Family Album (9 page)

And now it feels strange, going back. Of course, she hasn’t really left—she goes back every vacation. But it is as though she were only there by courtesy. She is poised now for flight, in a year or so she will be properly gone—to wherever she is going to go, a job somewhere, a flatshare. Is this scary? Or exciting? She does not know. Her face, flying along beside her, seems uneasy.

Everyone is coming, apparently. “Yeah,” Roger had said, on the phone last night. After a fractional pause, to which Katie’s ear was tuned. She knows Roger, she grew up with Roger. Oh, they all grew up together, but she and Roger were a unit. She knows his responses, his turn of thought.

“Everyone?”

“Yeah,” he said again. “Fair amount of aggro.”

He had lowered his voice. She knew exactly where he was: in the hall, where the phone had forever been sited. There would be others within earshot—Mum and Ingrid in the kitchen. Dad in his study, maybe Clare somewhere.

She sighed. “Paul?”

“Yup. Not returning phone calls. Couldn’t be reached. Mum going spare. Then eventually a message saying he’ll probably make it. Probably. Mum very spare still.”

“Sandra?”

“A fuss about some do she’d miss. But she’s coming.”

“Gina?”

“Gina’s coming.”

So they will all be there. Probably. Oh, and Corinna and Martin, apparently. That’s a turnup for the books. They do not often come to Allersmead. Katie is nervous of Corinna; she’s so clever, and she looks at you as though you are being assessed. Martin’s not much better. He knows everything there is to know about Shakespeare, he’s written all these books; what are you to talk to him about? Katie has always slunk into the background when Corinna and Martin show up. Gina copes with them better, and Sandra, who doesn’t give a hang about anyone assessing her.

There is to be a family supper this evening, for which she will be in reasonable time, and then tomorrow a buffet lunch for some friends and neighbors. A couple of people who were at school with Mum, and her cookery class—the group who come to Allersmead once a week to learn higher cooking, Mum’s first-ever earning endeavor, and why not? And a few other people Mum knows and . . . Well, Dad doesn’t really
have
any friends, when you think about it.

Twenty-five years. That is a seriously long time. A seriously long marriage. Sitting there in the train, Katie inspects this expanse of time, reeling back like a length of track, as long as her life, and then more. At the far end of it stand her young parents, but these are people she cannot imagine. A young Dad? Goodness no. A thinner, fresher Mum? A
childless
Mum? No, no. Her parents are unchanging figures, unchangeable, set fast at some point long ago, much as they are now, much as they were—are—for the Katies who are still playing in the Allersmead garden, digging with Roger in the sandbox, being pushed into the scary cupboard, getting the fairy costume out of the dressing-up drawer, trooping down into the cellar.

Actually, I never liked the cellar game, she thinks. But you had to, if everyone else was. And she didn’t like it when Gina and Sandra fought, and when Paul got told off by Dad, and when . . . When what? When there was something stalking around, something uncomfortable, like shadows outside the window on a dark night, but not that, something inside the house. What do I mean? thinks Katie. I don’t know now, and I didn’t know then.

The train pulls into the station. She reaches for her backpack, gets off, goes outside to where the buses are, and oh good, there is a home bus waiting.

She gets off the bus at the end of the road and walks the last stretch to Allersmead. How many times has she done that? Every school day. Twelve school years. So multiply by . . . Oh, thousands anyway. She has walked along here aged five, and then up and up and up until eighteen, and it’s after A levels and she has an A and two Bs and Manchester will have her. That wall where there used to be a ginger cat sitting, and that lamppost to which she used to race Roger, and the drain into which they used to drop sweetie papers. She and Roger always waited for each other, and walked together. When Clare started school, they waited for her too. The others went separately, for the most part, as though they had nothing to do with one another. Paul, Gina, Sandra—solitary figures trailing a few yards apart. Sometimes Paul and Gina would join up, sometimes Gina and Sandra—generally, they straggled. She can see them still, in different incarnations—smaller, larger. Gina and Sandra in those maroon school tunics, but Sandra manages to make hers look elegant, something about the way she ties the belt, the way she walks.

If I have children, thinks Katie—maybe not so many. But such thoughts immediately evaporate—she cannot see beyond finals, sometimes not even as far as that. She lives still from week to week, month to month. Her head is full of her friends, the kaleidoscope of her relationships, of Chaucer and Donne and
Middlemarch,
and if she gets a holiday job might she be able to save enough to go to France with people in the summer. She is tethered still to Allersmead, but it is a light tether that soon will break. She will be out there on her own, and will make the best of it, she knows she’ll do that, she’s not bad at managing. But right now she doesn’t much think about all that, there’s too much going on anyway.

She can see the white gateposts now—Allersmead. Almost, she can already smell it—comforting cooking smells, the hall smell of raincoat, a whiff of dog, and something unidentifiable that is just the Allersmead aroma—lifting somehow from woodwork and stone tiles and stained glass and people.

