Alys, Always (26 page)

When he comes out twenty minutes later he says Polly has telephoned the Azarias in a state, and Jo has gone round to collect her and will take her to their house in Kentish Town for the night. Malcolm has promised to call with an update in the morning.

‘I’ve told him I’m serious about you,’ he says, almost as an afterthought. ‘He sounded pleased for me.’

Oh good
,
it’s out
, I think.
I can handle it from here
.

Three months later. A Sunday in Highgate. Just after noon. I sit at the kitchen table, the newspapers – marked here and there with the faint overlapping rings left by my cup of tea – spread out in front of me. I’ve just looked through the
Questioner
’s books pages with a certain amount of satisfaction. I couldn’t resist commissioning Oliver to review a new book on the history of nepotism, and to be fair to him he made a decent fist of it. I wonder whether he saw the joke.

Tiny little Robin McAllfree took me out to lunch last week. When he emailed to suggest it, he wrote, ‘Let’s keep
this between ourselves,’ and when I was shown to the table he explained he didn’t want ‘to upset Mary unnecessarily’.

She’s been spending quite a bit of time in the managing editor’s office recently: there’s some issue over her expenses, though I gather there might be more to it than that. In this climate, sadly, no one is invulnerable. She has had a good run. It’s probably time someone else had a go.

Anyway, I talked Robin through my suggestions for the pages: a column I thought had run out of puff, a few contributors worth poaching from elsewhere, and some literary names due on the promotional treadmill with whom Gemma Coke might profitably wrangle. ‘Great stuff,’ he said. ‘Keep the ideas coming. Just ping them to me as you have them. And sit tight for now.’

So, I’m sitting tight for now. There’s no hurry.

As he settled the bill he coughed into his fist, so I knew he was building up to something, and then he said, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, ‘So, this is all true, what I hear about you and Laurence Kyte?’

I said it was, and he gave me one of those funny sideways looks and said there had been stories, of course, and then he’d seen us last week at the Almeida during the interval, and he hoped it was all going well, and I smiled as if to say,
None of yours
,
thanks
, and that was how we left it.

Mary rumbled me ages ago. One morning she sidled up while I was editing an Ambrose Pritchett review and dropped that morning’s
Daily Mail
on my desk, folded back to the relevant page. It was just a small diary item headlined ‘Kiss me Kyte: second shot at happiness for tragic brainbox’: the story of our relationship boiled down to five or six sentences in which an impression of impropriety was skilfully conveyed, despite a woeful lack of evidence. There was a small picture of us, taken as we exited an Amnesty fund-raiser: Laurence’s mouth twisting as if he was saying something to me (I think
we were discussing where to go on for dinner), and his arm hovering protectively around my shoulders.

I looked at myself: the lowered eyes, the demure suggestion of a smile, the photographer’s flash bouncing off my smooth hair. The general impression of freshness and discretion. Not a bad picture, I thought.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Mary, tapping the page with a finger. ‘I’ve had my suspicions for a while now, but this seems to be conclusive proof.’

‘Oh, you can’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ I said lightly, and then I ran the cursor along the first line of Ambrose Pritchett’s review and cut it out, so that we got straight to the central argument.

Mary shot me a look in which curiosity, irritation and a sort of wary admiration were all represented, and then she picked up the paper and moved away, back to her desk.

Fortunately by this point I’d already told my parents about Laurence.

‘I’m not sure if Hester mentioned it,’ I said during my next visit, as we sat sawing away at leathery pork chops. ‘But I’ve started seeing someone. You might have heard of him, possibly.’

They had heard of him. They remembered the BBC serialisation of the first Sidney Bark with Tom Conti and Lisa Harrow; and the Crofts always said
The Ha
-
Ha
(they saw it before the Gala shut down) was very powerful, although it was a pity about all the swearing.

‘How did you meet?’ they asked, and, ‘Isn’t he much older than you?’ and I decided to address that second issue initially, and leave the first for another day.

As I talked, I could see they were daunted by the age gap, his comparatively recent bereavement and by his success, too; but I took him to meet them one weekend when we were down at Biddenbrooke, and somehow he knew exactly what
to say to them, how to put them at their ease. My mother, glazed with fright and hairspray, was in such a state of anxiety that she asked us three or four times about the drive over, but after Laurence had commented warmly on the garden, she seemed as close to effervescent as I’ve ever seen her.

