Family Album (8 page)

“I was about to say—this book, which I daresay you will not read—happens to be nearly finished. I am on the final, crucial, stretch.”

“What’s it about?” says Alison.

Second time today, that question. “It is about . . . concepts of youth, of the young.”

Alison laughs.

“An amusing subject?”

“Oh no,” says Alison. “Just that it seems rather suitable.”

They eye each other.

“I have children,” says Alison. “And you have books. Except that of course you have children too.”

“Of course.”

The dark presence hovers.

“Fortunately,” says Alison, “I love children.
Any
child.” Her gaze is now intent.

Charles looks away. “Indeed you do.”

When Alison came into the room she was panting slightly—bothered, disordered. Now, she has cooled; she is stiff, contained, she is not her usual self at all. No wonder that Charles seems uneasy.

“Alison,” he says, “I realize you’re having a difficult day. These things will sort themselves out, I’m sure.”

Alison smiles now—a small, unedifying smile. “Oh yes. Things do, don’t they? Even the most tiresome things. I’ll leave you to your book.”

Alison goes. Charles blinks, frowns. He stares out the window, and then at the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Minutes pass. He begins again to type, haltingly at first, then more fluently. With an effort, he recovers his train of thought, and once again becomes impervious to the world. Half an hour goes by. He is unaware of Alison going up the stairs, and stopping for a moment to talk to Gina. He is unaware that Ingrid and the children have returned, loudly welcomed by the dog.

In fact, Charles is deaf. He has to be. He has trained himself in deafness. Within his study, he switches over to deaf mode, and the house obediently recedes. He does not hear cries, shouts, the thud, thud of the stairs, the phone, the dog.

Accordingly he does not, after a while, hear Ingrid’s knock. Nor does he hear when, eventually, she comes into the room. Just, he hears what she says: “Shall I bring you tea?”

He does not look up. “Mmn? Oh—yes. Yes, do.”

Presently, a mug arrives beside him. He types, halts for a moment, reaches for the mug, drinks, types on.

Ingrid stands there. After a moment, she says, “I am a servant.”

Charles does not at once hear that. Then an echo reaches him. In the echo, it is not quite clear if Ingrid has put a question or made a statement. Charles’s attention is caught by this ambiguity as much as by the content; he is something of a pedant. His hands leave the keyboard. “Don’t be silly.”

“It is true,” says Ingrid.

Charles sighs. “Oh, come on, Ingrid. Don’t be like that. Have the children been playing you up?”

“The children are like always.”

Ingrid continues to stand, slightly behind Charles’s chair. He is obliged to swivel in order to look at her. Her face is, as usual, short on expression, but there is something in her eyes that has him seeking cover. He turns away.

“Look,” he says. “You know we . . . You know I . . .”

“I do not know anything,” says Ingrid.

Charles frowns. “Oh dear, I’m sorry you’re feeling like this.” His hands drift back to the typewriter. But something else has stalked into the room, alongside Ingrid. Discomfort looms. “Ingrid, I’m in the middle of something just now,” he says. “Where’s Alison?”

“I do not know. I think she is upstairs.”

Silence. Ingrid does not go. Charles lifts a page from his piled typescript, puts it down again, waits, glances around, and meets once more Ingrid’s cool blue stare.

“Ingrid,” he says. “Really—I don’t know what I’m supposed to . . .” His voice trails away.

“I know you don’t know,” says Ingrid. “You do not know, and I do not know.”

She leaves the room.

Alone, Charles glares at the sheet in the typewriter. He glares, scowls, types furiously for about twenty seconds, and then stops. He is finding that he is no longer deaf; he can hear kitchen noises, a child yelling to another child, the slam of a door. The house seethes around him, the world is too much with him, what is a man to do?

It is now late afternoon. The light is softer, the shadows longer; everyone is home and the house is alive with activity. Paul has failed to locate any of his friends and thunders up the stairs to his room, where he flings himself upon the bed for a bout of morose self-pity. Gina takes her letter to the postbox on the corner. Katie and Roger are playing in the garden, with Clare trailing around after them. Sandra is back from the shops, in possession of some satisfactory loot, and a new hairstyle. Alison and Ingrid are in the kitchen, starting to prepare supper, both of them unusually quiet.

Charles struggles for an hour. He has dried up. He types, and then throws away the sheet, types some more, and wastes another sheet. He cannot recover that productive flow. At last he gives up. He shuffles together the completed pages, frustrated. He must get out, walk for a while. Perhaps that will clear his head, but he suspects that the rest of today will go down the drain. He had hoped to get far into this chapter.

He goes into the hall, and puts on his coat. The dog nudges open the study door, and climbs onto the leather armchair, a favorite refuge. Charles goes through the kitchen to fetch his keys from the dresser hook where all household keys hang. Both women glance at him but do not speak.

Charles says, “I am going out. I may be some time.”

As he crosses the road, he hears his own voice again, and his words sound a touch inappropriate: he is not leaving a cabin in the Antarctic in pursuit of a heroic death, he is merely escaping briefly from his family. That said, there is no chance that either Alison or Ingrid will pick up on the reference.

Charles walks purposelessly around the neighborhood, trying to focus upon the rest of his chapter, to marshal material and arguments, to work out the thread of the thing. Various neighbors notice him—that man who lives at Allersmead, with all those kids—but he is not much aware of others. Some people know him as Alison’s husband—Alison is more gregarious—and remember that they have really never exchanged more than two words with him. What is it that he does? Works at home in some way, it seems. This sets him apart from all those who have offices and working hours, and provokes mild contempt or suppressed envy, according to inclination. Whatever, he is perceived as somehow not a chap you’d have a pint with, or a chat about the local council’s latest cock-up. One woman eyes him and thinks furtively that he is rather good-looking, a bit like that American writer who married Marilyn Monroe, but the wife at Allersmead is no Marilyn Monroe—oh, dear me, no.

