Relative Love (20 page)

During the two weeks of inclement weather, access to Barham and the rest of the world had remained possible, thanks to his Range Rover, but because of the hazardous conditions he and Pamela had kept their sorties to the minimum, buying basic supplies and retreating to the house. Compared to many they had managed comfortably enough: the phone had been down for a while, but there was no shortage of dry logs for the open fire and they had enjoyed many meals in front of the TV, sipping wine and tutting at the images of the weather-induced dramas flickering across the screen. Belying such scenes of cosy domesticity, however, the atmosphere between them had been heavy with the ache of isolation, as nagging and constant as the pain at
the base of John’s spine. It had felt sometimes as if they were the last two old people in an old world. This was partly because they were marooned by the snow, but mostly because of the grief that, weeks after their granddaughter’s funeral, still hung round the beams of Ashley House and their own withered necks like an invisible lead weight. Their silences, usually so companionable, were heavy and unrelaxing.

Outside, the blanketing whiteness reduced even the most intricate shapes to lumpy masses, at times appearing to be smothering the earth, pressing inwards as if bent upon crushing the life out of everything in its path. As he dragged Boots round the grounds on their daily walk, the monochrome landscape was so unrelentingly dense that at times John struggled to distinguish the usually solid slope of the South Downs from the snow-laden sky overhead. The glare made his eyes sting too, so badly that he had taken to wearing an old pair of Pamela’s sunglasses whenever he ventured outside, not caring that the huge wing-tipped frames made him look camp and comical. As he stepped forward to greet the plumber on that Tuesday morning, he took them off, causing his eyes, with depressing inevitability, to flood with tears. It took several trumpet blows into his handkerchief before he was capable of speech. ‘Good of you to come. It’s over here. Watch your step, it’s devilishly slippery.’ He stood to one side while the man fitted and lagged a new shiny section of brass piping along the garage wall, fiddling with the sunglasses, which had a loose arm, and casting meaningful glances at his watch (he knew how these chaps dawdled to boost their fees). Afterwards he paid by cheque, pressing awkwardly on his knee to write it and shaking his pen several times to keep the ink flowing. After the man had gone, John fetched a spade from the garden shed and set about chipping the ice off the driveway, knowing in his heart that it was futile, but driven by some deep conviction that effort on any level was better than surrender.

‘Are you still going to go?’ Pamela set a cup of tea in front of him and turned back to the sink, running a cloth round the already gleaming stainless steel. She was bursting to reprimand him for chiselling at the ice with his fragile back (she had seen from the kitchen window, her heart wrenching at each hurl of the spade), but instead directed her criticism at his plan of taking the train up to London, an idea against which she had been chiselling, in a rather subtler manner, for days. He was due to meet Peter – and Charlie if he could get away from work – for lunch, before joining a gathering of ex-Lloyds colleagues at his club.

‘Yes. I see no reason to cancel. Most of the main roads are fine now. According to that plumber a proper thaw is on the way. I shall catch the eleven-twenty.’ John spoke quickly, swinging each sentence like a bat at a ball. He hated her disapproval. He also hated his own guilt at being so keen to get away. ‘Life goes on, Pammy,’ he added, more gently. Although her back was to him, he saw her shoulders tense. The hand working the cloth round the taps stopped.

‘Yes, John, I know it does.’ She folded the cloth into a neat rectangle and draped it over the edge of the sink before turning round. ‘Well, if you are going, perhaps you could take a jar or two of marmalade. I’m sure Helen and Peter would like some and I did promise Serena … that is, if Charlie turns up. It’s the new batch. I’ll wrap them and put them in your briefcase. It’s only a little thing but …’ Her voice tailed off.

She felt helpless, he knew. So did he. Marmalade wasn’t much consolation for a lost child but, then, nothing was. She had been to Wimbledon herself to see Charlie and Serena once since the funeral – before the onslaught of the virulent weather – taking with her all sorts of gifts for the children and several foil-wrapped parcels of food for the deep freeze. Since then all offers of
such active intervention – further visits, children for the weekend – had been gently refused. Regular phone contact reported that Charlie was more in the thick of things than ever at work and that Serena was doing well with the support of local friends but thinking of seeing a bereavement counsellor. The three children missed their little sister, but were fine otherwise. ‘Marmalade. Of course. No problem.’ John, detesting the idea of carrying the jars in his briefcase, however securely wrapped, rose stiffly from the table with his mug of tea. ‘I’ve just time for a bath.’

