The Simple Rules of Love

by Amanda Brookfield

  At the bottom of the stairs he checked his watch, took a deep breath and set off at a gallop. Dr Beresford's study was on the top floor, with views over the Parks. If he took the steps two at a time he'd be there on the dot of three. And it was good training, Theo mused, breathing hard as he raced upwards, hoping that his tutor would be in the mood to share whatever confectionary he had selected to get him through the afternoon.

  Sitting astride the bike parked in the corner of the games room, Peter worked the pedals gingerly, trying to ignore the ever-present tightness in his upper back. A week had passed since Cassie's party, most of which he had spent in court, fighting on behalf of a GP: the man had failed to diagnose meningitis in a thirteen-year-old girl, who had died. A hopeless case, as Helen had pointed out many times, even though the GP was good and kind, and the family, in the years before their loss, had invaded his surgery on so many spurious pretexts that it was little wonder he had sent the girl home with a prescription for paracetamol.

  Sometimes there was no right and wrong, Peter reflected bleakly, glancing at his blurred reflection in the windowpane next to the bike, then looking quickly away, as a distressing sense of futility threatened to take hold. In the gym he used near chambers, surrounded by others working as keenly on similar pieces of equipment, it was far easier to maintain con-centration. There was an atmosphere of camaraderie and competition, the vague sense that one was on show and therefore required to put on a decent performance. There were mirrors too, in which the sight of his straining face was pleasantly offset by the glimpse of pumping muscles, instead of this grey half-image in the glass next to him, shimmering like a troubled ghost.

  Having set himself an arduous course of three long hills, Peter was soon sweating hard. He kept his eyes on the little cinema of information flashing between the handlebars – remaining kilometres, calorie count, gradient – trying to keep his thoughts focused on these immediate, achievable targets rather than his sore shoulder and the niggling sense of failure that had trailed him out of the courtroom like a bad smell.

  ‘You are wet,’ shrieked Genevieve, pedalling in through the doorway on her scarlet tricycle. She pointed at his sweat-sodden T-shirt and shorts. ‘And your bike doesn't move like mine. Look.’ She hunched over her handlebars and set off across the room, working her stout little legs furiously.

  Peter wiped the sweat from his eyes and laughed. ‘Jolly good… but shouldn't you be in bed?’ He threw a hopeful glance in the direction of the palatial new utility room into which Helen had disappeared, clutching a pile of laundry, ten minutes earlier.

  ‘Not – tired!’ shrieked his youngest, her voice ringing with a newly discovered, worryingly Chloë-like defiance, as she steered the tricycle between two bean-bags and turned sharply past the french windows backing on to the garden. ‘Look, Daddy, look.’

  Peter looked, only to see the tricycle tip slowly on to two of its three chubby wheels causing its rider to squeal with glee – then on to the floor, which prompted a squeal of a more strident, less positive kind. At which point Helen charged into the room, her arms still full of crumpled clothes.

  ‘She's fine,’ Peter called, shouting over Genevieve's impressive orchestra of sobbing. ‘Bit of a tumble,’ he added, more defensively, as Helen, with a sharp look, dumped the washing on a bean-bag and scooped her daughter on to her hip.

  ‘There now, sweetheart,’ she whispered, stroking Genevieve's gingery curls until the sobbing had shrunk to hiccuping sighs. ‘There now, tired girl… Theo just called,’ she added, addressing Peter over her daughter's head in an altogether different voice. ‘He asked Clem to go to that ball and apparently she's agreed.’

  ‘Well done, Theo,’ Peter murmured, trying to focus on the last hill in his programme but for some reason finding it hard to do so with Helen watching, all tender and fierce at the same time.

  ‘He'll be home in a couple of weeks for the spring vac. He said to warn you his squash has improved beyond measure. He sounded really well.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Sorry about your case.’

  Straining now against the resisting pedals, a hair's breadth away from giving up, Peter managed a half-shrug. ‘It was just as you said it would be. A lost cause. The jury were never going to budge.’

  Helen turned for the door and paused, hitching Genevieve's solid little body higher on to her hip. ‘And that shoulder of yours?’ Her tone had hardened again. ‘Have you called Cassie's physio yet?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Call the physio,’ she snapped. ‘It's bound to flare up again, the amount you're exercising, these days.’

  Peter laboured on up the last hill, in thrall to gloom again. Helen was right, of course. She was good at being right – an endearing but maddening quality. He pondered, for a moment, the sheer density of married life, the good and the bad so entwined that it was impossible to see them separately. Remembering the news about Theo, a fresh surge of adrenaline obligingly flooded his tired legs. His son beat him at squash, eh? He'd see about that. Gripping the handlebars, forgetting the lost case, his wife's bossiness – even his aching shoulder – Peter managed a bursting sprint to the end of his programme.

  As he got off the bike he slapped the saddle in satisfaction. Physical exercise always made him feel better. He slung a small towel round his neck, headed into the main house and skipped upstairs, suddenly looking forward to seeing his youngest daughter's freckled nose peeking over the edge of her duvet and a gentler conversation with his wife. It was Friday night, after all. Two silvery trout lay in a dish next to the oven, with a handful of new potatoes and two wine glasses ready for the bottle of St Véran chilling in the fridge. They would drink and eat with their customary pleasure and then, maybe, retire upstairs for an early night and a little loving in the dark.

