Telling Lies to Alice (12 page)

I didn’t know whether to stay or go but when I saw Jack coming towards me I thought I ought to say hello, at least. Before either of us could get a word out this guy came bustling up to Jack and started on about how the language was disgusting and in front of his wife and daughter and all the rest of it . . . I felt I ought to apologise for Lenny because the man was right, it
was
disgusting, but he totally ignored me. He just kept on at Jack, getting more and more pompous, and then he said, “Do you know who I am?” And Jack—actually, I suppose this would have been quite funny if the whole thing hadn’t been so horrible—Jack said, in this terribly polite voice, “No, I’m frightfully sorry, I haven’t the faintest idea who you are. Perhaps one of these charming people . . .” and he started going round the tables, tapping people on the shoulder, saying, “Excuse me, I wonder if you could help us out. There’s a man here who’s forgotten who he is. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you?” It went on and on, with this bloke standing there
steaming
and looking as if he was going to land one on Jack at any moment, and all the other diners trying to pretend it wasn’t happening.

That was the night Lenny threw his cigarette case at me. He was absolutely convinced I’d had a hand in setting up the meeting. I kept telling him it was all Findlater and that I’d been just as surprised to see Jack as he was, but he wouldn’t believe me.

It was one of those silver ones, with sharp edges. I’ve still got the scar on my cheek. I told the doctor it was an accident—which it was, in a way—but he didn’t believe me. Lenny blamed that on the camels, too. I tried to talk to him about it. I even tried to make a joke of it—pointed out that camels don’t have the right sort of feet for chucking cigarette cases about—but Lenny just couldn’t face up to anything. Every time he got drunk or upset someone or did something wrong, it was because of those bloody camels.

Except at the end. At the end, he’d blamed himself.

I went back to the house, tailed by Eustace, and straight upstairs to my bedroom, where I knelt down on the rug, lifted the bedspread, and pulled out the shoebox. Lenny’s last note to me was right at the bottom, underneath the postcards he’d sent me from the States. He’d always sent the most boring pictures he could find: motorway service stations—or whatever they call them in America—and ones from restaurants called things like McCrud’s Diner showing lurid meals on plastic trays.

I unfolded the note. It’s written on funny paper, grey and slightly shiny, like the sort they use for wrapping fish and chips. There are a couple of places were Lenny’s pressed down so hard with the Biro that it made a little tear.

The handwriting’s so bad it’s barely readable, and it turns into scrawl—there are five or six words at the end that are completely illegible. The police who’d questioned me had kept insisting I’d misread the word
camels
and I tried to explain to them what it meant, but they wouldn’t believe me and we had this ludicrous conversation, going round and round in circles. I was so freaked out that I didn’t realise until afterwards that they must have decided that it was a code word for heroin or something and they’d been doing their best to trip me up. If that had been true, it would probably have taken them about five seconds because I was far too out of it to start inventing things, and there was no solicitor present or anything. They gave up in the end. I think they must have decided that I was as mad as Lenny.

Don’t blame the camels.
Perhaps he’d meant more than I’d thought. The stuff at the end I couldn’t read—did it mean he’d tried to blame them—denied causing Kitty’s death—or killing her—or
what
?

The despair and all of it
. . . No. I’d loved Lenny. I’d loved him so much. He couldn’t have murdered anybody. It just wasn’t possible. And why Kitty, anyway? If it
was
Kitty. It might be somebody else . . .
in Lenny’s car
. . . It isn’t, said a voice in my head. You know it isn’t. Perhaps they’d had a row and she’d driven off in his car and had an accident and nobody knew anything about it. . . . An accident . . . I could accept that.
Except that Lenny’d told me he’d sold the car.
Why would he lie? I knew he’d taken Kitty to the party—he hadn’t made a secret of it, so why . . . ? Perhaps he’d been confused, mixed up. . . . I hadn’t seen much of him after his grand entrance with Kitty, but he wouldn’t have been sober.

