Family Album (14 page)

“Actually,” says Sandra easily, “you’ve only thought up this head teacher stuff because you know it would annoy me.”

Ah. A home truth, maybe. Something has happened. Reality has invaded the game. The game has lost its potency, its immunity, the real world has muscled in, asserting itself.

The cellar game is doomed, in fact—the Damoclean sword of time hangs over it. At twelve, Paul is still in there; at thirteen, he will not be. Sandra, a sophisticate, has perhaps already sprung clear. Quite soon, the cellar will become just that once more. The mattress, the packing case, the broken cupboard will sit out the decades—unconsidered, unrequired. The Daleks will sink into the murk of their corner. But the wooden board under the window will continue to record FORFITS and PENALTYS.

 

 

 

 

K
atie does not have eight children. She has no children. Roger is not a British Airways pilot; he is a pediatrician in a hospital in Toronto. Katie has flown up from Boston to see him, because it is his birthday, and she is unhappy—she needs to get away for a couple of days, she needs a quick fix of family, this bit of family in particular. They are having a celebratory lunch in the restaurant at the top of the CN Tower, which is turning out to be a mistake because Katie is finding that she gets vertigo. She has to sit with her back to the stupendous view that is the whole point of the place.

“So adopt, then,” says Roger.

“Oh, we’ve thought of that. Of course. I would, but Al’s not so keen. He feels he might not . . . Oh, I don’t know quite what he feels.”

“You’ve done all the stuff?”

“All of it,” says Katie grimly. “IVF—all that. Every possible test, tried everything. It seems to be me, by the way, not him. Which makes it worse, somehow.”

Roger nods. “Yeah—I can see you’d feel that. Not that you should.”

“You would think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have inherited something of the family fertility?”

“Doesn’t follow, I’m afraid. Actually, come to think of it, none of us has managed to reproduce so far.”

“Gina wouldn’t have time. Can’t see Sandra with kids—they’d cramp her style. Nor Clare. Paul—well, better not, I should think. What about you?”

Roger spreads his hands. “I’m waiting for the love of my life. She doesn’t seem to show up.”

“Sorry to
whinge,
” says Katie. “Enough of that anyway. We’ll get over it.
I’ll
get over it. Al more or less has, I think.”

“There’s a sort of woman for whom having a child—children—is the only thing that matters. I know—I see them. I don’t think you’re like that.”

“I know who was,” says Katie, after a moment. “Mum.”

Roger nods.

“Mum without kids is unthinkable. Whereas Dad . . .”

“We happened to Dad,” says Roger.

“Oh, come on. It wasn’t parthenogenesis.”

“Short of celibacy, I assume he didn’t have much say in the matter.”

Katie looks slightly shocked. “You mean Mum just went ahead and
bred,
for personal satisfaction?”

Roger shrugs. “Maybe. Or just sheer inefficiency.”

“Not that,” says Katie. “It was the more the merrier.”

“Indeed. To a fault.”

They look at each other for a moment.

“Yup,” says Katie. “So was Dad put upon in a big way, or did he—um—fight back?”

Roger is thoughtful. “There is the matter of Paul’s birthday.”

“She was pregnant, you mean?”

“Well, presumably.”

“So?” says Katie. “Accidents happen.”

“Or not.”

“Oh!” she cries. “You shouldn’t say that.”

Roger inclines his head. “It’s been known. An old ploy.”

“But
Mum
. . .”

For both, their parents seem to hover—presences that are entirely known, familiar and also unreachable, enigmatic.

“She had people do what she wanted, somehow,” says Roger.

Katie disputes this. “That’s not right. She wasn’t as
organized
as that. And Dad never did anything he didn’t want to do. He stood on one side.”

“Or found it was the only place to be.”

“That’s not quite how I see it. He went into that study and pulled up the drawbridge. She did everything. She and Ingrid.”

“The harem? Or monstrous regiment of women?”

“Roger,
honestly
. . .”

“Both? I wonder . . . We’re not the ones who can know.”

“We were
there,
” says Katie.

“Six of us were there. Nine. Would we all tell the same story? Take that summer holiday in Cornwall. Crackington Haven.”

They contemplate an August that is dead and gone, but not so at all, shimmering in their heads, and presumably in other heads, an assemblage of fragments, of sea and rock and sand and faces and voices, things said and done, things seen and thought.

“Oh, goodness,” says Katie. “It was one commotion after another. Paul and the police. Sandra going off with that boy all the time. Ingrid’s man turning up.”

“On the contrary, it was an amazing summer. I had that kite. I got seriously into marine biology.”

