Close Relations (13 page)

Maddy nodded. She went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. She poured dewberry oil into the water and straightened up, looking at herself in the mirror. Surely it must be obvious? People in the street must know what had been happening to her.

Erin came up behind her, pressing her breasts against Maddy's back. The room filled with steam. Erin rubbed the mirror, revealing their faces. ‘Am I making you happy, my darling?'

Maddy nodded. ‘Nothing in my life had ever worked out.' She paused, wondering whether to tell her about Nigeria.

‘That's because you didn't know what you were looking for.' Erin turned her around and kissed her. Maddy clung to her in the steam.

It rained heavily overnight. It seemed that autumn would never burst into glory but slide sullenly into winter. Dorothy's hip-bones ached; they did so, increasingly, in wet weather. The joints in her hands ached. She was getting old. She pictured herself confined to a wheelchair, waving weakly
at her husband to get his attention. He was too impatient for illness. He boasted that he had hardly had a day off work all his life. Infirmity was something that people should snap out of; but one couldn't snap out of old age.

It was Friday morning. Irritably she watched him swabbing a piece of sausage in his tomato ketchup. Gordon always had a fry-up for breakfast and he always poured out too much ketchup. Over the years she must have scraped gallons down the sink.

She said: ‘I'm doing the wages, Gordon. Then I'm going round to Forsythe's.'

‘You're what?' He looked up from his
Daily Telegraph.

‘I'm going to get them to finish my kitchen.'

‘Don't be soft!'

‘And they can paint the bathroom while they're about it.'

‘That's daft. Look, I'll get cracking over the weekend.'

‘Six months, you've been saying that.' She pointed to her
Daily Mail
. ‘Know what it says in my horoscope?
The choice to assert yourself is your own prerogative.
'

‘Look, love. I promise.' He swallowed his tea and stood up. As he did so, he winced.

‘What's the matter?'

He rubbed his arm. ‘Just an itch.' He picked up his mobile phone, kissed her on the forehead and left.

‘They're coming to stay?' Louise stared at him. ‘This weekend?'

‘Didn't I tell you?' Robert swallowed his coffee and got up.

Imogen rushed into the kitchen. ‘Mum, come on!' It was time to go to school.

‘But I'm working today.' Louise glared at her husband. ‘The house is a pit, I haven't done any shopping, I haven't got the time –'

‘They'll help,' he said.

‘What, Henry and Sophie? They'll sit around drinking wine, sitting on the kitchen units so I can't get at anything,
and they'll say
what shall we do?
but everything takes far too long to explain, it's much quicker doing it myself, and anyway they're
guests
. The only thing guests like doing is shelling peas. And I haven't got any.'

Robert slipped out of the door. He was off to work.

‘Come
on
!' said Imogen.

Louise grabbed her car keys.

Gordon was stuck in a traffic jam halfway down the Old Kent Road. He tapped his fingers on the wheel. ‘Get a move on, you dozy buggers!' Gordon was the sort of man who carried on a one-way conversation with other drivers, admonishing them, chivvying them. His whole life seemed to be spent in traffic jams, stuck behind driver-only buses whose passengers spent ten minutes rummaging for the right change.

He had to get to the Elephant and Castle site; at nine sharp he had a meeting with the district surveyor. Then he had to check up on the Farleigh Road conversion, where items were missing from a delivery of sanitary fitments. His phone rang. It was Nobby, one of his plumbers. They were over in Lewisham, having problems with a catering oven. They couldn't get it through the hallway.

‘. . . why didn't you measure the bugger first?' yelled Gordon. ‘Is Frank there? . . . Well, where the hell is he?'

Louise was in Tesco. She was stuck in a trolley jam. Two shoppers were trying to pass in opposite directions. A temporarily abandoned trolley blocked the middle route. Why did people leave their trolleys in the middle of the aisle? They had only started to do this over the past few years; it was a new phenomenon, like the anarchy of the bus queues that she had observed when she went to London. A symptom of the fuck-the-rest-of-you malaise that seemed to be gripping the country as it slunk towards the millennium.

