‘Yes dear?’
‘I want what’s best for you Mum, and Dad, of course. But this is something we need to discuss as a family, just us; you know what I’m saying?’
‘You mean without Elliot? That’ll be tricky.’
‘I don’t know what Elliot’s agenda will be but I know that he’ll have one and you know what he’s like, no one else will get a chance to say what they really think. I don’t know what it has to do with the company anyway, really. Can you afford the Oaks?’
‘We already pay for Granny. It is a substantial amount. Maybe June and Muriel could begin to make a contribution? I don’t know.’ Mary placed her finger in front of the egg, arresting its circuit of the tray and Starlight seized it at last and mashed it into her mouth. ‘Maybe the Oaks isn’t the right thing. I just know that I’m weary of it twenty-four hours a day. I just want to talk about it.’
Belinda put her arm around Mary’s shoulders. Beneath the thick wool of her cardigan they were surprisingly thin. ‘Alright. Alright,’ she said softly. She looked at her mother, suddenly a smaller and less substantial figure than she had ever seemed before. Uncharacteristically, there was a stain on the front of her blouse, tea, perhaps, a suggestive sign that Mary was letting things slip. She was getting old, Belinda realised with a shock.
The hungry hoards poured into the kitchen and began helping themselves to the food. Since there was no room on the table for people to eat the young people were permitted to take their plates into the games room with strict instructions to take extreme care against spills. The latest Harry Potter was being screened for the half term holidays and they were all keen to see it. Tansy carried her own plate in one hand and Todd’s in the other; there had been some debate as to whether he should be allowed to eat away from the table.
‘He’s only six and he’s had a tiring day,’ Simon had said. ‘I think it might be risky.’ In the end though, the risk of histrionics seemed greater and Tansy promised to keep an eye on him.
‘There’s my princess,’ Simon squeezed her shoulder. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing your pot.’
‘It really is going to be lovely. Quite the nicest of all of them,’ Ruth said across the table, helping herself to salad. ‘Rachel likes Harry Potter. Maybe I should wake her.’
‘We went up before. She was fast asleep, Aunty Ruth,’ Ellie said, taking a glass of wine without asking anyone.
‘Oh well. I expect she’s seen it. I’ll send James up with some food for her, later.’
Speculation about the whereabouts of June, Les, Granny and Robert was rife. ‘They didn’t say anything about going out. I just can’t understand it,’ Belinda said, serving lasagne from the Aga hotplate.
‘I wish you’d make your mind up,’ Elliot scowled. ‘You’ve done nothing but complain about June and Les being here and now they’ve disappeared you’re still not satisfied.’
‘I think it’s her father that Belinda is worried about, Elliot,’ James said mildly, helping himself to ham.
‘Of course I’m getting used to the idea that you know what my wife means, far better than I do,’ Elliot retorted, wrestling with the lid of a jar of piccalilli.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ Ruth asked sharply. She looked from James to Elliot, and across at Belinda.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Elliot struggled and strained with the jar lid, becoming more and more puce in the face. ‘They’re very pally. Church yesterday, some old pile of rubble today and a regular Johnny and Fanny Craddock in the kitchen this evening.’ He gave up with the jar and placed it with a petulant smack back on to the table.
‘I took Belinda and the other ladies to the stately home today because you declined, as you very well know,’ said James mildly, picking up the jar and opening it with an easy twist of his hand, ‘although I must say it was an extremely enjoyable day.’
‘I didn’t know that you went to church with James,’ Ruth said, a little sulkily, to Belinda. But Belinda was busy with lasagne, hot and bothered over the Aga, and didn’t reply.
Rob cornered Ellie in the gallery. She was carrying a bowl of fresh fruit salad and another glass of wine. He blocked her entrance into the games room. Every time she stepped to one side, he shifted his position so that she couldn’t get by.
‘Move Rob,’ she shouted at him, exasperated, ‘or I’ll lose my seat on the sofa!’
He smiled down at her. He was a good head taller than her. ‘Your little friend came good with hardly any effort on my part. A pushover, she was,’ he said smugly. ‘And so now at last I know it all. The question is: what am I going to do about it?’
