Relative Love (55 page)

Helen, propped against a tree in the shade, watched the proceedings through the blue haze of her sunglasses, admiring the mutual co-operation but fearing that it would be short-lived. Jessica would lose and protest volubly, as would Chloë, while Ed and Theo, if beaten either by each other or by Maisie, would almost certainly lapse into deep sulks. Judging from Maisie’s demeanour, as lissom and glistening in her black one-piece as a seal, her hair bunched in a tight wet ponytail, her pretty features flexed in fierce determination, the boys had a lot to be worried about. Only Roland, Helen suspected, puffing his chest out and rubbing his knobbly ribs in
excited preparation to jump, would remain truly happy regardless of the race’s outcome. The transformation in her younger nephew was extraordinary: tanned and fuller-faced to look at, bordering on cheeky to talk to, everything about him refuted the traditional view that marital separation was supposed to stress a child. If anyone appeared stressed it was Clem, huddled on the rock like an old man in the dressing-gown, looking almost – unbelievably –
cold
, when Helen herself, in the protective shade of her tree, was so hot she hardly knew where to put herself. It was evident to Helen that the extraordinary shivering state of her niece related to her having grown painfully thin; yet she had certainly eaten well enough, tucking into their picnic of crisps and sandwiches and sausage rolls with as much gusto as her cousins. Maybe she was in love, Helen decided, remembering her own first all-consuming passion for a young sports master at the age of fourteen, which when she had discovered he was far more interested in his own sex, had metamorphosed into a crusading zeal to convert him. Helen smiled and closed her eyes, feeling rather sleepy. The race had been held up by Ed’s announcement – greeted with a round of groans – that he needed to pee. So there was no need to watch just yet, she told herself, no need to do anything but be very still and quiet. Her headache had receded to a distant, manageable place at the back of her skull, where it lay coiled like a sleeping snake. The other children had been left standing, poised in their positions like comical water statues, waiting for Ed to emerge from the bushes. Helen sighed, floating so blissfully in the weightless dark behind her closed eyes that when the bleeping tune of her mobile sounded from the basket next to her, her first instinct was to ignore it. Then she thought, Oh, God, the doctor! and lunged into the basket with both hands, groping through apple cores and half-eaten sandwiches to get to it in time.

‘Mrs Harrison? It’s Dr Fuller.’

‘I knew it would be, I just knew …’ Helen pressed her back hard against the tree-trunk behind her, seeking its solidity and the reassuring cool of the rough bark through the hot thin cotton of her shirt. Across the lake she saw Ed beating his way out of the bracken with both arms, as if fighting off a swarm of assailants. He was shouting something, but Helen, enclosed now in the silence of her own fear, heard nothing. ‘Yes, Dr Fuller, Helen Harrison speaking.’

‘It’s good news, Mrs Harrison.’

‘Is it?’ Helen pressed her hand to her chest and looked up at the sky, visible in asymmetric slices of blue through the mesh of branches overhead. There is a God, she thought, there is a God.

‘You’re not ill, Mrs Harrison, not in any way. You’re pregnant.’

Serena, clad only in her bathing costume with a towel slung, shawl-like, across her shoulders, walked with deliberate slowness, enjoying the shady cool of the copse and the springy dryness of the mossy path beneath her feet. Every so often the patches of brambles and already ripening blackberry bushes on either side were so overgrown that she had to turn sideways to pass through without snagging her skin on a thorn. Before coming out (and having checked that Pamela was safely ensconced in the kitchen), she had called Directory Enquiries for the number of the vicar at the church in Cheshire. A small action on the face of it, but it had felt enormous. It was the first thing Serena had truly
felt
like doing in months. It had reminded her that such simple processes were the basis on which she had once lived her life: wanting to do things, then carrying them out. Instead of being some dumb, reactive thing, going through the motions, saying the words of a part expected by other people. After securing the number she had folded the piece of paper into a tight fat rectangle and placed it in an inner pocket of her purse. The logic of her thinking was that to move a dead body there was no better place to start than with the person in
charge of the graveyard in which that body was buried. St Margaret’s, too, would have to be consulted, but she wanted Charlie to take care of that. Charlie, dear Charlie. Serena pulled the towel more tightly across her shoulders. She couldn’t wait to tell him. It was too important for the phone, so she had decided to hang on until he joined them all at the weekend for a week’s holiday before jetting off for his conference in Florida.

