Alys, Always (15 page)

‘The Jacksons have a place off the coast in Maine,’ Honor is saying, ‘and of course it’s better than staying in New York in August when it’s so hot and no one’s there – but they will keep ringing up and telling us to pack evening dresses and ties. The country club! Imagine it. I wish I hadn’t agreed to go.’

We are all sitting around the table on the terrace, but she’s really only talking to Laurence. As she leans forward to take
another of Polly’s cigarettes (I note that Polly no longer feels the need to hide the habit from her father; perhaps Alys was the one who always objected most forcefully) the little silver ‘H’ and the tiny horseshoe strung on a chain around her neck spin and sparkle over her breastbone. She has been showing off all evening, parading her worldiness, her sophistication, in a manner that highlights the naivety just a scratch beneath it.

In a strange way, I find this display – the animation, the widened eyes, the fingers at her throat and lips – quite touching. It makes me feel rather differently about Honor. I’m always affected when I see people unable to gauge a situation. Occasionally I feel pity for them, more usually contempt; often I’m amused; but just sometimes, and this is one of those moments, I find their obtuseness almost endearing. I can’t imagine how luxurious it feels, that sort of blithe unthinkingness.

Polly has the same adolescent quality, but I sense she’ll grow out of it one day. With Honor, the way she looks and the way she has been brought up have fixed her like this. I doubt she’ll ever change.

The moon sails up over the copper beech, bringing with it a soft aura of lighter, purer blue. As I put a strawberry in my mouth, I smell the taint of silver polish on my fingers. The air is so still that I’ve carried out the big candelabra from the dining room. The flames are burning as steadily as gas jets.

Teddy bends over to fill Honor’s glass. ‘Let’s face it, you were at a loose end and then your parents said they’d stump up for a first-class ticket,’ he says. There’s an edge in his voice, faint but distinct. I can tell he has only the vaguest sense of what’s going on, but it’s enough to make him bridle.

‘You’ll miss me, though, won’t you?’ she says, putting her hand on his forearm, reeling him in again. Then she leans back in her chair and stretches out her legs. I imagine she’s
looking at her toenails. She painted them this morning by the pool, first removing the old gold varnish with little damp clots of cotton wool that smelt of pear drops, then stroking on the new colour – a hot glossy pink – with absolute concentration, her knee beneath her chin.

Teddy is turning to his father. ‘So you’re writing?’ he asks. ‘Polly said you mentioned something about writing.’

‘It’s early days,’ says Laurence. To me, to be polite, he says, ‘It all … just stopped for a while.’

‘He couldn’t see the point after Mum died,’ says Polly, loyally. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Writing suddenly felt like a silly way to pass the time,’ he agrees lightly. ‘Sitting alone in a room, inventing things.’

We wait.

‘I lost faith in myself, I suppose,’ he goes on, almost as if he’s talking to himself, trying out the words, seeing how they sound. ‘And I had no ideas. Life lost its texture. But maybe that has started to change. We’ll see.’

I get the feeling he wants to move the conversation on. Probably he feels superstitious about this new project. ‘Charlotte’s on my back about it,’ he says to his children. ‘She might come down for a visit.’

Later, when Honor, Teddy and Polly have gone off for a swim in the dark, I’m left alone at the table with him. Because of the heat in the air, the candles were soft to the touch when I picked them out of the box at the start of the evening, and they’ve burned down very fast. Now, as the wicks begin to dip, they sputter and hiss. One by one the flames are going out.

I start to stack the plates and bowls, but then Laurence says, ‘Are they all right, do you think? Do you think they’re doing OK?’

‘You’re worried about them,’ I say, halting, gradually
easing back into my chair, sensing he needs something – a confessor, maybe.

He shrugs. ‘Of course,’ he says, a little exasperated.

I realise he wants some reassurance, not an opportunity to open up. So I say, ‘I don’t really know about Teddy, but I think Polly’s coming to terms with it.’

‘She has been very angry with me about something,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure what.’

I remember the night when she turned up at my flat, the things she told me.

‘She was always a funny little girl,’ he’s saying, wistfully. ‘She lived so much in the present, as most children do, it was amazing to watch. Teddy was always more careful somehow, more systematic, even when he was small. He trusted less to chance. But Pol – well, she never made plans. Things just happened to her. Good things, mostly. But now, this.’ He pours some water, drinks it.

