Family Album (40 page)

Paul says: Look, I’ve had an idea. How about I set up a nursery garden business there—all that space, you could have glasshouses and growing tunnels—masses of room for planting out. Nursery is far superior to garden center—you can do bare-rooted and the real connoisseurs are crying out for that. You’d specialize—just a few choice lines. Start-up capital? Oh well, you’d borrow, wouldn’t you? Gina, you’re so damn
practical
. Business experience? You’d learn on the hoof, wouldn’t you?

Paul says: Have it your own way. Passing up a golden opportunity, that’s how I see it—I could have made the family’s fortune. Species roses and lilies, that was the idea. A stand at Chelsea—articles in the Sundays. Vet students will trash the place—just you see. A laptop for my birthday? Look, thanks awfully but no thanks—I hate the things. Can I have a weekend in Paris instead? Ah.

Paul says:
Sell
Allersmead? Mum’ll never stand for that, will she? I’m not sure I would.
Sell Allersmead?

Gina drives in and parks by the front door. The gravel of the drive is a rare surviving substance now, peeking up here and there in between weeds and clumps of moss; tires no longer scrunch. She remembers a delivery of gravel, eons ago, and how they all waded about and helped to spread it. She notes the crack by the front door, and squints up at the roof, which does indeed signal distress—tiles slipped or missing all over the place.

Philip had offered to come too. No, she had said—thanks, but I’m probably best on my own, for this.

She sees Allersmead with a curious marriage of detachment and intimacy. She sees this large house, conceived in another age, a time of vastly different social assumptions, when domestic service was a major industry, and an army of women existed for the maintenance of Allersmead-style households. The bell panel still survives, in the kitchen: drawing room, morning room, bedroom 1 . . . she sees the house as an affirmation of the way things were back then, when a person was placed by the way they spoke or how they dressed, when most people took for granted such distinctions, and when the polarization of wealth seemed part of the natural order of things. Allersmead speaks for affluence rather than wealth perhaps. Gina thinks about this affluence: shades from Allersmead of another day float before her—ladies in capacious skirts and high-buttoned blouses, chaps in tweeds, children in pinnies, bowling hoops. A skivvy hauls scuttles of coal up the stairs—the old fireplaces are all still there, in the bedrooms. She sees the house as a consumer, over the century, gobbling up blacklead and polish and Brasso and Silvo (boosting the funds from which sprang Dad’s divvies, now so sadly diminished); she sees it also as a producer, a restaurant that never closed, from which flowed forth an endless supply of breakfasts and lunches and dinners, a century-long aroma of toast and roast. The smells are perhaps the most assertive; she can pick up their own—Sunday lunch and coq au vin and Lancashire hot pot and macaroni and cheese and apple crumble.

And the smells take her to a more intimate Allersmead, to the Allersmead-in-the-head, to a raft of private moments that come swimming up from the long darkness of the years, the strange assortment of glimpses that are known as memory. All of these are tacked to Allersmead; in all of them Allersmead is the backdrop—its rooms, its stairs, its furnishings, the deeply known places in its garden, the secrets of the cellar, where presumably the Daleks still roam.

I know what you mean, she tells Katie, and Clare, and Paul. I know exactly what you mean.

She is carrying a fistful of house agents’ brochures: charming cottages with easily maintained gardens, compact town houses with quick access to shops, lofts with fiber-optic mood lighting and bespoke kitchens. She pauses on the top step, pushes open the front door.

“I heard the car,” cries Alison. “I was just coming.”

Paul says: Jesus! Bully for Clare—the whole can of worms, wide open. What do
I
think? I don’t. I’ve always preferred not to. Otherwise I’d have chatted about it to the shrinks. Boy!—they’d have made a meal of it, wouldn’t they? I don’t think anything—just, aren’t all families screwed up somewhere, when it comes down to it?