Exposure (3 page)

'Well, we'd better say soon, Dad, because Mum called earlier asking if we were going to come back for supper—you know, because it's your birthday and everything.'

Alistair's wife astonished him: her capacity to suppress the unwanted and lay the table was awe-inspiring. Luke turned away, almost as embarrassed as his father by this inappropriate birthday.

'Yes, better let her know,' Alistair said.

'Sorry I forgot, Dad.'

'Forgot?'

'About your birthday.'

'Oh, God—couldn't matter less.' He wanted desperately to share some kind of acknowledgement with his son. What would it have been like to turn to Luke cleanly and say: 'Look, we both know it's ridiculous to celebrate my birthday. I've spoilt your mother's life and my own and now here we are in the place I grew up and you can see perfectly well I've been pretending—lying, really, since before you were born.' But it was impossible. 'Couldn't matter less,' he said again. His son coughed. Alistair's eyes flickered to the lifeless TV. He imagined switching it on and filling up the silence of that room.

'So shall we go back tonight or what, then?' Luke said.

'Yes, I think we should. I just wanted to get an idea of how much there was to sort out.'

'A lot of it's left to people, isn't it?' Again, his son fingered the ornaments—he was probably wondering who on earth would be glad to inherit them.
Ghastly
things—that was what he must be thinking. Luke tipped the cat backwards and its mouth opened. He grimaced.

Alistair took it out of his son's hand. 'Yes, a lot of it's left to people. God only knows who would want all this rubbish, though, right?'

Luke smiled, barely conscious of what had been said, just glad to have an opportunity to look into his father's sad eyes with affection.

To Alistair, he seemed to be sharing the joke. He and his son were filthy conspirators in his mother's damp little sitting room.

Perfect, Alistair thought. You have made this son yourself; you have worked hard all your life to earn his prejudices for him. You bought him the ski-trips, the boarding-school friends with their country houses, the teenage girlfriends with their shiny blonde hair and pashmina shawls. And now you must stand here, he told himself, and laugh with him at your mother's possessions. This is how you finish the betrayal.

'Come on, let's head back to London,' he said, gently putting the ornament back in its place.

Rosalind and Alistair had met when she was eighteen and he was in his last year at Oxford. It was 1958. Her cousin Philip had asked her along to a May Ball and her mother had insisted she go. She had not wanted to because Philip so obviously thought she was stupid. He was never actually rude to her, but if ever the conversation got on to something serious, like politics, he would worry that she was finding it 'boring' and change the subject. He would ask her about parties, who had been seen about together and so on. There was nothing she could do. Even if she had felt able to insist it wasn't boring, that she wanted to learn and be the sort of person who thought—well,
things,
she could not have risked contributing an opinion. But she would have liked to listen. She had a way of folding herself between her two white hands and looking out quietly. Sometimes people mistook this for smugness.

Her mother idolized Philip. Everyone did—but her mother particularly because she had lost her only son when he was two, and Philip had become her favourite nephew. They had an almost flirtatious relationship and when they were on the phone, discussing Rosalind's travel arrangements to Oxford, Rosalind thought it sounded as though it was her mother who was going, not her. Her mother laughed wildly at Philip's exaggerated descriptions of the chaos of preparation going on at his college, at the students' frantic taming of straggly hair and beards, which had seemed to lend them a philosophical air only the week before. Rosalind felt like the incidental component in an arrangement between two more vibrant personalities.

She often felt like that. She would have preferred to be more like her elder sister Suzannah, who told jokes and informed their father she was interested in Communism, or Buddhism. But when Rosalind listened to the rows Suzannah had with their mother, she buried her face in her pillow and thought how much nicer it was, really, just to be quiet.

'Cat got your tongue, Rozzy?' her father would say at lunch sometimes. And then he would ruffle her hair as if he was pleased with her for it.

'Sit up, darling,' her mother would remind her.

