Free Family Album by Penelope Lively

in her thanks to Roger for his solicitous attendance, Luke sits scowling, aware only that this means he will miss next week’s match.
    It is half-past six. Roger remembers with a jolt that this is the evening of the family gathering, and he had better leg it back to Allersmead pronto, or he will be in serious trouble. He gives Luke a kindly cuff on the shoulder, says goodbye to his mother, and gallops off.
    He has known that he wanted to be a doctor since he was about ten. He loved visits to the doctor’s, watched (and suffered) with interest as one or other of the family had chicken pox, flu, insect bites, gashed knees, scalds, and sties. One minute people are running around, just fine, he noted, and the next they are felled by this or that, and the effects are impressive, but something can be done. He was going to be a part of this process. Oh, wanting to help people came into it, to make them better, but just as impelling was the fascinating business of cause and effect, of seeing what happens to someone when ill or injured, and then being the person who works out how to frustrate misfortune. Biology became his favorite subject; by the time he got to GCSEs he was already on course, sails set for medical school. With luck, and hard work, in a few years’ time he will be the guy in the white coat, dispensing expertise in Emergency.
    He belts up the steps and into the house. Smell of food, sound of voices from the kitchen—help! are they already eating? He opens the kitchen door a touch furtively, and sees that all is well. The table is not even set. Katie is there, and Ingrid, and Mum is stirring something on the cooker. She turns sharply as she hears him, and her face falls.
    “Oh, it’s you, dear,” she says.

    Sandra sees Roger hurtling up the steps as she arrives. She often forgets about Roger. Katie too. They were always on the fringes of her vision, back then, of little interest unless you needed them to make up the numbers in some game. And now Roger is taller than she is, with a gruff male voice.
    She takes her time, switching on the car’s interior light to do her face. She is pleased with the car; it is secondhand—of course—but a lovely metallic blue, with sunroof, radio, and cassette player. She can barely afford the payments, but what the hell. She’s going to put in for a raise at the magazine, the editor likes her, she may even get to cover the Paris shows next spring.
    Allersmead is fading, for Sandra. From where she is now, Allersmead seems a long way away, an alternative universe where they do things differently, a place that has no conception of the fashion world, of the vie et mouvement of a vibrant office, of photo shoots and travel and being busy, busy, busy. Last Christmas, she brought a copy of the magazine. Her mother had eyed it with some alarm, turned over the page, and said, “Goodness, those girls are so thin .” Her father picked it up, stared at the cover, put it down again. Ingrid said, “These clothes are strange—I could not wear them but I suppose in London it is different.” Clare said, “Wow!”
    Gina had flipped through the pages. Was that a curled lip? “Not your scene,” said Sandra. “I shouldn’t bother. How’s Radio Swindon?”
    Sandra applies mascara. She glances at the house. Allersmead is alive with light. It may have faded in the mind, but within its context it is still very much in business. Someone walks past the sitting-room window—she cannot see who. Are they all here? Is Gina here?
    Gina and I, she thinks, were fish and fowl. Cat and dog. Sisters? Technically. Opposites. Rivals. Anything she liked I didn’t. Anything I did she despised. Same still, really, except that it doesn’t matter now. We don’t have to live together.
    She fixes her hair, steps from the car, takes her overnight bag from the back, and the flowers for Mum—the bouquet from Harrods—and runs up the steps, heels clicking on the stone. She pushes open the door, smells