‘Oh, Alice. You rotten liar. She wants to make you miserable. You know she does. It’s what turns her on.’
Maybe it’s a dream but let it go on. He can see. He sees. Like magic. Like he’s a wizard. My very own lovely wild-haired wizard. I can say it to him, he knows already. I can say anything to my wizard.
‘I hate her.’ Say it louder. ‘I hate her! She says I’ve run away to a circus. She makes them all pretend I’m not there. I hate her!’
‘Obviously. But we’ve agreed we can’t kill her. So what can we do?’
‘Put a curse on her.’
God knows I’ve tried but it never works.
‘What curse?’
‘So she gets covered with spots all over her face.’
Chloe has perfect skin.
‘Big swollen red spots,’ says Mr Strachan. ‘With fat yellow tops.’
‘And her hair could all fall out.’
‘And her eyebrows.’
Brilliant! No eyebrows would be so freaky.
‘And she could poo in her knickers!’
‘In assembly,’ he says. ‘Runny poo.’
‘Running down her legs!’
Laughing hurts, oh God now hiccups, any time soon I’ll be crying, I love Mr Strachan, he’s my darling wizard who knows everything especially how to be so silly you just laugh till you cry. Stupid to cry it’s not like I’m unhappy or anything but something’s opened up inside and everything’s just falling out.
Mum!
Darling Mum in the classroom doorway looking surprised but she’s got a smile on her face because she can see us laughing. Into her arms and feel her warm and soft and beautiful.
‘Here now, darling. Here now.’
Mr Strachan’s voice all normal and grown-up again.
‘We’ve been talking,’ he says. ‘We’ve not done as much work as we should.’
‘So I see.’ Stroking my hair. Hugging me close. ‘You okay, darling?’
‘I’m fine.’ Now I’m giggling. Did I really say that four times? ‘Let’s go home.’
‘Come on, then. Say thank you to Mr Strachan for looking after you.’
‘Thank you.’
Walking across the empty car park to our car holding Mum’s hand and skipping, hopping, light as a bird. Honestly I could fly, it’s like I’ve been let out of prison, and all that’s happened is a total stranger has turned out to know how it feels to be me. Just run, Alice. Oh, I’ll run. I’ll run so fast and so far no one will ever catch me again.
‘You seem to have had fun.’
‘He’s awesome, Mum. I love him.’
28
Laura clears away the children’s supper, half listening to Carrie as she sits on the stairs talking to her best friend Naomi on the phone.
‘I don’t know what I want to do,’ Carrie is saying. ‘You say first. Why does it always have to be me who decides? I said first last time.’
When they got home from school Laura took Carrie upstairs to show her what she had bought. Carrie rubbed at the fabric, twisting her mouth about, unable to lie. ‘You don’t like it.’ ‘It’s a bit, well, grey.’
Handel on the radio. Time for a glass of wine before Henry comes home. Leftover lasagne for supper, sometimes it’s even better reheated the next day, or am I just being lazy? Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the living room, steal a few moments in the kitchen armchair, sink into ancient cushions, take the weight off aching feet, drink wine, let the music flow like an unending stream—
The front door bell rings.
‘Jack! Someone at the door!’
Jack likes opening the door to people. It makes him feel he’s the owner of the house. Also Laura’s fingers are covered in food residue.
She sluices her hands under the cold tap and ponders whether or not to run the dishwasher. There isn’t really room for her and Henry’s supper but if she runs it now Henry will have to empty it later when he’s tired, which he hates. On the other hand if she leaves it to run after dinner she’ll have to empty it before breakfast, which she hates.
Jack appears.
‘It’s a man,’ he says.
‘What man?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Oh, honestly, Jack. Can’t you do better than that?’
She dries her hands on the roller-towel behind the door and goes into the hall. There standing on the doorstep before the open front door is Nick Crocker. Behind him a taxi reversing out of the drive.
‘Nick?’ she says.
‘Hi. I found you.’
