Alys, Always (10 page)

‘Not much. If I do, it’s mostly for work,’ I say.

‘Hmm,’ she says, slotting the book back in again, and coming over to take a mug. ‘Thanks. I am sorry for tipping up like this. I hope I didn’t mess up your evening.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say. I sit down in the armchair. Polly goes over to her bag. ‘Would you mind if I had a smoke?’

‘Go ahead,’ I say, wondering whether my bedroom door upstairs is open or closed. ‘And then perhaps you’ll tell me what was going on when you rang me.’

She lights her cigarette, blowing out the match and leaving it on her saucer. ‘Oh, it was just a misunderstanding,’ she says. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it. Just some arsehole.’ The blue smoke hangs in the warm air, twisting a little.

‘Right,’ I say, starting to get to my feet. It’s too late for patience. ‘Look, I’ll go and get some blankets and we can make up the sofa bed.’

‘Oh,’ she says, and I can see she’s feeling hurt. ‘Of course, I don’t want to keep you up.’

I lean back into my chair. ‘I’ve been thinking about you,’ I say, relenting a little. ‘Wondering how you’re getting on. What happened about the course?’

‘Oh – that,’ she says, savagely. ‘I’m still on it – just. I told you about Lord Strange’s Men, didn’t I? The travelling company? Sam came up with the name, it’s a reference to something or other. I wasn’t mad on it. Anyway, we’re still planning to go – in fact, we should be starting rehearsals around now – but Dad has really started interfering. He rang up Sam’s father and they’ve worked themselves up into a mutual
froth
, and now they’ve agreed to cut off our allowances if we drop out. Sam is absolutely livid. He thinks it’s
my fault somehow. If I hadn’t got involved, his dad wouldn’t have been dragged into it.’

‘That’s a bit tough,’ I say, trying to stifle a yawn.

‘Dad is being a total bastard,’ she says. ‘I can’t make anyone see it from my point of view: not him, not Teddy, not even Charlotte. It’s such a stupid mess.’ I can tell she’s thinking about her mother, about how Alys would have sorted it all out somehow, made it all good.

I imagine all her friends are getting rather tired of this routine, which is why she has ended up here. The familiar avidity surges up inside me again. I take a sip of my drink and wait.

But Polly is looking around the room again. ‘Do you live here on your own?’ she asks. I say I do. ‘It’s nice,’ she says, not really meaning it, and as she says this I see the room afresh, through her eyes: the racing-green sofa (a cast-off from Maida Vale), its stains inadequately camouflaged by a patterned throw; the combination of lamps and cushions and rugs which, rather than looking charming and eclectic, simply seem ill-assorted; and the view across the street of a little red-brick mansion block, metal-framed windows thick with nets and pulsing with blue light. There’s a burst of laughter from the kids by the chippy, and then the sound of a window being pulled open, and someone shouts, ‘It’s nearly midnight, don’t you have homes to go to?’ and then another voice yells back, ‘Get over it, wanker.’

Polly knocks her cigarette ash into her saucer and looks at me. ‘Keeping it real,’ she says.

‘Of course, it’s not Fulham,’ I say rather coldly.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ Polly asks. It’s a retaliatory question.

‘Not at the moment. Look,’ I say, moving again, ‘I think I’m going to go to bed.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ she says, in a rush. ‘I’ve got to tell someone.
And Teddy doesn’t want to hear. And Dad is – well, it wouldn’t get me anywhere. It might make things worse. But I need to talk about it. I have a right to.’

‘Tell me what?’ I say.

‘About what went on. On the day of the accident. I keep thinking about it, I can’t get it out of my head. What she must have been feeling when she drove off. That’s one reason why I was so keen to meet you when Kate Wiggins first mentioned you. I wanted to know if my mother talked to you about it, if things had been left unresolved. And then what you told us – you know, “Tell them I love them” … I knew she’d made her peace with it. But I’m not sure if I have.’

I’m feeling distinctly uneasy now, as if I’m losing my centre of gravity, as if a magnetic pole is gradually shifting position.

‘Wait a minute,’ I say. ‘I’ve just remembered something.’ I go back into the kitchen and dig around at the back of the shelves for the dusty-shouldered bottle which I bought when Hester asked me to supply the brandy butter last Christmas. How do you drink brandy? With ice? I don’t know, but there are a few cubes in a tray in the freezer, so I pop them out into two glasses and pour us both a couple of fingers.

