The Queen of New Beginnings (25 page)

In the end Alice did invite Ronnetta and Bob for Christmas lunch and amazingly they accepted her invitation.

They came bearing gifts: two carrier bags clinking with bottles of beer, gin, tonic, vodka and Bailey’s. Combined with what Alice already had and the bottle of deadly vintage brew George had brought with her, they had a dangerously well-stocked bar. In the fifty minutes since he and Ronnetta had arrived, Bob had applied himself with serious intent to what was available, and after Clayton had declined to drink any of George’s brew, joking that he was unaccountably attached to his internal organs, Bob had taken up the challenge of a large glassful. Alice had a horrible feeling that it was his way of proving himself more of a man than Clayton. He’d just tossed back the contents of his glass and with his eyes watering and his voice rasping, he was gamely holding out his glass for a top up from George. Just like a real man would.

Five minutes later and a second glassful consumed, he was red in the face and as playful as a Labrador puppy. Jabbing Clayton on the shoulder with a meaty fist, he was now offering him advice on how to get in shape. “No offence, Ralph, but I can see you’ve let your body go. You’re not exactly honed, are you? More like boned—there’s nothing of you!” He aimed another jabbing fist at Clayton’s shoulder. While Clayton smiled grimly back at Bob, Alice hoped the level of alcohol-induced merriment Bob was displaying wouldn’t go too far and turn the Labrador puppy into a spurned, snarling Pit Bull terrier.

She also hoped that she could keep up the subterfuge of calling Clayton by his alias. She had warned George to remember that he was Ralph and not Clayton, although if she was honest, Alice couldn’t quite see the point in it. If their relationship was going to continue, Clayton would have to dispense with the deception at some stage.

“Mistletoe moment!”

Alice looked up from where she was laying the table for lunch with Ronnetta’s help. Before she had a chance to react, Bob had her in his grasp and was dangling a sprig of mistletoe inches above her head. “Gotcha!” he said with a wide grin. He then clamped his mouth over hers. When she felt his tongue slide into her mouth, she wriggled with horror-struck disgust. After she’d shaken him off and had mentally disinfected her mouth, she saw Clayton looking on with a tight expression of disbelief on his face.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me, young man?” asked George with a roguish twinkle in her eye. Bob couldn’t have looked more terrified. He backed away, almost knocking over the Christmas tree and threw the sprig of mistletoe into the fire.

Just as she always used to, George had smartened herself up for the occasion. She was decked out in a tweedy dogtooth-check dress that Alice could have sworn she recognized from the old days. Perhaps it had fitted her better then; now it gaped at her scrawny neck and emphasized her small, desiccated body. Alice felt a pang of sadness, acknowledging just how frail the old woman really was.

• • •

By the time they were midway through lunch everyone seemed less tense. Or maybe it was just Alice who was feeling less tense.

Despite having consumed so much alcohol, Bob was at least behaving himself, and with plates refilled, wine glasses topped up, cracker jokes read out, paper hats worn, the conversation around the table was relaxed and friendly. George was mostly responsible for that, regaling them with amusing tales about the inhabitants of Stonebridge—the hill folk, as she referred to them. Alice’s favourite story was the one about the farmer who, back in the seventies when wife-swapping was supposedly all the rage in certain circles, had got entirely the wrong end of the stick and had placed an advertisement in the local paper with the hope of swapping his wife for a tractor trailer. He was later seen in the newsagent’s with two black eyes.

“So what sort of work is it you do down in London, Ralph?” Ronnetta asked.

“Oh, this and that,” Clayton replied evenly.

“This and that?” repeated Bob, nodding his head like that irritating bulldog from the insurance advert on the television. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m a lucky sod and can do as I please.”

“Loaded, are you? I might have guessed.” Bob stared at Alice accusingly, as if to say, so that’s the reason you’ve hooked up with him instead of me.

“And what’s your line of work, young man?” asked George. Alice had noticed that George hadn’t once called Bob by his name. She doubted it was because the old lady couldn’t remember it.

“He’s a telephone engineer for BT,” Ronnetta said proudly.

George narrowed her eyes. “I hope you’re not the engineer for whom I waited in all day and who never came. Let me tell you, I wrote a very strongly worded letter to British Telecom that evening.”

“Not my area,” Bob said. “My patch is north of here.” He downed his glass of Merlot in one long gulp, then belched. He thumped his chest. “Pardon me,” he said, “better out than in.”

As Ronnetta mildly admonished her son, Alice risked a glance in Clayton’s direction. As their eyes met, the corners of his mouth lifted into the smallest of smiles.

• • •

They were onto the Christmas pudding course when the shaky balance that had so far been in place collapsed entirely.