That must have been why he’d chosen to go back to Ivar. He’d told me he wanted to go somewhere quiet and think things over—about his career, he said. After America, he was adamant he didn’t want to carry on with Jack, but the problem was, he’d never worked on his own. Neither of them had. Lenny kept telling me he’d be better off without Jack but the truth was, he was terrified. And lonely—Jack was his closest friend, they’d done everything together, and he missed him, even though he was the one driving him away. I kept telling Lenny he’d be fine on his own, but what did I know? He wanted to think he could go solo but I don’t think he really believed it, not deep down inside. . . .

Don Findlater was dead against them separating. He’d invited Lenny to lunch at Biagi’s to talk things over, and Lenny’d insisted on dragging me along, and when Findlater saw us both come in, his face! Lenny was in a horrible mood that day and Findlater kept glaring at me like he wanted to stick his fork in my throat—it was
awful
. They had this ridiculous conversation with Lenny insisting he’d got an idea for a series on his own and he was going to write it himself, and Findlater going on about how he should carry on with Jack and he’d get them a tour and a TV special and all the rest of it. I was sitting there thinking it was all rubbish because if Lenny had had an idea for a series he hadn’t told me about it, and I didn’t think the TV people would touch him after he’d gone on the box and told everyone he was an alcoholic. . . . Then Findlater started giving Lenny the business about being greater than the sum of their parts, and Lenny said, “If you added up the sum of
your
parts, Don, you’d get the wrong answer, so why don’t you just fuck off?” And that was pretty much it, really, except that Findlater started being spiteful and saying that Lenny’d be lucky to get a second-act walk-on in
Brigadoon
if he was on his own. He flounced out after that—leaving us with the bill—and Lenny just sat there ordering more and more vodka. Every time I asked if we could go he shouted at me, so in the end I left him to it. One of the waiters had to bring him home in a taxi.

Lenny said he couldn’t face touring again—I tried to tell him it wouldn’t be all grotty boardinghouses like when he was starting out, but he didn’t want to know. To be honest, the last thing I wanted was for him to go traipsing all over Britain. Because even then I was still holding on to my stupid little dream about our life in the countryside.

It was just after that that Lenny asked Marcus Deveraux if he could stay in the cottage so he could do some writing for this TV thing he’d talked about. To this day I don’t know whether he really did have an idea for a series—I didn’t find anything that looked like notes when I went through his stuff—or whether he’d just said it to Findlater on the spur of the moment and then thought he’d better come up with something. Whatever it was, he phoned me two days later from the local pub sounding incredibly drunk, saying he couldn’t stand it and begging me to come immediately, so I did.

I thought the cottage was lovely until I got inside and saw what a pigsty it was. Clothes, empty bottles, ashtrays . . . you name it. You couldn’t even see the floor—how Lenny’d managed to get it like that in forty-eight hours I don’t know. He’d sort of anchored me to the sofa from the moment I arrived, wouldn’t even let me unpack my bags. I kept saying I wanted to tidy the place up because the mess was driving me mad, but Lenny’d got his arms round me and every time I tried to get up he’d say, “I want to hold you, I don’t want you out of my sight,” and pull me back down again. He was mumbling away in my ear—stuff about America, mostly, how the studio’d tried to turn them into Laurel and Hardy—most of it didn’t make sense, to be honest, and every so often he’d stop and doze off, but as soon as I tried to loosen his grip he’d wake up and start talking again. It was like looking after a giant baby. In the end he agreed we could go to bed. I was exhausted, but every time I dropped off he shook me awake and carried on talking. I wish I could remember what it was about, but most of it was incoherent. . . . I must have gone to sleep in the end because when I woke up the next morning the first thing I saw were these wide-open eyes staring at me and then I heard his voice and I remember thinking, my God, he hasn’t stopped talking all night.

When he saw I was awake, he said, “You left me. You fell asleep.” It sounded accusing, but I thought, he’s got to be joking, so I said, “That’s what beds are for, remember?”

“No, I can’t fucking remember. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in six months. I asked you to come down here and look after me and all you can do is pass out.”

“Lenny, I was shattered. Why don’t I make some tea and we can find your pills and—”

He grabbed my hair. “You’re not leaving me!”

