Relative Love (50 page)

That evening, sitting over her letters, freshly irked by a series of recent incidents – stepping over Elizabeth’s pile of washing on the landing, glimpsing the bombsite of her bedroom (even little Roland was tidier), finding that three of her best silver spoons had been put through the dishwasher – Pamela remembered again the messy piano-playing and shuddered. Domesticity, music, marriage, it was all the same. Elizabeth had no true discipline, no inner steel, no
guts
. What Colin had done was nothing –
nothing
– a mere fling. Why could Elizabeth not see that and forgive it? Something good and positive would result. Just as it had when – when – Pamela gripped her fountain pen, trying to focus on the line of congratulation she was writing to Ed. She was going to put in a ten-pound note when she’d finished. His scholarship was wonderful news, just the sort of boost Charlie and Serena needed; something for the future, to which they could look forward and be proud. Pamela tried hard to keep her thoughts there, but they shot out of control, as they seemed to have been doing all year, locking on – like some missile programmed to a single target – to her own private marital crisis almost half a century before.

Eric hadn’t been a fling. He had been the grand passion of her life. Her worst crime and her greatest love. Giving him up had been the hardest and noblest thing she had ever done. With John not knowing, there had been no luxury of forgiveness either, only guilt and longing. Years of it. In a perverse way Eric’s stroke had come as a blessing, because it put him, finally, out of reach and gave her a legitimate reason to nurture him openly, to stroke his thick hair and kiss his eyes. Reward after deprivation. Made after the miscarriage of Miranda, Pamela had never doubted the rightness of her decision, never once wavered from it. In many ways she recognised it as the cornerstone on which she had built her life, as solid and irrefutable as the foundations of Ashley House. But now her beloved home looked like a shipwreck and Elizabeth – wretched Elizabeth – had churned up all the old feelings again, making the secret burn like acid in her heart, making the past feel not like ‘another country’, as it had once famously been termed, but a living component of the present. Just as losing darling Tina had. Christ, what a year it had been. One ordeal after another. Forgetting the ten-pound note, Pamela sealed her letter to Ed, and dropped her head into her hands.

A few moments later when the phone rang she reached for it slowly and stiffly, wiping the dampness from her palms.

‘Mrs Harrison?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Mrs Cordman from Merrybell nursing-home. There is no immediate cause for concern, but I thought you ought to know that Mr Harrison has suffered another mild stroke. He’s resting comfortably now. We just thought you ought to know. We will phone again if the position changes.’

‘Right. Thank you, Mrs Cordman. I’ll tell my husband at once. He’s comfortable, you say?’

‘Oh, yes. No cause for alarm.’

Pamela had to shake John awake to tell him. She repeated verbatim what Mrs Cordman had said. John sighed heavily. ‘I guess this is the beginning of the end,’ he murmured, and she did not contradict him.

Told by his father that he could name the treat of his choice, Ed had opted for a day at Thorpe Park with his best friend. Lying late in bed on the first day of the summer holidays contemplating the prospect, he wondered if anybody in the world could possibly be as happy. Ever since he’d heard about the scholarship he had felt as if he was floating on air. Suddenly everybody was pleased with him. On the last day of term even the grumpiest teachers had given him warm adult handshakes and wished him well. At home the girls had been unusually deferential, while his father, after some manic hugging and a ridiculously generous settlement of his pocket-money debt, grinned idiotically every time he caught his eye. His mother, too, had been pleased, but in the new, subdued manner she had towards everything, as if she could feel all the right stuff but not quite show it. She had pressed his face between her palms and stared at him for several seconds, so intensely, that Ed, terrified she was going to cry, had found an excuse to wriggle free.

Moved by pangs of hunger to get out of bed, Ed bounded downstairs and gathered up the newspapers and post from the doormat. He glanced at the sports pages, then saw there was a letter for him from his grandmother. Scenting the possibility of cash, he tore at the flap only to find a notelet covered in daffodils, saying, ‘Edward, darling, you clever boy. How proud we all are of you.’ He was momentarily humbled, until he spotted an extra note on the opposite side of the card – ‘Thought the enclosed might come in handy’ – whereupon he shook the envelope furiously and checked the hall floor.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Clem, appearing all pale-faced and tousled at the top of the stairs.

‘Granny sent me a card and forgot to put the money in.’

