Everyone is coming, apparently. “Yeah,” Roger had said, on the phone last night. After a fractional pause, to which Katie’s ear was tuned. She knows Roger, she grew up with Roger. Oh, they all grew up together, but she and Roger were a unit. She knows his responses, his turn of thought.
“Everyone?”
“Yeah,” he said again. “Fair amount of aggro.”
He had lowered his voice. She knew exactly where he was: in the hall, where the phone had forever been sited. There would be others within earshot—Mum and Ingrid in the kitchen. Dad in his study, maybe Clare somewhere.
She sighed. “Paul?”
“Yup. Not returning phone calls. Couldn’t be reached. Mum going spare. Then eventually a message saying he’ll probably make it. Probably. Mum very spare still.”
“Sandra?”
“A fuss about some do she’d miss. But she’s coming.”
“Gina?”
“Gina’s coming.”
So they will all be there. Probably. Oh, and Corinna and Martin, apparently. That’s a turnup for the books. They do not often come to Allersmead. Katie is nervous of Corinna; she’s so clever, and she looks at you as though you are being assessed. Martin’s not much better. He knows everything there is to know about Shakespeare, he’s written all these books; what are you to talk to him about? Katie has always slunk into the background when Corinna and Martin show up. Gina copes with them better, and Sandra, who doesn’t give a hang about anyone assessing her.
There is to be a family supper this evening, for which she will be in reasonable time, and then tomorrow a buffet lunch for some friends and neighbors. A couple of people who were at school with Mum, and her cookery class—the group who come to Allersmead once a week to learn higher cooking, Mum’s first-ever earning endeavor, and why not? And a few other people Mum knows and . . . Well, Dad doesn’t really have any friends, when you think about it.
Twenty-five years. That is a seriously long time. A seriously long marriage. Sitting there in the train, Katie inspects this expanse of time, reeling back like a length of track, as long as her life, and then more. At the far end of it stand her young parents, but these are people she cannot imagine. A young Dad? Goodness no. A thinner, fresher Mum? A childless Mum? No, no. Her parents are unchanging figures, unchangeable, set fast at some point long ago, much as they are now, much as they were—are—for the Katies who are still playing in the Allersmead garden, digging with Roger in the sandbox, being pushed into the scary cupboard, getting the fairy costume out of the dressing-up drawer, trooping down into the cellar.
Actually, I never liked the cellar game, she thinks. But you had to, if everyone else was. And she didn’t like it when Gina and Sandra fought, and when Paul got told off by Dad, and when . . . When what? When there was something stalking around, something uncomfortable, like shadows outside the window on a dark night, but not that, something inside the house. What do I mean? thinks Katie. I don’t know now, and I didn’t know then.
The train pulls into the station. She reaches for her backpack, gets off, goes outside to where the buses are, and oh good, there is a home bus waiting.
She gets off the bus at the end of the road and walks the last stretch to Allersmead. How many times has she done that? Every school day. Twelve school years. So multiply by . . . Oh, thousands anyway. She has walked along here aged five, and then up and up and up until eighteen, and it’s after A levels and she has an A and two Bs and Manchester will have her. That wall where there used to be a ginger cat sitting, and that lamppost to which she used to race Roger, and the drain into which they used to drop sweetie papers. She and Roger always waited for each other, and walked together. When Clare started school, they waited for her too. The others went separately, for the most part, as though they had nothing to do with one another. Paul, Gina, Sandra—solitary figures trailing a few yards apart. Sometimes Paul and Gina would join up, sometimes Gina and Sandra—generally, they straggled. She can see them still, in different incarnations—smaller, larger. Gina and Sandra in those maroon school tunics, but Sandra manages to make hers look elegant, something about the way she ties the belt, the way she walks.
If I have children, thinks Katie—maybe not so many. But such thoughts immediately evaporate—she cannot see beyond finals, sometimes not even as far as that. She lives still from week to week, month to month. Her head is full of her friends, the kaleidoscope of her relationships, of Chaucer and Donne and Middlemarch, and if she gets a holiday job might she be able to save enough to go to France with people in the summer. She is tethered still to Allersmead, but it is a light tether that soon will break. She will be out there on her own, and will make the best of it, she knows she’ll do that, she’s not bad at managing. But right now she doesn’t much think about all that, there’s too much going on anyway.