“Please don’t do that, you’re hurting me . . . I’m not leaving you, I just want to make some tea, that’s all . . . darling, please let go . . . it’ll only take a moment . . .”

“I’m coming with you.”

Lenny trailed me round the kitchen while I put the kettle on and tried to find things. That’s what it was like for the next two days. By the end of it I was like a sleepwalker, trying to tidy up with Lenny always a couple of paces behind me, bumping into furniture and knocking things off the surfaces, spilling his drink and clutching at my clothes, my hair, my legs. . . . We were both exhausted, and I had no idea what to do. The cottage didn’t have a phone and there was no way that Lenny was going to let me out of his sight for long enough to go and find one. I kept thinking he’d have to go to sleep at some time, but he just
didn’t
. I’d say to him, “Why don’t you go and lie down?” and he’d accuse me of wanting him out of the way so I could sneak back to London to be with some boyfriend who only existed inside his head.

The final straw was when he suddenly did a sort of rugby tackle on me from behind, round my waist. We both lost our balance and I hit my head against the bedroom door frame. I’d never really understood what it meant before, seeing stars, but I did then, I can tell you. He wouldn’t let go. I tried to prise his fingers off, but he was squashing me, and all the time he was talking into my ear, things that didn’t make sense: “You can’t leave me, you don’t know what’ll happen—you’re bad luck, Alice, ever since I’ve known you . . . you’re no good to me—you make me helpless . . .”

“You drink too much, that’s why—”

“You’ve always wanted Jack more than me . . .”

“That isn’t true, Lenny . . . please let me go, I can’t breathe . . .”

“I love you, Alice. You shouldn’t be near me, but I love you . . .”

“I love you, too, Lenny, but I can’t . . .”

“Liar!” He let go of me with one hand and I tried to turn round to face him but he was too quick—it’s odd what you remember: There was a light switch on the wall in front of me, chest height, and I must have been looking down at it because the next moment it blurred out of shape and my head was jerked up and back as Lenny grabbed a hank of my hair, then I felt his palm smack down on the top of my head and turned my face just in time to stop my nose from being smashed into the wall. I felt an explosion of pain as my ear caught the side of the door frame. I was sure I was going to vomit—I managed to get my hand up over my mouth and I must have made a gagging noise because his grip loosened and there was a second’s space between us and I lunged forward into the bedroom, slammed the door behind me, and—to this day I don’t know how—managed to lock it.

I barely had time to turn the key before Lenny threw all of his weight against the door—thank God for old houses, because if it had been plywood he’d have been through it in a second—and then I fell onto my hands and knees and retched and retched while he pounded on the door with his fist and shouted “What have you done to me?” over and over again.

I must have been in that room nine or ten hours, and I remember every detail—the painted wooden ceiling shaped like an upturned rowing boat, with beams running across like seats—Lenny’d used one of them to loop the belt round, later . . . the green carpet that had started to stink of old dog the minute I’d hoovered it, the big brass bedstead, the famous portrait of a Chinese lady on the wall . . . There was a pretty window, three panes, too narrow for me to get through, so I pulled the curtains, blundered back in the half-light, and curled up against one side of the wardrobe, opposite the door, shaking and shaking. . . . My scalp felt as if Lenny’d pulled half my hair out, but my face wasn’t hurting much—it wasn’t till I was back in London that I saw the bruises. . . . There was only one thought in my mind: If I leave this room, he’ll kill me.

“Alice, I’m sorry. Please open the door . . . I’m not going to hurt you, darling, I promise I won’t hurt you . . .”

“Not till you go away.”

There was a thud and a clank—he must have sat down on the floor, because his voice came from lower down.

“You said you loved me. I know I don’t deserve it, I know . . .”

“I do love you, Lenny.”

“If you loved me you’d open the door . . .”

“No, Lenny, I
can’t
. . . I just
can’t
. . .”

“Don’t cry, darling . . . No more crying . . . Come out and talk to me . . . You’re so pretty, such a pretty bunny . . .”