Losing Nicola (24 page)

‘My dear, how pleasant you've made it.' Vi sits in my big armchair. I've shown her round, poured her a drink, pushed some olives in her direction. ‘Modernizing the bathroom and kitchen makes such a difference. And you're so wise to have the window-seat built in. I never got round to it before the war and afterwards, well, there just wasn't any money. You've done a really nice job in here.'

‘Well, it's a lovely room to start with.'

‘It was our drawing-room, of course, when Freddie was alive. We used to love looking out at the sea.'

‘Me too.'

‘Endlessly fascinating, isn't it? You wait until you see it in the winter storms.' She laughs. ‘But of course you've been here in winter, haven't you? I keep forgetting.' She glances at the piano stool. ‘Did you ever sort out about the music?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Orlando – I'm sure it's something to do with him.'

‘I can't quite see why. By the way, he sent – and I quote – his very fondest love.'

‘Did he indeed?' She raises an eyebrow. ‘He always was a charmer.'

‘Still is, I guess.'

‘He was such a funny little boy. So amazingly bright, so solemn. I do hope he's happy.'

Orlando's happiness is something it has never occurred to me to question. Is he? I am ashamed that I never thought to ask. ‘He seems to be.'

Her gaze takes in my work table and the open books and papers. ‘Look, my dear, I know you're tremendously busy, and I don't want to take up your time. But the reason I've come – apart from inquisitiveness, because I wanted to see what you've done to the place – the reason is I thought I'd have a farewell party before I shake the dust of the place off my feet, and I'd really love you to come.'

‘That would be great.'

She gives me the date, a Saturday four weeks from now, in mid-September. The year is already turning. In the gardens along The Beach, dry brown leaves drop lightly to the dry soil beneath and gather at the edge of flower beds. Not autumn, not yet, but preparing.

‘The movers will be coming in on the following Monday, so it's the last opportunity I'll have to say goodbye to everyone,' she says. ‘And if by any chance your lovely Orlando is around, you absolutely must bring him. I'll hope very much to see him.'

‘As a matter of fact, he will be. My birthday's around that time and he's coming down.'

‘Yes.' She frowns. ‘Of course, I should have remembered. It was at your birthday party that poor Louise Stone's daughter was killed, wasn't it?'

‘Not
at
, so much as
after
. And somewhere else.' I make a sudden decision. ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking of having a few people here, a sort of combination house warming and birthday. Do come.'

‘I'd love to.' Standing up, she smiles at me, puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘I hope it all works out for you, Alice.'

Once, I'd thought she was as old as the hills. Watching her walk away from me into the hazy glow of the town, she seems to carry her years far more lightly than I do. I hope it works out for me, too. I stare at the telephone. Shall I lift it, dial Orlando's number, ask him if he's happy?

I don't. Perhaps I'm afraid of the answer.

B
y six o'clock, the courier has roared away down the road with my manuscript translation stowed in his saddlebag. The evening stretches ahead of me, flat and uneventful. I am not only restless but also uneasy, besieged by insistent ghosts.

Seated at the piano, I play for a little, but am unimpressed by my lack of expertise. Once, although I was never gifted in the way Orlando is, I was considered an adequate player. Not any more.
Muss i' denn
, I sing softly.
Must I then, must I then, to the city away, and leave my heart here
?

Where is Sasha Elias now? He hovers between the folds of my gauzy white drapes. Because of him, I dreamed away my adolescence; his memory still hangs over me, weighting me down. I know how foolish I am. Apart from a brief meeting, I haven't set eyes on the man for twenty years. He could be anything now, anywhere. He probably barely remembers me. I know all the counsels of wisdom that I must move on, that what I remember is an adolescent fantasy. Yet I cannot help recalling the green star in his eye, the aniseed smell, the touch of the exotic that he brought to my dreary post-war life.

If only I could find him again, surely, surely I would be able to let slip the dogs of the past? But so far, my enquiries have led me nowhere. I am not sure exactly what I search for. A final end to Nicola, a new beginning with Sasha? Is either possible?

