Children everywhere. The garden running with children. A display of Alison’s fecundity. Not quite all are hers, of course—there are visitors, Gina’s invitees. The family rule is that the birthday child alone is allowed guests, Corinna remembers, and a handful only, the family itself being so numerous. So Gina has the decreed smattering of friends.
Alison is joyous, Corinna sees. The earth mother. Dressed by Laura Ashley, or perhaps robed would be a better word—an acreage of sprigged cotton, top to toe, nicely concealing the lack of figure. Could she be . . . ? Oh no, perish the thought. And the earth mother has provided—the kitchen table is testimony to her labors. Plate upon plate of tricksy little sandwiches, with identifying flags, bridge rolls, sausage rolls, tiny iced cakes in frilly cups, brandy snaps, chocolate biscuits, and jugs of apple juice and lemonade. And, in the middle, the Cake—eighteen inches in diameter at least, homemade down to the last piped rosette and the neat calligraphy: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GINA. Though the eight candles I imagine came from Woolworths, thinks Corinna. Oh, the earth mother has done her stuff.
Why does Alison so exasperate me? Is it because she has six children, and I have none? But this is 1977, and a woman’s achievement is not measured by the output of her womb. In my circles, where people have heard of feminism, Alison is a throwback: she is entirely dependent on her husband, her skills and talents are limited to nappy changing and birthday cakes, whereas I am a well-regarded scholar and teacher. I know more about Christina Rossetti than anyone except a tiresome man at Yale who will be trumped when my book comes out. In the modern world, it is I who am the achiever, not Alison.
All right, maybe the children come into it. Somehow. But it’s more elemental than that. It’s to do with that inexhaustible smile, and the way she pats your arm, and her general shapelessness and the fact that she’s barely read a book in her life, and that slight stammer, and her majestic complacency.
Why ever did my brother pick her? Suddenly she was there, and he’d married her, and no sooner married than babies poured forth. What’s in it for Charles? Amazing sex? Surely not. Three meals a day and room service when required, yes. Charles has never been asked to lift a domestic finger. Genetic prowess? Well, maybe. Who knows what dark unspoken urges he has. I’d be the last to say I know my brother.
Corinna has a cup of tea in her hand, supplied by Alison: “You must be parched after that drive, and we’re not going to have the birthday tea till after they’ve finished the treasure hunt.” Corinna drinks her tea and watches children eddy in and out of the bushes. Alison is in their midst, clapping her hands and exhorting them onwards. Ingrid wanders up from the pond garden, a baby on her hip. Her role today seems to be to keep the baby out of harm’s way. When did this one arrive? One was barely aware that there had been another.
And now Charles has appeared, also coming from the pond garden. He joins Alison, who is consoling someone who has not yet found any treasure, and he stands beside her, looking somehow entirely detached, as though none of this were anything much to do with him, as though he had merely strayed upon the scene. But, paradoxically, he manages also to seem some kind of pivot, he commands attention, this tall man in jeans and a green checked shirt, slightly stooped, as though he condescended to the shorter folk about him, at whom he vaguely gazes through heavy-rimmed glasses. There they stand, Alison and Charles, in the middle of their suburban acreage, their progeny whooping around them.
Alison is skimming and floating. She skims about the garden, with the children; her skirts float around her; she is on a tide of pleasure. Her thoughts too skim and float: lovely day . . . sun . . . children . . . Sandra, don’t push Katie, there’s plenty of treasure for everyone . . . Summer birthdays always best, poor Paul with January, one should have thought ahead . . . Paul’s a bit forlorn, so many girls, with Gina’s friends . . . Will there be enough lemonade? . . . Will they eat the paste sandwiches, too savory perhaps? . . . Gina, do make sure the little ones find some treasure, I don’t think Roger has any . . . sun . . . children . . . Ah, here is Charles.
She skims to a stop, with Charles now beside her. “They’re having such a lovely time,” she tells him. But Charles is not here, she can see, he is concerned with matters of the mind, the things that go on in his head that she could not possibly follow. She puts her arm through his, smiling. Smiling and smiling.
“Who are all these children?” he says. “The ones that aren’t ours?”
