Close Relations Read online

  ‘Saw your daughter riding by yesterday,’ said Tim.

  ‘She’s in seventh heaven,’ said Louise. ‘All through school she’s itching to get back on her horse. Not that she ever does anything in lessons anyway. Got any anchovies?’

  He looked at the cans. ‘No, but I could get you some.’ John West Salmon . . . Tuna Chunks in Brine . . . the words danced.

  ‘Remember what it’s like to be in love? Wildly in love?’

  He moved to the counter and wrote anchovies.

  ‘You dream about them? Your heart thumps when you see them?’ She flung a tin of tomatoes into her basket. ‘You get goosepimples just thinking about them?’ She reached up. When she raised her arm, her breasts moved beneath the T-shirt. He looked down quickly, and replaced his biro next to the till.

  ‘Well, that’s what she feels about her horse.’ She pointed to the potatoes. ‘Two pounds please. Mine have got some disgusting sort of blight.’ She laughed. ‘Story of my life.’

  He picked up the potatoes; his fingers felt boneless. He could see her shoes – the scuffed gym shoes she normally wore. Not surprising – she was only coming to the shop. She wouldn’t get dressed up for him. Sometimes, when her London friends were visiting, she wore delectable high-heeled shoes. His favourite were her grey suede ones with the ankle strap.

  ‘Better, really.’

  ‘What is?’ he asked.

  ‘I mean, a horse doesn’t leave the lav seat up or criticise you in front of other people. A horse doesn’t tell you you’re getting fat.’

  ‘You’re not!’ he said loudly.

  She turned to him with a dazzling smile. ‘Tim. You are nice.’ She moved away. Her T-shirt was hitched up on one side; it revealed the shape of her bottom – womanly, round.

  ‘Where’s the peanut butter?’ she asked, looking at the shelves.

  I’m sorry, it’s –’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll get you some.’ He picked up his biro.

  ‘This place used to be humming,’ she said. ‘I got all my gossip here.’

  ‘I don’t know how long we can go on.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ When she frowned, a crease appeared between her eyes.

  ‘Post Office Counters, they’re threatening to close us down.’ He stopped. ‘I shouldn’t bore you with this.’

  ‘It’s not boring –’

  ‘They want to take out a franchise in Tesco.’ He took her money. Her beautiful hands were grubby; she must have been gardening. ‘And now I hear they’re planning to build a Safeway out near the old A40.’

  ‘Well I shan’t go there.’

  ‘Margot’s in a bad way. She wants us to close down.’

  ‘You can’t!’ Louise protested. ‘Coming here’s the most exciting thing I do all day.’

  There was a silence. ‘Is it?’ he asked.

  The doorbell jangled. He jumped. James, her son, came in. His bike lay on the verge outside, its wheels spinning.

  ‘Mum, I’ve got it!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got the job!’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’ Louise hugged him.

  ‘I can start on Monday. It’s a doss. I just walk up and down bunging stuff onto the shelves.’

  ‘Where is this?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Tesco,’ said Jamie.

  There was a pause. Louise picked up her carrier bag. ‘Come on,’ she said to her son. And she left.

  At six o’clock Tim turned the sign to CLOSED. Above him he heard Margot’s heavy footsteps. He paused, listening. Then he went across to the shelf next to the frozen foods. He knelt down and removed the sack of Bar-B-Q Briquettes. He reached behind it, easing his hand around the plastic-wrapped baking trays that nobody had bought for years. He drew out the wallet of photographs.

  You have to be careful with photographs. You must not surrender yourself to gluttony. Upstairs, Margot was breaking up a Toblerone and putting one piece after another into her mouth. Down in the shop, however, Tim practised self-control. He knew, from experience, that if you look at a photograph too often the meaning drains from it. Like sucking the fruit juice from an ice lolly, you are left with frozen water. For this reason he didn’t open the wallet often; he needed to preserve that jolt of joy. This evening, however, inflamed by the first proper conversation he had had with Louise for weeks, he succumbed.

