Relative Love (22 page)

While he was standing in the queue at the deli he had phoned Cassie to say that the week was looking tricky in terms of meeting up. As always, just the sound of her voice excited him, the girlish breathiness, the colour of her moods as readable in her tones as an open book. She had been full of trepidation about her approaching night out with her sister-in-law, so unsure, so eager for his advice and reassurance that, as he slipped his phone back into his pocket, Dan found himself resolving to sort things out with Sally that evening. There was no point in putting it off any longer. What he and Cassie felt for each other was simply too strong. Just that one short phone-call had summed it all up – her loving gentleness, her need of him, and his own trembling need of her, his desire to protect, cherish her for ever. Sally was never gentle or unsure about anything and certainly didn’t seek his advice. Neither could the sound of her voice give him an erection. On the contrary, he found that he only really felt in the mood to make love to his wife when they folded their books away and slipped silently beneath the duvet in the dark, without the tetchy grind of conversation. And even then he often laboured to shut out images of Cassie (usually pornographic ones, flashing like delirium across his mind), which, rather than fuelling his libido, had the opposite effect. That he loved Cassie Harrison, Dan was in no doubt. What he remained less sure of was the timing of this new-found passion, whether he would have fallen for Cassie at any point along the time-line of his existence, or whether it related to more dubious, less edifying things like being forty, overworked and sharing a home with three
exhausting small people and an adult who had long since seen through his charms to the less adorable and myriad human deficiencies that lay beneath. If he left Sally for Cassie would they, too, eventually reach a similar stalemate stage of disappointment and dissatisfaction? Was that what all marriages came to in the end? Or had he, at the unformed age of twenty-three, simply made the wrong choice of mate? In which case prolonging the agony for them both was pointless, Dan decided. He punched in the numbers of his lawyer friend and left a message for him to call back as soon as he could.

‘Got anything nice planned for the evening, Dr Lambert?’

‘Oh, no, not really, Meryl, unless you count bathtime with my three delinquents.’ He made a funny face and the receptionist laughed. ‘Then a few paragraphs of Harry Potter if I’m lucky.’

‘Ah, bless.’ Meryl, whose own children had reached the age where they locked the bathroom against intrusions and preferred computer manuals to fiction, sighed wistfully. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Mr Presbitt collected that prescription, by the way, and says now his wife’s got the same thing. He made an appointment for tomorrow. Cheerio.’

Dan drove home slowly, rehearsing what he would say to Sally, for once not minding the turgidity of the rush-hour traffic.
Sal, we’re getting nowhere. I know you feel as I do in your heart, so let’s just sort out the mess and go our separate ways. It will be better for both of us in the long run
… The notion of telling her about Cassie was not, and never had been, on the agenda. Cassie had been superbly co-operative about the secrecy of the affair, seeing, as he did, that it would only exacerbate the inevitable bitterness of separation.
We’ve grown apart. It’s time to recognise that properly and move on
. And, God, how he longed to do that. Move on. Start something new and good. A clean sheet. No baggage, no preconceptions and simmering resentments. No more having to be nice to his whining in-laws, no more of Sally’s withering looks, her sulky silences, her recriminations about the hours he worked and the fact that they were stuck in London when the quality of family life would be so much better somewhere in the country. The grooves of their arguments, well furrowed during the course of the years, were exhausting and sickeningly predictable. Money would be difficult, of course. The children were currently at an excellent state primary but the plan had always been to move them into the private system later. His meagre investments had taken quite a knock in a recent run of bad luck and there was still a hefty mortgage on the house. In spite of Cassie’s sweet reassurances about her income and inheritance prospects (which sounded pretty decent: he had seen pictures of Ashley House and heard enough about the Harrison clan to know she wasn’t exaggerating), Dan felt very afraid whenever he thought about what he would have to pay out each month in a divorce settlement.

Having turned into his street, he slowed to a crawl in the search for somewhere to park. Like most of their neighbours they owned two cars and suffered the consequent maddening inconvenience of not being able to fit them all into the space available. The Espace, as usual, was right outside the front door, its ‘Baby On Board’ sticker taking up half of the back windscreen. Beyond it, as far as the eye could see, the street was solid with vehicles. After several minutes of cruising, Dan manoeuvred into a slot between a double yellow line and a skip in an adjoining street. Don’t get cross, he told himself, dodging round the now seriously melting lumps of snow as he walked the hundred yards back to his own house. Be calm. Be reasonable. Firm but kind.
Get it over with
.

‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Polly took my train but I shared it with her and Mummy gave me an apple if I cleaned my teeth.’

‘Did she now? And what are you doing still up?’ Dan reached down and disengaged George, his four-year-old, who had attached himself with vice-like affection to his right leg, settling him on his hip instead. ‘It’s way past your bedtime, isn’t it?’

‘He had toothache – back molars. Remember they were bad for Polly too? I’ve just given him something.’ Sally deposited the pile of laundry she had been carrying on the hall table and walked with outstretched arms towards her husband and son. ‘Come on, you. Back to bed.’ She kissed Dan’s cheek lightly and eased George on to her own hip. At the bottom of the stairs she turned. ‘Dan?’

‘Yes?’ There was an edge to her voice, a hint of subdued urgency.

‘I’ve booked a babysitter. I thought we could eat out. We … I … There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

‘Right. Okay.’ Dan’s stomach convulsed, a curious mixture of excitement and presentiment. ‘Me too … I mean, I want to talk too.’

‘Polly’s in the bath. Could you deal with her? Carol’s due any minute.’

She set off up the stairs and he followed, watching the familiar curves of her bottom, bulging slightly in her too-tight jeans, and feeling treacherous at the sight of the sleepy face of his son peering down at him over her shoulder.

Helen had rushed home to change between work and going out to the cinema and found Rika, the au pair, in heated debate on the kitchen telephone, surrounded by the debris of half-eaten pizza and what looked like several earlier meals as well. From the sounds coming through the open door to the drawing room it was clear that Chloë, instead of being overseen through the trials of music practice and homework, was watching one of the early-evening soaps on television. On seeing her employer, Rika turned her back to concentrate more fully on her conversation. She was speaking in her native tongue, Helen noted grimly, which almost certainly meant it would be an expensive call.

‘Chloë, darling, have you done your homework?’ Helen had to raise her voice against both the guttural dialect going on behind her and the volume of the television, which was considerable.

‘No, but I’m going to just after this.’

‘Right. After this programme, then.’ Helen inhaled and exhaled slowly, summoning the wherewithal for a show of toleration she did not feel. She wished she had gone straight to the cinema. She wished that Peter was at home to help her tackle Chloë, not to mention the increasingly insulting behaviour of their employee, but he had taken her night out as an excuse to have one of his own with an old friend from law school. Above all, she wished that her darling, rangy, pimply-faced son was not back in the exile of boarding-school, becoming a stranger again after the steady re-establishment of comfortable intimacy during their half-term skiing holiday. After much debate they had stayed on in Switzerland, flying home just a day early to be at Tina’s funeral.

Astonishingly, almost wickedly, they had managed to have one of the best family holidays Helen could remember. Her period had dried up as quickly as it had appeared. The sun had shone solidly for the entire week and the slopes were kept fresh and powdery by a couple of timely overnight snowfalls. They had all had lessons during the mornings, then skied as a family in the afternoons, with even little Chloë keeping up marvellously well. In the evenings they had swum, eaten huge meals and collapsed into exhausted marathon sleeps in their respective rooms. It was as if there was some tacit understanding that they were all on borrowed time, that being abroad
and therefore removed from the immediate body-blow of the tragedy to have hit the family, they had every right to make the most of it, to charge their batteries for the ordeal awaiting them at home.

And it had been an ordeal, from the unspeakable poignancy of the funeral to all the abrasive realities of everyday life that followed. Watching as her niece’s tiny coffin was lowered into the deep soil, Serena and Charlie convulsed by grief, Helen had vowed never to be moody, cross or ungrateful about anything unimportant ever again. They had stepped back into their lives subdued and humbled. Yet all too soon the old pressures, work, Chloë’s wilfulness, Peter’s long hours, the volatility of her own moods – the warp and woof of reality – had reasserted themselves with depressing definition. Helen still thought of Tina daily (great swoops of sadness and compassion would assault her at the most unexpected moments: during meetings, sorting laundry, shaving her legs), but all the early ennobling effects of the tragedy had worn off as quickly as the honey-glow of her sun-tan.

