Relative Love (12 page)

‘That’s our lot,’ said John proudly. ‘Seven grandchildren we’ve got now.’

‘Wonderful,’ murmured Stephen, his gaze drawn to one black-and-white photo-portrait in particular, of a girl with fine features and wavy fair hair blowing across her mouth and cheeks. ‘That’s Cassie, our youngest. Next to her is Elizabeth, and behind that our two sons. The one who looks most like me is Peter – he’s a barrister – and the other is Charlie, who’s in the civil service. Do you have a big family, Mr Smith?’

Stephen shook his head. ‘One sister. She lives in New Zealand. My parents are in Hull. We’ve rather lost touch.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘I’ve lived abroad a lot, you see.’

‘Ah, yes. Like Eric. All we ever got over the years was a flying visit now and then. Nice to have a base, though, somewhere to return to.’

Stephen shook his notebook to a clean page, wondering what it would be like to have a base other than a flat in Hackney, or a family home to which one wished to return, even for flying visits. ‘What I would really like to know, Mr Harrison, if you can cast your mind back, is what view Eric gave
you
of the war, how he was on home leave, what his letters were like …’

Cassie drove fast, relishing the heave in the pit of her stomach as the car flew over the undulations in the road, which was narrow but straight and clear. It was easily her favourite bit of the journey, when the countryside really opened up and began to feel familiar. Flicking at
random between radio channels, she had found a string of hit-songs and had sung along to them. It was that kind of day. A good day. A lucky day. A day of love and hope, as so many were now because of Dan. He had phoned early in the morning to say he was unexpectedly free and had booked a hotel in Brighton. A seedy tryst, he had joked, for their secret love. But it hadn’t felt seedy. They had walked along the pier holding hands in full view of the world, sharing a stick of candyfloss, licking round the edges until their tongues met. When the rain came they had raced into the hotel, still holding hands, standing at Reception and going up in the lift, as if they were any ordinary couple celebrating a birthday or anniversary. And it had felt so natural, so beautifully
ordinary
that Cassie had enjoyed it almost more than the ripping off of clothes that had ensued once the door was closed. Although the sex had been unbelievable too.

Slowing now to take a sharp bend in the road, Cassie felt a shudder of recollected pleasure. Dan was the most dedicated and expert of lovers. During the ten months they had been together he had worked almost methodically at getting to know her body, so that he could gauge exactly how far advanced she was along the spectrum of arousal and time his own climax accordingly. And on this occasion, instead of rushing to the shower afterwards, he had kept his arms round her, moaning into her hair that he could not live without her, that he would like them, one day, to have a child. Cassie, recalling the moment, felt again the leap in her heart. Her usual post-coital desperation had vanished in an instant. His child. Daniel Lambert’s child. The idea must have been there, of course, floating in her subconscious, but it was only when he had said it out loud – given it the reality of articulation – that the notion had taken shape as something concrete and desirable. Out of their love they would make a baby. Of course they would. The future, usually so ungraspable, seemed suddenly secure. Dan would leave Sally and start a new, better family with her. All the years of not feeling remotely maternal, of eyeing Serena, Helen and Elizabeth’s motherly travails with a wary relief, of feeling no horror at the proverbial tick of her own bodily clock had not been about being a career girl, Cassie saw now, or fearing the loss of independence, or emotional responsibility, but had derived purely from not having found the right person. Dan was that person: he had brought her life into focus, made all the hitherto neglected parts of her suddenly vivid and important – made her whole.

Cassie was jolted from this happy reverie by a phone-call from the client she was supposed to have met that morning. It was not an easy conversation. The client, who had too much time and money on her hands and who had acquiesced easily enough to Cassie’s suggestion that their meeting was postponed, had clearly decided since that she had been badly treated. It took all Cassie’s considerable charm to smooth her ruffled feathers; she resorted in the end to talk of discounts and faster completion times. After that she phoned her parents to alert them to the imminence of an impromptu visit to Ashley House. (Brighton was so close and the idea of delaying her return to piles of work and an empty flat so appealing that once the idea had taken shape she had acted on it without a moment’s deliberation.) Her mother said, as Cassie had known she would, that they would be delighted to see her and asked if she would mind stopping at the butcher’s in Farncombe to get two extra chicken breasts for dinner.

