Lie With Me (4 page)

‘Andrew is a gentleman.’

A shout of noise from the kitchen. Alice took a last look at her stub of cigarette and flicked it into the flower bed. She was wearing a little purple cardigan, the sort of thing an old lady might wear, and she pulled it together at the neck. Her face grew suddenly serious. ‘Every detail of that night is etched on my memory. I remember everything. It was such a terrible time.’

‘I heard. Your husband . . .’

‘I don’t mean Harry.’ She shook her head, let out a small, bitter laugh. ‘He died the year before. No. I mean that night, the night Jasmine went missing.’

If I searched hard enough, somewhere in the murky depths of my mind I could find what she was talking about, but it was just scraps, oddments, broken trails.

‘Remind me,’ I said.

Alice frowned. ‘Jasmine. Jasmine Hurley. You were there. Poor Yvonne, her mother. God.’ She let go of the cardigan and her hands waved in the air, fingers tense. ‘It was in the papers. You must have heard about it the next day, read about it. Where were you staying? Elconda? Even the Pyros police, who were hopeless from the beginning, would have taken their enquiries at least down there . . . Surely you remember.’

I bowed my head, embarrassed, as ever, to be found emotionally wanting. She had prodded my memory, though the details were still vague – a teenager who ran off, a single mother, a dodgy boyfriend? ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I do. I’m sorry.’

She rested the fingers of one hand on the bridge of her nose. I patted her shoulder, putting as much anguish and concern into my face as I could muster. I was keen to get back inside now. It wasn’t just the cold. I was feeling inadequate, and also nettled – the two emotions merging and doing each other no favours.

Through the cross-hatch of shrubbery, lights flickered from the kitchen. Andrew was walking around the table, the decanter in his hand glinting. Tina had crossed to the other side of the room, and was bending to lift a bowl – trifle? – out of the fridge. Boo had her arms in the air: she was trying to take off her cardigan and she’d got her top tangled with it. I caught a flash of skin and bra strap.

A high-pitched chirrup brought my attention back to Alice. She wiped her eyes and wriggled her mobile phone out of the front pocket of her jeans.

‘Phoebe – my eldest – wanting to be picked up from a party,’ she said, studying it. ‘Well, she’ll have to get the night bus. I’ve had far too much to drink.’

She tapped a quick text, saying as she did so: ‘Honestly, she’s nearly eighteen and about to leave home. You’d think she’d have learnt a bit of independence.’ She slipped the phone back into her pocket, angling her hip forward to make it easier. ‘Though God knows what I’m going to do when she’s gone. I can’t walk past her room without imagining it empty.’

She shivered, hunching her shoulders together and rubbing her lower arm. ‘I suppose we’d better go back in.’

‘Let’s see your phone again,’ I said.

She kept my gaze. ‘Why?’

‘Go on.’

A small smile. ‘No.’

‘It’s got rabbit ears, hasn’t it?’

I made a quick movement – as if to put my hand into her pocket. She jerked away, giggling, then with a childish petulance, pulled it out and threw it at me. ‘Go on then. Feast your eyes. Laugh all you like.’

I turned it over in my lap where it had landed and said flatly: ‘Your iPhone cover is in the shape of a blue rabbit.’

‘My son, Frank, gave it to me. It was a present!’

‘Do you take it to work, you big-shot lawyer you, to your very important meetings?’

She was grinning. I noticed then why her mouth was lopsided. A tiny puckered arrow pointed up at one corner, a small scar.

The feeling came from nowhere. She hadn’t flirted. She was not my type – about twenty years too old for one thing. So I don’t know what it was – Boo’s bra maybe, or the thought of Alice’s hip warm beneath her jeans pocket. Or something quicksilver about her movements. Or maybe, even then, I had subliminally registered the prospect of an empty room in a comfortable house. But when I saw that scar I had a sudden desire to lick it.

Chapter Three

I rang Andrew for Alice’s number the following morning. If he was surprised, he hid it well. He said, ‘Of course, hang on,’ and then blustered for a few seconds, muttering, ‘Sorry . . . stupid me . . . wait a sec . . .’ He was, he said, a ‘technical idiot’ – couldn’t work out how to access his contacts list while remaining on the phone. ‘Tina!’ he shouted. Then, finally, ‘Right, here we are. Alice Mackenzie. Work, home, or mobile – or maybe all three?’