“They’re Gina’s friends from school,” she tells him. “Just six of them, for her birthday. Rowena and Sally and Rosie and, um . . . Corinna is here. Having tea on the terrace. Why don’t you join her?”
And here now is Ingrid, wandering over the grass, her hair glinting in the sun, the baby on her hip. Charles goes. Alison smiles at Ingrid. “Is Clare tired?” she says. “You could try putting her in her cot for a bit.”
“She is fine,” says Ingrid. “Shall I soon take the ice cream from the freezer?”
“Soon,” says Alison. “They’ve nearly found all the treasure now.”
She sits at the top of the grassy slope above the pond garden, waiting. The treasure is hidden all over the garden—gold and silver chocolate coins. The little ones think the fairies hid it, but Gina knows better: she saw Alison, earlier, bustling in and out of the bushes, reaching up onto tree branches, pausing at the swing, the long bench, the steps up to the terrace. The treasure hunt is not to start till Alison shouts one, two, three—go! So they are all poised, dotted about the garden. She can see the bright flicker of their clothes, hither and thither, each pitched where they think they have a private hunting ground. There is Paul, over by the rhododendrons. Paul is not much enjoying himself, Gina knows; it is not his birthday, he has no friends here. She is sorry about that, because she is in bliss herself, but it is after all her turn. You wait a whole year for this, and he had his, as did all of them.
Bliss. She can’t quite believe it—this is the day, her birthday, the day you wait for, that will never come. Better even than Christmas, because it is yours alone. The presents, the cards, the fact that you are eight, not seven. Eight, eight—she rolls the word around in her mouth. I am eight.
There is Dad, standing beside the pond with Ingrid. Usually when it is someone’s birthday Dad stays in his study with the door shut, so Gina is pleased to see him. Ingrid is carrying Clare, and she now detaches Clare from her hip and appears to offer her to Dad, but Dad does not take her. Of course not—Ingrid should know by now that Dad does not carry babies.
Eight. Eight, eight, eight. And her big present, from Mum and Dad, is a new bike—green, with a bell and a saddlebag. Birthday. It is my birthday. And there is still the birthday tea to come, and this treasure hunt. But Mum has said she must not be greedy and find too many coins, she must help the younger ones to find some, and leave some for the visitors. Gina knows all the hiding places, because there have been treasure hunts before.
She waits, watching Alison, who is in the middle of the lawn. Beyond her, Gina can see Corinna—Aunt Corinna, except that they don’t say aunt, just Corinna—who has come out onto the terrace and is also watching—watching Alison, watching the whole garden. And now Alison is calling out one, two, three . . . and immediately Gina spots the gleam of a coin, there on that big stone.
She has five coins. Five treasures. But she must have eight—eight for her birthday. It doesn’t matter if she is not the one with the most, but she must have eight. Where to look next? Not the big shrubbery—Rowena and Sally are in there, they will have found everything. She has already done the long grass around the swing, and the flower bed below the terrace wall. She runs down the lawn towards the pond garden; Ingrid is sitting on the grassy slope above, playing with Clare, and beyond her Gina can see Sandra busy among the bulrushes beside the big square stone pond. What is Sandra finding?
“Go away,” says Sandra. “I’m looking here.”
“I can look too,” says Gina. “It’s my birthday.”
They scrabble in the rushe
s, a yard or so apart. Gina reaches out to search a thick clump and both at once see treasure. They are at the very edge of the pond; both fling themselves at the loot. They collide, Sandra is crying, “I saw it first—it’s mine”; Gina has her hand out to grab . . . and that is all she remembers.
Not quite all. There is this dreamy subsequent footage of being carried on a flat bed thing by men in uniforms, of Alison’s anxious face staring down at her, of Alison’s mouth opening and shutting but Gina has no idea what she is saying, of being in another bed somewhere else, and her head is hurting and hurting and someone says, “It’s all right, dear, you’re going to go to sleep for a bit now.”
“Ambulance,” says Corinna crisply, into the phone. “A child has a head injury. Allersmead—Number Fourteen Temperley Avenue, driveway with white gateposts, on the right as you go east.”