Alice had just poured a dash of brandy over the pudding and reached for the matches, when Bob rose unsteadily from his seat and took the box out of her hands. “Stand aside, Alice,” he said, “this is a job for Superman.” He clumsily scraped a match along the side of the box, then tossed it vaguely in the direction of the pudding. When nothing happened, he reached for the bottle of brandy.

“Could he be any more stupid?” Alice heard Clayton mutter under his breath. And then, when Bob poured the remains of the brandy over the pudding and struck three matches against the box at once and threw them at the pudding, Clayton said, “Ooh, I stand corrected.”

It all happened so fast. There was a loud
whoomph
followed by a ball of fire shooting high into the air. It made instant contact with the lampshade that was hanging directly above the table.

Clayton reacted first. With lightning speed, he smothered the Christmas pudding with a plate then grabbed the oven gloves Alice had left on the sideboard. He climbed onto his chair and wrapped his hands around the lampshade. In as much time as it had taken Bob to create it, the near-disaster was averted.

“Clayton Miller, you are my all-time hero!” George cheered with a beaming smile. “And you, young man,” she added, turning her attention to Bob, “are an idiot of the first order.”

“Don’t you call my Bob an idiot!” Ronnetta responded indignantly. The look she gave George could have vaporized her.

Alice wasn’t interested in the potential spat breaking out amongst the rest of her guests; she was more concerned with Clayton. He’d pulled off the scorched oven gloves and was shaking his hands and blowing on them. “Clayton,” she said, “are you all right?”

“I think so.” He blew on his fingers and winced.

“Come with me,” she said.

Out in the kitchen, she ran the cold tap and made him put his hands under the gushing water. She could smell the unmistakable tang of singed hair. “How bad does it feel?” she asked.

“I’ll be fine. I’m just attention seeking.”

“Keep your hands under the water,” she said, when he tried to move them.

“He’s quite a guy, isn’t he?”

“Who?”

“Yonder Romeo, your neighbourly paramour. I could almost be jealous.”

“Don’t be.” She touched his cheek and kissed him.

“Mm…do that again; that’s definitely making me feel better. Any chance we could lose the guests and go upstairs?”

“There’s nothing I’d like more. But until I’m sure your hands are going to be all right, we’re not moving from this tap. How do they feel now?”

“I can’t feel them; they’re numb.”

The sound of raised voices, followed by a loud exclamation and footsteps had them both turning. Bob was standing in the doorway.

“So let me get this straight,” Bob said, swaying slightly but doing his best to look directly at Clayton and focus on him. “Your name isn’t Ralph Shannon, is it? George called you Clayton Miller. And Alice called you Clayton as well. You’re that bloke off the telly and in the papers, aren’t you? I’ve read a ton about you. And not one word of it good. I thought there was something familiar about your untrustworthy mug the second I laid eyes on you.”

“Who’d have thought it,” muttered Clayton. “The dumb-ass can read as well.”

Bob’s expression darkened. He came over and squared up to Clayton. “What did you call me?”

Clayton turned away from the tap, his hands dripping water down his front. “I think you heard exactly what I said, Tinker Bell. Unless you’re going to claim deafness as an additional disability to your already extensive list of flaws, the most apparent being your crippling stupidity.”

“Oh, a smart mouth? Well, we’ll see how smart you are when I’ve finished with you. Outside. You and me. Let’s get this sorted.”

Alice intervened. She switched off the tap that was still running and put a hand on Bob’s forearm. “Come on Bob, that’s enough. You’re both saying things you’ll regret tomorrow.”

“I’m not going to regret anything I say,” Bob blustered, pushing out his enormous chest and towering over Clayton.

“Only because you have the attention span of a goldfish and won’t be able to remember anything ten minutes from now,” Clayton retaliated.

Alice tried to look stern. “OK, that’s enough from the pair of you. Any more of this playground squabbling and I’ll be forced to put the two of you in the naughty corner.”

Bob swung his head from Clayton to Alice. For a moment he seemed at a loss as to what to say. “What’s he got that I haven’t? That’s what I want to know. I mean, come on Alice, you and me, we have a history.” There was real bewilderment in his face. His shoulders had even sagged a little. He suddenly looked so pathetic standing there in his paper hat that had slipped to one side of his head. “Oh, hang on,” he said, “I forgot. He’s loaded, isn’t he?”

Seeing that Ronnetta was now standing in the doorway, Alice appealed to her with an anxious glance, hoping she would step in and save her son from embarrassing himself further. Or from doing something stupid.

