Close Relations Read online

  Contents

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Deborah Moggach

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part Two

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part Three

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part Four

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part Five

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Read on for an extract from Something to Hide

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Close Relations is one of the funniest and truest novels about modern family life you’ll ever read. Gordon Hammond, sixty-five, a builder who has built up his own, modestly successful business, has a heart attack. Whilst recovering in hospital he falls in love with April, a young black nurse, and leaves Dorothy, his wife of 45 years to set up home with her. Dorothy is released like a loose cannon into the lives of her three daughters and chaos ensues. More relationships break up, passions run high and dramatic developments ensue that will change the Hammond family forever.

  About the Author

  Deborah Moggach is the author of many successful novels including Tulip Fever and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was made into a top-grossing film starring Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith. Her screenplays include the film of Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.

  Also by Deborah Moggach

  You Must be Sisters

  Close to Home

  A Quiet Drink

  Hot Water Man

  Porky

  To Have and To Hold

  Driving in the Dark

  Smile and Other Stories

  Stolen

  The Stand-In

  The Ex-Wives

  Changing Babies

  Seesaw

  Tulip Fever

  Final Demand

  In the Dark

  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

  (first published as These Foolish Things)

  Close Relations

  Deborah Moggach

  For Kate Harwood

  PART ONE

  One

  YOU HAD A problem? Gordon Hammond was your man. He was a jobbing builder, a man with a van. He was good with his hands, cheerful and reliable. He was his own boss, beholden to nobody; he was not the sort to knuckle down under someone else’s orders. No job was too small for Gordon in those days. This was forty years ago, when he was just starting in the business and struggling to make ends meet. He had a wife, Dorothy, to support. And then his daughters were born, one closely followed by another, and though you could scrape by on £10 a week, especially with a wife like Dorothy who could conjure up a meal out of nothing, you still had rent to pay and as time progressed money to put down on a house.

  Gordon called his business Kendal Contractors, for he had a romantic streak and it was on a holiday in the Lake District that he had proposed to his wife. He stayed a one-man band for years and he worked all the hours God gave him. While he hammered and plastered, the Russians sent the first sputnik into space, 3,000 anti-war protesters marched on Aldermaston and Christian Dior, a man unnoticed by Gordon alive or dead, died. For Gordon was busy.

  By the late fifties the two daughters had arrived, and though people thought that he and his wife were trying for a son next time, a strong young lad to join the firm, Gordon said he was proud of his daughters and wouldn’t want it any other way. His tone silenced any further questions, even from his wife. By 1959 another daughter had been born. She was born on February 3, the day Buddy Holly was killed; if it had been a boy, Gordon would have called him Buddy but as it was another girl they called her Madeleine. In that year the Mini car was invented, heralding the start of the swinging sixties. It was a decade that passed Gordon by as if it were happening in another country. He kept his head down; he was busy elsewhere.

  In 1960 he and Dorothy bought their first home, a maisonette in Chislehurst. They even made a down-payment on a caravan but there was precious little time for holidays, Gordon being rushed off his feet and having to hire an ever-increasing work-force to cope with the demand. Word of mouth did it. He boasted that he had never advertised his services, there was no need for it, he kept his customers because no job was too small, small led to big, one recommendation to another. There was always a demand for a reliable builder who gave a fair estimate, turned up when he said he would, did a first-class job and cleaned up afterwards, not one of those cowboys–wally jobs on the cheap and the next month the ceiling falls in.

  In those days the world was a hopeful place. The Russians thrust Gagarin into space, Kennedy was elected President and in 1963 Martin Luther King had a dream. The housing market was booming too. By the mid-sixties Kendal Contractors had a ten-strong work-force of chippies, plasterers and plumbers, in addition to a fluctuating number of labourers Gordon called in on a casual basis. Flat conversions, local authority work, private speculations – in those days property developers were two a penny and in partnership with a firm of local architects he ploughed his profits into some terraced housing in Putney, divided them into flats and made a larger profit which he ploughed into another speculation. And so on.

  He put the girls into a private school, St Agnes, in Croydon. Though he winced at the size of the fees, his heart swelled with pride as he wrote the cheque. He bought a larger house, detached, up the road from the maisonette. The Vietnam War ended; the Watergate hearings began. In 1974 Gordon moved his family into their final home. It was a five-bed Tudor-style property in Purley, woods out the back, garaging for two cars and a dream kitchen at last for his wife, bless her. By the time Nixon had resigned Gordon had built an office extension on the side of the house, there was even room for a small yard for storing materials.

  So the girls went to school, benefiting from the sort of education neither he nor his wife had enjoyed. While they did so, his wife, Dorothy, sat in the office and answered the phone. Over the years she had taught herself book-keeping, she discovered that she had a flair for figures, and though they had their ups and downs, particularly when the property market collapsed in the late seventies, there was always work for a good builder, for if people cannot afford to move house they have to adapt the place they are living in, and by now he was the oldest-established builder in the neighbourhood.

