All eyes had turned now to Ed. ‘That's right… no doubt… unfortunately,’ he growled, rolling a thicket of pasta on to his fork, but feeling too much under scrutiny to place it in his mouth. ‘She… er… There was just me.’
‘That's what she says, is it?’ sneered Maisie, her mouth crammed with food.
‘Your sister is quite right,’ said Peter, who had been listening attentively, inwardly wondering why he had not pressed this point more thoroughly. The question had been asked, of course, but had received such irrefutable answers on all fronts that he had not pursued it. His nephew had been so sure, so ready to despair. ‘A paternity test is definitely called for. We should see to it, Charlie, the moment we get back.’
Charlie was already nodding vigorously. Serena, sitting next to him, seemed less sure. ‘Can they do that before a child is born?’
‘Oh, they can,’ put in Stephen, who had researched the matter for one of his plots. ‘They can either do an early sample from the placenta, look at what's called the chorionic villus, or by amniocentesis later with a needle through the abdomen. They'll take a sample of the father's blood and analyse it in conjunction with the foetal test. It costs, of course, and the NHS would only agree to such a procedure on medical grounds. If you have it done privately you'll pay around eight or nine hundred pounds.’
‘Really?’ murmured Cassie, torn between astonishment and the unnerving sensation, building inside her all afternoon, that she had been sharing her life with a virtual stranger. It occurred to her in the same instant that getting to know someone was not about what they told you so much as what they held back. Stephen had never made any secret of his rotten childhood. His father had hit him with a belt. His mother had watched. Cassie had loved him for revealing such things, felt tender, understood better why he should be so drawn to her and the solidity of her own upbringing. What he had never described to her, however – except, perhaps, through his vacillating reservations about becoming a father – was the effect of this treatment: possessiveness, insecurity, lack of self-esteem, deceitfulness… It had been up to her to find out such things and now that she had… Cassie blinked at her fiancé's profile, astonished that such easy good looks, such articulation could conceal so much mess. Was love about discovering a mess and forgiving it? Could she do that? Did she have a big enough heart?
Peter was saying that the cost of the process surely didn't matter. ‘Worth every penny, wouldn't you say? The more I think about it, the more insane it would be to take the girl's word… Oh, well done, Maisie, well done indeed.’
‘It does seem sensible, dear,’ agreed Elizabeth, who had been helping Maria clear the plates in spite of their employee's tutting efforts to persuade her to remain in her seat. Since their first unpromising encounter the pair had struck up a bit of a friendship, aided by Elizabeth's willingness to try out her creaky O-level Italian and the discovery that Maria, too, was a single mother with a teenaged son. He was called Roberto and had been brought along that evening, though whether for company or to help in the kitchen remained unclear: the boy had spent most of the time slouched at the kitchen table, either receiving kisses on his head or having his knuckles slapped when he picked at the food. As Maria stepped out on to the terrace now, though, bearing a freshly made panna cotta as if it were a crown on a velvet cushion, Roberto appeared behind her, cradling a huge plate of fresh fruit – figs, peaches, strawberries, melon and grapes, all sliced and arranged in a rainbow of shapes and colours.
‘It's like a painting,’ murmured Roland, leaning towards his grandmother so that the plate could find safe passage to the table.
‘Come?’ said Roberto, hesitating and looking anxious.
‘Pulchrissima!’ interjected Elizabeth, pointing at the plate.
The boy's face broke into a grin. He said something else, a long, incomprehensible sentence, which he directed at Roland before he was commanded back inside by his mother.
‘It is like a painting, Roland, darling,’ whispered Pamela. ‘How right you are.’ She pressed his hand, feeling, as always, a great affinity with this particular grandson, so much more alone always than the others, so encased – as, indeed, she was, these days – in his own world.
‘Talking of drawing,’ boomed Peter, on the prowl for happy subjects now, ‘how's it going, Roland? All that sketching you've been doing, when do we get to see any of it?’
