Family Album (30 page)

She is young—seven perhaps, or eight. They are on a beach, it is the summer holiday, and she is paddling in the surf. She turns and looks back, and sees her parents quite small and far away, sitting side by side on a rug. Dad is reading. Mum is putting sun cream on Katie and Roger. All around are other groups, other families. She sees that the world is made up of families, everyone is thus hitched, thus identified. The beach is composed of these units—self-sufficient, self-contained, alien from one another: the only known faces are those of her mother and her father and her brothers and sisters.

David once said to her, “You don’t need me. You like me—possibly you love me—but you don’t need me.” She heard this as a reproach, a criticism, but knew that he was right, and saw the end of their time together, like a bank of cloud on the horizon.

David is with someone else today. They have a child. Gina sees now that he had needed her, and that this imbalance was at the heart of the difficulties into which they had fallen. Perhaps need is the crucial element in any relationship, the necessary bonding material. Sexual need, emotional need, material need. But both parties must be needy, in one way or another, or things will run amok.

She does not care to assess the levels of need where she and Philip are concerned. Occasionally, gingerly, she squints at her own need and sees it quite emphatic—healthily so perhaps. Him too? No, let’s not go there. Fingers crossed.

“The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife.” She hears that nursery song; you played that game at birthday parties, in a circle, one person in the middle, Mum chivying people into position, the windup gramophone wheezing out the tune (they were the only family still to have a windup gramophone; visiting children gawped). “Everybody sing now,” cries Mum. “‘The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife . . .’ ”

The farmer needs a wife to cook and wash and milk the cow and to provide him with strong farming sons. But the wife doesn’t want him, or so Gina seems to remember, she wants a child—the primordial urge. But actually the wife would have needed him, even if she didn’t want him, because in the early modern period and beyond (Gina’s history module at university prompts her) the position of an unmarried woman was dodgy—you needed a man to supply food and shelter, to give you social status. See Jane Austen, see the plight of girls in the man-deprived years after the First World War.

That kind of need is not much around in Gina’s circle, but it certainly obtains elsewhere. Gina has recorded the dire circumstances of women whose husbands have been slaughtered in Rwanda, in Sudan—women left with a clutch of children to feed and no provider. It prevails indeed in Glasgow or in Brixton. Forget social status, the wife needs a man for sound practical reasons. Only in the clear blue air of well-paid jobs for the girls is that need eliminated.

Gina needs Philip, she finds, but she does not need a child, want a child. Not particularly. If a baby arrived—well then, one would make the best of it, no doubt—end up rejoicing, perhaps. But as it is she’ll pass quite happily, like Philip. Her own mother’s evident lust for children is therefore mysterious to her; she simply cannot imagine feeling like that. She remembers the evident distaste of Corinna—Aunt Corinna—each time she visited Allersmead and had to wade through the melee of nephews and nieces. She didn’t care for children and made no bones about it, thinks Gina. Does that make me like Corinna? Perish the thought. Dried-up academic Corinna—surely I’m more human than that? Corinna was my patron—the Allersmead term for godparent—but her patronage was limited to a book token at birthdays and Christmas, and the occasional display of benign interest since. Journalism is barely on Corinna’s radar—she is impressed only by achievements within her own rarefied sphere. I don’t write studies of nineteenth-century poets so I am beyond her remit. She gave me her own book about Christina Rossetti for a birthday present when I was sixteen: “I feel you’re perhaps old enough for it now, Gina.”

Gina remembers Corinna’s ill-disguised contempt for Alison. Women like Alison were throwbacks, retards, stuck with the mind-set of another age, mired in child care and cookery, not even conscious of the fresh air beyond—that was Corinna’s view. She ignored Mum, thinks Gina, she let Mum wash over her without listening. And, thinking this, she can conjure them up, both of them, they are in her head, clear as clear, she sees and hears them. Extraordinary, she thinks, the way we are stuffed with other people, all milling around in the mind, their faces, their voices, preserved like wraiths, incorporeal but unquenchable.

Alison is at the head of the kitchen table, pouring tea from the big blue pot. She is wearing something made of brown needlecord, one of those waistless garments that she favors; Ingrid makes them for her, from a worn-out Butterick pattern. Her hair flies out in wisps from the bun into which it is unsuccessfully twisted. “Milk, Corinna?” she says. “Do take a slice of the walnut cake.”

Corinna wears a crisp white shirt under a blue jacket; there is a silver brooch on her lapel, a Celtic knot that matches her earrings. Her short straight hair has been cleverly cut. She is talking to Charles, holds out her hand for the tea but does not take any cake. She is telling Charles about her new project on Swinburne: “So underrated, don’t you agree? I’m going to put him back on the map.” She has to raise her voice to compete with the chatter around the table; the family is assembled. Charles is apparently studying his teacup.