  Tim was known to be a keen photographer. The year before he had won second prize at the village fête for his study of a chaffinch feeding her young, an artistic composition of hinged beaks. It wasn’t unusual for him to be seen on his day off with his Olympus strung around his neck. But this tender hoard was his alone.

  He drew them out slowly, sensuously, delaying it. One snapshot showed Louise letting the dog out of her car. Wearing her padded jacket – it was winter – she held open the door of her Space Cruiser. The dog was a blur, half out of shot. Another, overexposed on a sunny day, showed her at the village pageant. She stood there, maddeningly half-obscured by Arnold Allcock, who ran the pub. Another, shot over her garden wall, was a far view of her kneeling at her lawn-mower. It had broken down. At the time Tim had longed to go to her rescue, but in doing so, of course, he would have had to reveal that he was spying on her in the first place.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Margot’s voice rang out querulously.

  Tim climbed to his feet. ‘Just cashing up,’ he called.

  Prudence was known for her temperance. Her personality had been forged, to some degree, by the personalities of her two sisters. Louise was the vague one; the girl who forgot her homework books, the woman who couldn’t map-read and who collected parking tickets whenever she drove to London. Maddy was the impulsive one who blurted out home truths and who decided, on the spur of the moment, to pack in her job and go to Nigeria. Somebody had to keep things in order and that role had been taken on by Prudence, the sensible one in the middle. When her family was quarrelling, Prudence had learned to keep the peace. She had learned to conceal her own feelings in the cause of general harmony. Having reined in her impulses for so long she sometimes forgot that she had them in the first place.

  For a year she had resisted the urge to see where Stephen lived. She had tried to blank off that part of his life – the part that began when he left the office each day. But the imagination is a powerful organism. It swells and festers, like a boil that has to be lanced. Sometimes she thought that she was going insane. 36 Agincourt Road, Dulwich. She had found the street in her A–Z. She had inspected it so many times that her thumb had blurred the print.

  On Friday she went out to dinner in Camberwell. She hadn’t wanted to go. She knew her hosts had arranged a spare man for her, a fact that would be glaringly obvious both to her and the man in question. They would be seated next to each other and watched, beadily. On the last occasion the man, whose name she had mercifully forgotten, had spent most of the evening telling her all about the wonderful things he could do on his Apple Mac. He had also spilled wine on her dress. Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Hell was sitting next to a man who wasn’t Stephen. When she got home she would be gripped by such loneliness she would feel as if she were dying.

  Sometimes the man asked her out; sometimes she went. The evening would be spent sitting in one of those Italian restaurants near Leicester Square that are listed in What’s On in London, the sort of restaurant nobody she knew ever went to, the sort that still served veal in mushroom sauce. The man would order house plonk and tell her how he never saw his children now his ex had moved to Hull. Panic would rise in her, panic for the whole human race.

  All things considered, she preferred staying at home. She was also becoming engrossed in the gardening woman’s novel, which she had begun reading the night before. But she went to the dinner party in Camberwell, just to prove to herself that she had a life. During the meal she was seized with the certainty that Stephen was ringing her at home. She heard his voice, speaking on the answerphone in her empty flat. ‘She’s gone out for the evening . . . the boys are staying with
friends, I could come over now . . . are you there, Pru? . . . oh my darling . . .’

  On either side of her the dinner guests chattered. They were talking about how often their cars had been broken into – a favoured topic in Camberwell.

  ‘. . . we take the radio out, of course, but they still smash the window . . .’

  ‘. . . last time they took all the tapes except Queen: The Classic Collection. They left it on the roof.’

  ‘How embarrassing! So now your neighbours know you like Queen.’

  ‘I don’t. It belonged to the au pair.’

  Suddenly Prudence saw Stephen so vividly it took away her breath. He had got no reply. He had remembered she was going out to dinner, so he had driven to her flat. At this very moment he was letting himself in with his key . . . he was getting into bed, waiting to surprise her . . .

