Looking for Alex (27 page)

I lifted them out, placed them on top of the drawers, examined them closely. There was Kirsty on a beach with her boys, all grinning at the camera. On her own in another, in an evening gown. Then one with Fitz, leaning into him, her arm around his waist, looking confident and assured. She looked younger than us — us? — by several years, with the sort of beauty that came from knowing who you were and where you belonged. Dark, slender, although a little severe. Her eyes stared straight into mine, challenging. They seemed to see the emptiness I was only just holding back. These photos, all the photos, made me feel like the outsider I was, viewing Fitz through the lens of spent decades, a whole swathe of life that was lost to me.

My phone rang, startling me, its shrill tone piercing the silence. I scrabbled around, finally locating my bag under my jacket, my heart jumping crazily when I saw it was Fitz.

‘Hi. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, fine,’ I said breezily, a little too breezily; I didn’t want him to think I could cheat on Phil with such impunity. ‘Well, you know.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Still at yours. I’m just about to leave.’

‘Did you find everything?’ My head swam for a moment, eyeing the photos I’d discovered. ‘You’ve had some breakfast?’

‘Yes.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘A little. I’m not hungry.’

‘If you want any paracetamol they’re in the drawer of my bedside table.’ I laughed, and said how had he guessed and that I might take some. ‘You were sleeping like a baby,’ he went on. ‘I thought you must need it. I hope you don’t mind I didn’t wake you?’

I found I had to think about this.

‘Beth?’

‘Yes?’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘No. It’s okay.’ I would have liked to see him, though, to know that he could still look me in the eye. ‘I’m going back to my hotel now,’ I said. ‘Then I have a quick meeting at work this afternoon.’

I waited for him to say, ‘Shall we meet, later?’

‘I’m going to Cornwall this evening,’ he said. He sounded matter-of-fact and I thought he must have decided that that was the best way to manage the situation, to deal in facts. ‘Catching the train straight after work. We’re going to a wedding tomorrow,’ he added, as if he needed to explain.

‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’ Stupid woman, I chided myself, why would you?

‘I didn’t say anything last night, it wasn’t…’

‘A good time?’ I suggested, and he rushed to say that he knew what it must look like but he hadn’t planned last night to happen, that the bad timing was just that. ‘Look, it’s okay, Fitz,’ I said. ‘We’re both grown-ups and we know what the score is. And anyway, if you weren’t going away we’d be tempted to repeat it and then we’d be in a proper mess, wouldn’t we?’

‘Beth…’ I waited resignedly for this conversation to be over, so that I could begin to work out how bad I was going to feel. ‘Last night was, you know, it was just great. I…it’s so complicated. I mean—’

‘Fitz, I know. Neither of us is free.’ I heard him sigh heavily. ‘I’m fine, honestly. Have a good weekend. Bye.’

I rang off, before he had time to say more, to spell things out, then stared blankly at the text that immediately followed.

Will ring Mon

Feeling slightly sick and with a headache now digging itself in I opened the bedside drawer. A pack of codeine nestled near the front. Heavy-duty. Just what I needed. I took two with the water that Fitz had brought me some time in the early hours, then picked up my bag and jacket. I was at the door, about to leave, when I thought:
something in that drawer spoke to me
. I didn’t know what it was but I knew I had to go back and look. I opened the drawer again and searched the contents with my eyes, just my eyes, not wanting to disturb anything. There it was, nestling at the back. A smooth grey pebble, marbled with white in the shape of a B.

I picked up my phone, called Fitz back.

‘Beth? I’m on my way to a class. I can’t talk now. I’ll ring you. Monday, I promise.’

‘No. Wait, just listen. Last night you said something about risk. You said the risk would be yours as much as mine. What did you mean? I want to know.’

There was silence at the other end. I heard a door open and close.

‘Okay.’ He began to speak quickly, urgently. I imagined him having stepped into an empty classroom. ‘I suppose when I said it I didn’t know what I meant, but look at us. We’ve both fucked up — we both have failed marriages behind us. Now we both have someone good in our lives. That’s what we’d be risking if we threw it all up in the air. For something from the past that might not work.’

