Close Relations (45 page)

The three of them walked towards the far ring where a crowd had gathered. Louise thought: this time last year we were a happy family. Now strangers are tramping around my house, opening the cupboards, standing in front of the windows, looking at my view.

‘What are you going to do when you see him?' asked Prudence.

‘Castrate him?' asked Maddy.

Louise shook her head. ‘I don't know.'

‘I just want to see what he looks like,' said Prudence.

At the time they had no plan. Louise had no intention of telling the blacksmith that he had made her daughter pregnant; the thought filled her with horror. What happened next filled her with horror, too, in retrospect. She would never have managed it without her sisters' presence. For they regressed, that mad day, into the giggly plot-making of their childhood.

The Young Farrier's Competition was in progress. A man held a megaphone. It was John Suttler, Louise knew him, he ran the riding stables with his wife.

‘. . . points against the clock,' he was saying, explaining the rules to the new people who had drifted towards the ring. Louise and her sisters peered through the crowd. A bent figure stood in the ring, hammering a shoe onto a large black horse.

‘That him?' whispered Prudence.

Louise shook her head.
He can take my shoes off any day
. How flippant she had been, how insouciant. She watched the blacksmith at work. She thought how all these years she and her children had been playing on a beach with their backs to the water, oblivious to the tidal wave that was rearing up behind them, higher and higher, poised, ready to engulf them.

When Karl walked into the ring she had made up her mind. As she watched him, it was Robert's face she saw. He grinned at her:
I like sex with women, too.
Beside him hung the upturned horseshoe, its luck spilling out. Louise looked across the grass at Karl. His hair was oiled flat like an otter's; he wore his leather apron slung around his hips. She pictured him on top of her daughter. A bay horse had been led into the ring; the clock clicked 1 . . . 2 . . . Karl got to work.

Louise squeezed through the crowd. How charmingly she smiled at John Suttler, oh, she could still charm. He gave her the megaphone and above her the clouds scudded and below
her feet the earth turned, for she was clearing her throat and speaking into the mouthpiece loud and clear.

‘Let's have a big hand for Karl Fairlight, a rising young blacksmith from Tetbury Magna. Karl is married with two small children but that hasn't stopped him pursuing his main career . . .'

Karl straightened up. Louise, appalled at what she was doing, stopped. Maddy grabbed the megaphone from her – Maddy, the brave one, who didn't care. Prudence whispered the words into her ear and loudly Maddy repeated them.

‘. . . you see, ladies and gentlemen, Karl is a bit of a stallion himself, he has a very high score in that respect. If it moves, jump it, that's Karl's motto, so if he visits your home we would advise you to keep your wives and daughters safely tethered up indoors.'

A hush fell. Across the showground the loudspeaker boomed but the crowd was stilled. They stared at Maddy. Their heads swivelled round; they stared at Karl. He hadn't moved.

The three sisters escaped to the car. They slammed the door and exploded into laughter. They laughed so hard they thought they were going to be sick. As they drove off, bouncing over the grass towards the exit, Louise thought: what the hell. After all, in a few weeks I'll be gone for good.

By the time they had pulled into the main road the incident seemed so unreal they could hardly believe they had done it. Already it had taken on the patina of a myth.

Prudence, driving, patted Louise's knee. ‘Let's stick together. We make a great team.'

That Saturday was the last day of Gordon's life. If they had known it, his daughters wouldn't have been at the horse show, humiliating a blacksmith. If they had known, they would have made their peace with him and no longer blamed him for breaking up their family, for by now they had learned the havoc that love can wreak. Maddy would have told him
what she had been planning to say, one day – that he wasn't entirely to blame for her misery when she was growing up. That his disappointment was understandable, for she had burst from her old skin like a butterfly and she too could look back on her old self, an atrophied chrysalis all those years, with bemused pity. That Erin, for all her arrogance, had solved her, and for this she would always be grateful.

