Telling Lies to Alice (5 page)

It’s a shame Granddad’s dead now because he would have loved it here with the chickens and the vegetable patch and everything, and I could do with some advice. . . . I’m glad he died before Lenny did, though. He always got on with Lenny and he would have hated all the stuff in the papers, but I do miss him. Not Grandma, because I always felt I was a bit of a nuisance to her. Mind you, from her point of view, there she was thinking her child-rearing days were over, and I came along. . . . She told me Mum was no good at it, she was always leaving me on my own in the caravan and forgetting to change my nappies, so she’d taken over.

I’ve got a film of them that Lenny made. He was trying out this 16-millimetre cinecamera he’d just bought. It only lasts a couple of minutes, but it’s Granddad in the garden, looking after his sweet peas, and then you see Grandma come out the back door and start cutting flowers with her big sewing scissors. Granddad hated cut flowers—there were no vases in the house and normally he’d never let anyone touch his garden. I’ve never been able to work out if Lenny’d suggested it so Grandma would have something to do in the film or if she was doing it deliberately to wind Granddad up but either way, he doesn’t say anything. Then my mum’s old spaniel, Tinker, comes trotting down the path and wags his tail at Granddad so he looks up to see if Mum’s coming, too. She’s obviously standing just out of the shot because he’s saying something and beckoning, but she doesn’t appear. That’s all it is, really.

Lenny’s projector must be upstairs somewhere, but I don’t know how to work it. In any case, it would only make me cry, so what’s the point? Typical of Mum that she wouldn’t join in, even to please Granddad. He wanted to be friends with her but she wouldn’t let him. She’s like Grandma, closed off from people. They hardly ever saw each other—you can see on the film, when the dog comes in and Granddad starts talking to Mum, Grandma doesn’t even look up.

Not that I can talk, because I’ve never been close to Mum, either. I’ve been trying to go there more often because her health hasn’t been so great—although I get the impression that she’s not really bothered one way or the other. She won’t come and stay with me because she doesn’t want to leave her animals.

To be honest, I’d been starting to wonder if it was worth the effort, but last time I saw her I was telling her about the farm and she suddenly said, “I’d always thought you might turn out like me.” When I asked what she meant, she said, “Well, you’re about twenty-six, aren’t you?”

“Thirty.”

“Oh, are you? I’d had enough of it by the time I was twenty-six. You must be a bit slow on the uptake.”

“Enough of what? What are you talking about?”

We were sitting on either side of the caravan table and she waved her hand at the window. “People.
Men.
” And I suddenly thought, she’s right. But then I looked at her, sitting there like a scarecrow with her jumper covered in dog hair, and I thought,
I don’t want to be like you
. So I said, “How can you like living here? You’ve got water running down the walls every time it rains.” I’ve offered her the money to fix it enough times, but she won’t take it.

“There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“It’s falling to pieces.”

“It’s fine. I like it—doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. That’s something I’ve learned—animals are the only ones that don’t let you down.”

I’m never very relaxed around my mum and I find it quite hard to talk to her, but I thought, what the hell, she’s not getting any younger, so I said, “Did my father let you down?”

“Oh, that’s all mumbo-jumbo. He’s got nothing to do with it. Or with you. He was barely there when you were conceived, never mind afterwards.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was drunk.”

“Why didn’t—”

“He was married. Married as well as drunk. Anyway, I like being on my own.”

“You sound like Greta Garbo.” She shrugged. “You’ve never minded what people thought, have you?”

“That’s a bit rich coming from someone who went to work with a rabbit’s tail stuck on her backside.”

“You never told me you didn’t approve.”

“I neither approved nor disapproved. It’s your life. Come on, it’s time for me to see to the animals. You’d better be on your way.” She tipped the cat off her lap and opened the door. I wanted to carry on talking but I knew she wouldn’t so I got up and went down the steps. When I turned to say good-bye she was standing in the doorway with her two Jack Russells, tying plastic shopping bags over her shoes to keep off the mud. She looked so self-contained I thought, she doesn’t need me, so I said—on the spur of the moment—“Do you want me to come again? It’s just that I’m not sure if you want me here, that’s all.”

She looked surprised. “Of course I want you here. I always look forward to your visits.”

