Relative Love (7 page)

‘Just one of my clients – or, rather, their flat. A spark from some out-of-date wiring or something. But no one was hurt and I’ve been given a big budget to redecorate. There’s some tea in the pot if you want it.’

‘Has Mum had some?’

‘No, she’s busy worrying about this photograph. She’s got a real bee in her bonnet about it. Poor old Sid, getting landed when all he really wants is his Christmas bottle of Scotch. And it’s going to take ages to round everybody up. The children have scattered and I saw Aunt Alicia sneaking back to the barn with a box of Turkish Delight under her arm. God, she’s a miserable old bag, isn’t she? Except with Charlie – she adores him.’

‘That’s because he flirts with her,’ put in Serena. ‘Old ladies love to be flirted with, I suppose because it makes them feel young again.’

‘What’s flirting?’ enquired Chloë, popping up next to the sofa.

‘Never you mind,’ began Helen, but Serena, speaking over her, said that it was trying to get people to notice you and think you were pretty. ‘But not in a good way,’ added Helen quickly, spotting the sparkle of happy recognition in her daughter’s face and wanting to crush it. ‘It’s a bit like showing off.’

Serena, feeling for Chloë, who was looking both puzzled and crestfallen, got up from the sofa, saying that if they were all to be on parade for Sid she ought to wake Tina from her afternoon nap. ‘And I could do with some help changing her nappy,’ she added, eyeing her niece, ‘but I warn you, it might be a bit smelly.’

‘Oh, yukky,’ shrieked Chloë, making no secret of her delight.

‘Thank God I’m through all that baby business,’ said Helen, with a sigh, after the two had gone. ‘Food and drink in one end and out the other – they’re just bivalves, really, aren’t they? All that mopping-up mothers have to do. I suppose, looking back, it’s not actually for that long, though at the time it does seem endless.’

‘Doesn’t it just?’ murmured Elizabeth, toying with and rejecting the idea of mentioning Roland’s sodden sheets, at that moment whirling round in the tumble-dryer in the utility room at the end of the passage. It seemed cruel to blurt out his problems to the whole world. Pamela knew and that was bad enough. When she had spotted the stripped bed that morning, her mother had suggested that it might be time to consult a doctor. Which, while sensible and well-intended, had stirred ancient resentments in Elizabeth’s already troubled heart. She had never been good enough, never getting-it-right enough. Battling to turn the mattress, she had marvelled at how quickly – how violently – the old feelings could sear through her, as if thirty seconds rather than thirty years separated her from the debilitating sense of inadequacy that had underpinned the
turbulence of her teens. Of course Roland should have grown out of such habits and, as his mother, she felt all the burden of being the one who should know how to assist him in doing so. According to family legend, she and her siblings were all potty-trained by thirteen months; washing nappies was such a bore, Pamela claimed, that it had been the only thing to do. As if all it had taken was a steely click of the fingers. As if that was all it should take Elizabeth, if only she could click hard enough and in the right way.

‘Well, I shall be quite hopeless at absolutely anything to do with babies,’ declared Cassie cheerfully, unaware both of her sister’s dilemmas and of the fact that, for the first time in her thirty-seven years, she had used the future tense rather than the conditional to address the notion.

As several had predicted, the photograph took a while to set up. Peter took charge of the operation, while Pamela talked Sid through the mechanics of pressing the right button. After some debate – mostly with himself – Peter settled upon the drawing-room sofa as the ideal focal point round which the group should assemble, instructing the tallest members to stand behind (himself, Charlie, Colin and Theo), the oldest to sit on the sofa (Alicia, John and Pamela) and the youngest to assume various poses at their feet on the carpet. The remaining group, who fitted into none of these categories (the twins, Elizabeth, Cassie, Serena and Helen), he directed to the sides of the sofa: Maisie and Clem perched on each arm while the women stood at their shoulders. It made for an impressive group, as Sid said many times, frowning more wrinkles into his creased old face and trying to keep his stout, calloused fingers steady on the button. They posed for several shots, during which baby Tina, resplendent in a new pink towelling Babygro, was passed along the rows like a parcel, landing finally with Cassie, who held her stiffly at first and then more snugly as the child, latching all ten fingers on to her big beaded necklace, relaxed in her arms.

