It happens to be Roger who answers the phone when the call comes from Bude police station. Everyone else—bar Paul—is dumped in front of the television, it being a damp evening, including Charles, who has noticed a documentary he would quite like to watch after the current program, and intends to assert his rights. Roger is outside the back door, with his buckets, and so is the only one to hear the phone ring in the hall and pick it up. He is too intent upon his researches to register the significance of what comes down the line to him, and so simply puts his head around the sitting-room door and announces: “It’s the police in Bude, for Mum or Dad.”
Alison gasps. An awful, yelping gasp. Charles gets up and goes out of the room to where the phone is. Someone switches off the television. They hear him say “Yes . . . Yes . . . No . . . Yes.” Then he comes back into the room, and looks at Alison. “We shall have to go to Bude,” he says.
Alison is speechless. She has risen, and simply stands there, staring. At last she manages, “Is he hurt?”
“Paul is unhurt,” says Charles crisply. “He is at the police station.”
There is a hunt for car keys, for Alison’s jacket. Charles is silent, Alison is incoherent. The others watch them get into the car, Charles at the wheel. They watch the Volkswagen make its way out of the drive and up the hill.
“Oh dear,” says Sandra.
Paul has been caught. Possession of drugs. This had to happen, thinks Gina. Maybe it’ll sort him out. Alison weeps, Charles seems resigned rather than enraged. Paul himself is sullen, but not especially repentant. “I’m not going to prison,” he says to Gina. “It’s a caution, that’s all. Could happen to anyone. Does happen to anyone.”
Gina points out that he had better watch it, in future. Paul says cheerfully that he will, of course he will. Just, he had to do something down here, didn’t he? He couldn’t just sit about in this godforsaken place all day. He’d made quite a few mates in Bude, and one thing led to another.
Gina sighs. One thing has always led to another, with Paul. Progress is a dogleg affair, for him, rather than a smooth trajectory; he shoots off in one direction on impulse, then switches course once again. It depends who he comes across, what he hears, what grabs his attention. He is borne along on some incorruptible current of optimism: it will all work out in the end, something will turn up, no one’s going to find out, are they?
Unfortunately they do, on occasion. The stolid spoilsport Cornish police, for instance. So now Paul is not so much grounded as under house arrest. For the rest of the holiday he will remain at Crackington Haven twenty-four hours a day. Surprisingly, he becomes quite docile about this. He flies Roger’s kite with him, he admires Clare’s cartwheels. He offers to help Alison in the kitchen, and spends a messy afternoon making drop scones for tea. Alison is tearful with gratitude and relief. She tells Gina that it is just so unfair, always someone turns up to lead Paul astray, left to himself he would just get on with things, there would be no problem, it is other people who are his undoing.
So that was the summer at Crackington Haven. Katie and Roger, at the top of the CN Tower in Toronto, reflect upon it across the years. Each sees just their own facet, but in any case they are other people now—those distant early selves can be summoned up, it is just possible still to see what they saw, but they are also unreachable. Katie looks across the table at her brother and sees this man, who is somehow a product of that boy in shorts and a T-shirt, fishing in rock pools. She sees this man with open face, thatch of gingery hair, this really rather nice-looking fellow (why hasn’t some girl snapped him up?), who deals daily with matters of life and death, a useful person, a necessary person. Roger sees a woman with a small, neat-featured appealing face (does that Al realize how fortunate he is?) and a faintly worried expression—but she always had that, he remembers.
“How’s work?” he says.
“Oh, fine. I’m a commissioning editor now—a step up.”
There is a silence.
“Do you know?” says Roger. “Even now, I get a thrill when I think of a butterfly blenny.”
Katie smiles. “Those crawling buckets. I can see them now. And you. Blue shorts and sunburn.”
“Careful. This is getting close to nostalgia.”
“One of Dad’s books is about that. I’ve read it. Tried to read it.”
“Said to be a bad thing, nostalgia. I have immigrant patients who suffer from it—yearning for somewhere else.”
“No way do I yearn for Crackington Haven,” says Katie. “Fuss and bother and an uncomfortable house is what I remember. We went there more than once.”
“Allersmead?”
“Allersmead what?”
“Nostalgia.”
Katie considers. “No,” she decides. “Not if nostalgia means what I think it does. Kind of glamorizing something. Allersmead just is. Was.”
“Inescapable.”
They smile, wryly.
“Coffee?” says Roger. “And then I have to get back to the nostalgic immigrants.”
INGRID
“Your mother rang,” says Philip.
Gina is just back from turbulent events half the world away. She is jet-lagged and displaced; a part of her is still scurrying, at work. Mother? What mother?
“She wanted to tell you that Roger is getting married, and wondered when we’ll be coming down to Allersmead for a weekend.”
Gina surfaces. “Ah. Who is Roger marrying?”
“A perfectly sweet Canadian girl.”
“Of course. Good for him.”
“So when?”
“When what?” says Gina, throwing dirty clothes into the washing machine. Philip has wandered after her, and offers a glass of wine.
“When are we going there? Just so I can clear my diary.”