‘Biddenbrooke’s such a pretty village,’ she said, passing him a paper napkin. ‘And the butcher is meant to be wonderful, if a little dear.’

He acknowledged that this was the case. There was some talk of Maggie and Brian Howard, who used to live in the village and whom he had met once at a neighbours’ drinks party, and then he said, ‘I do admire your lawn. We have awful problems with molehills, don’t we, Frances?’

As Polly once said, all those months ago, no one ever refuses her father anything, and certainly my parents gave him their approval after that.

‘What very nice people,’ Laurence said as we drove away, full of bite-size cheese scones and pastel squares of Battenberg. ‘But – do you mind me saying this? – I can hardly believe you’re related to them.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said, sitting back in the car, watching the hedgerows rush past in a multitude of greens. ‘I think I know what you mean.’

Hester’s reaction to my news, like that of Naomi and my other friends, has been rather more complicated. In part she is glad for me, glad I’m off the shelf, glad I’ve finally followed her example and have started to settle down (a phrase which always makes me think of a fat person on a sofa). My behaviour makes her and Naomi and the others feel better about their own choices, I know.

And yet I can hear in their approval and relief and advice a hint of something else: a suggestion of wonder and, yes,
almost of resentment that
I
should have ended up with such a person. Who would have thought it? What’s so special about me?

My sister and her husband came over to Highgate for supper a few weeks ago, and while Laurence humoured Charlie, asking him about sport and life in chambers, I could see Hester carefully evaluating everything from the food which Mrs King had prepared (sea bass, panna cotta) to the china, the flowers and the paintings on the walls. As I showed Hester and Charlie out at the end of the evening, as I stood in the hall with them, handing them jackets and offering them kisses, Hester hugged me with feeling, and then she stepped back, scrutinising my face, her fingers sharp for a moment on my wrists.

‘It all seems to have happened very quickly,’ she said, and there was an edge to her voice, a note of concern.

I bent to stroke the cat, who was purring and arching her back against me, and as I straightened up I said, quite truthfully, that it didn’t feel at all rushed to me.

‘Laurence seems lovely,’ she said. ‘But, well – he is a lot older than you.’

I said how funny it was to hear such a thing. After all, many people would consider me bordering on middle age. ‘It’s hardly cradle snatching,’ I added, raising an eyebrow.

‘Well, no,’ said Hester, and then she had the grace to laugh. ‘Of course not. But he has only recently lost his wife. I suppose I have to ask, are you sure? Are you sure it’s what you want?’

I told her I was, yes. ‘It is absolutely what I want,’ I said, and though she is only aware of a fraction of my ambition I could see that she believed me, and then she hugged me again and said, ‘I’m so pleased you’ve found someone who makes you happy. They do say, don’t they, that if you’ve had one very successful marriage you’re more likely to find
another relationship quickly.’ And then she asked me how his children had taken it.

After that weekend in Biddenbrooke, we mainly heard about Polly and Teddy – who would not return any of their father’s calls – through the Azarias. Jo felt responsible for the situation. When she and Malcolm came round to tell us the latest, she cried and asked for our forgiveness, turning a Kleenex over in her hands as we all sat in the rarely used sitting room, the sage-coloured room that I’d first seen filled with white blooms all those months ago. ‘I should never have said what I did to Miriam,’ she said, pressing the tissue over her eyes. ‘I betrayed your confidence, and now this has happened, the children are so upset … I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

Laurence was generous. These things happen, he said. No point dwelling on it. The only thing that mattered now was to re-establish contact with Teddy and Polly. ‘Are they both very angry with us?’ he asked.

Jo didn’t speak, but Malcolm said yes, they were. ‘Less so with Frances, I think,’ he added, as an afterthought. ‘That must be a good sign, don’t you feel?’

