Kate said, ‘She died in November 1990.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So this must have been about the last bee she ever had in her bonnet. Poor old Gran!’ As always the thought of Lydia’s death made her glance towards the staircase which clung to the further wall of the living-room. She stood up and went to look at it. Since their grandmother’s day an electric chair-lift had been installed for Daniel’s use—press a button and it made a purring ascent or descent, sliding on a rail.
‘If this had been there then she’d never have fallen.’
‘You think she’d have used it!’ Daniel took off his reading glasses and leaned back, smiling.
‘No, she probably wouldn’t.’
‘I’m damn sure she wouldn’t. She was an independent, bloody-minded old woman.’
Kate nodded. There were redeeming features, but in the years following her favourite son’s death the description was by and large fair. ‘You do take care, don’t you, Daniel?’
‘Care! I rise into heaven like Apollo in some eighteenth-century opera.’
‘No, I mean at the top, with your crutches.’ She had never been able to erase from her mind the irrationality of her grandmother’s death. ‘Why the hell didn’t she call for Sally if she felt … shaky?’
‘Oh, come on, you know she wouldn’t! She’d want to prove she could still do it on her own, shaky or not.’
Kate turned an abstracted gaze on him. ‘Just the sort of thing you’d do.’
‘Kate, I am not going to fall, I don’t want to.’
‘You think she wanted to?’
‘I don’t think she gave a damn, not after Father died. She more or less told me so.’
‘Told you! You were only a child.’
‘That made no difference. You don’t seem to have understood her at all; she didn’t mind being cruel.’
Kate nodded uncertainly. ‘She shouldn’t have said things like that to you.’
‘But that was the point. Since his death she was crippled mentally and I was crippled physically. She was telling me that we were neither of us duty-bound to cling to life if it became impossible.’
Kate was shocked; also touched at how easily he seemed to have accepted old Lydia’s parallel which struck her as lopsided, perhaps immoral. He added, ‘I was rather impressed—grateful in a way. She never used to treat me as a child; I’m surprised you didn’t notice.’
‘I suppose I did. She treated me like a child, she treated you like Father.’
‘Without the love.’ He could say it quite uncritically. Sometimes he made Kate feel young and inexperienced, which, in a way and compared with him, she was.
She went back into the room and sat on the sofa. From the kitchen came continued sounds of splintering wood and falling plaster. Kate kicked off her shoes and put her feet up. Daniel asked, ‘How’s the hotel, how’s Alex?’
‘Making money, mostly in the restaurant—his cooking gets better and better. He wants me to marry him.’ She had worked at Hill Manor for seven years now, ever since, at sixteen, she had decided against higher education in favour of earning money. Any academic talent in the family seemed to have been allocated to her brother: the only thing at which she excelled was languages. This may have had something to do with her finding a good job so easily. She’d answered an ad in The Lady and, a week later, been interviewed by Alex and Rosie Stratton at their already successful country hotel. He was then thirty-four and Rosie thirty-seven, wedded less to him than to the gin bottle: plump, lazy, good-natured even in her cups.
From the start, beaming, she had said, ‘Better watch it, Katie, Alex has got his eye on you.’ Whether this was true or not—and at sixteen it had seemed to her unlikely—she made very sure that neither he nor his wife would ever regret having engaged her. She worked hard, for long hours, and exerted all her charm on their behalf. But Rosie had been right: from his first sight of her, Alex had fallen in love, quietly and gently as he did everything else.
Within three years Rosie had relinquished all responsibility to this level-headed nineteen-year-old, and a year after that she left Hill Manor with relief and forever, going to live with her sister in Torquay, where they both drank gin, played bridge, and behaved like tipsy merry widows. She’d give Alex a divorce, she said, any time he wanted one. He wanted one now; he wanted to marry Kate, eighteen years his junior.
If her brother was surprised by this information he didn’t show it. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said it was a bit of a shock.’
‘Which it wasn’t.’
‘Right. I said I didn’t think I wanted to get married just yet.’
‘I suppose,’ said her brother judicially, ‘you could do worse.’
‘Of course I could. But I’m twenty-three.’
‘And he’s fortyish.’
‘I don’t care about his age.’ But even at that moment, thinking of Alex, there flared across her mind the picture of a very different man: young, flushed, black hair falling forward, black eyes glittering as he knelt above her, naked. Steve—one of her less favourite names, but what the hell had that got to do with it? And he didn’t want to get married either, he’d made that quite clear.
She sighed, thinking that probably the most extraordinary part of it was that it hadn’t happened to her sooner. Carefully she said, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve … sort of fallen for another guy.’
‘Poor old Alex! What’s he like?’
‘Sexy.’ She shook her head violently so that her fine brown hair flew wildly and she had to push it away from her face. ‘Oh God, I don’t know what he’s like. Appalling probably.’ She had postponed discussing this with her brother for four weeks now; it seemed unkind, even indecent, in view of the fact that he himself was forever denied any kind of sexual fulfilment; yet she had always discussed everything with him. She was touched when he jumped the hurdle for her, as he so often did: ‘“The ruling passion, be it what it will, the ruling passion conquers reason still.”’ These occasional quotations seemed to slip into his mind unlearned and unbidden: something to do with his habits of analysis and note-taking. Kate was always astonished. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Pope, I think.’
‘Puts it in a nutshell.’
‘He usually does.’
‘His name’s Stephen Callender, he calls himself Steve, he’s twenty-eight, he was born in Hounslow, he’s sales director for Boyd Electronics.’
‘Young to be a director of anything.’
‘And our meeting stepped out of the pages of True Romance.’
Daniel laughed.
She’d seen him coming into the dining-room, alone but sure of himself, and had moved forward, as usual, to escort him to a table. As soon as he sat down he looked up at her and their eyes met. Something peculiar and hitherto unknown took place in her stomach. She gave him the menu and beat a hasty retreat. But, as in True Romance, there was no unqualified retreat short of walking away from Hill Manor there and then. When she took him his wine—a good one—he watched her opening it and nodded at her proficiency; then said, ‘Can we meet for a drink later, in the bar?’
Naturally, she could have said ‘No,’ but her heart was pounding in an alarming manner and she felt an overwhelming desire to touch his black hair; she had no control whatsoever over her reply: ‘I can’t see why not.’
She