‘Nice one,’ she says, tucking her legs up on the sofa.

‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ I say.

So she does.

It was a miserable January weekend, sleety and dour, in the post-Christmas doldrums. Polly hadn’t planned to visit her parents at Biddenbrooke but she’d had an argument with her flatmate Serena (‘something pathetic – I’d finished her milk or not taken the rubbish out’); and though she had a party to go to that evening she suspected Sandeev, the ex, might be invited too, and she couldn’t quite face him yet. So she rang
her parents on the Saturday morning, trying Alys’s mobile when the Highgate phone went unanswered.

Laurence took the call; Alys was driving. They were en route.

Alys intended to stay in Biddenbrooke till late on Sunday afternoon, and Laurence would catch the train back on Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. He had the page proofs of his new book to go through before it went off to the printers.

‘Why don’t you come?’ her father asked.

So Polly caught the train from Liverpool Street and Laurence picked her up from the station and took her back to the house.

They were too late to go for a walk that afternoon, as it was already getting dark. Instead, Laurence lit a fire in the sitting room and Polly lay on the rug in front of it and they all read the papers and ate Alys’s walnut cake and drank tea. They talked quite a lot about Teddy, recently promoted at the Sackler Gallery, where his days seemed to be spent appeasing and cutting deals with often unreliable artists and the Russians who could afford to invest in them; and they talked a little about Polly’s course, though she tried to get them off the subject. The rain and wind lashed the windows. It was nice being there, in the warmth.

At 6.30 Laurence opened some wine.

Then he went out to collect fish and chips from Biddenbrooke, and they ate their supper out of the paper wrappers, sitting around the kitchen table.

When her parents went to bed around eleven, Polly stayed downstairs, watching a movie. It finished around one. As she went upstairs and along the corridor to her room, she heard her mother talking in a low voice – though not what she was saying – and noticed the thin spill of light beneath her parents’ bedroom door. She was surprised they were still awake.

When she woke up on Sunday morning and appeared at breakfast, there was an atmosphere in the air, as insistent as the smell of burning. Something had happened. And yet you couldn’t cite anyone’s actions or remarks as evidence of it. If anything, Alys and Laurence behaved quite normally. Too normally. Laurence was as attentive to Alys as he usually was, but he was watchful, too, as if he was waiting for something. And Alys, always distracted and dreamy, seemed preoccupied, almost absent.

Polly went back to bed with a cup of tea: she had a script to learn for college. An hour or so later, she was padding around the upstairs landing, on her way to run a bath, when she heard her mother’s voice, distinct, every word freighted. The kitchen door was ajar.

‘And you can change the dedication while you’re at it,’ she was saying. It was the coldness in her voice that shocked Polly most. Alys was never cold. ‘It’s not a tribute, it’s an insult.’

Polly didn’t want to hear any more. She was used to thinking of her parents’ relationship as harmonious. Her friends had parents who were divorced: mothers who were on their second or in some cases third husbands; fathers who lived in Geneva or New York with new wives and other, younger children, some of whom were still babies or at kindergarten. But Alys and Laurence were not like this. They were a partnership. They enjoyed each other’s company. Of course they rowed from time to time, but they always laughed at each other’s jokes.

When Polly still lived at home, she liked to lie in bed at night with the door open, listening to the sound of their conversation spiralling up through the house. It made her feel safe.

This was different. It was unwelcome. It frightened her.

She went down the landing to the bathroom and started to
run the bath, and when she went back to her room to collect her shampoo, she whistled loudly just to let Alys and Laurence know she was around and within earshot. By the time she’d bathed and dried her hair, lunch was ready. A simple sort of lunch, the sort of thing Alys could always throw together without any fuss: a roast chicken, a pan of diced potatoes with rosemary, watercress salad. The atmosphere was still perhaps a little strained but as before there was nothing you could quite put your finger on. Laurence talked in passing about Nikolai Titov’s forthcoming autobiography. Alys listened, as she always did. Perhaps she spoke less than usual.

And then after lunch, when Polly looked at her watch and realised she had only twenty-five minutes before the train went, Alys volunteered to drive her to the station. It was all a rush from that point: throwing stuff in the bag; Alys unable to lay hands on the car keys and Laurence finally finding them in his overcoat pocket; an anxiety, as they drove through the narrow lanes, about whether they’d make it in time. When the Audi pulled up in the station car park, the red warning lights were flashing, the alarm was sounding, the gates across the level crossing were coming down. Polly blew her mother a kiss as she ran through the ticket office on to the platform. ‘I’ll call you!’ she shouted, over the clatter and screech of the approaching train.

