Alys, Always (4 page)

Polly looks up, her eyes blurring, and asks in a burst, ‘Can
you tell us what she said? We know what you told the police, but … did she sound like herself?’

Kate Wiggins says, ‘Polly, I’m not sure whether Frances can—’ and then I interrupt her, with a firmness I don’t feel, and I say, ‘We talked. She was quite … together. She wasn’t in distress, or at least if she was, she controlled it. You know I couldn’t see her?’

For some reason, I want them all to be reminded of this. Polly nods, her pale eyes fixed on me.

I glance around the table. Everyone seems to be waiting for something – for me to continue, I realise. I have everyone’s absolute attention. It’s an alarming feeling, but not altogether disagreeable.

‘It was very dark,’ I say, my voice sounding small in that huge white space. ‘And because of that and the position of the car I couldn’t see how injured she was. I didn’t know. She told me she might have hurt her legs, but otherwise she seemed OK. She didn’t seem to be in pain. She said she’d come off the road avoiding a fox. She talked about living near by, she mentioned the car had recently been cleaned.’

At the edge of my vision, I see Laurence suddenly drop his head, staring down at his hands, processing this reminder of a previous life.

‘Yes,’ I say, as if it’s all coming back to me, ‘She cracked a sort of joke about how her husband – you – had just had the car cleaned.’

Polly makes a noise at this point: part laugh, part sob. Charlotte Black pushes the box of tissues across the table, reaches out to catch hold of Polly’s fingers. Her cuff winks in the light.

‘She thanked me for keeping her company. I remember thinking, what a dignified sort of person she seemed.’ As a matter of fact, this thought had crossed my mind only subsequently, reading over my statement with O’Driscoll, but
it’s the sort of thing I imagine they’d like to hear –
need
to hear, really.

Polly’s really crying now, into a handful of Kleenex. Edward is very still. I leave a little pause, just a tiny beat, and then, because it’s irresistible, I say, ‘And of course, when I told her I could see the ambulance coming, she said, “Tell them I love them.” ’

As I speak, I feel Wiggins shifting slightly beside me.
This wasn’t in the statement
.

‘Just that,’ I say. ‘ “Tell them I love them.” It was the last thing she said to me.’

I look up, into Laurence’s face, the eye of the storm, and I see him exhale, and as that breath leaves him, his energy seems to leach away with it. He looks more like an old man now, weak and tired, hollow with exhaustion. When he lifts his glass to his lips, his hand is trembling. Charlotte Black presses knuckles to her eyes. I get the feeling she’s startled and embarrassed by her reaction. Edward is staring at the table. The only sound is Polly, weeping.

‘There’s really nothing else I can tell you,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t seem very much.’

‘Well,’ says Laurence finally. ‘I have no questions. You’ve been very kind, Frances. Very sensitive. Thank you for that, as well as …’ His voice trails off. Then he looks around, remembering himself, consulting his children, clearing his throat. ‘Does anyone else want to ask anything?’

The room stays quiet.

‘I really wish I could have done more,’ I say. Then I have another sip of wine. It’s an intensely dark red which briefly stains the glass when you tilt it. Were I more knowledgeable, perhaps it would taste like the wines I read about in novels and restaurant reviews, which always seem to taste of plums and cherries and cinnamon. I’d quite like to finish it, but this might seem inappropriate, greedy, so I push the glass away
with a tiny sigh. Kate Wiggins gives me a discreet nod and starts to ease her chair back from the table. I am being dismissed.

‘I should be on my way,’ I say. ‘But if you have any more questions, if I can do anything …’

‘Won’t you finish your glass? Stay for some supper?’ says Polly, her fists full of damp tissues – she has managed to collect herself at last – but I can tell the rest of the family is surprised and slightly disconcerted by her offer. I shake my head and stand up. Charlotte Black says she will see me out and, after a pause, Kate Wiggins gives me a smile of thanks, and then I’m saying goodbye to them all, one by one. When I come to Polly I put my hand on her sleeve and apply just a little pressure and I make sure our eyes meet while I say, ‘Take care, won’t you?’ and then I follow Charlotte back up the stairs.

‘What wonderful flowers,’ I say, as we walk down the corridor, back towards the front door.

