Worst Fears (17 page)

“You prurient old cow!” shouted Alexandra, so that Hamish came running from the study.

“I understand your anger,” said Leah.

“No one understands my anger,” shrieked Alexandra.

“This session is at an end,” said Leah. “Worst fears!” and put the phone down, and the fox slunk away; wounded, howling. She would never recover.

“You mustn’t upset yourself so,” said Hamish. Alexandra put Leah on hold until, as Leah would have said, she could deal with it.

T
HAT NIGHT, AS ALEXANDRA
lay sleepless in Sascha’s narrow bed, Hamish came into the room. He was wearing Ned’s dressing gown and nothing beneath it. He had lighter body-hair than Ned’s, and thinner, longer legs, but warm flesh, not marble. He offered comfort, there was no doubt about that: he was good-looking; some essence of Ned was there. The need to keep life going, to overlay death with sex, was strong. She lay still. He sat on the end of the bed. She moved her feet out of the way.

“Anthropologists tell us,” he said, “that in many tribes when the husband dies the brother is expected to take over his role. I can’t sleep. Can you?”

“Yes,” she said. “If left alone.”

“I feel Ned everywhere. I think this is what he wants us to do: to comfort one another.”

“That may be wishful thinking, Hamish.” She sat up. She slept naked, as was her custom. She pulled the sheet up to cover her bosom. Gently, he pushed it down. She could not be bothered to resist. So, she had breasts. What woman didn’t?

“I find your modesty the titchiest bit hypocritical,” said Hamish, amiably enough. “Since your bosom is so easily bared to the millions.”

“About four hundred and twenty,” said Alexandra, angered, “and not even a full house, since no one at that stage expected the show to be a success. But I don’t mean to argue. Please go away.”

“You’re going to need me,” said Hamish. “More than you know. I think you’d just better give in and be nice to me.”

“Once you pay the Danegeld,” said Alexandra, “you never get rid of the Dane,” and she avoided his hands, now on her breasts, and got out of bed. “If I’m nice to you now you might never go away.”

She stood naked. She didn’t care. Moonlight came through the window. She could see out to the garden, the privet hedge, the field. She wondered if Jenny Linden was out there, watching, trying to claim Ned’s ghost as her own.

“You’re quite insane,” Hamish said. “You should have seen yourself with that axe. Totally out of control. I’m well out of it. Look at you! Exhibitionist, pure and complete. What Ned described as the Curse of Thespianism Descended. Actresses are sexually easy, he told me in one letter. Good at sex, but it’s not important to them. Anyone will do. It’s what they do for relaxation, between the only acts they care about. Actresses are not like real women at all. Make-believe females, with no centre, no soul, no capacity for real emotion.”

“Actors,” said Alexandra, and “I don’t believe in your letters. I’ve never seen them.” She was dressing. Pants, jeans, bra, T-shirt.

“I won’t show them to you,” he said. “They’d hurt you too much.”

She wondered where she was going to sleep. Abbie’s? Vilna’s? Both had seemed unfriendly. She needed sleep. She had to be fit to drive to her mother’s the next day. With Sascha in the house Hamish would probably leave her alone. She doubted that he was dangerous. He would finger and upset; his instinct was to find a vulnerable spot and hurt as much as he could, but he wouldn’t rape. He would not put himself so much in the wrong. No wonder Ned had kept him at a distance.

“Where are you going?” asked Hamish.

“To spend the night with Jenny Linden,” said Alexandra. “You know what we Thespians are.”

A
LEXANDRA DROVE ROUND TO
Jenny Linden’s house. She found a parking space just outside and reversed into it, bumping Jenny Linden’s car out of the way to do it. The sound of crunching metal brought people to their windows and doors, caused babies to cry, and bedroom lights to go on. Only in Jenny Linden’s house did everything stay dark and quiet. But Alexandra had seen a pale, frightened face appear momentarily at the top window, then disappear.

She banged again and again at the door, using the big, heavy knocker to advantage. It was iron, antique, mid Nineteenth Century, in the form of a fish. Alexandra realised it was just the same as the one on her own front door. But that door was large and solid: this door was small and flimsy, and rattled and shook with every blow. Compete with Alexandra as she might, Jenny Linden would never get it right. Neighbours peered all down the street to see what was going on. It was past midnight.