She got out her dress and laid it on the hotel bed. It was one of Suzannah's—a pale lilac, which went very well with her dark hair. She thought of herself as pretty, but not beautiful like her elder sister. Beauty seemed to be something that required more personality. Once, she had stared for a long time at a photograph in a magazine of Marilyn Monroe, her half-closed eyes fixed erotically on the lens. The image frightened her. She wondered what it would be like for a man to kiss Marilyn Monroe—the big breasts pressing on you, the plump arms round your neck. Was that what they wanted?

Again, she felt frightened. She got visits from this world of emotion she had not yet begun to understand. It was like seeing a ghost. The expression in Monroe's eyes belonged to it, and the time her sister had come home drunk and there was blood in her knickers and on her petticoat, leaves in her hair. Suzannah kept laughing, saying she couldn't believe
that
was all it was. She laughed all the way up the first flight of stairs, stopping outside their parents' bedroom to say, 'It's just so...
silly
—what you're expected to do. It's so ...
silly
,' and Rosalind had had to put her hand over her sister's mouth. She'd had to undress her. The next morning Suzannah had slipped a gold bracelet she knew Rosalind liked under her door with a note that just said, 'Thanks.'

Rosalind put on the bracelet and tightened the clasps on her pearl earrings. She was pleased with the way she looked when she was all dressed up. She knew she fulfilled most of the criteria—slim, not too tall, even complexion, clear eyes. And she knew Philip was only half joking when they walked towards the college gates and he draped his arm over her and said she would do his reputation no end of good. It was a cool evening and the light rain pattered on the streamers and balloons. They got under cover as soon as possible, and Philip called out to a friend of his, who looked slightly comic in a dinner jacket several sizes too large for him. 'Al!' he shouted. The friend turned and grinned at them and they went in behind him in the queue. He had dark hair, blue eyes and very pale skin. He was so pale, in fact, that Rosalind wondered if he was all right. She watched his sharp eyes bounce from her face to the pavement to the church spire and back again.

'Al, this is Rozzy. Rozzy, this is Al.' They had not had a chance to shake hands before Philip was introducing her to someone else a few places along.

 

Alistair thought she was the shiniest, cleanest-looking person he had ever seen. How did a person get that clean and shining? You had to come that way, he thought. There was a dinginess about him you could never scrub off. He stared at the incredible symmetry of her curls. A lot of the girls he had passed on the way had flowers, ribbonish things, but she just had the shining dark curls. It was almost intimidating, so resolute was its simplicity. She was like a haiku, he thought—he had been reading some that afternoon with his tea. He would have liked to be able to pay her a compliment, but he had no idea what it was appropriate to say. When he arrived at Oxford, it had taken him only a few days to abandon his own voice for Philip's public-school one. He still found quite often, though, that he did not know what to say in the new voice.

He had felt increasingly insecure throughout the week—as he had each year—watching the college transformed into a playground of coloured lights, balloons and white marquees. He knew where he was with his books in his hand, walking back across the quad from a tutorial with Philip, patiently explaining whatever his friend hadn't understood. They were a good pair: Philip did the frivolity and Alistair did the more academically confident sarcasm, and together they believed in nothing at all. Philip relied on Alistair for help with his essays and in their first term began to take him out for lunch or dinner to say thank you. Soon Alistair helped with all Philip's essays and Philip paid for all Alistair's meals.

But now, in Philip's spare dinner jacket, aware that the sleeves were too long and that he did not know how to dance, oddly chastised by the irreproachable prettiness of this girl Philip had not even bothered to mention, Alistair wished he could just go back to his room. But he would have felt like a failure. This was the first ball he had come to—he had earned enough in the last holidays to buy himself a ticket and he had been determined not to leave Oxford without having been to a single one, no matter how awkward and unprepared he felt.

Philip handed him a glass of champagne. 'Drink up,' he said. He knocked back his own glass in one and Alistair felt panicky. Recklessness frightened him—because life took so much thought, so much control.

