The Simple Rules of Love

by Amanda Brookfield

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR AMANDA BROOKFIELD:

  ‘A strong sense of humour, a natural gift’

  EVENING STANDARD

  ‘Brookfield goes from strength to strength. Treat yourself’

  PATRICIA SCANLAN

  ‘The novel walks a fine line between comedy and wrenching sadness. It is fluently written and its depiction of domestic chaos and a man's bewilderment when unexpectedly faced with a young son's needs is all too recognizable’

  ELIZABETH BUCHAN ON A FAMILY MAN

  ‘Perceptive and very readable’

  THE TIMES

  Also by Amanda Brookfield

  Alice Alone

  A Cast of Smiles

  Walls of Glass

  A Summer Affair

  The Godmother

  Marriage Games

  Single Lives

  The Lover

  A Family Man

  Sisters and Husbands

  Relative Love

  The Simple Rules of Love

  AMANDA BROOKFIELD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2006

  4

  Copyright © Amanda Brookfield,2006

  All rights reserved

  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925. Reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192561-5

  For my godchildren, Gabriel, Kiki, Hebe and Maddy

  ‘Moving, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life’

  Virginia Woolf

  Acknowledgements

  Help came from many directions during the writing of The Simple Rules of Love. Sara Westcott and the neonatal staff at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, Dickie Scarratt, Henry Sutton and Angela Brookfield all assisted me with invaluable research. For support of a vital but more invisible kind, I must thank Clare Ledingham and Stephanie Cabot, whose faith held firm when mine wavered. Lastly, but so importantly, my warmest appreciation goes to Barbara Ryan, whose artful physiotherapy eliminated pain as a reason not to sit at my desk.

  February

  By the time the mourners followed the coffin out of St Margaret's arched Norman doorway, the sun had burned the leaden screen of cloud to harmless grey tufts, which floated over the distant ridge of the South Downs like puffs of smoke. It had been a wet winter and the grass of the churchyard, pitted here and there with clusters of daffodils, was long and lush, asserting more than words ever could that, though bodies might rot beneath it, life, on the surface at least, went on.

  The surviving members of the Harrison family, the edges of their dark clothes flapping in the brisk breeze, made their way slowly down the path and into the graveyard, moving with the seamless ease of a flock of gliding birds. They came to a stop in a sheltered corner by a hedge of ripening privet where a deep, rectangular hole had been dug next to the other, variously weathered family graves.

  ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’ The priest issued his valedictions in a tone of almost bored familiarity, casting a handful of earth, which caught on a gust of wind and blew back against his gown.

  As the coffin was lowered into the hole, Pamela Harrison, at seventy-nine now the oldest living member of the family, found her attention drifting from the demise of her sister-in-law, Alicia, to the grassy mound that covered her husband's remains. After two years the plot still looked new and plump, as if John had changed his mind and was trying to punch his way through the rows of winter pansies she had planted on top, wanting a final gasp of air, or maybe the chance – so regularly sought in his life – to have the last word. With his ailing eighty-three-year-old heart, death had been expected but, for Pamela at least, none the less shocking. Six decades of marriage had bound them together as firmly as the twisted roots of the old oak that guarded the entrance to the drive of Ashley House, their beloved family home on the other side of the village. Passing the tree as they set out for the church that morning, Pamela had caught herself staring through the dots of her veil at its sprawling canopy of boughs, remembering how John had loved to sit beneath it, one hand cradling his pipe, the other absently stroking the silky ears of Poppy, their beloved springer spaniel. She had gripped her little black handbag as she studied the tree's heaving base of tangled roots, wondering at the surgical possibilities of removing just one, and how so old and convoluted a structure would respond to such an assault.

  For her own part Pamela had concentrated on the dignified but wearisome business of continuing, discovering in the process the comfort of pursuing all the myriad daily routines that, at various times in her life, she had despised for their sameness. As she twisted her thinning white hair into its customary bun, walked Poppy up the lane, browsed through the paper in the drawing room, with the lavender visible through the windows and the inviting green mouth of the pergola beyond, she was aware that it was precisely the familiarity of these actions and their landscapes that held her together: they required no thought, thereby offering at least a semblance of the business of living.

  It was performing tasks beyond this routine that Pamela found hard. Like choosing a hat for the funeral – a hat for John's rickety-hipped sister Alicia, who had clung to life with all the irascibility and obstinacy that had made her impossible to regard as a friend. Pamela had fretted for hours at her dressing-table, hat-boxes strewn across the counterpane of the bed, as paralysed with indecision as one of her fashion-conscious twin granddaughters. She liked hats and had several elegant black ones in various styles. With lace or without? Wide brim or narrow? Cocked to one side or straight? She had still been deliberating when Charlie, her second son, had shouted up the stairs that it was time to go. There was an edge of impatience in his voice, so reminiscent of John that, for a few seconds, Pamela had imagined that her husband might be waiting for her in the hall, his face creased with frustration, his elbow ready to loop through hers for the walk to the car. She had seized the nearest hat and reached for the enamelled box that contained her hatpins. John would never wait for her again, she reminded herself. Charlie and Serena lived with her now, and Ed, their seventeen-year-old, who made the walls of Ashley House vibrate with his
music, who used the old oak tree to shield the smoke of his illicit cigarettes, and who claimed so vociferously not to miss Maisie and Clem, his twenty-year-old sisters, that it was obvious he longed for them all the time.

