Relative Love (19 page)

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes … I … Not really. But, then, none of us is, are we? How are they all doing out there?’

He shrugged, picked up a book, then put it down without looking at it. ‘It’s quiet. The children are watching a film, Cassie is making tea, Colin is doing some marking, Elizabeth is with Serena and Charlie helping them choose hymns, I think.’

‘I wish Peter was here. I understand his decision not to cancel the holiday, but all the same I wish he was here, don’t you? He’s so …
solid
and, of course, it would be a comfort for Charlie to have his brother here.’

‘He’s got his sisters,’ John reminded her gently. ‘As for Serena …’ He faltered, as speechless now about his daughter-in-law’s dazed desolation as he was in her company. He had never known anything like it, at least not since … ‘Pam, I’ve been thinking … wondering if it would help to – to tell them about …’

‘Miranda?’ She said the name for him, her eyes glittering, her jaw clenching round the word as if it needed controlling.

He sighed. ‘Yes. Miranda.’ He looked at her properly for the first time, his eyes heavy with despair, not so much at the memory of their own distant loss (Miranda, as they had christened her, had been stillborn at six months, when Peter was a toddling two-year-old) but at the recognition that he never had and never could feel the loss as his wife did. He felt closer to Charlie and Serena’s pain: every room in the house was thick with it, a tangible presence, as impossible to ignore as a ringing bell, audible through silence and conversation alike. And Tina had been such a bouncy enchanting thing, already, at the grand age of one and a bit, with a vivid, endearing personality, a shining little light in all their lives. He moved towards Pamela, studying her face, seeing not the soft deep lines of old age, glistening faintly with powder, or the thin, lipsticked outline of her mouth, which had shrunk, as mouths were inclined to, over the years,
but the fresh beauty with which he had fallen in love fifty years before. ‘Not if you don’t want to, Pam, it was just a thought …’

‘And a good thought,’ she said firmly, folding her arms and crossing to the window to peer out through the arch of the cloisters at the garden. A storm was threatening: the sky was purple with it, the grass an iridescent green. Somewhere, in the background – her eyes were so poor now without her glasses – she could just make out the pink fuzzy blur of the quince blossom. ‘Though, of course, there’s a world of difference between a tiny … a half-developed six-month-old foetus …’ she struggled to get the words out, her tongue and teeth seeming, curiously, to get in the way ‘… and Tina … Dear, dear little Tina, she was
such
a little person. Wasn’t she, John, a dear little person?’

‘Yes, Pammy, she was.’ He hurried to the window and put his arms round her. She seemed to tolerate rather than welcome the embrace, keeping her own arms folded across her chest, hugging herself. But there was consolation in the physical contact. She didn’t let him in easily to her heart. She never had. And he was just the same. But it had never stopped them being happy, never blocked the oxygen of easy companionship on which they thrived.

‘I will say something … when the moment presents itself,’ she murmured. ‘You were right to suggest it.’

Outside, impenetrable grey clouds were squeezing the light from the day. A wind was getting up, making the windows hum in their frames and causing the trees, bare-limbed since November, to claw at the sky. The pergola, thinly protected in its skeletal winter gear of pruned laburnum and roses, was swaying visibly. Pamela almost remarked on it, then realised it didn’t matter; that nothing mattered as it once had. ‘I will say something,’ she repeated dully, ‘when the time is right … Timing is everything.’

Maisie knew she wasn’t really feeling anything yet, not properly. It was almost like being outside herself, looking in, like she was
seeing
the tragedy of losing her baby sister rather than experiencing it. When their grandmother had broken the news the afternoon before, with the three of them sitting round the kitchen table, her crinkled blue eyes all watery and her mouth twitching, Clem had cried at once while Ed had gone a sort of puce colour. Maisie, who had been expecting some sort of massive telling-off for abandoning her siblings on the walk to the village and then not getting back until an hour later, had at first been struck by a brief (and utterly despicable) thunderbolt of relief. This faded quickly at the magnitude of what they were being told although, throughout the subsequent turmoil of emotions, she felt a keen and new awareness of how weird life was, with its twists and turns, how just when you were all hyped up about one thing another quite different thing whacked you on the head from behind.

