The House of Sleep (27 page)

Sarah left a short silence, which seemed to her a more than adequate response. Then she asked: ‘Is Alison’s father at home tonight?’

‘Alison’s father doesn’t live here,’ said Rebecca.

‘Ah. What does your husband do, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘My what?’

‘Your husband.’

‘I don’t have a husband.’

‘Your partner, then.’

‘My partner,’ said Rebecca, placing a neutral stress on the word, ‘is dead.’

It was exactly what Sarah had been expecting to hear. Even so, the words were shocking: both in their finality and in the quiet, almost emotionless candour with which they had been spoken. She bowed her head.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well… there you go.’ Rebecca drank deeply from her wine.

‘I suppose that explains… one or two things…’ Sarah looked up. ‘Did you see that poem she wrote for her homework? The one about stars?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose – I suppose in a way Alison might have written that about her father.’

Rebecca flashed her a sharp look: scathing, impatient. ‘Alison’s father isn’t dead.’

‘No? But I thought you said…’

‘I said her father didn’t live here. He’s very much alive, all the same. He’s my brother, in fact.’

Sarah was having difficulty taking all of this in. ‘Your brother? But in that case – I mean, how…?’

‘Don’t worry. You haven’t stumbled upon a case of incest: one more thing to be reported to the social services. You see, I’m not Alison’s biological mother. Technically speaking, I’m her aunt.’

‘Her aunt. Right. So who – who
is
her biological mother?’

‘My partner. “Who, as I told you, is now dead.’

Sarah willed her brain into faster motion. She couldn’t understand why she had begun to feel so sluggish, so inept.

‘She was a woman, then: your partner.’

‘Yes.’ Rebecca stood up and looked out of the French windows. ‘I’m not absolutely convinced that this is any of your business, you know.’

‘No. No, you’re right. It isn’t.’

‘Somehow you don’t strike me as the kind of person who’s going to take a very enlightened view of these matters.’

Sarah ignored this; or rather, it failed to reach her. ‘How long were you together?’ she asked.

‘It would have been eleven years this August. She died almost a year ago.’

Neither of them spoke for a while, and when Rebecca sat down again Sarah thought she could sense a softening, a perceptible easing of her tension. It occurred to her that perhaps there had been very few people with whom Rebecca could have shared these painful confidences, over the last few months. When she asked the next question her voice was tentative, gentle, as if she was offering up a fragile gift.

‘And how did she die?’

‘Messily,’ said Rebecca. But this was her last stab at bravado. Abruptly the mask slipped, her face collapsed in upon itself, and then there was nothing but misery, shameless and uncompromising. ‘She took her own life.’ Still, however, she would not allow herself to cry.

Sarah said nothing at first. She could not bring herself to ask any more. She knew that the rest would come anyway.

‘The newspapers have got a name for it,’ Rebecca continued, brokenly. ‘“Yuppie burn-out”. It’s a syndrome, apparently. You work your rocks off in the City for ten years, you make pots of money, and then one day you look at your life and can’t remember what any of it was for. She was a textbook case. Driving around South London late one Friday night – God knows what she was doing in South London – she finds a nice long cul-de-sac with a brick wall at the end, revs up to ninety miles an hour, and drives straight into it. Writes off the company BMW. Writes herself off into the bargain.’

‘That’s… that’s dreadful,’ said Sarah, cringing at the inadequacy of her own words. ‘I can’t imagine anything like that. I mean, I can’t imagine anything like… having to be told that.’

‘It wasn’t so hot.’ Rebecca stirred herself, smiled a tough smile. ‘I think I’m going to have another glass of wine, at this point. D’you want some?’

‘That would be lovely.’

‘I might as well bring the bottle.’

