Relative Love (54 page)

‘I’m afraid he’s swimming at the lake with all his cousins.’

‘I see. Never mind,’ said Colin, minding very much, feeling yet again that the Harrisons were ranged against him, bent upon denying him not only his rights as a parent and husband but also what had once seemed the most secure of prospects. While Elizabeth might be able to sail on towards the promise of a hefty inheritance, taking half his worldly goods with her, a divorce would leave him considerably poorer. For one thing he would have to sell the house, and he liked the house a lot, with its glistening black mock-Tudor timbers and spacious rooms. He had spent a considerable amount of his life working towards being able to afford such a property and it seemed unfair that he should have to surrender it now. A marriage was entered into jointly and, in his view, should be terminated with the consent of both parties. He wasn’t a saint. He was a man who had strayed. He had admitted his sin and said sorry. What more was he supposed to do? ‘Would you say I called?’

‘Of course, Colin, of course. I could get Roland to call you back, if you like.’

Colin was on the point of replying when, looking out of the window, he saw Phyllis walking up the path to the front door. Her hair was loose and she was wearing a long turquoise cotton dress and gold flip-flops. ‘Don’t worry, Pamela, I – I’m going out. It might be easier if I called back. Tell Elizabeth that we need to talk, that I do desperately want to work things out.’

‘I know you do, Colin, believe me, I know.’ Pamela put the phone down and stared gloomily at the sock and sandal in her lap. At a loss as to what to do with the sweet, stuck firmly now between two fingers, she popped it into her mouth. It had a gluey bubblegum taste that was almost nice. She licked her fingers, and noticed the morning’s post, which someone, irritatingly, had picked up off the doormat and left by the telephone. It was all junk mail, apart from a large brown envelope addressed to her in writing she didn’t recognise. Inside, there were sketches of the family portrait she had commissioned so many months before, now nearing completion, the accompanying note said. It went on to explain that the sketches were just to give her an idea and that she was welcome to a proper viewing any time. Based on the photo Sid had taken at Christmas, the drawings showed them all striking the poses that Peter had helped to choreograph on and around the sitting-room sofa. For a moment Pamela felt excited. It would make such a good eightieth-birthday present for John, well worth the hefty three thousand pounds the artist was going to charge. But then, staring at the pencilled faces, Pamela realised with dismay that the picture was already wrong, already history. Theo looked so round-faced, as did Clem, quite unlike their new, skinny, adolescent selves. And then there was Colin, stiff but proud, his arms crossed in the back row, still quite the son-in-law instead of a lost voice on the phone. Most poignant of all, however, was the sight of Tina, dear little Tina, captured wonderfully by the artist as a chunky-limbed cherub, sitting sweetly in her mother’s arms, her eyes wild and inquisitive, one wispy strand of hair floating across her cheek. Pamela gasped and pressed the blue sock to her mouth to stifle the sound. How precious that time had been and how little they had known it. Six months, and the world – as if in one half-turn of a kaleidoscope – had changed irrevocably.

As the front door opened Pamela just had time to shove the drawing back into its envelope. She looked up to see Serena, bedraggled from her walk back from the church.

Serena dropped her handbag to the floor and leant back against the door with a sigh. ‘Hi, there. God, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ She prised her sandals off each foot with the toes of the other and raked her hair off her face with her fingers. ‘Relentless, isn’t it? Though it was quite cool at the church,’ she murmured, half to herself, remembering the kiss of the breeze on her cheeks as she had sat in the lee of the hedge and the echo of something like peace that had briefly stirred her heart. Then she peered at her mother-in-law, who was still sitting, motionless, in the chair by the phone. ‘Pamela? Are you all right?’

‘Fine, dear. Like you, a little weary with this heat.’ Pamela stood up, tucking the envelope under her arm. The commission, however advanced it was, would have to be cancelled. It seemed now that a sort of smugness had prompted it, a desire to show off, to revel in, the glorious, sprawling solidity of the family. When, in fact, nothing was solid, or could ever be made so by a few brushstrokes of paint. She would pay the full fee, if necessary, write it off as a well-intentioned scheme that had gone wrong. There were all sorts of other things she could give John for his birthday: a new pipe-stand, for instance, or a boot-scraper for the back door, or a pair of calfskin slippers to replace the dreadful tartan ones he insisted on wearing with the backs down, exposing the yellowing scaly skin of his heels. ‘Did you enjoy your walk?’

‘My walk? Yes, thanks, it was good … I … Pamela, this may sound an odd question to ask, but do you know anything about moving graves?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Pamela, her mind still on slippers, blinked in puzzlement.

