Relative Love (3 page)

‘It’s okay. You should have said sooner. We’re making a frightful din, aren’t we, my dumpling?’ Serena returned her attention to her daughter, widening her eyes and raising her index finger to her lips. ‘Ssh, bunny, or we’ll wake Roland, won’t we?’ The baby went very silent, transfixed by the suddenly solemn face of her mother.

‘Well, Father Christmas might wake him anyway,’ put in Chloë, in part wanting to test out a concept about which, thanks to various loose comments made by her big brother Theo and some of the elder cousins, she was having serious doubts, and in part wanting to get revenge on the least favourite of her aunts for ruining the fun. It was Christmas Eve, after all. And Roland was
always
ill. He couldn’t even stroke Samson because he said it gave him itchy eyes, though he was always hugging Boots – usually just when Chloë wanted to – which was ridiculous. At least, Theo had said it was ridiculous and although her big brother could be mean he was also frightfully clever. ‘When he comes down the chimney,’ she continued, her voice reedy with uncertainty, ‘Roland might wake then, mightn’t he? I did last year – at least, I did just after he’d gone. The reindeer had eaten the carrots and I heard his sleigh bells and everything.’ She paused,
feeling important as she always did at this point in her story, fresh conviction at the existence of Father Christmas welling inside. ‘The sleigh bells might wake Roland too, mightn’t they?’

‘Yes, they might,’ conceded Elizabeth, her expression softening although inside she felt helpless. All of the things that were supposed to be fun, like Christmas and birthdays, were precisely the things her own beloved boy seemed to find so hard. Over-excitement of any kind invariably distressed Roland. When she had taken him as a toddler to visit Father Christmas’s grotto in Guildford, he had howled in terror the moment they stepped inside; and when it dawned on him that the same bearded creature was due to tiptoe into his bedroom in the middle of the night he had been inconsolable. They had let him sleep with them that year, squashed hip to hip in the narrow spare bed at Colin’s parents’ place in Brentwood. After that the annual challenge of getting the stocking to the end of the bed became, not the jokey chore that her brothers’ families seemed to find it, but an ordeal involving huge stress all round, with Roland terrified he would wake up, and she and Colin arguing into the small hours over whether it was safe to go in and whose turn it was to make the attempt. Against such a background it had been a positive relief the year before to admit that it was in fact the duty of parents, rather than a team of reindeer driven by a fat man with a bushy beard, to deposit gifts on children’s beds. Yet this news – which Roland had seemed to want so badly – had only made him weep in complicated disappointment, triggering one of his headaches and two days off school.

‘Don’t worry.’ Serena had recognised the anxiety in her sister-in-law’s face, the jaw set firm and square like her father-in-law’s when he was hunched over the business section of the paper, and wanted to be kind. She had learnt long ago that one woman couldn’t tell another how to be a mother, especially not a woman like Elizabeth who, in spite of being intelligent, seemed to have an inbuilt mechanism for believing herself in the wrong. ‘He’ll be fine tomorrow, I’m sure. Ed was hacking like an old man last week and the twins both brought some dreadful bug home on the last day of term, but they all bounced back pretty quickly. They always do.’

‘Yes.’ Elizabeth wrung her hands, looking doubtful. She was fond of Serena and would have liked to talk to her some more. Like Charlie, to whom she was enviably well suited, her sister-in-law had a fabulous and refreshing ability to bat away life’s problems. The pair of them just did not seem to mind things in the way other people did. They lived surrounded by the inevitable clutter and chaos generated by four children in an Edwardian terraced house in Wimbledon. Even with a loft conversion they were very squashed, cupboards visibly bulging and bits of furniture wedged up against each other, like ill-fitting pieces of some vast three-dimensional jigsaw. Maisie and Clem, their fourteen-year-old twins, had adjoining rooms on the top floor, their brother, Ed, who was twelve, had a box of a room on the landing, while Tina’s cot was slotted into the spare bedroom, between piles of laundry and old art projects of Serena’s, of which there were many. Visiting them, which didn’t happen very often, these days, with her and Colin in Guildford, Elizabeth was always torn between admiration and incredulity at how they managed, not just to live happily but to find anything. Keeping track of her own modest family’s bits and pieces was hard enough, and they lived in a spacious mock-Tudor semi, with two spare bedrooms, an attic and a garage. ‘And he’d been so well, too, right up until this week. Typical.’ She tried out a grin, feeling better. She was on holiday, she reminded herself – no screechy violins to listen to for three whole weeks, no fidgeting choirs, no grubby grade-five theory papers with squashed, unreadable chords, their notes like misshapen beetles crawling up the stave.

