Alys, Always

by Harriet Lane

  ‘Anyone there?’ she asks.

  ‘Laurence Kyte. I didn’t get a chance to say hello,’ I say. ‘He was talking to an interesting-looking person, a girl with black hair, with a streak of white. Rather dramatic-looking. Do you know who that is?’

  Mary is tapping away at her keyboard. ‘Julia Price,’ she says. ‘Oh, she’s quite the thing, Julia Price.’

  At lunchtime, when all the desks around me are empty, when everyone has hurried out to the concrete plaza in front of the office to eat their sandwiches on the scratchy circle of grass, I google Julia Price.

  What I read makes my heart sink, just a little.

  I haven’t made any definite plans for my fortnight’s holiday. I’m intending, finally, to paint the sitting-room shelves, and there seems to be a general understanding that I’ll visit my parents for a night or two, but otherwise my diary is clear. So I text Polly to ask whether I can come and watch Lord Strange’s Men performing. According to the email she sent me a while back, they might be in Worthing next week, or Eastbourne.

  She rings me on the Thursday evening when I’ve come in from work and says it’s all off: the play was a disaster, the whole thing has been shelved. Pandora started seeing a new boyfriend who invited her to the South of France at the last minute; Ben got glandular fever; and when the rest of them looked into it, they realised that they needed ‘permits and stuff’.

  ‘And so Sam said it was time to rethink,’ says Polly. ‘He felt his artistic vision was being kind of compromised? It’s such a shame.’ She doesn’t sound too bothered. I imagine Sam is consoling himself with his allowance.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘I’m in Biddenbrooke. If you’re around, why don’t you come down for a bit next week? There’s lots of room.’ Over the phone I can hear the acoustics of the space around her: expansiveness, high ceilings.

  Why not, I say. I’d love to.

  The village is under friendly occupation when I drive through it in the late afternoon. In the lengthening blue shadows cast by the flint church and the graveyard yews, holidaymakers and second-homers picnic and throw balls on the green. Beneath the teashop parasols, most tables are busy. The women in print sundresses with oilcloth shoppers at their feet; the men in long baggy khaki shorts with lots of pockets. Every child wears a stripy T-shirt.

  The Kytes’ house, Nevers, is at the far end of the village, off the Welbury Road, a couple of miles from the sea. I drive past an old red phone box almost entirely hidden by sprays of cow parsley, and a couple of cyclists sprawled on a grassy verge, draining their water bottles, and then I turn off and follow the pebbly track down through a fenced meadow full of sheep, the sun in my eyes. An olive-green gate, propped open with a rock. Gravel skirls under the wheels.

  It’s a small Edwardian country house, or maybe a large villa: part brick, part flint, gabled ends, entirely unpretentious. It’s not a beautiful building but it has a solidity that makes it nearly handsome.

  I park the car up against the knackered-looking outhouses, next to an old Saab and a white Mini that must surely belong to Polly, and just sit there for a moment, watching the hollyhocks nodding in the breeze. It’s very quiet, apart from the murmur of the wood pigeons. There are croquet mallets lying on the lawn, and here and there beneath the hydrangeas I can see the red, blue, green and yellow of the wooden balls, planets frozen in orbit.

  The front door is locked and has the look of something seldom used. I don’t want to ring the bell so I sling my bag over my shoulder and walk around to the side of the house, through a brick arch, and on to another lawn, which is dominated, some distance from the terrace, by the spread of a copper beech. Three empty deckchairs are set out beneath it. A litter of books and teacups and suncreams and wineglasses fills the grass.

  ‘It’s Frances, isn’t it?’ says a voice behind me. I turn around and see Honor stepping out of the house’s dim interior, twisting the rope of her hair in front of her, so the water runs out of it and drips on to the brick. She is wearing a pink vest and a short stripy cotton skirt, tight on the hips and then flaring out in frivolous little pleats. ‘Polly said you were coming down, but she didn’t say you were arriving today.’

  She probably doesn’t mean to sound unwelcoming, I think.

  ‘Well, that was always the plan,’ I say, smiling. ‘You must be Honor. Where is she?’

  ‘At the pool, last time I saw her,’ says Honor, twisting the rope again. ‘I came in for a shower: it’s my turn to do supper. I hope there’s enough for four.’

  As if I am at a sufficient disadvantage, she now makes a few slim concessions. She says she’d show me my room, only Polly hasn’t told her where I’m going. ‘Do you want a swim? It’s down there, through the orchard,’ she says, pointing. ‘The gate’s in the wall.’ If I want to change, there’s a cloakroom and lots of spare swimming towels in the cupboard.

