The Simple Rules of Love

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘Really?’ She sounded insulted now, as if he had accused her of not caring enough about the woeful position of their nephew.

  ‘If the baby proves to be his,’ explained Peter, in a rush, anxious not to lose her sympathy before he had started, ‘then… well… Charlie is worried, among other things, about their financial position, supporting it, education and so on… so much so that he has asked me if I would consider taking over Ashley House.’

  Helen laughed, astonished and disbelieving. ‘For goodness' sake, they're not that broke, are they? And, anyway, it's out of the question, isn't it? Peter, you told him it was out of the question, didn't you?’

  ‘No, I didn't,’ admitted Peter, wearily, ‘at least, not exactly. You see, there are other considerations too… Running the place, he's found it hard. He says he and Serena have not been at all happy there. He seems to think they need a fresh start.’

  ‘Fresh start?’ Helen sneered. ‘You – we – gave them a fresh start. They live in one of the most beautiful houses in southern England, they have everything they ever wanted.’

  ‘That's not strictly true, is it? I mean…’

  ‘You mean Tina, which was several years ago and which, if you recall, was one of the reasons you felt moved to hand over the bloody house in the first place.’

  ‘Yes, Tina, but also, what with Mum…’ Peter ploughed on, thinking bleakly of how contrastingly well Delia had understood and sympathized with the situation, how, in spite of all the difficulties facing them, she, too, had been excited at the notion of his acquiring a pied-à-terre in town. ‘And now this business with Ed…’

  ‘What's that got to do with the house?’ wailed Helen, getting off the bed and starting to pull on her dress, then remembering her decision about the trousers and taking it off again, messing up her hair in the process. ‘The whole thing sounds mad to me, totally mad.’ She turned to him, trousers in one hand and hairbrush in the other. ‘As you well know, I have never had a strong desire to live in the country. I do not want either to give up my job or to spend fifteen hours a week on a train. In addition, Genevieve has only just settled into her school and Chloe would hate the disruption of leaving hers. Your brother is clearly in a state of utter panic even to have suggested such a thing, which in the circumstances is understandable. What is not under-standable is that you not only failed to recognize that but have, without telling me, agreed to the whole insane plan.’

  ‘I have not agreed,’ protested Peter, weakly, wishing with all his heart that he had undone her bra strap and kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Really? Oh, good! Well, in that case we don't have a problem, do we?’ At which point a squeal of ‘Mummeee' floated to them from along the corridor. Helen, still glaring, set off to respond to it, but then paused in the doorway, sighing heavily. ‘Charlie is all cut up about Ed and looking for things to blame,’ she said, sounding much more conciliatory. ‘It's clearly bonkers.’

  Peter remained on the bed after she had gone, in despair over his own ineptitude. Of course it was bonkers. Helen was right – she was always fucking right. Hadn't he been aware, even as he responded to Charlie's initial cry for help in Italy, that his perspective had been warped by his feelings for Delia, together with the unforeseen, alluring prospect of being given a second chance to assert his claim to the family home? It wasn't helping Charlie he had been interested in, so much as helping himself.

  Applying his intelligent, logical mind to the situation, Peter studied his own selfishness as if it were a specimen under glass – closely but at a clinical distance. How he felt about it all remained unchanged. He simply could not countenance either giving up Delia or turning his back on the possibility of taking over Ashley House. Everything seemed to hang on the result of the paternity test. If the baby turned out to be Ed's and Charlie really couldn't manage financially, there was a case to be made for the proposition of moving there. Helen would see that. She, too, was logical, good at weighing arguments: it was one of the many traits he valued in her.

  Peter pulled the shirt back out of the cupboard, then swapped it for a plain white one. To wear pink required a certain exuberance and the argument, with the contemplation of his various dilemmas, had robbed him of that. White showed off his still striking tan, and was the colour of innocence, he mused bitterly, studying his reflection in the mirror but avoiding his own eyes.

  In the Arndale Centre a poster advertising vitamins featured a pregnant woman with long, glossy auburn hair and a toothpaste smile. She was lying in a bikini on a beach between two palm trees, her belly a beautiful smooth olive slope, rising in the space between her hips and her ribcage with all the grace of an exotic sculpture. Next to her lay a handsome blond-haired man, smiling adoringly, one arm on hers, the other round a chubby-legged toddler, who was squatting beside a sandcastle.