‘I'm not sure… I…’ Roland faltered, quavering both from the attention and a lingering awareness of the Italian boy's beauty, the thick, ink-black hair, the lithe, compact body sliding beneath his clothes. It felt wrong to notice such things, but unavoidable too. Like feelings, the thoughts just came. It wasn't like he chose them.
‘Clem has shown his work to her painter friend, haven't you, Clem?’ blurted Elizabeth, clapping her hand to her mouth as she remembered she wasn't supposed to say anything. She had been thinking of Keith, trying and failing to imagine him at such a gathering, missing him. She mouthed an apology at Roland, who shrugged and smiled with such obvious, disarming forgiveness that she felt even worse.
The spotlight of the conversation, meanwhile, had shifted to Clem. ‘What painter friend?’ asked several people at once.
‘Oh… just someone who… A regular in the wine bar, a man called Nathan Chalmer,’ Clem answered, as breezily as she could, trying not to look at Maisie, or Theo, who was leaning back in his chair and smirking.
‘Nathan Chalmer? But I've heard of him,’ exclaimed Peter, clearly impressed. ‘He's American, isn't he? Figurative portraits. Had an exhibition somewhere a couple of years ago. Blimey, Clem, now that's what I call networking.’
Clem nodded, pink-faced and hollow with terror at the thought of her family ever clapping eyes on Nathan's now completed image of her: tousled raven hair, pearly white skin, the pink slit like a jewel in the dark triangle between her legs, the blue silk flowing like water round her limbs. Staring at it, even with him, she had felt embarrassed. The body, painted in odd wavering lines, could have belonged to any skinny girl, but the set of her face, with its wide, high cheekbones, round dark eyes and full red lips, the upper one protruding in its annoying inim-table way, were unmistakable.
‘Well, there's another cause for celebration,’ declared Peter, raising his glass yet again, aware that he was sliding towards a pleasing state of inebriation. ‘Bravo.’
After the panna cotta had been demolished and only a sliver of melon remained on the fruit plate Chloë asked if they could have a midnight swim.
‘Is it midnight?’ whispered Genevieve, awestruck at having been allowed to stay up so late and staring with wide owl-eyes at her mother.
‘Not quite.’ Helen pulled her youngest on to her lap and kissed her hair. ‘But it is very late… far too late for a swim.’
‘I disagree,’ cut in Peter, glancing with some longing at the shimmering dark rectangle of the pool on the terrace below. ‘What do you say, Charlie? Remember that time we sneaked down to the copse?’
‘I remember it,’ said Pamela, wanting to respond to the mention of the copse before anyone had time to feel awkward. ‘It was October and you both caught a chill.’
Laughter rippled round the table, drawing them all together, making the notion of swimming in August under an Italian night sky irresistible. The elder children were already pushing back their chairs. A moment later Theo, scrabbling in the corner of the terrace, found a switch that turned on the underwater lights. The pool lit up with instant, mesmerizing beauty, a glassy blue square of perfection, a portal to another world.
Pamela stood above the rockery and watched the scene unfolding on the terrace below. A scene as pieced and colourful as one of the Roman mosaics featured in Helen's guidebook, she decided, except that this one was alive and changing every second. The boy, Roberto, had been persuaded to join the fun, in a pair of Roland's shorts, which ballooned round his thighs as he swam. Someone had produced a tennis ball, which they threw to each other between ducking and diving; everyone was included in t
he game, even Genevieve, who paddled and squealed at the shallow end, armbands firmly back in place.
Maria, loading the last of the dinner plates on to a tray, paused to sigh wistfully at the sight, pressing one hand to her ample chest and whispering, ‘Bella famiglia.’
‘Bella indeed,’ murmured Pamela. The pleasure of seeing her family enjoy themselves was immense, impossible to put into words. Troubled times lay ahead – they always did – and such a romp as this, not to mention the holiday as a whole, would help them all immeasurably, she knew. Yet the longing to get home was pushing inside her all the time now, tightening the back of her throat like thirst. She couldn't wait to rescue Poppy from the kennels, to have a proper chat with Marjorie, to make inquiries about a vacancy at Crayshott Manor.