  On the stairs he met Chloe coming down. She had changed out of her grey school uniform into a T-shirt that stopped at her navel and jeans that trailed several inches over the soles of her shoes.

  ‘And why are you looking cross, little one?’ Peter ruffled her dark curls, ignoring her efforts to duck out of reach.

  ‘Mum made me turn my CD off because Gen's going to sleep, and even though I'm starving she says I can only eat cereal or fruit.’

  ‘Probably best to do as your mother says,’ replied Peter, cheerily. ‘A lot safer for both of us, eh?’ He winked, then went on up the stairs, thinking that happy families was all about playing the game, and that if he pulled himself together instead of moping he was more than up to the job.

  Cassie was lying on the sitting-room floor, sketching dress designs on a large white pad, when the dull cramps in her abdomen sharpened in a way that was only too familiar. Waking that morning to a headache and a limp feeling in her face and hair, she had resisted both painkillers and the notion that such symptoms might have anything to do with her menstrual cycle. Now, however, there was no denying the signs.

  She stopped drawing, put down her pencil and rested her head on her arms. There was no hurry. There never was at the beginning of her period. She lay quite still, staring at the flecked green fibres of the carpet, breathing slowly and deeply, wanting somehow to mark the moment – this dreadful moment – when all her hopes were crushed again.

  Stephen had gone on one of his early-evening walks, which he did sometimes if he'd had a bad day at his desk. There had been several such days that week – because of Keith, he said. It was almost a week since the party and his old friend was still with them. It was impossible to concentrate, Stephen claimed, with Keith lumbering around, turning the telly on and off, making endless cups of tea, calling up the stairs to ask if there was anything he could do. Each night, in the sanctity of their bedroom, they would agree that enough was enough and he had to leave, yet each morning they had shrunk from the task, mown down by Keith's cheery face, the news of imminent job and accommodation possibilities. The latest was an office redevelopment site in Pinner – months of work, he had assured them over breakfast the day before, b
iting into a doorstep slice of toast and slurping his tea. The money would be good enough to ‘see him right' for the rest of the year. He had licked his fingers and looked so pleased that Cassie hadn't known whether to feel exasperated or admiring.

  She could hear him now, moving around the kitchen, trying to make up for the inconvenience of his presence with the preparation of yet another meal. Lamb chops, this time, with mashed potato, carrots and peas. He had shown off the chops proudly on his return from the butcher; thick and bleeding with edgings of white fat as stout as fingers. Cassie, thinking of the ordeal of eating them, with her tummy sore, her heart broken and no chance of a moment to herself with Stephen, began, very quietly, to cry.

  Keith padded in from the kitchen in his socks to ask how she felt about grilled tomatoes and paused, imagining, with some reverence, that he was witnessing a moment of intense artistic concentration. ‘Did you have any plans for these?’ he ventured at length, tossing two tomatoes into the air. ‘Not everyone's cup of tea, grilled tomatoes, I know…’ He faltered, losing confidence. ‘Hey, are you all right down there?’

  ‘Fine.’ Cassie reached for her pencil and, beginning to go over lines she'd already sketched, pressed the lead so hard it cut the page.

  ‘You don't look fine.’ Keith peered at her. ‘You're upset.’

  ‘I am a bit. It's nothing, really.’ She managed a sort of laugh and wiped her hand across her nose.

  ‘Nobody cries for nothing,’ replied Keith, solemnly, kneeling on the floor next to her. ‘It's me, isn't it? I'm in the way, aren't I? Getting on your tits – I mean, shit… Sorry, that sounded bad.’

  Cassie couldn't help smiling. ‘No, it's not you, Keith, although… I think if you could find somewhere else soon, that might be best.’ She swivelled to a sitting position, sniffing freely now and feeling a little better. ‘If this thing in Pinner comes through, I mean. It's just with both Stephen and me working at home the place does feel a little… crowded.’

  ‘Say no more.’ Keith held up his hand. ‘I'll find somewhere else right away. You've been great, both of you, really great. Something will come up, it always does in the end.’ He sighed so wistfully that Cassie felt tempted to retract her ultimatum. ‘Are you worried about your wedding dress?’ he ventured, using the uncertain tone of one making a valiant effort to understand the incomprehensible and pointing at the page of what looked to him like magnificent drawings. ‘Is that it?’

  Cassie laughed and then, finding she was almost crying again, stopped abruptly. ‘No… nothing like that. It's… Well, the truth is, I thought I was pregnant and it turns out I'm not.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Keith stared at the tomatoes, wondering what on earth to say. ‘That – that is a shame. Mind you,’ he stammered, ‘kids are more trouble than they're worth a lot of the time, the little blighters. Sometimes I think me and June might have got on a bit better without them – not that I don't love my boys, give anything to see more of them, but, of course, wanting kids,’ he added, ‘that's how women are, isn't it?’

