Family Album (7 page)

“What are you doing?” demands Charles.

Gina replies that she is looking for paper and an envelope. She has drafted a letter to Mrs. Thatcher and she needs to copy it out in her best handwriting onto that paper he has with the address at the top.

“You should have waited, and asked,” says Charles. “You know you don’t come in here. And it’s not in that drawer anyway.”

Gina shuts the drawer, rather roughly, and in so doing manages to sweep the top sheets off the pile of typescript beside the typewriter. Charles exclaims angrily and leaps forward to gather up the paper. “Gina, I really don’t want you in here. Look, here’s some paper and here’s an envelope.”

“Don’t you want to read my letter?” says Gina, in a chilly voice.

Charles takes the draft from her, skims through it, and hands it back. “Fine.”

“Does she get a lot of letters?”

“Undoubtedly,” says Charles. His attention is all on the typescript, the pages of which have gotten out of order.

Gina is silent for a moment. Then, “Is that the book you’re writing?”

“Mmn.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s . . . it’s about how people have behaved towards children and young people, in the past and in different parts of the world.”

“What’s that bit about?”

Charles hesitates. He decides not to elaborate on circumcision rituals in Namibia and elsewhere. “Oh—it’s about what it’s like to grow up in societies unlike our own.”

“Actually,” says Gina, “I read some of it. I thought it was disgusting.” She stares at her father with cold disapproval. Charles, momentarily wrong-footed, feels personally responsible for these distressing practices. Then he recovers himself, moves back onto the moral high ground, and says, “Gina, you have no business poking around on my desk. You’re not to do that again.”

There is a movement at the door. Both become aware that Clare is there, watching with interest. “It’s lunchtime,” she announces.

“Right,” says Charles briskly. “Gina, take your paper and envelope. OK, Clare—tell Mum I’m just coming.”

The lemon chicken does not go unchallenged.

“What’s
this
?” demands Roger. “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it too,” says Clare.

Ingrid declares that the chicken is very nice. Others eat without comment. Paul has two helpings; Alison beams upon him. He makes a point of ignoring his father.

Charles does not notice that he is being ignored by Paul; he has developed a certain immunity to the reactions of his children, over the years. It would otherwise be difficult to operate with independence. This does not mean that he is unaware, or uncaring, simply that these particular family circumstances require a certain spirit of self-preservation. In any case, Alison is more adept than he is at riding the emotional roller coaster; motherhood is her métier. It is what she always intended. Occasionally he feels that he is incidental to her grand design. Sometimes he feels this quite strongly.

Right now, he is thinking of societies of which he has read in which the care and supervision of children is a more or less collective affair. The kibbutz has always seemed to him an eminently sensible arrangement, which reminds him that he needs to do more research on kibbutzim and their views. And then there are those African tribal groups in which all women keep an eye on all children, and the men get on with whatever it is that they do, which again looks like a healthy system. Whereas the centuries-old Western practice whereby children are hived off into individual family units looks both impractical—you have to have the work-house or the orphanage as a safety net—and potentially lethal. The child cursed with inadequate or cruel parents is in a trap. Charles’s book is not intended to be a vehicle for his personal views—it is to be a detached discussion of practices and attitudes—but, as he sits there thinking, at the head of the table, unimpeded (more or less) by the background clamor of his offspring, he decides that a careful selection of individual family experiences would nicely illustrate this point. The Tolstoys, for a start. All happy families . . . Yes, that would be the way to introduce local color, and a color in appropriate contrast to the setups in Samoa or the forests of the Congo. How many Tolstoys were there? Did old Leo rise to six?

Charles looks along the table at his own brood. He is thinking now about heredity, about gene pools, about kinship. Very important, kinship, in primal societies. Your kinship network could determine whether you sank or swam. Whereas in twentieth-century Britain kinship obligations have been superseded by the welfare state, which props everyone up from the cradle to the grave. No need to go cap in hand to your mother’s brother, by and large. Genes count for rather less, here and now. Charles eyes the storm of genes around him today, the kinship group arranged at either side of him—lanky Paul, dark intense Gina, pubescent Sandra, Roger and Katie, who share freckles and a stocky build, Clare with her straw-colored hair. A fair assortment, he thinks, no dominant feature, a bit of a job lot, really. In aristocratic circles there would be the inherited nose, or the poached-egg eyes, as in Lely portraits. In Namibia there would be the fancy tribal marks.

“Why are you
staring
?” complains Sandra.

Charles’s thoughts have been once again on ritual. “How old are you?”

Alison laughs. “Really, Charles! We had Sandra’s birthday only a few months ago. She’s twelve.”

“I apologize. I can’t keep track. Now, if you had grown up in some parts of Africa,” he tells Sandra, “you would have had some very pretty scars made on each cheek, at one time, and I would probably have been looking for a husband for you by now.”

Paul snorts. Katie giggles. Sandra says, “Scars! Yuck!”

“All a question of taste.” Charles considers his daughters. “You are offended by the idea of scars. Others would be appalled at jeans and trainers and”—a sharp glance at Sandra—“painted fingernails.”

Alison says, “Sandra dear, you know I don’t like that stuff.”

“ ’Specially green,” says Roger.

“Shut up,” says Sandra. To her mother, she explains, “Everyone’s doing it, Mum. Everyone in my year.”