She can see the white gateposts now—Allersmead. Almost, she can already smell it—comforting cooking smells, the hall smell of raincoat, a whiff of dog, and something unidentifiable that is just the Allersmead aroma—lifting somehow from woodwork and stone tiles and stained glass and people.
She climbs the steps and pushes open the front door. The dog heaves itself up and acknowledges her, tail swishing.
Ingrid comes down the stairs.
“Hi!” says Katie. “Are the others here yet?”
“You are the first,” says Ingrid. “Except of course Roger and Clare are already here. It is good that you have come. Charles has gone out, I do not know where. Alison is in the kitchen. Crying, I think.”
Clare hears the front door slam. Someone. One of them. But she’s busy right now, she can’t go down. She lifts her right leg and places the toes delicately against the mantelpiece. Then the left. Again. And again. She bends over backwards, slowly, floating her hands down to rest on the floor and stays there, thus arched, to a count of ten. She does the splits. Again. And again. And more.
The routine completed, she looks at herself in the mirror. Sideways on. She is thin, but not nearly thin enough. There is a suggestion of bum, the slightest curve of stomach. What to do? She has tried living on lettuce leaves and not much else, until Roger pointed out that dancers need muscle, and you don’t build up muscle on a starvation diet. So now she eats, sparingly, and eyes her body with distaste.
She knows what she wants. She has a goal, an ideal. She saw the Frankfurt Ballet on the telly, and from that moment her life changed. Those lithe androgynous figures, like pieces of string, apparently boneless; those dances that were unlike anything she had ever seen—startling, capricious, furiously inventive. She hadn’t known dancing could be like this. It is a world away from Nutcracker on the South Bank at Christmas, and the Saturday dance class at the leisure center. Where do you learn to dance like a piece of string? How do you melt your bones?
There is an ongoing argument. May she leave school at the end of the year and go to dance school? Dad just rolls his eyes and sighs. Mum sees her in a tutu, flittering around in Swan Lake, and says, well, ballet is lovely, of course, but don’t they sort of peter out at thirty? Ingrid says to dance is nice, but there are also A levels and college.
Roger is not at Allersmead. He is in the emergency room of the local hospital. He has had the most tremendous piece of luck. His friend Luke got his hand stamped on during the afternoon rugby match against a rival school—emphatically stamped on, broken in all probability—so Roger was able to step forward and offer to go with him to the hospital, which meant an enthralling couple of hours observing what goes on in Emergency. He has had a road accident (man with a head injury, woman with cuts), a couple of burns, an electric-hedge-clipper misfortune, and various people just looking ill about whom he would have liked to know more. His interest is forensic, though he is also sympathetic. He longs to get behind the curtains with the medics and really learn something, watch an examination, have a go himself at an assessment, a diagnosis. His only chance comes when it is Luke’s turn for a cubicle and a brisk young intern, whom Roger is able to chat up an
d thus gets to have a good look at Luke’s X-ray, over which he pores. There is no fracture, which would have made it more interesting yet, but massive bruising and swelling. Luke is by now thoroughly pissed off, and takes a dim view of Roger’s evident appreciation of the afternoon. When his mother arrives and is effusive in her thanks to Roger for his solicitous attendance, Luke sits scowling, aware only that this means he will miss next week’s match.
It is half-past six. Roger remembers with a jolt that this is the evening of the family gathering, and he had better leg it back to Allersmead pronto, or he will be in serious trouble. He gives Luke a kindly cuff on the shoulder, says goodbye to his mother, and gallops off.