Luckily Ronnetta took the hint. She stepped towards her son. “Bob, let it go, love. Just accept there’s no accounting for taste.” She turned to Alice. “I think we should probably go, don’t you?”

To Alice’s great relief, there was no animosity in Ronnetta’s voice.

“You don’t have to,” Alice said.

“I think it’s best if we do.” She glanced at Clayton with concern. “I’ve got some bandages if you need them. Oh, and I think you ought to check on the old girl; she’s fallen asleep at the table. The excitement must have been too much for her.”

It was another Christmas to remember.

Not quite up there with the worst one in living memory for Alice, but a serious contender all the same and bad enough to make her wish she had spent the day alone with Clayton. They would have had much more fun, just the two of them. But no, she had to go and ruin everything by thinking it would have been rude not to invite Ronnetta and Bob to join them for lunch. As a consequence, poor Clayton had burned his hands—thankfully not badly—and heaven only knew how she was going to face Bob again. There was also the worry that Clayton’s identity would soon be common knowledge in the village. The second Bob set foot in the pub, he’d be telling everyone just who was staying at Dragonfly Cottage.

When she had finally surfaced from her snooze at the dining table, George had been mortified by her slip of the tongue in calling Clayton by his real name. “I was so impressed with your quick thinking the words just slipped out,” she had admitted to him. “I’m so sorry. I hope I haven’t caused you any problems.” Alice had never encountered George in apologetic mode before and she had found it almost as unsettling as the old woman’s dress that was so poignantly too large for her. Clayton had played down the potential consequences of people knowing who he was, even saying that it was going to come out sooner or later, so why not now? Alice had been taken aback by the effect this one small, casual remark of his had had on her. Until he had uttered those words, she hadn’t dared acknowledge, not even to herself, the doubt she had been secretly harbouring, the worry that perhaps the reason Clayton had wanted to continue with the deception was because she didn’t really matter that much to him. Very quietly in the back of her mind, where she stored all her uncertainties and insecurities, she had subconsciously logged in this new doubt and it had got on with the job of steadily multiplying itself into the certainty that when it was time for Clayton to return to London, he would do so without a backwards glance in her direction and she would be merely chalked up as a pleasant and distracting fling, never to be thought of again. But as a result of this exchange with George, the doubt had been squashed in an instant and Alice’s confidence had returned.

She had added her voice to reassuring George that no real harm had been done in revealing Clayton’s real identity. “Didn’t I make the same slip myself?” she had said to the old woman. “It was a heat of the moment thing.”

“But you only did it because I’d opened my great big mouth,” George had responded. “I hope this isn’t the first sign of me turning into a dotty old dear. You must shoot me, Alice, if that’s the case.” She had insisted then that it was time for her to go home. “No, no,” she had said when Alice had tried to dissuade her, “you two don’t need a third party here playing gooseberry. I can see you’re itching to be alone. Clayton’s got that look in his eye but I don’t know how much use he’ll be to you Alice, what with those bandages on his hands.” She had then whispered something to Clayton in a way that Alice could only describe as collusive; it was as if they both knew something she didn’t.

Now, as she sprawled on the sofa with Clayton whilst trying to decide what to watch on the television, she was intrigued to know what it was George had said to him. “I feel it only fair to warn you,” she said, “secrets are all very well when they’re
my
secrets, but I draw the line at others withholding anything from me.”

Clayton looked up from the rumpled copy of the bumper Christmas edition of the
Radio Times
he was reading. “Secrets?” he said. “What makes you say that?”

She assumed a mock-serious expression. “I’m just wondering what it is that you’re keeping from me.”

“Why do you think I’m keeping anything from you? Why would I do that?” He was frowning now. Which made it harder for her to keep a straight face.

“You can’t fool me, Clayton,” she said. “I know there’s something. You’ve got guilty as charged written all over you.”

“I have?”

“I can hear it in your voice, too. Better just to come clean and tell me what it is. You know you’ll feel better for making a full confession.”

He slowly put aside the
Radio Times
. She noticed that the frown on his face had deepened. He suddenly seemed tense. He wasn’t looking at her either. Instead, he was concentrating hard on his left hand, smoothing out a wrinkle in the crepe bandage she’d applied for him. The change in him caused a small alarm bell to start ringing inside her head. Something was wrong. What had she unwittingly stumbled upon? Whatever it was, she didn’t want to hear it. If it was bad news, as she was sure it was, judging from the dramatic transformation in him, she didn’t want him to share it with her. Having salvaged what was left of the day, she didn’t want anything to spoil it. She wanted everything to be as it was this morning when they’d woken up and happily wished each other a Happy Christmas. He had surprised her with a present—a heavenly Nicole Farhi cardigan that he’d bought online—and then they had made love. Afterwards they had shared a bath together and then she had given him the first of the presents she had bought for him, a leather-bound notebook. It was the best Christmas morning she had ever experienced. There had been nothing whatsoever in his manner to suggest that he had been hiding something from her. Something that was now making him unable to look her in the eye.

