The Queen of New Beginnings (4 page)

When he thought about it, gravitational forcefields were odd things. He had been sucked into Bazza’s life, then Stacey’s, and now here he was, drawn into the unlikeliest of situations; holed up miles from anywhere pretending his name was Shannon, and with only a cheeky Latvian housekeeper for intermittent company.

Once again he was hot property, but this time it was because he’d made a spectacularly stupid mistake. This time the press was baying for his blood. He was a hated man. He was a national disgrace. Probably right now there were MPs demanding for capital punishment to be brought back for people like him.

“You’re not cross with me, then?”

Ronnetta laughed. “Cross with you? I wish I’d been there to witness your performance! As well as all your previous ones. I really had no idea what you’d been getting up to behind my back. Certainly no clients have ever said anything to me in the past. Although when I come to think about it, there was one woman who mentioned something about how efficient you’d been; that it was typical of where you were from. I didn’t give it another thought.”

“But what if Mr. Shannon complains to you?” Alice pressed. “What if he says I didn’t know my place, that I was rude to him? Which I was. Take my word for it; I was breathtakingly rude to him.”

“Stop beating yourself up. If he was going to complain, don’t you think he would have done so by now?”

It was a good point. Most people who have a beef about something usually complain straight away. They like nothing better than to make a huge fuss while they’re still steamed up. But twenty-four hours had passed since Alice’s encounter with Mr. Shannon, so maybe Ronnetta was right and he’d decided not to make a fuss. Was he a classic example of having a bark worse than his bite? He had seemed happy enough yesterday when she’d left him. She’d known, however, just absolutely known, that the first thing he would have done after she’d driven off was to check the till receipts she had given him, to see whether a bolshy Latvian had had the nerve to rob him.

“What interests me more,” Ronnetta said, leaning across her desk with a rattle of bangles and poking the air with a biro, “is what Mr. Shannon is doing here all on his own in a great big place like Cuckoo House. And why, I want to know, has someone else down in London made all the arrangements for his stay? What’s that all about? You don’t suppose he’s some kind of criminal, do you? Or how about an informant who’s in hiding? Maybe MI6 is behind this and Cuckoo House is a safe house for him.”

Alice laughed. “You’ve been watching too many episodes of
Spooks
. If he was being hidden because he was in danger, do you suppose for one minute they’d allow a stranger to come in and clean for him?”

“Mm…perhaps not. So what was he like? Good-looking bloke? Single?” Ronnetta wiggled her eyebrows. “If yes to either of those last two questions, do you think he’d like some company? I’m sure I could make myself available.”

In her own words Ronnetta had been divorced since the Crimean War and whilst there had been many a romantic entanglement in the intervening years she had not yet found that special person to be Husband Number Two. The search was ongoing. “I’m not sure about his marital status or that he’s your type,” Alice said. “To be honest, I don’t see him as being anybody’s type. He’s got an attitude that could etch glass.”

“Haven’t we all at times? How old do you reckon?”

“That’s a tricky one.” Alice didn’t want to say outright that she thought Mr. Shannon was too young for Ronnetta, so instead she described him, scruffy clothes and all.

“He sounds like he needs someone to take him in hand,” Ronnetta said, slipping the biro between her lips and sucking on it—despite the hypnotherapy, she had yet to lose certain urges and habits. “I’m intrigued,” she added. “Keep me posted.”

The mobile on her desk rang; she picked it up to take the call. Alice took it as her cue to leave. They both had work to do. She quietly closed the door of Ronnetta’s office—a 9 Swift Corniche three-berth caravan parked in her back garden—and went home. A manuscript had arrived in the post that morning and Alice was eager to make a start on reading it.

She let herself in at the back door, put the kettle on and opened the jiffy bag that contained the manuscript for a new children’s book. The title of it was:
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
. It made her think of the conversation she’d just had with Ronnetta.

Alice hadn’t actually lied to her neighbour, but then nor had she been exactly fulsome with her confession regarding Katya. At no stage had she mentioned that she knew Cuckoo House, let alone admitted that she had grown up there. If for some reason that was now to come out, it would be rather embarrassing to say the least.

