Angel Cake (31 page)

She supposed she must have had her suspicions all along. There must have been signs which she had chosen to ignore. Well, was it surprising? What woman would want to find out such a thing about her husband? She would never forget that day in the boarding-house, no never, when Leonard had come in from the beach with that tall blond Gerald he was so fond of, Gerald in his small striped swimming trunks and Leonard in his baggy old shorts, and the two of them had gone up to Gerald’s room to look at some catalogues they had been discussing. Leonard had not come down again and in the end Alicia hadn’t been able to stand it. She had tiptoed up to Gerald’s second-floor room, his regular one, the one he had taken every summer and she had stood at the door, holding her breath and listening. She couldn’t hear anything much, just whispering and shuffling, but she had stood there as if paralysed, quite unable to bring herself to bend down and look in through the keyhole. At last she had tiptoed away and gone back down to the kitchen. When the pair
of them finally came down, all healthy-looking from their outdoor exercise, she had served them tea and cake without a word. Because maybe there really was nothing to it. Maybe, in her suspicious way, she had made the whole thing up. Years later, there had been Mrs Pritchard’s son though, hadn’t there? And those cosy teas which Leonard used to have with him while she was out at work. There had been the little boys who did ‘Penny for the Guy’. No – Alicia knew what was right and proper. Year after year she had clung fast to her belief in marriage. She had made up her story and she had clung fast to that too. It had served her well, and it had served Alison. Everyone liked a little something, didn’t they, to sweeten their daily bread? Without Harry and without children, she didn’t have a great deal else.

So she took it quite calmly when it came, at first with a little hiccup and then smoothly, rising up to meet her. She was long ready. And, at first, yes, it was like paddling; the shock of the cold, which began at your feet and which you only connected with swimming when it reached your knees and went on rising. Not many swims, so often by the sea. But once, in the moonlight, icy, swimming the breast-stroke, with her arms spread wide for an embrace. Ahead of her, she could see his dark head bobbing and his hand beckoning her beyond her depth. There were thoughts. Swimming out into the sunrise. You were meant to have certain thoughts. And something about a lifebelt.

When I woke on the Monday morning in Alicia’s back bedroom, at first I had no idea where I was. For a moment or two, I even thought I was back home at my mother’s; the narrow room was so cluttered with a medley of indispensable possessions. Through the middle of them, we had cleared a little corridor the night before, for me to get to and from the thin bed. I was a bit dubious about Alicia’s sheets, but I reckoned that even if they hadn’t been washed, it must be a long, long time since someone else had slept in them. In any case, it was such a very warm night that in the end I slept on top of them.

The house was quite quiet and I guessed it was still early.
For a while I lay on the bed, sleepily exploring the state of my spirits. To my surprise, I found I was in a thoroughly good mood. I didn’t feel any apprehension or loss as yet, only a somewhat stunned sense of achievement that I had in the end dared to do what I dreamt of. I imagined Rob in Swansea, probably waking up beside Sarah Anderson, and really, I can’t say that I minded.

I supposed Alicia slept late most mornings, since she had no especial reason to do otherwise, and I thought what a nice idea it would be on my first morning to bring her breakfast in bed. After some time, I got up and went downstairs very quietly, so as not to wake her. The sun shone through the stained-glass panels of the front door and made a bright-coloured pattern on the hall floor. With a bit of an effort, I thought, you could really make this place quite liveable in. I looked round the front-room door and saw Alicia was still fast asleep on the sofa, so I tiptoed back and shut it.

Our plates from supper the night before were still on the kitchen table.

‘Once a rotter, always a rotter,’ Alicia had pronounced when I told her my story. ‘You’ll be better off without him, believe you me.’

I did believe her, as I cleared away the salad cream and the wilted lettuce, and started to set out her breakfast things on a painted tray. I thought Alicia had done me the most enormous favour and I was propelled by a wave of sincere gratitude as I carried the tray through the hall to wake her.

I gave a mock-formal tap on the front-room door and I called, ‘Breakfast is served, Madam.’ I listened for Alicia’s answering cackle, but she didn’t reply, so I nudged the door gently open and I went beaming in. I put the tray down on the table and sang out, ‘Wakey, wakey!’ Then I whipped open the thick curtains and I sat down beside her on the sofa. Although her face was pale grey and her mouth was a little way open, it wasn’t until I squeezed her hand ‘hello’ and felt it was cold that I realized she was dead.

