‘What's happened?’ said Chloë, absently handing the doll to Genevieve as she glanced from the stricken expression on her mother's face to her father, who was still clutching the telephone.
‘It's good news,’ said Helen brightly, firmly, reaching out to smooth the curly auburn mop of her youngest's hair, which sprang back the moment she withdrew her hand. ‘Your naughty, unbelievably selfish cousin has returned at last.’
‘Ed? He's home?’
‘Well, he's at Clem's flat, but no doubt will be going home any minute, yes.’
‘Well, that's good, isn't it?’ pressed Chloe, who was old and intelligent enough to wonder that such longed-for information had not elicited a more jubilant response.
‘It's fantastic,’ said Peter, smiling at her. ‘We're so relieved.’
‘Ed – is – home – Ed – is – home,’ chanted Genevieve, making her doll dance to the rhythm of the words along the edge of the kitchen table.
‘He's safe and well, and that's all that matters,’ said Helen, smoothly, ‘and it's all thanks to your clever, clever brother that we know about it.’
‘Theo? What did he do?’ asked Chloe, scornfully, picking out a carrot as her mother tipped them into a serving dish.
‘He told us, that's what he did, even though Ed didn't want him to,’ explained Helen, starting to put the food on to the table, then lifting Genevieve on to a chair. ‘He knew what was the right thing to do and he did it… and Ed is safe,’ she exclaimed happily, struck, in the midst of all the shock about the other dire aspects of her nephew's situation, by the excellence of the news. Not dead in a ditch, or dealing in drugs, but fast asleep on his sister's sofa. ‘Isn't that wonderful, girls? And do you know what is just as wonderful? I prayed for it this morning. I prayed for it and it happened.’
‘I'll go to my study to call Charlie and Serena,’ said Peter quickly, riled by his wife's increasing readiness to put a religious spin on everything. If a deity was responsible for such chaos then it certainly wasn't one with whom he wished to become acquainted.
‘Why can't you use that phone?’ asked Chloë, pointing across the kitchen.
‘Because I don't need Barbie's squeals and your chomping in the background, young lady. Now, eat up. I won't be long.’
Shutting the door of his study behind him, Peter leant against it and closed his eyes. The news was still sinking in. Ed, his nephew, screwing Sid's tart of a granddaughter and getting her pregnant. It was unbelievable. Appalling. Breathtaking. He felt, in the same instant, huge compassion for his brother and sister-in-law and gratitude that he was on the fringes of the calamity, rather than at its core. A termination would have to be arranged, of course, maybe counselling for the girl. Such a slut too, Peter reflected, recalling the ride he had given her to the station on the evening of Alicia's funeral, how she had simpered and squirmed in the passenger seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, making no effort to conceal her chunky thighs or the jagged holes in her tights. How terrible that Ed had succumbed to such dubious, cheap attractions. How fortunate and fantastic that Theo was built of the sort of mettle that meant he never would. How… Peter opened his eyes, wanting to stop his thoughts there, before they hit the wall of his own rather less virtuous predicament. Delia… He tried out an image of her in his mind, half hoping that something would have shifted. Was he up to cancelling their meeting after all? Was he up to doing the so glaringly obvious right thing, to behaving, in short, in precisely the way he found so commendable in his son? Maybe, he reflected wildly, there was a deity, after all, one who had organized the whole thing to shame him out of his intentions.
‘Peter?’ Helen caught him in the back as she opened the door. ‘I wondered how it was going –’ She broke off, clearly surprised to find him nowhere near the phone.
‘Just… collecting my thoughts,’ he stammered, hurrying to his desk, rubbing his back where the door handle had jabbed into him. ‘Not that easy.’
‘No,’ she agreed, and added, a little harshly, ‘Best to get on with it – not fair to keep Charlie and Serena waiting.’
‘Of course.’
‘Your lunch is in the oven.’
‘Thanks.’ Peter waited until she had closed the door, then picked up the telephone. Even then he hesitated, preoccupied, to his dismay, by the thought that if he did keep his rendezvous on Wednesday he'd better make damn sure he had a condom.
