Relative Love (66 page)

‘Is it about my feelings?’ he volunteered cheerfully, catching a shard of sliding chocolate with his tongue, knowing in spite of Elizabeth’s endeavours to disguise it that they were entering ‘grown-up’ territory, which, ever since the permanent separation from his father, had constituted long chats on how he felt about virtually everything under the sun.

Elizabeth laughed a little sadly, wondering briefly whether her relentless candour of recent weeks had protected her son’s innocence or destroyed it. ‘No, not your feelings, not this time.’ She watched Roland attempt a leap over a long thin puddle and land well short, splashing mud up the backs of his legs. Once upon a time, she thought, gathering courage to continue her enquiry, he wouldn’t even have tried such a jump. He would have been afraid of failing or getting dirty. ‘It’s just about a photo … a little photo I found in your shorts – oh, ages ago now.’ A few paces ahead of her Roland stopped, then continued walking without looking back. ‘I just
wondered how you got hold of it. Roland? Please answer me. I’m not cross or anything, I just want to know.’

Roland spun round, swiping the back of his hand across the vanilla smears on his cheeks and upper lip. He had done his best to forget about the man and the photo, even though one of the many difficult things he had learnt in recent weeks was that forgetting about something didn’t necessarily make it go away. Standing now in the lane, with the sun dancing in yellow specks round his feet, his stomach pleasantly full of sugar, and his lovely Hadrian tucked safely inside his satchel, the last thing he wanted was to be told off. But his mother’s eyes glittered expectantly and his heart quailed at the daunting task of trying to lie.

‘The man in the photo gave it to me. He came to Ashley House one day. He said he was my friend. He said I could tell you, but I decided not to.’

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Elizabeth, so clearly more astonished than angry that Roland galloped on with a thorough account of his morning’s encounter with Lucien, even mentioning how loudly he had whistled as he walked away.

‘He came here?’ said Elizabeth stupidly. ‘Whatever for?’

‘To see
me
, silly. And you, I suppose,’ Roland conceded, already bored with the subject and baffled at how grown-ups could switch from being scary one minute to downright thick the next.

‘What’s for tea? I’m starving.’

‘Fish fingers, potato waffles and peas,’ murmured Elizabeth, still marvelling at all she had heard and wondering what, if anything, to do about it.

Pamela got to Wimbledon much later than she had intended, with aching feet and several bulging shopping-bags. Serena greeted her with a warm embrace and a finger pressed to her lips. She explained in hushed tones that Maisie was asleep upstairs. ‘She’s not really ill,’ she whispered, unlooping the bags off her mother-in-law’s arms and leading the way into the kitchen, ‘but thinks she is, which is more or less the same thing, isn’t it? Actually it was good for Clem to be able to play the role of healthy one for a change, trotting off to school and seeing her sister laid up with a thermometer in her mouth.’

‘Dear Clem, how is she?’ asked Pamela, unable to contain a sigh of relief as she flopped into a kitchen chair while Serena scurried around with knives, forks and glasses. There was a lovely smell from the oven, which turned out to be a fish pie, perfectly cooked with crusted peaks of mashed potato covering a creamy concoction of soft cod, hard-boiled eggs, capers and nutmeg. Through the window to her left the recently mown narrow strip of grass shimmered in stripes of light and dark green, like the lanes of a long swimming-pool. On the path a huge quantity of leaves had been raked into a tidy pile next to what Pamela could see, with her expert eye, was a freshly and expertly trimmed Old Blush China rose, which had probably bloomed hard all summer and would, after such attentions, almost certainly be in flower again for Christmas.

‘Clem is doing all right,’ replied Serena firmly, dishing out spoonfuls of the pie as she talked and adding enticing clusters of petit pois and steamed French beans next to each portion. ‘The weight is going on slowly – but the main thing is not to pressure her, to make her feel that she’s doing it all for herself. The doctors have been fantastic – eating disorders are so horribly common, these days, and they’ve got all sorts of clever ways of treating them. She sees her psychologist tomorrow – that’s always a difficult day – but then she settles down again. We’ve got this thing called a treatment plan, all about what she should eat, what she’s aiming for, the point being it’s
her
plan not ours. She’s not being sick any more – at least, I’m pretty sure she isn’t – although,’
she added, with traces of the desperation she felt at her daughter’s plight slipping into her tone, ‘I do hear her exercising late at night sometimes when she thinks we’re all asleep.’

