Relative Love (72 page)

Colin, however, eyeing his small son over an unpleasantly boiling and watery cup of tea, saw the untroubled chirpiness – that peculiar live-in-the-moment innocence of childhood – and envied it. He knew no such peace. The sight of Elizabeth unloading Roland and a bulging overnight case from her car, chatting breezily about pickup times and trying new routes to avoid the traffic, had stirred him deeply. Her independence, her sheer I’m-okay separateness, was more galling than he could possibly have imagined. And the tears in Roland’s eyes as she drove away – that had been hard too. He knew he loved his son, but he had been unsure suddenly whether Roland truly loved him in return. When they had lived under the same roof as a family, such a question had never seemed at issue; but ushering his son inside the house that morning, trying not to watch as he blinked away his tears, Colin had felt for the first time as if he had to work to win Roland’s affection, as if he had to
earn
it instead of believing it – as he had in the past – some sort of God-given right. Hence McDonald’s, which he hated. Hence the video, of which he disapproved. Hence Chessington, which in half-term week would be hellishly overcrowded.

‘Is there more ketchup?’

‘Do you really need more?’ Colin cast a gloomy look at the long queues for all the tills at the food counter. ‘You have had
two
pots of the stuff already.’

‘But I’ve got my chips left. I need more for my chips.’ Roland, having detected the anger in his father’s tone and unaware that it was connected to things of greater significance than tomato sauce, felt his lower lip tremble.

‘Now don’t get upset – it’s hardly something to get upset about, is it?’ Colin’s voice was harsh with panic, not just at this reminder of his son’s sensitivity but at the sudden fear that the new part-time relationship on which they were embarking would always be too fragile to allow proper, strict parenting. Roland would cry and he would give in. Out of guilt. Out of fear of not being loved. It was intolerable.

‘I want … I need … Please … may … I … have … more ketchup …
please
,’ Roland repeated the word, the ‘magic’ word, as his mother liked to call it. Thinking of her made him want to cry even more. With his mother, things like wanting more ketchup were so simple you didn’t notice them. They certainly didn’t make her angry.

‘Okay, okay … There, now.’ Colin, aware suddenly of enquiring glances from two women at a neighbouring table, had softened his tone. He reached across the hateful little polystyrene picnic and ruffled Roland’s mop of dark hair, noting with distaste how long it was, all messy and curly
like a girl’s. ‘I’ll get some more, okay? But next time let’s remember to ask for three pots instead of two and then we won’t have any of this bother, will we? It’s called thinking ahead, Roland, and as you get older you’ll have to learn to do a bit more of it.’ He shot a sort of who-would-have-them look at the women and strode to the head of the shortest queue to see if he could slip his meagre request between the orders of new customers.

Colin found the evening no easier, not because Roland cried or misbehaved but because he was so docile and acquiescent, so desperately keen to please. No TV until the video, Colin commanded, expecting resistance. Roland, who had lost some of his passion for television since he and his mother had moved into the barn, nodded meekly and asked if he could play the piano instead. He had memorised something specially, he said. He pushed up his sleeves as he took up his position on the piano stool and closed his eyes until he could hear the sounds inside his head. ‘Ready and waiting,’ said Colin reaching surreptitiously for the newspaper. But when Roland began to play he found his gaze drawn at once from the headlines to his son’s racing fingers, thumping and twirling with a mastery that even Colin, tone deaf as he was, recognised as exceptional.

‘That was amazing. Play it again, if you like.’

‘Nah, don’t really want to.’ Roland slipped off the stool and tipped a box of his old model cars out on to the carpet.

‘That piece, what’s it called?’

‘“Mad Cat Jazz”.’

‘Is it, now? Well, you were good. Very good indeed. You must have practised very hard.’ Roland looked up from his little pile of cars, puzzling. ‘I just like playing it.’

‘Right. And would you like to watch that video now?’

