‘Really?’ Cassie exclaimed, genuinely amazed. ‘Whatever for?’
‘For standing close to you… close enough to smell your lemony hair and see the dark flecks in your wondrous blue eyes.’
‘Oh, please.’ She let out a short laugh, diverted from her unhappiness but also faintly alarmed. ‘Well, Keith is one thing we won't have to worry about any more, judging by how well the conversation went with Charlie. He's up to the job, isn't he? It would be too awful to offload him on to Ashley House if he wasn't.’
‘Oh, he'll be good,’ Stephen assured her, turning off the bedside light and pulling her back into his arms. ‘His dad was a joiner – Keith packed in school to be an apprentice to him. I'm sure he'll be fine.’
‘Good.’ Cassie wriggled into a comfortable position, closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘Stephen?’
‘Hm?’
‘I was thinking… if this goes on, the not getting pregnant, I'd like to see a doctor… maybe even look into the possibility of IVF
He was silent for so long that Cassie thought he might have fallen asleep. ‘Okay, baby, okay,’ he murmured at last, reaching up and stroking the wisps of hair off her face. ‘Anything for you. Anything.’
Anything for us, she thought, but did not say because it was a momentous thing to have asked and he had acquiesced so easily.
Roland altered the position of his Anglepoise lamp so that it was shining more directly on to the canvas and took a step backwards to study his picture. He had painted the background the day before – a thick black at the bottom graduating to midnight blue at the top. Now he was working colours on to it, yellows mainly, and some red, all so heavily applied that the paint sat in coils and ripples, as densely textured as wet sand. He had pulled back the curtains at the window next to the easel, even though it was well past midnight and the ivory crescent moon had no power to illuminate anything but the dusty streaks of cloud crossing its face.
He was painting because he couldn't sleep, which in itself wasn't unusual. Roland often found that crawling into bed and turning the light out had a stimulating rather than relaxing effect on his mind, as if it had been waiting for just such a time to address the issues swimming round his subconscious. Normally he just lay there and let it pass or, if that didn't work, flicked on his table-lamp and read until his eyes closed of their own accord. Tonight, however, every time he shut his eyes, colours had crowded in, jostling for space like pieces of a jigsaw demanding assembly.
Yawning hard, Roland had pulled on tracksuit bottoms and a jumper, rubbed the chill from his hands, then started to squeeze coils of paint on to one of the wooden boards propped next to the end of his bed. With the house so quiet – the gurgle of the central heating had long since subsided – and the darkness outside, he had at first felt almost too self-conscious to work. It was as if he was watching himself perform some cheap charade of inspiration, the sleepless artist, working into the small hours, alone in his garret, when in fact he was a recently turned sixteen-year-old schoolboy who was seeing colours probably because they were marginally less confusing than some of the more literal images pressing for his attention. Images like maths coursework – how many equations were there for fitting squares into rectangles and triangles into pyramids? – and the freezing tedium of rugby, running only to keep warm, hoping the ball would never come his way, and Carl Summers, the first-fifteen captain, with his big, square body and staring eyes: he couldn't pass Roland without a look, a tease and a nudge, but it was all gently done, so gently that Roland had wondered – hoped – that underneath the banter and joshing there lurked… what? Genuine interest? Mutual understanding? The very thought made Roland blush. As well as heading the rugby team Carl was head boy – sporty, clever, popular and as burly as a thirty-year-old. Girls from year nine upwards sighed when he passed them in the corridor. It was absurd to entertain hopes of friendship with such a creature – absurd, yet so appealing that Roland couldn't stop thinking about it.
He picked up a fresh brush and began to stab dashes of brown and orange among the yellow. The picture was of his mother, he decided, all her colour and gloom, the shining bits and the messy edges – all those disparate parts that, he was beginning to realize, constituted the business of being human. Certainly he was a mass of good and bad – lousy at maths but good at drawing, loving his mother but recoiling from her too, getting goosebumps talking to Carl, yet feeling sick with terror at what that might mean. No one was entirely knowable even to themselves, Roland decided, putting down his brushes at last and stretching out the stiffness in his arms. It was all a fucking mystery.
