Relative Love (65 page)

‘Cassie, it’s me.’

He didn’t need to say more. Cassie had waited months to hear those very words. At the sound of his voice, so sorely missed, she gasped. It was a spontaneous, electric moment of pure joy, all the more wonderful for arriving when Cassie had almost convinced herself of its impossibility.

‘I need to see you. Tell me I can see you.’

‘Oh, Dan.’

‘I need you. Tell me you need me too.’

‘Of course … of course I do. Oh, Dan, it’s been so awful.’

‘My darling, I’m so sorry. It’s been awful for me too. Unbearable. I’ve tried to be without you, I’ve tried and I can’t do it any more. Nothing makes any sense without you. Cassie, my darling, just hearing your voice … Christ, it’s good to hear your voice.’

‘And yours,’ she whispered, while another voice, steely and commanding, bellowed somewhere inside her head that she was mad and reckless and foolish and inviting back all the agonies she had spent months taming out of being. But this is love, she bellowed back silently, shivering in spite of the sun streaming in through the kitchen window. This is love and I cannot give up on it. This is how every human longs to feel. This is the emotion striven for and described and defended across centuries, not just by poets and knights, but by every single human on the planet.

‘When can I see you?’

‘I don’t know, Dan, I —’

‘Today? Can I see you today?’

Cassie’s gaze shifted from the newspaper to her diary, open at the week’s list of commitments and appointments, so solid that barely a patch of white showed through the tidy lines of her handwriting. ‘It’s hard —’

‘Because you don’t want to see me —’

‘No,’ she interrupted fiercely, ‘not that, not that at all.’

‘Lunch-time tomorrow, then – our usual place?’

‘Oh, Dan.’

‘Please say yes, my darling. Just say yes.’

‘Yes,’ Cassie murmured, as she succumbed to the old swelling feeling of need and the familiar not-so-difficult business of carving time out of her schedule to fit in with his. ‘Yes, of course,’ she added more firmly, as the need blossomed obstinately into hope. He had tried to live without her and couldn’t. Love had triumphed. It would be messy but they would find a way through – Her mother might have been able to give up on the one true love of her life – if that was what Eric had been – but she, Cassie, wasn’t like that. Here was a second chance and she had every right to seize it with both hands.

Sitting on the train to London that Thursday morning, Pamela gazed out contentedly as the bright autumn sun illuminated the burnished coppers and golds of the countryside. From time to time she nudged John to point out a particularly vivid display, hoping to puncture his mood with these small revelations, which were so dear to her. He looked where she pointed, grunting dutifully, but Pamela could see that the brooding darkness, which had closed round him after Eric’s death, remained as impenetrable as ever. At the funeral he had stood at the graveside long after the rest of the small gathering had hurried off to seek shelter from the rain. Concrete-faced under the black cloud of his umbrella, motionless, barely blinking as the rain lashed against his sombre expression and dark clothes, he had looked to Pamela like some tragic latterday Ozymandias, a statue of a man left to face the elements alone. The umbrella was eventually exchanged for a cup of tea, but the black cloud hung on, so obvious to Pamela that she flinched at the sight of him struggling with the social niceties of the wake and then, later, of seeing Alicia safely back on to a train to Wiltshire. As the days passed she waited for the cloud to go away. When it didn’t she tried tempting him out of it with little treats and kindnesses: she ran him baths, found his reading glasses before he realised he had lost them, produced unexpected snacks of all his favourite
things – potted shrimps, Gentleman’s Relish on slivers of toast, shelled quail’s eggs perched next to miniature mountains of crushed black pepper – she even asked Betty to save the Hoovering until he was on one of his daily excursions round the estate, knowing how the grinding noise jarred his nerves. None of these measures lifted his spirits, but still Pamela did not give up. She saw the cloud both as a challenge and a fresh chance of atonement.