When Philip died in his early fifties, essentially of alcoholism, Alistair remembered those gestures of his, each one arriving in his mind like a drum beat. It was a strange funeral, full of flamboy-antly dressed homosexual men with tragic faces. At the last minute Philip's partner had felt unable to do the reading and Alistair was asked to do it instead. He had felt frightened in case anyone imagined he was gay, too—and ashamed that this was how he thought when his old friend had died. There had been genuine love between them, even if they had drifted apart as Philip's lifestyle became less and less conventional and Alistair's more and more so. Philip always complimented Alistair on his clothes—and Alistair silently appreciated the depth of compassion from which this sprang. Philip had come to understand him in the early Rosalind days and he was someone who never judged or forgot the importance of what he had learnt about a person.

It had been Philip who suggested it in the first place: 'Why don't you ask her if she wants to be shown round?'

'Shown round?'

'Yes.'

'Is that OK?'

'What d'you mean?'

'I mean, wouldn't she think it was forward or something?'

'She's not as prim as she looks—I
hope.
Her mum's a scream anyway. She must have inherited
some
of it.' Philip elbowed Alistair in the ribs but he couldn't maintain the joke, faced with Alistair's frightened expression. 'It's perfectly acceptable to ask a girl something like that,' he said.

'Really?'

Rosalind was standing a little way off with a girl she had been to school with. Two nervous girls under a litde galaxy of fairy-lights strung up in a tree. Was there anything less approachable?

'Come on, I'll distract the other one—she won't remember who I am but we won't let that matter.'

Somehow Alistair asked and somehow she accepted. It was an agonizing few moments, but Rosalind was unsophisticated enough to make it obvious that she was pleased, and this encouraged Alistair. He noticed the schoolfriend grin and raise her eyebrows, and saw Rosalind return a faint smile.

They walked away together towards the river where couples were going out in punts, the girls sitting on rugs, tilting their heads to look up at the sky as if they were drawn to do it by some irresistible romantic force. Everyone was putting on a beautiful show.

'You know, I'm sure Philip's never met Veronica,' Rosalind said, as they walked over a little footbridge. Philip had rushed up to the girl with his arms open wide and told her he'd missed her. Alistair looked at Rosalind and wondered if she was going to laugh about it, but instead, she visibly gathered the implication of Philip's pretence and blushed. She looked away towards the river, pulled her glove on more tightly. 'It's very beautiful, isn't it? The trees, I mean ... with all the little lights,' she said.

He was impressed by her. He respected her capacity to regain her composure. She smiled at him as they got into the punt, and as he watched her smooth out her dress beneath her, he thought she was the neatest and most ordered person he could imagine. The river glistened and rocked the boat as they moved out into it. What would it be like to be around that neatness, to feel reassured by the action of those elegant hands? She was the opposite of his humiliating rehearsals in front of the mirror: Alistair smoking a cigarette, Alistair drinking a toast, Alistair reading a newspaper and looking up as someone brought him a cup of coffee
in his club.
The scenes he played out! She was the proof that he was nowhere near fooling anyone. She had been born into it all. She had lived the life he was piecing together from talks with Philip—of Sunday lunches followed by walks in Wellington boots, the opera at Glyndebourne in summer, drinks parties on crisp rainy evenings in London, quiet talks with your father over a glass of port. When he imagined Rosalind's life, he often forgot to include the fact that she was a girl. Sometimes this meant that as he sent her out into the dream a detail jarred. He would see her suddenly, and it made him feel oddly disappointed, so that he turned to dreaming about Philip's life instead, with which he could more closely identify, rather than wondering what Rosalind's might be like.

She did not have Philip's custodial air but she had his deeply impressive way of not being at all surprised that something delicious was waiting for her, so that when they got back from their punting she greeted a table covered with bottles of champagne, scattered with flowers, with a simple 'How nice to come back to,' and a quick smile. He wondered if he was in love already.

They had not talked about much as they punted along, past the other couples, sometimes close enough for Alistair to be embarrassed to hear the same male speech, 'And that's Magdalen Tower where they have the singing on May Day,' and so on. Mostly he had just told her about the different colleges and received the incredible reassurance of her nods and smiles. She seemed fascinated. She was so unlike the girls from Dover Grammar, who rolled their eyes if you 'harped on'. They thought he was dull and the books with which he had scrupulously characterized himself (often trying three different tides under his arm before he left the house) had made him unpopular with them. Books were a self-fulfilling prophecy—he saw that now.