In fact, Charles is not in this affluent English suburb on a spring evening in 1982, but amongst the Bushmen of the Kalahari, to which he has never been, and in an Israeli kibbutz, and scrutinizing the lifestyle of seventeenth-century French peasantry, and casting a speculative eye on the family of Queen Victoria—didn’t some rather odd child management go on there? He is getting back into the chapter, this walk is doing him good, the malaise of the last hour or two has eased. He wonders what Alison has for supper. He thinks that he might be able to get back to his desk later—he often finds the evenings conducive to work.

Macaroni and cheese. He recognizes supper as he comes in through the front door. A favorite with the children. He turns into his study, minded to make some quick notes.

At once, as he steps into the room, he knows that something is awry. There is a sense of invasion, of disorder. The dog flops off the armchair, tail wagging. But the dog is not at issue. Charles has seen now—he has seen the floor, the desk.

Paper. But paper as paper should never be. What he sees is paper in ribbons, in shreds, in a blizzard of long white fragments—a spaghetti blizzard of paper, spread out on the carpet, sliding from the desk. A paper storm that has replaced the neat pile of typescript that he left.

He flings himself upon it. He finds some intact pages beneath. But much is blitzed, blasted, scissored into a porridge of white strips on which dance bits of words, letters, punctuation marks. There can be no recovery, no first aid, whoever did this was assiduous.

Charles grabs a handful of paper and bursts into the kitchen. The family is assembled, most already sitting at the table, Alison at the cooker in front of a steaming dish of crusty golden macaroni and cheese. She turns: “
There
you are, dear . . .” Then she stares:
“Oh . . .”

“Who?”
roars Charles. “
Which
of you?” Strips of paper stream from his fist. Every face is now turned to him. All are apparently amazed, aghast.

“Who?”
demands Charles—calmer now, intent, focused. “
Who
has been in my study and cut up my typescript?” His gaze sweeps across the eight faces, and there floats through his head the realization that today he has offended at least four of those present; four have looked at him with eyes that registered—at that particular moment—deep resentment.

Silence. Alison’s hand is apparently frozen in midair, serving spoon in hand. Paul is looking out the window. Gina stares at her father. Time is suspended.

Clare says, “Aren’t we going to have supper now?”

 

 

 

 

“D
id you do it?” asks Philip.

“No.”

They are in the flat, in bed. Gina stares at the ceiling.

“So who did?”

“Actually,” she says. “I don’t know. Perhaps Paul. Maybe not Paul.”

“Haven’t you ever asked him?”

“We don’t discuss it,” says Gina.

“Why ever not?”

Gina shrugs. “Who knows?”

There is a pause. Philip says, “It has its funny side. In retrospect. Not at the time, I imagine.”

“No. Nobody laughed, I can tell you that. No way.”

Philip considers. “Sandra? She comes across as a bit . . . devious.”

“No. She wouldn’t have been interested in something like that.”

A further pause. Philip is evidently intrigued. “An adult? Surely not?”

“Ingrid or my mother?” Gina is impassive. “Not inconceivable.”

“Whew! That would put an interesting spin on things. Actually I reckon it was the kids—Katie and Roger. For a laugh.”

Gina shakes her head. “Katie and Roger were the good ones. And Clare was only five or six.”

“Did he publish the book?”

“Oh yes. It did rather well. He was much on Radio 4, talking about the cult of youth.” Gina smiles.

“And meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . Tell me more. Sometimes I think you hold things back.”

“Of course,” says Gina.

He turns his head to look at her. “Aha. I thought so.”

“And anyway, I don’t know it all, do I? There were six of us. Eight, with them.”

“And Ingrid. Nine. I take your point. But at least I can have one version.”

Gina now looks at him. “Why are you so interested?”

He grins. “It’s happy families, isn’t it? Everyone’s fascinated by someone else’s family. And it’s
you,
far as I’m concerned—it’s where you’ve come from.”

“Ah,” says Gina. “I see. You’re after insights. Why I’m how I am.”

“Nothing so vulgar. I just want the fuller picture. What you’ve got in your head.”

“Oh,
that
. Untransferable, fortunately.”

“When did everybody go? I mean, by when?”

Gina reflects. “In dribs and drabs. Me first, in fact. But there was never a finite going. There were compulsory attendances. Christmas. Anniversaries. Their silver wedding. That. Oh yes, that.”

“Some people I don’t see very well—they’re in the shadows. Katie, for instance.”

“Katie was kind. Is, I suppose. I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

Her present to them is a silver bowl, bought in the Saturday antique market. She went there specially, searching, two Saturdays running, and it cost more than she can afford. She will have to cut back for a while, though there is not much back into which to cut. Her student grant is rapidly eaten up, and the bit extra that she has from her parents doesn’t go far, and of course they can’t do more, not with Roger and Clare still to come.

She has wrapped the bowl in blue tissue paper, with a little silver label that says “For Mum and Dad with love from Katie.” It is in her backpack, up in the rack, and from time to time she glances up to check—the train is crowded, someone might grab it.

She is having to miss her best friend’s birthday party. Oh well. Can’t be helped. All the same, she thinks about this, right now, and that Mike, whom she is beginning to rather like, would be there, and so will Sophie, who also rather likes Mike. She tries to shake off this thought, and stares at the window, beyond which twilight landscape rushes past, overlaid by her own face—a small, worried-looking face framed in untidy curly hair, looking both familiar and profoundly unfamiliar. Katie is sometimes astonished to be twenty; part of her seems to be eight, or ten, or twelve, at Allersmead still, everything going on there as it always had. She can feel almost guilty, waking up in her room in the hall of residence—someone else.