Relative Love (18 page)

Helen moved forward to rest her elbows on the balcony. Even through three layers of clothes she could feel the icy metal of the railing. She clasped her mug, which was empty but still warm. Unable to face dinner, she had made herself hot chocolate, using one of the sachets and the kettle provided in the room. She had eaten a packet of shortbread, and a bag of peanuts from the minibar, which had made her so thirsty she had used the last sachet of chocolate to make a second cup. Her tummy, straining against the usually loose waistband of her jeans, felt bloated yet curiously hollow, as if a firm puncture from a sharp pin could reduce it to its normal size.

Only one snowplough remained on the mountain. Helen followed its progress, torn between the notion that man had an impressive capacity to imprint his influence on the natural world and a more compelling sense of how ultimately futile it was to try. The mountains, ancient and imperious, glowed with energy and presence; one rumble of their power could flatten not just a snowplough but an entire community. Just the week before there had been an avalanche in Austria: five killed, three missing and scores trapped in chalets in the valley. Theo and Chloë, seeing it reported on the news, had thought it exciting, Theo because being marooned in a chalet would introduce the possibility of not having to return to school and Chloë because it made for a thrilling story and she was still at the age where she felt immortal.

Frozen, Helen had already turned back towards the room when the telephone rang. Her first thought was that Peter was calling from Reception to see how she was and to report on the progress of the meal. She knew he had been put out at the prospect of eating alone with children and a little disappointed – suspicious, even – of her suddenly fragile state. ‘Well, if you’re really feeling that bad …’

‘Yes, Peter, I am. I’m sorry, but I am.’ She had been lying on the bed, one hand across the swell of her stomach. ‘And I’m not sure about tomorrow either, whether I’ll be able to cope —’

‘But, Helen,’ he interrupted, looking not so much compassionate as exasperated, ‘at the airport you said you were going to ski the socks off us.’

‘That was before —’

‘Okay, okay.’ He had held up his hands, not wanting to be subjected to any more details of her condition than were necessary. ‘I’m sorry, obviously, and hope you feel better soon. And Chloë is fine with anything so long as it’s got chips, right?’

‘Right. And ketchup helps.’

She got to the phone on the third ring and lay on the bed to take the call.

‘Hello, Helen, is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Peter there?’

‘Peter?’ Their voices were so similar that it took Helen a few seconds to register that she was talking to her father-in-law and not her husband. ‘No, John, he’s downstairs having dinner with the children – I’m feeling slightly under par.’

‘It’s taken a while to track you down – had to get hold of Peter’s secretary in the end. Look here, Helen, the fact is there’s some bad news on the home front, some very bad news. We thought the pair of you ought to know.’

‘Oh, no, John,’ Helen murmured, thinking immediately of Alicia.

‘It’s Tina.’ He spoke brusquely, almost coldly. ‘Charlie and Serena’s Tina. She’s been killed in a hit-and-run, Helen. It happened this afternoon and we’re all at our wits’ end. Thought you ought to know.’

‘Oh, no.’ Helen was bolt upright now and clutching the phone. ‘Oh, the poor, poor things – oh, how unspeakable. We’ll come home at once.’

‘Oh, no, don’t do that, I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to do that.’

‘How … I mean … how are they?’

‘Too soon to tell. They’re coming down here tomorrow. Charlie wanted to tonight but Serena won’t leave the house. The doctor’s given her some tablets. We’ve got the girls and Ed. They’re pretty cut up, as you can imagine, but not saying much … all in shock, of course.’

‘Of course, of course. Oh, John, how utterly terrible. I’ll tell Peter at once. And we will come home, I really think we should, at such a time. Is there a date for the … funeral?’ Saying the word brought Helen, for the first time, in touch with the full reality of what they were discussing and she began to cry.

‘Easy does it,’ John muttered, his own voice choked with emotion. ‘As to the funeral, it’s not yet been decided. Charlie said something about early next week. We’ll keep you posted. Go and find Peter. Let us know what you decide.’