The trouble with telling lies, even small ones, or lies by omission, is that once you start, there seems no way to stop and it rapidly becomes an unbreakable habit. One way or another, Alice had been telling lies nearly all her adult life. She wasn’t a pathological liar—a crazy fantasist who couldn’t open her mouth without lying—it was more a matter of creating edited versions of the truth, of constructing separate universes within her own world in order to compartmentalize her life. She firmly believed there was a distinction between good and bad untruths and the ones she told were not designed to hurt anyone, merely to keep people out.

She had learned the art of crafting slight truths at the feet of two of the greatest technicians: her parents. Although it was always possible that there had been no learning process involved, it could be that the liar gene had been passed down to her. Just as she had inherited her mother’s wide cheekbones and small chin, perhaps she had been born with the gift of embroidering the truth to suit.

Typical untruths for Alice’s mother had been to lie about her age or to give the public the impression that her home life was other than it really was. As for Alice’s father, a man who had never seemed to have a real grasp on reality, anything went for truth as far as he was concerned.

As a child Alice had lost herself in colourful landscapes of make-believe where anything was possible, so what could be more natural than to do the same as an adult? This wasn’t as bad as it sounded; she only did it as a means to reinvent herself. Even then, not to the point that she was unrecognizable to herself. All she had done over the years was apply a light dusting of reinterpretation here and there.

Really, it was extraordinary how easy it was to make people think what you wanted them to think merely by glossing over the bits you didn’t want them to know. Another trick was to deflect any unwanted questions by inviting people to talk about themselves. In her experience people would much rather talk about themselves than listen to someone else droning on. Yes, she would say if she was pushed to explain herself, she had spent her childhood living in the area…Oh, you know, I did the usual thing of leaving home just as soon as I was old enough…no, no brothers or sisters… and sadly both parents now dead…but tell me about you; where did you grow up?

Keeping people at arm’s length was the easiest thing in the world to do. Allowing herself to be close to anyone was not so easy for Alice. Closeness meant being honest. It meant she would have to open herself up to another and allow that person to poke and pry. People were like that. If they sensed something out of the ordinary, they nibbled away at it until they had devoured the whole story. Of course, she could have saved herself a lot of bother by not coming back to the area. But what did they say about criminals always returning to the scene of the crime?

Two and a half years ago, when she was approaching her twenty- eighth birthday and yet another relationship had unravelled, she had felt alone and aimless. Sitting in her London flat in Earls Court, listening to the noisy party that was going on in the flat below her, life had suddenly seemed very bleak. Her non-stop party-loving Aussie neighbours had invited her to the party but seeing as her ex-boyfriend, a software designer from Sydney, was going to be there, she had declined. There had been a brief moment of fantasy during her relationship with Austin when she had imagined being whisked off to Sydney to start a new life with him. She had liked the idea of that. Living somewhere completely new. But Austin had pulled out of the relationship, saying he found her impossible to live with. He said he’d given up trying to understand whether she was joking or being straight with him. He had known her for more than a year, and other than locating her G-spot, he didn’t think he knew any more about her than when they’d first met. He said he was tired of searching for the key to unlock the real her. She’d told him he’d been reading too many women’s magazines. He’d told her he was moving out.

So that was that. A nice straightforward break up. It seemed to be her forte.

In this aimless state, she began to dream of the scenery of her childhood, the wide open spaces, the vast empty skies, the undulating hills and the sweeping stretches of moorland. She would find herself lingering over the dreams when she woke in the morning and would feel haunted for the rest of the day. She almost succeeded in resisting the beckoning call, and then she learned that her father was dead. That he had been dead for some years. The beckoning call became a screaming siren.

There was nothing else for it. She packed an overnight bag and headed north. Her plan was simple. She would visit Stonebridge safe in the knowledge that one look at it would be enough to convince her that her subconscious had been playing tricks on her. She would realize in an instant that it was the last place on earth she should move back to. She also believed that the visit would help resolve her feelings for her father.