Dear Theo
,

I thought I’d write and ask how it’s all going. I think school is boring whether you are a day boy or a boarder. I HATE school at the moment because all we’re doing is test papers and I get lousy marks all the time. Not being a boffin like you! Still, the exams are over by half-term so I can chill out then. I’ve asked Mum and Dad for a mobile if I do okay, but they say I have to wait till
I’m fourteen. You’re so lucky having one already. We’re going to AH for half-term, what about you? Apart from that nothing much is happening. Scored two goals yesterday, should have been three but one was disallowed because the w
—
ref said it was offside. Maisie says she’s going to pierce her own ears but I bet she doesn’t. There was that woman who pierced herself so much she died of blood poisoning, did you read about it?

See ya
,

Ed

Ed, who had only written the letter to his cousin after a good deal of cajoling from his mother, sealed it inside the envelope with some satisfaction. At the last minute he unsealed it again, tearing a bit of the flap where his saliva had already dried, and stuffed in a couple of squares of chocolate. ‘PS Hope you like the war rations – sorry it’s not more, I got peckish!’ Then he put the envelope on top of his history exercise book, which he had abandoned in favour of Championship Manager. Soon he was on the point of leading his team out to face Brazil in the World Cup Final.

Elizabeth spent the afternoon buying food for the dinner party they were giving that evening. Their neighbours were coming, but only as a front. The real purpose of the event was to butter up the other guests, a headmaster and his wife from a rival school, whom Colin had met on the golf course the week before. Not because he had any definite strategy, he had assured her, but simply because the opportunity to develop the relationship had fallen into his lap and only a fool would have ignored it. Two weeks into the spring term, his partnership with Phyllis McGill was already showing signs of strain.

Elizabeth offered what counsel she could (Phyllis, from the glimpses she got in the staff room was, in her view, trying quite hard) but Colin – within the privacy of their own home at least – remained as glowering and brooding on the subject as a tiger in a cage. The night before he had kept her awake for hours ranting about it all: the job should have been his and his alone. The head clearly had no faith in him. Appointing two such different characters as his deputies showed that the man had no coherent vision of where the school was going or how it should be run. As a part-time music teacher and therefore on the fringes of things, Elizabeth could not possibly understand.

Which wasn’t true at all, reflected Elizabeth now, experiencing a sort of delayed effrontery at the remark (by one in the morning she had been too exhausted to feel effrontery or anything else). She dropped six Cellophane-wrapped pork chops into her shopping basket, with a pot of double cream and a packet of fresh sage. She understood ambition. She knew, dimly, that she had some herself, lurking beneath the daily grind of screechy cellos, dinner-party recipes and how to be a decent wife and mother. Going part-time had proved a compromise on all fronts. She felt torn all the time, as if she was doing a lot of things quite well rather than one thing really well: although she was only working twenty-five hours a week, life was a long race against the clock, a nonstop marathon between home, school gates, shops and classrooms. Elizabeth checked her watch. Only half an hour remained before she was due to pick up Roland from his rather fierce all-boys preparatory school on the far side of town, south of the new traffic-calming one-way system that made everyone who came into contact with it seethe with rage.

That afternoon the traffic was worse than usual. Bored and tense with waiting, Elizabeth delved for sustenance in the shopping bags on the seat next to her. First she ate an apple, because it was
wise, and then three chocolate wafer biscuits because she was still hungry. She turned on the radio and listened to a woman, who sounded like Serena, talk amusingly about the affliction of being tone-deaf; she thought fondly of her sister-in-law, who had rung the evening before to suggest a girls’ day in London, and somewhat anxiously of the child to whom she had given her last lesson of the day. With his grade-two piano just a week away Elizabeth had elected to concentrate on aural tests. ‘Think of your voice as an instrument,’ she had suggested. ‘Make it sing this sound.’ She had played just one note – middle C – several times and managed to keep her face expressionless at her pupil’s tuneless attempts to reproduce it. She had given up and asked him instead to play his best piece, which he did at top speed, like a horse galloping for a finishing line.

