Alys, Always (16 page)

‘Kate Wiggins, the police officer who arranged the first meeting between me and Laurence and Polly and Teddy, that time when you were there – she told me that witnesses who meet the bereaved families often find it helpful,’ I say as we trudge towards the sea, towards the three figures up ahead, who are now stopping and dropping their big cotton bags on the sand. The horizon is nothing more than a vague suggestion where an indeterminate sky meets an indeterminate sea. ‘I suppose I realised I had something to offer them when they had lost so much. Yes, getting to know Polly has helped me, I suppose.’

She looks at me then and gives me an understanding smile: a quick burst of sympathy and warmth. ‘Alys was always good at taking people in,’ she says. ‘She was a very welcoming sort of person. It’s lovely that her family has been so welcoming to you.’

We reach the sea. The sand slopes down into a glittering band of shingle which is scattered with driftwood and dark blistered ribbons of seaweed, and the waves are sluicing over it, greedily sucking and tugging on the pebbles, making them rattle.

Laurence has left his clothes in a heap by his sandals and is already wading out with Polly. I watch their spare figures bending and leaping as the waves crash into them and then they vanish into the wall of water, their sleek heads eventually appearing in the shifting surge of surf behind. I pull my dress over my head and drop it on the sand, and run in after them – away from Charlotte Black and her sharp alarming interest, her speculative gaze.

Honor is on edge for the rest of the afternoon. She’s very short with Teddy, whose efforts to appease her appear to be having quite the opposite effect. No, she doesn’t want to
walk into Biddenbrooke for a drink at the King’s Arms; no, she doesn’t want a game of tennis, a swim in the pool or a cup of tea. I’m in my room getting dressed after my shower and my door is slightly ajar so I hear his voice from the other end of the corridor, low, imploring; and then hers rings out sharp as a whip: ‘Oh, can’t you just give it a rest?’ Then a door slams shut.

When I go downstairs someone is moving stealthily around the living room. As I push the door wider open there’s a sudden movement, and then I find Selma stagily examining the black and ochre abstract over the fireplace – leaning close, then backing away from it, head tilted to one side – in the self-conscious manner of a guest who knows she’s not entirely welcome.

‘Can I help with anything?’ she asks, when I say I’m just going to start on supper. I say there’s nothing to do, it’s all cold stuff which just needs to be plated up. Does she want a drink? She says she is happy to wait until the others come down. Then she sinks into one of the gold sofas, murmuring about feeling ‘terribly spoilt’. I wonder what she was getting up to before I came in. Flicking through the postcards and invitations on the mantelpiece, perhaps? Nosing about in his collection of Pevsners? Of course, she’ll really have her eye on the photograph albums, but I doubt she’ll have the nerve.

In the kitchen I put glasses and cutlery on a large tray, ready to be taken outdoors, and find the clean napkins which Mrs Talbot has ironed. I’m just making a salad when Honor appears in lots of eye make-up and a rather tight pale green dress which I haven’t seen before. Without saying anything she goes to the fridge and pulls out a lemon and a bottle of tonic. ‘Want a sharpener?’ she asks, sloshing Gordon’s into a tumbler and then reaching into the freezer for the ice cubes.

I say I’ll pass for now.

She drinks down her first glass very quickly and then makes another: again, almost as much gin as fizz.

‘Oh. That’s better,’ she says, leaning back against the counter, pressing the cold glass to her temple. ‘I need a bit of reinforcement tonight. Back to London tomorrow.’

‘Of course, you’re off to the US soon,’ I say, pouring olive oil and vinegar into a cup.

‘Well, I think my time here’s probably up anyway,’ she says. ‘Me and Teddy – looks like it’s run out of steam, really.’ She sighs pragmatically, pulls herself up on to the counter and sits there, ankles neatly crossed, looking down into her glass.

‘Ah,’ I say neutrally. ‘Does Teddy feel the same?’

‘Probably not,’ she says. The ice cubes chink as she lifts the glass again. ‘But
tant pis
, right? No sense flogging a dead horse.’

Polly appears then and Honor slopes off again, glass in hand. I hear her laughing rather wildly in the hall with Charlotte, and then there’s a hush as they go through into the sitting room. ‘Silly cow,’ says Polly, ripping clingfilm off the lentil salad while I fetch the dish of cold roast chicken which Mrs Talbot has left for us in the fridge. ‘Poor old Teddy. He may not have seen it coming but the rest of us did.’

