Relative Love (52 page)

Lucien returned to the gatepost and peered round it up the drive. Elizabeth, in the glimpse he had had of her, had looked fuller-figured, with longer, more straggly hair – older, of course, but somehow
softer
too, as if some integral part of her had relaxed or matured, or maybe just given in. He had liked the scruffy hair, streaked naturally with grey, and also the long floral skirt she had been wearing, reaching almost to the rim of improbable, electric yellow shoes. The other woman, whom he recognised as Charlie’s extremely pretty girlfriend of two decades before, had been the more obviously beautiful of the two, but his eyes had been drawn to Elizabeth, springing into the car in her thick-soled shoes, her good mood still as readable, after so many years, as an open book.

With the Range Rover safely out of earshot Lucien, ducking, though there was nothing to duck behind, scurried past the little orchard of silver birches towards the wall that ran along the front garden and peered gingerly over the top. He had surprised himself already, coming this far and staying so long. Intrigued though he had been to receive a phone-call from what was clearly
some young relative of Elizabeth’s (the girl had disclosed, reluctantly, that she had family living at Ashley House), Lucien had only meant to visit Barham to see if he could sniff out a story behind her hazy allegations. Rumours had been flying round about Neil Rosco for months – coke, prostitutes, usual sort of thing – but without a sting operation (and Lucien didn’t approve of those) it was difficult to make anything stick. He had parked at the Rising Sun, had a ham sandwich and a half-pint and asked a few questions. Then he had walked to the gates of Rosco’s country retreat for a nose-around, peering through the bars, aware that he was probably wasting his time. Afterwards he had meant to return to his car and drive home, but found himself instead sauntering on through the village towards Ashley House, partly out of curiosity and partly because it was nice to be in the Sussex countryside, surveying the hot dusty colours through his Oakleys while his mind took an indulgent meander down Memory Lane.

Seeing Elizabeth was like being grabbed by the scruff of the neck. And the old man too, so much more stooped and frail but wearing the same hat, for Christ’s sake, as if it was yesterday and not eighteen years ago that Lucien had last laid eyes on him. The sight had made him hungry for more. Was the girl who had made the phone-call here too? he wondered, peering now with more confidence over the wall, his eyes scanning the familiar, impressive tapestry of his ex-mother-in-law’s garden, with all its bulging beds and clever, unexpected contours, where plants were trained to be wild and colours spilled into each other like paints on canvas. Absorbed for a few moments by this lovely, unpeopled scene, Lucien failed to notice the small boy sitting with his back to the wall directly under his nose. When the child looked up and said, ‘Who are you?’ he almost jumped out of his skin. Quite as shocking as the realisation that he had been observed was the fact – instantly and unequivocally plain to Lucien – that he had been addressed by Elizabeth’s son. The boy had darker hair, but the set and deep blue of his eyes, the steep neat nose and the ever-so-slightly jutting chin were unmistakable.

‘I,’ said Lucien, recovering himself and easing off his sunglasses, ‘am a secret. Can you keep a secret?’

Torn between maternal warnings on the subject of talking to strangers and bursting curiosity, Roland frowned. The man was tall and very thin, with interesting green eyes that looked like they laughed a lot. Having retreated to the wall for a sulk (now that the other cousins – and particularly Ed – were around, Jessica was ignoring him) he was in the mood for a diversion. ‘I think I can, but I don’t like them much,’ he added, his face clouding at the recollection of his father’s secret friendship with the woman in the purple dress and all the upset it had caused his mother.

‘Oh, and why is that?’ Lucien leant further over the wall. He, too, was enjoying the diversion. This was Elizabeth’s son; it was impossible not to be intrigued. After his marriage he had moved to a long partnership with a woman too obsessed with her career to consider a family. It had become a bone of contention in the end, one of many that had led to a parting of the ways. Now he was with a much younger girl, who talked so much about getting married and making babies that he found himself constantly digging out excuses to pull the other way. Life, he mused, smiling at the boy, who had an endearing pixie mouth but the familiar worried expression of his mother, was a funny old business.

Roland hesitated again, aware that a full explanation of his fears would be both inappropriate and impossible. ‘My mum and I are staying here with my granny and granddad and all my cousins and Aunty Serena and Aunty Helen. All the daddies are coming at the weekend. Except mine. He lives in Guildford. Mummy and I are living here now, except she’s gone to London but she’s coming back later today …’ Roland stopped abruptly, losing confidence.

