Alys, Always (3 page)

When I reach Hampstead, the flakes are falling less furiously; now they’re twinkling down, decorous and decorative.
I trudge up Christchurch Hill and Flask Walk, looking in the windows, which are always cleaner – more reflective, more transparent – than the windows in my part of town. I see earthenware bowls of clementines, books left face-down on green velvet sofas, a dappled rocking horse in a bay window. A tortoiseshell cat sits beside a vase of pussy willow, its cold yellow eyes tracking me without real interest. I pass on a little farther and am peering down into a basement kitchen when the person who is moving around in front of the cooker notices me and comes to the window and tweaks the angle of the plantation shutters, denying me my view.

In the high street I go into an expensive teashop, grab an empty table in the window, and order a cup of hot chocolate and a pistachio macaroon. An elderly man in a dashing scarf sits at the next table, working his way through a newspaper full of weather stories: cancelled flights, ice-skating in the Fens, the plight of Welsh hill farmers. Outside, strangers are sliding around, clutching at each other for stability, laughing. There is a strange festive atmosphere: the usual rules do not apply.

I drink my hot chocolate and get my book out of my pocket and start to read, shutting everything out, enjoying the sense of being part of something and yet at arm’s length from it. I do my best reading in cafés. I find it hard to read at home, in absolute silence.

‘Is this seat taken?’ someone asks. I look up reluctantly. It’s a young woman with a toddler in a snowsuit, his round cheeks scalded with the cold.

‘I’m just going,’ I say, knocking back the dark syrupy dregs of my drink. Then I leave her to it.

I’m nearly home when my phone rings. Someone introduces herself as Sergeant Kate Wiggins. She says she has been assigned to the family of Alice Kite, to help them through ‘this very painful time’. As I listen, the unwelcome sensations
begin again: the prickle of panic, of helplessness. Feelings which, over the last few days, have started to recede a little.

I know what she’s going to say before she says it.

‘I don’t think I can,’ I say quickly, without having to reflect. And saying the words, I feel the fear losing purchase, just slightly.

Kate Wiggins pauses. ‘I know it must be difficult for you,’ she says, in an understanding voice. ‘You’ve had a very traumatic experience. Sometimes, witnesses find that meeting the family can actually be cathartic, on a personal level.’

‘I don’t want to. I’ve told the police everything that happened. I don’t see what a meeting would achieve. It would just stir things up again.’

‘Of course, it’s not helpful to generalise but quite often, in circumstances like this, the family isn’t looking for answers. They just want to meet the person who was there. To say thank you, really. I know, for example, that Mrs Kite’s family, her husband, her son and daughter, are relieved she wasn’t alone at the end. I think they are grateful to you and it would mean a lot if they could meet you and tell you that themselves.’

‘Well – I have stuff of my own going on,’ I say, desperate to get her off the phone. ‘It’s not really something I feel up to right now.’

‘Absolutely. Take your time,’ Kate Wiggins says generously, seizing on the tiny opportunity I’ve clumsily afforded her. ‘There’s no hurry. Let me know when you feel ready.’

‘Fine,’ I say, pretending to take down her number. ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I go home and do my best to forget all about it.

Oliver is doing the post, tearing apart corrugated cardboard parcels to reveal novelty golf guides and pink paperbacks with line drawings of high heels and cupcakes on the covers, chucking most of them into a large carton bound for Oxfam or (if he can be bothered, which he usually can’t) eBay. There’s an idiotic tyranny to the post delivered to the books desk: wave after wave of ghosted memoirs and coffee-table photography retrospectives and eco-lifestyle manuals, none of which even vaguely fit the
Questioner
’s remit. Maybe one book in ten is put aside, waiting to be assigned to a reviewer.

I do my best to have nothing to do with Oliver, the son of one of our more famous theatrical knights, but his voice – as fruity and far-reaching as his father’s – makes this difficult.

‘Oh, here’s something interesting,’ he’s saying to Mary, waving a hardback in her direction. ‘We should do something big, shouldn’t we?’

Mary pulls her spectacles low on her nose and inspects the cover. ‘Oh, absolutely – ask for an interview, if he’s doing any. I’m surprised they didn’t push back publication. Maybe it was too late.’

