The cold air hit Toby as soon as he got the front door open. The fog, drifting and grey like smoke, obscured everything, and even the ground seemed to shift beneath him. Rob was stumbling too. One of the coils of cable unreeled itself and he fell over it and almost dropped the monitor as he tripped down the steps, and they both doubled up with laughter. It was almost impossible to see Aunty Belinda’s car in the fog, its dark grey colour melding with the greyness. Rob tried to balance the monitor with one hand while he stabbed at the key fob with the other. Eventually the lights flashed and the boot clicked open.
‘There we are. Now you go and get the rest,’ Rob said, ‘and then I’ll take you out for a drive.’
The girls and Mitch were back in the hallway. There was so much noise that Toby thought someone must have put another game on the computer but then he remembered that it was in pieces and they were putting it away in the boot. There was a dreadful, shrieking woman-crying noise coming from the games room. At the same time, from down the passageway towards the back of the house there was raw, angry man-shouting. Toby went into the study and picked up the tower and keyboard.
‘See you in a bit,’ he said to Tansy. ‘Off for a drive.’
The girls looked helplessly at one another. The sight they had just witnessed in the games room had shaken them badly. To hear so many words from Uncle Les was unusual; he was not a man given to much verbiage, contenting himself to what the McKays called ‘Ps and Qs’ and the odd general remark about football. His strength had surprised them - he was not an especially well-built man whereas June was stocky, a capacious size 18 or 20; it must have been the power of his anger alone which had allowed him to suspend her in mid-air like that, and it was the anger, probably, which had most stunned them. They had shrunk from it and without thinking about it at all, Ellie had reached for Mitch’s hand.
Rachel and Tansy were strangers to such outbursts. Ellie, of course, was familiar with it; Elliot was always raving about something and its very frequency made it trifling and negligible. She and Rob would just shrug, and remark that their dad was ‘off on one’ again. Les’ anger had seemed at first to be literally slicing the top off Aunty June’s head, and they had watched, first with horror, and then with a bubbling, inappropriate hysteria, the separation of her ghastly white head from her distinctive curls. They had not been ready for the sight of her as she hurled herself across the room and onto Aunty Muriel. The two women roiling on the floor in a dog-fight had galvanised them and they had hurtled up the gallery to find another rumpus underway down in the sitting room and Toby, clearly as drunk as a skunk, heading out into the mist for ‘a drive.’
Ellie and Mitch followed as far as the door. Her mum’s grey BMW was parked on the sweep, its lights blazing and its engine running. Its front passenger door and its boot gaped open. The fog of its exhaust mingled with the greyness of the mist but its yellow lights barely penetrated the thick air. As they watched Toby dropped the computer into the boot, slammed the lid shut and was making for the passenger door. Mitch, with a degree of objectivity and maturity unavailable to Ellie, dashed down the steps to try and put a stop to the ill-advised adventure. Toby was practically in the front seat when Mitch caught up with him. The car had already begun to creep forward. Mitch threw himself inside the car on top of Toby as the car spurted gravel from beneath its tyres and bound away. In seconds it had been swallowed up in the impenetrable denseness of the fog, and had disappeared entirely from view.
Tansy and Rachel remained in the hall. From down the gallery they could hear June shrieking like a banshee, the cries of Uncle Les ineffectual now against her. At the same time the raised voices from the small sitting room were intensifying in volume and shrillness. The sounds of smashing ornaments and the thud of heavy objects crashing around reverberated from down the corridor.
Upstairs, Starlight began to cry.
