Clare comes in. “Look,” she says.
Clare leans over backwards, drops her hands to the ground, and rests thus, a poised arch.
“Fantastic,” says Gina.
Clare straightens up. She lifts one leg up to the level of her shoulder, and holds her foot lightly in one hand.
“Impressive.”
Clare sits cross-legged by the hearth. “Have you ever heard of the Frankfurt Ballet?”
“I’m afraid not.” Gina purses her lips, tilts her head to one side. “You’re a young student of dance, Clare,” she says. “Tell me, do you see yourself as the Sugar Plum Fairy or a member of Hot Gospel?”
Clare giggles. “What’s the funny voice for?”
“It’s an interview voice. Clare, as a sixteen-year-old mover and shaker, how would you change the world?”
“I don’t believe you really ask people things like that.”
“Sadly, no. I ask them if they’re in favor of a new bypass and how they feel about winning the dog show. With luck, you can slip in the occasional subversive item.”
Clare gets up, does the splits, and rests thus on the hearth rug.
“Don’t,” says Gina. “It makes me sore just to look at you.”
Clare swings to her feet, wanders over to the window. “Here’s a car.”
“Aha. Corinna and Martin.”
“There’s been huge commotion about tonight.”
“So it seems.”
“Massive. Mum and Ingrid. Dad not. There’s a cake, silver things all over it. Mum was icing till midnight.”
Gina pokes the fire, which is going nicely now. She stares through sparks into the shuddering red embers across which flit a procession of other cakes, other celebrations—the birthdays, the bonfire parties, the ceremonial cooking of two decades. The family that eats together stays together.
The front door opens. Voices.
“Come on,” says Gina, getting up. “We’d better do hostess stuff if Mum’s still upstairs.”
“The fatted calf has been slain,” says Corinna as she opens the front door.
“I could smell it from outside.”
Martin follows her, carrying the bags. “I forget,” he says. “Have we brought an offering?”
“Of course. Silver candle snuffer. They’ll wonder how they did without one for so long.”
Gina and Clare appear from the sitting room. Greetings. Kisses. Martin deals awkwardly with the kissing. He and Corinna are childless, and never wished to be otherwise. The Allersmead environment is as alien as you can get, as far as he is concerned. Charles should be a fellow spirit—he is a scholar, after all, of a sort, he leads the life of the mind—but Martin has never achieved more than desultory exchanges. From his viewpoint, in the heart of academia, someone like Charles is a bit of a lightweight, a dilettante. Charles, on the other hand, has an aura of unjustifiable complacency and is clearly unimpressed by status. Neither he nor Alison wrote to congratulate Martin on his chair.
“They’re upstairs changing,” Gina explains. “Down in a minute.”
“Oh, my goodness,” says Corinna. “Is it black tie? Have we boobed?”
Gina ignores this quip, which she considers facetious. She offers to show Corinna and Martin to their room. Corinna says that actually she is dying for a drink.
“It’s champagne,” Clare announces. “I’ve seen it in the fridge. There’s a tray out with the glasses.”
Alison now appears on the bend of the staircase, with cries of welcome. She is wearing something long and flowery that looks to Corinna like a converted curtain, and is followed by Charles, who is in brown corduroy trousers, shirt, and a pullover that can be seen to be delicately laced with moth holes, if you look closely. He is followed by Sandra. Roger, Katie, and Ingrid now emerge from the kitchen and the Allersmead hall is suddenly full of people and talk. The dog barks hysterically. Alison sends Roger back to the kitchen for the champagne and starts to herd everyone into the sitting room.
“Still no Paul—oh dear. Well, we’ll just have to start anyway, tiresome boy. Clare, get the nibbles, would you—on the kitchen dresser. And Dad will need a cloth for the champagne, it always overflows, doesn’t it? Oh, you did get the fire going—well done. Now that there are so few of us we hardly ever seem to use this room. We’ve got the telly in the old study now, where people did their homework, it’s so much cosier. Corinna, we haven’t seen you for such a long time, you’re going to find everyone so different, so grown-up.”
