Alys, Always (6 page)

‘How is it?’

‘Not too bad,’ I say, dipping the croissant into my cup. ‘Oh, Alison Freiberg rang. Can you call her back?’

‘Will do.’ Mary is unpacking her bag, locating her turquoise diary. She flicks through it, the gold-edged pages rippling luxuriously, and pauses, a pensive look on her face, tapping her teeth with her Mont Blanc. Then she comes over to my desk and stands at my shoulder. It’s very disconcerting.
Perhaps she’s going to sack me. Perhaps the croissant was a sop to her conscience
. I ignore her and concentrate on the screen, the comfort of the two neat columns of words.

‘So, I saw you at Alys Kyte’s memorial service,’ she says, as if the memory has only just occurred to her. ‘You’re a friend of the family’s, are you?’

‘Well, I guess you could say that,’ I say. I run the cursor over a sentence, highlighting a repetition and then cutting it, so the overmatter shrinks back into the layout. Then I turn my chair around to face her. ‘It’s really so sad,’ I say, picking up my cup, as if we’re going to have a little heart-to-heart. ‘I don’t think Laurence is dealing with it terribly well, do you? Lost lots of weight. I suppose it’s only to be expected. Polly, though … we had a proper chat, I think she’s doing OK, all things considered.’

Mary is looking at me with a strange expression on her face.
My God, you’re avid for it, aren’t you? I think. You were only invited to the memorial service in your professional capacity – and there I was, on the other side of the velvet rope. You’re dying to know why and when and how, aren’t you? All those questions – but you can’t quite bring yourself to ask them. Not yet, at any rate. I’ll give you a few days, a few more posh coffees, and maybe I’ll let some more details slip. But you’ll have to work for them
.

‘Do you know the Kytes well?’ I ask innocently, blowing on my coffee and then taking a sip.

Mary widens her eyes behind her expensive narrow spectacles and steps back. ‘God, no. Hardly at all. No, the invitation came in via Paula at McCaskill, and I thought it was important to represent the paper. Well, of course, I’ve met Laurence on numerous occasions – parties, launches … a few years back we judged the Sunderland prize together – but I never met Alys.’

‘No … she wasn’t keen on parties. She was always better in small groups,’ I say, smiling, as if she has reminded me of some little memory – something almost painfully intimate. ‘She was wonderful with the Azarias and the Titovs, and
she could keep her end up, but she was never particularly at home with all that. She always seemed happiest pottering around the garden at Biddenbrooke.’

Mary listens, head cocked. I can see her hoovering up the insights – details from an old diary item in the
Telegraph
which I’d stumbled on during my internet trawling.
That’s enough
, I think.
Just stop there
. I give Mary a sad little smile, and then I say, ‘Well, thanks for the coffee. I’d better get on,’ and turn back to the screen.

She leaves me alone for the rest of the morning, which is punctuated by the usual landmarks: the arrival of the post, the tea trolley and Oliver, who sidles in just before eleven, unshaven and wearing what I’d lay money on are yesterday’s clothes. Mary pulls her spectacles low on her nose and gives him a cool look, but says nothing. He has been at his desk for only twenty minutes, talking on the phone in a low urgent voice and occasionally sniggering, when Sasha from Fashion comes over and they head off for a smoke. At 12.30 he leaves for a lunch in Covent Garden with some PRs.

I go out to the sandwich bar and buy a roll with some Parma ham, and I’m eating it at my desk, out of a shiny packet of greaseproof paper, flicking through the
Guardian
, when Mary stops by my desk again. She puts down a proof copy. It’s the new Sunil Ranjan. ‘Does this interest you?’ she asks.

I say I’ve read one or two of his other novels.

‘Oh, good, good,’ she says. ‘Six hundred words, a week on Thursday? I was going to get Oliver to do it, but – well, you know.’

I make a discreet, understanding noise, and she pats my shoulder and moves off.

Interesting
, I think, picking up my sandwich again.
Very interesting
.

‘So!’ says my mother brightly. She’s sitting bolt upright on the tightly upholstered button-back chair, holding a teacup and a petticoat tail, doing her best to look entirely at ease. I’ve been in the house for only ten minutes, and we have already exhausted the drive, the dreadful traffic around Ipswich and the weather. ‘How is London? Busy, is it?’

Like so many of my mother’s questions, this one anticipates one particular answer, in which she will take only the most limited interest. Conversation with my mother rarely goes anywhere unexpected. She has a horror of the unexpected and her entire life is structured to keep it at bay.

