the end of the drive and the bushes fell away to reveal an immaculately kept lawn; it was one of those that had been mown into that fancy two-tone stripe pattern and it stretched out to a lake that lay just behind. The house itself was small for a manor house, but a manor house all the same, complete with sculpted creatures adorning the roof and a shiny old Land Rover sitting in the driveway.

Theo parked the car and turned to me abruptly.

I noticed then that a sheen of sweat clung to his brow and his usually warm complexion had turned slightly pallid. ‘So, a quick crash course in how this is gonna work. My dad, he will insist you call him Rhys, is going to mention Great-Uncle Alwyn almost immediately after meeting you. He’s then going to mention him a few more dozen times before we leave, so just a heads up on that. My sister, Tessa, tends to be a bit absentminded and will probably act like you are the Antichrist until you prove her wrong.’

‘What about your mum?’

‘Oh, don’t bring her up.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s dead.’

I recoiled.

Was I being an idiot or had he never mentioned this before?

I scanned back through all the conversations we’d ever had and tried to find the moment when he’d told me that his mother was dead, but he hadn’t.

‘What? When? How?’

‘Died. Five years ago. Stroke,’ he said matter-of-factly like he was recalling morbid things from The Generation Game conveyer belt.

‘And you tell me now?’ I held my hands out in frustration as I saw his dad open the front door and walk towards the car with a Theo-like smile on his face.

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