Relative Love (59 page)

When Cassie had poured out these and all the other details during the course of his impromptu visit to her flat back in May Stephen had taken pleasure in consoling her, imagining naïvely that her need of a confidant could somehow, with time and tenderness, be transmuted into love. Knowing that this was now impossible, Stephen had begun, with the title of his manuscript,
Unsung Heroes
, staring up at him from the proof copy next to the phone on his desk, to hatch another plan; a way forward that would, without warfare or mortal courage, make him something of an unsung hero himself.

At the bus stop that Friday, however, his toes sore, he could feel all such brave resolve in danger of melting like the treacly black Tarmac on the road. If a bus didn’t come in five minutes … in ten minutes … He pulled off his sunglasses and tried to clean them on his T-shirt, only making the smears worse. They were old and scratched anyway, like a worn record, like his life. He lost patience and set off on foot, leaving the disgruntled bus-queue behind him, his flip-flops slapping noisily against his heels.

Dan was closing down his computer when Meryl, the receptionist, popped her head round his door to say that one more person was asking to see him. ‘He’s not registered but says it’s urgent,’ she explained nervously, not at all sure she had handled the situation correctly. The man looked scruffy and hot, with great damp patches under his arms and across the front and back of his T-shirt. He had entered the surgery barefooted, then slipped on a pair of blue flip-flops while he was talking to her. His toes and heels, she noticed, were thick with dirt, as if he had spent all day wandering the streets carrying the flip-flops instead of wearing them. Alone behind the desk Meryl had done her best to remember the security procedure for violent or drug-crazed patients. There was a red button somewhere under the counter, but she couldn’t remember where. But, then, it would be too awful to press it for someone who was perhaps slightly eccentric but making an innocent enquiry. And something about Stephen was profoundly innocent, she decided, looking into his big brown pupils for signs of dilation but seeing instead an intensity of determination that was disarming but not remotely hostile. His voice, too, was pleasingly gentle; not at all the voice of someone desperate for their next fix, with a knife or something worse tucked inside his pocket. He knew Dr Lambert’s name as well and said, very sweetly, that he wasn’t a regular patient and had no appointment but was prepared to wait for as long as was necessary.

Exhausted from a busy day, Dan followed Meryl out into the waiting room. Stephen was seated by the magazine stand, flicking absently through an ancient dog-eared copy of
Hello!
, drawing cheap comfort from the supposedly heartfelt public professions of love by celebrity couples who had subsequently gone their separate ways. His own love needed no limelight for its validation. Nor would any other face in the world ever make his heart beat quite as fast. Giving Cassie up, as he was about to do, was not inconsistent with loving her. It was just very, very sad.

Taken aback by the hippie-scruffiness of this would-be patient, Dan launched at once into standard explanations about the practice’s registration procedures and the fact that the surgery was now officially closed. ‘It’s not about me,’ said Stephen quietly, putting down the magazine, ‘it’s about Cassie. Cassie Harrison.’

Dan’s expression changed, encompassing in a few seconds everything from terror to surprise. ‘You’d better come in,’ he muttered, nodding reassurance at Meryl as he turned to lead the way into his consulting room. ‘Do sit down.’ He pointed at the chair next to his desk but Stephen was too busy studying the object of his own love’s passion to respond, trying to see whatever Cassie saw in what appeared to him to be Daniel Lambert’s rather indifferent features; sandy- grey hair, a narrow, already quite lined face, wide thin lips, hooded grey eyes – there was nothing obviously special or compelling. ‘I’ve not much to say.’ He remained standing behind the chair, childishly, irrelevantly, pleased to note that he was taller than his rival by several inches. ‘I’m a … friend of Cassie’s. I have come simply to tell you that she still misses you terribly and to say that if you truly … love …’ Stephen struggled with the word, a part of him wanting to resist, at this crucial moment of his sacrifice, the necessity of allowing this somewhat haggard doctor to share any of the territory occupied by his own emotions. ‘If you truly love her and need to be with her as much as she needs to be with you then you should get back in touch. It would make Cassie very happy. We only have one life, Dr Lambert, and should make the most of it.’

