Alys, Always (21 page)

He’s shaping the narrative, making it twist and fragment and re-form. He’s working his way towards a resolution.

It’s a pleasing thought. Poignant, too. Here in his study I confront his own sense of himself, and it makes the same impression that I get when I see him with Charlotte or the
Titovs or in a public place. Here, as in the wider world, he’s in charge, at the helm, the shaper of destinies.

I leave the room, closing the door softly behind me, and go on downstairs to make some tea. Mrs Polter from the volunteer reading scheme has left a voicemail on my mobile but I delete it without listening to the rest of the message.

For all my planning, I never thought beyond this point. Some instinct – could it be superstition? A disinclination to tempt fate? – had always prevented me from imagining anything after the actual moment of achievement. This makes the things that happen now all the more exciting, of course – all the more strange and vivid and new – but the sense of danger is also very strong. I’m used to being a few paces ahead but suddenly Laurence and I are walking in step, neither of us knowing what is coming next.

This is the critical moment, I tell myself, trying to regain control. This is where it could all go wrong.

But it’s difficult to remain level-headed. Laurence has knocked me off balance. Somehow, I hadn’t fully anticipated this. Over the preceding months, he’d come to represent so many things and as a consequence the man himself had somehow lost definition, become easy to overlook.

He may be old, he may be given to pomposity and self-regard; but all the same, I can’t help it: I love the way he makes me feel. I love it when he says, ‘What have I done, to deserve someone so
good
?’ And I love the way he starts to need me.

Quite gradually, I find myself falling for him. It feels like falling too: as if I’ve lost my footing, with all the potential for indignity that implies. As if there’s a chance of being hurt at some point in the future.

But for now I’m simply suspended between states. Am I falling, or flying? I can’t be sure.

I find my thoughts colonised by him, the things he tells me, the way he holds me.

Of course, I worry that this will work against me. I worry that I will lose my advantage, the clarity of my perspective. But at the same time, I find I can’t do much about it. I have to trust him. After a while, I stop worrying.

We don’t talk about the future. Not yet. And we meet only in secret: at his house, or my flat. The day before he comes to my flat for the first time, I remember to inspect it with critical eyes, searching out the things he mustn’t see here. Alys’s cashmere shawl. The old silver thimble I took from the inlaid box in his bedroom at Nevers. An alabaster egg.

Polly’s umbrella I decide can stay: it’s anonymous enough, he won’t notice that. But I fold the egg into the shawl and put the thimble in an envelope, and then I drop them off at a charity shop that I pass on the way to the office. I no longer need these talismans. Perhaps they’ll bring luck to someone else.

When he rings the bell that evening I let him in and he comes up the stairs and I’m waiting for him, feeling a little shy and nervous, as I usually do at the moment of meeting, and he holds out his arms and the anxieties melt away.

After a while he lets me go and moves around, examining things, much as Polly had done that evening in the spring, although the sitting room looks different now. The bookshelves are an even white, the cushions on the new wheat-coloured sofa are luxuriously plump and firm. I’ve thrown out the clip-frame art. The flat smells of ironed bedlinen and furniture polish and the expensive tuberose-scented candle which is burning on the side table.

He glances through my books, and I see his attention going to the line of Laurence Kytes, my project for the year.

‘You see, I’m your greatest fan,’ I say, lightly.

He pulls out the hardback of
Affliction
, and flicks through
it, pausing for a moment on the dedication page.
For Alys
.
Always
. Then he shuts it and slides it back in between the others and his eyes move on to the mantelpiece, over the stack of invitations, the fossil from Golden Cap. Then he comes over to me. ‘Oh, that’s just as well,’ he says, and he sounds almost serious, more serious than I could have hoped.

We do not talk about Alys yet, though I imagine we may some time soon.

One Saturday morning I tell him about running into Honor, and the claim she made, and how easily I discounted it. I don’t tell him that I know he’s innocent because I was watching the scene from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. I let him believe I simply believe in him.

But he’s too exasperated to notice my trust, my faith. Perhaps he will remember it at a later point.

He pulls himself up against the pillows and tugs his hands through his hair, reminded of something tiresome from very long ago. ‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘How ridiculous. What if she tells the children? What if they fall for her story?’