“What is it, Clayton?” she asked, dispensing with her childish reaction of not wanting to hear anything bad. “Why do you look so serious?” He swallowed.

“Because you’re right. I do feel guilty. I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t stop myself. I’ve done something you’re not going to like.” He still wasn’t looking at her.

“You’re leaving? Is that it? You’ve decided to go back to London?”

He shook his head.

Right now there didn’t seem anything worse than him leaving, so with the worst of her anxieties dealt with, she said more confidently, “What then?”

“I’ve…I’ve been doing something behind your back,” he said. “Something for which I should have asked your permission. You’re going to be furious with me. And I can’t say I blame you.”

She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but trying for a note of levity, she said, “You haven’t been carrying on with George behind my back, have you?”

For the first time he looked at her. “If only that was all I had done.” His gaze faltered and he looked down and fiddled with his bandages again. “What made you suspect I was hiding something from you? Did you hear me talking on the phone to Glen?”

“Glen? What’s he got to do with it?”

Leaving her question unanswered, he stood up. “I think the best thing is for me to show you what I’ve done. Then you can decide for yourself just how morally bankrupt I am.”

• • •

While he waited for the hangman’s noose to be placed around his neck, Clayton left Alice on her own with his laptop. He stood outside by the back door, as if punishing himself by being in the freezing cold. He had never dreaded a response to something he’d written as much as he did now. The harshest and bitterest critics could not have instilled more fear in him than Alice’s impending condemnation. The chance was a slim one, but he hung onto it all the same; he had to hope that Alice cared for him sufficiently to forgive him.

When he could no longer bear the cold, he went back inside the house. He crept quietly through the kitchen towards the sitting room. He hovered anxiously outside the door, then went in to hear his fate.

She looked up from the laptop. “You were right,” she said, “you are morally bankrupt. How could you do this to me? How could you have thought this was a good thing to do?”

“I don’t choose what to write,” he said. “It chooses me.”

“That’s bullshit. You stole this. You stole my life story. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Put yourself in my shoes. I haven’t been able to write in over three years, then out of the blue I meet you and you banish the fear that had crippled me for so long.” He went and knelt on the floor in front of her. “Alice, you have to believe me; if I could have stopped myself from grabbing hold of the lifeline you’d thrown me, I would have. But I couldn’t. OK, I was motivated by narcissism and the desperate need to write again, to feel I could still cut it. Call that rampant self-absorption if you want, but after the crap I’d gone through with Bazza and Stacey, life suddenly felt good again. Better than good. So much better. These last few weeks have been the best I’ve known in years. And that’s all down to you.”

She pushed the laptop at him. “A fine speech from a fine writer. But it won’t do. You lied. You betrayed me. With every word you’ve written, you’ve betrayed me. And I’ll never forgive you for that.
Never
.”

“Please don’t say that. Think about it.”

“I already have. Did George know about this? Was she in on it? Was that why she whispered to you earlier when she was leaving?”

“George knows nothing about it. She was—” he broke off. In the circumstances, he could hardly tell Alice what George had whispered to him, that she had been congratulating herself on knowing that he and Alice would be good together. “She was merely saying good-bye in her own inimitable fashion,” he said.

“Well, in my own inimitable fashion I’m saying good-bye to you. I never want to see you again. I want you out of my house.”

“I understand that you’re angry. But please, Alice, take a moment to consider what I’ve said.”

“I’ve done all the considering I’m ever going to do. You clearly don’t understand the first thing about me. If you did, you wouldn’t have done this. If you’d ever really cared about me or my feelings, you wouldn’t have done it.”

“I do care about you. More than you’ll ever know.”

“Then prove it to me. If you delete what’s on your laptop, you can stay. But if you don’t delete it, you have to leave. The choice is yours.”

He swallowed. “That’s not fair.”

“Fair? You want to talk fair? How about we discuss how you continually cross-examined me about my family just so that you could make sure you got the details right for your script? Does that sound fair to you? Does it sound fair that I opened my heart and soul to you, imagining for one stupid moment you were interested because you cared about me? Does it sound fair to you that I kept my promise not to tell anyone who you were, while all the time you were preparing to tell the world the most intimate details of my life? My God, I’ve done some stupid things in my time, but thinking that we had something special going on between us was the dumbest thing I ever did.” She shook her head. “I believed in you, Clayton. I think that’s what hurts the most.”