Relative Strangers

  Relative Strangers

  Allie Cresswell

  © Allie Cresswell, 2012 and 2018. Except as provided by the Copyright Act [1956, 1988, 2003] no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Allie Cresswell asserts her moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction; no similarity to any real person or persons is intended or should be inferred.

  Cover design by Sarah Cowan www.rebeccawatsondesign.co.uk

  Author photograph © Tim Newell

  This book is dedicated

  to my children

  Thomas and Abigail

  with all my love

  October 2004

  Friday

  As usual, Belinda McKay-Donne waved her husband and children off in the car. Elliot, her husband, in the driving seat, did not even acknowledge her raised arm. He was fiddling testily with his mobile telephone with one hand and jamming the tiny earphone into place with the other. Rob, their son, from his position in the passenger seat, miraculously manoeuvred the car, in reverse gear, between the gateposts and out into the Close. Now that he was seventeen, and having lessons, he ought to be driving to school with his L plates on his father’s car; practice making perfect. But Elliot was always in too much of a hurry and, in any case, hadn’t the patience. Even Belinda’s patience had been rather stretched on the couple of occasions she had taken Rob out; he tended to drive too quickly and with reckless disregard for other road users. He had managed, just on the relatively quiet side streets, to have a couple of near misses and she had had to warn him that, if he wasn’t careful, he would end up causing an accident.

  Ellie, in the back seat, was the only one to manage a half-hearted wave as the car roared off up the tree-lined road towards the by-pass.

  Half an hour later, Belinda too drove away from the house. She’d packed their smart luggage into the boot, ramming Wellington boots and waterproofs anachronistically into the spaces, repeatedly checking her list. The full width of the back seat was taken up by boxes of food and cleaning materials and two cold-bags, packed at the last minute, were wedged behind the front seats. On the passenger seat rested her handbag, a Tupperware of neatly cut and tightly cling-filmed sandwiches and a sheaf of papers with directions to Hunting Manor.

  Before leaving she’d checked again that the doors were firmly locked, the thermostat was turned down low, the cooker was switched off and the taps tightly closed. Everything was neat and tidy: the beds made, the kitchen floor polished to a high shine, the dishcloth folded and draped over the tap. The linen basket was empty, the ironing done and put away. Even Rob’s room, usually a no-go area, was reasonably straight.

  Belinda was a confident driver and she negotiated the back end of the school run traffic with ease, taking a nifty short cut through an industrial estate to avoid the road works near the airport turn-off and was soon on the motorway, cruising at a steady seventy-five in the middle lane.

  She had had the idea almost twelve months before: to rent a large house for the autumn half term holiday, coinciding with her parents’ golden wedding anniversary. She wanted to get the whole family together, at last, for something special that everyone, but particularly her mother, Mary, would really enjoy. Left to itself the family would disintegrate. It was always Belinda who kept them in contact, only she seemed to care enough to keep the connections. To her it was a matter of maintaining a firm anchor, reinforcing it with layers of developing association. To the others it seemed to be something that chafed, a kind of restraint, and she was quite aware that when her phone calls or her emails came suggesting a weekend visit or even only lunch, there would be a palpable shrinking, and their acceptances came with weary resignation.

  Geography made it difficult for Simon now that he lived so far from his hometown, and so far, too, from McKay ways. Ruth hadn’t the excuse of geography - she had remained local - but she seemed to have drifted away from them all one way or another, especially since poor April had died; it was all Belinda could do to get her and James and the children to visit once or twice a year. And Heather? She moved in fashionable, glamorous circles now. In any case she had always been somewhat otherworldly. It was so long since they had all been together for more than just a few hours - and a tortured few hours at that; April’s funeral, the chill of the churchyard and the stilted conversation afterwards in the function room of the hotel; Dad’s stroke, and the whispering corridors of the hospital. But Belinda would persevere with it for Mary’s sake; she - now the harassed carer of their debilitated father - needed to feel, for once, their strength and support.