  Even now the hat Pamela had chosen didn't feel right. There was a growing sore spot where one of her treasured mother-of-pearl hatpins was pushing through her bun into her scalp. And she had pitched it so far forward that the brim now obscured the view of the sky and rolling hills, precluding what would have provided a welcome visual escape from the sombre expressions of those around her. She made do instead with looking at the ground. Next to John's grave an empty patch of grass was reserved for her. Pamela squinted at it through the fine gauze of her veil, trying to imagine the cold comfort of death, but thinking instead, with sudden yearning, of a nice cup of tea.

  ‘All right?’ Peter, her elder son, patted her hand where it gripped his arm. He and his wife Helen had driven down from London that morning, electing not to bring their four- and thirteen-year-old girls, Genevieve and Chloë, and apologizing for the absence of Theo, their eldest, who was in the thick of his second term at Oxford.

  Pamela nodded, pressing her fingers into the soft cashmere of Peter's overcoat. with his wide, balding grey head and determined eyes, he was so like John at a similar age that every time she saw him, these days, she wanted to weep at the complicated poignancy of life's relentless echoes, so comforting yet so disquieting.

  Her other three children, ranged among the small crowd on the opposite side of the grave, were less obvious physical replicas of their parents' union, though people often remarked that Cassie, still striking at forty-two, with her petite frame and long curly blonde hair, looked as she had in her prime. The middle two, Charlie and Elizabeth, with their much heavier features, dark hair and wider girth were like peas from an altogether different pod – apart from their eyes, which were blue and deep-set like her own. And Elizabeth had her father's chin, reflected Pamela, feeling a little spurt of fond compassion, as she always did, for her somewhat clumsily assembled second child. In her long black coat she was as close to smart as Pamela could remember. Only the thick-soled boots protruding from below the coat hem bore testimony to the faintly anarchic style she had adopted in recent years, a style that involved not only heavy-soled footwear but layers of shapeless clothes and, on particularly misguided occasions, two thick, squaw-like plaits. It was no way for any woman to dress, in Pamela's view, least of all a fifty-three-year-old secondary-school maths teacher with an impressionable teenage son to consider.

  Dear Roland. Pamela sighed as her glance shifted to the fifteen-year-old, whose six-foot frame towered above his mother and whose cheekbones jutted out under his huge, long-lashed brown eyes with a man-boy innocence she would have done anything to preserve. To be so handsome was almost unnatural, and would lead to trouble, she was sure. As she watched, Elizabeth slipped an arm round Roland's waist and leant into him, resting the side of her face against his upper arm. Depending on him, as usual, Pamela noted with despair, marvelling as always at Roland's still unspoilt good nature and that Elizabeth's split from Colin five years before seemed – contrary to all traditional wisdom – to have proved far less traumatic for the boy than for his mother. Elizabeth had rebounded, with predictably disastrous results, into the arms of her first husband, Lucien Cartwright, and then there had been a series of other unlikely characters, each promising much but delivering little. Pamela had seen it all coming, just as she could see that Elizabeth leant too heavily on her only son in consequence. She saw such things but no longer tried to speak of them. Voicing opinions, no matter how accurate, changed nothing, she had discovered, especially if one was old, lacking in confidence and struggling, publicly now, with the disconcerting embarrassment of a failing memory.

  The funeral cars were waiting for them in the lane, their shining black bulk taking up almost the entire space between the church wall and the hedge on the other side. At the sight of them Ed's spirits lifted. He nudged Roland, the only one of the cousins to have been subjected to the ordeal of their great-aunt's sendoff, and made a face. ‘We could do a royal wave through the streets of Barham. The lords of the manor, returning to their country seat.’ He slung out an arm to demonstrate, accidentally catching his aunt Helen's ribcage with his elbow. ‘Whoops. Sorry.’

  ‘You two will probably go with Sid in the Volvo,’ said Helen, sharply, absorbed not by any real irritation at her nephew so much as a strong desire to get back to Barnes, where the demands of her two young daughters awaited her, with a briefcase of work on a difficult deal for her law firm's latest, most prestigious corporate client. Fitting in Aunt Alicia's funeral had blown the week off-course, just as she had known it would. Angling with Peter to be let off the hook – the demise of a prickly family ancient hardly constituted a tragedy – had got her nowhere. Peter, as was his wont on any matter relating to his family, had been intractable. A good turnout was essential, he said, to support his mother, not to mention Charlie and Serena, on whom would fall the burden of orchestrating the event. So here they were, and with the wake still to get through, God help her. It would be seven o'clock at least before they got home.

