Family Album (16 page)

Paul. He has been led astray, undoubtedly. He has fallen in with some bad types at that college place. He has been turned into someone else. This is not the old, known Paul—a bit naughty sometimes but nothing you couldn’t cope with. Evil outsiders have fed him drugs and distracted him from his studies and turned him into a person who takes buses to Bude all the time instead of being part of the lovely family holiday.

Sandra and that boy on the beach.

Katie does not exactly give cause for alarm, but she is disconcerting all the same, in a different way. She is as tall as Alison, she has breasts, she has her own quiet decisiveness. You feel that you can’t tell her what she should do anymore. She has probably already done it, or done something else.

And Gina. The way she
talks
now. Sometimes Alison feels that Gina is in fact much older than she is. Much cleverer. Knows much more. Gina takes Charles on—argues with him, has opinions of her own. It’s not that she’s rude or anything, just that she has become this
person
. This person who seems only tenuously connected to child Gina, and who makes Alison feel inadequate. One is somehow on the edge of things now, trying to get a word in, trying to be listened to. Time was, they
needed
you, even Gina. Now, they do not. They are not just self-sufficient, they have raced off to some other incarnation; there are moments when Alison hardly recognizes them.

Ingrid.

This man. It’s not going to be like that time back then, is it?

Oh, this holiday is running off the rails. She has lost control of it; there are daily subversions, intrusions. After all the careful planning—the house booked way back in
January,
the lists of stuff to bring, the Volkswagen serviced, the rail tickets sorted, the excursions noted.

Alison stands at the kitchen table, rolling pastry and watching the rain that snakes down the windowpane and reduces the hillside opposite to a quivering green blur. At least when it rains you know where everyone is. Paul is still in bed, the rest are scattered around that uncompromising sitting room, walled off from one another by bulbous furniture. Gina has her feet up on a sofa, reading. Roger is on the floor with his nature book and his notebook and one of those buckets that are supposed to be left outside. Katie is writing a letter. Sandra is painting her toenails. Clare is in the only open space, jiggling about to the tinny racket that emanates from the Walkman she has borrowed from Sandra.

Charles is in their bedroom, which has to serve also as his study.

Ingrid is peeling potatoes at the sink and humming to herself. This is not a familiar sound. What has she got to hum about?

Alison cuts the pastry lid to size and fits it over the dish already filled with steak and kidney. She crimps the edge, arranges a pastry flower in the center, slashes a couple of air vents. Then she washes and dries her hands, and takes off her apron.

She walks across into the sitting room; bright, brisk, in charge.

“What about a game of Scrabble?”

Alison and Ingrid are in the kitchen, assembling the next meal. Alison drops her knife; she is on edge, it seems.

She says, “Of course, Jan is charming, but what is it that he does in London?”

Ingrid replies that he is studying.

Alison expresses surprise. She had thought that, well, he’d have a job, he’s over thirty, isn’t he? But of course some people do go on with studying for quite a while. What is it that he studies?

“He is studying linguistics,” says Ingrid.

Alison supposes that Ingrid has, well, seen something of him when she goes up to London?

Ingrid has been going up to London quite a lot recently. It was understood that she had developed an interest in art, and was visiting galleries.

Ingrid says blandly that she has seen much of Jan. “We like to go to exhibitions.”

Is linguistics something to do with art? Alison decides not to pursue this, and also to be cheerful, and neutral. “Well, that’s nice,” she says. “Now, have we done enough potatoes?”

Jan is large and silent. He has blond stubble all over his face and a surprisingly weathered look for someone so devoted to his studies. He arrived riding an elderly motorcycle, on which he and Ingrid sputter off on expeditions, Ingrid clutching a little metal hoop in front of the pillion seat. Jan smiles a great deal but says little. Cornwall is very beautiful, he agrees. Yes, he likes the sea very much. After the initial astonishment at Ingrid’s coup nobody except Alison is much interested in Jan. Most people have other fish to fry.

In a turfy hollow up on the cliff, well screened from the path by some bushes, Sandra loses her virginity. The event is a bit of a letdown: hurried, messy, and faintly embarrassing. She hopes this does not mean that sex is just not what it is cracked up to be, but suspects that he is as inexperienced as she is, though he suggests otherwise. Probably they will get better at it.