It was not Jenny Linden who opened the door but her husband, Dave, in striped pyjamas and dressing gown. Alexandra remembered him from Kimmeridge.

“Go away,” he said. “You’re disturbing the peace. I will not have Jenny upset. You’re persecuting her. I shall call the police.”

Jenny Linden appeared at his elbow, wearing a discreet pale blue nightie, its hem showing beneath a woollen dressing gown in dusky pink. “Don’t be too hard on her, Dave,” said Jenny Linden in her sweet little voice, her restraining hand on Dave’s arm. “Poor Alexandra, she’s having a hard time. She won’t give herself permission to grieve.”

“You’re too good to her,” said Dave. “You’re not fit to be out on your own.”

“Oh dear!” said Jenny Linden, peering out into the night. “Someone’s gone into the back of my car. Does that mean they have to pay, Dave?”

“Certainly does,” said Dave. “You go back in and get your beauty sleep. I’ll see to this.”

Jenny Linden nodded, smirked and went back in. Dave barred the door.

“How’s the herpes, Jenny?” called Alexandra after her, loud and clear.

“Just get out of here before I call the police,” said Dave. “You’ve done us enough mischief.”

“Me?” asked Alexandra, taken by surprise.

“So much the career girl, so eaten up with ambition,” said Dave, “you couldn’t even control your own husband.”

“I never thought it was a wife’s role to do that,” said Alexandra. “But I can see yours sees it differently. There’s some new stuff called Zorimax. Very good for herpes, they say. Your wife caught it from Eric Stenstrom and passed it all round the neighbourhood.”

Dave seemed taken aback. She was glad it was not she who was, for once.

“Because if you two are getting back together again,” Alexandra said, “it’s the kind of thing a husband needs to know.”

“Jenny needs looking after,” said Dave, automatically, but his eyes had lost hers. He seemed bewildered.

“I thought Stenstrom was gay,” said Dave.

“Jenny proved otherwise,” said Alexandra.

“Bitch!” said Dave, and slammed the door in Alexandra’s face. A sigh of response, a ripple of appreciation, went round the cluster of neighbours.

Alexandra pulled the iron knocker off the door—it was down to its last feeble nail-hold—someone’s DIY job—and threw it in the gutter, untangled her car from Jenny’s and drove all the way to her London flat. She could spend no more nights under the same roof as Hamish. She was exhilarated.

But soon Alexandra felt uneasy. What had she done? The best and safest place for Jenny Linden might well be in her husband’s arms. Some people could get away with acts of malevolence; Alexandra never could. If she tugged someone’s hair at school, a teacher would spot her. If she didn’t pay a fare, she got caught. A policy of pleasant talking, optimistic outlook and an easy blindness to inconvenient fact had got her through life, or so she had thought, very well. She’d left it to Ned to be nasty, so she could be nice. Now Ned was dead and she, Alexandra, was left with the consequences of her own emotional idleness; she had encouraged Ned to be nasty to others and in the end he’d turned his nastiness on her. She had thought herself the famous, the beautiful, the bountiful Alexandra Ludd, immune from disasters which afflicted others, but of course she was not. She was like some charming villa in a hot climate, set in a ravishing and luxurious garden, built on stilts, and termites had been gnawing away at the stilts for years—termites from a whole assortment of nests: Resentment, Envy, Jealousy, Lust, Ambition, Malice, Spite (and the termites from Resentment have the strongest jaws, the most powerful bite of all)—and now see, the whole edifice was about to tumble into mud.

N
ED AND ALEXANDRA’S LONDON
pied-à-terre
, No. 13 Angliss Street, was to the north of Sloane Square, the top half of a small, quaint house in a little street barred to traffic. There were two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom, a living room and a balcony. The place was just about large enough for Ned, Alexandra and Sascha, though if Theresa came too it was a squash. Theresa’s agreeably firm, white-skinned flesh came in contact with dressers and porcelain, and blue and white china; she’d knock her big head against the wall-lamps and bathroom fitments; the breakages were dreadful. Sascha clomped and jumped about in too small a space for comfort and had to be hushed because of the people living below—an old couple in their eighties, fortunately deaf: they could not hear the noise but could watch flecks of plaster dust falling from their ceiling when Sascha cried, “Watch me! Watch me!” and jumped from sofas or did his sudden if ineffectual somersaults. He would fall sideways, not properly head over heels. But the place was near enough Theatreland. At a pinch, Alexandra could walk to matinees, and in the summer to evening performances, before dark made the streets dangerous.