His other daughters, what could they have told him – that they loved him? They hadn't told him this since they were children, maybe not even then, though they had signed their letters
lots of love, all my love
– how easily such words slip from the pen. Neither of them felt anything as simple as love but it must be lying there hidden, surely it must. If they had known he was going to die the wind would have blown away the topsoil and revealed the rock beneath, wouldn't it? Louise, caught in the present, was still hurt by his refusal of help when she most needed it. If she had known, that Sunday lunch when he'd visited her with April, she would have forgotten her own distractions: after all, Imogen had survived.

But they were caught in the present, in the myopia of the moment. Nobody more so than Gordon himself, a man of impulse, who seldom reflected on the past or anticipated the future. That was his wife's department, and it was something he missed, had he realised it, when in the company of April. He also missed the past itself. Though it was exhilarating to start afresh, Dorothy was his
aide-mémoire
for his adult life, the early struggles in Chislehurst, the raising of their girls, the world events that he was frequently too busy to heed; without her presence, he felt, at times, drifting and untethered.

This particular morning, this Saturday, he was buying a new lawn-mower and cursing his recklessness in leaving the old one back in the shed at The Birches. If he had known, he would have taken April to Paris, or at least taught her the words of the song which now she would never sing.

And if she had known, April would never have spoken to him the way she did when he came home. He unloaded the
car. She followed him out into the garden. The nameless bushes challenged her – prune us, don't prune us, you haven't a clue, have you? She thought: why are we weighing ourselves down with a house, with
things
? With all these things? He's done this before; why is he doing it all over again? The dry rot, the tasks. The building of a home only to find that its occupants have fled.

The scent of roasting meat drifted through the hedge; next door was having a barbecue. The woman laughed shrilly. April had only met her once, when she'd been coming home with some shopping and the woman had asked her: ‘Excuse me, do you work here? I'm desperate for a cleaning lady.'

Gordon was tearing open the box. He never undid things, he always tore them open. Today, because she was feeling out of temper, this annoyed her. She said: ‘I'm feeling homesick, Gordon. I want to go back to Brixton.'

He straightened up. ‘What, to live?'

She didn't nod, thank God, though this was the answer in her heart. She was unhappy in Wandsworth. She missed her friends, she missed the late-night shops, she missed her job. She had realised this, with a sinking sensation, over the past week. Thank God she didn't speak the truth.

‘You don't like it here?' he asked.

‘It's fine. I'm sure it'll be fine.'

‘You having second thoughts, about me?'

‘Of course not.' Thank God she said this, too, though in fact she was having doubts. Not about Gordon, exactly, but the reality of their life together. But nobody ever knew this. She said: ‘I just feel a bit like one of those plants, pulled up by the roots. I don't like being dependent on a bloke. I want to get some agency work.'

He put his hands on her shoulders and gazed into her eyes. ‘You do whatever you want, my love. You saved my life, know that?' He smiled but she could see he was upset.

‘I just fancy – you know – seeing some of my mates, maybe having a bite.'

‘Your wish is my command,' he said. ‘Sod the lawn. Had
forty years of mowing the lawn.'

She had intended, in fact, to go alone. Later, she was grateful that he had misunderstood her, for it had saved his feelings being hurt.

Ah, but if he had been a more sensitive man – if he had understood her and stayed home – if that had happened, might he still be alive?

So they went to Brixton later that day and had a coffee in the market. They dropped in on her friend Carole, who ran the hair salon in Second Avenue, and when Carole's last client left they bought some wine and went back to her place, where her husband cooked them a curry. Beverley dropped by, the friend who had told April about the earlobes, which hadn't worked because Gordon had resumed smoking but which, on the other hand, had worked because it was his earlobes that she had first touched, apart from nursing touching, and it had been his earlobes that had switched on their electricity. The evening gathered momentum, as Saturday evenings do when one is not living in Purley, or Wandsworth, and soon another couple of people dropped by and then somebody said: ‘Let's go dancing.'

