Alys, Always (11 page)

‘I won’t go back,’ says Polly stoutly, but I can tell the idea is starting to appeal to her. ‘Anyway, Dad won’t buy it.’

‘You don’t know until you try,’ I say.

‘No, you’re right,’ she says doubtfully. ‘It might be worth giving it a go. I just hope I can explain it as well as you did just now. You made it sound completely reasonable.’ She looks at me slyly. ‘I don’t suppose you’d come too?’ she says, and there’s suddenly a kittenish, imploring edge to her voice.

I umm and ah for a little, for form’s sake; and then – as if I’m overwhelmed by the expert deployment of charm – I say OK, I’ll do it, I’ll come.

We walk up to Highgate together, turning off the steep road that leads past the hospital – the road where Dick Whittington heard the bells, now clogged with double-deckers – to enter the park. It is already hot. There is a purple haze in the borders where the bees are rolling and tumbling rapturously, and the small playground is full of babies in sun bonnets. Daisies sparkle in the grass.

We pass along narrow inky corridors of shade and through scented clouds of lilac blossom. As the path curves round
past the shrubbery at the top of the park, we pause and look back over the green slopes sprinkled with the first picnics of the year, over the placid oily expanse of the ponds, and far in the distance I see the towers and domes and Ferris wheel of central London, winking and glittering with a hard mineral light.

Leaving the park by the tennis courts, we cross Pond Square, where people with pint glasses are playing pétanque under the plane trees, and work our way through the side streets towards Laurence’s house. Polly has a key in her satchel. She opens the front door and we step inside. It’s cool and dark after the brightness of the day.

‘Hello,’ she calls. ‘Daddy? Where are you?’

There’s no answer, so she leads me downstairs. The big white kitchen is in a bit of a state. There are carrier bags on the counter and more slumped on the floor. There’s a dirty pan left out by the Aga. Coffee grounds are spilled around the kettle. By the open French window a newspaper lifts and falls, like something breathing.

Polly inspects one of the bags and takes out a shiny gold bar of French butter and a couple of cheeses wrapped in waxed paper, which she puts in the fridge. She says that Laurence has hired a housekeeper who comes in most mornings to clean and prepare meals, but Mrs King doesn’t work weekends. She rolls her eyes and crosses the room to the French windows, pushing them wide, leading me out on to the soft brick terrace.

‘Dad!’ she calls, and waves.

Laurence is halfway down the long garden, sitting – as I’d once imagined him sitting – on the bench outside the summer house. In the moment before Polly calls to him he’s entirely unaware of our arrival. It’s all there, unguarded: the endlessly miserable business of loneliness. I see it in his posture and
written on his face. Then he hears his daughter and turns and rises and comes to meet us.

‘I understand you rescued Pol last night,’ he says to me while we are rather awkwardly shaking hands, and then, to her: ‘You are a little fool, losing your keys like this.’

‘I haven’t lost them, I left them in the flat,’ she protests, taking his arm as we walk back up the garden, along the brick path. Of course, I haven’t seen the house from this angle before. Between the dark glossy windows, thick pale hawsers of wisteria twist upwards, thinning like smoke. The blossom isn’t quite out yet. Another week or two, I think.

‘Serena is coming back this afternoon anyway,’ Polly is saying.

‘Well, I’m glad you could both make it for lunch,’ he says, holding the French windows open for us and following us inside. ‘Pol tells me you’ve been seeing quite a bit of each other,’ he adds, stooping for a carrier bag. There’s something less formal in his voice now, as if he’s surprised but pleased, for his daughter’s sake, that the two of us have made a connection.

‘I enjoy her company,’ I say, directly to him. ‘She’s so … young. It’s rather energising. And flattering too, I suppose.’

Polly laughs, as if this is a silly thing to say, and Laurence looks at me then, a thoughtful, assessing glance. Among other things, I know he’s trying to work out how old I am. Thirty? Thirty-five? ‘I hear you gave her some good advice a few months ago when she was going through a rough patch at drama school,’ he says. ‘Talked some sense into her. She certainly wasn’t interested in anything I was saying at that point, so thank God she listened to you.’

‘I wouldn’t say I did anything,’ I say. ‘I just asked a few questions, that was all. She came to the decision by herself. Isn’t that right, Polly?’

‘Mmm,’ says Polly, who has been busy upending little
paper bags. Purple and pale green lettuces, earth still clinging to their frills. A tub of queen olives leaking oil. Bagels spill out over the counter like deck quoits.