‘Well … I …’

‘And just one more thing. If you do choose to go back to Cassie, please promise me that you will never breathe one word of this meeting.’

‘I’m not sure that …’

‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes, if you insist, but …’

‘Thank you.’ Stephen left the room before Dan could say anything else.

Outside the gun-metal skies glowered, close now to bursting point. Close to bursting himself, Stephen walked as fast as his horrible footwear would allow, sustained by the inimitable consolation of having acted well. His heart was swollen with pain but there was virtue there too now, and truckloads of the kind of self-esteem that can only blossom from courage.

The storm broke on Saturday afternoon. The purple blanket of cloud that had smothered the southern half of the country for days began to heave like an inverted sea, releasing rain, zigzags of neon lightning and gun-shot cracks of thunder. Samson, who had been spread across two children’s laps on the sofa in the TV room enduring caresses to his head, tummy and tail, leapt to the carpet and ran for somewhere less exposed to hide. The picture on the television flickered and fuzzed as the aerial, freshly secured by the workmen a few weeks before, swayed in the buffeting wind. Rain clattered on the cloisters’ roof like deafening applause, prompting Maisie, who was sprawled on the rug in front of the television, to press the volume button on the remote control till it was almost at maximum. The film they were watching, a Disney tale of separated parents being united by the efforts of their children, was ending. There was an air of subdued gloom in the room, born of the knowledge that their glorious summer was over, with nothing to look forward to but school and shortening days.

Roland had followed the story of the film with especial concentration, his innards churning in confusion. He knew now that they were staying for his grandfather’s birthday, then going home. Back to their own small house with its heavy silences. Back to school. Back to his father, which
made him glad in a way but also afraid. Upstairs, his mother was already packing, ferrying clothes from the airing cupboard to their open suitcases, talking brightly about things she thought he’d like to hear: Art Club, his own cosy bed, seeing Dad. Roland had done his best to be pleased, but still felt as if he might cry at any moment for the silliest reason.

‘Biscuits, anyone?’ Pamela had come in with a heaped plate of homemade cookies, fat with honey and oatmeal, and beamed as her six grandchildren clustered round her like eager puppies.

Clem, not so eager, took hers last, then sat cross-legged on the floor next to Maisie where she sucked five crumbs off one edge and let them melt on her tongue. Alone among the children she was looking forward to getting back properly to the routine of home. Their few days in London that week had reminded her how much easier it was to control what she ate in the relaxed bosom of her own family rather than under the beady eye of her catering-obsessed grandmother. During the course of the summer holiday she had taken to exercising, feverish with heat and the fear of detection, once Maisie was asleep. Sit-ups, leg-lifts, press-ups, bicycles – each time she forced herself to do more repetitions, as the sweat poured off her and the blissful but maddeningly transient sensation of being in control, for those moments at least, took its soothing hold. Her grandfather’s dinner – pâté to start, roast duck, a three-tiered pavlova on which she had helped spread the snowy peaks of whipped cream – loomed now, huge and horrible: a terrifying obstacle course that would tax her powers of self-discipline and stealth to the limit. Two ducks were already stuffed and ready for the oven, pinky-brown and fatty, with onions and herbs sprouting out of their cracks and orifices. The very thought of them made Clem’s stomach clench. It was getting harder to make herself sick after each meal – she didn’t want the food in her stomach in the first place. But there were the exercises, she consoled herself now, and the laxatives – another recent acquisition in her increasingly formidable arsenal in the never-ending war against the dial on the bathroom scales. She could double her usual dose, she decided, liquidise whatever remained in her stomach before its hateful calories could circulate round her bloodstream.

‘Hey, look,’ squealed Ed, his mouth bulging with biscuit as he pointed at the television, ‘it’s that guy you’re so keen on, Maisie, Neil the-crappiest-singer-that-ever-lived Rosco.’

