Family Album

by Penelope Lively

  Alison returns. Charles barely registers the slam of the door.

  Alison hauls the heavy bags through to the kitchen and unpacks the shopping. She is hot, tired, and cross. The car kept stalling, she was stuck at a traffic light with everyone hooting at her, the car park was full and she had to circle for ten minutes, they were out of lamb so she couldn’t get the shoulder she’d planned for tomorrow, there was no brown bread or olive oil. All right, one should avoid supermarkets on a Saturday afternoon, but she had no choice, somehow she hadn’t been able to get there earlier in the week. This is turning out a bad day, a day when Alison feels submerged by the house, the family, instead of riding high, in her element, in control. There was that business with Paul, and Ingrid has been funny lately, and Gina is quite difficult, and there is something wrong with the top oven of the cooker, and the wretched car . . . Plus, she has her period.

  She stands in the kitchen, out of sorts, surprisingly alone in this house in which one is never alone. She remembers that of course Charles is here, and there comes the urge—a fatal, irresistible urge—to involve Charles in her malaise. She knows that this is unwise, she knows better than to do this, but something drives her to abandon the last of the shopping on the kitchen table, to walk out of the room, to cross the hall, to open the door of the study.

  Alison does not often go into Charles’s study. When she does, she feels that in some eerie way she has stepped outside the house—her house, their house—and into some alien space. She is not at home here. The room is unfamiliar—the enormous desk, covered with books and papers, the bookshelves that line the walls and that she has never inspected, the fireplace with the tile surround (De Morgan, Charles says, and Alison always repeats this to visitors because evidently De Morgan is something desirable), the oriental rug that came from Charles’s family home, the old leather armchair—she knows its landscape but at the same time she feels a trespasser, a foreigner, a person who has left her own consoling habitat.

  “I’m back, dear,” she says.

  “Mmn . . .” says Charles, typing.

  Alison continues, in a rush. “The car’s acting up, it keeps stopping, I had an awful time. I’ll have to take it to the garage but of course Sunday there won’t be anyone there, it’s a nuisance, I need it on Monday for Paul’s dentist appointment. And, Charles, I wanted a word about Paul, that business this morning, I mean, I’m sure you’re right, Amsterdam isn’t a good idea, but I wondered if something a bit less, well, foreign, maybe Brighton . . .”

  Charles ceases to type. The words cease to tumble in his head, the sentences to form. Alison’s voice breaks in, reaching him as an incoherent sequence, something about a car, a dentist, Paul.

  “What about Paul?” He scowls at the typewriter, rereading his last paragraph.

  Alison repeats what she has just said, with extra points. Paul does need to do things with other boys; his friend Nick is really quite sensible; she wonders if they are giving Paul enough pocket money; boys that age are so hard to understand, of course one hasn’t had a boy of fourteen before.

  Charles hears most of this. He says tartly that he himself has been a boy of fourteen, and remembers the condition well. Paul will get over it, one trusts, most people do. In the meantime, it is just a question of stoicism all around. His hands return to the keys of the typewriter.

  Alison judders with irritation—an unfamiliar reaction, for her; you cannot be a good wife and mother and a prey to irritation.

  “Well, yes, dear,” she says. “Of course. I know that. But I do feel we should sometimes discuss things when there is a problem with the children, especially when it’s you who had the, well, the little bother with Paul this morning . . .”

  Charles cuts in. “Alison, I am working.”

  “Yes, I know that too,” says Alison recklessly.

  Charles takes a deep breath. He stares ahead for a moment, then turns to look at her. “Then why are you in my study?”

  Alison stares back. “Because I live here.”

  There is tension now. Something dark has stalked into the room.

  Charles lays a hand on the pile of typescript on the desk. “This book,” he says, “is . . .”

  “I know,” says Alison, cutting him off. “This book, and all the other books.”

  “I was about to say—this book, which I daresay you will not read—happens to be nearly finished. I am on the final, crucial, stretch.”

  “What’s it about?” says Alison.

