Les parked the car and went into the house. Grimly, he climbed the stairs.
✽✽✽
Muriel and Granny McKay were breakfasting. Granny had shown no surprise at all at being greeted by her elder daughter on waking and had made no reference to Mr Burgess. She seemed for now to have forgotten everything which had occurred in her life for the past thirty odd years and treated Muriel as though they were still living together in their gloomy little terraced house. As Muriel had washed and dressed her mother’s sinewy, resilient body, she had given a tirade of instructions regarding the washing of the best china, poshing of the laundry and the stoning of the step. Muriel had agreed vaguely with all her suggestions and helped her down the stairs.
They had gamely attempted to empty the dishwasher. Granny had gone through the motions of helping; picking up crockery and moving it from one place to another, putting glassware into the refrigerator and the cruet in the sink. They were in the middle of this exercise when Les came in and Muriel gave him a reassuring smile while he found a glass and filled it with water, dropping two effervescent tablets into it. She offered to make tea, eyeing the kettle on the Aga doubtfully. Les placed Ellie’s card on the table then he shook his head and exited the room with a look of grim resignation on his face. By the time Belinda arrived, plates and pans and cups and cutlery were strewn everywhere and the two older women were sitting amongst it all blinking and smiling like two magpies discovered in their hoard of stolen trinkets.
‘We weren’t sure where anything went, were we Mother? But we like to help, if we can,’ said Muriel.
‘Although we pay enough in all conscience,’ Granny demurred, making a sudden mental time-leap. ‘It doesn’t seem right to me that we should be put to work. Matron must be short-staffed.’
‘Yes,’ Belinda said, placing the kettle on the Aga. ‘Well. Now I’m here I’ll put the kettle on, shall I? Just a light breakfast this morning; I’m going to cook brunch at twelve. Did you sleep well?’
‘Oh yes, very well, thank you Belinda. Did you?’
‘Not especially. I don’t suppose you’d know, Muriel, but it’s Ellie’s birthday today. Now you’re not to worry about a gift or a card. You came and helped us out at such short notice that no one will have expected you to have thought of it.’
Muriel’s heart sank. ‘No. No, I’m sorry. I hadn’t any idea.’ Having been so determined to fit in, and be family, she felt as though she had failed at the first fence.
‘Never mind. Milk?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Who’s Ellie?’ Granny’s spoon hovered over her Weetabix. ‘Bloody ridiculous name.’
‘She’s Belinda’s daughter, Mother.’
‘Oh. Well that explains it, then. Who’s Belinda?’
Belinda laughed. ‘I am. I’m Robert’s oldest.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Robert’s only fourteen. He isn’t even married! Wait till I tell Mrs George!’
Muriel and Belinda exchanged looks. ‘Mrs George?’ Belinda queried, raising her eyebrows.
‘Used to live next door,’ Muriel mouthed, ‘years ago.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Eat your breakfast, Mother,’ said Muriel.
‘The milk tastes funny.’
‘It’s because they give you HRT milk at the Oaks. You’ve forgotten what real milk tastes like.’
‘I think you might mean UHT,’ Belinda suggested, with a smile.
James joined them. He surveyed the scene from the small window in the back door. ‘A met and wiserable day,’ he intoned. Belinda passed him a cup of tea.
‘I’m going up to the village, to the church service,’ he announced, sipping. ‘Ruth is unwell and I don’t think either of the children will want to come. So, unless anyone else..?’
‘Well,’ began Muriel.
‘I’d like to, actually,’ Belinda interrupted, surprising herself. She was not a regular attendee. She and her siblings had been sent to Sunday school with faithful regularity but all had stopped attending once they had been confirmed. Her parents had only attended services as spectators; when Heather had been singing in the children’s choir, the year that Simon had been Joseph in the nativity and, once, when Ruth had been picked to do a harvest reading. Now she, like them, tended only to put in an appearance at the children’s Harvest and Christmas services or at funerals as the official WI representative. But the chance to spend a whole hour with James was not to be missed. ‘I expect I’ll be cooking for the rest of the day so I’ll take the chance to get out now.’
James nodded. ‘I think the service starts at 9.30, so we should leave in about ten minutes.’
✽✽✽
Les parted the bedroom curtains six inches and June moaned and screwed up her eyes.
‘For God’s sake, Leslie!’
He ignored her complaints. ‘Drink this. It will ease your head. Then you can get up and come down for brunch. There’s a birthday. You know the routine.’ He turned his back on her as she struggled up from the bedclothes, emptying his pockets before peeling off his damp trousers and crumpled shirt and dropping them in a corner of the room.
‘I certainly won’t be coming down. I’m far too ill.’
‘Rubbish. You’re hung-over and ashamed to show your face. But you will show it. You can’t stay up here for five days. Here, you can put these on,’ Les plucked clothes from their hangers and flung them on the bed.
‘You’ve changed your tune. I thought you wanted to go home,’ June snapped. Les ignored her. He wrapped a towel around himself. ‘I’m going to find a shower,’ he said. ‘It’s pouring outside and I got soaked.’
June sipped the fizzing drink. ‘Is she still here?’
