A girlish voice came first, breathless, a shade anxious. ‘Ian, this is Serena. Why are you always out? Don’t you sleep at home? Mummy wants. to know where Daddy is. She knows you and he aren’t speaking, she’s utterly thick to expect you to know, but anyway she insisted I ask you. So if you know, give me a ring back, OK?’
Serena, my half-sister, daughter of Alicia, the one child born to Alicia in wedlock. Serena, seven years my junior, lay in my distant memory chiefly as a small fair-haired charmer who’d followed me about like a shadow, which had flattered my twelve-year-old ego disgracefully. She liked best to sit on Malcolm’s lap, his arms protectively around her, and from him, it had seemed to me, she could conjure a smile when he was angry and pretty dresses when she had a cupboardful.
Alicia, in sweeping out of the house when Serena was six, taking with her not only Serena but her two older boys, had left me alone in the suddenly quiet house, alone in the frilly kitchen, alone and untormented in the garden. There had been a time then when I would positively have welcomed back Gervase, the older boy, despite his dead rats and other rotten tricks; and it had actually been in the vacuum after his departure that I contrived the bricking up of my kitchen-wall room, not while he was there to jeer at it.
Grown up, Gervase still displayed the insignia of a natural bully: mean tightening of the mouth, jabbing forefinger, cold patronising stare down the nose, visible enjoyment of others’ discomfiture. Serena, now tall and slim, taught aerobic dancing for a living, bought clothes still by the cartload and spoke to me only when she wanted something done.
‘Mummy wants to know where Daddy is …’ The childish terms sat oddly in the ear, somehow, coming from someone now twenty-six; and she alone of all his children had resisted calling Malcolm, Malcolm.
The next caller was Gervase himself. He started crossly, ‘I don’t like these message contraptions. I tried to get you all evening yesterday and I hear nothing but your priggish voice telling me to leave my name and telephone number, so this time I’m doing it, but under protest. This is your brother Gervase, as no doubt you realise, and it is imperative we find Malcolm at once. He has gone completely off his rocker. It’s in your own interest to find him, Ian. We must all bury our differences and stop him spending the family money in this reckless way.’ He paused briefly. ‘I suppose you do know he has given half a million… half a million… to a busload of retarded children? I got a phone call from some stupid gushing female who said, “Oh Mr Pembroke, however can we thank you?” and when I asked her what for, she said wasn’t I the Mr Pembroke who had solved all their problems, Mr Malcolm Pembroke? Madam, I said, what are you talking about? So she told me. Half a million pounds. Are you listening, Ian? He’s irresponsible. It’s out of proportion. He’s got to be prevented from giving way to such ridiculous impulses. If you ask me, it’s the beginning of senility. You must find him and tell us where he’s got to, because so far as I can discover he hasn’t answered his telephone since last Friday morning when I rang him to say Alicia’s alimony had not been increased by the rate of inflation in this last quarter. I expect to hear from you without delay.’
His voice stopped abruptly on the peremptory order and I pictured him as he was now, not the muscular thick-set black-haired boy but the flabbier, overweight thirty-five-year-old stockbroker, overbearingly pompous beyond his years. In a world increasingly awash with illegitimate children, he increasingly resented his own illegitimacy, referring to it ill-temperedly on inappropriate occasions and denigrating the father who, for all his haste into bed with Alicia, had accepted Gervase publicly always as his son, and given him his surname with legal adoption.
Gervase had nonetheless been taunted early on by cruel schoolmates, developing an amorphous hatred then which later focused itself on me, Ian, the half-brother who scarcely valued or understood the distinction between his birth and mine. One could understand why he’d lashed out in those raw adolescent days, but a matter of regret, I thought, that he’d never outgrown his bitterness. It remained with him, festering, colouring