Grown-up? Corinna eyes the group. Indeed yes, though she glimpses too their younger selves. The small boy somewhere beyond Roger. Katie’s expression, which is still that of a wide-eyed eight-year-old. Sandra is elegant, poised, and out of kilter with the rest; that was perhaps heralded years ago. Gina—well, Gina always did have an air of shrewd appraisal and she has it now; Corinna feels judged and found wanting, something of an unusual experience for her. Clare is rapier thin and undeniably pretty. Ah—Clare.
Charles is opening champagne and making a hash of it. There is mopping up to be done. At last everyone is furnished with a glass.
Corinna raises hers. “Here’s to marriage!” She and Martin are not married, so is there a hint of irony here?
Alison puts her arm through Charles’s. “I really can’t quite believe it. Twenty-five years! It feels like much less—and then in other ways much more. I mean, the wedding seems like yesterday, I remember everything . . . that register office—of course they are a bit sort of official and a church wedding is lovely but out of the question for us, Charles felt you really have to be paid up C. of E.—and the lunch at that hotel, my mother’s hat, she always overdid things, my father forgetting his speech . . .”
Corinna remembers Alison pink-faced with excitement, wearing a sort of smock, flowers in her hair.
“. . . the icing on the cake so hard I couldn’t get the knife in . . .”
“Did anything go right?” asks Gina.
Alison is merrily indignant. “Things aren’t meant to go right at weddings, that’s part of the fun. It was a lovely day, wasn’t it?” She beams up at Charles, who is wearing what his offspring recognize as his expression of contained endurance. It is his Christmas expression; they know it well. He inclines his head in reply to Alison, which might mean anything.
Clare is circulating with the nibbles, which, this being Allersmead, are not nuts or olives but exquisite little savory confections made by Alison. Corinna takes several. At least you eat well here, which can somewhat mitigate whatever circumstance has arisen—the birthday, the calendar ritual. Alison now holds cookery classes, it seems. Next thing, she’ll be on the telly. One can just see her, the earth mother radiating into every home, wooden spoon in hand. Except that Charles would never allow it. Saw the telly as beneath contempt, I seem to remember.
“So you’ve got a dedicated TV room now?” she remarks. “I thought you scorned the telly, Charles?”
“He got hooked on the Gulf War,” says Roger. “Kate Adie in a flak jacket and missiles whizzing down ventilator shafts.”
“Six o’clock news every evening,” says Clare. “He was sitting waiting for it.”
Alison chips in. “Now that’s silly. Of course Dad wanted to know what was going on, like we all did. It’s true that he doesn’t normally watch television very much.”
Charles smiles. “I will admit that there was a certain awful fascination. The language alone. Scuds and Exocets.”
“Well, it is good that it is finished,” says Ingrid. “All those poor men getting killed. Iraq men mostly.”
Corinna stares for a moment at Ingrid. One has never really got to grips with Ingrid.
Alison now hurries from the room; the pheasants need attention. Corinna tells everyone that she and Martin are having a sabbatical in the States—a semester at Berkeley, she’ll be able to get on with her book and Martin is giving a lecture series, a rather prestigious one, as it happens. This does not prompt much response; Clare asks what sabbatical means, and is
told, at some length. Charles appears uninterested.
“So how’s Leeds, Katie?” says Martin, in a hearty tone.
Katie, apologetic, says that actually it’s Manchester, and it’s fine. Martin refers to a colleague of his there and wonders if Katie has come across him. The colleague in question is the vice chancellor, and you do not come across the vice chancellor if you are a second-year student. Katie is once more apologetic. Martin loses impetus and turns to Charles. Katie slinks from the limelight and goes to join Roger on the window seat.
“Well done,” says Roger.
“I’ve always been scared of him.”
“I’m not good with Corinna. She used to make me feel as though I’d got dirty ears and breakfast between my teeth.”
“You probably had,” says Katie amiably. “Thing is, she couldn’t do children.”
“Perhaps she’ll come around to us now we’re maturing.” Roger grins. “She’s having a try with Sandra anyway.”