‘It’s innocence, I suppose,’ he says eventually. ‘I hate the idea of her losing it.’ The words carry over the dark lawn. There’s a sheen of moonlight on the grass, a silver glitter in the leaves.

I want to say: that sort of innocence in an adult is a form of stupidity, really. It’s proof of corruption: too much privilege and indulgence. But I don’t say that, of course. I sit there beside him in the airless garden as the darkness envelops us, waiting for the last candle to go out.

It turns out Laurence is quite right: Polly has indeed had a change of heart and now says she is really looking forward to going back to college in the autumn.

‘I’m going to knuckle down. No, really, I mean it,’ she says when I ask her about it. ‘Just going through that whole thing with Sam made me see what a waster he was, and how
easy it is to fall for all that bullshit.’ She has ordered half of next year’s reading list from Amazon and is ‘loving Euripides’, she tells me (although the only thing I see her studying is a
Grazia
she picked up at the petrol station).

I pass this information on to Laurence as we stand together under the apple trees. I’m careful about how I phrase it. ‘I really think she talked herself around,’ I say modestly. ‘I can’t take the credit for this.’

I’d volunteered to make an apple tart for Charlotte, who is due to arrive any moment, and I was out in the orchard when Laurence came back from the pool, a towel slung over his shoulder, and offered to help. He’s picking, being the right height, and I’m carrying the basket. ‘Watch out,’ he says as I step backwards. ‘Look, just there.’ The grass is treacherous with windfalls and wasps.

He squints up, reaches through the leaves. The tree flinches a little as he twists off the fruit.

‘Well, whoever’s responsible, I’m relieved,’ he says, inspecting the apple for flaws, polishing it against his sleeve and putting it in the basket. ‘It’s really quite a weight off my mind.’

Not for the first time, I wonder at his ability to leave other people to sort out his family business. But then it’s becoming increasingly clear that Alys always shielded him from this sort of thing: the tantrums, the sudden enthusiasms that petered out just as quickly, the running hot and cold. I’m only now sensing the extent of his emotional laziness. Of course he knows this stuff matters – after all, he engages with it endlessly in his books – and yet he’s more than happy to let someone else deal with its petty and frequently tedious real-life intricacies.

We head indoors. He goes off to his study, I go to the kitchen. I cut cold butter into cubes and rub it into a basinful of flour with just a little bit of sugar. I try to keep my hands
light, cool, full of air, and as I work the feel of the flour changes as it gains weight and texture. I stir in an egg yolk and some dribbles of cold water, and then I leave the ball of pastry in the fridge to chill.

The rinsed apples stand on the marble-topped table, drying on a striped tea towel.

Alone in the kitchen on this bright quiet morning, I allow myself to imagine that it’s mine. The china coffee-grinder bolted to the pantry wall, the deep cupboards piled with cake tins and glass jelly moulds, the snagging drawers full of old implements suggesting a more leisurely and satisfactory life: nutcrackers, cherry-stoners, sugar tongs, grape scissors. The view of the herb garden, the pots of geraniums that Mr Talbot waters during his gardening visits, the moss-speckled sundial near the tall hedge where Alys took Laurence’s picture.

Just for a moment, as I stand by the sink peeling a long rosy spiral from the yellow flesh of an apple, I think about all of this and what it means to me.

Charlotte Black arrives late morning with Selma Carmichael in tow. They’re expected at Bunny Nesbitt’s house in Allwick, a little farther down the coast, but not until the following day. Bunny’s house parties are famous: Charlotte never passes up on an invitation. ‘Wait till she hears you’re around,’ she says to Laurence. ‘You won’t get out alive.’

Laurence tells us a story from a few summers ago involving a fashionable American writer, a bottle of Ricard and the coastguard. Selma Carmichael’s eyes are out on stalks.

I’ve seen Selma before, of course, but have never spoken to her.

‘You’re
that
Frances Thorpe, aren’t you?’ she says, when
we are introduced. ‘Of course, I know your byline. I’ve started to look out for it, actually.’

I can’t help myself, I feel myself flushing with pleasure when she says this – though of course it’s the sort of thing people tend to say in these circles, whether they mean it or not.