  As soon as she could politely do so, after the first round of coffee, Prudence said her goodbyes and left. She drove home fast. She jumped the lights; she took a left corner so tightly that she narrowly missed a cyclist. She speeded across Clapham Common and down her road, jamming on her brakes at each hump.

  Her flat was dark. There was a smell in the kitchen; she had forgotten to put out the rubbish.

  It was then that she could bear it no longer. She got back into her car and drove to Dulwich. By the time she arrived at the end of his road it was half past one.

  She switched off the engine and sat there. So this was where he lived. Her stupid heart thumped. It was a street of large, red-brick houses with front drives. They were obscured by trees. The street lamps illuminated the branches; they illuminated the pavement upon which he had walked for the past seven years. It was the strangest sensation to look at a road that was so familiar to him and sickeningly, unknowably familiar to her.

  She turned the car round and drove through the neighbouring streets, acquainting herself with them. She drove past a parade of shops – a Thresher, for his whisky; a place called Animal Crackers where his sons no doubt bought food for their gerbils. She knew about the gerbils. She felt like a thief, crawling at walking pace through the streets. She felt she was betraying him by spying on his life; from now onwards she would have a secret from him. It struck her as unfair: he didn’t have to spy on her, he didn’t have to feel like a criminal.

  Finally she plucked up courage to return to Agincourt Road. She drove past 36 and stopped. The hall light illuminated the number. It was like the other houses – a comfortable, Edwardian, family home. The downstairs windows were dark. Upstairs, however, a light glowed behind a blind. This must be their bedroom – the master bedroom. The next window was plastered with what looked like football stickers. This must be Dirk’s or Pieter’s room. In the driveway two cars were parked – his company car and a battered 2CV that no doubt belonged to his wife.

  Oddly enough, Prudence felt nothing. Now she was here at last, parked outside the place she had imagined so painfully, she felt blank. Thinking about it all these months had sucked the flavour from it. All she felt was that she shouldn’t be here; it was nothing to do with her. It had no connection with the Stephen she knew. The only shock was seeing his Ford Granada parked outside.

  She drove home. It was only when she slotted in the Brahms that the tears came.

  ‘They can’t close it down!’ said Louise. ‘The village will die. It’s more than a shop. It’s where everybody meets. Old ladies who can’t go anywhere else.’

  ‘Market forces, my dear,’ said Robert.

  ‘Don’t market forces me! It’s all right for you, you’re hardly here. He can’t afford to buy the stock, everybody goes to Tesco. Soon there’ll be – oh, a packet of tea-bags and a box of bootlaces. Like Eastern Europe.’

  ‘You been to Eastern Europe lately?’

  ‘You don’t care. Oh why did I marry a Tory!’

  ‘Your father’s more Tory than me. He reads the Daily Telegraph.’

  ‘Well I’m going to keep going there.’

  ‘You can afford to. Know why? Because you’re married to a venture capitalist.’

  ‘God you’re cheap.’

  ‘No. I’m expensive. That’s why –’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  Robert grinned and left. He was off to play tennis.

  Louise was cleaning out the rabbit’s hutch. She dug viciously at the dried droppings in the corner. Boyd, the rabbit, sat hunched in his sodden sleeping compartment. He glared at her. Nobody liked Boyd. He was the last of their dynasty of rabbits, a moth-eaten old buck who had fathered hundreds of babies, fluffy darlings the children had crooned over and then forgotten. Jamie and Imogen had grown out of their pets. Though Imogen’s bedroom was plastered with Save the Whale posters she ignored Boyd; he could be dead for all she knew.

  But Boyd didn’t die. Like many belligerent octogenarians he clung stubbornly to life, refusing to go gently into that good night, sticking it out and making life a misery for anyone who ventured near. Nobody did, except Louise. She scattered sawdust into the hutch. She tried to shunt him into the clean side – she couldn’t pick him up, he was surprisingly powerful and would scratch her arms to ribbons. She pushed his rump. He turned round and bit her. She yelped. Ears flattened, he hunched himself further into his corner. He growled. Boyd was the only rabbit she had ever known who growled. Robert said he was a Pit Bull terrier in disguise.

