Exposure
 
Copyright © Talitha Stevenson 2005
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations,
and events are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales
is entirely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain by Virago.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Stevenson, Talitha.
Exposure/Talitha Stevenson.â1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. SecrecyâFiction. 2. AdulteryâFiction. 3. Social classesâFiction.
4. London (England)âFiction. 5. Middle-class familiesâFiction. I. Title.
PR6119.T48E97 2005
823'.92âdc22 2005012938
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101162-9 ISBN-10: 0-15-101162-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603044-1 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603044-6 (pbk.)
Text set in Bembo
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2007
A C E G I K J H F D B
AcknowledgementsFor Jonty Elkington
I would like to thank John Harwood-Stevenson for supplying me with essential information on the life of a London barrister. I am grateful to Michael Birnbaum QC, for allowing me to follow him about the Old Bailey. Thanks also to Dr Brian Kaplan, genius physician, who restored my health and then made clever suggestions about the early chapters of my novel, just to show off. I could not have written about Goran and Mila without the advice of Sergey M.
All our failures are, ultimately,
failures in love
Chapter 1âI
RIS
M
URDOCH
As if someone had come into the room and caused him to lose the thread of what he was saying, Alistair Langford had forgotten what he believed in. He had spent his life making ruthless compromises for the sake of his ideals and it had been a great surprise to find that they had just drifted off. The rest of humanity had continued to drive cars and carry babies and have lunch just the same. He gave the sky a wry smile because it was his sixty-third birthday and he had never expected to spend it standing on the edge of a cliff.
Sea spray blew up and fine chalk dust puffed over the drop as if in reply. He was not usually one for superfluous journeys, not one to leave the table for an ordinary sunset or moon. But now he looked down quietly at the grey sea, and the waves that rose and formed and broke in on themselves.
Nothing frightening had ever happened to him before. He had kept clear of all danger. He had cultivated interests rather than passions and had always presented his eyes with elegance rather than troublesome beauty. It was a discreet pleasure that he took in his nineteenth-century tables, his John Cafe candlesticks, his Chippendale chairs. These were all arrangements of lines and angles, essentially, prey to the laws of trigonometry.
The sea was very different. He looked at his shoes on the rough yellow grass. Behind him, two colourful girls came along the path. They were talking a language he couldn't understand and they laughed as they passed. For a moment, Alistair was afraid they were mocking his walking-stick, but he let the thought go with the sound of their voices and their shoes thudding on the soft chalk. What on earth was the point of worrying about his dignity now? Besides, it was too hot.
Beneath him the sea looked cold and fierce and he liked watching it hitting the bottom of the cliffs and spraying up in arcs against the chalk.
His leg had only been mobile for a week now and he knew the physiotherapist would not have encouraged him to drive or to walk this far. He was genuinely amazed at the way he had just grabbed the car keys and left. Why? He knew what had happenedâhe had been struck by a strong physical memory: the sensation of space, of the whole Channel in front of you. It had taken hold of his stomach like hunger. Next thing he knew he had walked out of his mother's old houseâleaving his son packing up her holy china and brass relics, her lifetime's treasuresâand made his way up here.
It was a warm wind and unusually hot even for August. As he drove through Dover, he had found it composed of white-hot, abandoned streets. There was a sense of what the hours after a nuclear disaster might be like in the dry, bleached lawns, the shrivelled geraniums swinging eerily in their baskets on Maison Dieu Road.
He had wound his way up the cliff road, left the car in the public car park and limped along the path in search of the view. And now here it was: the Channel, grey-green and empty all the way to Calais. A disembodied female voice drifted in from the vast ferry terminal on the right. It urged people in toneless French and German to get on or get off the boat. It all seemed rather poindessâbut ultimately benign. There were seagull cries, which were always faintly exciting.
It was strange how this view still found its way into his dreams. As a boy, he had often spent whole afternoons hiding and plotting up here, but today he was exhausted after just ten minutes or so. He thudded his walking-stick against the ground, feeling obscurely disappointed. Still, he told himself, there was always the danger that excessive solitude might start him reliving the event. He was at least avoiding that.
In fact, there was no reason to be concerned about this, because his mind was clean of the recent past. Bizarre as it was, he was not haunted by the event at all, but by something his wife had said about it. At the hospital, holding his hand, Rosalind had turned her white face on him and said, 'But how could you not have
heard
them, Alistair?
How?
They must have been ... silent as
dogs!
The sinister image was so foreign, so
film-noir
sophisticated somehow on her neat, scrubbed mouth. It had made him feel oddly threatened. It was as if she had been hiding some part of herself from him all these years. Suddenly it occurred to him that she might have had an affair.
She
might have been duplicitous.
How could you tell with other people, even your wife? Was he sixty-three and still unable to feel certain of any of his instincts?
