Alys, Always (24 page)

‘Just visiting some friends,’ I say, returning her gaze. ‘No one you know.’

We finish the pages in good time and at 6.15 I tidy my desk and leave the office to catch the tube north, pulling my red and purple scarf around my neck because the day has been quite cool. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to Laurence’s house, initially along steep avenues lined with cherry trees and blameless red-brick villas, and then down some quiet streets where the houses require more space, more greenery, more privacy; the short drives, behind their high electronic gates, clogged by day with gardeners’ vans and by night with Priuses and Range Rovers.

The houses are lighting up. There are glimpses of shiny kitchens, brightness lying in glossy bars across slabs of white marble, and living rooms arranged with modular sofas and sticks in tall vases. A dog rushes barking at the railings, his paws scattering the gravel.

I walk up Laurence’s street, listening to the sudden drone of a jet circling round to Heathrow.

As the light dwindles, the air sharpens. I fold my scarf inside my collar, tucking it down.

The bag handle rubs a little on my fingers. I adjust my grip and think about the weekend ahead: three days alone with Laurence, at Biddenbrooke. It seems significant that he wants to take me there. It’s another step in the right direction.

Left foot, right foot.

I’m nearly there, I think. Just a few more moves, and it’s finished, complete, secured. But this stage is the stage I have least control over. Because of that, I’m eager to get it started. I want to see how it plays.

I remember Laurence as I once glimpsed him long ago, when Polly took me round to Highgate for lunch. I remember looking down the garden from the French windows and seeing him alone on a bench, nursing his grief, picked out by its dark isolating lustre. He’s happier now, I tell myself. He wouldn’t risk going back to that.

I’ve distracted him from that vast and absorbing despair, but he knows it’s still out there, unpredictable, fatal, a thin layer of ice in a dip in the road. He will do anything to avoid it again. Once you’ve experienced it, you know how dogged it is, how compelling. In his heart of hearts he believes I’ve seen it off, like a talisman, a lucky charm.

No, I think. He won’t risk it. Of course it would be preferable if Teddy and Polly could come to accept the situation; but if they don’t, he will still cleave to me. I’m his happiness now. He will not let me go. Will he?

When I reach the house, the front door is half open, light from the hall spilling down the steps. Hesitantly, I wait on the gravel drive, listening, trying to work out whether he is alone. I hear nothing, and then the sound of feet on floorboards. I shrink back away from the steps, easing into the shadow at the edge of the house. The door opens wide.
Laurence comes out, carrying something, his teeth set with the effort. I move forward.

‘Oh, good, there you are,’ he says, coming down the steps towards me. He’s carrying a case of wine. He glances towards the street and, balancing the box on the balustrade, risks a quick kiss. ‘All set? Can you get the boot for me?’

I open it and put my bag in, next to a carrier of groceries and his small holdall, and he lowers in the wine. ‘Shall we go? I’m quite keen to make a quick getaway.’

‘I thought the roads should be pretty clear on a Thursday,’ I say.

‘Oh, the roads should be fine,’ he agrees, placing his hands on the boot and closing it. ‘Well. Thing is, Polly rang earlier, she’s planning to stay here tonight with Martin. They’re going to a party somewhere near by. They may drop in beforehand, I suppose, to leave their things.’

I stare at him. I can’t quite see the expression on his face. A broken yellow pattern moves over the drive: the light from the street lamps filtering through the trees.

‘I take it you didn’t …’ I say.

‘Long story,’ he says briskly. ‘The timing wasn’t right.’

He looks away, adjusting the wing mirror. ‘Right,’ he says again, popping the driver’s door. ‘Shall we …?’

‘I’m thirsty,’ I say. ‘I’ll just run in for a drink of water. I won’t be a minute.’

‘Oh, of course,’ he says, nice and expansive now he’s over the hump of the bad news. ‘Just pull the front door shut behind you when you’re finished.’

I go up the steps and into the house. The tawny floorboards with their ancient whorled knots, the scarlet rug, the wall of coats, the pot of umbrellas, the hall table shining clear of post. I walk down the corridor and put my hand out for the switch and there’s a faint charged hum as the lights over the stairs illuminate, flooding the oatmeal carpet, showing up
the tiny loops in the pile. I follow the spiral of the stair down into the kitchen, turning on the lights as I go. It’s tidy, the table free of crumbs, nothing out on the counters: a Mrs King day.