My morning's mail waits for me on the marble mantel. I slit open envelopes containing bills for this and that, brochures, a request from a publishing house wanting to discuss a translation of one of their prestigious foreign authors. There are personal letters, too. One from Fiona, one from Bella, Orlando's weekly news bulletin. I glance through the first two then more slowly read the third, typed on a piece of A4 paper. He tells me more about his work in Boston, critiques a concert he has attended, writes an account of a trip to Atlanta. Ends by saying that he'll see me soon.

His voice echoes in my ear. Eventually I put his letter back on my work table and get up, find my keys, go out into the night. Warm air sits on my shoulders like a feather boa. Behind curtained windows, lamps glow. In the yacht club, steel cables tap faintly against aluminium masts.

I walk a couple of hundred yards down the road to Glenfield House and stand looking over the garden wall. The front garden is shadowed, the hedge separating it from the gravelled drive is neatly trimmed, giving off the faintly sour scent of privet in summer. I can smell something dry and peppery – early chrysanthemums, perhaps – and a faint drift of dying phlox.

None of the windows in the house are illuminated, and with a quick look up and down the pavement I slip inside the gate and tiptoe alongside the hedge until I reach the gap which leads into the front garden. The eight cast-iron steps from what had once been our drawing room are freshly painted and gleam in the street light's glare. I stand on the top step. There is the occasional sound of cars in the distance, the rustle of leaves from the shrubbery, a radio playing, seagulls shutting down for the night. Inside the bamboo clump, the lily-pond frogs chatter gently.

I close my eyes. Force myself to concentrate, blocking out the lights, the sounds of the here and now, thrusting myself back into the past. What really happened that night? Twenty years ago I'd stood exactly where I am now, and seen Nicola turn, heard the squeak of the gate opening, behind the hedge. In the drawing room behind me, people had been moving
en masse
towards the dining room, and after a moment, I'd trailed after them. Was there something I'd seen which if only I could prise it from the locked box of the past, might provide some clue?

Concentrate, Alice. If you saw anything, it must still be lodged inside your skull.

She'd been standing by the hedge. Inside the drawing-room, Leslie Hutchinson crooning
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
was playing on the turntable. I could hear Callum's voice calling to someone, the laughter of girls, someone singing along to Hutch. Anything else?
Think
, Alice.

I try to squeeze the memories from the vault at the back of my head where I've contained them for so long, but I can dredge up nothing that seems remotely significant. I'd watched Nicola for a moment or two, that's all, then turned away and followed the crowd into the passage leading to the dining room, hurrying so I could accidentally find myself standing beside Sasha Elias.

The hall: as I mentally pass through, I recreate it in my mind. It's the same as it always was. The oak chest against one wall, with a bowl of flowers I'd picked from the garden. The threadbare carpet-runner across the coloured tiles. A print of the Lady of Shallott in a dark oak frame. The carved stand holding walking sticks, golf putters, silver-topped canes, a spear.

I move on to the dining room. Like an artist using charcoal to block out a painting, I try to sketch in the scene. The background first: the silky blue wallpaper, a marble fire surround, the uncurtained window at the far end. Makeshift tables set up down the middle of the room, spread with bedsheets worn so thin that in places you can see the grain of the wood beneath. Platters of sandwiches, sausage rolls, savoury tarts, fairy cakes, buns, bowls of trifle and jelly, and in pride of place, my birthday cake, with my name picked out in shiny silver pellets. There is damp on one of the walls, which has stained the paper black. Waxed paper cups stand at the end of one table, with big jugs of orange squash and lime juice cordial, a barrel of cider rests on a cradle suspended above a galvanized iron bath tub recovered from the stables. I try to paint in the faces, though some of the people there I'd never seen before, friends of my brothers', for the most part, or lame ducks swept in under Fiona's wing.

Inside my head, they are gathered together, each in his or her allotted space, as though our dining room has become one of those paper puppet theatres Fiona used to build for us. Just as we used to cut the splendidly Jacobean characters out of a book and stick them to slices of cork, then push them around the stage using knitting needles, so now I push them around my head.

Ava stands by one of the tables, looking carefree but in reality keeping an eye on the family to make sure they don't help themselves too lavishly before the guests are fed. As she talks to Louise Stone, she takes dainty bites from a crustless sandwich. Not far from her is Bertram Yelland, in a canary-coloured waistcoat over an open-necked white shirt into which he's tucked a paisley cravat. He looks rather handsome and from my current vantage point, I can see how young he must have been back then, however old he'd seemed at the time.

