Family Album (21 page)

Not entirely, it would seem. Dinner is her creation. The Allersmead cuisine has moved with the times; there is no
boeuf bourguignon
or beef Stroganoff, but a fancy sort of salad with rocket and goat’s cheese for starters, followed by sea bass and some tricksy accompaniments, rounded off with a lemon sorbet. Susan is again all appreciation; she and Alison get into a cooking conversation, which Roger knows will earn Susan much credit.

Charles has become rather silent. It is at this stage that he breaks into the cookery exchange to ask Susan if she comes from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Susan, Canadian to her toenails, takes this on the chin and replies that she comes from Toronto, while Roger cringes. He suspects that Charles understands Susan’s status perfectly well, and is merely being provocative. Alison, unaware of the loaded moment, is keen to get back to cookery, and asks Susan if she does phyllo pastry. Susan says that she has never been much good at it, and wonders if Alison is fond of waffles. Clearly there is going to be some trading of recipes in due course. Roger sighs with relief and makes a mental note to tell Susan, later on, that she was a real trouper with his father.

Roger finds it very strange to be here without his siblings. The place feels both empty and full of ghostly presences—a cacophony of voices from the past, everyone at every age. Gina holds forth about the Falklands war, aged thirteen; Katie comes banging into the kitchen, dropping her satchel on the floor, a teenage Clare pirouettes in the hall. He says as much, to Alison, which provokes a storm of reminiscence, followed by a frenzy of updating: Gina was in
Iraq,
if you please—on the news night after night; Sandra is managing a boutique in Rome; Clare’s dance company is touring Germany—she sent a lovely photo, I’ll show you later; Katie you’ve seen not too long ago, I know, such a shame about no baby.

“And Paul?”

Alison says that Paul is away at the moment. She does not elaborate.

Later, over coffee in the sitting room Alison will display Sandra’s postcards from Ischia, where she was staying with a friend, and Clare’s publicity photo—caught in midflight with a male partner, ethereally thin, impossibly supple, her straight flaxen hair smoothed back in a chignon. Susan looks at this with interest.

Eventually, the evening is over. Roger and Susan retire to the spare bedroom and climb thankfully into bed. Roger is relaxed; it has not been too bad, it could have been worse. Made comfortable by food and wine, he talks: this is the moment maybe to explain the little glitch in Allersmead life.

“You mean your father fucked the au pair?”

Roger blinks. He has never heard it put like that. He has never put it like that himself. It is too brash, too coarse, too . . . well, true. He says nothing.

Susan is not insensitive. She sees that she has boobed, and scolds herself. She turns to Roger, pulls a face, puts all this into her expression, and the bad moment passes.

“It must have been a tricky time,” she says.

Roger shrugs. “Well, I don’t remember, do I? I was two. So I don’t remember Clare not being there.”

Susan is wondering how it was done. Did Alison stuff a cushion down her front? Was Ingrid consigned to a convent for a discreet interval? She keeps these thoughts to herself but is not surprised when Roger speaks: they have reached that point at which mind reading goes on, in a couple.

“Paul once told me that he remembers Ingrid went away, and when she came back there was somehow this baby too. But it was always our baby, and Mum and Dad were her Mum and Dad. Something about her real parents not being able to look after her so they’d given her to us as a present.”

“And later?”

“Later one sort of realized. Much later. And by then it was simply a part of family life. A fact—but a submerged one.”

“Your family is so much more interesting than mine,” says Susan.

Roger looks at her, startled. He has found a Chinese immigrant family pretty interesting, and says so.

Susan laughs. “Oh no. We are standard, all over North America. Striving, aspiring parents—achieving children.”

Roger protests. He points out the significance of cultural diversity—the value of growing up in one culture but having that other ancestral culture in your bones.

Susan again laughs at this. “My mom’s dim sum, and firecrackers at our birthday parties?”

And your face, he wants to say. Your fascinating face that remembers the other side of the world. Instead, he is disparaging about his own origins.

“We were middle England, to the core. There are thousands and thousands of households like Allersmead.” Except that, having spoken, he realizes that this is perhaps not entirely so: he thinks of his father’s opinions, which were maverick; he thinks of his mother, who seems to have stepped rather from some bohemian milieu of the 1920s, with her errant hairstyle and defiance of fashion; he thinks of Allersmead itself, which also defied the requirements of polite society—middle England is not so shabby, its loos are not Edwardian, its kitchens have been done over since the 1950s.

“Actually,” says Susan, “any family is intriguing, if you look closely. I suppose it’s just that yours seems exotic in every way, to me.”

Exotic? Roger is taken aback. He sees suddenly the chasm between himself and Susan—his beloved Susan—that unbridgeable gulf between any two people that is the product of their early years. Childhood—which sets the scene, the determining scene, which establishes the norm, which has you observing other people’s arrangements with surprise. Childhood—which you do not remember except in cinematic fragments, which was simply accepted and is forever the foundation on which you stand. What is exotic about Allersmead?

It is past midnight. One of the joys of marriage, thinks Roger, is this late-night dissection of events in the privacy of bed, this glorious intimacy, when the rest of the world is locked out, and only you and she exist. It is odd to have this take place in the spare room at Allersmead, but the flavor is the same. He tells Susan she was brilliant with his father, some would have gotten mad; he tells her that she was a star to talk cooking with his mother, she didn’t
have
to.

