‘I thought something was going on,’ exclaimed Theo, happily, as they reached the front door of the flat, ‘when you mentioned him at the ball. I could just tell it was something special. Hey, look, it's about to stop raining. I might leave you to Roland for a bit and check out a couple of locations – I need to find a park for that scene where you've got the bomb but are having second thoughts.’
‘Great. Whatever,’ murmured Clem, anxious now to see whether Roland had arrived and not sharing her cousin's optimism about the weather. Not yet sharing his faith in her acting abilities either, she was also quite glad to have a good reason to defer putting them to the test. ‘See you in a bit.’ She took the stairs two at a time, preparing apologies for Roland in her head – preparing, too, to explain that she would show the paintings to Nathan later in the week, that her spare time that day had to be shared with Theo.
‘We let them in,’ said Flora and Daisy in unison, as she opened the door. Dressed now and with handbags over their shoulders, they hurried out, casting looks of sympathy over their shoulders.
‘Drunk,’ mouthed Daisy, before they disappeared round the bend in the stairwell.
Clem thought she must have misheard the word, since she had rarely seen Roland take a sip of anything alcoholic, not even when they were all experimenting behind the backs of their parents and grandparents as youngsters. She returned her attention to the room.
‘Hi,’ said Roland, emerging from the flat's little kitchen, clutching a pot of coffee and a mug. ‘I thought I'd better try to sober him up. It's Ed,’ he added, somewhat unnecessarily, pointing to the armchair at which Clem was already staring in slack-jawed astonishment. ‘I found him on the doorstep.’
‘Oh, Ed! Ed, you pillock.’ She ran to her brother, tripping over his outstretched legs in her eagerness to embrace him. Ed blinked at her with bloodshot eyes, managing a sort of shrug within the circle of her arms. ‘You fucking eejit! If you knew – bloody hell!’ cried Clem, punching him and hugging him at the same time. ‘What the fuck have you been playing at? I'm going to call Mum – have you called Mum, Roland?’
Roland was pouring coffee and stopped mid-flow, spilling a few drops on to the carpet. ‘Oops, sorry.’
Clem got to her feet and snatched the half-filled mug from him. ‘Roland, for Christ's sake, have you called Mum and Dad?’
‘No… It's a bit… I would have, but…’ Roland noted that the coffee spill, between two faded brown flowers, might have been part of the carpet's design.
Ed chose this moment to come to life in the chair. ‘No one,’ he growled, craning his neck to get them both in his line of vision, ‘is to call anyone.’
‘Don't be ridiculous, Ed,’ wailed Clem, kneeling beside him, close to tears. ‘If you knew how worried they – we – have been Christ, where did you go anyway?’ she asked, with fresh incredulity, noting his lank hair and the crumpled state of his clothes. He smelt a bit too, a mulchy smell of unwashed body and junk food.
‘Brighton,’ grunted Ed. ‘I've been in Brighton… I… Oh, what the fuck does it matter? Go on, Roland, tell her the rest. I really can't be arsed.’
‘Have you become an alcoholic, Ed?’ asked Clem, aware that the question sounded prim and silly, but not knowing how else to tackle it. ‘Because if you have, there are…’
Ed began to laugh, tweaking at the greasy strands of his hair, which, deprived of his styling gel and Serena's hairdryer, had spent two weeks dangling irritatingly in his eyes. ‘Sadly not. Didn't have the money. I'm pissed because I found a half-bottle of Scotch at the bus station – amazing what you find if you look… Amazing.’ He drew breath in wonderment at the recollection of this serendipitous start to his morning, how it had eased the desperate decision to give up the increasingly hopeless task of trying to survive on a couple of pounds a day and seek the help of his sister. ‘Money is what I need and then I can return to the family fold… the prodigal…’ he struggled with the syllables and giggled ‘… son returns.’
‘Money? What for?’
‘I could lend you money,’ ventured Roland, shyly, setting the coffee-pot on a pile of magazines and perching on the end of the sofa. ‘I've got three hundred pounds in my savings account.’
‘That's very decent, mate, thanks.’
‘What do you need money for?’ persisted Clem, shrill with exasperation.
