Close Relations Read Free

cans shifted.
    â€˜Gordon! One of these days you’ll give me a heart attack.’ She replaced the package on her lap. ‘Unless you have one yourself first.’
    Six miles from Beaconsfield, in a fold of the hills, lies the village of Wingham Wallace. Set amidst rolling pastures and beechwoods it is in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The village itself was recorded in the Domesday Book and its core remains – a pub, rows of cottages and a church dating from Norman times, with Victorian additions. The beauty of the village has been enhanced by age and wealth, the first needing the second for its own preservation. Within easy commuting distance of London, the place has attracted those high-fliers who wish for rural relief at the end of a demanding day. It is also convenient for Heathrow Airport, a mere thirty minutes’ drive away. As a result of this several of the larger houses are inhabited by people so rarely glimpsed that they have become rumours. The smaller cottages have long since been gentrified, too, and their outhouses converted into garages that are too short for the 5-Series BMWs whose bonnets jut into the lanes and cause the passing traffic to swerve.
    At its heart, however, this is still a real community inhabited by real people. Pebble-dashed council houses prove this, and bunches of youths who gather at night in the bus shelter, shifting restlessly like heifers, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. There is still a primary school – just – and a store-cum-post office run by a man called Tim, who does all the work, and his depressed wife Margot. And how could the rich live without the local people to service their households, cleaning and gardening and minding the place when they are away in the Caribbean?
    On Sundays the church is well-attended, mainly by women with carrying voices and organisational skills who make jam and who campaigned successfully against a proposed development of starter homes which would have ruined the views and brought down the property prices. The vicar has long since moved into the next village; he now has five parishes in his care and the vicarage itself was sold back in the sixties. In a village of desirable properties it is one of the most enchanting – a Georgian house burdened with wistaria, grand but not imposingly so, with sunny roomsoverlooking a walled garden and a view of the Chiltern Hills from the master bedroom. Successive owners have improved the place, adding
en suite
bathrooms, a Smallbone kitchen and that essential accessory of the seventies, a conservatory. When Robert and Louise moved here with their children, six years ago, there were no more improvements to be made. This suited Robert. He hated DIY and said he had better things to do on a Sunday than stand on a ladder covered with dust.
    This particular Sunday was their daughter Imogen’s birthday. It was one of those early autumn days that already possess their own nostalgia; like petals packed into a bud, the dewy garden held within itself the future memories of a perfect day – the sort that makes England in general, and Wingham Wallace in particular, a satisfactory place to live. Robert’s and Louise’s visitors, of which there were many, remarked how it always seemed sunny at the Old Vicarage, as if one of Louise’s many skills was to create her own weather for her guests.
    Today’s lunch was to be a family occasion – Louise’s parents and her sister Prudence. Unaided by her adolescent children she was cooking the meal. She was hampered by the dog, an overweight labrador called Monty, who lumbered to his feet whenever she moved and who stood in front of the kitchen units, strings of saliva hanging from his jowls, whining as she unleafed the salami from its wrapping paper.
    Louise was forty-two and still beautiful. In fact age had improved her, revealing the bone structure beneath her soft face. Twenty years of marriage had also