We Are Family

by Emlyn Rees

  She did.

  The church was already packed with mourners by the time Sam and Rachel arrived. Sam didn’t stop to look at the mostly middle-aged, mostly leathery, tanned faces of the affluent men and women who sat silently and respectfully in the crowded rows of seats, waiting for the service to begin. Instead, he hurried Claire down the aisle and ushered her in beside Rachel on the long oak pew reserved for close family at the front.

  Claire kissed her grandmother, whispering into her ear, and Sam reached across and touched Rachel’s hand. Static raindrops glistened like sequins on her drying hat and coat.

  Sam sat and stared at Tony’s unadorned wooden coffin. Elaborate flower arrangements were stacked all around and at its side was the cast-iron lectern, from behind which Sam would soon be doing his reading.

  On a parallel pew across the aisle from Sam sat two identical male twins, in their early fifties. Both of them stared fixedly ahead. Sam assumed they were Tony’s half-brothers, who lived in Canada, and with whom Sam wasn’t acquainted, since Tony had lost touch with them over the years.

  In all the time Sam had known him, Tony had pointedly never spoken about his youth. Like it was something he’d wanted buried and forgotten.

  The organ swelled with the sound of Bach and Sam stared back at the coffin. Outside, the thunder rolled.

  This was the first funeral Sam had attended which had really meant anything to him, the others having been for distant relatives whom he’d barely known. Sam was lucky, in that both of his parents were still alive and well, playing their golf, watching their TV soaps and eating their microwaved TV dinners. The same went for his brother, Tom, who’d moved to be with his boyfriend in Australia six years before. His grandparents, too, were happy and well.

  The cloying scent of lilies reached Sam’s nostrils. He shivered. He could hardly stomach the thought that Tony – a true friend who’d trusted him and taught him so much – was simply no longer here. For the first time since he’d heard the news of Tony’s death, Sam felt like he was going to cry.

  He thought of Archie, of how readily he’d give his life to protect him. The bond between them was like iron, forged a second after Claire had told Sam she was pregnant, and a second before he’d been about to tell her that their relationship was at an end.

  As Claire had wrapped her arms around him and pressed her belly up against his, he’d found himself consumed with thoughts of the child inside. How could he start a new life somewhere else with X, when a new life, created by him and reliant on him, had already begun to grow here?

  With each passing second, he’d felt his will deserting him. Until, finally, he’d said nothing at all.

  And he’d been right, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he been right to cease all contact with X? To give up the other life they might have shared together so that he could be a father to his son? Anything else was an impossible dream, a fantasy constructed away from the currents and tides of the real world.

  That’s what he’d told himself as he’d moved with Claire into their new Portals Nous home. And that’s what he’d continued telling himself. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Until, eventually, he’d come to believe it as truth.

  He glanced across at Claire now. This was his reality, this woman who’d borne him his child, this woman to whom he’d tried to be a better husband, and to whom, he’d vowed to himself, he’d stay faithful from now on.

  Things weren’t perfect between them, he knew. He thought she’d been unfaithful to him as well, just over a year ago, although he had no proof. He’d seen her with another, younger, handsome man, lunching in the La Boveda bar in Palma. When he’d got home from work that night, Claire had lied to him and told him she’d been out on her best friend Sadie’s boat all day. On another occasion, Sam had come home early and seen the same man leaving their apartment building and flagging down a taxi. But Sam had never challenged Claire. After what he’d done himself, he’d felt he hadn’t the right.

  The organ wheezed to a stop and the vicar took his place at the lectern. Rain beat against the stained-glass windows and the service began.

  When Sam’s turn came to speak, he walked to the lectern and faced the congregation. He took a piece of paper from his inside pocket and unfolded it. Printed on it in his own meticulous handwriting was a poem by Christina Rossetti, which Tony had known off by heart.