‘You shouldn’t swear, Ed,’ scolded Chloë archly, looking round for their grandmother, who had retreated to the kitchen with an empty plate. The children all returned their attention to the TV screen, which promptly split into several bands of black and white as the aerial performed another ducking dive at a particularly ferocious blow from the wind raging outside. A few moments later the bands had dissolved and re-formed to reveal a bedraggled Rosco being led from his home by police officers, arms crossed in front of his face in a vain attempt to mask his identity from the waiting cameras: ‘Teenage pop idol Neil Rosco was today taken in for questioning by police investigating allegations of drug abuse and the accessing of illegal child-pornography websites on the Internet. Police searched the star’s riverside penthouse in Battersea, emerging several hours later with boxes of disks, videos and a personal computer. Speaking through his lawyers Neil Rosco said he was innocent of all charges and would work ceaselessly to clear his name.’

‘A right pervert, in other words,’ remarked Ed, licking his fingers.

‘But innocent until proven guilty,’ declared Theo, grandly, feeling that with both parents in the legal profession he was duty-bound to make the point. Neither of them noticed the twins, staring in mute astonishment at the television, each silently wondering what part, if any, they might have played in the rock star’s disgrace.

‘I’d really gone off him anyway,’ said Maisie at length, stealing a glance at her sister, hoping for some support. ‘There’s something really
creepy
about him, don’t you agree, Clem?’

‘Uh? Oh, yeah, a real creep.’ Clem’s attention had already shifted from the news to the chunks of uneaten biscuit by her knees. She couldn’t care about Rosco or Maisie or anything. All that mattered was disposing of the biscuit without detection. With a sudden swoop of longing she thought of Boots, whose fat pink tongue would have Hoovered up the evidence in seconds.

Maisie, drawing unconsciously on years of mental alignment with her twin, saw in the same instant not only the abandoned wedges of biscuit but Clem’s obsessional preoccupation with them. She saw, too, as if for the first time, the hollows in her sister’s cheeks, the brittle thinness of the wrists sticking out of the arms of her unseasonably heavy and voluminous sweatshirt. Maybe something about the news report helped – a sense, simply, of closure to the worst chapter of her own short life – but in those few moments Maisie realised that her love for her sister had to surpass her fear of alienating her. Clem was starving herself to death. Suddenly the burden of that knowledge was too much for Maisie to bear alone. Something had to be done. Someone had to be told. Even though it meant betraying Clem. Even though it meant her sister might never love her again. Even though it meant her own sordid escapade would almost certainly be publicised in revenge.

With the suitcases half full Elizabeth remembered a last load of washing still hanging on the line outside. It would be sodden by now, more so than when she had pulled it out of the machine. She ran at such a pelt along the landing that she bumped into Maisie coming the other way. They bounced off each other, apologising. Or, at least, Elizabeth apologised. Her niece, who seemed breathless and distraught, said she was looking for Serena and had Elizabeth seen her.

‘She’s in the dining room, I think, laying up for dinner. Is something the matter?’

‘No, nothing.’ Maisie sped back the way she had come, both hands clutched round her stomach, as if, Elizabeth couldn’t help thinking, she was concealing something under her T-shirt. Dismissing the thought, she hurried on down the staircase and made her way to the utility room, which offered the nearest exit to the small cordoned-off area where Pamela kept her washing-line, strung between a sturdy wooden post and a cherry tree. She flung open the door, and leapt back in shock at the torrent of water teeming from the skies, so thickly that although it was still only early evening it looked like the middle of the night. It was pouring off the roofs, too, of the main house, the cloisters and the garden sheds, splashing in fountains out of the gutters. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘A cracker, isn’t it?’ agreed her father, appearing behind her
en route
to the cellars to pick out some of his finest wines to accompany the evening meal and already a little perked up by his first gin and tonic. ‘Thank God we had the roof done, that’s all I can say. Not going out, are you?’

‘Just for some washing I’d forgotten – for packing.’

‘Ah, yes. Packing.’ John eyed his daughter fondly. It was just the outcome he had anticipated: a cool-off followed by reunion. Everyone stronger and better as a result. ‘Well, I for one will miss you – and little Roland, of course.’

‘Oh, Dad, I’ll miss you too.’ Elizabeth put her arms round her father’s neck and hugged him hard so he wouldn’t see her tears.

Never good at heavy displays of emotion, John patted her back, much as he had once patted Boots and his predecessors. ‘Glad we could help. There’s always a home for you here.’