He has known that he wanted to be a doctor since he was about ten. He loved visits to the doctor’s, watched (and suffered) with interest as one or other of the family had chicken pox, flu, insect bites, gashed knees, scalds, and sties. One minute people are running around, just fine, he noted, and the next they are felled by this or that, and the effects are impressive, but something can be done. He was going to be a part of this process. Oh, wanting to help people came into it, to make them better, but just as impelling was the fascinating business of cause and effect, of seeing what happens to someone when ill or injured, and then being the person who works out how to frustrate misfortune. Biology became his favorite subject; by the time he got to GCSEs he was already on course, sails set for medical school. With luck, and hard work, in a few years’ time he will be the guy in the white coat, dispensing expertise in Emergency.
He belts up the steps and into the house. Smell of food, sound of voices from the kitchen—help! are they already eating? He opens the kitchen door a touch furtively, and sees that all is well. The table is not even set. Katie is there, and Ingrid, and Mum is stirring something on the cooker. She turns sharply as she hears him, and her face falls.
“Oh, it’s you, dear,” she says.
Sandra sees Roger hurtling up the steps as she arrives. She often forgets about Roger. Katie too. They were always on the fringes of her vision, back then, of little interest unless you needed them to make up the numbers in some game. And now Roger is taller than she is, with a gruff male voice.
She takes her time, switching on the car’s interior light to do her face. She is pleased with the car; it is secondhand—of course—but a lovely metallic blue, with sunroof, radio, and cassette player. She can barely afford the payments, but what the hell. She’s going to put in for a raise at the magazine, the editor likes her, she may even get to cover the Paris shows next spring.
Allersmead is fading, for Sandra. From where she is now, Allersmead seems a long way away, an alternative universe where they do things differently, a place that has no conception of the fashion world, of the vie et mouvement of a vibrant office, of photo shoots and travel and being busy, busy, busy. Last Christmas, she brought a copy of the magazine. Her mother had eyed it with some alarm, turned over the page, and said, “Goodness, those girls are so thin.” Her father picked it up, stared at the cover, put it down again. Ingrid said, “These clothes are strange—I could not wear them but I suppose in London it is different.” Clare said, “Wow!”
Gina had flipped through the pages. Was that a curled lip? “Not your scene,” said Sandra. “I shouldn’t bother. How’s Radio Swindon?”
Sandra applies mascara. She glances at the house. Allersmead is alive with light. It may have faded in the mind, but within its context it is still very much in business. Someone walks past the sitting-room window—she cannot see who. Are they all here? Is Gina here?
Gina and I, she thinks, were fish and fowl. Cat and dog. Sisters? Technically. Opposites. Rivals. Anything she liked I didn’t. Anything I did she despised. Same still, really, except that it doesn’t matter now. We don’t have to live together.
She fixes her hair, steps from the car, takes her overnight bag from the back, and the flowers for Mum—the bouquet from Harrods—and runs up the steps, heels clicking on the stone. She pushes open the door, smells dinner—a thousand dinners—fends off the dog, which threatens her skirt with dirty paws, and Charles comes out of his study.
“Hi, Dad,” says Sandra. “Happy anniversary.”
Charles appears to consider this. “Ah. Yes. Much is being made of it.”
“Of course. An event. Is everyone here yet?”
“The front door has been active. I have not counted.”
“Dad,” says Sandra, “you are out to lunch, as usual.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Sandra shrugs. “An expression. You’re not entirely . . . with it.”
“I apologize,” says Charles. “In fact, I was about to go up and put on a clean shirt in honor of the occasion.”
“Good idea,” says Sandra. She is thinking that a new shirt would be appropriate. That blue thing with the frayed button-down collar dates from when she was about ten. Does he even own a suit?
Charles is in no hurry. He eyes her. “How much are you paid?”
Sandra is affronted. “No way am I telling you.”
“My interest is purely academic. I am writing about economic expectations. What people feel themselves to be worth. What are you worth, then?”
“About thirty K,” says Sandra crisply. This is significantly more than her present pay packet.
Charles raises an eyebrow. “Impressive. You can buy a university lecturer for that, I believe. Remind me how old you are?”
“Oh, Dad . . .” cries Sandra.
The kitchen door opens and here is Alison.
