Telling Lies to Alice (17 page)

I stood up and dialed the operator, praying she’d put me through to get the number—which she did—and that Jack and Val weren’t ex-directory, which they weren’t. 0-7-0-7-8-7-9-2-6-4—Right. Reverse the charges. I dialed the operator again, repeating Jack and Val’s number in my head. “My name’s Rosalie,” I told the woman, praying that Rosalie wasn’t at home with Val. “I’m her daughter.” I hung on, crossing my fingers, while the operator did her stuff, and then—

“Go ahead, caller.”

“Thanks. Hello?”

I remembered Val’s voice—soft and slightly lispy. “Hello? Rosie, for heaven’s sa—”

“No—no, it’s not. It’s . . . Look, I’m sorry about that, and I’m sorry to disturb you so late—”

“Who is this?”

“I don’t know if you remember, but my name’s Alice, Alice Jones. I’m afraid I didn’t have any money on me, and it’s a bit—”

“What makes you think I’ve got anything to say to you?”

“It’s not . . . I mean, I don’t think you have, but it’s Jack, he’s—”

“I don’t want to know. You’ve got a nerve, ringing me up.”

“Look, please, Val, Jack’s in a terrible state, he—”

“Well,
Mrs.
Jones, you’ve made your bed, haven’t you? Now you can go and lie in it.”

“I’m not—”

She hung up.

I stepped out of the phone box, tore the trailing lace off my cuff, and took it over to the litterbin. I’d only met Val a few times at dinners and things, but she knew I’d been Lenny’s girlfriend—one of them, at any rate. Black curly hair, grey eyes, sharp nose, graceful . . . She’d reminded me of a drawing of a gypsy in a book I’d had as a kid.

The last time I’d seen her was at Lenny’s funeral, six years ago, but when I phoned she’d known who I was immediately, even though I’d used my married name, and she hadn’t been surprised, either. When I’d mentioned Jack she’d said she didn’t want to know, which was odd . . . unless she already did. Know he was here, I mean. Not that I’d actually said he was—or had I? I couldn’t remember. But in any case, why would he tell her? He’d always been obsessive about keeping the two sides of his life separate. They say wives are always the last to know, but she had to have some idea. . . . And she obviously did know, or she’d assumed, that I’d slept with him. She must feel the same way about me as I do about Kitty, I thought. I couldn’t blame her for that. If I was married to Jack, I’d be suspicious not just of me, but of every woman on the planet. . . . Poor Val. Mind you, if Kitty’d ever said that to me, “Poor Alice,” I’d have called her a hypocrite, and I’d have been right. I shook my head and looked down at myself. The front of my nightie was dusty and bedraggled, and the white cotton looked grey in the moonlight. Like a shroud—how they must look when you’ve been in the earth for a bit. Probably how I looked, too.

I picked my way back to the farm and stopped at the gate. What the hell am I doing? I thought. Save yourself, that’s what the doctor had said. He meant from Lenny, but . . . it amounted to the same thing. Jack could hurt me, really hurt me . . . He’d said he wouldn’t, but in the kitchen, when I’d dashed past him, I’d seen the look on his face, and I knew. . . . Like when he’d come towards me with the scotch bottle swinging in his fist and his face had looked so
evil
. . . then the next minute he’d been contrite, saying sorry . . . He won’t even remember any of it in the morning, I thought. Lenny never had, and he could get pretty vicious when he’d been at the brandy. We’d have blazing rows and then when I reminded him of the things he’d said he’d be horrified and swear he’d make it up to me and beg me not to leave. . . .

Save yourself.
I looked over at my car. The keys were in my bag, in the kitchen. So was Jack. I heard a snort from the field—Pablo. And Eustace was waiting for me in the bedroom. I couldn’t leave them. Hobson’s choice . . . wasn’t that something to do with horses?
This is my home. There’s nowhere else to go.