Before climbing into bed he had another look out of the window. The moon had disappeared, leaving the darkness complete. Yet not complete: pressing his nose to the pane Roland could make out the shadowy lines of the treetops at the end of the garden and the shape of next door's chicken coop. Nothing was black and white, if you looked closely enough. He rubbed away the steam of his breath from the glass and narrowed his eyes, wondering suddenly if he could really see the trees and the coop or whether he was imagining them because he knew they were there.
Turning out the light a couple of minutes later, his elbow caught the edge of a card that had arrived from Cassie that morning. Would he consider being an usher at her wedding? An usher! The idea of him doing something so stuffy and pompous had made both him and Elizabeth laugh. ‘And come and see me in the Easter holidays,’ the note continued. ‘We could go to a film and maybe buy something for your birthday – a new phone or some clothes. I hardly know what you teenagers are into!’
Which was very nice of her, Roland decided, closing his eyes with a happy sigh, relieved to discover that all the blobs of colour had been replaced by the cheery face of his godmother waving her cheque book. At which point his dad tried to enter the dream too, stepping off an aeroplane with that look of earnest expectation he wore, holding out his arms for a handshake, one of the American sort, in which, he had learnt, you seized the forearm for a double squeeze. Roland took control at once, shooing him back up the steps and making the plane fly away, till it was no more than a dot in the sky. By which time Cassie had flown away too and there was only the bliss of nothing for company.
April
‘So you want the shelves there – on the right of the door – and the worktop over here, next to the window?’
‘Yes… At least, I think so.’ Serena squinted at the bare brick wall, trying to imagine a worktop sprouting out of it and herself seated at it, moulding one of her clay vases or, better still, reframing the numerous collages of family photos, which, currently situated on various corkboards round the kitchen, were yellowing and losing their moorings. ‘What do you think?’ She studied Keith from under her long sandy eyelashes. It was only three days since his arrival and she was still trying to make him out. He had the faintly lugubrious, lived-in face of one who had known suffering, yet there was an energy to him – in his voice, his quick hand movements and crooked, ready smile – that suggested something far brighter and determinedly positive. He had an ex-wife and two children in Hull, she knew: after agreeing terms of work with Charlie he had promptly disappeared for three weeks to visit them. Serena wondered what had driven Keith and his wife apart, and thought how desperate anyone must be to move voluntarily away from their children. With her own three so grown-up, she felt more keenly every day that she wouldn't have missed a second of mothering, not one tottering step or tantrum. She wouldn't have missed a precious second of Tina either, not even if an angel had swooped down to warn her of what lay in store, fast-forwarding her to the roadside where she had cupped her daughter's crushed skull in her palms.
In the three days since Keith's arrival she and Charlie were already wondering how on earth they had managed without him. As well as being an excellent handyman he was good with Sid, offering the old man cigarettes during their tea-breaks and seeking his opinion on everything, from nail sizes to what the weather would be doing. Nor did he seem to mind Sid's grudging r
esponses, the old man's resentment as visible as the now righted cockerel on the garage roof.
Charlie was especially delighted with their new employee because she would get her studio, he said, although Serena suspected it had just as much to do with proving to his meddling brother that they were on top of things. She could picture the scene when Peter came down for Elizabeth's surprise dinner the following weekend: how her husband, so keen to please, so incapable of rancour, would tug him round the place, pointing out what had been done, as eager for approbation as he had been when they were little boys and Peter had chosen all the games. Charlie was, and would always be, the younger brother, she reflected, looking past Keith through the open door to the garden, bursting on all sides with a spring growth that she felt little inclination to tame. He was vulnerable to Peter's dominance just as Ed could still be crushed by the will of his elder sisters, and Chloë, for all her naughtiness, would do anything to earn a smile from Theo. Such sibling patterns were forged in the cradle and you had as much hope of changing them as of kneading granite.