Same voice. Soft, relaxed, barely requiring a response. She feels the heat in her cheeks. He found me. Ridiculously, staring at him as mindlessly as Jack, she speaks the words that rise unfiltered to her lips.
‘You’re not meant to be here.’
He looks exactly the same. This is some kind of time warp. The same mass of curly hair, the same broad high cheekbones, the same wide mouth.
‘I said Friday.’
‘Oh, well,’ he says.
He gives an easy shrug. No apology. No explanation.
‘I’m not ready for you. You were supposed to come tomorrow.’
What must I look like to him? Hair all over the place, wearing an apron for God’s sake. All those wrinkles round the eyes.
‘Come on in, at least.’
He shuffles his feet on the doormat, hunches his shoulders. Did he used to do that? Yes, the same don’t-notice-me stoop. Part of his arrogance.
‘This is Jack. Henry’s not home yet. Carrie!’ Yell up the stairs. ‘Come and say hello! This is Nick. He’s an old friend.’
He gives each child a proper look, a smile, a nod of his head. She takes him into the kitchen and offers him a drink. All she wants to do is run upstairs and fix her face before he sees how old she’s got. Why isn’t he old?
‘Just a beer if you have one.’
He’s looking round at everything like he sees everything. Stainless steel extractor hood. Fridge magnets holding paper notes. The big house suddenly grown unbearably bourgeois in the bright light of his attention.
Carrie goes back to her phone conversation. Jack goes back to the television.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Some hotel up the road. The Riverside.’
‘That’s no distance at all. I could have picked you up. You should have phoned.’
‘I did phone.’
‘Yes, but…’
He seems puzzled that she should be so agitated.
‘I can go away again if you’d rather.’
‘No, no.’
She gives him a cold can of beer from the fridge and a glass.
‘You deal with that. I have to run upstairs for a moment.’
In her bedroom she dabs at her nose, then assaults her hair with brisk ferocity until it’s cowed into submission. Two quick spritzes of Diorissimo. A swoosh of Plax round her mouth. All the time her mind racing, absorbing the astonishing reality that is Nick.
The first shock of recognition has passed. Of course he’s changed. He’s heavier, slower, quieter. But still handsome, if anything even more so. Time unfairly kind to men.
Why show up a day early? It’s like a surprise inspection. Catch me on the hop. What for? His little display of power. Nick always liked to be the one with the power. Used silence as power. Not that I worked that one out until much later.
She finds him mooching about the kitchen, glass of beer in hand, peering through the back window at the garden. She pours herself another glass of wine.
‘You have a view,’ he says.
‘Yes. Nothing between us and the river. There’s a gate at the bottom of the garden. Through there and you’re into open country.’
Plenty of scope for solitary walks.
He’s looking at her in that way he used to look, half smiling, waiting for her to speak, to blunder, to reveal.
‘So,’ he says. Meaning, here we are again. Meaning, you start. Christ, it’s as bad as Carrie and Naomi.
‘Henry should b
e home soon.’
He nods. His smiling silence propels her helplessly into further speech.
‘He’s making a history documentary for Channel Four. They start shooting tomorrow. It’s about iconoclasm.’
This is completely stupid. But Nick is interested.
‘What period? Bonfire of the vanities? Savonarola?’
‘No. English Puritans.’
Of course Nick knows all about it. Probably written a book on it. So he and Henry will get on like a house on fire. Except he’s not staying.
‘So what are your plans?’
‘We could go for a walk,’ he says. ‘Through the gate at the bottom of the garden.’
‘I meant in England. In Sussex.’
‘Oh. To see you.’
She looks away, shocked by the simplicity of his words. He speaks as if they’re alone together, which they are, but not like that. Not yet. Not here, in the kitchen, where Henry will join them at any moment.
So what do I want? To go somewhere alone with him? Nick’s reappearance in her life has swept her back to an earlier self, a pre-Henry self. This is between her and Nick.