She had walked to the gates of Rosco’s country retreat alone, expecting little beyond a glimpse of bricks and mortar. She had been peering through the railings, one hand clasped on either side of her head, feeling sort of excited and let down all at the same time when a man, whom at first she took to be a gardener, appeared from out of the shrubbery to her left and asked if she was looking for anything in particular. He was wearing muddy wellingtons, ripped jeans and a huge shapeless sweater full of holes. His hair, scruffily cut and plainly in need of a wash, screened so much of his facial geography that it was a good minute before she realised she was being addressed by Rosco himself. ‘No, I’m just looking,’ she had replied, before this moment of enlightenment, wondering as she spoke what, indeed, she had been hoping to find beyond something to ease her conscience about Monica. ‘Is he at home?’

‘Yes, he is.’ The man shifted the curtain of hair from his eyes and shot her a grin, revealing the trademark diamond stud in his front tooth.

‘Oh, my God …’

‘Not a form of address I’m used to, but you can call me that if you like. Come in, if you want.’ He was already pulling a bunch of keys from his front pocket. Maisie watched spellbound as he slid one into the padlock and released one half of the gate. It creaked as he pushed it open. ‘Come and have a wander.’

‘Oh, my God …’ For a few moments she clung to the side of the gate that he hadn’t opened. The metal was rusty and chips of old black paint were sticking to her palms. She longed to accept the invitation. It felt wrong, but also exciting – the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. ‘Well, maybe just for a bit.’ She sidestepped through the gap in the gates, rubbing her hands on her skirt to get the bits of paint off, feeling at any moment as if her knees might buckle under her. ‘I suppose you get a lot of this – fans and stuff.’ The diamond in the tooth was amazing. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

‘Some. Not so much down here. I’ll give you a quick tour, if you like, round the grounds anyway.’ He looked at his watch. ‘By which time my breakfast will be getting cold.’ He gave her another grin, at the same time – or did she imagine it? – running the tip of his tongue round his lips.

‘Breakfast?’ Maisie had laughed uncertainly. ‘At this time?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m a night dude. Breakfast in the afternoons, lunch in the evenings, often don’t bother with dinner. Such a waste of time, eating, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, God, absolutely.’ Maisie, who had been hungry – who was always hungry – felt her appetite vanish. He pulled a squashed packet of cigarettes from his back pocket and offered her one, cupping his hands so closely round hers to light it that at one point she felt the tickly contact of his skin against hers. The cigarette was strong, almost choking her, which was embarrassing, but she sorted herself out eventually, at one point even managing to let the smoke stream out of her nostrils, a trick she and Monica had practised for hours. During the course of the tour she smoked a couple more, disclosed that she was on a visit from London to her grandparents, implied that she was studying for A levels rather than GCSEs and asked him where he got his inspiration for his music. ‘Nowhere and everywhere,’ he had replied. ‘And from people like you.’ They were back at the gates by this time, so Maisie was able to reach out and grab one for support. ‘Will you call again, do you think, Miss Maisie?’

She had blushed, unsure whether the teasing was kind or condescending. ‘Oh, yes … At least, I should think so.’

‘Good. There’s a little bell here, see?’ He walked to the wall and pulled back an armful of hedge. ‘Ring it twice very quickly and I’ll know it’s you. You’re very pretty, Maisie. Anyone ever told you that before?’

‘I … well, no, I guess not … not really.’

‘Boyfriends must have.’

Maisie’s brain had whirred through her list of meagre conquests: Peter Masham, whom she had snogged without much enjoyment at three parties; Phil Dormund, who had put his hand inside her bra and kneaded her breast with all the subtlety of a four-year-old attacking a lump of Plasticine; and Jonny Cottrall, who had kissed her rather tenderly a couple of times behind the school gym. ‘Sort of … I guess.’ She shrugged, glad to feel some composure seeping back into her, glad, too, that she had taken the precaution of wearing makeup, heels and a decent jacket.

Now sitting at the kitchen table with her siblings, images of this encounter had flashed across Maisie’s brain, making her feel at once consoled and guilty. To be able to think of anything other than the unimaginable horror that had befallen Tina was, she knew, a sin of criminal proportions. Ed, too, was looking stricken with guilt. She could see it imprinted on his face, as if someone had punched him on the nose. Maisie, filled with empathetic compassion at the sight of it and guessing its origin, found herself blurting out clumsy reassurance, telling him not to feel awful about how he’d behaved at the station, that he had just been in a bad mood and it didn’t mean anything, especially not to Tina who had loved everyone regardless and Ed especially. Her brother squirmed, then burst into terrible, coughing tears, prompting a hug from their grandmother, which had gone on for ages even though Ed looked like he didn’t want it.

