The living quarters above the Maidenhead Arms are warm and cluttered with the kind of comfortable disorder that speaks of a family home rather than a pub. Framed photographs line the walls, the smell of a Sunday roast drifts up from the kitchen below, and pale winter light falls through the net curtains. White garment bags hang from door frames. A christening gown is laid out across the settee with the reverence of something sacred.
LEONARD GOMEZ stands at the window in his cream suit, tie already perfectly knotted, holding a mug of hot chocolate he hasn't yet touched. He begins, quietly at first, then with increasing conviction, to sing.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (swaying slightly, conducting himself with one finger) Celebrate good times, come on! There's a party going on right here, a celebration to last throughout the years—
JOHN GOMEZ: (appearing in the doorway, shirt untucked, one cufflink in, one hand searching his pocket for the other) Didn't know you were the singing type. Normally it's the newspaper, hot chocolate and off to bed by half eight.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (turning, entirely unashamed) Your mother always said the same thing. Thirty-seven years of marriage and she still acts surprised every time I open my mouth to sing. As though I haven't been singing since before either of you were a coherent thought in my head.
JOHN GOMEZ: And yet here we are.
LEONARD GOMEZ: Here we are. (He sets down the mug and looks at his son properly, the way only a father can, the kind of look that takes in the whole of a person in a single sweep.) Drove your mother mad when I used to sing to you in the baby cot. Same with you, Jennifer. I could tell by looking deep into your faces that you'd become beautiful and genuine people. Something in the eyes. Babies can't lie, John. Their eyes tell you everything about who they're going to be before they've had the chance to become it.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (entering from the hallway, adjusting the fascinator on her head, a glass of Buck's Fizz already in hand despite the hour) Are we talking about babies or are we finally talking about something useful, like whether Charles remembered to bring the order of service cards from the car.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: (calling from somewhere down the corridor) I heard that, Jennifer. Yes, I remembered the cards. I also remembered your wrap, your spare shoes, and the emergency paracetamol you always deny needing until you absolutely need it.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (to her father, lowering her voice) I married him for his organisational skills. Don't tell him that.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (smiling) I know why you married him.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (raising an eyebrow) Do you.
LEONARD GOMEZ: Because underneath all that efficiency he's got a good heart, Jennifer. And you, for all your performance to the contrary, have always known exactly what a good heart looks like.
A beat. Jenny softens just slightly. She takes a sip of her drink and looks away toward the window.
ANGELA GOMEZ: (sweeping in from the bedroom corridor in a cream lace dress and a hat that means serious business, moving with the decisive energy of someone who has been quietly organising everyone and everything since six in the morning) Right. Perdita is nearly ready, the baby is dressed, the car is booked for eleven, and if anyone hasn't ironed their shirt yet, they're walking to the church. John, for the love of everything holy, do your cufflinks. You look like you've just been rescued from somewhere.
JOHN GOMEZ: (fumbling) I can't find the second one.
ANGELA GOMEZ: Left breast pocket of yesterday's jacket. Which I told you not to leave on the chair.
JOHN GOMEZ: (disappearing back down the hall) Found it!
ANGELA GOMEZ: Of course you did. (She turns to Leonard and straightens his tie unnecessarily, simply because it is something to do with her hands.) You look handsome.
LEONARD GOMEZ: I know.
ANGELA GOMEZ: Don't push it.
PERDITA GOMEZ appears in the doorway. She wears a white lace dress, her dark hair pinned back, holding the baby Annabelle against her chest as though the child is the most natural extension of herself imaginable. Annabelle is dressed in white christening robes, a tiny bonnet framing a face that has not yet decided what expression it prefers. She blinks at the room with the vague authority of someone newly arrived and already unimpressed.
The room goes quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortably. More the way a room goes quiet when something worth looking at walks into it.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (softly) Oh, Perdita.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (glancing down at Annabelle, then back up, slightly self-conscious) Is it too much? The dress? I wasn't sure about the length—
ANGELA GOMEZ: It is absolutely not too much. You look like you belong on a Christmas card. Both of you.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: (appearing now, cards in hand, stopping short when he sees them) Right. Well. Nobody's going to be looking at any of us today.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (laughing quietly) Don't say that. She'll get a complex.
JOHN GOMEZ: (returning, cufflinks now correctly installed, stopping dead at the sight of his wife and daughter) There they are. My girls.
He crosses the room and kisses Perdita's temple, then touches Annabelle's cheek with one careful finger, as though checking she is real.
JOHN GOMEZ: (quietly, just to them) Good morning, trouble.
PERDITA GOMEZ: Which one of us are you talking to?
JOHN GOMEZ: Yes.
ANGELA moves to take Annabelle for a moment, and Perdita lets her, watching the way Angela holds the baby with that particular grandmother confidence that makes it look effortless. There is something on Perdita's face as she watches. A tenderness. And underneath it, something more complicated.
ANGELA GOMEZ: (to Annabelle, in a low voice, as though telling her a secret) You have no idea yet what you've walked into, my love. This family. Lord help you, but you couldn't have done better.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (quietly, almost to herself) No. You really couldn't.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (catching Perdita's tone, sitting beside her on the arm of the sofa) Is your mum coming today?
