Relative Love (46 page)

‘Hello, my darling, are you having a lovely time?’ Looking down, he saw her new trainers. ‘Those are nice shoes.’

‘Do you like them?’ Elizabeth shuffled her feet, pleased in spite of herself.

‘Are you going to draw me or what?’ They both turned to look at Jessica who was busy practising poses between the scaffolding poles now skirting the house.

Roland let go of his mother, grinning. ‘I’m going to do a picture of Jessica.’

‘That’s a good idea … Darling … I was thinking we – we could go home soon, if you like.’

Roland looked up at her blinking furiously. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘Don’t you?’ Elizabeth whispered hopefully, appalled at her own desperation.

‘I like it here. Let’s stay, Mummy.’ Roland turned and raced towards the cloisters, the pages of his drawing pad flapping under his arm.

‘Okay, we’ll stay a bit longer, then,’ she called after him, her voice hoarse, then trudged back to the front door, the bag containing a pot of long-life cream banging against her leg.

Cassie didn’t realise how hot it was until she ventured out to gather all the unfiled papers strewn around in the boot of her car. As she crossed the street the Tarmac felt soft and warm under the thin soles of her sandals. The air was as dry as sandpaper and smelt faintly stale, as if all the odours of city life, normally dispersed by brisk breezes and showers, were suspended within it. Cassie liked the heat, but this was getting to be too much. It hadn’t rained for weeks. In the little park opposite the grass was withered and brown, the flowerbeds like cracked pavements. The car was so hot that when she touched its metal surface with her knuckles as she turned the key she winced.

The papers, left unattended for so long, were smeared and curling at the edges, and somehow thicker too, so that it took several minutes to marshal them into a manageable pile. Cassie shied away from filing at the best of times, but in recent months things had got out of control, with the back seat of the car acting as the prime repository for all the invoices, quotes and correspondence that wouldn’t fit into her briefcase. She would probably have left things that way, too, if it hadn’t
been for Serena, due that morning for a trial run at being some sort of secretarial assistant. Charlie’s plea in June had been followed by a sweet, beseeching letter: ‘I know it’s a tall order, Cass, but Serena is too proud to ask you again herself and I am so worried about her being on her own all day every day …’ Cassie had phoned Serena on the spot, beating all her sister-in-law’s protestations into an agreement that she would come over to do a couple of sessions of phoning and filing during the last week of the summer term. Upbeat during the conversation, she had put down the receiver with a feeling of gloom.

Charlie’s irrepressible concern for the welfare of his wife, while admirable, only made her more aware than ever of the gaping hole in her own personal life. She would have given anything to experience such a mutually supportive partnership, even – she decided bitterly – one highlighted, as Charlie and Serena’s had been, by tragedy. Her life seemed so empty in comparison. With neither her mother’s ugly secret nor Stephen Smith to worry about (he hadn’t phoned since the toe-curling awkwardness of their last meeting), there was nothing to focus on but Dan. Or, rather, the lack of him. Cassie knew there wasn’t supposed to be just one Mr Perfect on the planet, that circumstance and mind-set meant that hundreds of possible partners lurked in the shadows of every human life, but sifting, as she often did, through mementoes and memories of their time together, remembering his tenderness and his promises, she could feel neither conviction nor consolation in the thesis. He was the man for her and she had lost him, not to something inarguable and easy like death but to a parallel life just across the river with a woman he did not love. Such thoughts still plagued her all the time, although they were no longer overshadowed by leanings towards self-annihilation. She might sniff Dan’s aftershave, still on the top shelf of her bathroom cabinet, like a starving beast, but her hand never hovered with malign intent over the scissors. Occasionally she studied the small silvery scars on her left wrist, but felt no temptation, even in her darkest moments, to reopen them. This was good, she knew. Progress of some kind. Even if it did not stem from acceptance or any noble burying of her desires.

‘Cassie?’

‘Serena.’

‘I’m early, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, that’s fine. No problem.’ Cassie, clutching the papers to her chest, slammed the car door and kissed her sister-in-law, inwardly marvelling that one who had suffered so much could still look so good. She wore no makeup and was dressed entirely in white – a long loose shirt hanging almost to the knees of baggy thin-cotton trousers, with very worn-looking beige espadrilles on her feet. There was a new, chiselled gauntness to her face, but this only served to highlight her wide sandy-lashed eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her chestnut hair straggled attractively from three simple white combs, the strands curling round the pearl studs in her ears. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’ Serena folded her arms, then quickly unfolded them again. ‘Can I help with anything?’

