Alice was silent, taking it in. She was beginning to feel she understood. This phone call, after all this time … A complex feeling overwhelmed her; something a little like regret, but mostly like relief.
‘Good for you,’ she said at last, realizing that she meant it.
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Of course I do. Friends, Joe, remember?’
His answering laugh was a little unsteady, and she could tell that he was moved.
‘God, I’m relieved!’
‘So am I. Now I don’t have to spend my life looking over my shoulder expecting to see you in pursuit.’
Good laughter together. Alice held the moment to her, that warmth, knowing that in some way for Joe it was an exorcism of her, of their wild and bad years, of what he still thought of as her rejection of him. She felt a sudden rush of unpossessive, uncomplicated love for him, sad Joe hiding his isolation behind a wall of facetiousness, Joe who only needed to be needed and wanted and clung to before he could blossom. She hoped that this girl would be the right one for him now, hoped that she would like electric folk music, would want babies and marriage and all the things which Joe had wanted, and Alice had given up in the name of her freedom.
Something cold and hard and lonely inside her melted and disappeared, and the relief she felt was like a blessing.
‘So,’ said Alice. ‘What’s she like?’
‘Well—’ he began. ‘She’s different. Different from everybody else. She likes Virginia Woolf and Egyptian art and chamber music … would you believe that I could fall for a girl who likes chamber music? She looks a bit like Kate Bush, and … I suppose I’d better translate that into aesthetic terms you can relate to. You’re so square you probably don’t get this technical stuff.’
‘Watch it,’ warned Alice.
‘Well, she has kind of Rossetti-ish hair, and a kind of Burne-Jones-ish face …’
‘She sounds like a woman of many parts. I suppose she has a William Morris beard?’ said Alice with a grin.
‘Well, why don’t you find out for yourself? You’ll have to meet her; that’s mostly why I phoned in the first place.’
‘Oh,’ said Alice. ‘Sure, OK.’
Joe seemed to sense her reluctance.
‘I mean it, Al,’ he said firmly. ‘I’d really like you two to be friends.’
For a moment, Alice hesitated, choked by a sudden poignant regret. Then, with an effort, she shrugged it off, almost in control again.
‘I’d love to meet her, Joe,’ she said. ‘And I’d love to see you again, too. I’ve lost touch with too many old friends to let this one pass me by.’ She tried to stop her voice from breaking. ‘How about meeting you both in town? Or maybe I could come and hear your band. Does …’ she paused. ‘Joe, you mutt, you never even told me her name.’
Joe laughed.
‘Didn’t I? Hey, you can’t expect me to think of everything. It’s Virginia, Virginia Mae Ashley, but everyone just calls her Ginny. She says Virginia Mae’s too much of a mouthful for someone like her. Do you still like pizza? We could go for a pizza somewhere if you like. The band doesn’t play again till Tuesday, but we could go out, see a film. How does that sound?’
‘That sounds fine.’
‘What about you? You sound a bit down. You OK?’
‘Of course I am. I’m just a bit tired. It’s late, you know.’
‘Yes … ah … I’ll get off in a minute. Let you get some sleep. There’s just one more thing, but the fact of it is that … I’m in a bit of a quandary here, and normally, you know I wouldn’t ask you, but… well … Ginny’s new to Cambridge, and she doesn’t have very much money … I wondered if you’d mind putting her up?’
‘Joe—’
‘Tell me if I’m out of line,’ he went on, ‘but it would only be for a day or two. I can’t offer her a place in my digs because the landlady wouldn’t allow it. We’re looking for a flat or something, but you know how hard it is to get something decent in Cambridge at this time of year, when all the good places have been snapped up by the students or the tourists. It would only be for a little while, maybe just a few days, while we find somewhere else, and failing that, I’ve got a friend who lives in Grantchester who’s going off to the States on Friday, and he says we can use his house as a stopgap, so even if the worst comes to the worst it would only be till the end of the week.’ He stopped. ‘Alice? What do you think?’