‘Graves. Changing where someone has been buried.’

‘Heavens … No, I can’t say I do, except that I expect it’s rather difficult. Why? Are you …’

‘Nothing. I just wondered, that’s all. It’s nothing, honestly.’ Serena retrieved her sandals, looped the straps over one finger and headed for the stairs. ‘I’m going to change and join the others at the lake for a swim. Give Helen a breather.’

‘Okay, dear.’ Pamela, still clutching the envelope, stood watching as her daughter-in-law made her way up the stairs. She took each step very slowly and kept her head bowed, as if studying the progress of her own bare feet, as if it was a matter of huge importance which few inches they chose to occupy of the carpet. Then the phone rang again. This time it was John, sounding distant and suspicious as he always did on his mobile, explaining that the staff at the nursing-home had said he was welcome to stay for a spot of lunch and he thought he might because … Here he faltered, then concluded, ‘Because it’s not something I’ve done before.’

‘How nice, of course, how nice,’ Pamela murmured, concerned both for the trout fillets she had defrosted for their lunch and the faintly unsettling notion of Eric, silent and chair-ridden, somehow showing preference at this late stage for a human being other than her. ‘I’ll see you when I see you,’ she added lightly, shifting the position of the envelope under her arm. She had been gripping it so hard that the edge was cutting into her skin. ‘And you can have your trout as a starter tonight.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I got some trout out of the freezer for our lunch, but you can have yours tonight.’

‘Trout, yummy,’ he said sweetly, sensing that she was put out and wanting to make up for it.

‘Give Eric my love, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

John put his phone back into his pocket and returned to the tray of lunch that the pretty Irish nurse with green cat-eyes had kindly brought up for him. Baked potato with cream cheese, cold salmon and a tomato salad sprinkled with fresh chives. No wonder the place cost a fortune. Eric had already been fed his own plate of food, and had his mouth patted dry like a baby. He was sitting now, spruce and only slightly lopsided in the chair next to his bed, his stick legs covered, in spite of the heat, with a green tartan rug. The stroke had induced no visible deterioration in his appearance. John, squeezing both papery hands in greeting, had even wondered whether his compulsion to make the visit had not perhaps been a touch self-indulgent and melodramatic. Nothing had changed after all. The clammy medicine-smell of the room was the same. And Eric, mute but unbowed, was as he had been for nearly three decades.

‘How are we? Not too bad, I’m told, not too bad at all.’ Even after so many years John found his brother’s lack of response hard and was soon longing for Pamela to cluck and tuck and soothe them through the gaps with her soft commentary. Without her, he felt brash and inept. Thoroughly useless, in fact. He’d stay ten minutes and go, he had told himself, sitting on the windowseat and sipping the coffee brought by the little Irish nurse; there was no urgency, after all, and – now that he was actually here – he had no clear sense of what needed saying. But in that ten minutes John had studied the slack, inscrutable expression on his brother’s face and had
seen that something had changed, after all. After so many tenacious, obstinate years, some force within was letting go, slipping back, much as a drowning person clinging to a hand chooses at last to release it. Time, John realised, was truly running out. So he had started to talk, with staccato awkwardness at first, but then more slowly, finding that if he looked out of the window, addressing himself to Eric’s presence, rather than to the disconcertingly vacant, gawping body behind him, it wasn’t so hard. The things that spilled out of him were trivial: the progress on the roof; the volatility of the insurance market, soaring premiums and subsiding profits; the car needing a service; the parched state of the countryside; the children all meeting in London for a jolly.

It was only when his own lunch plate was mopped clean – with a tasty crust of brown bread – that John ventured into the other, trickier territory, feeling his way with each sentence, fighting the debilitating doubt as to whether he was being heard. ‘You gave me Ashley House, Eric, and I want you to know that I will always, to my own dying day, be grateful for that. The house links us to the past and the future and I love it so.’ As he talked, John remembered again the full shocking circumstances of his brother’s decision all those years before. The handing over of a birthright was nothing short of extraordinary. As a second son John had learnt to live without expectation. He had even tried, for many weeks, to talk Eric out of it, fearful of repercussions and regret. But Eric had been adamant, expounding not only the conflicting needs of his own, infinitely more itinerant personality, but also the theory that houses such as theirs had
natural
inheritors. His younger brother was the only man for the job, he had insisted, with his wife, his growing family and predisposition to put down roots instead of gazing, as Eric did endlessly, at the possibility of distant horizons. Affected by the crusading zeal of such arguments, John had allowed himself to be persuaded. Even so, it was years before he appreciated the full extent of Eric’s gift, understood that Pamela, with her capacity for nurturing love of him and their offspring, was an integral part of it, that without her at his side he would have been as ill-equipped as his elder brother to assume the mantle of ownership.

