The Simple Rules of Love

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘Oh, yes, John would be cross,’ she murmured, her trembling mouth settling suddenly, miraculously, into a smile. ‘Very cross,’ she added, closing her eyes and chuckling softly.

  ‘He certainly would.’ Peter pressed her hand to his lips, delighted at this evidence of a corner turned, musing that no problem was insoluble if one dared to face up to it boldly enough. He laid her hand gently on the bed, as if it were a delicate creature in its own right. Her fingers, swollen-knuckled, these days, with rheumatism, stroked the duvet a few times, as if checking their bearings, then relaxed. Peter watched, chest tightening at the recollection of how the same fingers had once deftly flown over piano keys, worked knitting and threaded silk into miniature needles. We have a duty of care. The sentence slipped into his consciousness so easily that it took Peter several moments to recall that the physiotherapist had planted it there. A good one, he mused, in spite of its dubious source. He rolled his shoulders, enjoying the new muscular freedom between them, and the wonderful distance he now felt between the present moment and the shock of Charlie's phone call. ‘We want to look after you, Mum,’ he said. ‘We want to, okay?’ he repeated, his voice ringing with fresh self-belief and a vivid, lucid sense of his and his siblings' place in the world – in the family poised between generations, caring for the elderly who had produced them and the youngsters they themselves had spawned.

  Ed popped his head round his grandmother's bedroom door a few minutes later, and drew back in surprise at the sight of his uncle sitting at the bedside with his eyes closed, smiling benignly, like a Buddha. His grandmother was smiling too and squeezing his hand in a way that wasn't entirely normal, but the atmosphere in the room was far from the funeral kind, for which Ed had braced himself.

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Ah, hello, Ed.’

  ‘Hi… Just to say… ten minutes till supper, Mum says.’

  ‘Splendid. And what is for supper?’

  ‘Er… not sure.’

  The two adults exchanged a look as Ed, feeling the vibration of his phone in his pocket, bolted from the room and up to the second floor. ‘Hi, Jess, how are you?’

  ‘All right, I guess. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ Ed retorted, compelled by something irritating in her tone – something sarky and flippant – to add, ‘apart from the fact that my gran tried to kill herself this morning.’ Even as the words left his mouth Ed felt a tingle of shame. Not just because he had already defied his father's plea for discretion by telling Clem but also because he knew that so easy a disclosure of such a dreadful piece of news was wrong. Texting Clem had been justified. She was his sister, after all, one of the few people who might understand the bizarre, harrowing spectacle of their grandmother being carted into the kitchen, dripping and limp, pondweed trailing from her clothes. Their grandmother, with her Mrs Pepperpot bun, tapestry kits and cups of tea, trying to commit suicide. If it wasn't so horrible it might have been funny. Clem would understand that, too, just as she would the awfulness of their mother's ashen face as Serena had rushed across the landing with blankets and towels, while downstairs Keith, the saviour of the hour, had sat at the kitchen table nursing the brandy bottle, pressing his teeth against the rim of his glass to stop them chattering.

  Calm had been restored with the visit of the doctor, Keith striding back to his bolt-hole in the barn, and the arrival of their father, full of refreshing normality and reassurance. Feeling forgotten during the numerous hushed consultations that had followed, Ed had retreated to the TV room with a plate of buttered toast. He had eaten ravenously, watching a Spanish football match on Sky, fighting the mounting sensation that a curtain had been lifted on a world he neither understood nor wished to understand. Communicating with Clem had felt like he was making contact with something real, bringing it all down to earth. He had felt a surge of longing for Maisie, too, who was so good at not being afraid, but reasoned that it wouldn't be fair to muck up her trip with bad news.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Jessica, which, while exactly the response Ed had hoped for, made him no happier. ‘How?’

  ‘Tried to drown herself in the lake in the copse – walked into it carrying all these stones, like Virginia bloody Woolf.’

  ‘Virginia who?’

  ‘Woolf. You know – the writer. I'm doing one of her books.’

  ‘What's it called?’

  ‘Jess, really.’