Three days later a wood-pigeon chose to lament the dawn of another grey sky from the vantage-point of Ed's bedroom window. Surfacing slowly, reluctantly, to consciousness, Ed thought for a moment that he was still in Brighton where each long day had started with the gulls wheeling round the roof of the hostel, screeching for breakfast. Not ready to deal with his despair, he turned his face into his pillow, thinking how soft it was, how perfectly wonderful. Then the cooing stopped and a different, much more whiny, persistent sound took its place. Opening his eyes, Ed saw Samson at the window, miaowing furiously and scratching at the frame. ‘Bugger off,’ he growled, not angry with the cat so much as the avalanche of unpalatable thoughts concomitant upon the fact that he was in his own bed, with his sordid secret public knowledge and nothing to look forward to but the unspeakably diabolical prospect of a meeting in London that afternoon with Jessica and her mother. And it was his birthday. This thought depressed Ed almost more than all the others. He was eighteen, to which he had once looked forward with such longing, imagining it as the gateway to freedom, to power, the beginning of the bit of his life that really mattered. But it was none of those things. He had never felt less free or less powerful. His mother's suggestion that he could still have a party had made him laugh violently. There was nothing to celebrate, nor ever would be again.
Samson, seeing the lump under the bedclothes move, redoubled his efforts to be noticed, pressing his whiskered face against the windowpane and scratching so aggressively that Ed could hear the shredding of wood and paint. Swearing under his breath, he got out of bed and undid the latch. The cat leapt past him on to the bed where it purred happily, arching its back to be stroked. Ed ignored it and burrowed back under the covers, losing himself to contemplation of his horrible day and the fact that every time he thought things couldn't get any worse they did. The way Theo had betrayed him – gone behind his back to his father after all his plans and promises – still made him feel physically sick. The first he had known about it was the ring of Clem's bell and the sight of his parents staggering through the door, his mother reeling towards him as if she was falling, as if the only thing to prevent her losing her balance was him.
‘It's okay, darling,’ she had said, over and over again, ‘everything's going to be okay.’ He had let her cling to him, aware of his father hovering in the background, wide-eyed and stupid, like he didn't know what to do with his arms, legs or face. Ed had started to weep, partly at the peculiar painful pleasure of seeing them and partly because all his meagre hopes – of resolving the whole miserable business discreetly, of retaining a shred of dignity – were lost for good. Ever since the shame had been crushing, like a steel clamp round his lungs and heart, as bad when they berated him as when they tried to cover up their disappointment with kindness and futile promises about everything being okay.
Hearing a timid knock on the door, Ed closed his eyes and turned towards the window. Pamela, who had heard the cat and often spent the early-morning hours awake with the radio for company, opened the door and peered in. Samson rolled on to his back and purred loudly in the hope, at last, of receiving some attention. Pamela tiptoed to the bed and ran her fingers along the cat's soft gingery tummy, noting as she did so that her grandson's eyes were far too tightly shut to denote genuine sleep.
‘I thought you'd be awake,’ she said softly. ‘I wanted to say happy birthday.’
Ed kept his eyes closed. He couldn't deal with his grandmother. He couldn't deal with anything. If it were at all possible – if they weren't all watching him like hawks – he would have run away again.
‘D
ifficult times,’ she murmured next, ‘but they will pass, they always do, just like the good ones. Nothing stays the same. All things pass in time. I'm making hot chocolate by the way, and some of my eggy-bread – lots of sugar. Come downstairs if you want some.’
Ed kept his eyes shut, ears ringing, heart thumping. He was aware of his grandmother's stillness, of her watching him. Then he felt her scoop the cat of the bed. ‘Naughty puss,’ she crooned, ‘bothering Ed when he's in no mood for you. You come with me. You've had a rabbit, haven't you? That's why you're not hungry… Horrid cat, I can't think why I bother with you…’ Ed heard the rustle of her moving across the room and then a gentle click as she closed his bedroom door.