‘You chose a harder route, old man,’ continued John now, ‘in so many ways, a much harder route, allowing me, somehow, to be the lucky one and I don’t know why. And that bothers me. Why did I become the lucky one when we started out so equally? Or, rather, not so very equally, given how I worshipped you. Do you remember that, Eric? Do you remember how I followed you round, like a puppy? All those games. Do you remember the games, Eric? And now the children, the grandchildren, are playing the same games – little ruffians running wild. They’ve been at the lake all week and we’ve got your tent up, and yesterday I dug out the little calor-gas heater so they could make their own campsite tea. Baked beans, I think it was, with sausages and a loaf of bread. I can’t tell you what memories it brings back, Eric, to watch them, this new generation of youngsters, their lives echoing ours and none of them realising it. I’ve tried to explain, but they don’t listen or care much, of course. Neither did we at their age. I can’t tell you how it makes me feel. On the one hand so happy and on the other so damnably sad because it seems like yesterday that it was our turn to have all that, to be at the beginning of life instead of …’ John wrested his gaze from the window and went to stand over the chair, pinning Eric’s empty eyes to his. ‘Do you suffer in there, old man? Do you suffer? My back aches most of the time, these days. In the morning I’m as stiff as an old tree and I lose things and forget things and Pammy too – she’s all over the shop – and the truth is … the truth is, Eric, it’s … I’m scared as hell … scared as hell.’ John thrust his hands into his pockets and returned to the window. ‘We’ve had a bastard of a year,’ he continued huskily, scanning the gardens and thinking of his little granddaughter and the new troubles confronting Elizabeth. On the path directly below a tiny bird
of a woman was edging her way along with a walking frame, bent almost double in concentration upon the potential treachery of the gravel under her feet. In the middle of the lawn next to her a weeping willow shimmered in the midday sun, a resplendent fountain of lime and yellowy green. ‘Whereas you,’ continued John, turning back to face his brother, ‘have had not much of anything to worry about, have you? In fact …’ John laughed, quietly at first and then so loudly that the Irish nurse, hovering outside the door with knuckle poised, drew back in some astonishment. ‘In fact, maybe, after all these years, you’re the bloody lucky one, after all. You, with just this window on to the world, a window that, for all we know, you may not even be able to look through. Your pleasures may have been limited over the years, old boy, but, by God, so has your pain. So has your pain.’

When the nurse entered John was standing with his hands clasped, jaw resolute, staring out of the window with the air of one who has completed the purpose of his visit. ‘Mr Harrison?’

‘Fabulous lunch. Just fabulous. Thank you so much, my dear.’ John picked up his hat and patted it into place on his head. ‘He gave me this, you know,’ he said, tugging the brim. ‘My brother gave me this hat, many moons ago.’

‘Did he? It’s very fine.’

‘Isn’t it just?’ John stepped towards the chair, put a hand on each of Eric’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head. ‘Thank you, Nurse, for looking after him. He’s been happy here. I feel it in my bones that he has been truly happy.’

At the lake the children were organising a race – a complicated process since, in order to be remotely fair, it required different starting points to accommodate their differing abilities. Maisie and Theo, in joint and sometimes conflicting charge of the operation, were lining the others up, beginning with Jessica who, much to Helen’s relief, was commanded to the waist-high shallows, where she could perform her idiosyncratic doggy-paddle flops without too much endangerment to her life or anyone else’s. Chloë, in her armbands, was also assigned to the shallow side, but a little further back than Jessica, which, judging from the broad grin on her face, was a matter of some considerable relief. Roland, too, was looking happy, since Maisie had overruled Theo’s suggestion that he should stand behind Chloë and directed him instead to a rock at the beginning of the deep bit, from where he could launch into his top speed non-breathing crawl secure in the knowledge that the muddy bottom was within a couple of feet of his toes. After a few last-minute quibbles, Ed, Theo and Maisie, who were all powerful swimmers, picked their way round to the big rock at the widest point of the lake where they were to dive in unison from a spot several yards behind their less able siblings and cousins. In the meantime Clem, who had done no more than paddle all morning, declining even to remove the thick towelling bathrobe (an old dressing-gown of John’s consigned to the large trunk of Ashley House swimming things), had volunteered to be referee. With this intention she had taken up a central position on the furthest side of the lake from where she had torn out a huge feathery frond of bracken to use as a starting flag.