It was a silly plan; there was only ever going to be one outcome. Sure enough, nine weeks later she moved into Dragonfly Cottage just five miles away from Cuckoo House. Her agent, Hazel, said that Alice couldn’t have made a smarter move as a new recording studio had just started operating on the outskirts of Nottingham and it would be an easy journey to undertake on a regular basis. What was more, if the owners were to be believed, it looked like the work would be plentiful.

Ha, ha! The Queen of New Beginnings triumphs again!

Clayton had been busy.

In readiness for Katya’s visit he had been swotting up. She had accused him of knowing nothing about her country; well, today he’d show her. Unable to sleep last night, he’d gone online and read all he could about Latvia. He’d also looked up a few key words of vocabulary and using a language site and in response to a robotic woman’s voice, he had been practising his pronunciation. Nobody got away with making out he was a jackass by implying he was ignorant. No siree!

Perversely he was now looking forward to Katya’s arrival. His hands clasped behind his head, he leaned back in the chair and stared out of the window. He liked this room. If this was his house, this would be where he’d choose to write; it would be his den. It was home to nearly as many books as he possessed in his house down in London, so perhaps the owners, Glen’s friends, used it as a study. Or maybe they called it something grander: a library. Dotted about the room were framed photographs of the Armstrongs; it didn’t matter whether they were dressed for the ski slopes, a race course meeting, a tropical beach or an occasion that warranted a dinner jacket and a ball gown, they looked smug with happiness. It was enough to make Clayton feel ill.

Where he was sitting in the turreted area of the room, the windows looked directly out onto the front garden and in the distance, at the end of the long, straight drive he could see the white-painted metal gate and the trees that flanked it. The trees had lost nearly all of their leaves but the thick impenetrable hedge that ran the perimeter of the land to the front showed no sign of doing the same. It must be an evergreen hedge of some sort. Laurel? Rhododendron? He racked his brain to think what else it could be. It didn’t look coniferous. Holly? Beech? No, beech was deciduous. Any fool knew that. He scratched his chin and once again took himself by surprise at the feel of it. A week without shaving and he had developed quite a beard. Apart from when he’d been a student, when it was obligatory to sport a pretentiously goaty affair, he had never grown a proper beard before. Stacey wouldn’t have stood for it. He had only to go two days without shaving and she would turn her cheek away from him when he tried to kiss her. “Horrible,” she would say with a shudder, “go and shave.” He stroked his beard with exaggerated pleasure. “This is for you, Stacey!”

It was raining again. Perhaps that was how it was going to be; whenever it was a Katya day it would rain. Certainly there was something of the storm cloud about her.

So far he hadn’t put a foot outside of his prison walls. Not even yesterday when it was dry and sunny. Instead, he had explored the house spending time in each room, as if trying them for size. Every room was large and high-ceilinged and starting from the ridiculously over-sized entrance hall complete with chandelier was the room he was currently in and opposite was a dining room. Beyond were two sitting rooms—possibly one for relaxing in and the other, the larger of the two, for not relaxing in, for pretending to be something other than one’s natural self. At the back of the house was the kitchen and a collection of associated rooms—laundry, pantry and larder—and a general dumping area where a selection of outdoor coats hung on old-fashioned, black-painted metal pegs with an assortment of leather walking boots and green Wellingtons below. A wide staircase led up to four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the first floor and a smaller staircase gave access to a further three bedrooms and two more bathrooms.

His mother would have been hopelessly overawed by it. She would have crept about the house as if she had no right to be there. Dad, too, would have felt out of place and had one of his chippy turns. The pair of them had been bad enough when they used to come and stay with him and Stacey. “My, this is fancy,” Mum had said when she’d stepped over the threshold of the house in Fulham which he’d bought on the success of the first series of
Joking Aside
. “Is it all yours?” she’d asked. “All of it? That’s never a cream carpet, is it? Oh, you’ll regret that.”

Stacey had seen to all the decorating and furnishing and for some obscure reason she had taken great pleasure in telling his parents just how much everything had cost. “All that on curtains?” Dad had exploded. “That’s how much I earn in a year!” Clayton had very nearly exploded as well. He’d had no idea curtains could cost so much. The only room Stacey hadn’t decorated or furnished was his office-cum-den. She had wanted to but he’d put his foot down. One of the few times he had.