Alice sighed inwardly.
‘I suppose it’ll be all right,’ she said, as he had known she would. ‘Where is she staying now?’
‘Nowhere yet,’ replied Joe. ‘She’s just come out of Fulbourn.’
‘Fulbourn?’
‘They’ve offered to put her up for a while, but I hate the idea of her having to stay in that rotten place any longer than she has to. Just looking round there’s enough to give anyone terminal depression.’
‘Oh, no. Are you serious?’ You never really knew with Joe; years earlier, when they had been good friends, before intimacy had come to take their friendship away, Alice would have been able to say: ‘Fulbourn? Well, she must be a nutcase if she sees anything in you,’ but here, the link between them was still too distant, still too fraught with bad memories, to allow more than a momentary easing of the tension.
‘You mean … Was she a patient?’
Joe tutted. ‘Honestly, I knew how you’d react. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know, one person in three has a breakdown at some time or other. Your mother told me that you were pretty close to it yourself, when you went through that bad patch of yours, so don’t try to make it sound as if she—’
‘Don’t be silly. That wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was …’ Searching for the right words. ‘How is she?’
Joe’s answer sounded a little cold; Alice wondered whether she had overstepped the mark. After all, what claim on Joe’s private life could she have now?
‘It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, Al,’ he said, ‘but after all, it’s Ginny’s private life we’re talking about here. I don’t think I should have the right to tell people about her private life without asking her first, and I’m not sure how much she wants people to know about what happened to her. I only told you about Fulbourn so that you’d know to be careful of what you say and how you talk to her. She’s still very vulnerable, you know.’
So am I, thought Alice, but let it pass.
‘Al? You don’t mind, do you?’
Alice said: ‘I don’t mind.’
‘Good.’ The relief in his voice was apparent. ‘Besides, she’s fine. You’d never think her life had been touched by so much crap. She’s only eighteen, you know, she’s got everything to live for. You’ll love her, Al. Everyone loves her.’
He broke off for a moment, laughed quietly to himself. ‘I think this is it, Al. You know, the L-word. It’s funny, isn’t it? I never used to think that I’d feel this way; I thought that there was only room in my life for the music, playing and grafting and getting bottled off stage, and all in the hope that the graft would pay off. And in a funny way, it has. If I hadn’t played the Sluice, I wouldn’t have met Ginny. God knows what she was doing in the Sluice in the first place. But ever since then she’s been bringing me luck. Everything’s been looking up for me.’
Alice was silent for a long time. She hated the idea. More than hated it. Not because she loved Joe any more, but because it was all wrong. It wasn’t like Joe to talk like this. Joe only cared for himself and his music and his ambitions; Joe was charming, likeable, amusing, but underneath, he was unscrupulously selfish. He didn’t put himself out for anyone, didn’t really consider what other people might be feeling … he was usually too much involved with his own enthusiasms. And he never mentioned what he called the L-word – she had thought he never would.
But Joe was a friend … had been, anyway, and she had behaved badly, as she always did when a good friendship went the bad way into intimacy. Maybe this was her chance to make up for that. And more than that,
she was conscious of a desire to see him again, to talk to him, to remake their old, comfortable companionship. When he had laughed with her, laughed with the good laughter of old times recalled and recaptured, she had felt warmed, and had known that it was the friendship she missed coming back, and that she would do what she could to keep it, even if it meant putting up Joe’s girl. She gave an unwilling laugh.
‘Sounds good to me,’ she said. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’ll like having her here. I can even put you up too, if you like. I’d be glad to have you both.’
As she spoke the words, they were almost true. The last of the old resentment melted, and Alice felt an easy warmth for this girl Ginny, whom she had never met. It was so good to feel the rift beginning to close at last, as if the sourness and emptiness had been there all this time, half-felt but in disguise, touching everything with cold … Alice realized that Joe was talking.
‘We could meet at your place, if that’s all right,’ he was saying. ‘We’ll have tea or something, then we’ll go and have a pizza, or see a film, or both. Does that sound good?’