  Sam read it through in his mind, memorising it as he did:

  My heart is like a singing bird

  Whose nest is in a watered shoot;

  My heart is like an apple-tree

  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

  My heart is like a rainbow shell

  That paddles in a halcyon sea;

  My heart is gladder than all these

  Because my love is come to me.

  He then returned the piece of paper to his jacket pocket, cleared his throat and looked up at the pew he’d just left. He’d meant to look at Rachel Glover as he started to recite the poem, to look at her as if she were the only woman in the universe, to make the poem truly hers as he read it out loud.

  Instead, he found himself looking at X. His Ex. The other woman, the woman he’d fallen in love with – thought he’d fallen in love with – in less than three weeks in southern France in the summer of 2000.

  Only now – seeing her here in the flesh, sitting between Nick and Christopher, almost close enough to reach out and touch – he no longer thought of her as X at all. But as Laurie, Laurie Vale, the woman he’d once promised his life to, but had then betrayed.

  Chapter VI

  Stepmouth, March 1953

  ‘Ouch!’ said Rachel, as the pin pricked the back of her knee.

  ‘Hold still,’ mumbled Laurel Vale, removing the last pin from between her lips.

  Rachel was standing on a chair in the back parlour behind the shop. It was dark outside, the yellow glass lampshade hanging on gold chains from the ceiling casting a warm light over the small room. A coal hissed and slipped in the small grate as the announcement of the evening concert from the BBC crackled from the radio on the brown sideboard.

  From where Rachel was standing, she could see the cobwebs blowing in the draught towards the two old gas masks on top of the cupboard. A layer of dust peppered the top of the portrait of the deceased King on the wall and the top of the oval wooden mirror. Rachel supposed that she really ought to step up her cleaning efforts, before Bill noticed the dust, too. Still, she thought, she wouldn’t have seen it unless she’d been standing on a chair and she could probably get away with it until her mother instigated the annual spring clean, which was bound to happen at the start of April.

  Rachel glanced down. Laurel Vale sat below her in her wheelchair wearing her grey housecoat over her usual black day dress. Her hair was tied up in a pink-and-purple silk scarf and she bent over, peering intently through her horn-rimmed glasses, as she carefully pinned up the hem of Rachel’s new dress. Next to her, the leaf was pulled out on the table to accommodate the new electric Singer sewing machine and several empty Oxo tins which were stuffed with bobbins, cottons, brightly coloured ribbons, buttons and bits of lace. Offcuts of the red material of Rachel’s new dress had scattered on to the brown lino, like fallen blossom.

  Rachel lifted her wrist to her nose to see if she could still smell the dab of rosewater scent she’d borrowed from Anne earlier, but it had faded. Instead, she got a whiff of the suet pudding and boiled cabbage supper that she and her mother had pretended to enjoy. She looked down at the paper pattern sleeve on the table and the picture of the model on the front, standing with her arms akimbo to accentuate her tiny waist. She looked as if she didn’t have a care in the world and Rachel tried to replicate the pose, practising a sunny smile in the top of the mirror opposite.

  Her mother’s firm, warm hands were on her legs in an instant, pivoting her on the chair, so that she turned and faced the other wall, as the sonorous tones of a Beethoven symphony started on the radio. On the shelf above the door to the
hall was a row of brass monkeys, which had once been her grandfather’s. On the other wall was an oversized dresser stacked with the best china plates, and her mother’s collection of Dickens novels, none of which Rachel had read herself, in spite of her mother’s encouragement. She dreaded to think what her mother would say if she knew that under Rachel’s pillow was Forever Amber, the racy novel that was doing the rounds in school.

  Her mother sat back. ‘There.’

  Freed at last, Rachel jumped down from the chair and wriggled her hips, so that the dress swished about her knees.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked, plunging her hands into the front pockets on the skirt and jiving around on the tiny rag rug.

  Her mother pulled the tape measure from around her neck and laughed. She took off her glasses and laid them on the table. She looked years younger without them on. Even so, her curly black hair peeping out from under the scarf was flecked with grey at her temples and there were deep lines around her soft brown eyes. Only her neck showed that she was still a woman in her prime. It was long, smooth and proud and always housed a simple silver cross, which she often held in her fingers like a talisman.