She returned to the kitchen and began, amid much clashing of crockery, to clear the table, shooting pointed looks at Rika who, unabashed, continued to talk. The bin was too full to cope even with the hardened crusts of discarded pizza. Helen seized the bag, tied it with a clumsy knot and slung it over her shoulder, Father Christmas style, then marched – her anger ringing in the clack of her heels on the quarry-tiled floor – past her employee and out of the back door. Just as she arrived at the wheelie-bin, the bag split, spilling a messy cocktail of eggshells, yoghurt pots, coffee granules and a chicken carcass on to the pavement. ‘Fuck, fuck and double fuck.’

‘Always bloody happens, doesn’t it? Last-straw department. Good for local foxes, though – they’ll be round here like a shot, especially for that chicken.’

Helen, squatting awkwardly over the mess, trying to keep the tips of her smart shoes from getting smeared, looked up to see a woman with a pouchy face and a long ponytail grinning over her. ‘Quite,’ she replied tersely, picking out the yoghurt pots and flinging them into the bin.

‘Hang on, don’t move, I’ve got just the thing.’ The woman, who was wearing a tartan tent of a dress and wellington boots, darted across the road and reappeared a moment later with a large spade. ‘Used it to clear the drive of snow. Stand back a minute.’ And before Helen could protest she was scooping the blade of the implement under the mess and depositing it in the bin. ‘There, that’s better, isn’t it?’

‘Thank you so much.’

‘I’m Kay, by the way. Kay Sagan, like the French writer – no relation to my husband, or ex-husband, rather – although he is French. I live opposite and down a bit.’ She gestured at the small row of 1940s terraced houses across the road, the least aesthetically pleasing section of the street, which had sprung into being thanks to a stray bomb during the Second World War. ‘It’s Mrs Harrison, isn’t it? I took a parcel for you once, but you probably don’t remember.’

‘Oh, yes,’ murmured Helen, embarrassed, not remembering. Working the hours she did, she barely knew any of their neighbours, except by sight, and had never been enthused by the notion of improving the situation. Friendly neighbours, in Helen’s eyes, introduced the unwelcome possibility of being sucked into tedious dinners, residents associations and campaigns for sleeping policemen. ‘Thanks anyway.’ She turned to go inside.

‘They’ve changed the collection day, by the way.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The council. The bin men are coming on a Tuesday now. And paper recycling has moved to Saturdays.’

‘Right. Thanks.’ Helen rubbed her hands, which were greasy with chicken and yoghurt.

‘There’s a new postman too, a dead ringer for George Clooney.
Gorgeous
.’

‘Really. Well, nice to meet you … Kay … but I’ve got to go – I’m going out and I’m late as it is.’

‘What are you doing, then? Anything nice?’

Desperate to be released from the conversation and wanting in some indefinable way to put the woman down, Helen said, ‘Actually, not that nice, no. My baby niece was killed recently in a road accident and I am taking my sister-in-law out in a no doubt futile bid to try to cheer her up. What is more,’ she continued, the release of her thoughts gathering a momentum that she was suddenly powerless to control, ‘I’m having to leave my daughter with a girl who should be sacked for incompetence, but whom I can’t afford to get rid of because my husband works even longer hours than I do and I simply haven’t got time to go trawling round agencies for a replacement.’ Helen glowered, expecting to see signs of dismay and retreat. During one of her recent aggressive diatribes at work her secretary – much to her horror – had burst into tears. But Kay took a step forward and touched Helen’s arm. She was older than the high girlish ponytail had first led Helen to believe – early fifties at least. Her hair was thick and lustrous but grey. Her face, seen close to, was full and soft but distinctly weathered. Her eyes, painted on both upper and lower lids with sharp black lines that met in cat-like points at the sides, looked both quizzical and kind. ‘You poor love, what a bugger.’

‘Oh, it will be all right,’ Helen stammered, appalled to find a lump in her throat.

‘It’s so bloody hard, isn’t it, doing the unpleasant stuff? Like sacking that girl you employ, even though she’s crap. I stayed married for years for similar reasons, to a complete bastard. But I couldn’t bring myself to confront him because I couldn’t face the nastiness. And then, when I finally did, it was so fucking simple. I say,’ she grinned suddenly, ‘why don’t you give this girl her marching orders right this minute and I’ll babysit for you? I mean it. I’ve got nothing on. I’d be more than happy to help. I’ve had three kids of my own – all grown-up now, of course – so I know what’s what. You don’t forget how to look after children. Like swimming and riding bikes – once it’s there it’s there for life.’