Relative Love (53 page)

Cassie, who had joined in the greetings, quickly returned her attention to the menu, willing Charlie not to quiz her on the subject of his wife’s employment. Serena had come twice, answered two phone-calls, sorted out Mrs Shorrold’s file and read her book. On the second occasion she had brought a bottle of lemon barley water and consumed a good half of it during the course of her stay, along with a tin-foil package of sandwiches and a Greek yoghurt. She read while she ate, curled up in an armchair with the book propped on her lap, as if she had no more connection to Cassie or her surroundings than a commuter awaiting a train.

‘And how are you, Lizzy?’ continued Peter, in full avuncular mode now, pulling out the chair for his sister and signalling to the waiters for more menus and drinks. ‘How are you bearing up? Tough times, I guess.’

Elizabeth sat down, shook out her napkin and looked round the table at her siblings’ expectant faces. ‘I’m fine. No, really,’ she added, as they all continued to stare at her, ‘I’m not too bad at all. But in case you’re all wondering, I’m not going back to Colin. I’ve decided.’ She pressed her hair behind her ears, pleased at the sound of her own certainty. The decision, such as it was, had evolved during the morning, as she stared through the train window at the baked browns and greens of the Home Counties. It had presented itself suddenly as something very simple. Usually it felt complicated – and impossible. Her emotions swung like a pendulum, yet this time she was going to hang on. With both hands. Just getting it out into the open now – expressing it, giving it shape – was an enormous help. As was the sight of her brothers and sister digesting the notion, as if it were fact rather than wishful thinking.

‘What will you do?’ murmured Cassie.

‘Don’t know yet.’ Elizabeth picked up a menu and began to study it. ‘I can’t stay at Ashley House for the rest of my life. I’d go mad. And so would Mum.’ She made a face. ‘Her and Dad, they’re like two prehistoric rocks glued together. She simply can’t understand that it’s not like that for everyone. She can’t forgive me for getting it so wrong –
twice
.’ This unfortunate truth wrought a moment of silence that Elizabeth filled. ‘If we’re doing starters I’ll have the stuffed mushrooms – heaped with garlic, no doubt, which Colin hates, but that doesn’t matter now, does it? Peter? Are we doing starters?’

‘Whatever … whatever.’ Having already exchanged several anguished glances with Cassie, Peter stared, unseeing, at the options on the card in front of him.

‘Artichoke salad and veal for me, I think.’ Charlie slapped his menu shut and turned to his elder sister. ‘It goes without saying, Lizzy, that anything I – Serena and I – can do, you have only to ask. Okay?’ He squeezed her arm. ‘Promise you’ll ask?’

Elizabeth nodded gratefully, for a moment not trusting herself to speak. Then she said, ‘Just … well, just having you lot … all of us here … helps you know … makes me feel less alone.’

‘Of course you’re not alone,’ Cassie burst out, thinking suddenly that it was quite wrong, unnecessary and wrong, for her and Peter to be involving the other two in all the mess over Stephen’s book. She shot a pleading glance at him, willing him to read her mind. But Peter had had enough of all the high emotions whizzing round the table and the intolerable suspense of suppressing what had to be said. Once the waiter had been despatched with their orders, he launched, succinctly and fluently, as he did so often before judges and juries, into the painful business of the day. Cassie, twisting her napkin in her lap, watched the faces of the other two as he talked, reading the shadows of astonishment, disbelief and pain that had characterised her own reaction to the news.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Charlie, when Peter had finished. ‘Uncle Eric! Fucking hell.’ He took a swig of his wine, and then another. ‘Mother and Uncle Eric – it’s unbelievable. Christ, does Dad know, do you think?’

Peter shook his head. ‘It seems unlikely.’

‘Maybe,’ said Elizabeth, in a small voice, ‘maybe he did know and forgave her.’ Inside she could feel the pendulum swinging back again, no longer hard and cool and graspable but a bar of soap slipping from her fingers. Would it be wrong, after all, to give up on Colin? Her parents hadn’t given up on each other and they had had forty subsequent happy years. Then she thought of what Pamela had actually done and a huge rage swelled inside her. Her mother, her fucking mother, having an affair, no better than Colin, no better than anyone, it was outrageous, unbelievable. All that self-righteousness, all that judging, all that debilitating perfection based not on virtue but betrayal. And of the worst kind, too. Her husband’s brother. Christ. She thought the word and then said it out loud, almost shouted it: ‘Christ.’

‘Steady on,’ growled Peter, glancing at the other tables and the waiter approaching with their plates of food.