During the course of the last century not only did the nature of war change, but also the nature of the heroism at the heart of it. Nowadays, with the action live on our television sets, there is a sense of outrage for every soldier’s life lost, often accompanied by public questioning as to the manner in which he or she died and the merits of the commands they were following. Media access to battlefields has brought accountability on a scale that would have left First and Second World War generals quaking in their boots …

Stephen lifted his hands from his laptop and folded his arms. The week before he had had lunch with his editor and talked convincingly of his manuscript, as if it actually existed instead of floating, as it still did, in some garbled form in his mind. They had agreed that good writing required passion and conviction, that even the simplest sentences shone with authenticity if they came from the heart. The editor had paid, and Stephen had splashed out on a taxi home, full of
pasta, wine and self-belief. He had spent the rest of the afternoon vigorously arranging his notes, which had somehow extended into an energetic overhaul of the flat. As it comprised only four small rooms, this would not have been a huge undertaking, were it not for the scores of half-unpacked boxes, piles of books and unhung pictures stacked along the skirting-boards, with several unassembled self-assembly units in which much of it was destined to be stowed. It wasn’t just laziness that had caused this lamentable state of affairs. On receiving the packing cases several weeks after his return to England, the eclectic collection of belongings they contained – dog-eared Spanish manuals, carved wooden figures, rainbow-coloured wall-hangings, a leather saddle – had looked so incongruous in his cramped urban surroundings that Stephen had not been able to muster either the heart or the inspiration to grapple with them. But on that Monday afternoon, when all his notes were tidily filed, he found himself erecting bookshelves and pinning up his Ecuadorean tapestries with precisely the sort of passion he had been discussing with his editor. It was an arduous task that took several days and which he was frequently tempted to abandon. There was something comforting about untidiness, something, perhaps, to do with its possibility of improvement. As a child, the chaotic state of his bedroom was one of the many misdemeanours that had prompted his father to slide his belt out from the waistband of his trousers. Stephen thought of this many times as he laboured, marvelling at the ineffectuality of punishment as an incentive for anything. If his father were to walk in the door Stephen would probably have turned the place upside-down again just to rile him. As a child, resistance and disobedience had been his only weapons. And not crying. He had got good at that, too, even when the edge of the belt buckle swung into the spaces between his ribs.

It was only as he had been putting the last things in place that Sunday morning, hanging a brillo-scrubbed pan on a new hook above the stove next to a hand-painted tile depicting a Spanish bullfighter, that it had dawned on Stephen that all this sudden rush of domestic fervour stemmed from one source: Cassie Harrison. He wanted her to see his home, to see him and all the odd little pieces of his history. He wanted to point at the bull-fighter and describe the day on which he had bought it, a steamy day in Pamplona when he had gorged himself on tapas and chilled sherry, then almost brought it up at the sight of the bull, lumbering blindly at the matador, blood and spikes trailing from its hide. He wanted to show her the polished pink stone he had found on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the little silver horse given to him by a grateful student. He wanted to point at his shelves of dog-eared novels, tell her when he had read them and what each had meant to him. He wanted, in short, to spill himself open to her so that she could love him, all of him, as he loved her.

Heroes are a strange breed. They are people who are brave when there is no hope, people who rise above all the normal human preoccupations with fear and self-preservation in the interests of a greater good …

Stephen stopped, reread all that he had written, then pressed the delete button. He didn’t want to think about heroes, unsung or otherwise, he wanted to think about Cassie Harrison. The silky waves of her hair, her startled blue eyes, the faint outline of her bra pressing through the fine blue wool of her top. He imagined reaching out and tracing one finger from her hairline through the centre of her face, across the tiny shallow lines etched along her forehead and down the smooth slope of her nose to her wide pink mouth. He longed to press his face against her neck and breathe the scent of her skin, to run his tongue along the ridge of her collar-bone, to taste her
… God, how he wanted to taste her, all of her, every crevice, every dimple, every downy blonde hair.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Stephen shouted, slapping the keyboard and causing a nonsensical string of letters to burst on to the screen in front of him. It was intolerable, this obsession. Mad, insupportable. Unlike anything he had ever known. It sapped all his energies, ate away at his concentration (dubious at the best of times). He had to see her again, he simply had to. Either to push the thing forward or to stop it in its tracks. He had to make something happen. He grabbed his address book and the phone, then dialled Ashley House.

