Exposure (2 page)

But all the old places had been there that morning in his mother's photograph albums. Tucked into the front of one of them there had been a picture of a little white-haired woman with a cat on her lap. Apparently this was his mother. He would not have recognized her. The woman he had known was one with chestnut hair and heavy hips and pretty eyes. Where was the glass of sweet sherry or the cigarette in her hand? On the back of the photograph it said, 'Dear June, thanks for a lovely day and a smashing lunch. October 2000.' He felt a pang of jealousy, of exclusion. This thin woman with the cat was the person who had died five weeks ago. It had not occurred to him to wonder what his mother had looked like when she died. It was so hard to believe other people existed when you didn't see them.

He and his mother had not spoken or touched each other in forty years. And yet there she had been, giving her friends lunch on an October afternoon. Her life had continued without him. She had owned a cat. Where was it? What had happened to her cat? he wondered.

When he and his son Luke arrived they had found the place in chaos. The hall ceiling had caved in and water had poured through it, ruining the carpet. He imagined the cat had probably run away in search of food. Had it watched its owner sleep tantalizingly through each mealtime, through three long days and nights, in a strange heap at the bottom of the stairs? It must have been a very quiet death, he thought, with only the cat for a witness.

It was not the way his mother's life should have ended. Suddenly he felt that passionately and the colour came into his cheeks and his eyes glittered. He knew he had no right to this indignation. The prodigal son had no right to grieve. He had recently discovered that all his emotions were in rather poor taste.

He pulled up outside the house. Two Iraqi Kurdish men walked past, one carrying a split bin-bag of clothes; the arm of a red jumper hanging down and flapping behind his legs. The man stopped and turned. His profile was gaunt and handsome, rough-shaven. When he sucked out the last of his cigarette, his cheeks hollowed. He threw the butt into the bushes and adjusted the weight of the bag, lifting it on to his hip. Then he nodded to his friend and they moved on. They were obviously practised at accommodating each other's checks and pauses. Perhaps they had done their long journey together. Was that bin-bag all they had brought?

The night before, he had seen news footage of a busload of asylum-seekers being deported from France. He remembered one man in the eye of the camera, twisted, crying, literally punching himself in the head, tearing out his hair. They had all been found squatting in a Parisian church and after several days of bureaucratic debate, of chanting crowds with homemade signs, of illuminated TV reporters and hunched cameramen, it was decided they had no right to be in Europe.

Alistair locked the car and walked towards his childhood home. He still expected to see the sign above it, 'The Queen Elizabeth Guesthouse. Vacancies', and the bright, flowery curtains in each window. But these things were as remote and obsolete as his childhood.

Apparently his mother had stopped running the guesthouse in 1980. She would then have been sixty-six. Just three years older than he was now. At one point, she had tried to sell the top half of the house as a flat, but no one had wanted to buy it. Dover was hardly a pleasure spot these days—just a place to be passed through, a place of temporary accommodation.

He had learnt these facts about the house from the legal documents he had been sent after his mother's death. She had probably thought of living on the ground floor because of the trouble with her hips, he thought. He had learnt about her hips from the medical report.

His mother's hips—the broad hips he had been carried about on, with his thumb in his mouth, feeling the folds of her cotton dress, the warmth of her soft waist and stomach, under his bare legs. At one time, he had not been himself but the most awkward part of her body. He could still remember the way she shifted him up more firmly as she leant towards the ashtray to tap her cigarette. She dealt with problems in twos always: you dusted with one hand, plumped the sofa cushions against your leg with the other. You swilled the old water out of the bedside carafes while you cleaned out the basin.

It startled him how often in his memory she was cleaning. Always cleaning. Turning down the beds, mopping the kitchen floor, reaching up for a cobweb with a pink feather duster. Or, most often, he saw her last thing of all on a Sunday afternoon, polishing the little ornaments in their own sitting room. He remembered a parrot on a swing from a trip to Bath (who knew why it had constituted a souvenir from
Bath?),
a silver cat licking its paw, a grinning shepherdess, thirty litde painted china boxes. He still felt the poignancy of her satisfaction when the sideboard shone and she could settle down with her Sunday glass of sherry. In his memory, the radio was going in the background through a coil of cigarette smoke.

