Exposure (48 page)

Alistair did not think about Rosalind at all. Tentatively, he had tried to begin a conversation about Karen Jennings, about his idiotic mistake in that hotel room, but as soon as it became obvious to her that this was his subject, she had remembered a phone call she had to make. He had found himself alone in the drawing room, staring at her glass of wine. He wondered if she felt she would have to leave him and was merely trying to delay the inevitable. After that one occasion, he did not formulate this thought again.

When they arrived at Charing Cross, the driver pulled up with a jerk. 'Is fifteen pound, sir,' he said.

Alistair handed him a twenty-pound note and waved his hand at the change. When the car pulled away, he was mildly amused by the vulgarity of this gesture and hoped the driver kept the tips for himself.

It was a familiar bustle at Charing Cross. His work as a barrister often involved his travelling on trains. He would go to Norwich Crown Court, to Chichester or Leeds. He was allowing himself to confront the end of this agreeable way of life by degrees, like a swimmer lowering himself slowly into a cold sea. Never again would he sit on a train, with a blue legal notepad on his knee, his briefcase and robing bag beside him, putting the finishing touches to his speech for the jury. Work had been a good friend to him for many years.

He moved towards the ticket office, still slow on his bad leg, still suspecting violent intentions in the crowd, and still embarrassed by the walking-stick. He wondered if people guessed he was injured or if the stick just made him look like an old man.

Like
an old man, he thought. He virtually
was
an old man. While he stood in the queue, he studied a few free brochures and found he might have been given a pensioner's discount for his ticket. He had never once thought to use the card he had been sent on his sixtieth birthday. He had thrust it into a drawer as soon as it arrived in its ascetic brown envelope. He had felt personally insulted by it.

'You really should try to remember your Rail Card if you've got one, sir. It does make you a good saving,' said the benevolent ticket salesman.

'Yes, you're quite right,' Alistair said, too tired to be offended.
Why be offended, after all? Wasn't it a pleasant relief to be spoken to in this gentle way?

There was not much gentleness left in the world. As he took his seat on the train, the thought of soft, round, cool-palmed, cake-scented Ivy made him close his eyes with relief. Perhaps Ivy would forgive him for what he had done. As he drifted into a light sleep, he found himself confused about who might forgive him for which of his wrongs. Was it Ivy to whom he had been unfaithful, Rosalind he had abandoned, Luke to whom he had sent an inadequate, hurtful note? And was it Sophie he had hated with such violent passion for laughing and drinking and drinking and laughing, long into the night, with all of those male guests?

All the way to Dover, he dreamt of men with moustaches.

There were local mini-cabs outside Dover Priory station and Alistair eased himself delicately into the back of one. His leg felt the strain of the journey already and he longed to stretch it out flat for a while. He asked the driver to take him home, to Maison Dieu Road, where he would drop off his bag and rest for a bit, before going to see Ivy.

The new scenery was becoming familiar to him now, even though it bore little resemblance to the Dover of his childhood. There were taller buildings, there was a brisk, industrial atmosphere that had not existed before. The billboards were designed to be viewed from passing cars, the lettering full of that urgent American song, bright as TV screens, in which the whole world was beginning to join. At the site of his lovely old Café de Paris was a roundabout: lorries—right through the little corner table.

But, still, there was the sea on the right and all the seafront hotels, some with different names, but essentially they were their bleached, sun-strained, pastel-coloured selves, serving the same English breakfasts, no doubt. 'The Castle Hotel', he read, 'The Britannia', 'The Queen Elizabeth' and then,' We take Euros. 'There certainly had been a few changes. He smiled out at the old place with the kind of affectionate surrender with which he had greeted Sophie's blue hair. It had become a sunny, blustery afternoon, of the kind that best suited Dover because it brought the smell of the sea into all the streets.

He paid the driver and walked up the old path with his bag in his hand. The work he had arranged had improved the place no end. The missing tiles on the path had been replaced, the weeds had been removed from the front garden, the grass mown and all the tangled rubbish had been taken out of the hedges. The window-frames, rotten as they were, had been repainted. It looked respectable—if a little battle-worn, he thought. Much like himself. In fact, the place now looked much the way it had when he left it, forty years ago.

