Alys, Always (5 page)

Polly stops and stares at me. ‘No. No, of course you don’t.
It’s ridiculous, but somehow I feel as if you know everything already.’

She tucks my arm back into hers and starts to walk again. The shoes I bought for the occasion are soaking up the rain; it’s hard to navigate puddles when you’re being marched along like this. I feel as if I’m being swept up by the sheer force of her personality.

‘It’s pretty shit, I guess,’ she says, as lightly as she can manage. ‘People tell me it takes a long time to get used to something like this, let alone get over it … As if that will
ever
happen. Some mornings I wake up feeling OK about stuff, and then there’s this horrible moment when I remember. It’s like falling.’ Her voice trails off.

‘I think about her all the time,’ she says, bleakly, eventually. ‘Wish I could tell her stuff. Ask her things.’

We’re going up the drive now. The gravel skitters away under our feet. As we come up the steps into the warmth, we’re met by a man in a white jacket who takes our coats and the umbrella and retreats with them into one of the rooms off the corridor. A tray of glasses is set out on the hall table. Polly takes a flute of champagne. ‘Really?’ she says disbelievingly, when I choose orange juice.

A group of people comes into the hall behind us in a burst of wind and raindrops. Mary Pym is among them, her hair slightly coarsened by the weather. She starts to prink in the hall mirror, and then catches sight of me over her shoulder.

‘Oh!’ she says, turning around. ‘Frances! What a surprise to see you here.’

I smile at her politely as Polly pulls at my sleeve. ‘Come on,’ she urges, bored by the new arrivals. ‘I’ve got to get something from my room, it won’t take a minute.’

‘See you later,’ I say to Mary as I follow Polly’s slender little figure up the oatmeal-coloured stairs.

We ascend, passing on the half-landing a door, just ajar,
permitting a glimpse of Laurence’s study: a bright, barely furnished room, a dinosaur of an old Mac on a trestle table, an ugly office chair, white blinds at the window, walls lined with books, with more piled along the skirting.

Up again, past the jumbled tilting frames of old
Private Eye
cartoons and Ravilious prints and artwork for various novels in French and German translations, past a bathroom with a rolltop bath, a snatched impression of an airing cupboard luxuriously stashed with fat white towels, past a shut door – the master bedroom? – and on, as the staircase narrows, up to the top floor, illuminated by an enormous rooflight smeared with drizzle.

Polly’s room is painted robin’s-egg blue. A string of chilli-pepper fairy lights is looped around the barley-sugar twists of her white bed. There’s a poster for a Théâtre de Complicité show tacked to a pinboard, along with some curling strips of Photo-Mes, old Glastonbury and Latitude passes and a handful of postcards: Botticellis, a Tracey Emin sketch of a shoe, one of Sargent’s self-possessed socialites, leaning back complacently against some upholstery.

She closes the door and takes a packet of Camels out of the chest of drawers. Then she pushes open the window, letting in the cold, drags a knitted throw off her bed and over her shoulders, and sits down on the ledge. ‘Want one?’ she asks, waving the packet towards me. I shake my head.

‘Do you still live here?’ I say, idly moving to her dressing table, my eyes quickly going to the framed photograph standing there among the little tubs and bottles, the dishes of hair clips and scented erasers and novelty lip balms, the detritus of a childhood which she is evidently not ready to leave behind quite yet.

So she says, no, she’s living in Fulham with a friend from school. She tells me about drama college, how she wanted nothing more than to get in, and now she’s actually there it’s
a bit of a disappointment, frankly. Since Alys died, it seems, she hasn’t really been turning up much. Her course tutor phoned her last week, and she had to agree to go in and see him next Tuesday. ‘Fucker better cut me some slack,’ she says, breathing a steady plume of smoke into the wet trees.

All the time, while I’m making little sounds of agreement and sympathy, I’m examining the photograph on the dresser. Alys is sitting on a shingly beach, wearing flip-flops and a sunshine-yellow sundress, her hair blowing over her face. Strong square shoulders, swimmers’ shoulders. Her mouth is opening as if she’s about to say something funny to the photographer.

Where Laurence is dark, she is fair: the silvery sort of fairness that Polly has inherited. The sort of fairness that makes me think of birch woods.

So there you are
, I think, meeting Alys’s gaze.
There you are
.

