Relative Love (51 page)

‘What are you doing?’

Maisie looked up to see Clem, ghostly and trembling, in the doorway. Not knowing what to say, she looked down at the diary, open at that morning’s entry –
6st 6lb 3oz
– and back up at her sister.

‘How dare you? How
dare
you?’ Clem was on her in an instant, scrabbling and spitting like a wild cat. Maisie fought back, trying to keep the diary out of reach, half crying, half trying to shout some sense into her. ‘It’s not right, Clem, it’s not right.’

Clem, who had sharp nails, clawed at her sister’s arms and hands. ‘You bitch, you utter bitch, give it back.’

Serious injury was only prevented by the arrival of an astonished Charlie. ‘What the hell is going on?’

They pulled apart at once, sullen and snivelling. Clem was the first to speak, saying in a small voice, ‘She was reading my diary.’

‘Maisie? Is that true?’

Maisie nodded, not looking up. She could feel Clem’s gaze on the top of her head. She could feel the terror in it, the pleading. She could feel her own terror too, both at what she had discovered and at the knowledge of what revealing it would lead to. Panic from her parents for one thing. A bollocking for another; with their pact broken Clem would tell them everything. But worse than all this was the thought of how heartbroken and angry Clem would be, how alienated and unremittingly hostile. Maisie would lose her love and, for the moment, that was more than she could bear.

‘What possessed you to do such a thing?’ Charlie sounded – and felt – more helpless than angry. He wasn’t in the mood for this. It was supposed to be Ed’s treat day and already it was going hopelessly wrong. ‘Apologise at once, do you hear? And if you don’t you – you …’ He faltered, not wanting to come up with the only punishment that sprang to mind, but unable to think of an alternative ‘… you can stay at home today.’

Maisie burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to come on Ed’s stupid treat anyway. I don’t want anything. I hate everyone.’

‘Just say sorry,’ Charlie repeated, begging now, so wanting the day to right itself.

‘Sorry.’ Maisie shrieked the word, tossed Clem’s diary on to the floor and ran from the room.

The pub was thick with the smell of beer, smoke and sweat. Two men at the bar, with bloated bellies and shaved heads, had taken their shirts off and were having a noisy debate, stabbing the air round each other’s faces with their cigarettes. The barmaid, makeup and hair-do wilting in the muggy heat, kept a wary eye on them while her hands worked the pumps and her mouth flashed smiles for other customers. Stephen watched her for a bit but glanced away quickly when she tried to catch his eye. He had come to this place to lose himself in the humming of other people’s lives. He wanted to be as undetectable as a grain of sand on a beach, beholden to no one and nothing, not even the glance of a stranger. Unable suddenly to face the prospect of returning to his flat, he had spent the past few nights at a dingy hotel near King’s Cross, venturing out only for food and alcohol. Each evening he had found a different haunt, huge and crowded and impersonal. It was a cliché, of course, to try to use drink as a method of accessing oblivion. As
he ploughed steadily through pints of beer and whisky chasers, Stephen was bitterly aware of this and disdainful at his own lack of imagination. Of most immediate concern, however, was that, for him at least, the process wasn’t working. No matter how drunk he got, all the things he sought to forget – the vengeful cruelty of his amended manuscript, the unrequited, unassuageable pain of loving Cassie, the wounds of his childhood – remained, heaving and monstrous and unresolved.

His trip up north had offered no solutions beyond that there was nothing to solve. His parents, shrunken versions of how he remembered them, had greeted him with muted surprise, handshakes and cups of tea. There were no revelations, no emotional explanations, no emotion at all, in fact. They asked him about his travels, much as any stranger might, with one eye on the clock and another on the television, which had flickered at low volume in the corner of the sitting room throughout his visit. When he said he had written a book, they murmured interest but looked distant and dumbfounded. They read newspapers and magazines, he remembered, not books. Clare had been ill, they said, with breast cancer, but was recovering well. Mrs Dawkins across the road had died of a heart-attack. Had he seen the England–Germany match? Would he be staying in London long? If it hadn’t been for his father’s belt buckle, the same belt buckle, glittering under the lower buttons of his shirt, Stephen might even have convinced himself that he had got the wrong house, the wrong set of parents. Whatever version of the past they carried in their hearts was sealed for ever, he realised, certainly from him and quite probably from each other. They were old people riled by the weather, edging from one day to the next via meals and the news headlines, their eyes on the ground. They weren’t a threat any more but they weren’t an answer either. ‘Call again soon,’ they said, when he left, but they closed the door even before he got to the gate, leaving him to make his way alone to the bus stop.