Reading between the lines, it was clear Polly and Teddy were most wounded – on their mother’s behalf – by the Julia Price episode. It seemed to suggest all sorts of hidden horrors, a long history of betrayal. Later, Laurence would sigh and put his head in his hands, saying the whole thing had been a dreadful mistake. ‘One slip,’ he said. ‘One slip, that’s all it took.’ I thought of the girls without names skulking in the darkness behind the fast-fading ghost of Julia Price, and I felt a prickle of contempt: both for Laurence, who imagines I do not know about them, and for Alys, who grasped only a fragment of the truth. The thought made me steely. Never again, I thought.

But as the days passed, as the Azarias had nothing new to
report, Laurence became angry too. As he fretted over what he began to see as his daughter’s intransigence and his son’s priggishness, he started to lose patience with them. I heard him on the phone to Malcolm a few weeks after the initial confrontation, and I was struck by his exasperation. ‘Oh well, if they’ve made up their minds …’ he was saying. ‘No, Malcolm, I can quite see how bloody difficult this is for you, but frankly I can’t see either of them backing down over this.’

He stood there in the white kitchen, the receiver to his ear, staring out at the garden. It was early evening, and the French windows were open, as they had been for most of the day. I could smell the wisteria – a heavy, clinging, almost narcotic scent – drifting through the house on indistinct currents of air. I went to him and put my arms around him as he listened to Malcolm and drummed his fingers on the window frame and let out little despairing exhalations, as if only just holding back from saying something which really mustn’t be said. ‘No,’ he said eventually, as if in reluctant agreement. ‘No. I take your point.’

‘I’m losing them,’ he said, when the call was ended. ‘It’s hopeless.’

‘Well, you mustn’t let them go,’ I said. ‘They’re your family. You need each other.’

‘Do we?’ he murmured, reaching for me. ‘Do we really?’

‘Of course you do,’ I said. ‘You must try to speak to them yourself.’

‘But they won’t take my calls,’ he said.

‘Well – maybe you should doorstep them. Outside their flats. Outside Polly’s college. Teddy’s gallery. Show them you really mean it.’

The suggestion was not, I could tell, very appealing, but he agreed it was worth a shot, and that Polly was probably the softer target. The next afternoon he was standing across
the street from the drama college when classes finished. She came out in the middle of a group, laughing and joking, but saw him and stopped on the kerb as he crossed the road towards her. Martin hung back, waiting for her, but she waved him on. ‘I’ll catch you up. I won’t be long,’ she said.

She told Laurence she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. She wasn’t sure whether she ever would be. She and Teddy had ‘a lot to think about’. Then, as he started to reason with her, she simply walked away, her silver satchel bumping against her hip.

He came home and told me about it, and he slammed his hand down on the kitchen table so the water slopped out of the glasses and the cutlery rattled. ‘Oh, what’s the point,’ he said. ‘She’s being ridiculous. I’ll never be able to make this right.’

I let him say it all. I let him talk about how he and Alys had overindulged both children; how they’d been encouraged, almost, to drift through life with no sense of how it really works. ‘We spoiled them both. We made things too bloody easy for them,’ he said angrily, ‘and now I’m going to have to live with the consequences.’

I listened to him as we sat there at the table, my head bent sorrowfully over my clasped hands, thumb resting on thumb, fingers knitted. Oh, it would be so easy, I thought idly. So easy to allow his resentment to build. To harbour it, stoke it, foster it through various subtle inflections.

To say things, or not say things.

But I didn’t have the heart for it. Better, I knew, to be the one to bring them back together again. Like Alys: always ready with the right words; so good at finding common ground, drawing out the best in people.

The thought of their eventual gratitude amused me.

So I listened to Laurence, and made comforting remarks
when I felt he wanted to hear them; and then, without telling him, I wrote a letter and posted it.

I met them both in my lunch break in a coffee shop near the British Museum. At first neither would make eye contact. They sat sullenly side by side on a worn black vinyl banquette and said very little. So I talked. I said the right things, as I’ve found I can, watching for the tiny signals – the sighs, the quick consultative glances, the almost imperceptible beginnings of smiles – that herald a thaw. But the signs didn’t come.

When the minute hand hit twenty past, I said how very sorry I was to have deceived them both. I said I understood that they might never be able to forgive me, but for their mother’s sake I wondered whether they could find it in their hearts to forgive Laurence, who was lost without them in his life. ‘He misses you,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how much he misses you.’