Polly taps her ash into the windowbox and sips her drink. Now she’s telling me about Sandeev. She dumped him before Christmas, she explains, and of course I sit tight and nod, even though I know, from the commiserating comments on Facebook, that it didn’t happen quite like that.

It was the right thing to do, she says, sighing, it wasn’t going anywhere, and they haven’t seen each other since the split, but he rang when he heard the news – he was incredibly upset, he and Alys always got on like a house on fire – and he might be coming today. He couldn’t make the memorial because he was on shift but he said he’d come afterwards if he could.

Polly’s very young, of course; and on top of that she has the performer’s transparent and somehow rather tawdry desire for attention. She is entirely at ease talking about herself, as if it’s her birthright to be heard. That’s good. She has hardly noticed how uneven the conversation is. That’s good, too.

Her cheeks hollowing effortfully, she takes a final drag,
pings the butt out into the street and pulls the sash window down with a clatter. ‘I like being with you,’ she says slowly, as if the thought is just occurring to her. ‘Everyone else seems to want to tell me how I should be feeling – “You’re feeling guilty because you always gave her the runaround”, “You’re feeling lost because she kept you on the straight and narrow”, blah blah fucking blah – but you don’t do that.’

‘Any time,’ I say. ‘Really, Polly, I’m always here if you want to talk. I hope you’ll remember that.’

‘Mmm,’ she says. She’s at the dressing table, rooting around for a tube of mascara. ‘Didn’t bother before the church,’ she says, holding still, raptly intent on her reflection. ‘Didn’t want panda eyes. I think I’ll be all right now.’ She pokes the wand back into the tube, sprays some scent into the air, steps into the cloud of vapour, and then moves to the door. The room is full of cigarette smoke and tuberose. ‘Shall we?’ she says.

There are jolly knots of people exchanging gossip in the hall; they break off respectfully when they see Polly coming down the stairs. Murmuring apologies, a woman edges past us, shouldering her way into her coat, and as she goes I notice the pallor of her face, the white flash at her temple.

In the kitchen, waiters are manoeuvring themselves through the crowd with polite difficulty, offering top-ups and hot little snacks: angels on horseback, sausages jumbled around bowls of English mustard.

Polly sails off without a farewell, claimed by the Azarias.
Fair
-
weather friend
, I think, not at all surprised.

I move through the room without any sense of destination, listening to people talking in low tones about the family, how they’re bearing up, the terrible hole in everyone’s lives. ‘It’s such an appalling
shock
,’ people say, over and over again. And, ‘You never know what’s around the corner.’
This may be a literary crowd but at times like these everyone resorts to the commonplace, I suppose.

Alys’s mother is sitting in a chair by the French windows, with the cat on her lap, talking to Charlotte Black and someone from McCaskill. The garden beyond her, invisible on my first visit, is still in its winter disarray, but is charming nonetheless. A robin, a sequence of tiny clockwork movements, is pecking at something on the brick path which winds down, between the curves of hedges and bony-looking fruit trees, to a summerhouse.

I can imagine the two of them out there in the summer evenings, sitting on the wooden bench, bare feet in the warm grass, faces tilted blindly to the last of the day’s sun.

‘Twice a week, rain or shine,’ an elderly woman is saying, and I notice the golden Labrador sitting patiently at her feet, the reflective band of the harness. ‘She had such a lovely voice. So expressive. She did marvellous things with Edith Wharton.’

‘Hello,’ says Teddy, in passing. ‘How are you?’ But he doesn’t wait for an answer. A pretty girl with a serious expression is waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. When they kiss hello, she puts her hand on his forearm and leaves it there for an extra beat while she comes out with one of those useful sympathetic clichés. I can see that kiss might just be the beginning of something.

She is, I’m fairly sure, someone’s daughter, the child of one of the playwrights or critics around me, mindlessly refuelling on wine and oysters. A family friend.

I watch her – the messy ponytail, the lankiness, the string of plastic beads, the expression on her face – and something’s bugging me. She reminds me of someone. Who is it? It’s almost there, just coming within reach, when Laurence steps backwards, holding an empty glass, and knocks me lightly with an elbow. He swings around, apologising. For a moment
he is, I can tell, unable to put a name to my face. I see myself through his eyes: pale, nondescript, as dull as my clothes. No one in particular.

‘Frances,’ I say, helpfully.

