Close Relations (3 page)

As she drove out of London the road blurred. Brahms was playing – her cassette of the Piano Quartet No 2. On their first date together she had taken Stephen to a lunchtime concert at St John's, Smith Square. The Brahms had been played then, the Lindsay Quartet had performed it. For months afterwards whenever she read the name
Lindsay
she had felt a foolish jolt of electricity. During the concert she and Stephen hadn't touched each other. She had kept her hands in her lap, resting on her handbag, like a dowager, but she had felt the
heat of Stephen down her right side. Her skin had been drawn towards the magnet of his shoulder and his thigh. It was the strangest sensation, as if her soul were being removed into his body.

Later, when the whole thing had started, he said that he had felt it too. They had lain in bed, and with the luxuriousness of all new lovers they had gone back over the preceding weeks, charting their progression into intimacy moment by moment. ‘Did you feel that then, really?' ‘What about that time when we bumped into each other next to the photocopier?' They described each other's clothing – ‘You were wearing your white blouse' – all those months of working together in the office were rerun, their own tender videotape, as they lay under her duvet. Hindsight made their most mundane conversations charged with significance. It was during the Brahms, he said, that he had felt his soul removing itself from his wife and finding its home in Prudence.

Her Metro was a mess. Her box of Kleenex was buried under a tea-towel, a box of fisherman's lozenges (empty) and a packet of Silk Cut (also empty). She pulled out a tissue and wiped her nose. People's cars are often a surprise. Those who lead orderly lives can have chaotic vehicles, and vice versa. Those whose lives are disintegrating can drive around in spotless cars smelling of air freshener, with a single hardback road atlas on the back seat. Cars, supposedly an extension of our personalities, in fact reveal something more interesting – the contradictions that lie within us all. Prudence kept her flat tidy but in her car she became a different person, liberated and powerful, in control of a destiny which in normal life eluded her. She drove fast too – fast and skilfully. Yet she looked like the sort of woman who bicycled around London with a basket full of Kit-e-Kat. Which she did do, too.

Stephen was her editorial director. He had a wife, a Dutch woman called Kaatya. He also had two sons. Prudence's affair with him, conducted for the most part with little physical contact, at lunchtimes, had been going on for a year. Prudence wasn't the sort of woman who fell in love with
other people's husbands. The revelation of her own capacity for deceit had been one of the more painful experiences of the past twelve months. She drove along the fast lane of the M40; she turned up the Brahms. Stephen had given it to her two days earlier. ‘Our first anniversary,' he had said, lifting her chin towards his face.

She rummaged for a cigarette and lit it. She was the only Hammond sister who smoked though she hid the fact, out of some vestigial childish cowardice, from her parents. She didn't look like a smoker; she wore navy-blue cardigans to work, white blouses, flat shoes. It surprised some of her authors when she took them out to lunch and lit up. She smoked; she committed adultery. She thought how none of us are what we seem. Explore deeper and a person disintegrates, just as newsprint, when viewed close-up, disintegrates into tiny dots. How could you trust a word when it was just a collection of spots? Yet her life consisted of working with words, she had to believe in them.

At times she believed that she only existed in other people's expectations of her. When she was a child, for instance, her parents had assembled the dots to create Prudence, the nice, steady sister, the middle one, the swot. These dots clotted together to become her personality. But she knew better. She knew that she was a shifting collection of atoms trying to shape themselves out of chaos. Stephen didn't suspect this; neither did her sisters. Only her cat knew the truth; she could see it in his eyes.

The front of the Old Vicarage was knotted with wistaria. It had been planted many years ago, before the arrival of Robert and Louise. Its thick branches were twisted around each other like lovemaking limbs; their marriage had lasted so long that nobody could prise them apart, even if they had thought to do so. To the right of the vicarage rose the church, St Bartholomew. In its graveyard, beneath the silence of the yew trees, stood headstones. They slanted this way and that,
as if blown on by the breath of God. Depending on the mood of the onlooker the mellow brick house and the ancient place of burial suggested either the permanence of love or its transitoriness.