A pause. Just long enough.
ANGELA GOMEZ: Is your mother and father coming, Perdita?
PERDITA GOMEZ: (without bitterness, but with a kind of worn honesty that is more devastating than anger would be) They haven't reached out to me since the wedding. I could be dead for all they care. They don't give me the time since the wedding. I sent Mum a card when I found out I was pregnant. Just a card. Nothing dramatic. Just — here's some news, I thought you'd want to know. Never heard back. Not a call, not a text, not a knock at the door. Nothing.
The room absorbs this.
JENNY RIDGELEY: Perdita—
PERDITA GOMEZ: No, I don't want — (she stops herself, takes a breath, looks at Annabelle in Angela's arms) I'm not going to cry today. Today is not that day. I made my peace with it, or I'm making it, which amounts to the same thing when you've got a newborn and not enough sleep. (She looks around the room. At Leonard by the window, at Angela with the baby, at Jenny and Charles, at John standing beside her.) This is my family now. This is Annabelle's family. The Gomez family is ours, and I know what I've got, and I'm not going to spend today grieving what I haven't.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (simply) And we are yours, Perdita. Every last complicated, singing, hot-chocolate-drinking, newspaper-reading one of us.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: (raising his Buck's Fizz glass, which Jenny has somehow handed to him without his noticing) I'll drink to that. And I'm a Ridgeley so I know what it is to marry into this family and find out rather rapidly that you don't get a choice about belonging.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (drily) You proposed to me, Charles.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: And I stand by it. My point stands nonetheless.
A small ripple of laughter moves through the room. Even Annabelle seems to respond to it, her face arranging itself into something that might, if you were feeling generous, be called a smile.
JOHN GOMEZ: (to his father, the laughter fading, something shifting in his voice) Dad. Can I — I need to say something. Before we go.
LEONARD GOMEZ: John—
JOHN GOMEZ: No, let me. Please. (He steadies himself.) Do you forgive me for my past mistakes. Perdita, I know what I did was the lowest of the low, and I know that to all three of you I could and should have reached out. I should have come home years before I did. I should have called. I should have been a son and a brother and a husband long before I managed it. And I know sorry is the cheapest currency there is when it's said too often, so I'm not going to drown you in it. But I need you to know that I know. That I carry it.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (carefully, not unkindly) I was so hurt when you told me you'd slept with Isobel Matthews. I put all my faith in you after Gary and how I was subjected to what he had done. Everything I went through before you. I had rebuilt myself from the ground up, John, piece by piece, and I handed you all of it. Every piece. Do I forgive you. (A beat.) We'll get there. But we have a life to put together after our own now, so you'll need to pull your socks up and obey me and our baby girl. Otherwise it's last chance saloon.
JOHN GOMEZ: I know.
PERDITA GOMEZ: And I mean it.
JOHN GOMEZ: I know you mean it.
PERDITA GOMEZ: Good. (She takes Annabelle back from Angela, resettles her against her shoulder, and the conversation continues.) Right then.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (to John, and the directness of it is not cruel but it is unsparing) You missed so many events whilst you were homeless and disconnected from us. Cameron started a new job in the United Arab Emirates. Jenny gave birth to two young women who are this little one's nieces. You missed their births in the early two thousands. You weren't there when your mother had her procedure. You weren't there when I turned the Maidenhead Arms into what it is now, when I nearly lost it, when we nearly lost everything and had to fight to keep this family standing. Your disappearance for whatever reason in 1999 broke me, John. And I can't pretend it didn't. I won't pretend it didn't because that would be a lie and I don't lie to my children.
JOHN GOMEZ: I know, Dad.
LEONARD GOMEZ: But you came back. And you found Perdita. And today we have Annabelle. So I'll tell you what I told myself when you walked back through that door. I said, Leonard, you've spent enough years mourning. Now it's time to live forward. And that's what we're doing today. We are living forward.
ANGELA GOMEZ: (quietly, touching Leonard's arm) Living forward.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (to John, and she means it even if her delivery is typically sideways) For what it's worth, I'm glad you're here. Even though you owe me approximately fourteen Christmases, six birthdays, two graduations, and one disastrous family holiday to Tenerife where Dad managed to burn his eyebrows off.
LEONARD GOMEZ: We agreed we'd never mention Tenerife.
ANGELA GOMEZ: I never agreed to anything.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: (to John, underneath the laughter) She talks about you, you know. Jennifer. She always has. Even when she was furious with you.
Jenny does not deny it. She looks at the window instead.
JOHN GOMEZ: (to Jenny) I'm going to be better at it. All of it.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (still looking at the window) You'd better be. Because she (nodding toward Annabelle) is going to need her uncle Cameron and Auntie Jenny's girls around her, and we can't do any of that if you go wandering off again.
JOHN GOMEZ: I'm not going anywhere.
PERDITA GOMEZ: No. He's not.
