We Are Family Read online

  How many months ago was it since he’d set about clearing the weeds from this land? Four? Five? March, it had been, the same day Emily had walked into the shop looking to buy a gift. It could have been so many years, so much had changed. He’d been up here that morning, readying the soil for planting. Spring had since turned to summer and now here he was reaping that earlier work’s rewards, turning over potatoes and carrots and beets, slinging them back behind him into mud-heavy piles. Growth, that’s what these last few months had been about for him, growth and progress.

  He was lucky, he knew, that the rain hadn’t destroyed everything he’d planted. Up until three hours ago, when the sun had finally burnt through the grey clouds and scorched the sky blue, it had been tipping it down for over a week. It had been a worse month than May and no one had thought that possible.

  Down in the town below, dripping vacancy signs flapped and rattled under every guest-house doorway. Only the bank had been busy, watching like a vulture over the town’s ailing businesses. Vale Supplies had been luckier than most, being less reliant on visitors, but even its takings had dived. People’s hopes were now pinned on August to turn the tourist year around. But who knew what August held in store?

  ‘I’ve never known the like of it,’ Bill’s mother had complained after church that morning, as he’d wheeled her back through the watery streets.

  The vicar’s sermon had been about Noah and the Flood. About God’s anger over mankind’s decadence and ungodliness. About punishment and purification and the need to wash away our sins.

  But Bill hadn’t cared. He’d thought instead of lying naked in Emily’s bed the evening before as a coal fire had smouldered in the grate, and he’d wanted to sin again and again and again.

  He let the gardening fork fall to the ground and took the tin bucket and filled it with the freshly dug potatoes. They rumbled like a drum roll as he tipped them out, adding them to the pile on the allotment path. He drank water from the flask he’d left there. Pulling his shirt tails free, he ruffled the coarse cotton material and fanned his skin beneath.

  The wind rose suddenly like the laughter of a child and he stared across the ground to where the raspberry canes had once stood, remembering again his father and mother and sister, chasing each other in circles on that distant summer day.

  But then he heard her, Emily, calling to him as she trudged across the heavy ground from where she’d been salvaging what was left of the runner beans she’d planted here soon after they’d begun seeing each other. (‘Think of all the money you’ll save if you grow what you need for the café here,’ he’d suggested at the time, even though they’d both known he’d meant it more as an excuse for them to spend time together.)

  She was dressed in her brown leather work boots, baggy black trousers and a loose-fitting pale orange shirt with its sleeves rolled up. She combed her fingers through her glistening blonde curls, which she’d cut fashionably and daringly short the week before in the bathroom above the Sea Catch Café, as Bill had watched her from the comfort of a steaming hot bath.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she asked, stopping before him now.

  He stared at her blankly.

  ‘Gazing off into the distance like that,’ she elaborated. She pointed back towards the bean canes. ‘I was waving like mad . . . but it was like you were looking right through me. Like I was a ghost.’

  Ghost. There, she’d said it.

  It was time to let go. He could see that now. It was time to turn his back on the past. All the guilt he’d loaded on to his shoulders over not having been there to save his father, all the resentment he’d racked up about his subsequent return to Stepmouth . . . what had any of it brought him but more misery? Ghosts and memories . . . his mother had lived off them for eight years now, but he wouldn’t, not for another minute.

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he answered Emily. ‘Not any more.’ He didn’t. He felt like his own life had only just begun. With time, he hoped to help his mother feel the same. All of them should move on. The whole family. All of them, together.

  Tiny wrinkles appeared at the corners of Emily’s grey eyes as she smiled. ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

  Whenever he kissed Emily, he felt she was breathing life back into him. His life before her arrival was a darkened room. He pulled her towards him and kissed her now.

  ‘There!’ she said, as they broke apart. She looked up, distracted. ‘They’re back.’

  Bill turned to see two aircraft, lancing low and fast above the moor, before disappearing into a bank of clouds gathered on the horizon. The roar of their jet engines grumbled down the valley towards them.

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’ she asked. ‘What they say?’