She returns to the terrace. Alison and Charles are beside the pond. Alison is kneeling. Charles is bending down. Ingrid is rounding up the other children. “Come, come,” she calls gaily. “We go inside now, the treasure hunt is finished.” But the children are uncompliant. Roger is saying that he wants Alison. The visitors are shocked and interested; queasily, they stare down towards the pond. Katie is asking if they can have tea now. Sandra seems not to be around. Ingrid has Roger by the hand, and is trying to herd the others onto the terrace. The baby is crying.
“What exactly happened?” asks Corinna.
Ingrid pauses. Her fair flat face, always rather impassive, has become even more so. “I think I did not really see,” she says.
“Why the hell did you hide stuff right beside the pond?” says Charles.
Alison weeps. This is not happening. Things like this do not happen. Not in this family, not to her. It is all some sort of ghastly hallucination, in a moment she will come to, and the children will be rushing around again, and it will be time to call them in for tea.
Thus, the birthday, of which everyone will remember something different.
Gina will remember coming home, her head all bandaged. And it is not her birthday anymore, her birthday has gone down the drain—written off, wiped out. There was never any birthday tea. Later, another day, they had the cake and she blew out the candles, but it did not count.
In due course, there is the scar, across one side of her forehead, where, it seems, she hit the stone wall of the pond. And the hospital visits.
“A wretched accident,” says Alison. “A wretched silly accident. She slipped.”
Katie says, “You can have my treasure. All of it. I’ve kept it for you.”
Ingrid says nothing. Not then.
Paul will remember hating Gina’s friends—those girls ganging up, whispering. He will remember the ambulance men, advancing down the garden like alien invaders. He will remember watching out of the bedroom window, while the others swirl around in the hall and Ingrid cries, “Now we play a game—come in here and we play pass the parcel.” He will remember that people sneaked into the kitchen and helped themselves to the birthday tea.
Alison will remember the ambulance ride, the siren, Gina’s face, the voices of strangers, the doctors, the nurses, the hospital smell, the trolley taking Gina somewhere, the waiting, the waiting.
Corinna will remember telephoning someone’s parent: “I’m afraid that the birthday party has had to be curtailed—Gina has had an accident. I wonder if you could come and fetch—um—Sally.” She will remember Katie saying, “Can we have tea now? Why aren’t we having tea?” She will remember thinking, Now I know, definitely I am not having children, never. She will remember the arrival of concerned parents, the departure of their overstimulated offspring, Ingrid saying oh—they did not have the party bags for going home, the baby wailing, the dog discovered wolfing down bridge rolls in the kitchen, the eventual return of Alison (fraught) and Charles (irritated). It will be some while before she again visits Allersmead.
Sandra will remember feeling sick.
Charles will remember saying to Alison, “Get that bloody pond filled in.”
Katie, Roger, and Clare will remember nothing.
SCISSORS
When the day begins, when the light swells and within the house some people turn over in bed, blink, burrow down for some more sleep (Sandra, Katie, Roger, Clare), and others yawn, stare at the window or the clock, return to yesterday’s preoccupation (Charles, Paul, Ingrid), or simply pick up the thread of existence once more (Alison, Gina), when this spring morning gets up momentum there are nine at Allersmead, none of them more than a yard or two from someone else, but all poles apart within their heads, their hearts. The adults are incapable of recovering what it is that goes on inside the mind of a person of six and a half, or ten, or fifteen. The children have on the whole not the faintest idea of what it is that drives and motivates their elders, or of the landscape of their thoughts. The children have various instinctive understandings of why their siblings behave as they do; the adults retain the intimacy of daily association but have lost sight of one another in other ways—like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.
Thus, the beginning of the day, one day among so many, for each and all, though admittedly some have more under the belt than others—over fifteen thousand for Charles, a humble two thousand plus a few for Clare. A day is a day is a day, but some pack more punch than others, and at eight in the morning there is no knowing. This one appears to be set fine—a blue early April sky with some thin veils of cirrus, the sun glinting on the chestnut buds, the radio by the matrimonial bed suggesting outbreaks of rain in northern Scotland but turning quickly to the more pressing matter of the task force steaming towards those southern Atlantic islands, and the war that is about to begin. There will be a lot of people down there for whom this day is not especially propitious.