  At one time Belinda had turned to Mary as a first resort in any kind of crisis but recently their roles had been reversed. Now it was Mary who needed help and Belinda who provided it. Indeed it was to Belinda that they all turned, these days, in times of crisis. Their sudden calls for help, like some ancestral clarion cry, would send her scurrying across the country to administer condolence, or nursing care, or casserole. She, now, was the lynchpin of the family, and she was quietly determined to hold it together.

  So, she had hatched her plan, quietly, as she did everything, careful to reflect the glory of it onto others, and yet with a dogged determination to overcome every obstacle. The holiday was to be a long overdue reminder to everyone that Mary mattered; that family mattered. ‘Family,’ Belinda had read on a picture frame in some gift shop or another, ‘is the link to our past and the bridge to our future.’ Belinda only wanted to provide the occasion, the venue, to deal with the practicalities which would enable the others to make the links and set foot on the bridges. That, she felt, if any, was her gift. Ruth had once called her, in the new-fangled ‘business-speak’ she so often affected these days, a ‘facilitator’. Unsure of her meaning, Belinda had finally asked Elliot what it meant. ‘It means you let other people get on with the important things,’ he’d explained. Well, she’d settle for that.

  The whole project had taken some considerable organization, overcoming her brother and sisters’ reluctance and getting them to commit themselves to that few days. They had such different ideas!

  ‘Oh no! Not there! Too far to travel. It isn’t like you to be so impractical,’ from Ruth.

  ‘That place? Almost on our doorstep! Have you thought about getting somewhere abroad?’ from Simon.

  ‘Oh I don’t care! You decide. Only do let there be hills and open spaces, Belinda, and trees, and a positive aura, and room to dance.’ This from Heather, her youngest sister.

  In the end she had found Hunting Manor advertised in The Lady. It was perfect. ‘A stately home of character and quality peacefully placed in its own grounds, a mile from the village of Hunting Wriggly, easily accessible by road. Luxuriously appointed with every modern convenience, lovingly restored and tastefully furnished with fixtures and fittings from a bygone age of elegance and refinement. Ten principal bedrooms plus servants’ quarters.’

  This image conjured up both longing and anxiety in Belinda. It sounded perfect... But would she arrive to find a dilapidated pile running with damp and infested with vermin? Surely not. Her conversations with the agents regarding the booking had inspired her with confidence.

  ‘Spick and span,’ they had promised, ‘cosy and warm.’ Unlimited firewood, an enormous Aga, a huge boiler, copious hot water, plenty of space for the kiddies, commodious rooms for the grown-ups: convenience, comfort, practicality and beauty. What else could any of them require?

  The sky, which had frowned rain earlier, cleared to show increasing glimpses of blue sky above driven white clouds. Ploughed fields the colour of bitter chocolate gave way to velvet crop
ped moorland dotted with sheep, and in the distance purple mountains suddenly made sense to Belinda of a long forgotten Harvest time hymn sung at school. The trees shimmered - green and gold, copper and bronze. The Lorries and vans which had accompanied her like seagulls above a fishing boat began to drop away, and soon she was almost alone on the ever unwinding grey ribbon of roadway. She pressed the accelerator a little more, and edged up to eighty. The car responded without demur.

  As she drove Belinda cast anxious glances at herself in the rear-view mirror. The previous week, for the first time in her life, she had attended a beauty salon to have her eye-brows shaped and lashes dyed. She was still wondering whether she should have had something done to her hair; a colour, perhaps. But this would surely have been going too far. She had been discreetly dieting for the past few months, and her face had lost its fleshy roundness, her cheek bones had emerged. Some of her clothes had grown too big for her and she had bought new ones in a smaller size. Nobody at all had passed any comment on these changes in her appearance; certainly not Elliot and not even Mary, usually so quick to spot any physical alterations in her children. Belinda, while feeling rather proud, dared to make no conscious acknowledgement of the motivation behind these changes, and now she banished those fluttering wings which troubled her from time to time by concentrating on the road.

