Relative Love (60 page)

‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth whispered, wiping her nose surreptitiously as she pulled away and reached for an anorak. ‘Back in two ticks.’ In fact, it took rather longer. The washing-line, dancing crazily in the storm, fought all her efforts to control it. Then, having unpegged the
clothes, Elizabeth found herself wanting to stay a little longer, relishing the pummelling of the rain on her hood and the dramatic floodlighting of the countryside as the storm tossed over the South Downs. There was such energy, such drama. It made her feel small and inadequate in comparison. Tomorrow she was returning to her husband. To the momentous decision of a fresh start. But it didn’t feel momentous. It felt remote and impersonal, like something that had been decided and would be enacted by someone else.

Back inside the utility room, she opened the door of the tumble-dryer and fed in the wet clothes. As she did so, she felt something hard in the pocket of a pair of Roland’s shorts. She investigated and found a stone, almost perfectly round, coral-coloured, and smiled, thinking of the assortment of other such mementoes that had gathered on his bedroom window-sill during the summer and which he had insisted on packing to take home: feathers, odd-shaped sticks, half an empty thrush egg, a flint – nothing was ever too ordinary to be beyond his interest. But there was something else too, Elizabeth realised. She set down the stone and put her hand back into the pocket. Something papery and damp. Hurrying now – she still had so much to do before dinner – Elizabeth turned the pocket inside out and gave it a good shake. A photograph slipped out of the lining and floated to the ground. It landed face upwards, presenting Elizabeth with a faded but recognisable image of herself cheek to cheek with her first husband.

‘What on earth …?’ Unable to believe her eyes, she picked it up by one corner. Studying it, she reached out, closed the dryer door and set the timer for an hour. How could Roland have a picture of Lucien? It didn’t make sense. She didn’t even have one: after the split she had destroyed or given away everything, right down to the last stray notepad and guitar string. Where could Roland have found it?

Elizabeth squinted at the picture, remembering as if it was yesterday the mad exuberance of the rainy afternoon on which it had been taken. They had run into the supermarket to buy steak and wine and jumped into the photo booth on a whim, her hair all wet and spiky and Lucien’s sticking in rat-tails to his neck. She could remember the moist coldness of his cheek on hers, the leathery smell of his tatty jacket. The only possible explanation for her son to have it was that he had chanced upon it at Ashley House in a bottom drawer somewhere, or during one of his forages in the attic. Struggling to convince herself, Elizabeth turned the photo over and saw a telephone number written on the back, the figures faint but clear, written in Lucien’s distinctly extravagant style. Elizabeth had a head for numbers. She could still have recited, if called upon to do so, the telephone numbers of every flat she had lived in, every school she had worked at. She knew, too, effortlessly, the number of her father’s mobile phone, Cassie’s place in Pimlico, Peter’s chambers. As she stared at the figures before her, Elizabeth was struck by their lack of familiarity. More puzzling still, it was a mobile number. During the distant days of her first marriage, mobiles hadn’t existed. What was a new number doing on such an old picture? And, most importantly, what was it doing in Roland’s pocket? The obvious thing, of course, was to ask Roland.

Elizabeth left the utility room with this intention, but on finding her son bedded among floor cushions and cousins in the TV room, she decided to leave it until a quiet moment presented itself. Instead she returned, in a state of some agitation, to her half-filled suitcases, which gave her a hollow feeling, reminiscent of Sunday nights as a teenager, packing to return to school.

‘How’s it going?’

Elizabeth looked up to see Serena’s head round the door. ‘Oh, fine, thanks – at least, not too bad.’

‘You’re being very brave, you know. Going back is brave.’

‘Do you think so?’ Elizabeth smiled tightly.

‘You are brave,’ repeated Serena solemnly, stepping into the room. ‘In fact, I’ve been meaning for weeks – months, actually – to thank you for your courage that day … our day in London when …’ She paused. ‘When Tina got killed. You were amazing, Elizabeth – calm, phoning everybody. I want to thank you for that, I should have done so before. It must have been terrible for you.’