Ellie looked over her shoulder at her cousins and then out again into the solid night. She knew for certain that her brother had been driving the car. Who else could it have been? He’d been having lessons and had been out in their mum’s car a few times. But he had been drinking and the fog was so thick and the local roads were so narrow and dangerous. She was flooded with a chilling sense of doom which had nothing to do with the mist which crept like insistent, icy fingers around her legs and into the house. Something connected itself up inside her, a previously unknown channel between her heart and her head. Its fluid fibres reached out and made her skin shrink into gooseflesh. Her heart pulsed with anxiety, her mind incendiary with dire projections. She was afraid for Rob. Her anxiety about him overlaid every other emotion. His pinching and hair pulling, his name calling and teasing, the times when he had put spiders in her bed and salt in her tea - they all seemed to disintegrate, like the car, into the mist leaving behind only solid but until now dimly recalled incidents of tenderness. Her first day at school - he had sat next to her at lunch amongst the other tiny reception children while the bigger boys in his class laughed and jeered. The time he had gone with her to the staffroom when she had cut her hand on some glass in the playground, and let her use his shirt-tail to soak up the blood. The day he’d given her his bus fare when she’d spent hers on sweets, and walked the four miles home in the rain. His offer to beat up the creep on holiday. She knew suddenly - with eye-watering clarity - that he’d only told their parents about that holiday misadventure because he was genuinely incensed by the waiter’s loutish behaviour towards her. In the same way she knew absolutely that he would never have told them about Philip, about her stupid lie.
All at once she was running down the steps and across the sweep, over the gravel and up the drive; running and running, and calling her brother’s name.
Rachel and Tansy looked at each other for a few seconds, both white and shaking, while the house, the family, everything, seemed to crumble and dissolve around them. Then Tansy turned and walked swiftly down the corridor towards the sitting room and Rachel ran, like Ellie, out of the house.
✽✽✽
James walked slowly along the landing and stood at the top of the stairs. He couldn’t be sure but he thought Robert had suffered another stroke. His blue pills made him drowsy and indistinct anyway but there was definitely a lack of mobility about the mouth and his speech was slurred. He had been uncertain as to what the day might be or where he was. He had been unwilling, or unable, to raise his hands above his head. Putting these things together had given James sufficient cause for concern given Robert’s medical history. He had used the extension in Belinda and Elliot’s room to dial 999. Now he descended the stairs. The main door of the house was wide open admitting gusts of cold, moist air. As he closed it he became aware of the sounds of angry raised voices - females shouting, men yelling - they seemed to be coming from all over the house. The games room, the rooms at the back, the panelled walls, the vaulted ceilings. The tongues of Hunting, stilled for generations, seemed to be loosed from the dour portraits; ghosts yelled down the chimneys. Furniture crashed and slid around, restless from years of entrapment. Crockery and glassware shattered; it was as though the whole house was imploding. He ran down the corridor towards the sitting room.
✽✽✽
‘There’s no need to speak like that, Elliot,’ Simon said sharply. ‘I think we can have a family discussion if we want to, without your permission.’
‘That depends what you’re discussing.’ Elliot took another pace into the room. Heather, in front of him, remained in possession of the main floor; she still held her hands out to her brother and sister. Simon took half a step towards her, bringing him to the edge of the hearth, and took her outstretched hand. Ruth lifted her hand up and clasped Heather’s. Belinda had shot up from her seat on the arm of Mary’s chair and retreated a pace or so behind it. She was obscured from Elliot’s view by the open door. Mary remained on her chair, staring as though in a trance, at the hearth rug.
‘What is this?’ Elliot half laughed, although his face - puce only a moment before -
was now bloodless. ‘Some kind of weird family ritual I don’t know about? A mystic McKay gathering? Are there to be incantations and a human sacrifice?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Elliot,’ Heather said in a low voice. ‘We’re just deciding things about Daddy.’
Elliot’s face turned from anaemic to virtually fleshless, the thinnest of skin covered his sharp nose and prominent cheek-bones, his eyes sunk into bony sockets. His voice rasped, venomous and reptilian, ‘About Robert? What about him?’
‘Well we don’t know yet, we haven’t decided,’ Ruth said with studied reasonableness. ‘We won’t be too long Elliot, if you’d like to give us a few moments...’ She lifted her spare hand and held it out, palm tilted slightly, indicating the doorway behind him, inviting him to withdraw himself.
‘Oh no,’ Elliot shook his head and raised a hand in denial. ‘Oh no. You can’t decide anything without Belinda. I won’t have you three ganging up on Mary without Belinda being here to speak up for her mother.’