Louise, hearing cars arriving, stepped out of the front door. Later, months later, she remembered that moment. A leaf from the wistaria spiralled down in front of her and came to rest on the gravel. She looked up, beyond the knotted limbs of the trunk. Did it have some sort of blight? The leaves were dying already; they usually didn't fall until October.

It was five to one. The cars arrived – her parents' estate car followed by Robert's BMW. They stopped in the driveway. As they did so Prudence's car appeared along the lane and drove through the gates. Louise hurried to greet them.

‘Hello!' called her mother. ‘We've all come together.'

‘Glad some people do.' Robert grinned at his wife. ‘Just kidding.' He shook Gordon's hand and kissed his mother-in-law.

Gordon pointed to the house. ‘Should get that guttering seen to.'

‘Gordon –' Dorothy said.

Robert smiled. ‘Want to fix it while we're having lunch?'

‘Don't, love,' said Dorothy. ‘He will.'

‘One of my lads lives out this way. I'll get him to drop by –'

‘Come on!' said Robert.

Robert carried two Tesco bags. A new superstore had opened four miles away. Though he had only gone out for some lemons he had missed the village shop, which only opened briefly on Sundays, and had driven to Tesco with the pleasant sensation that he was both doing his duty and skiving off helping with lunch. Once in the superstore he had succumbed to impulse buys, he was a man who seldom resisted temptation. He had picked up exotic, whiskery fruits from Penang and a bottle of such extra-virgin olive oil that he had practically remortgaged his house to buy it. He had headed to the wine section where he had been seduced into buying various obscure New Zealand vintages. How
could such a boring country produce such interesting wines? Maybe, once they had finished polishing their Vauxhalls and filling in their crossword puzzles, they had nothing better to do. Then he had lingered at the magazine rack and leafed through the more lurid Sunday tabloids, admiring the girls' breasts and the catastrophic lives of lottery winners.

Robert went into the house with his parents-in-law. Louise paused with Prudence. She looked at her sister's reddened eyes.

‘You all right?'

‘Blame it on Brahms,' said Prudence.

‘Only Brahms?' Louise hated it when Prudence cried; she did it so seldom. Prudence was the one she relied on, who would always be there. The trouble was, other people thought so too.

‘How's everything with . . . you know?' she asked.

‘Same as ever.'

‘That's why you look so awful.' Louise accompanied her to the front door. ‘Listen, I don't want to sound like an older sister but shouldn't you –'

‘No.'

Louise looked down the hallway. Sunlight slanted onto the tiles; it shone onto the rear portion of Monty as he wagged his tail, greeting the guests. A champagne cork popped; Imogen laughed.

Louise stood there, seeing it through her sister's eyes. She felt a wave of hatred for Stephen, a man she had never met, for Prudence kept him a secret and their parents didn't even know about his existence. Stephen wasn't entirely to blame, of course, but it is easier to put the responsibility onto somebody unknown, particularly if he is so visibly making your sister unhappy.

The dining room was square and masculine. Its french windows opened into the conservatory where geraniums glowed
blood-red in the sunshine. There was a marble fireplace; there was a grandfather clock and a large mahogany table which Robert had inherited from one of his uncles. They ate salami and tinned artichokes, Imogen's favourite starter. Robert poured out more champagne. He was a generous host; he looked at home in this room, doling out wine and chatting, a man at ease with himself and his possessions. Today he wore a striped silk shirt from Tumbull and Asser and a plum-coloured cravat; he looked exactly what he was – a City whiz-kid who had loosened up for the weekend.

‘So how're you doing, Pru?' he asked. ‘How's the literary scene. Discovered any geniuses?'

‘Well, I'm working on a book called
My Favourite Microwave Recipes.
It's written by that newscaster, what's his name.'

‘Yeah, and really written by you. Why don't you tell them? I would.'

‘It's what I'm paid for.'

‘Don't be such a wimp,' said Robert. ‘You're wasted in that place. You should be managing director by now.'

