Relative Love (4 page)

It had taken a while to get the kitchen thus, exactly as she wanted it. Stripped of its accoutrements, it was a vast, potentially austere space, with stone walls, quarried floor tiles and big plain windows overlooking the measliest of the lawns and the scrawny bit of privet hedge that ran into the upper wall of the vegetable garden. As an area originally designed for the use of servants it had received little cosseting before her arrival. John’s mother, Nancy, a delicate, willowy woman with soulful eyes, had performed marvellously at the end of dinner-party tables but could barely lift a teaspoon to serve herself. She had entered the kitchen only to discuss menus and shopping lists and had not thought to update it, beyond installing taps to replace the old water pump and an ugly fat beige electric cooker to replace the old stove. During Eric’s brief (servantless) reign as master of the house the kitchen had suffered yet more neglect. Pamela retained a particularly vivid image of her brother-in-law standing in front of the beige cooker in a tatty tartan dressing-gown, feet bare, cigarette in one hand and frying-pan in the other, blithely spattering fat that he had no intention of wiping away. When she and John had moved in, they had been too strapped for cash to see too much beyond fresh coats of paint and treatments for woodworm and rising damp. It was several years into John’s tenure as a Lloyds Member before the Aga saw off the beige cooker and a friend of Sid’s built all the handsome oak cupboards to replace the greasy black shelves.

Pamela glided between the sink, the oven and the table, adding to the array of bowls and plates of food. Centre stage was the Christmas cake, which she had iced and decorated that morning with the little figurines she used every year: three fir trees, two reindeer, a squat Father Christmas, a church and two golden angels, who were disproportionately large for the scene but who always looked charming anyway, with the dusting of snow on their tiny songbooks and the icing swirling in drifts round the bottom of their gowns. In a white pudding basin next to it the Christmas pudding glistened. Wrapped in muslin since October, it smelt so strongly and deliciously of brandy and fruit that on peeling off the cover Pamela had felt the saliva burst inside her mouth. The children, she knew, preferred mince pies and only ate the pudding for the
money, thrilled, as only children could be, at the notion of stumbling upon buried treasure, even the little five-pence pieces, which everyone – apart from dear little Tina – knew had been eased inside by Granny with a spoon.

But no treasure on John’s plate this year, Pamela reminded herself, thinking of her husband’s poorly teeth. She turned aside from her cooking and wrote ‘
DENTIST
’ across the opening page of her new diary. He would put off doing anything about it himself. And she had seen how he was struggling with his food, steering each mouthful to one side until his cheek bulged and taking twice as long as usual to clear his plate. She hadn’t said anything, of course. The timing was all wrong, with Christmas just a day away. He would have been irritated at having his discomfort observed. But in the peaceful aftermath of January, with Christmas and New Year safely behind them and the house back to themselves, she knew it would be easy to find exactly the blend of compassion and sternness with which to broach the subject. In life timing was everything, Pamela mused, sliding a knife into the belly of the fish and dropping a fresh sprig of mint into the now boiling potatoes. From cooking to marriage, expertise lay in the ability to seize the right moment to do the right thing. She smiled to herself, pleased at the thought, which had occurred to her before but never so lucidly, and which, like many good thoughts, she decided to keep to herself. She retreated to the sofa and picked up her diary again, which was large with embossed leather corners and illustrated with flowing-haired pre-Raphaelite women to mark the beginning of each month. She opened it at random and smoothed her palms across the crisp white pages, infused for a moment with a sense of all the possibilities ahead, as if the skeleton of the year lay under her fingertips. It promised to be a good twelve months. Her children and their families would, as usual, make several visits during half-terms and holidays, Peter was talking of a summer party to celebrate his fiftieth, and her old friend Dorothy was planning a trip from Boston. And then there was the young man who wanted to write about Eric. A book about war heroes, the letter had said. Unsung war heroes. He had wanted to come before Christmas but she had put him off. Timing, Pamela thought again, closing the book as her head did one of its whirls, depositing her suddenly and for no particular reason at the notion of sex, which she had once enjoyed but which she now regarded as one might a dear deceased friend, recalled with fondness rather than loss.

‘Can I do anything?’

She looked up to see her eldest daughter-in-law framed in the doorway, her dark hair cropped briskly round her fierce cheekbones and earnest brown eyes. ‘Helen. How kind.’ Pamela slipped the diary back into its place on the shelf. ‘I don’t think so, except to call everybody to the dining room. Maisie and Clem did the table – oh, and I promised Ed he could light the candles. He asked specially.’ Moments later the kitchen was filled with people: Charlie looking for Sellotape, Peter tugging corks out of bottles, Cassie with wet hair and a towel round her shoulders asking if anyone had seen her hairbrush, and Maisie, self-conscious but radiant in towering heels and sparkling purple eye-shadow smeared like bruises across her pale lids.