While Laurence is tipping the olives into a dish and wiping up the mess, she meets my eye, and I give her a tiny shake of the head:
Not yet
,
not quite yet
,
let’s have a drink first
. ‘Have you got any white, Dad?’ she’s asking, and he’s directing her to a frosted bottle in the fridge. There’s not much else in there, I see. Some Greek yogurt. A carton of semi-skimmed milk. A couple of Pyrex dishes sealed with clingfilm, which I imagine have been left by Mrs King. Lasagne, by the look of it. Some sort of chicken casserole.

I rinse the lettuces and Polly mixes a vinaigrette while Laurence gets glasses and unwraps the cheese. Then we take our plates and go out to the ironwork table. Around us at some remove, discreetly shielded by dense dark hedges waxy with heat, the neighbours are living their comfortable lives: children on trampolines, the hiss of hoses. This time I guess it’s OK to look as if I’m enjoying the wine.

Laurence asks all the questions Polly has failed to, and I answer them, without going into much detail. My modesty is real enough. Used to Polly’s solipsism, I find his polite interest makes me uneasy. I don’t like feeling exposed.

As if he has sensed this, he takes the conversation elsewhere: to Mary Pym, whom he remembers from the Sunderland prize panel; to Frynborough and Biddenbrooke and the seaside at Welbury. He went to Welbury as a child most summers: his parents took rooms in a boarding house there every August. Those childhood memories (swimming off the groynes; the annual crabbing contest) were the reason why he and Alys started looking for a holiday house in the area when they left America. We talk about the pier and the bandstand and the boating lake, the closure of the fishmonger’s and the colonisation of the high street (he and I
agree this is lamentable, Polly is rather pro) by cupcake merchants and boutiques selling patterned wellingtons.

The bottle empties and he goes to get another one. Smoke from a barbecue drifts lazily through the hedge.

A window opens somewhere releasing the Jazz Record Requests signature tune.

‘I was talking to Frances about Sam’s Shakespeare project,’ begins Polly carefully.

He raises an eyebrow and slides deeper into his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him. ‘Ah,’ he says.

‘I was wondering if we couldn’t find a compromise,’ she says.

He sits there, waiting.

‘Sam’s plan – it’s such an amazing opportunity,’ she says, then sees his expression. ‘Well, anyway. I thought that perhaps if we worked on Tony Bamber, he might let me take some time off the course. Special circumstances and all that. Compassionate leave. So I wouldn’t be dropping out, I’d just be taking a break for a while. A term – or maybe a year at the most.’

We watch him as he considers this for a moment, running his thumb absently over the bristle on his jaw.

‘And if I helped you lobby for this, you’d definitely rejoin the course?’ he says.

‘Absolutely,’ she says, her eyes shining with innocence.
Maybe she has got some talent after all
, I think.

He makes a contemplative sort of noise and shifts position, tapping his index fingers together.

‘What do you think about this?’ he asks me, eventually.

‘Well, if Mr Bamber agrees, it appears to solve the problem,’ I say, hesitantly.

‘I take your point,’ he says. He sighs. Then to Polly he says, ‘I think we’d better book in to see your Mr Bamber some time next week.’

Soberly Polly nods, but when he has gone inside to answer the phone, she leans over the table to me, hissing, ‘Yes!’

‘It’s not a done deal yet,’ I caution, my voice low.

‘No. But it will be,’ she whispers back. ‘Wait and see. No one ever refuses Dad anything.’

Laurence comes back, picking his way over the grass. Like so many men, he looks at a disadvantage in bare feet. ‘Teddy’s coming round,’ he calls. ‘And Honor.’

‘Not Honor,’ Polly groans.

I remember the Sargent postcard and suddenly feel an anxiety to be gone by the time they arrive. The afternoon has been a success, I feel, and it’s good to leave on a high. ‘Oh, look at the time,’ I say, rising to my feet. ‘I really must go.’

‘Oh. Must you?’ says Polly, unconcerned. ‘Thanks for last night.’

‘Any time,’ I say, kissing her cheek in a sisterly fashion. ‘Let me know what happens at college. I’ll see myself out.’

But Laurence insists on accompanying me to the front door. There’s a tiny quick confusion at the French windows, as we both feint and hesitate, prepared for the other to go into the house first, and then he lightly touches the small of my back to encourage me to step ahead of him, and I note the gesture, and I save it.