  Jessica stopped to look at the poster whenever she wandered through the arcade, feeling each time a little angrier, a little more despairing of her own ugly state, not just without a man but with a belly that had swelled sideways as much as outwards, mysteriously taking with it any shape her thighs had once possessed. Her bum, too, had inflated, then collapsed, like a punctured beach-ball, while her bust was so big she had had to buy several bras.

  The poster was outside Mothercare where Jessica found herself drifting most days. She'd pick things up and put them down, browse through the rails of miniature outfits, trying to equate them with the kicking creature clearly bent on destroying her body as well as her life. It was wrong to feel like that, she knew, and not what she had planned or imagined. Bella, the girl she'd mentioned to Ed who'd had a baby, had spent her pregnancy preening and boasting, relishing the attention and the excuse to give up school. Jessica had seen her a couple of times since, proudly pushing her pink buggy, with bags and baby toys dangling off it like decorations on a tree, her mum in tow, spewing to anyone who would listen about how emotionally mature Bella was and how great to be a grandmother at thirty-nine. It was shite, all of it, of course, but better than having a mother who didn't speak at all except to yell about the flat being a tip and how she had the dumbest daughter in the world – dumb enough to turn down Jerry's offer of a full-time job and to agree, like some brainless cow, to the Harrisons' bee in their bonnet about a paternity test. If Jessica was so bent on having the kid, she said, she should have made the Harrisons hang on, got some money first, played the thing out.

  Jessica hadn't liked the test. Amniocentesis, they called it; a long word for a long needle. She hadn't watched – kept her eyes tight shut – trying to keep the doubts out. Of course it was Ed's. The Jason thing had been months and months before and on the couple of times they'd gone all the way he'd pulled out, spilling his come on her belly. Of more concern was the time with Jerry; but he'd been inside her so briefly – just as long as it took for her to scramble to her senses and use her hand instead… Surely no baby could have resulted from that. Behind her squeezed eyes Jessica had nevertheless found herself imagining a single sperm – fat, stubborn and goofy-faced, like its producer, swimming up the tube towards her womb, like some gross, burrowing worm. Not having even entertained such a possibility before she agreed to the test, it now haunted her. Jerry himself didn't even know she was pregnant, since she'd left the salon before it had got obvious. When he called, out of the blue, to offer her the full-time slot, she'd been as sharp and unfriendly as she could manage without actually telling him to fuck off. He'd tried to chat anyway, asking about her rubbish GCSE grades and plans for the future, wheedling as he always had for her to like him. Jessica, looking at the handset resting on her bloated belly, had had to suppress a sudden, vicious urge to tell him everything – give him some of the worry that she now dragged around like a ball and chain. But she'd known there was no point. If by some sick fluke the kid was his, she'd die rather than confess it, to him or anyone else. She'd rather chuck the thing in the canal.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked a shop assistant, nosing in like they always did the moment she touch
ed anything. ‘Can't be long now,’ the woman added, nodding at the bare bump protruding between Jessica's T-shirt and stretch-waist jeans. ‘How many weeks?’

  ‘Not enough,’ snapped Jessica. ‘Not bloody enough.’ She thrust the little yellow and green vest she had been holding into the woman's hands and ran out of the shop, her belly straining as if it was trying to break free. By the time she got to the poster she was breathless, sweating hard and close to tears. She didn't want the stupid baby, Ed's or anyone else's. Her mother – all of them – had been right. She had not thought it through, the grossness of it, the sheer impossibility of things working out well. Ed had phoned just once since he'd got back from his swanky family holiday to say that if the kid did turn out to be his he didn't want anything to do with it. She would get money and that was it. Nothing more. EVER. He had shouted the last word, his voice cracking like he wanted to cry.