Ellie blanched. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ Rob raised his eyebrows, as though considering his options. ‘I ought to do what I did in St Lucia. Philip,’ he sneered the name, ‘ought to lose his job at the very least, even if he doesn’t face criminal proceedings for sex with a minor.’ The glass in her hand trembled and wine slopped over its rim, dribbling over her hand and soaking into her sleeve.
‘I didn’t have sex with him,’ she said, her voice high and shrill. Her heart was in her throat. She sounded so pathetic that she didn’t even believe herself.
‘Oh well, if that’s true, there’s the question of spreading lies and gossip which stain his good name. I expect your time at St Hilary’s will be over pretty swiftly. He might sue you for slander.’
‘Rob! You wouldn’t...’ Ellie’s hands was shaking so badly now that her bowl began to slip and fruit salad threatened to spill onto the floor. ‘Careful now,’ Rob said, taking the bowl from her gently, ‘it wouldn’t do for anyone to think you’d lost your cherry.’
The lights in the games room were switched off and on the screen Harry Potter zoomed energetically around the quidditch pitch. Rob settled himself down on one of the sofas and took a pull at a bottle of cold beer. Presently he nudged Toby, sitting next to him, and passed him a bottle. Toby’s eyebrows expressed surprise and anxiety but Rob touched the side of his nose with his finger. He deliberately placed his bottle into an ambiguous position between the two of them on the glass-topped table and indicated that Toby should do likewise. In the event of discovery, he implied, Rob would claim both beers.
Todd, snuggled next to Ben on a large beanbag and underneath a fleecy throw, was almost asleep; the outdoor exercise, fresh air, lake swim and big dinner had just about finished him off. Ben had only half of his attention on the film. He’d seen it before and read the book too. His eyes kept wandering to the piano, where their half completed song stood on the music stand. Really he would have preferred to continue with it but Jude said that these things were best left to ‘ferment’ for a while. Writing the music with Jude had been like touching a star, a new star, formed almost as they explored it, their fingers shaping the craters and mountains. The music had drawn them like a field of gravity.
Mitch held Starlight in the crook of his arm. The baby’s eyes were following the action on the screen but her body felt limp and heavy, as though sleep would claim it soon. Mitch’s eyes kept straying to Ellie, who, since she had come back into the room, had been edgy and distracted. Her dessert remained untouched on the coffee table. She kneaded and wrung her hands restlessly, a gesture Mitch had observed in Belinda. Rob, Mitch noted, was not even pretending to watch the screen. His eyes were fixed on his sister, and in the gloom they glinted malevolently. After a while, discomfited, perhaps, by their scrutiny, Ellie got up from the sofa and left the room.
Clearly, Mitch thought, Rob’s spiteful intention was still in play. The lad’s malefic glower was sounding one of a number of discords in the family symphony; his father’s impotent rage was another, Ruth’s peevish hypochondria a third. And, last night at the pub he had become aware of another; a massive, yawning chasm of hostility between Simon and the old man. Their dissonant notes were spoiling the family’s attempts at harmony. Everywhere he looked there were embryonic connections; evidences of new beginnings. He saw it in exchanged glances and understanding smiles; in shar
ed burdens; in the pursuit of common passions. But the filaments of intuitive comprehension which were beginning to loop and link between them were under threat. He hated to see it. But what more, after all, could he do?
✽✽✽
Rachel sat up in bed. She had not slept; her headache had not eased and she burned with thirst but uppermost in her discomfort was this relentless, nagging sense of doom. She slipped out of bed and got a drink of water from the bathroom. As she drank it, the waft of food smells drifting up the stairs and into the room made her aware that the biscuits, cake and crisps, which were all that she had eaten that day, had long since ceased to satisfy; she was hungry. With all that had occurred to her that day, and with everything that she had pressing onto her mind, she was disgusted by her own appetite. People with worries like hers became thin and distant; their anxieties made a blockage so that food could not pass by. But her tummy was grumbling and she cast a glance across the room at Tansy’s dressing gown, laid tidily over the end of the neatly-made bed. Perhaps she would borrow it and go downstairs. As she considered this idea the sound of footsteps treading wearily up the spiral steps made her hope that food might be on its way to her. She slipped back into bed. It was cold in the bedroom and her quilt retained the heat of her body. But Ellie brought no food with her. Her face, for once naked of makeup, looked white and stricken. Her hair, un-brushed, styled or straightened, was dull and devoid of its usual shimmer. Rachel knew, with a terrible certainty, that in some unfathomable way her good intentions had been hijacked and that her disconnected status in the family would make her a legitimate target for blame.
