Relative Love (74 page)

He laughed. ‘Sure.’ He took off one of his black leather gloves and gripped her fingers, then released them. ‘And since you’re here,’ he rummaged in a small luggage box behind his seat, ‘take this. First proof, full of typos, and of course that won’t be the cover, but you’ll get the gist.’

‘Thanks.’ Cassie took the book and folded her arms across it. ‘Seeing as you asked,’ she added, following an urge to set the record straight, ‘that doctor, Daniel Lambert, I did start seeing him again but now I’m not. It would never have worked out. Married men.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘All the bloody same.’

‘Right.’ Somehow, in spite of this information, Stephen got the bike going, glad of the camouflage of the thick gloves for his trembling hands. This was what he had promised he would do, he reminded himself, and he was going to stick to it. He had a good life, these days, not just because of the advance on his thriller, but because of the girl from the Indian restaurant and a new flat with decent-sized rooms. Cassie was part of the nightmare of before, when he had been out of control on every front. Doctor or no doctor, he wasn’t going to break his vow to himself and balls everything up. Not now, not ever. He was revving the engine loudly when suddenly it cut out.

‘Oh dear.’ Cassie pressed her hand to her lips to conceal her amusement. ‘Maybe cars are best after all, even unwashed ones.’

‘Yeah, well … The mud on yours is thick enough to carve messages in,’ he muttered, fiddling with the key.

Somewhere, deep inside Cassie’s consciousness, a penny dropped. ‘Oh, my God, it wasn’t you, was it? My name – in the mud by the wheel. Was it you?’

Stephen blushed so heavily he was glad of his helmet. ‘Guilty as charged.’ The words, so light, seemed to stick in his mouth. He remembered in a flash all the other things he had done – the secret vigils, the flower on the doorstep, the dancing hearts on her icy windscreen – and blushed again. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I had a bad patch, sort of lost myself for a bit. I’m sorry you, er, got caught up in it.’ The engine flared at last, much more healthily this time, drowning the tail-end of his sentence. ‘ ’Bye, then,’ he shouted. Ride away, he told himself, ride away, but she was trying to say something now, pressing her mouth close to his helmet.

‘Will – your – publishers – have – a – launch – party – for – the – book?’

‘Maybe.’ He nodded. ‘Next year.’

‘Invite me,’ she said, or at least that was what he thought she said, although it was hard to be sure through the clamour of the motorbike and the shouting inside his head:
You shouldn’t have come, nothing has changed, you shouldn’t have come, nothing has changed
.

Frowning as the bike sped away, Cassie was musing on precisely the opposite notion. Everything changed, she decided, strolling back to her flat to pack for the weekend with her family. Everything always changed, because the world and people were in constant flux, bouncing off each other and situations like atoms in the quantum-theory business she had struggled with so badly as a schoolgirl. Every incident, every action, every thought triggered myriad consequences. Like Tina dying and Stephen finding her mother’s love-letter and Dan’s wife getting sick. Each event was a stone in a pond, the impact rippling endlessly into countless lives, creating consequences in countless ways. Nothing happened in isolation. Nothing stayed the same. Like her feelings for Dan. She had simplified deliberately in her explanation to Stephen; it hadn’t been easy to give him up, in spite of her growing recognition of his indecisive, deeply married state. She still missed him, or at least she missed the hope of happiness with which she had always associated him. But after a couple of encounters, intense and passionate and wonderful though they had been, something inside her – some instinct for self-preservation, perhaps – had clicked
into place. She deserved, she needed, more than half-hopes and a half-life of clandestine meetings and hazy promises. It’s over, she had told him, a few weeks after they had got back together. I don’t want to do this any more. Live your life with Sally and let me go. He had begged her to change her mind, but then, confronted perhaps by the limitations of his own position, his inability still to offer the full commitment she had always sought, accepted defeat. They hadn’t spoken since and the silence felt permanent. Instigated on this occasion by her own strength of mind, this second separation had proved much easier to cope with. The flames of love, if unfanned for long enough, could subside, Cassie had discovered. Emotions, too, changed with time and altered circumstance.