‘Mobile,’ I said. I was rolling the Christmas bauble from his hedge between my fingers, feeling the glitter turn to grit.

‘OK.’ He paused. ‘You going to ring her now, or after your work trip?’

‘What work trip?’

‘New York.’

‘Oh yes.’

He paused again, and then said: ‘Look, I know I’m being an arse. But I can’t help being protective. Ali’s had such a tough time – Harry’s death was so awful for her. She’s kept it all so brilliantly together and her kids are fantastic, but she’s still vulnerable. She is special to me, to Tina, to both of us. I don’t want her to be hurt, or to be messed about, or . . . There – I’ve said enough. Lecture over.’

Would a better man have said, ‘Fair cop. My intentions are purely dishonourable. Your words have made me see sense, and I will respectfully back off.’ Frankly? Would
anyone
have listened to his self-serving, conceited little speech and said that?

I wanted to say, ‘I’ll do whatever I like, you interfering little twerp,’ but instead I made all the right noises. So credible was my claim to decency, I half believed in it myself.

The number was duly delivered, recited slowly, each digit apparently wrenched from Andrew against his better judgement.

I arranged to meet Alice in ten days’ time, on a Tuesday night: an odd choice, but her diary was packed with university visits and appeal deadlines and parents’ evenings, ‘unbelievably complicated’. It was too long a wait. As the days went by, I began to go off the idea. By the time the night in question arrived, I had forgotten what I had seen in her in the first place.

Still, a date’s a date and I am nothing if not gallant. Andrew Edmunds, a small intimate restaurant in Soho, was my go-to venue in those days. It was perfect for such occasions: candle-lit, quirkily arty. I liked to think it said something about
me
that I was so at home there. Plus, I got a discount: thirty per cent off in exchange for having tutored the manager’s daughter. GCSE English Literature:
Othello
. (She got an A.)

I was early, and disconcerted to find Alice already there, drinking a glass of wine and sifting through some papers. When she saw me, she stuffed them into a voluminous leather bag, along with a thick alligator-skin A3 desk diary, and quickly got to her feet, putting out a hand for me to shake. She was wearing a navy-blue skirt with a buttoned-up white shirt, and flat knee-length black boots. Her hair was pulled back, and she was wearing no make-up but for a slash of the unflattering pink lipstick.

She apologised for looking ‘office-y’. She had been in court all afternoon: a Congolese teenager, a model A-level pupil at school in Barnet, who was due to be deported when she reached adulthood in a month’s time. Yes, I was right, it was emotionally draining. Her own daughter was almost exactly the same age, which added an extra layer.

‘Phoebe?’ I said. ‘The one who is moving out?’

‘Yes. She has a place at Leeds in September to read English. If she gets the grades.’

‘Oh. Not until September.’

‘It’ll come soon enough. I can’t bear it. She’ll leave such a hole.’

‘You could get a lodger?’

‘She wants to be a journalist actually. Andrew said you wrote for newspapers sometimes?’

‘I do. And if she’d like any advice, I’m happy to help. Anything to help her on her way.’

‘That would be kind. Thank you.’

We ordered food – wild sea trout and the guinea fowl special. I learnt more about her children. Phoebe, the eldest, followed by two boys (Louis, sixteen and Frank, fourteen). She mentioned her dead husband several times. ‘Frank is straightforward,’ she told me, ‘just like Harry, up for anything.’ Louis was a darker character, going through a difficult stage, ‘but then of course he misses his father more.’ She sighed when she said this and, with the middle finger of her left hand, lightly padded the pouchy skin under her left eye. Her eye was dry, so the gesture seemed staged or, at least, well practised; an instinctive check, perhaps, from a time when there would have been tears there. I felt as I had in Andrew’s garden, that even when she was apparently opening her heart, she was keeping a great deal back.

My chair was near the entrance to the kitchen and the waiter jogged it every time he passed – through the doors, out again. I began to find it hard to concentrate. I felt agitated, knees twitchy, not at my best. As soon as the plates were cleared, I decided to call it a day by asking her back for coffee, and was astonished when she accepted. It was raining and the pavements were slick with it – or perhaps I’m making that up: all my memories seem to involve rain. She whistled for a taxi, a proper scalp-shrinking two-finger whistle, which abruptly turned me on, and when we pulled up in my street ten minutes later, insisted on paying. She professed herself ‘charmed’ while we were still climbing the stairs, her shoulder bag bashing against the bannisters, and she stood in the doorway of the flat, raving in self-conscious delight at my taste and cleverness. ‘Oh yes. Oh yes. This is
lovely
.’

