Relative Love (2 page)

John pushed the barrow slowly, trying not to hunch his shoulders in accordance with the Chichester chiropractor’s advice and stamping his feet in the hope of shedding some of the mud from the soles of his boots. Inside the tunnel of the pergola, his favourite route back to the house, it was dark and silent, save for the gentle scrape of the dog’s claws on the paving-stones and the occasional squeak of the barrow wheel. Around him a few brave rosebuds, pearly white bulbs, glimmered from among the tangle of leaves. Through the criss-crossed thicket overhead stars were twinkling between patches of dispersing cloud. John, a little chilled now, hurried on. There was still so much to do. For one thing he would need a bath, if there was any hot water left, which he doubted, with hordes of women washing their hair and the children having the mud scrubbed off their knees. Pam would require help putting up the holly, wine had to be cooled for dinner (Peter had kindly brought several bottles of Saint-Veran, which were still sitting on the sideboard), after which a contingent of the family would bundle into a couple of cars to attend midnight mass at St Margaret’s, the little Norman church on the far side of Barham village. And he had still to wrap his gifts, a modest clutch as usual (Pam orchestrated all the serious present-
giving within the family), but which would take some time since he was all fingers and thumbs when it came to Sellotape and folding paper corners. It seemed incredible that he had once fitted in so many duties with a full-time job. Not long ago Christmas Eve would have been spent in the office, before a scramble for last-minute shopping in Victoria Street and a sprint for the six-fifteen. The thirteen years since John’s retirement had slipped through his fingers with terrifying speed; although, as a Lloyds Member, he continued to take a serious interest in the business, regularly meeting with ex-colleagues in London to discuss old times and the vagaries of the insurance market, still reeling from the towers atrocity two years before. Talking shop was always a joy, but afterwards John would slump gratefully into his train seat for the journey home, relishing without shame the simple prospect of a pot of tea and the steady hand of his wife to pour it for him.

John was a few yards from the house when the necklaces of lights – arranged by him with much cursing – among its tangle of rampaging ivy sprang to life, triggered by a timer switch, which, no matter how cunningly he tried to outwit it, continued each year to pursue a schedule of its own. Every year John treated Pamela’s suggestion that a new device might be a worthy investment with a gruff dismissal. Like the single sprout on the plate of each protesting grandchild, grappling with willful Christmas lights had somehow become integral to his view of the festive scenery: a challenge when they resisted, a cause for immense satisfaction when they didn’t. Besides, he didn’t like throwing things away. Even things that didn’t work. It felt too much like giving up and he’d never been one for that.

Cassie, at thirty-seven the youngest of John and Pamela Harrison’s children, pulled her bedroom curtains shut, kicked off her shoes, which looked fabulous but hurt like hell, and settled herself among the half-unpacked clutter on her bed. She would put them back on to go downstairs, slip them off under the table during dinner, then put them on again for church. A family Christmas had always demanded a certain sartorial elegance, which she enjoyed – being grand did make things feel special – and in a week or two the shoes would be fine. It was her feet that were the problem, small and wide, so that practically everything rubbed in the wrong places to start with even if they got to be as comfy as slippers later on. She had been staring out of the window for some time, thinking that the veil of rolling mist was just as atmospheric as snow and wondering whether to make her own small contribution to it by lighting a cigarette (she was supposed to be on five a day and had already had six) when she spotted her father wheeling his barrow of holly up from the copse at the bottom of the field, Boots waddling at his heels. She raised her knuckles to rap on the window, but stopped at the last minute, overwhelmed by troubled fondness at how decrepit he looked, as lumbering and stiff-limbed as his dear old hound. He wouldn’t see her anyway, Cassie told herself, tugging the curtain shut, feeling suddenly that she was spying. These days, his eyesight was poor, a problem compounded by his reluctance to acknowledge it and the family’s tacit willingness – led by Pamela – to collude in the process. The hair-raising experience of a car journey in his company was never due to his glasses’ prescription being out of date but to the bloody-mindedness of other drivers. They were all protecting him, but from what? He would die anyway, whether he wrapped his car round a tree, lost his footing on the reedy edge of Ashley Lake or had a heart-attack.