Serena drove carefully, tussling with the urge to try to penetrate the silence of the hunched figure next to her and the wiser instinct to leave him alone. The day was moist and muggy, the sky like a dark, swelling sponge. Her dread at the prospect of seeing the Blakes was, she was certain, equal to her son's. Yet her heart, ever since Sunday, had been bulging with joy. To have Ed back, to have him safe, made everything else bearable. Shock, outrage, anger – all the things that made Charlie still choke and stutter through every effort to discuss the situation – were to her a sideshow. Plainly, Ed had been stupid, not just in getting Jessica pregnant but in imagining he could solve any-thing by running away. How she felt about their son, though, was unchanged. If anything, she loved him more for getting into such a mess, for so obviously needing their help and being unable to ask for it. She had wanted, every minute of every hour since stumbling into Clem's flat, to try to make him understand that – to explain that nothing he had done, or could do, would ever endanger the huge solidity of her love for him. After the trauma of his disappearance and the mounting sense of foreboding that had preceded it, the certainty of this feeling was, to Serena, like floating in a warm sea, like stepping into sunshine, like seeing beyond all the anxieties of living to a universal truth.
‘If you want to talk, darling…’
Ed squirmed, huddling deeper into his seat.
‘Such a shame that it had to happen – this meeting, I mean, today of all days, but it was simply the only time everybody could manage. We'll have to celebrate your birthday properly another day. I've phoned the driving school already, by the way, booked a couple of lessons before we go to Italy…’
Ed wound down the window and stared at the fields and houses streaking past the car until the colours blurred and he couldn't tell trees from grass or sky. Of course he didn't want to talk. There was nothing to say. It didn't matter that it was his birthday, or that he had been given driving lessons, or that they were all going to Italy. Nothing mattered. He could think only of the ordeal ahead, being paraded like a guilty criminal in front of Mrs Blake and Jessica, the horrible, shameful secret laid bare to be picked over by his parents and his uncle… Dear God, his uncle.
‘Why does Uncle Peter have to be there too?’ he burst out.
‘Dad thought it was a good idea, to cover the legal side of things.’
‘The legal side? What does that mean?’
Serena sighed, her thoughts on the matter as hazy as Ed's. She wasn't sure she wanted Peter there either. Yet her redoubtable brother-in-law had been involved from the start, not just because Theo had referred to him first but because he had turned up at Clem's flat too, ostensibly to drive Theo back to Oxford but exuding such irresistible energy and confidence that even she had been grateful for it. It had reminded her that in crises the Harrisons rallied round, that was how they were, why they survived so well. While Charlie made the initial, intensely difficult call to Mrs Blake, Peter had stood by his side, nodding sombre-faced encouragement and shooting looks of sympathetic consternation at her and Ed, who remained curled in the corner of the sofa throughout, clutching himself as if he had been shot.
Maureen Blake, both on this first occasion and throughout their subsequent conversations, had been as shocked and anxious to clear up the whole sorry business as they were. A termination, she agreed, was the only way to proceed. It was Peter who had pointed out that, relieved as they all were to hear this, compensation might be required and he would be happy to attend the meeting to help handle it. In the intervening two days he had also taken it upon himself to compile a shortlist of reputable clinics where the procedure could be carried out, with possible dates and prices.
‘Have you spoken to Jessica again?’ ventured Serena, gently. They were just two muddled teenagers, after all, she reminded herself, caught up in that early tangle of sexual feelings and emotions. She thought, too, of the happy fact that it had been this, rather than any failure on her or Charlie's part, that had compelled her son to run away.
Ed shook his head miserably. He hadn't spoken to Jessica since Sunday night when she had screeched at him about breaking his word, about how she had hung on for him and he had let her down, about how her mum had called her a worthless whore. He had shouted back that if she had agreed to get rid of the thing in the first place it would all have been easier, how it was her fault that everything had got so out of control. ‘The poor girl. This is so hard for both of you.’
‘She's not poor,’ Ed snorted, ‘she tricked me into it. She said she was on the pill, that I didn't need to use a –’ He snapped his mouth shut, unable to say the word, hating in that moment the fact that his parents knew he had had sex almost as much as the sad truth that he had done so without taking the necessary precautions.
‘Did you – do you have feelings for her?’