‘They keep coming – even this long after the funeral,’ Charlotte says. ‘People are so incredibly kind, but it’s almost too much, there are no more vases, we’ve had to put them in ice buckets, and all the sinks are full of them. Alys loved flowers. You know about her garden at Biddenbrooke? Oh, it’s quite famous. You should see it in June. All white flowers, of course.’

She watches me while I put on my jacket and scarf. ‘Wait a minute,’ she says. Then she goes into one of the rooms and when she comes back out, she has a big hand-tied bouquet in her arms: creamy roses and ranunculus trussed up in thick rustling layers of tissue paper, purple and sober dove-grey.

‘They won’t miss them,’ she says. ‘Take them, for heaven’s sake. Alys would have hated those flowers to just sit there in a dark room, not being looked at. Honestly, it’s fine, no one minds. Take them.’

I walk back through the slippery streets holding the flowers, the white petals cool and firm when they brush against my cheek; and although my hands are soon numb with cold from the wet stems, I find myself enjoying the conspicuous beauty of my trophy, the glances it attracts and the alternative life it seems to suggest.

In the flat, I remove the tissue paper and cellophane and discover the little note tucked inside, which I realise is from the controller of Radio 4 and her husband (‘To Laurence, Teddy and Pol. All our sympathy and best love’), and then I trim the stems and put the arrangement in my bedroom, so I can drift in and out of the scent as I sleep.

A week or so later, as the petals begin to tumble off in milky clusters, I find an envelope waiting in my pigeonhole when I get home from work. A stiff white card inside, the scratch of a fountain pen, the pulse of blue-black ink. It’s from Polly, inviting me to the memorial service in a month’s time. ‘We would be so glad to see you if you felt like coming,’ she writes. Beneath her name, three quick automatic kisses: ‘XXX’. I put the note on the mantelpiece and, when I mention it to Hester, I say I haven’t decided whether to go or not. Of course, this isn’t strictly true.

I sit at the back of the church, which is spectacularly full. It’s an expensive crowd: plenty of familiar faces behind the out-size shades. I see Mary Pym several pews in front, leaning over to greet a playwright; one entire row is occupied by senior representatives from McCaskill, Laurence Kyte’s publisher. As well as some distinguished actors and academics and a few cabinet ministers, there’s a healthy showing from his old Soho cohort, the poets and raffish literary hacks he ran with after Oxford (he still plays tennis with Malcolm
Azaria and Nikolai Titov at weekends, according to the cuts I’ve been browsing online).

Kate Wiggins, in a tidy jacket and shiny heels, comes over to say a quiet hello before the service starts. ‘I wondered if you’d be here,’ she says. ‘Polly asked for your details, I hope it was OK to give them to her.’

Of course, I say. She’s on the point of saying something else – possibly a reference to the little extra that I dropped into the discussion in the Kytes’ kitchen? Most likely she’s forgotten all about it – when there’s a general fluttering as people reach in unison for their orders of service. She murmurs, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and returns to her seat.

Yes, Laurence and his children are entering the church, coming down the aisle. Edward – Teddy – is erect and inscrutable, wearing a defensive social polish which allows him to smile at people in the congregation, but Polly, drooping in black, reminds me of a bird in the rain. A fragile-looking elderly lady whom I take to be Alys’s mother walks with them, clasping Laurence’s arm. He has lost some weight, I think.

We stand to sing ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’. Initially this trawlerman’s hymn strikes me as a strange choice but, as we work through the verses, its vision of the tinpot vulnerability of human existence seems increasingly fitting.

All around me, people are fumbling in pockets and bags for tissues.

Teddy, very composed, reads a poem by Christina Rossetti. A middle-aged woman – an old schoolfriend? A neighbour from Biddenbrooke? – rushes through a passage from one of Vita Sackville-West’s gardening columns and then sits down, blowing her nose. A tenor sings a song by Peter Warlock.

Then Malcolm Azaria, bearish and grizzled in a black moleskin suit going grey at the knees, delivers the eulogy.

He speaks with tremendous warmth and affection, but without attempting to disguise Alys’s quirks and flaws. If anything, he draws our attention to them. In doing so he conjures up Alys as a vivid presence where previously I’ve found only an absence.

I listen, holding my breath, as he talks about first hearing about Alys one evening at the French House, shortly after she’d arrived at art school from Salisbury. ‘We were all very down on Alys,’ he says, with a dry little cough of amusement. ‘We thought she must be some ghastly Lorelei, come to steal Laurence away from us. And that belief flourished until we actually met her. And then we all, without exception, fell in love with her.’

