Close Relations Read online

  At its heart, however, this is still a real community inhabited by real people. Pebble-dashed council houses prove this, and bunches of youths who gather at night in the bus shelter, shifting restlessly like heifers, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. There is still a primary school – just – and a store-cum-post office run by a man called Tim, who does all the work, and his depressed wife Margot. And how could the rich live without the local people to service their households, cleaning and gardening and minding the place when they are away in the Caribbean?

  On Sundays the church is well-attended, mainly by women with carrying voices and organisational skills who make jam and who campaigned successfully against a proposed development of starter homes which would have ruined the views and brought down the property prices. The vicar has long since moved into the next village; he now has five parishes in his care and the vicarage itself was sold back in the sixties. In a village of desirable properties it is one of the most enchanting – a Georgian house burdened with wistaria, grand but not imposingly so, with sunny rooms overlooking a walled garden and a view of the Chiltern Hills from the master bedroom. Successive owners have improved the place, adding en suite bathrooms, a Smallbone kitchen and that essential accessory of the seventies, a conservatory. When Robert and Louise moved here with their children, six years ago, there were no more improvements to be made. This suited Robert. He hated DIY and said he had better things to do on a Sunday than stand on a ladder covered with dust.

  This particular Sunday was their daughter Imogen’s birthday. It was one of those early autumn days that already possess their own nostalgia; like petals packed into a bud, the dewy garden held within itself the future memories of a perfect day – the sort that makes England in general, and Wingham Wallace in particular, a satisfactory place to live. Robert’s and Louise’s visitors, of which there were many, remarked how it always seemed sunny at the Old Vicarage, as if one of Louise’s many skills was to create her own weather for her guests.

  Today’s lunch was to be a family occasion – Louise’s parents and her sister Prudence. Unaided by her adolescent children she was cooking the meal. She was hampered by the dog, an overweight labrador called Monty, who lumbered to his feet whenever she moved and who stood in front of the kitchen units, strings of saliva hanging from his jowls, whining as she unleafed the salami from its wrapping paper.

  Louise was forty-two and still beautiful. In fact age had improved her, revealing the bone structure beneath her soft face. Twenty years of marriage had also strengthened her character, sharpening the edges that had been blurred when she was younger. Robert was a demanding husband, easily bored. He expected her to amuse him and to be a sophisticated hostess when their guests came to stay. She had always wanted to please him – too much, according to her sisters. They suspected that deep down she felt that her background and intellect were inferior to his and that she had to stay in trim, mentally and physically, to keep up with him. They despised this lack of self-confidence, this female compliance. Didn’t Robert realise how lucky he was to have her?

  Louise carried some muddy lettuces in from the garden. Her son had appeared. His face was bleary with sleep. He leaned against the sink eating a bowl of Nutty Cinnamon Shapes.

  ‘Jamie, it’s twelve o’clock.’

  He raised one eyebrow. It was a new mannerism, caught from his father. ‘Chill, Ma.’

  ‘They’ll be here in a minute.’

  ‘It’s only Granny and Grandad.’ His withering tone, too, resembled his father’s voice. She hoped that he wasn’t growing up to be a snob. Jamie was eighteen. Next year he was going to university. He was tall and bony, with thick fair hair. Judging by the number of phone calls for him he was becoming attractive to girls. This wasn’t improving his character. They spoiled him. One would have imagined that in these post-feminist times this would be a thing of the past. But then Louise had spoiled her son too. Her sisters had always accused her of being slavish with men.

  ‘Budge up,’ she said, dumping the lettuces in the sink.

  Imogen came in, yawning. ‘Where’s my black top?’

  ‘Is nobody going to help me?’ asked Louise.

  ‘It’s my birthday!’

  Jamie, still eating, sauntered away into the living room. Sound bloomed from the TV.

  ‘Why does he always leave the room when I come into it?’ asked Louise.

  ‘Because he thinks you’re boring.’

  ‘Gap year my foot. Gap from what?’ She pointed to the potatoes. ‘Scrape these, will you?’