‘All alone, ducky?’

‘Yes, and happy that way, thank you.’

The woman, who was in her fifties with brittle bleached hair and red lips, cackled. ‘No one’s happy that way and anyone who says otherwise is pretending.’

Stephen drained the last of his beer, picked up his bag and left.

AUGUST

John pulled back his bedroom curtains and peered through the lattice of scaffolding at the seamless blue sweep of sky. There had been no rain since the party and the countryside was a mass of sapped yellow and brown. With a hosepipe ban now in force, even the colours of the garden were fading to a pastel version of their usual August brilliance. Only the copse, sprouting on its mysterious subterranean tributary, looked truly green. John squinted to make out the silver of the lake at its heart, glistening like shards of glass between the tree-trunks. Although the nineties had produced a couple of record-breaking summers, the heatwave had made him think more than anything of the distant merging dream of his childhood, when he and Eric had whiled away seemingly endless hot days running wild around the estate, homemade spears and daggers tucked into their shorts, along with other more serious tools, illicitly borrowed from their father’s work-shed to build tree-houses and boats and precarious diving-boards. Having the house full again of grandchildren, camping in the garden and trooping to and from the copse in bathing costumes with towels slung over their shoulders, had sharpened such images, making him feel at once heartened and deeply nostalgic.

John left the window and stooped to check his appearance in the dressing-table mirror, running his hand over his cheek for missed bristles and smoothing the stiff, sparse sides of his hair. He was going to visit Eric and wanted to look smart. Pamela had offered to accompany him, but he had resisted for once, knowing that he would, as ever, use her marvellous coping as a shield behind which he could himself remain safe and disengaged. The exact purpose of the visit was something John had not yet analysed, beyond a dim sense that with Eric’s recent stroke and the doors of his own life closing, a certain shaping to the process was called for: proper farewells, a tying-off of loose ends. He had continued to make good preparations financially (he had replied to his accountant, understood fully the complexities of avoiding inheritance tax and was planning to make further gifts to all four children the following year), and felt that the trickier geography of emotions could no longer be ignored either. It was time to play his part properly, to make his own sense of this last act in their lives.

Satisfied with his face, he began to search for his hat, a battered Panama to which he was devoted and which Eric had given him on his return from his travels many years before. Overhead he could hear the men at work already, whistling and chatting between muffled thumps and bangs. It wouldn’t be long now. The patches of new tiles grew each day, spreading like treacle over the dips, curves and slopes of the roof. Having cursed the expense and inconvenience, John was aware that he had grown rather attached to the project. The men were good sorts and seeing the effects of their labours gave him a vicarious sense of achievement, perking up days that might otherwise have seemed indolent and unsatisfactory. He couldn’t find the hat so went downstairs to look in the cloakroom, where Boots, slumped on the cool of the linoleum, greeted him with a hopeful thump of the tail. ‘Not now, old fella, it’s no dogs allowed.’ The hat wasn’t on any of the pegs either. Muttering under his breath, irritation mounting, he turned to see Serena and Elizabeth, with sunglasses and handbags, clearly preparing to go out too.

‘Pamela said you were going to visit Eric and might be able to give us a lift.’

‘Did she, now? And where are you two off to, then?’

‘I just want to go to St Margaret’s,’ replied Serena, dropping her eyes, clearly not wanting to be pressed on the matter.

‘Well, of course —’

‘And I’m catching a train to London. The lunch with Peter, remember?’

‘Ah, yes, the lunch, of course.’ John frowned. The subject had come up during dinner the night before. At Peter’s instigation his four children, without spouses or hangers-on, were having a get-together in London. On the face of it it was an entirely normal thing to do. But somehow, for a reason John couldn’t quite put his finger on, it was also a little odd. It had even crossed his mind that it might be something to do with the plan for their inheritance, that perhaps, somehow, somewhere, a little dissatisfaction had crept into the works. ‘Well, my dears, I am entirely at your disposal the moment I find my hat …’

‘Do you mean this?’ Helen popped her head round the door, waving the Panama. ‘I’m so sorry, John, Chloë had it – some sort of dressing-up game – none the worse for wear, I promise. Are you two off, then?’ She delivered the enquiry with breezy nonchalance. In truth she had been a little put out at Peter’s insistence that the crisis meeting about the book should be for siblings only. Neither was she entirely happy that she was to be in sole charge of six children for the duration of the morning. To reveal resentment on either score would have been unacceptable, though. Pamela’s indiscretion and how to handle it was a purely family affair, as Peter had said many times. And Serena’s sudden announcement that she wished to spend time at the church was hardly a matter with which one could take issue. Six months on, Helen still found her sister-in-law’s grief both frightening and unapproachable, as if she had pegged an invisible electric fence around herself, which hummed and prickled when anyone got too close. Although they never had been great confidantes, she missed the old Serena dreadfully.