‘That’s fine.’
Alice must have hesitated for an instant, because Joe picked up on it at once.
‘Hey, Alice? Are you sure?’
Alice made her voice light. ‘I’ll look forward to it, Joe. Keep playing those blues, hey?’
‘Hang in there. I’ll be round at about six. I tell you, things are going to be just great. You won’t be disappointed.’
One
I DON’T SUPPOSE there was anything I could have done to avert what she had planned. As I said, she was very clever, and she knew my failings only too well. When I hauled her, dripping, into the cab with my coat flung protectively around her shoulders, myself only half-dressed, with my shoes and hat and tie still abandoned by the edge of the Cam, she must have smiled to herself, as such creatures may. She must have smiled through her lavender eyes as I hastened to revive her with my little flask of brandy, panting around her like an eager dog. There was nowhere to take her except to Grantchester and my landlady’s house, nothing to do but to take her in (she was shivering now and could walk shakily from the cab to the door of the house), to explain as best I could and to watch helplessly as she was whisked away upstairs by a concerned and clucking Mrs Brown to an unknowable and half-defined realm of hot water and soft pillows.Lucky that she was such a kind, easy-going old soul. Other, more suspicious landladies might have treated my strange visitor with less consideration; but Mrs Brown was by far the best woman in my long and varied experience. She provided sympathy, attention, and tea – her all-purpose cure-all – then left Rosemary in the best bedroom, threatened me with the direst consequences if I were to disturb the young lady, and retired to her business, supremely unruffled, as if I brought half-drowned ladies to the house every day of the week. Bless her.
Left on her own in the best spare room, her bright hair washed, and wearing one of Mrs Brown’s starched linen nightdresses, how Rosemary must have laughed. Laughed at the foolishness of it all: at our kindness, our misplaced sympathy; my hopeful adoration. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
I spent the rest of that day in a haze. I did not dare leave the house in case some new development arose; in case the girl disappeared. Her face haunted me. The memory of her silent floating on the water filled me with poetic thoughts. I spent the long enchanted hours lying in my room, reliving those dreamlike instants again and again, my ears tuned to the slightest sound from that secret, silent room in which she slept, my heart bursting with a kind of music. Mrs Brown came and went with cheerful, concerned efficiency. A vase of early cherry-blossom found its way into the sleeping girl’s room, then a number of patchwork cushions; then, at about half past four, a tray of tea and biscuits. At five Mrs Brown announced that the young lady might like to get up and have some hot soup; and at six I found myself sitting at the dinner table, shaking with anticipation, staring at the extra place set by my landlady, my head feverish and my hands clenched out of sight in my lap.
I was love-lorn, I suppose; what young man would not have been? She had stepped out of a fairy tale for me, a white Ophelia borne from nowhere on a muddy wave and a whisper of morning. The threat of scandal, the riot of speculation which might have arisen later from the society of which I was a part did not even enter my mind; for me, Rosemary might have been new-born there and then, like Venus from the wave. And it was with these thoughts in mind that I waited for my first glimpse of her, half afraid to look, as if I might see some hitherto unsuspected flaw in her perfection. I need not have worried. A quick mothlike sound on the stairs, a clip of high heels, and suddenly, she was there, her features, blurred by the movement of light and shade in the passageway, coming into abrupt relief as she stopped in front of the window. Her hair was a nimbus of flame in the sunlight, her figure trim and childishly slight. Her face was pale, her eyes lost and haunted, but even then she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Even then. Even now.
She looked at me silently for a while, then turned slantways against the sunshine, so that I caught the flutter from her hooded eyes. Her hair was so bright that it threw coppery reflections on to a cheekbone, the curve of her neck.
‘To be alive,’ she said quietly, turning to me again, her voice hoarse and sweet, like scratched silver. ‘What little difference between being alive and not. Don’t you think?’ I think I just stared at her, not knowing what to say, not thinking.
‘To be alive,’ she repeated, ‘such a brief mystery, too short to understand. The thing to have is power. Power is everything and lasts for ever.’