Gina sighs.
“You’re prejudiced, that’s the trouble,” he says. “From my point of view the whole setup has a certain fascination. And the food is amazing.”
“This is my family,” says Gina coldly. “Not a setup.”
He puts his arm around her. “Sorry. Sorry. There was further news. Your father has had a beastly cold. The dog dug up Ingrid’s asparagus bed and Ingrid was much displeased.”
Gina switches on the washing machine and picks up her glass. “Talking of nosh, we have none. Shall we go to the Turkish place?”
“You have to understand,” says Philip, “that for those of us who grew up with the most bland of family circumstances, yours are exotic. Six of you. That house. Where I come from everyone had two-point-five children and lived in a semi. No one had heard of such a thing as an au pair girl, let alone one who stays forty years and grows asparagus. Forty years?”
“Thereabouts,” says Gina.
“Were you fond of her?”
“Fond?” Gina gazes at him. “I’ve no idea. She was there, and that was that. Part of the landscape.”
Indeed yes. So that when she wasn’t there you noticed. That time.
“When’s Ingrid coming back?” someone would say, once in a while. Postcards came, bright and shiny in blues and greens—sea and sky and Scandinavian forests—addressed to All at Allersmead, or to individuals: some rugged fishermen with creels for Paul, lasses in national costume for Katie, kittens in a basket for Clare. Gina was eleven, with concerns of her own, but she was aware that things were somehow awry. There was a gap, and Mum was all on edge.
“Soon,” she would say. “In a week or two, I expect.” And when one day Sandra said, “Actually, is Ingrid coming back?” she flew into a temper.
“Will you not go on about this. Of course Ingrid’s coming back. She had to see to family business, that’s all.”
“Did you know?” asks Philip, later that evening, in the Turkish place.
“Not consciously. Not till later, when one put two and two together.”
Alison remembers that time with absolute clarity. That is to say, she remembers seminal moments. She remembers being locked in dispute with Ingrid somewhere in the garden, wher
e they cannot be overheard. Dispute? She is the supplicant. Ingrid is rock hard, immovable. “I am not sure,” she says. “If I come back. Perhaps.”
“You must come back,” cries Alison. “The children would be devastated, you know that, the little ones especially. Clare is so young still. They’ve never known Allersmead without you.”
Ingrid shrugs. “Perhaps I take . . .”
“No!” says Alison violently.
They stare at each other.
“This is a family,” wails Alison. “You know that.”
“Talk to her,” she says to Charles.
Charles looks out of the window. “She is a free agent, Alison.”
“Just so it’s clear to her how much everyone wants to be sure she’s coming back.”
Charles is silent. After a while he says, “I daresay things will work out somehow.”
Alison makes a wild gesture. “That’s what you said . . . then.”
“And I suppose that is what has happened, if you look at it objectively, which is why we are having this conversation.”
How long? Months, rather than weeks. One postcard says that Ingrid is having a holiday with some cousins on this pretty fjord, another that she is doing for a while some work in a restaurant, she has made chocolate brownies just like Alison’s! These periodic reminders mean that no one is able to forget that Ingrid is no longer there; they prompt questions, for which Alison has no answer. There is damage to the status quo; Allersmead is not as it should be. And of course Alison is not just on edge, she is overworked, she has too much to do, she has to scamp the cooking, meals are late and substandard, she forgets the washing and there are no clean socks, the dog has fleas because only Ingrid ever remembered to put the flea collar on.
“Why did she go?” says Philip. “Interesting move. But why?”
“Who knows? A whim? A challenge?”
“Challenging who or what?”
“The facts,” says Gina. “The situation.”
“Of which you were aware? You children.”
She nods. “Sort of. Just it was never mentioned.”
They know. They all know, eventually. They know but the knowledge is tamped down, stowed away somewhere out of sight and out of mind. The house knows, and is silent, locking away what has been done and said and thought. No one quite remembers anymore how they know, it is as though the knowledge was not suppressed but arrived through some osmotic process, absorbed from Allersmead daily life, an insidious understanding that seeped from person to person. Not that there were conversations, exchanges, comments. No one has wished to discuss it; if ever the facts of the matter seemed to smolder dangerously, there would be a concerted move to stamp out the embers, to move away, to find safe territory elsewhere.
“We just didn’t talk about it,” says Gina. “Best policy, eh?”
“But how was Clare’s birth explained?”
“Ingrid went and fetched her from some people who were too poor to look after her, so they gave her to us—a lovely present.”
“Ah. I see.” Philip hears Alison’s voice.
“And thereafter the matter was not referred to,” says Gina. “She was simply there, and that was all there was to it.”
Indeed, no one talks about it. Corinna, to her credit, does not talk about it, except perhaps occasionally to Martin, who is only mildly interested. Corinna is much interested, and will never forget that moment of revelation, at the Allersmead kitchen table. For her it is a seminal moment not just because of the revelation, but because she sees it as a nice instance of a way in which such a revelation changes the entire perception of a scene. Allersmead was reshuffled and rearranged, as she sat there, like the fragments of a kaleidoscope.
