To Have and to Hold (29 page)

Vera went on: ‘I was the only one. Sometimes I felt I should not be alive. But I was loved by my new family and I learned that life has to go on, and that it is most precious. And that a family, any family, is a wonderful thing and is to be treasured.' She had been looking down at the cake, its icing cracked by her knife. Now she looked up and met Viv's eyes. ‘It is to have people who love you whatever you do, even if they sometimes do not understand.' She was looking at everyone now, from one face to another. ‘And I just need to say – I'm sorry for taking up all this time . . . I am so happy, to be part of something again, and such lovely people. And I hope we can have many more bottles of champagne together.'

She sat down. There was a silence, then a rumble of thunder. A few people hesitantly clapped, and then the rest joined in.

THE PLACE STILL
looked as if he had only just arrived. In fact, it was now October and Ollie had lived in his sister's flat for six weeks. His disorder, however, had a transient, bachelor air – he had never unpacked his suitcase and the wastepaper basket was full of lager cans.

The flat was in a mansion block near the Albert Hall, an area of London he had always found boring and over-upholstered. The other inhabitants appeared either to be Arabs, or girls as well-bred as his sister, whose daddies had bought the flat for them and who had boyfriends with the sort of braying laughs that made his skin pucker. He lived with the curtains closed, in perpetual twilight, telling himself that out of suffering at least he could hammer out his masterpiece. His typewriter sat on the table, surrounded by scattered notes. He had never been so lonely in his life.

It was disorientating how many hours there were to the day when one was not at home. He had even started playing the piano again – Caroline was a gifted musician and had installed the old family Bechstein in the living room.

In fact, he was in the middle of ‘Riders on the Storm' when there was a knock at the door and she came in.

‘Hi, sis,' he said, swivelling round on the stool.

She put down her suitcase. ‘Haven't heard you playing that for yonks.'

‘Haven't played for yonks. That's why my songs are so dated.'

‘You were awful in the sixties,' she said. ‘You smelt of very old carpet and you smiled all the time. Must've been the drugs.'

He revolved slowly. ‘I just found more things to smile about.'

‘How've you been? Can I spend the night?'

‘It's your flat,' he said.

‘You're not expecting anyone?'

He nodded as he spun around. ‘She's blonde and Finnish
with long tanned thighs. She doesn't talk at all but just gazes at me in mute adoration. She demands nothing but my diminished, though still faintly pulsating, masculinity.'

Caroline smiled, like a sixth-former who has found a junior in her study. ‘Shall I make us a cup of tea?'

‘None left.'

‘You are hopeless. Coffee then.'

She went into the kitchen. He heard her make a noise of disgust, loud enough for him to notice.

‘Sorry,' he called. ‘Ran out of bin-liners.'

‘It's not that,' she said, reappearing. She held out three empty whisky bottles.

He nodded. ‘I'm learning to be an alcoholic. It's a new life experience.'

She sighed and went back into the kitchen. He played the piano softly, thinking how if Caroline weren't his sister he'd have nothing in common with her at all. Yet he was fond of her. She had been a no-nonsense, middle-aged little girl; sometimes she reminded him of a more privileged version of Ann.

She came back with two mugs of coffee. ‘Never seen so many take-away boxes in all my life,' she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be liberated.' She passed him a mug. ‘Bet you can't even boil an egg.'

‘Look, Caro, you must realize something about my wife.'

‘What?'

‘We were supposed to have a sharing marriage but you can't share anything with Viv.'

‘Why not?'

‘She wants – she wanted to be in control. Cooking, sex, life. And she was. Nothing very liberated about that for either of us. We just used the vocabulary.' He ran his finger down the keys, playing a descending scale for effect. He felt full of self-pity today.

‘Can I be frank, Ollie?'

‘I hate it when people say that.'

‘You're well rid of her. She sneered at us. She had a bad
influence on you. You were always weak and she made you weaker –'

‘Shut up.'

‘What?'

He said: ‘Don't talk like that about her.'

‘Why not? You've always been saying –'

‘I'm allowed to,' he replied. ‘I love her.'