CHARLES has moved toward the table near the window, sorting through the order of service cards with the concentration of a man who is grateful for something practical to do. He stops. He turns over an envelope that has been sitting on the table, half hidden beneath a fold of tissue paper. He looks at it. Looks up at John. Back at the envelope.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: You want to explain yourself, John. Why is there an NHS letter addressed to you here? On the table. Opened.
The temperature of the room changes. Not dramatically. Just subtly. The way a room changes when something that has been sitting in the corner of someone's peripheral vision for weeks suddenly becomes the only thing anyone can see.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (very quietly) Are you ill.
John doesn't answer immediately. He looks at the envelope in Charles's hand. He looks at Perdita. At Annabelle. He looks at his father by the window and his mother beside him. Jenny has turned from the glass and is watching him with an expression she does not attempt to conceal.
JOHN GOMEZ: Stage three prostate cancer.
Silence.
Not the comfortable kind. The kind that has weight.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (barely above a whisper) Why didn't you tell anyone.
JOHN GOMEZ: I was this close, Dad. I was standing right here in this room about to say it and then Perdita gave birth, and being told that the father of the child has cancer is not the welcoming news, is it. It's not what you hand someone who's just come through everything she came through. I kept thinking, one more week. One more week and I'll find the right moment. And then there was never a right moment because there is no right moment for something like this. There is no version of this conversation that begins well.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (very quietly, all the dryness gone from her voice entirely) I'm so sorry, John.
JOHN GOMEZ: (and he almost holds it together) God's having his turn to punish me for all my misdeeds. All the people I've hurt. All the people I've let down. (He stops.) As you said, Perdita. We've got a little life to protect. And I'm going to fight this cancer. I am. But I can't do this alone. I thought I could. I thought I was protecting everyone by keeping it quiet, and I can see now that I was protecting myself because I didn't know how to say it out loud without it becoming real.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (and there are tears in her eyes but her voice does not waver, not even slightly) You stood by me when I was going through cancer. You sat in every waiting room. You held my hand in every appointment. You made tea I never drank and you watched terrible television with me at two in the morning because I couldn't sleep and you never once made me feel like a burden. It would be deeply, profoundly unfair if I didn't do exactly the same for you. And I am going to. Every appointment, John. Every single one. You are not sitting in a waiting room alone as long as I am breathing.
JOHN GOMEZ: Perdita—
PERDITA GOMEZ: I mean it. Don't argue with me. I told you. Obey me.
A sound escapes him that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sob but something exactly in the middle of both.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (moving to his son now, both hands on his shoulders, looking at him the way he looked at him in the doorway earlier, but without the lightness this time, with something older and steadier and more absolute) You're not alone, son. You have a loving and beautiful and caring wife in Perdita. And we'll be staying for the long haul. Because we love you. And we are one family unit. When one is down, we rally against whoever or whatever the threat is. That is what this family does. It is the only thing we have ever done that has ever truly mattered. We rally. We stay. And we fight, John. We fight together.
ANGELA GOMEZ: (stepping forward, taking her son's face in both hands the way she must have done when he was very small, pressing her forehead briefly to his) My boy. You are not being punished. Do you hear me. You are not being punished. You are being tested. And Gomez men do not fail tests.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (wiping her eyes, furious at herself for it) Neither do the women they're attached to, for what it's worth.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: (putting a steady hand on John's arm) Whatever you need. Whatever either of you need. You only have to say it.
A long, held moment. The kind that settles a room rather than disturbing it. Outside, a car horn sounds gently from the street. The hired car. The church. Annabelle, entirely unconcerned by the weight of adult sorrow around her, makes a small decisive sound of her own.
ANGELA GOMEZ: (looking down at the baby, laughing despite herself, pulling herself back into the present with both hands) Right. Well. She's right. We have a christening to get to.
LEONARD GOMEZ: (straightening, clearing his throat, returning to himself) Get your coats. All of you. We're not arriving late to this child's first public appearance. She deserves a proper entrance.
JENNY RIDGELEY: (gathering herself, finding her wrap, the familiar rhythm of logistics a mercy) Charles, cards.
CHARLES RIDGELEY: Cards. Yes. Got them.
PERDITA GOMEZ: (to John, quietly, just between them, while the others move and bustle around them) Today we celebrate her. All the rest of it — the fight, the appointments, the hard days ahead — all of that begins tomorrow. Today is hers. Can you do that?
JOHN GOMEZ: (looking at Annabelle, then at his wife) Today is hers.
PERDITA GOMEZ: Good man.
She takes his hand. He takes hers. And together they move toward the door with the rest of the Gomez family folding around them like something warm and absolute and unshakeable, and Annabelle blinks at the winter light coming through the window, and for a single perfect moment everything is exactly as it should be — and then Angela's handbag falls from the hook by the door and spills open across the floor, and out from it slides not only her purse and her lipstick and her order of service card, but a sealed envelope with handwriting that Perdita recognises the instant her eyes fall on it — her mother's handwriting — and the smile on Perdita's face does not fall, not exactly, but something behind it shifts entirely, and she looks at Angela, and Angela looks back at her, and in that look is something that has not yet been spoken, and the door is open and the car is waiting and the church bells are beginning somewhere in the middle distance and nobody says a word—