‘Oh. You’re awake,’ Ellie said, unzipping her top and dropping it onto the floor. Her voice was flat.
‘Yes,’ Rachel replied, her hands mashing her midriff under the quilt. She waited for the accusations to begin, but Ellie simply stood in the middle of the room, looking around her. When Ellie didn’t speak, Rachel pounced in desperation on the only other topic of conversation she could think of. ‘Have you had tea?’
Ellie nodded. ‘Supper, you mean? Yes. Have you?’
‘No.’
Ellie looked helplessly at the mess on and around her bed. Discarded clothes, make up, CDs, dirty knickers, shoes, cups with the gritty residue of hot chocolate, carrier bags, a plate with toast crusts. She looked at it as though someone else had come and dumped it while she was out; as though it was nothing to do with her at all but was a deliberate attempt by some cruel hand to burden her even more. She wondered vaguely whether Rachel expected her to do anything about the fact that she had not eaten. There was always this sense with Rachel that she was waiting for you to do or say something and Ellie was never able to grasp hold of the hidden agenda. She waited for Rachel to come out with whatever it was, but Rachel just sat in her bed, her hands moving restlessly under the covers, a hunted expression in her eyes. Ellie gave up on it with a sigh. She kicked off her trainers, slipped off her tracksuit bottoms and pushed them all under her bed. She extricated her pyjamas from her unmade bed, put them on and climbed under the covers. She wanted nothing so much as to go to sleep and not wake up for about five years, until all of this mess would have been forgotten. In five years she would be twenty-one, a free, independent grown-up, and able to run away from Rob, and Caro and anything else that she didn’t want to face.
‘Are you going to sleep?’ Rachel asked quietly. Although Ellie was clearly very troubled, Rachel didn’t dare ask what was wrong; she was too afraid of the answer. Ellie ignored her. ‘Good night, then,’ Rachel said in a whisper. She continued to sit in her bed in the gloom of the meagre light which seeped under the bathroom door. The curtains were still open but the night outside was thick with darkness. She could hear Ellie breathing, a series of stepped in-breaths followed by a wheezing out-breath. She was crying. Rachel felt tears prick the back of her eye balls. She felt sorry for Ellie and sorry for herself. A worm of guilt writhed in her chest, even though, she told herself over and over again, Ellie’s friend had told Rob the secret; he had known the secret. What had she done? Confirmed it, possibly. Named the teacher. But he had promised her that he wouldn’t use it to hurt Ellie. He had promised. But she could see it all thundering back towards her like a vehicle out of control on a treacherous roadway. She would be run over even though it wasn’t fair. Rachel slipped out of bed again and went to stand by Ellie’s bed. Tentatively, she put her hand on Ellie’s quivering shoulder.
‘Ellie?’ she whispered. ‘Ellie?’
The duvet made a lurch and rose up, but Ellie only disappeared further down the bed. ‘Leave me alone,’ she wailed from within its folds. ‘Just leave me alone!’
✽✽✽
In the end all the adults chose to eat in the kitchen, which made Belinda wonder why she had been persuaded to produce a buffet meal, as though it was less trouble. She appreciated the fact that the children had wanted to watch the film but even that could have been accommodated with a later meal. Now she would have all the plates and glasses to collect from the games room. You always had to produce an excess of food for a buffet; you could never predict quantities very accurately when people were allowed to help themselves, or given a selection of dishes to choose from. Now, she could see, there would be left-overs to sort out and try to incorporate into other meals, which was always annoying.
