Relative Love (67 page)

Maisie had gone back to bed and sunk into an exhausted sleep, only to wake – thanks to the Ovaltine – with an aching bladder a couple of hours later. When the household stirred to the buzz of alarm clocks, she didn’t move, telling Ed, who scoffed at her slothfulness from the doorway of her bedroom, that she felt too ill to get up. Serena, peering over his shoulder, had colluded without a murmur, shooing her son downstairs and instructing Maisie to go back to sleep.

It had been nice to lie there and hear all the familiar rushing going on around her, feet pounding on the stairs, the faint scrape of spoons in cereal bowls (Clem would have her usual single Weetabix and a special strawberry milk drink, which Ed would swig only to get ticked off for doing so). Then the kitchen noises had stopped and she had heard her father, late as usual, shouting if anyone had seen his glasses. After that there was lots of key-jangling and the slamming of doors. A lovely silence had followed, during which Maisie had turned her face to a cool uncharted stretch of pillow and thought blissfully of being able to feel normal again, with only Monica’s fawning to worry about and whether
ut
took the subjunctive and what to wear to Jonny Cottrall’s sixteenth birthday party.

Maisie hadn’t woken until her grandmother arrived for lunch. Initially drawn downstairs by the smell of the fish pie, when she heard the serious tenor of the conversation going on in the kitchen, she had made a last-minute decision to listen in on it, partly because she was fifteen and curious, but mainly because of a sudden knee-weakening apprehension that Serena would feel the urge to tell Pamela everything about her. It was just that sort of conversation – Clem, Tina, and some terrible thing that had happened to her grandmother that she couldn’t quite fathom. During each lull Maisie braced herself to hear her mother say, ‘And another thing … You’ll never believe what Maisie told me last night …’ But the words never came and, as Maisie
scurried along the landing and back upstairs to bed, she had the heartwarming feeling that Serena never would tell anyone either, that there was something about the whole episode that she would want to guard as closely as Maisie did.

Clem dawdled outside the school gates, wondering idly if Maisie had already set off home before remembering that she had spent the day sick in bed. If her sister had been around Clem would have avoided her, but knowing there was no possibility of her company made her feel perversely sad. She knew, somewhere inside her head, that in alerting their parents to her weight loss, Maisie had been trying to do the right thing; but this knowledge was still like a distant fact and not something Clem truly felt. What she
felt
was that her twin had blown the whistle on a covert but perfectly legitimate way of being, resulting in an at times almost unbearable sensation of entrapment. The doctors, her family, the beady-eyed teachers following her progress with her lunch tray at school were like an army of vigilant inspectors, all preventing her living as she wanted to live. As she had a
right
to live. They said she had an eating disorder, but that was because they didn’t understand. They were judging her against how she
had
been, as if that was the norm, when in fact she had been thoroughly overweight. A girl in her class called Tamsin had weighed under seven stone for months and months and nobody had carted her off to a doctor. Clem was co-operating with the hateful
treatment plan
because not doing so would mean being hospitalised. It was as simple as that. But she didn’t have to co-operate with Maisie, Clem reminded herself, glancing down the street and wondering if she had time – if she trotted fast enough – to go the long way home, which would allow some shedding of the hateful calories she had been forced to acquire during the day. For a moment she felt quite exultant at the prospect. Then she remembered that failing her weight target would only tighten the already strangling noose that had been placed round her life and her courage dissolved. It was pointless, she reflected miserably. She crossed the road to take the usual route home, fresh anger at her sister burning like acid in her heart.

‘Hey! Clem – wait a minute.’

Clem turned to see Jonny Cottrall, clutching his battered guitar case in one hand and sax in the other, striding across the road towards her. A car, approaching at speed, tooted and swerved.

‘Fucker,’ yelled Jonny cheerfully, and galloped to Clem’s side. ‘Hi, how are you?’

‘Okay, thanks.’ Clem looked at the ground, horribly aware of her unwashed hair and makeup-less face. She didn’t try to go near cool people like Jonny any more. In fact, she didn’t try to go near anyone very much, except a new girl called Anna Mason who was spotty and shy and safely unpopular.

‘Did you get it, then?’

‘Get what?’

‘The invitation. I’m having a party. You’d better bloody come.’

Clem raised her eyes, emboldened enough to forget, temporarily, her greasy fringe and bare eyes.