Of more immediate concern was that the children, as usual, were clamouring to go swimming, which meant she, too, would have to make the trek to the lake to keep an eye on things. As the only grown-up, it would be a lonely – not to mention stressful – vigil. Although Jessica could not swim, she flung herself like a lemming into the deepest, weediest eddies. In addition to which there would be all the usual races, ducking games and competitions to see who could stay under the longest, when they all lolled in the water like floating corpses. Helen had ventured in just once that week, only to find that the lake’s iciness made her still tender head throb like an engine. Sunbathing had much the same effect. The doctor, disconcertingly mystified, had given her a thorough check-up and taken some blood for tests. Peter, still resident in London until the weekend, was diligently checking the post each morning for anything resembling a set of results, although the doctor, a sombre young man with pouches under his eyes, had promised that if anything remotely sinister presented itself he would call her on her mobile. No news, as Peter kept saying, was therefore good news, but Helen had packed her phone for the swimming session anyway, tucking it into the largest of Pamela’s many wicker baskets, along with the picnic, tubes of sunblock, bottles of water and a copy of
Homes and Gardens
.

‘You look good in that, Dad.’ Elizabeth stepped forward and tweaked the brim of John’s hat. ‘Quite the man about town.’

John smiled. He knew Pamela found the continuing presence of their elder daughter irksome, but he had got rather used to having her around. True, she was messy and disorganised and almost certainly not facing up to things, but it had been nice to have the extra company and to hear her strumming away on the piano and reading stories to help Roland sleep. Most gratifying of all
was how Roland was coming out of his shell – he was so much more chatty and, with his sandy suntan, quite unrecognisable from the pale, red-nosed child who had arrived the month before, with purple shadows under his eyes and a brooding look that didn’t seem right on any nine-year-old. It was dreadful, of course, the whole sorry business, but John maintained the view that, rather than running away, Elizabeth was taking a much-needed extended break; that, come September, she would return refreshed and reinvigorated to her responsibilities in Guildford.

‘Shall we go, ladies?’ He held out both elbows for Serena and Elizabeth to take and led them out to the car, feeling suddenly young and chipper and more than up to the always daunting business of a visit to the nursing-home.

Lucien Cartwright, peering round the gateposts of Ashley House at the very moment that John, Serena and Elizabeth were climbing into the Range Rover, leapt back in surprise. In Barham to nose around the Rosco story, he had ambled down the lane out of sheer curiosity, lost in a bubble of the past, never once imagining that his ex-wife would be in the vicinity as well. He had spent the last eighteen years trying to forget the Harrisons, putting behind him not just the pain of happy memories but also the youthful, lazy creature who had squandered them. Twenty-three had been a ridiculous age to get married, although at the time he had felt so old. Elizabeth, older but not much wiser, had been desperate to exchange vows, mostly out of love but also, as Lucien came to realise, because she was seeking some sort of escape from the pressures and oppressions of her family. Coming from a cheerful extended set-up full of step-parents and half-siblings, Lucien had found it baffling. Elizabeth had talent, money (loads in prospect), but seemed incapable of enjoying either. Yet, as he recalled now, stepping out from behind a wide tree after John’s Range Rover had rumbled past, they had had some good times: a camping holiday on a rainy Brittany coast, listening to jazz in the basement club round the corner from their flat, making love in the afternoons in the bed with the lopsided headboard, pizza remains and beer bottles strewn among the sheets. Elizabeth had let go then, all right. At other times she had been like a woman in two halves, each one straining against the other. As an indulgent, unsorted and aimless whole, Lucien had had neither the patience nor the capacity to understand. At that stage life had seemed to him to be simply for the taking, a heaped tray of delectable food from which one could pick or scoff as one chose. Elizabeth was either at his side being equally indulgent, or standing over him with tears on her face and a wagging finger. What had begun as love of his
laissez-faire
attitudes had soured to suspicion, and finally distrust.