So began one of the strangest weeks of my short life. I’m not sure any more how long I sat on the sofa, horrified, having snatched my hand back from Alicia’s cold grasp. All
I know is that after too long I thought suddenly that maybe she could still be saved after all and, jumping up in a panic, rushed headlong into the hall and telephoned for an ambulance.

The ambulance crew were very nice to me, but it was clear from their expressions that they had come too late for Alicia. One of them, a chubby man with sideburns, said to me, ‘I know it’s tough to lose your granny,’ and I blurted out, before I had thought what the consequences might be, ‘Oh, she wasn’t my grandmother.’ He gave me a faintly irritated look, as though I had thoughtlessly turned down his set sympathetic responses, and thereby caused him extra work. He asked, ‘What was the relationship?’ and when I said feebly that, well, there hadn’t been any really, we were just friends, he sighed a gusty sigh and spoke in an undertone to a colleague of his called Bill.

They all stopped what they were doing then and Bill even sat down on the edge of the dining-table and took his cap off. The man with the sideburns asked me to show him to the phone and when, in my distress, I couldn’t straight away remember where it was, his irritation visibly solidified into suspicion. He made a short officious phone call and then brought the card Alicia always kept by the telephone back into the front room, and checked with me that the doctor’s name written on it was that of her GP. Then he went back to the phone and rang the doctor too.

I couldn’t see the point of summoning the doctor since Alicia was irretrievably dead, and it wasn’t until he and a policeman arrived simultaneously on the doorstep that I understood that she had died in suspicious circumstances and that the suspicious circumstances were largely me.

I suppose it didn’t take that long, the questioning and the signing of the certificate. But by the time it was all over, the greying weary Indian doctor had declared the circumstances no longer suspicious, patted me kindly on the shoulder and hurried on his way, and the ambulance men had left, taking Alicia away under a nearly flat blanket, half the morning had gone by and when I looked at my watch in the daunting silence, I saw it was nearly eleven o’clock. It was only then
that I remembered to ring Mr Charles and let him know what had happened to me.

His voice at the other end of the line was the first familiar, friendly thing in the whole distressing morning, and that must have been why, when he was so terribly sweet and understanding and said, ‘Good heavens, what a fearful shock for you,’ I suddenly started to cry.

I didn’t go back to the museum, as he suggested, until the following day. In the afternoon, Alicia’s social worker came round and began to make the first arrangements for disposing of the house and of Alicia’s many possessions. My presence plainly put her out, as it had put out the chubby ambulance man, because I didn’t fit into any officially recognized category, yet she could hardly evict me from the house.

She was a scurrying mousey woman, who seemed half-crushed by the weight of her official cares and worries. But she went about her business with determined good humour, drawing up lists and looking in room after room in the hope of finding some scrap of paper which would indicate Alicia’s last wishes. Only when the long and dusty search had proved fruitless, and it became clear that the entire task of tidying up Alicia’s affairs would fall on her, did one uncharacteristically sharp remark escape her: ‘It’s quite impossible to get these old things to make a will, you know. Really, anyone would think they thought they were immortal.’

Mr Charles was looking out for me on Tuesday morning. He leapt up when I appeared in the doorway of his room and, beckoning keenly, called, ‘Come in, come in!’

He motioned me to the leather armchair. ‘Sit down, my dear. How are you feeling?’

My knees folded beneath me and I sat down with a bump. Mr Charles had said ‘my dear’, Mr Charles had called me ‘my dear’. Dazedly, I mumbled, ‘I – I’m fine, thank you very much, Mr Charles.’

He clasped his hands tensely in front of his waistcoat and he said, ‘You must take it easy these next few days, Alison. I know there’s a great temptation to soldier on regardless, but you shouldn’t push yourself. Please don’t take any more on board than you feel you want to.’

I thanked him and I tried to crack a feeble joke about how nice it was to hear advice like that from one’s boss.

He more or less ignored my joke and went on, ‘Now, I don’t know if you’ve made any arrangements for today, but, just in case you were free, I’ve booked us lunch at the Pescatore. If – if that appeals to you, of course?’

