Relative Love (62 page)

‘Yes, I’m worried about tomorrow and Colin,’ cut in Elizabeth impatiently, slurring her words but feeling fluent inside her head where it mattered most. The pieces had been falling into place for weeks, months, years, only she hadn’t known it until now, until the sudden imminence of Eric’s death. Eric, her uncle, her mother’s lover. She had been born around that time, after the
miscarriage. She of all four children had never truly felt loved. She was the misfit, the one who never felt secure, never felt quite
right
. ‘But I’m worried most of all about … Eric.’

‘Eric? Really?’ For a moment Pamela’s unease dissolved. ‘Well, we’re all sad, of course, but —’

‘The thing is, Mum,’ Elizabeth was sitting bolt upright now, hands clenched in her lap, ‘the thing is, if Eric is actually my father I’d prefer to know about it before he dies.’

‘Eric? What are you talking about? What, in God’s name, are you talking about, you stupid, stupid girl?’

‘Stupid, right.’ Elizabeth nodded furiously, tears streaming down her face. ‘That’s what you’ve always thought of me. Well, I’m not so stupid that I don’t recognise that I’ve been treated differently – harshly – all my life by
you
. You don’t love me like you do the others, you just don’t, and since I now know that you were in love – that you had an affair with Eric it seems perfectly logical to me —’

‘How dare you – how
dare
you talk to me like this?’ said Pamela, in a strangled voice.

‘How dare I speak the truth, you mean,’ sobbed Elizabeth.

‘The truth,’ rasped Pamela, ‘you know nothing of the truth.’ She tried to reach for the folded napkin but her hands were jumping. Her old, liver-spotted hands. She felt in that moment both overwhelming longing and envy for her husband’s brother, slipping away from his moorings, slipping away without her there even to hold his hand, leaving all the dreadful difficulty of living behind.

‘Well, did you or didn’t you have an affair with Eric?’ persisted Elizabeth, not prepared, now they were at the nub of things, to let go. ‘Is he my real father?’

Pamela looked at the door, needing to see that it was still closed, that they were the only ones sharing the horrible reality of the conversation. A conversation she had dreaded, protected, evaded for nearly fifty years, sometimes imagining having to endure it with her husband, but never with her elder daughter. The door was closed, which meant they were safe, but there was nowhere to hide either. It was, Pamela realised, as the flutter in her hands receded, one of those moments of truth. One of those rare, unavoidable moments that spun lives in different directions. Like the one with Eric among the silver birches in the dark forty-seven years before. When she told him that, with the miscarriage of their child, she would stay in her marriage. That she would stay with John, see her life through in another way. It had taken just a few seconds to end their dream. Two whole years of hope, gone in an instant.

‘You are not Eric’s child, Elizabeth. The baby I lost was Eric’s. If I have treated you harshly I’m sorry. I never meant to. I found you … harder than the others. I think maybe … oh, my God.’ Pamela swallowed and summoned the wherewithal to voice what had always been unvoiceable: ‘Maybe, in part, because you weren’t Miranda. You came so soon after. Maybe I couldn’t forgive you that. I did my best. I am sorry. I did my best.’

For several minutes neither of them spoke. Drunk as she was, Elizabeth knew that her mother had spoken from the heart. The ring of truth in her words was unmistakable. And it all made sense. So much sense. ‘So,’ she whispered, conjuring a blurred image of Colin, awaiting her return under the shiny beams of their home, ‘you stayed with Dad even though you didn’t love him.’

Pamela folded her arms across her chest, so tightly she could feel each quick beat of her heart. ‘Oh, no,’ she said softly, ‘not at all. I loved your father. I have always loved him. But there are different kinds of love. Eric was wild and difficult, a free spirit … different in every conceivable way. I don’t think we would have been happy. He never wanted to settle or be responsible or … any of those things. What happened was for the best. At one point, we were going to run away
together, then I lost Miranda and changed my mind, realised it was hopeless. Eric handed over the rights to Ashley House and went abroad. It was hard in many, many ways, but it was the right thing to do. I, for one, have never regretted it. Not once, Elizabeth. Not once.’