  Bill didn’t need to ask her what she meant by this. A rumour concerning the appearance of the war planes over the moors had been growing in the town for weeks now, amplified by the recent bad weather. Auxiliary staff from the nearby RAF base drank in the town’s pubs at the weekends and, just as during the war, secrets got spilt along with the beer.

  ‘Cloud seeding.’ That was the phrase which had slipped from the drunken auxiliaries’ lips. They’d found a way to make it rain. By firing chemicals into the clouds. To burst them. To tear the heavens open and let the waters cascade down. They were going to use it on the communists, to flood their dams and smash their cities.

  ‘I think it’s a load of old rubbish,’ Bill said. He thought back to his time in the army, remembering the tired old uniforms and rifles they’d been issued with. ‘Even if they had the technology,’ he added, ‘which I doubt they do, why would they test it here?’ Only two years before, he’d watched pictures in the cinema of the Arizona Desert being rocked by atomic bomb tests. ‘Why not somewhere safe and far away from anyone who might be affected?’

  ‘Maybe they want us to be affected. Maybe that’s what a proper test is. That’s what Dad reckons, anyway. That’s what he said when I spoke to him on the telephone last night.’

  Bill snorted. ‘This from the man who believes that one day they’ll put men on the moon,’ he teased. Alun Jones had told Bill as much when Bill had taken him out for a pint two weeks before, when he and Mavis had driven over from their new home in Wales to see how Emily was getting on.

  ‘And who also approves of me seeing you,’ Emily answered back, jabbing Bill in the ribs.

  ‘Good point,’ he conceded with a laugh, ‘maybe he’s not so mad after all.’ Hugging Emily, he looked back at the sky. ‘I still think the rumours are rubbish, though. Big talk from the air force boys to impress the girls.’

  ‘Want to know how to impress this girl?’ Emily asked. Before he could answer, she’d grabbed his hand and had started pulling him up the hillside to where the small wooden potting shed stood at the top of the allotment.

  Spiderwebs covered the tiny smudged glass window set into the warped wooden door. Emily kicked off her boots and stepped inside.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘What does it look like?’ she replied with a giggle, as she hurriedly pulled down her trousers and knickers. Balling them up into a makeshift pillow, she lay down and held out her arms to him. ‘Quickly,’ she told him, shivering, ‘I need impressing. Now.’

  Stepping inside, he pulled the door shut behind him.

  They made love there on the floor, the sunlight streaming in through the knot-shaped holes in the sides of the shed, making their skin shimmer like fish beneath the water as they slowly twisted and turned. Afterwards, she lay draped across him, breathless, with her mouth pressed up against his neck. Whipped up by their exertions, dust motes danced like tiny fireworks above them in the air.

  ‘God, I love fucking you,’ she said.

  The word didn’t bother him. Not the way she said it. It contained too much joy to be crude.

  ‘Me, too,’ he answered. When he thought back to what it had been like being in bed with Susan Castle, he marvelled at his ineptitude. In bed: that said it all. They’d never do
ne it anywhere else. The same as they’d never done it with the lights on, as if seeing one another naked might have somehow spoilt the romance of it all.

  Oh yes, he marvelled at that, but not half as much as at the years which had passed between Susan’s departure from his life and Emily’s explosion into it. How had he survived? That’s what he could no longer understand. How had he managed without Emily’s company, without her laughter and frankness, her openness and determination? In short, how had he managed without her at all?

  Optimism leapt up inside him. There’d been something he’d been wanting to tell her all day. He’d been saving it up for the right moment. He saw that moment was now.

  ‘I’ve got something to –’ they began simultaneously, before bursting out laughing and rolling apart.

  ‘You first,’ he said.

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘And I’ve got something to give you,’ she replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This,’ she said, before kissing him lingeringly. ‘Well, I’ve shown you mine,’ she then said. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘You’re going to have to get dressed first . . .’

  Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Why? Where are we going?’

  He picked up her knickers and tossed them on to her lap. ‘Wait and see.’

  ‘William?’

  It’s was Bill’s mother, calling him from the parlour. Bill and Emily had just driven back from the allotment and Emily was waiting for him in the car outside. Annoyed, Bill stared down at the creaking step which had betrayed his attempt at sneaking up to his bedroom undetected.