‘Pretty busy, yes,’ I say, taking a sip of tea. We look together at the shrubs thrashing around beyond the patio doors. My mother considers herself green-fingered, which simply means she subscribes to a lot of gardening magazines and pays a man to mow the lawn in the summer. She calls him ‘the gardener’. My dad does all the legwork – digging in the compost, pruning, planting bulbs – under her instruction.

It’s a very tasteful sort of garden. There’s very little colour or scent in it – my mother thinks most flowers are vulgar, and she has a deep-seated fear of vulgarity, as if it might suddenly overpower her in a dark alley – but plenty of texture and shapes. At this time of year, as the dusk consolidates, it looks drearier than usual.

‘Your father should be back any minute,’ my mother says, taking another tiny bite of biscuit and dusting an invisible shower of crumbs off her skirt. At the far end of the house, the dog barks manically.

‘How is the dog?’ I say. The dog is called Margot, after the ballerina. She’s a Jack Russell, enormously fat and badly behaved. My parents have always had dogs, but by the time
they got Margot they’d run out of energy and never found the time to train her properly, so she has to be shut up in the sunroom, like the first Mrs Rochester, whenever anyone visits.

‘Getting on,’ says my mother, adjusting the knife-pleat in her skirt. ‘Poor old thing.’

‘Maybe I’ll take her for a walk later,’ I suggest, as I always do, for my own amusement. ‘She could do with it, I expect. Take her over the common, down to the reservoir?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ says my mother, as I knew she would, as if I have suggested something terrifically reckless. ‘Poor old Margot, she gets ever so out of breath nowadays.’

I know the reason why Margot never goes for walks, and it isn’t because of her old age, or her inability to behave herself on the lead, or anything like that. My mother has always been most comfortable on her own territory. Nowadays even minor local expeditions (trips to the seafront with Hester’s children, or the Pearsons’ Boxing Day drinks) make her jittery. She’d never admit it, of course. So there’s always a reason why she can’t come or must leave early, and usually it’s something to do with mass catering. ‘I’ve got to put the potatoes in,’ she’ll say with a tiny smile of martyrdom. ‘See you back at the house!’

I finish my tea and as soon as I’ve put the cup back on its saucer my mother has risen from her chair, whipping them (and the plate of biscuits and the little stack of napkins) off the coffee table, and bustling back to the kitchen, where I hear her carefully rinsing and then arranging the china in the dishwasher, in what is always a very particular formation.

‘Why don’t you go and put your things in your room, Frances?’ she calls gaily, over the roar of tap water.

I take my bag and climb the stairs. My parents live on the edge of a pretty village, in a comfortable three-bedder built
in the seventies: white-painted boards and Cambridge brick, pine panelling in the dining room, bubbled glass in the bathroom door. At the front, the view is of the village green, with its bus shelter and pink-washed pub and occasional uninspired games of cricket. At the back, you look out over the garden and fields of rape and cabbages, and the strange dwindling architecture of pylons processing off into the next county. It’s a very flat, uneventful landscape.

My mother has gussied up the room for me, as she always does, as if the gussying up will somehow distract me from the shot springs in the bed, which I’ve had since primary school. It’s like a little stage set, every painstaking detail suggesting gracious living.

The pair of scatter cushions arranged against the pillow. The guest soap, still in its wrapper, laid upon the flannel. Three padded satin coat hangers fanned out on top of the duvet. The stack of
Good Housekeepings
and
House & Gardens
on the bedside table, next to the tray of tea things – mini-kettle, sugar sachets, UHT thimbles – as if I’m being accommodated in the East Wing, as if the kitchen is half a mile away.

I drop my bag and sit down on the bed, and then I reach over and pick up a magazine and flick through it. It’s full of candle-making, beetroot recipes, charmingly mismatched blue-and-white crockery. There’s a special offer on glass cloches and brooms made in Sweden by the partially sighted. I don’t believe any of it. I put the magazine back with the others, taking care to line up the spines. I don’t want my mother to think I actually looked at them.

All my personality has long since gone from this room. The rosettes and posters and framed class photographs, the joke books and sets of C. S. Lewis and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the cushion cover I cross-stitched when I was nine: so many dust traps, all got rid of. The bottom drawer in the little chest
contains my A-level and degree certificates, my stamp collection and a shoebox of old snapshots, and that’s really all that is left of me in the house.

