Relative Love (32 page)

Yours sincerely
,

Alicia Morrell

PS Spring cleaning this morning I did find the enclosed, which I thought might possibly be of interest to you. The photo I would like back, but the letters you might as well return to my brother so he can put them with all the other family archives at Ashley House. Our mother was a keen letter-writer – for years she wrote to all of us at least once a week – though I’m afraid the ink has faded rather with time
.

Stephen pushed aside the debris of his late Saturday-morning breakfast and spread the letters across the table. They gave off a musty, faintly lavender smell and were all addressed in a thin spidery hand, so faded that it looked like pencil instead of ink. ‘My dearest Eric, It is much colder today – the first real touch of winter in the air. The Virginia creeper shed all its leaves overnight – the barn looks quite naked without them … the wall for the kitchen garden continues apace … I trust you remain in good health … your devoted mother, Nancy.’ Stephen skim-read the first and moved on to the second, sighing heavily with a lack of enthusiasm for what Eric’s mother might have to say about her garden or anything else. Yet he did need a diversion, from both the dreaded moment of switching on his laptop and the increasingly uncontrollable urge to make one of his pilgrimages to Pimlico, where a pretext for ringing Cassie’s bell continued to elude him. Last time he had left a red rose on the doorstep but, like the frost-writing on her windscreen, such gestures were beginning to feel inadequate. It was miserable and frustrating not to know if she had even noticed them (the rose might have been blown away in the wind, the sun might have melted the frost before she got to the car), not to know if they had
affected
her in any way at all. No, something much more direct was called for and soon. She liked him, Stephen reminded himself, thinking back wistfully to their game of Scrabble months and a lifetime before. All he needed was a bit of courage to take things to the next stage, to become a hero in action rather than one who sat dreaming at home.

Cassie spent Saturday morning trying to find quiet corners in the house and clutching her phone. But the call didn’t come until Sunday, when the children were hunting for chocolate rabbits in the garden and she was in the bath. It was on its fifth ring before she unearthed it – the phone slipping in her wet hands – from her handbag, parked in case of just such an eventuality under the towel rail.

‘My darling, do you forgive me?’

‘No, he doesn’t, and neither do I.’ The number that had flashed on to the screen was Dan’s, but the voice was Sally’s. ‘You are never to call or try to see him again. Never.’

‘Is Dan there? Is he …?’ Cassie made out the low murmur of Dan’s voice in the background, and hesitated. ‘Is he there?’

‘He doesn’t want to speak to you. Not now. Not ever.’

‘Make him tell me himself,’ she whispered. There was a pause and then Dan’s voice was on the line. ‘It’s over,’ he said, sounding like Dan but not like Dan because there was no warmth in his tone, no discernible emotion of any kind.

‘There.’ It was Sally again, spitting the word. ‘Now leave us alone.’ There was a click and then silence.

Gleeful shouts were coming from the garden. Dimly, through the misty window, Cassie could make out figures racing across the lawn. She pulled one towel round her and then another, the bathwater chilly on her skin. With feeble, shivering fingers she redialled, but there was no reply. And when she tried the main line all she got was Sally, explaining cheerfully that Dan, Sally, Harriet, Polly and George couldn’t come to the phone but would reply promptly to any messages. The phone clattered to the floor. Cassie bent down to pick it up but found herself sinking to her knees instead. She crouched on the floor, pulling the towels over her head like a tent, muffling the steam from the bathroom and the cries of the children outside.

