Close Relations

  Prudence had laid the table for two. Dinner simmered in the oven. She had changed the sheets. She had removed a half-corrected manuscript from the bedside table and replaced it with a vase of anemones. She had felt like the most tender of stage managers.

  The bell rang. She ran downstairs. Stephen stood in the doorway. The sodium street light bathed him in its unearthly glow; shadowless, he looked like the hologram of all her desires.

  She flung her arms around him. Ah, but he was real!

  Some evenings it was worse than others, the longing that squeezed Tim’s heart so tightly he could scarcely breathe. Some evenings he could battle against it.

  Not tonight. She had cheated him of her walk across the green. He hadn’t even seen her leaving at lunchtime, he had been busy with a customer. When he had looked outside, her Space Cruiser had gone.

  Margot stood at the oven, mashing potatoes.

  ‘Just going out for some fresh air,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ she replied. ‘It’ll be ready at eight.’

  He looked at her back. How vulnerable she seemed, his big wife whom he had once loved! Within that bulk there was still the woman who had once laughed her loud, fruity laugh, who had once been happy. In front of her the window was curtained with the poppy material from their old flat. They had chosen it together, soon after they’d married.

  His eyes stung. He turned away. He put on his anorak and went downstairs. The shop was illuminated by the chill cabinet; the milk cartons stood there, mute witnesses in the bluish glow.

  Prudence poured Stephen a gin and tonic. ‘Just for once, I want us to be like everybody else,’ she said. ‘I want us to have supper, and watch TV, and go to bed.’

  ‘How about doing it the other way around?’ He grinned, taking his glass. ‘What’re we eating?’

  ‘Guinea fowl braised in oranges and wine.’

  ‘Mmm . . . I’ve cooked guinea fowl. It needs to be done for hours, so it falls off the bone . . .’ He took her hand and stood up. He indicated the drinks. ‘Let’s take these into the bedroom.’

  It was a cold, windy evening. Clouds chased across the moon. The church tower reared up.

  Tim stood on tiptoe and peered over the wall. There was another, unfamiliar car parked in the driveway – a TVR. In the rectory, the downstairs windows were lit. He looked at the kitchen; he always looked there first. She was there, bending at the stove.

  He slipped through the gateway. He moved across the spongy, damp grass and slipped behind the bushes.

  Stephen unbuttoned her blouse. He stroked the silk slip – black silk, edged with lace. ‘Mmm . . . very nice.’

  ‘This is what we wear in Nuneaton,’ said Prudence.

  ‘Mmm, let’s talk desktop publishing . . .’

  ‘Let’s talk Microsoft . . .’

  ‘Mmm, so soft . . .’ He led her to the bed and laid her down. ‘Let’s talk about layouts.’

  ‘Mmm, lay me out . . . that’s nice . . . Do you want to touch my spreadsheets?’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Mmm, like that . . .’

  ‘Let’s feel your disk-drives . . .’

  ‘Hard or soft?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Oh! Mmm . . . I can guess . . .’

  ‘Shall we start formating now?’

  ‘First, you press here . . .’

  ‘And here?’

  ‘Mmm . . .’

  The phone rang. They froze.

  ‘It’s on the machine,’ she whispered.

  She put her arms around him. They paused, waiting.

  In the living room the machine beeped. They could hear a faint sound. It was her mother’s voice.

  ‘Prudence, are you there? Your dad’s in hospital! St Mary’s. . . . Are you there? Oh, where are you?’

  Tim crouched in the bushes next to the lounge window. It was his usual place. Through the window he could hear the faint sound of laughter. Louise was passing glasses of champagne to her guests. She wore a loose blue dress he had never seen before. Her hair was loose, too; it glowed in the firelight. The horse whinnied. He jumped. Louise turned and said something to the woman.

  The phone rang. Tim jumped. Louise walked over to the phone. It was near the window; she came so close he could almost touch her.

  She picked up the phone. She listened for a moment.

  She turned away from the window, her hand pressed against her mouth.

  Maddy’s bedroom was dark. The digital clock pulsed from 8.03 p.m. to 8.04.