Elizabeth looked at her mother’s face, seeing the strength in the soft, powdered lines and the steely blue of her eyes. For a few moments the sense of her own separate, younger self merged with a picture of how her mother must have been, passionate and torn, making momentous decisions on her own. An extraordinary wave of empathy spread through her, uninvited and so physical that she shivered involuntarily. ‘How much of this does Dad know?’

‘Only that Eric decided to hand over his birthright and leave England.’ There was a certain pride in Pamela’s voice. ‘There was no need – no justification – to tell him more. The hurt it would have caused …’ She closed her eyes. ‘I couldn’t do it to him. It would have been unthinkable … but how …?’ She blinked, as if waking from a vivid dream. ‘How on earth did you know … about my … about Eric?’

Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably in her chair. The alcohol was bringing her down now, from insouciant fluency to a much less comfortable engagement with reality. Peter would go mad. He had gone to such lengths to manage the situation, to protect the truth. When he had related how Stephen had backed down during the meeting with Cassie, he had been jubilant. And now, without permission or even consultation, she had found some cheap Dutch courage and blown it all. Elizabeth, staring at her mat, its wintry Brueghel scene flecked with dots of dried gravy, thought grimly of all this, yet could summon no remorse. Prising out the truth might not have offered any solutions, but sitting next to her mother now, with a hangover already mushrooming at the base of her skull, she was aware of the possibility of a new sort of peace with the world and herself. The sort of peace that comes with understanding. All her life a deep part of her had been battling against something – invisible demons, an incomprehensible sense of having been wronged. She had been fighting in the dark. Now it was as if a light had been switched on. The demons were still there – would, to some degree, always be there – but they had been exposed and could therefore, perhaps, be comprehended. Forgiven, even. It was impossible to regret that. Impossible too, Elizabeth saw suddenly, to go back to Colin, whom she did not and could never love again. ‘Eric’s biographer,’ she said slowly, chiselling at the congealed gravy with her fingernail. ‘Stephen Smith. He found out. There was a letter that you had written to Eric hidden inside a bundle of correspondence Alicia sent him. He was going to put it in his book. He told Cassie, who told Peter, who told me and Charlie. But then Peter and Cassie talked Stephen out of it. So you’re safe.’

‘Safe?’ The word came out on a half-laugh. ‘I’m not safe. I never have been. Not from anything – not from what I did, not from all those feelings. I thought I was for a while, but this year, when little Tina died, it all seemed to come back at me … The grief … it has been indescribable.’ Pamela pressed her fingers to her mouth to hide the tremble in her lips. ‘It was a double blow, you see, losing Miranda and then, of course … losing – giving up – Eric. And I had no one to talk to, except your father, who deserved only kindness.’ She continued to talk through her fingers, patting her mouth as if she would have stemmed the flow of her words if she could. ‘And now it turns out that I’ve hurt you so very badly … I never meant to, Lizzy. I did my best.’ She repeated the phrase, shaking her head, struggling still with the dark, hitherto unacknowledged fact of her failing as a mother and the causes behind it. ‘I tried so hard to be fair. I only ever wanted the best for you. All your talent, I loved it so and yet …’ She shook her head again, causing her already dishevelled bun to slip half an inch further down the back of her head.

‘I didn’t love my talent, did I?’ Elizabeth answered for her. ‘Maybe,’ she said gently, ‘because it’s hard to love anything if you don’t feel loved yourself.’

‘But I did – I do – love you,’ Pamela cried. ‘All five of you, I loved all five.’

‘It’s okay, Mum, I know that. I know it. And I was a pain of a child and I’m sorry for that. So much makes sense now and I love that. I love it that it makes sense.’ Elizabeth leant across the space separating their chairs and placed one arm across Pamela’s back. She could feel the resistance in the sharp points of her mother’s shoulder-blades, the years of suppression. ‘I’m
so
glad you’ve talked to me,’ she whispered, recognising that Pamela was close to tears and feeling like a good cry herself, ‘so very glad. We won’t tell Dad about Eric, Mum, none of us will, ever, I promise. I’m so sorry if I’ve upset you, but I needed to get the picture straight. For
me
. Which might be selfish but …’ Elizabeth dropped her forehead on to Pamela’s shoulder with a groan. ‘I can’t tell you how cross Peter’s going to be. He’s been so desperate to protect you from all this book business and now I’ve mucked everything up.’