  I follow her indoors, through a long cool sitting room: a piano, books, copper bowls of alabaster eggs, a pair of sofas – their cushions dented with evidence of leisure – facing each other in front of a generous fireplace over which hangs an abstract oil in ochre and black. The cloakroom is off the hall, full of bootjacks and waxed coats with corduroy collars. When I’ve changed into my swimming costume and folded up my clothes and shoved them in my bag, Honor is nowhere to be seen, so I wrap the towel around my waist and retrace my steps into the slanting golden sunshine, then pick my way barefoot down the lawn.

  Edged with smooth curves of silver foliage spiked with foamy flurries of white, the lawn gives way to the longer grass and lusher shade of the orchard: the apple trees, which Malcolm Azaria mentioned at the memorial service. They’re venerable, stooping trees, probably older than the house.

  A brick wall runs along the edge of the orchard, radiating the stored heat of the day, and in the middle of it, between two espaliered pears, there’s a gate. I unlatch it.

  There’s no one in the pool or around it. The sunloungers with their bold print cushions are empty. An orange towel lies in a tangle over the flagstones, which are splashed with water around the shallow end, proof that someone has emerged from it fairly recently; but the footprints lead into a bright patch of sunshine and vanish.

  The rectangle of water stretches ahead of me, a calm holy blue snagged with the smallest circle of wrinkles where an insect is floundering. I drop my towel over a chair and stand at the edge with the sun on my back, watching my shadow flying over the pale mosaic, the random neon geometry of sunlight far below. Then I take a breath and dive in.

  It’s cold, very cold, and the shock forces me to the surface, but already I’m becoming accustomed to it, and I start to swim, fiercely at first. I do a few fast lengths of crawl, pushing hard through the water, feeling my chest starting to tighten, then I slacken the pace and turn on my back and float, enjoying the cool suck and slide of the water as the activity leaves it.

  At the edge of my vision I see the gate opening, and I flip over and swim to the side. Polly and Teddy are standing there in shorts and tennis shoes, looking down at me. Both of them seem slightly taken aback.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, resting my arms on the edge of the pool. ‘I’ve been looking for you. Honor said you were having a swim, and when I got here – well, it just looked too good to resist.’

  ‘We were having a quick knockabout next door,’ says Polly. ‘We heard the splash and wondered who it was. Is it Monday already? Christ. I’ve totally lost track.’ She says they usually play at this time of day, when the sun goes off the court.

  While she talks, Teddy patrols the perimeter of the pool, dragging the skimmer through the water. From the way he avoids my eye and doesn’t address me directly, I am made aware that he’s displeased to find me here; and not simply because I’ve caught him off guard.

  I get the feeling that he would quite like to fish me out, too, along with the flies and leaves.

  He has something on me, perhaps. I wonder what it is.

  He keeps his gaze fixed on the task, ignoring me, a
nd when he has finished, he slides the skimmer back behind the poolhouse, pulls off his T-shirt and shoes, and dives in: tidy, exact, not much of a splash. He comes to the surface with a gasp, throwing his head back so the pool is briefly marked with a flurry of tiny droplets, and then he rotates in the water and says to me, quite coolly, ‘So, how’s tricks?’

  I don’t enjoy this sort of question. Too open-ended. It could go anywhere. So I say work’s grim at the moment. ‘It’s a bit like Oranges and Lemons. Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head. There’s no way of knowing if you’re going to get a candle or the axe.’ He smiles politely.

  Polly is tugging off her T-shirt and shorts, revealing an even tan and a faded red bikini. Cautiously she starts to inch down the rickety metal ladder, making little showy screams about the temperature. Finally she pushes off, her breath coming in snatches. We bob around in the water for a while, and once she has got used to the temperature Polly tells me about the neighbours, Colonel and Mrs Williams, who let them use the court whenever they want. ‘We could play tomorrow,’ suggests Teddy. ‘Doubles, if you play, Frances?’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll play chess, if you like. That’s the only game I’m any good at. I’m useless at tennis, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Shame,’ says Teddy. But I don’t get the feeling he minds all that much.

  Polly shows me to my bedroom. It’s smallish, on the first floor over the front porch, with a view of the croquet lawn and the sheep field. Rather to my surprise, the double bed is a tangle of linen. There’s a pillow on the floor. The cupboard is open, yawning hangers.

  ‘Oh shit, I forgot,’ says Polly from the doorway, as I put my bag down, noting as I do so the apple cores and cotton-wool balls blackened with kohl lying in the bin. ‘Jacob and Marie-Élise were here at the weekend, and Mrs Talbot doesn’t come in until tomorrow. Just grab some clean sheets and pillowcases from the airing cupboard.’ She wanders away in search of a drink, her plimsolls sounding softly on the stair carpet and then, more distant but precisely, on the parquet in the hall below.