‘Of course, of course,’ he says. Clearly, he didn’t know I was invited. ‘Good of you to come.’

‘I found the service terribly moving,’ I say, looking up at him, noting the grey planes under his eyes, the looseness around his collar. ‘And it was lovely to be able to spend some time with Polly.’ Some distance behind him, Mary Pym is cosying up to the host of a radio books show, but I can see her attention has now shifted to Laurence, and to me. I lean forward and say, ‘Let me get that for you,’ and then I dab something – possibly some mustard, possibly a bit of lint – off his sleeve.

‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’m afraid I’m due somewhere else,’ I say. ‘I’m late already. I just wanted to make sure I spoke to you, to say how touched I was to be asked. It really means a great deal to me.’

‘Well, it’s good that you could make it,’ he says, directing his gaze over my shoulder, processing, assessing, wondering – with a certain weariness – how much longer this thing will go on for. I step towards him and reach up and kiss him on the cheek and see, from his expression, that this was rather unwelcome, and then I give him a little smile and push away through the crowd towards the stairs.

‘Take care, Teddy,’ I call, my hand on the newel post. He waves vaguely at me, polite in only the baldest sense of the word. The girl doesn’t even look over. He turns back to her. ‘Oh, Honor, give me a break,’ he’s saying. As I start to climb the oatmeal stairs, she says (in the sort of deep, husky, modulated voice that requires, in my experience, some cultivation), ‘For Christ’s sake, you’ve got to let
yourself get
used
to what’s happened. You should take some time off. Fuck’s sake! They owe you. Plus, in any case, they
love
you.’

As I wait in the hall for the helpful young man in the white jacket to find my coat, I remember the Sargent postcard, the air of entitlement, the absolutely impermeable confidence, and I think:
Ah, yes. That’s it. You remind me of her
.

As well as my coat, the helpful young man brings me Polly’s umbrella. It has stopped raining, but I take it anyway.

Most mornings, you hear Mary before you see her. She’s one of those relentlessly, conspicuously busy people. Even the longueurs spent waiting for or in the lift are put to use. When the doors open, releasing her on to the fifth floor, she’s mid-conversation, talking about her weekend, the weather, the dogs. Her voice carries down the quiet expanse of office carpet, over the banks of angled screens. It’s the sound of long wet walks on the beaches of north Norfolk, the sound of children boarding at Winchester and Wycombe Abbey, the sound of a holiday home in the Auvergne. I never feel good listening to Mary’s riffs.

Still, this is a work call; she’s speaking to one of her grander contributors. This becomes apparent when she says, ‘Oh, file when you’re ready, darling. Any time on Thursday will be fine.’ This means copy will arrive late afternoon, just when the pages are due to be sent to the printers. Mary will read it, scribble little queries all over it, and pass it over to me. Then she will depart, smartly, to meet her husband the corporate lawyer at a drinks party in Primrose Hill, and I’ll be stuck here for an extra hour or two dealing with the fallout.

My desk is quite near the window, and though I’m meant to be giving Ambrose Pritchett’s latest review a quick read-through, I find my attention keeps wandering from the
screen. A pan-lid sky hangs over London. The forecast is for rain. Half-listening to Mary as she emerges from the elevator lobby, I watch the dull silver ribbons of trains flowing in and out of the station, the slow rotation of cranes over distant building sites. Beyond the cloud, beyond the city, a margin of green – the Surrey hills – is startlingly bathed in sunshine.

Turning back to the monitor, I wonder why so few people understand the difference between ‘practise’ and ‘practice’.

Mary arrives at her desk, drops her bag on her chair, and turns to me. She has two cups of coffee in a cardboard holder. ‘Got one for you,’ she says, shouldering off her aubergine wool coat. ‘Do you want cappuccino or latte?’

‘Either’s fine,’ I say. In the seven years I’ve worked with Mary, she has never once bought me coffee.

‘Good, I’ll have the cappuccino. Croissant?’ she adds, passing me a white paper bag. ‘No, go on, it’s for you.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I say. From the lettering on the bag, I can see that she stopped by the high-end deli, the one I visit only when I feel I deserve a treat, the one with salami slung festively from overhead beams and big glass jars of amaretti on the counter. I take the lid off my latte and break a horn from the croissant. Buttery flakes shower down on my mouse mat. ‘I’ve just started working on Ambrose’s review,’ I say.