Absorbed in her thoughts, Serena was only a few yards from the point where the path burst through to the clearing that housed the lake when she became aware that the muted noises filtering through the trees represented a commotion beyond the usual high spirits of a communal swim. The lake itself, a bulging oblong of browny green fringed by boulders and tall reeds, was unoccupied, as was the flat sandbank to her left that was commonly used for sunbathing and picnicking. A blanket and basket set back a little under the shade of two grand old oaks looked similarly abandoned. What noises there were emanated from the jungle of bracken on the far side of the lake, in the thickest part of the copse where, at this time of year, the path was too overgrown to follow. Looking in that direction, Serena could make out bobbing heads and the occasional flash of a bare limb, as if the entire party was beating around in search of something. A ball, perhaps, she decided, squinting across the water, or maybe a pair of goggles, flung in petulance or as an ill-judged prank.

‘Hey,’ she called, waving an arm, ‘what’s going on?’

Chloë was the first to emerge and waved back, both arms at once, high over her head. ‘Aunty Serena, Aunty Serena.’ Her voice sounded shrill and upset.

‘Chloë, what’s happened?’ Serena took off her sandals and began to pick her way round the edge of the lake, which was hard because there was no proper bank and in some places the mud was so deep that it oozed up to her shins. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

‘She’s here. We’re all here. She’s crying and Boots is here too but he’s – he’s —’ Chloë broke off, convulsing with tears. ‘Boots is
dying
,’ she wailed. At which point, Serena hurled her towel and shoes into the bushes and plunged into the water. For a moment the iciness took her breath away, but she was an excellent swimmer and in a few fast, powerful strokes was heaving herself out on to the other side. ‘What is it, sweetie? Is Boots sick?’ She tried to hug Chloë, who squirmed out of reach of her slippery cold arms and pointed into the bracken. ‘He’s in there. Ed found him, all walking funny, and we got Mummy to look but she doesn’t know what to do and she’s … crying.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear. Let me see.’ Serena let go of her niece and strode into the tangle of bushes, ignoring the stabs of sharp stones and twigs on the soles of her feet and doing a sort of breaststroke to get herself through the mass of fronds, all well above head height. She broke through eventually to a flattened section where the children were clustered round Helen and the stricken dog, whom Helen had by the collar. She was trying, ineffectually, to persuade him to walk in the direction of the overgrown path. When they saw Serena the children all turned at once, shouting simultaneous and unintelligible explanations.

‘Shush everybody. Helen? What’s happened to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ sobbed Helen, releasing Boots’s collar as the dog let out a whimpering snarl.

‘I’m just so hopeless with animals. He’s obviously hurt but he won’t let us lift him and he won’t walk and —’

‘Theo.’ Serena turned to her eldest nephew. ‘Run back to the house and tell Granny to call the vet. Stand back a minute, Helen, let me have a look.’ She knelt by Boots and gently stroked his head, noticing as she did so that there was a large swelling on his neck, and two small but clearly
visible puncture marks in the middle of it. ‘It’s an adder,’ she shouted after Theo, who was already crashing away through the bracken. ‘Tell Granny he’s been bitten by an adder.’

‘If we try to lift him he growls,’ sobbed Helen, standing back now, wanting to hug Serena for being so cool and knowledgeable. An adder bite, of course, why hadn’t she thought of it? But all she could think about was the baby. A baby! Another child, growing inside her, a terrible mistake of a child. She was almost forty-eight. It had been a big enough decision to have Chloë at forty, but this – this was impossible. She wasn’t one of those super-mothers who could manage such things. A baby would shrivel her body, suck the colour from her hair, sap the last of her already faltering energy. Peter would agree. In fact, Peter was going to be appalled. She had been crying even as she dropped the phone, even before the children were hollering at her about the wretched Boots, whom Ed had found staggering around the undergrowth moaning, his back legs collapsing to the ground.