Irritably she pushed her trolley through. She felt guilty that she wasn't shopping in the village but she was in a hurry and she needed to get everything at once. Why hadn't Robert told her the Warshaws were coming? She flung in a packet of pasta. She flung in a bottle of sun-dried tomatoes – Robert called them ‘dead men's ears'. When people came to stay they suddenly discovered they had enormous appetites. It must be the fresh air. They ate huge breakfasts.
We never have cooked breakfasts usually, do we darling
? They ate vast lunches.
I don't know how you do it, Lou, I wish I had time to cook like this
. They especially looked forward to her home-made bread.
Why don't you make bread, darling? Because I've been in Milan all bloody week, that's why
.

Louise saw a thin, fair-haired youth. Dressed in overalls, he was loading tins of cat food onto the shelves. It took her a moment to recognise her own son.

‘God, you look quite grown-up!' she said, coming up to him.

‘Mum!' Jamie frowned at her, indicating the other shoppers.

‘Sorry. Get me some Whiskas, would you?' She pointed. ‘Those ones.'

He passed down some tins. Their cat was finicky. At the moment he would eat only Salmon'n'Tuna Select Cuts. The trouble was he was also unpredictably fickle. He seemed to know, by radar, the moment when she had stocked up on his latest favourite. Then he would refuse to touch it. He would sniff the bowl, a look of pained revulsion on his face as if she had offered him a bowl of vomit. Then he would wander around the kitchen, stiff-legged, miaowing. Monty, who would have been waiting, saliva hanging from his jowls, would lumber forward and eat it up.

Louise left her son and pushed her trolley towards the meat counter. The trouble was that despite their enormous appetites her weekend guests were frequently faddy too. Was Henry or Sophie a vegetarian? Was Sophie on anti-depressants so she couldn't eat cheese? Last time she had
talked about Prozac, how Henry's ex-wife was on it and how she was thinking of taking it too because she was so depressed at not conceiving a child. Oh, it was so complicated.

As she stood at the checkout Louise thought of her parents. They had been brought up in a world that was unrecognisable to her, let alone her children. Their class – the respectable working class – was more or less extinct. Besides, her parents had long ago struggled out of it. They had scrimped and saved – how quaint those words sounded now! – they had eaten tinned luncheon meat and mashed potatoes. The salmon her own cat sneered at would have been the height of luxury to them.

Louise carried her bags out to the car-park. She didn't know where this got her. Should she feel guilty for her petty preoccupations, for taking so much for granted? Should she feel guilty if, after all they had done for her, she wasn't happy?

Gordon was late for his next appointment. Where the hell was Frank, his foreman? He couldn't get him on his mobile phone. Frank had a drink problem. Every month or so he disappeared on a binge. God forbid that he should be off on one now.

Gordon hurried across to his car. A traffic warden was sticking a ticket to his windscreen. ‘Hoi!' shouted Gordon. ‘Hoi, mate! I'm just coming!'

But the warden carried on, deaf. Gordon bellowed in frustration.

Two mornings a week Louise worked. She was one of the Volunteer Reading Help team at the village school. Tim knew her exact times of arrival and departure. The school was situated across the green from his shop. On that Friday he was unblocking the gutter beside the front step; last night's downpour had clogged it up with some foul-smelling overflow
from the drains.

At ten o'clock her Space Cruiser hove into view. His heart jumped. She was late; she usually walked. He straightened up and watched her park outside the school. She got out and hurried through the gates.

Even from this distance her Toyota looked as huge as a tank. It towered above the other cars; if it hadn't been Louise's he would have called it a monstrosity. It resembled a jeep pumped with steroids – bulging, silver, barricaded with cattle prods. Her husband had sealed her off from the world; he had reinforced the walls around her so that nobody could get in. Louise was a princess in a tower of her husband's making; she wasn't happy. Tim knew that; he, and only he, could see through the veneer. She was waiting to be rescued; it was only a matter of time.

‘I'll be home by six,' whispered Prudence. ‘Come as soon as you can.'

She replaced the receiver, picked up her papers and went upstairs to the editorial meeting.

Alan, the managing director, squinted at her through his cigarette smoke. ‘Hey, Pru, you're looking bright and bushy-tailed this morning.'