  ‘Well, I never used to want them,’ confessed Cassie, ‘and then, a few years ago, my little niece died and it changed the way I looked at things. I was in a hopeless relationship then no prospects of making babies, though I fooled myself there was for a while.’ She picked at the pile of the carpet, lost in the recollection of her rollercoaster year with Daniel Lambert, all that belief and energy coming to nothing.

  ‘What did she die of then, your niece… if you don't mind me asking?’

  ‘She was hit by a motorbike in Oxford Street. The bastard drove off. Just one of those dreadful things that happen to people who don't deserve them. Serena, Charlie – the whole family – we were all distraught, but life moves on, doesn't it? I think they're all right now, with Ashley House to look after, not to mention my mum.’ Cassie made a face and got to her feet. ‘Certainly puts my little loss into perspective, doesn't it? Keith?’ Instead of coming back with the quip she had expected, he had rammed a cigarette into his mouth and was fumbling for his lighter. ‘Not in here, please,’ she reminded him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cigarette?’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell. Sorry. Of course. I'll just pop out the back, then,’ he muttered, looking peculiar and awkward, and hurrying out of the room.

  Cassie ran after him. ‘I say… can I join you? Have a fag, I mean. I shouldn't, really – I'm supposed to have given up – but I could just do with one.’

  Ten minutes later Stephen returned from his walk to find his fiancée and his friend huddled in coats on the small patio, shrouded in smoke and the steam of their warm breath against the cold night air. ‘Darling…’ Cassie dropped her cigarette and ran to hug him, wanting to communicate some of her own distress and to erase the dismay on his face. ‘I'm not pregnant after all,’ she whispered. ‘I felt so sad.’

  ‘Poor baby,’ Stephen murmured, hugging her back but keeping a dark look fixed on Keith, busily smoking his own cigarette down to the filter.

  ‘I've had an idea,’ announced Keith, when they were all back inside, seated a little stiffly in front of mountainous plates of chops and mash, the meat charred from overcooking and the potato clogged with lumps. ‘At your party that brother of yours, Cassie, Charlie, he said he might need some work doing down at his place in Sussex. I should have heard about the Pinner job by now, to be honest, so I'm thinking why not give him a ring, see if he's still interested? Cassie said you two want me gone…’

  ‘Did she?’ exclaimed Stephen, looking at her with barely concealed admiration. ‘Well, I… We're glad to help out obviously but, yes, that sounds like a good plan… a very good plan. I seem to recall someone mentioning the old house was in need of attention – but it was Peter, not Charlie. Mind you, the place is a couple of hundred years old at least, so it's hardly surprising…’ Stephen, aware that this rambling response was charged only by ignoble relief at the prospect of waving goodbye to his friend, gave up and put a forkful of food into his mouth.

  Cassie nodded. ‘I, too, think that sounds like a great idea. I don't know about general repairs. All Charlie said to me was that he wants to turn the old toolshed into a proper studio for Serena, who's always been quite arty but never done anything about it. There are all these outhouses and barns and things, Keith. My father converted one into a cottage, but the rest just sit there… empty.’ Cassie dropped her eyes to her plate, acutely aware suddenly of her own aching emptiness, crouched inside her, so in need of private, intimate consolation that it was all she could do not to run from the table.

  As it was, consolation, like all things intimate that week, had to wait until after the washing-up and the ten o'clock news and Keith asking for Charlie's number. It felt like hours before she and Stephen were upstairs in the soothing privacy of their own bedroom.

  ‘My period came,’ she explained bleakly, pulling her nightie over her head and climbing into bed.

  Stephen rolled over and hugged her. ‘Poor baby.’

  Which was what he had said before. Cassie did her best to be satisfied but felt, somewhere deep inside, that she needed something more, some inkling of comparable distress on his part. ‘I feel so sad,’ she whispered, pressing her mouth to his chest, breathing the faint saltiness of his skin.

  ‘Well, smoking's hardly going to help, is it?’

  Lying with one cheek pressed against his chest, Cassie went very still. She could feel the quiet pulse of his heart against her head. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘All I meant was…’

  She was fighting her way out of his arms now, feeling like a diver thrashing upwards for air. ‘One measly cigarette is hardly going to make any difference, is it?’ She was almost shouting. ‘It's not as if there's a foetus to damage, is there?’

  ‘Hang on, Cass, I know you're disappointed –’

  ‘Do you?’ She grabbed a pillow and hugged it to her chest.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked, his voice light, incredulous. He tried to prise one of her hands off the pi
llow, but she resisted.

  ‘I don't think you do know. You've spent all week worrying about Keith being here and how your work's going. The truth is, you don't care as much as me about having a child and never will.’

  ‘That's not true. Of course I care as much, of course I do.’ Stephen made another, more successful lunge for her hands and pressed them to his lips. ‘There's nothing wrong with loving you more than the idea of a baby, is there?’ he urged softly. ‘I love you so much,’ he continued, encouraged by the way her fingers were softening against his lips, ‘that coming in tonight, seeing you with Keith on the patio, I wanted to punch his face.’