  Candlewax puddled the saucers that sat about on the carpet. There were two mugs on the bedside table, half-filled with cold tea. The bed lay there like a ship, berthed on its voyage of discovery. My America, my new-found land. Tonight the bed was empty. Maddy was at Erin’s flat, two miles away.

  The phone rang . . . and rang . . . There was nobody to pick up the receiver.

  It rang and rang. And finally it stopped.

  PART TWO

  One

  AFTER SIXTY-FIVE YEARS Gordon’s body had been taken away from him. It had been prodded, inspected and penetrated by lasers. It had been wheeled from one department to another; needles and tubes had been inserted into it, sucking out blood and pumping in fluids. Its life had been spirited along wires and reproduced on a monitor whose erratic zigzags danced beside him as he lay in bed, an oxygen mask clamped to his face like the sucker of an octopus. Only the pain belonged to him but even that seemed like an unwelcome visitor, an intruder that had lodged in his chest and stolen his normal sensations. It dared him to shift his position. It lurked, heavy and serious, beneath his ribcage and lingered in his leg where the angioplasty had been pushed into his vein. Over the past two days alien instruments had intimately explored his body; they were accompanied by a technical vocabulary with which he was now becoming familiar, though it still gave him a jolt when he realised that it was applied to himself.

  Gordon was a man who had seldom known fear. He had rushed through the decades with little pause for thought. Now he lay immobilised by his own faltering mortality. On one side of him a man lay slumped in bed, wired up like a puppet and shaken by a cough that already resembled a death-rattle. Even Gordon’s get-well flowers were expiring in the heat; their heads drooped as if bowing to a stronger will than their own. On his second night a screen had been hastily erected at the end of the ward; in the morning it was removed to reveal an empty mattress. Gordon was gripped by panic. He clamped the hospital headphones to his ears and listened to radio phone-ins, whiny voices complaining about pavement potholes. He told himself that he was recovering and in a week he would be home, everything would be back to normal.

  He dreaded Dorothy’s visits because he saw his own alarm reflected on her face. On Sunday evening she arrived with a walkman.

  ‘I borrowed it from Jamie,’ she said. ‘And here’s some talking books I got from the library. That actor’s doing it, the one who plays the vet on TV, remember?’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘I’ve got your pyjamas and some apple juice.’ She wanted to surround him with familiar things. Clamped in his mask he felt like a deep-sea diver, nothing was familiar out there but he didn’t let on. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ he lied into the plastic. ‘Right as rain.’

  She talked about the girls, how they would come to see him the next day. She showed him some get-well cards and tried to prop them up on his bedside locker. She asked him what they had done to him that day, if they had got the results of the test, and then she fell silent.

  He looked at her and thought: I nearly died. He saw the bathroom trap-door above him; he lifted it and a white light shone down, blinding him, dispersing him into atoms. He looked at his wife: wavy auburn hair, cream blouse and cardigan. To those who have glimpsed death, people once familiar to them are set apart, as if mouthing at them through glass. He was a deep-sea diver, clamped in his mask. Dorothy seemed to be talking again. He thought how brave she was, to tint her hair with such dogged regularity, trying to s
top the greyness creeping through. Who was she fooling?

  On Monday the consultant came round. His name was Mr Jarvis-Jones. He reminded Gordon of the fathers who had sat in front of him during Founder’s Day at his daughters’ school, blocking his view as if their backs declared: what right has this man to be here at all, who does he think he is?

  ‘I see you’re a builder, Mr Hammond,’ he said, looking at his notes. ‘Let’s think of your body as a central heating system. Now, what happens when the boiler breaks down?’ The ward sister gazed at him moistly. ‘Now, you’ve had a small heart attack – I’d prefer to call it an episode. We should take it as a warning signal. Two of your main arteries are significantly narrowed. However, there is no reason for you not to lead a perfectly normal life for a man of your age, so long as you follow certain rules. Cut out the stress – probably plenty of it in your job, eh? Certainly plenty of it when we have the builders in!’ He laughed. The ward sister laughed. ‘Switch to a low-cholesterol diet, no more fry-ups I’m afraid.’ He looked at the notes. ‘And you’re a smoker too. Dear oh dear. Give up the weed, there’s a good chap. I’ll see you again before you leave us.’

