Relative Love (48 page)

Dear Edward
,

I am writing to inform you that the standard you achieved in your recent Common Entrance paper was sufficient for us to decide to offer you one of our three Prestwick Scholarships, which we award to boys of exceptional potential and ability. We shall of course notify your parents and headmaster
…

Ed read the letter once, then slowly laid it on the bed next to him. If someone had forewarned him of its contents he would have expected to find himself leaping round the room, shouting jubilation to his sisters and the rest of the world. He would do that, probably very soon. But for now, for these still, quiet, precious moments, the jubilation – the sheer relief – assailed him in a quite different way. He walked to the window – his legs like jelly – and looked down on the scrubby rectangle of the garden and the small metal goal against which he practised his penalties, its frame lopsided and dented from all the batterings of his near-misses. This is happiness, he thought. This is being happy. He thought of how pleased his parents would be and tears pricked his eyes. And then, just as suddenly, the tears had gone and his heart felt like an erupting bomb. ‘Maisie! Clem!’ He seized the letter off the bed and ran down the stairs, taking the steps three at a time and skidding on the mat in the hall.

The train was like a furnace, its small, high, rectangular windows open as far as they would go, mere vents for the warm air outside. Stephen shifted uncomfortably, aware of his jeans sticking to the back of his thighs and the prickle of heat on his stomach and arms. In South America he had got used to functioning in a humid swelter, but after almost a year in England his stamina for high temperatures had shrunk back to its original level. Looking out of the window as the train rolled through the industrial hinterland of the urban sprawl where he had spent his childhood, Stephen felt as if he had reverted to his former self in ways that went far deeper than heat-tolerance. He had been a sweating, pale-skinned boy and he was a sweating, pale-skinned man, a cauldron of disappointments, now returning to the place and memories he had spent two decades trying to leave behind.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past
. He had always liked Scott Fitzgerald, particularly
The Great Gatsby
, finding solace in the glittering prose and the fact that wealthy, privileged lives could be as integrally ugly as those shackled by the more obvious limitations of poverty and abuse.

The train doors slid open with a hiss, a dark mouth opening on the past. Standing in a cluster with others preparing to disembark, Stephen found it hard to move. He did not know why he had come, other than because there was nothing else left to do. What he had imagined to be a new phase of his life looked now as if it had never started. The energy that had empowered him to write his book, so intertwined with the energy of his love for a relative of one of the protagonists, felt as distant as a dream. He had fallen, he realised now, not just for Cassie but for the whole sprawling, robust branching tree that was the Harrison clan, so blessed with all the things his own origins lacked – identity, pride, history, wealth, roots.

His decision to give up on it, accept that he would remain an outsider, the biographer of a tiny portion of it, had grown no easier to live with in the weeks since Cassie’s disastrous visit to his flat. He had left the shards of the broken vase for days, stepping round them, needing to see the pieces of his dreams to prevent them re-forming in his mind. She did not love him. She loved someone else. The honesty of her rejection still turned like a knife in his heart. He had always known that love and hate were supposed to be either side of the same blade but had never before experienced it. He ached for what he could not have and in that aching felt a resentful loathing for the object of his desires. He had been a child with his nose pressed up against a shop window. Nothing more. It was time to move on. Again. The book was finished, a chapter in his life had closed.

Thanks to the delivery of the manuscript, he had a little money. He had made a start on the long-postponed project of a novel. His editor, on hearing the plan, had been almost encouraging – certainly more so than he had been at the idea of poetry. Stephen had started writing feverishly the moment their conversation ended, only to find himself on a fruitless quest to articulate his own misery. Storylines and characters shimmered out of reach. Swamped by hopelessness, his efforts were clumsy and undisciplined, spewing on to the screen like vomit. Other, nobler creatures might fashion and edify their suffering into art, but Stephen had had to accept, after four torturous weeks, that he could not. Instead he had slowly – unwillingly – hatched the plan of heading north.