‘Ed, fetch the biggest of the towels,’ commanded Serena. ‘We’ll see if we can wrap and carry him back in that. Maisie – Clem – is there anything either of you can find to put some water in? It might help, if he’s thirsty, or just to cool the wound. Quickly, children. There’s not much time.’

‘What can I do, Aunty Serena?’ whispered Roland, coming to stand next to her with Jessica.

‘You, my sweetheart,’ said Serena, crouching next to him and looking into his big solemn dark-lashed eyes, ‘you and Jessica can help by packing up the picnic and suncreams and things and putting them all in the basket ready for going back to the house. Okay?’

Some ten minutes later, a curious procession, with Ed, Theo, Helen and Serena in the middle carrying the bulky bundle of Boots in a towel, like hunters returning with a kill, wound its way back through the woods and across the fields to Ashley House. After struggling hard, Boots went very still and remained so even after they had laid him gently on the cool floor of the cloisters and unwrapped the towel. When the vet arrived, followed closely by John, it was clear that he was dead.

By the time Charlie joined his family, catching an early-afternoon train on Friday, a small wooden cross had been erected in the middle of the orchard of silver birches where Boots had been laid to rest. John had chosen the spot, to the left of the drive at the front of the house, because it was where Boots had spent many months during his latter years, mostly asleep, but with an ear cocked both for the rustlings of unobtainable wildlife in the grass around him and for any signs of arrivals and departures from the house.

Sid had dug the grave, sweating profusely at the effort of ramming the blade of his spade against the concrete earth, so hard in places that if he hadn’t been aware of John watching from the study window behind a cloud of pipe smoke, he might have been tempted to give up. He could feel the man’s pain, knew what the dog had meant to him, both as a companion and as a link to an era now gone. He’d been the same when Scot, beloved Yorkshire terrier of his dear Ruthie, had passed away: it had been like losing Ruthie all over again, losing a last little part of her. So he had laboured on, watched intermittently by various grandchildren, until the soil grew dark and moist and he could shovel it out with ease.

For the burial itself they all assembled round the plot, the little girls solemn-faced with posies of wild flowers and everyone whispering amens to Pamela’s softly spoken prayers. John, jaw clenched, had concluded the proceedings by throwing in the frayed, much loved blanket off the
old dog’s bed followed by a fistful of earth. He then nodded at Sid to commence the business of covering the body.

During the course of the week, Charlie had been given detailed accounts of all aspects of the proceedings by various members of his family and felt as if he had lived through the drama himself. Serena, clearly the saviour of the hour in spite of its unhappy outcome, had at times sounded almost unnaturally energised by it. Helen had fallen apart completely, she said, and still didn’t seem to have recovered. John, too, fresh from a long visit to his brother, had been shaken to find them all on the cloisters with poor Boots dead at their feet. He had said all the right things, then and many times subsequently, about the dog having had a happy life and a good innings, but always in a clipped, strained way that suggested he was far from accepting such consolations himself. He was smoking so many pipes that Pamela, normally mutely accepting of the habit, had let slip a few remonstrations about how it was making him cough and setting a bad example to the children. What Serena never mentioned to Charlie – because there was no need – was that, after Tina, coping with a dead dog was nothing. Peanuts, in fact. She, more than Pamela, had helped the children organise the funeral and taken drinks out to Sid while he hacked out the grave in the keen afternoon sun. I can do this, she had thought, I can be strong for this. And it was precisely this strength that Charlie had detected in her breathy excitement over the phone and which gave a definite bounce to his step as he pushed open Ashley House’s heavy front door and shouted his arrival to anyone within earshot who cared to take notice of it.

‘Hello, Charlie, we’re in here.’ Charlie traced the greeting to the music room where he found Clem and Elizabeth sitting at the little rosewood table in the window poring over music-theory practice papers.

‘Daddy.’ Clem pushed back her chair and ran at her father, who squeezed her hard, resisting the urge to remark on her gauntness, which had hit him like a hammer-blow the moment he had laid eyes on her. She was, unbelievably, thinner. Not having seen her for a week, he was sure of it. Living day to day one lost perspective on such things. Next to his sister, whose now unrestrained curves pushed out merrily in all directions from a tight white T-shirt and wide Bermuda shorts, she was all bones and eyes.