While I let the cold tap run to get rid of the residual heat from the Aga, I reach up over the sink to get a glass from the cupboard. The stream of water is a crystal rope, fraying as it hits the white ceramic. I fill the glass, turn off the tap and lift the brim to my lips. As I drink, I look around the room: so plain, so complete, so utterly impervious.

I take the water away from my lips and pour the rest of it into the sink and pull open the door of the dishwasher and insert the glass. Then I walk to the foot of the stairs and click off the overhead kitchen lights.

In the dimness of the room, I take a few steps back into it. I walk around the refectory table with its neat self-satisfied arrangement of chairs and I pull off my red and purple scarf, feeling the rasp, the burn of it against my throat, and I let it fall on the flagstones, halfway between the sink and the stairs. It lies there, a vivid shot of colour even in the half-light.

I go back through the silent, expectant house, touching switches as I pass, leaving first the stairs and then the hallway in darkness. When I come out on to the front steps, Laurence is in the car, waiting for me. I pull the door shut, hearing the heavy reassuring click of the lock, and then I run down the steps and get into the passenger seat, and we pull off into the evening, the two of us.

During the long flat drive towards the coast, he tells me about his week, the lunch with a screenwriter friend, an overture from a BBC documentary producer, progress on the book. The children came over on Wednesday, he explains, but Teddy seemed downcast: he’d seen Honor the
night before, and for whatever reason it hadn’t been an easy encounter. ‘There’ll be a better moment to tell them,’ he assures me, beating his fingers on the steering wheel: a tic of anxiety. ‘We just have to wait.’

‘No rush,’ I say, calmly, but that’s not how I feel.
I’ve been patient
, I think,
I’ve been patient for months and months
,
and now my patience is running out
. I visualise it: sand sliding through a hourglass, the inexorable trickle. Only a few grains left.

I think of the red and purple scarf, lying on the kitchen floor, and the thought calms me a little.

It’s nearly ten by the time we reach Nevers. The looming hedgerows, the phonebox with its melancholy illumination, the pebbly track, the meadow full of silver in the moonlight. All the time we are carrying our bags in from the car and turning on lights, I’m thinking of the scarf, wondering whether Polly will even see it tonight. Tomorrow, I think, tomorrow, maybe then she’ll notice it, when she goes down to make some tea in the morning. She’ll pick it up and look at it and hang it over the back of a chair, or the banister; maybe she’ll recognise it. And maybe she won’t.

Laurence is in the kitchen. Mrs Talbot has left him a pork pie and salad and some cheese, and he’s looking for a jar of Alys’s gooseberry chutney, banging cupboard doors and moving things around in the larder, clattering cutlery on the marble-topped table. I stand by my bag in the hall, smelling woodsmoke from the fire Mrs Talbot lit for him in the sitting room hours earlier, which has died down to a dim red rubble.

The house smells quite different now. The last time, in high summer, the doors and windows were always open and the rooms seemed full of air, air and sun-baked upholstery, the tang of chlorine and the suggestion that somewhere not far off Polly was having yet another cigarette. Now, there’s a sense of the house being locked up with itself. There’s a
staleness hanging in the huge space of the hall, despite Mrs Talbot’s best efforts with polish and detergent.

Laurence’s things lie in a tangle on the hall table. His coat has been slung over his bag, and his coat pocket yawns open a little, revealing his mobile. The face is illuminated and I can see that he hasn’t locked the keypad. There are some figures – 331* – on the screen. He must have knocked the phone as he came in and put everything down.

Without stopping to think I pick up the phone and scroll quickly through the address book. It’s not very full: I’m in it, surname and initial, and there’s someone called Price J, and then there are the names I recognise from work: the shorthand of the cultural elite, the direct lines and private numbers to which few ordinary people have access. I find the entry I need, and press the button with the little green telephone on it, and then I slip the phone back into the coat and go through into the kitchen, leaving the door wide open.

Laurence is there, standing by the sink, a bottle of red and two glasses on the table in front of him.

‘Mrs Talbot’s left plenty of food,’ he’s saying, ‘But I can’t get the bloody lid off this pickle.’

