Alys, Always (12 page)

A girl with a green glass necklace is standing in the doorway with Hamish and they’re arguing about something, and then they’re kissing. Some people start to dance, and Tom is there with them, attempting a flashy humorous little sequence of steps – jazz hands, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrates – and then he looks around to see whether people are watching. Whether I’m watching.

A little later, I go into the kitchen to get my bag and find Tom and Sol slicing up giant wheels of delivery pizza, and then Sol takes the stack of flat damp boxes into the next room and I’m alone with him, and it’s suddenly very quiet, despite the noise of the music and laughter from the corridor, and he comes up close and looks at me and says, ‘Frances,’ and I know what’s going to happen next, and I don’t want it to, I don’t want him, the thought now fills me with a kind of horror, so I wait until there’s absolutely no room left for doubt and then I step back. ‘No, sorry, that wouldn’t be a good idea,’ I say, raising my palms, making
another barrier between us. ‘Really, don’t take this the wrong way, but …’

And I leave, in quite a hurry, anxious to get out of there: away from Tom, his flat, his drunk friends.

When I see him at work the following week, we are cordial and a little bit cool with each other, and that’s as far as it goes.

A month or so later, I hear he’s seeing the new work-experience girl on the magazine. People giggle about it at the tea trolley. He’s quite an operator, they say.

The weather holds. For weeks, it seems, I’ve been sleeping under just a sheet. When I wake in the morning, just before my alarm goes off, I throw the sheet down over the bottom of the mattress, so it billows and pools over the floorboards. I lie there, hands at my side, and watch the light blooming and shifting on the ceiling, pitted with the interruption of leaves.

Mary gets very ratty as August approaches. Her children start ringing her up as soon as she arrives at the office, asking her where the bicycle pump is, telling her one of the dogs ran off in the park or there’s no loo paper in any of the loos.

Plus Oliver has booked a fortnight off (Sardinia: he’s wangled a travel freebie), and then I’m away for two weeks, and somehow the pages have still got to come out.

On top of all that, Ambrose Pritchett has gone AWOL owing twelve hundred words on a controversial new biography of Sturges Hardcastle.

From my desk, I can see the little men in the crane cockpits: remote mysterious figures alone in the moving air, high over London. The city is white-hot, hard to look at. The pale dusty skies seem to go on for ever.

When Mary asks whether I could do a rush job reviewing the Hardcastle, I say no problem.

She glances up at me. There’s something in her expression which you might almost mistake for warmth. ‘What would I do without you,’ she says breezily.

Oliver sits silent at his terminal, head down, a mime of industry. He has cut back on the stagey phone calls and now slopes off for a smoke with Sasha from Fashion only twice a day.

I often see him edging anxiously into the knots of people puzzling over the latest memo from Human Resources. These emails are extremely long and involved, banging on about synergies and platforms and tasking and traction, but no one around the tea trolley really knows what any of these words mean. No one really knows anything at all. The one certainty is that the heads of department are going through a ‘consultation process’ during which ‘the strengths and weaknesses of their teams will be assessed’.

Tiny little Robin McAllfree paces his glass office like a prisoner, waving his arms and shouting at the HuRe gorillas seated around his groovy Perspex desk. We know they’ve only been invited up so he can put on this floor show.

‘All this for us?’ murmurs the comment editor, passing on his way to the printer. ‘What a prick.’

In low voices we talk about how ridiculous it is, and then we go home and eat and sleep and eat and come in again, and the days roll on. Sometimes it feels as if nothing will ever change.

One afternoon Mary drops a card on my desk. It’s an invite to the launch of a poetry magazine. She can’t go herself – she has promised to take Leo to the new X-Men movie – but some quite big names are on the board and we might get a diary story out of it. ‘Only if you haven’t got anything else on,’ she says.

From time to time, I’m thrown these so-called perks, like a bear at the zoo being chucked a stale bun. I don’t have high
hopes for this one – there’s no money in poetry, so it’ll be cheap bottled beer and CostCo crisps rather than rationed fizz and canapés – but it’s being held in Bloomsbury in a guild with an Arts and Crafts hall, and I’ve always wanted to see the interior.

