The Outcast (9 page)

Jane gave Lewis supper in the kitchen and while he ate she cleared the rest of the glass from the floor of his room. She put a wooden tray over the broken window and stuffed eiderdowns around it. She would have liked to have comforted him, but he wasn’t crying.

Gilbert drank too much at the Carmichaels’ to drive home. It had happened before. It seemed Elizabeth’s death allowed him to do all sorts of things that would have been otherwise un- acceptable and still carry on with people’s opinions of him unchanged. In later years it was forgotten that he used to fall asleep on the Carmichaels’ sofa after dinner, or that once he had left the table before the main course and been brought in

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from the garden much later by Claire. If one didn’t mention a thing afterwards, it was as if it hadn’t happened.

Kit was up at six, before anybody, and she got dressed and crept down to let herself out into the garden. She sneaked into the drawing room to take a box of matches and saw Gilbert’s feet sticking up over the side of the sofa. He was sleeping in his clothes, head sideways, tie undone.There was an ashtray and a whisky bottle next to him. Kit looked around, half expecting to see Lewis. She watched Gilbert sleeping for a bit and thought how old and ugly grown-ups were and wondered why every- body always said Mr Aldridge was ‘so attractive’ and if he was staying for breakfast. It would be nice if Lewis came too and she could show him her camp, but she hadn’t seen him all holi- days; he hadn’t come round, and when she was with the bigger children they never went calling for him like they had in the summer. She collected the matches from the coal bucket by the fire and tiptoed out.

Kit let herself out of the side door by the kitchen. Frozen grass snapped under her feet as she ran up to the woods; she would light a fire and get warm and pretend to be a gypsy until it was time to go in.

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You couldn’t see daylight from the inside of the shop at all, so there was no knowing what time it was and the air was dry and hot. Kit and Lewis could see Tamsin and her mother’s legs and the legs of the sales assistant if they put their faces on the linoleum and looked out from under the rack of mackintoshes. Kit had three marbles in her pocket and Lewis had seven and a piece of chalk, and if they sat opposite each other with their legs apart and their feet touching they could play and not lose them across the vast floor. They were both hungry and the morning had gone on for ever. Lewis was to meet his father and Alice Fanshawe at her mother’s flat in Knightsbridge and they were going on for a special birthday lunch at the Ritz. He wasn’t thinking about it, just playing marbles with little Kit and being dragged round having clothes bought by Mrs Carmichael, who’d taken Gilbert’s stack of accumulated clothes coupons and included Lewis in her shopping for the girls.

‘You’re going to look very smart,’ she kept saying and buying things so big he thought he’d never have to wear anything else again, which was an appalling prospect from one point of view

– that you could wear the same thing for ever and never like it to begin with – and an encouraging one from another, that you would never have to enter another shop and get measured and

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breathed on by ladies whose breath smelled like the inside of their noses.

‘That gives me sixteen,’ said Kit, lisping intently, and Lewis noticed the way she had to talk sideways out of her mouth to accommodate the gaps in her teeth and wondered if she’d always talk sideways and what that would look like. Not pretty, he concluded.

For his birthday that morning, his father had Jane decorate the table with twigs and winter berries from the garden. When Lewis came down and saw the table, and the presents, he had a sick feeling in his stomach, as if someone was playing a trick on him. He stood in the doorway of the dining room and looked at the table and his decorated place. Gilbert was in his seat already and he stood when Lewis came into the room.

‘Happy birthday, Lewis.’

Lewis felt tight and foolish and oddly ashamed. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, and sat down.

It felt silly to have holly branches in front of him getting in the way of breakfast. He unwrapped his presents and they ate, not looking at one another, but when Gilbert left for work he stood in the doorway for a moment and lifted his hand to Lewis’s head and stroked his hair.

‘Well done,’ he said.‘Good boy.’

Gilbert left and Lewis sat on the stairs until Claire Carmichael arrived in the car with Kit and Tamsin to take him up to London, and now he was standing on the steps outside the mansion flats in his new oversized jumper and shorts and duffel coat and surrounded by boxes and bags. He thought he looked like an evacuee, but up to London instead of away. He rang the bell and Claire,Tamsin and Kit stared at him from the

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pavement. It was a very cold day, but he was hot in all his layers. The door was opened by a uniformed porter who looked at Claire Carmichael as if she were a burglar.

