Close Relations (43 page)

‘They're not ours any more.' Jamie squatted in front of the cage. Boyd sat hunched in his corner, growling. ‘You a man, or what?'

‘He's a rabbit,' said Imogen.

Jamie lifted him out. It had been a long time since he had picked him up. Boyd, taken aback by this, froze. Jamie lowered him onto the grass. ‘Off you go. Forget those home commitments, all that responsibility. Wasn't it boring in your little hutch?' Still the rabbit didn't move. Unnerved by the prospect of freedom, he sat there, his ears twitching. ‘Go on, go forth and multiply,' said Jamie. ‘Shag thyself senseless.'

Boyd hopped a few feet. He stopped and sniffed the air. Then he started nibbling the grass – it was long and lush, nobody had cut the lawn for weeks.

Louise straightened up. She put her arms round her children. They were no longer her kids; they were two large allies for the short amount of time she would have them, because soon they too would be gone. She felt strangely exhilarated.

‘Let's celebrate. There's still some Bolly left.'

‘I'd like some lemonade,' Imogen said.

‘Oh, diddums,' said Jamie.

They had run out of lemons. Louise jumped into her Space Cruiser and started the engine. She remembered Imogen's birthday, how Robert had driven off to look for lemons. Why had he been away for such a long time? The past, that once-smooth landscape, was now planted with mines of this kind.

On the dashboard a light started winking. Brake fluid? Oil? Robert had dealt with all that. She had so much to learn but just now she didn't care. She had the children and Robert had lost them; there was a sick satisfaction in this. Today she didn't care about anything, even seeing Tim for the first time since that humiliating evening.

She stopped outside the General Stores and jumped down. The shop was closed. She looked at her watch: it was 5.10.

Arnold, the publican, was watering his hanging baskets. ‘He's packed up and gone.' He jerked his spray bottle at the shop. ‘Last Thursday.'

‘Tim?' asked Louise stupidly. ‘Why?'

‘Came to our village for some peace and quiet, you know he's had a rough ride. Well, he said the vandals were the last straw.'

‘What vandals?'

‘Stealing cars, you not heard? Been a spate of it round here. Then a few weeks ago somebody emptied his till. That did it.'

Louise gazed at the shop window. The blinds were pulled down. Stuck to the glass, however, was the banner.
SUPPORT OUR VILLAGE SHOP.
Its colours had faded in the sunlight.

She walked back to her car. She thought: I tried to save him. I did, in my own blind way.

Being alone now, Maddy and Prudence drew closer to each other. Released from the constraints of disliking each other's partner – a vocal dislike in Maddy's case and an unspoken one in Prudence's – they felt more intimate with each other than they had for years. That Prudence had introduced Maddy to Erin deepened this; so did their shared lesbian confidences. And then there was Allegra. Maddy loved the little girl and felt responsible for her. Erin had always neglected her daughter and now only took her to photo-opportunities.

Maddy and Prudence decided to take her out on the sort of jaunts they would have taken their own children, if they had had them. On a Sunday in late May they took her on a river trip to Greenwich. Aziz accompanied them. They made a curious, reconstructed little family.

Prudence hadn't met Aziz before. She was charmed by his elegaic good manners and sorrowful eyes. He looked like a prince who had been stripped of his inheritance. They watched him leaning against the rail, his arm around his daughter.

‘His life's such a mess,' said Maddy.

‘Join the club.'

‘He feels betrayed.'

‘Don't we all.' Prudence laughed. ‘Stephen betrayed me with his wife, Robert betrayed Louise with their money and Erin betrayed you with her own ego.' She flung back her head. The clouds raced above her.

‘You're good with words,' said Maddy. ‘You've always made sense of things.'

‘Oh, words are easy.'

Aziz joined them. Prudence pointed out the Unimedia building, glittering in the sun as they slid past. ‘That's where I work.'