  ‘That’s sexist. What about Jamie?’

  ‘He’s not here. Where’s your dad?’

  ‘He went to buy some lemons.’

  ‘That was hours ago.’ Louise thought: the trouble with the country was that you spent the whole time running out of things and the rest of the time in the car.

  Her daughter popped a slice of salami into her mouth and wandered off. She paused to pat the dog. ‘How’s my sweetie today?’ she crooned. It often struck Louise that her children were nicer to their pets than they were to her. Yet neither the dog nor the rabbits had ever lifted a finger to help them, they had never been bored rigid by playing card games with them, nor had they nursed them through the night. Imogen had a sugary voice that she only used with Monty. When Louise pointed this out Imogen showed no surprise. ‘But he’s so sweet,’ she said. ‘So if I rolled on the floor with my legs in the air you’d be nice to me?’ asked Louise.

  Imogen was a small, wiry girl. Her hair was dark, like her father’s, but she hadn’t inherited his good looks. The person she most resembled was Aunty Maddy, a fact that her brother pointed out when he wanted to upset her. Like Aunty Maddy she was no intellectual; she was a direct, loyal girl whose slow responses irritated her father and caused Louise to jump to her defence. Robert wanted dazzling children. When Louise pointed out that success could be measured in quieter, more internal ways – didn’t niceness matter? – he said that niceness was the most tepid word in the English language and should be banned. Besides, Imogen was never nice to him.

  Upstairs, Louise brushed her hair. The arrival of her parents always filled her with trepidation. She could trust neither of the men to behave themselves; they brought out the worst in each other. Her father’s pride in her and her lifestyle made him look foolish and Robert, who had a cruel streak, goaded him on, much to Louise’s and her mother’s embarrassment. Gordon was a simple soul. He was putty in his son-in-law’s hands and became a caricature of himself – legs akimbo, rubbing his hands like a north country mayor in a play by J. B. Priestley. Louise despised him for this and then hated herself for despising him; she hated Robert turning her father into an object for his own amusement and hated herself more for finding it amusing. For her husband could always make her laugh.

  It was a quarter to one. Louise went downstairs. Where was Robert? Trust him to disappear when she needed him most. He would breeze in, late; he was never late for his friends, only for her parents. Sometimes she suspected that he was jealous of her family. He had no brothers or sisters. He had been brought up in some style, a lonely little boy on whom lavish amounts of money were spent but who was shamefully neglected. His mother had been too busy marrying her various husbands to take any notice of her son, who had been sent off to boarding school at the age of four. When Louise and Robert were quarrelling he brought up this fact, embellishing it with pitiful descriptions of himself sobbing in the dormitory, clutching a sodden teddy bear. This always did the trick, reducing Louise to tears. The bastard.

  There were two composers who made Prudence cry: Brahms and Schubert. Other composers could, with certain passages – Bach, during the slow movement of his double violin concerto, the violins soaring up and entwining, making love to each other with such tenderness it seemed they must break. It was Schubert and Brahms, however, who spoke to her heart. Not the symphonies – Prudence found symphonies windy and self-important, there was a look-at-me feeling about a symphony. She was a chamber music
person; there was a spareness and precision about a string quartet that suited her. Prudence needed order. It was essential to her life, it was the structure upon which she depended.

  As she drove out of London the road blurred. Brahms was playing – her cassette of the Piano Quartet No 2. On their first date together she had taken Stephen to a lunchtime concert at St John’s, Smith Square. The Brahms had been played then, the Lindsay Quartet had performed it. For months afterwards whenever she read the name Lindsay she had felt a foolish jolt of electricity. During the concert she and Stephen hadn’t touched each other. She had kept her hands in her lap, resting on her handbag, like a dowager, but she had felt the heat of Stephen down her right side. Her skin had been drawn towards the magnet of his shoulder and his thigh. It was the strangest sensation, as if her soul were being removed into his body.