‘Roland, I asked you to tell her, didn't I?’ Ed pressed the tips of his fingers to his forehead and closed his eyes.
‘Tell me what?’ wailed Clem. ‘What's he done? What's happened?’
Theo, who had found the door ajar, froze in the hallway.
Roland took a deep breath. ‘Ed… and Jessica – Jessica Blake – had this… thing for a bit and, well, apparently she's pregnant. Ed needs the money to… er… sort it out. He asked your parents for his trust money but they said no and that's why he ran away. He got a job selling deckchairs but the rain meant he didn't earn very much so he couldn't pay the rent on his bedsit.’
Roland, having delivered the most lucid version of the disjointed summary Ed had given on stumbling into the flat half an hour before, folded his arms and looked from cousin to cousin. This was a crisis, he knew; he was glad to be the youngest present and therefore not required to do anything but repeat facts and do his best to remain composed. For his own part, he felt too detached from the concept of Jessica Blake having a baby or Ed being its father to react to any of it. He even felt a little twinge of compassion for his canvases, which he had rolled and tied with such excitement, but which were now leaning unattended and forgotten behind the door. The only thing of which he remained convinced was the cruelty of prolonging the agony of uncertainty at Ashley House – but he had already tried to explain that to Ed and got nowhere.
‘Pregnant?’ The word came out of Clem's mouth as a small shriek. ‘You can't have, Ed… Jessica?’
‘Oh, yes, he can have,’ said Theo, darkly, striding into the room in a way that made all three of them, even Ed, feel a little reassured. ‘Edward, it's a relief, of course, to see that you are well.’
Ed groaned, burying his face in his hands. ‘I need your help, guys,’ he moaned, ‘I asked for my trust money but Mum and Dad said no… I need money… lots of it.’
‘For an abortion, presumably,’ said Theo, taking the mug of coffee from Clem and thrusting it into Ed's hand.
‘Yes, or maybe to… You see, the worst of it is she some-imes says she wants the baby.’
‘Dear God,’ Theo murmured, looking, though none of them grasped it, exactly as his father did when he was absorbing difficult evidence that threatened to blow an argument off course. ‘That does make things awkward.’
Clem was still gawping incredulously at Ed, but let out a gasp of a laugh at this understatement. Yet she was glad Theo was there. He was famously sensible, so much more likely than any of them to know what to do.
‘I'm going to persuade her,’ said Ed, struggling into a more upright position and taking his first proper swig of the coffee. ‘If we set it all up, find a place for her to go, I'm sure I still can.’
‘Who knows about this?’ demanded Theo.
‘No one,’ growled Ed. He was feeling a little better, not just sober but hopeful too. Talking about it, after so long, after so much soul-searching, was such a relief. He looked at his sister and cousins, basking in the sense of their allegiance. ‘And no one must know either.’
Theo was leaning against the wall next to the fireplace, arms crossed. He cocked his head at his cousin. ‘That will be hard… impossible, even.’
‘No, it won't,’ cut in Ed, fiercely. ‘She gets rid of the baby, she gets a load of cash – that's all that needs to happen. Deep down she's as terrified of everyone finding out as I am. She hasn't even told her mum and I don't think she will, not if I handle it right. No one must know – do you hear me?’ He looked desperately at all three of them. ‘Swear you won't tell… swear it. If Mum and Dad find out I think I might… die.’ He burst into tears, his head dr
opping into his hands, his shoulders heaving.
‘Of course we won't tell,’ murmured Clem, hugging his legs and laying her head on his knees. ‘Dear Ed, don't worry, we'll sort this out together – won't we?’ She looked pleadingly at Theo and then Roland, who was chewing his lip anxiously at the recollection of his mother and his aunt returning from their trawl round Chichester on Friday afternoon, pale and crestfallen. ‘They must be told you're all right, though,’ he ventured, after a pause. ‘I mean, you should see how it's been – how they've been, especially your mum, not knowing where you are…’ He faltered, defeated by an inability to explain the level of desperation he had witnessed and to think more deeply into how the situation might be resolved.
