Relative Love (5 page)

‘Darling? Everyone’s standing.’

‘Sorry.’ Colin gripped the back of the pew in front and hauled himself to his feet, smiling in fierce defiance at the embarrassment of having been caught one step behind.

Roland dreamed he was swimming. It was mostly a nice dream; scary, because the water was dark and cold, but nice, because he was gliding and weightless and because although he had been holding his breath for hours it didn’t hurt. In the water he was strong and powerful. Like a fish. Like Theo and Ed who had races across the lake in the summer, not minding its iciness or the thought of the creatures underneath; nameless, shapeless slimy things that brushed against one’s shins and toes. In the dream the water was getting less dark but colder too. He was swimming towards something, a light, maybe. And he wanted to reach it badly, so badly that it hurt but felt wonderful at the same time, just knowing that he was going to arrive there, if only he could hang on a little longer. And then his lungs started to hurt and his tummy too, and he wanted to cry out but no sound would come because he hadn’t reached where he was going. Just as he thought he would explode with aching there was a sense of wonderful release. A moment of relief followed before he was suddenly wide awake, with the tick of the clock on the bedroom mantelpiece and a terrible warm wetness between his legs. His pyjama bottoms, sheets and even part of the pillow case were soaking. For a few minutes Roland lay very still, torn between the urge to cry out for his mother and a gut-wrenching sense of shame. He had wet his bed before and been told, many times, by Elizabeth that it did not matter. That it was something some children did, that sheets could be washed, that it was just something that happened from time to time. But it did matter, Roland knew, because of his father’s jokes about putting him back in nappies and because on the rare occasion he had been invited to stay overnight at friends’ houses he had refused for fear of
committing the same crime in another family. It was a few minutes before he had assembled his thoughts sufficiently to recall that he was at his grandparents’ house and it was Christmas Eve.

Trying to ignore the wetness of his pyjamas and bedclothes, now horribly cold and sticking to his skin, he gingerly slid his feet from side to side, searching for the weight and rustle of a full stocking, unsure if he wanted it to be there or not. If it wasn’t there his parents had yet to come in. If it was they would be asleep in the next room, beyond consolation or disapprobation until morning. Roland wasn’t sure which would be worse. He could feel nothing with his feet so he gripped the edge of the bed and peered over the side. Because of being ill he had been put on his own, instead of sharing one of the lovely big top-floor bedrooms with Ed and Theo. This room was square and very small, having once served as a dressing room to the bedroom next door where his parents were. There was just enough space for the bed, a chair and a small chest of drawers, on top of which sat a large white porcelain bowl with a matching jug. They had been for washing in the olden days, before taps and basins, and he was to be careful not to break them, his mother had explained, as she folded his clothes and tucked him up. Roland, his head thick with his cold and a sense of gross injustice at being herded into bed before even the youngest of his cousins, had said he thought it was dumb that a jug and bowl could be so special. But now, seeing the white glow of the porcelain in the dark, he thought it did look sort of special and, if he screwed his eyes up, like a huge white bird, a ghostly swan, gliding through the pitch black of the room. Below, propped against the chest of drawers, was his small holdall of clothes; and leaning against that, he saw suddenly, his heart clenching, was a bulging version of Uncle Eric’s large woollen sock (one of several relics from his days in the army, which traditionally served as Christmas stockings for all the grandchildren), which had been draped across the end of his bed a few hours before. Which meant his parents were indeed asleep on the other side of the connecting door. Roland toyed for one last brief moment with the idea of fetching his mother, then decided finally against it. She would be kind – she always was – but his father would be cross. Coming into their bedroom in the middle of the night, like wetting sheets and crying when he fell over, was something he was supposed to be growing out of. Because he was nine and a quarter and had to learn to be brave, Roland reminded himself, biting his lower lip, which was trembling and threatening to let him down.

He hugged his damp pillow to his chest, crawled to the other end of his bed, tugged all the bedding out from the mattress and wriggled down inside. If he kept his legs to the left with his knees bent up to his chest he couldn’t feel the wetness in the sheets. And the pillow wasn’t too bad either, turned the other way up and upside down. There was a smell, sort of sweet but not very nice, although it was hard to be sure of anything through the thickness of his cold. In a few minutes he was asleep again, breathing heavily through his mouth, and emitting little squeaky wheezes with the rise and fall of his chest.