The place was in darkness. Can’t risk waking him up, I thought, and walked round to the side of the house. The sitting-room window was slightly open. I hitched up my nightdress and climbed through, padded across the room, inched the door open, and slithered into the hall, where I stood, straining my ears for any sound from the kitchen. Silence. I tiptoed up the stairs. If you tread right on the edges they don’t creak. I shut the door, wedged the chair back under the handle, and climbed into bed, dirt and all, trying not to think about what might happen if Jack decided to join me. At least there’s Eustace, I thought, as the dog clambered on top of me and buffeted my face with his nose. After a couple of minutes, he curled up and began to snore. Val’s words came back to me:
You’ve made your bed, now you can go and lie in it.
I suddenly remembered what Jack had said—
It was all your idea in the first place
—he couldn’t have meant us sleeping together, because that wasn’t my idea—I mean, yes, I’d done it, but he’d come on to me in the first place, not the other way round.
You started all this.
Lenny’d said it, too. At the cottage at Ivar . . . shouted it through the door.
This was your fault in the first place, all of it
. . . Was that what he’d meant? Had Jack told him I’d seduced him? No . . . It had to be something else. But what? I turned onto my back and stared at the ceiling. What had I started? What had I done?

I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep, not with Jack downstairs in the kitchen. It was weird, though, because it was Lenny I kept thinking about, not him. I think it was because that last time I
did
run away and perhaps if I’d had the guts to stay put, things might have turned out different. But I was frightened, really
scared
. I honestly did think Lenny was going to kill me. Sometimes I look back—I mean, even still—and think, how could all that have happened? It’s easy to sit here now and say, if only I’d done this or that, but at the time, the way he just . . .
deteriorated
. . . I should have been paying more attention but I was so excited about buying the house, and I thought it was all going to happen—we’d redecorate and sort out the garden and get a dog and maybe even start a family. Honestly, the way I imagined it was like one of those corny bread adverts, not real life. I was living in a dream, really—in my mind, everything was going to be wonderful and the problems would just disappear into thin air.

I’d felt so optimistic, it stopped me seeing how bad things really were. . . . Lenny would go on for hours about the Americans and what bastards they were for sacking him, and how it wasn’t the right film, and blame Jack for getting them involved in the first place. I didn’t know what to say to that because Lenny’d been just as excited about it before they went, saying it was their big chance—you know, to be international, not just British . . . but I thought I could smooth it over, that if I did all the stuff with the house and everything I could make things go right, and I didn’t realise . . . well of course I didn’t
realise,
I didn’t know the half of it . . .

And there were other things, too: Lenny was drinking more and more, he’d seen all these doctors and taken the pills but none of it had worked and he always ended up back at square one. I used to say to him, “Don’t you want to stop?” He’d say he did and I’d believe him—I couldn’t
not
believe him—but I don’t think it was true. It was almost as if he accepted he was on a sort of collision course with the booze, and nothing—certainly nothing that I was offering—could alter it. Fatalism. That’s the word. I thought it was my fault because I wasn’t . . .
enough
. . . for him to stop drinking. But if he felt guilty about what happened at that party—if the dead girl was Kitty . . .
Don’t blame the camels.
Saying it was his fault. There’d been something about that in the paper. I got out of bed and felt on the floor for my shorts. The cutting was still in the pocket. I switched on the lamp.
Did guilt drive Maxted to end his own life so close to the scene of the tragedy?

The world seemed to have stopped. Getting back into bed was like moving through wet cement.
Tragic Lenny told pals he’d sold the sports car
. . .
Police are seeking to interview Maxted’s former partner
. . .

I lay down on my back. My body felt heavy enough to fall right through the bed. I’ve had enough, I thought. Please, God, just let me go to sleep, I don’t want to think about this . . .

I must have dropped off after that because about an hour later something woke me up. The house creaks sometimes, but I’m used to that . . . this was more like a movement, but not close. Couldn’t tell if it was upstairs or downstairs. Like scratching, scraping . . . big mice with big feet, I thought stupidly. Something bumping along the ground.

Jack? I sat up in bed, listening. Nothing more. The house was quiet again, and Eustace was still dead to the world. Maybe it
was
mice. Jack must be flat out by now. He hadn’t woken when I’d climbed in through the window, and with the amount he’d put away . . . My mind drifted off to the taxi driver at Ivar talking about the cocky bloke he’d driven to the cottage. Drugs, that’s what he’d said. Was that Danny Watts? He’d definitely been on Lenny’s list, and Jack had asked me if I remembered him. . . . I knew I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. Lenny’s address book was somewhere in the attic. Might as well go and have a look. Anything would be better than lying here worrying.

I got up and took the chair away from the door. Eustace sat up and looked at me with his head on one side, as if he was asking a question. “You stay here,” I said. “I won’t be long.” I took a torch and started tiptoeing across the landing. To get to the attic I had to go down the main stairs, across the hall, through the dining room, and up the other staircase, which is a lot of creaky boards to cross without making a noise. I felt like a burglar in my own house, but I didn’t know what Jack was up to—if he had gone back to sleep, I didn’t want to wake him.