‘Roland is quite right,’ said Theo. ‘We'll tell them you're okay, that you're staying with Clem for a bit and take it from there. Clem?’ He was already pulling out his mobile phone. ‘Can he stay here?’
‘I guess so – I'm sure Flora and Daisy wouldn't mind it for a bit, though he'd have to sleep on the sofa, of course… but Mum and Dad will want to talk to you, Ed, to know what's been going on.’
‘Yes, they will,’ agreed Theo, starting to punch numbers on his phone.
At which point Ed heaved himself out of his seat and made a lunge for his cousin, knocking the mobile out of his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he moaned, scrabbling under a chair on his hands and knees to retrieve it, then checking fearfully to see if the call had gone through. ‘I know they need to know, but – but not just yet, okay? I'm pissed, for Christ's sake. I have to think what I'm going to say. Please, Theo…’ His cousin was staring down at him, steely-faced. ‘When I'm ready, okay? When we've talked all the other stuff through… I need you to lend me the money,’ he continued, starting to sob again, ‘and to promise to keep quiet about – about Jessica. Will you do that? Will you promise, all of you?’ Clem murmured that she would while Roland nodded solemnly. Ed, still cradling the phone, looked up beseechingly at his eldest cousin. ‘Theo?’
‘Of course, mate.’
‘Thanks,’ whispered Ed, handing back the phone and wiping his nose noisily on the back of his sleeve as he clambered to his feet.
‘Would you like a bath?’ ventured Clem.
Ed nodded, smiling for the first time. ‘I bloody would.’
Clem stood up, glad to have something concrete to do. ‘I'll run it. Roland, perhaps you could make some more coffee? And we could have some toast, too, and jam Granny's homemade. I brought jars of it from home when I moved in here.’
Ed emerged, scrubbed and shiny-cheeked, from the bathroom ten minutes later, then ate ravenously and with mounting happiness as Theo put forward a plan to do with lending his own trust fund to his cousin and agreeing to help talk sense into Jessica. He had been on the point of asking for the money anyway, Theo explained, deliberately avoiding mention of the film project for fear of complicating matters.
‘You're fantastic – all of you,’ Ed muttered. ‘I feel it's like us against the rest of the world, us against the adults sort of thing.’
‘We are adults,’ said Theo, gravely. ‘That's why this has happened.’
‘Yes, of course, but you know what I mean,’ insisted Ed, undeterred. He tipped his head back with a sigh and had fallen fast asleep a minute later, his mouth open, emitting the snores of an old man.
Theo studied him for a few moments, then reached, with some weariness, for his mobile. ‘We are adults – some of us, that is.’ He smiled quickly at Roland. ‘But this is too big. We can't handle it alone.’
‘Theo, what are you doing?’ whispered Clem, fiercely, glancing at Ed and putting her hand to her heart. ‘Theo, you promised him…’
‘Yes, I know I did, and don't think this isn't hard. But sometimes the hard things are the right things. Ed needs help, but we're not the ones best placed to deliver it. He can't see that, but we can and I, for one, am prepared to act on that knowledge.’
‘I'm going to write to Maisie,’ said Clem hoarsely. ‘She has a right to know too.’
Roland, not wanting to hear the conversation, retreated to the kitchen and began to wash up. He worked slowly and methodically, scrubbing at the brown stains in the mugs, and thinking how full of surprises life was, how awful sometimes but how interesting, how a million paintings couldn't begin to do justice to it.
Shortly after twelve thirty Peter went into the kitchen and peered, with some concern, at the sizzling state of the rolled sirloin Helen had instructed him to put into the oven. He was anxious about the roast potatoes too, which appeared to be browning haphazardly and with far less efficiency on the shelf above. Helen had told him when to put them in, giving him the exact times for turning and basting so that all that would be required of her on her return from church was to boil the vegetables and whisk up the gravy. But, thanks to a long phone conversation with Delia, Peter had put the potatoes in late, then got into a muddle about how far up to turn the temperature dial and when to do the basting. Helen understood the oven much as one knew and accommodated the idiosyncrasies of an old friend. One glance at the overcooked meat and the undercooked potatoes and Peter was sure she would know that he had failed to do as she asked. He trembled to think of it, imagining in his feverish state that such knowledge was a hair's breadth from his wife discovering everything else too – his outrageous fantasizing after she had left for church, the phone call he had made in his dressing-gown, needing to hear Delia's voice, to introduce a toehold of reality into his overheated brain. Instead he had babbled about wanting her, how it was driving him mad. She had laughed softly and said it was driving her mad too, and when could they meet, she wasn't talking about lunch. At this crossroads, Peter had said not that he was too busy or too married or too full of conscience but that, with Umbria only a couple of weeks away, he had been winding down his workload, instructing clerks to keep major assignments until the autumn and that he was hers to command. What day would suit her best?
