Ed gave the picture a cursory glance, then turned to scowl out of the window at the rain, still teeming down in fat grey rods outside.
‘I know it's been tough lately,’ Serena ventured gently, ‘but Dad and I are both so proud of the way you've buckled down to work… I mean, from that point of view Dad's punishment probably even helped, didn't it? You've always been a bit of a last-minute merchant, just like him.’
‘I'm not like Dad,’ Ed said fiercely, getting to his feet and ramming his hands into his pockets. ‘I'm not like anyone, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Serena echoed, at a loss as to how to elicit even a glimpse of the freckled cheerfulness staring up at her from the photograph. It occurred to her in the same instant that maybe Ed's open, easy-going nature really was lost for good, mislaid somewhere in the vile dark tunnel of adolescence and academic pressure. Then I will have lost all my children, she thought. The studio heaved, a raft pitching on a storm. Tina, Maisie, Clem, Ed… Serena gripped the worktop for support as all the anxiety she was fighting so hard to contain pounded through her veins. Silly, silly, silly. She could hear Charlie saying it now, dismissing each of her worries the minute she expressed them – his mother was fine, there were other handymen in the world, a little discipline would do their son no harm at all – while behind each breezy reassurance clanged the warning: Don't you dare fall apart on me, not again.
‘And I've decided I don't want an eighteenth,’ Ed declared stoutly, keeping his back to her, loath to see the expression on her face, all the kindness, all the wanting to understand. Being gated had helped, but only because it had provided a legitimate pretext for not facing Jessica. But now she was waiting for him at the bottom of the lane, looking bigger already, she had said, managing as she delivered this sickening piece of information to sound both coy and proud. Getting off the bus after the phone call, Ed had lurched down a footpath away from the road to throw up, only to find that there was nothing to eject but spittle and spasms of air, like he was puking his own panic.
‘No eighteenth?’ Serena exclaimed, sufficiently astonished at the announcement for her own terrors to slide away.
Ed cleared his throat and braced himself. He had a plan, he reminded himself, a way out, if he played his cards right. ‘Maybe get the cousins round or something but I don't want a big party. I'd like the money instead, if that's okay,’ he said, making a conscious effort not to speak in a rush, not to sound nervous. ‘And I've decided I don't want to go into the army either – at least, not for the time being.’
‘Well, I'm sure…’ Serena faltered, glad of any opportunity to wave goodbye to images of body-bags, but suspicious of her son's jerky voice and averted gaze. ‘Do you know what you want to do instead?’
‘Travel… I want to travel for at least a year, like Maisie.’
‘Right, I see.’
‘And I would like to use Granddad's trust money, if that's okay. You and Dad have always said it's for us to use as we choose. Well, I'd like to spend mine on travel. In fact, I'm going to need some pretty soon. I've been looking at these gap-year websites and lots of them want deposits. There's this placement in Sri Lanka that looks good – a turtle sanctuary…’ Ed clenched his lighter inside his trouser pocket, needing to hold on to something so he wouldn't lose courage. He did indeed want to travel – far away and for ever, like his great-uncle Eric – but how much money he would have left for such a purpose was a different matter. Jessica was half playing along with his plans and half resisting, one minute agreeing to a termination, the next changing her mind. There were pills, she said, that would do the job more gently, but the weeks were ticking by and she had refused so far to do anything about getting some. She seemed to like him trying to cajole her, as if she thought it was all a big game. If he lost his temper, as he had phoning her on the bus that day, her viciousness knew no bounds. ‘Your mum of all people wouldn't want a baby terminated, would she?’ she had hissed. ‘Maybe I'll go and tell her and see where we get to.’ The nausea had started then, unlocking memories of his mother's zombie-like unhappiness after the death of his little sister and, worse still, the muffled arguing behind closed doors. People thought grief drew families together. Ed felt like he was the only person in the world who knew that it tore them apart. He couldn't stir all that up again, he just couldn't. And with sufficient funds he wouldn't have to, he reminded himself fiercely. Money, as his uncle Peter was fond of saying when he'd had a glass or two, was power. Beneath Jessica's brassiness Ed guessed that she was as terrified as he was – as eager for a way out. Money could provide that. ‘Then I thought I might go to South Africa or Kenya or somewhere,’ he continued, in such an enthusiastic tone that he even felt half convinced, ‘to work in one of the game parks, but I need money to book it up now so – so would you ask Dad?’ He shot his mother a pleading look, then dropped his eyes and scraped at some invisible mark on Keith's newly laid honey-coloured floorboards with the scuffed toe of his shoe.