Corinna has never heard of the magazine, so Sandra tells her about it, a touch laconically. She is well aware that fashion mags are not on Corinna’s radar, and she doesn’t care, one way or the other. Corinna isn’t really on her radar, for that matter, except in the way that everything back then—everything pertaining to family and Allersmead—glimmers away in the mind and there’s nothing you can do about that. She describes a fashion shoot, amused by Corinna’s expression of disdain.
“These girls are paid how much? It’s outrageous!”
Martin has asked Charles what he is working on at the moment, thus inviting an extended account of some book on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Charles is a popularizer, in Martin’s opinion—potboilers, Sunday newspaper fodder. Martin himself produces the sort of work that provokes intense discussion amongst about a dozen people and is bought only by academic libraries. For some reason, Charles’s projects both intrigue and exasperate Martin and he is always driven to make inquiries, through clenched teeth. Some years ago, he discovered that Charles’s book on cults of youth sold in the tens of thousands; he has never gotten over this.
Gina attends to the fire, which threatens to sulk again. Corinna is talking to Sandra, Martin is engaged with Charles—Ingrid apparently listening. Katie and Roger are in a huddle on the window seat, with Clare on the floor beside them. Gina wonders about going to the kitchen to see if Alison needs a hand, and then decides against it. Alison would probably decline help—she always has kitchen matters perfectly under control—and also she is in a fuss, which intrusion might make worse.
Gina sits down on the hearth stool, and considers the room. Hello and welcome to the family program. Last week we looked at what it means to be an only child. Today, we’re going to get inside a large family—a family of six, a throwback some might say to the Victorian age, but there is nothing Victorian about the Harpers, from fashionable Sandra to leggy schoolgirl Clare. Gina is number two, but when I asked her about the dynamics of such a family she was curiously reticent. I forget, she says. You forget. They forget, I suppose. That’s the thing. There’s a whole lot of oblivion, and then out of it occasionally something floats up, quite sharp and clear. Someone saying something, doing something. And anyway, it’s not so much dynamics, it’s a climate. I asked about the importance of position in the family. Oh, eldest or youngest, says Gina, that’s the place to be—in the middle is just rank and file. She is reluctant to be specific about the part that parents play. Let’s just say they have leading roles, she comments.
Alison returns. “Dinner’s ready!” she cries. “Come through, everyone. Gina, put the fireguard in front of the fire. Bring your glasses, please—and those plates, Roger dear.”
They troop into the kitchen. Alison has a placement. “You there, Corinna, by Charles. Martin at the other end. I’m giving up on Paul, I suppose—oh dear, what can have happened? Sit, everyone. Charles, do the wine, will you?”
The starter is a smoked salmon pâté, one of Alison’s specialties. At last she’s able to say goodbye to fish fingers and beef burgers, thinks Gina. Poor Mum, she had to cook below her level for years and years.
They are ten around the table in the Allersmead kitchen. Alison has turned off the overhead light and lit candles. They are eating off the Limoges china that belonged to Alison’s mother and whose appearance always signals some significant occasion. Alison explains its provenance to Corinna—how her parents bought the set in France on their honeymoon and miraculously she has been able to maintain it intact: “Not that it comes out that often, but even so . . . Twelve place settings and the soup tureen, so pretty—the pink and gold. My mother was torn between this and a blue and green, apparently.”
“We wash always by hand,” says Ingrid. “Not in the dishwasher.”
Martin is wearing a glazed expression. Katie and Roger are engaged in cozy banter across the table. Sandra is telling Clare that she should try wearing her hair up, she’ll show her how tomorrow. Charles has just asked Gina how much she gets paid at the radio station.
Corinna has heard all about the Limoges china on previous occasions and considers it hideous. She tucks into the pâté, eyes Charles, and decides that he looks distinctly middle-aged these days—and then remembers that if he does, then so presumably does she. He is two years younger.
“Great pâté, Mum,” says Roger. “Is there any more going?”
Beaming, Alison hands the bowl around for seconds.
“Very good,” says Martin.
Alison beams further. “I’ll give Corinna the recipe.”