‘But tell me, before you go—’

‘Beth, I’m supposed to be—’

‘I know. But tell me this. Have you already decided? That it wouldn’t work?’

There was a long pause. I heard children’s voices, faint, giggling.

‘I’ll ring you Monday, Beth. We’ll talk then.’

He rang off. I shut the drawer, gathered up my jacket and bag, and left. Once outside my legs felt leaden, as though they didn’t want to take me anywhere, as though they might just give up, too heavy to lift. And it was only when I was halfway to the tube station, Fitz’s door locked firmly behind me, that I remembered I never put those photos of Kirsty back where I’d found them.

*

Alex was sitting in the window of the café, reading a newspaper. She looked up as I passed, outside, and lifted one hand in greeting. The café was busy with Saturday shoppers and tourists, loud with the chink of cups and plates, the scraping of chair legs, and chattering voices. Alex took her time folding the paper and putting it back in the rack; by the time she’d done this the moment that we might have hugged had gone. She said she didn’t have too long, that she had to meet Adrian later.

‘Sorry, but it’s the only time we have this weekend to do a few things.’

I was feeling squeezed in.

I offered to get the coffee and had to queue for several minutes, my sense of frustration increasing with every prolonged hiss of the machine. Finally it was my turn. I ordered coffee and brownies.

Back at the table it struck me how different Alex looked from when I first saw her, dressed now in jeans, T-shirt and a thin fleece, with less perfect hair and minimal make-up. The sun through the window caught the network of lines and creases around her eyes and mouth, so that I saw something of her mother in her delicately boned face and slight features, and in the way her eyes flitted round the room. It shocked me to think that we were older than her mother had been then.

She said, ‘This is all quite amazing. I can’t really believe how you tracked me down like this.’ There was a sting in that, the way she said it, so that I wondered if she wished I hadn’t. It left me unsure where to start, as though I didn’t have the right to ask anything. Alex had no such problem and got straight to the point.

‘Were you very shocked?’ I tilted my head at her, quizzically. ‘About me and Celia?’

I blew on my coffee to cool it down. ‘What other reaction would there be? It’s not something that happens every day.’

She broke her cake into half, then into smaller pieces. ‘It sort of took me by surprise as well.’

‘What do you mean? You must have agreed to it?’

‘I mean Celia took me by surprise.’ She put a square of brownie into her mouth. ‘One minute I’d bumped into her in St Mary’s A&E, the next she wanted me to move in.’

‘When was all this?’ I asked, trying to construct a time frame of things I knew about Alex. First Empire Road. Then Fitz. Now Celia.

‘Early eighties,’ she said vaguely, waving a hand in the air. ‘I was a mess — I suppose Fitz told you.’ She didn’t wait for confirmation. ‘I was bouncing from one bastard man to another and I thought, Well, that’ll do. A room in a squat with Celia, why not?’

She was rapidly devouring the brownie.

‘So you move in with Celia and next you think, Oh, I know, let’s swap names?’

‘No, not just like that, of course not.’ She hesitated, drank some coffee. ‘It was Celia’s idea.’

‘But you and Celia… I don’t get it. You hated each other.’

Alex gave a little sigh and rested her elbows on the table, chin propped between them.

‘We had something in common by then, didn’t we? Or should I say someone?’ She pressed some cake down onto her plate with one finger, then licked it clean. ‘You kept that one quiet, didn’t you, about Celia and Pete?’ I shrugged, not about to apologise for that. It hadn’t been up to me to tell her Celia was Pete’s ex. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it just came out of a drunken discussion one night. I thought it was a bit of a laugh. Turned out she was serious.’ She bit on another piece of brownie and brushed crumbs from her lips. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. Get rid of the old me. Fresh start, all that stuff.’

I said I could see that but that if it was me I’d want a completely different name.

‘Yes,’ she said, cradling her coffee, ‘I did suggest that. But Celia had this thing about not destroying our identities. She was on some kind of spiritual kick at the time — she said it would be like killing ourselves off.’

‘Sounds like that’s what you wanted: off with the old, on with the new.’