In spite of the severe patches of misery she had experienced as a child, and the still somewhat problematic relationship she had with her mother, Elizabeth found herself drawn back to the family home more and more. The memories of her unsatisfactory youth were still vivid, but so
now was the recognition of her sheer good fortune in having such easy access to somewhere as large and beautiful as Ashley House. From the start she had loved bringing Roland there, not just for the glory of giving him so much space to run around in but also because playing regularly with his cousins provided some relief from the burden of being an only child. They were an alarmingly robust bunch, her brothers’ children – it tore at Elizabeth’s heart sometimes to see Roland’s efforts to keep up with them – but by and large they were kind.

‘Poor Roland, it’s too bad.’ Serena had dried Tina and was deftly fitting her into a sleepsuit, bending and steering her chubby limbs into the arms and legs. ‘Do you want to do the poppers?’ she asked Chloë, who had moved off her stool and was standing very close to her lap, breathing hard, her big blue eyes shining with hope.

‘Yes, please.’ Chloë set about her task with both hands, biting her lips in concentration, wet strands of her thick black hair still glued across her face. ‘And then can I carry her to bed?’

‘Of course.’ Serena, catching Elizabeth’s look of concern, smiled. ‘And then I think we’ve all earned a drink, don’t you? The men are downstairs opening bottles. Maisie and Theo are laying the table and Pamela is doing a thousand things in the kitchen and refusing help from everybody, as usual. She’s a miracle, isn’t she, your mother? Charlie always says it’s unnatural to like your mother-in-law so much but I can’t help it. If I’m half as capable and beautiful at seventy-three I shall be completely thrilled. Fat chance, though,’ she continued cheerfully, talking now over the top of Chloë’s head, ‘on the beauty side of things, anyway. Sixteen months on and I’ve still got this huge spare tyre. Look.’ She let Chloë take full charge of the baby, turned sideways and gripped what looked to Elizabeth, who’d had curves in all the wrong places long before she’d had Roland, like a modest roll of flesh. ‘And with this last pregnancy some more veins exploded on my legs, only small ones but they’re quite hideous. She seized the hem of her skirt and hoicked it up round her waist, revealing long socks and shapely white thighs. ‘There, see?’ She stabbed her index finger into her flesh. ‘And there. And there.’

Elizabeth could see only a couple of tiny pink spidery veins. She herself had a fat blue river of a blood vessel on the inside of her own thigh that she wouldn’t have pointed out to anyone. But Serena had a way of saying anything and making it sound okay. It was entirely her doing, for instance, that everybody knew Tina had been conceived at Ashley House after a particularly merry New Year’s Eve family gathering when – as Serena had cheerfully put it – she and Charlie had been too pissed to bother with precautions. Instead of minding (Elizabeth always shuddered to think how Colin would have reacted to her disclosing anything so personal), Charlie had laughed gustily, saying, and thank God because Tina was a complete darling and they wouldn’t be without her for the world. Tina herself was now dangling at a precarious angle in Chloë’s arms. Elizabeth knew it wasn’t her business to be worried, but it was hard nonetheless, like a reflex one couldn’t control. ‘She’s all right like that, is she?’ she blurted, clenching her hands in a bid to restrain herself from reaching for the baby.

‘Oh, heavens, yes.’ Serena dropped her skirt. ‘She gets much more manhandling than that. Chloë’s in complete control, aren’t you, sweetheart?’ Chloë nodded fiercely. ‘You lead the way, then. Tina’s cot is in the little room at the end next to the big green room where Uncle Charlie and I sleep. So we can hear her if she needs us in the night. I’ll see you downstairs in a minute,’ she added to Elizabeth, then trotted to catch up with her niece, who was staggering visibly under the weight of her load. ‘I’ll put her in, shall I?’ she said gently, as they approached the cot, ‘and you can wind up the musical box. It plays “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” for hours. Tina loves it.’

‘Does she?’ Chloë sighed dreamily. ‘I’m going to have
six
babies when I’m a mummy and not make any of them go to school.’

‘Really? That will be hard work.’

