Read Online Family Album by Penelope Lively - Free Book Online Page B

Allersmead, but it is a light tether that soon will break. She will be out there on her own, and will make the best of it, she knows she’ll do that, she’s not bad at managing. But right now she doesn’t much think about all that, there’s too much going on anyway.
    She can see the white gateposts now—Allersmead. Almost, she can already smell it—comforting cooking smells, the hall smell of raincoat, a whiff of dog, and something unidentifiable that is just the Allersmead aroma—lifting somehow from woodwork and stone tiles and stained glass and people.
    She climbs the steps and pushes open the front door. The dog heaves itself up and acknowledges her, tail swishing.
    Ingrid comes down the stairs.
    “Hi!” says Katie. “Are the others here yet?”
    “You are the first,” says Ingrid. “Except of course Roger and Clare are already here. It is good that you have come. Charles has gone out, I do not know where. Alison is in the kitchen. Crying, I think.”

    Clare hears the front door slam. Someone. One of them. But she’s busy right now, she can’t go down. She lifts her right leg and places the toes delicately against the mantelpiece. Then the left. Again. And again. She bends over backwards, slowly, floating her hands down to rest on the floor and stays there, thus arched, to a count of ten. She does the splits. Again. And again. And more.
    The routine completed, she looks at herself in the mirror. Sideways on. She is thin, but not nearly thin enough. There is a suggestion of bum, the slightest curve of stomach. What to do? She has tried living on lettuce leaves and not much else, until Roger pointed out that dancers need muscle, and you don’t build up muscle on a starvation diet. So now she eats, sparingly, and eyes her body with distaste.
    She knows what she wants. She has a goal, an ideal. She saw the Frankfurt Ballet on the telly, and from that moment her life changed. Those lithe androgynous figures, like pieces of string, apparently boneless; those dances that were unlike anything she had ever seen—startling, capricious, furiously inventive. She hadn’t known dancing could be like this. It is a world away from Nutcracker on the South Bank at Christmas, and the Saturday dance class at the leisure center. Where do you learn to dance like a piece of string? How do you melt your bones?
    There is an ongoing argument. May she leave school at the end of the year and go to dance school? Dad just rolls his eyes and sighs. Mum sees her in a tutu, flittering around in Swan Lake, and says, well, ballet is lovely, of course, but don’t they sort of peter out at thirty? Ingrid says to dance is nice, but there are also A levels and college.

    Roger is not at Allersmead. He is in the emergency room of the local hospital. He has had the most tremendous piece of luck. His friend Luke got his hand stamped on during the afternoon rugby match against a rival school—emphatically stamped on, broken in all probability—so Roger was able to step forward and offer to go with him to the hospital, which meant an enthralling couple of hours observing what goes on in Emergency. He has had a road accident (man with a head injury, woman with cuts), a couple of burns, an electric-hedge-clipper misfortune, and various people just looking ill about whom he would have liked to know more. His interest is forensic, though he is also sympathetic. He longs to get behind the curtains with the medics and really learn something, watch an examination, have a go himself at an assessment, a diagnosis. His only chance comes when it is Luke’s turn for a cubicle and a brisk young intern, whom Roger is able to chat up and thus gets to have a good look at Luke’s X-ray, over which he pores. There is no fracture, which would have made it more interesting yet, but massive bruising and swelling. Luke is by now thoroughly pissed off, and takes a dim view of Roger’s evident appreciation of the afternoon. When his mother arrives and is effusive