Relative Love (35 page)

‘Did she? Well, she got that wrong. We’re not cross at all. I mean, we assumed you’re coming. You are, aren’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Excellent. Splendid. And how are you otherwise?’ Peter continued, a little absently because he was in fact very busy indeed, acquainting himself with a complicated medical-malpractice brief and because he believed the purpose of his sister’s call had been achieved. ‘Working hard?’

‘Er … yes,’ Cassie lied, winding the telephone flex round her fingers and facing the new and disconcerting fact that no member of her family knew anything about her. Nothing that mattered anyway. She was the busy, independent little sister, the one with the bubbly personality who liked nice clothes and decorated people’s houses. No one, least of all Peter with all his kind but brusque formality, wanted her to be otherwise. If she had confessed that she hadn’t done any work for four weeks due to a state of paralysing misery brought on by the end of an intoxicating, sexually charged affair with a married father of three, he would have been both appalled and utterly lost as to how to respond. Such things were more easily said to strangers, she reflected bleakly, recalling with some shame how her once idle temptation to confide in the unwitting Stephen Smith had become a reality. Finding herself weeping in his arms on the morning of his appearance at her flat, she had told him everything, seeing him momentarily as a safe receptacle
for her sad secrets precisely because he
didn’t
know her. She had felt better afterwards, empty, but better, much as one did after being sick. ‘There was something else I wanted to discuss …’

‘Right-oh. Fire away.’ The junior colleague helping Peter with the new case put his head round the door. Peter held up a hand indicating five minutes.

‘The thing is, I think – that is, I’d prefer it if we actually met. Today, if possible.’

‘Really? Today?’ Peter, his full attention on her now, could not conceal his surprise. His mind scrolled with its usual efficiency through the possibilities behind such an unusual request: money, ill-health or some ludicrous birthday surprise. ‘That might be tricky, Cass … But, of course,’ he added hastily, hearing the intensity in her silence, ‘of course we can meet if it’s that important. You – er – can’t give me any clues, I suppose? Terminal illness, murder – anything along those lines?’ He had meant to be funny but she didn’t laugh.

‘Could you come to my flat after work? I’ll be in all evening … and, Peter, if you wouldn’t mind, don’t tell Helen that you’re seeing me, okay? You’ll understand why after I’ve talked to you.’

‘Bloody hell, Cass, are you okay? I mean, it’s not a bloody illness, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t. Honestly, Peter, I’m fine. I’ll explain everything tonight.’

Cassie put down the phone and surveyed the mayhem of her flat. With an impending visit from her brother – the most fastidiously tidy of all of them – she felt a new compunction to clean the place up. She hadn’t cared a jot about Stephen Smith seeing the mess, but Peter was another matter. She began to empty ashtrays, gather up dirty mugs and takeaway boxes and to make a pile of clothes for the washing-machine, aware that she was attempting in the process to reassemble some superficial but important part of herself. Like the big pink sticking plaster on her left wrist. Covering the wounds and cracks; getting things acceptable on the outside. So that Peter wouldn’t know anything was wrong. What she had to tell him related to the little bundle of letters Stephen had spilled on to her kitchen table, and was shocking enough, without her compounding matters by giving any inkling of her own fragile state.

She took the housework slowly, not wanting to rush herself, knowing that she needed delicate handling. Even the simplest things now required a superhuman effort; phoning her brother, tolerating the grating drone of the Hoover, scraping rock-solid baked beans off a plate – as she performed these tasks Cassie felt that she had to cling to the reality of them to prevent herself subsiding back into the mesmeric state of despairing calm that had propelled her to carve at her own flesh with a scissor blade two days before. The possibility of such behaviour remained, lurking at the back of her mind, a darkness that might swallow her if she relaxed her guard and gave it the slightest chance. Steering the Hoover between chair legs, under the sweep of her curtains, round tables and book shelves, she concentrated instead on the smooth swathes of clean carpet opening like tracks of mown grass in front of her and the fact that Stephen Smith, arriving to show her some letters of Eric’s sent to him by Aunt Alicia, had unwittingly saved her life, both by ringing her doorbell and presenting her with the distraction of an entirely new and perplexing problem. She had watched absently at first, shaken both from her confessional and the secret throbbing of her sore arm, while Stephen pulled the letters out of envelopes and spread them on the table. They were all written on tissue-fine paper in a faint, spidery hand she hadn’t recognised. All apart from one, which was of thicker paper and folded into a much smaller square than the rest and covered in her mother’s unmistakable sloping handwriting. ‘I thought you said they were all from my grandmother.’