‘Turtles?’ Serena laughed, with happy incredulity. ‘Since when have you been interested in animals, Edward Harrison?’
‘But will you ask Dad,’ Ed persisted, ‘about the party money and the trust? Pave the way sort of thing?’
‘I suppose I might,’ she replied carefully, ‘if you promise to stop sulking.’
‘Sure. Thanks, Mum! Awesome!’ Ed managed a lopsided grin.
‘Anything to help endangered species.’ She smiled back, then started to arrange the photographs on large white pieces of cardboard, feeling that the perfect order in which to frame them was there, if only she could find it.
In the hairdresser's Pamela found herself sitting next to Marjorie Cavendish, which was nice but also a little embarrassing as they hadn't seen each other since the Cavendishes' fortieth-wedding-anniversary party many years before. It had been a good party, Pamela remembered now, held in the garden on a balmy evening with twinkling lights spangling the trees and a string quartet playing waltzes. She and John had drunk too much champagne and danced like young lovers, ignoring both the lateness of the hour and their aching knees.
‘I heard about John,’ said Marjorie at once, ‘I'm so sorry. Geoffrey passed away last year. A heart-attack on the golf course. Just like that.’ She clicked her fingers.
‘Oh dear, how terrible for you,’ Pamela murmured, shy both of her own recent crisis of misery, and the hairdresser teasing her thin silver strands on to rollers, showing the pink patches of her scalp. Marjorie's head of much shorter, thicker hair was far further along in the process, already pruned and permed to a resilient and elegant helmet of ivory waves. ‘I have my second son and his family living with me now,’ Pamela explained, ‘keeping an eye on me.’ She rolled her eyes as if the idea amused her rather than making her stomach heave with shame.
‘How lovely,’ replied Marjorie, slipping two pound coins to the girl sweeping the floor and carefully easing herself out of the chair. ‘I've had to sell up. The tax man.’ She made a face. ‘I was going to buy a bungalow but my son found out about this place called Crayshott Manor, a retirement home for people like you and me, my dear. Except that it's not like a home because it's grand and beautiful and the food's top-class and you get a little suite of rooms so you can have all your most precious things around you. Costs an arm and a leg, of course, like a five-star hotel, but I thought, Why scrimp for the last few years to leave something behind, when neither of my two needs money and the wretched chancellor will snatch most of it anyway? I've met some of the other residents and they seem so nice, just the sort of people one would want to spend time with. The grounds are splendid – the place belonged to some lord or other once upon a time – with a lake and a croquet lawn, and they're always organising little parties and concerts and… But listen to me, rabbiting on, when I've got both my sons coming for the weekend to help me go through the attic. There's not much in the end that one does want, don't you find? So much clutter – it will be a joy to be rid of it.’
‘A joy indeed.’ Pamela glanced at her
reflection. The curlers were all in place now, pulling uncomfortably in places, making her look like a shrivelled hedgehog. I was once beautiful, she thought. I turned heads and broke hearts. Now there is only clutter and death. She could think such things now without being overwhelmed by them. The pills were splendid in that regard – like little cotton-wool plugs against reality – letting her keep dreadful things at a distance so they didn't seem dreadful at all. And her memory was better, too, not letting her down nearly so often. Yet she didn't want to take pills all her life: it seemed cowardly, somehow, as if she wasn't really coping. Pamela shifted her gaze to Marjorie, now tying a plastic scarf round her sculpted white head and talking loudly to the receptionist about dates and next appointments. Pamela stared till her eyes clouded, envying the woman's energy, her obvious sense of a future.