She climbs the steps and pushes open the front door. The dog heaves itself up and acknowledges her, tail swishing.

Ingrid comes down the stairs.

“Hi!” says Katie. “Are the others here yet?”

“You are the first,” says Ingrid. “Except of course Roger and Clare are already here. It is good that you have come. Charles has gone out, I do not know where. Alison is in the kitchen. Crying, I think.”

Clare hears the front door slam. Someone. One of them. But she’s busy right now, she can’t go down. She lifts her right leg and places the toes delicately against the mantelpiece. Then the left. Again. And again. She bends over backwards, slowly, floating her hands down to rest on the floor and stays there, thus arched, to a count of ten. She does the splits. Again. And again. And more.

The routine completed, she looks at herself in the mirror. Sideways on. She is thin, but not nearly thin enough. There is a suggestion of bum, the slightest curve of stomach. What to do? She has tried living on lettuce leaves and not much else, until Roger pointed out that dancers need muscle, and you don’t build up muscle on a starvation diet. So now she eats, sparingly, and eyes her body with distaste.

She knows what she wants. She has a goal, an ideal. She saw the Frankfurt Ballet on the telly, and from that moment her life changed. Those lithe androgynous figures, like pieces of string, apparently boneless; those dances that were unlike anything she had ever seen—startling, capricious, furiously inventive. She hadn’t known dancing could be like this. It is a world away from
Nutcracker
on the South Bank at Christmas, and the Saturday dance class at the leisure center. Where do you learn to dance like a piece of string? How do you melt your bones?

There is an ongoing argument. May she leave school at the end of the year and go to dance school? Dad just rolls his eyes and sighs. Mum sees her in a tutu, flittering around in
Swan Lake,
and says, well, ballet is lovely, of course, but don’t they sort of peter out at thirty? Ingrid says to dance is nice, but there are also A levels and college.

Roger is not at Allersmead. He is in the emergency room of the local hospital. He has had the most tremendous piece of luck. His friend Luke got his hand stamped on during the afternoon rugby match against a rival school—emphatically stamped on, broken in all probability—so Roger was able to step forward and offer to go with him to the hospital, which meant an enthralling couple of hours observing what goes on in Emergency. He has had a road accident (man with a head injury, woman with cuts), a couple of burns, an electric-hedge-clipper misfortune, and various people just looking ill about whom he would have liked to know more. His interest is forensic, though he is also sympathetic. He longs to get behind the curtains with the medics and really learn something, watch an examination, have a go himself at an assessment, a diagnosis. His only chance comes when it is Luke’s turn for a cubicle and a brisk young intern, whom Roger is able to chat up and thus gets to have a good look at Luke’s X-ray, over which he pores. There is no fracture, which would have made it more interesting yet, but massive bruising and swelling. Luke is by now thoroughly pissed off, and takes a dim view of Roger’s evident appreciation of the afternoon. When his mother arrives and is effusive in her thanks to Roger for his solicitous attendance, Luke sits scowling, aware only that this means he will miss next week’s match.

It is half-past six. Roger remembers with a jolt that this is the evening of the family gathering, and he had better leg it back to Allersmead pronto, or he will be in serious trouble. He gives Luke a kindly cuff on the shoulder, says goodbye to his mother, and gallops off.

He has known that he wanted to be a doctor since he was about ten. He loved visits to the doctor’s, watched (and suffered) with interest as one or other of the family had chicken pox, flu, insect bites, gashed knees, scalds, and sties. One minute people are running around, just fine, he noted, and the next they are felled by this or that, and the effects are impressive, but something can be done. He was going to be a part of this process. Oh, wanting to help people came into it, to make them better, but just as impelling was the fascinating business of cause and effect, of seeing what happens to someone when ill or injured, and then being the person who works out how to frustrate misfortune. Biology became his favorite subject; by the time he got to GCSEs he was already on course, sails set for medical school. With luck, and hard work, in a few years’ time he will be the guy in the white coat, dispensing expertise in Emergency.

He belts up the steps and into the house. Smell of food, sound of voices from the kitchen—help! are they already eating? He opens the kitchen door a touch furtively, and sees that all is well. The table is not even set. Katie is there, and Ingrid, and Mum is stirring something on the cooker. She turns sharply as she hears him, and her face falls.

“Oh, it’s you, dear,” she says.

Sandra sees Roger hurtling up the steps as she arrives. She often forgets about Roger. Katie too. They were always on the fringes of her vision, back then, of little interest unless you needed them to make up the numbers in some game. And now Roger is taller than she is, with a gruff male voice.

She takes her time, switching on the car’s interior light to do her face. She is pleased with the car; it is secondhand—of course—but a lovely metallic blue, with sunroof, radio, and cassette player. She can barely afford the payments, but what the hell. She’s going to put in for a raise at the magazine, the editor likes her, she may even get to cover the Paris shows next spring.