Losing Nicola (23 page)

‘What's the matter?'

‘I feel so lonely.'

‘Oh, Alice, sweet Alice. It breaks my heart to hear you cry.'

‘I keep seeing her,' I say.

‘No doubt we both will until the end of our days. But you must think of other things. Go for a walk. See friends. Take on more work. It'll pass. It always does.'

‘I miss you,' I say. ‘I wish you were here.'

‘Believe me, so do I.'

I replace the receiver. I'm beginning to wish I hadn't so hastily cut myself off from the metropolis. In London, I had friends and interests; despite my brave words to Erin, down here there is very little of either. At least I have my work. And I can always go for a walk. Which I do very shortly, three miles along the seafront to the grassy headland. And as I walk, I wonder just how many other things Orlando knows and hasn't told me.

On my way back, I climb the steep little path between overarching trees and step out on to rough grass. It's all exactly as I remember it, even the Secret Glade, though when I get nearer, I can see that it is overgrown now, the patch of grass in the middle vanished beneath further long curls of brambles to make a single large clump. Unreachable now unless the picker is prepared for considerable damage to tender flesh, the berries tantalize, plumply ripe, lustrously black. The police must have searched the place for clues at the time, but I can't help wondering what lies buried under that thicket of thorns: did they ever find whatever was used to smash her head in, for instance? If not, do they have any idea what instrument had been used to inflict such damage? If I'm determined to find out, my best line of information is probably Gordon Parker.

Another night of shimmering heat. Restless, I stand at the open window staring out to sea. There are lights in the town and I know I can always go and have a drink in a pub or eat at the Chinese restaurant that has braved the frontiers of provincial England and set up in the High Street. Or visit the town's only cinema. Or simply idle along the front while the sea gnaws and nibbles at the shingle.

I do none of these things. Instead I sit down and pull another of Sasha Elias's sheets of paper into the light of the lamp. I wonder what I am looking for. If I could find him, unasked questions might be answered, including the one that still bothers me: why he did not get in touch with me again in Paris?

My telephone rings with an urgent commission from Brussels: a hefty number of pages on some complication to do with the coal and steel industries, three days to complete, they will send a courier, they will pay a great deal of money if I think I can
get the job done in time, they particularly asked for me since I have the reputation not only of doing a good job but also of getting work in on time. I tell them I can do it, and stay up most of the night to get a head start.

For once, sleep comes easily. I am up again by ten, and seated at my desk. I wear cut-offs and a sleeveless white blouse that ties at the waist. Orlando is right. Work chases away the demons, puts the world into perspective. Under my bare feet, the pile of the rug is smooth, almost sensuous.

At two o'clock, I take a break, eat a salad of cos lettuce and tiny brown local shrimps from the fishmonger, with a slice of wholemeal brown bread and a knob of Caerphilly. I missed cheese in the States. With a cup of coffee to hand, I settle down again to my work. By seven o'clock, from the all-seeing eye of my window I watch the shadows beginning to slant across the green, adding a certain gravitas to the day, a reminder of men coming home from work, sailors returning from the sea, of suppers to be prepared, children to round up. The sea is clustered with white sails as the members of the sailing club come in to shore.

Louise Stone walks along the front with her little dachshund trotting beside her. Despite my deadline, I put down my pen, slip sandals on to my bare feet and hurry after her. She wears a dress that floats behind her like a sail. From behind, she could be a girl. I wonder how it feels to have lost a child, especially a child as wilful, as wicked, as Nicola. There must have been so many occasions when she wished her daughter were elsewhere. How often I've reconstructed that afternoon when she heard that Nicola was dead, and wondered whether I'd correctly remembered how the expression of shock and horror and pain which crossed her face had been prefaced by a fleeting, shamefaced look of relief.

She is a brisk walker and it takes me a while to catch up with her. We are away from the houses now. On our left is the shelving beach and the sea; to our right are the shallow cliffs still tangled with bramble bushes, and above them, the short smooth run of grass leading to the Secret Glade. ‘Mrs Stone!' I call.