‘You must come and see me before I leave, insisted Marjorie, returning to Pamela's side, ‘or when I've settled into Crayshott. We're allowed to do as we please – like boarding-school but without the rules.’ She chuckled. ‘I loved boarding-school.’
‘I might but I – I've not been well,’ Pamela murmured, moved to the confession by the pressure of her companion's cheerfulness and her inability to compete with it.
Marjorie's dimpled face sagged with concern. ‘You poor dear. What sort of not well?’
‘Oh, nothing serious. I just… I suppose I miss John,’ admitted Pamela, once the hairdresser had moved out of earshot.
Marjorie sighed, so deflated now that Pamela felt almost guilty. ‘Yes, I know, believe me, my dear, I know. Being left behind is always the hardest thing. I got a taste of it when the boys went off to university and Geoffrey was so busy I hardly saw him – I was bereft for months, a mother, a wife, with no one to look after, much as I am now.’ She hesitated, closing her eyes, as if summoning some deep reserve of hidden strength. ‘But Geoffrey hated me moping then and it would make him positively furious if I did it now. And, besides, missing someone means you loved them, doesn't it? And, really, I wouldn't have had it any other way. All the broken marriages, these days, we were so lucky, you and I, finding the right men, staying together all those years. One couldn't really ask for more, could one?’ She looked at her watch, all businesslike and cheerful once again. ‘I must dash. I'm on a meter – a pound a minute now, isn't it? Call me, Pamela, please? We could do lunch, as they say,’ she added gaily, tightening her plastic headscarf and scurrying out of the salon.
Serena was in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden, picking through broken flowerpots and crispy brown skeletons of dead plants when she looked up to see Charlie pressing his nose flat against one of the misty panes, grinning and making ghoulish faces. ‘For you,’ he said, trotting round to the entrance and producing from behind his back a large, somewhat battered bunch of red roses. ‘For my wife, my angel, who puts up with ungrateful children, difficult grannies and resigning handymen, who has had a hard time and deserves a treat from her loving, hopeless husband.’
‘Oh, Charlie…’
‘I'm taking you away, sweeping you off your feet.’ He put his arms round her and began to dance her round the greenhouse, bumping into the flowerpots and bin-liners of rubbish.
‘Away? Where?’
‘To a luxury hotel, luxury food, luxury beauty treatments, where they'll massage your feet and your face but only when I've had a go first.’ He pulled her head into his neck and kissed her hair. ‘I've a good mind to take you now, ravish you in the glasshouse, with the rain pounding around us. We did that once, do you remember, in this very place, just before we told my parents we were getting married? We destroyed several trays of Sid's seedlings.’
‘Of course I remember.’ Serena laughed softly, pressing her face into the familiar rough warmth of his skin, loving the way he knew her, the way he was trying to cheer her up. ‘But we can't possibly go away –’
‘Oh, yes, we can, no buts allowed.’ He pressed his finger to her lips. ‘It's all arranged. I've spoken to Keith, and Lizzy's coming over to help hold the fort. I've persuaded Peter and Helen to join us at the hotel – use that overpaid nanny of theirs for once. We need ties for dinner and swimsuits for the pool. Dinner is booked for eight so we should start packing.’
‘But I've got to pick your mother up from the hairdresser,’ protested Serena, her voice ringing with dismay, not because of Pamela so much as the news that they would be sharing their treat weekend with Peter and Helen.
‘No, you haven't.’ Charlie looked down at her, enjoying this final moment of triumph. ‘She phoned just now, moments after I walked into the house. She's getting a taxi home, she said, the lovely Paulo is arranging it for her. So you see,’ he continued, hugging her again, as if he might press all his hope and good humour into her, ‘there's no escape. My mother has decided she can look after herself and I've got you cornered, with every intention of reminding you why you married me.’