“Smelly dead things in buckets. That I do remember.”

“Police?” says Roger. “Boy? Man? I do have a vague memory of small local disturbances, on the edge of one’s vision. That’s my point, you see. Your Cornwall evidently was not my Cornwall. Nor, I suppose, was anyone else’s. Mum’s. His.”

Cornwall flickers—an old film rerun, degraded by time.

“So who’s right?” says Roger. “Who sees all of it?”

The rented holiday house has five bedrooms. Paul and Roger must share, Katie and Clare, Gina and Sandra (under protest). Charles and Alison. Ingrid alone has a room to herself, but it is a sliver of a thing, next to the kitchen, perhaps once a pantry. The whole place is overfurnished; hefty armchairs rub shoulders in the large sitting room, you fight your way through a thicket of occasional tables, magazine racks, and ottomans. The conservatory/dining room with a view over the sea has stacked white plastic chairs and a wood table. The kitchen is underequipped, but that is not a problem because Alison has brought her own
batterie de cuisine
—the most cherished pans and casseroles, the knives, the implements. The mattresses on the beds all have plastic covers; Alison finds these offensive and removes them. There is a forest of spider plants on every surface in the sitting room; these she banishes to the cloakroom, which is cluttered with other people’s abandoned rain jackets (torn), beach balls (punctured), and buckets (leaky). Further legacies from previous occupants of the house include a shelf of paperbacks (that Charles inspects with disdain), and detritus such as playing cards that have gotten underneath chairs and cupboards, forgotten shampoo in the shower, magazines, a postcard from Portugal to someone called Ella reporting that Joey can swim now, and a pink cotton sun hat with daisy trim.

Gina considers the magazines, the postcard, and the sun hat and tries to imagine their previous owners: what were last month’s voices like, last month’s faces?

Sandra examines the shampoo, and then bins it: an inferior brand.

Paul finds a bus timetable on the shelf under the telephone, and perks up.

Crackington Haven is a small resort: a scatter of houses and cottages, most of them summer rentals, a village shop, a couple of daily ice-cream vans, an itinerant burger bar. No cafés, pubs, or shopping malls, which is why Alison has chosen it. A lovely, lovely family sort of place, quite unspoiled, off the beaten track, just heavenly sea and the dear little beach and gorgeous walks along the cliffs.

There are a few things she has not reckoned with: that bus timetable, the telephone, other holiday folk.

Roger’s life is hitched to the tides. He needs low tide. He waits—daily, hourly—for low tide. He goes out first thing to assess the state of play. Waves rippling up the beach are bad news: high tide, that will take hours to recede, hours before the rock pools are revealed, hours before he can get out there and get stuck in, eyes down, net in hand, the buckets and the jars lined up on a convenient slab.

In the evening, he pores over the book, the guide to the seashore. He is getting good at identification. He has a notebook, and he lists what he has caught and identified. The daily catch heaves, crawls, and wriggles in the containers that Alison insists must be left outside. In the morning, he returns the lot to their proper environment, but there are often a few casualties. He regrets these, but scientific inquiry necessarily involves a degree of detachment. He is immersed, absorbed, away in an intellectual frenzy. He thinks of nothing but sea anemones and sea urchins, limpets and whelks, shrimps and sea slugs. He has had a red cushion star and a spider crab, a sea lemon and a shore rockling. He is desperate for a butterfly blenny. The guide has put him on his mettle; its illustrations offer alluring creatures that he has not yet met. He must have a rock goby and a velvet swimming crab. Will he achieve these before the end of the holiday? He cannot afford to lose a single moment of low tide, even when it is windy and the kite also calls. The best days are when wind and high tide coincide and he can take to the cliff, with the kite dancing overhead and the sea waiting to be harvested in due course.

Horse mussel? Dog whelk? He squats outside the kitchen door, staring into the bucket, the book open alongside. He hears Alison’s voice, a background noise to which he is impervious, as irrelevant as a bluebottle on a windowpane. “Where is Paul?” she is crying. “Where on earth has he got to? Has anyone seen Paul?”

Sandra has spent the day stretched out on the sand in her pink bikini. When, at points, she becomes too unbearably cold, she sits up and huddles her towel around her, eyes trained on the far side of the beach where the boy’s family is encamped, where he is idly kicking a ball around with a younger brother.

It is working. One has not suffered in vain. He glances towards her more and more frequently. The ball is kicked in her direction again and again. Once, it skims across her legs.
“Sorry!”
he calls. Sandra glimmers at him, sideways.