‘Is that Pamela Harrison?’

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Stephen Smith, the, er —’

‘Ah, the biographer.’

She sounded distant and unwelcoming, not at all as he remembered. ‘I was wondering if I might call again to —’

‘We’ve shown you all that we have, Mr Smith, there’s nothing more.’

‘And I am so grateful,’ he ploughed on, heedless of the evidence that Pamela had little desire to prolong the conversation, ‘but I wondered if I could just drop by one more time to clear up a couple of points … maybe in a few weeks?’

‘A few weeks? I suppose …’

‘Maybe one weekend, if that’s not too inconvenient?’ At a weekend there was a small chance of Cassie being there. If she wasn’t he would wangle her address or phone number or NHS number or
something
through which he could make contact. Stephen had kicked himself a million times already for letting her go without establishing anything beyond that she lived somewhere in Pimlico. Directory Enquiries, offered this one fact on several occasions, had been consistently unhelpful, making him feel like an axe-murderer in pursuit of a potential victim.

‘A weekend … I’m not sure.’ Her voice was so thin and uncertain that Stephen feared he had pushed her capacity for co-operation too far.

‘A Tuesday, then,’ he blundered. ‘In, say, three weeks. March the nineteenth, in the afternoon.’

‘Yes, yes.’ She sounded truly impatient now, almost angry. ‘Very good, Mr Smith. We’ll see you then.’

Stephen put down the phone and punched the air with his fist. It was a tenuous thread of a hope, of course, a desperate strategy devised by a desperate man. And if ever he did get to know Cassie, it probably wouldn’t work; socially, they were worlds apart, and emotionally too, damaged as he knew he was by the gritty unhappiness of his youth, while she radiated the self-confidence of one who had been nurtured in all the right ways. What could he offer her that she didn’t have? Money, career, security, a solid, happy family, striking looks – she possessed everything already. And even without a ring on her fourth finger (her lovely slim, bare fingers) she almost certainly had a boyfriend. Such women always did. Stephen didn’t like thinking about the boyfriend, did his best to avoid it. But even given a boyfriend there was hope, he decided fiercely. Even if she told him to fuck off there was hope, because there always was, if you looked for it hard enough.

Pamela had taken Stephen’s call in John’s study. After putting the receiver down she remained standing by the desk for a few minutes, resting the fingers of one hand on the worn, smooth leather inlay of its top, edged on all sides by an intricate pattern of faded gold. She knew she had
been distant on the phone and hoped that the biographer hadn’t thought her rude. With all that had happened she was finding it hard to concentrate.

The room smelt of John – that indefinable smell of human that had nothing to do with laundry powder or aftershave – and of wood and leather. It was a man’s room, with heavy furniture, dark green furnishings and the resonant stillness of a library. Three of the four walls were taken up from carpet to ceiling with bookshelves, many of them leather-bound ancient editions that had belonged to his father and grandfather. An equally ancient set of library steps was positioned half-way along the furthest wall; John insisted on using them even though the feet had worn at different rates over the years causing them to wobble whenever they were subjected to the most modest weight. During the Christmas break Tina, mistaking it for a climbing frame, had been discovered very near the top, toothy with glee and triumph. Pamela, in charge while Serena had taken the other children shopping, had whisked her down in trembling arms, breathless with guilt at her own lack of vigilance. Later on she had confessed the episode to her daughter-in-law, profuse with apology, and been greeted with gales of laughter, followed by several other proud tales of Tina’s recent flirtations with disaster: falling down the stairs, climbing out of her cot, crawling through a hole in the fence to a neighbour’s garden. Remembering the incident now, Pamela caught her breath. Every moment of every life was a hair’s breadth away from disaster. She had known that once but, like most people when things were going well, had forgotten it.

‘Pam?’

‘Oh, John.’ She lifted her hand from the desk, without seeing the deep, semi-circular imprints where her nails had cut into the leather.