Theo arrived at the station with so much time before Clem's train was due that he sat down on a bench and pulled his laptop out of his rucksack. The rain, which had been falling steadily all morning, had finally retreated, allowing the clouds to part like curtains and reveal a livid sun. The bench was still wet but Theo was soon too absorbed to notice. He dipped into some lecture notes and that week's essay, making amendments here and there, then scrolled to his now almost complete film script. Disaffected student recruited by terrorists. A female Serbian, orphaned by the Bosnian war, a nihilist in search of her own end, who agrees to plant a bomb, only to fall in love twelve hours before she's due to detonate it. He was still working on the ending. A Hollywood feel-good or a dark, life-affirming tragedy? That was the question. Did his heroine get to be with her lover or blow herself up?
Theo rubbed the now substantial field of bristles covering his upper lip and chin as he pondered, enjoying the quandary and the diversion from the prospect of having to take his cousin to the Keble ball. A sore reminder of why he had been persuaded to initiate the invitation had accompanied the welcome injection of cash from his parents.
Clem not keeping in touch is in our view very poor behaviour. What with your grandmother's recent trauma and Ed being difficult, Charlie and Serena have quite enough on their plates without worrying about her as well. So, darling, we are all relying on you to report honestly on what you find. Our biggest fear, of course, is that Clem is losing weight again and sinking back into the clutches of that dreadful disease. I know we can rely on you, Theo, to tell us if you think that's the case. The four of us are taking a much-needed break at a country hotel this weekend, so if you need us try our mobiles. Fondest love, Mum. PS Don't spend the enclosed all at once!
Reading it had made Theo feel like a spy. It had also made him worried about what he would be meeting off the train. He remembered only too well how his once dumpy cousin had shrunk into a bony, hollow-eyed stranger, who hid behind books and attempted to disguise her scarecrow thinness in baggy tracksuits. If she was going that way again, the weekend would be an ordeal beyond his worst fears.
It was with genuine delight therefore that Theo glanced up from his laptop to see a tall, striking young woman emerge from the main entrance to the station and look about her with somewhat imperious and indifferent curiosity. Her hair had grown considerably since the previous summer and hung in sleek, dark waves round her shoulders. She looked slim but attractively so, displaying her figure in boot-cut hipster jeans, and a T-shirt that stopped half-way down her rib-cage, revealing the pearly white slope of her stomach and a small gold ring in her belly-button.
‘Clemmy,’ he called, waving.
‘I thought you'd forgotten,’ she shouted, grinning and waving back as she tottered down the steps towards the bench, dragging a large suitcase.
‘How could I? Highlight of my term.’ Theo sprang to his feet, stuffing his laptop into his rucksack. ‘Sorry, I meant to meet you off the train… Forgot the time… Was doing a bit of work on a script.’
‘A film script? I thought you'd given all that up. M
y God, do you remember when you asked me to be your producer and we made that dreadful film about the family? We managed to get everyone to contribute except Sid, who agreed but then got stage-fright and ran away.’ Clem dropped her bulging case, laughing, partly out of pleasure at the memory but also from relief. She, too, had been dreading the ball, regarding its approach on her calendar like an unavoidable missile. It was nothing short of astonishing to find herself pleased to be there. Pleased to see Theo, she realized, with his funny stubble of a beard and wide, interesting face, boffin-like still, but exuding a new easy-going confidence, as if he had grown into his big, square features at last.
‘The film wasn't dreadful.’ Theo frowned, then laughed. ‘Well, maybe just a tad. Everyone's got to start somewhere.’
‘Yeah, they have,’ agreed Clem, popping a stick of bubblegum into her mouth and thinking of Stephen's continuing silence with regard to her own tentative efforts. It had to be bad obviously, or he would have been in touch. Though Nathan, bolstering her as he always seemed to, had said that this wasn't necessarily the case and the opinion of one person meant nothing anyway. Art was subjective, he had said. As long as it came from the heart, that was all that mattered.
‘You've got a beard,’ she remarked, nudging Theo when they were wedged into seats on the bus with their bags.
‘And you've had your stomach pierced,’ quipped Theo, inwardly despairing at how every member of his family seemed determined to make a big deal of his decision not to shave. Friends at college had barely remarked on it.
The Simple Rules of Love Page 21