The Facts of Life (35 page)

‘The one writing the biography of Myra Toye,’ Miriam explained. ‘She spent hours at The Roundel with poor Dad. – almost an entire day, rooting through boxes and papers he’d stashed away. And now she keeps asking what
I
know. As if I’d know anything. The book’s due out soon in any case. She’s probably just pestering me for more information to help publicise it.’

‘Why on earth would she ask you?’ Alison asked.

‘Did Grandpa know her then?’ Jamie added, suddenly interested. Francis sighed histrionically, indicating that this was ground that had already been gone over thoroughly and had bored him the first time around. He left the room and turned on a satellite sports programme next door.

‘No,’ Miriam insisted, ignoring his departure. ‘I’d have remembered. I mean, he knew her to chat to – like he knew Vivien Leigh and Margaret Lockwood. Poor Vivien came to the house several times before she died. She was always sweet to me. But that Toye creature wasn’t a friend or anything. Silly tarty woman, she’s become. Grotesque. Plastic surgery’s obscene.’

‘Oh I think she’s good!’ Jamie protested. ‘And she hasn’t had surgery. I read an interview. And it’s amazing how she’s got herself a second career so late on in life. She must be, what, sixty? Seventy? Grandpa’s age, at least.’

‘Eighty. She looks eighty,’ Miriam insisted.

‘Never. She’d pass for fifty-five in
Mulroney Park
. Her body’s amazing.’

‘You don’t
watch
that trash?’ his mother asked.

‘Every week,’ Jamie admitted. ‘I’m completely hooked.’

‘I’m going out for a bit,’ Alison murmured. ‘Come on dogs.’

She pushed open a French window and Miriam’s nervy, overbred red setters slipped eagerly out with her, charging ahead in a clumsy race to pee on Francis’s mock-Georgian urns and scuff up the perfection of his daisy-less lawn. Sunday weighed heavily on her as it always did there. She longed for proper countryside, unmanicured, bleak and windy. She thought with envy of her grandfather. Having made his feelings towards his son-in-law amicably clear at an early stage in the courtship, he lived happily on in his studio and his flat, spared these stifling weekends at his daughter’s bogus manor, as if they were some meat from which he had a religious dispensation. Alison smiled to herself, thinking how little truck Sam would have with Francis and Miriam’s pretensions.

The morning after the attack – she could not, would not think of it as rape – she was momentarily startled to find the huge man drinking tea in her kitchen. He was utterly calm and unsmiling, however, and his calm proved infectious.

‘Hope I didn’t wake you,’ he said. ‘I tend to get up with the sun.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Is that tea still drinkable?’

As answer, he poured her a mugful. She cupped it in her hands and sipped. Then she found her hands were shaking and she had to set it down.

‘Hell,’ she said, mopping scalded fingers with a tea towel. He furrowed his brow in sympathy.

‘Bastards,’ he muttered. ‘They won’t come after you again, though.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But they’ll probably go after someone else. I really should go to the police.’

He sighed wearily.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should.’

‘You’ll come with me? You saw them, after all.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I said last night. I’ll make myself scarce. Thanks for the tea and everything, though.’ He pushed back his chair.

‘No,’ she said hurriedly, acutely aware now that the last thing she wanted was to be left alone, even in the banality of a weekday morning. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t. There must be hundreds of people who look like them in any case. But why don’t you want me to?’

He kept on out into the hall.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t go. Please. Stay for a bit.’

‘I can’t answer questions,’ he told her, suddenly angry, ‘and it’s not fair on you to expect you not to ask.’

‘That’s my problem. I won’t ask.’ She held open the kitchen door to him respectfully. ‘Please?’

For what felt like a full minute, he seemed to read her face, registering what he saw there with minute alterations in his own, ironic expression.

‘Please,’ she said again and at last something in him relaxed and he walked past her back to the kitchen. His legs were so long that they stretched out right below the table when he sat and under the chairs on the other side. The leather on one of his boots had worn down so that a steel toecap shone dully through it.