There’s no one at the door and the room is already pretty full by the time I get there, so I sidle in and wander around the edge of the space, looking at the span of the beams, the stained glass, the way the light falls on the long waxed floorboards. The speeches are just about to begin when there’s a small stir of interest around the entrance and Laurence comes in, deep in conversation with beaky Audrey Callum, one of Mary’s contributors. I turn away as if to examine the list of the Fallen, not wanting him to see me here, alone; and as I do so I notice a young woman in a blue dress, a woman with a streak of white in her dark hair. I notice her particularly because of the way she notices him.

Without dropping a beat, somehow without really disconnecting from the conversation she is having with two older men, she transfers – and it’s only for a moment, a fraction of a moment – all her energy to Laurence, over there on the other side of the room. I feel her anxiety and the pitch of her anticipation. It signals itself in the way she returns to her companions, applying herself fully to their discussion, laughing and nodding and raking a hand through the tangle of black curls. The white flashes like the beam of a lighthouse.

I remember her brushing past me in the Kytes’ hall on the day of Alys’s memorial service. I remember the pale stunned look on her face.

I stay at the back of the room during the speeches. Afterwards the party relaxes again, given a new lease of life, and Laurence is claimed by a group next to the platform. I’ve lost track of the young woman in the blue dress. I’m on the point
of leaving when Audrey Callum recognises me and comes over to find out more about the dreadful atmosphere at the
Questioner
as it goes down the tubes. ‘Well, they’d be mad to get rid of you,’ she says. ‘You’re an asset to that desk. I’ve told Mary.’

Eventually I extricate myself and leave my glass on a side table, stepping out into the hot evening. In the square, the light is just going out of the trees but the pavements are still blood-warm underfoot. The cars parked along the railings are sticky with lime pollen.

I’m walking along the square towards the bus stop when I hear a low voice in the garden, and then another. One of the voices is Laurence’s. I see a flash of white through the leaves as she turns on her heel and comes out of the garden, the iron gate clanging behind her.

Mary expects gossip, so I bring it to her. Thanks to Audrey Callum I have some decent stories, though they are all unprintable. I tell her about the air-con scion who has sunk cash into the project as a tax dodge; I pass on a rumour about the editor’s proclivities.

‘Anyone there?’ she asks.

‘Laurence Kyte. I didn’t get a chance to say hello,’ I say. ‘He was talking to an interesting-looking person, a girl with black hair, with a streak of white. Rather dramatic-looking. Do you know who that is?’

Mary is tapping away at her keyboard. ‘Julia Price,’ she says. ‘Oh, she’s quite the thing, Julia Price.’

At lunchtime, when all the desks around me are empty, when everyone has hurried out to the concrete plaza in front of the office to eat their sandwiches on the scratchy circle of grass, I google Julia Price.

What I read makes my heart sink, just a little.

I haven’t made any definite plans for my fortnight’s holiday. I’m intending, finally, to paint the sitting-room shelves, and there seems to be a general understanding that I’ll visit my parents for a night or two, but otherwise my diary is clear. So I text Polly to ask whether I can come and watch Lord Strange’s Men performing. According to the email she sent me a while back, they might be in Worthing next week, or Eastbourne.

She rings me on the Thursday evening when I’ve come in from work and says it’s all off: the play was a disaster, the whole thing has been shelved. Pandora started seeing a new boyfriend who invited her to the South of France at the last minute; Ben got glandular fever; and when the rest of them looked into it, they realised that they needed ‘permits and stuff’.

‘And so Sam said it was time to rethink,’ says Polly. ‘He felt his artistic vision was being kind of compromised? It’s such a shame.’ She doesn’t sound too bothered. I imagine Sam is consoling himself with his allowance.

‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘I’m in Biddenbrooke. If you’re around, why don’t you come down for a bit next week? There’s lots of room.’ Over the phone I can hear the acoustics of the space around her: expansiveness, high ceilings.

Why not, I say. I’d love to.

The village is under friendly occupation when I drive through it in the late afternoon. In the lengthening blue shadows cast by the flint church and the graveyard yews, holidaymakers and second-homers picnic and throw balls on the green. Beneath the teashop parasols, most tables are busy. The women in print sundresses with oilcloth shoppers
at their feet; the men in long baggy khaki shorts with lots of pockets. Every child wears a stripy T-shirt.

