Her (29 page)
I scan the garden but I can’t see him, and when I go back indoors he’s not in the living room or in the kitchen area, and he’s not in his room, or ours, or any of the bathrooms. I push open the door to Sophie’s room – the open suitcase, the clothes trailing over the floor – and then Nina’s, which is dim, cool, perfectly ordered, much as it was before she arrived.
Ben has Cecily in his arms. He says, ‘Maybe he went into the wood.’ I run back out onto the lawn and shout his name. The sound makes Sophie end her call and tip herself out of the hammock. She crosses the grass and she’s saying, ‘But he was just here a minute ago.’
Nina comes around the corner of her father’s house. She moves towards me. The look on her face. She passes me quite fast, already running, and as she passes she says, over her shoulder, ‘You and Ben do the woods, I’ll check the pool.’
But I’m right behind her, my hands flying up, reaching for her, clutching at her hard bare arms, the grain of her linen dress, and I’m saying something, my voice shrill and wild, a sound that would ordinarily embarrass me, and I’m trying to get hold of her so I can push past her, but she won’t stand back, she’s in my way, she’s blocking me, she’s moving so extraordinarily slowly, and she won’t get out of the way. So I grab her shoulder, bony under my fingers, and I’m holding her, trying to push her aside, and we’re both running, but the path leading to the pool gate seems tremendously long and elastic, as if it is a hallucination, as if the gate is sliding further away from us, retreating with every step we take towards it, and she’s still in the way. The little fiddly hedges, the tall trees, the dense smell of hot grass and scorched earth and white flowers. Hands turning salad. Runnels in dirty hair. A blue glass bead, winking in the sun. Time sags and screams. It spills away from me, like the gravel sliding under my bare feet, the hard vicious glitter of it.
I’m right behind her, I’m right behind her, why won’t she let me pass? The white stones rattle and skitter.
I see it, the damp towel slung over the gate so the latch hasn’t caught. I see it, the toy ambulance on its side by the steel ladder, the tiny wet tracks its tyres have left, parallel lines seeping into the limestone.
The black glass. The water rises up around me. I do not know if I’ll be in time.
My editors Arzu Tahsin and Judy Clain; my agents Cat Ledger, Gráinne Fox and Karolina Sutton; Sophie Buchan; Rachel Thomas; Susie Steiner; Amanda Coe and Andrew Clifford; Morag Preston and Damian Whitworth; Lucy Darwin; Anna Mazzega; Daisy Cook and David Masters; Aisling Crowley, Chipo Mumba, Becky Crowley, Holly Kershaw and Zara Janmohamed; Anna Chrempinska; Elizabeth Loding; Deborah Dooley and Bob Cooper at Sheepwash; all the readers who enjoyed
Alys, Always
and took the trouble to tell me so.
David, Sara and Victoria Lane.
Stafford, Poppy and Barnaby Critchlow.
Before the publication of her debut novel,
Alys, Always
, Harriet Lane wrote for the
Guardian
, the
Observer
,
Vogue
and
Tatler
. She lives in north London with her husband and two children.
Alys, Always
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2014 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © Harriet Lane 2014
The right of Harriet Lane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 297 86507 0
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5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
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