Reeling slightly from the unexpected delivery of so much fascinating information, Lucien could see that it was time to take his leave. The child was looking more anxious and the last thing he wanted was to frighten him.

‘You’re a great little chap, do you know that? And I have so enjoyed meeting you.’ He offered his hand over the wall, which Roland took, looking solemn but also pleased. ‘My name’s Lucien, what’s yours?’

‘Roland Patrick Ashley Jessop.’

‘Okay, Roland Patrick Ashley Jessop, I’ve got to go now, but I want to give you something. Once, a long time ago, your mother was a very good friend of mine. Look …’ Lucien dug into his back pocket for his wallet and pulled out the little wad of photos he kept under his press pass. At the bottom of the wad, under nephews, nieces, siblings and parents, there was a dog-eared picture of him and Elizabeth, heads squashed together, pulling funny faces into the tiny window of a photo booth. Roland peered at it, then exclaimed, ‘That’s you and Mum. You look weird.’

Lucien laughed. ‘I’m afraid so. We boys all had long hair then. Your mother’s was much shorter though, wasn’t it, compared to now? While I’ve got practically none at all.’ He laughed again, running his hand over his hair, which he liked to keep, these days, to a number-four on the scalping machine. ‘Like we’ve swapped styles —’ He broke off, kicking himself for talking so carelessly and making his young companion look worried all over again. ‘Anyway, the fact is, we’re old friends from way back before you were born and sometimes it’s best to leave things that way. If your mum wants to, that’s fine. But just in case, I’m going to write my number on the back of this picture and give it to you to give to her. Okay? Will you do that for me?’

‘So you’re not a secret, then?’

‘Not to you or your mum, but don’t tell anybody else.’

‘I see,’ replied Roland, though he didn’t really see at all. The man put his sunglasses back on, reached over the wall to pat his head, then strode away down the drive. Roland stood alone for several minutes, listening to the man whistling long after he had disappeared from sight. It was a tuneful whistle, very bouncy, high and loud. It made him feel glad, until he glanced again at the little photo in his hands and his heart crowded with fresh uncertainty. It was odd to see his mother looking so like a girl. It was like staring at someone else, someone he didn’t know. They were making silly faces but their cheeks were touching. Something about it made Roland afraid. And all the secrecy business, that made him afraid too. With the man there it had seemed all right, but standing alone by the wall, the whistling quite gone, Roland wasn’t so sure. Should he tell his mother or would it make her cross? Would she say, ‘Roland, I’m disappointed in you, talking to a stranger’? But he wasn’t a stranger, he was a friend. But if he was a friend, why hadn’t Roland met him or heard about him or seen other bigger photos of him? For a moment he toyed with the idea of screwing the photo up into a tiny ball and hurling it over the wall. But then his aunt Helen called that it was time to go swimming and he tucked it hurriedly into his shorts, then set off at top speed for the house, slicing the air with his hands as Ed had said you should do if you wanted to run really fast.

Serena didn’t go into the church but made her way round to the graveyard at the back. The area near the building was flat, with well-ordered plots, crosses and slabs, but beyond that it sloped in a more higgledy-piggledy arrangement of mounds and gravestones, many pitching at odd angles out of the grass like unruly teeth. Serena picked her way among them, pausing every so often to study the mossy inscriptions, feeling superior and dismissive at the great ages recorded under the
names.
Ethel Rhys 92 years. Bernard Merris 89 years. Florence Dewhurst 88 years
. The notion of mourning such ancients was almost laughable. Even a fresher stone headed,
Grace Peeble, aged 7 years
, brought only a flutter of compassion. Seven whole years! Compared with the measly seventeen months she had had Tina, it was a lifetime. Seven years of memories and joys and photographs and ballet certificates and little playmates and conversations and hugs and breathy kisses … The mere thought of it made Serena giddy with envy. She had gone through her own memory bank so many times that it felt lifeless and picked clean. There was nothing left to be gleaned, nothing new – not a single moment, not a single smell that she had not remembered a million times, squeezing it harder and harder for drops of recollected happiness. Even the wobbly few seconds of footage screened by Theo on Easter Sunday had been something to which she had returned, countless times, in her head. Seeing Tina like that, so alive, so busy, in a brief hitherto unknown snapshot of her short life, had been truly dreadful but also magical, as if, for a few moments, she had come back to life. And afterwards Serena had felt she had been given something new to treasure, a fresh image on which to feed the bottomless hunger of her sorrow. But the others had not seen that. They had seen only tears, which meant unhappiness, and their own blinding helplessness.