The Kytes’ house, Nevers, is at the far end of the village, off the Welbury Road, a couple of miles from the sea. I drive past an old red phone box almost entirely hidden by sprays of cow parsley, and a couple of cyclists sprawled on a grassy verge, draining their water bottles, and then I turn off and follow the pebbly track down through a fenced meadow full of sheep, the sun in my eyes. An olive-green gate, propped open with a rock. Gravel skirls under the wheels.

It’s a small Edwardian country house, or maybe a large villa: part brick, part flint, gabled ends, entirely unpretentious. It’s not a beautiful building but it has a solidity that makes it nearly handsome.

I park the car up against the knackered-looking outhouses, next to an old Saab and a white Mini that must surely belong to Polly, and just sit there for a moment, watching the hollyhocks nodding in the breeze. It’s very quiet, apart from the murmur of the wood pigeons. There are croquet mallets lying on the lawn, and here and there beneath the hydrangeas I can see the red, blue, green and yellow of the wooden balls, planets frozen in orbit.

The front door is locked and has the look of something seldom used. I don’t want to ring the bell so I sling my bag over my shoulder and walk around to the side of the house, through a brick arch, and on to another lawn, which is dominated, some distance from the terrace, by the spread of a copper beech. Three empty deckchairs are set out beneath it. A litter of books and teacups and suncreams and wineglasses fills the grass.

‘It’s Frances, isn’t it?’ says a voice behind me. I turn around and see Honor stepping out of the house’s dim interior, twisting the rope of her hair in front of her, so the water runs out of it and drips on to the brick. She is wearing a
pink vest and a short stripy cotton skirt, tight on the hips and then flaring out in frivolous little pleats. ‘Polly said you were coming down, but she didn’t say you were arriving today.’

She probably doesn’t mean to sound unwelcoming, I think.

‘Well, that was always the plan,’ I say, smiling. ‘You must be Honor. Where is she?’

‘At the pool, last time I saw her,’ says Honor, twisting the rope again. ‘I came in for a shower: it’s my turn to do supper. I hope there’s enough for four.’

As if I am at a sufficient disadvantage, she now makes a few slim concessions. She says she’d show me my room, only Polly hasn’t told her where I’m going. ‘Do you want a swim? It’s down there, through the orchard,’ she says, pointing. ‘The gate’s in the wall.’ If I want to change, there’s a cloakroom and lots of spare swimming towels in the cupboard.

I follow her indoors, through a long cool sitting room: a piano, books, copper bowls of alabaster eggs, a pair of sofas – their cushions dented with evidence of leisure – facing each other in front of a generous fireplace over which hangs an abstract oil in ochre and black. The cloakroom is off the hall, full of bootjacks and waxed coats with corduroy collars. When I’ve changed into my swimming costume and folded up my clothes and shoved them in my bag, Honor is nowhere to be seen, so I wrap the towel around my waist and retrace my steps into the slanting golden sunshine, then pick my way barefoot down the lawn.

Edged with smooth curves of silver foliage spiked with foamy flurries of white, the lawn gives way to the longer grass and lusher shade of the orchard: the apple trees, which Malcolm Azaria mentioned at the memorial service. They’re venerable, stooping trees, probably older than the house.

A brick wall runs along the edge of the orchard, radiating
the stored heat of the day, and in the middle of it, between two espaliered pears, there’s a gate. I unlatch it.

There’s no one in the pool or around it. The sunloungers with their bold print cushions are empty. An orange towel lies in a tangle over the flagstones, which are splashed with water around the shallow end, proof that someone has emerged from it fairly recently; but the footprints lead into a bright patch of sunshine and vanish.

The rectangle of water stretches ahead of me, a calm holy blue snagged with the smallest circle of wrinkles where an insect is floundering. I drop my towel over a chair and stand at the edge with the sun on my back, watching my shadow flying over the pale mosaic, the random neon geometry of sunlight far below. Then I take a breath and dive in.

It’s cold, very cold, and the shock forces me to the surface, but already I’m becoming accustomed to it, and I start to swim, fiercely at first. I do a few fast lengths of crawl, pushing hard through the water, feeling my chest starting to tighten, then I slacken the pace and turn on my back and float, enjoying the cool suck and slide of the water as the activity leaves it.