‘Yes, please.’ He leapt to his feet and threw himself on to the sofa. Colin managing not to mention either the abandoned cars, strewn round the armchairs and under the coffee table, or that furniture was not for jumping on, slotted the video into the machine and retreated back to the sofa. There were other things he wanted – needed – to do, like fixing himself a drink and phoning Phyllis, but it seemed right that he should sit with Roland for part of the film anyway. Then, just as he was thinking of sneaking into the kitchen, Roland, fighting yawns, edged towards him and tunnelled his head under his arm, so snugly that Colin found he didn’t want to move after all. When Phyllis herself phoned, much later on, Colin was sitting at the end of Roland’s bed watching him as he slept, his beloved Teddy and Beaky, a tatty duck stitched clumsily back together many times over the years by Elizabeth, tucked firmly under each arm. He looked so sweet, so peaceful, so fragile.

‘I thought you were going to call
me
,’ complained Phyllis, when he finally arrived at the phone.

‘I said I would when I could and it’s not been … easy.’

‘Oh dear, is he being a handful?’ she said soothingly, eager both to grant her lover an excuse for his unprecedented, most unwelcome curtness and to present herself as an ally in the face of any separation difficulties he had still to overcome.

‘A handful? Not at all, no.’

‘Oh.’

‘Look, Phyllis, I’m a little tired,’ Colin explained hastily, too caught up in the poignancy of his own confusion to summon the effort to respond properly to the hurt in her tone. He didn’t want to gang up with this woman against the foibles of his son, he realised, not that night – not ever, probably. And, anyway, Roland had been far from a handful. Apart from the little show of petulance in McDonald’s he had been easy and affectionate. So affectionate, indeed, that by the
time Colin had given him a piggy-back up to bed, feeling the grip of his wiry legs and arms round his waist and neck, he had felt quite wretched with affection himself. It was different without Elizabeth. Worse, because it was much harder work – relentless and threaded with guilt – but better too. Closer. If Elizabeth had been there Roland would have curled up next to her, and Colin wouldn’t have questioned it. He might even have enjoyed some private critical musings on the subject of Disney videos and motherly physical indulgence, pouring a second drink while Elizabeth tucked Teddy and Beaky under the duvet, drew the curtains and picked the discarded socks off the floor. He would have sat happily alone on the sofa while Elizabeth, not him, perched on the little bed upstairs, stroking Roland’s wide forehead and fielding sleepy unanswerable questions about whales. How long did they live? How deep could they dive? How fast could they swim? But now Colin had done those things because, without Elizabeth, he
had
to. Because their new circumstances called for it. Some fighting, obstinate part of him felt resentment still. Yet the day had brought joy, too, unexpectedly, in the simple pleasures of its entanglement, its
closeness
.

Sitting beside his sleeping son, Colin had, for the first time, felt both the complicated weight of this joy and the inherent sadness of glimpsing something good only after it could never be properly retrieved. The shrill ring of the phone had been jarring beyond words. As had the hard-done-by edge to his lover’s voice. I have lost so much, he wanted to say, but couldn’t because it would only have made her uncomprehending and jealous. Instead, he kept the burden of his revelations to himself – the glimpse of love, the handcuffs of part-time parenthood within which that love would now have to be explored – and spoke gruffly instead. He could feel Phyllis bristle at his coldness. It would take a lot to reassure her.

And this is how it will be, he thought, putting down the phone. This is how it will be.

‘Look.’ Pamela held up six inches of yellow knitting, tugging the border so that it hung in a tidy rectangle from the needle. ‘The front will be harder – a blue bunny every three inches, I don’t know how I shall manage.’ She smiled, knowing she would manage very well.

John, who had gone to the fireplace to stoke the fire, turned and nodded. Without his glasses both the knitting and his wife’s face were hazy smudges; an unframed yellow blur next to a paler, cream one. He returned to the fire, but it was a few seconds before he could even focus properly on that. It had no need of stoking, he saw now. The logs Sid had chopped from the fallen tree were so thick they took an age to burn; and air was circulating nicely too, the flames leaping out of a healthy molten carpet of orangey red. No stoking. No log. His journey from the armchair, across the yards of faded cornflower Axminster, had been for nothing.