He glanced along the street at the other boarding-houses, most of which had 'No Vacancies' signs outside. Business was obviously booming. A group of thin, exhausted-looking people stood at the end of the road, talking. The women wore headscarves and long skirts. The men were black-haired, dark-eyed. Were they Roma gypsies, he wondered. There had been an influx,
The Times
said: yet another group of people sick of persecution or just of being held back, in search of a better life even if it must be in a foreign country, even if it must mean starting from scratch. He watched an Englishwoman with a tartan shopping-bag cross the road to avoid passing them.

When the door was unlocked he felt immediate relief. The cleaners had been and the builders had thrown out what was broken—old tables and chairs and so on—so that now it was straightforwardly good to be there, in the freshly scrubbed little house, with its few remaining pieces of furniture. Suddenly it was a huge relief to escape from the accumulated weight of his possessions and the unspoken demands of their elegance. He wanted nothing more than to put his feet up in the front parlour, as they had always called it, and rest his bad leg for a bit.

As he settled in his mum's old chair, he realized he had forgotten to eat his sandwiches on the train. He took them out and unwrapped them, suddenly ravenously hungry. They were quite delicious—sausages, good butter, soft brown bread and a little coarse-grain mustard. What Michelin-starred meal is better than this, he thought. With his bad leg propped up on the old footstool, his weight sunk deep in the sagging green chair, he wondered why he had ever thought he needed so much out of life.

But Alistair had decided not to be easy on himself, to leave no posture unexamined. Was this sudden charming unworldliness merely another luxury of wealth, he wondered. In one sense it was. But in another perhaps it really did constitute an arrival in new territory. Perhaps the conclusion he was beginning to draw was that it wasn't the wealth, the possessions, that mattered, but the necessity to rid oneself of the appetite for them. It seemed there were two ways of doing this: either by wisdom or by slavish accumulation. This moment would come either way.

If only I had been wise, he thought, rather than merely clever. If only I had thought a little more and worked a little less.

But he was not sure what this might have changed. The permutations were too various: they spiralled off uncontrollably, making him sick with possibility. It was very much easier to believe that life was destined to unfold as it did. But even as he thought this, he knew that he was not prepared any more to sit back in resignation and observe the shambles of his emotional life.

 

When he felt rested and he had unpacked his shaving things in the bathroom and hung up his change of clothes in the empty wardrobe, he went out.

Uncle Geoff and Auntie Ivy had lived just round the corner. And all these years they had gone on living there, at sixty-three Hill Road, still calling on his mother for tea, still asking her over for a glass of sherry, no doubt. On the way into the centre of the town in the taxi, he had read some signs on the town-hall notice-board: 'Wednesday nights: Bingo!', 'Tuesday afternoons: Knit and Natter!'. This would have been their life. A game of bingo and a half at the pub afterwards, he thought. Would Uncle Geoff still have fetched the drinks for his 'girls'? Of course he would. Alistair could imagine it all.

He reached the front door and rang the little bell. It gave out a resounding 'ding-dong', which seemed to belong to a far larger house than this two-up-two-down. He waited for what felt like a very long time before a shape became visible through the frosted glass in the door. 'Coming quick as I can,' it called.

It was Ivy! That was Ivy's voice! He was surprised to find that his heart was racing, his palms wet. Why, after all these years as himself, had he so little talent for guessing how he was going to feel?

The door opened and there she was: smaller, stouter, her hair now completely white, but it was no other person in the world than Ivy Gilbert who stood in front of him. He took in her familiar smell. 'Hello, Ivy. Remember me?' he said.

She looked at him and shook her head, smiling. 'Well, look what the cat dragged in.'

How typical of her sense of humour, he thought, adoring her, loving her voice, her sweet face, her satirical eyes. 'May I come in?'

'No,' she said. 'Not without a hug first.'

He moved forward awkwardly and, with his nose squashed against her ear, her white hair tickling it, a sob rose up in him and broke like a wave. Her hand patted his back. 'Tears is it now?' Ivy said. 'Silly boy. Where on earth have you been?'