The memories of her buried sin had reached their apex on the dreadful, extraordinary night of the storm. The incredible conversation with Elizabeth. Eric’s death. After almost fifty silent years she had spoken the unspeakable and felt not worse but better. Elizabeth was nesting happily in the barn now, keeping herself to herself, giving private piano lessons on an old upright between strolls up and down the lane to deliver Roland to and from Barham village school. Limited by its catchment area and a lack of concern about league tables, the school had few budding Einsteins. Roland, for the first time in his ten years, was at the top of his class. Peering through the hall window in the afternoons as the two entered the drive, then turned down the path to the barn, Pamela could see how her once frail grandson glowed, how he bounced on his toes, how he seemed to have grown not just a couple of inches but several feet. The sight filled her with grandmotherly contentment and another, infinitely more complicated kind of happiness on behalf of her daughter, alone but finding her feet at last, at the age of forty-seven. Pamela found it hard to explain the entwining of this happiness with Eric’s passing, beyond the fact that alongside her grief at the sight of Sid, John, Peter and Charlie bearing the coffin into the church, she had experienced the most wonderful and unforeseeable sense of release. Brutal as it was, death had offered closure, she had discovered, and opened her throat to sing in a way she hadn’t for years: ‘Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war’. She pushed the notes through the lump in her throat. It was a clean slate, a chance to be better, to try again. That John, with his black mood, seemed bent on making this harder was fitting. Of course it was hard. Good things often were or they were of little worth.

That morning she had given him his favourite breakfast of poached egg and bacon, then cajoled him into letting her accompany him to London. She needed to make a start on her Christmas shopping, she had claimed, which was true; she had been reluctant to watch him trudge out of the front door so ashen-faced and alone. He had put up quite a fight: he was seeing business acquaintances all morning and for lunch, he said. Christmas was months away and she would do just as well trawling the shops in Chichester. Only when Pamela had produced the trump card – via a hasty phone-call to Serena – of her own lunch date in Wimbledon, had he given in, albeit with gruff warnings that he could make no firm commitment as to which train he would be catching home.

Roland tipped back his chair and squinted at his Roman soldier, who was still far from the magnificently muscled and imperious figure etched in his imagination. One leg was fatter than the other and his shield looked flat and flimsy. Sighing impatiently, he rubbed out the offending leg and weaponry, sharpened his pencil and tried again. He liked the Romans. They were brave and strong and good at things. Not just fighting either, but building and looking after people. His particular Roman was called Hadrian. Behind him he had sketched in a few turrets of the famous wall, copying from the poster the teacher had pinned next to the blackboard. He was saving the writing, which he hated, till last, although he knew already what he was going to say, all about the wall and how the soldiers took it in turns to guard it and live in it and how some of them married local ladies and had families and started farms. When he contemplated how the finished
page would look – the beautiful picture, his best handwriting – Roland burned with excitement. It would be perfect. So perfect he had decided it might be one of the things he took to show his father when he went to stay at half-term.

He was also going to take some of his new music: there was one piece in particular that he could already play quite well. He wasn’t doing grades any more. When he told his new teacher how afraid his first two exams had made him, how he had mucked up and only scraped just enough marks, she had said, as if it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world, that he never needed to take another music exam in his life if he didn’t want to. She had then produced a fat new shiny orange book full of tunes with funny titles like ‘Boogie Woogie’ and ‘Mad Cat Jazz’. They had funny rhythms, too, which Roland found he could get the hang of quite well if he just listened to the sounds and stopped trying to make the printed notes add up like impossible sums. When, after considerable urging, he had played some of them on the Ashley House grand piano the previous weekend his grandmother had gone all watery-eyed and said he took after his mother, which had made Roland feel strange (how could a boy take after a woman?) but also rather pleased. His grandfather had clapped a little but carried on looking grumpy, as he always seemed to, these days, as if he had simply got too ancient to enjoy himself.

The bell rang when Roland was still on the leg. But it was a good leg now, the same size as the other and with a convincing knee. ‘Time to stop,’ said the teacher, peering over his shoulder with a smile. ‘That
is
coming along, isn’t it?’

Roland smiled back. ‘I’d like to stay and finish it now, please.’

‘And miss break?’ The teacher, who had a big friendly face with two chins, laughed. ‘It will still be here tomorrow, you know.’