Here in my bedroom, the curtains in the little dormer windows were once yellow with a scarlet and orange rick-rack trim; now they’re toile de Jouy shepherds and ladies on swings, toes pointed and hat ribbons flying. When did one replace the other? I can’t remember. Was my permission, or even my inclination, sought? I am sure it was not.

There is a rattle from downstairs as my father opens the glazed front door and closes it behind him.

I spread my hands on the duvet cover, feeling the heat trapped in my palms by the polycotton, the light, uneven give of the springs. Then I stand up and unzip my bag and take out my toothpaste and toothbrush, my hairbrush and the Sunil Ranjan proof copy. Seeing it lying there on the bedside table makes me feel like a slightly different person; someone, possibly, whose opinions might just matter a little.

When I go downstairs, my mother is busy in the kitchen, and my father is circulating with a jug of water, charging the tumblers set out on the dining table. He puts down the jug to greet me and we kiss hello. I am filling him in on the highs and lows of my journey (‘Did you see the new B&Q they’ve built outside Tewford?’) when my mother – mouthing a tiny O of anxiety as she bears a Pyrex dish of mince and potatoes before her – enters, obliging us to separate. We both step back to the edges of the room so she can get to the table.

‘I hope you’ve worked up an appetite!’ she says, settling the dish on the trivet, which is laid upon a cork mat, which is laid on top of a tablecloth, which is laid on top of an oilcloth, as if the table itself, somewhere deep beneath these protective strata, happened to be Georgian mahogany rather than an ugly Formica.

The meals at my parents’ house always come thick and fast,
and in between there’s a constant opportunity to supplement. The food rolls out in marshalled surges, like Bomber Command. There is no let-up. Someone is forever passing around foil-wrapped chocolates, cheese straws, yellow slices of Madeira, salted luxury nuts, little fruited scones anointed with scarlet jam, cubes of mild Cheddar speared with cocktail sticks, decorative tins containing layers of scalloped Viennese biscuits. It’s a relentless battery of snacks. The food and the constant preparation and clearing away of it quite often get in the way of other things we might profitably be doing, things normal families seem to do when they convene: going for walks, playing Scrabble, talking about subjects other than roadworks or the weather we’ve been having lately.

From time to time, the real world makes itself known to my mother: strikes, petrol shortages, heavy snow, a rise in the price of wheat. Such events prompt panicked phone calls, sometimes two a day, suggesting I stock up on basic provisions as the local supermarkets have had a run on bread and milk. The chest freezer out in the garage accommodates several weeks’ worth of apocalyptic menus – chicken à la king, beef olives, Gypsy tart – stashed in neatly labelled containers that once held soft-scoop ice cream.

Occasionally, when it’s entirely unavoidable, my parents come to London, and though they usually stay with Hester (who has a proper spare room in the house in Maida Vale), once in a blue moon they have to stay on my sofa bed. Of course, these visits are always an ordeal for my mother, who applies herself strenuously to the task of appearing easy and relaxed in what is essentially enemy territory. ‘This looks smart,’ she’ll murmur faintly, as I put a risotto on the table or scoop some avocado into a salad. ‘Just half for me.’ After one such meal, when I came unexpectedly into the room, she turned her back on me, unable to speak, her mouth full of biscuit.

The chocolate wrappers and apple cores I find in the bin when they’ve left are always exquisite little reproofs.

We sit and eat. It’s constantly disconcerting, my mother’s cooking. She models herself on the ideal hostess, but she cooks like a prison caterer, as if the activity is a punishment which she is obliged to pass on to others. This cottage pie is no exception.

‘Frances was saying London is very busy,’ my mother informs my father.

My father picks up his fork and says Stewart Pearson was down in London last week, visiting Clare and the grandchildren.

‘Clare lives not far from you, doesn’t she?’ says my mother. ‘Do you ever see her?’

Clare lives, I believe, in Acton. I barely even know where Acton is. I had nothing in common with Clare when we were at primary school together, and now she’s a marketing manager at Unilever with a husband and two children we have even less to talk about when our paths cross at the Pearsons’ Boxing Day drinks. ‘I thought I saw her going into Selfridges last week,’ I invent. ‘But she was quite far away, I couldn’t be sure.’ I rake my fork through the pale uncrisped mash so the gravy seeps down the channels, just as I used to as a child, before I knew that not all food tasted like this.