All morning, as I sat at my desk, dutifully not working and browsing through back numbers of fine arts magazines, I mused on this significant development. Unmistakably, it seemed to me, Mr Charles was revealing his intentions at last. He had never called me ‘my dear’ before. When lunch-time came, I took one of the flowers from the beautiful bouquet he had left in a vase on my desk and made myself a buttonhole of it.

He pretended the flowers were just ‘a token of thanks’ for all the hours I had put in on his book when I tried to thank him for them over lunch. But it was quite clear to me from the way he blushed that, of course, they were nothing of the sort.

The Pescatore is several notches above the Sovereign Grill. Italian waiters fussed around us with giant menus and starched serviettes and when the food had been brought, they kept popping up again beside us to offer an outsize pepper mill and to enquire if everything was to our taste? It was a pity really that I didn’t have much appetite, because the meal was delicious. I did my best, toying with the fettucini and the escalope, but the combination of the upsets of recent days and now this overture from Mr Charles made it almost impossible for me to swallow a mouthful.

Mr Charles looked at me with concern. ‘Why, Alison,’ he said, ‘you’re eating like a bird.’

I blushed; I didn’t want him to suspect that half the reason was my tense good behaviour in the face of his advances. ‘Oh, it’s all delicious,’ I assured him. ‘It’s just that I haven’t had much of an appetite, I’m afraid, the last couple of days.’

Mr Charles nodded sympathetically. ‘That’s only to be expected, I suppose, isn’t it?’ he said kindly. ‘Just don’t overdo it now, will you? I should hate you to waste away.’

He suggested a little digestive stroll along Knightsbridge after lunch, before we went back to our desks. I wished
rather childishly that someone I knew would walk past and see me strolling beside him, such a smart, distinguished-looking figure.

Rob was due back from Swansea on Tuesday evening. On the desk in his study, he would find the note which I had left for him, informing him of the decision I had reached. It said that at a mutually convenient time I would come back to collect my belongings. All evening, I sat taut in Alicia’s front room and waited for the phone to ring. I hadn’t told him where I’d gone to, but I was quite sure he would guess. When the phone didn’t ring and it at last got so late that I knew Rob wasn’t going to call, I felt quite aggrieved. I had wanted him to ring, repentant, in floods of tears.

On Wednesday morning I rang him in the end, myself. My pretext was to check that he was safely back, that he was ‘all right’. But at the sound of his voice at the other end, I had such a strong physical reaction that, for a moment, I could barely speak.

I stammered, ‘Rob?’

There was a short pause before he replied, ‘Well, well.’

‘I wanted to check you were OK,’ I said unconvincingly.

After another pause, he said, ‘I’m fine.’ Then he asked, ‘You’re with your aged soul-mate, I presume?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ which wasn’t entirely a lie. I didn’t dare tell him what had happened. I was worried that left here all by myself, I wouldn’t stay convinced for long that I had made the right decision, that Rob was really such a good-for-nothing after all, if he decided to stage a comeback. But he didn’t.

‘Well, I don’t think there’s very much more to say then, really, is there?’ he said sullenly. ‘When do you want to come over and pick up your stuff?’

Furiously, I answered, ‘Oh, whenever. Preferably when you’re out.’

How dare he take it so casually? I thought indignantly. He obviously doesn’t care at all.

Rob gave a little hard, hurt laugh. ‘Well, you can come any time over the weekend, then,’ he said shortly. ‘I think I’ll probably be off in Swansea again.’

As I put the phone down, I was startled by a ring at
Alicia’s front door. Someone, a big figure, had come up to the door while I was talking to Rob and now stood imperiously on the other side of the stained glass.

I opened the door apprehensively to face a large black lady, who appeared so astonished at the sight of me that her eyebrows shot up towards her fuchsia sunhat and she exclaimed, ‘Goodness gracious, whatever are you doing here?’

It was Mrs Cunningham, Pearl, Alicia’s little-loved home-help. For a moment, I wondered how to break the news to her. But I didn’t imagine she’d be that upset, and I thought that maybe she knew anyway and had been sent along to help clear up. So I just said, ‘Well, you’ve heard what happened? You know Mrs Queripel died?’