What She Left: Enhanced Edition (40 page)

Shadows around her eyes; a fellow insomniac. Us at a concert, eating mackerel in a wood-panelled room, a boarding house in a provincial seaside town long prior to it going upmarket, the leather and fabric seats of my TR7, tan-coloured and sticky. One memory prompting another – layers of them, accretions, like strata in rock.

‘There was the text, too.’

‘The text?’

‘She sent it at twenty-one minutes past midnight, but I didn’t see it until the Sunday morning.’

‘The text?’

‘Wasn’t fazed by it initially, Alice was forever drunk-texting, but by about ten I was in a proper tizz at her not returning my call. Then the knock on the door – a policeman and a policewoman. I knew it was bad because they don’t come to your house unless it’s bad.’ She dabbed at a mark on the arm of the chair. ‘It was still an ordinary Sunday morning when I read that text, the last ever ordinary Sunday morning.’

‘Liz, talk to me. What text?’

‘It was Plath. That
fucking
woman. The line about lying in the grass – it’s a suicide line.’

She licked her finger and had another go at the mark on the chair more frantically, chipping at it with her nail. ‘Won’t come off,’ she said and compassion gripped me, like a vice. ‘The press got everything else, but they never got that. I haven’t been able to face it until now, but it
can
only mean one thing. I couldn’t bear those to be her last words so I’ve never mentioned it to a soul, I couldn’t, not even David.’

‘But the police –’

‘Not the ones who came to the door but the ones afterwards, they’re up to speed on it, but no one else is. It’s one
of the few pieces of Alice that isn’t public property. It’s no one else’s business.’

We sat and there was a brittle, taut atmosphere, like the aftermath of an argument we’d never actually had.

‘I guessed she’d been at the wine because she’d mangled the quote and my Alice was a stickler for getting quotes right.’ She sniffled, half smiled, but that fell away. ‘You’re never short of an opinion – what do you make of this then?’

It could have been thirty years before, her spitting: ‘You’re never going to leave your wife, are you?’ Back then, my desire for her had been feverish: the inescapable apogee of it, her unravelling. Now, her dismantled, that desire had transmogrified into only one wish: to ameliorate pain.

‘I think due process will eventually prevail. But for now, I don’t think you should be here. Can I give you a lift anywhere – home, for example?’

‘It’s miles.’

‘I’d do that, you know I’d do that for you.’

‘And I’d avoid my husband, if I were you.’

I poured myself a top-up and an image of Liz presented itself: red wine on her teeth. Guilt chafed at me, but I’d done nothing wrong, Larry. I’d depart this rendezvous in a few minutes and head home to another woman with similarly greying hair: a man in his sixties who suffers from heartburn and strains to read train departure boards, when thirty years ago I’d done likewise, except I was someone who’d bore along green lanes in a sparkling sports car, and go five games on the squash court then jump on my Raleigh Europa, and was cancer-free.

‘Does David know you’re here?’

‘What do you think?’

As in 1982, questions engendering questions.

‘Dave and Robbie are convinced I’m still vulnerable; they’re babying me. I’m no baby.’

‘You’re strong.’

‘I’m not strong, Jem. Who’d be strong?’ She crossed her arms, rubbing herself as if she was cold. Her
shell
. Besides us, the sofa that her daughter had slept on drunk eight years ago.

She said: ‘You need to know, Jem, that I love my husband very much.’

‘Sandhill cranes, eh?’

‘Sandhill cranes. I presume you picked up on the flurry of puerile speculation you were Alice’s father.’

‘Mocksy,’ I said. ‘Stoked up by Devereux. My nemeses.’

‘I’d never cheat on a man as good as David.’

Alice used to remind me of her, Larry, but at that instant it was the other way round: it was she who reminded me of Alice.

‘You ought to read Fanthorpe’s “Atlas”,’ she said. ‘That sums marriage up perfectly.’

I wiped the lenses of my glasses; it used to be prescient to have a stock of tissues on standby to dispense when freshers bared their souls, but latterly they only visited to assert their rights and demand a re-mark. I’ve got my own theory, Larry. More than a theory, a
fact
. It doesn’t involve suicide, either.