Elizabeth felt her mother’s shoulder stiffen and lifted her head. Pamela’s pupils were dark holes in the blue of her eyes. ‘But he needn’t know,’ she said softly, her gaze boring into her daughter’s. ‘None of them need know. This whole talk we’ve had, we could keep it to ourselves. Couldn’t we?’

It was a plea from the heart. Elizabeth breathed in and out very slowly. ‘Yes, we could,’ she said. ‘Of course we could.’ She stood up and pushed her chair into the table. ‘Mum, there’s something else … I won’t be going back to Guildford tomorrow. If Dad agrees I’ll move into the barn, pay you a proper rent until I’ve found somewhere of my own.’ She waited, both hands gripping the back of the chair in reflexive preparation to defend herself against the inevitable volley of admonitions about hasty decisions, giving things another go, thinking again, thinking of Roland. She gripped the chair harder. She would not be swayed this time, not by anyone, not by anything. She didn’t open her eyes again until she felt Pamela’s hand close round hers.

‘Move into the barn if you like, darling,’ she said, ‘but we won’t need rent.’

Approaching the dining-room door with a tray of coffee things, Serena heard raised voices and turned back for the TV room. She reflected, with some despair, on the persistently prickly relationship between Elizabeth and her mother-in-law, grateful that the situation between her and her own mother had been so straightforward. By the time the cancer had won its grisly battle, there had been nothing left unsaid, no gratitude or love unexpressed. And Tina too, she mused, setting down the tray and switching on the television, had known – if she knew nothing else in the bewitching baby-chaos of her mind – that she was loved. It was a comforting thought and Serena relished it as the steam of her coffee warmed her face and she settled down, mobile at her side, in the deep leather sofa facing the television.

She had left Charlie three messages now. She had apologised for forcing the business of moving Tina’s grave so uncompromisingly upon him. She had said, even, that she would be all right if they decided not to do it, that the essence of so momentous a decision was, she saw now, meaningless without his desire for the same thing. She had said, finally, that something else big had happened and she needed to talk to him. She had kissed all their three children goodnight and said she loved them. She had reassured Ed, who was nervous about starting at Kings Grove, tried to stroke the sadness from Maisie’s drained, sleepy face, then hugged Clem with all her might, feeling the thinness of her frame as if for the first time, wishing she could press some of her own motherly vigour into it, feed it, literally, with love.

The late news was just starting. ‘Hurricane Louis, having gathered pace on its journey through the Caribbean, causing widespread damage to the scores of island tourist resorts in its path, this afternoon reached the Gulf of Mexico, where it turned eastwards and began to batter the Keys and southern coast of Florida. The National Hurricane Center in Miami reports that it is now the biggest storm system to hit the United States since Hurricane Andrew, with wind speeds of up to ninety-five miles an hour and waves over fifteen metres high. Initial reports indicate that eleven lives have already been lost although the final toll is expected to be much higher. The President has declared the state a national disaster zone and emergency services are already working round the clock to provide shelter for those who have lost their homes and livelihoods.’

The face of the newsreader was replaced by images of roofless houses, cars upside-down in trees and waves the size of tower blocks plunging into the coast. A rain-drenched reporter, yelling into his microphone against the din going on around him, added that an American Airways plane carrying thirty-six passengers was missing and that several ships in the area were also unaccounted for.

Serena stared at the screen, then at the phone next to her, then back at the screen. The anchorman had moved on to a different story. Three Islam extremists had been arrested in North London. Outside, their own little British storm was dying down: the rain was pattering instead of thundering on the cloisters roof; the wind, subsiding like an animal tiring of a game, was no longer pawing at the window-panes. But not in Florida. In Florida the worst hurricane in fifteen years was tearing buildings from their foundations, spinning vehicles, trees and people. Eleven lives lost already. Emergency services at full stretch. A disaster area. Serena crept closer to the television, wishing she could press rewind to hear it all again, wishing she had paid more attention to Charlie’s curt delivery of the details of where he would be. They were negotiating some new international marine treaty. She knew that much. Somewhere near Miami, or was it in Miami? She couldn’t even remember the name of the hotel. When he had said his mobile would work she hadn’t thought it mattered particularly. But it mattered all right. It had always mattered. She should have listened. Just as she should have treasured their farewell instead of letting the treadmill of her own selfish preoccupations get in the way.