Oliver finds the press release tucked inside the flyleaf, and picks up the phone. I hear him flirting in a bread-and-butter fashion with the PR. There’s a little shop gossip about a book launch they both attended earlier in the week, and then he says, ‘The new Laurence Kyte … we’d love to have an interview.’ He listens, putting his head on one side and pulling a comedy sad face – furrowed brow, fat lower lip – for Mary’s benefit, though as she is scrolling through a layout on screen his efforts are wasted. ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ he says finally. ‘But of course, in the circumstances … Such a terrible thing to happen. Well, if he changes his mind … Or
maybe we can do something when the paperback comes out? Yeah – you too. Take care, babe.

‘He’s not doing any publicity. She sounds sick as a pike,’ he adds, swinging his feet off the bin. ‘Should we get Berenice to review it? Or Simon?’

‘Simon,’ says Mary without looking up.

Oliver puts the book on the shelves, awaiting dispatch.

Later, when they’ve both gone to morning conference, I go over and pick it up. It’s a novel called
Affliction
. A fairly plain cover, a drawing of a man’s shadow falling over a patch of city pavement: puddles, a cigarette butt, scraps of litter. I turn it over. There’s a small photograph of the author on the back of the dust jacket, nothing too flash, though it’s nicely composed. He’s standing in front of a tall dark hedge, resting his hand on a sundial speckled with lichen. His face is, naturally, familiar. Laurence Kyte. Of course. I wonder why I hadn’t made the connection. I didn’t know he had a place near Biddenbrooke. Beneath the picture is printed in small italic font, ‘Author photograph by Alys Kyte’.

The biographical note is only two short sentences, as is usually the way with the big-hitters: ‘Laurence Kyte was born in Stepney in 1951. He lives in London.’ No mention of the Booker, then, though he won it five years ago, or was it six? No mention of the ghastly movie Hollywood squeezed out of
Ampersand
; no mention, either, of the rather more successful adaptation – he did the screenplay, I seem to remember – of
The Ha
-
Ha
, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar.

I flick through the pages. I’ve not read any Kyte but I know the spectrum of his interests: politics, sex, death, the terminal malaise of Western civilisation. In Kyte’s books, middle-aged, middle-class men – architects and anthropologists, engineers and haematologists – struggle with the decline in their physical powers, a decline which mirrors the
state of the culture around them. Kyte’s prose style is famously ‘challenging’, ‘inventive’ and ‘muscular’; usually it’s ‘uncompromising’, too. Not words that do it for me, particularly. I read the first few pages. It’s all very clever. Then I read the dedication. ‘For Alys. Always.’

I didn’t save Kate Wiggins’ number, but it’s stored on my phone anyway, under ‘calls received’.

‘Hello, it’s Frances Thorpe,’ I say when she answers. ‘You called me the other day, about the accident involving Alys Kyte? I’ve had the chance to get myself together a bit. If you really think it would help them, I guess I feel up to meeting the family now.’

The Highgate house is set back rather grandly from the street: gravel, gateposts, the humped suggestion of a shrubbery. A dingy pile of old snow is lying in the lee of the garden wall, evidently out of reach of the winter sun on the rare occasions when it might appear; otherwise there is little sign of it left in the front garden and the wide front steps have been scraped clear of ice. Apart from the glow of the stained-glass fanlight – smoky purple grapes spilling forth from a golden horn – the house itself is in darkness. It’s five o’clock, teatime, but could just as well be midnight.

A security light clicks on as I walk up the steps and press the bell but I hear nothing: no chime, no footfall. I was nervous enough about this meeting to start with and now, before I’ve even gone inside, I’m feeling caught out, on the hop.

Perhaps I didn’t press the bell hard enough? Perhaps it’s broken?

I wait another few seconds, just to see whether anyone’s coming, and then press it again, firmly this time, though with a similar result. A moment passes, and then I hear the sound
of light footsteps, followed by the snap of the lock. A trim-looking young woman in a zippered fleece and knee-length corduroy skirt opens the door.

‘Frances,’ she says, clasping my hand and looking me squarely in the face, an onslaught of sincerity. ‘I’m Kate Wiggins. The family’s downstairs.’

In the hall, I take off my scarf and jacket. There’s a worn scarlet rug underfoot, Turkish, by the look of it. A tall pot of umbrellas and cricket bats. A rack of wellingtons and shoes and hiking boots. A wall of coats, slumped there like so many turned backs.

