Family Album (38 page)

If cross-examined on the matter—something that has not happened, and just as well—Alison would probably admit that she never much cared for sex. She agreed to it willingly enough for procreative reasons—virgin conception was a romantic idea but Alison knew well enough that its only record is biblical. The Allersmead four-poster bed thus saw a standard amount of marital sex during the early years; the bed itself, an untypically flamboyant gesture, had belonged to an aunt of Alison’s who was going to send it to a sale—Alison pounced and it was reprieved. Paul, Gina, and Sandra were born in it: Katie and Roger had to make do with the local hospital because by then home deliveries were not so popular with doctors and Charles had made it clear that he shared their reservations, though probably not for the same reasons.

Alison enjoyed giving birth. She couldn’t understand why some people made such a fuss about it. All right, it hurt a bit but not
that
much, none of hers had taken long, just a final hour or so of ouch! and heave, and there you were, with the dear little bundle. She had loved sitting up in the Allersmead bed, displaying the bundle to its siblings, and to Charles. There had been such a sense of achievement, and being the center of a wonderful primal ritual, the woman in the home having a baby; the house around her was grateful, she used to feel, as though she had adorned it, made the one superb addition to its furnishings. Hospital was a fearful letdown: strangers all around you, other women with their bundles and their noisy relatives, nurses clattering up and down, clamping the baby to your breast as though plugging an appliance into a socket, the assembly-line doctors and midwives, hauling babies out, so many per day.

There is no record of total Allersmead births, but it must be assumed that small Edwardians let out their first yell here, in the age of innocence before 1914, and later there must have been infants of the 1920s and 1930s, and then perhaps on into the war years, adding up to a collective howl of outrage, the universal greeting to a cold and dazzling world. These cries are buried in the walls, along with everything else that the house has heard and witnessed; the babies have grown up, and gone, and some of them are dead, but somewhere there may be a pair of elderly eyes for which the first sight was an Allersmead ceiling, and which first blinked at the light through Allersmead windows.

Allersmead fathers of times past no doubt did the traditional thing and paced up and down while people busied themselves boiling kettles, and the doctor hurried up the stairs with his black bag. Charles did not pace; he got on with some work, distracted by the comings and goings and the generally portentous atmosphere. He felt uncomfortably aware of having the supporting role, of being inevitably involved, but also at this point superfluous. Exasperating midwives would refer to him as Daddy, inadequate meals were perfunctorily flung together by Ingrid, the existing children roared around the place quite out of hand. When the drama had reached its conclusion, he would go upstairs (“Someone’s ready to see their Daddy now”) and do duty at the bedside, while Alison beamed, and the bundle squirmed and snuffled, and seemed to him quite remarkably inhuman. He always thought of the pig baby in
Alice,
while trying not to.

Alison looks back with nostalgia at those halcyon early years. You had babies, and there were small children and a baby forever, it seemed, and just those manageable problems—teething and croup and a spot of sibling jealousy—except that it was not forever, not at all, there was this unruly race up the measurement wall, and suddenly no more pliable little figures but instead an entourage of wayward people who are both deeply familiar but also dismayingly unknown. Allersmead has been fingered by some alien outside force, mutation has taken place, and Alison is helpless.

Alison responds. She reinvents herself. She sees that she is now the guardian of their security. They still need Allersmead, they still need her; they are not fledged, just flapping.

So the halcyon years are succeeded by those more challenging times. Alison finds that she can adapt, and Allersmead does the same. The babies’ high chair goes up to the junk room on the attic floor. Tricycles give way to bikes flung down by the front steps; the nursery gramophone (“The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife . . .”) is overtaken by Paul’s stereo, Sandra’s Walkman. The garden swings grow moss; the sandbox is buried in dead leaves. It is all right, it is fine, everything is as it ever was, except different. Alison has faced down the passage of time, and emerged, if not triumphant, then afloat, on course.

And there is more. Much more. There has been white water; she has navigated, and come through. She has kept her head and been sensible and firm, however difficult, however much she felt let down, betrayed; she has kept her sights fixed on the one thing that matters: this is a family, this shall always be a family.

I said, this is what we are going to do. This is what I have arranged. I told her. I told him.

Well, I said more than that, quite a lot more. I can’t remember exactly now. I know I talked a lot, because it helped somehow, and nobody else did—there wasn’t much for others to say, was there? And of course the children mustn’t know, not then, not ever, so the talking had to be done when they weren’t around, which wasn’t often, in those days. Roger was only two.

I talked mostly to Charles—well, at Charles is more what it was, I suppose. Charles didn’t say much. He’d sit there staring sort of through one in that way he does, and you’re not sure if he’s listening or not. I told him that however hurt I was and however he’d let us down all that mattered was the family. The children.
All
of them—the one that was to come just as much. And Ingrid. Her too. I never for one moment wanted her to go—I told him that straight off. That was out of the question, I said. I told him it was a silly, stupid mistake and I realized that—now we all had to live with it, for always. And the only way, the best way for everyone, was to live with it together, as a family. Except of course that the children didn’t have to know, they mustn’t know, none of them, not even . . . Clare. I’d thought of what to tell them, and they’d be told, and that would be that. They could just forget about it, and there’d be six of them then, and that would be fine. And there need be no more talking about it, ever again, we were talked out now, at least I was, everything was settled and we were just going to make the best of it. Do you see? I said to him. You understand? And he went on staring and I don’t remember what he said. Nothing much.