Charles is back with ritual adornment. He sees the fingernails as a Western version of all that tribal face-painting, tattooing, and creative self-mutilation with which he has become familiar during recent research. In fact, he decides, Sandra is merely responding to an atavistic need to turn her body into a personal declaration—a statement about her affiliations and her aspirations. She is announcing that she is a late-twentieth-century Western adolescent for whom appearance is of central significance. She is setting out her stall in a way that young people have done since prehistory; one can hardly take exception to this. One must accept the fingernails as the symbol that they are. Maybe he will share this perception with Alison, later.

The chicken is followed by jelly, which meets with approval from all except Charles, who declines it in favor of cheese and biscuits. The morning is now tipping into afternoon, the sun is high, the house is rich with occupation—the aroma of lemon chicken, the chatter of eight voices (only Charles is silent, pondering his various insights)—it is time for the next stage, when people will disperse. Sandra will catch the bus into town, Gina is going to copy out her letter to Mrs. Thatcher and do some homework, Alison has her appointment with the supermarket, Ingrid is taking the three youngest to the local park, where there are swings and slides. Paul is frustrated because his best mate is off somewhere for the day; he will loaf around and see if he can find someone else.

Charles retires to his study. The front door bangs. Once: exit Sandra. Twice: exit Paul. A third time: exit Ingrid and the children. Gina thuds upstairs. The dog whines at the study door, wishing to join Charles, who ignores it, busy making a note of the points that occurred to him during lunch. Does he have a biography of Tolstoy? No. Add to the checklist for Monday’s library session.

The front door again: Alison has gone.

The house seems now to subside a little, to settle itself into relative silence; the dog can be heard to slump down on its side in the hall, the grandfather clock ticks. Charles puts a sheet of paper into the typewriter and starts to type. Chapter eleven creeps ahead, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. Charles is immersed—in his train of thought, in the organization of words, of sentences. Time passes—but, for him, it seems to stand still. He looks out the window occasionally, unseeing, thoughts tumble in his head. He is elsewhere, inside his mind, in pursuit of an argument, a sequence.

Alison returns. Charles barely registers the slam of the door.

Alison hauls the heavy bags through to the kitchen and unpacks the shopping. She is hot, tired, and cross. The car kept stalling, she was stuck at a traffic light with everyone hooting at her, the car park was full and she had to circle for ten minutes, they were out of lamb so she couldn’t get the shoulder she’d planned for tomorrow, there was no brown bread or olive oil. All right, one should avoid supermarkets on a Saturday afternoon, but she had no choice, somehow she hadn’t been able to get there earlier in the week. This is turning out a bad day, a day when Alison feels submerged by the house, the family, instead of riding high, in her element, in control. There was that business with Paul, and Ingrid has been funny lately, and Gina is quite difficult, and there is something wrong with the top oven of the cooker, and the wretched car . . . Plus, she has her period.

She stands in the kitchen, out of sorts, surprisingly alone in this house in which one is never alone. She remembers that of course Charles is here, and there comes the urge—a fatal, irresistible urge—to involve Charles in her malaise. She knows that this is unwise, she knows better than to do this, but something drives her to abandon the last of the shopping on the kitchen table, to walk out of the room, to cross the hall, to open the door of the study.

Alison does not often go into Charles’s study. When she does, she feels that in some eerie way she has stepped outside the house—her house, their house—and into some alien space. She is not at home here. The room is unfamiliar—the enormous desk, covered with books and papers, the bookshelves that line the walls and that she has never inspected, the fireplace with the tile surround (De Morgan, Charles says, and Alison always repeats this to visitors because evidently De Morgan is something desirable), the oriental rug that came from Charles’s family home, the old leather armchair—she knows its landscape but at the same time she feels a trespasser, a foreigner, a person who has left her own consoling habitat.

“I’m back, dear,” she says.

“Mmn . . .” says Charles, typing.

Alison continues, in a rush. “The car’s acting up, it keeps stopping, I had an awful time. I’ll have to take it to the garage but of course Sunday there won’t be anyone there, it’s a nuisance, I need it on Monday for Paul’s dentist appointment. And, Charles, I wanted a word about Paul, that business this morning, I mean, I’m sure you’re right, Amsterdam isn’t a good idea, but I wondered if something a bit less, well,
foreign,
maybe Brighton . . .”

Charles ceases to type. The words cease to tumble in his head, the sentences to form. Alison’s voice breaks in, reaching him as an incoherent sequence, something about a car, a dentist, Paul.

“What about Paul?” He scowls at the typewriter, rereading his last paragraph.

Alison repeats what she has just said, with extra points. Paul does need to do things with other boys; his friend Nick is really quite sensible; she wonders if they are giving Paul enough pocket money; boys that age are so hard to understand, of course one hasn’t
had
a boy of fourteen before.

Charles hears most of this. He says tartly that he himself has been a boy of fourteen, and remembers the condition well. Paul will get over it, one trusts, most people do. In the meantime, it is just a question of stoicism all around. His hands return to the keys of the typewriter.

Alison judders with irritation—an unfamiliar reaction, for her; you cannot be a good wife and mother and a prey to irritation.

“Well, yes, dear,” she says. “Of course. I know that. But I do feel we should sometimes
discuss
things when there is a problem with the children, especially when it’s you who had the, well, the little bother with Paul this morning . . .”

Charles cuts in. “Alison, I am working.”

“Yes, I know that too,” says Alison recklessly.

Charles takes a deep breath. He stares ahead for a moment, then turns to look at her. “Then why are you in my study?”

Alison stares back. “Because I live here.”

There is tension now. Something dark has stalked into the room.

Charles lays a hand on the pile of typescript on the desk. “This book,” he says, “is . . .”

“I know,” says Alison, cutting him off. “This book, and all the other books.”