‘Carl Zinich built that,' he said. ‘We were in partnership when we started out.' He pointed out the other buildings and told her the names of their architects. ‘César Pelli, Richard Seifert . . . Know how many square feet of office space is lying empty over there? Docklands is a monument to developers' greed. I want to build wonderful spaces for people to live in.' His voice warmed up. ‘We put people into little boxes, they get so lonely, like rabbits in their hutches. I want to create big, flexible spaces that absorb our comings and goings, that have privacy and conviviality. My family's house in Bombay, it was a living organism, aunts, cousins, it welcomed them all in, very Chekhovian . . . wouldn't people be happier living in big, loose arrangements, a sort of non-family version of mine?'

‘Our father's a builder,' said Prudence. ‘Did you know? Not grand, like those architects, but he had ambitions, too. Ambitions for us. So he worked and he worked until he could buy a big house in Purley, mock-Tudor, all that. Trouble was, by then he had given us the education to sneer at it.' She laughed. ‘I'm sure your house in Bombay wasn't like that.'

‘Oh no? So why do you think I left?'

She smiled. They drifted down the Thames, through the hazy sunshine. They were flotsam, bumping together in the current.

They ate a picnic on the hill, up by the Observatory.
London lay spread beneath them. The buildings seemed to be exhaling, exhausted by the burden of those living within them. The Canary Wharf building rose into the haze, the light on its pinnacle pulsing in the sunshine.

Prudence gave Aziz a sandwich. ‘It's so strange.' She pointed to the knapsack Allegra wore on her back. ‘Maddy and I, we could pack one of those and just go anywhere.'

‘Don't go!' said Allegra.

‘We're not going to.'

Maddy said solemnly: ‘You think you can leave it behind, but you take your baggage with you.'

‘It's just an alarming thought, that's all,' said Prudence.

‘Shall I tell you when I was first truly afraid?' asked Aziz. ‘I said to my elder brother,
Look at that beautiful yellow balloon
and he said,
Ah but your yellow may not be mine. How can you tell we're really seeing the same thing?
I suddenly felt utterly alone.'

‘You think you can rely on words,' said Prudence. ‘I used to think that, when I was little. Then I looked closely at the newspaper and it was all little dots. I felt terrified.'

‘It's okay,' replied Aziz. ‘They're computer-typeset now.'

Prudence laughed. She said: ‘When my parents split up the past sort of disintegrated. Back into the little dots.' She turned to Allegra. ‘Even at my age that happened.'

‘Mine weren't parents to begin with,' said Allegra.

Aziz brushed grass-clippings off his trousers. ‘Don't blame me for that, my darling.'

Prudence flung herself back onto the grass. She stared up at the sky. ‘Let's all go to India and live in a big house with a veranda. Let's pack our bags and go. Nobody'll miss us.' How huge the sky was, above the suffused city. ‘Let's all see the same colours. Let's live together because we like each other, not because we're related. Wouldn't it be fun?'

‘Yes,' said Allegra.

Maybe the seed was sown that day. Later, Prudence remembered that conversation on the hill and her vision of a communal life – serene, companionable, unmuddied by sex.
Herself, her sister Maddy who had been lost for so long, the lonely child, and the refined, pedantic man who brushed grass-clippings off his linen trousers. Maybe they had as good a chance as any of being happy.

And they were happy that day, the four of them. After lunch, Prudence took them to the Unimedia building, the security guard let them in, and while she showed Aziz around its empty, marble spaces, Maddy and Allegra travelled up and down in the lift, mouthing at each other in its glass lozenge. They went into her office and she made them some tea. She gave Allegra some children's books; she gave Aziz a book on landmarks of modem British architecture which she had recently published. As he leafed through it she gazed at his shiny, blue-black hair. A feeling of pleasure spread through her; she always felt this when she watched people reading.

And then the peace was shattered. ‘I suppose we'd better go,' she said, stacking the cups on the tray.

‘I'm not,' said Allegra.

They looked at the little girl sitting on the carpet.

‘I'm not going home,' she said. She unclipped her knapsack and took it off. Dumping it on the carpet, she opened it and showed them what was inside – pyjamas, a pair of knickers, her Barbie ballerina.

‘I'm coming to live with you,' she said, looking from one face to another. ‘If you won't have me, I'm running away.'

‘Ally!' said her father. ‘Don't talk like that.'

‘Why did Mummy have me if she doesn't want me? She never watches TV with me, she never does anything, she's always doing something else.'