It was years since he had been home. He knew that his sister, who had settled long ago in New Zealand, sent cards occasionally, a few scrawled sentences, but he had made no contact with his parents since he had left for Spain in his early twenties. Their issue of sorry little Christmas and birthday cards had dried up at some long-forgotten point during his time in the southern hemisphere. At the time he hadn’t cared. That they had given up, too, made him feel both less guilty and more free of the grim eighteen years that had passed for an upbringing. And he was only going back now because … because … Stephen paused to get his bearings. The city centre was packed with people and full of buildings where he remembered gaps. The bus stops had changed too – numbers in different colours indicating routes he no longer recognised. He found the right one eventually, then cowered in a back seat, irrationally terrified that he would meet someone he knew.

The bus lumbered round a new one-way system, then took to the more familiar route through the suburbs. Stephen cowered less and looked out of the window more, torn between embracing and hating the familiarity of the streets – more traffic-lights and zebra crossings, more housing estates and different shop fronts, but essentially the same. He might not even ring the bell, he told himself, pausing at the end of his road, absorbing every forgotten detail of the physical
terrain of his childhood: the low walls running along the front gardens, the two lines of different-coloured front doors, the stone lions on the doorstep outside number fifty-two, the heaving paving stones where the roots of a couple of healthy trees were still bursting out of the ground. It was peculiar to see again the geography of the street, to feel it merging with the emotional terrain, borne for two decades inside his head. He would just look at the door, he decided, tugging the peak of his baseball cap more firmly over his eyes and beginning slowly to walk. There was no need to do more. Maybe it would have changed colour. Maybe his parents had moved away or died. Maybe there was nothing to face after all. Maybe that was all he needed to know. But as he stood outside the little wrought-iron gate and the cracked stone path leading to the door, still brown, Stephen saw the curtains twitch in the front room and the blurred face of his mother – wider, saggier, white-haired but unmistakable – appeared at the window. There was perhaps a second or two when he could have run away. He wanted to very badly. Adrenaline flooded his system as it would that of an animal confronting mortal danger. His limbs felt both light and leaden. The curtain twitched again and his mother raised her hand. Stephen remained on the pavement, staring at the brown door, waiting for it to open.

‘Theo, supper’s ready, can you come down now, please?’

‘Coming, Dad.’ Theo carried on polishing the lens of his camera for several minutes, then set it carefully next to the rest of his equipment and his box of miniature film cassettes. He had been having a grand sort-out, inspired by several weeks’ absence from his room and all the beloved objects it contained. At first, surprisingly, it had been something of a let-down to come home for the summer holidays. He had been looking forward to it so much, only to find himself thoroughly irritated by his little sister and the fact that everything was so exactly the
same
. Like he had changed and his family hadn’t. There had been an initial fuss, his mother all misty-eyed, his father quizzing him about teachers and the end-of-year exams and Chloë showing him pirouettes and muddy paintings, but then they had all sunk back into being their usual predictable selves. After the buzz of life in his boarding-house and the thrill of winning both the history prize and his junior rowing colours, it had all seemed empty and thoroughly dull. On the shopping trip with his mother two days before he had felt that he might literally die of boredom – not to mention embarrassment at Chloë’s tantrum and the cringe-worthy display of emotion that had ensued. The thought of it still made him shudder, as did the recollection of his mother’s subsequent exuberance in the department store, waving ten pairs of horrible shorts at him, joking in a loud voice with the sales assistant about sizes and styles. But for some reason once they got home things had begun – and continued – to feel much more all right. Chloë had gone for a sleepover with a friend and his parents let him sit up with them eating takeaway pizza and watching a 15-rated sci-fi with quite a lot of sex and the most brilliant computer graphics. They were having a takeaway that night, too, from the Thai place in the high street – they’d each been allowed to choose their favourite dish and were going to eat it sitting at the wooden table in the garden. His father had organised it all. Which was unusual, and connected, Theo knew, to the fact that his mother had another of her headaches; a bad turn of events but also good because it made his father, usually pretty brusque and businesslike, all sort of caring and concerned in a way Theo had never seen before. That day, for example, he had insisted on cooking a Sunday brunch, which was unheard-of and also quite amusing because he couldn’t cook. Burnt bacon and fried eggs frilled with scaly brown had been served with much aplomb on cold toast. He had then led the way in the clearing up, putting on a silly apron and barking orders at him and Chloë
to load the dishwasher properly and put things away in the right places. Theo hadn’t enjoyed it particularly but it had introduced him to a new, interesting side of his father as well as to the notion that maybe things at home weren’t quite so fuddy-duddy and unchanged after all.