Simon shook his head incredulously. ‘Of course we wouldn’t decide anything without Belinda.’
The gaze of the three of them travelled past Elliot to an area he couldn’t see behind the door. Swiftly, and in defiance of Ruth’s gesture, he stepped right into the room and closed the door.
Belinda’s reaction on being thus discovered by her husband spoke volumes. It was as though a tract in an ancient, indecipherable cuneiform language had suddenly been translated and made accessible to them, clearly annotated, comprehensively illustrated and written in script ten miles high. She could not hide it - her secret - from them any longer. She stepped backwards, an instinctive recoil, further into the corner of the room, behind the chair and right against the standard lamp which occupied the far recess of the space. Her face, beneath its fine powder, was pale, and she lifted an automatic arm defensively across her face.
‘Oh there you are,’ Elliot sneered nastily, ‘hiding, are we?’
A frisson of comprehension travelled between Simon, Heather and Ruth, still holding hands on the hearth rug. Then Simon let go and stepped carefully towards his mother. Without looking at her he raised her gently to her feet and walked with her across the rug, away from Elliot and Belinda, pressing her with care back down into the larger arm chair.
For a moment the McKays made an ineffectual attempt to revert to their default programming; to skim over, with polite determination, the unpleasantness which they all felt mushrooming in the atmosphere around them.
Heather spoke very brightly into the heavy silence which Elliot’s question had spawned, ‘I think that we ought to leave this discussion to another day. We’re all very tired.’
‘Mum certainly is,’ Ruth said.
‘And you won’t have eaten, Elliot,’ Belinda managed to say from between lips suddenly parched.
‘We saved you some supper,’ Simon reached out to take hold of Elliot’s elbow in an attempt to release Belinda from where she cowered in the corner. ‘Come with me and I’ll serve it up for you.’
Elliot shrank from Simon’s hand and took another step towards his wife. ‘Tell me,’ he spat, ‘what you have been talking about. Here. In this little secret room. Without me.’
‘Heather told you Elliot,’ Belinda stammered. She could see it coming; she could hear it in his voice. The early start, the long drive, the problems at the office, the drive back in the mist, finding everyone busy without him, no supper, and no wife to welcome him. ‘We were just talking about Daddy...’
But Ruth found her ability to gloss over the disagreeable had expired. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she broke out, taking a step towards Elliot, ‘I don’t think it’s any of your damned business what we were discussing. This is family business.’
Elliot turned on her. ‘And who do you think runs your precious family business?’ he roared. ‘Which one of us has been up since six and done seven hours driving and a full day’s work and licked boots and arses all day for the benefit of your precious family business?’
‘This wasn’t really anything to do with the business,’ Belinda tried to placate him. ‘It was to do with the family proper.’
He turned back to her, further enraged, his voice increased by decibels. ‘Aren’t I family proper? Christ, I’ve changed my name and worked my balls off... what else do I have to do? Have a fucking blood transfusion? Jesus Christ! What kind of a wife are you, Belinda? You’re my family, you’re supposed to be loyal to me, not to them. You’re supposed to have given them up for me! “Forsaking all others” you promised. But no! You’re in here conniving and plotting behind my back...’
‘Don’t you talk to me about loyalty,’ Belinda cried. But he was deaf to her and to the remonstrance of her family as they spoke his name in increasingly louder tones. His shouting had brought Jude and Miriam into the room. They too tried to distract Elliot but his anger was beyond control. Jude and Simon attempted to restrain him as he rained imprecations down upon her, certain that his fury would soon erupt into violence, but he shook them off with such ferocity that Jude was thrown backwards into the china cabinet, smashing its glass frontage. Simon lunged at Elliot again; he was by far the bigger man and had every advantage of height and breadth, but Elliot’s rage was uncontainable. He threw Simon away from him and he fell backwards over one of the small round tables. Its collection of exquisite porcelain flower baskets went skidding across the floor. Simon landed on his back on the rug and cracked the back of his head on the hearth. Tansy, also now in the room, screamed.
