Close Relations Read Free Page B

the worst in each other. Her father’s pride in her and her lifestyle made him look foolish and Robert, who had a cruel streak, goaded him on, much to Louise’s and her mother’s embarrassment. Gordon was a simple soul. He was putty in his son-in-law’s hands and became a caricature of himself – legs akimbo, rubbing his hands like a north country mayor in a play by J. B. Priestley. Louise despised him for this and then hated herself for despising him; she hated Robert turning her father into an object for his own amusement and hated herself more for finding it amusing. For her husband could always make her laugh.
    It was a quarter to one. Louise went downstairs. Where was Robert? Trust him to disappear when she needed him most. He would breeze in, late; he was never late for his friends, only for her parents. Sometimes she suspected that he was jealous of her family. He had no brothers or sisters. He had been brought up in some style, a lonely little boy on whom lavish amounts of money were spent but who was shamefully neglected. His mother had been too busy marrying her various husbands to take any notice of her son, who had been sent off to boarding school at the age of four. When Louise and Robert were quarrelling he brought up this fact, embellishing it with pitiful descriptions of himself sobbing in the dormitory, clutching a sodden teddy bear. This always did the trick, reducing Louise to tears. The bastard.
    There were two composers who made Prudence cry: Brahms and Schubert. Other composers could, with certain passages – Bach, during the slow movement of his double violin concerto, the violins soaring up and entwining, making love to each other with such tenderness it seemed they must break. It was Schubert and Brahms, however, who spoke to her heart. Not the symphonies – Prudence found symphonies windy and self-important, there was a look-at-me feeling about a symphony. She was a chamber music person; there was a spareness and precision about a string quartet that suited her. Prudence needed order. It was essential to her life, it was the structure upon which she depended.
    As she drove out of London the road blurred. Brahms was playing – her cassette of the Piano Quartet No 2. On their first date together she had taken Stephen to a lunchtime concert at St John’s, Smith Square. The Brahms had been played then, the Lindsay Quartet had performed it. For months afterwards whenever she read the name
Lindsay
she had felt a foolish jolt of electricity. During the concert she and Stephen hadn’t touched each other. She had kept her hands in her lap, resting on her handbag, like a dowager, but she had felt theheat of Stephen down her right side. Her skin had been drawn towards the magnet of his shoulder and his thigh. It was the strangest sensation, as if her soul were being removed into his body.
    Later, when the whole thing had started, he said that he had felt it too. They had lain in bed, and with the luxuriousness of all new lovers they had gone back over the preceding weeks, charting their progression into intimacy moment by moment. ‘Did you feel that then, really?’ ‘What about that time when we bumped into each other next to the photocopier?’ They described each other’s clothing – ‘You were wearing your white blouse’ – all those months of working together in the office were rerun, their own tender videotape, as they lay under her duvet. Hindsight made their most mundane conversations charged with significance. It was during the Brahms, he said, that he had felt his soul removing itself from his wife and finding its home in Prudence.
    Her Metro was a mess. Her box of Kleenex was buried under a tea-towel, a box of fisherman’s lozenges (empty) and a packet of Silk Cut (also empty). She pulled out a tissue and wiped her nose. People’s cars are often a surprise. Those who lead orderly lives can have chaotic vehicles, and vice