Is that a betrayal?
She resolves to abide by the courtesies. A friend arrives unexpectedly. There are conventions.
‘Stay and have supper with us if you like. It won’t be much. I was just going to warm up some leftover lasagne.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I’m not really hungry.’
‘You have turned up at supper time, you know.’
‘Have I?’
He must be jet-lagged or something. He goes on looking at her and says no more. He’s challenging her, she can feel it. Come on, he’s saying. When do we begin the real conversation?
‘So do you want to sit and watch us while we have supper?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No. I’ll go back to the hotel.’
When Henry comes home. That’s what he means. When they’re no longer alone. She can’t stop herself.
‘So you don’t show up for twenty years, then you call for five minutes.’
‘I thought we could fix up when’s a good time.’
That’s what he always used to do, talk in that soft reasonable voice, so that it was her who was in the wrong, her who was putting an unwarranted load of emotion onto simple arrangements. His eyes say, What’s the problem?
So when’s a good time? A good time for what? She’s already invited him to family dinner tomorrow evening. So he means a good time to be alone together.
‘I have to work tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Then it’s the weekend and we’re going to Glyndebourne and the children are around. Maybe Monday.’
‘Monday, then. We could go for that walk.’
‘You’d better give me a number in case I have to cancel.’
‘I’ll be at the hotel.’
He looks round as if the hotel is just outside the door. It’s not far, no more than five minutes in the car.
‘Do you want me to run you back? I’ll have to wait till Henry comes home so there’s someone here with the children.’
‘If that wouldn’t be too much hassle.’
She realizes she wants him to go. She needs to be on her own to discover what she feels about his reappearance. She wants him to go but to return.
‘So what’s this work?’ he says.
His first sign of curiosity.
‘It’s at the local big house. Edenfield Place. I’m archiving the library.’
He nods, satisfied with this information.
‘What about you?’ she says.
‘What about me?’
‘Well, I don’t know anything about you, remember? What you do. If you’re married. If you have children.’
‘Not married. No children. I’m in the art trade.’
‘What does that mean?’
Now that she looks she sees that he’s wearing expensive shoes. And the Riverside is a pricey hotel.
‘I buy and sell works of art. Mostly English watercolours. Towne. Cotman. Turner.’
‘So where do you live?’
‘Santa Monica.’ He pushes his hair back from his face and it shocks her how well she knows that gesture. ‘You look good, Laura.’
‘Oh, sure.’ But she blushes.
‘You remember the strip of pictures we took of you?’
‘Just about.’
Just about perfectly. One straight, one smiling, one where she looks quite mad. Nick used to say that was the one he loved best.
‘I keep them in my bathroom. In the mirror.’
‘Why?’
‘Old times’ sake.’
He gives her one of his smiles, accompanied by a look of such penetrating intensity that she almost gasps. Does he know he’s doing it?
Don’t say anything. Don’t collude.
He turns away from her, looks out through the window into the twilight. His reflection soft as a ghost on the glass panes, like the first time she saw him on the train.
‘I knew as soon as I heard your voice on the phone,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s changed.’
‘That’s not true, Nick.’
‘I didn’t know it at the time. But what we had was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.’
Laura finds she can’t speak. Nick doesn’t turn round. Her silence gives him hope, but all she feels is confusion. A rushing sound in her ears.
The crunch of a car on the drive.
‘That’s Henry,’ she says.
Henry’s footsteps on the gravel. His key in the door. She hastens into the hall to meet him as he enters, which she never does.
‘Nick’s shown up,’ she says. ‘He got the wrong day.’
A frown of exhaustion crosses Henry’s face.
‘Don’t worry. He’s not staying.’
Nick himself appears. Henry is well-behaved.
‘Heard all about you,’ he says, shaking Nick’s hand. ‘You’re quite a family legend.’
‘How’s iconoclasm?’ says Nick.
‘Smashing,’ says Henry. ‘Are you sure you can’t stay?’