It was lunchtime. The sun had come out. Maddy and Erin sat on a pile of rolled-up turf in a garden off Kensington High Street. The place belonged to an Arab who was never there. They sat side by side, eating mozzarella sandwiches. Maddy had become a vegetarian. She didn't miss eating meat. It was like men; she couldn't understand what she'd seen in it. The rolls of turf resembled fur, skinned from defenceless mammals.

‘Look,' said Maddy, ‘we've got the same sized feet.'

Erin rubbed her boot against Maddy's foot. ‘I want you to come home with me tonight. I want you to meet my daughter.'

The sun had come out. Prudence sauntered down the street, swinging a Fenwick carrier bag.

From a doorway a voice called: ‘Spare us some change?' A head emerged from a sleeping bag. He was a young boy, her nephew's age.

She bent down and gave him a pound coin. She smiled blithely and walked on. She thought how happiness makes us both blind and generous. We glide along so well armoured that nothing can dent us. She knew she should feel guilty for buying a silk slip that cost fifty times the amount she had given the boy. But then again, didn't she deserve to be happy, just for once?

She stopped. She must have passed this place countless times. In the window a sign said
Leg Waxing
.

Prudence smiled to herself. She pushed open the door of the beauty salon and went in.

What a day! Parking ticket, gas leak. The traffic was diabolical, the Friday afternoon scrum, drivers behaving like madmen and now Gordon's phone rang again as he drove across Waterloo Bridge.

‘Thank goodness I've got you!' Mrs Malik's voice was hysterical. ‘I'm in the bathroom, it's flooded. Oh, come quickly, please!'

‘Don't panic, love,' said Gordon. ‘Where's your mains stopcock?'

‘I don't know!'

He changed direction and headed for Victoria. ‘I'm on my way.' He blared his horn at an
Evening Standard
van that slewed around in front of him, making a u-turn. Drivers of
Evening Standard
vans were the biggest maniacs of the lot, they drove as if they were telling the world about the outbreak of war.

Gordon braked. Blast! Westminster Bridge was closed off with traffic cones.

Louise yanked the bottom sheet over the spare bed. She knocked over the carafe of water on the bedside table. Shit!
London's such a madhouse
, they said.
Bombs, car clampers, muggers . . . It's so peaceful here, we always sleep like a log, don't we, darling
?

She swabbed the water with Kleenex. She didn't even like Henry and Sophie much. Henry worked with Robert. They would spend the whole weekend talking about management buy-outs. Sophie worked as a PR in the fashion business and made it smilingly obvious that she considered Louise an empty-headed housewife.

Louise lifted up the duvet and tried to stuff it into its cover.

Gordon drove round the block twice. No bloody meters. He double-parked and hurried across to the house. He rang the bell. A small girl opened the door.

‘Is your mum upstairs?' he asked.

She nodded. In the lounge, a crack had appeared across the ceiling. Water was already seeping through it.

Gordon pounded up the stairs.

Trish was putting on her coat. ‘Sure you don't mind me going early?'

Prudence shook her head. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.'

‘You're very cheerful. Doing anything exciting tonight?'

Prudence smiled. ‘Just staying in.'

‘Oh, well. Never mind.'

Under the desk, Prudence stroked her shin. Even through her tights she felt it, smooth as glass.

Water shot out of the disconnected tap. The floor was awash.
Mrs Malik, a vague, frightened woman, was trying ineffectually to staunch the flow with a towel.

‘The tank's on the roof?' asked Gordon, trying to remember the layout of the house.

‘I don't know!'

‘The stopcock?'

‘My husband would know!'

He pointed to a trap-door in the ceiling. ‘Got a ladder?'

‘I don't know!'

‘There's a stepladder under the stairs,' said the little girl.

Gordon raced downstairs. As he passed the lounge he heard a thud. He looked in. Plaster dust billowed out; a section of ceiling had collapsed.

He opened the cupboard and pulled out the stepladder. It was a heavy wooden ladder encrusted with paint. He struggled with it upstairs. In the bathroom he waded through the water, set up the ladder and started climbing. He pushed at the trap-door. It was stuck.

As he pushed, two things happened. His phone rang. Then a thick, elastic band tightened around his chest. It stopped his breath.