‘Why?’

‘Because I bloody like you, that’s why.’ He sounded furious but blushed so violently that Clem had to make a conscious effort not to burst out laughing. Repressed, the merriment rippled inside her, rejoicing not in his embarrassment
per se
but in the sudden sense of kinship with his pink face. As one who felt awkward and uncertain most minutes of most days, it gave her the sensation of being just the tiniest bit less alone.

‘Well, I might, I suppose,’ she conceded stiffly, without any trace of the empathy she felt inside.

‘If I’m not busy.’

A moment later he was bounding back across the road in response to the hooting of another car, this time containing his mother. Clem hurried on down the road, turning over the exchange in her mind and rehearsing how she could explain such a sudden climb-down to Maisie, whose alacrity in accepting her own invitation to Jonny’s party had been one of the main reasons Clem had so far not responded.

At home she found her grandmother on the doorstep, hugging her mother goodbye. A taxi waited in the street with its engine running and the driver holding open the door.

‘Clem, darling, how lovely to see you.’

‘Hello, Granny.’ Clem kissed Pamela’s powdery cheek, feeling shy of her grandmother’s surreptitious – but obvious – appraisal of her looks. Thinner or fatter, that was what they all wanted to know. It made her feel like a specimen in a jar, a butterfly pinned to a board with a needle.

‘Here’s ten pounds, dear, to treat yourself to something nice. I was going to leave it with your mother, but seeing as you’re here … and now I really must go. Take care, darling.’

Serena, Clem and Maisie, who had appeared at the last minute still in her nightshirt, stood on the step to wave the taxi off.

‘Did she give you a tenner too?’ asked Maisie, once they were back inside.

‘Yup.’ Clem waved the note, already heading for the stairs, not looking at her. ‘By the way,’ she added, not turning round, ‘I’ve changed my mind about Jonny Cottrall’s party. I think I might go after all,
if
that’s okay by you.’

‘Of course,’ began Maisie, exchanging a look with her mother. ‘In fact, I’m really … pleased,’ she finished, but Clem was already rounding the bend in the stairs. Once inside the sanctity of her bedroom Clem found herself reaching for her diary, her heart swelling with angry sadness at the sight of all the entries recording her weight loss. The pages of recent weeks were blank. Writing down her torturous accumulation of ounces held little appeal, but Maisie having shown the diary to their mother had been an act of violation from which Clem had found it hard to recover. She would throw it away, she decided suddenly, and rammed the little leather book into the wastepaper basket next to her bed. Then she turned her back on it, folding her arms tightly and gripping both sides of her ribcage with her fingers. For a few seconds she remained like that, clenching herself in the small tight circle of her arms. As she sat there, however, all coiled and knotted, the afternoon’s encounter with Jonny tiptoed into her mind. Her fingertips tingled. She wanted to write about it. But why? What was the point? She gripped her ribcage harder but the tingling wouldn’t go away. Angrily, she plunged her hands into the wastepaper basket and pulled the diary on to her lap.

Jonny thinks-he’s-so-cool Cottrall has BEGGED me to go to his stupid party. Think I might go, but only to annoy Maisie to whom I am now nothing but an embarrassment. Well, she can fuck right off. In fact everyone can FUCK OFF.

Clem locked the diary and slipped it under her pillow, then looked round for a new place to hide the key, eventually settling on one of the tiny drawers in her dressing-table. It was a pretty obvious place, but then, she decided, ramming the drawer shut, if Maisie was treacherous enough to read what she’d written this time she’d hurt no one but herself in the process.

That evening, while Clem slowly spooned tomato soup into her mouth, studiously not watched by her family, and Pamela spent her return journey staring again at the panoply of autumn colours streaming past the train window, and John brooded over pages of figures in the reading room of his club, a glass of whisky perched on the leather arm of his chair, Peter and Charlie met a few miles across town at Peter’s club for their second game of squash of the year. Without Peter’s insistence the encounter would not have taken place. Charlie, busy at work and with all that was going on at home, had felt a mounting reluctance at the prospect. At five o’clock, after an excited call from Serena (she had made it half crouched, like a thief, on her mobile, behind the mountain of leaves they had raked off the lawn) to say that Clem had changed her mind about the Cottrall boy’s party, Charlie, thrilled at such a sign of progress in their reclusive daughter, had phoned his brother to cancel the arrangement.