‘My dear, how terrible …’

‘Oh, no, honestly.’ Serena looked squarely across the table, wanting her mother-in-law to know that she had no need of pity, not any more. The desperation, like the sadness, was a constant companion, but one whose acquaintance could now be endured because she shared it with Charlie. When she had first told him – just before he boarded his return flight from Tampa – the full version of events with regard to Clem, her actual weight, the pitiful diary entries, the vomiting, the laxatives, he had offered ten sensible manly responses, then wept like a child. When they had fallen into each other’s arms at the airport he had wept again, as had she. They had stood in the middle of the airport concourse, travellers, shoppers, loaded trolleys, petulant children streaming on all sides, clinging to each other like distraught lovers. Their tears were not just for their sick daughter but for each other, for Tina and the alienation of their grief, for the scare of the hurricane and the whole fragile business of being alive. ‘It’s tricky at times,’ admitted Serena, still wanting to melt some of the compassion from her mother-in-law’s gaze, ‘but not terrible. I’m getting help too now, from a bereavement counsellor. So it’s not as if Clem is the only one having her head examined.’ She paused, momentarily overcome by how far things had gone, how in the space of just a few months the world of her lovely blossoming family had been turned upside-down and shaken to its core. ‘The hardest thing is admitting one needs help, but at least, these days, the help is there, unlike when you …’ Serena stopped abruptly. With Charlie having told her only recently about the extraordinary business of Pamela’s affair with Eric, she had meant to leave the whole subject of her mother-in-law’s past well alone. Although the more Serena had thought about it, the less extraordinary the affair seemed. Her father-in-law, though sweet, was a little dour and dull. That Pamela should have been attracted to his wild-spirited war hero of an elder brother was just one of those unfortunate but thoroughly understandable things. Looking across the table now at Pamela, primly loading peas on to her fork, Serena was aware that this new knowledge of her mother-in-law’s past misdemeanours only made her like her more. It was comforting to find that no one was exempt from the business of being human: that life, with all its joys and disappointments, was complicated all the time for everyone. ‘I just meant … when you suffered your loss … Miranda – how hard it must have been …’

‘As I have said, Serena dear,’ countered Pamela easily, ‘that was
years
ago. Things were different then. We had our ways of coping.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you did,’ agreed Serena gently, ‘and, of course, coping without Tina is what is going on now, for all of us. It all goes back to Tina,’ she murmured, struck afresh by the truth of the sentiment.

Pamela slid her knife and fork into a tidy pairing across her empty plate. She wondered, but only fleetingly, if Serena – thanks to Charlie – knew about Eric. It didn’t matter, she knew, since it was hardly a subject to which her daughter-in-law would feel able to refer. No, all Serena was interested in, Pamela decided now, was Miranda, but she didn’t want – and didn’t have – to talk about that either. She didn’t need to. She had coped, Pamela reminded herself, not at first, maybe, but certainly now, with the unwitting help of Elizabeth and the unexpected release of Eric’s death. There was peace in her heart now, there really was. ‘John’s not well, though,’ she said, the words slipping out on the slipstream of her thoughts.

‘Oh dear. What sort of not well?’

‘Eric’s passing … he’s taken it hard. I think maybe he feels, somehow, that he’ll be next. He worries about money too, I think – whether he’ll live long enough to outwit the taxman.’

‘Oh dear.’ Serena made a face. ‘But he’s in great shape for his age … loads of years left in him. Aunt Alicia, on the other hand, now she did look frail, I thought, leaning so hard on her stick after all that business with her hip. Oh dear, but that’s probably not much consolation, is it?’

Pamela smiled. ‘Not really, no. Although Alicia, in spite of what she’s been through this year, was actually in very good spirits. Paul has invited her to Australia for Christmas and she’s determined to go.’

‘Good for her,’ declared Serena. She cleared the plates and went in search of the fruit salad she had prepared for dessert.