It wasn't until much later that night, when Elizabeth was asleep and the villa quiet, apart from the quiet grumbles of Peter's snores, that Pamela put on her dressing-gown and tiptoed along the hallway, through the kitchen and on to the terrace. Moving carefully in her bare feet, not wanting to trip or tread on anything unpleasant, she made her way down the steps, past the rockery to the poolside.
The water without its clever lights was like treacle, but the moon was bright and its reflection shone in the middle like a penny in need of retrieval. It was on this that Pamela focused as she peeled off her dressing-gown and stood naked in the dark. Skinny-dipping, that's all it was. She had done it with John once, not in the copse, which was always too cold, but in the sea at Biarritz on their honeymoon. She dipped a toe in and shrank back at a sudden injection of icy fear. Maybe it was too soon, after all, to expect so much of herself. But then she heard John telling her not to be silly, telling her how good it would feel, and she went in, not diving or jumping, but simply taking a step, like walking off a cliff. And there was a falling, of her body and her heart, and then a surge of joyous energy as she surfaced, nose pointed to the stars, hair sleek, mouth open and ready for air.
September
Back in England an Indian summer lay in wait, each day a hot, sultry package encased in the freshness of dawn and dusk. Unattended for four weeks and fed by rain, the garden at Ashley House had swelled to the point where the house itself seemed to be sinking among the tidal waves of verdure and colour that surrounded it. Butterflies and insects bobbed lazily at the full fat flowers, splayed among the beds and bushes like the basking populace of a crowded beach, all heedless of the shortening days and the occasional tugging breeze that warned of change.
Serena, tracing the particularly busy traffic of bees to a crack in the lintel above the front door, thought of calling Sid, or a pest-control company from the Yellow Pages but didn't have the heart. The weather would turn eventually and the bees would disappear. They were living on borrowed time, on borrowed hope, clinging to the coat-tails of summer, just as she, Charlie and Ed were clinging to the feel-good shreds of the holiday and the new, desperate hope about the paternity test. Change, and reaction to it, would be forced upon them all soon enough. She only wished she knew where it would lead. The natural world might have its patterns, its enviable seasonal grand design, but she was losing faith in the notion that the existence of humans could relate to anything so comfortingly certain.
As she turned towards the garden, Serena experienced a reflex of pleasure at the sight of it, so gloriously abandoned and rampant, so oblivious to its own imminent demise. At least all her loved ones were in good health, she reminded herself, and if Helen's God existed, He would surely see to it that the paternity test proved negative. Then, with time, she and Charlie could emerge from the separate corners into which Ed's crisis had propelled them and start to talk – to love – properly again. The terrible said things would be forgotten. The future would beckon, as it once had, so efforlessly.
And if the test was positive? Ed had been so certain, after all, so unquestioning of his culpability. Serena moved closer to the flowerbeds, humming to herself, aware that the prospect of an even so clumsily conceived grandchild still filled her with a sort of excitement. A dreadful thing, maybe, which Charlie had every right to distrust, but as solid and undeniable as the old walls of the house towering over her, soaking up the sunshine. She began to hum louder, picking flowers now, even those that were too full-blown to last more than a couple of days, dipping her hands carefully among the insects to preclude the possibility of being stung.
In London Cassie was waiting for the arrival of her period and the state of clear-headedness that she was sure would accompany it. As the heat ballooned and retreated with its new diurnal rhythm, she felt as if the world and the weather had stopped moving, suspending her in some timeless limbo in which there was no sense of where she had come from or where she might be heading. She sought refuge instead in the immediate demands of each day, working hard, a wary eye over her shoulder as she moved between appointments, and overseeing wedding preparations in the evening. While Stephen ploughed through the pile of invitations, complaining merrily about his aching fingers and the taste of the envelope glue, she sewed the finishing touches to Sylvie's bridesmaid dresses herself, closing her mind to everything but the challenge of attaching a lace trim to a velvet yoke, forcing the squeaking, reluctant needle through and out again, gripping ever tighter as her hot fingers slipped on the metal.
