Relative Love (63 page)

‘Mum?’

‘Darling?’ Serena swung round to see Ed standing in the doorway in only his pyjama bottoms, one leg at his ankles, the other hoicked above the knee. His tummy was brown and his chest was peeling where it had burned a week before.

‘I can’t sleep.’ He yawned and stretched, revealing the satiny white underside of his arms.

‘Ed, darling, you know about hurricanes, don’t you? You did that lovely project.’

‘Yeah. Why?’ Ed eyed the television, puzzled both at the question and the searching expression on his mother’s face. He had entered the room expecting to be sent back upstairs. His main concern had been how to elicit permission to raid the fridge before he did so. He couldn’t sleep because he was still thinking about his new school but also because he was starving. He was always starving, these days, no matter how much he crammed in at meals. ‘Why, Mum?’ He looked at the TV again. Two distraught parents were putting in a plea for a missing child.

‘It’s just that there’s one going on now, quite near where Dad is, and I don’t know anything about them.’

‘Near Dad?’

‘Yes. I’m sure he’s fine, but I just want to know about them.’ Serena, fearful of an imminent recap of the headlines and the effect that the sight of Florida’s flattened palm trees might have on her son, switched off the television.

Ed scratched his head. ‘Well … I remember that they can be up to six miles high and that one of the reasons they twist is because the earth is rotating and,’ he continued, gathering confidence as the details of the project came back to him and from his mother’s rapt attention, ‘they start because warm sea heats the air above it and that rises really quickly and creates a centre of low pressure which drags in all these trade winds, and that makes everything spiral upwards more and it releases heat and rain and stuff. Oh, yes, and the amount of energy released is the equivalent of three hundred and sixty billion kilowatt hours a day, which would be six months’ supply of electrical energy for the whole of the USA. They can travel up to four hundred miles a day but usually die out after about three thousand. They are bad but also important to the earth’s atmosphere because they transfer heat and energy between the equator and the poles … Mum, is Dad right in the middle of this thing, then?’

Serena crossed the room and ruffled his already tousled hair. ‘I don’t honestly know, darling, but he is in Florida and that’s where a bit of the hurricane is at the moment. It just makes me feel better to know a few … facts. Thank you. What a clever love you are.’ She smiled and pressed her fears into abeyance, for the sake of Ed who was looking worried. After so many months of being at the mercy of her own emotions, it was good to find that she could master them; good to know she could be strong again, even if it was only on the outside. ‘Clever and, I suspect, a little hungry?’

‘Starving,’ admitted Ed ruefully.

‘Come on, then. Let’s get you some cereal or something.’

They stepped into the corridor just as Elizabeth and Pamela emerged from the dining room. ‘Have a bowl of Shreddies, Ed,’ she instructed, and pushed him on ahead. Then she turned to the other two, and without paying much attention to their somewhat shell-shocked state, burst out with the news about the hurricane and her concern for Charlie. In the same instant the front door opened. Helen and Peter tumbled into the house with dripping umbrellas, anxious about the weather across the Atlantic. They had heard a bulletin on the car radio, explained Peter, helping Helen off with her coat, then leading the way into the TV room in search of more news.

Ten minutes later, with Ed back in bed, Peter had found CNN on Sky and they were all huddled in front of it, nursing mugs of coffee and murmuring in horror at the images of rain-lashed marinas and gutted buildings.

‘You’ve tried ringing, have you?’ asked Peter, for the third time, having managed to restrain his incredulity at Serena not knowing the name or location of Charlie’s hotel to a glance at his wife. They were sitting on the sofa with Pamela, shoulder to shoulder, holding hands. The night, with the breaking of the weather, Eric’s stroke and the ferocity of an originally mild Atlantic-bound hurricane, felt endless in its capacity for shock. Peter squeezed his wife’s hand and could not think when he had last felt so protective of her, so at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

‘I’m sure he’s all right,’ said Elizabeth, which all of them had said at intervals, when the atmosphere of concern grew too tight to bear. ‘A government meeting like that – there would have been reports by now if their hotel had been hit … all those big cheeses, someone would have said something.’ Although her head throbbed and her lips were still stained faintly crimson from all the red wine she had drunk at dinner, she was sober now. More sober, indeed, than she had ever felt in her life. Her decision about Colin shimmered at the back of her mind, already as irrevocable as if she had acted upon it and far more manageable than the thought of something dreadful happening to Charlie. From time to time she glanced at Pamela, needing to reassure herself that their conversation had not been a dream, that she had found the understanding she had been seeking incoherently all her life. She thought of Eric too, glad that he was, after all, just
an uncle; and of her father, wronged but protected, going through goodness knows what at his brother’s bedside. What a night. Terrible but amazing, as terrible things often were. Deep in her heart, Elizabeth was sure that Charlie was all right. Not just because, statistically, it was improbable that he wouldn’t be, but because of Tina. Tragedy like that didn’t strike twice. Not in one year. Not in one family.

