Relative Love (56 page)

‘What are you two up to, then?’

‘Grade five theory.’ Clem made a pouting face, looking, for one happy minute, quite like her old self. ‘I suck.’

Elizabeth laughed loudly. ‘She doesn’t suck … well maybe at spotting the difference between appoggiaturas and acciaccaturas but …’

‘Appo-whats?’

‘They’re horrid little notes you have to play before a main note,’ explained Clem, sitting back at the table with a sigh. ‘I get them muddled.’

‘I’m not surprised, they sound vile.’ Charlie crossed to the piano and played chopsticks very badly and very fast, standing all the while with his foot on the pedal, flooding the sound. Seeing Clem still so skinny after a week of his mother’s cooking was a blow, but apart from that he felt full of hope. There was a week’s holiday to look forward to – with a wife who seemed, at last, to be recovering some of her
joie de vivre
– and then, after the August bank holiday weekend, he was off to Florida for four days of discussions on a new international marine treaty, being hosted by his counterparts in America. There was a hefty agenda, but the institute and hotel where they were to be based, on the edge of the Keys, was reputedly one of Florida’s finest: swimming-pools and golf courses galore. Not that Charlie was a golfer, but he liked the thought of them –
all those shimmering greens and undulating fairways – and he could admire them while he ran round the edge. ‘Where’s everyone else, then? Where’s Mum?’

‘Yours or mine?’ quipped Clem, rubbing out a bunch of little notes she had just written on a stave.

‘Both.’

‘They’re in the raspberry canes, I think, picking for supper. The other children are at the lake with Helen. Clem didn’t want to go, did you, Clem?’

‘Nope.’ She spoke firmly, not looking up from her work.

‘Too bad about old Boots.’

‘Yes, it was awful, Daddy,’ agreed Clem gravely, looking up at him now, her big eyes flooding with tears.

‘Awful,’ echoed Elizabeth, recalling not the family’s mourning for the pet on her return from London, but her own tumultuous state of mind. After the extraordinary revelations over lunch, seeing her mother had produced many difficult and conflicting feelings, ranging from anger to understanding. Pamela was maddening, perfectionist, critical, but also in the end, Elizabeth realised, rather noble. How she had conducted herself proved that a bad affair did not preclude a good marriage. The thought, once there, would not go away. It pushed the pendulum inside her head back again, where it lodged, obstinate and unignorable. A break had undoubtedly done her good. It was wrong to deprive Roland of the company of his natural father. With Colin penitent she could start the relationship again more on her own terms: be herself; be less afraid. When Pamela informed her that Colin had called that morning, she had phoned him back to announce, in a quavering voice, that she had decided to give their marriage another go after all. A trial reunion. ‘To follow the trial separation,’ Colin had quipped, sounding relieved but not remotely penitent.

‘I want it to be different,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Not like before.’

‘No, of course not. Quite different. Better. When will you come home?’ Elizabeth had hesitated, loath, in spite of this new resolution, to surrender her freedom so soon.

‘Well … everyone’s here next week, and the weekend after that Mum wants us all here for Dad’s birthday dinner, so I think I’ll stay till then … Come back on the first Monday in September … if that’s okay?’

‘Absolutely. Unless you’d like me to join you at any stage?’

There was so much reluctance in his voice that it had been easy for Elizabeth to dismiss the suggestion, which held far less appeal anyway than she knew it should, and to steer the conversation into smoother waters, like how to get hold of the head to confirm that she would be resuming her duties and when Roland would be returning to school.

Charlie found his mother and wife, as Elizabeth had said, picking raspberries. Or, rather, Serena was picking raspberries while Pamela sat, one full basket on her knees, on a tree stump in the shade at one end of the cages. She got up to greet Charlie, saying Serena was being marvellous and she didn’t know what she would do without her, then tactfully excused herself to wander back up to the house. Charlie slipped under the green netting and pulled his wife into his arms, so fiercely that several of the berries on her own already mountainous basket, tumbled to the ground. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you either,’ he murmured, kissing her mouth and tasting fruit. Aroused, he pressed a little harder, wanting her to feel how much he missed the physical intimacy they had once taken for granted but which, for so many months now, had been absent.

‘Me neither.’ Serena spoke fondly enough but pulled away and began to search for the lost berries in the tufts of grass at their feet.