An hour later he was on the train, speeding through the snowy wastelands of the Home Counties towards Victoria, his heavy briefcase on the seat beside him, his heart shamefully light. The prospect of some male company presented him with much-needed respite from Ashley House. It would be good to see his sons too. Grief-stricken though they all were, John knew that being with them would be easier than being with their mother – or any of the women in the family – around whom the air was so thick with emotion that it was hard at times to breathe. As men they would give each other space, talk round the subject instead of wading through the middle of it. And afterwards he could relax properly with a glass of port and some business chat with his old chums. He might not even mention Tina. Not because he didn’t care – Christ, he cared – but because he needed time out, and if he told them what had happened they wouldn’t be able to give it to him.

After the Range Rover had disappeared round the bend in the lane Pamela stepped back from the window and put the kettle on. She hadn’t wanted John to go, but now that he had it felt okay. Good, even. She made herself some milky coffee, put the radio on and settled to the task of labelling the rest of the marmalade jars and checking that the rubber bands were tightly sealed round their blue gingham lids. When she had finished she arranged them in lines on the largest of her trays and carried them carefully into the larder, managing not to trip on the little step down (where John, in spite of so many decades of familiarity with all the foibles of the house, regularly stumbled) and transferred them one by one to the top shelf, next to the cluster of little jars that contained the quince jelly. Then she fetched the diary from the shelf next to the sofa and slowly turned the pages, checking what had to be prepared for in the weeks ahead. Easter. She would cook a goose, as always, paint funny faces on eggs and hide foil-wrapped chocolate bunnies in the garden for the children. And then there was Peter’s fiftieth, scheduled for the end of May, the children’s summer half-term. She had promised Helen to look into the cost of marquees and to check out some local caterers. She would phone Marjorie Cavendish who had organised something similar the year before for her and Geoffrey’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Or had it been their fiftieth? Not knowing caused Pamela a stirring of unease. It was such a simple fact and therefore unforgivable to forget it. They had given the Cavendishes a cut-glass fruit bowl and been to the party, where they ate lobster (rather chewy) and waltzed, with some trepidation, on a wobbly wooden dance floor.

Forty or fifty? Pamela frowned as she continued to ponder the question, unable to turn another page until she had resolved it. And during those moments, the melancholy, which had been waiting in the wings all morning, saw its chance and swooped, obliterating the hitherto interesting words of the woman on the radio and her own thoughts about anniversaries and jam-jar labels. If John had been around there would have been a chance of deflection, or dilution at least. But Pamela was alone and there was nowhere to hide. As if to verify this, she scurried out of the kitchen, along the hall, into the music room, into the study, into the drawing room, then
back into the hall, and stopped in front of the large gilt-framed mirror. Her bun perched with its customary precision on the crown of her head; her eyelids, dusted as always with a fine pale blue powder, hung heavily over the still vibrant blue of her eyes; her lips, virtually without lipstick, thanks to the coffee, looked thin and drawn. Pamela pressed the palm of her right hand to her mouth as the first real tremors of distress took hold, tugging at the corner of her lips. She was sad because of Tina, she reminded herself. Little, chunky-legged Tina, so robust and loud, yet so completely fragile. And because of Serena, glassy-eyed and distant, floating round in a bubble of private misery, which hurt Pamela all the more for being so familiar.

The funeral, which had taken place against Charlie’s and the rest of the family’s wishes, in the windswept Cheshire parish where Serena’s mother had breathed her last, had been surreal in its awfulness. The tiny white coffin with brass handles, carried by Charlie and Peter, one shoulder under each side, toppling slightly because Peter was taller, had looked like a toy, a mockery of the real thing. Behind it, shuffling but dignified, their faces pinched and pale against their black outfits, Serena and the other three children had held hands in a line, gripping each other as if staying upright depended on it. The girls, like their mother, were in hats, their eyes hidden under the brims, making Ed’s startled misery all the more exposed and brave. They were a strong family, the vicar said, and would pull through. Theo, in his squeaky vibrato, read a poem: ‘You are not gone for ever, You are just ahead, a flower in another world.’ Peter, looking ashen but resolute, immaculate in his dark suit, had stepped into the pulpit and spoken about his niece in strong, determined tones, reading words that Serena and Charlie had composed, relating Tina’s countless endearing ways, her early capacity to sleep long and soundly, her love of chocolate yoghurt, her stubbornness, her serenity in the still hours of the morning when she woke before the rest of the household and lay whispering baby nothings to her dolly. The poignancy of it had been almost unbearable. Unbearable and unreal – but not unreal, because it hurt so much.