Pamela said little, other than to dismiss someone’s suggestion that Cassie be woken to join in the vigil. ‘Let her sleep,’ she had commanded, in a tone that silenced the idea at once. It felt like the least she could do, to protect her youngest from unnecessary pain. Just as she had protected John, just as she had tried to protect all of them in various ways over the years. Not always succeeding, of course. Particularly with Elizabeth: clumsy, suffering, struggling Elizabeth, born, Pamela saw so clearly now, when she herself was still in mourning both as a mother and a lover, nowhere near ready to deal with anything beyond the neediness of her own heart. It was astonishing that this unsavoury truth, exiled for so long from her consciousness, should have brought Elizabeth so much relief. Yet Pamela had seen the instantaneous effect of it in her daughter’s face, as she picked away at her mat – like a light spreading, a shadow lifting. Even now, gazing at the footage of devastation on the TV screen, presumably contemplating the possible demise of her own dear brother, Elizabeth looked somehow radiant. As if nothing could harm her again. For Pamela the sight was a tiny pinprick of consolation in an otherwise dark night. To her, the threat of losing Charlie seemed only too real. Death, unforgiven but accommodated – at huge personal cost – five decades before, seemed to have been reasserting itself all year as a malevolent, omnipresent force: Tina, Eric, Boots, and now Charlie – everything loved was there to be taken away. Particularly from wretches like her, who had dared to imagine that secrecy would preclude punishment, that the layer of years could ever truly bury the past. Talking to Elizabeth had brought it all back; not just the anguish of her loss but, buried deeper still, the ugliness of her adulterous deceit – making love with Eric and then, when she had realised she was pregnant, seducing her husband, teasing like a whore for sex, not because she wanted it but so that the identity of the foetus in her womb could never be called into question. Forced again to confront the graphic details of her treachery, it seemed to Pamela only right that Eric should be at death’s door, that Charlie should be drowned or crushed or hurled into the sky. Because she deserved it. Because chaos reigned and all her battles against it had been for nothing.

It wasn’t until Serena, exhausted by her own desperation, flung her mobile on to the carpet instead of clutching it to her heart, that it rang. They all watched it, spellbound, apart from Serena who dropped her face into her hands and burst into tears. ‘It might not be him,’ she sobbed.

‘Of course it’s him.’ Peter picked up the phone and thrust it under her nose. ‘Who else would call this number in the middle of the bloody night?’

Serena took the phone with trembling fingers, as if expecting it at any moment to explode in her face. ‘Charlie?’ she whispered, turning her face from the others in a futile bid for privacy. ‘Oh, Charlie … oh, darling, it
is
you.’ There were exclamations of relief all round. Serena, smiling now, turned to face them with a thumbs-up sign. ‘So you’re fine, are you? Well, we were a tad worried, yes …’ She rolled her eyes at her audience and then took herself and the phone off in search of a place where all the things she had to say could not be overheard.

John, watching his taxi disappear up the dank darkness of the lane, knew nothing of the jubilation going on in his TV room. Alone in the rain, falling now in a thick drizzle, he studied
the familiar contours of his home, the lights in the downstairs rooms shining like the welcoming smile of an old friend. He had talked to Eric that night of Ashley House, describing the views towards the copse and the Downs, the dusky white roses rampaging up and down the legs of the pergola, the polished brass of the sundial. He wasn’t great with adjectives, not like Pamela or Peter, but he had wanted to give Eric one last flavour of the still pulsing heart of the family home.
Their
family home, even though he had been the one to live in it.

