Family Album Read Online Free PDF Page B

others yawn, stare at the window or the clock, return to yesterday’s preoccupation (Charles, Paul, Ingrid), or simply pick up the thread of existence once more (Alison, Gina), when this spring morning gets up momentum there are nine at Allersmead, none of them more than a yard or two from someone else, but all poles apart within their heads, their hearts. The adults are incapable of recovering what it is that goes on inside the mind of a person of six and a half, or ten, or fifteen. The children have on the whole not the faintest idea of what it is that drives and motivates their elders, or of the landscape of their thoughts. The children have various instinctive understandings of why their siblings behave as they do; the adults retain the intimacy of daily association but have lost sight of one another in other ways—like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.
    Thus, the beginning of the day, one day among so many, for each and all, though admittedly some have more under the belt than others—over fifteen thousand for Charles, a humble two thousand plus a few for Clare. A day is a day is a day, but some pack more punch than others, and at eight in the morning there is no knowing. This one appears to be set fine—a blue early April sky with some thin veils of cirrus, the sun glinting on the chestnut buds, the radio by the matrimonial bed suggesting outbreaks of rain in northern Scotland but turning quickly to the more pressing matter of the task force steaming towards those southern Atlantic islands, and the war that is about to begin. There will be a lot of people down there for whom this day is not especially propitious.
    At Allersmead, it is simply another day. It is nobody’s birthday, there are no special arrangements for it. Some people have plans. Charles intends to work—he is at a crucial phase of his book, and wants to get on with this new chapter. Sandra must, simply must, get to a hairdresser and a jeans shop, and to French Connection. Alison wakes thinking about a recipe for baked lemon chicken. Paul has a plan, about which he is apprehensive. Ingrid is not so much thinking as brooding; within her head there is a gray fog of discontent.
    Clare sees, out of the bedroom window, the shining chestnut buds, the splendor in the grass, and is, for an instant, transfixed.
    Gina also hears the news bulletin, on her own personal radio, the radio she got for Christmas, and forms an opinion.
    The house itself has experienced around forty-three thousand days since first it rose from the mud of a late-Victorian building site. It has known over a century of breakfasts, it has sat out decade upon decade of springs, of people saying, Oh, look, the trees are coming into bud, of the sun poking its way into the rooms, of the moths creeping into frock coats and plus fours and twinsets and, today, into Alison’s good tweed jacket that she keeps for best. It has weathered four-course meals served by parlormaids, the arrival of the windup gramophone and the wireless, the departure of the parlormaids, the onslaught of the Hoover; it has seen birth and death and a great deal of sex. Most of this it does not record; it keeps its counsel, it does not bear witness to the Sturm und Drang, to the raised voices and the tears, to the laughter, the exuberance, the expectations. It is merely the shell, the framework, the abiding presence that remains when all that evanescent human stuff has passed through and away. It is a triumph of impervious red brick, black and white tiles, oak woodwork, stained-glass lilies and acanthus. It neither knows nor cares. Its current market value would astonish its builders, but then so would much else about its leafy neighborhood, this provincial suburb—the cars, the trousered women, the cars, the hatless men, the cars, the curious metal arms skewered to every roof or chimney. But they might also be astonished by—or complacent about—the stolid survival of the house, very much