  Suddenly red brake lights and winking hazard lights indicated a stoppage up ahead. The cars in front of her slowed to a snail’s pace and Belinda sighed impatiently. She had so much to do when she got to Hunting Manor - she wanted everything to be ready for when the first arrivals showed up. She crawled along for perhaps a mile or so, keeping pace with a silver Mercedes on her off side and a Walkers Crisps van to her left. Then bollards and the overhead information display indicated that the outside lane was closing and the Mercedes nosed in front of Belinda with an apologetic wave. A police car and then an ambulance screamed down the hard shoulder and Belinda knew with a sinking sickness that there must have been an accident. When she came to it she was surprised to see that the accident had occurred on the opposite carriageway. The outside lane of their carriageway was being closed off for emergency vehicles; this, and the ghoulish propensity of people to slow down and stare, had caused the tail-back.

  The accident looked very nasty; six or seven cars mangled almost beyond recognition littered the carriageway. One of them was covered in soapy foam; plainly it had been on fire. A lorry – not a McKays’ vehicle, she noted - had slewed off the road and was on its side down the embankment. A caravan had jack-knifed and rammed the central reservation barrier. Luggage was scattered all over the place, camping gear and, sickeningly, children’s clothing. A fire crew was working with cutting equipment on one of the cars. On its windscreen, shattered into a mosaic, Belinda could see blood. Ambulance crews were helping the injured; a woman sat on the hard shoulder weeping over the body of an infant, a Day-Glo jacketed paramedic in attendance; a man in a business suit stood in the midst of it all and shouted into his mobile phone. Then she was past the incident and three lanes of stationery traffic tailed back behind the impassable scene for several miles. Amongst it she spotted the blue and silver of a McKay’s Haulage vehicle emblazoned with the nationally recognised by-line ‘Going the McKay Way’. The coned off area finished, the cars on her side of the motorway sped up and off and there was clear road ahead.

  Belinda tweaked the indicator. Her exit was coming up. She reached down to the passenger seat and picked up the list of directions. She was nearly there.

  ✽✽✽

  Elliot escaped from his business lunch appointment at two-thirty and drove onto the ring road towards the industrial estate where the McKays Haulage yard was now situated. His first action as the new Chairman had been to sell their seedy backstreet premises and take a lease out on a splendid new compound and office. He had computerised their systems as well, and appointed new staff whose loyalties would be to him and not to old Robert, Elliot’s father-in-law, the founder of McKays. Most of the drivers he had kept on, however. They knew their vehicles and their routes. And so far it had proved impossible to shift Aunty June from her swivel chair in the accounts department.

  She had been brought in to do the figures in the sixties. Robert believed in family, he wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t family to play any important role in the firm. His sister did the accounts and Les, her husband, had been taken on as the first additional driver back in those early days of the company. The biggest disappointment of Robert’s life had been his failure to persuade his son Simon into the family business. Elliot, taken on straight out of college with an HND in accounting had soon recognised that his only means of occupying the chair in the boardroom would be via the bed of one of the McKay daughters; he would have to become family. The bed, once he had put his mind to it, hadn’t taken him too long but he had to wait what had seemed an interminable time before taking possession of the chair. Robert had finally retired the previous year following his first stroke. Les had retired at the same time as Robert but June had stubbornly refused to let go, still appearing in the office three times a week, interfering with the accounts clerks, double checking their figures, crashing the accounts program and generally getting in the way. She made no secret of the fact that she was ‘keeping an eye on family interests’, a ridiculous notion since she wasn’t even a director of the firm. But she was, by birth anyway, a McKay, and Elliot had not - yet - liked to oust her for fear of wounding what he thought of as the minefield of McKay family relations.