‘Bad luck.’ She giggled and floated on past him to the kitchen where she smeared milk and a sprinkling of sugar round a spoon and bowl and squashed a couple of Frosties into the bottom. Then, checking that Ed hadn’t followed her, she took two crispbreads from the cheese-biscuit tin and nibbled each one slowly, rolling the sticky crumbs round her mouth before swallowing.

Serena appeared just as she finished. ‘Have you had breakfast?’

‘Hm, just finished. I had Frosties. Look.’ She held up the bowl. For good measure she picked up one of the now soggy crumbs and placed it on her tongue.

‘I’m making a picnic, what would you like in your sandwich?’ Serena reached into the bread bin and began lining up slices of bread for buttering. A distant part of her sensed that she was being lied to, that her daughter, with her big knuckles and bony knees, visible where the hem of her nightie ended, was playing some sort of elaborate game. She sensed it but could not muster the strength to act on it. She felt drained even by the thought of having to make sandwiches. With Ed’s friend, due any minute, they would need six rounds at least. She did not want to go to Thorpe Park. Upstairs Charlie was pulling on shorts and loafers, exclaiming – as if it was some new phenomenon – on the brilliance of the weather and, as usual these days, making up for her lack of enthusiasm by exuding extra quantities of his own. Its force made her shrink inside and want to run into some cool dark corner where it would be okay never to smile – never to have to
be
anything again. Recently, since she had agreed to help Cassie, he had left her – or, at least, her
feelings – more alone. While this was precisely what she had hoped for, it had had the baffling effect of leaving her feeling even more wretched and adrift. ‘Cheese and ham?’

‘Sounds great.’ Clem opened the newspaper and began to read, noting as she did so that the hairs on her forearms had got thicker and longer, like an animal’s. She stroked them absently, humming to herself.

Serena caught sight of the novel she had started at Cassie’s, sitting next to the breadboard, a mindless sex-and-shopping romp, full of improbable characters doing improbable things, and slipped it into her handbag.

‘Whatever are you taking that for?’ boomed Charlie, appearing from nowhere, sunglasses in one hand and Ed’s empty notelet in the other.

‘I might not go on the rides,’ murmured Serena, not looking up from the butter, so soft that it was sinking into the bread like oil.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’re going on the rides. We’re all going on the rides, aren’t we, Clemmy?’

Clem grinned. ‘Yes, Dad.’

‘There, you see. You won’t need this.’ Charlie reached into the bag for the book, knowing he was being brutal but thinking that if he acted with enough light-heartedness and aplomb he might get away with it. His hopes were short-lived. Serena snatched the book from him. ‘Leave it, Charlie, just leave it, okay? I’m coming, aren’t I?’

Yes, he wanted to cry, you’re coming, but you’re not really going to be there, which is worse than not coming at all, because your absence would at least preclude the bitterness of disappointment. ‘Fine. Naughty Charlie.’ He slapped his hand, trying for Clem’s benefit to make the incident look like a joke. ‘Look at this.’ He waved the notelet. ‘My poor mother is clearly going senile. A card for Ed and she forgets to put in the cash. What do you think? Should we tell her or just pay him ourselves?’ He dropped the card next to the butter dish. ‘What do you reckon? Alert the old bat to the fact that she’s losing her marbles or cover up for her? Tricky one, isn’t it?’ At which point Ed glided into the kitchen on his skateboard, one of the many normally forbidden practices he had lately been getting away with, and deftly seized a slice of buttered bread as he passed his mother.

Serena swung round, ready to fling out a reprimand, but couldn’t see the point: Ed, looking impish, was already three bites into his catch. There were plenty more slices in the bag, and half a pack’s worth of melting butter. Instead she pointed at her handbag with her chin, telling Charlie that she had a spare tenner in her purse. She looked nonchalant, but her blue eyes burned, daring him even to think of trying again to remove the novel. ‘I suspect your mother is feeling the strain of having Elizabeth,’ she murmured. ‘They’ve spent years not getting on and not admitting it.’

‘Really?’ Charlie, pleased to get a voluntary remark on any subject, but also a little surprised, picked out her purse and extracted a ten-pound note. ‘Do you really think so?’

Serena merely shrugged and returned to the picnic. Charlie, feeling that a door had opened and closed before he could get his foot in it, strolled over to Clem and kissed the top of her head. ‘Had any breakfast yet, Mouse?’