There were six Harrison graves in all, set out like giant table mats along the hedge separating one side of the graveyard from a field of rape, an ocean of brilliant yellow so vivid that, after a minute or two, Serena found her eyes seeking solace in the gentle brown and violet of the South Downs, breasting the horizon like breaking waves. She had brought an apple and sat next to one of the graves to eat it, keeping as much of herself in the shade of the hedge as she could. Having the deceased clan of her husband’s family around her was somehow soothing, as if they were all seated together at a table, gathered, apart from the munching of her apple, in companionable silence. On the odd occasions she had gone up to the graveyard in Cheshire she did not feel this. For one thing the church was much newer and the graveyard larger and more ordered, laid out among wide gravel paths like some ornamental garden. Her mother, who had been cremated, had a small cross near the car park. Tina was next to her, the plot marked by a little stone angel carrying a book engraved with the date of her death and the words, ‘Our Guiding Light’. Serena, visiting with high hopes of consolation, only ever left the place in a state of acute anguish. As she sat now, on the lumpy piece of grass by the hedge, legs stretched alongside the handsome black marble slabs commemorating the lives of her husband’s ancestors, idling chewing through the core and pips of her apple, it occurred to her that this would have been a much cosier spot in which to bury their daughter. More sensible too. They were always visiting Ashley House and, since her mother’s death, very rarely went north.

During the dark days of preparing for the funeral Charlie, in shock himself and tiptoeing on eggshells round her grief, had never once openly contradicted her suggestion of Tina’s burial place, though she had sensed his doubts. Sensed them and ignored them. Engulfed by her own needs and what felt like burning instinct, she had stuck to what felt right at the time. But now … Serena, flicked the apple stem into the hedge and plucked a juicy blade of grass to chew instead. Now, she could think of nothing more comforting, nothing more natural, than having Tina tucked up among Edmund, Violet, Albert, Nancy and the rest of them, in the lee of the old privet hedge, with the primrose-coloured sea in the field next door and the big old hills ranged behind, watching like great custodians over it all.

Peter got to the restaurant early, wanting to make sure they had a good table and also to impose his authority on the occasion. With Elizabeth’s train journey in mind, he had chosen a moderately priced Italian in Ebury Street, just a hundred yards’ walk from Victoria station. He followed the waiter to the back of the restaurant and felt, for the first time, truly nervous when he saw the four empty place settings, glasses and cutlery shining, napkins plump and expectant. Both Charlie and Elizabeth had quite enough to deal with as it was. It hadn’t helped that when he phoned to suggest the lunch they had both been excited at the prospect, Elizabeth openly exultant at the chance to get away from Ashley House, and Charlie saying the four of them should have such get-togethers more often. Peter had felt obliged to prepare his brother in some way and explained that, beyond the obvious pleasure of seeing each other, he required a serious decision from all three of them on a delicate subject. At which point Charlie, having probed for more and got nowhere, had become quite cross, even implying at one point that Peter was getting a kick out of being mysterious, tweaking the strings of his siblings like some grand puppeteer. Which couldn’t be more wrong, reflected Peter grimly, ordering himself a Scotch and musing upon what a tricky bastard Truth could be, both inside a courtroom and in the equally problematic arena of everyday life.

Cassie arrived first, which was a relief. She ordered a glass of water, which she sipped meekly, apologising, as she had many times already over the phone, for having so misread the situation. ‘I thought he liked me enough not to use the information,’ she explained. ‘I was wrong.’

His anger with her long since vented, Peter patted her arm. ‘The man’s a head case. It’s just a question of handling it right. We’ve got a few months till publication and I’ve got a plan. You’ll see. Now, look at the menu and cheer up. Ah, here’s Charlie – and Elizabeth. Good.’ He stood up to wave them over, shook his younger brother firmly by the hand and kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks. ‘What about this, then, the four of us? You’re right, Charlie, we should do it more often. How are things? How’s Serena doing? Working with Cassie now, I gather, which is splendid.’