As Azaria speaks, she’s coming into view: her enthusiasms, her eccentricities, her weaknesses. Someone with an eye for beauty and for the absurd; a dreamy sort of person, given to absent-mindedness, always generating (‘along with damson jam and those famous mountains of meringues we enjoyed beneath the apple trees at Biddenbrooke’) a certain carnival atmosphere of chaos. There’s an amused, affectionate rumble of recognition as he talks about the lost passports, the missed trains, the Sunday lunches eaten in the very late afternoon.

‘And yet she never forgot the truly important things,’ he says, raising a finger. ‘When you got a terrible review, Alys was always the first person on the phone – the only person you could face speaking to – to suggest a long walk, a bottle of claret, or a light spot of firebombing.’

Briefly, he describes her occasional fits of melancholy: ‘Her extraordinary talent for happiness was not always best served by the world around her.’ He talks at more length about the most reliable sources of that happiness: the pleasure she took in her garden, her children, and her partnership with her husband. ‘Other people’s marriages are invariably a mystery to outsiders,’ he says. ‘But this one, you always felt, was
the best sort of mystery, with secret caves and smugglers and gypsy caravans and a proper high tea at the end of it.’ He stops to let the muted, grateful laughter subside, gestures clumsily towards the front row, and says, ‘Truly, Laurence, Teddy, Polly – our hearts go out to you.’ Then, quickly, he steps down and returns to his seat.

I see Laurence leaning over to thank him, putting a hand out to touch his.

After the service, the crowd ebbs gradually out of church, small groups forming and breaking off during the procession towards the Kytes’ house: middle-aged couples, gangs of tall tearful-looking girls, an elderly lady with a guide dog. It’s a blustery early spring day: the wind whipping through the trees in The Grove, patches of blue coming and going like little shocks in the sky. The tension is easing. People are kissing each other in greeting, and smiling. There’s the relieved sense that everyone has been through an ordeal, and that a stiff drink is not too far off.

I see Azaria and Paul Crewe pausing by the small stone cross to light their cigarettes, deep in discussion with Charlotte Black and a younger woman whose black tangle of hair is streaked with a badger flash of white at the temple. Then a sudden squall of rain hits, and the group moves off in a hurry, pulling jackets and scarves over heads, hastening along in the usual inelegant manner.

I’ve stopped under some trees and am waiting there, warily looking up at the sky, when I hear someone calling my name.

‘Frances,’ says Polly, bringing her umbrella over my head. ‘I hoped I’d see you. You are coming back to the house, aren’t you?’ I get the feeling that she hasn’t any tears left for today and, free of the blotches and the red-rimmed eyes, she is really rather pretty, in a silvery, insubstantial fashion.

We walk on together, in the dark intimacy of the umbrella’s shelter. At first, we keep bumping into each other,
falling out of step, until she nudges my arm with hers and says, ‘Hook in, will you?’ After that, it’s much easier.

I say how good the service was, how affecting I found Malcolm Azaria’s address.

‘Oh yes,’ says Polly. ‘Malcolm always knows what to say. He’s one of Dad’s oldest friends, you know. He and his wife Jo – she’s the one in the turquoise coat – have been very good to us since Mum died. Keeping an eye on Dad, popping round, taking him out to lunch, that sort of thing. Making sure he’s OK.’

‘And … how is he?’

‘Mmm,’ says Polly with a shrug, a little gesture of grief and bafflement. ‘It’s hard to say, really. He gets up, goes for walks, picks up books from the bookshop, goes into his study, comes out for meals. I don’t think he’s writing anything yet, and I think that’s worrying him. Personally, I think it’s far too soon for anything like that. But what do I know.’

‘And what about you?’ I ask, as we turn into the Kytes’ street.

‘Me? Oh, OK. You know.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I say. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

This isn’t true, of course. From my online research (from various profiles of her father, from her slack Facebook privacy settings and her Twitter feed) I know that she’s nineteen and at drama college, not a top-flight one, but a decent one nonetheless. I know that she went to a London girls’ school until sixteen, and then to an arty liberal boarding school where she fell in with people called things like Tabitha and Inigo. I know she spent her year off teaching in South Africa and interning in an administrative capacity at the National Theatre. I know she has just split up with a BBC trainee called Sandeev.