Family Album (35 page)

The political commentator had broached the subject of marriage. That is when alarm bells ring, for Sandra, even if everything is still satisfactory. The hint of a permanent commitment has her on the alert; she will begin to notice things about him that had seemed unexceptional—his repetitious jokes, the state in which he leaves the bathroom, that jacket. Sex becomes perfunctory. Time’s up.

She throws the English paper into the back of the car, and slots into the traffic. She is meeting an old friend for lunch. She and Mary go way back—they worked together on a magazine. Mary was Beauty Tips; Sandra answered fashion queries. Mary is here for a few days with her husband, who has been sent off to the Sistine Chapel while Mary has a girls’ lunch with Sandra. They have not seen each other for several years.

Mary is already seated, at the restaurant. As she rises to wave, Sandra sees at once that she is pregnant. Good grief! Mary is thirty-nine, and as firmly into child abstinence as herself, Sandra had thought. Over antipasti, it emerges that Mary and James had been having second thoughts, during the last year or two.

“And with me getting so elderly,” says Mary, “it was now or never.”

They are indeed elderly, both of them, Mary and Sandra, in their world. The girls on the catwalks are sixteen, eighteen—washed up by twenty-eight. The photographers—like Mario—are svelte black-clad twenty-somethings; Mario himself is a touch long in the tooth at thirty-three. People over forty are either the editors—the queens of the magazine world—or customers at the boutique, who are rich enough to patronize it either as high earners or funded by a man, and whose purpose is to grab time by the throat and hold it still, to shave off a few years by being thinner, more elegant, more hollow-cheeked, more wrinkle-free.

And now here is Mary, with a bulge of which she is patently proud, a hint of a double chin, crow’s-feet, and her eyebrows all over the place.

“You look fantastic,” Mary says. “That
dress
. . .”

Sandra finds herself oddly discomforted. By the pregnancy? By Mary’s evident complacency? One will say nothing about the abortion, that’s for sure.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Mary. “I was a paid-up member of the child-free brigade, just like you.” She pulls a face. “Something changed. Both James and me . . . So there we are.” She pats her bulge.

Mary is small, neat, and is wearing one of those clinging pregnancy outfits that seem designed to accentuate rather than modify the bulge. Sandra remembers the discreet smocks of yesteryear. Fecundity is to be flaunted, nowadays. She thinks of Alison; perhaps her mother was ahead of her time.

“We’d have liked two,” says Mary. “But we’ll see how it goes with one, first. I was an only and James says I’m self-centered. You had masses of brothers and sisters, didn’t you?”

Sandra smiles. “Indeed. And I’m the soul of generosity and self-sacrifice in consequence. On the contrary—it’s in a large family that you learn to fight dirty and look after number one. I pushed my older sister into a pond when I was seven, it seems.”

“Really? Is that the one who’s on telly sometimes?”

“Gina. Yes.”

“Well, she seems to have done all right, despite that.”

“And we used to go down into the cellar, among the spiders and black beetles, and fantasize. I used to fight my brother over who was James Bond.”

“Bliss,” says Mary. “Heaven. Weren’t you lucky!”

Was I? Were we? Sandra looks across the table at Mary but is transported back to the Allersmead cellar; the murk, the damp, and that atmosphere of thrill and intensity, removed from reality, disbelief suspended, plunged into other worlds, pretense but also not pretense, nothing since has been so all-consuming. Shark-infested seas, wolves howling on the prairie, hunched shadows of the Daleks in their corner. “Eat a spider!” says Paul. Did I?

Sandra shrugs. “Well, I don’t advise six. My mother was . . .” She pauses.

“Frazzled,” says Mary. “Laid out, I bet. No, no—I’ll stick with one. Two conceivably.”

You’ve got it quite wrong, thinks Sandra, but never mind. Neither frazzled nor laid out. Triumphant, on the whole. Fulfilled. Numbers matter—we were her bank statement. Quantity counts. We were the largest family on the street, in the school—in the town I daresay. She was unchallenged. And of course the little local glitch was a family matter. Who was to know? Who does know? Just us—we’ve never gone in for spreading the news around. The family closes ranks. She considers felling Mary with a conversational ace: actually, one of us wasn’t hers.