Cassie sat down on her bed with a sigh, trying to picture a world without her parents, who annoyed her terribly at times, but to whom she was unequivocally devoted. It was impossible to imagine pain of any kind, she decided, impossible really to
feel
anything in advance of the
feeling itself. Especially not on Christmas Eve when everything was poised and perfect, and when all she really wanted to think about was Daniel Lambert, a London GP for whom she felt an altogether different and entirely consuming love; whose very presence on the planet, even miles away in Derbyshire, surrounded by his wife, children and, by all accounts, quite hideous in-laws, made Cassie feel both immortal and blessed. Placing her mobile phone tenderly on the pillow next to her, even though Dan had warned that he probably wouldn’t call, she folded her arms and looked round the familiar contours of the room, which had been hers ever since she could remember and which always made her feel a curious combination of comfort and frustration.

She was an established freelance interior designer, Cassie reminded herself, with a string of clients and her own website. Yet sitting now on the old threadbare beige counterpane, she felt as if she had never moved on from being a little girl and never would. Her surroundings were like a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the first two decades of her life: the pin-board of faded rosettes, the framed music and ballet certificates, the collection of soft toys propped against each other like a band of war-weary veterans on top of the bookcase, the beads she no longer wore draped round the mirror on the dressing-table, the trinket boxes containing obsolete coins and single earrings whose partners had gone missing, but which she still hoped, vaguely, to find one day. Peachy silk curtains had replaced the Barbie pink on which she had insisted as a schoolgirl and several layers of creamy paint had long since freshened the once fuchsia walls. The carpet was still the same, however, covered in rugs these days to conceal its age, but fraying visibly at the edges, especially where it met the little cast-iron fireplace set into the wall opposite the bed. Overhead, the heavy roof timbers, which ran the length of the top floor of the house, seemed to sag slightly, as did the stretches of ceiling between, as if the entire structure was preparing to cave inwards. As a child Cassie had devoted many dark hours to worrying about this, especially when she could hear the scrabble of rodent feet behind the plaster, which conjured terrifying images of debris and animals with sharp teeth tumbling out of the night on top of her. A series of Ashley House cats had eventually sorted out the problem, the latest of which, a ginger tom called Samson, was lying now in the furthest corner of the window-seat, curled up tight with his head half buried under his paws, stoutly ignoring both Cassie and the muffled thumps coming from downstairs.

Cassie’s was the only bedroom in the house without a basin (a cause, at some hazy adolescent stage of her life, for serious complaint), but it had a wall of oak panelling, which none of the others did, and a dear little roll-top desk full of tiny drawers that had belonged to her grandmother and where she had once spent many hours pretending to be a serious student. Unlike her elder sister Elizabeth, who had been sent away to a fierce school run by nuns, Cassie had been allowed to remain a daygirl until at sixteen she had decided to board, opting for a small co-ed school where everyone had pets (by then she had been through her horsy phase and had taken with her a beautiful lop-eared rabbit called Horace) and where getting a part in the school play was given as much praise as doing well in exams. With a mind that retained interesting but not necessarily useful facts, Cassie had acquired respectable exam results without managing anything spectacular. Even now, as a fully fledged grown-up, she struggled to remember who was in charge of which government department and how to work out percentages and what the names were of all the countries in Eastern Europe. That her three elder siblings were all more obviously academic than her was something Cassie had always accommodated with ease, as much a fact of life as the tear-shaped birthmark next to her tummy-button and being the only one to have blonde curly hair. Bobbing along as the baby of the family in the less pressurised
slipstream of family life, Cassie had watched the highs and lows of her brothers’ and sister’s faltering advance through adolescence to adulthood with a combination of compassion and curiosity. Particularly Elizabeth’s, for there was no doubt that her sister had suffered most. Through a combination of being unhappy at school, arguing with Pamela (a maddening adversary because she never got cross), opting for disastrous hairstyles in the seventies (pudding-basin page-boys and frizzy unforgiving perms), misguided dalliances with fashion (hot-pants, miniskirts, thick multi-coloured knee-length socks) and even more misguided dalliances with men (Elizabeth’s first marriage to an unemployed journalist, called Lucien, had lasted three years), her sister had had a very bumpy ride indeed. Cassie had quietly observed it all, finding her sibling, who was nine years older, easier to love for these struggles but inwardly determining that
she
would never endure such public and catastrophic failures herself.