All the children were patient and co-operative apart from Maisie who, worried that her aunt would smell the cigarette smoke on her hair and clothes (Uncle Peter, stamping round the garden with the dog, had almost stumbled right into her), kept tossing her head and saying what a drag it was. When Theo pleaded with them all not to move while he fetched his video camera, she groaned until silenced by a stern look from her father.

‘But then
you
won’t be in the picture, Theo,’ squealed Chloë, who was thoroughly enjoying sprawling on the carpet, shouting, ‘Cheese,’ every five seconds and keeping a firm grip on Boots’s collar. Slumped with exhaustion from his walk at John’s feet – right on top of his shoes, to be exact – the dog didn’t need holding, but Chloë, feeling proud and powerful, couldn’t resist the chance to lay claim to him.

‘It doesn’t matter that I’m not in it,’ Theo assured his sister, when he returned a few moments later with the lens of his camera glued to his right eye. Behind him Sid was shrinking back into the room, dreading a request either to pose with the family or to handle this infinitely more complicated piece of equipment. ‘Any decent documentary-maker has to remain outside his subject, be objective and so on.’ There was a ripple of exchanged looks: some, among the grown-ups, of admiration, and some, among his cousins, of baffled toleration.

‘Just get on with it,’ hissed Maisie, breaking off to yelp with pain as her tiny sister, bored with Cassie’s necklace, seized a clump of her hair. ‘Ow, Jesus, bloody hell, Tina.’

‘Maisie,’ growled Charlie, who had a post-lunch headache, ‘that’s quite enough.’

‘It hurt. And my leg’s gone to sleep.’

‘Well done, Theo, I think that will do,’ purred Pamela, rising from her seat to restore calm. ‘Thank you, all of you. And to you, dear Sid. So kind.’ She floated across the room and looped her arm through his to steer him from the room, knowing that without such assistance her employee, especially when he was full of mulled wine and good cheer, sometimes found it hard to make his own way to the front door. ‘Love to Vera. Is Jessica coming to stay this holidays? Oh, good. Well, do send her round whenever you want, won’t you? The more the merrier, as far as the children are concerned. Isn’t that right, children?’

‘Yes,’ they chorused, not catching each other’s eyes because they all hated Sid’s granddaughter, even though they were supposed to feel sorry for her because her father had run off with a barmaid and her mother, as Pamela frequently put it, ‘couldn’t cope’. ‘Of course, Granny.’ They kept their laughter in until Pamela had left the room and their parents had drifted out of earshot, drawn by someone’s suggestion of more tea. Then they all exploded, united properly for the first time that holiday by the invisible bond of antipathy against a common enemy. ‘You’re a stinking rude boy,’ shrieked Theo, imitating Jessica’s whining falsetto and all six children collapsed on the floor, holding their bellies and rolling with laughter, Ed seeing suddenly that Theo hadn’t transformed into a pompous git after all, Chloë feeling for once blissfully old and included, Roland truly forgetting the ignominy of his wet bed, Clem thinking that
this
was what she had needed to get finally and thoroughly into the Christmas mood, and Maisie deciding that, as a form of recreation, smoking cigarettes alone by the manure heap had its limitations.

JANUARY

Pamela had packed carefully for her visit to Eric. As always, she used her big black leather handbag, of which she was not particularly fond but which had enough wide compartments to accommodate all the normal essentials together with a book, glasses, needlework and two bumper bags of sherbet lemons. Although he was unable to speak, Eric still took great pleasure in food, particularly sweets, and most particularly sherbet lemons. His appetite was probably why he had lived so long, the nurses said, but his once-broad, muscled frame, confined for so many years to beds and wheelchairs, was sagging and shrunken, as if caving in on what was left of the body inside. As fragile as a birdcage, thought Pamela now, hugging him gently and feeling the spokes of his ribs press against her chest. She released him and stroked his hair, which was white and thick, thinking as she always did how incongruous – how cruel – it was to have so much healthy growth on top of a face that was already more skull than skin. He had excellent teeth, too, for his age, in spite of the sweets, although the huge smiles with which he had once shown them off were a thing of the past. He looked, if anything, more alert than he had at Christmas, when perhaps he had been overwhelmed by the number of visitors (as well as John and herself, Elizabeth, Charlie and Peter had come with an assortment of grandchildren, including little Tina, who had toddled round the room lunging for ornaments and medicine bottles); his eyelids had hung so heavily and still throughout the visit that he might have been asleep.