Corinna gulps.
Sandra says, “Oh, are you a crack cook too, like Mum?”
Corinna manages a wintry smile, and suppresses comment. It occurs to her that perhaps there is more to Sandra than meets the eye.
Clare is exercised about the matter of her hair. She twists a long blond lock and holds it around her head. She addresses the table. “What do you think? Up?”
“Either way is nice,” says Ingrid. “But up will fall down when you dance.”
“You skewer it,” says Sandra. “Trust me—I know about hair.”
Corinna sighs. Martin is thinking of high table dinner at his college.
Alison reckons up would be lovely. “So sweet and old-fashioned. Of course, mine has been up forever”—she waves a hand at her frazzled bun—“the trouble is you can’t get proper hairpins these days, just these peculiar clamp things, but I have got a little store, I’ll let you have some, dear, to experiment with.”
“Mum . . .” cries Clare, “I don’t mean to be rude, but no way is it going to be anything like yours.”
Charles rises, reaching for the wine bottle.
“Yes, please,” says Corinna, holding out her glass. “What is it, incidentally?” She is not in fact interested in the wine but is determined to put a stopper on this hair debate.
Charles peers at the label. “Sainsbury’s.”
“Boxes are cheaper,” says Ingrid. “But for special occasions always a bottle.”
Martin’s expression is unfathomable. Roger tells everyone that actually cheap plonk is laced with antifreeze, everybody knows that. Katie is saying that she and her friends drink beer anyway, plonk’s too expensive, antifreeze or not. Sandra says that now she knows why she steered clear of uni. Gina has begun to take away the dirty plates, and Alison is opening the door of the oven. There is a gust of roast pheasant.
Charles is required to carve. Ingrid and Alison dish up vegetables. There is bustle now, people getting up and down, Charles complaining about the anatomy of pheasants, Roger offering advice, Alison putting finishing touches to the gravy, Ingrid handing out the servings. “Sit down,” orders Alison, “everyone who’s getting in the way.”
At last all are provided with a plateful of pheasant, all are once more seated. The vegetables circulate. And from the hall the dog begins to bark. Alison freezes, gravy boat in hand.
The door opens. Paul. He stands there, eyeing the room.
“There you are!”
cries Alison. “Better late than never. Whatever happened? Why didn’t you ring? I tried and tried to reach you. Anyway—here you are. Pull up that chair—Sandra, you and Roger shunt up and make room between you. Charles, another helping, please.”
Gina observes Paul. Oh dear. Glazed look, slightly swaying motion. Pissed or stoned? Both, possibly.
“Sit down, dear,” says Alison.
Paul continues to stand. He has everyone’s attention, except for Charles, who is once more addressing himself to a pheasant carcass, with irritation.
Paul says, “I want to sit next to Gina.”
“OK, OK,” says Roger. “No prob. Shove up, Clare.” He hauls the chair around the table, then steers his brother into it. “There.” He fills a glass with water from the tap and sets it down in front of Paul.
“I want some wine,” says Paul.
Martin has begun to talk with pointed loudness about the summer that he and Corinna have just spent in Italy: “. . . lent this villa by a colleague of mine. Perfect place in which to get down to some work . . .” Clare and Katie, having registered Paul, raise their eyebrows at each other, and are exchanging opinions about a film.
Gina fetches a glass and half fills it with wine. “That’s the ration,” she says to Paul, quietly. “Right? Now eat, there’s a good boy.”
Paul appears to subside. He eats, in a desultory way. Alison is watching him with an anxious expression. “You do look tired, dear. What have you been doing with yourself?”
Roger snorts. Clare rolls her eyes. “Mum,” says Gina. “This pheasant is amazing. And how do you do potatoes this way? You must write it down for me. I’m really trying to get into cooking now I’ve got a flat. Could I have a Le Creuset thing for my birthday?”
“. . . Piero della Francesca country, of course . . .” Martin is saying.
Paul puts down his knife and fork. He takes a swig of his wine, and gazes vaguely around the table. “Is it someone’s birthday?” he inquires.
Family Album Page 7