Exposure (28 page)

 

A little while after they had moved back to the drawing room, Rosalind said, 'You did put the coffee on, didn't you?'

'Coffee?'

'Oh, Al. I did ask you.'

'Darling, I'm so sorry, I forgot. Forgive me, Rosalind.'

'Of course I'll
forgive
you.' She laughed. 'Darling, what's the matter this evening? Are you all right?'

Why did she keep asking him that? Yes! Yes, he was all right! 'Forgive me' was just a figure of speech, for God's sake.

'I'm fine,' he said, 'just tired out. That was an incredible meal.'

'It wasn't bad, was it? Even if I do say so myself,' she said, smiling shyly.

He squeezed her arm. 'You're very talented, darling.'

'Thank you.' She appeared touched—flattered, even moved by his approval. It struck him that these moments of bland encouragement were all that she lived on.

'I'll do the coffee now, shall I?'

'Lovely, darling.'

The guests wanted two black coffees, one decaffeinated coffee with cream, a mint tea and a camomile tea ...

He crept out of the room, smiling amiably. Although, of course, nobody knew what he had done that evening, he felt utterly humiliated. When he remembered his weird laughter at the dinner table, he was afraid that he might start talking to himself. He was, essentially, talking to himself then. And the tone of the conversation seemed at best ironic and at worst horrified.

He did not want to talk any more, because he had said quite enough already. Least said, soonest mended, his mother always used to say.

Why was he thinking about his mother so much all of a sudden? It was just plain odd that he had talked about his past with Karen. And now, just for having mentioned it, he felt his concealed history sticky on his fingers and arms and hair. He sniffed his fingers and smelt sex.

His childhood had no place in his real life. It was just a crackly black-and-white film sodden with shame and sentiment. A far greater proportion of his life had been spent in these surroundings, in Holland Park, in corduroy trousers and a cashmere V-neck, than in Dover. If the number of years counted for anything, he was unquestionably Alistair Langford, QC—the man in the photograph at the House of Lords, rightfully there because of his own achievements. He must simply put out of his mind this terrible evening and the pervasive sense of his own fraudulence. It had all been a rather devastating species of Freudian slip—and now he would continue with what he had meant to say. 'A Freudian slip is what happens if you say one thing when you mean your mother,' a friend had once joked.

He flicked the switch on the kettle and heard it start up. This was the way life functioned, he told himself. You put lots of things out of your mind—starvation, torture, wars, famine. Terrible things, which, if attended to, would make ordinary routine impossible. This was the purpose of good manners—he glanced through to the dining room—this was the purpose of nineteenth-century tables with silver knives and forks lined up, each one to be attended to carefully. Etiquette slowed the painfully racing heart: it distracted you from the things that did not bear thinking about.

He heard Karen's soft voice—'You've got a beautiful cock, haven't you?'—and flinched. The different age-group with its risky liberation. But it was not his problem. It was his son's problem, his darling daughter's problem. And yet those words he had used in the hotel bar when she suggested they get a room: 'Want to,' he had stuttered.'
Want to'.
The shard of desire in his eye.

He took out the cups and saucers and spoons and put them neatly on the tray. As the kettle boiled, it made him shudder to think how terribly cold it must have been, in late December, for one unconscious in the doorway of Tesco, one so drunk he had forgotten his own name.

 

The phone call about his mother's death came two weeks later. Rosalind received it and wrote down the details on the phone pad. She stared at them for a long time after she had put down the receiver. She decided to wait until Alistair got home before telling him—it was inappropriate to do so during the working day. She had great respect for what he did, and in all their years of marriage, she had interrupted him only once at court, when she had gone into labour with Luke.

At around eight, she heard him shut the front door and drop his keys into the bowl on the hall table. She walked out into the hallway. 'Darling, there's been some news,' she said.

'Really?'

'Yes.'

He was loosening his tie. 'What have our children done now?'

'No, it's not them. It's about your mother.'

'My ...?'

'Alistair, she died last week.'