At the end of the drive, he saw what looked like a red toy car stop at the gate. He checked his watch. Eleven o’clock. Katya was on time today. She got out of the car and he watched her open the gate, get back in her car, drive forward, get out, shut the gate, get back in the car, then drive slowly up the drive.

He drew a piece of paper towards him and quickly read through the vocabulary he’d been learning. No worries, he was word perfect. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Prepare to be amazed and astonished, Katya,” he said aloud.

• • •

“
Sveiki!
” he greeted her at the door. “
Ka jums klajas?
”

From the expression on her face, he could see she really was amazed and astonished. Who wouldn’t be? He’d not only said hi, but had enquired after her health. He stood back to let her in. “
Paldies par palidzibu
,” he continued. He was showing off now, thanking her for coming.

She still had the same look on her face.

“I’ve been learning Latvian,” he said. “Aren’t you impressed?” Of course she was. He could see it in her eyes, and by the way she had put a finger to her top lip and her face was reddening. She was obviously touched that he’d gone to so much trouble. For some unaccountable reason, he felt touched that she was touched. But then her expression changed. She began to smile. Next thing she was giggling, a hand covering her mouth. “What?” he said. “What’s so funny?”

“Sorry, mister. Sorry for rude. But you just say big funny thing. You say you have sexy goat in bath.”

His jaw dropped.

She laughed some more. “I tell you for sure, I no clean bath if goat in it.”

“But I couldn’t have got it so wrong. I’ve…I’ve been practising.” He felt embarrassed at the admission. Far from impressing her he’d just made a fool of himself.
No change there, then
, he heard the irritating voice of Captain Sensible mutter inside his head.
That’s what you get for showing off
.

“Is good for you to learn new language but bad for me. I here to learn English. I no want to speak Latvian.”

“Oh,” he said, feeling flattened.

“English. Only English. You must speak good English to me so I learn well. One day I speak like Queen. Right, mister?”

“Oh,” he said again.

“Now I roll up sleeves and start work.” She sped off towards the kitchen. “Ooh,” she let out, “look at big mess mister has made here. You make much work for me.”

Clayton left her to it. He closed the door on the room he’d claimed as his study, took out his list of vocabulary and switched on his laptop. Where had he gone wrong?

• • •

That, Alice told herself, had been a close-run thing. She hadn’t seen that coming. Fancy him trying to learn Latvian. Given that she knew next to nothing about her supposed country of birth, she had to hope that his next step wasn’t to start badgering her about it. If he did that she would have to read up on the subject; the last thing she wanted to do was to let Ronnetta down. After discussing the matter, they had both decided that it would be better for Alice to continue as Katya. Understandably, Ronnetta didn’t think it would be a good idea for a client to think he’d been made a monkey of, not when he was paying top dollar for Alice’s services.

When she had finished cleaning the kitchen, Alice went upstairs to see how big a mess Mr. Shannon had made up there. It wasn’t too bad. Despite what she’d said about the kitchen, on the whole he wasn’t an untidy man. As far as she could see his impact on the house was minimal. He’d brought just the one case with him, along with a laptop bag and his clothes took up hardly any space in the wardrobe and chest of drawers.

She wondered what he did to pass the time. Was he lonely? Bored? Was that why he had been teaching himself a few choice Latvian expressions? The fact that he had, amused her and, to a degree, raised him in her estimation. Had she really been Latvian, she would have been pleased that he’d gone to so much trouble.

She finished cleaning his bathroom—giving his toiletries a quick inspection—straightened the curtains in his bedroom, then went downstairs for the vacuum cleaner. Passing his door, she knocked on it, waited politely for him to respond then went inside. “Sorry to disturb, mister,” she said. “You make list for shopping?”

“Not yet,” he said, not bothering to turn round and look at her. His attention was focused on his laptop in front of him. She was reminded of all the occasions her mother had sat in the very same spot. Clattering away on her typewriter, she would barely notice if anyone came into the room. Unless, of course, it had been her father, who, like a cyclone, had been impossible not to notice. But many times Alice had stood on the threshold of her mother’s study waiting for her to turn round. She once timed how long it took for her mother to stop what she was doing and to answer Alice’s question: ten whole minutes. She had been a patient and determined child.