‘Yes. Mum already asked me.’

‘Good girl. I’ll use your bowl, then, shall I?’

‘That’s Ed’s.’

‘Whatever.’ Charlie shook out the business section of the paper and began studying the share prices, soothed by the factual definition of the numbers, so unlike the invisible gusts of emotion swirling round his home.

Upstairs Maisie, unaware that Clem had already woken up, put her head round her sister’s door. She had a top she wanted to give her, a lilac one with shoulder straps and a little red satin rose stitched to the front. It was only just too small for Maisie and she liked it a lot. The decision to offer it to her twin had not been arrived at lightly. In spite of the heatwave Clem was still dressing in baggy tracksuits as if she wanted to hide her hard-won slimline figure instead of showing it off. Still hostile to any direct approaches on the subject, the lilac-top plan was Maisie’s new tack to induce her daft sister, so capable of being pretty, to open her eyes and recognise that if she dieted any more she really would be a stick insect. The previous week Monica had celebrated the loss of a measly couple of pounds by buying a hipster mini-skirt, merrily parading her hefty thighs and the still considerable flab of her tummy as if she were Kate Moss in her prime. Which was typical and pretty dumb, but not nearly as dumb as having a great body and covering it up with ugly, shapeless clothes.

‘Clem?’ Seeing the bed was empty, Maisie was about to withdraw when she caught sight of her sister’s diary lying open but face down on the shelf next to her bed. She stepped towards it and hesitated. The only other time she had been presented with – and taken – such an opportunity had been on an exceptional, dreadful day when it felt like there were no rules about anything. Things were different now, better. Clem didn’t deserve such a betrayal of trust. Through all the business of phoning the journalist, Mr Cartwright, she had been as solid as a rock.

When they finally got through on his mobile (the day after Ed had interrupted them) it had been a bit of an anticlimax. Unprepared to disclose any details beyond that she had met Neil Rosco at his mansion in Barham and he was not the clean-cut teen-idol he appeared to be, Maisie had been painfully aware of the flimsiness of her information. The journalist, however, had been kind enough not to make her feel she was wasting his time. He said he respected the anonymity of all his sources, asked her how old she was, how she knew Barham and said he’d bear it all in mind. So it hadn’t changed anything, not obviously. Maisie had put down the phone feeling rather let down, and Clem had seemed to understand, going on for ages about how brave it had been just to make contact and how the important thing was to have done
something
, no matter the invisibility of the result.

It was like she just
knew
what was going on in Maisie’s mind. Knew it and accepted it. Which was how things should be: they were twins, after all, and had spent most of their fourteen years being incredibly close. The only trouble was that Maisie felt, increasingly, as if there were great swathes of Clem that she didn’t know or understand at all. The hateful dieting was one thing, but there was also Jonny Cottrall, whom she clearly liked but went out of her way to avoid, and the piano, which she said she hated but practised like a fiend for at least an hour every day.

So all she wanted, Maisie decided now, eyeing the diary, was simply a little assistance, a leg-up towards understanding what the hell was going on in her sister’s mind. Convinced by the irrefutable virtue of this argument, she tiptoed out on to the landing and leant over the banisters. Downstairs she could hear the radio on in the kitchen and the rumble of Ed’s skateboard wheels in the hall. Satisfied that she had a couple of minutes at least, she sprinted back into Clem’s bedroom and threw herself on to the bed to begin reading. Having given little concrete thought to her expectations – moans about school, maybe, or Monica, whom Clem loathed, or Ed’s dreadful swollen head, which was getting them both down – Maisie was so unprepared for what she found that she gasped out loud. There was no juicy titbits about her or Monica or Ed or anyone else. In fact, there was nothing, just huge empty spaces under each date … but not empty, because printed in the middle of each one, in tiny, skeletal writing, was a weight, recorded in pounds and ounces. Clem’s weight, Maisie realised, feeling sick with terror as she flicked through the pages.
There were weeks of it, sad, stark entries, some so small she had to press her nose to the page to read them. As if Clem was afraid of her own writing. As if she was literally shrinking into the emptiness of each page.
7st 12lb. 7st 5oz. 6st 13lb. 6st 12lb. 6st 10lb 3oz. 6st 7lb
…