Relative Love (76 page)

‘Visit?’ exploded Charlie, flinging the pillow across the bed. ‘You can fucking live here too – all of you. We could divide the place up – give everyone their own patch. It could be a second home for all of us.’

Peter laughed quietly. ‘Now, I’m not sure that would work, old bean. Four families sharing one house, however big, sounds like a recipe for disaster.’

‘I wouldn’t need more than I’ve got already,’ said Elizabeth, in a small voice. She had been kneading Cassie’s hand in hers, but dropped it now to run her fingers back through the straggly mane of her hair, as if she needed a clearer view of Charlie, to whom the statement was addressed.

‘Of course … of course, Lizzy. You could stay in the barn as long as you wanted —’ Charlie broke off and suddenly they were all looking at Cassie.

Slowly, very carefully, she folded her hands into a tidy parcel in her lap. There was a lot to take in and it didn’t seem the moment for complaint. ‘Ashley House matters more than anything,’ she said quietly, aware of five sets of pleading eyes; aware, too, of the huge adjustment this would mean to her own future. She would never have described herself as grasping: she had easily dismissed all Dan’s early concerns on such matters. But the fact of her inheritance had always been there: a buffer between her and possible hardship, more solid than practically any other expectation in her life. ‘It would be wrong to sell this house,’ she added, trying in her heart not to be selfish, to see the big picture. Hadn’t she said herself that Charlie and Serena would be ideally suited to take over Ashley House? Yet all she could think now was that Elizabeth, with the barn, would be all right, Charlie, getting Ashley House, would certainly be all right, and Peter, with all his millions, would be all right. While she, the youngest, would get nothing, except a room for the weekends.

‘Cass, a quarter of this house would be yours,’ Charlie urged, as if reading her mind. ‘You could come and go whenever you wanted. It would be
yours
. Serena and I would just be …’ he groped for the right word, and alighted upon it with triumph ‘… custodians.’

‘And then?’ asked Cassie, doing her best to sound curious and innocent, so that while they might guess at her selfish reservations they would never know the extent of them. ‘What about the next generation? Would it go to your three or to all seven – eight,’ she corrected herself, remembering Helen’s pregnancy, ‘grandchildren?’

‘That will be for Charlie and Serena to decide,’ answered Peter firmly, glancing at his brother.

‘Well, what about a sort of trust thing?’ Cassie ventured next, her voice still steeled with objective interest. ‘So that we’re all co-owners.’

Peter shook his head. ‘Not possible, I’m afraid. No beneficiaries of such a trust could live here without paying rent, set by the taxman according to the market rate. For such a scheme to work we would have to install an outsider, which would rather ruin the point, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes, it would,’ murmured Cassie, glancing at her parents, aware of the indecency of the conversation: they were talking as if the pair of them had already died.

‘I’m sorry, Cassie,’ growled John, who had been watching his youngest anxiously. She was his sweetest, his baby: the thought of leaving her nothing was intolerable. ‘All of you … I’m so sorry.’ Keeping Pamela tucked tightly into the crook of his arm, he reached with his free hand into his trouser pocket for a handkerchief and dabbed his forehead and eyes.

Pamela was too heartened, too proud, for tears. She stared instead at Peter, her firstborn, thinking what a package of surprises each child was, half-way through their lives and still with personalities as deep as conjurors’ hats. She had meant it when she reassured John that their children would sort out the future for themselves, but never, in her wildest imaginings, could she have predicted the solution they were offering. Peter, the most unbending and ambitious of her offspring, in many ways the most blinkered, was being so selfless, so
visionary
. It was wonderful; almost miraculous, in fact.

‘Dad, don’t be sorry,’ Cassie begged, every selfish concern dissolving at the sight of his sad, crinkled face and dabbing handkerchief. ‘I don’t want you to die – I don’t want any of you to die,’ she wailed, looking round the room, then dropping her head into her hands and bursting into tears.

In the kitchen the two sisters-in-law were busying themselves counting plates and pricking sausages, acutely aware of the ticking wall-clock and the tension prowling round them. Both were, in different ways, poorly equipped for the sudden joint exile in which they found themselves. Used as they were to each other’s company, there was no history of natural intimacy for them to fall back on and both felt the lack of it.