“Look, I wanted to,” says Susan. “I’m interested in cooking. Haven’t you noticed?”

Roger agrees that he has, indeed he has. He lays a hand on her hip. “Just, you were terrific with them. Mum really liked you.”

“And your dad?” He can feel her smile, in the darkness.

“Dad sort of doesn’t go in for liking people. At least, not so you’d notice.”

“But you’d notice if he didn’t?”

Roger agrees, with some emphasis, that you would.

“Then I’ve kind of squeezed through the middle, I guess,” says Susan. She yawns. “I need to pee. Will I wake people if I go to the bathroom?”

“No. Their room’s at the far end of the house. And Ingrid’s up in the attic.”

She pads out of the room, without turning on the light. He hears the bathroom door close and then the muffled sound of the antique cistern emptying. Susan returns and snuggles up against him. “I just love that toilet. The ball and chain. Can we have one like that fitted? You can get them from reclamation places.”

“No,” says Roger. After a moment he speaks again. “When I was thirteen my parents proposed to exchange me for a German boy of the same age.”

“Permanently?” exclaims Susan, amazed.

“No, no. For a month or so. It was a thing that was much done then. To improve your German or French or whatever, and vice versa. And to experience another culture.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“In this instance it didn’t work. The German boy went home after a week. He found the English way of life insupportable—at least as exemplified at Allersmead. And his parents let it be known, as politely as possible, that they were no longer keen to receive me.”

“Too bad.”

“Oh, I was hugely relieved. I tell this tale, though, simply to demonstrate that not all visitors find my family interestingly exotic. Some are merely dismayed.”

“What happened?” says Susan, yawning again. “What went wrong?”

“Never mind that. And don’t go to sleep.” He pushes up her T-shirt, runs a hand over her thigh. She makes a little sound of protest that is not a protest. Presently they discover, as did Gina and Philip, that the Allersmead spare-room bed has the most vociferous springs.

The German exchange was smaller than Roger; he was dark, with large eyes that clearly took in everything, and then some more. He stepped off the train, immaculate despite a journey that had involved several changes, and greeted Alison in equally spruce English. The travel had been good, thank you, his parents had told him what to do; he showed Alison two closely typed sheets of paper. No, he was not hungry at the moment, thank you, his mother’s provisions for the travel were only just finished. He shook Roger by the hand and said that they would be good friends. Roger shook back, limply, less certain about this.

“He is charming,” said Ingrid, later. Roger, who doubted that anyone had ever said
he
was charming, stared out of the window. Stefan was being shown the garden by Alison, and was conspicuously responsive. From time to time he pointed at something, inquiringly, or gazed at a tree. Stefan had adults sewn up, Roger could see; he didn’t even need to be speaking his own language. He seemed to be not thirteen, but about thirty, or a hundred and thirty. He was unfailingly polite; he leaped to attention whenever Alison or Ingrid entered the room; he asked Charles his advice about English books that he should read.

“Who’s this little creep you’ve brought?” said Paul, returning from college.

“I didn’t bring him,” muttered Roger. “And
shut up
. He speaks English better than we do.”

Stefan was to share Roger’s room. On the first evening he stood in the doorway staring at the mounds of jeans, sweaters, T-shirts, the fetid heaps of trainers, the windowsill on which Roger’s caterpillar collection heaved in glass jars, the poster of
Life on the Seashore,
the torn wallpaper, the carpet that had gamely absorbed tea, milk, Coke, and other substances over the years. In fact, goaded by Alison, Roger had tidied the room. He thought it looked pretty OK, but, glancing at Stefan, he saw it afresh for a moment, and saw it fall short. Stefan’s expression was complex: it registered dismay rapidly tamped down and succeeded by resignation. He eyed the bunk beds.

“You can have the top if you like,” said Roger.

Stefan smiled.
“Danke schön. Das ist ja sehr freundlich. Vielen Dank.”

Roger looked at him in horror. His last German exam mark had been a B minus. Conversation was not in the cards.

Stefan made a gesture of apology. “I thought perhaps you should practice. Another time. Thank you for the top.” He unpacked his bag, from which came meticulously folded garments, and a washbag full of mysterious toiletries. Roger showed him the bathroom, and again had that moment of fresh and disturbing vision: he saw the rail festooned with towels, the ripped shower curtain, the shelf crammed with Sandra’s cosmetics, the holder that sprouted a forest of toothbrushes, the towels draped over the side of the bath, the plastic ducks behind the taps (and who played with those now, for heaven’s sake?). The loo. Oh God, the loo. He smelled an awful smell of ancestral damp, and saw Stefan smell it too. “This is the bathroom,” said Roger glumly.

It emerged over supper that Stefan was an only child.

“Lucky sod,” said Paul.

“Really!” cried Alison. “He doesn’t mean that,” she told Stefan. “It’s a joke.”

Stefan nodded politely. “Sod?” he inquired. “That is a word I do not know.”

Charles put down his knife and fork. “A colloquialism. Generally regarded as coarse or derisive. My son’s conversation will afford you a rich opportunity to study the baser forms of our language.”

Stefan nodded again, his expression inscrutable.

Paul said, “Thanks, Dad. It’s good to know one’s useful.”