Family Album (29 page)

Gina smiles, trying to deflect. The interviewee does not do the questioning.

“Younger than most of us anyway. No kids?”

This won’t do. “Well, no,” says Gina. “Tell me, do you think people should be limited to two children?”

The woman says, “You wait, my dear. When you get started you won’t be counting them out. They happen or they don’t. How many in your family—brothers and sisters?”

Gina smiles again, parrying. “Suppose there was legislation limiting family size—would you go along with that?”

“How many?” insists the woman.

“Six,” says Gina crossly.

“Catholics, were you?”

This is getting out of hand. “No,” says Gina. “Would you personally be prepared to . . .”

“Six and not Catholics,” says the woman. “Then either your mum was put upon or she was a glutton for punishment. So how was it for you, in a family that size?”

Gina is on the back foot now. “Actually, that’s not really quite the point,” she says.

“Come on,” pursues the woman. “Don’t tell me you weren’t at each other’s throats half the time. Boys or girls, were they?”

Enough. Gina knows when she is outmaneuvered. Close the interview, as gracefully as possible, and move on.

Now she is thirty-nine and then she was . . . what? Twenty-two or -three. She cannot see that other self—cub reporter harassing older women who became justifiably resistant. You do not see yourself in those earlier incarnations, you remain the observer, the center of the action, the person for whom something is happening. Each slide is suspended, it hangs in the head—over and done with but going on forever.

And what about this one? Earlier? Later? All she knows is that she is—was—in the Allersmead kitchen with Sandra, and Ingrid, who is ironing. What have they been talking about that led up to this? Gina does not know, only that what was said next has crystallized in her head, just this exchange.

Ingrid looks up from her ironing. She addresses Sandra: “It was Gina’s birthday party. Of course you did not mean to push her. Not so as to hurt her. Just, you pushed a bit.”

They stare at her.

“How do you know?” says Gina.

Ingrid shrugs. “I saw.”

Gina turns to Sandra. “Do you remember?”

Sandra looks away. “Not really. I remember . . . the fuss. I was
seven
.”

She probably did, thinks Gina. It fits. Did Mum know? Does Mum know?

Gina turns to Ingrid. “Does Mum know?”

“She did not see,” says Ingrid. “Only I saw.” She sounds distinctly smug.

Gina laughs, startling all three of them. “And all this time you’ve kept shtum. Why?”

Ingrid is intent upon the ironing. She spreads a sleeve upon the board, smooths it. She shrugs. “It was something that only I would know. I liked that.”

Gina addresses Sandra. “I forgive you. It was an inexcusable act of aggression but I forgive you.”

Alison walks into the room. “Forgive her for what, dear?”

Ingrid looks as though she may be about to speak.

“For helping herself to my shampoo,” says Gina. “How magnanimous can you get? Eh, Ingrid?” She beams upon Sandra (upstaged, wrong-footed) and sweeps from the room.

A family is a coherent mass, a set of people united because that is the way it is, progressing thus from day to day, year by year, and who is to question the matter? The component parts of this mass may make their individual sorties into the outer world—they may go to school, go to work, go shopping—but they always roll back into that self-contained unit. Until, in the nature of things, fission takes place—but at Allersmead that was a long way off, unthinkable even, for what now seems to Gina an eternal present. There was Allersmead, and its inhabitants, except that now and again there might come a moment of observation, of evaluation.

She watches Clare one day and sees that Clare looks like Ingrid, very like Ingrid. Has she never seen this before? Well, yes—but she has never
thought
about it before.

She thinks.

Roger and Katie look like Mum. Paul looks like Dad. Sandra and I have a bit of each. Whereas Clare . . .

People do not get to look like each other because they live in the same house. It is to do with genes.

She nurtures these thoughts for a while. Eventually, she mentions them to Paul, who just looks puzzled. When she raises the matter with Sandra, in a rare confiding moment, Sandra is not puzzled; she is brisk. “Yeah,” she says. “I know. I’ve noticed too.”

But Ingrid has no boyfriends. Ingrid has no life beyond Allersmead, so far as anyone knows. That Jan who came to Crackington Haven is in the future still. I was five when Clare arrived, thinks Gina. Sandra was four. That was well before Ingrid went away that time. Ingrid had been here all along, and nowhere else. And she has always stayed. They are both thinking this, but neither comments. Merely, Sandra’s eyebrows lift.

“So why did she stay?” says Philip. “Why didn’t she just take Clare and go? It doesn’t look as though she and your father were exactly . . .”

“A unit?” says Gina coolly. “Oh no. If they ever had been.”

“So why?”

“We were a family, weren’t we? Families are indissoluble.”

Philip is interested. Allersmead interests him. Gina is amused rather than irritated by this interest, knowing that this is the way he is. He inquires, he is programmed to pursue. And she likes that quality. Moreover, she can glimpse through his eyes—she can see Allersmead as he sees it, as a baffling, intriguing phenomenon. Whereas for her it is just the immutable fact from which she has arisen.

Indeed, these days she does not much think about family, and Allersmead. From time to time, she touches base with Paul. Occasionally her mother will ring. And of course that eternal present drifts back, reminding her that a person is forever hitched to an elsewhere, to the other time and place.

Today, she is everywhere—in the flat, in the office, out and about in London, in a plane, stepping off a plane into one of those alternative worlds that make up the globe. She has been everywhere for years now, miles and miles from Allersmead. Allersmead lies submerged beneath many layers of subsequent experience, some of which has revealed to her something about Allersmead.

Gina considers marriage to be a curious institution. Nowadays people do not so much bother with it. Perhaps in due course it will wither away entirely. It would seem to survive because it has a legal significance, and a religious one for some, and a fair number of young women still like to dress up and be the center of attention for one ecstatic day. And of course it has been replaced by something very similar, if not so legally hazardous. Living with someone is marriage without the red tape. The pleasures and perils are the same.

Around the world, Gina has seen and noted the subservient role of married women in many societies. Women cook and mind the children. Ring any bells, does that? She sees Alison in the kitchen at Allersmead, serving up meal upon meal upon meal. She does not have to fetch the water from a well, or grind the corn, or milk the goat, but her life’s work has been the provision of food. How lucky that she actually enjoys cooking, thinks Gina.

Subservient. Subservience implies inferior status, doing what you are told, or what is expected of you. But Mum did what she did because that is what she wanted to do. Dad was fed and watered like the rest of us, and no doubt would have spoken up if service had ceased, but he did not instruct.

What
did
he say to her indeed? Listening, Gina finds the airwaves rather silent here. They didn’t say much to each other, she finds. Mostly, Mum is addressing everyone, or attending to a particular child. Dad is making some comment, very likely sardonic, or is silent, or is simply absent, segregated in his study. She does not hear her parents discuss the state of the nation, or even what to do at the weekend.

She thinks of the dialogue between Philip and herself—the daily, ongoing dialogue. She sees her parents afresh. She wonders about this strange, required system that sets two people alongside each other, in bed and out of it, this precarious conjunction.