  The book you're doing, what's it called?’

  Ed sighed, wishing more than ever that he'd kept his mouth shut. ‘Mrs Dalloway.’

  ‘Right.’ Jessica, who was lying on the sofa in her flat, scribbled the name on a cigarette packet, not daring to ask for the spelling. ‘Look, I'm sorry, Ed, for your gran and stuff. My mum tried to top herself once – took a load of pills – but she was just pissed and feeling sorry for herself as usual. Granddad took her to the hospital and she had her stomach pumped. Put her off ever trying anything like that again, she said.’

  ‘Right… Er, Jess, they're calling me for dinner – I've got to go.’

  ‘Hang on, Ed – when can I see you again? You said you might come up to London.’

  ‘Yeah… but it's hard – I've got a load of work and –’

  ‘What about next weekend, then? I could get away early after school on Friday.’

  Ed hesitated, aware suddenly that talking to Jessica was a lot more complicated than touching her, a bit like being on board a moving vehicle with no controls. ‘Maybe. I'll call you, okay?’

  ‘Promise me, Ed Harrison.’

  ‘For Christ's sake! I promise, okay?’

  ‘Don't you want to see me, then? Don't you want to do what we did again?’

  ‘Of course,’ he whispered, glancing at his bedroom door. ‘Of course I do.’

  Jessica let out a whoop of glee, so piercing that Ed held the phone away from his ear. ‘Look, Jess, my mother's calling – I've got to go.’

  ‘All right. Love ya,’ she sang, then clicked off the phone.

  For a few moments Ed remained motionless, relishing the silence of his bedroom. His mother hadn't called him down to dinner. Why had he lied? He crossed to the window and rested his forehead on the pane. And why, when he knew full well that Jessica wasn't the One, had he agreed to see her again? Ed straightened and traced a line through the smear his forehead had left on the glass. Outside, he could see the treetops at the bottom of the garden swaying in the wind, silhouetted against the inky black sky like flailing arms. It felt shitty to have lied, even about something so small. He didn't want Jessica, he wanted sex, Ed reflected, miserably, and it wouldn't do, it just wouldn't. He rubbed angrily at the window with the sleeve of his jumper. He would see her at the weekend, he decided, but only to tell her it was over. Whatever ‘it' had been.

  Downstairs he heard his mother banging the little gong in the hall, which was what she did when she didn't want to holler up three flights of stairs.

  ‘Coming,’ he yelled, taking the stairs three, at a time, then vaulting over the banisters on the first landing and continuing in the same fashion down the second flight. He arrived, breathless and tousled, in the kitchen a few minutes later to find his parents, his uncle and Keith already seated in front of steaming plates and full wine glasses.

  ‘All right, darling?’ asked Serena, with concern, her face all hot and pink from cooking.

  ‘Yes… I am, in fact,’ declared Ed, his heart swelling with gladness at the prospect of eating and at the sight of all the grown-ups ranged round the table, so ordered and on top of things. ‘I'm so glad Gran's okay,’ he burst out, feeling he might cry from the relief of being young and alive. As he loaded his fork with food, he thought again about Jessica. The drama with his grandmother had shifted something, he realized, made him see stuff differently, made it clear that there was only one decent option open to him. It had made him – possibly – more grown-up, he mused, approaching the notion warily, uncertain as to whether it was something for which he was truly ready to strive. Did decent mean
boring, he wondered, piercing a few extra peas on the end of his fork? Did it mean snoring in front of the news like his father or swirling wine noisily round his mouth like his uncle? Preoccupied both with these thoughts and his now mountainous forkful of food, it took Ed a few moments to register that the adults were staring at him, waiting with their glasses raised.

  ‘To you, Keith,’ said Peter, gravely, once Ed had reluctantly lowered his fork and picked up his glass. ‘From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. Life is full of turning points and today you made sure that a potentially disastrous one went the right way.’