Like Stephen Smith, she mused, going over their meeting as she threw toiletries and clothing into a bag. The events of the year had certainly changed him – for the better, it seemed. Maybe rejecting Peter’s offer (even more unbelievably crass and desperate in retrospect than it had seemed at the time) had been the making of him. Whatever the cause, Stephen was a more mature, composed version of the creature who had tremblingly dispensed champagne and stammered out his feelings on that stifling day in June. And more attractive too, Cassie admitted, frowning at the uncomfortable and uncharitable fact that the man should seem appealing only after his desperation for her affection had run its course.

‘Life’s a bugger,’ she declared, directing the remark cheerfully to her new lime green Osborne and Little wallpaper and picking up the proof copy of Stephen’s book, which was lying next to her bag. ‘But an interesting bugger none the less,’ she murmured, riffling slowly, and then with some urgency, through the pages. Just to be absolutely sure, she told herself, skim-reading the chapter on Eric and sighing with satisfaction to find that Stephen had not let them down with another last-minute change of heart. As she was closing the book her eye was caught by a blank page at the front – blank, that is, apart from ‘
for C
’. The dedication page. Cassie stared at it for a few seconds, then snapped the book shut, chiding herself for the arrogance of her own speculations. He was over her and she was glad of it, she reminded herself, and dropped the proof into her bag to show her parents.

The house, large as it was, seemed to shrink with the arrival of the family. Within an hour of their habitually awkward reappraisals of each other, the children had settled into a variety of entertainments, Theo instructing Clem on the new attachments to his recently mended camera in the drawing room, Maisie playing Chopsticks in the music room with Ed, Roland and Chloë chasing around every room on the ground floor with Roland’s new chocolate Labrador puppy yelping ecstatically at their heels. Instead of minding the noise, as she had during the course of their recent visits, Pamela, shifting a rucksack as she passed the TV room, where Charlie and Peter were watching some sporting fixture, found it soothing. The house had come alive again, its walls and floorboards vibrating with the energy of its young occupants. For all its spaciousness, oak-beamed charm and spectacular views, a home had no pulse beyond that generated by its family, she reflected sadly, wondering how on earth they were all going to react when John broke his terrible news.

Since the traumatic episode in the garage the pair of them had thought and talked of little else. With virtually all his liquid assets drained by pay-outs from his syndicates, the children would have to sell Ashley House to pay the inheritance tax levied on its value. After which they’d still end up with a hefty three hundred thousand or so each – a fortune by any standards – but the house, their beloved Ashley House, would be gone. To another, alien family. Or, worse still, to a
property developer, who would bulldoze everything to exploit the beauty of the views and make his own fortune. Pamela strained her ears for any sounds of movement upstairs where John was having an afternoon nap. In the last couple of days he had slept a lot, much like an invalid in convalescence. Second only to his preoccupation with the long-term effects of his financial losses was his penitence for what he had put her through, for the selfish desperation that had prompted him to close the garage door and turn on the car engine. Never again, he promised, and Pamela believed him. Ministering to his needs, however, noting the new disturbing gauntness of his face against the pillow, she could not help being reminded of Eric during his final months. Yet when he was awake and they were talking there was more ebullience to him than she had seen in weeks, simply, he said, from having shared the extent of his woes instead of letting them fester in the solitary prison of his mind. That morning he had woken her in the small hours, gripping her arm to say, ‘It might come good yet, if the next three years are profitable … It might not be so bad.’ Knowing he was half asleep, needing reassurance before he dared lose himself to the oblivion of proper rest, Pamela had stroked his head until his eyes closed, then stayed awake for hours herself, racking her brains for some other, more concrete solution to their problems.

Alicia hadn’t ended up with much money and what she did have would, quite rightly, go to Paul. Pamela felt it would be wrong even to consult her sister-in-law about their problems, since she was leaving that week for her Christmas visit to Australia, succumbing to twenty-four hours on a plane in spite of her hip and extensively expressed terrors of deep-vein thrombosis. Armed with packets of aspirin and support stockings, she was planning to spend most of the flight pacing up and down the aisle – beating the air stewards with her stick, no doubt, John had joked when Pamela told him, chuckling for the first time in ages. A card, Pamela thought now, putting her head round the door of the TV room and catching Peter’s eye. A card to wish Alicia well for her journey. Such small things mattered, they always did, no matter the other, bigger dramas circling overhead. ‘Peter, darling, could you go up and see Dad? He said to wake him when you arrived. He wants a word, just the two of you.’ She gave Charlie, already pulling himself out of his seat, a fierce look.