‘You seem to be a good influence,’ he says quietly as we pass through the white kitchen and up the pale stairs, into the hall. ‘I’ve been worried about Polly recently, but she seems to listen to you, and your advice seems to be very … sensible. Of course, I don’t want to be too hard on her. She was very close to her mother. We’re all still coming to terms with what happened. It’s going to take some time.’

I don’t know exactly how to respond to this, so I stand still in the hall, on the Turkish rug, my hand resting on the cool polished table. An insect knocks itself against the fanlight,
trying to get out. In the silence of the empty house, I hear the rustle of the trees in the street.

‘So, really, thank you,’ he says. ‘I’m grateful.’

I say it’s nothing, a pleasure, anything I can do to help, and I smile and look up at him, and as I do so I feel a shock in the air, another tiny moment of possibility like the one I felt months ago, only this time I’m fairly sure he has felt it too. And then it passes, and I’m walking away through the long shadows on the pavement, while behind me the front door closes quietly.

One afternoon I’m waiting by the printer when Tom comes over and says if I’m at a loose end on Saturday night, he and his flatmate are having a party.

I’m half-minded to text him at the last minute saying I’m a bit under the weather, but I find I keep thinking, quite idly, about the way he dislikes Oliver so very much. And also about his eyelashes.

Mid-evening I catch the bus to his part of town and turn down a street with a Paddy Power on the corner, passing – as he instructed – a curry house and a minicab firm. The little front garden is choked with bindweed and shepherd’s purse, and as I press the bell I notice the terracotta pots that no one has bothered with for years. I am buzzed into the shared hall: a bulb on a string, dirty carpet, a bike with a flat tyre, drifts of pizza fliers and brown envelopes addressed to tenants who moved out months ago. Sometimes it seems we all live in the same places.

When I go up to the first floor and into the flat, pushing through the knot of people in the corridor, I find Sol from work in the kitchen, talking to a man in a checked shirt who turns out to be Tom’s flatmate, Hamish. I put the blue plastic carrier bag on the kitchen table and take out the bottle
of red wine, and then – because Hamish’s attention is already elsewhere – I look around and find the corkscrew and a clean plastic cup among the shiny pillows of corn chips on the counter. Underfoot, the lino is already sticky with beer. The music is very loud.

Oh, how I hate parties. I hate standing around on the edge of things, feeling awkward and conspicuous, having to pretend that life doesn’t get sweeter than this: a crowded room full of strangers, a warm drink and a handful of processed snacks.

As I take my wine and move through Tom’s flat, smiling blankly, trying hard to look as if I know where I’m heading, I find myself thinking about my mother, wondering whether this is what life feels like to her: messy, noisy, unsympathetic. A little bit frightening, I suppose.

Just finish your drink
, I tell myself.
You’ve made the effort to come
,
he won’t have expected that
.
Then you can go
. The flat comes into view, behind the people who are leaning towards each other and telling jokes and showing off, and it looks like all the others, like Naomi’s flat and, I suppose, like mine, too. White walls, varnished pine floorboards, a lumpy blue sofa. The individual touches are similarly predictable: a phrenology head on the mantelpiece; bits of taxidermy; a Now Panic and Freak Out poster; Amis, Auster and – I look for him, and of course I find him – a recent Kyte in between the India and Guatemala Lonely Planets on the shelves.

And then Tom comes out of nowhere. ‘Hey, nice one!’ he is saying. ‘You made it, then.’

‘Yes, hello,’ I say, and looking at him now – the T-shirt with the ironic slogan, the Puma trainers with dirty laces – I can’t remember why I came. What was I thinking?

He’s very personable, very attentive. I allow him to refill my glass, and I put it to my lips and drink it down quite quickly while he introduces me to some people, Nick and
Catriona, and I hear myself asking questions and talking, about films and work and where and how I live. I sound quite unlike myself, but of course nobody here knows the difference.

I listen to Catriona making a joke about the host of a reality TV show, the line of her asymmetric bob swinging against her jaw as she turns her head to monitor our responses, and I think,
We’re all pretending
. The room is full of constructs and inventions. People are experimenting, trying out lines, seeing what goes down best and takes them farthest. I watch the ways they betray themselves and their intentions, the way they draw closer to and turn away from each other. I hear the things that they say and the things that they leave unsaid.