'Really?' he said again. He put down his briefcase very softly. He had told Rosalind his mother had died just before they got engaged.

'I don't really know what to say about it,' she said. 'As you know, it's a shock to me, too.'

'Yes. Yes, I see that.'

'So, I'm just going to tell you the facts, Alistair.'

'OK.'

She had received a call, she said, from an Ivy Gilbert. His mother had died of a heart-attack. It would not have been a drawn-out thing, Rosalind told him. Apparently the doctor had been quite certain about that. It was sad, though, that she had lain undiscovered at the bottom of the stairs for a few days. It had been Ivy who alerted the authorities, concerned that she hadn't heard anything from her friend for a while. Ivy had said she felt that Alistair ought to be told, as he was his mother's son, no matter how long it was that they hadn't seen each other. Because of the circumstances in which she had been discovered—so long after her death—she had already been cremated.

As Rosalind spoke, they went into the drawing room and stood a little way apart from each other in front of the fireplace. When she had finished, she looked right at him. His eyes ran over the room, skipping from the chandelier to the carpet, along the shelves of books to the orchid in the pot by the door. She was reminded of the way his eyes had done this when they first met—and how she had thought at the time that it was as if they were seeking refuge, a place to rest.

'Well,' he said, 'I'm quite shocked.' He looked hunched—stiff.

'Yes. Let me get you a drink.'

'Thank you,' he said. And, as he had been on so many occasions, he was intensely reassured by her presence—and by her good manners. She must be angry and confused, he thought, but she would never lose her temper, not Rosalind.

She poured him a glass of whisky, put a litde water into it and brought it to him on the sofa. He took the glass and she looked at him until he averted his eyes. She said, 'Alistair, I have lived countless years thinking your mother died before we were married.'

'Yes,' he said.

'You've lied to me. We've lied to the children.'

'Yes. Well - not you. You haven't lied to anyone, darling.'

'Look, I'm not going to make you talk about it now—I'm not even sure I can face it myself—but ...'

'But I owe you an explanation.'

'I think you do,' she said. 'My God, Alistair, you do. I know you didn't get on with her, but this is really ... I can't even think of the right word.'

'No,' he said. 'I'm not surprised.'

She sighed very deeply and then she held his hand. But it was he who squeezed her fingers.

'I expect you're in shock, aren't you?' she said, as if she was offering him an excuse for not explaining himself just yet.

'I think I am, darling,' he said.

'Oh, God, Alistair, I've just remembered that I'm meant to be going to our table supplier in Sussex with Jocelyn tomorrow. This is hopeless. We won't get back till very late—you'll be on your own all evening. I'm going to call her and cancel.'

'No, no. Don't, darling. You must go. It's ... important,' he said. Then he slapped his forehead. 'We're meant to be going to Julian's for dinner.'

'Tomorrow night?'

'Yes. I—I forgot to say.'

'Oh, Alistair. Well, we'll cancel that, too.' She had just enough room in her mind to think how unlike him it was to accept a midweek invitation to dinner and how unlike him it was to forget to tell her about it. She squeezed his hand, attributing his uncharacteristic vagueness to the news, even though she knew it had preceded it. She had noticed an odd, hunted expression on his face and a new habit of jumping as she walked into the room.

'No, let's not cancel
anything,'
he said. 'You go to Sussex. I'll go to Julian's. It's probably the best thing for me. I'll explain I didn't warn you—all my fault.'

'You really think so?'

'I do. I think it's best we carry on as normal. It'll be best for me that way.'

'Well, if you're sure.'

'I am.' His voice sounded sure, too. The flawless performance was his only protection from an evening alone with his loving wife.

 

When Rosalind thought over the events a few weeks after this, she couldn't help dwelling on the subject of fate. This was a concept Alistair had always laughed at—he thought it a preoccupation of neurotic women, like her sister Suzannah, and at first she felt embarrassed. It was her instinct to check whether her thoughts would bear her husband's scrutiny. But suddenly she pushed open the french windows and went out into the garden, thinking angrily that it was not exactly as if Alistair's brilliant mind had been right about everything, was it?