Roland frowned. He wanted to finish his picture – so badly it was like an ache inside – but then he thought of the playground, which he could see through the window was already filling with children, its black Tarmac gleaming in the sun. He had a friend called Polly whom he usually met by the swings. His break snack was always fruit or a cereal bar, but Polly got crisps. Today, Roland remembered, she had promised to try to bring an extra bag for him. Ketchup flavour. His mouth watered. He looked longingly at Hadrian, seeing exactly how the shield should be, how intricately patterned, held up as if the great Roman was ready to defend himself against the world. ‘Can I take it home, Miss? I’m going to show it to my dad soon, you see, and …’

The teacher’s face softened. They knew, of course, of the situation at home. Sadly, there were many such situations among the class, some horribly divisive and unsettling for the children. Although Roland had presented no obvious cause for worry, there was an uncertainty and a solitariness about him that she knew they would have to keep an eye on.

‘What a good idea. Your dad will be very proud, I’m sure. Now, pack up your things, there’s a good boy, and go and make the most of this sunshine.’ She clapped her hands to make him move faster, prompted by the thought of the coffee and biscuits awaiting her in the staff room.

A few hours later when he came out of the school gates, Roland saw his mother standing across the road talking to Polly’s mother and Polly’s little sister, Tessa, who was all rosy-cheeked and still in a pushchair like Tina had been. He had told Polly about his baby cousin dying, making it sound as dramatic as he could to impress her, then feeling bad because her eyes had gone pink and after not saying anything for a long time she had admitted that she hated Tessa but still wouldn’t like her to
die
.

‘Hello, darling.’ Elizabeth, momentarily forgetting Roland’s recent instructions about not hugging him in public, put out her arms, then slapped them quickly to her sides. ‘Hello, you.’
She ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead. ‘We were just talking about getting Polly over for tea. Would you like that?’

‘Cool,’ said Roland, tracing a circle on the pavement with his toe. ‘I’ve brought my soldier home to work on – the crayons we’ve got are much better than the school ones.’

Elizabeth and Polly’s mother exchanged looks. ‘I think that’s a yes,’ murmured Elizabeth, grinning. ‘I’ll call you tonight.’ Then she turned to Roland and suggested that, as the sun was shining, they should go home via the village shop and treat themselves to an ice-cream. After a crisp start to the day the afternoon had turned unbelievably warm. By the end of her walk to school Elizabeth had tied her new pink sweatshirt round the hips of her equally new denim skirt and yanked the sleeves of her T-shirt up over her shoulders. She was also wearing new shoes, blue ones with comfy flat soles and pretty bows across the top. These additions to her wardrobe had been possible thanks to Colin’s first cheque, haggled for through several draining conversations during the course of the previous few weeks.

Colin’s reaction to her change of heart on their marriage had been an icy rage, focused primarily on her selfishness and lack of rationality. If he had been gentle, or pleading, or truly penitent, Elizabeth might – even at such a late stage – have caved in. But Colin, she now saw clearly, had little concept of gentleness or, indeed, of any emotion that did not involve asserting his own demands. He was a bully, to whom she had formed an attachment at a time in her life when she had had little confidence in her own abilities, when she had been only too willing to abdicate personal control to someone else. Someone older. Someone forthright and brimming with self-conviction, no matter how ungenerous. Armed with such hindsight, Elizabeth’s own self-belief had grown stronger under verbal attacks that would once have left her quaking. With the result that during their most recent conversation, Colin, protesting bafflement and injury, had promised not only to send a cheque but also to enlist a firm of lawyers to act on his behalf. Elizabeth, drawing on what was left of her father’s gift, was already paying some lawyers of her own and working out meticulous lists of her spending and income. A permanent settlement, in her view, couldn’t come too soon. In spite of her parents’ protests, she was insisting on paying them rent. Modest though the sum was, it was still proving difficult to make ends meet on the meagre income generated by a few hours’ teaching the piano. The sweatshirt, skirt and shoes had all come from a sale; the rest of Colin’s money had been gobbled up in gear for Roland, who was growing in all directions by the minute.

When they were back at the top of the lane, choc ices still only half eaten, Roland relaxed and merry, Elizabeth slowed her pace and turned to him. ‘Darling, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you – a silly little thing …’