Prudence shrugged. She was immune to Robert's flattery; to his attractions too. He had a handsome, wolfish face and thick black hair. He was a small man – it always surprised her that he was shorter than Louise. At some point in his childhood he had contracted TB and spent months languishing in bed, that was probably the reason. Like many small men he had grown up to be intensely competitive. He played tennis in a London club, thrashing what he called merchant wankers and boasting about it afterwards to Louise. Prudence was both fascinated and repulsed by his hairiness – dense black hairs on his slender arms. She pictured him in bed with Louise, gripping her like a monkey. When other people were talking a muscle twitched in his jaw; there was a restlessness about him, an impatience to be amused. Next to him Prudence, in her floral dress, felt like a head teacher.

Jamie had inherited his father's restlessness. His leg was jiggling under the table. His grandmother was talking to him.

‘So what are you going to do in your year off?' she asked.

‘Try to find a job.'

‘Should be easy, with your A levels.'

‘Not round here.'

Jamie was bored with the country; he had grown out of it. His days of tadpole-collecting were over and though he sometimes joined the local youths in the bus shelter they seemed like bumpkins to him. Like most adolescent boys he was unwillingly drawn into family gatherings and looked as if he would rather be doing a hundred other things. The question was: what?

Louise came in, carrying a platter. It contained a large salmon strewn with herbs.

‘Look at that,' said her father. ‘Is there nothing this girl can't do?'

‘Woman, Dad,' said Louise. ‘I'm forty-two.'

‘A moment's silence.' He tapped his fork. ‘Let us gaze upon this masterpiece.' On these occasions Gordon was inclined to grow flushed and jovial. It embarrassed his daughters but amused his grandchildren, who were at one remove. Louise sliced into the flesh of the salmon. Gordon raised his glass to Imogen. ‘To the birthday girl. Sweet sixteen! You'll be giving me a grandchild before your aunties, unless they pull a finger out.'

There was a silence. Louise glanced at Pru, then she laughed hastily. ‘I thought I was starting the menopause last week. Then I realised I'd just left my diaphragm in, all through my period.'

Prudence laughed. Dorothy indicated the teenagers: ‘Louise!'

Robert turned to his father-in-law. ‘Some potatoes? So how's the business doing?'

‘Worked off our feet,' said Gordon.

‘I wish he'd take it easy. Haring around London like a twenty-year-old. He won't admit he's getting older.' Dorothy turned to Louise. ‘You tell him. He never listens to me.'

‘He never has,' said Louise.

‘And what's that supposed to mean?' demanded her father.

‘You've never listened to Mum,' said Prudence, joining in.

‘Oh-oh, they're ganging up on me.' Gordon turned to Robert. ‘Same as always.'

The doorbell rang.

‘Shit,' said Louise. ‘Send them away, whoever they are.'

Robert left the room. They heard murmurs in the hall, the surprised tone in Robert's voice. There was the bumping, dragging sound of luggage being brought in.

A woman came in. Though she was thirty-seven she looked younger. She had a no-nonsense, tanned face. It was bare of make-up. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and when she entered the room she paused, startled, as if she had emerged from the darkness to popping flashbulbs.

‘Aunty Maddy!' cried Imogen.

Forks clattered onto plates. Her sisters hugged her.

‘When did you arrive?'

‘I've come straight from the airport.'

‘Why didn't you tell us?' asked Louise.

‘Are you all right, love?' asked her mother. ‘You look so thin.'

‘Wicked tan.' Jamie grinned at his aunt.

‘We would've come to the airport,' Louise protested.

‘She always was a law unto herself,' said her father.

Maddy looked at the teenagers. ‘You're so enormous!' She hadn't seen them for four years.

Robert dragged forward another chair. Maddy, who didn't like kissing, who shrank from any show of affection, turned to Imogen and said gruffly: ‘Happy birthday. See? I got back in time.' She looked around. ‘I didn't know it was going to be, well, everyone.'

‘Shall we go home then?' asked her father.

‘Gordon.' Dorothy shot him a warning look.

‘A letter would have been appreciated,' he said. ‘Just one.'

‘Dad.' Prudence frowned at him.

Louise gave Maddy a plate of food and a glass of orange juice – her sister didn't drink alcohol. They asked her questions: why had she decided to come back to England? How
long was she here for?