‘Yes, she is. And she’s staying.’ Les hesitated by the half open door.
June sniffed. ‘You can take me home, then. I’m not staying here with her.’
Les closed the door, sat down on the bed and looked at his wife. Without all her artificial additives she looked quite like Muriel, except for a hardness of mouth and a steeliness of eye.
‘I can’t think what she thinks she’s doing here!’ June blustered. ‘She can’t possibly fit in!’
Les sighed. ‘They invited her when they found out about Mr Burgess, in case your mother got upset. Your mother has to stay until Thursday, and so will we.’
‘And Sandra?’
‘No. Sandra has gone.’
‘Gone? Why? Why has she gone?’
‘Because I told her to.’
They looked at each other. For the first time in their entire relationship Les was in control. It was an unnerving state of affairs for both of them and it nonplussed them, temporarily. Suddenly June’s face crumpled and she began to cry.
‘Take me home, Leslie,’ she sobbed. ‘Please take me home.’
Les got up and passed her a box of tissues from the dressing table.
‘I can’t,’ he said, quietly. ‘I can’t leave them to cope with your mother, not when it was you who brought her here. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.’
‘Muriel can cope with mother!’ June exclaimed, with tragic eyes.
‘But it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to. Not on her own. Not when it was you who brought her here. And I’ve promised Mary that we’ll look after Robert as well. It’s the least we can do.’
June wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She examined her finger nails, then sniffed. She avoided his eyes. It was a well-known sign that she was formulating a plan. ‘Of course I only wanted to make things special for them,’ she said. ‘I realise now that I made a mistake.’
‘That’s all you’ll have to tell them. They’re kind people. They’ll be polite to you, as a guest. And of course, they’ll expect you to be polite to … their other guests.’
‘You mean her.’ June’s eyes flicked towards the dressing table. Les followed her glance.
June drained the glass. ‘That stuff’s horrible. Where did you sleep last night?’
Les got up. He picked up his razor,
toothbrush and comb from the bedside table. ‘In one of the other rooms, same as the night before.’ He walked over to the dressing table and surveyed the cluttered array of belongings strewn across its surface. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and caught June’s reflection, watching him. Her eyes stalked his hand like a snake hunting a rodent as it roved amongst the clutter. Then, slowly, he picked up his car keys. Her eyes met his in the mirror and there was an instant of naked comprehension between them before the shutters slammed down.
‘Go and have your shower. You stink. I suppose you slept in those clothes. I bet you’re sorry now that you didn’t bring more things. I shall find a bath. There’d better be plenty of hot water.’
✽✽✽
When Rachel woke up and opened her eyes the first thing she saw was her pile of neatly folded new clothes. The remembrance of them caused her to stroke the material of her beautiful new pyjamas with furtive pleasure. She put a peculiar sensation in her abdomen down to hunger and excitement. She heard the rain drumming on the roof above her head and splattering like plastic beads onto the window but bad weather couldn’t dampen her delight in the burgeoning feelings of friendship which were developing between the cousins. Turning her head she could see that Tansy and Ellie were still asleep; Ellie, in the bed nearest to her, lay on her back, her arms flung above her head, her dark hair tumbled over the pillow like shiny rivulets of lava.
Rachel had been promised that today she might try to put Ellie’s hair into a French plait. Last night her two cousins had brushed her hair and tied it up this way and that and discussed cuts and ceramic straighteners and colours, and indeed any possibility other than the characterless style it currently occupied. The shopping trip, the mutual grooming, and high jinks late last night – although it had taken Rachel a while to cotton on – were all serving to break down the barriers which Rachel had so feared would alienate her from her more worldly, moneyed, mature cousins. Two nights and one very hectic day had given them ample opportunity to discuss every topic of interest. Boys, of course, first and foremost. Ellie had had boyfriends ‘of course’, several. Tansy had liked a boy for a while and been kissed by him once, unexpectedly, on a coach as they returned from a study trip. Rachel shook her head. Bra sizes and puberty were discussed late in the night. Ellie, 32B, yes, since she was twelve. Tansy 32A, yes, last year. Rachel 36A, no, not yet. They had been kind to her, overlooking her non-McKay blood, her physical grossness, her naivety, and treating her as one of themselves. Tansy had painted her toenails and Ellie had even offered to pluck her eyebrows although she had declined this offer on the grounds that her mother would surely disapprove.
‘Oh! Mothers!’ Ellie had said, dismissively. ‘They don’t even notice, half the time. And what they don’t know about won’t hurt them, believe me.’ She had yanked down the waistband of her pyjamas to reveal a small tattoo at the base of her spine, just above the cleft of her bottom. ‘I’ve had this three weeks and no one’s noticed, yet.’
Rachel and even Tansy had gasped and exclaimed but amid the thrill of the revelation it was understood implicitly by Rachel that Ellie had trusted her with a secret which she must not tell, even to her father.
Rachel rolled over onto her side and groped around on the floor beside her bed for Bridget Jones’ Diary, which Ellie had lent to her the night before. She knew that it would be disapproved of. The sensation weighed her down, and she found, surprisingly, that anger, and not despair, rose up to meet it. Her bowels lurched and tautened with indignation as she found her page and began, defiantly, to read.