  Second time today, that question. “It is about . . . concepts of youth, of the young.”

  Alison laughs.

  “An amusing subject?”

  “Oh no,” says Alison. “Just that it seems rather suitable.”

  They eye each other.

  “I have children,” says Alison. “And you have books. Except that of course you have children too.”

  “Of course.”

  The dark presence hovers.

  “Fortunately,” says Alison, “I love children. Any child.” Her gaze is now intent.

  Charles looks away. “Indeed you do.”

  When Alison came into the room she was panting slightly—bothered, disordered. Now, she has cooled; she is stiff, contained, she is not her usual self at all. No wonder that Charles seems uneasy.

  “Alison,” he says, “I realize you’re having a difficult day. These things will sort themselves out, I’m sure.”

  Alison smiles now—a small, unedifying smile. “Oh yes. Things do, don’t they? Even the most tiresome things. I’ll leave you to your book.”

  Alison goes. Charles blinks, frowns. He stares out the window, and then at the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Minutes pass. He begins again to type, haltingly at first, then more fluently. With an effort, he recovers his train of thought, and once again becomes impervious to the world. Half an hour goes by. He is unaware of Alison going up the stairs, and stopping for a moment to talk to Gina. He is unaware that Ingrid and the children have returned, loudly welcomed by the dog.

  In fact, Charles is deaf. He has to be. He has trained himself in deafness. Within his study, he switches over to deaf mode, and the house obediently recedes. He does not hear cries, shouts, the thud, thud of the stairs, the phone, the dog.

  Accordingly he does not, after a while, hear Ingrid’s knock. Nor does he hear when, eventually, she comes into the room. Just, he hears what she says: “Shall I bring you tea?”

  He does not look up. “Mmn? Oh—yes. Yes, do.”

  Presently, a mug arrives beside him. He types, halts for a moment, reaches for the mug, drinks, types on.

  Ingrid stands there. After a moment, she says, “I am a servant.”

  Charles does not at once hear that. Then an echo reaches him. In the echo, it is not quite clear if Ingrid has put a question or made a statement. Charles’s attention is caught by this ambiguity as much as by the content; he is something of a pedant. His hands leave the keyboard. “Don’t be silly.”

  “It is true,” says Ingrid.

  Charles sighs. “Oh, come on, Ingrid. Don’t be like that. Have the children been playing you up?”

  “The children are like always.”

  Ingrid continues to stand, slightly behind Charles’s chair. He is obliged to swivel in order to look at her. Her face is, as usual, short on expression, but there is something in her eyes that has him seeking cover. He turns away.

  “Look,” he says. “You know we . . . You know I . . .”

  “I do not know anything,” says Ingrid.

  Charles frowns. “Oh dear, I’m sorry you’re feeling like this.” His hands drift back to the typewriter. But something else has stalked into the room, alongside Ingrid. Discomfort looms. “Ingrid, I’m in the middle of something just now,” he says. “Where’s Alison?”

  “I do not know. I think she is upstairs.”

  Silence. Ingrid does not go. Charles lifts a page from his piled typescript, puts it down again, waits, glances around, and meets once more Ingrid’s cool blue sta
re.

  “Ingrid,” he says. “Really—I don’t know what I’m supposed to . . .” His voice trails away.

  “I know you don’t know,” says Ingrid. “You do not know, and I do not know.”

  She leaves the room.

  Alone, Charles glares at the sheet in the typewriter. He glares, scowls, types furiously for about twenty seconds, and then stops. He is finding that he is no longer deaf; he can hear kitchen noises, a child yelling to another child, the slam of a door. The house seethes around him, the world is too much with him, what is a man to do?

  It is now late afternoon. The light is softer, the shadows longer; everyone is home and the house is alive with activity. Paul has failed to locate any of his friends and thunders up the stairs to his room, where he flings himself upon the bed for a bout of morose self-pity. Gina takes her letter to the postbox on the corner. Katie and Roger are playing in the garden, with Clare trailing around after them. Sandra is back from the shops, in possession of some satisfactory loot, and a new hairstyle. Alison and Ingrid are in the kitchen, starting to prepare supper, both of them unusually quiet.