She was away for some minutes: long enough for the realization to creep up on Sarah slowly, biding its time, pacing itself, so that the thunderclap, when it came, would be all the more brutal, all the more devastating. It started with the return of that odd sense of familiarity: general at first, to do with shapes and textures and colours, before the real specifics began to announce themselves. Then, initially, it was the books. Her eyes were drawn to the row of novels by Rosamond Lehmann: hardbacks, first editions, unmistakably, their original dust-jackets
protected by plastic wrappers, but missing one title:
Invitation to the Waltz.
Yes, she had always said that one would be hard to find… And as this thought broke in upon her, everything else followed at once, the whole impossible truth of it made suddenly clear, the world turned upside down in one infinitesimal movement… The African figurine on the mantelpiece, souvenir of a family trip to Ghana… The tiny framed photograph on the bookcase, arms around Rebecca, beaming blissfully, the happy couple… And just outside Sarah’s field of vision, the sight of it not yet to be trusted, but irrevocably
there
: another book,
the
book, that well-remembered green spine… These were hers. These were her things. This had been her house, her room…

Rebecca came back with the bottle. Sarah could just about see her through the mist.

‘What was her name?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Her name: it was Veronica, wasn’t it?’

And everything else was blank, until she recovered and found herself on the sofa, sobbing uncontrollably, Rebecca’s taut arms holding her in an awkward, uncomprehending embrace. It seemed for a while that she would never be able to stop crying, and the explanation she offered Rebecca through her tears must have been wildly incoherent, for she had to repeat it, again and again, and there were gaps in the explanation, there were intervals, when Sarah had to go into the toilet to pull herself together, for instance, and when Alison appeared, drawn by the noises and the voices, and Rebecca had to take her upstairs and put her to bed.

As the evening drew on, things became calmer. When the light began to the down outside, Rebecca brought in candles and placed them around the room. She opened the second bottle of wine, and they started to talk about Veronica.

What seemed most incredible, to Sarah, was that in all the years Rebecca and Veronica had spent together, her name had never once been mentioned.

‘But that was how she was, in a way,’ Rebecca insisted. ‘Absolutist: don’t you think? I mean, when she was going out with you, did she ever talk about any of her previous girlfriends?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘She never dwelt on things. She was less tied down by the past than anyone I’ve ever known. I tried to be like that, as well, when I was with her. It’s only now, really, that I’ve started to wonder whether it’s actually any kind of way to live your life.’

‘Well… You knew her much better than I ever did, obviously. In fact I hardly knew her at all. We were only together for… well, for about nine months. You must think it’s very odd, in a way – you must wonder why I’m so upset about this.’

‘No. No, not at all.’ Their eyes met, briefly, but Rebecca was quick to look away, and flicked back a short lock of her auburn hair in a rather self-dramatizing gesture. ‘Why did you split up, anyway? Was it mutual?’

‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘No, it was my fault, entirely. It’s funny, isn’t it, still to be talking of faults at this kind of distance? But it
was
stupid to split up with her: that’s what I think now. It wasn’t even for personal reasons. It was… political, almost. Something to do with the spirit of the age…’

‘The Zeitgeist: Ronnie’s favourite word.’

‘Yes,’ said Sarah, surprising herself with a smile. ‘Yes, it was one of her favourites. I used to make fun of her at the time, but in a way I was the one who was… too solemn about all that sort of thing. Everybody gets it wrong about the nineteen-eighties, don’t they? They think it was all about money, and maybe it was, for some people, but for the people
I
used to hang about with, the students and people like that, there was a different set of values, just as severe, just as intolerant, really. We were so
obsessed
with politics all the time: gender politics, literary politics, film politics… there was even that phrase, wasn’t there, that awful phrase, “political lesbian”.’

‘And is that how you used to think of yourself?’

‘On the surface, maybe. God, I probably even described myself that way to some people. And yes, we were reading our Julia Kristeva and our Andrea Dworkin and we never passed up an opportunity to complain about patriarchy, but… you know, that wasn’t the real reason. I can’t even remember how it all started, now. I just remember that I really liked Veronica… I thought she was just a lovely and fascinating person. Which made it all the more ridiculous that it was
my
political puritanism that split us up, in the end. I couldn’t cope with the idea of her going to work in a bank. I saw it as a personal insult, an affront to all the things we stood for, as a couple… She was supposed to be starting this theatre group, you see. That was always going to be the plan.’