  He knew her type, anyway, and it was easily managed: she was a leech. In spite of all appearances to the contrary she didn’t have money beyond what she earned at McKays and Les' pension, and her expensive lifestyle - a big thirsty car, golf and bridge with well-heeled women, expensive boutiques and regular appointments at the beauty salon - meant that she was at the mercy of whoever held the purse strings. She had sucked off Robert and Mary for years but now Elliot was in control and when the time came he would make her dance to his tune.

  As he drove up the by-pass at something over the speed limit Elliot consoled himself with the fact that, for a family business, apart from June, McKays Haulage was mercifully unburdened with family involvement. How much worse it would be to have a whole litter of McKay cousins and nephews throwing their weight around, lording it in the compound and lounging in the office cubicles, thinking that the business owed them a living and running up astronomical expense accounts! The McKay siblings had all taken nominal directorships when Robert had had his stroke but they didn’t trouble Elliot with awkward questions or requests to examine the accounts and as Chair Elliot found it thankfully a very rare necessity to call a board meeting. He had them all more or less where he wanted them.

  Had Elliot chosen to examine the other side of that coin he might have had to admit that in fact the McKays had him in a similar grip. He nurtured the McKay nest-egg unaided and largely unappreciated. He got results but he got little recognition for them from the family. He got little of anything from them, in fact. They tolerated him, and that only for Belinda’s sake. But Elliot didn’t care; life wasn’t a personality contest, after all. It didn’t bother him that he was avoided at conferences, labelled a pariah, or that he was unpopular at the golf club. Nobody could argue with his success or his ability to get, in the end, exactly what he wanted.

  He swung off the by-pass and began to indicate left, turning into the forecourt of the impressive modern office suite. ‘McKays’ was emblazoned in blue and silver across the porch. To his left the high-walled compound was full of tidily parked wagons, their paint freshly washed and gleaming. A uniformed gate keeper touched his cap at Elliot as he got out of the car and made for the smoothly gliding glass entrance doors. He glanced at his watch. It was ten past three. He had half an hour to sign off the wages, clear his desk and get back onto the by-pass to collect the children from school. The traffic was bound to be appalling at four on the Friday before half term, and Rob had wheedled him into agreeing to go h
ome to collect the computer on the way; that would put them back even more.

  He was not looking forward to the holiday at all. A week incarcerated with the McKay clan miles from anywhere was nothing like his idea of fun. But Belinda had had this idea and worried at it like a terrier until he had been railroaded into agreeing. Having to keep the kids in hand, play the adoring uncle to the brats, make jolly conversation with the brothers-in-law and cope with Belinda working herself up into a frenzy over the catering arrangements - none of this struck him as being very appealing, even if it was in somebody else’s stately home. On the other hand there were some members of the McKay family who were good value. Simon liked to throw his cash about as proof that he had made it big without McKays, and that foxy new woman of his had a certain appeal. Being seen with Jude - the famous brother-in-law - had its attraction too, and since Belinda had organised – and paid for, he’d be bound – the whole deal, that would put Elliot in the driving seat as host. Certainly that would be very satisfactory - it was exactly where he liked to be.

  The whole family deal with the McKays was something that had been as hard – or harder, in some ways – for Elliot to pick up as the business. His own parents had died and his only sibling lived as a semi-recluse on a barge with a posse of whippets, mercifully un-desirous of any involvement with Elliot or his new relations. It had taken him a long time to appreciate the tight-lipped restraint which seemed to characterise family relationships. They tip-toed around each other as though on egg-shells, and tolerated each other’s failure, feebleness and foolishness with stiff-necked forbearance. Tolerated it rather than confronted it. McKay fools, it seemed to Elliot anyway, were suffered, if not gladly, then stoically. The family tree might be riddled with damp and rot but as long as the thing looked sound from the outside, that was all that mattered. But surely, Elliot thought, glancing over the documents on his desk, the whole thing was a complete charade! The four children had travelled in widely diverse directions from their humble beginnings. Were they to meet as strangers they wouldn’t give each other the time of day and yet Belinda relentlessly pursued this family connection long after there was any life or purpose left in it. It was a dead horse and he wished she would stop flogging it.