  Charles struggles for an hour. He has dried up. He types, and then throws away the sheet, types some more, and wastes another sheet. He cannot recover that productive flow. At last he gives up. He shuffles together the completed pages, frustrated. He must get out, walk for a while. Perhaps that will clear his head, but he suspects that the rest of today will go down the drain. He had hoped to get far into this chapter.

  He goes into the hall, and puts on his coat. The dog nudges open the study door, and climbs onto the leather armchair, a favorite refuge. Charles goes through the kitchen to fetch his keys from the dresser hook where all household keys hang. Both women glance at him but do not speak.

  Charles says, “I am going out. I may be some time.”

  As he crosses the road, he hears his own voice again, and his words sound a touch inappropriate: he is not leaving a cabin in the Antarctic in pursuit of a heroic death, he is merely escaping briefly from his family. That said, there is no chance that either Alison or Ingrid will pick up on the reference.

  Charles walks purposelessly around the neighborhood, trying to focus upon the rest of his chapter, to marshal material and arguments, to work out the thread of the thing. Various neighbors notice him—that man who lives at Allersmead, with all those kids—but he is not much aware of others. Some people know him as Alison’s husband—Alison is more gregarious—and remember that they have really never exchanged more than two words with him. What is it that he does? Works at home in some way, it seems. This sets him apart from all those who have offices and working hours, and provokes mild contempt or suppressed envy, according to inclination. Whatever, he is perceived as somehow not a chap you’d have a pint with, or a chat about the local council’s latest cock-up. One woman eyes him and thinks furtively that he is rather good-looking, a bit like that American writer who married Marilyn Monroe, but the wife at Allersmead is no Marilyn Monroe—oh, dear me, no.

  In fact, Charles is not in this affluent English suburb on a spring evening in 1982, but amongst the Bushmen of the Kalahari, to which he has never been, and in an Israeli kibbutz, and scrutinizing the lifestyle of seventeenth-century French peasantry, and casting a speculative eye on the family of Queen Victoria—didn’t some rather odd child management go on there? He is getting back into the chapter, this walk is doing him good, the malaise of the last hour or two has eased. He wonders what Alison has for supper. He thinks that he might be able to get back to his desk later—he often finds the evenings conducive to work.

  Macaroni and cheese. He recognizes supper as he comes in through the front door. A favorite with the children. He turns into his study, minded to make some quick notes.

  At once, as he steps into the room, he knows that something is awry. There is a sense of invasion, of disorder. The dog flops off the armchair, tail wagging. But the dog is not at issue. Charles has seen now—he has seen the floor, the desk.

  Paper. But paper as paper should never be. What he sees is paper in ribbons, in shreds, in a blizzard of long white fragments—a spaghetti blizzard of paper, spread out on the carpet, sliding from the desk. A paper storm that has replaced the neat pile of typescript that he left.

  He flings himself upon it. He finds some intact pages beneath. But much is blitzed, blasted, scissored into a porridge of white strips on which dance bits of words, letters, punctuation marks. There can be no recovery, no first aid, whoever did this was assiduous.

  Charles grabs a handful of paper and bursts into the kitchen. The family is assembled, most already sitting at the table, Alison at the cooker in front of a steaming dish of crusty golden macaroni and cheese. She turns: “There you are, dear . . .” Then she stares: “Oh . . .”

  “Who?” roars Charles. “Which of you?” Strips of paper stream from his fist. Every face is now turned to him. All are apparently amazed, aghast.

  “Who?” demands Charles—calmer now, intent, focused. “Who has been in my study and cut up my typescript?” His gaze sweeps across the eight faces, and there floats through his head the realization that today he has offended at least four of those present; four have looked at him with eyes that registered—at that particular moment—deep resentment.

  Silence. Alison’s hand is apparently frozen in midair, serving spoon in hand. Paul is looking out the window. Gina stares at her father. Time is suspended.