‘Oh, Serena, I did nothing –
nothing
.’ Elizabeth had nursed a dim guilt about her ineptitude that day. She hurried across the room and clamped her arms round her sister-in-law, pulling her to her motherly chest. ‘In fact, I’ve often thought that if we hadn’t met for lunch, or if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in talking to you …’

Serena pressed her fingers to Elizabeth’s mouth to prevent her continuing. Self-blame, she knew now, was just a way of trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. It led nowhere. ‘It happened,’ she said simply. ‘It was the most terrible thing and it happened. And you were wonderful.’ She stepped back, studying Elizabeth’s sad face through tear-filled but calm eyes. ‘Now I must let you get on. And Pamela needs me downstairs.’ Prompted by her sister-in-law’s still stricken expression, she added, ‘You and Colin, I’m sure it will work out if it was meant to.’

‘Do you believe that? Really?’ Elizabeth, who had returned to her suitcases, clasped a shirt to her chest, rumpling all Betty’s careful work at the ironing-board. ‘Things work out if they’re meant to,’ she murmured, repeating the phrase like some new mantra for survival. ‘Thanks, Serena. Oh, by the way,’ she added, suddenly remembering, ‘did Maisie find you?’

‘No. When?’

‘Just now. Ten minutes ago. She was looking for you. I’m afraid I said you were in the dining room.’

‘I was, but then I came up here to call Charlie. He said his mobile would work over there but I can’t get through.’

‘Maisie … she … It looked sort of urgent.’

‘Did it?’ Preoccupied with the sudden horrible thought that Charlie might be deliberately screening her calls, Serena made a face. ‘I’d better track her down, then. Give me a shout if I can do anything, won’t you?’

Elizabeth smiled and nodded. Then, once the door was closed, she dug the little photograph out of her bag and stared at it for a long time. The sight of Lucien, after so many years, had shaken her, not just because it was a sore reminder of past mistakes but because the image, creased and sodden as it was, offered a glimpse of a past, happier self. She reached for her phone and began to dial the number on the back of the photo, but stopped half-way through and called Colin instead. It was several rings before he answered.

‘Hello, it’s me.’

‘Hi. How’s it going?’

‘Okay. How are you?’

‘Fine.’

‘You sound … muffled.’

‘Do I? There, is that better?’ Half buried in bedclothes, with Phyllis in a state of post-coital luxuriance next to him, Colin levered himself upright and shifted nearer the phone. The idea had been to say goodbye. Phyllis respected that he had to try to make his marriage work, for the sake of Roland if nothing else. They had begun sombre-faced – Phyllis almost tearful – promising themselves one drink, one kiss, one embrace until, three drinks later, they were tearing frenziedly at each other’s clothes and clambering up the stairs.

‘A bit better. I’m packing.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Colin, you do want me back, don’t you?’

‘Absolutely. Of course.’

‘And do you think we can be all right?’

‘Of course I do. A bit more … give and take, maybe …’

‘What was that?’

‘What was what?’ Colin shot back, with an impressive innocence given that his lover had chosen that moment to place her tongue inside his left ear.

‘I don’t know. Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, then, as planned.’

‘As planned. Yup.’ Still trying manfully to ignore the attentions of his companion, Colin added,

‘I’m looking forward to seeing you, I really am.’

‘Me too.’

For several seconds after the call Elizabeth stared at the phone, wondering at her unease. He hadn’t been passionately reassuring but, then, neither had she. So she had no right to blame him for that. But there had been something else too, something in his tone that she couldn’t put her finger on but which she knew was wrong. It was like he didn’t
care
, like he was going through the motions. She had at least been fearful, tentative, which, while not exactly positive emotions, certainly came from a true and trembling heart. How could she trust that trembling heart to a man who didn’t care?

Running bath water which they would take it in turn to use, the Ashley House boiler being in its usual over-stretched state, Peter and Helen were floating in their own bubble of suspended tension a few yards down the corridor. Helen climbed into the bath first, resting her palms on her stomach as she sank into the foam. Peter stood at the basin, shaving, then flossing his teeth.

‘I’m already bigger.’

‘No, you’re not – at least, not that I can see.’ He peered at the white bubbles half covering his wife, seeing nothing but his own determination for the conversation not to veer out of control, forcing demands he was not yet prepared to concede. He had told Helen many times already that they should make no attempt to address a decision until his father’s eightieth-birthday festivities were over. She was angling to talk about the pregnancy all the time, picking away at it like a fingernail on a scab. He knew she was into the fourth month now, but a day or two more, surely, would make no difference. It would also give him a little more precious time to continue the torturous process of assembling his own thoughts.

