Alys, Always

by Harriet Lane

  ‘Serena is coming back this afternoon anyway,’ Polly is saying.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you could both make it for lunch,’ he says, holding the French windows open for us and following us inside. ‘Pol tells me you’ve been seeing quite a bit of each other,’ he adds, stooping for a carrier bag. There’s something less formal in his voice now, as if he’s surprised but pleased, for his daughter’s sake, that the two of us have made a connection.

  ‘I enjoy her company,’ I say, directly to him. ‘She’s so … young. It’s rather energising. And flattering too, I suppose.’

  Polly laughs, as if this is a silly thing to say, and Laurence looks at me then, a thoughtful, assessing glance. Among other things, I know he’s trying to work out how old I am. Thirty? Thirty-five? ‘I hear you gave her some good advice a few months ago when she was going through a rough patch at drama school,’ he says. ‘Talked some sense into her. She certainly wasn’t interested in anything I was saying at that point, so thank God she listened to you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I did anything,’ I say. ‘I just asked a few questions, that was all. She came to the decision by herself. Isn’t that right, Polly?’

  ‘Mmm,’ says Polly, who has been busy upending little paper bags. Purple and pale green lettuces, earth still clinging to their frills. A tub of queen olives leaking oil. Bagels spill out over the counter like deck quoits.

  While Laurence is tipping the olives into a dish and wiping up the mess, she meets my eye, and I give her a tiny shake of the head: Not yet, not quite yet, let’s have a drink first. ‘Have you got any white, Dad?’ she’s asking, and he’s directing her to a frosted bottle in the fridge. There’s not much else in there, I see. Some Greek yogurt. A carton of semi-skimmed milk. A couple of Pyrex dishes sealed with clingfilm, which I imagine have been left by Mrs King. Lasagne, by the look of it. Some sort of chicken casserole.

  I rinse the lettuces and Polly mixes a vinaigrette while Laurence gets glasses and unwraps the cheese. Then we take our plates and go out to the ironwork table. Around us at some remove, discreetly shielded by dense dark hedges waxy with heat, the neighbours are living their comfortable lives: children on trampolines, the hiss of hoses. This time I guess it’s OK to look as if I’m enjoying the wine.

  Laurence asks all the questions Polly has failed to, and I answer them, without going into much detail. My modesty is real enough. Used to Polly’s solipsism, I find his polite interest makes me uneasy. I don’t like feeling exposed.

  As if he has sensed this, he takes the conversation elsewhere: to Mary Pym, whom he remembers from the Sunderland prize panel; to Frynborough and Biddenbrooke and the seaside at Welbury. He went to Welbury as a child most summers: his parents took rooms in a boarding house there every August. Those childhood memories (swimming off the groynes; the annual crabbing contest) were the reason why he and Alys started looking for a holiday house in the area when they left America. We talk about the pier and the bandstand and the boating lake, the closure of the fishmonger’s and the colonisation of the high street (he and I agree this is lamentable, Polly is rather pro) by cupcake merchants and boutiques selling patterned wellingtons.

  The bottle empties and he goes to get another one. Smoke from a barbecue drifts lazily through the hedge.

  A window opens somewhere releasing the Jazz Record Requests signature tune.

  ‘I was talking to Frances about Sam’s Shakespeare project,’ begins Polly carefully.

  He raises an eyebrow and slides deeper into his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him. ‘Ah,’ he says.

  ‘I was wondering if we couldn’t find a compromise,’ she says.

  He sits there, waiting.

  ‘Sam’s plan – it’s such an amazing opportunity,’ she says, then sees his expression. ‘Well, anyway. I thought that perhaps if we worked on Tony Bamber, he might let me take some time off the course. Special circumstances and all that. Compassionate leave. So I wouldn’t be dropping out, I’d just be taking a break for a while. A term – or maybe a year at the most.’

  We watch him as he considers this for a moment, running his thumb absently over the bristle on his jaw.

  ‘And if I helped you lobby for this, you’d definitely rejoin the course?’ he says.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she says, her eyes shining with innocence. Maybe she has got some talent after all, I think.