‘John sends his love. He’s at the dentist today. Root-canal treatment, poor love.’ Pamela settled herself in the armchair next to the window, manoeuvred his wheelchair so that he was facing her and pulled out her needlework. She was stitching a new cover for the piano stool, a complicated trellis of entwined flowers that was testing her skill to the limit. ‘He put off going, of course, you know what he’s like. Turned out to be some horrible abscess – he’s on antibiotics and everything.’ She fed the needle through one of the tiny holes in the hessian and gave it a sharp tug, checking before she continued that the back of her handiwork looked as tidy as the front. Her mother had always said that the sign of a truly good needlewoman was when the hidden stitches stood up to as much critical scrutiny as those on display, without knots or loops or loose ends. She would often add, in a tone so menacing that Pamela still quailed to recollect it, that it was the same with people; that truly good characters could be turned inside out without fear of what might be revealed.

‘I’ll read to you in a little while – I’ve brought a John Buchan,
Greenmantle
. I expect you’ve read it, but it’s nice to re-read things, isn’t it? Like visiting old friends. Talking of visiting, did I tell you that the young man who wants to write about you is coming next week? So exciting. He’s called Stephen Smith and the book has been commissioned by some publishers in London. I hadn’t heard of them, but John had. He’s going to look out some of your bits and pieces from the attic. He said he might want to come and see you, though I said I’d check with you first. I don’t want to put you under any strain, so we’ll see how you are, shall we? You never were one for chatting to strangers very much, were you?’ she murmured, and paused in her stitching to sigh, then reached with a tissue to dab away a tiny overspill from the rheumy half-closed eyes.

John kept his mouth open as wide as he could, trying to ignore the ache in his jaw and the unpleasant sensation in his gums. Not pain exactly, but acute discomfort. As if pain was just
round the corner and might explode into being at any time. The antibiotics hadn’t entirely cleared up the infection, the dentist said. He would need another, stronger course, together with a couple more sessions of cleaning out the roots. Seventy-nine was wretchedly old, reflected John miserably, wishing he could close his jaw and run his tongue round his lips, which felt stretched and ready to split with dryness.

‘Okay down there?’ The dentist offered a grin of encouragement over the top of his white mask. ‘Not much fun, I know, but we’ll get there in the end, Mr Harrison.’ John widened his eyes in an attempt at a response, thinking as he did so of Eric, and the appalling tragedy of being trapped inside one’s body without resource to communication of any kind. Who knew what his brother really thought and felt about anything? Pamela, like the dentist, was quite happy to pursue one-sided conversations, finding enough response in her imagination to continue for hours at a time; but even after twenty years the sight of his stricken sibling still reduced John to a state of tongue-tied compassion coupled – if he was honest – with a sort of terror that he might one day end up the same way, sliding towards death with a dribble on his lips. It was one of the harshest tricks of life, he mused, that one could choose neither the manner nor the moment by which one left it. Just that morning over breakfast he had read about a woman embarking on a legal battle to have herself killed. There had been a picture of her bent almost double in a wheelchair, her body all warped and witchy from some dreadful disintegrating disease, her stoic husband at her side, huge sleep-deprived pouches puckering his eyes, his lips thin with suffering and determination.

John let his eyelids close, blocking out the glare of the dentist’s angle-poised light. A small but persistent tickle had started at the edge of his left nostril. Would he take eternal life if it were offered to him? No, he wouldn’t, John decided fiercely. Life only derived meaning through its transience. And yet he longed for the reassurance that he would leave some imprint on the world after his death, some echo of immortality. Like Eric having an entire chapter devoted to his exploits in the war. For a brief moment an absurd envy flickered inside John’s heart. His own few months of active service – all spent in England – had been singularly inglorious and a career in insurance would never warrant a biographer’s interest. Access to anything equivalent would arise simply through the continuation of the family line, through his strapping sons and daughters, and Ashley House, of course, the jewel in the proverbial crown, nestling at the heart of the Harrison name. Cheered immensely by these thoughts, John opened his eyes to find the dentist pulling down his mask.