‘They are except this one.’

‘I know. That’s my mother’s writing.’

Stephen, who had picked up the letter, dropped it again, catching his breath. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course,’ Cassie murmured, not yet seeing the point and reaching for the letter herself. ‘Is it to Eric too?’

‘Cassie …’ He put his hand on hers, but she pulled back, alarmed by the expression on his face, which looked fearful, yet intensely excited. ‘I found it folded up in one of these others – it didn’t say who it was from,’ he explained, breathless now with anticipation and the general thrill of how unexpectedly well everything was going. She had let him hold her in his arms. She had poured out her heart to him. Some married bastard had rejected her. His timing simply couldn’t have been more perfect. And now, on top of all that, there was this other astonishing thing to bind them. ‘There’s no name at the bottom, you see, I didn’t know who it was from until just now when you …’ but Cassie, absorbed in the letter, wasn’t listening.

Ashley House, 4 April 1955

My dearest, sweetest, darling Eric
,

Every moment of every minute of every hour, I think of you. Going to sleep, waking up, even combing my hair, which always reminds me of that very first time, when you stood behind me and took the pins out one by one, smiling at me in the mirror and stroking my neck. My sweetest heart, the joy you bring me is simply beyond words. I never thought it possible to experience such feelings. And so I want to say now – very quickly because it makes me think of the end and I don’t ever want to think of the end between us – that whatever happens I will always treasure what we have shared. It is utterly beyond regret. Never forget that, my love
.

Always, your little bird

Cassie read it twice, torn in equal measure between a sense of trespass, curiosity and empathy. If she could have composed such phrases she would have done so for Dan. It was love, pure and simple, exactly the mad, raging, all-consuming passion on account of which she herself was suffering so bitterly. The recognition was so strong that, for a moment, she was almost thrilled. Then she remembered her own mother had written the note – to her uncle instead of her father. At which point it occurred to Cassie to inspect the date; she saw that it was three years into her parents’ marriage. When Peter would have been two and Elizabeth a twinkle in her father’s eye. ‘But you wouldn’t use this, would you, for your book, I mean?’ she whispered, the implications of the discovery rippling through her mind.

Stephen, flush with a delicious sense of intimacy – of power – had replied, ‘I don’t know.’

Which was why, after much agonising, Cassie had called Peter.

That Tuesday afternoon Clem took a detour on the way back from school. Her piano lesson had been cancelled, giving her an extra half-hour before she was expected home. Walking into the music block she had spied Jonny Cottrall through a half-open door, playing his saxophone in the school orchestra. He had seen her, too, and made a funny face, rolling his eyes at the music master, as if to say, I’d much rather be out there in the corridor with you. Which, in retrospect, had been an absurd assumption to make, Clem scolded herself, pausing to study some mannequins in a shop window and wondering what on earth she was going to wear for her uncle’s big party. Maisie knew already, of course. Maisie always did. Clem was torn between wanting to show off her new skinny figure (only seven and a half stone on the scales that
morning) and fear that she would receive a barrage of remarks on the subject from her family. Since Easter, when her lack of enthusiasm for her grandmother’s cooking had alerted her mother to her secret campaign to lose weight, she had had to be much more surreptitious – with the consequence that the vomiting, initially a last-resort fall-back position, had become something of a habit. It was so much simpler to keep everybody happy by clearing her plate and then, in the quiet of the bathroom, with the tap running to hide the noise, eject the contents of her stomach down the lavatory. As she had said to her father, she knew all about eating disorders – from what she had read about people like Lady Di, and because they had done them in biology. She knew, too, that it was worries about such things that had prompted her mother to give her a telling-off after Easter. But Clem was equally clear in her own mind that the way she was behaving bore no relation to a disorder of any kind. Quite the opposite, in fact. First, without any shadow of a doubt, she had been overweight (Maisie, her
twin
, had been pounds lighter for years). Second, people with eating disorders were ill and out of control, whereas she, physically at least, had never felt better. For the first time in her life she was totally
in
control, particularly with the vomiting trick. She still didn’t like doing it, but it was liberating. She could eat anything and then eradicate the consequences in seconds. She had got so proficient that she had only to touch the back of her throat with her finger for the familiar spasms to take hold.