  Jessica began to weep in earnest, sinking to her knees under the poster, as if prostrating herself before an altar. What an idiot she had been and all because of some dim hope about keeping Ed and not liking being told what to do – not by the stupid, pompous judge of an uncle, or Ed's goggle-eyed parents, or her mum, being smarmy and grasping after cash as usual. If they'd begged her to keep it she'd have probably flounced off to the abortion clinic that minute. What a cretin she'd been – what a fucking cretin.

  ‘Are you all right, dearie?’

  Jessica shook her head, unable to speak.

  ‘Oh, and look at you, expecting and all… Poor love. Let's get you up. There we are, that's better. You look like you could do with a nice cuppa.’

  ‘No, I'm all right, honest.’ Jessica wiped away her tears, managing a weak smile for her rescuer, a tiny, shrivelled lady with a beaky nose and legs like pencils. ‘I just…’

  ‘I know, I know… Cried my eyes out when I was expecting mine. Lovely, though, when they come – you'll see.’ The woman patted Jessica's arm, then launched herself back at the crowds of shoppers.

  For a moment Jessica was tempted to run after her, take up the offer of tea, see what the old dear said when she explained that her baby was the biggest mistake of her life, too unwanted to be lovely to anyone. But when she looked again, the tottering spindly figure had disappeared, swallowed up in the busy tunnel of the arcade.

  The result of the paternity test arrived the next morning, a slim white envelope with the name of the hospital printed on the back. Pamela, standing in the hall, tying her headscarf in preparation for a visit to Marjorie, with Poppy springing at her heels, heard the postman come down the steps, whistling one of his tuneless tunes, and saw the envelope land on the doormat. With her long-sighted eyes, she spotted the official stamp of the hospital and knew at once what it contained. Excited as always by the postman, who sometimes gave her a biscuit, Poppy sniffed it once, then put her nose to the crack under the door and whined softly.

  ‘Not today, darling,’ murmured Pamela, approaching the mat, then glancing over her shoulder along the hallway to the half-open kitchen door where her grandson and his parents were enjoying the mindless, comforting ritual of family breakfast. She should pick it up, of course, bending carefully as she had to, these days, especially in the mornings when her bones felt stiff and unwieldy as if a night's repose had glued the joints. Instead, staring down at the envelope, Pamela thought of all the bomb talk on the radio that morning, the home secretary's plea for public vigilance, how any odd behaviour, any odd packages were immediately to be reported to the appropriate authorities. Here was an explosive package, all right, she reflected sadly, but not one that could be defused or taken away.

  Poppy was whining more insistently now and scratching at the door. Pamela hesitated for a couple more moments, then reached across the dog and unlocked the door. Poppy bounced through the gap and Pamela, careful not to tread on the envelope, followed her. It was their bomb, after all, not hers, and if she delivered it to the table she would be forced to wait and deal with the fallout. She would deal with it anyway, of course – the news, good or bad, would be forced upon the entire family soon enough but for now her own future beckoned: coffee with her old friend and a tour round Crayshott Manor. Even Poppy, frisky as in her puppy days, had sensed all morning that something exciting was going on, something beyond their usual stroll down the lane.

  She trilled a goodbye, closed the door and wondered what state she would find them all in when she returned.

  A little over an hour later, Ed slammed the same door behind him and ran up the steps to the drive. Unaware of his mother watching from an upstairs window, her heart bursting, he looked about him, at the silver birches, at the lane, at the path leading round the far side of the house, trying with almost comical obviousness to decide which way to go.

  ‘You don't suppose he'll run away again?’ said Serena, dropping the curtain.

  ‘No.’

  She approached Ed's bed, where Charlie was still sitting, arms dangling open and useless, head bent. She looked about her, at the framed photographs of Ed posing with school football teams, at the Airfix models and plastic trophies on the shelves, at the two moth-eaten teddy bears abandoned on top of the wardrobe. ‘We'd all got our hopes up. Now we must be strong for Ed.’

  ‘Strong… for Ed… yup.’

  ‘Charlie, this isn't the worst thing that could have happened.’

  ‘Isn't it? Really? And what would have been the worst thing?’

  ‘You know what.’

  He frowned, tapping his temple with his index finger, as if to encourage his brain to embark on the retrieval of an important fact. ‘Ah, yes… something happening to Ed. That would have been worse, wouldn't it? Because of what happened to Tina.’