Since Helen had broken the news Peter had done nothing but go over the arguments inside his own head. He knew he hadn’t handled that first conversation well, and when they next broached the subject properly he wanted to be fully prepared. Not unkind, not sarcastic, but as tender and convinced as the loving husband he knew himself to be. He didn’t want a third child for the same reasons he didn’t want to get Chloë a dog: the added work, the commitment, being tied down again just at the point where their freedom as a couple was about to open up. They were fortunate in that money, even for a private education, would be no problem, but the most robust financial state could not make up for the fact that by the time this still theoretical third child went to university Peter would be almost seventy. It was unthinkable. In addition to which, there remained the issue of a late baby’s health; Peter had taken the precaution of reading up on the subject and found the statistics terrifying. As if all these reservations weren’t enough there also
hung, like a large shadow over a small picture, the broader question of how they envisaged their future.
Where
they envisaged their future. Helen wanted, rightly, to continue working. If, in the next few years, Ashley House – through increasingly imaginable circumstances – were to become theirs, Peter couldn’t see the feasibility of them both spending four hours a day commuting and leaving a little one at home. It wouldn’t be right. Which meant committing themselves, for another decade at least, to staying in London. Which, confusingly, had its attractions but also conflicted with every vision of the future he had ever held.

‘Your turn.’ Helen stood, brushed the thickest suds off her body, then stepped out on to the bath mat. Overcome suddenly by the pink, pearly beauty of his wife, her body – though he had denied it – indeed riper and fuller with her condition, Peter reached for a towel and wrapped it and his arms round her. ‘I’m sorry if I’m appearing hard-hearted in all this. I don’t mean to be. I know how tough it must be for you, Helen, I really do.’

Helen rested her cheek on his shoulder and cried quietly for a few moments, as she had taken to doing with increasing frequency in recent days. ‘I so want to feel pleased,’ she whispered, ‘and I can’t, and I hate it that I can’t.’

‘Tomorrow.’ Peter rubbed her back through the towel. ‘We’ll have a good talk about it tomorrow, I promise. Let’s get tonight over with first. Dad’s going to be opening his presents soon, he’ll want us all there.’

‘I know.’ Helen pulled back and wiped her eyes on the towel. ‘Chloë’s made him something, did she show you? A stuffed animal from one of those kits she got for her birthday. Big stitches with the filling hanging out. A cross between a kangaroo and a giraffe. She wouldn’t let me help her – but that’s our Chloë, isn’t it?’ she added, her eyes shining with pride and the new tenderness that had been unravelling in her all year and lay at the heart of her desire to nurture their accidental baby rather than terminate its existence.

‘Her mother’s daughter in many ways,’ murmured Peter fondly, kissing the top of Helen’s head. He started in alarm as a vicious blast of wind rattled the bathroom window. ‘That’s quite a storm going on out there.’ He went to check that the bolt was secure. ‘And there’s a hurricane brewing in the Caribbean by all accounts – Hurricane Louis, they’re calling it – just starting to spin itself into a frenzy.’

Like me, thought Helen, but didn’t say so, because she knew Peter needed her to be calm and she was determined to manage it, for a little longer anyway.

The entire family gathered in the drawing room for the opening of presents. John took prime position in the middle of the sofa, with Pamela on one side and Chloë, breathless with excitement about her own misshapen, heavily Sellotaped gift, on the other. The remaining grown-ups occupied the armchairs while the children arranged themselves in various positions on the carpet. Serena, burdened now with what Maisie had revealed about her sister’s true state of mind, evidenced by the dreadful, stark entries of the diary, sat as close to Clem as she could, her eyes glued to the pinched, starving face of her daughter. She had known it, of course, but not
seen
it. She hadn’t been able to see it. Hadn’t wanted to see it. Maisie had told her everything: the throwing up, the pills, the late-night exercises in the dark, the countless stealthy ways of hiding food. Afterwards they had put the diary back, Maisie returning the key to the slot under the skirting-board that Clem thought was known to her alone. Fearing recrimination, guilty at her own collusion and her disloyalty, Maisie had required a lot of reassurance.