‘How are things at the office?’ she asks. ‘Don’t tell me – ghastly, I imagine. We’ve just been through the same ordeal. Terrible for morale, isn’t it?’ Selma is literary editor at a rival paper, one with a rather richer proprietor. She’s tall, bony, mid-fifties, full of a tremulous nervous energy. ‘Is it true what they’re saying about Robin McAllfree and Gemma Coke?’

I give her a coolly apologetic smile and say I don’t know, I really have no idea, and she lets the matter rest there.

To my secret amusement, she is allocated the tiny boxroom with the sailing boats on the blind. I picture her bending her long thin limbs and lowering herself on to the bed, and the image that comes to mind is of an umbrella being folded up.

Charlotte gets the large double farther down the landing, the one with the sea view.

At lunchtime we drive to Welbury and buy fish and chips from the tar-painted shack a little way down the estuary. We eat them sitting along the jetty, dangling our legs, watching birds fastidiously picking their way over the shiny expanses of mud. Their boats confined to a narrow channel of water, people are swabbing decks and furling ropes and drinking tea while they wait for the tide to turn. The rigging chimes irregularly.

It’s slightly overcast now: it’s still very warm, but the sky is that in-between shade of grey that could go either way.

After we’ve eaten, we walk around the headland to the beach. Teddy and Honor lag behind, and the sound of their
argument rises up over the bickering of seagulls. Honor wants to go back to London, I gather, and Teddy wants her to stay.

‘You’re not flying until next week,’ I hear him say.

‘But I’ve got a lot to sort out,’ she says. ‘And there’s Jack’s party.’

‘Oh, well, if
Jack
’s having a party,’ he begins, scornfully, but I can hear the anxiety in his voice. It’s an undignified sort of exchange. I feel almost sorry for him.
You won’t hold on to her that way
, I think.
Have some self
-
respect
. But Teddy, usually so self-possessed, so composed, still has this lesson to learn.

Charlotte Black drops back to join me. She’s one of those rare women who looks as pulled together off duty as she does in more formal circumstances. I have to admire her slim-fitting dark cotton dress and flat plain sandals and the few adroit bits of silver. ‘Are you having a good holiday?’ she asks as we pause to let two teenagers drag a dinghy over the road, up towards a boatshed.

‘Oh, yes. I didn’t really have any plans, and then Polly asked me down, and I’ve never quite got around to leaving,’ I say, with a laugh.

‘Yes, it seems you’ve really become part of the family,’ she says, and there’s something in her voice that reminds me, as if I needed reminding, that I really shouldn’t underestimate Charlotte Black. ‘What an unusual way to get to know the Kytes.’

‘Oh. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ I say, letting the smile fade from my face. I think it’s probably time to make Charlotte Black see she needs to take more care when speaking to me. I would like her to realise I’m offended by her remark; that I find it distasteful. ‘Naturally I wish it hadn’t happened like this. It’s an appalling thing they’ve all been through.’

‘Oh, that goes without saying,’ she says quickly. ‘God knows, it must have been dreadful for you too. I can’t imagine what an experience like that does to a person.’ We walk on for a bit without saying anything. At this point the harbour road turns hard left towards the town, running parallel to the beach, but we make our way off the tarmac and on to the boardwalk that leads down through the dunes towards the sea.

‘I hear you’ve been a real friend to Polly,’ she says, and her tone is softer now, as if she has reassessed me, come to a slightly different opinion. ‘Laurence has told me how good you are with her.’

‘Really, it’s not a matter of being
good
,’ I say, looking ahead at Polly, who is walking with her arm through her father’s, Selma on his other side. ‘I’m very fond of her. Of course, I was nothing like her really, but somehow she reminds me of myself at that age.’ This is, of course, a lie; but I know it’s also a fairly persuasive argument. It’ll take me far. Even Polly might buy it, if she ever thought to query our relationship.

‘All that hope, all that energy,’ I go on, warming to my theme. ‘You know, “the unfailing sense of being young” … Of course, it’s early days, but if I’ve been any sort of support to her … if I’ve helped her, in even the smallest way, during the last six months, well – that’s good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps you’ve helped each other,’ she suggests as we step off the boardwalk on to the sand. The path, rutted with footprints, weaves between the dunes and around dry tangles of marram grass. I kick off my flip-flops but even so it’s a struggle. Whenever I walk along a beach, I’m taken back to those recurring childhood nightmares: the sand holding me back, spilling and drifting beneath my weight and making a mockery of my efforts, while all the time something nameless and intent approaches steadily from behind.