Presently, Elliot entered the room with a mug of tea for Ellie.
‘Good morning girls. Happy birthday Ellie,’ he said, placing the mug on the bedside table nearest to his daughter. Ellie rolled over and yawned.
‘Mmm?’
‘Happy Birthday, Ellie,’ Tansy and Rachel chorused.
‘The usual birthday rigmarole awaits downstairs. But don’t rush. Your mother, for some obscure reason known only to herself, has gone to church,’ said Elliot.
✽✽✽
James and Belinda sat at the end of one of the ancient wooden pews in the chill interior of the village church. They had been welcomed by a kindly but surprised verger, who had handed them a dog-eared service booklet and a musty copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Three elderly worshippers huddled together in a pew further back which leaned against an old fashioned, bulbous radiator. The verger and the priest whispered conspiratorially by the shelves of bibles. The organist played a quiet and inconsequential series of chords and arpeggios. Outside, on the spire, crows called to one another. Belinda sat as close to James as was decent and kept her hands clasped on her lap. James, who never felt the cold, unzipped his anorak and then closed his eyes. He didn’t kneel or make any gesture but Belinda could tell that he was praying and she wondered at this newly discovered facet of his character. She sat still, fighting the urge to wriggle or chafe her frozen fingers, respecting his detachment, feeling, at the same time, a breathless excitement at the opportunity which had been presented to her, to be alone with him. Then from nowhere, she remembered the poor families whose holiday had been ruined by that dreadful accident on the motorway, the families missing a member now, and wondered who, in the end, would take the blame for it all. Which inattentive driver or defective vehicle would be cited as the cause? Did it really help at all to have someone to blame when a chair at the dinner table, a child’s bed, was empty forever? Could a family ever recover from such sudden and wanton loss?
Presently James exhaled heavily, his breath making a cloud in the icy air. Then he turned to her.
‘Now at last I’ve got you to myself,’ he smiled, ‘and we can talk. How are you?’ Belinda felt like weeping - not, she was ashamed to say, because of the thought of the accident victims, but just for herself. He really wanted to know, indeed, he already knew, largely, how things were for her. He was so intuitive, a reader of people. He had seen things and discerned the truth from the things he had seen. It had become his habit periodically to take her to one side and gently probe with careful questions. It made her feel so blessed to be singled out by him, and made much of, and it added to her sense of connectedness with him which was so markedly absent from her relationship with Elliot or indeed any other human creature. There was no requirement that she should gush or gloss over things; there was no point. He seemed able to divine the truth. It was this genuine care about her, perhaps even care for her and his intuitive understanding which somehow unloosed her inside.
She shook her head, ‘No change,’ she said, sadly. ‘I always seem to get caught on the wrong foot. It’s only a matter of keeping one step ahead but I don’t often manage it.’
Two more people shuffled down the aisle and took the pew in front of them. They flicked the pages of their service books and consulted the list of hymns on the board.
‘No.’ James lowered his voice further and bent his head down so that he could speak more confidentially. ‘No, Belinda. This is his problem, not yours. What this all stems from is his lack of self-confidence. He feels intimidated by you.’
Belinda searched his face. ‘Me? But I’m hopeless at everything!’
‘No, you’re not. You’re the key to his success. Everything he has and does is down to who you are. He feels it and it irks him.’
‘Because I’m Dad’s daughter?’
‘Yes, you’re the genuine article. He’s just an interloper, really, so he has to fight all the time to establish his authority. You’re the real McCoy. Or, should I say, the real McKay?’
‘I see. Yes. I hadn’t thought about it like that.’
In the spire above them a mournful bell began to toll, bidding worshippers to come. Belinda considered James’ words. He waited for her to digest what he had said. She could feel his breath on her face as it was turned to him.
‘Don’t let him crush you, Belinda. You have a gentleness and a softness and a kindness which is too precious. Don’t let him crush it out of you.’ Beli
nda bit her lip. His own kindness was almost too much to bear. He awoke feelings in her which confused and excited. His huge body seemed to offer comfort and protection, his calmness was a welcome balm after Elliot’s volatile temper. She saw herself, through his eyes, as a new person, and the vision was exhilarating.
They sat together in companionable silence and he watched her assimilate his vision of her. He placed his hand over hers to reinforce the connectedness between them, stilling, at the same time, the restless twisting and twisting of her ring. His hand was large, clean, warm and soft, with neatly trimmed nails. It folded around her icy fingers and squeezed them gently. She squeezed back instinctively and as she did so, equally involuntarily, from nowhere, the question came into her mind: what would it feel like to have that hand un-pin her hair, placed on her breast? To have his fingers inside her? She almost cried out at the shock of it. The thought itself - so inappropriate, so wrong - and yet the picture, the idea, shockingly arousing. At that moment the organist’s rambling notes collected themselves into the opening chord of their first hymn, the priest walked down the aisle, the few worshippers stood and James removed his hand to reach for their hymn book. Belinda stood up, clutching at the back of the pew in front to steady herself. Her legs were trembling.
✽✽✽
Relative Strangers Page 27