Here Ned and Chrissie had lived, before Ned met Alexandra and they fell in love, and Ned and Chrissie parted. Divorced. Then the house had been divided: Chrissie had sold her half and gone to live with horses in Sussex. Ned kept his half as a
pied-à-terre
for himself and Alexandra, buying The Cottage out of money left him by his and Hamish’s mother. Ned was convinced that London was no place to bring up a child—pollution was bad and streets dangerous, and Sascha himself overlively—so one or the other of the parents would always take him back to the green fields, the Virginia creeper and the roses of his real home after a day or so in the city.

Alexandra arrived at four in the morning. She was worn out. She had not eaten for days. But she must sleep now. She was too tired to eat. She went into her bedroom and turned on the light. There was someone sleeping in her bed. A woman. Alexandra turned off the light quickly, went into the second bedroom, lay down without undressing, and slept.

Alexandra did not wake till noon. She had a headache. She took some aspirin, had a shower and went into the kitchen. A woman she did not recognise was cooking spaghetti. She was in her forties, had short straight hair and an intelligent, reproachful face. Alexandra supposed she was some kind of academic. The woman acknowledged Alexandra’s presence with a curt nod, but did not seem anxious for conversation. Alexandra put her dirty clothes into the washing machine, started the cycle, and only then said: “Who are you?”

“Chrissie Ludd,” said the woman. “And now Ned has died, this place is mine. I don’t mind you staying until you sort yourself out, but don’t make it too long. A couple of months will be fine.”

“I don’t think that can be so,” said Alexandra. She feared a re-run of Jenny Linden. She, Alexandra, was the second wife, this one the first. They had never met. Ned had been at pains to keep the two women apart. He had described a neurasthenic, malicious woman, who drank too much and was forever on the edge of a breakdown. He, Ned, had married her out of pity, but eventually, after she had brought home a drunken teenager for a one-night stand, had decided he and she must part. But she had divorced him, eventually. He hadn’t bothered to divorce her even after he had met and fallen in love with Alexandra. The one, the true, the only love in the face of which all other loves must falter. So Ned had said.

Chrissie now said, “According to the divorce settlement, the property remained in my name, but he had the right to live in it until he died, after which it reverts to me. Now he’s dead, so here I am.”

“That isn’t fair,” said Alexandra. “Why should a Court do anything so silly?” It was all she could think of to say.

“It was twelve years back,” said Chrissie. “Fault still entered into these things. Ned’s behaviour had been such I got much the better deal. He howled and struggled and squirmed about everything: he hated to part with a penny. He was a monster; but I stuck to my guns and won. You must have known. You were with him at the time. Very much with him.”

“I didn’t know,” said Alexandra.

“You must be a very unobservant person,” said Chrissie. “Anyway, here

I am. And you’re on your way out, so I’ve won. If you hang about long enough, things come round; you win. I should have got a chunk of his inheritance too, from his mother, but he didn’t disclose it to the Court.

Ned always played his cards close to his chest. But you’ll know that.”

She was straining the spaghetti into her, Alexandra’s, colander. She seemed so much at home Alexandra felt unable to challenge her.

“So, do you have another man ready to go?” asked Chrissie, as if pleasantly. “You look the type.”

“Ned isn’t even buried yet,” said Alexandra. “Why did you divorce him? What were the grounds?”

“You,” said Chrissie. “Adultery. He brought you back to our bed. It hurt, that. I don’t forget it. I walked out there and then. Bed’s still there, in the same place. Fits the alcove. Good mattress: not too hard, not too soft. Makes you feel rough, though, that kind of thing. Took me five years to recover. I slept in that bed last night, like a top. Yes, things come round.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alexandra, bleakly.

“Look at your looks, look at mine,” said Chrissie. “What chance did I have?”

“Looks aren’t important,” said Alexandra. “They count for very little.”

“That’s what the pretty ones always say,” said Chrissie, and laughed: haw-haw-haw. She had a deep voice, a brusque manner. You could see her breeding dogs, winning at a dog show, biting back emotion. Not Ned’s type. No wonder. But what was Ned’s type? Herself? Jenny Linden? Perhaps Ned liked only women he could despise? How would she manage to work without this apartment? She would go to a lawyer: this woman could just be trying it on. Ned would have told her, surely?