In a hotel bedroom near the Aldwych Peter, too, was learning to lose himself to the precious ticking of the present. The world of his family, his work, his guilt, his brother's troubles remained outside, in a parallel universe. When Delia had tried to talk of Julian and Maisie, in regular phone contact, apparently, since the family's return, he hushed her with a kiss. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Now there is only us.’ When, complaining of the heat, she tried to open a window, he prevented that too, not wanting even the toot of a horn to remind him of any reality other than the one at hand. ‘You are the love of my life,’ he said. ‘Let me enjoy this little piece of you.’ She tugged at the curtains but he pulled them back again. ‘I want to see you… all of you.’ She laughed and said he was impossible, while he peeled off first her clothes and then his own, touching and kissing her with precisely the reverence she sought, which kept her hungering for lovers as well as a husband. In the heat their bodies slid against each other making unseemly noises and moving in ungainly ways, watched only by the glaring eye of the sun and a pigeon, which landed briefly on the windowsill before taking off in search of shade.
A few miles south Nathan Chalmer peered out of the window of his studio flat until Clem had emerged safely on to the pavement below. By the time she looked up he had already stepped out of sight, nearer the whirring blades of a recently purchased fan, which moved the air but did not cool it. Nathan sighed and ran his hands over his face. He had seen the sadness lurking in the child's expression and known that it was because of him. He liked his subjects to fall a little in love with him, and he with them. He knew how to do it too, how to open them up so that their vulnerability, their essence could find its way on to the tip of his pencil. With Clem it had been more intense than usual, so intense, indeed, that he had been half tempted to cross the line. Even that day, recognizing the care with which she had dressed, the thin white cotton T-shirt (no bra), the flimsy silk skirt, all showing off to him the alluring, toffee glow of her Italian tan, he had toyed with the idea of pursuing the seduction for which she so clearly yearned. It hadn't helped that she had been full of breathless, endearing talk, spilling the ups and downs of her holiday – the appearance of her beloved twin sister, the uncle's promise about her manuscript, her cousin's film script, the paternity test for her hapless brother. Listening to it all, Nathan had come closer than he cared to admit to scooping her up in his arms and feasting on the sheer energy of her, so young and pretty, a bud half burst.
But he had feasted enough, he knew: Clem's fragility and strength, that poised state between girlishness and womanhood, shone out of his finished painting, making it alive and good. He had a new subject now, Nathan reminded himself, a petite chocolate-skinned girl w
ith full lips and enormous slanted brown eyes. He had found her on the tube, little cream head-phones nestling in her ears, her beautiful mouth silently shaping the words of the tunes.
Nathan returned to the window to check on Clem's progress. She had stopped on the corner of the street and was talking animatedly into her phone. He hoped she was telling the cousin about his offer. He watched, pleased that he had given her something to take away, after all. And it hadn't been out of charity either: the boy could paint, that was plain. Although the product was still raw and untamed, talent blazed from every stroke. And where would he have been, Nathan mused, without his own first chance to exhibit? He'd have to swing it with his agent, of course, but that wouldn't be hard, not these days, with the prices he could command.
Clem had been so delighted that he thought for a moment she might bust out of her delicious shyness and kiss him. But an instant later she was grave-faced, eliciting a promise that her portrait wouldn't be exhibited at the same time. Nathan, not liking the demand, had prevaricated, muttering that the exhibition wasn't until December and she might have changed her mind by then. But Clem was adamant. Only her sister knew she had posed nude and she wanted to keep it that way. Her family had had a tough year and she didn't want to round it off by giving them any further shocks. When still he hesitated she threatened, with a cheek that astonished him, to walk away with Roland's paintings and forget the whole deal.
‘You could be walking away with his future under your arm,’ Nathan had pointed out, laughing.
‘Well, it's my future too and I want to be in control of it,’ she snapped, so strong and grown-up, so unlike the starving waitress he had first propositioned, that he had held up his hands in surrender.
The Simple Rules of Love Page 35