  He makes a contemplative sort of noise and shifts position, tapping his index fingers together.

  ‘What do you think about this?’ he asks me, eventually.

  ‘Well, if Mr Bamber agrees, it appears to solve the problem,’ I say, hesitantly.

  ‘I take your point,’ he says. He sighs. Then to Polly he says, ‘I think we’d better book in to see your Mr Bamber some time next week.’

  Soberly Polly nods, but when he has gone inside to answer the phone, she leans over the table to me, hissing, ‘Yes!’

  ‘It’s not a done deal yet,’ I caution, my voice low.

  ‘No. But it will be,’ she whispers back. ‘Wait and see. No one ever refuses Dad anything.’

  Laurence comes back, picking his way over the grass. Like so many men, he looks at a disadvantage in bare feet. ‘Teddy’s coming round,’ he calls. ‘And Honor.’

  ‘Not Honor,’ Polly groans.

  I remember the Sargent postcard and suddenly feel an anxiety to be gone by the time they arrive. The afternoon has been a success, I feel, and it’s good to leave on a high. ‘Oh, look at the time,’ I say, rising to my feet. ‘I really must go.’

  ‘Oh. Must you?’ says Polly, unconcerned. ‘Thanks for last night.’

  ‘Any time,’ I say, kissing her cheek in a sisterly fashion. ‘Let me know what happens at college. I’ll see myself out.’

  But Laurence insists on accompanying me to the front door. There’s a tiny quick confusion at the French windows, as we both feint and hesitate, prepared for the other to go into the house first, and then he lightly touches the small of my back to encourage me to step ahead of him, and I note the gesture, and I save it.

  ‘You seem to be a good influence,’ he says quietly as we pass through the white kitchen and up the pale stairs, into the hall. ‘I’ve been worried about Polly recently, but she seems to listen to you, and your advice seems to be very … sensible. Of course, I don’t want to be too hard on her. She was very close to her mother. We’re all still coming to terms with what happened. It’s going to take some time.’

  I don’t know exactly how to respond to this, so I stand still in the hall, on the Turkish rug, my hand resting on the cool polished table. An insect knocks itself against the fanlight, trying to get out. In the silence of the empty house, I hear the rustle of the trees in the street.

  ‘So, really, thank you,’ he says. ‘I’m grateful.’

  I say it’s nothing, a pleasure, anything I can do to help, and I smile and look up at him, and as I do so I feel a shock in the air, another tiny moment of possibility like the one I felt months ago, only this time I’m fairly sure he has felt it too. And then it passes, and I’m walking away through the long shadows on the pavement, while behind me the front door closes quietly.

  One afternoon I’m waiting by the printer when Tom comes over and says if I’m at a loose end on Saturday night, he and his flatmate are having a party.

  I’m half-minded to text him at the last minute saying I’m a bit under the weather, but I find I keep thinking, quite idly, about the way he dislikes Oliver so very much. And also about his eyelashes.

  Mid-evening I catch the bus to his part of town and turn down a street with a Paddy Power on the corner, passing – as he instructed – a curry house and a minicab firm. The little front garden is choked with bindweed and shepherd’s purse, and as I press the bell I notice the terracotta pots that no one has bothered with for years. I am buzzed into the shared hall: a bulb on a string, dirty carpet, a bike with a flat tyre, drifts of pizza fliers and brown envelopes addressed to tenants who moved out months ago. Sometimes it see
ms we all live in the same places.

  When I go up to the first floor and into the flat, pushing through the knot of people in the corridor, I find Sol from work in the kitchen, talking to a man in a checked shirt who turns out to be Tom’s flatmate, Hamish. I put the blue plastic carrier bag on the kitchen table and take out the bottle of red wine, and then – because Hamish’s attention is already elsewhere – I look around and find the corkscrew and a clean plastic cup among the shiny pillows of corn chips on the counter. Underfoot, the lino is already sticky with beer. The music is very loud.

  Oh, how I hate parties. I hate standing around on the edge of things, feeling awkward and conspicuous, having to pretend that life doesn’t get sweeter than this: a crowded room full of strangers, a warm drink and a handful of processed snacks.