‘It's your decision,’ prompted Keith, eyeing his new employer with equally guarded curiosity, aware that her attention wasn't fixed on the issue in hand but not minding much. He still couldn't believe the turn his life had taken – bumping into Stephen, then stumbling on employment with the Harrisons and accommodation thrown in. Opening his eyes each morning to the barn's timber and stone walls, with its handy little kitchen and living room, the simple comfort of its furnishings, views of trees and fields on all sides, Keith felt at times as if he had fallen into a parallel universe. Don't blow it, he told himself now, trying to gauge Serena's mood, whether she would welcome an opinion or find it irritating. ‘Personally, I'd want to work by the natural light from the window and that wall there would be best for the shelves as it's so large…’
‘Great.’ Serena pressed her hands together. ‘Let's do that, then. And the floor – I want pine boards, like the ones in the barn. Are you okay in there, by the way, got everything you want? The fridge doesn't close sometimes. You need to give it a shove.’
‘The fridge is fine. Everything's fine.’
‘I guess we'll need a proper estimate,’ Serena added, pausing at the door, feeling faintly fraudulent because she wasn't good with things like estimates. The way he was looking at her made her wonder suddenly if he thought she was just some bored rich housewife who would never use a studio for anything more than dreaming in and showing off to friends. And maybe he would be right. Maybe she was just going through the motions, these days, filling life instead of living it. Seeing Helen at the party in London, hearing her stories about Chloe and Genevieve, the trials and tribulations of juggling work and home, Serena had been aware of a sensation akin to envy. It had intensified when Cassie – in hushed promise-not-to-tell whispers – had broken the happy news that she and Stephen were already trying for a baby, that they had decided the race against the biological clock was too tight for them to care about upsetting Pamela or anyone else by not doing things in the conventional order.
Pondering it all now, it seemed to Serena that her own maternal duties had shrunk to a sort of deluxe housekeeping service – the regular preparation of large meals (Ed's appetite was boundless) interlaced with laundry duties. Neither Pamela nor Charlie was anything like as demanding, and they were grateful, too, with a form of caring politeness that seemed to be as alien to teenagers as a foreign language. With Ed, these days, it was bear-hugs or silence. In fact, Serena mused wryly, if there was any equivalent of a small child in her life now it was Ashley House. With its creaking three storeys, seven bedrooms and five bathrooms, all serviced by temperamental heating and water systems, it generated as much need for attention and organization as any petulant young charge. Just that morning she had been diverted from changing the sheets by the sight of a bulging patch of green behind Charlie's and her bed; on closer inspection she had discovered several more, less verdant outcrops, confirming that the entire wall was succumbing, chicken-pox style, to some dreadful case of spreading mildew.
Standing precariously on the edge of the bed to check the severity of the problem, Serena had been diverted yet again by hundreds of tiny red spiders partying along the dado rail. Remembering them now, and the blotched wall, she said, ‘I might need you to look at a patch of damp in our bedroom at some stage and also… little red spiders. Do you know any-thing about them?’
‘Spider mice?’
‘Is that what they're called? I keep finding them in the house.’ ‘Check the pot plants, they'll be nesting in those – silvery webs coating all the leaves. You have to get really close to see them but they'll be there, all right.’ ‘Will they? Thanks.’
‘Some sort of bug-killer will sort it out – an aerosol. Do you want me to…?’
‘No, it's all right, I'll get some. Spider mice… thanks.’
‘As for the damp, I'll have a look this afternoon, if you like.’
‘Oh, would you? Thanks so much.’ Serena beamed at him, thinking again how lovely it was to have someone other than the doddery Sid to turn to, someone so relatively young and willing.
Making her way back up to the house a few minutes later, she noticed Pamela, in a too-big mackintosh of John's, wellingtons and a headscarf, heading towards the vegetable garden. She was walking purposefully, carrying an empty basket and a pair of secateurs.