‘It’s going to be a layette for Helen and Peter’s baby.’ Pamela clutched her knitting to her chest as the joy of expectant grand-motherhood swelled inside. ‘For the baby,’ she repeated, a little sharply, annoyed that not even this most astonishing news – delivered so matter-of-factly by Peter on the phone just a few days before – could inject a little
joie de vivre
into her husband’s increasingly stooped and slackened mien. Seeing him now, shifting from one foot to the other on the hearth-rug, staring at some spot on the wall as if he wished he could vanish through it, Pamela felt the stab of annoyance mushroom into something deeper. After weeks of trying to cheer him she was feeling the strain. Undoubtedly it had been a tough year for all of them, there was no denying that, losing Tina and then Eric, yet their blessings were still so numerous – especially now, with this extraordinary news of the baby. Pamela shot her husband a wary glance, thinking, as she had started to do, that his prolonged state of misery smacked of self-
indulgence. I will tell him so, she decided, and began again to knit fast, her fingers expertly looping and threading the fine yellow wool. I will declare my impatience.

‘John, darling …’ She faltered, quailing as ever at the prospect of stirring up any unpleasantness. ‘John …’ She fixed her eyes on her sliding needles, though she could knit just as well without looking. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying, but I can’t help wishing you could seem more … pleased. About the baby. In fact,’ she continued, gathering courage, ‘I think it’s quite
wrong
of you not to be more pleased. It puts a dampener on the rest of us … on
me
. The children will be here the day after tomorrow – they’re bound to notice how low-spirited you are. For
their
sakes, I think you should try to pull yourself together a bit. On top of which there’s still so much to do, all those boxes of fireworks to sort out, not to mention the pumpkins, which Sid has put in the garage. It’s such a chore, I know, but they look so lovely with candles in and I’ll be able to use some of the flesh to make a pumpkin pie. I’ll use that marvellous recipe of Dorothy’s but …’ Pamela faltered again, aware that she was losing her way, thanks to a distracting image of John the previous year, whistling jauntily as he carved the tops off ten pumpkins, scooped their stringy flesh into a huge pudding basin, then sliced his penknife through their plump orange carcasses to make masterfully ghoulish expressions. Jagged teeth and gaping eyes. When Pamela inserted and lit the candles, the pair of them had laughed like gleeful schoolchildren at their handiwork. Happiness comes in unexpected moments, she thought now, as the image dissolved like a dream. She realised in the same instant that, after five decades, her own capacity for happiness had become inextricably entwined with her husband’s. She could rejoice in nothing with him so glum. Her joy simply wouldn’t take flight without his alongside. Maddened, but also a little inspired, Pamela glanced up from her knitting to find the stubborn hunch of her husband’s back still set against her, as articulate as a grimace. ‘Eric would have hated his death affecting you in this way, you know,’ she scolded. ‘It’s the very
last
thing he would have wanted.’

‘And you would know what Eric would have wanted, wouldn’t you, my dear?’ He jerked round, gripping the mantelpiece to steady himself, then launched himself away from it, glowering at her as he strode out of the room.

Pamela’s heart stopped, then started again at twice its normal speed. ‘I only meant —’ she began, but he was already gone. A moment later the front door slammed. Pamela lowered her knitting on to her lap. She was half-way through a row. Two stitches had slipped off the needle and begun to unravel, creating an unsightly hole in the dense, even pattern below. He knows, she thought. Maybe Elizabeth had said something. Maybe – worse still – he had known all along and his punishment had been not to tell her, to let her stew for fifty years in the juice of her own guilt. With the death of Eric, and his own mortality suddenly so unignorable, it had begun, after all this time, to eat away at him, to seep like poison from an untended wound. His black mood was because he wanted, finally, to have it out, to clear the air before they were both in their graves. Pamela sat motionless, her thoughts spinning and meshing like the little yellow jumper in her lap. It was all so obvious – obvious and inevitable. She had been right not to feel safe. How had she ever imagined one could be safe from the consequences of one’s own sin? A revelatory conversation with her daughter, her own guilt and desire for atonement, they were all nothing when it came to the relentless surfacing of the truth. Pamela looked at the open door, then looked away again, dreading the prospect of John, his accusations marshalled, storming back through it. The room was very still. A few more minutes passed and then, slowly, she picked up her knitting and retrieved the stitches, painstakingly looping them back on to the safety of the needle.

Outside, John paused on the doorstep, then headed for the front gate and left towards the garage. He had been vicious, he knew, cruel, even. Yet he had wanted to hurt her. Her serenity, sitting there with her clicking needles, trying to smooth the surface of things as she always did, as if her life were so perfect, sickened him. How dare she chide him for not being more glad? As if gladness was something one could summon with the snap of a finger, regardless of shame, failure and weakness.