At Christmas the dining room came into its own. Of all the rooms in Ashley House, it was by far the grandest. Generally passed over in favour of the kitchen, where the old oak table could easily accommodate huge numbers, it had been sufficiently underused and unassailed by modern furnishings to retain all the elegant formality of earlier times. A long mahogany dining-table, with rounded corners and flamboyant pedestal legs, held centre-stage, with a large crystal chandelier, suspended from an elaborate ceiling rose by a heavy brass chain. Oil paintings, including a couple of stiff portraits of Albert and Nancy Harrison, were ranged round the walls, illuminated by gleaming brass picture lights. Between them, sprouting like flowers, were several
delicate pairs of wall lights with tulip-shaped glass shades and curvy brass stems. The curtains were of burgundy velvet, matching the wine red of the carpet and setting off to perfection the sumptuous damask cream wallpaper and the dark polished wood of the furniture. With an antiques shop’s worth of silver and crystal adorning the table, the effect was spectacular. Even Tina’s high chair had been laid with a crisp folded dove of a napkin and a tiny silver spoon and fork. Helen, entering the room with a dish of bread sauce in one hand and a silver gravy-boat in the other, paused to take in the scene, struck, as she was from time to time, by the effortless magnificence of the family into which she had married. Her own family had money but – as she had realised when she met Peter during her final year at law school – absolutely no equivalent sense of style or history. When her father retired her parents had moved to a bungalow near Plymouth, which was sizeable but soulless and housed their accumulated hotchpotch of possessions without any obvious affection or cohesion. The garden surrounding the bungalow was large and might have been attractive, were it not for the cumbersome presence of the caravan in which they liked to holiday. Family ancestors were rarely mentioned and only in passing. Consequently Helen had little sense of where she came from, other than in purely geographical terms, nor that it mattered particularly.

In contrast, Peter’s sense of family was immense, his pride in his pioneering ancestors almost palpable. To be invited to become a part – even an imported part – of such a clan, so reverential of the past and still functioning so well in the present, had given Helen an unprecedented and inspiring sense of self-definition. It was only as the years passed that she had learnt it could be overwhelming too at times, when she wasn’t in the mood. Or when, as was occurring with increasing frequency these days, Peter talked in sweeping terms of the time when Ashley House would pass into their own hands. The nearing of this once-distant prospect made Helen, fearless about most things, rather afraid. Pamela would be a hard act to follow. Particularly for a woman like her, with a full-time job as a lawyer and no feel for country life. Sharing such apprehensions with her husband, however, was proving difficult. Just the night before they had argued about it – after midnight mass, too, which somehow made it worse – when Helen, exhausted from a week that had stretched her energies almost to breaking point (work deadlines, Christmas shopping, school carol services, threats of resignation from their irksome Turkish au pair) had been misguided enough to seek reassurance on the subject.

‘I don’t know how your mother manages. I’d need an army of helpers if I lived down here.’

‘Would you? Why?’

‘Oh, Peter, you know why.’ Helen flopped on to the stool in front of the long cherrywood dressing-table next to their bed, peering warily at her pallid reflection in its gleaming oval mirror. ‘Commuting to London and trying to keep the place nice … the garden and so on.’ She screwed the lid off her night cream and dabbed several blobs on strategic places across her face.

‘Sid helps with the garden.’

‘Sid won’t live forever.’

‘Son of Sid, then.’

‘He hasn’t got a son, he’s got a daughter who lives miles away and who has that dreadful child Jessica who’s always coming to stay and pushed Chloë into all those brambles last year.’

‘Really, Helen, stop being so literal, would you?’ Peter offered his wife an eyeroll of despair, then stepped into the bathroom and switched on his electric toothbrush. The conversation was suspended for a few minutes, the tension it had created visible only in the angry dabbing of Helen’s fingertips across her face and the unnatural thoroughness with which her husband steered the vibrating bristles round his teeth.

There was an audible click as he slotted his toothbrush back into its portable holder. ‘My parents have always managed without an army of helpers,’ he continued, emerging from the bathroom.

‘Your mother was at home all day.’