There I had it; the creed of Rosemary Ashley, but, like a fool, I just gaped, offered pity where none was needed, impulsively stretched out my hand towards her (the sunlight bled it white), and said: ‘Don’t talk. Try to eat something. You’re among friends now.’
Her strange gaze fixed me for an instant.
‘Friends,’ she said, almost blankly.
‘I pulled you out of the river,’ I said, trying not to sound too pleased with myself. ‘Believe me, miss. I’m your friend now, if you’ll have me – if you’ll trust me. The river isn’t any answer … Whatever it is … not that.’
I think that somewhere in my mind there might have been a suspicion of something tawdry; some slinking tale of seduction and abandonment, but whatever it was, was banished as soon as I looked into her eyes. She was innocent. I could have sworn she was; staked my life on it, as, in a way, I suppose I did. It shone through her like a searchlight. Innocence. Or so I thought.
Later I learned to know her better. It was not innocence which streamed from every part of her, piercing her transparent skin and shining from her lilac eyes.
I think it was power.
Three
HE CLOSED HIS book and went to the window again. It was raining now; the light from the street fell in great corrugated sheets against the thick glass of the window and bounced from the windowsill with a sound like shrapnel. It was half past two in the morning, and still she did not come.
He went to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a whisky. He didn’t really like the stuff, though he would never have admitted it to anyone, but it was what she drank, whisky, no ice; and he was still too much in love and wanted to drink it for her sake, as if the taste could somehow bring her closer to him. He swallowed, made an involuntary face, then downed the whole glassful, slamming the glass back on to the table in front of him in a way he imagined might have impressed her, if she had been there to see him.
But she did not come. Where was she? A movement from outside caught his eye, and he squinted through the window again; was that a figure in the courtyard below, the gleam of a plastic mackintosh in the lamplight? He fumbled with the catch of the window, pushed it open, regardless of the rain pouring in.
‘Over here!’ he shouted through the crashing of the overflow pipe, and the figure halted, looked up. He caught a brief glimpse of her face above the shiny black collar, saw her nod, and the familiar thri
ll always occasioned by her presence overcame him again, a starburst of adrenalin which began somewhere in the region of his stomach and expanded in thin, prickly lines towards the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet; a delight which was partly compounded of lust and wonder and a kind of fearful insignificance. Making love to her never changed her. She renewed her chastity like the moon, every time; only he was defiled.
Her footsteps sounded on the stairs. He poured himself another glass of whisky and drank half of it at once, afraid she might see his trembling hands. She was not kind, his lady; she knew his weaknesses and laughed at them. Sometimes, in his moments of lucidity, he wondered why he needed her so, knowing as he did that all she had ever offered him were the joys of fear and humiliation and the dark exhilaration of the fairground, rank with the scent of sweat and the beast which was himself. She had no love for him. They had nothing in common, never talked like friends. And yet, her step on the landing, quick and light as a cat’s, set his pulses racing, his head spinning, and he ran to open the door as eager as a schoolboy.
So slim, so frail; even now she never ceased to amaze him, that so much perversity could be contained in such a thin white vessel. She stood before him in the semi-darkness, sensing his feelings, mocking him. She was wearing the black plastic raincoat, tightly belted at the waist, the collar turned up to frame her face. She had pushed back her hood, and the thick curls of her pale red hair spilled out on to her shoulders. Her mouth was very red; he felt dizzy with his proximity to her, felt as if he were falling towards that mouth, saw the lips part very slightly to allow him to fall … She untied the belt of her raincoat, shrugged it open; dropped the coat on to the floor of the landing where it lay in a pool of rain, smiled. She was naked under the raincoat, her body opalescent in the reflected light from the street-lamps, her hair a wild cascade, her eyes, her lips, the tips of her breasts, the dark delta of her pubic hair like holes in that pallid body, holes from which cables of mystic night winched him closer and closer to her, powerless in the face of her irresistible attraction.