  As I take my wine and move through Tom’s flat, smiling blankly, trying hard to look as if I know where I’m heading, I find myself thinking about my mother, wondering whether this is what life feels like to her: messy, noisy, unsympathetic. A little bit frightening, I suppose.

  Just finish your drink, I tell myself. You’ve made the effort to come, he won’t have expected that. Then you can go. The flat comes into view, behind the people who are leaning towards each other and telling jokes and showing off, and it looks like all the others, like Naomi’s flat and, I suppose, like mine, too. White walls, varnished pine floorboards, a lumpy blue sofa. The individual touches are similarly predictable: a phrenology head on the mantelpiece; bits of taxidermy; a Now Panic and Freak Out poster; Amis, Auster and – I look for him, and of course I find him – a recent Kyte in between the India and Guatemala Lonely Planets on the shelves.

  And then Tom comes out of nowhere. ‘Hey, nice one!’ he is saying. ‘You made it, then.’

  ‘Yes, hello,’ I say, and looking at him now – the T-shirt with the ironic slogan, the Puma trainers with dirty laces – I can’t remember why I came. What was I thinking?

  He’s very personable, very attentive. I allow him to refill my glass, and I put it to my lips and drink it down quite quickly while he introduces me to some people, Nick and Catriona, and I hear myself asking questions and talking, about films and work and where and how I live. I sound quite unlike myself, but of course nobody here knows the difference.

  I listen to Catriona making a joke about the host of a reality TV show, the line of her asymmetric bob swinging against her jaw as she turns her head to monitor our responses, and I think, We’re all pretending. The room is full of constructs and inventions. People are experimenting, trying out lines, seeing what goes down best and takes them farthest. I watch the ways they betray themselves and their intentions, the way they draw closer to and turn away from each other. I hear the things that they say and the things that they leave unsaid.

  A girl with a green glass necklace is standing in the doorway with Hamish and they’re arguing about something, and then they’re kissing. Some people start to dance, and Tom is there with them, attempting a flashy humorous little sequence of steps – jazz hands, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrates – and then he looks around to see whether people are watching. Whether I’m watching.

  A little later, I go into the kitchen to get my bag and find Tom and Sol slicing up giant wheels of delivery pizza, and then Sol takes the stack of flat damp boxes into the next room and I’m alone with him, and it’s suddenly very quiet, despite the noise of the music and laughter from the corridor, and he comes up close and looks at me and says, ‘Frances,’ and I know what’s going to happen next, and I don’t want it to, I don’t want him, the thought now fills me with a kind of horror, so I wait until there’s absolutely no room left for doubt and then I step back. ‘No, sorry, that wouldn’t be a good idea,’ I say, raising my palms, making another barrier between us. ‘Really, don’t take this the wrong way, but …’

  And I leave, in quite a hurry, anxious to get out of there: away from Tom, his flat, his drunk friends.

  When I see him at work the following week, we are cordial and a little bit cool with each other, and that’s as far as it goes.

  A month or so later, I hear he’s seeing the new work-experience girl on the magazine. People giggle about it at the tea trolley. He’s quite an operator, they say.

  The weather holds. For weeks, it seems, I’ve been sleeping under just a sheet. When I wake in the morning, just before my alarm goes off, I throw the sheet down over the bottom of the mattress, so it billows and pools over the floorboards. I lie there, hands at my side, and watch the light blooming and shifting on the ceiling, pitted with the interruption of leaves.

  Mary gets very ratty as August approaches. Her children start ringing her up as soon as she arrives at the office, asking her where the bicycle pump is, telling her one of the dogs ran off in the park or there’s no loo paper in any of the loos.

  Plus Oliver has booked a fortnight off (Sardinia: he’s wangled a travel freebie), and then I’m away for two weeks, and somehow the pages have still got to come out.

  On top of all that, Ambrose Pritchett has gone AWOL owing twelve hundred words on a controversial new biography of Sturges Hardcastle.

  From my desk, I can see the little men in the crane cockpits: remote mysterious figures alone in the moving air, high over London. The city is white-hot, hard to look at. The pale dusty skies seem to go on for ever.