  He walked through to find his mother with Edith Carver, still dressed in her black church dress, and Giles Weatherly, the ironmonger from across the alley. Edith was sitting at the table pouring tea into cups and Giles stood by the barred open window, smoking a pipe. The sweet scent of cherry tobacco pervaded the room.

  ‘Edith,’ Bill said, enjoying the wince in her face which the deliberately overfamiliar greeting had inspired. ‘Giles.’

  ‘William,’ Giles replied, running his thumb along his thick black moustache.

  Bill liked Giles. He was a widower, childless, a few years older than Bill’s mother. His wife had died from tuberculosis before the war. He’d been great friends with Bill’s father and had been the first to arrive after hearing the shooting on the night Keith Glover had robbed the store. He’d given evidence against Keith Glover during the trial.

  Bill noticed his mother was wearing the white silk neck scarf he and Rachel had bought her for Christmas.

  ‘You look pretty, Mum,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t she just,’ Giles agreed.

  Mrs Vale blushed. As Bill looked between her and Giles, the absurd notion entered his head that perhaps they might one day end up as more than just good friends. Hot on its heels came the less absurd notion that that’s what his father might have wanted, for his mother to move on, the same as Bill was now moving on himself. Why not? he thought. Stranger things had happened. And anything seemed possible, especially the way he felt right now.

  ‘You know what, Giles?’ he said. ‘You should come over for dinner one night. I might be able to talk Emily into cooking something up for you and Mum. It would be fun.’

  Edith Carver cleared her throat, looking sharply between Giles and Mrs Vale. Sniffing out the potential for gossip? Signalling her disapproval? Bill could neither tell nor care.

  ‘I really don’t think –’ his mother began to protest.

  ‘What a lovely idea,’ said Giles. ‘I haven’t had a decent home-cooked meal in ages.’ He turned to Bill’s mother for approval. The burnished brass watch fob hanging from his brown woollen waistcoat pocket glimmered. ‘Laurel?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said, flustered, ‘I suppose there wouldn’t be any har —’

  ‘Good,’ Bill said, ‘that’s decided then. You’ve got a real treat in store,’ he confided in Giles. ‘Emily’s an amazing cook.’ He turned to his mother. ‘Isn’t she, Mum?’

  Bill walked over and kissed his mother on the brow. He knew she was annoyed with him, for demonstrating in front of Edith Carver that the scandalous Emily Jones was now an accepted face in their home. But Emily wasn’t scandalous. Not to Bill. And not to his mother any more, he didn’t think, not now that Emily had put in the effort to win her over. The sooner everyone else got wise to the fact, the better.

  ‘You should give the Sea Catch Café a try, you know, Giles,’ he went on. ‘Everyone should. It’s the best in the town.’

  Giles laughed. ‘Nothing like a partisan recommendation, eh?’

  The comment had been directed at Bill’s mother, but it was Edith Carver who responded. ‘Hardly the most popular place in town, though, is it?’ she remarked frostily.

  ‘Only because certain small-minded people, on account of their peculiar – and if I might say so – un-Christian prejudices, won’t give it a chance,’ Bill answered back.

  ‘Well, really,’ Edith Carver objected. She looked to Bill’s mother and scowled. ‘Even putting Emily Jones’s own indiscretions aside,’ she continued, ‘you can’t get around the fact that she still employs that vicious Glover boy and –’

  ‘Who she employs has nothing to do with you,’ Bill cut her off. He noticed his mother staring fixedly at him. He’d so far avoided discussing Tony Glover’s continued employment at the café with his mother and certainly didn’t intend to allow Edith Carver to agitate matters now. ‘Or anyone else, for that matter,’ he added pointedly, ‘including myself.’

  His mother looked at the clock and said nothing. He knew he was letting her down, but at the same time he could no longer summon up the same venom he’d once felt for Tony Glover. Hatred, yes, he held a reservoir of that for Keith. But not Tony. Tony’s presence was something to be endured, not suffered, Bill had decided. Emily was more important. He knew this was something his mother would never understand.