It was the only way. The only way to deal with it. They’ve never known, the children. I’m sure they haven’t. Sometimes I almost forget about it myself. Sometimes.

And it is all a long time ago now. Alison is someone else; she is no longer a young mother in flowing Laura Ashley with mousy brown hair that tumbles from restraining grips but a sixty-five-year-old mother in cord shift dresses with gray-brown hair that does the same. She is still first and foremost a mother, but motherhood is emblematic now; therein resides her status but it is no longer her occupation. Her days are busy with Allersmead—Allersmead is still demanding, it still requires servicing, policing—and with the kitchen. There are still people to be fed; twice a week there are the cookery class women, who can be taught how to feed others. Women have come and gone—indeed, over the years they have merged, for Alison, into a sort of conglomerate kitchen greenhorn who keeps on bungling her hollandaise and collapsing her soufflé. There have been highfliers, graduating with honors. And there have been those whose personalities have left a permanent impression, whose comments and glances are stored, much as she would like to wipe them away. These women wear choice clothes, their hair has received attention, they have waistlines and good complexions, and, by implication, well-appointed homes and attentive husbands. Alison has been made aware that if she were not the cook that she is, they would not notice her, that, for them, she is some kind of subspecies. They have made her wonder if she really likes other women.

Alison has fewer friends these days. In the past, when the children were at school, she had a circle of neighborhood friends, the other mothers with whom she consorted, who delivered offspring to play at Allersmead, before whom she could not resist preening herself. No one else had
six
. From no other house came such a rich procession, each school day, no other house so rang with child life, was so redolent of family. Back then, Alison felt that she queened it—graciously, tactfully—over friends and acquaintances less well endowed.

But they seem all to have evaporated now, those other mothers.

Old familiar faces have vanished (their offspring grown, the house too big) and been replaced by the hobbling inhabitants of the nursing home, the fly-by-day owners of the expensive cars. There is no pausing for a chat in the street, these days.

Alison is not bothered, on the whole. Allersmead was always self-sufficient; it is indeed diminished now, with the children gone, but it remains the unit that it ever was. And it is populated by all those winsome ghosts—perpetually happy, harmonious, the ideal family; they swing on the swings, they dig in the sandbox, the nursery gramophone croons away upstairs: “The farmer wants a wife . . .”

Charles is gray, more stooped, but otherwise unaffected by the years, or so it would seem. He still spends most of the time in his study, but no book has emerged for some while now. He has found publishers unenthusiastic. Old contacts have been replaced by very young men and women who politely reject his proposals—they find themselves unable to get behind this idea, interesting as it is. Charles is still working on a book—of course he is, what else would he do?—but he finds that his relationship with this book is different from that with other books: not much is written as yet, he feels little urgency or compulsion, the book is like some comfortable garment that he puts on when it suits him to do so. He doesn’t really care if it is published or not. Suffice it that he has reason to be occupied in his study as he ever has been. Sometimes he does not feel too well these days.

Ingrid has gone entrepreneurial. During the growing months she sells surplus produce from the vegetable garden to the cookery course women. She has branched out into cut flowers, and has turned a further area of the garden into a permanent border from which she can harvest a steady supply of blooms. Alison has insisted that she keep the income thus generated, but Ingrid, equally, insists on putting it into the household kitty. She is aware of a certain cash-flow problem, perhaps rather more than either Alison or Charles, who prefer to ignore this difficulty.

Ingrid has thickened—she no longer has that girlish willowy look. But her hair—that betraying hair—is still corn-golden, without a thread of gray. She has still that impassive, enigmatic gaze, she is still inclined to slightly disconcerting conversational intrusions. The cookery class women are baffled by her; they can’t work out her role, and her stonewall response to their advances makes them feel put in their place. Alison is blank, when probed: “Oh, Ingrid is
such
a support—what would we do without her?” That “we” seems to draw in the seldom visible Charles, the husband about whom the women are mildly curious. Those who have glimpsed him, and have even tried to exchange a word, report a vaguely distinguished-looking guy, in
the
most ancient tweed jacket you ever saw, not what you’d call forthcoming, polite enough but dived straight back into that room of his, what does he
do,
one wonders.

Allersmead provokes a certain curiosity. Perhaps it always did, but back in the days of full occupation, when the place ran with children, the response was also vaguely critical—what were people doing with a family that size, in this day and age, not even Catholics apparently, and what an odd mismatched couple, him so reserved, barely says hello, but her all smiles and chatter. Today the interest is focused on the inhabitants—this trio so out of kilter with the times (except where gastronomy is concerned), and what exactly is the Ingrid person for?—but equally on the place. Most neighbors are very property conscious—either they’re sitting on a gold mine or they’ve mortgaged themselves silly in order to buy one—and they note that Allersmead is far from up to scratch these days. The roof is visibly in need of repair, gutters are sagging, the paintwork is flaking, and there is a zigzag crack up the brickwork by the porch. Does this suggest apathy or lack of funds?