Rebuffed, Charlie put his hands in his pockets, while the now familiar sensation of physical deprivation, a deep ache, swelled and hardened inside. Maybe nothing had changed, after all, he reflected bleakly. All week he had been saving the astonishing news about his mother and his uncle, looking forward to his wife’s cool intuitive wisdom to help him make sense of it. Yet now, looking down at the top of Serena’s head while she scrabbled for raspberries instead of returning his embrace, the desire to tell her anything disappeared. ‘All well?’ he said instead.

‘Oh, yes … very well.’ Still crouching, she looked up at him. ‘Charlie, I’ve been wanting to tell you … I’ve had such an idea … such a wonderful idea … couldn’t say it on the phone.’ Her voice trembled but her face – eyes brilliant, cheeks pink – shone so brightly that Charlie, his own fragile hopes blazing again, crouched down next to her and seized her hands. ‘What, my darling, what?’

‘Tina … I want to move her … here … to St Margaret’s. I’ve spoken to the vicar and the diocesan registry and we need to apply for something called a Faculty, which is a court order from the consistory court, and also a licence, which you get from the Home Office; and then, of course, there’s the local environmental health people and the funeral directors who would organise the move —’

‘Whoa there – hang on a minute.’ Charlie dropped her hands and stood up. ‘Move Tina? You want to
move
her?’

‘Yes.’ Serena set down the basket and stood up, crossing her arms. ‘It will be hard because she was buried on consecrated ground and apparently —’

‘And you’ve decided this, have you?’

‘It would be so much better,’ Serena persisted, hearing the edge in his voice but deciding to ignore it. If he didn’t understand this, he was incapable of understanding anything. ‘We’re here so much, it would be lovely to have her —’

‘You have
decided
this, have you? Without consulting me.’

‘I am consulting you. Now.’

‘Well, it doesn’t feel much like a consultation, I can tell you.’

‘Oh, Charlie, please understand —’

‘No, you understand. I lost her too. Our darling daughter. Our precious Tina. We laid her to rest
together
. Next to your mother. As
you
wanted. Forgive me if I do not immediately leap to the notion of digging up and carting her little body across the country because of some new whim of yours, which you have seized and acted upon without deigning to refer to me first.’ Charlie turned and fought his way out of the cage, tugging at the green netting as it caught at his shoes and elbows. Serena watched, furious and helpless, until he was striding away, past the rows of wigwammed runner beans towards the gate in the privet hedge and into the garden.

In spite of the heat Stephen decided to wear a beanie for his meeting with the brother. The big brother. Big wanker brother. He didn’t want to meet him. He didn’t want to have anything to do with any of the Harrisons ever again. But the guy had rung so many times and been – even Stephen had to admit – very charming, with chat of mutual interest and excellent propositions, that he had eventually given in, seduced as much by curiosity as anything else. With the hot wool of the beanie, grey with black stripes, pulled down to his ears, he felt somehow safer. Uglier, but safer. The brother would no doubt be in City-gent gear – pinstripes, matching-shirt-and-
handkerchief, suede brogues and a silk tie. Stephen knew what Peter’s face would look like because of the photos he had seen at Ashley House: a fuller, younger version of the father, with short, crisp grey hair, deep-set eyes, a long Roman nose and a square jaw. A face full of pride and self-assertion, with lines of age rather than doubt. A man in the prime of life, sure of his place in the world. Contemplating the meeting, Stephen had at first been tempted, in some small way, to compete. Back in his flat after his futile spell in July of failing to blot out the world with the anonymity of benders and bedsits, he had spent some time that morning surveying the smarter items of his disparate wardrobe, ranged round the dado rail in his bedroom. Then he had thought, What the fuck? and pulled on his baggy khaki shorts, a faded brown T-shirt and a pair of old leather sandals, bought several years before at a roadside market in Quito for the equivalent of fifty pence.

Peter had insisted they meet on Westminster Bridge, of all places. He would have a
Financial Times
under his arm, he said, as if they were two characters meeting in a spy novel, exchanging passwords and information on dead-letter drops. Stephen was to arrive in the middle of the bridge at three o’clock exactly, he instructed; he would be waiting for him, leaning on the railings of the east side, looking towards the London Eye. Stephen, who had never liked being told what to do by anyone, set off for the bus stop deliberately late: a little tardiness would make Peter squirm, destroy just a touch of that grand, affluent cool. But the moment he got to the bridge itself and saw not only Peter but Cassie, unmistakable with her curly halo of hair and long pale-skinned limbs, waiting in the middle of it, he broke into a trot, fearful that they would give up and hail a cab before he reached them.