Passing the Bay Tree coffee-house, she noticed Maisie and Monica sitting at an outside table, puffing at cigarettes and fiddling importantly with their mobile phones. Clem put her head down to hurry by, but Maisie saw her and waved her over. It was only twenty minutes since school had ended, but she had already put on makeup – eye-liner and lipstick – and pinned up her hair in a new arty way that got it to stick out in all sorts of clever spikes. ‘Are you skiving off your piano lesson?’

‘No, it was cancelled.’ Clem sat down on a spare seat feeling, as she often did with her sister these days, especially when she was with Monica, thoroughly old-fashioned and not wanted. ‘I was just window-shopping.’

‘Right …’ Maisie exchanged a look with Monica, a conspiratorial look, as if, Clem realised, her stomach twisting, they were wondering whether to tell her something.

‘You shouldn’t smoke – Mum’ll smell it,’ she muttered, hating herself but unable to resist making the comment. Their mother was so easily upset, these days – just this morning she had wept because the milkman got the order wrong – that Clem found herself doing everything she could to keep provocation to a minimum. It was typical of Maisie not to care. Typical and selfish. ‘Look, I’d better go. I’ll see you later.’

‘No, hang on, Clem.’ Maisie had ignored the smoking comment, which was unusual, and was looking truly animated. ‘The most amazing thing has happened, hasn’t it, Monica?
Amazing
.’ Her friend nodded eagerly, her bunched curls swinging. Like a dog, Clem thought bitterly, like an obedient, dumb animal, jumping whenever Maisie gave the word. She looked daft with a cigarette too, all awkward and stiff-fingered, pouting her lips round the cork tip, as if deep down she was scared of it, unlike Maisie who somehow, Clem observed grudgingly, smoked like a bloody film-star, sleek silky grey streams slipping through her lips.

‘What sort of amazing thing?’ She put her satchel on her lap and leant on it with a theatrical sigh, determined not to gratify either of them with the remotest inkling of enthusiasm.

‘She’s only got a text message from Neil Rosco,’ squeaked Monica, ‘inviting her to a
party
.’

‘Shut up, Monica – I was going to tell her.’

‘You haven’t, have you?’ Clem looked at her sister in disbelief. ‘But how did he get your number?’

‘I gave it to him,’ Maisie replied archly, ‘that day I went there on my own. He asked me and I said it and he must have remembered it, which is pretty amazing in itself.’

‘But you can’t possibly go – Mum and Dad would never let you.’

Maisie grinned. ‘That’s the most beautiful bit. I
can
go because …’ she paused, still choked with disbelief at her own good fortune ‘… because it’s the same night as Uncle Peter’s fiftieth. Don’t you see?’ she exclaimed fiercely, annoyed at Clem’s blank stare, which wasn’t at all the response she had hoped for. ‘With all that going on, no one will notice if I slip away for a couple of hours.’

‘Oh, but, Maisie, you couldn’t possibly —’

‘Oh, yes, I could.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and folded her arms, sticking out her jaw defiantly.

‘Oh, fuck, there’s my mum, I’ve got to go,’ bleated Monica, ducking down and scrabbling for her schoolbag. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ The sisters watched her race down the street, then turned to face each other again.

‘You’ll never get away with it,’ whispered Clem. This was too much, she could feel it in her bones. Smoking and tarting up was one thing, but this was something else, something way off the map.

‘Oh, yes, I will,’ said Maisie slowly, leaning across the table so Clem had to look at her. The black eye-liner was in heavy wide lines across her upper and lower lids. It made her eyes, which were impressively large and green anyway, look like two vast orbs; fascinating but also horrible. ‘Oh, yes, I will,’ she repeated, ‘if you help me.’

‘Me? How on earth …?’

‘By covering for me if anyone asks.’