‘Good afternoon, madam.’

‘I’d better take him up. Come and wait in the lobby,’ said Claire, sounding very tired indeed at having to follow Lewis.

She came up the steps and held his elbow and they both went in and there was a lot of discussion with the doorman about leaving the packages and girls downstairs, and which flat and which floor and whether to take the lift. Lewis thought he’d boil in his coat and wished Mrs Carmichael would let go of his arm. She had a faded sort of coldness and was always just one colour, a kind of beige fawn from top to bottom.They toiled up the red carpeted stair to the first floor and rang the bell of number two. Lewis wasn’t nervous, he wasn’t going to be nervous for Alice Fanshawe, he didn’t care if she liked him.

‘He doesn’t like me.’

‘It’s not for him to like or dislike you.’ ‘That’s easy to say. I’d like him to like me.’ ‘I like you.’

The waiter cleared away their plates and Alice leaned closer to Gilbert. Her hair was very soft and light brown, like child’s hair. He wondered if she put it up whether she’d look older, and if he wanted her to look older or if he liked her ingénue quality. Perhaps at twenty-six she was too old to be an ingénue anyway, but she was one to him, she seemed terribly young and she smelled of violets, not like Parma violets but fresh ones, and he couldn’t think how she did it.

‘Can I give him his present when he comes back?’ ‘Of course.’

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‘Will he like it?’

‘All children like sweets.’

‘Gilbert, am I all right, do you think?’ ‘You’re lovely.’

‘All right for him?’ ‘All right for anybody.’

Lewis came back into the dining room. The room was very big and mirrored, and the walls and ceiling and curtains were pink and gold and the tall windows to the park were shaded in pink, so that you felt conspicuous in the room for not being the right colour. He saw his father and Alice at their corner table from far across the room.They were leaning together, whisper- ing. He had seen his father look like that all his life, with just that expression and just that pose, except he had been with his mother. He simply looked exactly the same but with the wrong woman, and the familiarity and welcome feeling it gave him to see his father as he remembered him was corrupted.

Lewis glanced to his right and saw the waiters standing like sentries at the door to the restaurant. Past them was the long entrance, with sofas and chaises with ladies in hats, drinking tea, and potted palms, and then there was the street, and the light looked blue and bright compared to the pinky warm light in the hotel. Lewis turned towards the daylight and made for it. His father and Alice hadn’t looked up and he wasn’t conscious of trying to avoid them until he passed the waiters and thought they’d stop him and then he realised he was escaping.

He walked down the very long carpet towards the blue daylight and the doorman at the end of it. His back felt vulner- able and strange and his new shoes rubbed his heels.When he reached the door, the doorman opened it and Lewis stepped out onto the pavement under the grey colonnades.There were

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a lot of cars and people hurrying and he didn’t immediately know what to do, but he knew he could be seen from inside the hotel, so he walked a little way to his left before he stopped.

He didn’t have his coat. He’d never been out on his own in London before and it was an odd, nothing feeling to be on the street with people walking past and not speaking to him.

It was very cold, with the deadness about the cold that you get just before snow. People kept going in and out of the hotel and every time they did he thought they were going to be Gilbert, but they weren’t. It wasn’t as if he had any feelings, he wasn’t upset and he didn’t want to make a scene. He would go back inside to the table and be perfectly normal.

He tried to act normally and seem interested in the buses and things, but he knew he looked like a lost child. He wasn’t lost; he was waiting. He was waiting for it to be easier to carry on.

‘Lewis?’

He turned at his name and saw Alice.

She hadn’t got her coat on either and hugged herself with her arms to keep warm. The people in their dark coats and hats walked past them and Alice was all pale colours and nothing covering her skirt or dress, or whatever it was that was light and not thick at all. Behind her, the doorman glanced at them curiously and then away again.

‘Would you like to come back inside now?’ She said it very gently and kindly, and smiled at him.

Lewis saw that she had softness. He hadn’t seen that in anybody, anybody that was for him, for what seemed like for ever. It was everything he wanted. She looked cold and he wanted her to be warm and he didn’t want her to look so worried. He was going to cry. He had become used to not

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having any feeling at all and now he was going to cry. He stared at her, terrified, willing himself not to.