  Later, when the whole thing had started, he said that he had felt it too. They had lain in bed, and with the luxuriousness of all new lovers they had gone back over the preceding weeks, charting their progression into intimacy moment by moment. ‘Did you feel that then, really?’ ‘What about that time when we bumped into each other next to the photocopier?’ They described each other’s clothing – ‘You were wearing your white blouse’ – all those months of working together in the office were rerun, their own tender videotape, as they lay under her duvet. Hindsight made their most mundane conversations charged with significance. It was during the Brahms, he said, that he had felt his soul removing itself from his wife and finding its home in Prudence.

  Her Metro was a mess. Her box of Kleenex was buried under a tea-towel, a box of fisherman’s lozenges (empty) and a packet of Silk Cut (also empty). She pulled out a tissue and wiped her nose. People’s cars are often a surprise. Those who lead orderly lives can have chaotic vehicles, and vice versa. Those whose lives are disintegrating can drive around in spotless cars smelling of air freshener, with a single hardback road atlas on the back seat. Cars, supposedly an extension of our personalities, in fact reveal something more interesting – the contradictions that lie within us all. Prudence kept her flat tidy but in her car she became a different person, liberated and powerful, in control of a destiny which in normal life eluded her. She drove fast too – fast and skilfully. Yet she looked like the sort of woman who bicycled around London with a basket full of Kit-e-Kat. Which she did do, too.

  Stephen was her editorial director. He had a wife, a Dutch woman called Kaatya. He also had two sons. Prudence’s affair with him, conducted for the most part with little physical contact, at lunchtimes, had been going on for a year. Prudence wasn’t the sort of woman who fell in love with other people’s husbands. The revelation of her own capacity for deceit had been one of the more painful experiences of the past twelve months. She drove along the fast lane of the M40; she turned up the Brahms. Stephen had given it to her two days earlier. ‘Our first anniversary,’ he had said, lifting her chin towards his face.

  She rummaged for a cigarette and lit it. She was the only Hammond sister who smoked though she hid the fact, out of some vestigial childish cowardice, from her parents. She didn’t look like a smoker; she wore navy-blue cardigans to work, white blouses, flat shoes. It surprised some of her authors when she took them out to lunch and lit up. She smoked; she committed adultery. She thought how none of us are what we seem. Explore deeper and a person disintegrates, just as newsprint, when viewed close-up, disintegrates into tiny dots. How could you trust a word when it was just a collection of spots? Yet her life consisted of working with words, she had to believe in them.

  At times she believed that she only existed in other people’s expectations of her. When she was a child, for instance, her parents had assembled the dots to create Prudence, the nice, steady sister, the middle one, the swot. These dots clotted together to become her personality. But she knew better. She knew that she was a shifting collection of atoms trying to shape themselves out of chaos. Stephen didn’t suspect this; neither did her sisters. Only her cat knew the truth; she could see it in his eyes.

  The front of the Old Vicarage was knotted with wistaria. It had been planted many years ago, before the arrival of Robert and Louise. Its thick branches were twisted around each other like lovemaking limbs; their marriage had lasted so long that nobody could prise them apart, even if they had thought to do so. To the right of the vicarage rose the church, St Bartholomew. In its graveyard, beneath the silence of the yew trees, stood headstones. They slanted this way and that, as if blown on by the breath of God. Depending on the mood of the onlooker the mellow brick house and the ancient place of burial suggested either the permanence of love or its transitoriness.

  Louise, hearing cars arriving, stepped out of the front door. Later, months later, she remembered that moment. A leaf from the wistaria spiralled down in front of her and came to rest on the gravel. She looked up, beyond the knotted limbs of the trunk. Did it have some sort of blight? The leaves were dying already; they usually didn’t fall until October.

  It was five to one. The cars arrived – her parents’ estate car followed by Robert’s BMW. They stopped in the driveway. As they did so Prudence’s car appeared along the lane and drove through the gates. Louise hurried to greet them.

  ‘Hello!’ called her mother. ‘We’ve all come together.’

  ‘Glad some people do.’ Robert grinned at his wife. ‘Just kidding.’ He shook Gordon’s hand and kissed his mother-in-law.

  Gordon pointed to the house. ‘Should get that guttering seen to.’