‘Me?' said Gordon. ‘I'd look a right nincompoop.'

But he went, willingly, and as they walked to The Fridge he flung back his head and looked at the stars, bright even in the sodium light, and he turned to April and ceremoniously kissed her hand.
‘Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,'
he sang, and she knew he was drunk but then so was she. She fell in love with him again that night – it wasn't just in retrospect – she loved this stubborn, sentimental man, and then they were inside, under another galaxy of pulsing lights and she shouted at him: ‘Better than a hottie, eh?'

He didn't hear, the music was too loud. She took his hand and led him onto the dance floor. His last words, shouted at her over the noise, were: ‘Oh well, you only live once.' But she didn't hear them, they were drowned by the music.

The music thumped, it beat through three hundred shared heartbeats. It thudded through their skulls, through their pulsing, jointed bodies, the miracle of them.
Don't they know what a miracle it is? No matter what an idiot someone is, how selfish or stupid, still their bodies go on digesting, pumping
. . . April and Gordon, who were both guilty of selfishness, and more besides, drew closer.
However bad we've been, our bodies always forgive us. Heart-breaking, isn't it?

He took her in his arms. For a moment they danced together, cheek to cheek, heart to heart, the proper way to dance, the way they'd danced when he was young.

And then he fell and she was sliding with him to the ground.

She wrestled his collar open. Hunched over him, bumped by the legs of other people, she opened his mouth with hers. Before Gordon died his lover left him; she was replaced by April the nurse, the April he had first loved.

But all her professional skills, great though they were, could not save him now.

THAT SATURDAY, FOR
Dorothy, was one of the bad days. Her rage against Gordon had a life of its own, it flared up unexpectedly like the inflammation from a gunshot wound where the bullet has not been removed. It existed alongside her new-found contentment with Eric, and she kept it quiet. Her marriage had not been kindly dismantled. Gordon had torn it open like the lawn-mower's packaging; he had cut the knots he couldn't untie, removed the contents and left her to cope with the rubbish. What could she do with all the stuff that filled her head?

Eric had come to lunch. He had brought his road map with him; they were looking at possible places to live in the country. ‘What about opening a tea shop?' he suggested. ‘A little business, something to keep us busy.'

A watercress farm?
It was April, she was sure, who had told Gordon that story.
You wouldn't believe what happened to April last night.
She remembered him sitting up in bed, his eyes bright.

Dorothy felt sick. How could she start a new life when her old self was raw and unfinished? Later that afternoon, when Eric left, she dialled Gordon's number.

His machine answered. ‘
We're not at home . . .
' How easily one
we
had replaced another! She ignored the fact that exactly the same thing had happened to her. The machine played a moronic, electronic version of ‘Greensleeves' and beeped.

‘Gordon,' she said, ‘Dorothy here. Are you going to go on burying your head in the sand or will you meet me and talk?
Maybe you haven't even heard about Imogen or the various other things that have been happening to your family whilst you have been otherwise engaged. Maddy's out of work, Louise and your grandchildren will soon be homeless. D'you think if you just keep your eyes closed these things will go away? Please phone me at your earliest convenience.'

That night Louise phoned her father. She was sitting in Robert's study. His framed print of Charterhouse had been knocked sideways by somebody pushing past his desk. Strangers moved over her house, herds of them; they ground their cigarette butts into her lawn. She gazed at the picture of Robert's old school. It was a boring print; she had never liked it. Why had he left it here; was he putting childish things behind him?

‘Gordon Hammond here. We're not home at present but if you want to leave a message for me or April please speak after the beep.'

She was pleased. It was easier to leave a message on a machine. How much simpler life would be if you never had to speak to a living, breathing person.

‘Dad . . . Hi. Hope you're well. Maybe April's spilled the beans already, she's known for a while. Just to say, remember Immy's birthday? You said she'd beat her aunts to it? Well, you were right. In January you'll be a great-grandfather. Hope it doesn't make you feel too old . . . Lots of love. Bye.'