‘Why don’t you come back inside?’ she smiled.

He wished she’d stop it, there was no need to be so sweet. ‘Come back in, I’ve got a present for you.Wouldn’t you like

your present?’

She said it temptingly, with a little smile, as if there was no more to any of it than giving him a present and winning him over. After that it was easy. He didn’t feel sad any more, it just went away and he felt hard as anything, hard as diamond. She shivered and hugged herself some more, but he didn’t care and he didn’t feel cold, he didn’t feel anything.

‘Lewis? Do come back in. Please.’ What could he do? He went.

The sugared almonds were in a box and wrapped in cellophane and tissue paper and had three different coloured ribbons tied around them in a bow. Lewis had never seen anything like it in his life.

‘Happy birthday,’ said Alice, then, conspiratorially, ‘It’s sweets.’

The only sweets he’d seen were in paper bags and smeary jars.There were no boxes, there was no having fun about them. This box was shiny and joyful. It was like a thing from another planet.The cellophane alone was extraordinary.

‘My mother got them in NewYork. I asked her to get them just for you.’

‘What do you think about that, Lewis? All the way from America!’

‘Isn’t it lovely? I hadn’t seen anything like that for years.’ ‘Aren’t you going to open them?’

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‘Don’t you think it’s the prettiest box you ever saw?’

‘Say thank you. He doesn’t know what’s inside,’ said Gilbert. ‘Well, he should open it.’

‘Come on.’

‘They’re almonds. I think you’ll like them. They’re covered in sugar. In lovely colours. It looks too pretty to touch, doesn’t it?’

Lewis looked up at her doll-like eyes. He waited. He stared at her and he took pleasure in it.

‘It’s a girl’s present,’ he said.

She blinked. She didn’t look very clever.That was what was wrong with her face, he thought, she wasn’t very clever, so none of it added up to anything. She could be soft, she could be a woman if she wanted, it didn’t make any difference to him; she wasn’t clever and she wasn’t a mother.

‘Lewis, that’s rude,’ said Gilbert,‘Apologise.’ Lewis thought about it. He decided not to. ‘Apologise to Alice.’

‘Gilbert, it’s all right,’ said Alice. Coward, thought Lewis. ‘I want you to say sorry, and thank you, or you’re to give

them back.Then you won’t have any sweets.’

Lewis stared at her and didn’t blink and pushed the box across the table in front of her. She looked down at the box. She straightened the bow on it.

‘I’ll get the bill.’ Gilbert turned to the room.

Lewis looked at Alice fiddling with the ribbons on the box. He hated himself, but he was used to that, and anyway there was nothing he could do about it now.

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Gilbert married Alice in March and took her to Scotland for two weeks’ honeymoon afterwards. Alice was keen to get back to Waterford. She was very eager to fit in and be liked, and Gilbert’s friends and neighbours talked behind his back about rebound marriages and Alice’s naïvety and invited them to dinners and parties as a matter of course.

Alice loved playing house. She dismissed Jane and hired a woman called Mary as housekeeper. Mary lived in Turville and had grown-up children and hadn’t known Elizabeth or anyone connected with her. Mary was more in charge of Alice than the other way around, and Alice liked it that Mary was motherly and knew something about the running of houses, which Alice didn’t and was the first to admit. Alice felt as if she were dressing up in her mother’s clothes and pretending to be a wife. She waited to get pregnant. She paid calls.When Gilbert came home, Alice was there, with cocktails, every night. At first it was just a game to be there with a drink and say,‘How was your day?’ – but then it became normal. She was always there, at half-past six, in the drawing room, freshly made up and dressed for dinner, with a jug of Pimm’s or Martinis or something new she’d read about somewhere; and Gilbert, who at first found it delightful and funny, very soon came to take it for granted.

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Alice spent days in London, shopping for clothes and lunching with friends, but in the school holidays she decided to be home all the time. She had given herself a pep talk. She was going to be a proper stepmother to Lewis and not so frightened by him. She envisaged his gradual softening, and his surrender to her. She reminded herself Elizabeth had not been dead five months when Lewis was introduced to her the first time, but it was a difficult thing to bear in mind because Gilbert’s life before her seemed shadowy and far away.