‘Good,’ she told him, sitting too. ‘I’m Alison.’

‘I’m Sam,’ he said.

‘Suits you,’ she said.

‘So they tell me.’

For the first time, he smiled. It was a lovely, sexy smile, that dimpled his cheeks and made little creases around his eyes. Alison had grown up surrounded by men with unkempt beards and long hair, so she remained vulnerable to the charms of naked male grins. She feared he had shaved with one of the blunt disposable razors she used on her legs and hoped it had not hurt him.

‘Do you want some breakfast?’ she added. ‘I can never face anything but there’s bread and so on.’

‘I’ll grab a bacon sandwich in a caff on my way in,’ he said. ‘I should go.’ He glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I’m going to be late.’

‘Where are you working? Sorry. That’s a question, isn’t it?’

‘The new hospital,’ he said. ‘Where the glue factory used to be.’

‘I should leave too,’ she told him. ‘We can go together.’

‘You’ll be all right going out?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But I’d rather be in the office than out here on my own. I can get a taxi home if I’m going to be late. And I’ve too many things to get done today. I’ll go to pieces later, when there’s time. It’s okay. That’s a joke. Here, take the spare key,’ she said impulsively. ‘I often have to work late and I don’t want you waiting out there on that bench.’

He took the key and looked at it in the palm of his hand, puzzled.

‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing here?’ he asked.

‘Not really.’ She reached for her bag of still unread manuscript. ‘But it feels right.’

‘But you don’t know me or anything about me.’

‘You’re Sam. I trust you.’

‘I’ve already got a place to live at the hostel.’

‘But do you like it there?’

Sam paused a moment, then snorted.

‘It’s bloody horrible. Sarajevo under siege.’

‘So stay here. There’s nothing worth stealing anyway, I’ve been burgled so often. Not that I think you would.’

‘I wouldn’t. But still …’ He hesitated.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Or we’ll both be late.’

As they parted company outside the tube station, he plucked, quite unselfconsciously, at her jacket sleeve, holding her back by him.

‘I might not come back tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s … I … I can’t explain but –’

‘It’s all right,’ she assured him, light-headed from risk and an empty stomach. ‘Keep the key in case.’

But he had come back. And the night after that. He came home reddish-grey with building dust, leaving a faint tang of sweat behind him in the kitchen while he paused for a cup of tea before taking a shower and falling into a deep sleep in a chair or on the sofa. He usually woke again after a couple of hours, half-way through the evening. He shaved with a noisy, battery-powered razor he carried in one of the deep pockets of his coat. Apart from the odd finger-print, he moved through her small household leaving remarkably few traces, fastidious as a large but graceful cat, comforting, in his strongly felt presence, as a dog.

‘But he’s a
man
!’ the Cynthia within said when she caught her mind tidying him away in this emasculating fashion. ‘He must have appetites, needs. He’ll soon start making demands.’ But Sam seemed more self-contained and less demanding than any man or woman she had ever met. He let slip certain pieces of information. He had a savings account where he stored his wages for safekeeping. He owned no clothes other than the ones he stood up in and a second set of shirt, socks and underwear, which he carried screwed up in another pocket of his coat. A precious spare pair of jeans was retrieved from the hostel. He had a blue shirt and a red one, and was scrupulous in washing each set of clothes with a bar of soap on the night he took it off. Alison envied him the simplicity of this system, being tyrannised herself by a large wardrobe, much of it bought for momentary psychological comfort rather than long-term physical necessity, and much of it deemed unwearable. He asked her no questions about herself, which was strangely liberating, allowing her to exist for him just as she appeared, there, then, simply. He was keenly aware of his surroundings, however, and openly curious about things he found lying about the house. Books, mainly, and house-plants and compact discs. He regularly listened to whatever disc she left in the player, content to play it over and over until she changed it. And she knew he had occasionally looked at the manuscripts she brought home because, turning their pages at her office desk, she had found signs of his work-dusty touch on their pages.