‘They won’t,’ I say. ‘If I know she’s lying, they will too. Anyway, she says she doesn’t want to hurt them.’ But of course I have my doubts.

I’ve lost touch with Polly since the summer. She doesn’t need me now; my occasional texts mostly go unanswered. It certainly makes my life a lot easier but part of me misses her and the drama that trails around after her like scent or cigarette smoke.

Laurence sees her from time to time, and tells me the latest: he’s met the new boyfriend, a fellow student, a bright boy from Stoke-on-Trent. She looks well, very happy. She’s sticking at the course. Bamber’s pleased with her.

Teddy I know less about. He works hard and meets his
father for dinner in town. Laurence suspects he’s still moping after Honor.

Our affair – carefully protected from both the past and the future as well as from the other people in our lives – settles into a sort of pattern. Naturally it’s not like real life; and though in some ways it’s better than that I’m aware, as the weeks pass, of a gradual restlessness, a sort of vague dissatisfaction creeping up on me. Little things begin to annoy me: if he’s listening to music or the radio, the volume is usually turned too high; and sometimes, talking to him on the phone, I have to repeat myself.

When I wake before him I find myself inspecting him quite dispassionately in the half-light: the thinning faded hair falling away from his temples, the creases around his mouth and eyes, the liver spots on his hands. The murky stains of age.

His skin, I think sometimes, is too soft.

But these are just little details, and I try not to dwell on them.

One evening we are sitting over supper in the white kitchen in Highgate when Laurence happens to mention Christmas. He’s planning to go to Biddenbrooke with the children, he says, quite casually. Then he sees the expression on my face and puts down his fork.

‘Why, Frances – surely you didn’t think we were going to spend it together?’ he says, with a little steely edge of reprimand. ‘It’s our first Christmas without Alys. Their first Christmas without their mother.’

Of course, I say, I don’t know what I imagined.

He sees the hurt on my face and reaches across the table. ‘Don’t be a goose,’ he says, more gently. ‘No need to rush. We’ve got lots of time.’

This comment gives me hope, but otherwise I have to take a lot on trust. I’m careful not to put any pressure on him. I hold back, even as I want to push forward.

Gradually he lets down his guard, just a little every so often. The Laurence I begin to glimpse in these moments has little in common with the public figure, assured and self-contained and maybe faintly stuffy; he’s someone else, someone less certain, still confused by grief but starting to see beyond it, beginning to have a sense of new possibilities.

From time to time I see myself through his eyes, and I appear to have plenty to offer: youth, independence, freedom. I understand people, their ambitions and desires, their fears and weaknesses. It’s a talent that he finds both amusing and useful. And I’m new, too, free from associations with his old compromised life, the life he shared out meanly between Alys and those discreet obliging girls. Perhaps it’s not so strange, after all, that we’re together. I try not to think about his affairs; and he certainly does not mention them to me, though I have hope that one day he will make a confession of sorts involving Julia Price, at least.

This time it’s different, I tell myself. Soon, circumstances will force his hand; soon we will go public. It won’t be an affair at that point, it’ll be a relationship. The girls without names never got that far. Neither did Julia Price.

But for now, we lie low.

There are a few scares. We are talking in his kitchen late one evening when his mobile rings, upstairs on the hall table. He leaves it. Not long after we are on our way to bed when we hear the doorbell.

He is not expecting anyone.

We stand motionless in the hall, staring at each other like characters in a farce, and then there’s the sound of a key going into the lock. Without thinking I grab my coat and bag off the peg and back swiftly into the sage-green drawing room, a room which is rarely used, pulling the door to after me, while he goes forward to greet Polly.

I stand in the darkness, my heart hammering, listening to
their conversation. She rang earlier; why didn’t he pick up? She’s had another row with Serena.

Their voices fade into murmurs as they go along the corridor, as he leads her down into the kitchen, switching on lights, the kettle.

Silently, furtively, I creep out of the drawing room, holding my bag against my stomach so nothing rattles, placing my feet carefully on the red rug to muffle my steps. As I let myself out into the cold night, I remember – with a faint guilty qualm of regret – that there’s no evidence of me left for her to notice: the dishwasher set off, with its pairs of plates and forks and wineglasses; the toothbrush at the back of the cabinet.