The air is full of scent: flowers, the creamy sweetness of their fragrance. There’s a bowl of hyacinths on the hall table, next to the spill of unopened post, and as we walk down the corridor I look off into the shadowy reception rooms on either side and see containers filled with roses, lilies, irises, freesias, mostly white and still bound in luxurious cellophane ruffs and curls of ribbon.

The staircase at the end of the hall curves down into the open-plan kitchen: a judicious combination of heritage (flagstones, butler’s sink, Aga, a dresser stacked with Cornish-ware) and contemporary (forensic lighting, a stainless steel fridge the size of a Victorian wardrobe). More flowers are crammed into jars and jugs along the bookshelves and the windowsills and the oak refectory table, around which three people are sitting. A fourth figure, a girl, stands at the French windows, a cat angling around her ankles. As I descend, the girl glances away from the back garden, the golden rectangles of light falling on the preserved fragments of snow, and fastens her pale eyes on me. It’s a very desperate sort of scrutiny. It makes me feel even more self-conscious. Carefully, I look down and watch my feet moving over the last few stairs.

‘Laurence Kyte,’ he says, rising from the table and coming
towards me. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see us. Can I call you Frances?’

I take his hand. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I say.

He swallows. The cheap remark is fresh, still a shock, for him. Seeing his vulnerability I feel a strange tremor of excitement. This man I know from the half-page reviews and the diary pages and the guest slots on
Newsnight
, with his authority and remorseless judgements, standing here before me, shouldering his grief, bowed down by it.
I have something he wants
, I think, with a prickle of possibility.
I wonder if I can give it to him
. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘These are my children, Edward and Polly.’

Edward is mid-twenties, tall, fair, slight-looking, and his greeting is non-committal, courteous but impersonal. Polly, a few years younger, comes away from the French windows towards me and as we shake hands she twists her mouth to stop herself from crying. Her narrow white face is blotchy with old tears.
She looks like a little mouse
, I think. I squeeze her hand. ‘I’m Frances,’ I say.

‘And this is Charlotte Black,’ Laurence Kyte says, indicating the third person at the table, a woman in her fifties. Plain dark clothes, the sort that cost serious money, a heavy silver cuff on her wrist. ‘A friend of the family.’

Of course I know of Charlotte Black, Kyte’s agent. She has quite a reputation.

Kate Wiggins has been standing back, letting us get on with it. Now, in her supportive administrative role, she offers me a cup of tea or coffee. I feel too nervous to have a preference. ‘Water’s fine,’ I say.

‘Well, I’m having a glass of wine,’ says Laurence. ‘I think we can probably all agree this situation calls for a drink.’

He locates a particular bottle of red in the rack under the counter, and brings the glasses to the table. While he’s doing this, his children are taking their seats at it, side by side, not
looking at each other.
They are dreading this
, I think.
They want to know
,
but they’re scared of what I might tell them
.

Charlotte, at the end of the table, smiles reassuringly at me. ‘Kate was saying you don’t live far away?’

‘Down the hill,’ I say. ‘No, not far at all.’ Of course, my part of north London, maybe a mile off, is quite a contrast to this one, as it’s dominated by arterial roads, betting shops and the empty mid-rise office blocks which no tenants can be persuaded to occupy. The Kytes live in a very different London. Their neighbourhood is a sequence of broad, moneyed avenues running between green spaces – various woods and parks, the Heath – and what the locals call ‘the village’, a high street full of coffee shops, estate agents and boutiques selling organic face creams and French children’s-wear.

Laurence uncorks the bottle and starts to pour. Kate Wiggins shakes her head when he looks at her, but everyone else accepts a glass. Finally, we’re all sitting at the table, ready. I hold the glass in my hand. It’s a solid, simple goblet. Danish, I expect. When I taste the wine, I try to concentrate on it, but I’m really a bit too on edge, waiting to see how the Kytes want to play this.

Let them set the pace
, Wiggins had suggested.
They’ll let you know what they need to know
.
And if you can’t answer their questions
,
just say so
. I put my glass down and fold my hands in my lap. The table vibrates slightly: Edward, jiggling his foot, betraying his nerves. To my surprise, he speaks first.

‘We wanted to meet you to tell you how grateful we are,’ he begins, as if he’s finally delivering a speech which he has rehearsed privately many times. ‘We’ve been taken through your statement, and it has been a real comfort to know that Mum wasn’t on her own at the end. That she had someone to talk to … someone who could talk to her.’