“You do that,” she says. Suddenly she is bored with all this. She would quite like to describe to Mary the black marble bathroom that she and Luigi have so lovingly designed, but knows better. Property development is not an occupation that impresses others, unless it be other property developers. It is seen as a touch indecent, too commercial, rapacious indeed. As perhaps it is. But she does not feel rapacious. She feels—creative. The bathrooms, the kitchens, the dulcet shades of paint. And the satisfaction when the figures too are creative—when
x + y
has become
x + y + z
. If this is rapacity, then she could make a case for rapacity as an art form. And the money is, after all, mythical money. You never see it, handle it—it merely ticks away on screens. A market trader is closer to the real thing. Even the boutique, where credit cards are flourished. The boutique is commerce; figures do indeed flower. But they do not flower with such simplicity, such elegance.

So she puts her primary concern to one side and allows the conversation to drift, agreeably enough. The meal over, they embrace, and part. Sandra watches Mary make her way along the street, her bump cheerily emphasized by the skintight, wasp-striped top that she is wearing over her jeans. She suspects that she and Mary will see even less of each other in the future.

Few of Sandra’s friends have children. They are childless, like her, by inclination, or frequently, by omission—life has somehow rushed by, too busy, too demanding, and they have never got around to it. In Italy, it is a somewhat unusual position. Children are endemic, here. Well, a Catholic country—most people are at least nominal Catholics. A family of six would be unremarkable. Indeed, you soon realize that Italy is a land of teeming youth—the streets flow with the young, the air rings with their confident voices. The buzz of their scooters deafens you. Youth teems elsewhere. Of course. In Brixton or Bradford or Glasgow. But the young of Italy are more insistent, more pervasive. From the putti that gambol on fountains, that float on ceilings, to the streams of today’s schoolchildren who occupy the pavements, hold up the traffic, the city seems to be in defiant, flamboyant production, regeneration.

My mother would approve, thinks Sandra, held up in revving traffic as a seemingly endless file of pinafored tots is ushered over a crossing. But of course she never came to Rome. They never traveled, did they? No holidays in the Algarve for us.

And anyway, was it that she liked children for themselves, or just her own children as validation, as endorsement, as proof of her maternal prowess? Her own children? Clare? Clare was treated just the same as anyone else, I don’t remember so much as a flicker of discrimination, ever. And of course the facts of the matter were kept under wraps. We were the family, and that was that.

The tots are safely across the street, and the traffic roars ahead, taking Sandra with it.
La famiglia
is pretty sacrosanct in Italy, which is one good reason to keep the involvement with Mario in check bearing in mind that appalling mother. Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not planning to snitch your little boy, and no way would I enter your suffocating embrace. At least my mother doesn’t call up to report that she is about to go to the shops, or that the window cleaner has been.

Sandra is still thinking about family, the family, Allersmead, when she climbs the stairs to her apartment—the apartment that she shares with Mario, for now. The apartment has big windows with a wide view over a park and a slice of golden Rome; it has cool stone floors and a huge pale leather sofa and a low glass-topped table on which there are always flowers. It is stylish, tranquil, there is no mess, no clutter, pictures are precisely hung, the paintwork is in mint condition. It is a million miles from Allersmead.

When Sandra was still at Allersmead, still a child, she had glimpsed such alternative worlds in magazines. The dentist’s waiting room had been a revelation. She had scrutinized these amazing interiors: so this was how people could live. And had known that she would do so herself, in due course.

But the apartment, this afternoon, is overlaid by Allersmead. She wanders around that virtual-reality place, so intimately known—the sitting room with its shabby chintz-covered sofas and chairs, the faded blue curtains, the kilim rug in front of the fireplace, the kitchen with that great battered table, scene of a thousand family meals. She wanders—not in the spirit of nostalgia but of curiosity, of surprise, even. It seems odd that she was ever here, was here for so long, without, as it were, noticing.