It was lunch. Family lunch to which Corinna has come because she was going to be driving this way in any case and she is guiltily aware of not having visited for some while. They are all at the table, children ranged along each side, Alison and Ingrid at one end, serving food, Charles at the other with Corinna beside him. She has not seen the children for eighteen months at least and everyone has grown, naturally enough. Paul is a skinny twelve-year-old, with his father’s distinctive bony nose, Gina peers out from under a dark fringe, sharp-eyed, Sandra has a glossy brown ponytail and looks older but Corinna remembers that she is number three. Roger and Katie have both of them Alison’s gingery frizzy hair, and a scatter of freckles. Clare—not much more than a baby last time Corinna saw her—has flaxen straight hair and a little pink face. Corinna looks intently at Clare.
Alison is serving up stew from a vast tureen. Ingrid dispenses vegetables—mashed potatoes and greens. Filled plates are passed down the table, portions neatly matched to size of child; it is a deft operation, well-coordinated teamwork.
Corinna stares at Ingrid. Then again at Clare.
I see. Oh, I see.
But who, then, is . . . ?
She looks at Charles.
Of course. What au pair girl stays for twelve years? How obtuse one has been. Of course.
She looks at Alison, smiling down the table. Always smiling, Alison.
“Well, quite,” says Philip. “No point in harping on it, indeed. Your mother, though, she puzzles me rather . . .”
“My mother was unfathomable.”
“You would think she’d feel she was well shot of Ingrid.”
“Oh no. No way.”
Alison responds to the postcards. She writes appealing letters to the contact address given by Ingrid, but no postcard ever refers to these. Perhaps Ingrid is no longer at that address; perhaps she has no comment to make.
“I expect Ingrid’s got married,” says Sandra conversationally.
Alison slams a saucepan into the sink and tells her to get on and help to clear the table.
And Charles? Charles is writing a book, of course. He keeps to his usual routine, and has the tact (or prudence) not to remark upon the disagreeable household climate—children querulous about late meals and mislaid possessions. Alison’s disheveled mood. He says nothing, and keeps himself to himself, rather more than he would tend to do in any case. You would think that none of this had anything to do with him.
“Your father . . .” says Philip.
Gina sighs. She puts her hand on his. “Do you know, I’ve had enough of facing down the past. Shall we get the bill and shoot off? I could do with an early night.”
“Of course. Just—your father is inscrutable.”
It seems to Gina not so much that people are unfathomable or inscrutable but that other times, other circumstances, are unreachable, are no longer available. That was then, and you cannot go back there, just as you cannot revisit your own former self, recover the eleven-year-old Gina of that time when Ingrid went away. That person is herself, but also someone quite other, a distant stranger who occasionally signals, and there is a flash of recognition, but who is for the most part an alien being.
She remembers that she had a green pencil case with slots for eraser, sharpener, ruler, individual pens and pencils. She remembers the splendor of that pencil case, the soft material of its interior, the pink eraser, the zip that went around three sides. She remembers writing a diary that she hid in her pillowcase lest Sandra should find it. She does not remember wondering where Ingrid has gone, or what her mother or her father may feel about this. Just, Ingrid was not there for a while. So?
It seems to her that your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown. She knows her parents intimately—their faces, their voices, the way they walk, smile, laugh, frown, hold a knife and fork, turn their head to speak. And she does not know them at all—why they did as they did, what they experienced, how they saw the world, and each other. As for the rest—Paul, Sandra, Katie, Roger, Clare—the five of them dart through her head like the images in one of those flicker-books, every shape and size, and they too are both known and mysterious, she realizes. You thought you had them nailed, but you know now that you did not—they were as slippery as yourself.
And Ingri
d?
She tries to remember Ingrid then, to extract her from Ingrid now. Ingrid then was authority of a kind, but secondary authority, not authority on a par with Mum and Dad. You played Ingrid up, you disregarded her, you sometimes obliged her and other times you did not. Ingrid had pale gold satiny hair, and she was good at sewing, she made her own clothes and some of theirs, she could do origami, and she didn’t like spicy food or coffee. What does this tell you about Ingrid, then? Well, nothing significant, of course. Nothing that throws light on what went on in the grown-up world, that impenetrable world of Mum and Dad and Ingrid, of which they, the children, knew nothing. They were the center of that world, its focus, but it passed them by.
Alison was in the kitchen, sorting out the wash, when she heard the front door open, and close. It was ten o’clock at night. The Allersmead front door was never locked until Alison and Charles went up to bed. Had Charles gone out, and returned? No, he was in his study, she was sure of that, and even as she rose she heard his door open: he too was wondering who would come in at that time.
So they met in the hall—Alison, Charles, and Ingrid, who carried a suitcase in each hand. She set them down as Alison spoke, as Alison opened her mouth in an unconsidered torrent: “You’re back! But why didn’t you let us know, we’d have met you at the station, did you get a taxi? So often there aren’t any, oh I wish you’d told me, and have you had anything to eat? There’s some cottage pie left, I can heat it up, really, Ingrid, you should have said . . .”