‘Still?'

He swivelled his seat to face her. ‘There's one thing you don't understand about Viv. None of you've ever understood it. You, or our parents, with their sherry and their platitudes, who wouldn't know a feeling if it came up and slapped them in the face; or Marcus, stuck out in Hong Kong in his boring sterile job, talking about tax evasion and what sort of stacking stereo to buy – none of you've realized one thing about Viv. She's alive.'

‘So we're dead?'

‘No. I'm just saying she's alive.'

Ignoring his coffee, he got off the stool, went into the kitchen and split open a lager. It was Triple Strength Export, the sort of beer that the men in his own neighbourhood, without his educational advantages, drank in the doorways of bankrupt shops. It gave his disintegration a spurious street pedigree. Besides, it got him drunker quicker.

He returned to the living room. She said: ‘You might sneer at your family but the moment you're in trouble we do rally round.' She drained her coffee and took the mugs into the kitchen. He stepped aside for her. ‘And you didn't exactly refuse Great Auntie Flo's legacy.'

‘She left it to me.'

‘Know what I'm going to buy with mine?' she asked, pulling up the kitchen blind. He winced in the sunlight. ‘A Golf Convertible. It's
la rage
in Brussels.'

Ollie said: ‘I've bought time.' He pointed through the doorway at his typewriter.

‘Why did you leave the magazine?' she asked. ‘Don't say you've turned Tory.'

He shook his head. ‘Just lost my faith.' He tipped the can against his mouth. ‘I've decided to discover myself instead.'

‘Gawd,' said his sister, and heaved a sigh. ‘It's kaftan time.'

Viv paused at the newsagent's. A
For Sale
postcard had caught her eye. She got out her biro and took down the details.

The autumnal sun shone and Mr Gupta, the newsagent, was standing in the doorway. He disappeared for a moment and came back with some
New Society
magazines. ‘Your husband, he never picks these up any more.'

She took them. ‘Look, why don't you cancel them from now on?' Saying the words, she felt a spasm of pain. It's arbitrary, how these things hit. After all, she was only cancelling a magazine order.

To recover herself, she pointed to the three little girls that Mr Gupta was shooing to the back of the shop.

‘They're not all yours, are they?'

‘Two belong to my sister and her husband, they live upstairs.'

‘Do you ever forget which child belongs to who?' she asked.

He smiled politely at her joke. Well, he thought it was a joke. As she walked away, stately now in her advanced pregnancy, she thought: perhaps they would manage this business better in India.

Only those who have been pregnant know how it transforms them into public property. Strange children stroke their bellies and question them; other women confide in them, repeating in uncomfortable detail their experiences of birth, varicose veins and flatulence. De-sexed, their bodies are no longer their own, but reproductive vehicles to be prodded in clinics, preferably in front of twenty male students.

In the past Viv, unlike many women, had enjoyed this. Ollie no doubt would have attributed it to her desire to be the centre of the universe. This time, however, it made her feel uneasy and spurious. Bella next door, for instance, had had a more lurid gynaecological history even than Ann, but had managed finally to produce five children, now grown up. She liked
comparing notes, and there had always been something watchful about her that Viv had never trusted.

When Viv wheeled the pram home – Ollie had taken the girls out in the car – Bella spotted her.

‘Getting prepared, are we?' she asked. ‘How long is it now?'

‘Six weeks,' said Viv briskly, easing the pram into the hall. She shut the door behind her.

As her mother used to say, apropos of childbirth:
It goes in easier than it comes out.
Viv had to get the pram out, to Ann's house. It now became dark by six o'clock and that evening, under cover of nightfall, when the car was returned, she threw a blanket over the pram and emerged from the house as furtive as a burglar. Glancing up and down the empty street she bundled it into the back of the estate and slammed the door shut.