  Rachel looked down at her pitifully flat chest. She tutted. ‘I wish I was curvy.’

  ‘You’re fine as you are,’ said Rachel’s mother curling up the tape measure with her deft fingers.

  ‘I look like a boy.’

  Laurel Vale closed her eyes and shook her head in a familiar gesture of exasperation. She had a thick line between her eyebrows, which deepened now as she fixed Rachel with one of her knowing looks.

  ‘We’re given what we’re given,’ she said. ‘Don’t you go wishing for anything different. You’ve got your grandmother’s beautiful legs. What more do you want?’

  Rachel looked down at her own legs and then couldn’t help glance at her mother’s legs, motionless beneath the tartan shawl over her knees. She too had once had fine legs – still did, only they didn’t work.

  It baffled Rachel that her mother’s legs looked so normal and yet she couldn’t move them at all. At first, Rachel had secretly hoped that her mother was faking. That she’d given up the will to move deliberately. To make some kind of statement.

  But that had just been childish fantasy. Her mother had a will of iron and the pride of a lioness. There was nothing false in her silent anguish when Rachel supported her up the stairs every night to her bed. She knew that her mother hated relying on her daughter. But her mother coped with such strength and dignity that sometimes Rachel forgot that she was disabled at all. Compared to most people, her mother seemed astonishingly abled.

  ‘Pearl’s got new stockings,’ Rachel said.

  ‘I can’t afford new stockings this month.’

  ‘Then will you paint lines down the back on them for me?’ Rachel begged, looking over her shoulder at her mother, sticking out a freckly white calf towards her. ‘Anne’s mother did for her.’

  ‘I don’t care what Anne’s mother did. You’re not going out looking like a . . .’ Rachel looked at her mother, daring her to swear, or say a bad word. But she knew she couldn’t. ‘. . . you-know-what,’ she continued. ‘Now hop it. Out of that dress so that I can stitch it while you’re in the bath.’

  Rachel peered through the crack in the doorway to where the tin bath was set up by the range in the kitchen. She knew that as soon as she went in there, she’d be able to see her breath.

  ‘Can’t we put the bath in here? It’s so much warmer.’

  ‘No.’

  It was one of her mother’s special ‘no’s’. The no of the boss of the household. The no that meant no without an explanation needed, or given.

  In one deft move, her mother had turned round her chair and had pushed open the door and slipped down the ramp into the kitchen. A blast of cold air hit Rachel’s legs. She watched her mother lift down the heavy kettle from the range and expertly pour it into the tin bath.

  ‘Come on. And look lively about it,’ she said from inside a cloud of steam, as Rachel slipped out of the dress and laid it carefully over the back of the chair. ‘Before your brother comes in and wants his turn.’

  There was no arguing with her mother. Friday night was bath night and Laurel Vale insisted on hygiene in her household. Rachel wondered, if just once, her mother could drop the routine she lived by.

  Rachel reluctantly followed her into the kitchen, shivering.

  ‘Shall I wash your hair?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I’ll do it myself,’ Rachel said, feeling self-conscious. She didn’t like her mother hovering over her as if she were still a child.

  Her mother nodded as she wheeled away. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’

  ‘Mum,’ Rachel called out after her. ‘Thanks for my dress. It’s lovely.’

  Her mother turned in the half-light, her face sad. ‘I wish your father could see you all grown up,’ she said.

  Considering that the absence of her father was such a big issue in their household, Rachel found it ironic that she couldn’t remember his presence at all. She would never tell Bill or her mother, but over the years since Thomas Vale’s departure, the more Rachel studied the photograph on the lace tablecloth by her mother’s tall mahogany bed, the further away he seemed. In the end, she accepted that this stiff black-and-white image of her father was almost the sum total of her memory.