  Louise, kneeling at the hutch, heard the sound of an engine approaching. That would be the blacksmith. It was Saturday; Imogen had spent most of the morning grooming Skylark and preparing her for this visit, as if preparing a bride for her groom. This past week had transformed Imogen. Where her horse was concerned, there was no problem with droppings. The moment they fell onto the stable floor Imogen darted forward with her spade, her face radiant. She was a young girl in love.

  ‘Do you want sugar – er –’

  ‘Karl.’ The blacksmith nodded.

  Imogen put the mugs on a ledge. The blacksmith flexed himself against Skylark’s back leg. He lifted it up, wedging it between his thighs. With a pair of pliers he wrenched off the old shoe and flung it aside.

  ‘She likes you,’ said Imogen, ‘she usually fidgets in here.’ She gestured around the stable. ‘I ride her for miles. I feel so free! The birds don’t fly away when you’re on a horse. It’s, like, you’re part of an animal too.’

  ‘We are animals,’ he said. ‘Just animals, with clothes on.’

  ‘I suppose we are.’

  ‘Trouble comes when we forget it.’

  She watched him working. He had curly black hair, damp with sweat. He wore a singlet; when he moved, she could see the muscles shift under his skin. She could see the bushy black hair in his armpits. Around his hips was slung a leather apron. He was pressed against the flanks of the horse, peeling off pieces of hoof as if he were peeling the rind off an apple.

  ‘I saw a heron yesterday,’ she said. ‘And a fox.’

  ‘Know Blackthorn Wood? There’s a badger’s sett there.’ Karl had a ripe, local accent. ‘Pal of mine showed me. He’s into wildlife photography.’

  ‘Badgers! Wow!’

  He leaned against the horse, grinning. ‘Yeah. Wow.’ He turned away and hammered in a shoe. ‘Have to go at dusk. They come out and play. Thing about badgers, they don’t lumber around, like folk think. They’re really light and graceful.’

  ‘Wicked!’

  He looked at her. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Ah. Thought you were older.’

  Imogen glowed with pleasure. ‘Really? How old?’

  ‘Then you say something dumb like wicked.’

  Imogen flinched. ‘It just means great.’

  He reached over for his mug and drank a draught of tea. ‘Should enlarge your vocabulary when you grow up. That’s what your mum and dad pay for.’ He put back the mug and reached into his box of tools. ‘Bet you go to private school, right?’

  ‘It’s not my fault! I didn’t want to go. Anyway, I hate school. I’m hop
eless at everything except netball.’

  He grinned. ‘Don’t get angry with me. Save it for your parents.’

  She smiled at him. He didn’t notice; he pulled Skylark’s leg between his, braced himself against her and started filing the hoof.

  ‘Where exactly is this badger’s sett?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe I’ll show you.’

  ‘Do I have to get older first?’

  He looked up at her, under his oily hair, and grinned.

  Louise watched the van drive away. Beside her, Imogen rinsed out the mugs.

  ‘Mmm, very Lawrencian.’ Louise leered. ‘He can take my shoes off any day.’

  ‘Mum! Don’t be disgusting.’

  Louise laughed. ‘It doesn’t stop at forty, you know.’

  Stephen was trying to read a manuscript. Kaatya was hauling the furniture about. She was a volatile, black-haired woman. Tonight she was dressed in leggings with a child’s skirt over them, and a shrunken jumper on top. Her perspex earrings rattled. She glared at one of her collages, hung on the wall. She took it down. Then she yanked an armchair across the room.

  ‘Kaatya, come and sit down,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I don’t like this here!’

  ‘You liked it once.’

  She pulled the coffee table across the floor. ‘No, you did.’

  ‘Kaatya!’

  She pushed the coffee table against the chair. ‘Don’t mind me. Just read your intellectual book.’

  ‘Actually, it’s a poorly constructed, derivative, and totally unconvincing little thriller by that man you fancy on Europe Tonight. Just because a chap can read an autocue he thinks he can write like García Marquez.’

  She yanked the table back. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’