Helen, watching Serena glide round the kitchen, her hair falling into her face as she so effortlessly attended to the preparation of the meal, thought how for years she had underestimated her sister-in-law’s strengths, writing her off as unambitious and domestic, not seeing the extent of the qualities behind such characteristics. Armed with her own meticulously organised, career-oriented life, she had, she saw now, always felt faintly superior. A part of her longed to confess to this and also to explain that there was no sense of superiority whatsoever in her and Peter’s decision to hand over the reins of Ashley House, just – on her part at least – the most monumental gratitude. Aware of Peter’s warning about premature discussions, however, Helen said none of these things, confining herself instead to remarks on the fatness of the sausages and silent musings upon the remarkable converging and diverging of fortunes that had shaped the previous twelve months: so much lost, so much gained. Robbed as they had been of dear little Tina, Charlie and Serena would be the ones to acquire Ashley House; whereas she and Peter, on the face of it, had lost a house and gained a child. Synchronicity, symmetry: it was all there if only one looked hard enough. Helen sighed, thinking as she so often did, of Kay, from whom she had heard not a word since her departure for France.

Serena, immersed in mental battles of her own and misinterpreting her sister-in-law’s sigh, decided it was time to make an attempt at clearing the air. ‘About your baby, Helen … Genevieve … I want you to know that I am
so
happy for you and Peter, and more touched than I can possibly say to be chosen as her godmother. It was just the kindest thing to ask me. The last baby in a family is so special too, different somehow – spoilt rotten for one thing.’ She beamed, her eyes shining with tears. ‘As godmother, will you let me spoil her?’

‘Of course,’ whispered Helen, ‘of course. I realise,’ she added, her voice faltering, ‘how hard it must be for you … That us expecting a girl must make you think of Tina.’

Serena, grinding pepper and salt over a pile of hamburgers, looked up, her eyes still sparkling.

‘Oh, but, Helen, you mustn’t mind that. Everything makes me think of Tina. Everything, all the time. That’s how it is. You just learn to live with it and, with time, the living gets easier.’

‘Oh, Serena …’ Helen felt so much compassion she thought she might burst. Instead, throwing caution and Peter’s warnings to the the wind, she blurted, ‘I think it’s lovely that Peter wants you and Charlie to live here, just lovely. I wouldn’t want it any other way.’

‘Really?’ Serena put down the salt-cellar and wiped her hands on her dress. ‘Oh, Helen, what a wonderful thing to say. Thank you so much. I’ve been bursting to talk about it but Charlie said not to until Peter had spoken to John and Pamela.’

Helen burst out laughing. ‘Me, too. Peter told me not to breathe a word.’

They giggled, all the ghostly tension gone. ‘Hey, I tell you what, how about a drink?’ Serena, smiling wickedly, pointed at one of Peter’s precious bottles of Brunello di Montalchino, already uncorked for dinner. ‘Oh, heavens, you probably don’t feel like it, do you?’

‘I was off alcohol for a bit, but not any more. In fact, right now it feels
very
high on my list of needs.’

‘Will Peter mind, do you think?’

‘Possibly.’ They both laughed. Then Helen took two glasses off one of the trays Serena had laid ready for transporting down to the field and held them out to her. ‘Let’s go for it. Mind you,’ she glanced upwards with a frown, ‘I don’t suppose we’re the only ones gasping for a drink. Haven’t they been
ages
?’

‘Ages,’ agreed Serena solemnly, pouring out the wine. ‘Here’s to Genevieve.’ She raised her glass. ‘Your darling little girl and my godchild.’

‘And here’s to Ashley House,’ said Helen. ‘To you and Charlie and Maisie and Clem and Ed being happy here.’

They chinked glasses, then hugged each other, spilling a little wine in the process. The puppy wandering in after a rolling session with Chloë and Roland in the TV room, lapped at one of the little red puddles before sniffing in disappointment and retreating to the sofa where, rather to his surprise, no hand nudged him back on to the floor.

Sid had set the pumpkin lanterns round the barbecue and the trestle table of food, although with the roaring glow of the bonfire there was hardly any need for more light. A brisk wind tore at the grand flames of the fire, making them spark and billow like sails in a storm. Protected by their pumpkin cases, the little candles danced madly, lending an eerie orange flicker to their hollowed eyes and cadaverous mouths. Padded in coats and hats against the November cold, the children munched their hamburgers and hotdogs, mesmerised by the colours of the blaze and its fierce blasts of heat. Behind them the adults, bundled even more heavily against the night chill, sipped their wine, the men manning the barbecue while the women spooned out salad and passed bread and potatoes, breaking off to upbraid any child who stepped too close to the fire.