‘Oh, no, it’s quite all right.’ As Cassie delivered this assurance three or four pieces of paper broke free of the bundle and floated to the pavement. Both women bent down at once to gather them up, elbows clashing, eyes too close for comfort. Serena was quicker.

‘Oh, look,’ she exclaimed, reaching for the fourth and last sheet, which had caught under the wheel, ‘someone’s written your name.’

‘What?’

‘In the bit of dry mud here.’ She pointed to a spot on the car just above the mud guard. ‘Obviously with a stick or something. It’s very clear.’
Cassie crouched next to her. ‘Oh, yes, so they have.’ She stood up again, her heart racing with a mad, wild thought. ‘Shall we go inside? I feel as if I’m being gently boiled out here.’

‘But what a funny thing to do – I mean, who would do that?’ Serena hurried to catch up with Cassie, who was already crossing the road.

‘God knows – one of the children, I expect.’ As Cassie offered the explanation she realised, her spirits nose-diving, that this was almost certainly true. The wild thought – that Dan had been trying to make contact – fizzled and died.

‘Which children?’

Cassie sighed. ‘At Ashley House. I was there last weekend. Roland was too because of …’

‘Yes, I know – the business with Elizabeth and Colin. Terrible.’ Serena spoke with genuine feeling. The downturn in Charlie’s elder sister’s life had touched her deeply, the first thing in many months to do so. She added, in a murmur, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing … just a … Nothing. So, you think it was Roland?’

‘And that little grandchild of Sid’s, Jessica. They’re inseparable at the moment, which is rather sweet if you think about it and just as well too – Roland would be so bored down there otherwise. He’s such a sad little chap in many ways, don’t you think? Goodness knows how he’ll cope if Elizabeth doesn’t patch things up with …’ Cassie left the sentence hanging, patched-up marriages being a subject on which she had decidedly conflicting opinions. She hated whatever patching up Dan was managing with Sally and yet if her mother hadn’t stayed with her father she wouldn’t even exist. ‘Here we are, anyway.’ She pushed open the door of her flat and led the way inside, dropping the papers on to the hall table as she went. ‘Now, what can I get you? Tea, coffee, orange juice?’ She turned to see Serena standing stiffly in the middle of the sitting room, both hands clutching the shoulder-strap of her bag.

‘Look, Cassie, can we get one thing straight? I know I’m here because Charlie —’ Cassie tried to interrupt but she held up both hands, shaking her glossy hair and all the combs restraining it vigorously. ‘This is my dearest husband’s idea of therapy, which is very sweet but also ridiculous. It’s important you know that I know that. It will save a lot of time and play-acting. I’m here to shut him up. You’ve allowed me to be here to shut him up. I’ll gladly reshuffle your files, answer the phone and put the kettle on, but I’ve also brought a book to read.’ She patted a bulge in her shoulder-bag. ‘And I categorically refuse to accept a single penny in payment. Is that understood?’

‘But I —’

‘Is it understood, Cassie? Because if it isn’t I’m walking out now and then we’ll both have Charlie on our backs all over again.’

‘But I can’t have you working for nothing, I simply can’t.’ Cassie wrung her hands.

‘Well, I won’t work, then, I’ll read,’ retorted Serena, pulling a fat novel out of her bag and throwing herself into a chair. ‘Please, don’t make an issue out of this. We both know we’re playing a game and it will be so much easier if we establish the rules up-front. The children break up next week, anyway, and by September Charlie will have got a new bee in his bonnet.’

‘He only wants to —’

‘To help. I know.’ Serena sighed. ‘I know he does, silly sod. He wants me to get
better
, like I’m ill or something. He thinks that one day things will go back to the way they were. A normal family, three children, not four, but otherwise
fine
.’ Serena paused, close to tears suddenly, furious with herself for still having so little control and for having mentioned the one subject she
had vowed to avoid. Cassie watched her sister-in-law in silence, noting the whites of her nails as she gripped the book and feeling helpless. She thought in the same instant,
At least Dan is alive
, which she knew was selfish, but consoling none the less. ‘He’s right about one thing,’ continued Serena, with forced cheerfulness, ‘it
is
nice to be out of the house. In one’s own home it’s simply impossible to ignore all the things that need doing, don’t you find? Washing, ironing, tidying, it all sits there, doesn’t it? Crying out for attention.’