  ‘Isn't Sid a bit on the doddery side for driving, these days?’ asked Ed, sliding his fingers through the quiff he had sculpted with some care that morning, using gel and a few blasts of Serena's hair-dryer. ‘From what I've seen he can hardly manage a lawn-mower.’ He cast a mischievous glance at Roland, hoping for a glimmer of approbation in his younger cousin's pale, grave face. As far as his own hardening adolescent heart was concerned, the best thing about Ashley House's old gardener – Sid was so long-serving that he was almost an honorary member of the family – was his granddaughter, Jessica, who lived in Wandsworth with her mother but was always popping down to Barham on one pretext or another. As children they had all found Jessica a pain. She would appear at Ashley House when she was least wanted, whining to join in their games and running to Sid with tales of their unkindness if they didn't let her. Lately, however, this same plump, whingeing creature had reemerged as a curvaceous sixteen-year-old, with a come-on smile and a taste for tight clothes. Ed had almost lost his footing on the stairs that morning, glimpsing her tottering along the hallway with a tray of glasses in a mini-dress that paraded both her sizeable chest and the outline of her knickers. ‘What do you reckon, Roland?’ Ed pressed, cheered at the prospect of Jessica playing waitress at the wake. ‘Should we trust creaky old Sid with our lives?’

  Roland's hands were in his pockets and he was kicking a stone with the tip of his shoe. ‘Sid's okay,’ he murmured, shrugging his broad shoulders. He could feel the tension crackling between the adults and didn't want to make it worse. Nor did he care much which vehicle transported them back across the village. He would have been happy to walk. After the heavy smell of lilies in the church – the oppressive atmosphere of sorrow – it was a huge relief to be outside. Personally he thought it daft that anyone should mourn the loss of a grumpy eighty-year-old who, to his recollection, had always displayed a clear preference for television and Turkish Delight over the company of her family. She'd had a nasty habit, too, of using her walking-sticks to get attention, banging them on the floor or jabbing their rubber ends into her great-nephews' and -nieces' shins and ribs, so hard sometimes that Roland, as a small boy, had often swallowed tears.

  Church, in Roland's opinion, was a lot of mumbo-jumbo. He far preferred the sound of religions where families partied at gravesides, quaffing wine and telling funny stories. He hadn't felt sad until they'd assembled at the graveside when he had thought of his grandfather, whom he still missed, and his little cousin Tina, whom he didn't – you couldn't pine for a toddler – but whose death six years before was still a vivid memory and, in his view, a much more obvious cause for mourning. He was sure that his aunt Serena, nose in a soggy tissue for most of the service, was thinking far more of her dead daughter than of the witchy occupant of the coffin parked in front of the altar. And he suspect
ed that his mother's tears had much more to do with being on her own and the fracas with Richard, her latest ex-boyfriend, rather than sadness about her aunt. He was on the verge of telling Ed he'd prefer to walk when Sid appeared round the side of the church, looking even more craggy-faced and rheumy-eyed than usual, jangling the keys to the Volvo.

  ‘I think you two are with me,’ he growled, so firmly that both boys barely exchanged a look as they followed him to the line of smaller cars parked further down the road.

  At the sight of Ashley House, crouched, with its mossy walls and crowning glory of polished slates, waiting to greet them like a huge, shy friend, Peter felt a familiar wrench of affection. His decision, five years before, to hand over to his younger brother Charlie the right to inherit it wasn't one he regretted. For one thing, Peter didn't believe in regret. Life was about paths chosen. It was pointless to look back and play ‘what if' based on nothing but imponderables and hypotheses. For another, all the reasons behind the decision – neither he nor Helen wanting to commute, loving London and their spacious Barnes home, avoiding upheaval for Chloe, their thirteen-year-old, recognizing that Charlie and Serena, with their country ways, were far more the natural inheritors of this family jewel – still stood. Yet it was hard sometimes because he loved the place so. Built by his great-great-grandfather and lived in by Harrisons for two hundred years, Ashley House was an integral part of his childhood landscape, something he could not have surrendered even if he had tried. Since moving in, Charlie and Serena had kept the open-house policy upon which they had all agreed – he, Cassie and Elizabeth had their own bedrooms and visited often – but it wasn't the same, Peter reflected, as he helped his mother out of the car and scowled at the precarious angle of the cockerel weathervane, the three loose slates on the garage roof. Had he been in charge, his perfectionism would have had him on to anything like that in a flash. Leading the way through the gate and down the steps to the front door he couldn't help noticing other things too – the squeak of the gate hinge, a section of loose grouting in the garden wall, the unsightly eruption of three molehills on the front lawn – and wondered whether Charlie's idle streak or shortage of funds lay behind it. A talk was called for, Peter decided, easing off his mother's coat and handing it to Jessica, who was hovering nearby, clearly briefed to deal with such matters but too shy to say so. A brotherly chat, nothing too heavy-handed, ideally – if he could engineer it – over a pint at the Rising Sun that evening.