‘The sparklers – we’ve forgotten the sparklers!’ cried Pamela. ‘Children, would one of you run in and fetch them? I got giant ones this year – they’re in a box on the hall table.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Clem at once, pushing the tail-end of her burger into her mouth. ‘I’ll go, Granny.’ She set off at a run across the field.

Maisie watched till she got to the garden gate, then took off after her. Arriving at the front door a few minutes later, she was greeted by Little Boots, wagging his tail so hard that his entire sausage of a body swung with it, but there was no sign of Clem. The packet of sparklers, Maisie saw at once, was exactly where her grandmother had said it would be, on the hall table next to the telephone. ‘Clem?’ Maisie stood still, straining her ears for any sound. ‘Clem?’ she called, more urgently, walking along the hall and peering into the rooms.

She was stopped in her tracks by the sound of a flushing toilet and her sister emerging from the downstairs lavatory next to the kitchen. ‘Clem?’

Clem read the look on her sister’s face and said quickly – crossly, ‘I wanted to pee, okay?’

‘Sorry … sorry, Clem. Just for a moment I thought …’

‘I know what you thought. It’s okay, I just had a fucking pee,’ mumbled her sister, seeing no need to mention that other possibilities had crossed her mind, as they always did. The desire for physical emptiness was still there, beckoning, tempting, like a dark figure with a crooked finger
at the back of her mind. She resisted it, that was all. And sometimes, these days, between meals, like when she’d been having a laugh with Theo that afternoon, or later, when they were all scrambling round the attic looking for Uncle Eric’s army gear, she even forgot it was there.

‘Sorry, Clem,’ repeated Maisie miserably, ‘it’s only because …’

‘You care, I know. Everybody cares.’ Thinking of Jonny, who also cared but in a completely different and totally exhilarating way, Clem grinned.

‘What?’ exclaimed Maisie, smiling herself at her sister’s altered expression. ‘What?’

‘You might as well know, I suppose … Jonny Cottrall. I’m going out with him. It started at his party and, well … he’s just great … great at kissing anyway.’ Clem peered out impishly from under the thicket of her fringe.

‘Clem – bloody hell!’ Maisie shrieked, so loudly that Samson, venturing out from the drawing room, his green eyes alert for any sign of his new enemy, ran back in the direction he had come from. Little Boots, spotting him, took off in pursuit.

‘Don’t tell Mum and Dad, okay? Promise you won’t tell.’

‘I promise,’ Maisie agreed solemnly, promising also, deep in her heart, never to let her sister know that she, too, had once enjoyed Jonny Cottrall’s kisses. Jonny, she was sure, wouldn’t have mentioned it. And quite right too. Hurtful disclosures never did anyone any good. ‘Amazing about Lucien Cartwright, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed instead, wanting in part to change the subject but also to have a proper talk about Ed’s revelation of this stunning coincidence. The twins had been with their cousins all afternoon and hadn’t had a moment to discuss the matter properly.

‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Clem excitedly, picking up the box of sparklers and leading the way back outside. ‘Do you think he knew who we were when we phoned?’

‘I suppose he might have guessed,’ conceded Maisie, with a frown, having puzzled over exactly the same question herself. ‘I asked Mum about it and she says she knew pretty much straight away who our journalist was but thought it best not to say anything. She also said,’ Maisie added gleefully, ‘that in her view Lucien was the love of Aunt Elizabeth’s life and now that he’s called she’d put money on them getting back together.’

‘In which case we’ll be able to ask him all about it ourselves one day, won’t we?”

‘Not bloody likely.’ Maisie seized her sister’s arm. They had reached the gate to the field. Ahead of them the blaze of the bonfire was once again in full view, the silhouettes of the family moving like shadow puppets across its spitting yellow face. ‘It’s bad enough Mum knowing about that horrible night. I don’t ever want to talk about it with anyone else ever again.’

‘I was only joking,’ Clem reassured her, a little surprised at the note of desperation in her sister’s voice. It made her wonder if anybody ever really got over anything; whether life didn’t just gather bad things in its wake, and all one had to do was learn to put up with them, as she, for ever it seemed, would have to put up with the desire not to eat. ‘Now, come on, Granddad will be starting the fireworks.’ She took Maisie’s hand and they ran back down the field, stumbling among the molehills and grass tussocks.