But I probably noticed first, she thinks. I remember thinking—we are not like other families, we are not a normal family. Mum and Dad hardly ever talk to each other, and there is Ingrid who is family but is not, and there is Clare. Gina did a bit of thinking too, but we didn’t much exchange views. And by the time I was—seventeen or so—I noticed all the time. Oh, not the decor, the general Allersmead ambience, that was neither here nor there by then—I noticed that this was a pretty weird sort of family, a seriously odd family, a screwball family.

What did I feel? Well, kind of exasperated. I felt sorry for Clare. I thought someone should sit down and talk it through with her. And with the rest of us, for that matter.

Now, I see it all differently. I see three people for whom things had gone dramatically wrong, who probably should never have been together anyway. I see them muddling on, because no one could face up to doing otherwise. Condemned to cohabitation.

The phone rings, and virtual-reality Allersmead evaporates, along with Sandra’s thoughts. That was then, this is now, and now is on the line. Sandra’s deputy at the boutique is unable to mollify a customer whose ordered garment has not arrived when promised. Sandra knows this customer well—the wife of a wealthy industrialist, a woman for whom shopping is a career; you do not offend such customers. She speaks to the woman herself, assures her of immediate, violent action; she is placatory, flattering, unctuous even, and afterwards she is contemptuous—of herself. That woman is a vapid parasite, Sandra despises her, and her like. But the fashion world is full of them—it is for them that the fashion world exists.

That is the problem with fashion. Sandra spotted this long ago, when first fascinated by clothes and what could be done with them. The products of fashion are intriguing and entrancing—the fabrics, the styles, the ingenuity of design. They are craft of a high order, and a craft furthermore that determines what the woman on the high street will look like this year, or next. This manipulation is itself remarkable—that an idea, a concept, a sketch can blossom, can send tentacles worldwide, can decide the contents of a million wardrobes. The whole edifice of fashion is impressive—the way in which a catwalk garment priced for plutocrats will reappear, modified and made accessible to the populace. Fashion percolates downwards, until it becomes relevant to anyone. What a clever trick, and how nicely it thus contrives to make lots of money for lots of people.

And that is the trouble—the people. The consumers on the front line, like the patrons of the boutique, the lettuce-leaf ladies with no thoughts but of self-gratification, and the entire frenetic army of those who cater to them, the task force of designers, and vendeuses, and PR girls and buyers, all of them stupefied by the glamour and significance of their calling.

Such as Sandra? She would admit readily that this was perhaps the case way back, when first she found herself in the heady world of magazines, awed by the brittle, assertive older women and those who danced attendance—the slick photographers, the other besotted acolyte girls. Disillusion set in long ago—it was all right to be a part of all this so long as you stayed sane, and saw it as a sort of lunatic circus, playing to an audience of turnip heads. And the clothes could be mesmerizing—the hang of a skirt, the elegant conceit of a trimming. Plus you have to earn a living somehow.

But today even the clothes are losing something of their charm. Sandra still loves (ah, that labored word)—enjoys—the glorious touch of silk, the pleasure of some new unfamiliar weave, the interest of a clever cut or a challenging design. The fascination persists, if a touch diluted, but there is increasingly the sense of déjà vu, the catwalks have become a yawn, the entourage more and more of a pain. Luigi is better company, marble bathrooms more inspiring.

Well, it is not too late to jump ship. If this current project works out, sells well, and the next—then maybe she’ll say goodbye to the boutique, go all out for . . . marble bathrooms. One might well go back home, to England—rumor has it that you can do well there in the housing market, and she has never seen Rome as more than a phase.

Sandra believes in following her nose. If things become stale, in love or in work, then sniff the air and move on. Twenty years in fashion is perhaps enough. The determined eighteen-year-old who got a foot in the door is someone else; a different Sandra is ready now for change. She remembers her father’s curled lip when she announced that she had a job with this magazine and would be leaving home.

“A
fashion
magazine?” cries Alison. “Well, my goodness, I suppose if that’s what you want . . . But why not go to university, like Gina?”

Because—Sandra thinks but does not say—because that takes three years and I haven’t got the time. And that’s what Gina’s doing, so I am not.

Charles says nothing. He simply looks, which is enough.