  The girls grew up. Louise was the first-born. She was blonde and pretty and vague; from infancy she charmed those around her. She daydreamed her way through school, preferring to play with her dolls in a rehearsal for motherhood. Everybody loved Louise and she accepted this with the equanimity of the beautiful. Even her sisters’ intermittent bouts of jealousy were disarmed by her obliviousness to their existence, for those who are favoured by nature have an innocence about them, a protective envelope that seals them into their own sunny climate. She grew up into a willowy teenager with long silky hair. Lovelorn young men laid siege to the house; bricklayers hung around on payday hoping for a glimpse of her. In her sisters’ eyes she always seemed to be disappearing, roaring off in some sports car leaving emptiness and a smell of exhaust behind her. She enrolled in secretarial college but she never completed the course, she was far too disorganised. By that time, however, it no longer mattered for she had fallen in love with a young venture capitalist and soon she was ensconced in a flat in Chelsea, pregnant with her first child.

  Prudence, the middle sister, was the intellectual. ‘Always got her nose in
a book,’ boasted Gordon. With Louise it was ‘bees round a honeypot’. Not a reflective man, he spent little time analysing his daughters and, when asked, summoned up the same phrases throughout their teenage years. He set each daughter in the mould of his own catchphrase. Prudence was the quiet one, the bluestocking. Prudence, whose self-esteem was low, considered herself plain but when removed from Louise’s proximity her face gained in definition. It was a face one could gaze into with pleasure, like a painting of a Dutch interior.

  Prudence was the only sister to go to university. She led a separate life inside her head and on graduation day it gave her a shock to see her parents in the audience, so alien did they seem in the mock-medieval hall. In their different ways all three sisters grew away from their parents but it was Prudence who was educated out of her background. Though she knew her mother and father were proud of her, the very shininess of their pride showed up their incomprehension of what she so easily took for granted. They had worked so hard to get her there, and in doing so they had lost her.

  She remained a dutiful daughter, however, the peacemaker between her father and her unruly younger sister and the one to whom her parents turned when Louise moved away to her new house in a favoured part of Buckinghamshire. Prudence was the reliable sister, one of life’s baby-sitters, who held the fort whilst others were having fun. If she rebelled against this she did it in such a well-mannered way that nobody noticed. Her parents were too busy with the daily dramas of the business and their two grandchildren. And Maddy, her younger sister, though a loyal ally – she would fight to the death for Prudence – had never got on with her father and absented herself by moving away from home and finally out of the country altogether. Meanwhile Prudence got a job in publishing, bought a flat in Clapham and lived there with her cat for company, and a row of African violets, the spinster’s house-plant, on the window-sill.

  From an early age siblings are assigned their roles and through the years they settle into others’ expectations. Louise was the beautiful earth mother and Pru was the clever one. Maddy was the tomboy. When their mother recollected their childhood the same scene repeated itself. Louise sat in the garden, tucking up her dolls on the lawn. Pru lay on her stomach reading a book. And along charged Maddy, vroom vroom, pushing her toy bulldozer over Pru’s pages, vroom vroom, pushing it over Louise’s dolls. The yells! Maddy was a fierce, sturdy little girl. Sometimes her sisters wondered if her destiny was to act the part of the son her parents had never had, and maybe secretly desired. A truculent girl, she grew up at odds with her surroundings, ‘a square peg in a round hole,’ her father said. Even the name she was given, Madeleine, didn’t fit; she never grew into it and remained Maddy from an early age. Photos showed her with a round face and pudding-bowl haircut, glaring at the camera and standing halfway out of the shot.

  Despite her glowering, somewhat humourless exterior, she was deeply loyal to her sisters and fought with anyone who criticised them. She was a strong girl, good at sport, and won swimming trophies which her father proudly showed visitors. When he did this she grew red-faced and abrupt; her father considered this rude but her sisters knew she was simply embarrassed. When she was sixteen she dropped out of school. Her father was furious; hadn’t he slaved away all these years to get her into the best school in Surrey? But she left anyway and went to live with a group of people in Stockwell who were running an adventure playground. For years she all but disappeared from view. She met Prudence from time to time, but she seldom saw Louise because she disliked her husband. He was a handsome, caddish man called Robert about whom Prudence, too, had mixed feelings but she was more tactful about showing it.

  During the late eighties Maddy travelled a great deal, backpacking, and for a while she lived in Canada where she worked with disadvantaged kids. Though she had never been a student there was a studently feel to her life – footloose, impermanent, at odds with not only her upbringing but with the Tory government, the felling of the rainforests and the conspicuous consumption of many people including Louise’s venture capitalist husband. Her face remained curiously youthful, like a nun’s unmarked by the passage of time. By the age of thirty-three, when she left to work in Africa, she could still be mistaken for a girl of twenty. ‘You must have a picture in your attic,’ said Prudence, who was feeling her age. Maddy, however, didn’t understand; she had never heard of Dorian Gray.

  Gordon, too, was feeling his age. That day in September, his granddaughter’s sixteenth birthday, he and Dorothy were driving down to Buckinghamshire for the lunch party.