St Margaret’s, half empty most Sundays of the year, was so full that a few latecomers had to stand at the back. Every time the huge oak doors were opened, the flames of the candles fixed into brass sticks at each end of every pew shivered in protest, threatening to cast the packed congregation into darkness. Clem was standing between her twin sister, who was much taller than her in her heels, and her mother, who looked thrown together but somehow splendid, with a black silk shawl across her shoulders and her hair messily tucked up into a wide-brimmed black
hat. Clem was aware of her perfume, a musky scent, which had been the same for as long as she could remember. Her father stood on her other side, his usually jovial face slack with solemnity. His hair, still thick and only faintly peppered with grey, hadn’t quite grown into a new hair-cut and was sticking up a bit at the crown. There were little flecks of dandruff on the shoulders of his overcoat, Clem noticed, and longed to reach across the back of the pew and brush them off. Her eyes moved along the line to light on the figure of her uncle Peter, lean and imposing in a long dark cashmere coat, his jaw jutting, his bald patch glinting through his thinning mesh of grey hair. Beside him, her aunt Helen, with her short-back-and-sides hairstyle and dark blue trouser suit, might, at a distance, have passed for a miniature man. She was fidgeting, apparently concerned about keeping her hymn and prayer books in a tidy pile, but glancing all the time at Theo, who was slotted into the pew behind, between their grandparents and Aunt Cassie. The poor boy had been made to wear his new school blazer, which was so huge that the sleeves hung to his fingertips, while the shoulders bulged from all the unoccupied space inside.

With such a large group, Elizabeth and Colin had been forced to make do with seats to the far right of the church, where they were half hidden by a stone pillar and a fat woman in a fur coat. The only adult absentee from the service was Aunt Alicia, who had been enticed into remaining at Ashley House in the role of babysitter for the younger ones. Although, having seen her wedged among cushions in the deepest of the TV room armchairs with her sticks propped next to her and the telly on full blast, it had occurred to Clem that the old dear would have trouble hearing an earthquake, let alone anything going on in the bedrooms upstairs. Her aunt Elizabeth hadn’t seemed too happy about it either: at the last minute she had even volunteered to keep Alicia company, but Uncle Colin, whispering fiercely into her ear, had more or less frogmarched her out of the front door. Every time her aunt’s face bobbed into view between the pillar and the fat woman’s coat Clem could see that she still looked unhappy. During the hymns she hardly opened her mouth and when everyone was supposed to have their heads down in prayer Clem, peeking between her fingers, saw that Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes were wide open and staring fixedly ahead, as though her thoughts were a million miles away from the vicar’s prayers for the homeless and starving babies.

Clem found it obscurely comforting that one of the grown-ups should appear to be as little in the mood for Christmas as she was. Usually, coming to Ashley House triggered a surge of happy feelings, connected not to the prospect of anything specific so much as a general sense of anticipation. But this time all the familiar things – Granny in her apron, fussing over food, jolly questions about school from aunts and uncles, hanging up her smart clothes for Christmas Day – just made her feel flat. Like she’d done it all before and there was nothing in the world to look forward to ever again. Her cousins – normally great comrades when they were thrown together, regardless of age or sex – had struck her as either impossibly alien (Theo) or impossibly irritating (Chloë and Roland). So lacking in jollity herself, she had found it hard to believe in any show of such emotions in those around her. Before coming out that night she had written in the notebook she kept for her most private thoughts, ‘Christmas is for hypocrites’, underlining the last word because it was a favourite in her burgeoning arsenal of vocabulary and she was pleased to have found so perfect an opportunity to use it. Maisie, she knew for certain, had only been keen to come to church because she thought it was grown-up to stay out till past midnight and – even more pathetically – because she had believed that the pop star Neil Rosco might be there. It was true that the man had bought the big manor house on the other side of Barham – Clem had read about it in the paper – but unattached millionaire celebrities were, in her view, unlikely to spend Christmas Eve on their knees in a country church. When she had said as much to Maisie,
prompted by the sight of her dolling herself up in front of the little mahogany dressing-table in their bedroom as if she actually had a
date
with the man, her sister had exploded with righteous indignation, saying just because she liked to make the best of herself it didn’t have to mean it was for the benefit of the opposite sex. Clem had gone very quiet. Thanks to a tousled new sixth-former called Jonny Cottrall, she herself had devoted considerable energy during the course of the previous term to doing just that, bullying her thick dark hair daily with washing and conditioning and, on occasions, making furtive use of Maisie’s eyelash curlers. She had even gone through a phase of rolling up the waistband of her school skirt to reveal more of her legs, which, unlike the rest of her, had a decent shape. ‘Sorry.’ She had breathed the word miserably. She didn’t often quarrel with her sister and to do so on Christmas Eve, when the nameless wretchedness had taken residence in her heart, was almost more than she could bear. The pair of them were very different in looks (Maisie was slim with chestnut hair like their mother, while Clem was thicker set with her father’s darker colouring) and personality, but also fiercely close. At one stage they had even developed a bit of a secret language, until Ed got the hang of it and there no longer seemed any point.