Ed snorted again. He had feelings, all right, but none that he dared express. ‘I screwed up, okay? There's nothing more to say. I know you and Dad are trying to help with this meeting…’
‘It's not easy, darling, for any of us,’ murmured Serena, changing down a gear as they hit the speed restrictions on the final approach to London, ‘but please try to see that it's not the end of the world either, that there are worse things that could have happened –’
‘Oh, yeah, like what?’
‘Like…’ Serena hesitated, thinking inevitably of Tina – her reference point for any calamity. That unspeakable loss, she saw now, had weakened her in some ways but strengthened her in others. The demise of near relatives, her mother-in-law's breakdown, herself being at loggerheads with her husband, her son getting a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant – none of it came close to touching the nerve of grief awakened by the death of her child six years before. Yet the troubles of the year had shown, too, that she was still raw about the tragedy, that the nerve was still so easily stirred. ‘Like you deciding never to come home to face the music,’ she continued firmly, ‘folding deckchairs all your life, leaving us all beside ourselves with worry.’
‘I'm sorry,’ said Ed, bitterly. ‘I told you not to worry.’
‘That's okay, sweetheart.’ Serena patted his leg. ‘I understand.’
Ed resumed staring at the countryside, puzzling at how her kindness could be just as hard to take as his father's unguarded glances of disappointment. Reacting to either of them, he often felt like a boxer punching at air, a boxer who would have preferred the reassuring collision – the pain – of a fist against a target.
Even without such dire circumstances, a gathering of the Blakes and the Harrisons would never have prompted an easy cohesion. Maureen knew them all by sight, just as they knew her, from the times in the past when she had collected or dropped Jessica to play under the eye of her grandfather at Ashley House. She came home early that afternoon to prepare for them, giving the flat more of a spring-clean than it had had in years, darting to and from the concrete balcony that overlooked the street in the hope of some warning before the doorbell rang. Her daughter, meanwhile, kept to her room, as she had since their shouting match on Sunday, emerging only to forage for food among their meagre stocks and to turn away her head if her mother so much as looked at her.
In spite of her attempts at vigilance, the knock on the door took Maureen by surprise, as did the unreal sight of Serena and the t
hree tall Harrison men filing into her narrow hall. The boy was a man, Maureen thought, unable to resist gawping at Ed, whom she had last seen as a skinny fifteen-year-old with clusters of spots round his nose. Loath though she was to admit it in the circumstances, she could see now why Jessica had got so keen on the lad; had she herself been twenty years younger, she wouldn't have said no either. She even felt a momentary pang of something like sympathy for her daughter. After all, she hadn't been much older when she'd had Jessica, and that hadn't been planned either.
After an unspeakably awkward series of handshakes, Serena took the lead on efforts to break the ice, saying Sid sent his best regards and offering to help make tea. Elbow to elbow with Maureen in the tiny kitchen, she lamented the unfortunate circumstances of the meeting, emphasizing their concern for Jessica and how they all just wanted to help the children put it behind them. Maureen, busy with tea-bags and mugs, agreed heartily, at the same time privately doubling the figure she and her mate Dot had agreed she should ask for.
Sitting knee to knee with Charlie and Peter in the sitting room next door, Jessica and Ed eyed each other like wary animals, both too overwhelmed, too entrapped in their separate wretchedness, to speak. The two brothers did their best, taking it in turns to ask Jessica if she was well and telling her not to worry, that between them they would sort everything out. After a long, awkward silence Charlie, catching sight of a dog-eared copy of To the Lighthouse, picked it up and said it was one of his favourites and who was the reader.
‘That would be Jess,’ replied Maureen, appearing in the doorway with a mug in each hand. ‘She's good at books and that, aren't you, love?’
Jessica scowled, her gaze fixed on the floor.
‘Well…’ Charlie took a sip of his tea and cleared his throat. ‘Now that we're all assembled, I would like to begin by saying that I – that all of us – only wish you two had come to us at once instead of… However…’ he tried the tea again, which numbed his lips because it was so hot ‘… be that as it may…’
The Simple Rules of Love Page 29