‘It was a long time ago,’ ventured Cassie, adding, as a wave of desperation about Dan rolled over her, ‘and it must have been hard … if she really loved Eric … to give him up. You should have seen that letter …’

‘Didn’t you bring it?’

‘No, I —’

‘I asked you to bring it.’

‘I’m sorry, Peter, I forgot. It’s quite safe, in my bottom drawer.’

‘Hard?’ snapped Elizabeth. ‘I’ll tell you what’s hard. Hard is having a mother who parades her moral virtues like a set of fucking medals, making sure you fail in every attempt to emulate them. Hard is a mother who thinks you’re an emotional failure. Hard is a mother who turns out to be a total hypocrite.’

‘Lizzy, stop it.’ It was Charlie who cut in. ‘I can see – we can all see – that, given your current circumstances, this must be particularly difficult, especially if Mum, as you say, has been giving you something of a hard time.’ He paused, thinking of what Serena had said about the relationship between his elder sister and his mother, and how perceptive she always was, particularly about Elizabeth. ‘But,’ he continued gently, ‘as Cass says, it
was
a long time ago and she did do the right thing and managed to have a great marriage and just wants the same for you.’

‘Yeah, I guess,’ Elizabeth conceded. ‘And don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to her and Dad for all that they’ve done – Roland has been so happy …’ She placed her knife and fork together, took a deep breath and folded her arms. ‘Sorry, everybody. I guess I’m not really very fine after all.’

‘Yes, you are.’ Peter spoke firmly, pushing away his own plate, wanting to get things back under control. ‘And all this mess is going to be fine too. Because …’ he cleared his throat and patted his lips with his napkin ‘… I have decided that the best thing to do, since appealing to this wretched man’s better nature has failed, is to appeal to his worse nature instead.’ He hesitated, quailing at what he was about to suggest, aware that it fundamentally contravened the ethics to which he had devoted a lifetime of unwavering personal and professional support. ‘With the view that desperate situations call for desperate remedies, what I propose is that we offer Mr Smith money – quite a lot of money. From what Cassie says he’s completely broke. We offer it as, shall we say, a
reward
for editing his book so as to preclude causing our family any unnecessary grief? The thing comes out in the spring. It’s hardly likely to win the Booker or make the bestseller list. By the time – if ever – he changes his mind it’ll be out of print. Or Mum and Dad will be dead. Or both.’

‘Bribe him, you mean?’ Elizabeth laughed, incredulous.

‘Call it that if you like.’ Having given the matter a huge amount of thought, he was not about to change his mind. ‘And I would like to be the one to foot the bill – both for today and for the business of writing a cheque to Stephen Smith.’

‘That’s daft. We should all contribute,’ put in Charlie, scowling because he was unhappy about the proposition but unable to think of an alternative. Peter was right: their parents probably only had a decade at most left to them; it was intolerable to think of their last years being blighted by the distant past when all that had followed had been so redeeming and good.

‘I don’t want contributions from anyone. I am responsible for the conception of this plan and I will be the one to carry it out. Please, don’t cross me on this, Charlie, or you two.’ He looked at his sisters. ‘It is not a matter on which I will be persuaded.’

‘How much will you give him?’ whispered Cassie, as appalled as the others but also hopeful. Her visit to Stephen’s humble flat, the thick, cheap glasses and tawdry furnishings, was still vivid. Money, though crude, would surely do the trick.

‘I was thinking of ten.’

‘Ten thousand pounds?’ the other three echoed, incredulous.

Peter nodded. ‘It has to be significant or it won’t work. Probably double what his publishers have given him. He’s a rat. He’ll scuttle back down his hole. I’m going to sort it, okay? I wanted you lot to know, but not to worry. And it really need not go any further. Helen knows, obviously,
because it was her friend who – thank God – alerted us to what the bastard was playing at. But, Charlie, there’s really no need to tell Serena. The tighter we keep this thing, the safer it will be.’

Charlie frowned, making no promises, because he told Serena everything and because he felt that to be a matter on which he, not Peter, should decide. A little later the four said their farewells in the street, then parted to return, slowly, to their respective lives, each a little heavier of heart, each a little afraid.