‘Has he been doing time?’ Sandy asked when Alison described the quiet charm of living with him.

‘Of course not,’ Alison told her. ‘I’m not a total fool.’

But it was only as she denied it that she saw that he probably
had
been in prison. It would explain his reluctance to have her involve him with the police – especially if he were still on parole – and his inability to find a better job. It would explain his tough self-sufficiency, and the armour of discretion he wore over his emotions, much as going to boarding school had done to Jamie. She felt foolish at having taken for unworldliness the symptoms of institutional abuse. In her weaker moments, she also felt shame at the prurience with which she now imagined the extent of his criminality. She felt fear, too. He had already showed himself to be violent, albeit in a good cause, and she wondered how long it would be before she witnessed that violence again. She determined not to tell him her assumptions about his recent past. If there was any purpose in their paths crossing, it was that she could discreetly help him to make a fresh start. She pictured Miriam and Francis’s horror if she had hinted at any of these suspicions.

She reached the bench at the far end of her stepfather’s garden and sat squarely, glaring across the lawn at his fatuous house and waiting for her anger to evaporate in the still air. It soon would; she had always been reliably even tempered, quick to speak her rage – which she seldom did – quick to forgive. The dogs slumped to the grass on either side of her legs, faithful without encouragement. She petted one, rubbing its long, silky ears between her fingers and scratching its chest. It was as far removed from Amos, the scruffy adopted stray of her childhood as ‘Henchley Manor’ was from The Roundel. It was so maddeningly typical that Miriam, who had given open house to any number of more or less criminal men throughout her youth and had even conceived children by two of them, should now react towards her daughter’s simple act of grateful hospitality with querulous alarm. There was always the possibility, of course, that a mother’s intuition had prompted her to guess that the hospitality was not quite so simple as Alison would have it appear.

At a fierce two-finger whistle, Alison looked up to see Jamie waving to her from the terrace. The dogs bounded away towards him. He bent to pet them then looked back to her, tapped his watch, jerked his head towards his car and grinned. She held up a thumb in agreement and stood.

‘So do I get to meet him?’ he asked as he swung the car up on to the Bow fly-over. ‘Mr Strong-and-Silent?’

‘Jamie, he’s just my lodger, all right?’

‘If you say so.’ He grinned across at her and accelerated through some lights as they were turning red. He allowed the music to swell up between them for a few moments; listening religiously to the entire Top Forty every Sunday evening was one of his eternal teenage habits. He would still be wearing jeans and baseball boots in his fifties, she sensed, and, damn him, he would still have the figure to get away with them. ‘But I do want to meet him,’ he added. ‘Can I?’

‘Of course you can,’ she sighed, weary of his teasing and wondering, with a trace of apprehension, what he and Sam would make of one another.

‘He won’t run away or anything?’

‘
Jamie!
’

‘I’ll be good,’ he assured her. ‘Promise.’

He turned up the radio for a song they both liked and wound down his window to take a better look at the pale torso of a cyclist who had stopped to peel off his Lycra top at the roadside.

Sam wasn’t there, however. Adept at reading her house’s atmospheres, Alison could tell it was empty as soon as she crossed the threshold. She laughed the disappointment off, telling Jamie her lodger must have heard him coming, but after he had driven off, excusing himself for some, urgent, unspecified assignation, she examined the house more carefully. She saw that Sam had taken the previous day’s shirt with him, although it would still be damp. The spare jeans were gone, and a loaf of bread, and a pint of milk. She knew then that he might not be coming back, knew too with a spasm like the shivers that heralded an infection, that she wanted him.

Alison was not a woman to lose control. She sank to the point of sitting on his tidily made bed, touching his pillow and moping like a lovelorn teenager, then checked herself on the safer side of folly. She spent the evening reading manuscripts and the next few days gathering information on the coming season’s fiction titles for a sales conference, and putting in extra hours doling out advice and calm on the helpline.