‘Theo, what the hell are you up to?’

‘Coming, Dad.’ Theo closed the lid of his cassette box and put it back into the bottom drawer of his toy cupboard. Of the used tapes there was nothing of which he was yet particularly proud. His grand interviews of all the family at Ashley House already made him blush they were so amateurish. In any case the whole project had been tainted irretrievably by the cock-up over Tina. He had realised, seconds before his cousin waddled on to the screen, doughnut in hand, what was about to happen, but instead of flinging himself at the ‘off’ button, he had remained as if spellbound in some terrible dream while the scene unfolded around him, with everybody gasping and his aunt Serena bursting into tears. Any serious film-maker was only as good as his editing, and Theo regarded the whole episode as a huge personal failure. He should have airbrushed his cousin from the footage, not to mention a hundred other clumsy bits. Even without the cock-up the end result had been desperately below his expectations. And yet Theo rejected the thought of eradicating it completely – re-using the tape for something better – the moment it entered his head. He gave the box a fond pat as he closed the cupboard door. It was part of his archive now, a crucial building block in whatever he would eventually become and achieve. Downstairs he found his family dishing food from tin-foil containers on to their plates. Chloë was already nibbling chicken off a wooden stick. She only ate chicken and rice when they had a Thai, but in impressive quantities.

‘Mum’s refusing to help me out with any of this beer. Would you like some, Theo?’

Helen, tapping her temple to indicate the fragile state of her head, raised her eyebrows at his father but offered no objection. Theo nodded eagerly.

‘And me,’ piped Chloë, her mouth bulging with chicken.

‘Not you, sweetie,’ Helen murmured, ‘but your orange is nearly the same colour, isn’t it?’

Chloë paused. ‘Nearly,’ she conceded, dislodging a last piece of skewered chicken with her teeth, then laying the wooden stick next to her plate. She would collect them, she decided, and use them to build something or maybe paint them so they looked like the pickup-sticks game she had got in her stocking at Christmas.

The four of them busied themselves with eating, exchanging occasional comments about the food, school and plans for the holidays. Chloë broke up on Tuesday. Helen was seeing the doctor on Thursday. Griselda, their Scottish nanny, was setting off on her own holiday on Friday. The following two weeks Theo and Chloë would spend at Ashley House, with Helen there for both and Peter joining them for the second. As Peter and Helen now explained to the children, they had decided to postpone a more exotic summer holiday until the autumn half-term, or possibly Christmas.

‘But we go to Granny’s at Christmas,’ Chloë reminded them, concerned at the notion of a change to a routine she treasured and Father Christmas’s ability to locate her bed in some hotel room on the other side of the world.

‘Maybe we’ll do both, or maybe we’ll just do something a little different this year.’ Peter smiled fondly at his daughter’s grave expression. ‘Whatever happens, you’ll have a lovely time, I promise you. We’ll go somewhere with fantastic beaches, like St Lucia, which is a little island in the Caribbean or —’

‘Oh, Peter, could we?’ Without thinking, Helen seized his wrist. ‘Could we really?’ She converted the grip into a little pat, fearful that he would see into her mind and recognise the
appeal – suddenly so crystal clear – of not having to go to Ashley House for Christmas. She loved his family, of course she did. She loved all the rituals too, their way of doing things – the grand meals and all the mayhem of nephews and nieces and piling into cars for visits to Uncle Eric and services at St Margaret’s. But for that moment at least, with her head humming and the exhaustion of enduring a heatwave without air-conditioning or swimming-pools or any of the other luxurious props with which she normally associated such soaring temperatures, she loved much more the idea of their being alone and far away. ‘I just think it might be nice to be just the four of us for once,’ she added, as she stacked the plates. ‘Like the skiing … that was lovely, wasn’t it? Apart from —’