At Allersmead, it is simply another day. It is nobody’s birthday, there are no special arrangements for it. Some people have plans. Charles intends to work—he is at a crucial phase of his book, and wants to get on with this new chapter. Sandra must, simply must, get to a hairdresser and a jeans shop, and to French Connection. Alison wakes thinking about a recipe for baked lemon chicken. Paul has a plan, about which he is apprehensive. Ingrid is not so much thinking as brooding; within her head there is a gray fog of discontent.
Clare sees, out of the bedroom window, the shining chestnut buds, the splendor in the grass, and is, for an instant, transfixed.
Gina also hears the news bulletin, on her own personal radio, the radio she got for Christmas, and forms an opinion.
The house itself has experienced around forty-three thousand days since first it rose from the mud of a late-Victorian building site. It has known over a century of breakfasts, it has sat out decade upon decade of springs, of people saying, Oh, look, the trees are coming into bud, of the sun poking its way into the rooms, of the moths creeping into frock coats and plus fours and twinsets and, today, into Alison’s good tweed jacket that she keeps for best. It has weathered four-course meals served by parlormaids, the arrival of the windup gramophone and the wireless, the departure of the parlormaids, the onslaught of the Hoover; it has seen birth and death and a great deal of sex. Most of this it does not record; it keeps its counsel, it does not bear witness to the Sturm und Drang, to the raised voices and the tears, to the laughter, the exuberance, the expectations. It is merely the shell, the framework, the abiding presence that remains when all that evanescent human stuff has passed through and away. It is a triumph of impervious red brick, black and white tiles, oak woodwork, stained-glass lilies and acanthus. It neither knows nor cares. Its current market value would astonish its builders, but then so would much else about its leafy neighborhood, this provincial suburb—the cars, the trousered women, the cars, the hatless men, the cars, the curious metal arms skewered to every roof or chimney. But they might also be astonished by—or complacent about—the stolid survival of the house, very much unchanged. It has seen off fashion, or rather, it has risen above fashion. It is nailed firmly to
a time, but has also floated free of its time, has accommodated itself to new habits and practices, has digested central heating and washing machines and agnosticism and voting women and children who are very much heard as well as seen. Created as a shrine to family life, it has remained as such, even if family life itself is a rather different construct.
The family, this morning, gets up according to personal taste. Sandra takes a bath, using Bliss bubble bath, and keeping others out of the bathroom for too long. Paul wipes his face with a towel and leaves it at that. Alison showers while wondering how many of them will eat ratatouille if she plays down the garlic. Charles cuts himself shaving, and comes down to breakfast with a flake of Kleenex on his chin, which makes Clare giggle.
Ingrid does her hair in a complicated braid, which means that she is down rather later than usual. Katie, who precedes her, finds that the dog has made a mess in the cloakroom, and cleans up so that it will not get into trouble.
Roger does handstands in his bedroom until chivied by Alison. Gina continues to listen to the radio while she dresses in jeans and a red jersey, and decides to write a letter of protest to Mrs. Thatcher.
Charles is only partially in the here and now, which accounts for the shaving cut (Alison has advocated an electric shaver for years but Charles has his preference). He is on chapter twelve of his book, which deals with adolescent rites of passage in primal societies. The book itself is a general study of the cult of youth, in time and space. He is pleased with it. He has only a few more months of work to do, then the polishing and refining and checking, then the footnotes, then off to the publisher, and he can start thinking about the next, which so far is just a gleam in his eye but which will be a discussion of the concept of nostalgia. Charles prides himself on his eclecticism; he never writes the same book twice; he is known and regarded for his range, his ability to turn his mind to fresh fields. Not for him the carapace of a discipline; not for him some dusty academic label. Thank goodness. He tried a stint in academia once, and got out quick. Thanks to a godfather who made a fortune out of household cleaning products in the early part of the twentieth century, Charles has the cushion of a modest private income—not a princely one, but enough to keep them all if they are careful, when bolstered by what the books earn. Thank goodness for Vim and Dettol and Brasso.
Family Album Page 3