‘She was still talking about that. She never stopped talking about it.’ Rebecca’s hazel eyes glowed with the reflected candlelight; these recollections were warming her. ‘It was one of the things that kept her going.’

‘Did she not like working in the City, then? I never thought she’d be able to stick at it, somehow.’

‘She must have liked it a bit – or part of her must have liked it. I’m sure the work excited her, even though she despised it too. I think she enjoyed it on the level of a highly abstract, highly intellectual game, but probably knew – certainly knew, I suppose, considering what she did in the end – that this was a fiction, and that she’d lost something by trying to sustain it for so long: lost something of herself. And of course, she hated all of the people she had to work with – that goes without saying. I noticed that right at the beginning. We met at a ghastly office party – I was acting for her firm at the time – and we clocked each other at once, got chatting, realized we’d found kindred spirits, left early, and… that was that. It all followed from there.’

‘And Alison? You must – I mean, Veronica must have had her really soon afterwards. Which amazes me, because she
never,
never
said anything about wanting children, or even liking them.’

‘Yes, it was a very sudden decision. She knew the dangers, you see, of doing that job: she knew what it was going to cost her. And Alison was a sort of insurance policy against that. She thought – we thought – that if we had a child, then we’d be less likely to lose sight of – the fundamentals, if you like. Does that make any sense?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘So, first of all we had to find a donor, which didn’t turn out to be very difficult. My brother helped us out there. But things seemed to go wrong after that. It was a terrible birth – twenty-four hours in the delivery room, very nearly a Caesarean – and then Ronnie went into a major depression which lasted… lasted for years, in effect. It’s a miracle she didn’t lose her job in that time.’

‘Poor Veronica… I can see it now, as well: the resemblance. It’s been staring me in the face all this time. Just the other day I started thinking about her, for no apparent reason, but now I know why: because I’d noticed something about Alison recently – something about her mouth…’

‘They were alike in lots of ways. Which was ironic, sadly, because Ronnie never took to Alison, never seemed to bond with her at all. I did all the childcare, saw her through the nursery, got her into primary school; played with her, read to her; slept with her, most nights. I thought this was the right thing to do – and it was, in a way, the only thing to do: I mean, somebody had to be giving the child some attention – but I never noticed the effect it was having on the two of us; how edgy she was becoming, how remote. Everything had gone very stale, very suddenly. So we started trying the usual sorts of tricks – we moved to this house a couple of years ago, thinking it would give us a new start, maybe, but… well, it was too late by then.’

Sarah nodded. ‘Yes, I can see… I can see exactly how something like that might happen.’

Rebecca drained off the last of her wine. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, upending the bottle over her glass. A few droplets spilled out. ‘I’m sorry I was so hostile to you earlier. I underestimated you. You get used to assuming that everyone else is going to be conventional; censorious.’

‘That’s OK.’ Sarah looked at her watch. ‘I should go now, anyway. I’ve got forms to fill in before tomorrow. The never-ending nightmare.’

‘Yes, of course.’

As they stood in the centre of the room, facing one another, there seemed to be no obvious way of bringing this extraordinary evening to a close. Finally Sarah remembered the business which had brought her there in the first place.

‘I don’t know if we have anything more to discuss,’ she said. ‘About Alison, I mean.’

‘Look, I’m sorry I complained about that. I went way over the –’

‘No, it’s good that you did. Now we’ll both be looking out for her. I’m sure she’s going to be all right.’

‘I hope so,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘I’m doing my best.’ She waited for a shy moment, before admitting: ‘There is one thing, anyway… One bright spot on the horizon.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I think I may have met someone. Someone new.’

‘Oh?’ Sarah felt a quick, tiny sense of deflation: the premature thwarting of some unacknowledged hope.

‘She works in publishing,’ Rebecca said. ‘So far we’ve only seen each other a few times, but… it’s been good. You know, we’re taking it slowly.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ said Sarah: and meant it.

They fell silent, until Rebecca added brightly, changing the subject: ‘I like your hair, by the way.’

‘Really?’ Sarah was pleased, and found herself blushing; she was not used to compliments. ‘I keep thinking about dyeing it, but people seem to like it like this.’