It turns out that Polly has been so bored this afternoon that she has spent ages decorating the table on the terrace. I’ve never known her to concentrate on anything for any length of time, so the spectacle takes me by surprise. She has put out a white damask tablecloth and the ancient gold-edged Spode which usually lives in the sideboard in the dining room. There are jam jars crammed with lavender and blowsy roses arranged between the candle lanterns at either end. When I follow her out with some salads, she stands
back, arms complacently crossed, admiring it and, to a lesser degree, my reaction.

I don’t say anything, but the weather isn’t on our side. Because of the motionless grey sky the daylight seems to be fading earlier and faster than usual; the flares which Polly has lit along the paths and set out on the terrace steps are burning with a smoky intensity, creating strange leaping shadows at the edges of the garden. It’s still very hot: sticky and airless.

‘Oh – how pretty!’ says Selma, when we call everyone out to eat.

Teddy, drawn and distant, sits next to Charlotte. Polly grabs the chair on her other side. I’m left to slide in between Selma and Honor. While the salads and the rolls are passed around, I see Honor nudging her empty glass towards Laurence, who is opening another bottle of white. ‘Do tell me how far you’re getting with your new project,’ I hear her saying.

While Selma begins to steer us towards the subject of her recent divorce I nod and look stricken on her behalf, but really I’m concentrating on the conversation Laurence and Honor are having on my right, with all its false steps and misapprehensions and dead ends. Honor really must be completely off her face already, I think, because Laurence’s reluctance seems barely to register with her. She just keeps on at him, her fingers toying with the horseshoe on its silver chain, drawing attention to the length and shape of her neck.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ she’s asking, and, ‘What would you have done if you hadn’t become a writer?’ and, ‘Do you use a word processor or do you prefer pens and stuff?’ and, ‘Do you have, like, a routine when you work?’

She’s asking the questions you’re never meant to ask and now he’s actually giving in, he’s taking her seriously, he’s starting to answer them. I hear him lowering his voice and
out of the corner of my eye I see him spreading his hands expansively, and I think:
Oh no
,
he’s confiding in her
,
he’s enjoying it a little
.
She’s actually making some headway
.

And in the meantime, here I am, stuck with Selma and the dreary story of Steven Carmichael’s midlife crisis and the charity motorbike rally around South America from which he never returned, instead falling in love with a girl from Chile and taking up a position in Santiago as a TEFL teacher. I could scream. But I don’t. I just nod slowly and frown and nod slowly again, while doing my best to eavesdrop. I hate hearing Laurence talking like this, but at the same time I’m unable to tear myself away.

Honor is crunching through a stick of celery and asking, ‘And was Daniel Day-Lewis, you know, really
intense
?’ when I hear Selma say, ‘So, Frances, are you happy where you are?’

For a moment I can’t think what she means, and I sit there with a fork in my hand, gazing at her blankly, hoping for clues; and then I realise that she’s trying to find out how I feel about the
Questioner
. So I say that apart from the general air of uncertainty, I’m not exactly unhappy there: Mary’s a decent person to work for, I’m interested in books, I like most of our contributors.

She pops a piece of bread into her mouth and says, ‘Because I’m about to start looking for a new deputy, there’s going to be an opening, and I was wondering whether you’d be interested in applying.’

‘Me? Really?’ I say. ‘Because I’m not all that experienced, really. I mean, I’ve been subbing the pages for ages, and commissioning and editing the odd thing, working with writers quite closely, but I’ve only really been writing for Mary for a few months.’

‘Oh, I know all that,’ says Selma, spooning some cucumber salad on to her plate. ‘But you’re a safe pair of hands, that’s obvious enough. Only last week Audrey Callum was
singing your praises. You know how it works, you’ve clearly got the contacts. Well, why don’t you think about it.’

‘I will,’ I say. ‘Gosh. Thanks. I will.’ Then I accept the bowl of cucumber salad and help myself, and then I turn to pass it to Honor. But she’s distracted; she’s leaning away from me, resting her cheek on her hand, staring up at Laurence. I can’t see the expression on her face but really I don’t need to: this has been building for some days, like the break in the weather.