Cassie saw Stephen first and nudged her brother. He hadn’t wanted her to come, but she had insisted, having seen the shaming crudity of Peter’s plan and hoping, somehow, to soften it by her presence. Peter would be all businesslike and unfeeling, while she might be able to explain things better, make Stephen see that as well as protecting themselves, they hoped to help him. Genuinely help him. Or so Cassie told herself. For the closer the day came the more uncomfortable she had felt about it. A bribe was a bribe. Demeaning. It would also – no matter what Peter said – open them up to more bribes in the future, make them vulnerable, when what they really sought was impregnability. By the time Stephen’s jogging figure came into view on the bridge, she had, with increasing jitteriness, suggested many times that they give up and go home. Seeing him proved even more terrible than waiting for him. In his woolly hat and baggy clothes he looked so scruffy and boy-like that Cassie’s heart tore at the thought of what they were about to do. ‘Peter …’ she began, but her brother had broken away from the railing and was already walking towards their adversary with his hand extended.

Composed as he appeared, Peter was, in fact, a jumble of nerves. This was as close to the wind as he had ever sailed, as desperate, probably, as he had ever been. It didn’t help that from the moment he had mentioned it, Helen had been openly sceptical and incredulous – yet when pressed she could offer no alternative beyond a suggestion that the truth be allowed to come out. Which, in Peter’s view, was unacceptable. Protecting one’s loved ones took many forms. In this case, it involved risk and the possibility of dreadful backfiring. But he was prepared to see it through for the sake of the family, for the sake of his parents’ happiness, which, surely, had only a few more years to run. The demise of Boots earlier that week was a reminder, if any of them needed it, that his father, about to enter his ninth decade, was already on borrowed time. All too soon he would be dead too and the truth could weasel its way to the surface, wreak whatever havoc it wanted and be damned.

‘Mr Smith? I’m Peter Harrison. I believe you already know my sister.’

‘Hello, Stephen,’ said Cassie, in a small voice, goosebumps of shame tiptoeing up her bare arms. ‘How are you?’

‘Great, thanks, just great.’ Stephen thrust his hands into his pockets and looked at his sandals. He could feel where the leather had worn under the pressure of his soles and toes, creating perfect indentations for them to rest in. ‘I can’t think why you wanted to see me,’ he added, with less confidence, wishing she didn’t look quite so fresh and delicate, in a silky blue sleeveless dress, which, though full, did nothing to hide the slim neat contours of her figure.

‘Shall we walk?’ cut in Peter. ‘There’s a place on the south side near the wheel – I thought we might have a coffee there.’

‘Bit hot for coffee, isn’t it?’ said Stephen, feeling the force of Peter’s determination to control the proceedings and instinctively resisting it.

‘A cold drink, then. Quite right, far too hot for coffee.’ Peter began to walk, glancing behind to check Cassie and Stephen were following. Next to them the London Eye turned slowly, like a huge, stranded waterwheel. Beneath it the river fluttered, silvery white in the glare of the afternoon sun. After so many rainless weeks the mudflats on either side were plainly visible, punctured in places by rusting objects and beached driftwood.

‘What’s all this about, then?’ ventured Stephen, falling into step alongside Cassie, managing, in spite of the awkwardness of the occasion and the roller coaster of his emotions during the preceding months, to enjoy being next to her with the sun on their heads and the arched pavement of the bridge stretching ahead. He had hated her many times in his heart, but now that she was within sight once more the love flooded back in, as simple and overpowering as a tidal wave against a sandbag.

‘It’s about the book,’ replied Cassie. ‘Your book. Peter will tell you.’ Not wanting to reveal more, she increased her stride until the three were walking abreast. They continued in silence, each locked in the tangle of their own thoughts.

Peter waited until their drinks had arrived, an iced tea for him and Sprite for the others, then launched, glib and fluent, into the matter of his financial proposition. Cassie watched, sickened, as Stephen’s expression moved from one of simple enquiry to embarrassment – at the revelation of their knowledge of his addition to the manuscript – to pure shock. Peter, oblivious, or perhaps merely disregarding, ploughed on.