  He left, accompanied by the sister. April came up to Gordon’s bedside. She was a nurse – his named nurse, her name was on her badge.

  ‘What a creep.’ April jerked her head. ‘Know something? He preens himself before he comes in. I’ve seen him in the car-park.’ She gave Gordon his pills. ‘Reminds me of my boyfriend. When I get home he’s arranged the wardrobe mirror and the other one so he can see himself from the side. Pathetic, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pathetic.’ Within his mask, Gordon smiled at her. April was a young black woman, bouncy and full of life. He liked watching her in the ward; she was like a cork, popping up, refusing to let the current pull her down.

  ‘Men are much vainer than women, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘My bloke, Dennis, he’s into body-building. How’re you feeling today?’

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Gordon. ‘There were all these jobs that needed doing on Friday, crises and such. Now it’s like – it happened to somebody else. Know what I mean?’

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter any more, does it?’

  ‘Other people feel this way, do they?’

  She nodded. ‘Some of the heart cases. They go home and their whole life’s changed. One bloke, I bumped into him the other day. He’d left his wife and started a watercress farm.’

  ‘Watercress?’

  ‘Sort of soothing, I suppose. Like, watercress can’t nag you, can it?’

  ‘Poor Dad,’ said Prudence. ‘He’s frightened. Nothing’s supposed to frighten one’s father.’

  ‘Because he’s supposed to last for ever?’ replied Maddy.

  ‘He’s frightened of dying.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll be all right,’ said Maddy. ‘He’ll just go on as if nothing’s happened.’

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘Nothing can change our father.’

  ‘You used to call him Dad,’ said Prudence.

  ‘Well, I’ve changed.’

  They walked towards the car. The hospital loomed up behind them, its chimney belching black smoke. Prudence had been shaken by the sight of their father. She hadn’t seen him in pyjamas for years; it seemed shockingly intimate. His chest hairs were grey, now, and thicker than she had remembered. Quite apart from the tubes, the act of wearing pyjamas had transformed their father into an old man. And she hadn’t been prepared for the oxygen mask.

  ‘Do I seem different?’ Maddy asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something’s happened, you see.’

  An ambulance passed, its siren wailing. It disappeared round the side of the building.

  ‘Thing is,’ said Maddy, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’

  Prudence stopped beside the car. ‘Maddy! How wonderful.’

  ‘It is, rather.’

  ‘Who is he? Have you just met him? It’s not that person in Africa, is it, what’s his name, the Swede?’

  Maddy shook her head.

  ‘Go on,’ said Prudence. ‘Do I know him?’

  ‘It’s Erin.’

  Prudence stared at her sister. She felt her face heating up. ‘Erin?’

  ‘Are you surprised?’

  ‘Yes – no – what do you want me to say?’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Maddy. ‘That’s the funny thing. It’s the least surprising thing that’s ever happened to me.’ Maddy leaned against the car and gazed down at her trainers. ‘It makes sense of everything. I had to tell somebody.’

  ‘When did this happen? After you came to dinner?’

  Maddy pulled at a thread on her sweater. ‘She kissed me. It was like – all my life I’d been asleep and she woke me up.’

  ‘Have you – er, been attracted to women before? God, I sound like someone on Channel 4.’

  ‘You mean, am I a lesbian or have I just fallen in love with Erin?’ Maddy raised her face – her square, honest face. Her cheeks were flushed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m just so happy.’

  Prudence put her arm around her sister. Maddy stood there, stiffly. She wasn’t a demonstrative person.

  ‘Don’t tell – you know,’ she said.

  ‘Poor Dad,’ said Prudence. ‘It’d give him another heart attack.’