  Clare says, “Aren’t we going to have supper now?”

  THE SILVER WEDDING

  “Did you do it?” asks Philip.

  “No.”

  They are in the flat, in bed. Gina stares at the ceiling.

  “So who did?”

  “Actually,” she says. “I don’t know. Perhaps Paul. Maybe not Paul.”

  “Haven’t you ever asked him?”

  “We don’t discuss it,” says Gina.

  “Why ever not?”

  Gina shrugs. “Who knows?”

  There is a pause. Philip says, “It has its funny side. In retrospect. Not at the time, I imagine.”

  “No. Nobody laughed, I can tell you that. No way.”

  Philip considers. “Sandra? She comes across as a bit . . . devious.”

  “No. She wouldn’t have been interested in something like that.”

  A further pause. Philip is evidently intrigued. “An adult? Surely not?”

  “Ingrid or my mother?” Gina is impassive. “Not inconceivable.”

  “Whew! That would put an interesting spin on things. Actually I reckon it was the kids—Katie and Roger. For a laugh.”

  Gina shakes her head. “Katie and Roger were the good ones. And Clare was only five or six.”

  “Did he publish the book?”

  “Oh yes. It did rather well. He was much on Radio 4, talking about the cult of youth.” Gina smiles.

  “And meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . Tell me more. Sometimes I think you hold things back.”

  “Of course,” says Gina.

  He turns his head to look at her. “Aha. I thought so.”

  “And anyway, I don’t know it all, do I? There were six of us. Eight, with them.”

  “And Ingrid. Nine. I take your point. But at least I can have one version.”

  Gina now looks at him. “Why are you so interested?”

  He grins. “It’s happy families, isn’t it? Everyone’s fascinated by someone else’s family. And it’s you, far as I’m concerned—it’s where you’ve come from.”

  “Ah,” says Gina. “I see. You’re after insights. Why I’m how I am.”

  “Nothing so vulgar. I just want the fuller picture. What you’ve got in your head.”

  “Oh, that. Untransferable, fortunately.”

  “When did everybody go? I mean, by when?”

  Gina reflects. “In dribs and drabs. Me first, in fact. But there was never a finite going. There were compulsory attendances. Christmas. Anniversaries. Their silver wedding. That. Oh yes, that.”

&
nbsp; “Some people I don’t see very well—they’re in the shadows. Katie, for instance.”

  “Katie was kind. Is, I suppose. I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

  Her present to them is a silver bowl, bought in the Saturday antique market. She went there specially, searching, two Saturdays running, and it cost more than she can afford. She will have to cut back for a while, though there is not much back into which to cut. Her student grant is rapidly eaten up, and the bit extra that she has from her parents doesn’t go far, and of course they can’t do more, not with Roger and Clare still to come.

  She has wrapped the bowl in blue tissue paper, with a little silver label that says “For Mum and Dad with love from Katie.” It is in her backpack, up in the rack, and from time to time she glances up to check—the train is crowded, someone might grab it.

  She is having to miss her best friend’s birthday party. Oh well. Can’t be helped. All the same, she thinks about this, right now, and that Mike, whom she is beginning to rather like, would be there, and so will Sophie, who also rather likes Mike. She tries to shake off this thought, and stares at the window, beyond which twilight landscape rushes past, overlaid by her own face—a small, worried-looking face framed in untidy curly hair, looking both familiar and profoundly unfamiliar. Katie is sometimes astonished to be twenty; part of her seems to be eight, or ten, or twelve, at Allersmead still, everything going on there as it always had. She can feel almost guilty, waking up in her room in the hall of residence—someone else.

  And now it feels strange, going back. Of course, she hasn’t really left—she goes back every vacation. But it is as though she were only there by courtesy. She is poised now for flight, in a year or so she will be properly gone—to wherever she is going to go, a job somewhere, a flatshare. Is this scary? Or exciting? She does not know. Her face, flying along beside her, seems uneasy.