Gina is reading, writing, and waiting. She is waiting for the results of her A levels, on which depends her place at York, and in the meantime she is reading
War and Peace,
because this is the last chance—she’ll be too busy from October onwards, possibly for the rest of her life—and she is writing a diary. The diary is not a confessional one but a record of her reactions to current events. She is thinking these days that she just might want to become a politician, in which case she needs to sort out where she stands on various contemporary issues. She is seriously deprived of news material down here; she has her radio but newspapers are hard to come by in Crackington Haven, and she needs print stories. The village shop does not stock the
Guardian,
the few copies of the
Telegraph
have all been snapped up by five past nine, and in any case Gina wouldn’t be seen dead with the
Telegraph
. She asks Paul to bring her back a paper from his forays into Bude, but he usually forgets.

At night, before they put the light out, Gina is at the battle of Borodino, while Sandra is immersed in
Cosmopolitan,
locked behind her Walkman. They get on best if they don’t much bother to talk. Silence can be really quite amicable. And Sandra is in excellent humor. Gina knows why. She knows about Sandra’s boy. You could hardly fail to—they are inseparable, snogging behind the rocks, or mooching around the cliff path. They have been to Bude together—he has his driver’s license, and was allowed to borrow the family car. Bude is where the action is, says Sandra—insofar as you can call it action—in Cornwall.

It occurs to Gina that this is probably the last family holiday, or at least the last in which she will be involved. This time next year she will be a student, and when you are a student you spend the vacation back-packing on the Continent, don’t you? That’s what Paul should be doing, by rights, if he wasn’t grounded because of the fuss at his college place, no cash flow, no option but to stick to home. Gina is sorry for him, but also concerned. He has been on drugs, no question, and probably still is, given half a chance. There was a scheme to find him a summer job, and indeed he did a week stocking shelves at the supermarket at home until he was cheeky to the manager and got fired.

“That was stupid,” she told him. “You should have stuck it out.”

He shrugged. “It was a crap job. What’s the point?”

“Cash,” said Gina. “Gainful employment. It’s what we all have to come to.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Not just yet, for Christ’s sake.” He grinned at her. “How about you take me to the pub after supper? We can tell Mum we’re going for a walk.”

Gina reckons something will have to be done about Paul, sooner or later, but she is not her brother’s keeper, and she has enough on at the moment anyway, what with the looming A level results, and the prospect of York—fingers crossed—and this realization, both heady and sobering, that she is at a brink, that she is about to step into a new world, a new life, in which there will no longer be August in Cornwall, and the smothering embrace of Allersmead.

Katie is worried. She worries about these spots she gets, she worries about her math—she’s sure she’s going to flunk math at GCSE, she worries because Mum’s so het up this summer, not that anyone else ever seems to notice. She worries also about this worrying; she does too much of it, she should be more laid back, like Gina and Sandra, or indeed Paul, who is practically horizontal and that’s not particularly good either.

Mum is in a lather about Paul. He keeps schlepping off to Bude and she can’t stop him. He’s not supposed to have any money but somehow he has; he says he’s going surfing but Paul has never shown the faintest interest in surfing before. So Mum agitates each time until he gets back. Plus, she is for some reason fussed about Ingrid having this man turn up. She is lavishly nice to Jan, and to Ingrid too, but it’s clear enough that she is not happy about things. Does she mind that they are, well, obviously having a relationship? Surely not. Ingrid is a grown-up person, after all, very grown-up you might say. Does Mum think that Ingrid is going to go off? Like that time (which Katie remembers only rather vaguely), and after all she came back, didn’t she?

And Mum is fidgety too about Sandra and her boy. The amount of time they spend together, what they may be getting up to—and that’s clear enough, frankly. They’re doing it; Katie feels pretty sure about that. So of course Mum is in a stew in case Sandra gets pregnant. Katie is a bit anxious about this too. That would be a serious problem. Except that once there was a real-life baby Mum would simply take it over and digest it into the family, wouldn’t she? But it won’t happen, because Sandra will see that it doesn’t, somehow. Girls like Sandra do not get pregnant.

Is Dad even
noticing
any of this? He seems to be aware of Jan, but only because he’s someone different to talk to at meals, except that Jan doesn’t talk back. Dad gives his views on whatever and Jan nods and says, “Ah, indeed yes.” Mum made sure that Dad got drawn into the first row with Paul about Bude but one notes that it is not he who is always asking where Paul is, has anyone seen Paul? Sandra’s boy is not even on his horizon.