  ‘Sixteen,’ he said. ‘Seems only yesterday she was a baby.’

  ‘Seems only yesterday the girls were babies,’ said Dorothy.

  It was true. His daughters were three great creatures, practically middle-aged. It seemed only yesterday that they were playing together in the garden. They seemed to have grown up while his attention was momentarily diverted. It was as if he had nipped out to buy the evening paper and come home to find them women. They had mortgages and opinions. Maddy was in Nigeria, speaking Ibo or whatever, how about that?

  Birthdays always gave him pause for thought. His granddaughter Imogen was sixteen – practically capable of breeding herself. They drove towards Beaconsfield. Dorothy sat beside him, a parcel on her lap. She had bought it, she saw to that side of things.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Wait and see. It goes with her big one, from her parents.’

  ‘Why won’t anybody tell me?’ he whined. He swerved out to overtake a lorry.

  ‘Gordon!’ Dorothy clutched the door handle. ‘It’s a secret.’

  A secret – the story of his life. Girlish giggles behind closed doors. A houseload of females, mother and daughters, closeted together. Mood-swings, whispers. Don’t tell Dad, he wouldn’t understand. He’s just a man.

  ‘Gordon! It’s a thirty-mile zone.’

  Gordon was a restless, impulsive man. He drove too fast, he smoked too much. He was probably a stone overweight if he ever thought to stand on the scales. His wife was always nagging him about his health; he was sixty-five, he should have more sense. But it was his drive, his own blind energy, which had got him where he was today. It was part of the package.

  In fact he resembled a parcel. He was a short, sturdy man – Maddy was the only daughter who had inherited his physique. He was getting bald, no denying that, but the extra weight was all solid, he spent his days on the go, he was as fit as a bull. There was a pugnacious set to his jaw, a forward thrust to his stocky body. But he was a cheerful man, too, a whistler. None of the young lads who worked for him whistled, they didn’t have the tunes any more, but he had a repertoire of standards which used to get on his daughters’ nerves. He was a robust man, he liked a drink and a joke; he was a man of action rather than a thinker and though he grumbled about the business he was happiest haring from one site to another, bawling out orders and bantering with his lads, he was a male animal through and through.

  Women were by and large unfathomable. He should be used to them by now, he had had enough practice, but to tell the truth his daughters had always bemused him. Their preoccupations seemed beyond him, in another dimension entirely. And why couldn’t Prudence and Maddy each find themselves a man, get married and give him some more grandchildren before it was too late?

  His wife, now she was a different matter. He could rely on Dorothy. She twittered and fussed, like all women, she couldn’t tell one end of a car from the other, but her femininity was of the old school, it was comprehensible to him. They had been married for forty-four years, they held no secrets for each other. His childhood sweetheart had become a plump matron of sixty-three; when he looked at her properly, which wasn’t often, it gave him a mild shock. His familiarity with her hadn’t caught up with her age. Her hair, tinted now, was set in the same soft waves she had set it in for years. They were old companions, they had weathered their storms, they understood each other. If people had asked him about his marriage – which they didn’t, it w
as too settled an institution and besides, nobody of his acquaintance talked in that language – if they had asked he would have replied that he and Dot rubbed along, what else was there to say? Conversations about relationships always made him fidget.

  So Gordon Hammond and his wife drove through Beaconsfield in their Mercedes estate car, its back heaped with bags of cement. They passed the Queen Anne homes belonging to captains of industry and TV personalities. Set behind grass verges, the shops in the high street displayed designer clothes and photographs of desirable properties. The prosperity of the place – the width of the street, the manicured lawns! This was the heart of the Home Counties, sealed off from the brutish outside world. Nothing terrible could ever happen here, that was the message. Intruders beware! Wealth breathed from its renovated façades. Soon Gordon would be sitting down at Louise’s table. It made his heart swell, to think that his daughter’s sweet face had gained her entry into this privileged world. She had always been his golden girl, touched by the Good Fairy’s wand. The reward for her beauty was two healthy children, a handsome husband and a life her sisters must surely envy.

  He braked at a zebra crossing. Dorothy jerked forward. In the back of the car, paint cans shifted.

  ‘Gordon! One of these days you’ll give me a heart attack.’ She replaced the package on her lap. ‘Unless you have one yourself first.’

  Six miles from Beaconsfield, in a fold of the hills, lies the village of Wingham Wallace. Set amidst rolling pastures and beechwoods it is in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The village itself was recorded in the Domesday Book and its core remains – a pub, rows of cottages and a church dating from Norman times, with Victorian additions. The beauty of the village has been enhanced by age and wealth, the first needing the second for its own preservation. Within easy commuting distance of London, the place has attracted those high-fliers who wish for rural relief at the end of a demanding day. It is also convenient for Heathrow Airport, a mere thirty minutes’ drive away. As a result of this several of the larger houses are inhabited by people so rarely glimpsed that they have become rumours. The smaller cottages have long since been gentrified, too, and their outhouses converted into garages that are too short for the 5-Series BMWs whose bonnets jut into the lanes and cause the passing traffic to swerve.