‘You can’t not come, I won’t hear of it,’ barked Peter, himself snowed under by a fresh set of medical testimonials and the absence of his key junior barrister, who had succumbed, uncharacteristically, to a bout of flu. ‘I need a run-around for one thing and for another there’s something I want to discuss. A couple of things, actually.’

‘What sort of things?’ enquired Charlie wearily. He sometimes forgot how, once his elder brother got an idea into his head, it was a task of Herculean proportions to dislodge it. It was maddening, but also, Charlie reminded himself, one of his indubitable strengths. Only Peter, for example, could have had the tenacity to tackle the awful business with the biographer head on and scotch what would otherwise have been an extremely distressing set of circumstances. Mollified by the recollection of this unhappy episode and Peter’s brave leadership in dealing with it, Charlie backed down. ‘Are these things important, then?’

‘Very,’ replied Peter, gravely. So gravely, in fact, that recalling the conversation as he hurried up the steps of Green Park tube station Charlie found his thoughts returning again to the dreaded Stephen Smith, wondering if a new ugly twist to the tale had presented itself. His concerns were not allayed by the visible tension in his brother’s face. Peter asked tenderly after the family, particularly Clem, then refused to discuss anything else until they had played their game. Most astonishing of all, instead of charging round the court in a relentless pursuit of victory, he then proceeded, for the first time in the forty-four-year history of their relationship, to concede defeat with barely any over-exertion – or even swearing – at all.

‘What the hell is up with you?’ Charlie burst out, once they were back in the changing rooms, towelling themselves after a shower. ‘Are you ill or something?’

‘I don’t feel too hot, actually,’ Peter admitted, stroking his throat, which felt somewhat sandpapery. ‘I think I might be getting a touch of flu. It’s been going round chambers.’

‘That’s too bad.’ Fastening his watchstrap, Charlie eyed his brother carefully. ‘Might have guessed there was
some
good reason for my being granted the unprecedented satisfaction of two wins on the trot. I knew it couldn’t have anything to do with
my
abilities.’

‘Oh, but it did,’ countered Peter, deliberately not acknowledging Charlie’s teasing tone and patting him on the back. ‘You’re so much fitter, these days. It really shows.’ Charlie zipped up his sports bag, shaking his head in amused disbelief. ‘So much humility, so much generosity of spirit, I warn you, Peter, I could get used to this.’ He slung the bag over his shoulder and turned to his brother, grinning. ‘Am I at least allowed to get the drinks?’

‘Oh, I think I can let you do that.’ Peter grinned back at him, while his heart performed a double-flip at the thought of what he had to say and how Charlie would react.

They sat at a table in the furthest corner from the bar, where a group of rowdy young bankers were finishing a long lunch. In spite of considerable joshing from his younger brother, Peter insisted, as he had on the last occasion they had met for squash, on having a pint of orange squash instead of beer.

‘Helen’s off alcohol,’ he explained, as Charlie set their drinks down, ‘and I’m supporting her.’

‘That’s above and beyond the call of duty, isn’t it?’ Charlie tugged open a pack of peanuts with his teeth, spilling them on to the table. ‘I mean, surely, if Helen —’

‘She’s pregnant,’ declared Peter abruptly, picking up his drink and setting it down again. ‘She’s pregnant,’ he repeated, looking properly at Charlie who was opening and closing his mouth like a fish. ‘It wasn’t planned but we’re pleased,’ he added, because Charlie still hadn’t spoken and he thought he might as well answer the obvious questions before they were asked. It took Peter a few moments to realise that his brother’s fish-mouth muteness stemmed not from any lack of enthusiasm but because the news had moved him deeply. ‘Hey, mate, steady on. Christ, of course.’ He groaned, thinking of Tina. ‘I should have known …’

‘I’m not upset, you great berk,’ gasped Charlie, slinging an arm across the table and seizing Peter by the shoulder. ‘I’m just delighted, bloody delighted – for you and Helen, for the family, for everyone. It’s what we all need, a baby in the family. I said as much to Cassie a couple of months ago when I thought for one misguided minute she was keeping a Mr Right up her sleeve. It never occurred to me … I mean, I thought you and Helen were past that stage.’