Family Album by Penelope Lively Page A

keyboard. “Don’t be silly.”
    “It is true,” says Ingrid.
    Charles sighs. “Oh, come on, Ingrid. Don’t be like that. Have the children been playing you up?”
    “The children are like always.”
    Ingrid continues to stand, slightly behind Charles’s chair. He is obliged to swivel in order to look at her. Her face is, as usual, short on expression, but there is something in her eyes that has him seeking cover. He turns away.
    “Look,” he says. “You know we . . . You know I . . .”
    “I do not know anything,” says Ingrid.
    Charles frowns. “Oh dear, I’m sorry you’re feeling like this.” His hands drift back to the typewriter. But something else has stalked into the room, alongside Ingrid. Discomfort looms. “Ingrid, I’m in the middle of something just now,” he says. “Where’s Alison?”
    “I do not know. I think she is upstairs.”
    Silence. Ingrid does not go. Charles lifts a page from his piled typescript, puts it down again, waits, glances around, and meets once more Ingrid’s cool blue stare.
    “Ingrid,” he says. “Really—I don’t know what I’m supposed to . . .” His voice trails away.
    “I know you don’t know,” says Ingrid. “You do not know, and I do not know.”
    She leaves the room.
    Alone, Charles glares at the sheet in the typewriter. He glares, scowls, types furiously for about twenty seconds, and then stops. He is finding that he is no longer deaf; he can hear kitchen noises, a child yelling to another child, the slam of a door. The house seethes around him, the world is too much with him, what is a man to do?
    It is now late afternoon. The light is softer, the shadows longer; everyone is home and the house is alive with activity. Paul has failed to locate any of his friends and thunders up the stairs to his room, where he flings himself upon the bed for a bout of morose self-pity. Gina takes her letter to the postbox on the corner. Katie and Roger are playing in the garden, with Clare trailing around after them. Sandra is back from the shops, in possession of some satisfactory loot, and a new hairstyle. Alison and Ingrid are in the kitchen, starting to prepare supper, both of them unusually quiet.
    Charles struggles for an hour. He has dried up. He types, and then throws away the sheet, types some more, and wastes another sheet. He cannot recover that productive flow. At last he gives up. He shuffles together the completed pages, frustrated. He must get out, walk for a while. Perhaps that will clear his head, but he suspects that the rest of today will go down the drain. He had hoped to get far into this chapter.
    He goes into the hall, and puts on his coat. The dog nudges open the study door, and climbs onto the leather armchair, a favorite refuge. Charles goes through the kitchen to fetch his keys from the dresser hook where all household keys hang. Both women glance at him but do not speak.
    Charles says, “I am going out. I may be some time.”
    As he crosses the road, he hears his own voice again, and his words sound a touch inappropriate: he is not leaving a cabin in the Antarctic in pursuit of a heroic death, he is merely escaping briefly from his family. That said, there is no chance that either Alison or Ingrid will pick up on the reference.
    Charles walks purposelessly around the neighborhood, trying to focus upon the rest of his chapter, to marshal material and arguments, to work out the thread of the thing. Various neighbors notice him—that man who lives at Allersmead, with all those kids—but he is not much aware of others. Some people know him as Alison’s husband—Alison is more gregarious—and remember that they have really never exchanged more than two words with him. What is it that he does? Works at home in some way, it seems. This sets him apart from all those who have offices and working hours, and provokes mild contempt or suppressed envy, according to inclination. Whatever, he is perceived as somehow not a chap you’d have a pint