  ‘Gordon –’ Dorothy said.

  Robert smiled. ‘Want to fix it while we’re having lunch?’

  ‘Don’t, love,’ said Dorothy. ‘He will.’

  ‘One of my lads lives out this way. I’ll get him to drop by –’

  ‘Come on!’ said Robert.

  Robert carried two Tesco bags. A new superstore had opened four miles away. Though he had only gone out for some lemons he had missed the village shop, which only opened briefly on Sundays, and had driven to Tesco with the pleasant sensation that he was both doing his duty and skiving off helping with lunch. Once in the superstore he had succumbed to impulse buys, he was a man who seldom resisted temptation. He had picked up exotic, whiskery fruits from Penang and a bottle of such extra-virgin olive oil that he had practically remortgaged his house to buy it. He had headed to the wine section where he had been seduced into buying various obscure New Zealand vintages. How could such a boring country produce such interesting wines? Maybe, once they had finished polishing their Vauxhalls and filling in their crossword puzzles, they had nothing better to do. Then he had lingered at the magazine rack and leafed through the more lurid Sunday tabloids, admiring the girls’ breasts and the catastrophic lives of lottery winners.

  Robert went into the house with his parents-in-law. Louise paused with Prudence. She looked at her sister’s reddened eyes.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Blame it on Brahms,’ said Prudence.

  ‘Only Brahms?’ Louise hated it when Prudence cried; she did it so seldom. Prudence was the one she relied on, who would always be there. The trouble was, other people thought so too.

  ‘How’s everything with . . . you know?’ she asked.

  ‘Same as ever.’

  ‘That’s why you look so awful.’ Louise accompanied her to the front door. ‘Listen, I don’t want to sound like an older sister but shouldn’t you –’

  ‘No.’

  Louise looked down the hallway. Sunlight slanted onto the tiles; it shone onto the rear portion of Monty as he wagged his tail, greeting the guests. A champagne cork popped; Imogen laughed.

  Louise stood there, seeing it through her sister’s eyes. She felt a wave of hatred for Stephen, a man she had never met, for Prudence kept him a secret and their parents didn’t even know about his existence. Stephen wasn’t entirely to blame, of course, but it is easier to put the responsibility onto somebody unknown, particularly if he is so visibly making your sister unhappy.

  The
dining room was square and masculine. Its french windows opened into the conservatory where geraniums glowed blood-red in the sunshine. There was a marble fireplace; there was a grandfather clock and a large mahogany table which Robert had inherited from one of his uncles. They ate salami and tinned artichokes, Imogen’s favourite starter. Robert poured out more champagne. He was a generous host; he looked at home in this room, doling out wine and chatting, a man at ease with himself and his possessions. Today he wore a striped silk shirt from Tumbull and Asser and a plum-coloured cravat; he looked exactly what he was – a City whiz-kid who had loosened up for the weekend.

  ‘So how’re you doing, Pru?’ he asked. ‘How’s the literary scene. Discovered any geniuses?’

  ‘Well, I’m working on a book called My Favourite Microwave Recipes. It’s written by that newscaster, what’s his name.’

  ‘Yeah, and really written by you. Why don’t you tell them? I would.’

  ‘It’s what I’m paid for.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wimp,’ said Robert. ‘You’re wasted in that place. You should be managing director by now.’

  Prudence shrugged. She was immune to Robert’s flattery; to his attractions too. He had a handsome, wolfish face and thick black hair. He was a small man – it always surprised her that he was shorter than Louise. At some point in his childhood he had contracted TB and spent months languishing in bed, that was probably the reason. Like many small men he had grown up to be intensely competitive. He played tennis in a London club, thrashing what he called merchant wankers and boasting about it afterwards to Louise. Prudence was both fascinated and repulsed by his hairiness – dense black hairs on his slender arms. She pictured him in bed with Louise, gripping her like a monkey. When other people were talking a muscle twitched in his jaw; there was a restlessness about him, an impatience to be amused. Next to him Prudence, in her floral dress, felt like a head teacher.