Maisie, who had been eavesdropping from behind the door into the dining room, turned and tiptoed back upstairs to bed, placing her bare feet carefully round the squeaky patch at the top of the landing. She had felt ill that morning, terrible, in fact, but mainly, as her mother knew, from lack of sleep. They had met in the small hours on the landing, as Maisie was making her third or fourth trip to the bathroom for a drink of water. Her mother, with her new look-every-problem-in-the-face boldness, had asked what the matter was. Maisie had started to say, ‘Nothing’, then burst into tears. Curled up five minutes later on the sitting-room sofa with a mug of Ovaltine and Serena’s arm round her shaking shoulders, she had poured out her woes, beginning with Clem’s shunning of all her attempts at affection and then wending her way, tearfully, bitterly, to a full rendition of the events both during and subsequent to the night of her uncle’s party. ‘We agreed to keep each other’s secret,’ she sobbed, ‘it was like this huge promise we made to each other, but then I broke it by showing you Clem’s diary, which I thought would make her go and tell you everything anyway, but instead of that she’s just being horrible – she hardly talks to me, she won’t walk home from school with me, it’s like I don’t exist and I hate it so much that I’d have preferred her to tell you all about stupid Rosco, I really would.’

Serena had fetched a box of tissues and stroked Maisie’s hair where it sprang from the top of her forehead, remembering as if it was yesterday the same line of little curls she had stroked as a shell-shocked but deliriously happy mother of twin baby girls. Friends had been delighted but sympathetic. Twins! Double the worry, double the work. And then with Ed, too. Three children under the age of three. Poor Serena! But she hadn’t felt ‘poor’: she had felt blessed, enriched beyond her wildest dreams. And now the girls were little women, and Ed, with his gel-spiked hair and sinewy muscled legs, a little man, all as beset with foibles and hang-ups and precarious hopes as any adult, as vulnerable to life’s pitfalls as the palm trees she had seen snapping in the Florida winds. ‘My darling, my poor, precious darling. What a thing to go through alone. What a horrible thing. You should have told me —’ Serena broke off at the realisation of how impossible this must have seemed, not just because she could recall clearly her own anxious teenage secrets – a horrible first kiss with a drunken friend of her father, being caught cheating in her mock maths O level, two pregnancy scares in the sixth form, none of which she would have dreamed of confiding to her own parents – but also because she saw how unapproachable her zombie-like state of grief must have made her seem. To her family, to the whole world. ‘It sounds as if Clem was wonderful.’

‘Oh, she was,’ agreed Maisie fiercely, ‘she really was. And then she helped me too, calling the journalist, and it must have done some good because now Rosco’s been arrested.’

‘Has he?’ Serena stared in astonishment at her daughter.

Maisie sniffed. ‘I don’t know if we had anything to do with it. I don’t care, really. It made me feel better anyhow, like I’d sort of done
something
to get my own back.’

‘You certainly did,’ murmured her mother, her expression shifting from astonishment to undisguised admiration. ‘And who was he, this journalist, if you don’t mind my asking?’

Maisie blew her nose loudly several times. She felt empty but also sort of fantastic, as if nothing could ever really worry her again. ‘Mr Cartwright. Mr L. J. Cartwright.’

‘Was he now? Blimey.’ Serena felt a shiver creep up her spine. It might be chance, of course – similar name, same profession, L stood for lots of names – but it was something of a weird coincidence, one that made her feel as if the world was very small and densely interconnected in a way that was preordained but unknowable. Then another thought occurred to her, a horrible one, which would not go away. ‘Darling Maisie, are you sure that … I mean, might it be wise for you to have a … test?’

Maisie turned to look at her mother, her face puffy, her nose scarlet. ‘What sort of test?’

‘Oh, darling …’ Serena plucked at the used tissues scattered across her lap. ‘A pregnancy test or … to check whether…sweetheart, I’m afraid there is always the chance of an STD.’ She whispered the word, fearful both of its ghoulish implications and Maisie’s reaction, which, much to her relief, was one of exasperation.

‘Mum,’ she groaned, ‘nothing
happened
. I promise, okay? It wasn’t like that. I don’t need a
test
, I really, really don’t.’

‘Okay.’ Serena smiled with relief. ‘Good. And I will talk to Clem, but you must understand, darling, she’s being difficult with all of us, it’s not just you. She’s going through an awful lot – we can only imagine the half of it. We’ve all just got to try and
be
there for her, show her we love her … and she does love you, you know, of course she does. It’s herself she’s not too keen on. She’s got to learn to like herself again and that can be very hard.’