She stops, turns to face me, eyebrows raised in enquiry at the summons from a stranger, then her face softens. ‘My goodness, it's Alice, isn't it?'

‘That's right.'

‘You haven't changed a bit, even after all this time.'

‘Nor you.' I fall into step beside her as the little dog frisks along in front of us.

She smiles. ‘I knew you'd turn into a beauty.'

‘Well . . .' It's difficult to know how to answer this without simpering. ‘Thank you.'

‘Not that it's any of my business,' she says, ‘but what are you doing here? I thought you were long gone.'

I explain my circumstances. The divorce, the move to England, my work, the compulsion that led me down here. ‘And you've not moved away, after all these years,' I say. It's a question, though it sounds like a statement.

‘That's right.' She seems on the verge of saying more, then leaves the syllables in the air without further expanding on them.

I want to ask her so many things but my thoughts feel stuck in quick-setting glue. There is almost no subject I can bring up which won't refer back in some way to Nicola. Why had I ever thought I could talk to Louise about her dead daughter? It's the very last thing I can mention. Even asking after her son, or mentioning Sasha Elias, or any of the people from those days who she might still remember would have the same effect. ‘Do you still work in fashion?' I ask finally.

‘Yes. It's good to have a profession which doesn't entail going into an office every morning,' she says. ‘You must feel the same.'

‘Yes.' We discuss our different jobs for a while. The dog sniffs among the stems of pink and scarlet valerian which push through the shingle on our left, interspersed with tall stands of withered tawny grass and fading yellow flowers whose name I don't know. The path veers slightly, away from the sea, magnifying the sound of waves crunching the pebbles at the edge of the shelved beach.

‘And how is the lovely Orlando?' Louise asks. ‘Such a charming boy. So mature for his age, so gifted.' She sighs. ‘How I envied your mother.'

Again, I expatiate on Orlando and his career. ‘And . . . Simon?' I ask tentatively.

‘He's fine. Doing really well. He has his own little business now.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Well . . .' She laughs a little hesitantly. ‘. . . to tell you the truth, I'm not really sure. I mean, he makes widgets of some kind, but I don't know what they are. Something really essential for boatbuilders, I know that. He turned into something of an inventor, in the end.'

‘Is he married?'

‘Yes indeed, to a lovely girl, Vicky. They have two adorable little boys, Vincent and Martin. They're living in Norfolk, now, and we see them quite often, much more than when they were living in Singapore.'

I wonder who this ‘we' is. Inevitably, the shadow of Nicola, the children she will never have, the dreams she never fulfilled, walks between us. I look at my watch. ‘I'd better be getting back,' I say, falsely reluctant. ‘I have an urgent deadline.'

We say our farewells. She does not suggest that we meet again; given the particular flat I have chosen to live in, I do not invite her to come round sometime, not wanting to revive unhappy memories. As I turn, I catch a whiff of her perfume and suddenly I am transported back twenty years, Nicola and I are in Louise's bedroom, dabbing that same perfume behind our ears. I see Nicola's tiny frame, her mother's jewelled bracelets dancing up her arm, diamond earrings swinging, a heavy gold locket round her neck, over the thin gold chain she always wore. I see her snapping open her mother's enamelled compact and dabbing powder over her freckles, her greenish eyes narrowed as she looks around for some further mischief to make. I see, too, the photograph beside the bed of a man in a double-breasted suit and a stylish black fedora that shadows his face as though he were a black-and-white movie star, and the way Nicola's expression tightens suddenly as she briefly glances at it. ‘I know, let's try on Mum's evening dresses,' she says, her voice suddenly shrill.

‘Won't she be cross?' I wonder, but she ignores me and opens a wardrobe, brings out a couple of silk gowns and hastily pulls one on over her clothes. It sticks, refuses to slide down her body, caught on a button or a zip. She swears, her head swathed in material, pulling at the dress. I hear the silk rip, see Nicola's hands tug fiercely at the delicate material, her fingers finding the slash and widening it, the pretty pea-green dress ruined.

‘Nicola!' I gasp, and she stares at me, her eyes cold.