Alys waved back, smiling.

That was their goodbye.

Laurence rang Polly that evening, around eleven o’clock, and told her what had happened.

‘Did you ever ask him what they had argued about?’ I ask, when the room has fallen silent.

‘No. How could I? Anyway, I only wanted to remember them together, happy. The disagreement, or whatever it was, only really came back to me when I heard about you.
Then I let myself remember. And what you told us made me feel better – that she’d made her peace with whatever had happened.
Affliction
was published and of course it was dedicated to her. Most of them are, did you know? Apart from
The Ha
-
Ha
, which he dedicated to Teddy, and
Ampersand
, which he dedicated to me. Usually he just put her name, but for
Affliction
the dedication read, “For Alys. Always.” ’

I nod as if this is news to me.

‘I think she wanted her name taken off that book,’ she says. ‘And I don’t know why.’

‘Well,’ I say, sitting back; I’ve been leaning forward, listening and thinking hard. A siren wails louder and louder, then fades away as a police car speeds past the end of the street. ‘It was just one of those things, wasn’t it? It doesn’t sound very serious.’

‘It doesn’t
sound
like it,’ agrees Polly, looking down into her empty glass. ‘But something had happened. Something which my mother was taking seriously. Still – I’m glad you heard her say what she did. I can’t tell you how much it helps.’

I look at my watch. It’s nearly 1 a.m.

Together we take the throw and the cushions off the sofa, and tug out the bed frame, and then I help her to make up the mattress with some clean sheets. I give her a pillow and a blanket from my bedroom, and a T-shirt to sleep in, and I offer her a spare toothbrush, but there’s one in the interior pocket of her silver satchel. ‘It’s nothing to do with being a dirty stop-out,’ she says, though I feel free to draw my own conclusions about that. ‘I’m a bit OCD about my teeth.’

I say good night and leave her to it, clicking off the light on the landing and starting to climb the stairs.

‘Frances?’ she calls.

I go back and open the door wider, and she’s sitting up in
bed, the sheet pulled tight over her knees. ‘Can you leave the hall light on?’ she asks. ‘I’m not very good in the dark.’

I sleep very badly, disturbed by noises that are part of the usual nocturnal soundscape: people arguing in the street, the double blip of car alarms being deactivated, the yowl of cats and, more distantly, foxes. My bedroom curtains slowly fill and empty with breaths of air. The harsh orange of the street lamps gradually gives way to a softer, pearlier light.

Finally, my neighbours’ days begin. I listen to the familiar sounds of sash windows being pushed open and the burble of radio phone-ins, the lunatic fanfare of Saturday cartoons.

When I go downstairs and peer into the sitting room, Polly is still asleep in the dimness. She is stretched out on her side, her long pale legs kicked free of the sheet, one hand under her flushed cheek. On the table, a light pulses on her mobile.

I’m eating toast at the kitchen counter when she comes in, yawning, still pink and dishevelled, expressing amazement and satisfaction that she doesn’t have more of a hangover. I push a cup of tea over to her as she checks her phone. It’s a message from Laurence.

‘He’s asking me to come over for lunch,’ she says, rubbing sleep out of her eyes with her palm. ‘It’s some sort of summit. Brilliant. Another bollocking.’ She sighs and slides on to the stool opposite me. Her bare toes – orange polish – grip the chrome bar like a chimp’s.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘Maybe this is an opportunity. Maybe you can use this to get a concession from him. Engineer things a little.’

She looks at me blankly.

‘Oh, come on,’ I say, impatiently. ‘You want to skip college and go off with Sam for a bit. He wants you to stick at the course. Can’t you meet in the middle somewhere?’

‘How would that work?’ she’s asking, aggrieved. ‘He’s made up his mind, and if I don’t do what he wants, he’ll stop my allowance.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘But I’ve been thinking, what about if you managed to convince Tony Bamber, or whoever, that you needed a break from the course? Just temporarily – maybe for a year, or even just a term? I’m sure because of your circumstances they’d consider it. Compassionate leave, isn’t that what they call it? So you’d have a sort of sabbatical, which would allow you and Sam to go off and do your tour … and then you’d be able to go back to the course once you’d got the other thing out of your system.’