  ‘. . . our own sister! Does she look different? What did she say?’ Louise picked up an empty yoghurt pot and flung it into the bin. With her free hand she was tidying up her daughter’s room. ‘Do we call her a lesbian or gay? We’re out of touch here and I don’t want to get it wrong. Trouble is they’re always changing the word, aren’t they, like the blacks, and it’s bound to be the wrong one.’ She clenched the phone against her shoulder, bent down, and sorted through a heap of dirty tights. Down the line Prudence’s voice faded, either through distance or excitement. ‘Wish I was a lesbian.’ Louise carried the underwear into the bathroom. ‘No horrible children with their horrible horrible mess.’ She dumped the clothes into the laundry basket and glared at the bath. ‘Why don’t they ever clean the bath? It looks like someone’s washed a warthog in there. And she’s used my body rub.’ Dreamily, she said: ‘No more adolescent daughters with their bloody hormones . . .’

  When she put down the phone she wondered if she had been tactless to complain about her children to Pru. Pru’s childlessness was something that was no longer mentioned between them, and though Louise presumed that by now her sister had come to terms with it – indeed, she suspected that Prudence never really wanted children in the first place – she also knew that, to the childless, a complaining parent is more hurtful than a boasting one, just as millionaires’ complaints grate more harshly than their self-satisfaction.

  Louise, like her father, was not by and large a reflective person. She lived instinctively, through her senses. She cooked, she mothered, she was stroked and loved. She heaved shopping bags and pulled up leeks, smelling the earth on her fingers. It was her surface that dazzled the world. Beneath it, her mind was unexercised. She felt the rusty cogs turning as she tried to reorganise her thoughts about her younger sister. Had Maddy always been a lesbian, was this the clue to her? Since childhood Maddy had been obstreperous and difficult, at odds with their father and, now Louise thought about it, men in general: their maths teacher at school; an apparent sadist called Barney who ran the project in Canada, and several others besides. Did lesbianism make sense of this, combing out the tangles of Maddy’s psyche like cream conditioner, leaving her sister silky and manageable? Or was life more complicated than that? The whole thing was such a shock – deeply fascinating, but a shock. Louise had never met this Erin woman but by all accounts she was a powerful, charismatic creature. Had she corrupted Maddy or liberated her? For all her truculence, Maddy was a vulnerable person who had always felt inadequate. Maybe this woman was just what she needed. Despite this, Louise felt lonely. Her sister was a lesbian. Applying this unfamiliar word made Maddy lost to her.

  Meanwhile, their
father lay in hospital, himself transformed into a statistic – a Heart-attack Victim. Though there was every hope of a recovery he too had been jolted away from her: in this case, towards death. Of the three sisters Louise had the closest bond with their father. All her life she had pleased him by her beauty and compliance. Her life was understandable to him – motherhood, home, the upholstery of wealth. His pride in her, though embarrassing at times, was something she had long taken for granted. She was a simpler person than her two sisters, and her anxiety about him was unmuddied by the currents that his brush with death had stirred up in the hearts of the other two.

  Adolescents, on the other hand, are blessedly self-absorbed. Imogen was out riding. When she galloped the wind blew away her preoccupations but when she reined in Skylark they settled on her again like flies, briefly disturbed but returning buzzingly to crowd her. Was her chin too big? Were her breasts too flat? Yes. What did Karl really think of her, did he really want to show her the badger’s sett? ‘You’re just a kid,’ he had said. What did he mean by that? She had replayed the scene so many times that it had lost all meaning, like her Blackadder videos. Oh his curly hair, dampened with sweat! The ruddiness of his neck . . . the battered leather apron slung around his hips . . .

  It was a clear November morning. She rode along Westcott Ridge, following the bridle path. A chain-saw whined in the woods. She smelled her horse’s sweat and the corrupt scent of silage. Down below lay a secret valley. A farmhouse nestled there, snug between the thighs of the hills. She lived there with Karl. In the mornings she flung open the door and threw grain to her chickens. Chunk, chunk . . . Karl was chopping wood. At night they climbed into bed, a brass bed with a featherdown duvet, and the moonlight shone through the window and silvered their faces. How immature Jamie’s friends seemed, how giggly the girls at school! Imogen rode down the track, between the sighing pines. She rode along the main road into the village, past the council houses, past the cottages. She rounded the bend. There, in front of her, lay the village green. The church clock struck one. Outside the pub, Karl’s van was parked.