“I make busy with vacuum,” Alice said, “and then I go shopping for you. You want me to clean in here?” She stepped further into the room, peered to see what was of such interest to him on his laptop. She made out just one word—
OBITUARY
.

As if sensing what she was doing, he snapped the lid shut and turned to face her. He then looked about the room. “It doesn’t look like it needs cleaning to me. Does it to you?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps no. You very tidy in here.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Unlike the kitchen?”

“Much grease everywhere in kitchen. You fry too much, mister. Try grill or oven. Healthier for you.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Maybe you like me to cook you one day.”

He cracked a smile. “Trust me; I’ve been well and truly cooked.”

“Well, mister, I leave you in peace to write list.” She closed the door after her. Interesting, she thought. What exactly did he mean by being cooked?

She lugged the vacuum cleaner upstairs. When she reached the landing, instead of turning right to go to her old bedroom, which Mr. Shannon was using, she turned left.

She pushed open the door of her parents’ old bedroom. She had grabbed her chance to have a quick look at it the other day, but today she wanted to linger. She had dreamed of it last night, or more precisely, she had dreamed of her parents in this room.

It was like all the other rooms in the house, beautifully furnished and tastefully decorated. If Alice was honest, the decor was beginning to grate on her. It was as if the heart and soul character of the house had been stripped away in the name of good taste. That was something her parents would never have been guilty of.

She went over to the window seat, sat down and closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye she could see the room as it had once been. Clothes strewn everywhere, rugs rucked up, the paintings hanging lopsided on the walls, lampshades dusty and dented and the chest of drawers and dressing table covered with all manner of objects—Great Aunt Eliza’s silver-backed hairbrush set, strings of beads, safety pins, an old china teapot with a spider plant growing out of it, a framed picture of her father when he’d been at university, and teetering piles of books.

Alice had been twelve when her mother died. Dr. Barbara Barrett’s sudden death had been perfectly in keeping with the way her parents lived their lives. Why go quietly when you could go with a bang? And her mother had died with a bang. She had managed to electrocute herself by watching television in the bath. Alice’s father had repeatedly warned her to be careful, but she would roll her eyes at him, saying that if anyone needed to be careful it was him with all those chemicals he stored in his darkroom. Watching herself on television while soaking in the bath with a glass of wine became a happy eight o’clock weekly ritual for her. The programme she took part in was always pre-recorded and she said it was her duty to scrutinize her performance in order to appear at her best. “One has to be professional,” she would claim. Then stop talking about sex all the time when you’re on the telly! Alice had wanted to say.

It was so embarrassing to be known at school as the daughter of a sex and relationship expert. She was regularly teased for it and girls were always coming up to her and asking her questions about something her mother had said on TV. It was a wonder she had been able to walk, her toes had been so constantly curled.

Her mother’s death was reported in the newspapers and while nobody could ever be sure exactly what had happened, the coroner’s verdict was that Dr. Barbara Barrett must have slipped whilst getting into the bath and had accidentally knocked the portable TV set in with her. She wasn’t found for two days, not until Alice’s father returned from a trip photographing Emperor penguins. Alice was informed of her death at school by the headmistress. The news was bluntly delivered; no attempt was made to soften the blow.

Her father came to fetch her home from the boarding school she had recently started attending and the only words he uttered whilst driving her back to Cuckoo House were: “Thank God I was out of the country when it happened. At least no one can accuse me of finishing her off!” The day of the funeral, with tears in his eyes, he admitted to Alice that they’d had a terrible row before he’d left for Antarctica and he just wished they’d had a chance to make up before she’d died. For years afterwards, Alice could never think kindly of Emperor penguins. If her father hadn’t gone rushing off to photograph them her mother might not have died.

There were many things about her parents that Alice had never understood, but two things she could say of them with absolute certainty: her father was a powerfully charismatic man and her mother was impervious to his tantrums, wrapped as she was in her own self-absorption. There was an intense rivalry between them, each believing that their own area of expertise was superior to the other and it was probably this that made their relationship so volatile.