As a matter of fact there were a number of things she was beginning to find annoying about sharing a house with her relations. It seemed that no one was very keen to clear up after themselves; she was constantly collecting cups and glasses from all over the house. Also strewn everywhere were personal belongings - books and clothes and shoes - they made the place look so untidy. Nobody seemed capable of changing the toilet roll properly or of picking a bath mat off the floor so that it could dry. Her stores of food were being wantonly pillaged; she would never have believed the quantities of gin they could consume.
She had plated up food for Les, June, Granny and Robert. She didn’t know where on earth they could be. It was quite dark outside now; nowhere they might have decided to visit could possibly still be open. She wondered if the car had broken down. Mary was clearly very anxious. She hadn’t eaten much, perched on the end of one of the benches next to Muriel, glancing one moment at the empty carver chair where Robert generally sat, the next at the kitchen door. Muriel was nattering inconsequentially about this and that, but Mary only made distracted replies. Periodically one of the children would come in, help themselves to food or drink, and leave again. Rob came in twice for beer from the fridge. She couldn’t remember having told him that this would be alright but he did seem to have been working diligently on his coursework all day and Belinda decided to let it go. Elliot didn’t seem to notice. He had set himself apart from everyone, morosely eating his food and frequently recharging his wine glass with a bottle he kept at his elbow. On entering the kitchen he had cast a sour glance at the laptop on the dresser but made no comment. Jude and James were sitting on the opposite side of the table; Jude was telling James about Ben’s day at the outdoor pursuits centre, and, with a great deal of enthusiasm, the song they were writing together. Their efforts, admittedly rather stiff, to include Elliot in their conversation, had been rebuffed. Simon was seated in the carver at the far end of the table. Miriam was perched on his knee and feeding him forkfuls of food from their shared plate. Ruth and Heather had retreated to a far corner of the kitchen and had their heads together. Belinda, who had, for once, managed to sit in the comfortable chair by the Aga, surveyed them all. She wished she could slip off somewhere quiet to think over everything that had happened, to escape from Elliot. His presence, brooding and malevolent, cast a shade over the brightness of everything, like a volcano over an idyllic Mediterranean island. She was appalled, really, at how little love she felt for him, or from him, now that she understood, so much more clearly, the nature of it all.
Ruth could scarcely believe what she was hearing. She had at last asked Heather straight out about Starlight. Miriam’s parting shot
about ‘legitimising’ Starlight’s status in the family had intrigued her and the questions she had been asking herself about the child’s provenance had all bubbled to the surface with fresh vigour. It turned out that her understanding that Starlight had been rescued from a parched African village was something wide of the mark.
‘You assumed it,’ Heather explained, ‘but I never said we’d brought her from Africa. I said we’d heard about her there. One of the workers on the Famine Fund tour was a social worker from Birmingham. She was just coming to the end of a career break. Jude got talking to her and she offered to help us out. When we got home, we got in touch with her and she got Starlight for us.’
‘Got her? You can’t just ‘get’ a child like that!’ Ruth said indignantly. ‘Didn’t you have to do a course, get assessed, all that?’
‘No.’ Heather took a mouthful of quiche and chewed it slowly. ‘She waived all that for us, in the circumstances.’
Ruth put her fork down and looked incredulously at her sister. ‘Waived it? In what circumstances?’
Heather sipped her orange juice. She still seemed unable to meet Ruth’s eyes. ‘In the slightly irregular circumstances.’
‘Heather!’
‘Oh alright, I’ll tell you. But don’t think of climbing up on one of your high horses, Ruth. We’ve already established today that neither of us can claim any moral high ground.’
‘No. Alright then.’
‘Monica – she’s the social worker – she works at a reception centre for failed asylum seekers. They get families in there all the time in transit for the flight back to wherever they came from once their applications have been assessed and turned down. Sometimes the parents are beside themselves; prospects for children – especially girls – are grim beyond anything in their home countries and they’ll do anything to save their children from such a future. You know what I mean? D’you know that in some African countries they believe that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin... I mean, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’
Relative Strangers Page 38