‘She won't say anything, even if she finds it.' Pulling herself out of the dress, she bundles it up and throws it into a dark corner of the wardrobe.

As I open the door to my flat, the phone rings and I snatch it up as though I had been waiting for it for days. ‘Yes?'

‘I just wanted to check up on you, see if you're all right.'

It's Orlando. His voice soothes me, sets things back to rights. ‘Fine,' I say. ‘I'm fine. Guess what? I've just been for a walk with Louise Stone.'

‘So she's still living down there.'

‘Slightly odd, isn't it, given the circumstances?'

‘You'd think she'd want to get away, start afresh.'

‘Can you imagine Fiona going on living in the same place, if it had been one of us?'

‘Oddly enough,' says Orlando slowly. ‘I think I can. If it was the place where the last memories she had of us . . . if it was all of us there was left.'

‘I suppose.'

 Nicola sways between us in her torn white blouse, her rumpled denim skirt, constantly being destroyed by someone's rage, or hate, or frustration.

‘Was she wearing a gold chain?' I say suddenly.

‘What, when we first saw the . . . the body? I don't remember.'

‘She always used to.'

‘Yes,' he says. ‘She did.'

‘Thing is, I'm fairly sure it wasn't round her neck when we found her.'

‘Do you think the murderer took it?'

‘It can't have been very valuable, surely.'

‘Nor can I believe she was murdered for gain.'

‘I suppose it could have been torn off during the . . . the attack, and fell into the grass. But then the police would have found it.'

‘We wouldn't know whether they did or not.'

‘I could ask someone.'

He sighs. ‘Alice, you need to put all this behind you. It's long gone now.'

‘And it's still right there with us, Orlando. It's the same for you as for me. You said then that you would never ever forget it – and you never ever will.'

‘This is true.'

‘What bugs me so much is that, if you exclude passing tramps, the murderer is almost bound to be someone we knew. Maybe even someone we liked.'

‘I know.'

‘Funny,' I say, ‘that she wasn't . . . she wasn't sexually molested.'

‘And what conclusion do we draw from that?'

‘That the motive wasn't sexual, I suppose. But she wasn't wearing underpants when we discovered her, was she?'

‘No.'

‘I wonder if they ever found them.'

‘I doubt it. She wasn't wearing any that evening,' Orlando says.

‘How would you know that?'

‘She hardly ever did. Surely you must have realized. We all knew, all us boys.'

Not wearing underpants? I couldn't have imagined that anyone would dare to go out of the house without them. Or even walk around
inside
the house. I glimpse again, through the curtain of the past, Julian hunched over himself, Charlie's shamefaced smirk, David's hot eyes, while Nicola sat in a corner of the chesterfield in our drawing room. It never occurred to me. Why would it?

Time folds in on itself. At one and the same time I'm standing here, an adult watching the moon slant across the sea, looking at the way my white curtains wave in the cool salt air coming through the window and the ivory glimmer of the magnolias in the next-door garden, and I am also a child again, staring at a dead girl's body, blackberry juice staining my fingers, the scent of crushed grass giving a deceptive air of normality to something which is so abnormal as to be incomprehensible.

‘Knickerless Nicola, Charlie used to call her,' Orlando says.

‘You never liked her.'

‘I loathed her. She was a vicious little creature. But even so, nobody could have wished such a death on her.'

‘I know. Oh God. Orlando. It's all so terrible. And it goes
on
being terrible, even after all this time. It's like a curse.'

‘It
is
a curse. It's
our
curse, and there's nothing we can ever do about it.'

‘Would it make any difference if we knew who was responsible?'

‘Knowing's not going to expunge what we saw.'

‘It's the same time of year here. The blackberries are ripening, and it's another boiling hot summer, just like then.' Through the window I see the garden gate open and Mrs Sheffield appear. Walking up the path, she glances at my windows, but doesn't see me. ‘Orlando,' I tell him. ‘I have to go. Mrs Sheffield's come to call. Vi, I suppose I should call her.'

‘Say hello from me,' he says, and there is laughter in his voice. ‘Give her my very fondest love. And keep some for yourself, Alice, sweet Alice.'