I go over to him and take the jar away from him and put it aside, and then I turn my face up to him while I slide my hands under his shirt, and I say, ‘Do you know what, sweetheart, I would suggest going to bed, but I’m not sure I can manage the stairs.’ And he bends his head to kiss me and in between kisses he gives a shout of laughter and says, ‘Well, how about we see how far we get …?’ and it’s not very far, as it happens, but it’s close enough for the phone to be able to pick up pretty much everything. And partly because of that, I suppose, it’s especially good. Particularly enjoyable.

Waking up in that room feels like the long-awaited answer to a question. I rest there, feeling the rightness of it at last, as tangible as the smooth satin edge of the blanket under my fingers. The spring morning dances on the curtains: a thin wash of light stippled with the movement of leaves.

It’s all here: the little reading lamps, bent towards us like snowdrops. The dresser, with its scattering of silver and wooden boxes. The window seat with its ticking cushion. The grate full of pine cones. The snaps stuck around the looking glass. I remember the scent bottle and the body cream: these, I see, have been removed.

The wedding photo is at the more tactful angle I found for it when Laurence was brushing his teeth, after we’d finally made it upstairs.

Laurence is still asleep, turned away from me, his breath low and even. Curiously, carefully, I lean over and pull open the drawer in my bedside table to see what evidence remains. A pair of nail scissors. A cherry-flavoured lip balm. An old slim Penguin,
The Pumpkin Eater
, with a strip of newspaper marking page 58. I look at the paper, wondering whether it’ll be significant, but it’s nothing: a few lines from the sports pages with an advert for Greek villa rentals on the other side.

I put it back and shut the drawer and lie where she lay, between the ironed Egyptian cotton sheets she picked out, my head upon her feather pillows, with her husband next to me, and I feel very close to her – perhaps as close as I’ve ever been, apart from that moment in the woods, when I briefly heard her voice and knew it, knew almost everything about her that mattered. The ease and comfort and significance of her life.

Somehow, I have a stronger sense of her here, in
Biddenbrooke, than at the house in London. I expect she was happier here.

Where are they? Will Polly come alone, or will she have Teddy in tow? Martin? The excitement surges up in me: a sense that only this one hurdle remains.

Later, I hum while I cook us both a brunch of bacon and eggs. Laurence looks up over the newspaper he collected from the village shop. ‘You’re very cheerful this morning,’ he says.

‘Oh, I love being here,’ I say, cutting bread and buttering it. ‘I love being back. This is my kind of bolthole.’

‘Mm,’ he says, inspecting the paper, turning over pages, drifting away from me, into its world.

It strikes me that I am almost entirely happy. Out of the kitchen window, time moves slowly on the sundial. All along the terrace, in terracotta pots and stone urns, green shoots – daffodils, grape hyacinths – are pushing their way into the light. Birdsong. The tick of the kitchen clock. The gradual panicky scream of the kettle.

I remove it from the hotplate and fill the teapot, and then I listen. I listen. Soon, I know, I’ll hear something. There’s no hurry now.

They arrive mid-afternoon. We have been for a long circular walk through the woods, a route Laurence suggested. I’m sure he picked it because he knew we would be unlikely to meet anyone going that way. A small rain shower blew over us while we were crossing the stream at the bottom of the meadow, and so we’re in the hall taking off our wet coats and talking about lighting another fire when we hear the sound of wheels, the hiss of gravel.

Laurence hangs his coat hurriedly on the hook. ‘I’ll get rid of them. Whoever it is,’ he says. ‘Just stay here.’ Out of sight,
he means he wants me to stay out of sight, but he doesn’t have to say it; it’s understood.

So I shrink back into the shadows of the hall while he goes to the front door, the door which was always kept locked and bolted in the summer. I hear him saying their names, loud enough to send me an urgent message. I hear the scrunch of gravel underfoot and car doors being slammed, and over these I hear Polly’s voice, high, excited and dramatic, full of vocabulary she must have picked up from the texts she studies at college: words such as betrayal and sly and deceit and humiliation. I do not hear Teddy speak at all.

I listen to the scene, standing there holding a wet coat which is dripping on to the parquet, and I say goodbye to the old life without any regret. Like my patience, that life has run out, ended. Everything will be different from this moment. My relationship with Laurence, Laurence’s relationship with his children. And – I imagine the consequences radiating outward like ripples – Laurence’s relationship with the people around him, the people who knew him and Alys.