‘And what if I really do need help?’ exclaimed Cassie. ‘What then?’

‘Then I will give it. Free of charge. Just ask.’ And with that she slapped open her novel at the first page and began, pointedly, to read.

‘Hold my hand to cross the road.’

‘Only if Theo does.’

‘Theo is older, he doesn’t need to.’

‘I don’t need to.’

‘Yes, Chloë, you do.’ Helen seized her daughter’s hand and stepped off the kerb, nodding gratitude at the taxi that slowed to let them pass. Chloë resisted, her hot little fingers sliding around inside her mother’s. ‘Chloë, honestly, come
on
.’ Having made it safely to the other side, Helen rounded on her daughter. ‘I will not have you behaving like this, do you understand? I will not have it. This is a busy street. Crossing roads is dangerous. Think of little Tina, for heaven’s sake —’ Helen broke off even before Chloë burst into tears. She had gone too far, of course. She was a terrible mother. As if to verify this, Theo had divorced himself from the scene, turning the uncannily Peter-like expression of steely resignation with which he had endured the morning’s retail torture towards a display in a shop window.

Chloë, meanwhile, was weeping and thumping ineffectually at her mother’s legs. ‘I don’t care about anything, I don’t care about Tina.’

‘Chloë darling, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Mummy is cross and hot. We’re all cross and hot.’ Helen bent down and managed, in spite of four shopping-bags and Chloë’s not inconsiderable weight, to lever her daughter on to her right hip. ‘I know shopping is boring, but we’ve only a couple more things to get – shorts for Theo and a swimming costume for you. Remember? You wanted a pink one, like your friend Isobel, didn’t you?’ Shoppers in skimpy summer gear, their expressions inscrutable behind sunglasses, were streaming by on all sides, bulldozing unhelpfully into Helen’s shoulders and laden bags. Chloë, squirming, was oblivious to everything but her own misery. ‘Maybe we could get new armbands too, so you can swim to the middle of the lake this summer with the big boys. How about that? Just a few more days and Mummy will have a whole week off work instead of just one day and we’ll all be on holiday at Granny’s having a lovely time.’

Helen knew she didn’t sound convincing. She didn’t feel convinced of anything except that she was at the end of her tether. It seemed incredible that shopping in the sales with the children on such a hot day was a plan she had actually conceived herself. A precious day off and she had voluntarily turned it into a nightmare. Chloë had her knees clamped round her waist but was still flinging her upper body from side to side. If she carried on Helen knew she would either overbalance or drop her. The dull headache with which she seemed to awaken most mornings now had worsened that day to a dizzying nausea. The heatwave didn’t help, of course, but she was beginning to see that she couldn’t continue to blame the weather for everything. Something sinister was at work in her system, she was sure of it. Kay had been murmuring about the virtues
of HRT, but Helen was nursing the darker fear that instead of the natural inconvenience of the menopause she might be grappling with something infinitely less benign, like a brain tumour. The wife of a colleague at work had died of one just the year before: three months of bad headaches, followed by four weeks from diagnosis to death. Peter poohed-poohed such terrors when she voiced them, but he, too, was worried. So much so that, ranting about her prevarications on the matter, he had that very morning phoned the doctor on her behalf and arranged an appointment for the following week. ‘Why you haven’t done it yourself, I do not know,’ he had growled. Helen had been unable to muster a response. Now, however, with Chloë’s jigging knees pinching her hips and rivulets of sweat streaming from her armpits, she knew that the plain answer was that she was afraid. Perhaps because she was forty-seven, perhaps because of Tina, but death – disaster of every kind – felt so much closer these days, so much more
possible
. Acknowledging this fear in the packed swelter of the West End, Helen abandoned all hope of appeasing her daughter and burst into tears. Not the invisible, soundless tears so easily disguised during a sad film, or the ones she’d hidden behind a veil at the funeral of her niece, but huge, loud, hot, angry explosions, impossible to conceal from Chloë or anyone else.