His mother came back to him intact—with her curlers, her fears. He had never appreciated her fortitude before. Now each of his memories seemed to embody her supernatural determination to get the job done. Her life had been brutally subdued to fulfil a cheery set of principles: if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well; idle hands are the devil's playthings. He felt himself collapse inside with love and horror. The soul-destroying modesty of her expectations! This was what he had shaken off when he ran that last time for the train to London, slamming the window down as soon as he was on, taking huge gulps of air and listening to the wheels set off.

We don't really move very far at all in life, he thought.

But how could he be blamed for thinking he had, for thinking he had been reborn on another planet? The home he and Rosalind had made in Holland Park with the thick damask curtains, the walnut side-tables, the heavy, silver-framed photographs of their children playing tennis and of the place they often took in Italy—every aspect of their lives was a product of the taste his wife had inherited. And that was exactly how he had wanted it. He had wanted to forget where he grew up and to lose himself in another person's world. He had chosen a clean, ordered world with no smell of fried breakfasts or of large, unknown men.

'Luke?' he called, as he went into the cramped hallway. He could see his son through the back door, in the garden, smoking a cigarette and kicking at bits of loose turf. He watched Luke make a fist with his right hand and turn it over under his eyes as if he was calculating how powerful it might be. Alistair felt aware of violence stored up in people now. 'Luke? I'm back.'

His son let the fist slacken and blew out a jet of smoke. 'Just having a cig, Dad. Be there in a minute.'

'No hurry,' he called. Conversation was difficult with Luke. Always had been.

Alistair walked into his mother's sitting room and looked at all the dusty ornaments. He had not attempted to explain a single thing to his son—and, to his great relief, Luke appeared to be too distracted to ask. This was a surreal situation and could not possibly last—even if Luke had, as his mother put it, had his first heartbreak. Surely his son must be amazed by this past of his father's. After all, he had known precisely nothing about it, until the evening before, when they had arrived in Dover and shared a supper of beans on toast in a dead old lady's kitchen.

Alistair felt he would have to explain something—somehow. But in a bit.

His leg hurt a great deal after the walk and the drive and he sat down in the old armchair and breathed deeply. The quiet had the intensity of death. It was not unpleasant.

He was sitting where his mother had been sitting in the photograph. There were white cat hairs along the arm of the chair. Her chair—angled for the TV. What had she watched? he wondered. She had liked detective stories on the radio when he was little. Detective programmes, perhaps. He pulled a cat hair from the fabric and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. Her cat.

That he must have shattered his wife's faith in the world in the past few months was another thing Alistair tried hard not to think about. This reality visited him occasionally in the form of a sharp contraction of his stomach and he would immediately pick up a biography or a newspaper in an attempt to prevent thought. He had developed a nervous habit of straightening his shirt cuffs.

It was a strange fact that, in a life often spent arguing the defence of drug-dealers and thieves in front of sceptical juries, he had never had to defend himself. He was literally lost for words now that he needed them most, when eye-contact with his demure wife was like a blow to the face. He had never wondered before, in his whole career as a barrister, what the defendants told their wives, whether there were scenes in kitchens, in hallways. Whether there were tears.

Not that he had reached a state of humility now. In reality, the thought that made him throw down his book and pinch the bridge of his nose, as if he was holding the two sides of his head together, was that it could all so easily have gone undiscovered. A few altered details: if his attackers had been fitter and outrun the police, if he had genuinely drunk the awful wine Julian always served and had had to take a cab home, rather than emptying two glasses secretly into the sink and remaining almost sober. Or if Julian hadn't been quite so bloody
vigilant.
After all, how many Londoners came running out of their warm houses at the sound of a car alarm? They were just part of London's music.

