Family Album (15 page)

This is day three. Day one was a dead loss. The beach had nothing to offer but kids building sandcastles, lolloping dogs, and parents erecting windbreaks and staking out territories. She sat morosely on a rock, in shorts and a sweater, glaring at the sea. Other families go to the Algarve, or Majorca, where there’s proper sun and you can get a decent tan;
we
have to come to bloody Crackington Haven.

At the end of day two everything changes. She has spotted him. Eighteen, probably—even nineteen.
Very
nice. Suddenly Crackington Haven takes on a different complexion. The sun is not as feeble as one had thought; the beach and the cliffs are really very pretty. Now it is just a question of the pink bikini, and perseverance.

Katie knows where Paul is. Paul is either in Bude, or on his way there. She knows this because she saw him at the bus stop. “You haven’t seen me, right?” he tells her, and now she is in a quandary, as Alison bounces around the house in escalating distress. Where should her loyalties lie?

Paul is grounded this summer because of the trouble at college. Paul did not make it to what Alison calls “one of the nice universities,” and is doing an engineering course at a place that he says is utterly crap but actually he quite likes it because they leave you pretty well alone. Perhaps in consequence of this there has been trouble. The lower-grade trouble is that Paul has not applied himself, and has failed the end-of-year exams. The higher-grade trouble is referred to by Alison only in whispered asides to Charles, but Katie knows what it is, as does Sandra, as does Gina. Paul has been caught doing drugs. So Paul is grounded for the summer; he has to do remedial studies at evening classes run by the council, and he is to account for his movements. Bude is not accounted for.

Supper is ready and Alison is still keening. In fact, the way things are going, supper will be put on hold altogether and Alison will be on the phone to the coast guard. It is only three years since the episode of Paul and the cliff rescue. Katie realizes that common sense dictates a single course of action: she must shop Paul.

Clare too needs high tide. She needs that expanse of hard wet sand. Even so, she will have to compete for possession with the cricket-playing family and the volleyball lot.

She does handstands. She walks on her hands. She does cartwheels. She wheels over and over until Crackington Haven spins around her, and when eventually she stops, she staggers.

She has made a friend. Emma. Emma is hopeless at handstands and cartwheels but she is an audience, and they are digging a trench, when Clare is through with cartwheels—for the moment.

“So he’s gone to Bude . . .” says Gina. “So? It’s not Las Vegas. He’s
nineteen,
Mum.”

He should have said. He
knows
what the agreement is. What the rules are. He should have talked it over. We could have gone there all together, for a family outing. There’s no need to go off like that on his own. Bude is horrid, by all accounts, crowds of people, and rubbishy shops and bars. You get those leather bikers there, apparently, and goodness knows what else. That’s exactly why we come to Crackington Haven.

The conservatory/dining room reverberates with Alison’s dismay. Supper is being eaten, by those unaffected. “Is there any more?” inquires Roger. Sandra has just realized with disgust that she forgot to take her watch off while sunbathing, and now she has a watch-strap mark.

Gina turns to Charles. “Where do you stand on this, Dad?”

A challenge. Get involved—one way or the other.

Charles appears to reflect. “I have never been to Bude.”

“Oh, you
have,
” cries Alison. “We went there once when the car had to have a new exhaust. But never mind that. It’s the
principle
. He
knows
.”

Gina sighs. We have been here before. Many times. Mum going berserk (and usually about Paul); Dad standing back.

Alison continues, at length. When she draws breath, Charles speaks. He says, “Paul will presumably return, in due course. At that point, there can be discussion.” He puts his knife and fork together, rises, and leaves the table.

Gina watches him. Does he have a point? What is the view from Dad? We hear a lot about the view from Mum, but what does he see? What is there to be seen?

Charles has brought with him on the holiday three boxes of books, his typewriter, and a sheaf of paper. This baggage, along with everyone else’s, Alison’s cooking equipment, Paul’s guitar, and other essentials meant that the family car—a Volkswagen bus that can seat ten—was so crammed that all except Charles, Alison, and Clare had to travel by train.

Charles plans to work, insofar as this is possible. He has always found the summer holiday particularly taxing. He has no dedicated study to which to retreat, he cannot escape from a degree of communal activity (sandcastle building, thank God, is done with), he must take part in outings to places of interest. In fact, he is not entirely averse to these last—a castle or stately home is fine—but the definition of a place of interest is a matter of impassioned argument within the family; he is equally likely to find himself at an ice rink or a funfair. He likes to walk, and does so, though usually alone, since the concept of walking for pleasure has not caught on with his offspring, and Alison finds that she gets out of breath rather soon.

He is forty-seven. Age has never been of great interest, but occasionally he finds himself looking at this figure: an awful lot of life seems to have leaked away. He is reasonably satisfied with his achievements, but has the feeling that his magnum opus is still to come. What will it be? He is known for his range. He is waiting—for a consuming new interest to sneak up on him. In the meantime, there is a thing on the Romantic poets; something of a potboiler, in fact. In the service of this, Charles walks on the cliffs above Crackington Haven, thinking about the Romantic Revival.

Or trying to. But today there are distractions. He is distracted by the view—the serenely sailing fleet of clouds, the soft rim of the horizon on which sits the gray shape of some ship, Tennyson’s crawling sea down there below the cliff. He is distracted by last night’s scene with Paul, which hangs in his head. And he is distracted by thoughts that have no bearing on the Romantic poets but stem from their very existence: the concurrence of things, the fact that the Romantics march on because he and a mass of others are interested in them, Tennyson too for that matter, the sea forever hitched to his words, if you are that way inclined. Concurrence, juxtaposition, the absence of any sequence.

Could the magnum opus be lurking here? If so, it is an effective lurk; Charles cannot see beyond that single intriguing perception. And, oddly, it translates to a vision of his own children, whom he sees suddenly as multiple creatures, each of them still present in many incarnations—smaller, larger, babies, lumpen teenagers, any of them to be summoned up at will.

He contemplates this, picking his way along the cliff path, past clumps of thrift, little thickets of gorse, outcrops like rocky gardens, none of which he notices, locked into these thoughts. It occurs to him that a novelist would make more of this sequence problem, if that is what it is, rather than a serious analytical worker like himself.

Ingrid receives a phone call. She talks for some while in a low voice, in her own language.

Ingrid says, “My friend is in Cornwall and would like to come to stay for a few days. All right?”

“Of course,” says Alison. “How nice. She won’t mind going in with you, will she? There’s that extra foldout bed.”

“He will not mind at all,” says Ingrid.

People stare. Sandra claps her hand over her mouth; she is impressed—well! Who’d have thought it!

Alison blinks. “Oh. Yes—right, then.”

Charles alone does not react. Perhaps he did not hear.

Alison is oppressed by age. Not her own. The children, who are no longer children, except for Clare, and perhaps Roger, who is on the cusp. The others are disappearing over the horizon, and she is aghast. This should not be happening. Not yet. Oh, of course they grow up but somehow one had always felt that that was way, way off. And now, suddenly, this summer, it no longer is. It is not just their size, their new concerns—it is the sense that they are moving into foreign territory, places of which she knows nothing. Once, they were infinitely familiar, predictable; now they are alarmingly volatile, one does not know what they are thinking, or, half the time, what they are doing.