She straightened up, breathing heavily. Her back ached. It was at moments like this, when she was doing something practical for her sister, that it hit her. Day by day she could coast along, in the slow, ruminative rhythm that came with pregnancy, and not think at all. But when it came to lugging prams – real metal, real sweat . . . Next week she and Ann were going to Mothercare. She would stand in the bright lights and buy soft white Babygros in cellophane packets, for the new human being that was kicking so insistently inside her and which she must never, for everybody's sake, ever consider hers.

‘You unfold it like this. Look.'

Viv was demonstrating the pram in Ann's kitchen.

‘I'd given all my stuff away after Daisy was born,' she went on.

‘But Viv –'

‘No, it's my treat,' she insisted. ‘It was dead cheap. I got it from an ad at the newsagent's, and when I got there somebody else was about to buy it but I spun them this sob story –'

‘But Viv, it's
old.'

‘Less than two years.'

‘But we were going to buy, Ken and me –'

‘They cost the earth new,' said Viv ‘and you only need them for a few months.'

‘But, I mean . . .' Ann paused. She looked embarrassed and polite, as if Viv were a neighbour who had dropped in at an awkward time. ‘I mean, we wanted a new one.'

‘Why?'

Ann touched the pram handle. She looked up at Viv, her face pink. ‘It's a new baby.'

‘My babies were new.'

‘But it's . . . special.'

‘All babies are special,' Viv said shortly.

There was a silence. Neither of them could think of what to say next. If she weren't my sister, thought Viv, what on earth would we have in common? This realization in the past had not worried her; now it made her heart contract in what she realized was panic.

She looked out at the extension room. Ken had finished it during the summer. It would be a place for the child to play. A sliding door led into the garden; it was one of those aluminium, double-glazed, sliding doors Viv had always considered irredeemably suburban. The sort of thing, in fact, that Ann and Ken would have. As they indeed had.

She felt jittery and went into the lounge. She suddenly missed Ollie terribly. He had always made fun of Ann and Ken's doggedly earned consumer goods, their vacuumed car and indexed cassettes. He was as snobbish as she was. Like her, he had rebelled against his background, posh though it was. He had tried to consider himself a free spirit (ah yes, but when it came to the crunch, who was?). It would have soothed her disquiet to tell him what she felt. Only somebody who knew how she felt could tell her how silly she was being.

But was she? Ann came in. Viv was studying the two shelves of books – paperback romances and
Wonderful Ways with Mince
. Some demon prompted her to speak. She said, louder than she had intended: ‘This place reminds me of our parents'. They never had any books either.'

Ann paused. Then she went to the window. Outside it was dark and foggy. She closed the curtains.

She turned. For a moment her face resembled Vera's, weeks before on her wedding day; there was the same tense dignity about it. Instead of replying to Viv, she said simply: ‘Thanks for the pram. It was kind of you.'

They went into the hall and stood for a moment at the front door. Viv fiddled with her car keys.

Just as she was about to leave, Ann said: ‘It's not the same as our parents' house. It's not the same as yours.' She opened the door. ‘It's ours.'

Viv stepped out into the street, its lamps a foggy blur.

Later that evening Ken came home, his boots covered in mud. He was in high spirits.

‘Funny how I don't mind slogging my guts out after work when it's my own building site.' He pulled off his boots. ‘My own mud.' He put down his sheaf of drawings on the hall table. ‘Do you realize that something deeply miraculous is happening in the history of construction?'

‘What?' asked Ann.

‘We appear to be on schedule.'

He carried his boots into the kitchen and stopped.

She followed him in. As she had feared, he was staring at the pram.

‘Viv gave it to us,' she said.

‘Viv?' His voice was sharp. ‘When was she here?'

‘Earlier.'

His voice trembled. ‘She trying to give us things?'

‘Ken –' She put her hand on his arm. He moved away. She thought: my bloody sister. He went to the door and threw his muddy boots into the garden – Ken, who was usually so tidy. (Ah yes, nor did he as a rule get parking tickets.)

‘Think we can't afford to buy one for ourselves?' he demanded.

‘Do sit down.'

‘What's she doing? What's she up to?' He was highly agitated.

‘Don't be the old Ken,' she said. ‘Don't spoil things.'