Mary Pym is the only person who senses something has happened. One morning in late November I catch her watching me over her spectacles. I raise my eyebrows in interrogation, and she says, ‘You look different.’

‘Do I?’

‘Oh yes. You’re up to something, aren’t you?’ She sounds almost affectionate, pleased for me.

I laugh, trying to sound offhand, and say I don’t know what she means.

I hear from Polly in early December when she sends a text asking me whether I’m able to come to the end-of-term performance of
Footsteps on the Ceiling
. I ring Laurence and we agree I should go. Teddy isn’t free that night, which is a relief, but Charlotte Black has also been invited, and I am both daunted and excited about subjecting myself – us – to her scrutiny. I can’t believe we’ll get away with it.

The auditorium is overheated and as I find my seat I’m
already feeling flushed, ill at ease. All around me, groups of parents and friends are bent over programmes, pointing out names.

Charlotte Black and Laurence arrive together, deep in conversation: my mouth is dry with anxiety as they spot me and make their way sideways along the row towards the seats I’ve saved for them, coats over their arms. I kiss Charlotte and then I kiss Laurence, and suddenly our joint deceit seems awfully conspicuous and foolish. Laurence sits in the middle, and the three of us make small talk for a short while, and then the lights go down.

Polly has a sizeable part and she’s not bad: she looks lovely and she gets a few big laughs.

During the curtain call, she shields her eyes from the lights, squinting out into the audience, and when she finds us she waves and blows us kisses.

‘You must come and eat with us after this,’ says Laurence in my ear. ‘It’ll be fine, really it will.’

‘I can’t,’ I say, not looking at him. ‘Not like this. Don’t make me.’

In the foyer, I wait with him and Charlotte, surrounded by happy, excited groups of people, and eventually Polly comes out and joins us. There’s someone with her, a tall boy with dark red hair.

‘Oh, Frances,’ she says, hugging me. ‘I’m so glad you could come.’

‘You were really good,’ I say, meaning it. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Martin,’ she says, tugging on his hand, dragging him out of the conversation he is having with her father, ‘Martin, come and meet Frances.’

Martin shakes my hand and says he’s pleased to meet me. He’s very striking, with his hazel eyes and pale skin. ‘How do you know each other?’ he asks.

There’s a tiny weighted pause while Polly and I are reminded of things we’d rather not think about.

‘Through my mother,’ Polly says. ‘I’ll tell you the story another time.’

Christmas comes, and we convene at my parents’ house. ‘’Tis the season to be jolly!’ sings Toby as my mother circulates yet again with a long-suffering expression and a rubbish sack. The house is full of tiny wastepaper baskets and she empties them constantly, as if having a middling-sized bin with anything in it is a sign of extreme slovenliness.

The suspicion is always that without the wastepaper baskets my mother would have very little purpose in life.

When I am sent out to the garage to get more green beans from the chest freezer, I see she has taped a piece of A4 to the lid, an index of all contents, with lines neatly scored through ‘cauliflower cheese’ and ‘puff pastry’. Later additions are in green biro: ‘Half sliced granary loaf, Mrs Craven’s apple pie (WI), back bacon (3 rashers)’.

Hester and Charlie are in the room which used to be hers; the boys are sharing my old one; and I’m on a put-me-up in the study. When it all gets too much, there’s nowhere to escape to. I spend quite a bit of time walking around the village with my hands deep in my pockets, thinking about Laurence not so very far away, wondering whether he will call me (he doesn’t, though he leaves me a message on Christmas Eve to say he hopes I’m ‘having fun’); but I am careful not to advertise these excursions for fear of having the boys foisted on me, which would defeat the object.

Hester, as usual, vacillates between ostentatious maternal self-satisfaction (‘Lovely sharing, Toby!’) and a desire to spend as much time as possible away from her sons. ‘Probably it’s the overexcitement,’ she confides tipsily on the sofa one
afternoon – following a few parched Christmases, Charlie now travels with his own booze – when the boys have been removed to the playground at the end of the village. ‘But they’ve been pushing all my buttons.’ She has just read a book which has made her see that ‘I’ve got into this habit of intervening in every squabble. Boys fight, there’s not much I can do about that, and they need to learn to sort things out without my involvement. So we’ve decided we have to step back, to empower them to find a solution by themselves.’