And now Eric was dead. Mrs Cordman, who had phoned during dinner had warned that he would not last the night. John had reported otherwise to Pamela and the children but had felt only a small qualm about lying. Death, he knew, from having watched his father strain stubbornly for every last breath, was neither serene nor beautiful. When he entered the room, Eric had a trickle of yellow vomit at the corner of his mouth and the glaze of what looked disturbingly like panic in his usually lifeless eyes. Even without such details (the little Irish nurse quickly dabbed his mouth clean) the sight of the wasted body was harrowing enough. Mentally prepared as he was, John had flinched at the visible deterioration since his last visit: the birdcage frame under the bedclothes, the thighs as thin as wrists, the contours of the skull painfully clear through the papery skin of his once handsome face, as if the life was literally being sucked out of it. He had wanted, he told himself, to spare Pamela – to spare all of them – such a sight. But most of all he had felt a keen selfish desire to say this last farewell alone, to make it brother to brother, ending their acquaintance as they had begun it, before the complications of fate and fortune had got in the way.

It was a while before John felt ready to go inside. Standing in the drive, with the rain seeping over the edges of his coat collar and down his neck, he felt both freed and burdened by the new, absolute, absence of his brother. He felt, too, a mounting trepidation at how Pamela would react. Her devotion to Eric, he knew, had been unwavering, as had Eric’s to her.

As John watched the house it seemed to heave and breathe as the water slid off its walls and dripped from its gutters. With Eric gone, the path to his own death had opened up, stripped and stark. One day soon only Ashley House would remain, the thread through the years, connecting the generations with the solidity of its stone walls and the whisper of old conversations floating under its high beams. And thank God for that, John reflected, wresting consolation from what might have been a desolate thought and forcing himself, still stiff from his vigil in a hard chair at Eric’s bedside, to move towards the front door. The old metal handle creaked as it always did before it granted him access to the hall. Peter appeared first. ‘Dad?’

John shook his head, unable for a moment to speak.

‘Oh, no … I’m sorry, Dad. And on your birthday too. Christ, how awful.’ Peter touched John’s arm, shy, even in such dire circumstances, of offering anything more intimate than their customary handshake. ‘I’ll get you a Scotch, shall I? Expect you could do with one. The others are in the drawing room. Mum, Lizzy, Helen, Serena – we’re all still up —’ Peter broke off, instinct warning him that it wasn’t the moment to mention the false alarm of Charlie and the hurricane. ‘I’ll get that whisky.’

John walked towards the drawing room and stopped in the doorway, momentarily daunted by the sight of them all chatting quietly and looking so comfortable. Pamela, sitting on the near end of the sofa, saw him first. ‘John, darling …’

‘I’m sorry, Pammy, the end was nearer than they thought. He’s gone. I’m sorry.’ He went quickly to stand behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders, unable to bear the glimmer of recrimination in her eyes. She would need to forgive him, he knew, for having gone through the ordeal alone.

‘Poor you, Dad, and poor Eric. But Charlie’s all right,’ added Elizabeth hurriedly, wanting to give her mother time to recover and feeling they all needed a reminder of their recent good fortune.

‘Charlie?’ John looked from one to the other. ‘Why shouldn’t Charlie be all right?’

Suddenly they were all talking at once, telling him about the twist in the path of the hurricane and their fears. How, just when they were getting desperate, Charlie had phoned to say that, apart from the inconvenience of the conference being evacuated north to Tampa, all members of the international delegation were fine.

‘He’s absolutely fine,’ echoed Serena, still exultant with relief and the sheer joy of hearing Charlie’s gravelly voice saying he loved her and would always love her, that together they would sort out Clem and everything else. ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he had murmured, ‘my darling Serena, I thought I’d lost you.’ And she had said that he had for a while because she had lost herself.

‘So that’s good, isn’t it?’ said Pamela softly, patting one of the hands on her shoulder, inwardly fighting with the parallel reactions of having lost Eric but been granted the safety of her son. There was a balance to it, a pattern she recognised but was yet too numb to find consoling. Her beloved Eric, gone at last, after all those years, all that pain of loving him. The pain didn’t stop, of course – it never had – but there was some peace in that his side of the story had found an ending. While her side had yet to complete its unravelling, she reflected bleakly, and glanced anxiously at Elizabeth. Her daughter returned her gaze but with a new, heartening composure. The secret had leaked, but not spilled entirely, Pamela reminded herself. She had fought hard for that and would continue to do so. For her own sake, but mainly for John’s. She squeezed her husband’s hand harder, saying with her fingers what words could not.