  Giles broke the uneasy silence. ‘I’m surprised you’re back,’ he said. ‘Your mother said you were out for the afternoon.’

  ‘I forgot something,’ Bill answered. ‘Where’s Rachel?’ he then asked, noticing her absence and using it as an excuse to change the subject.

  His mother’s expression was unreadable, as blank as a waxwork doll’s. She was dwelling on Tony Glover. Or if not him, then Keith. The thought had switched her off like a light. All because of Edith Carver and her big mouth.

  ‘Over at Anne’s house,’ she finally replied, still without looking at him.

  ‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘I’d best get going,’ he said. ‘Emily’s waiting for me in the car.’

  He rushed up the stairs, buzzing, taking them one, two, three at a time, and then on into his room.

  Bill’s bedroom looked more like a draughtsman’s office than a place where someone daydreamed and slept. The day he’d asked Emily Jones out on their first date, he’d come back here and pushed his iron-framed bed up tight against the far wall, underneath the window which hung out over the River Step. In its place, at the centre of the room, his drawing board now stood.

  He’d dug out his old drawings from university like she’d said. The bridges and art galleries and fantastical houses he’d designed in his leisure time while studying for his engineering degree now covered the walls. Architecture, that’s what he’d dreamt of pursuing once he’d finished his course. And architecture, that’s what surrounded him now whenever he slept.

  Pinned on the wall above the bed were two photographs. One was of Emily, taken on their second date, when he’d driven her to a pub along the coast for lunch. He took it now and slipped it inside his wallet, suddenly wanting it close. The other was a photograph of the Bathers’ Pavilion, the derelict building overlooking the beach which Emily had pointed out to him in May, when she’d told him it was a terrible thing to allow ambition to go to waste.

  Neatly ordered on his bedside table were his draughtsman’s
tools. On the drawing board was what he’d come here to collect. He’d been working on it for the past few weeks. It wasn’t finished yet, but it was near enough there, and he couldn’t wait any longer. The timing felt right. He wanted to show it to Emily now.

  Rolling the drawing up under his arm, he ran back down the stairs. Nerves stretched and snapped inside him with each step down he took.

  ‘Hey, guess what?’ he said to Emily as he climbed into the Jupiter beside her. ‘Rachel’s over at Anne’s house again.’ It was a running joke between them. Rachel had a mystery boyfriend. She’d told Emily and Emily had, in turn, told Bill. Anne was the excuse she used for getting out of the house. Bill wanted to know who it was, but Emily had so far stopped him from prying. Still, Rachel couldn’t keep it a secret for ever and, meantime, whoever it was, they’d better be taking good care of her. And Rachel had better be behaving herself, too.

  ‘So has she told you who he is yet?’ he asked.

  Emily’s eyes were fixed on the tube of paper in his hand. ‘No, and I haven’t asked. And nor should you,’ she warned. ‘Girls her age like to keep their affairs mysterious. I know I did.’

  ‘Quite,’ he teased, starting the car, ‘and look where it got you.’

  ‘Enough of your stalling,’ she said, snatching the paper from him. ‘Where are we going now and what’s with this?’ She started to unwind the paper cylinder.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, gently touching the back of her hand. ‘Please. I promise: it’ll be worth the wait.’ He hoped it would. He prayed.

  She rested the paper on her lap and they set off down the high street towards the harbour.

  They turned right at the end of the high street and on across Harbour Bridge to the east side of town. Instead of turning right along East Street towards the Sea Catch Café, however, as Emily (judging by her look of surprise) had obviously been expecting, Bill pulled up outside the Bathers’ Pavilion.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ Emily asked

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  Taking the roll of paper from her, he got out of the car.

  The dilapidated building was rectangular in shape, one hundred and twenty feet long and forty wide. It had been built at the turn of the century as a changing and washing facility for the prudish tourists to undress in, before they stepped out on to the beach in their striped cotton knee-to-neck bathing suits. Its roof had been torn off and its insides shredded in the great storm of 1933. But even before that, its use had gone into decline. People had no longer required such extreme levels of privacy. It had become unfashionable and the funds to rebuild it had never been raised.