  May

  Stephen pressed word count, then leant back in his chair, hands laced behind his head, and stared out of the window. It was a relief not to look at the screen, not to see the sorry reminder of how far behind he was with his weekly target. His readers, his editor had assured him at their last meeting, wanted more of the same: more Jack Connolly, with his troubled private life and weakness for malt whisky; more pretty widows with trembling emotions, more murders, abused children and grisly post-mortems. Cassie, reading his mood as they lay in bed with cups of tea that morning, knowing it had been a barren week, had been full of gentle encouragement. There was no need to rip himself apart over each story, she had said. He should stay detached, see it as a craft at which he excelled, assemble it with the clinical approach of a mathematician – clues, dilemmas, resolution. While welcoming her comfort, Stephen had tried to explain that it wasn't like that, that, if anything, he felt too detached. Sitting at his desk now, he felt even more strongly that he didn't care enough about Jack Connolly. The man was paper-thin, a walking cliché, a mish-mash of convenient reactions, each one linked clumsily to the necessities of an equally clumsy plot. The detective had been beaten up as a child, which made him a lousy adult. So what? So bloody what? If Stephen didn't care, why the fuck should his readers?

  Cassie had gone now. He had seen her off at the door, wiping a smear of butter off her cheek, wishing her luck, managing not to say that he didn't want her to go. Managing not to quiz her on where exactly she was going to be for every minute of the long day that stretched ahead. She had shown him her work diary earlier in the week, murmuring in amazed despair at how busy she was, saying it was no wonder her body was stalling over making a baby. Stephen, keen to keep the option of consulting a doctor at bay, had held her hand and said there was plenty of time and not to worry and maybe she should consider turning down projects instead of accepting them. At which point a man called Frank had telephoned to request a William Morris makeover for his dining room. Double-quick, double-money, Cassie had exclaimed, flushed with sheepish pleasure as she came off the phone. Good old Frank, and all because she had bumped into him while she was shopping with Roland. Just like her bad ankle had led to all that work in Richmond. Wasn't life funny?

  No, Stephen mused now, life wasn't very funny. Even with love, even with money, he still felt unsafe. If he failed as a writer the money would dry up. If he failed Cassie, love would dry up too. In the euphoria of getting engaged it had never occurred to him to entertain such doubts. Life, it felt then, had reached a point of such completeness that he could never doubt any-thing again. And yet here he was, just a few months on, nursing irrational terrors and jealousies of just about everything. Even having Roland to stay the previous weekend had been a struggle for him. Well-mannered and easy-going as Cassie's godson was, Stephen had, at some seedy, dim level, resented the boy's presence in the house, just as he had resented Keith's a few weeks before. It didn't help that Cassie had fluttered round him like a bee at an open flower, attentive and adoring, pandering to his every need, even when it was perfectly clear the lad would have preferred to be left alone.

  By Sunday morning Stephen had been counting the hours until Roland's train. Feeling guilty that he was capable of such mean-spiritedness, he had tried to make up for it by dropping them at the door of the brunch place in the Barbican so that only he had to endure the inconvenience of finding somewhere to park. When he got to the table, Cassie's niece, Clem, had been there too, reed-thin in a pair of high-heeled boots and a long black dress, her kohl-rimmed eyes like holes in her face. She had eaten one toasted muffin, picking bits off with her fingers while the rest of them feasted on eggs and bacon, hash browns and sausages. They talked of art mostly, Cassie leading the way, teasing opinions out of the young with a patience that Stephen had found both admirable and alienating. This is how it will be, he had thought suddenly. With a child, this is how it will be. I will lose her. Then she had touched his arm, asked if he was okay, and his heart had ached with shame. Of course she wanted a child, of course he wanted a child, a fusion of their love. How could he not? As they were saying their farewells Clem had reached into her satchel of a handbag and pulled out a battered yellow folder. The start of a manuscript, she had said shyly, thrusting it at him. If he had time, could he possibly… she knew he was busy… Charmed, delighted, feeling integral to the family gathering at last, Stephen had assured her that it would be no bother at all.