But Julian's daughter had been brutally mugged only a few months before and any sound on the street would bounce him out of bed and over to the window tearing open the curtains, turning the bedroom pale orange with streetlight. His wife thought perhaps he should see someone about it, talk to someone. Alistair had heard Rosalind on the phone to her.

The alarm had gone off when one of the boys fell back into the car. To have heard it, Julian and Elise must have been seeing other guests into the hall. Out Julian had jogged. Having taken in what he had initially thought was two joy-riders holding a baseball bat near a neighbour's car window, he had called 999 on his mobile phone. It was only then that he saw his friend crumpled on the ground. He ran back into the house in fear.

If they had just disappeared off into the night, Alistair thought, the whole world would still hang together. He would still have his job, his reputation, the respect of his wife and children. Had he altered the course of history so minutely as to have stayed a few minutes longer and left
after
the other guests, by the time of the attack Julian and Elise might already have gone to the kitchen with the empty glasses. The sound of the car alarm might have been overwhelmed by the dishwasher.

A few touches here and there and Alistair might have suffered nothing more than a serious injury to his leg. He would have had sympathy.

But within the hour Michael Jensen and Anil Bandari had been signing their names in Chelsea police station and Julian was being complimented on his swift reaction. Three days later, the story was in the papers.

Alistair's daughter, Sophie, had not spoken to him since. She worked for the
Telegraph
and, of course, she had been forced to see her own father written about by her colleagues, who hunched, agonized, over their keyboards as she passed with her cup of coffee. He did not know it yet, and neither did she acknowledge it, but this had given Sophie the vocabulary she needed. She had been looking for a way to explain her desire to chuck in her dream job.

Alistair had no idea how lonely Sophie was. He loved his daughter in an awkward, passionate way. She was the fiercely intelligent girl he might have married. When his wife worried about why Sophie didn't have 'anyone special on the scene yet', he was disturbed by how repulsive he found the idea. He couldn't bear to discuss it. He had snapped his cufflink last time—when Rosalind had suggested they ask James Marsden over for dinner.

'Anthony's
son, you mean? He's an absolute
idiot,
darling. She'd argue him under the table,' he said.

'Oh. He's nice-looking, I thought. Friendly, polite. Perhaps you're right, though, darling. You probably are.'

As a teenager Sophie had been very ill with anorexia and Alistair was still mystified by this and deeply afraid of the sheer will she had shown—six and a half stone and silent at the table. Had he caused this weird illness? He had never referred to it in front of her. And, although she was outspoken about everything else, she had never brought it up with him. Instead, they had fierce arguments about current affairs and while they told themselves they enjoyed the discussions, there was always a subtext of betrayal implicit in the extreme positions they took. She was always the cynic in these arguments, always the one who sensed corruption, while he was the voice of conservative reason. Neither felt they represented themselves fairly in this after-dinner ritual. They would go through sadly to join the other two in front of the news.

'So, Dad,' Luke said, coming into the room with his hands in his pockets, 'do we take stuff back or what? I mean, what do you want to do with all the ...
stuff?'
He had picked up one of the ornaments—a little china dog—and Alistair watched him for a moment, longing to remove it from his son's hand. He knew the judgements Luke would be making, thinking his unknown grandmother had been a tasteless, vulgar person. It was unbearable.

'Are you OK, Dad?'

'Me? Yes, fine. Just tired out.'

'You're not meant to walk, are you? Where did you go?'

Alistair stood up and stretched his leg again. Then he stretched his arms, rolled his head, rubbed the back of his neck, clicked his fingers. 'Oh—nowhere. Just a bit of fresh air. I suppose I'd better call Mummy and let her know what we're planning.'

'What
are
we planning?'

'I'm not sure...' Alistair's voice was uncharacteristically quiet. He glanced out of the window, through the net curtains. He felt an overwhelming urge to cry. For some reason, he remembered the letters his son used to write home from boarding-school, listing every goal he'd scored, every good mark he'd got. Sophie had never bothered to write. It ought to have been the other way round, really.