But before this came the night of Julian and Elise's dinner, the night of the attack, of the whirring car alarm and the two figures running away in the dark.

Afterwards, at the hospital, when the doctor had examined his leg, Alistair found he was still clutching the litde card Rosalind had written for Julian and Elise, to apologize for her absence. The words were smudged with his sweat:'...so disappointed I can't be there ...' he read,'...have been lovely ... miss out on Elise's delicious ...' He was in a great deal of pain and he read his wife's gentle words while the doctor asked him if he could move his toes and rotate his ankle.

After his X-rays, he was told that Rosalind was on her way and he was put into the private room he would stay in for the next week. Detective Inspector Pendry sat on a chair by Alistair's bed. He spoke highly of Julians swift telephone call. 'That's a good friend you've got there,' the efficient policeman told him.

Two constables in a nearby squad car had caught the attackers on the high street minutes after the attack. Just half an hour later they were signing their names at Chelsea police station.

'I must just ask you a few questions,' Detective Inspector Pendry said, taking out a notepad. 'First, do the names Anil Bandari and Michael Jensen mean anything to you?' he said.

Alistair had never heard of Anil Bandari. The other name, though—the other name he did know. He felt his mouth go dry with fear. Michael Jensen was a defence witness in the Giorgiou case, a friend of the defendant.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I've never heard of either of them.'

When Detective Inspector Pendry had gone, Alistair thought it all through with terrifying clarity, resolving the outlandish details into a story that really did fit into his life.

There could be no doubt as to the motivation for the attack: it was an act of revenge, the lashing out of a male ego. It was about a girl.

He could not believe Karen's indiscretion had been malicious. She would have seen it as something to giggle about. He felt absolutely sure of this and amazed that he did. But he trusted Karen—he trusted that her betrayal had not been a desire to expose him to anger and violence, but merely to make a joke at his expense. She would only have wanted to laugh about it with someone, to entertain a friend with a funny story about her adventure with an old barrister. He imagined her talking excitedly with a drink and a cigarette in her hand. He remembered how sad she had been that she didn't have a camera to record the way the hotel room looked. She was young enough to find private experience lacking and to believe it must be validated by the envy or approval of another, no matter what the risk.

Obviously it had got back to Giorgiou. And that proud, vain young Greek could never have let it pass—although Karen had said he was openly unfaithful himself. He could picture the reaction: 'What?
Karen?
With the prosecution barrister?' the spoilt mouth would have asked. 'With the barrister who is trying to
put me away?'

Karen should have known her friend better. Why had she not known her friend better? He closed his eyes in desperation. But she was very young, he thought, and we all have our quota of mistakes to make and learn from. This episode had undoubtedly been her short, sharp tutorial on discretion.

It was possible that even Giorgiou could not have foreseen the ultimate outcome of his revenge. That the men had been caught was the factor no one could have predicted. If only they had got away, it might have been passed off as a mugging and Giorgiou would still have inflicted his punishment on Alistair's leg. But Julian, the good neighbour with his mobile phone, had ensured the bad guys were caught, and now there was the signature, 'M. Jensen', scrawled in the police book, signalling something curious, something to be looked into, to anyone who cared to notice.

Alistair lay in his hospital bed, waiting for someone to notice, his hours punctuated by visits from the doctor, the physiotherapist and the nurses—and his increasingly suspicious wife.

Astonishingly, he managed to cling on through Rosalind's initial questions, buying himself more time. But the questions quickly took on the essential theme: why had the police come back
three
times to visit him? Wasn't it strange that muggers had not even
attempted
to take anything?

One moment had been almost comic—if it's possible to laugh as you dig your own grave. Rosalind had arrived in a determined mood, as if she was going to insist on some kind of explanation. Alistair told his heart to enjoy the last moments of its former life. Within seconds he would have to tell her about Karen. But one heartbeat—literally one heartbeat!—before he began to speak, a nurse came in, saying it was time for his bed-bath.