Pamela cut the crusts off the bread and arranged the slices round the largest of her pudding basins, then tipped in the cooked fruit and sugar and pressed it all down with the back of a spoon. For a summer pudding the fruit mixture had to be tightly packed or its beautiful crimson juices didn’t soak into the bread enough, leaving dry, unsightly patches of white. If they were compressed too tightly they were reduced to a mushy pulp and that didn’t do either. Apart from the cellar the kitchen was easily the coolest room in the house, especially with the back door open, as it was now, allowing what paltry breeze there was to drift in across the stone-tiled floor, lifting the corners of the curtains and the tea-towels hanging along the front rail of the Aga. With John at the nursing-home, Helen and the children at the lake with a picnic, Elizabeth in London and Serena still in the village, the house was quiet. Blissfully quiet. Pamela had not realised how much she was in need of silence until the last of the doughty Jessica’s high-pitched screeches had died away and the swimming party had disappeared over the brow of the hill towards the copse. Now all was still, apart from the buzz of the fat bluebottle bashing itself against one of the kitchen windows and the occasional drone of an aeroplane following the well-worn trail of the Gatwick flightpath. The workmen had stopped, as usual, for an early lunch. They were off to find sandwiches, the foreman said, which meant they were going to the Rising Sun for some beer and a pork pie or two. With the end of the job now well within their sights – and on schedule too – such indulgences had crept into their routine. The day before only two men had come instead of four and by half past three they had disappeared. Going home, they said, though John, watching the dusty white van disappear down the drive, had remarked that they were probably off to make a start on the next job.

Pamela pressed a plate on top of the summer pudding, in a final bid to encourage the juices out of the fruit, then placed it carefully on the bottom shelf of the fridge. With so many people in the house the fridge was packed with food and it had taken some rearrangement to create sufficient space. Having crouched right down to do the job, she stood up too quickly and found dancing pencil points of light flecking her field of vision. She held on to the fridge to steady herself, feeling suddenly unbearably hot and frail. It was lovely, of course, having all the family again, but also quite a strain. Catering, laundry, tidying – it was a lot to keep on top of, especially without Betty who was away visiting a sick brother in Penge. She should, she knew, take the opportunity of an empty house to rest, to take some
time out
, as Helen had called it when she had caught Pamela cleaning silver in the dining room the night before, a hankie tied round her nose and mouth because of the smell, and rows of gleaming Harrison treasures laid out on the table before her.

Time out
. Pamela wasn’t sure what the phrase would mean for her, other than sifting through recipe books on the sofa or sliding her needle and thread through her latest growing thatch of silky flowers. But it was too hot for sewing now, and sitting on the sofa would only make her feel guilty. There was simply too much to do, not just in the kitchen but around the rest of the house as well. Pamela tried not to mind the clutter – mess, with so many, was natural, she knew
– but with the house empty it was somehow harder to ignore, particularly in the downstairs rooms where abandoned shoes and single grubby socks seemed to be everywhere, along with strewn packs of cards, half-started board games and empty sweet wrappers. The utility room was piled high with unwashed laundry and she could feel grit under her shoes on the kitchen floor. When the phone rang Pamela, standing with one pink sandal, a blue sock and a half-sucked boiled sweet she had found on a window-sill behind a curtain in the hall, answered it with some reluctance.

‘It’s Colin. I’m so sorry to trouble you …’

‘Colin, my dear, no trouble, of course.’ Pamela sank into a hall chair, her voice softening in an instant. As she had said many times to John, she had no intention of taking sides over the thorny business of their daughter’s marriage, but every time she heard Colin’s voice on the telephone, so thin and lost, she found it impossible not to feel compassion for his predicament. Elizabeth, if she was punishing him, had already – in her opinion – gone way too far.

‘I was wondering, Elizabeth isn’t … available, is she?’

‘No … she’s not here. She’s in London with Peter, Charlie and Cassie – some sort of get-together Peter has organised.’

‘Really?’

In revealing this, Pamela had meant only to offer reassurance that, on this occasion at least, Elizabeth was not standing next to her, signalling that she had no desire to take the phone. Colin though, picturing Elizabeth pouring her woes out to her siblings, talking about the situation – about
him
– felt a surge of fresh unease. Since the start of the holidays the reality of his new circumstances had hit home. Waking alone each morning, with nothing to attend to but his own needs, life felt considerably emptier, but also freer in a way that was undeniably pleasant. He didn’t miss Elizabeth’s presence so much as feel riled by her absence. That she thought she could just walk out on everything, snap shut their life like a suitcase, was outrageous. Regardless of what remained of his affection for her, something in Colin felt honour-bound to fight such an attitude, just to show her that a joint existence, no matter how unsatisfactory, could not simply be thrown away like that, as if it were of no more intrinsic value than a used tissue. And there was Roland, of course, whom Colin missed and who – he had no doubt – needed him. With all his babyish insecurities he was more in need of a father than most boys. Colin shuddered whenever he thought of the detrimental effect the separation must be having, with only his mother’s haywire emotions and indulgent ways for guidance and no opportunity for his own firm, infinitely more authoritative hand to balance things out. ‘Could I have a word with Roland, then?’