I thought, you could have told me, but when I thought about it later I realised that she must be lonely, too. She always seemed to me like some sort of impregnable fort—no, wrong word, because I’m here, aren’t I? I used to think my father was the great love of her life—not that she ever said so. I’d just pretended—hoped—but at least it could have been a dashing young soldier, not some married, middle-aged letch out for a night on the tiles, which is what she made it sound like . . . at least, it didn’t sound as if she’d fancied him very much. She said he’s dead, anyway, so I couldn’t go and find him even if I wanted to, which I don’t.

I’ve wondered recently if people see me like that—self-contained. I’ve thought about it a lot, though, why I came here. All my friends thought I’d gone mad. They kept ringing up and asking if I was okay on my own. But it’s been nearly nine months now, and I still think it was the right decision . . . I would be lonely without Eustace, though. That was one of the weirdest days of my life, getting him, and believe me, living with Lenny, I’ve had a few of those. I wanted to get a stray, or a dog that nobody wanted, so I went to the shelter and walked down the row of pens and all these lovely dogs rushed up to the wire and wagged their tails and stood on their hind legs and tried to lick my hand and I couldn’t begin to choose, I wanted to take them all. But right at the end of the row there was one dog that didn’t move. A basset hound, brown and white, he just lay at the back of the pen on his stomach in a perfect straight line with his back legs tucked in neatly like a sugar mouse, great stubby front paws stuck out on either side of his chops and big velvet ears spread out on the ground like pools of gravy. He’d got his eyes closed, but he must have heard me coming because he looked at me from under his eyebrows, stretched, yawned massively, and ambled over to the front of the pen. I thought he was coming to say hello, but he didn’t, he just lay down again with his nose pressed right against the crack of the door as if he was pointing to it with his whole body. Then he sighed, and it sounded like, “You took your time, didn’t you?”

They said I could take him for a walk to see if I liked him, but I already knew I’d be taking him home, because
he
had chosen
me,
and I wasn’t about to let him down. We were about halfway down the little track when he stopped and looked up at me with these huge, serious eyes, like Granddad. I don’t know what happens to your soul after you die, but if there is such a thing as reincarnation . . . the dates fit, anyway. That’s why I called him Eustace—Granddad’s middle name.

Lenny bought this place a few months before he died. We were going to live here together. I’d been looking at houses while he was away in the States, making a film, and as soon as I saw Maynard’s Farm, I thought,
that’s it
. I should think it was quite something in its heyday, but the farmer who owned it was long retired. His wife had died about thirty years before, and he’d sold off most of the land and let the place fall to pieces around him—he’d even pulled up the floorboards in a couple of the upstairs rooms to use as firewood. But it was big—five bedrooms—and had a garden and a stableyard and ten acres of paddock. It was all pretty ramshackle, but like a dream come true—wisteria growing on the front, and the big oak staircase and the ivy on the stone walls in the garden and the beautiful old barn. I fell in love with it straightaway. I knew that Lenny would love it, too. He was still in the States, but I phoned him and as soon as I told him the name of the village—Duck End—he said, “We’ll take it.” It immediately became Duck’s Arse, then D.A. for short. The first weekend we were here was like camping because the place was a complete mess with puddles on the floor and lumps of plaster falling off the walls. The dining room . . . that’s in the front bit, which is Georgian, the rest is Tudor—it’s two houses stuck together, really—had its walls covered in brown hessian with all these little pins sticking out that they’d used to tack it on. When we pulled them out we discovered they were old gramophone needles, hundreds of them, and underneath was a beautiful wall-covering, china blue watermarked silk. It was very old—completely worn away in some places—but Lenny said, “It’s beautiful, let’s keep it,” so we took down all of the hessian and had dinner in there by candlelight. Lenny had a favourite toast he always used: “Champagne for your real friends, real pain for your sham friends.” He was so happy, he didn’t get drunk, for once. The usual pattern was that I’d come home from the club and find him passed out on the sofa.