‘Without a nanny and twice the number of children to look after.’

‘I won’t give up my job,’ Helen had snapped, prompted by a sudden terrifying image of being buried in the countryside all day with no one to talk to but Labradors and gardeners. Her face was shining slightly from too much cream. A few specks had caught the edges of her hair, lending a greasy sheen to her sideboards. It was a convenient if not especially flattering cut, to which she had resorted after Theo was born, when the time pressures of getting both herself and a baby presentable by seven o’clock in the morning had precluded anything involving a hairdryer.

‘Of course you won’t give up your job.’ Peter sounded both despairing and exasperated. ‘I’ve never suggested otherwise. Look, Helen, I haven’t the foggiest why we’re arguing. All I said was that, in the extremely unfortunate event of my mother and father’s demise, I would prefer to run Ashley House informally, as they have, without a posse of staff. Instead of getting hot under the collar about it, we should perhaps focus instead on our good fortune. My dear siblings, as you know, will inherit nothing like the equivalent value of this place.’

‘I know, I know.’ This, too, was a well-worn subject. Peter, as the firstborn, would get Ashley House; the others would divide up their parents’ liquid assets, estimated to be around a million, once the tax man had taken his share. No one, therefore, would suffer too badly. ‘And of course I’m grateful,’ muttered Helen.

‘We’re agreed on that, then,’ he replied briskly, tugging back the bedcovers. ‘Besides, in a few years Chloë – with a little cajoling – will also be at boarding-school, which will simplify things all round, won’t it?’

‘Yes.’ Unconsoled, Helen had mouthed the word, watching in the mirror as her husband clambered into bed and reached for his book. These days, boarding-school was a subject on which she felt as confused as the prospect of their inheritance. It hadn’t always been so. Indeed, for a long time the plan of sending the children away to be educated had seemed like the answer to her dreams – the answer, indeed, to every career-mother’s relentless juggling act. The six years separating the births of Helen’s children bore testimony to the constant and supreme effort of managing a job and a family. The decision to allow the conception of Chloë when she was forty years old had been one of the most difficult she had ever taken. The pregnancy was fraught and draining but she had rushed back to the firm of lawyers where she worked six weeks after the birth, desperate to prove herself, openly articulating her longing for the day when boarding-school would take some of her domestic responsibilities off her hands.

As the day approached for Theo to start at St Peter’s, however, Helen began to feel rather differently. By the time they had to say goodbye she was a wreck. Even now, recalling the tight desperation in her son’s big square face as she finally released him, the crimson tips of his ears, the tug of his lower lip as he turned back towards his dormitory, where several intimidatingly large boys had started a pillow fight, brought tears to her eyes. Back in Barnes the house had felt hollow and somehow
unbalanced
. Instead of getting on better she and Chloë – always the more prickly, emotionally complicated child – seemed to spend most evenings bickering about everything: table manners, homework, music practice, television. Rushing home to relieve the au pair, Helen would often wonder – guiltily – why she had bothered. Sitting alone on the sofa in quiet moments between such wearing confrontations and Peter’s return from the office, she would find herself longing for Theo’s easy bear-hugs, with such a physical hunger sometimes
that she thought she might be going mad. Peter, himself the happy product of a public-school education, was kind but essentially uncomprehending of her anguish. It would pass, he said, as it had for his mother and millions of other women. She should concentrate on Chloë – who needed a lot of concentrating upon – and try not to be sentimental. Almost harder than anything for Helen was that the boy who returned from St Peter’s looked and seemed so different from the one she had sent away. Not just because he was taller and bulkier, with a faint oiliness displacing the fresh apple look of his skin and a rumble in his once sweet treble of a voice but – harder still – because there was a new aura of distancing self-consciousness about him. A distance that Helen could not – and knew she should not – try to cross. On the odd occasion that he did put his arms round her, she wanted to squeeze him till his ribs cracked. She wanted to say, ‘This is me, your mother, remember me and the love I have.’ It was like the end of a love affair, Helen thought now, gripping the handle of the gravy-boat, tears pricking her eyes as she watched Theo laughing with Maisie about something at the far end of the table. Her son no longer loved her in the way he had and never would. The mother passion of his boyhood was over.