‘Are you going to be OK?’ I asked.

‘The blue of police uniforms isn’t how it is on the telly when you see it in the flesh.’

‘Liz, are you going to be OK?’

What I was about to do might mean she’d never be OK ever again.

‘You asked to see me,’ she said. ‘Here I am.’

‘So you are, young Megan. Please, come in.’

She did as instructed, unravelled her scarf, then declared: ‘You’re a bit old to be creeping around leaving notes, aren’t you?’

Larry, if she’d responded to my correspondence I wouldn’t have needed to resort to the old note-under-the-door trick. ‘I wish to make amends for my actions,’ I’d scribbled, confident that would flush her out. ‘Drop by; it could be the most lucrative hour you ever spend.’ She was wearing boots and black tights and had opted for a short skirt, despite the inclement weather. ‘You look well,’ I lied.

She slipped out of her coat and draped it over the arm of a chair. ‘It’s like a dungeon in here; there’s no air.’

I passed her the wine I’d kept on hand for her arrival. White, very chilled: how she preferred it. ‘Make yourself at home, sit.’

She did, then asked: ‘So, this offer?’

I’d alluded in my missive to securing her a couple of museum accounts for her new PR firm; her intention to re-enter the world of academia seemingly abandoned. Our relationship had degenerated, but I suspected her greed for business would outweigh any misgivings on her part about visiting. Now, reeling from some not such good news from my consultant, I had a brash, confrontational edge. ‘Why did you claim I touched you?’

‘If the cap fits.’

‘But it’s not true.’

She took a big disdainful glug of the wine. ‘What is this stuff?’

‘Gagnard-Delagrange. It’s phenomenally good.’

‘Rarely drink these days,’ she said. ‘After what happened to Alice, it scares me. When I see girls trolleyed, I get the urge to lecture them on the dangers of alcohol. Must be getting old!’

‘I’m becoming more impulsive as I get older,’ I said absent-mindedly. ‘In the next life, I’ll be positively reckless.’

‘Alice is one big game to you, isn’t she?’

‘I’d hardly deem her that.’

‘I read that interview where you claimed to be an “inveterate observer of human nature” but you’re only interested in people if they’re dead or in some tribe on another continent. It’s like reading – it’s avoiding real life because dead people and faraway people can’t hurt you.’

I tried to place that phrase from a book,
faraway people
, but my memory isn’t what it was, Larry. ‘Finished with the character assassination?’

‘No, not yet. What about us, the living? Don’t we deserve the same duty of care? What about the right to privacy? The media have ridden roughshod over that. Some of the stuff they’ve written about Alice and I, it’s pure fantasy.’

‘Alice and me,’ I said. ‘It’s “Alice and me”, not “Alice and I”.’

She held out her empty glass, like a supplicant, so I obliged.

‘Today’s news, tomorrow’s chip paper – that’s what I remind myself, but it doesn’t help.’

She plays the privacy card, Larry, but hasn’t missed an opportunity to thrust herself into the limelight, give her hard-done-by coquettish smile – there’s something of the Diana in her – then take a deep breath and eulogize about her best friend.

‘It’s all right for you,’ she added, ‘you’re Teflon-coated. But doesn’t it wear you out, everyone having an opinion on you?’

‘One becomes accustomed to it.’ So many of my associations had gone that way, Larry: my father, my contemporaries from school, university peers, colleagues. Last I heard of Devereux he’d been farmed out to some OAP home, hunched in a corner, deluded and spouting vitriol. I cut to the chase. ‘Why did you try to frame me?’

‘Sometimes people get arrested for stuff they don’t do. They get convicted of the wrong offence and it might not be for what they did but they’ve done something equally as bad. Is that a miscarriage of justice?’

‘Technically,’ I said.

‘Screw
technically
. It all rolls into one. It’s justice. I decided you needed it.’

‘Justice isn’t yours to dispense,’ I said.

‘It’s not yours, either.’ She was knocking back the wine as if it was water; it would hit her presently. ‘I’ve learnt one thing. The public much prefer a simple lie to a complex truth.’

I saw the winter sun, weak and watery. ‘The truth travels in straight lines, Megan. Like light.’