MAY

John stared longingly out of the study window. The clematis, winding its way round the pillars of the cloisters, was in full bloom, a riot of green and dusky violet. Behind it, the wooden bones of the pergola were dressed in equally colourful garb, the white roses and yellow laburnum hanging like the thickly clustered grapes of a ripe vine. He had spent the morning outside, working his way round the odd jobs that needed doing with more focus than usual because of Peter’s party, now just two weeks away. Although in all likelihood the guests would see little beyond the canvas awnings of the marquee, Pamela was determined that not just the garden but the entire estate should be in prime condition. In the space of three hours John had nailed the loose slats of several perimeter fences, dug out the clogged part of the ditch near the garage and replaced the loose, dented handle of the garden-shed door. He had also done a tour round the barn conversion, which – since Alicia had declined her invitation – would serve as a guest-house for a couple of Helen and Peter’s more honoured friends. All there was in perfect working order, apart from a lopsided trellis, heavy with pink floribunda roses, which he adjusted with his last nail, and the hinge on the main door, which needed oiling. He had then taken a circuitous route back to the house, through the field that was to serve as a car park. Thanks to a recent dry spell, the ground underfoot felt hard and relatively smooth, although the grass was already growing furiously. Knowing that the paperwork on his desk awaited him, John had taken rather longer over the inspection than was necessary, watching Boots lumber ineffectually after a baby rabbit and enjoying the view of the garden – the frothing blue wall of ceanothus, the rainbow reds and purples of the rhododendrons – before trudging in through the back door to his study.

It was hard to concentrate when he was yearning to be outside in the kaleidoscope jungle of early summer, and these days his mind couldn’t cope with figures in quite the way it once had. Everything took longer to resolve, especially bad things, like the estimates for the roof. The cheapest quote was twenty-seven thousand pounds, but the firm wasn’t free until the autumn. The other two were over thirty thousand – thirty thousand! – and could start more or less straight away. Except that was no good either because of the party. The last thing anybody wanted was skips blocking the drive and ugly scaffolding poles criss-crossing the walls, boxing in the beauty of the house like a badly wrapped parcel. Each bout of rain seemed to find new weak spots (Betty had discovered a large, muddy stain just that morning in Cassie’s room, lurking in the corner behind the rolltop desk), but to the naked eye the slopes and plateaus of grey slate tiles still looked as sleek and smooth as a brushed hat.

With a sigh, John put the estimates to one side and turned his attention instead to the letter from his accountant, which had been in his keeping since before Easter and which related to his recent
financial gifts to the children. In announcing the gifts at the Good Friday dinner John had been deliberately succinct and upbeat. With the Tina business still so raw, he had felt strongly that some good news was called for, a show of strength. And money, for all its limitations, could provide that. All the children had seemed genuinely – gratifyingly – touched, seeking him out during the course of the weekend to deliver extra heartfelt thanks. So it had been worth it, just for that. In truth, however, the situation was both more complicated and more daunting than John had indicated. Handing over so much cash might indeed reduce his tax liability, but only if he stayed alive for some years to come. John didn’t regret the gifts, not for one moment, but was uncomfortably aware, alone in his study with only the ache in his back and the tick of his desk clock for company, that he was gambling with his own mortality. This, in essence, was what the accountant’s letter was about. If he lived for seven years he would pay no tax at all. But if he died within that time a complicated sliding scale of tax payments would come into effect: one hundred per cent if he passed away within three years, eighty per cent if it happened within four, sixty per cent within five, forty per cent within six … John ran his finger down the paragraphs while his brain, maddeningly, kept losing the thread. Eighty per cent of what? The eighty thousand he had gifted? The forty per cent inheritance tax? What was eighty per cent of forty per cent anyway?

‘Cup of tea?’

John grunted, starting slightly at the sight of his wife, hovering in the doorway with a mug and a plate of shortbread. She was wearing a lilac two-piece and a shade of lipstick that made him think of the floribunda roses outside.

‘How’s it going?’ Pamela approached his desk warily, knowing from his demeanour – the set of his jaw and the furrows across his brow – that he was wrestling with the habitually thorny business of money. In spite of their wealth, paying bills always made him anxious and short-tempered. ‘The roof isn’t going to be cheap, is it?’ she ventured, putting the mug on a coaster and balancing a piece of shortbread against it. ‘But, then, it’s got to be done … no point in patching bits here and there. Sid says that once the slate starts to go …’

‘Yes, yes, I know. Thank you.’ He nodded at the tea. ‘The marquee people, they’re invoicing Peter directly, aren’t they?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, eager to lighten the gloom on his face. ‘And the caterers and flower people – I’ve been liaising with Helen, it’s all taken care of.’