Whenever she told people that she was a music teacher she was aware that it sounded like a lucky sort of job to have, one of those rare occupations where the passion of a hobby and a true vocation could converge. The reality, of course, was infinitely more complicated and far less satisfactory. Labelled early in life as the one fortunate enough to have received the lion’s share of Pamela’s musicality, Elizabeth had been encouraged to learn two instruments. She had chosen the cello, because it looked interesting, and the piano because Pamela insisted it was invaluable to any would-be musician. While her siblings were permitted to pursue stop-start relationships with half an orchestra’s worth of instruments, Elizabeth had been persuaded to stick with these chosen two, passing all the grades and developing a genuine proficiency in both. She wasn’t that good, though, and she knew it. Hard work produced technique, but nothing approaching the instinctive flair of true musical genius she had glimpsed occasionally among the clutch of young musicians with whom she had jostled for recognition in youth orchestras and competitions. It had been a relief to give up in her A-level year and concentrate on her academic studies. At university she had hardly played at all. Though afterwards, during the Lucien years, when she was working in PR and hating it, she would sometimes, after a glass of wine or three, sit down at the piano and rattle through some of her old repertoire. Lucien, who played the guitar badly but with great aplomb, would whoop with appreciation for a bit, then persuade her to accompany his strumming. Musically they made a questionable duo, but had had many hours of fun, ploughing through wrong notes and splashing the sheet music with wine.

When the marriage fell apart, Elizabeth, wanting a completely fresh start to her life, had given up the hateful PR (she hadn’t been glib or committed enough) and retrained as a teacher. Maths, which she had read at Imperial College, was her primary subject, but in her first post at a shambolic school in Battersea she had soon found herself sucked into the music side of things and enjoying it far more. By the time Colin joined the school she was running both departments practically single-handed and beginning to think that a career in PR might have been an easy option after all. Colin, ten years older and infinitely more confident, had taken her in hand. The maths stressed her so she should give it up, he said. With his backing she renegotiated her position and became head of music instead, which she had enjoyed enormously. A couple of years into their marriage, an opportunity for Colin had brought them to Guildford, where Elizabeth – eager to continue working alongside him – had settled for a considerable demotion. With the arrival of Roland she had taken maternity leave, then gone back part-time. The stress had decreased, but so had the satisfaction. She missed being in charge of a department. Teaching singing to some of the more rebellious classes was a bit like managing a crowd of unruly football supporters, but she always forgave them in the end, melting when they belted out the tunes, often half-shouting in their enthusiasm to drown their neighbours. In individual lessons, she did her
best to encourage rather than criticise, remembering only too well from her own childhood the chore of practice and the burden of parental expectation.

‘I was hoping you’d do your beef thing,’ said Colin, when he saw the chops.

And I was hoping you would be nice, Elizabeth thought, but did not say because Roland was within earshot and she was banking on the evening putting her husband in a good mood.

Spotting a key on the window-ledge, Stephen unlocked the French windows in the music room and stepped outside into the arched porch they called the cloisters. A light, positioned to his right in the rafters overhead, flicked on, illuminating a set of worn wickerwork garden furniture and several folded deck-chairs. A hardy black spider was abseiling up the canvas, legs flailing, like a climber searching for a foothold. Stephen, who didn’t like spiders, turned to walk the other way, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking faintly on the stone floor. As he walked, more lights burst into action, making him feel self-conscious, but in a delighted way, and adding to the curious sensation, building inside him all day, that his collision with this charming family and their extraordinary house was somehow
meant
to be. His initial fear that he was out of his depth had quickly dissolved, thanks not just to Pamela’s effusive warmth but to the old man, who had opened up considerably during lunch, bombarding him with so many questions about his experiences in South America that Stephen had had to remind himself that he was there to research them rather than the other way round. Even the loud-mouthed American woman, smacking her lips at the food (which had been delicious), and flinging amusing and often irrelevant remarks into the conversation, had seemed endearing. The four of them had drunk a bottle of wine with the shepherd’s pie and then, at John’s suggestion, had brandy with their coffee. Later, talk of Eric had flowed so easily that Stephen’s hand ached from trying to scribble it all down in his notebook. Solitary, fearless, heroic, giving up his inheritance to fight as a mercenary in foreign wars, arriving home unannounced with kitbags only to take off again to sail oceans and tackle mountains (including three assaults on Everest) then to be cruelly felled by a stroke at the age of fifty-five – the copy was fantastic. Listening to it all, with so many verifying documents, letters and photos scattered across the table in front of him, Stephen had felt like a prospector who had struck gold. Before he knew it the afternoon was gone. He was on the point of announcing his departure when Pamela appeared with a tray of tea-things, including a toffee-coloured fruit cake, thick with raisins and cherries, and crustless egg and cress sandwiches, cut into bulging triangles and arranged with mathematical precision on a delicate porcelain plate. ‘We’d like you to stay for dinner, Stephen,’ she declared, pouring tea into cups that matched the plate.