Pamela, in a front pew among the rest of the family, her face behind a dotted black veil, had concentrated hard on dignity and strength. Beside her John had wept, silently but for one blow of the nose, which he timed to coincide with the start of a hymn so as to have the foghorn blast drowned by the swelling chords of the organ: ‘When I needed a friend, were you there, were you there?’ Many choked at the task of singing, but Pamela had found her voice flowing. Not because she felt the comforting presence of the Lord (she didn’t), but because, with so much evidence of desolation in the family, she had been overpowered by the need to hold them together. Everywhere she looked handkerchiefs were pressed to crumpled faces. Cassie, standing on her left, was so overcome that she dropped to her knees, burying her face in her hands. Even in the midst of the trauma of it all, Pamela found a small moment in which to be amazed at this disconsolation of her youngest, usually the least sentimental of all of them and certainly the least engaged by her posse of nephews and nieces. Pamela, keeping her right hand in John’s, had reached out to stroke Cassie’s head, for a moment almost exhilarated at this physical chain-link of support fusing them all together, with her – the lynch-pin – in the middle. The family. It was everything.

After the service there had been a subdued reception in the soulless modern box of a parish hall next to the church. Pamela, catching Serena in a rare moment alone, had ventured, at last, to tell her about Miranda, ‘Of course it’s not the same, I know, and it was a very long time ago, but it was a huge … bereavement.’

‘Poor you, Pam, I’m sorry.’ Serena had spoken mechanically, too drowned by her own emotions to feel anything on her mother-in-law’s behalf.

‘I know it’s not the same,’ Pamela repeated. ‘I mean, it was just a very late miscarriage … no funeral or anything – not like there would have been these days, time for proper mourning and so on …’

‘Well, I’ve got that at least – a funeral, time for proper mourning.’ Serena’s voice trembled.

‘My dear, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel worse.’

‘Worse?’ Serena looked at her in disbelief. ‘Worse? You can’t do that. No one can. I feel worse than worse. Look, Pam, thank you for telling me – I appreciate it. Really, I do.’ Charlie had shuffled up then, looking dishevelled in spite of his smart suit, his eyes darting and anxious, one hand gripping an empty glass, the other clutching a full plate of miniature sausage rolls. ‘Mum?’ He held out the plate with a look of such pleading that Pamela took one, forcing dry pastry between her lips and chewed clods down her throat. Serena just stared mutely at the plate, shaking her head.

As a child Pamela had sometimes scotched the self-indulgence of tears by watching her face in a mirror as they started to spill out of her, shaming them out of existence by the ugliness, the sheer silliness, of the sight. She tried the same trick now, aged seventy-three, standing before the mirror in the hall of Ashley House, her face powder glistening on her cheeks and in the small purple pockets under her eyes. But the unhappiness was beyond containment. Not seeing well for tears, she turned away from her reflection and made her way towards the music room, groping blindly along the wall, then bumping into the music stool before she managed to sit on it. She didn’t play much now. Her fingers were stiff and uncooperative, the tunes, so clear in her head, faltering and amateur when she tried to translate them to the keys. Elizabeth had been the talented one, but she had turned the talent into a labour, stopped loving it. Pamela chose a Beethoven prelude she knew by heart, playing with her eyes closed, missing notes, but moving on, trying to vent her emotions through the tune. She played badly and hated herself for it. The joints in her fingers felt old and unwieldy and all she really wanted to do was claw her thin silky hair from its prim package and hurl herself on to the carpet. She wanted not a tune but an explosion that would release the madness of her misery and shatter the ordered sanity of her life. She wanted, above all, to race upstairs, up all three flights to the top floor, along the landing to the door with the stiff handle that led into the eaves of the attic and the little leather suitcase full of baby clothes. Miranda’s clothes. Unworn, unstained, smelling not of talc and milk but of mothballs.