No, surely not. And it was ridiculous, the idea of Rosalind having an affair. In the complacent past he had almost wished she would, because sometimes he wanted her stripped of that inhuman faultlessness for which he had fallen in love with her. Now the idea felt dangerous, though. He needed her elegant conformity more than he ever had, as much as frightened children need stories at night. One act of violence had sent cracks through everything he touched.
Why had she used that odd phrase?
In fact, even though she had not actually been there at the time, it was a good description. The two men had been silent as dogs, padding under the street-lamps after him in their soft trainers. And when they stopped they were invisible too, except for a star of light that bounced off the buckle of the smaller one's belt. He noticed it and moved back a little, behind the phone boxâand the star went out.
At exactly that moment, the front door opened four houses along, spilling light voluptuously down the white steps and through the shiny black railings. Bars of shadow grew over the London pavement. Piano music and that singing kind of laughter, which is not really laughter but civilized conspiracy, drifted out with a faint scent of cigar smoke. The host had his arm round the hostess and she raised her hand to hold it, her bracelet or watch-face playing the light back obliviously at the belt buckle. The host said: 'Well, you'll send Roz our love, won't you?'
'Yes, of course I will,' Alistair said.
The smaller man glanced at the other, larger one. Although it was too dark to see the recognition on his face, it was perceptible: yes, this was him. That barrister shit.
'Oh,
damn
itâthe
card!'
Alistair said. 'Did I give you her card?
Damn
it! I bet I didn't give it to youâand she wrote you a bloody card especially...' He was rummaging in his pocketsâpatting them all twice.
To the figures in the darkness, it was as if he was playing for time. But he could have had no idea he might need to play for timeâto him it was just the end of an evening.
'Honestly,' he said, 'how typical of me. She wrote you a cardâroses on the front, a window, a cat or somethingâshe made me
promise
I wouldn't forget...'
'Well, you're utterly useless, Al. None of us ever understood why she married you,' the host said. He was a very tall, thin man, of the kind you imagine always got his glasses knocked off rather pathetically when he was younger and had arranged his life so it would never happen again. He laughed, just a little harder than was necessary. Then he slapped Alistair's shoulder. 'You just send her our love,' he said.
'I will, Julian.'
'And you're sure you don't want a cab? Last chance ... you
must
be over the limit.'
The smaller man felt his heart leap, heard his friend's breath catch: after all this build-up, just to watch the bastard drive off in a cab, just to go on back to the flat with a couple of bags of Burger King...
'No, noâ
really,
I'm OK to drive,' Alistair said, smiling.
The couple stood back in their doorway, framed by golden light, hands linked, a chandelier twinkling behind them. They looked wealthy and content while unseen faces wondered if they had ever been burgled.
The light from the door cut out behind Alistair's heels and he set off towards the new dark blue BMW the two men had identified when they walked that way earlier. They had both wanted to key it, but the larger one said they should save it upâsave it
all
up for later.
Now that the time had come, they padded after Alistair, watching him search his pockets for his car keys. Eventually he brought them out of his jacketâalong with something else. They heard the tut and groan he made as he recognized the card in his hand. He was coming up to a rubbish bin and he slowed down, his hand moving uncertainly towards it, questioned by his conscience. Should he throw away the card and let his wife assume he had given it to their friends?
'Suppressio veri
or
suggestio falsi?'
he asked himself mockingly, knowing he had told Rosalind many barefaced lies.
It was then that two figures jumped on him and altered the rarefied quality of his perspective for ever.
They moved quickly: one held his arms back, and the other smashed the baseball bat into his right leg, hard, five or six times. Alistair heard the bone shatter and felt himself crumple. It was an odd, involuntary movementâa dive into the wave of pain. When they dropped him on the pavement, one of them must have stumbled back into a parked car, because the last thing he remembered was the whir of an alarm going off and the headlights pulsing, illuminating the running figures in heartbeats of time.
Now Alistair limped off the cliff path and spotted the car, which would be hot enough to bake cakes in: he had left it, unwisely, in the sunlight. He would not have been able to drive his own car, but this one, which belonged to his wife, was an automatic and just about manageable with his bad leg. He started it and looped his way back into Dover past boarding-house after boarding-house, each one like a long-lost maiden aunt to him, shabbily coquettish behind her busy-lizzies.
Time had really passed since he was last in Dover. The Igglesdon Square bakery, with its litde tea-roomâhe could still taste the scones and jam, the sense of having been a good boyâwas a sterile bookshop and stationer's now. The Cafe de Paris, whose name had conjured so much nonsense, in which he had sat dreaming with an ordinary cup of tea and a book the whole year before he went to Oxford, had been demolished and forgotten. Beach Street, his old friend Tommy's house, had been wiped out and replaced with a lorry park.