Prudence, staring down at her, had a sense of
déjà vu
. Stephen had stood on that very spot, his bags heaped on the floor.
I've left them. Can I come and live with you?

Maddy sat down next to Allegra. ‘Of course she loves you.'

‘
You
know what she's like,' said the little girl. ‘She doesn't love anybody except herself and her beastly book.'

‘Come on, darling.' Aziz stretched out his hand.

Allegra grabbed her knapsack and ran out of the room.

They chased her, their footsteps clattering on the stairs. Down and down she ran, they glimpsed her dark head as she turned the corners. Finally, down in the lobby, Maddy cornered her. She had ducked behind a tub of ferns. Maddy took her arm and led her out. ‘Come on, darling,' she said.

Prudence felt a jolt. She had never heard Maddy call anyone
darling
before. All her life Maddy had worked with children and she had never had one of her own.

In silence they drove Allegra back to Hackney. Aziz sat with her in the back. When they arrived in Romilly Street she had fallen asleep against his shoulder.

On Saturday Louise's sisters and mother came down to clean up the Old Vicarage as if preparing a bride for the highest bidder. They arrived together in Prudence's car. In the lane, a man was hammering up a
FOR SALE
sign; though this was inevitable, it was still a shocking sight; it always is.

Louise tried to greet them warmly. On a good day this would have felt like a show of female solidarity, womenfolk rallying round and rolling up their sleeves, but today there seemed something pitiful about these four abandoned women. She could picture herself and her sisters ending their lives alone, a cat on each of their laps. Jamie was the only invigorating masculine presence, dragging down a bag of rubbish from his room.

‘What's happened to the shop?' asked Dorothy, getting out of the car. ‘We stopped there for some rubber gloves – I thought, Lou won't have enough rubber gloves – and it was shut up.'

Louise explained about Tim and Margot. ‘They had a daughter, you see. She died from meningitis six years ago. They came here to start a new life. Village shop, sounds so idyllic.'

Jamie lowered his bag to the ground. ‘They had a daughter?'

Omitting her own role in this, Louise recounted what had happened. ‘So she went first, and finally he left. He said the local vandals were the last straw, smashing up scouts' huts, stealing cars, that sort of thing.'

‘What?' Jamie was looking at her curiously.

‘Then somebody burgled his shop. That did it. And he left.'

Dorothy looked at the house, at the heavy buds of the wistaria hanging over the porch. ‘Even here, in this beautiful place,' she said. ‘You'd think you'd be safe here.'

‘Nothing's safe,' said Louise. ‘If I've learned anything, I've learned that.'

‘Don't, Mum.' Jamie shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Dorothy turned to him. ‘Those hooligans, they're probably your age. I blame it on the parents.'

Jamie hauled away his bag of rubbish.

They set to work washing woodwork and clearing out cupboards. They sorted things into piles for the Help the Aged shop in Beaconsfield, reducing the Bailey family past to jumble.
‘If in doubt, throw it out,'
was Dorothy's motto and she muttered it as she rummaged through the hall cupboard, flinging out child-sized wellington boots and frayed espadrilles, flattened like biscuits. Having already cleared out one house that year she was ruthless but Louise felt the same way and left her to it.

She and Prudence started on the marital bedroom –
splendid master bedroom with en suite bathroom and extensive views,
according to the estate agent's brochure. Prudence, standing on a chair, opened the top of the wardrobe and pulled out a cardboard box. It was filled with baby clothes – dungarees, Babygros. ‘Why did you keep these?'

Louise, busying herself, didn't reply.

Prudence blushed. ‘It's a bit late now,' she said, and dropped the box on the floor.

‘Have you heard from Stephen?' Louise asked.

Prudence shook her head.

In the
en suite
bathroom Maddy was polishing the taps with an old silk stocking she had found behind the towel rail. ‘Never had a jacuzzi,' she said, looking at the bath. ‘Never done lots of things. I'm going to start a new life.'

‘Me, too,' said Prudence. ‘So how do we begin?'

‘Search me,' said Maddy.

Jamie came in and gave a carrier bag to Maddy. ‘Allegra might want these. My old computer games and things.' He paused, and turned to his mother. ‘Do you know where Tim's gone?' he asked. ‘The man from the shop.'