Mrs Millwood bit into a Granny Smith with great relish and Doubler, grateful once again for her deep wisdom, and quite used by now to his housekeeper having a much greater instinct than his own for matters pertaining to life, chose not to comment on her choice of apple.
On the first Sunday of each month, Doubler’s only daughter, Camilla, liked to visit Mirth Farm with her family. This had been happening for many years. It was a habit that had been initiated by Camilla once she had her own children, as if she might be able to teach her father the correct procedure to hold a family together. One or two such lunches established a precedent, a couple more sealed it as a tradition, and this was then upheld by Camilla with great diligence and worn proudly as some sort of badge of filial duty.
‘It’s lovely to know that my kids are part of Dad’s life,’ she said to her brother, Julian, with a barely concealed stratum of aggression-tinged superiority that she rarely found cause to exhibit in her brother’s company.
Conversely, Julian, Doubler’s only son, was ambivalent about his role in the family. His associations with both family and Mirth Farm were linked to his childhood and now, an adult with adult responsibilities, his main preoccupation at the weekends was the management, from afar, of his costly ex-wife and the ongoing provision for two expensive children who found little to interest them on a potato farm, having been exposed to the sort of infancy that valued lawn much more highly than soil. Even if they had clamoured to visit their grandfather, Julian would have found an excuse to resist. At Mirth Farm, there was little escape from the immediacy of fatherhood and Julian felt exposed by this. In stark contrast, his own home provided any number of distractions and barriers that allowed the children and their father to coexist without confronting the enormity of each other’s failings.
To date, Julian’s involvement in his children’s upbringing had given him very little fulfilment other than the satisfaction of completing numbers in a column of the ledger of his mind. Nevertheless, he wore his paternal responsibilities quite heavily on his stooped shoulders and never was this more apparent than under the gaze of his father and sister. He didn’t quite understand Camilla’s need to imitate a conventional family so regularly, but nor did he quite trust his own emotional response to try to change or influence the pattern.
Camilla, however, had a very certain sense of what these occasions should feel like to her offspring, and even though her own childhood had failed to live up to many of the obligations she liked to associate with the institution, she insisted on imposing her own needs upon all of them. She made sure that Julian and his children joined them at least four times a year, and this Sunday was one of those prescribed occasions when Doubler’s son and daughter and his four grandchildren were due to visit Mirth Farm all together.
In his many years of voluntary isolation, Doubler had learnt to navigate the extremely narrow path that separates solitude from loneliness. One he sought; the other sought him. But never was he more certain that he would prefer to be alone than when his family descended upon him in this manner. Had Marie not gone in the way that she had, things would certainly have been different. Raising children was something that he and his wife had undertaken together, and he had no doubt that he would have approached grandparenthood with a similarly shared sense of commitment. But he had not sought the role of single parent with its double dose of duty and he eschewed all grandparental influence for fear that he would fall short twice. He deeply resented the additional pressure the seismic shift his wife’s departure had imposed upon him.
And anyway, Doubler valued his time on his own. He relished the silence, and his intellect needed very little stimulation other than that provided by his potatoes, by his carefully stocked cellar and by his daily lunch with Mrs Millwood. In truth, he had come to dread these family occasions, but he knew that the more normality he was able to depict, the sooner he would be left to his own devices for the ensuing month. This meant interacting as well as he could, feigning interest in those around him, keeping off the subjects that tended to provoke conflict and never, ever letting any of his family realize that he had chosen to live life as a recluse.
Julian wasn’t overly interested in the comings and goings of his father, Doubler knew that. But if Camilla had any idea of just how far, how conclusively, Doubler had removed himself from society, then she would be even more disappointed in him. As it was, Doubler felt his deceit had been reasonably successful, as his daughter believed quite vocally that her father was coping ‘as well as could be expected under the circumstances’.
One of the greatest pretences that Doubler could enact to give the impression of lucid stability was to provide a flawless Sunday lunch. Increasingly he found great comfort in cooking well and these visits gave him an opportunity to put his skills into practice. He could produce a roast for eight people without any one of them even realizing there was expertise involved. To his visitors, lunch meant trays of piping-hot food sliding from the Aga at 1 p.m. with very little sense of the many significant decisions that separated a good Sunday lunch from a great one. His trick was to have completed the preparation long before anyone arrived – even the gravy was made. All he had to do as his family gathered in the kitchen bothering him with details of their small lives was to take the beef out, put the Yorkshires in and finish off the gravy by adding the meat juices while the beef rested before carving.
As for the next generation (‘f3’, Doubler liked to joke to himself), he barely took a passing interest in his grandchildren. He was fascinated to see which, if any, of his own genetic characteristics had been passed on, but these could be observed with side glances as he went about his kitchen business. The trouble with humans, he had learnt, was that their life cycles were just too long to intervene in the genetics meaningfully. By the time the weak or undesirable traits fully emerged, the sample had probably already reproduced itself.
He suspected that Marie, had she not gone, would have been a very good, active grandmother, interested in their grandchildren’s school progress, their extra-curricular choices, their loss of teeth, their new haircuts or the little triumphs that everyone felt necessary to discuss but that Doubler found dull. Marie would have excelled at grandparenting, so Doubler didn’t dismiss his obligation altogether but nodded and listened and even made a small comment every now and then, feigning interest as best he could. What he was watching for in his grandchildren was something that might arrest his attention. A flash of genetic improvement that meant they weren’t going to just be dull incarnations of their parents.
Julian’s children, born to a generous portion of the same DNA as their cousins, had already been ruined by an expensive education. Though still small, they were haughty, just like their father, and their lack of stable family life meant they had quickly learnt to exploit their father’s guilt to their own advantage. That is what their private education had taught them: to see a weakness in an adult and to monetize it. This manifested in a steady access to costly things: overseas cricket and skiing trips, expensive electronic gadgetry and a sense of entitlement that would guarantee them good careers later in life.
Meanwhile, Camilla’s children were a little younger and it was hard to see who they might become in the years ahead. Doubler had some hope for them but expected their qualities to be presented to him like a gun dog’s prize. He didn’t yet like them enough to try to coax some good out of them or to shape the people they might become.
They arrived today in the usual flurry of coats and welly boots flung across the kitchen and Doubler, who prided himself on preserving some semblance of order within his home during the weekends, tidied up after them while putting the finishing touches to the lunch.
As they sat down to eat, Camilla smiled benevolently at all of them. ‘Isn’t this special!’ she said, just as she always did. ‘Being together as a family is what it’s all about, don’t you think?’
Her husband, a translucent man with thin lips that rested his face into a grimace, muttered some agreement, while Julian admonished his spoilt children, who were leaning over to help themselves to potatoes with their fingers. Scolded, they sat back in their chairs, growling their dissatisfaction and sharing that special camaraderie