‘Theo
lives
at school now and it’s horrid. And I’ve got to one day as well, when I’m eleven.’

‘Eleven, but that’s ages away. Not something to worry about now. Especially not on Christmas Eve.’

‘Will Father Christmas come to Tina as well?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where’s her stocking, then?’ She eyed her aunt suspiciously.

‘I’ll put it out later, when Uncle Charlie and I go to bed. Now we must hurry away, before she notices we’re gone, while the music is still playing. Look, she’s put her thumb in her mouth – that’s a good sign.’ Serena ushered Chloë out of the room, turning the light off, but leaving the door ajar.

Downstairs the sweet smell of poaching salmon filled the kitchen. Pamela Harrison, her fine silvery tresses coiled into a neat French pleat, her apron fastened loosely round her slim waist, to protect her silk blouse and skirt from the splash of vegetable water and Hollandaise sauce, hummed to herself as she worked. She had listened to the King’s College nine lessons and carols and the tunes were still with her, swelling like joy inside her chest. For ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ she had settled herself in front of the telly, wanting to see the face behind the sound, pouring like an invisible thread of gold from the cherry mouth of the chorister. The boy’s pale face and tar-brush hair – so adorable against the starched frill of his ruff and red gown – had reminded her of Theo. Although Theo was, in fact, the least musical of her grandchildren and currently afflicted with a speaking voice that squeaked between octaves like notes in search of a tune. Poor Theo. Thirteen was such a difficult age for a boy. Pamela had sipped her tea, remembering vividly Peter and Charlie going through exactly the same adolescent ordeal. She had closed her eyes and must have nodded off for a few minutes, although when the door opened and Theo himself had sidled in, his face flexing in disappointment at the realisation that both the room – and, more importantly, the television – were engaged, she did her best to conceal it, getting briskly to her feet and patting her hair. ‘Do you want to watch something else?’

‘ ’Sokay, Gran,’ he had muttered, shoving his hands into his pockets. ‘I was just looking for the others.’ He looked listless, she noticed, clearly searching for something, although Pamela doubted that it was really his cousins. Charlie’s twin girls were already young women, wearing heels and bras and – in Maisie’s case – quite a lot of makeup whenever a pretext presented itself. While their younger brother Ed, at twelve only a year behind Theo, was still very much a boy, full of enthusiasm for simpler pleasures like football and pizza. Theo, with his spotty chin, stringy limbs and screechy voice, was stranded somewhere between, a tadpole on the edge of a pond. It didn’t help that he wasn’t a handsome child, with the Harrison square jaw and one of those over-earnest faces that looked as if it might grow into itself somewhere around the age of thirty-five.

‘I expect TV is rationed at boarding-school, isn’t it?’

‘Rather. Not too bad.’

‘Here.’ She handed him the remote. ‘I’ve got lots to do anyway.’

‘Would you like some help?’

Impressed, Pamela had laughed and told him not at the moment, but she’d ask if she thought of something. She was only truly happy when she was busy, especially in the kitchen. To her it was the heart of the house and she loved it, particularly when all the family were staying and needed providing for. It made her feel like the conductor of a huge orchestra for whom only she knew the score. The entire room glowed with warmth and light. On top of a shining blue Aga, set into the huge arched recess that had once housed its Victorian ancestors, several saucepans bubbled, releasing spirals of steam that spread like a thin mist beneath the strip-lights and timbers overhead. Bunches of dried herbs, strings of onions and garlic hung from hooks scattered between the oak dresser and wall units, their faint scent mingling pleasantly with the aromas of cooking and fresh flowers; a crystal vase of red and white carnations stood in the middle of the kitchen table (a thick oblong of weathered oak almost as old as the house itself), while more slender arrangements of roses, each in scarlet and cream, were slotted into two small stone alcoves on either side of the fireplace. Although the table formed the centrepiece of the room, such was the extravagance of the space available that between the walk-in larder and the back wall there was also room for a hefty mustard-coloured sofa and matching armchair, cast-offs from a previous generation of sitting-room furniture. This cosy corner, lit by a blue ceramic lamp on the windowsill, constituted one of Pamela’s favourite refuges. The light from the lamp was gentle, and stacked next to it were all her most-thumbed cookery and garden books, together with an ancient, sagging coil pot Charlie had made at primary school that housed all sorts of vital implements, like scissors, pens and a spare pair of glasses.