Pamela backed out of the room, feeling like a child leaving a headmaster’s study, which wasn’t nice, but grateful as always that shuffling family finances did not fall into her domain. Modern relationships, she knew, were all about both parties having a hand in absolutely everything – money, childcare, DIY – but it had always been perfectly clear to her that having separate, defined roles to follow lay at the heart of her and John’s marital harmony. He had always earned them a handsome living and fixed practical things (lightbulbs, shelves, fuses), while she had seen to more creative, nebulous matters like hurt feelings, children and preparing meals. Old-fashioned and sexist it might be, but it worked, Pamela mused, airbrushing John’s surliness from her mind and retreating to the kitchen. Her elderflowers, crammed into an ancient stainless steel vat of a saucepan, were steaming gently, sending misty clouds into the kitchen rafters where they curled like smoke round the strings of dried flowers and garlic bulbs. Pamela lifted the pan off the heat to cool and pressed the flowers down with a wooden spoon, thinking as she did so of Cassie, who was a particular fan of her elderflower cordial, and with whom she had been trying and failing to make contact all week. A sudden work problem had called her away over the Easter weekend and Helen had complained recently that she hadn’t yet sent a formal reply to
their invitation to the party. Which was technically unnecessary – of course all the family would be there – but an oversight on Cassie’s part none the less. It was only right to reply. Such things mattered, especially to Peter and Helen, who were great believers in doing things properly.

Cassie lay on her back, pressing the pillow against her face till her lungs burned and bright lights zigzagged behind her eyelids. She could feel her heart thumping, not so much broken as obstinately alive. It was nearly lunchtime but she was still in bed. Sleep evaded her at night now, which she used as an excuse not to get up, slamming the shriek of her alarm into silence and turning to face the wall. Her answering-machine was crammed with unreturned calls, her flat, once a cosy nest of welcome for her lover, was strewn with the debris of abandoned meals and unwashed clothes. That she had once sprung out of bed each morning, willing to race round shops and houses with fraying squares of fabric and a diary of appointments, seemed nothing short of miraculous; part of another life, belonging to a separate personality. Losing Dan felt like bereavement. Without him, her anchor, her hope, her happiness, Cassie could not think who she was or why life was worth living. In the weeks since Easter her existence had shrivelled to a monotone of suffering. And lonely suffering at that. For having confided in no one during the course of the affair, there was no one to whom she could now turn.

While she had been seeing Dan, Cassie had recognised but never questioned her utter dependence on him. She had been so sure of his love, and his promises, that there had been no need. The secrecy of the relationship had only been hard because of the exuberance she felt inside, the desire at times to burst with the joy of it. Yet now it sealed her isolation. In this respect – because she had lost something she could never share – it was actually worse than bereavement. At least with Tina (and Cassie thought of Tina a lot – almost as much as she thought of Dan) Charlie and Serena had each other and the children; they had the sympathy – the attempts at empathy – of family and friends. So that when Serena, during the screening of Theo’s uncut film on Easter Sunday, had let out a howl at the sight of ten compelling, terrible, forgotten seconds of Tina waddling across the TV screen, clutching a doughnut, her face slathered in jam, all hands had rushed to her aid with cups of tea and shushes and tenderness. Theo, crimson with unhappy embarrassment, had needed almost as much reassuring as his aunt, while she, Cassie, had remained in the front row of Clem and Theo’s makeshift cinema, the to-do going on around her, frozen in the silent world of her own misery. She had left soon afterwards, feigning an impromptu summons from the tyrannical Mrs Shorrold, prompting clucks of approval at her commitment to her career, which in turn caused her to feel so strangled by deceit that it was all she could do to steer a steady path down the drive. Once out of sight of her family, gathered and waving in front of the house like a troupe of actors on a stage, the children horsing around, the couples with their arms round each other, she had pulled on to the verge and wept until the windows misted and the steering-wheel was damp with snot and tears.

At one o’clock, summoning what felt like a superhuman effort of will, Cassie heaved herself out of bed and made some toast with a stale tail-end piece of bread, and black tea, because the milk was sour. Then she did what she had done at least thirty times a day for four weeks, which was to call Dan’s mobile number, even though his consistent failure to reply almost certainly meant that he had got a new phone. She hadn’t dared to call his home again and had only once tried the surgery where the receptionist had said he was busy and offered to take a message. ‘No message,’ Cassie had gasped, dropping the receiver, utterly humiliated by her longing and desperation.