‘Another time.’
‘Nick’s at the Riverside,’ says Laura.
‘Very nice,’ says Henry.
‘I’m going to run him back.’
In the car, navigating the narrow lanes in the twilight, she resists the nervous impulse to chatter. She no longer knows what’s happening, she’s excited and afraid. She has done nothing wrong, she has said nothing she need be ashamed of. But when he said ‘What we had was a once-in-a-lifetime thing’ she didn’t deny it. She didn’t laugh and say, ‘Oh Nick, how can you be so silly? We were practically children.’
All through that long-ago July they’d spent hours in a car together, in Nick’s burgundy-coloured Vauxhall Viva, as un-cool a car as you could get, and so poorly maintained that it smoked in cold weather. Only Nick Crocker could get away with a car like that. Laura had loved it, was proud to occupy its sagging passenger seat and inhale its reek of petrol fumes and Gitanes. Long drives had been their best times, Nick’s characteristic silence masked by the car’s rattle and hum, the passing scene filling in the blank between them. Sometimes even then Laura had realized that this was not the way it should be. She was happiest with Nick in cars or when he was asleep, at those times when she seemed to possess him wholly, when his eyes were on the road ahead or closed, and not on her, withholding love.
‘Henry seems like a good guy,’ he says.
‘He is.’
‘Must be doing all right. That’s quite a house you’ve got.’
‘Yes. We’re very lucky.’
‘An old farmhouse, right?’
‘Yes.’
At the end of the lane, as they approach the main road, they pass the Critchells’ barn. The huge floor-to-ceiling windows that have replaced the old barn doors glow with light.
‘Who lives there?’ says Nick.
‘They’re called Critchell. He’s a lawyer.’
‘A lawyer. And he lives in a barn.’
‘Wha
t is this, Nick?’
‘Nothing, really. Just one of those slow but irreversible changes.’
‘What changes?’
‘The thing about England used to be that it still had countryside. But it’s gone now.’
‘Don’t be silly, Nick. Of course it’s not gone.’
Quite a relief to talk about nothing. But also strange. For a moment back there by the kitchen window he’d been on the point of making a confession.
She turns down the short drive to the hotel. Its historic walls washed by hidden lights.
‘Used to be an abbey,’ says Nick. ‘Now it’s a Relais and Chateaux.’
Laura pulls the Volvo up by the stone porch.
‘So we’ll see you for dinner tomorrow evening,’ she says, sounding all bright and easy. ‘About seven thirty?’
‘Sounds good.’
He touches her arm lightly with one hand, gives her a smile, and goes into the hotel.
Laura drives home slowly, cocooned in the car’s headlights, the bright bubble of space never expanding before her. She feels like an astronaut, a moon man, travelling through the outer reaches of the cosmos. Her everyday life has retreated to some infinite distance.
She’s young again and her heart is breaking.
29
In high summer they returned to the abandoned farmhouse. The grassy bank outside the kitchen window was bursting with wild garlic and lush green clover. The house’s water supply, no more than a stream redirected through a pipe into the deep white sink, played trickling music to accompany their daily life. Where in winter they had huddled before the only fire, now their playground was the wide Welsh hills. They walked for hours, sending the curious sheep flurrying away in sudden flight, descending the hoof-pocked paths through deep grass to lunch in half-empty pubs. Returning down valley lanes they hitched lifts on passing farm vehicles, their bona fides established with the name of their borrowed home.
‘Bailey Bedw, is it? There’s been nobody there since Thomas Evans died. So have they put in electricity, then?’
‘No, not yet. We use candles.’
‘Candles, is it? And no television? It’s a long old day without television.’
Laura played house, cleaning shelves to lay out their modest belongings, re-hanging sagged curtains, filling china mugs with bunches of wildflowers to stand in sunlit windows. Nick sat at a wooden table in the farmhouse parlour with art books spread round him, at work on a treatise with which he planned to make his name in the art world.