‘Is he ill?’ demanded her younger son suspiciously.

‘No, certainly not.’ Pamela did her best to sound incredulous. ‘He takes naps, these days. At eighty it’s hardly surprising. He’ll be down soon. He just wants a word with Peter first.’

‘Good luck,’ murmured Charlie, catching his brother’s eye as he left the room, acutely aware of Peter’s own agenda and wanting to communicate his support.

Pamela retreated to the kitchen to find Elizabeth making a pot of tea and Serena up to her elbows in flour, rolling out pastry for the pumpkin pie. Helen, who had had a scare with a bit of blood earlier in the week, had been instructed to remain on the sofa where Cassie, perched on one arm, was entertaining her with the story of the biographer turning up out of the blue on his motorbike with a proof copy of
Unsung Heroes
and talk of a launch party. ‘We could all go,’ she was saying excitedly, ‘like a sort of final tribute to Uncle Eric.’

‘It’ll be very limited numbers I expect, dear,’ Pamela warned, wary now of Stephen Smith and his book, although a hurried check of Cassie’s copy had already confirmed that it contained no disclosures she should fear. John would be delighted with it, she knew, although an irrational part of her remained nervous at the thought of him taking his turn to thumb through the pages on his brother, as if the untold part she had played in the story might yet leap out at him from between the lines. That the children themselves all knew most of that story now was oddly comforting, as was their tactful silence on the subject. Protecting their father, of course, Pamela reminded herself, catching an arch look from Cassie, although from what, exactly, she was
increasingly uncertain. John, it was now clear, had known the broad truth of the situation all along. Who had loved whom. Who had chosen whom. He had known and accepted it, lived happily with it. And given that, Pamela realised, the details behind those big truths were almost irrelevant. ‘Peter,’ she exclaimed, jolted from her thoughts by the sight of her eldest hovering in the kitchen doorway.

‘I thought maybe Dad would like some tea.’ He looked so uncertain that Pamela wondered if he could possibly have some instinctive foreknowledge of the bleak news awaiting him upstairs.

‘That’s a good idea,’ she agreed, recovering herself. She handed Serena a clean knife with which to trim the pastry. ‘Elizabeth, would you pour another cup?’

Peter remained in the doorway while the tea was prepared, his gaze fixed on Serena’s steady hand slicing strips of pastry off the pie. Around her plates of food lay ready for the cook-out that night: homemade sausages and burgers, chicken drumsticks, slabs of marinating steak and bagfuls of round and oblong buns. Sid had already set up a trestle table and a makeshift barbecue of bricks in the corner of the lower field. The bonfire would be lit and they would cook and eat in the warmth of its glow, marvelling at the sparks and starry sky until John wiped the grease from his hands and, with a lighted spill, set off, to complete the evening’s magic with the spectacle of the noise and exploding colours of the fireworks, a celebratory ritual that his own father had performed before him and that Peter had expected, one day, to carry out himself. But not now, he reminded himself, not now. He glanced at Helen, aware of her attention, the comforting knowledge of their shared apprehension. If he was venturing upstairs to his father then it could mean only one thing. As he left with the tea he shot her a quick smile, wanting to show her that he was all right about it, that there would be no wavering from the course upon which they had agreed. Although it had been undeniably hard, sweeping into the drive that afternoon, seeing the massive grey beauty of the house with its large, friendly windows and frothing ivied walls. The extent of what he had elected to give up had hit Peter then, with such winding force, that he had reached for Helen’s hand to steady himself.

‘Let me do something,’ Helen cried, after Peter was gone, seeking activity to mask her nerves. She had wanted to talk to Serena about the new twist in their future, but Peter had pointed out that until his parents had been consulted such discussions would be insensitively premature. Seeing the house for the first time since their decision to surrender it had made him sad, Helen knew, but for her it had been the other way round: relieved of the burden of knowing that she would one day be responsible for the place, she had found herself instantly fonder of it. I’ll never have to worry again, she had thought, sitting in the drive in the shadow of its long stony front. I can always be here as a guest, passing through, enjoying the best bits, then retreating to our other life without a care.