“Oh . . . Sandra dear. I thought it might be Paul. We’re a bit worried that he . . .”
The front door now. It swings open, and frames Gina.
“Gina dear . . .” says Alison. Her voice falls away.
Mum is in a tizz. Dad is not. Sandra has blond highlights and a pricey-looking car.
Gina closes the door behind her and is digested into Allersmead. Clare shimmies down the stairs. Katie’s voice sounds from the kitchen, and Roger’s, interrupted by Ingrid, who is saying something about laying the table now. Gina holds out her bunch of lilies to Alison, and at the same moment spots Sandra’s bouquet on the hall table. Upstaged. Wouldn’t you know?
“Oh, goodness,” says Alison, vaguely. “And you too, Sandra! How lovely. I must put them in water right away. You’re both in your own rooms, of course, but remember you’re sharing the bathroom with Corinna and Martin. I hope they won’t be late—the pheasants have to come out of the oven by eight-thirty. And Paul . . . At the worst I suppose we’ll have to start without him. He didn’t seem able to say definitely about coming and he hasn’t rung again. I think I’ll just pop up and change before Corinna gets here. Ingrid has been having a struggle with the sitting-room fire—would you have a look at it, one of you?”
Alison goes upstairs, followed by Charles. Sandra and Gina contemplate each other.
“I’m not much good at fires,” says Sandra with a silky smile. She too heads upstairs, bag in hand.
Gina goes into the sitting room where the fireplace sullenly smolders. Once, she sent a letter to Father Christmas asking him to bring her a real typewriter. He did not comply, any more than God attended to her request that Sandra be transferred to another family; these failures induced a permanent skepticism about the powers of vaunted agencies. The United Nations can also fail to deliver, one has observed.
She adds some kindling to the sulky flames, applies the bellows, and coaxes forth a gush of flame. She sits back on her heels, watching.
Katie comes into the room. “Can you remember where the flower vases are? Mum’s told me to do them.”
“Top shelf of the pantry cupboard.”
Katie sits down on the fireside stool. “Mum was in tears, when I arrived.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Dad didn’t seem to be anywhere and there’s a fuss about Paul.”
Gina pokes a log. Sparks fly up. “Fingers crossed,” she says.
“What?”
&nb
sp; “Just—I wouldn’t bet on Paul, one way or another.”
“Oh dear.” Katie sighs. “Mum’s rather set her heart on tonight.”
“I know. Half a dozen pheasants have died for this.” Gina hands Katie the bellows. “Here, you blow for a bit.”
Katie squats by the fire. The logs flare up. “What do you do at the radio place?”
“I chase fire engines,” says Gina. “Strictly local fire engines. I record outrage about the vandalism of park benches. I interview centenarians.”
“Is it fun?”
“You can certainly find some fun.”
“You were always going to do something like that,” says Katie. “Remember the Allersmead Weekly Herald?”
Gina laughs. “Editor, lead writer, and reporter. The rest of you were hopeless. Lost interest after issue number one.”
“You’re so lucky. I don’t know what I want to do.”
“Don’t worry. Things have a way of simply happening.”
“But suppose the wrong things happen.”
“Evasive action,” says Gina. “Spot the dead end. Mind, I can talk. Some would say local radio is just that. I’m giving it one year.”
“There are these postgraduate scholarships to America. I’ve been wondering.”
“So go for it.”
Katie sighs again, gets up. “I’d better do the flowers.”
The fire is developing a heart. Gina puts on another log. In this suburban home, she tells the mike—no, in this suburban mansion a family is gathered for a sacred ritual, the celebration of the passage of time. Twenty-five years have been knocked on the head, twenty-five years are under the belt. Parents and children have come together to wonder at this amazing mastery of the calendar, to congratulate one another on having gotten older, on having refused to stay still. Animals have been sacrificed, there will be festive exchanges—not too much, let’s hope—there will be statements of individual beliefs and tastes—again, let’s hope no one overdoes it—the old home will echo with merriment and no doubt, frankly, the occasional discordant aside. Let’s talk to some of the key players . . .
Family Album Page 6