Trying to behave as if she wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring, Cassie began to fish all the presents out of the bottom of her suitcase and line them up across the bed: a blue cashmere scarf and a book on cooking curry for Elizabeth (she and Colin, her second husband of fourteen years, were mad about Indian food); a state-of-the-art chrome corkscrew for her eldest brother Peter; a bland but safe silky grey scarf for his wife, Helen, who made a habit of dressing severely even for country walks; a book of after-dinner speeches and a silly tie for Charlie, her other brother, who at forty-three was the closest in age to her and who, in spite of being a civil servant, was the joker of the family; an arty print of some flowers for his wife, Serena; a set of tapestry wool for her mother and a pair of leather gloves for her father. For Colin there was a bottle of wine, looking worryingly bubbly from its ride in the bottom of her bag, and for all her nephews and nieces there were cheques as usual, fifteen pounds each, apart from Roland, Elizabeth and Colin’s nine-year-old, who was her godson and therefore got twenty. The only child for whom she had ventured to buy an actual gift was Tina, Serena and Charlie’s sixteen-month-old, the fourth and youngest of their brood. After much agonising, Cassie had settled on a rag doll with yellow woollen hair and freckles stitched across her nose, which reminded her vaguely of a much-loved dolly she had once had. To give a baby money didn’t feel right, she had explained to Serena that afternoon, worrying both about appearing fair to all the children and her choice of toy, which in retrospect seemed a bit unimaginative. Serena had laughed, then said it sounded lovely and that Tina would probably enjoy the wrapping-paper just as much as whatever was inside it. Cassie had laughed too, while hoping secretly that this would not prove the case, since the doll was handmade and had cost rather a lot.

Cassie’s phone rang when, absorbed in writing gift-tags, she had at last forgotten about it. ‘My darling,’ she whispered, her heart leaping as it always did at the sound of her lover’s voice. ‘My dearest darling, how are you?’

‘Missing you.’

‘Me too. Is it awful?’

‘Fairly.’

‘I can hardly hear you, it’s a bad line.’

‘I’m outside, pretending to put the rubbish out. I just had to call. I miss you so much.’

‘And me. I’m in my room. Refuge from children and noise.’

‘I wanted to thank you for my present. So sweet.’

‘It’s only a little thing.’

‘A beautiful little thing. Like you. I shall treasure it. And you liked mine, didn’t you?’

Cassie’s fingers leapt to the gold necklace concealed under the collar of her shirt. ‘I love it,’ she whispered, ‘and I love you.’

‘I love you too, but I’ve got to go. I’ll call when I can. Think of me tomorrow – our first Christmas.’

‘Of course, my sweetheart, of course.’

Elizabeth tiptoed backwards out of the room, her eyes fixed upon Roland’s sleeping figure – he had been suffering all week with a streaming cold. Holding her breath, she pulled the door shut behind her, frowning in the direction of the bathroom at the end of the corridor where the splashing and shrieks were reaching a new frenzy. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’ She opened the bathroom door just enough to put her head round it. Inside, Serena was kneeling on a sodden bathmat, her long chestnut hair streaming with customary artlessness out of a loose bun, her arms elbow-deep in one of the huge lion-footed, cast-iron baths, which resided in all four of the Ashley House bathrooms. The front of her blue jumper was dark with water and there were pink spots in her cheeks. In front of her, baby Tina, wispy hair plastered to her face, was batting at mountainous suds with both arms, squealing with delight as flecks of foam and water splattered over the sides of the bath and up the tiled walls. ‘She likes soap, look,’ announced Chloë, Peter and Helen’s seven-year-old, who was perched, looking equally drenched and thrilled, on a stool next to the taps. ‘Here, Tina, what’s this? She even likes licking it, see? She doesn’t mind the taste or anything.’

‘Goodness, so she does,’ murmured Elizabeth, too concerned at the possibility of the rising noise level waking her son to offer anything more enthusiastic, and marvelling as she so often did at her sister-in-law’s ability not to fret about soap-eating or any of the other worrying things children got up to. Colin said it was because, after four, she had got used to anything. But Elizabeth, watching as Serena expertly slid the soap from view and began blowing raspberries on her daughter’s pink barrel of a tummy, knew that it went rather deeper than that; that if she herself had ever been courageous or insane enough to produce three more offspring she would have collapsed under the strain, even if they weren’t fragile and prone to allergies like Roland. ‘You couldn’t … I hate to ask … but you couldn’t keep the noise down just a tiny bit, could you, Serena? Only Roland’s full of cold and I’ve only just managed to get him to sleep and if he doesn’t get a good night he’ll be so crabby tomorrow and probably ruin everything for everybody.’ She offered an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry to be a bore.’