There is Prunella Vane, talking to Fiona, while Gordon Parker listens. Each time he nods, a flake of sausage-roll pastry stuck to his lower lip bobs in time. My elder brothers are huddled together near the cider barrel, along with their friends – who seem to include Simon Stone, Nicola's brother. They're laughing a lot. Sasha is there, in the middle of the room, among a group of his pupils and their mothers. A pair of small round spectacles, different from the ones he habitually wears, sits at the top of his nose, giving him a more serious air, as though he is hoping to establish a certain gravitas. He's in his early twenties, I see now, little more than a boy. There are lines under his eyes and a sad twist to his mouth, and I remember how I wanted to cross the room and stand beside him. There are other mothers too. I see Mrs Sheffield, Mrs Tavistock, Mrs Gardner, Mrs Arbuthnot. They are talking, and I remember now how they looked over at him, Mrs Arbuthnot saying she had taken Mary away from him, there were
rumours
, you can't take the chance, can you, not with young girls, she'd heard that a couple of other mothers were removing their daughters, too.

Aunt had been down earlier before retreating upstairs to her room, but there are still two or three old ladies sitting on chairs in their flowered Liberty prints, drinking white wine and cackling slightly, obviously enjoying themselves. In the light from the candles, which Ava and Fiona have set all round the place, their ancient faces melt and blur, and they appear young again, transported for a moment from the end of their lives back to the beginning. There is the man from next door, a retired Rear Admiral, who is wearing baggy yellow corduruoys; there are some of the teachers from Fiona's school; there are a few other neighbours. And Bella, of course, talking to the young Tavistock sisters, and Jeremy's orphaned girl-cousin who lives with them and goes to Bella's school.

But Nicola?

I can't see her, but she must have been there. Someone would have noticed otherwise. Now the puppets in my head move, mingle, form new groups. Dougal has his arm around some girl's waist. Orlando sits down with the old ladies, says something that makes them chortle, refills their glasses. My father talks to Callum by the door. Louise Stone glances round the room and then at her son, who is leaning with one hand against the wall while he talks to Mary or Rosie. Miss Vane is here, Ava there, Bertram by the sideboard. Gordon Parker droops beside the cider barrel, Sasha stands with an elbow on the mantelpiece, surveying the room, Julian and Charlie, David and Jeremy stand in a group with their mothers, then with each other. Orlando moves over to the window and looks out, his back to the room.

And then Nicola appears. She pauses at the door of the room and a small silence falls. I'd forgotten that moment, but now it comes back to me very clearly, how all of us stopped what we were doing to take her in, a girl in a denim skirt and home-made white blouse. The candles shimmer on the thin gold chain round her neck and the little golden studs in her ears. She remains on the threshold and surveys us without smiling, without speaking. And everyone stares back at her. Everyone except Orlando.

She was powerful. I recognize that now. She had no regard for convention. She did what she liked, and what she liked most was the danger of not caring. Young and old, whether we knew her or not, we recognized something alarming about her. From my adult perspective, I can see now how damaged her soul was, how disabled her heart.

Julian breaks away from his friends and pushes through the crowd but she turns a shoulder to him and he steps back, crest-fallen. She smiles faintly. The Admiral stares at her and smooths down his tobacco-stained moustache; his tongue emerges like a swollen red slug and rasps across his lower lip. Miss Vane is holding a paper plate containing a bit of everything; she flushes as Nicola moves past her, puts the plate down on the table, takes one of the little savoury tarts she has made and nibbles at it. Yelland was laughing when she appeared. Now he stands very still as though waiting for Armageddon. Again, now I am an adult, I can see how vulnerable he must have felt, for Nicola was under-age and he could have gone to prison if she chose to broadcast what the two of them had been doing. Sasha Elias, too, watches as she moves into the room, and so does Dougal, a slight frown on his face. Her brother Simon looks wary and resigned; perhaps he recognizes the sign of imminent or recent mischief-making and wonders who is about to become her next victim.