  She had no doubt (her mother had told her often enough) that her father had loved her, but she had no evidence to prove it – no keepsake, or note, no lock of hair or trinket that she could claim for herself. She knew she ought to miss him more and that it was a terrible thing to lose a parent, but her mother did enough missing for both of them. Rachel had decided long ago that she might as well leave all the grieving to her mother and concentrate on living. After all, there was enough retrospection in her life and, for Rachel, the future was much more intriguing.

  She wasn’t going to tell anyone – not even her best friends, Anne and Pearl, about her plans, but Rachel had already mapped out her future: long-distance travel (Africa particularly appealed), an extremely exciting love affair with someone exotic and unusual (a lavish marriage would follow), unlimited wealth (at the very least she would need a big town house and a chauffeur-driven car) and, most importantly, Rachel would be distinguished in her own right.

  She’d read enough about Florence Nightingale and Emily Pankhurst to know that she had more in common with these types of women, than with the stoical domestic types her mother knew in the local WI. No, she thought, interlacing her fingers and stretching her lean arms away from her, a life of cooking three meals a day and scrubbing the front porch was not for her. If she had her way, people would cook and clean for her.

  Rachel wallowed in the bathwater, letting the Lifebuoy soap dissolve in her hands. She knew that it would annoy Bill to find the water cloudy and the soap a slimy mess, but she was far too busy daydreaming to care. One day she would live in a house with a bathroom of her own, with big gold taps and mirrors all around. She had no idea how she would achieve it, but Rachel knew that she would. She had to. Bill may be cut out for running the shop and being a good Stepmouth boy, but Rachel certainly knew she wasn’t.

  And she knew that nothing was ever going to change around here. She’d assumed after her father’s death, even before the trial, that they would all move away and start afresh. She’d assumed that people would treat them as outcasts. That every time they came into the shop, they’d be reminded of what had happened there. That the Vales would be for ever tainted.

  But instead her mother had used the pittance that her father had left them all to refurbish, repaint and secure the shop. That’s when her obsession with the locks had started. Three on the front door, three on the back, two on each window. She’d made the shop into a fortress safer than the Bank of England. And once she was satisfied that they’d never be broken into again, with the keys sounding like warning bells on the iron loop on her belt, she’d declared that it would be business as usual. She�
��d defied anyone to baulk at her will, or to give her sympathy, as if her spirit and sheer force of will could wipe away what had happened.

  And she’d succeeded. After a while, Laurel Vale’s determination that things should carry on as if nothing had happened, meant that they did. If people thought they were coming into the scene of a crime when they entered the shop at first, over time, they’d seemed to forget. With the sheer repetition of the daily routine, of the shop opening and closing, of the same customers coming and going, it was as if a thin layer of the tissue paper her mother used to wrap up the best china was laid again and again upon the shop, until, over time, the tragedy was dampened down, was muffled by the weight of normality.

  They never talked about it at home. It was there, of course, the aftermath of what had happened, but it was all under the surface. By day, her mother was cheerful and polite in the shop, by night, once the supper was over and the dishes cleared, she went to her room.

  And that was when Rachel felt the weight of her mother’s private grief. There, in the sound of muffled crying and fervent prayers behind her mother’s locked bedroom door. There in the row of black dresses that hung on the washing line. It was there in the heavy, suffocating silence on the anniversary of her father’s death, or his birthday, or their wedding anniversary. There, in the row of her mother’s religious tapestries framed in the dark upstairs hallway all dedicated to the loving memory of Thomas Vale.

  Sometimes Rachel longed to find a way to purge all the grief out of her mother and the anger out of Bill. She wished that they could be set free, that just for once they could be truly happy. But it would never happen. In her darker moods, Rachel thought that Bill and her mother deserved each other. Her mother wanted to hold on to her grief and Bill wanted to stay impudently angry. It made them who they were. Well, one thing was for certain: she was different from them both.

  Rachel heard the back door banging, then she heard Bill call out: ‘I’m home.’