  Staring at the yellow folder now, however, Stephen felt rather less avuncular. He had perused its thirty or so dog-eared pages on Monday morning, slurping his first coffee of the day, glad to have what felt like a legitimate diversion from his own creative efforts, expecting only to be faintly entertained. His twenty-year-old soon-to-be niece writing a novel – it was, as Cassie had said, rather sweet. For it hadn't crossed her mind either that it would be good: that, while Clem fell occasionally into the obvious traps of youthful, autobiographical indulgence, her writing would contain a raw power, for which Stephen dimly remembered striving when he had been younger and less afraid.

  Stephen plucked at the rubber band holding the folder together. It had split open down one side allowing part of a page to protrude. I wake to the sound of my own breathing. I listen in the dark, hearing the silence outside my body, so thick it has the quality of sound. I am alive but alone, in limbo, between earth and sky, a lost child, a would-be woman…

  He wanted badly to look at it again – he had promised a critical appraisal, after all – yet he feared the effect of it. All those heated young thoughts. He was surprised the thing hadn't burned a hole in his desk. As if afraid it might do just that, he picked it up, slipped it into the bottom desk drawer and kicked it shut.

  His foot on the drawer handle, he tipped back his chair and peered out of the window down into the garden: a patio, a patch of grass bordered by two flowerbeds and a pretty, trailing tree whose name they didn't know. It was a modest but heartening sight, especially since the tree's lacy green skirt had thickened that week into a layered tutu of yellow and emerald, dotted with buds of crimson pink. Maybe Jack Connolly could possess such a tree, Stephen decided wildly, maybe it would illuminate his detective's stunted, gritty, urban life. Maybe…

  ‘Stephen, darling, sorry to disturb you… and it's a terrible line too. How's it going? Is the muse with you?’

  ‘Absent without leave, as usual.’

  ‘Poor you… Look, I haven't got long, I just rang to ask if you could possibly get something for Elizabeth's birthday?’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘Oh, God, I don't know – I never know what to get her. Do you have any ideas?’

  ‘She's your sister.’

  ‘Don't say it like that. I meant to get something yesterday but ran out of time. It would be too awful to turn up empty-handed tonight.’

  ‘But the big dinner isn't until tomorrow. We could go shopping together in the morning – in Chichester or somewhere.’

  Cassie groaned. ‘Spend our precious Saturday sitting in bank-holiday weekend traffic for three hours? No, thank you. Oh, darling, anything will do – you could go to that gift shop in the high street, get her a scarf or some really expensive body lotion or a picture frame or –’

  ‘Okay, I'll see what I can find,’ Stephen promised, sounding defeated but actually pleased to have been reminded of the approaching weekend in the country. Visiting A
shley House was always pleasurable, particularly since Charlie and Serena had allocated them the roomy first-floor bedroom with its four-poster bed and views towards the downs. On this occasion there was the grand birthday dinner to look forward to, in the splendid mahogany-panelled dining room, with its jewelled candelabra casting intricate shadows across the ceiling, and Cassie's ancestors ranged round the walls, smiling like benign spectators. A veteran now of such Harrison gatherings, Stephen knew that they induced in him a joyous sense of belonging, of safety. At such times he felt as if he had fallen in love with Cassie's family as much as with Cassie herself; not so much for their wealth as for their cohesion, the way they all still wanted to criss-cross their lives, to build and strengthen the web that bound them together. His family was a trailing thread in comparison, disparate and pointless, too infused with ugly memories and resentments for it ever to be anything else. Peter and Helen, with their high-flying legal careers and huge salaries, could be pompous at times, but he was fond of Charlie and Serena, Elizabeth too. As something of the unacknowledged black sheep of the Harrison brood, Elizabeth's life always helped to quash any lingering doubts about his own credentials. And he could see Keith, Stephen realized, with a start, testing the prospect with some caution and finding that not having seen his old friend for two months, this, too, held considerable appeal.

  ‘You're an angel.’

  ‘Hm… I might need to remind you of that one day. Where are you anyway?’

  ‘Fulham – but I've got to go. I was due at Frank's ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Frank's… I see. When will you be back tonight?’

  ‘Stephen, please… I don't know – not too late obviously. I'll call when I'm on my way.’