  ‘Charlie, don't, please.’

  ‘The fact is,’ he continued, ignoring her, ‘something has happened to Ed, something pretty fucking terrible, and I reserve the right to say that, at the top of my voice, if I want to. Just as you have the right, Serena, darling, to pretend that you're upset when in fact you're rubbing your hands with glee at the prospect of getting your hands on –’

  Serena let out a small cry, raising her palms as if to defend herself from a physical blow.

  Charlie stood up, tugging at his shorts where they had hitched up round his crotch. ‘Sorry, that was too harsh. I'm upset, for-give me.’ He crossed the room to look out at the now empty drive. A wind had picked up and was raking through the branches of the silver birches, sending a scattering of leaves on to the grass below. ‘Do you know?’ he added, putting his hands into his shorts pockets, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘I really thought it was going to be okay… the test. I really thought it would be okay.’

  ‘Things still can be okay,’ whispered Serena, hugging herself. She was still reeling from the sting of his words. Rubbing your hands with glee – of course she wasn't. She just couldn't help loving the idea of Ed's child. Even if she never met it, she'd love it. That was all.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘No, no, they can't, not for Ed, not for any of us… not really.’

  ‘That's nonsense. You're talking nonsense.’

  But Charlie was in his own dark world. ‘I realized, thinking about it all in Umbria, that our time here, at Ashley House, has been jinxed from the start. It was never meant to be. Accepting Peter's offer, coming to live here, has been a hideous mistake. Deep down you've been feeling as much yourself all year – you can't deny it. “We have failed as a family.” Those were your exact words…’

  ‘It's been difficult lately, I admit, but when I said that I never meant –’

  ‘No, you were right. It's time we both recognized it… recognized it and moved on. My mother has certainly recognized it…’ Charlie laughed darkly. ‘She's planning on leaving us, did you know? I saw the form – an application for a place called Crayshott Manor. She'd put in Poppy's details and everything. Christ, Dad must be spinning in his grave. The deal was that we looked after her, do you remember? Talk about a botched job… Jesus.’

  ‘No, I did
n't know that,’ said Serena quietly. She had gone to sit on the bed in the indentation left by Charlie. She could feel his warmth still on the linen. It made the coldness of his voice almost impossible to bear. ‘I'll talk to her.’

  Charlie shrugged, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets. ‘Nah… I shouldn't bother. She'll tell us in her own good time. Anyway, she might change her mind when she hears Peter's taking over.’

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘I asked him, in Umbria, explained the position, said the way things were looking it would be money we needed rather than this roof over our heads. If Peter takes it we can revert to the original plan of whatever cash Mum leaves being split between me, Cassie and Elizabeth. The last thing Peter needs is more money – he's drowning in it.

  ‘We need more money?’ Serena gripped the edges of the bed, feeling, even though her feet were planted firmly on the carpet, as if she might fall off it.

  ‘To – pay – for – the – child,’ said Charlie, giving equal accent to each word, as if he was spelling out a difficult sentence for a foreigner. ‘I presume you had thought about that, hadn't you, in all your secret plotting to get the thing born?’

  ‘I don't need… I don't deserve this.’ Serena stood up very slowly, fighting the dizziness that threatened to topple her to the floor. ‘This – this is not how it should be,’ she faltered, trying, in spite of everything, to cling to her knowledge of the fact that somewhere behind this cold, accusatory voice was the kind man she had married. Distress had warped him… warped them all.

  ‘No, you're right there. This is not how it should be. We'll see Cass through her wedding, then move out, further east, near Brighton, maybe. It's well in the commuting belt, these days.’

  Serena had put her hands to her ears. ‘Stop this, Charlie. You're not making any sense. I don't want to leave Ashley House. Giving it back to Peter would break my heart.’

  He laughed, a hard, sharp noise, like a gunshot. ‘Would it, now? Well, that means we'd still have one thing in common anyway. Mine snapped months ago when our son committed the worst error of his life and you took his side instead of mine, when it struck me that you're not over Tina and never will be – He broke off, as the room and his wife's ashen face came back into focus. ‘Sorry, I –’