By the time James entered, the family was in complete hysteria. Tansy was screaming. Simon lay on the floor, blood seeping from the back of his head. Mary - shaken from her reverie at last, knelt next to him trying to dab at the blood with her handkerchief. Heather was helping Jude to his feet as shards of glass fell from his shirt and skin and hair. Ruth tried to interpose herself between Elliot and Belinda who had wedged themselves into the corner of the room. He was shouting, haranguing Belinda. Flecks of spittle sprayed from his lips and landed like cuckoo-spit on her hair and on the lenses of Ruth’s glasses. Then, almost in slow motion, he reached out his left arm and pushed Ruth away, into the back of the armchair. At the same time he raised his right hand and with a quick, practiced move, opened his palm and slapped twice, forehand and backhand, across Belinda’s face. The sound, like the clap of hands which the teacher uses to bring her class to attention, stopped time. Every face turned towards him, all eyes aghast, each mouth agape. The blows seemed to have conjured his ire into some kind of tangible form which astounded even its creator and he stood appalled - they all did. Released into the light at last his fury flooded the confines of the room. It oppressed them like a swarm. The sense of menace was so real that when Belinda slowly raised her own right hand James believed for a moment that she wanted to swat at it. A second later he wondered if she planned to return the blow. Then, in just a fragment of a second before she did it, he knew what her intention was, and although he stepped past Tansy and reached his long arm past Elliot to try and prevent her, he was too slow. Her palm, with the cold blue glitter of the diamond cluster she wore on her third finger, flashed across her own face leaving a whitened print on her cheek with a livid red weal at its centre. Slap. Slap. Slap. With cool, practised precision she expiated the punishment and pain which choked the air. Then she rested and her eyes held Elliot’s until, with a sound like a maddened elephant, he stormed from the room.
He almost collided with June. She had manhandled her suitcase down the stairs and was in the process of dragging it across the hall towards the door. She had a black eye and her hair was askew.
‘Leaving too?’ Elliot barked as he strode past her. ‘I don’t blame you. This family is insane.’
‘Oh yes. Are you? Take me with you,’ June sobbed.
‘I’m going right now,’ he said, eyeing the suitcase. She let it fall and the two of them hurried across the gravel, got into his car and roared away up the driveway into the mist.
✽✽✽
‘Put your seatbelt on!’ he yelled, struggling to secure his own as the car bucked and jolted. Rob had the lights on full beam and the window wipers going ten to the dozen. The sudden heat of three bodies in the cold car had caused the windows to mist up so he also had the demister going full blast. The noise of the revving engine and the fan heater and the thudding wipers made conversation almost impossible.
‘It’s a bad night...’ Mitch began.
‘If you didn’t want to come, why did you get in the car?’ Rob shouted back. He stabbed his finger onto the CD controls and the curdled tones of Tammy Wynette filled the car. ‘Oh fuck that!’ he exclaimed, ejecting the CD. ‘Look in the glove compartment. She must have some decent music in there.’ With a sense of acting out a dream Mitch pulled at the latch and half a dozen CDs spilled out as the car made a lurch forwards. ‘Shit! I’ll get it in a minute, just a bit rusty. Are you alright Toby?’ Rob screwed himself round in his seat to peer into the back of the car. ‘Sit up, mate! You’re going to miss all the fun.’
Mitch rifled through the CDs. ‘Which do you want?’
‘Thriller.’
The whooping tones of Michael Jackson reverberating full blast from the speakers of the car seemed to calm Rob somewhat. He managed to get a better control of the accelerator and the car made steadier progress. But the drive - deeply rutted and covered with a thick layer of damp and slippery leaves - still made the car rock alarmingly from side to side and occasionally the wheels could be heard skidding on the vegetation and loose surface. Visibility was barely two or three feet beyond the bonnet and the lights seemed to make the mist into a solid white curtain.
‘Can you see where you’re going?’ Mitch ventured, over the din.
Relative Strangers Page 50