The attic’s full of trunks and cartons—Lenny’s stuff, mostly—a lot of lumps and bumps under dust sheets. The single light bulb is weak and dusty and doesn’t shine into the corners, so it’s eerie enough, even without the stand hung with Lenny’s hats and coats that looks like a huddle of empty men. I kept glancing over my shoulder at it as I went through the boxes. I thought I knew which one the address book was in, but of course it wasn’t and I ended up going through about six before I found it.

By the time I’d finished, my fingertips were grey with dust, my feet were filthy, and the front of my nightdress looked like a floorcloth. I picked up the address book and took a last look round.

Granddad’s armchair stood alone in the far corner. Blue brocade, with the piping falling off and the seat sagging and the stuffing falling out of the bottom. Unusable, but I’d kept it because it was his favourite. The dust sheet must have slipped, or . . .
wait a minute
. There’d been other things there, more boxes, and . . . where had they gone? I didn’t just make it up, I thought. Jack
was
looking for something. He’s been up here, too.

I couldn’t remember seeing the strip of light under the sitting-room door on my way down the main staircase, but it was definitely there when I crossed the hall to go back up it. Heart thumping, I stood in the dark, wondering what to do. I couldn’t hear anything. I put my foot on the first step—an inch too far over—and it creaked.

“Alice?”

I froze.

“I know you’re out there.”

I didn’t reply.

“Come and talk to me, darling. I’m lonely.”

“I just wanted a glass of water,” I gabbled.

“No you didn’t. Come
on
.”

“I’m tired, Jack. We can talk in the morning.”

“There’s something I want you to see.”

“I’ve seen it before,” I said, hoping he’d laugh.

He didn’t. “Just get yourself in here.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No. Don’t make me come and get you.”

I tiptoed across to the linen chest, opened the lid just a fraction so I could slip Lenny’s address book inside without disturbing the flowers on the top, and shut it as gently as I could, holding my breath. Then I went over to the sitting room and opened the door.

The first thing I saw, on the wall opposite, was a rectangle of moving black-and-white shapes. The film was grainy and scratched and the picture was broken up by two of the vertical timber beams. It was hard to tell what was going on at first, but I could see a crawling tangle of pale shapes—how many? More than two . . . male and female . . . Spots and glitches winked as thighs, calves, buttocks, and stomachs squirmed against each other. . . .

There was no sound except the whir of the projector. The room was dim and hazy with smoke. Jack’s armchair stood a few feet away from me, and I could see the top of his head and one hand dangling down at his side, holding a cigarette. I craned my neck round the door and saw the projector. Lenny’s. From the attic. Sitting on top of the sideboard.

“Come in and sit down.” Jack sounded completely sober.

“You want me to watch a
porn film
?”

“Why not? It’s yours.”

“No it isn’t. I don’t watch this sort of rubbish.”

Jack twisted round to look at me. “I know you don’t, darling, but this is important.”

“
Important?
Jack, it’s half-past three in the morning and this is a blue film, and not a very good one, either, by the look of it.”

“Please, Alice.”

I suppose I might as well humour him, I thought, because he’s bloody well going in the morning.

I squeezed behind his chair and went over to sit on the rug in front of the fireplace, as far away from him as possible. He hadn’t managed—or bothered—to get his trousers back on, and the damask tablecloth I’d used to cover him was wrapped round his waist like a sarong.

I could sense that he was watching me, so I tried to look in the direction of the film without actually seeing it, which was easy enough because it was just a big, soft-edged jigsaw of shunting flesh and you couldn’t really work out what was whose. “How anyone finds this stuff a turn-on is beyond me,” I said. “I’d rather watch pai—” I stopped, because there was a jerk and the camera, which had obviously just been plonked at the foot of the bed, focused on the back—and bum—of a man humping away at a woman who was on all fours in front of him, his hands clamped round her hips for more purchase. For some reason it made me think of the Pushme-Pullyou in
Doctor Dolittle
and I started to giggle, but then the man bent right over and there, kneeling up, the woman’s face in his crotch and a hand on each side of her nodding head, was—“Oh,
God
!” I scrambled to my feet. “Jack, stop it! Turn it off—please, just turn it off!”