  When Mary asks whether I could do a rush job reviewing the Hardcastle, I say no problem.

  She glances up at me. There’s something in her expression which you might almost mistake for warmth. ‘What would I do without you,’ she says breezily.

  Oliver sits silent at his terminal, head down, a mime of industry. He has cut back on the stagey phone calls and now slopes off for a smoke with Sasha from Fashion only twice a day.

  I often see him edging anxiously into the knots of people puzzling over the latest memo from Human Resources. These emails are extremely long and involved, banging on about synergies and platforms and tasking and traction, but no one around the tea trolley really knows what any of these words mean. No one really knows anything at all. The one certainty is that the heads of department are going through a ‘consultation process’ during which ‘the strengths and weaknesses of their teams will be assessed’.

  Tiny little Robin McAllfree paces his glass office like a prisoner, waving his arms and shouting at the HuRe gorillas seated around his groovy Perspex desk. We know they’ve only been invited up so he can put on this floor show.

  ‘All this for us?’ murmurs the comment editor, passing on his way to the printer. ‘What a prick.’

  In low voices we talk about how ridiculous it is, and then we go home and eat and sleep and eat and come in again, and the days roll on. Sometimes it feels as if nothing will ever change.

  One afternoon Mary drops a card on my desk. It’s an invite to the launch of a poetry magazine. She can’t go herself – she has promised to take Leo to the new X-Men movie – but some quite big names are on the board and we might get a diary story out of it. ‘Only if you haven’t got anything else on,’ she says.

  From time to time, I’m thrown these so-called perks, like a bear at the zoo being chucked a stale bun. I don’t have high hopes for this one – there’s no money in poetry, so it’ll be cheap bottled beer and CostCo crisps rather than rationed fizz and canapés – but it’s being held in Bloomsbury in a guild with an Arts and Crafts hall, and I’ve always wanted to see the interior.

  There’s no one at the door and the room is already pretty full by the time I get there, so I sidle in and wander around the edge of the space, looking at the span of the beams, the stained glass, the way the light falls on the long waxed floorboards. The speeches are just about to begin when there’s a small stir of interest around the entrance and Laurence comes in, deep in conversation with beaky Audrey Callum, one of Mary’s contributors. I turn away as if to examine the list of the Fallen, not wanting him to see me here, alone; and as I do so I notice a young woman in a blue d
ress, a woman with a streak of white in her dark hair. I notice her particularly because of the way she notices him.

  Without dropping a beat, somehow without really disconnecting from the conversation she is having with two older men, she transfers – and it’s only for a moment, a fraction of a moment – all her energy to Laurence, over there on the other side of the room. I feel her anxiety and the pitch of her anticipation. It signals itself in the way she returns to her companions, applying herself fully to their discussion, laughing and nodding and raking a hand through the tangle of black curls. The white flashes like the beam of a lighthouse.

  I remember her brushing past me in the Kytes’ hall on the day of Alys’s memorial service. I remember the pale stunned look on her face.

  I stay at the back of the room during the speeches. Afterwards the party relaxes again, given a new lease of life, and Laurence is claimed by a group next to the platform. I’ve lost track of the young woman in the blue dress. I’m on the point of leaving when Audrey Callum recognises me and comes over to find out more about the dreadful atmosphere at the Questioner as it goes down the tubes. ‘Well, they’d be mad to get rid of you,’ she says. ‘You’re an asset to that desk. I’ve told Mary.’

  Eventually I extricate myself and leave my glass on a side table, stepping out into the hot evening. In the square, the light is just going out of the trees but the pavements are still blood-warm underfoot. The cars parked along the railings are sticky with lime pollen.

  I’m walking along the square towards the bus stop when I hear a low voice in the garden, and then another. One of the voices is Laurence’s. I see a flash of white through the leaves as she turns on her heel and comes out of the garden, the iron gate clanging behind her.

  Mary expects gossip, so I bring it to her. Thanks to Audrey Callum I have some decent stories, though they are all unprintable. I tell her about the air-con scion who has sunk cash into the project as a tax dodge; I pass on a rumour about the editor’s proclivities.