I wonder what Teddy makes of it. When I glance over at him, I see he has a bright artificial smile on his face as he pretends to enjoy a story Charlotte is telling about an Australian author she had lunch with last week, a story which makes Polly double up with laughter. All the drama on the other side of the table seems to be passing her by. No surprises there, then.

Poor Laurence, I think, as Honor tilts her glass, inviting a refill, which flashes green-gold in the candlelight. He doesn’t have a clue. For a clever man, he really is rather stupid. He can’t resist Honor’s attention tonight; he’s dazed by the velocity of her interest. And of course she’s young and terribly pretty.

So he sits there, eating salad and cold chicken, talking in a rather sheepish voice about the habit he has of mapping out plots using different coloured Post-its; about ‘the legwork’ mostly getting done first thing and in the late afternoon; about his early superstitious devotion to American legal pads, which he stockpiled whenever he went to the US, and how much easier things are now he’s used to a Mac. ‘I never quite know how novels begin,’ he’s saying now. ‘Sometimes you start with a sentence. Sometimes it’s something you hear someone say. Or maybe you get stuck on an image, an image that holds your interest for some reason, and you can’t work
out why, and then you realise you have to write about it to find out what it means.’

I don’t want to hear this. There’s no magic in what he’s saying. It’s as if someone has let the genie out of the bottle, only it’s not a genie, it’s just some stale, sour-smelling air.

I scrape my fork across my plate.

It’s almost a relief when Honor, making some big encapsulating gesture, knocks over her water glass. The wet races steadily across the damask. ‘Whoops!’ she says, giggling and pushing her chair backwards, sending her knife skittering on to the brick beneath. When she stands up, she weaves a little on her heels.

‘Oh, for God’s sake …’ says Teddy, unable not to.

‘It’s only a bit of water,’ she hisses at him. Polly’s staring at her now, nose wrinkled in distaste.

‘I really think you should try to eat something,’ I say in a low voice, trying to catch Honor’s arm, and I see Laurence – the spell broken – swiftly glancing over at me, noticing my intervention and grateful for it; but she ignores me, she’s giddy with relief at the public break with Teddy, and she’s full of adrenalin because of all the attention from his father, the Great Man himself. She thinks she’s flying. I’m fairly sure she’s crashing, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.

Now Laurence is standing up too, his sleeve dark with water. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he says with a rather stiff smile, pulling his chair back and crossing the terrace.

It seems obvious that the first course is over. Selma and Charlotte and I start to collect the plates while Polly and Teddy walk off down the lawn between the flaming torches, their pale heads close together.

‘Oh dear,’ says Charlotte, pausing to watch them. ‘ “Take Honor from me and my life is done.” ’

‘Do you think she’s
on
something?’ Selma is whispering excitedly. ‘She seems rather high.’

Honor has vanished. The sky over the copper beech is darkening to lavender now, the colour of half-mourning. Rain is on its way. I wonder whether there’s any point in bringing out my apple tart, the neatly fanned slices glazed with apricot jam. It took me hours to make it look beautiful and now no one will notice it.

I pick up the stack of gold-deckled plates and go indoors.

All the lights are off in the hall, and I can’t switch them on because my hands are full. But as I pass from the soft oriental rugs of the sitting room on to the hallway parquet, I look up and see Laurence and Honor at the top of the stairs, lit by the little red-shaded lamp which stands on the table there. For a moment I can’t work out exactly what’s happening, I hear only the indistinct murmur of their voices. Then there’s a flash of sudden movement. I see he’s shrinking away from her, his hands raised in a gesture of apology, of helplessness, possibly of fear, while she tries angrily to catch his wrists. ‘You do, I know you do,’ she’s saying, and then she’s craning up towards him, reaching for his face, pulling it towards her, and he’s pushing down her hands, breaking away, walking off towards his room, not saying anything.

I wait in the shadows, half-expecting her to follow him, but she doesn’t. She stands there for a moment or two as if indecisive and then I hear her going into the room she shares with Teddy, and the door closes.

I’m in the kitchen, rinsing cutlery under the tap, when she puts her head around the door. ‘Do you know any taxi numbers?’ she asks. Her cheeks are faintly flushed, but otherwise she looks quite normal.

I find the little cards which are kept in one of the dresser drawers, along with the string and candle stubs and plasters and the big box of cooks’ matches, and then I hear her booking a cab ‘as soon as possible, please. I’ve got to catch the nine fifty.’