Then she moved away from him and he followed her down the passageway towards the kitchen. She walked very slowly, her hips plainly uncomfortable, her hands distorted by arthritis. 'I'll put the kettle on,' she said.

The kitchen was completely changed. The sink was on the wrong side of the room; the cooker was in the wrong place. It almost made him dizzy. 'This is all new,' he said.

She glanced round at him as she filled the kettle. Her hands were so shaky he wanted to rush over and help her, but he would not have offended her for anything. She had always been independent. 'New? Oh, love, you're going years back. Martin did this for us. You remember Martin? Our nephew?'

Alistair nodded and smiled. Yes, he remembered Martin. Martin with his incredible carpentry skills prized beyond anything Alistair could do; Martin, who was Ivy and Geoff's
real
nephew. Did he still feel jealous? What a petty character I am, he thought.

Ivy went on, 'Yes. Dear Martin came and done all this work for us about—oh, it must have been a good fifteen years back. He died about five years ago, you see. He got cancer and it took him quick.' She tutted as she carried the kettle across the kitchen and plugged it in. 'Where's the sense in that, eh? Old bag like me still going strong and Martin dying not even sixty. 'With an attempt to conceal a wince, she reached up for the cupboard door. 'Now, if I know you,' she said, 'you'll be wanting something sweet. You're lucky I've got custard creams in, aren't you?'

She tipped out some of the biscuits and put them on the table in front of him. He could see the faces of the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales smiling on the plate underneath them. Geoff had always been a royalist, he remembered. He got a tear in his eye when he heard the national anthem. Although he never spoke about it, he had been decorated for bravery in the war.

Ivy poured water into the teapot and Alistair brought over the cups and the milk she had put on the side.

'Thank you, dear. Sorry about the bottle,' she said. 'My lovely milk jug I had since I was married, I went and broke it the other day with these useless hands of mine.'

'Couldn't matter less,' Alistair said. He sat down at the table. Had she no money to buy a new jug, he thought, his stomach clenching, just as Luke's did.

He watched Ivy stir the tea in the pot and took in the sweetish perfume. She poured a little milk into the cups—had this been the first of his horrified discoveries, that in polite society one never put the milk in first?—and then she pushed the sugar cubes towards him. So, you could still get cubes of sugar! Custard creams and sugar cubes and milk jugs ... Ivy seemed to exist in a time capsule, an England that had died long ago. It was wonderful.

'Thank you very much, Ivy. This is lovely,' he said.

'Well, you always loved a custard cream. Anything sweet.'

'Yes. Yes, I did,' he said.

It was Rosalind's Tarte Tatin, these days. He bit into a biscuit. It was the taste of childhood.

'Good. No change there, then,' she said, nodding definitively. She handed him the cup of tea, her hand rattling the little cup on its saucer.

'Thank you. No, no sugar, thanks. Is Geoff around?' he said.

'No, love. I've not got him here any more. He's up at the old fogeys' home near Castle Hill. I visit him, but it was ... well, it was too much for me to have him here,' she said.

'I'm so sorry.'

'I've been waiting for ever on my old hip, you see. And Geoff, well, he's not been in good sorts for a while and it just got too much for me.' She looked down into her lap and Alistair thought how typical it was of Ivy to feel guilty when these were circumstances entirely beyond her control. This was what he feared most about old age: the loss of control. Suddenly the balance shifted and the body ruled the will.

'Still,' she went on, 'they've pretty young nurses up there and he's settled in nicely. I've no reason to worry.'

'Oh, Ivy, it must be difficult for you not having him around,' Alistair said. And as he spoke he knew what her stoical reply would be.

'Well, we had a good innings. You can't deny that.'

'Yes, that's true,' he said. Ivy and Geoff must have been married for more than sixty years. He and Rosalind had done less than two-thirds of that! They were mere beginners. 'You're all right here on your own, though, are you?'

'Oh, I'm not on my own, love. I've a fantastic girl from the Meals on Wheels comes in every day with a bit of lunch for me. And I've a nurse comes by from time to time for my physio. And then I have my check-ups with Dr Hargreaves. And you might not believe it, love, but I still get out to my bingo every week with those of us who haven't croaked it yet.'