‘What I wanted, yes. But Celia was, I don’t know, she was a bit desperate for me to have her name and do something with it. Look, she was pretty weird back then. She was still anorexic and I knew she was damaged in some way. I thought, well, if this helps, why not? To be honest, I didn’t really care. I wasn’t exactly in a rational state of mind.’

‘Have you ever regretted it?’

‘No, not really. It’s been so long now. I just am Celia Beaumont.’

‘It must have been complicated to do.’

She shook her head, pushing her empty plate to one side.

‘Not then. We were both living on the margins, paid cash in hand, no tax. Neither of us had a bank account or a passport. All we had to do was call ourselves something different. It was only later that we did it all legally, so I could get a council flat and claim benefit.’

She sat back and folded her arms, as if to say, that’s it, that’s all there is to it, and I realised she wasn’t going to ask what it had been like for me when she disappeared from view so thoroughly.

‘And so that no one could find you,’ I said carefully, dabbing at a splodge of coffee on the table.

She let that hang for a while. ‘It is a bit addictive. Being answerable to no one but yourself.’

‘Can’t you live like that without cutting yourself off completely?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘But don’t you just form new attachments?’

She pressed her lips together.

‘Beth, all these questions. Look, you know more than anyone why I wanted nothing more to do with home.’

I thought of the things she told me about her stepfather.
It started when I was fourteen, when I wouldn’t do what he said any more
. And Celia’s words.
Imagine that all your life you’ve been told that you are shit. That everything you do is shit.

Alex was watching me shrewdly. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I wanted out and that’s what I got.’

‘Yes. You did. But you didn’t just leave them behind, you left me behind too. After telling me what a crap friend I was.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Have you been carrying that round all this time?’

I shoved my plate away so hard that it crashed into my coffee cup. I leaned across the table. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? Did you ever think about me?’

‘Of course I did. I thought about trying to contact you, but then I imagined you at drama school, with a big crowd of new friends—’

‘Instead of which I was working in a record store for twenty quid a week.’

She stared at me.

‘It wasn’t just you that fell apart. After that summer I dropped out of school, dropped out of everything, for a while. I never did the drama course. I had my own share of useless men, and—’ I stopped. Alex had gone pale and still. ‘Look, I got over all that years ago. I’m not here for some sort of retribution. I just hate that you think it was a breeze for me.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she said.

‘Exactly! You didn’t know, because you disappeared. I lost you, and Fitz, in one fell swoop. One minute you were both there, the next…’ I snapped my fingers ‘…gone.’

A woman interrupted, asked if she could take a chair from our table. Abruptly I said yes. Alex had to move her bag and coat, transfer them to the back of her chair, and I finished off the brownie, which was dry and stuck in my throat.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said, when she turned back. ‘I’m sorry, that I wasn’t around.’

I said well it was all in the past now, and we didn’t speak for a while. At length I said, ‘So you’re in touch with your mother?’ She looked at me a little vacantly. ‘You said she told you it wasn’t me.’

Alex turned to stare out of the window. She cleared her throat.

‘I didn’t see her for many years. Wasn’t going to. But then when Jamie was about four or five he started asking questions about grandparents. They were doing families at nursery and he’d sussed out that some kids have two sets, while he just had a grandma — Adrian’s mum, I mean.’ She turned back to me, smiled. ‘To be honest, I think he was after more Christmas presents.’

‘So he doesn’t see his father’s parents?’

‘No.’ She didn’t explain why. ‘So, there came a point where I thought, this isn’t fair. To Jamie, that is. I contacted her and…well, to cut a long story short she came down. On her own, obviously. I saw her without Jamie at first. I wanted to be sure I could hack it, having her around. Then the second time we met I took Jamie along, and after that she used to come down once a month.’

Her voice was casually brittle, and when I remarked that her mother must have been shocked to hear from her she just shrugged. ‘Are you still in touch?’ I asked.

‘Jamie is. Once he got old enough I left it to him. To be honest, Beth, it wasn’t some great reunion, no prodigal daughter stuff. We had one conversation about the past and she was still sticking to her version of events, that it was me as much as him, that I exaggerated stuff. I said, “How do you exaggerate a bruise?” and she said how did she know it was him? I just laughed in her face then. She used to see it and hear it. The woman’s in fantasy land.’