That night, I’d made up a bed on the sitting-room floor. There wasn’t any electricity so after dinner we took the big silver candleholder in there and lay on my mattress with all the windows open because it was warm—May, I think. We giggled and talked and made love, and I thought, I really did think,
this is the beginning.
I thought if we could live down here, away from London, Lenny would be happy and I could help him get better and— Well, I was a romantic. I believed in love. How stupid can you get? Because I had no excuse, not by then. The first time he’d promised to stop drinking was if I moved in with him. I believed it, but after a couple of months we were right back to square one. Then he said it was the flat, so we found a house. That didn’t work, so then he said it was living in London and he’d be fine if he got some peace and quiet. That’s why he wanted this place. . . . But it wasn’t only that. He blamed people as well. He used to keep a list of names pinned on the fridge. He called it his Shooting List, and every so often he’d cross off one name and replace it with somebody else’s. I didn’t know who half the people were, but it never stopped him talking to them—all business as usual and then he’d invite them round to dinner! I’d be frantic to keep them out of the kitchen so they wouldn’t see the list with
People Who Deserve To Be Shot
and their names scrawled underneath in black Biro. My name was on there a few times. I never made it into the top ten, but Jack was a permanent fixture after they came back from the States. Not that there was any chance of him being invited to dinner—by that stage they couldn’t even agree about the time. But even after that I still thought that all Lenny needed to get well again was love, and that if I loved him uncritically and gave him security, I could save him. I must have been off my head, because the only thing I was doing was making it easier for him to drink. But I felt guilty, too, because I thought their splitting up was partly my fault. Lenny’d never talked to me about it, and Jack always swore he’d never breathed a word—about us, I mean—but I don’t know . . .

The wall-covering—or what’s left of it—is still in the dining room. I’ve never changed it because Lenny liked it and it was the only comment I remember him making about the decoration. He left me the house—money, as well, otherwise I couldn’t live here. We’d had most of the major repairs done before he died, but it was just too soon and I couldn’t face being here on my own. I didn’t want to sell it because it was Lenny’s, so I hung on to it. Then I married Jeff so I was living in London and hardly ever came up here. I only moved in properly last November. It was
unbelievably
cold. The boiler broke down after a week and I was freezing for a fortnight because that’s how long it took the plumber to get the part to fix it. I slept with all my clothes on and Eustace tucked in beside me like a hot-water bottle, otherwise he would have frozen, too, and I remember some nights waking up because I was so cold and thinking, what the hell am I doing here? But when I thought about it again in the morning I knew I didn’t want to leave. For one thing, I couldn’t face going back to London, and for another, it was my decision so I wanted it to work. It was like being a bunny, in a way—something I was doing for
me
. Because I always seemed to let people decide things for me—Lenny, Jeff . . . even the dog. Lenny and Eustace I didn’t mind, of course. Jeff wasn’t so great, but as I say, it wasn’t his fault, really. He was older than me, as well. Ten years, something like that. Don’t think I don’t know—the older man, the father I never had, that’s what a psychiatrist would say. All I can say about that is, if that’s what they get up to with their fathers, then frankly I don’t think I’m the one with the problem. But it’s easy to look at somebody else’s life and trot out pat answers about why they do this or that. In my case, I don’t know whether it’s true or not, and what’s more I couldn’t give a monkey’s, either.

Lenny and I hit it off from the word go. He took me to The Ark and ordered
boeuf en daube
for both of us—I still ate meat in those days—and two bottles of wine, straightaway. I felt a bit uncomfortable at first because I wasn’t sure where it was all going—which was ridiculous, really, when you think we’d had it off before we were even
introduced
—but I was half-expecting Jack to be there, and there was a touch of, you know, this man is a famous comedian, what’s he doing with me, what are we going to talk about? Which was unusual for me because I’ve been chatted up by the best of them and turned quite a few down, too, but—well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say I was in love with Lenny, not then . . . let’s just say I already knew that whatever happened was going to matter a lot.

When we first got to the restaurant I couldn’t stop staring at his head, because he had two great patches of hair cut out at the side. I hadn’t noticed in the taxi, but it looked bizarre under the restaurant lights because he had all this lovely wavy black hair with two huge bald patches just above his right ear. I wasn’t going to say anything because I thought he must have done it for a film or something, but he was obviously a bit self-conscious because he kept putting his hand up to his head. Then he said, “Sorry about the hair. I hope you don’t mind being seen in public with me looking like this, but it got singed.”