I lit a cigarette and busied myself in the kitchen over the coffee machine, listening to her move about the sitting room, knowing, with each particular creak in the floorboards, where she was standing: by this picture, or that bookcase.

‘I love the “twiggy bird”!’ she cried. She was in front of the black and white print above the fireplace.

‘A dry-point etching,’ I returned. ‘It’s a Kate Boxer.’

‘You play?’ she called a little later. She was poking in Alex’s pile of sheet music to the side of the sofa.

‘Terribly rusty,’ I called back. ‘Not since I was a child.’

I had a quick tot of whisky from my emergency supplies, and then a couple more. Persephone wound herself around my legs and I gave her a saucer of milk. I wasn’t quite sure what my next move should be. Was this a seduction? I didn’t know how it worked with the older woman. Would she expect something rather more gracious and prolonged? In which case, why was I bothering? It didn’t cross my mind to tell the truth: that the life the flat purported to reflect wasn’t mine – not because I was embarrassed, though I might well have been, a forty-two-year-old man with nothing to his name but a few bin bags in his mother’s attic. No, I didn’t see the point. So what if I was due to be evicted in a week? I didn’t expect ever to see her again.

When I brought the coffee through, she was sitting on the sofa, studying that framed Trinity College photograph. It was Alex’s of course, but as he and I had met there, it might just as well have been mine. ‘I took it off the wall in the loo. I hope you don’t mind. I’m looking for you.’ Her finger traced along a row of young, plump, pompous faces. ‘Ah!’ She smiled. ‘Longer hair . . . Where’s Andrew?’

I leant across to peer. Etiolated face, peaked nose, sanctimonious expression. ‘In the middle at the front.’

‘Oh yes. Also longer hair.’

‘
More
hair.’

‘Don’t be naughty.’ She laughed, and then looked again at the photograph. ‘I can’t see Florrie. Is she here?’

‘No. She came later. In my third year.’

She put the picture on the sofa to one side of her, and then looked at me. ‘Were
you
happy?’

I paused for a moment, wondering what she meant, and then said: ‘Yes, very.’

‘I remember, when I visited, thinking the place was very grand, and the people there were either very grand or very small. At Bristol, where I was, you could be anything. But there, you were one or the other.’

I experienced a small internal tremor. ‘Perhaps that’s true.’

She took a sip of her cappuccino. A lock of her hair fell forward. I could see the strands of grey in with the blonde.

‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Were you happy as a child?’

It was one of my usual chat-up lines. Alice responded to type: a self-deprecating shrug, and then a sort of glow – perfectly content to talk about herself for hours. She had grown up in north London, the only child of a lawyer and a university lecturer. Private school, then Bristol, where she had met Harry. A golden life, a lucky life, she said.

‘It’s hard, isn’t it, living with privilege?’ She gestured to the flat, the artwork, the items of mid-century furniture, the shelves of books. ‘Do you ever feel guilty at how easy it all is, how much people like us have been given on a plate by our parents?’

I felt another tight spasm in my chest, a need to unburden, as if I might tell her how it
wasn’t
, what a struggle it had been not to lead the life of my parents, how I had always hated the smallness of their ambition, their willingness to settle with meekness and mediocrity. I wondered at the extent of
her
privilege. How rich was this lady bountiful? How much had Harry left her? How big was
her
house? I managed to nod sagely. ‘Yes. I suppose one has to be mindful of that and . . . well, do one’s best to give something back.’

She rested her hand on my arm. ‘I knew you’d understand. It’s why I do what I do. Andrew berates me for not joining a firm like his, for not doing commercial law, but it wouldn’t make me happy. I’ve always fought for the underdog, for people who don’t have a voice of their own.’

She shook her head and took another sip from her coffee. ‘You write books,’ she said. ‘That’s a generous act in some ways. You have to open up.’

‘Yes. You really do.’

‘Are you working on anything at the moment?’

I offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head. I lit one for myself. ‘Yes, actually. A novel about London, about immigration, about the dispossessed. State of the nation, kind of thing.’