‘Pamela?’
Her mother-in-law stopped and looked about her, then shook her head and continued with the same purposeful strides.
Serena sighed and continued up the narrow stone path that led round the side of the house towards the kitchen door. Pamela wouldn't find much to put in her basket. Thanks to Sid's decline, the vegetable garden had produced paltry pickings all year. She had done a trawl herself the day before, finding nothing but a few withered carrots and a couple of Brussels sprouts stalks, both badly mutilated by some of the munching assailants that Pamela had once energetically helped Sid keep at bay. Delving into Pamela's library of gardening books to get to grips with such matters was high on Serena's never-ending list of Things to Do. In the meantime she had scattered an entire canister of slug pellets between the rows, then toured the perimeter fence, cutting her fingers in her efforts to tug rusting chicken wire over the holes.
Maybe Keith knew about vegetables as well as floor tiles and red spiders, she mused, hurrying on at the sound of an approaching car, consoling herself with the thought that searching for non-existent vegetables was a better pastime than writing Christmas-card lists, which was how Pamela appeared to have spent most of the morning. Christmas in April… Taking a cup of tea into the study, where Pamela was perched like a dainty queen in John's winged Jacobean desk chair, Serena had had to bite her cheeks to stop herself smiling. How quaint, she had thought. How quaint and sweet. Peering over her mother-in-law's shoulder at the names she had been sufficiently enchanted to remark on the number with black lines through them, joking at how many friends had obviously fallen out of favour.
‘They're the ones who have died, dear,’ Pamela had replied, so mildly, so matter-of-factly that Serena was half-way to the door before the awfulness of what she had said hit home.
‘Oh, Pamela, I'm so sorry.’
‘It's quite all right. I didn't like many of them very much. There are only a few people one really likes in the end.’
Recalling the conversation as she arrived at the back gate, Serena felt again the awfulness of the moment and thought how typical it was of Pamela to have taken it so well – to be so stoical. Her mother-in-law was one of a dying breed, she reflected fondly, a generation that had known world wars, rationing, strict upbringings, for-better-or-worse marriages and, as a result, were so much better at accepting things instead of complaining and lunging after happiness as if it were some God-given right. Sometimes she felt positively flimsy in comparison.
But perhaps not as flimsy as her sister-in-law, she reflected, peering over the gate and seeing that the car she had heard coming up the
lane belonged to Elizabeth. Dear Elizabeth, with her wide, sad eyes and dreadful statement-making clothes. At fifty-three she was so obviously still in search of herself that it pained Serena sometimes to bear witness to it. She was always having ‘fresh starts' – most recently landing the maths job at Midhurst Grammar and meeting the odious Richard – only to discover, as any of them could have told her, that the job was far more stressful than teaching primary children and Richard was interested in no one but himself. No wonder she'd started drinking too much. Serena still shuddered at the recollection of the dinner she had organized in an attempt to welcome this new beau into the family circle. Between revealing the table manners of an oaf, he had spent the evening lecturing them on the terrorist threat to the Western world and how Charlie should single-handedly reform the civil service.
At least that horror had gone away, Serena reminded her-self, resting her elbows on the back gate and watching in some amusement as Elizabeth made a to-do of parking the car, reversing, turning and going forwards again, as if she was negotiating a busy street rather than Ashley House's spacious rectangular drive.
Elizabeth took several deep breaths before she turned off the engine. She could see Serena fiddling with something by the back gate but wasn't yet ready to greet her. Feeling desolate was one thing; letting other people – even her sweet-natured sister-in-law – know the extent of it was quite another. Friday was her day off and she usually spent it full of preparations and optimism for the weekend. But this weekend was the start of the Easter holidays and Roland had gone to London to see Cassie so there was no one to prepare anything for except her-self. Waving her son off on the station platform that morning, she had been enveloped with such a strangling sense of emptiness that only raw determination had kept her smile in place until the train was out of sight.
The Simple Rules of Love Page 10