With both her siblings crying Maisie, feeling bleak and exposed, had crept upstairs to be on her own. Lying on her bed with her face to the wall, a sense of outrage had crept over her because the best and worst events of her life so far had happened on the same day. It just wasn’t fair. She’d got out her phone to text Monica, then hadn’t known what to say. Later on in the evening her uncle Colin and aunt Elizabeth arrived. They talked in quiet voices with her grandparents and the rest of them were despatched to the TV room with mugs of hot chocolate and a plate of biscuits. They were allowed to stay up really late, even Roland, who could barely keep his eyes open and who had spent all afternoon gawping at the three of them as if they were exhibits in a zoo.

The worst bit of all had been the arrival of their parents that morning. Hearing the crunch of car wheels on the gravel the three of them had raced outside, each half hoping, as Maisie realised later, that these two loved authorities in their lives would have some sort of miracle solution as to what on earth they were all supposed to do. A tiny desperate part of her had even hoped to see Tina, riding high on their father’s shoulders as she had loved to do, gurgling and unrepentant at the terrible scare she had given them all. But there was no Tina and no solution, miraculous or otherwise. Only her mother and father, dishevelled and shell-shocked, their eyes puffy and red, their faces engrained with deep, frightening lines. They had all hugged and wept, her dad crying most of all, so much so that Maisie had felt a sort of rage at his misery, at the sheer uselessness of it. Her mother cried silently, stroking their heads and nodding as if to keep herself in the scene when in fact she was miles away, in some lonely, desolate place where she might never be reached again. Clem and Ed seemed to want to stay near them, but Maisie couldn’t bear it. She had retreated upstairs, with this hateful feeling that she was watching herself – watching all of them – in an unfolding drama of other people’s lives.

After a few minutes she noticed the diary she had given Clem lying, in a rare moment of unlocked vulnerability, next to the pillow on her bed. Beyond talking when they had finally trooped upstairs the night before, her sister had scribbled furiously in it before she fell asleep. Without any compunction, feeling that the drama of the situation warranted it – warranted anything – Maisie reached for the diary, which fell open at the words:
‘Tina has died. I can’t believe it. Tina is dead. A motorbike ran into her and drove off. This is a nightmare. I know I must be strong, but I can’t. I hate the world more than I have ever hated it before.’
Opposite, a page and a universe away, was an entry from the day before:
‘I think I love Jonny Cottrall. I don’t want to, but I just do. But, then, that’s what love is, isn’t it, something that just happens whether you want it to or not, like a DISEASE?’
At this point Maisie did cry, explosively, with her face buried in Clem’s pillow, feeling as if she was weeping for the sorrows of the entire world.

MARCH

Winter, having bided its time with four months of drizzle and halfhearted frosts, pounced with icy ferocity during the first two weeks of March. Spring flowers, lulled into a false sense of security by the mildness of the preceding weeks, wilted in the frozen ground, clamming up their half-open buds in a vain bid to preserve their future. Temperatures plunged, then rose slightly, releasing truckloads of snow; large crusty crystals that did not melt upon contact with the ground, but held their shape even as a thousand others landed on top of them, building up layer upon layer until, across the country, roads were indistinguishable from fields and entire villages woke to find themselves cut off from the outside world. News reporters filed stories from touring helicopters, describing road collisions and marooned hypothermic pensioners, their voices raised against the roar of wind and machine, their faces clenched with the grim concern of those experiencing a battle at first hand. Behind and below them the white undulations of the landscape shimmered, alien and indifferent.

At Ashley House the lake in the wood froze, and the pergola sagged and swayed under its heavy white coat like a staggering beast. On the surrounding lawns and fields the snow lay as thick as cake, inching inwards during the course of each day, then hardening again at night until the grounds looked as if they had been laid with a patchwork of huge linen tablecloths, each with a pea-green trim where the snow had melted sufficiently to reveal strips of grass. Up by the house a stretch of unlagged piping, which fed the outside tap by the garage, burst and spilled gallons of water that froze overnight, converting a large portion of the drive into a treacherous ice rink. Sid, called out to apply his plumbing skills, slipped and sprained his wrist, which Pamela soothed with some of her witchy homeopathic creams, then bandaged expertly with crisp white gauze and a small gold safety-pin. John, proud yet envious of her tenderness, hovered in the background, thumbing through the
Yellow Pages
in search of alternative assistance. Twenty minutes later, the muffled stillness outside was broken by the sound of the plumber he had summoned negotiating the snow-rutted lane in his van. John, going outside to watch the last few yards of its approach, felt like a castaway witnessing the arrival of a ship.