‘Me too. Friends?’

‘Friends.’

‘I’ve got you a gorgeous present, Clem, I just know you’ll love it.’

Clem had smiled, thinking of her own gift, a pair of glittering lilac earrings nested in cotton wool in a box so tiny that she had feared, dropping it into the ocean of presents already swamping the laden Norwegian pine downstairs, that it might never be found. ‘And you’ll like yours, I promise.’

‘Want some of this?’ Maisie, in awe of her own generosity, held out the new and much prized box of sparkling purple eye-shadow. ‘I mean it, honestly.’

‘No, I won’t, but thanks.’

‘It is exciting, though, isn’t it?’ Maisie threw herself on to her sister’s bed, scissoring her legs as she talked. ‘I mean of all the places in the world Neil Rosco could have bought a house and he goes and chooses
Barham
. When I told Monica Simmonds she was so jealous she almost wet herself – she practically cries when she sees a picture of him. I mean, I think he’s quite good-looking and everything, but it’s his music I’m really into. He’s pretty talented, you’ve got to admit.’

‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Clem, although the great Rosco’s tunes were far too
obvious
for her to get really excited about them. But the sisterly truce was going well and she hadn’t wanted to blow it off course. She could write what she really thought later in her secret notebook, she decided now, sneaking a look at her watch to see how long the vicar had been talking and musing on what a simple, perfect receptacle a private sheet of paper was for any honesty, no matter how brutal.

‘Are you okay?’ Elizabeth touched Colin’s sleeve. Since they had arrived at Ashley House that afternoon she had been aware of him retreating into himself, away from her. She wondered if he was still brooding about the promotion fiasco that had overshadowed the end of term. He had got the job of deputy head only to find that he would be sharing the post with Phyllis McGill, the abrasive head of Physics, with whom he had never got on.

‘Fine.’ He patted her hand, keeping his gaze fixed on the altar where the vicar was now preparing the wafers for holy communion. She could see the vein in his temple pulsing above the dark limb of his glasses, just where his thin grey hair met his face.

‘And I’m sure Roland’s all right,’ she whispered, hoping both for his forgiveness over her earlier anxiety and to remind him that it was Christmas when the happiness of their son should be paramount. ‘I’ve got the stocking all ready. It should be easy.’

‘Great.’ Colin patted her hand again. He had been thinking not of their son, or of Phyllis McGill, but of a conversation during dinner with his brothers-in-law. About wine. Of course. It was always about something like that. Wine or sport, with Peter making a show of seeking other opinions but only as a pretext for voicing his own. What did Colin think of the Saint-Veran? Colin, his thoughts lurching to the five bottles of Sainsbury’s Own Label that constituted his own wine stocks, had said – what else? – that it struck him as very pleasant. Whereupon Peter had launched into one of his diatribes about grapes and soil-types until Charlie had banged him on the back and said he was being a bore and nothing mattered except the stuff tasting good and hitting the spot. Colin had been grateful, but not particularly consoled. When he had first made the acquaintance of his brothers-in-law some fourteen years before, their friendliness had caused him to overlook the fact that they belonged to an invisible club from which he would always be excluded. A club based on public-school and privilege, and a form of inner self-belief for which Colin had striven in far more laborious ways. He tried not to mind. The Harrison family always endeavoured to make him feel welcome – bent over backwards, in fact. Which sometimes made it worse. Like Charlie bailing him out like that, telling Peter to shut up because he knew Colin was out of his depth. Saying what Colin would have given anything to be able to say himself but which he never could because at the end of the day he was still an outsider, without the luxury of the confident insouciance that Charlie had – that they all had, apart from Elizabeth, who had grasped at him all those years ago, like an insect clinging to a blade of grass …