Thinking back on the conversation, as he stared hopelessly through the clouds of acrid steam issuing from the meat tin, Peter was incredulous at how easy it had been. The line, so firm, so indelible, so huge, so resisted, had been crossed at last and with such a little step too – with a mere skip, a leap of the heart. Not that long ago, hearing or reading about people whose marriages had buckled under adultery and who had used phrases like ‘it just happened‘, and ‘we couldn't help ourselves’, had made Peter snort with impatience. Such action didn't happen to people. They were responsible for it. Yet, examining his state of mind now, Peter genuinely felt as if he had been swept along by powers – needs – beyond his control. He could imagine nothing less than his own death keeping him from the tryst he and Delia had agreed for Wednesday. His desire was simply too strong – like nothing he had ever before experienced, not even during the early days with Helen and certainly not with the meagre conquests that had preceded her.
It was wrong, of course. Peter knew that with a clarity that felt at once awesome and irrelevant. It was wrong, but he would go anyway. He had stopped resisting. He was in a new territory – a new world – as alluring as it was terrifying. Never had he wanted another human being in the way that he wanted Delia. How could he not explore such feelings? How could he creep deeper into humdrum middle-age, closer towards increasing decrepitude and death without having explored them? Just the thought of her made him feel more alive than he had for years: the grass was greener, the sky less grey, the smiles of his daughters more vibrant. She illuminated him.
Lost in such thoughts, Peter did not hear the key in the front door. So that when Helen strode into the kitchen, dumping her handbag on the table and reaching for the oven gloves in one swift movement, he started guiltily. ‘Have you checked the meat? It smells overcooked.’ She sniffed suspiciously while he stepped out of the way, part of him still fearful that his wife's formidable perspicacity might detect matters of greater import than the blackening meat and the too-white potatoes. ‘It's done to death,’ she cried, tugging out the tin. ‘No wo
nder you're looking sheepish. Pass that plate, could you, so we can keep it warm in the top oven? That's it. God, and the potatoes have hardly begun… What have you been up to?’ She laughed and ruffled his hair.
‘I…I…’
‘It's okay, darling, I didn't marry you for your culinary skills. Church was good, by the way. Even Chloe listened to the sermon. He's one of those lovely priests who manage to make religion sound normal.’ She moved busily round the kitchen as she talked, draining off fat from the meat, reaching for a spoon, putting on the kettle for water, calling with mounting impatience for Chloe to lay the table, weaving round Peter as if he was one of the kitchen fittings.
‘I'll bet she's plugged into her iPod.’
‘Probably. You okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good.’ Helen smiled, holding out a wooden spoon for him to taste the gravy.
They were still waiting for the potatoes when the phone rang. Peter answered it, mouthing, ‘Theo,’ at Helen, when he heard his son's voice. A moment later his expression had darkened so visibly that Helen was dancing round him in concern. ‘Dear God,’ he murmured, when Theo had finished reporting on the events of the morning, concluding with the view that his father should be the one to break the good – and bad – news to his uncle and aunt. ‘Absolutely… of course… and well done, Theo, you've done the right thing – absolutely the right thing. Ed himself, I'm sure, will see that in time. Christ, what a mess. Don't tell Ed you've told us yet, in case the wretched boy takes himself off again… What a business! It beggars belief.’
‘What?’ cried Helen, when he had finished. As Peter relayed Theo's news she sank into a chair and groaned, clapping a hand to her mouth as Chloe charged into the kitchen waving a Barbie doll out of reach of her little sister.
The Simple Rules of Love Page 28