Alison breaks in from behind the teapot. “Is he someone one learned by heart at school? I’m hopeless at names. Roger, don’t do that with your feet—we can’t hear ourselves speak. Of course, they don’t learn by heart now but I do think there was a point. I’ve got yards in my head, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck . . . , ’ ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore . . .’—now who was
that
by? You’d know, Corinna. Clare, not sandwich and cake both at once. I do think poetry is so important. You know they write it now in school instead of learning it. Gina did a lovely poem for homework last week, she had to read it out in class. Gina, get it to show Corinna.”

Charles speaks. He says, “No sadism at the tea table, for heaven’s sake.”

Alison frowns. “I don’t understand, dear. Gina, wouldn’t you like to . . .”

Gina glares at her.

“Macaulay,” says Corinna, without looking at Alison, turned still to Charles. “I’m thinking of trying the OUP with this one. Have you published with them? Or maybe they aren’t commercial enough for you?” A roguish smile. “Mercifully one doesn’t have to think about that too much, the priority is a well-produced book, and of course the academic library subscription is guaranteed.”

Charles sends his empty teacup down the table to Alison. “How fortunate. Though those of us dependent on a readership still quite like our books to look nice.”

He is wearing a black sweater over a gray shirt with frayed collar. One arm of his glasses is held on with a piece of sticking plaster.

He floats thus still in Gina’s head. So does everyone.

Gina has not seen Sandra for years. Nor Katie, nor Roger. She talks to Paul quite often, and has always done so. She sees him at Allersmead now, and before that whenever he turned up and suggested meeting for a drink.

When Clare’s dance company—based in Paris—comes to London, Clare too will call. Gina has seen Clare dance a number of times, and is always startled by the lithe professional who has sprung from child Clare, from teenage Clare doing the splits in the Allersmead sitting room. She is startled also by the young woman who talks in a matter-of-fact way of retirement before long. Clare is thirty-two. You burn out around then, in her trade. Clare’s dance company is not that of tutus and Tchaikovsky; hers is the world of modern dance, all shape and style, as far a cry from Diaghilev as James Joyce from George Eliot, thinks Gina, as Picasso from Stubbs. Gina has watched with appreciation, though this would not be her chosen art form. But she likes the grace and athleticism, the inventiveness, the element of shock and surprise. When she spots Clare onstage she sees her as a creature quite unrelated to that once-Clare, that child in her head. And again, over coffee or lunch, that child will be there again, subsumed within this elegant, delicate woman at whom people glance. Thin as string, and that corn-colored hair still swept into a coil on her neck. Ingrid’s hair, but that is never mentioned, not even now, nobody goes there, the matter is sealed up, tamped down out of harm’s way.

“Retire?” says Gina. “Christ! Then what?”

“Teach probably,” says Clare with a shrug. “Retrain as a probation officer?” She laughs. “Go rural, maybe. Pierre fancies a vineyard in Languedoc.” Clare’s partner is an IT consultant. She eyes Gina. “Do you people just go on forever?”

“Dear me, no,” says Gina. “Plenty of ageism in my business. You go on until shouldered aside by the young turks coming up behind.”

“You’re so clever to do what you do.”

“I think you’re pretty smart,” says Gina. They grin at each other.

Clare has just been down to Allersmead. “I can’t believe I was there for years and years. It seems like a foreign country now. They’re just the same, aren’t they? Except a bit kind of . . . faded. Mum kept hinting about grandchildren.”

Gina considers Clare. It is hard to see how a baby could fit into that sparse body. “Will you oblige?”

Clare shakes her head. “Probably not.”

“Genetic drive seems to have died out with our generation,” says Gina.

“Actually, I really don’t much like children. Is that awful?”

“I used to feel the same myself, back at Allersmead.”

They laugh.

“We’re a pretty assorted lot, aren’t we?” says Clare. “Flown off in all directions. All doing quite different stuff.”

“True. It doesn’t say much for our nurture.”

They consider each other, across the table; two women operating in vastly different worlds, but sprung from the same source.

“None of us having kids,” says Gina. “Except possibly Rog, I imagine, in time. Most of us gone global, except for Paul.”

“How is Paul?”

Gina pulls a face. “OK. Insofar as he’s ever going to be.”

Clare sighs. “What happened there?”

A small silence. “Who can say? Nurture, nature? Mum smothered him, didn’t she? The favorite. And he’s—well, feckless, I suppose. And the rest of us are not. And he wound Dad up, so Dad practiced sarcasm on him. Recipe for—well, loss of self-respect?”

Clare nods. “And he ends up the only one still kind of tethered to Allersmead. So are we others flung far and wide because of Allersmead?”

“No. You’re where you are because you’re a brilliant dancer. I’m doing what I do because I stick at things and I’m fairly pushy and I love foreign assignments, and Rog is a career doctor and”—Gina spreads her hands—“we are what we are.”

“All the same, we’ve rather—gone away, haven’t we? So much for family. Mum’s iconic family.”

Mum.