  I put a copy of the Spectator in the bin and drag the sheets from the bed, revealing an unpleasant wad of dried-up tissues under one pillow, and then I set off to find the airing cupboard. Polly hasn’t told me where it is, so I use this as an excuse to glance into all the rooms opening off the landing. Polly’s room is under one of the gables: it’s papered with a rosebud print marked with dark Blu-tack stains where her posters once hung. There’s a doll’s house on the floor next to her suitcase, which has yet to be properly unpacked. Clothes and cosmetics spill out of it and drift across the floor. Designer deodorant. A tiny little black bra. A pair of jeans, tugged inside out like a snakeskin.

  There are two other unoccupied guest bedrooms: a cramped boxroom single with sailing boats on the blind, suitable for a child, and a large double with an unwrinkled linen coverlet and a view over the orchard towards the sea, a low blue haze on the horizon.

  Teddy and Honor have chosen to stay in what is clearly his boyhood bedroom: they’ve dragged the mattresses off the twin beds, and pushed them together on the carpet. Possibly they are amused by the nostalgic thrill of having sex in there, with the matchstick galleon on the dresser and the bookshelves full of Asterix and old Beano annuals.

  Through the open window, I can hear Polly and Teddy talking on the terrace beneath, the clink of a glass or a bottle being put down on a hard surface, and then I smell cigarette smoke.

  ‘She didn’t realise it was anything special,’ Teddy is saying, defensively. ‘She didn’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘OK, but she might have thought,’ Polly says. ‘I mean, you’d never know she was the guest here, would you? Sheesh.’

  The last room is Laurence and Alys’s. I glance over the bannisters before I go in, listening for Honor, and when I hear the sound of running water from the kitchen I know I’m safe and I place my hand on the doorknob, carved with a spiral to resemble a beehive.

  Clearly he hasn’t been down to the house for some time. The curtains are partly drawn to keep out the sun. The housekeeper has pulled the blue-and-white cover tightly over the high bank of pillows, and left a satin-edged blanket neatly folded at the foot of the bed. I go around the room in the half-light, examining things: the gooseneck lamps on the bedside tables, both angled for reading; the inlaid box on the dresser, its worn velvet trays full of a mess of cufflinks and kirby grips and buttons and an old silver thimble; the wedding photograph – outfits, confetti, the kiss on the step – in the mother-of-pearl frame; the curling snaps of Polly and Teddy stuck in around the edge of the looking glass. I open the wardrobe, and it’s full of clothes, his on one side, hers on the other. Handfuls of sundresses in primary colours, Guernseys, thick walking socks, polo shirts, white shorts for tennis.

  There’s a bottle of French scent on the dresser, just a faint film of yellowish liquid left inside, and I take off the lid and sniff it, and then I spray a little into the air in front of me. It’s a clean, fresh smell, a morning smell, energetic, lively. Not what I was expecting. I put the bottle back, beside its matching jar of body cream. A birthday present, I think. Alys wouldn’t have bothered to buy a set herself.

  In the bathroom, I pick out some linen and a bath towel, and then I make up my bed and empty the bin into the carrier bag in which I packed my shoes, and I go downstairs, my arms full of Marie-Élise’s detritus. I ask Honor, who is laboriously grating cheese, whether she wants any help with supper, and in a long-suffering sort of voice she says no, she’s fine; so, when I’ve put the rubbish in the kitchen bin and left the laundry in a basket in the utility room, I head out to find the others on the terrace. I’m walking through the sitting room when I hear their voices. They’re bickering over whose turn it is to do the next supermarket shop.

  ‘But that’s not fair, I did the last one,’ Polly is complaining.

  ‘Yes, but Jacob and Marie-Élise are your friends – and so,’ says Teddy, lowering his voice significantly, ‘is Thingy. What on earth is she doing here, anyway? Even by your standards, Pol, she seems a bit random.’

  I pause for a moment in the shadows, absently picking up one of the alabaster eggs – cool and heavy in my hand – as I listen to his snicker of amusement, waiting for the inevitable betrayal.

  But to my surprise, it doesn’t come. ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ Polly is saying, resisting the temptation to turn me into a joke. ‘I feel a bit sorry for her, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ says Teddy, and I can hear him stretching and starting to yawn.

  ‘Look, Frances has been through something horrible too, you know. And she has been kind to us. She didn’t have to meet us, did she? And she has really been there for me the last few months.

  ‘Anyway, she’s good at fitting in,’ adds Polly, crossly, in summary. ‘She’s easy to have around. Whereas Honor …’

  Ridiculously, my heart leaps as I listen to Polly’s speech, though I know I’ve become a cheap shot, just another instalment in an ancient sibling argument. Her defence of me is certainly not proof of any real sort of loyalty.

  Still, despite everything, I can’t help finding her reaction endearing; touching, almost.

  ‘Whereas Honor …’ Polly is saying ‘… with her soya milk and organic shampoo and Peace Oils … Surely she must be running out of Peace Oil by now?’ And when Teddy starts to speak, she says, ‘It’s definitely your turn. There are two of you. I don’t see why I should have to do another.’

  ‘I think you’re being very unfair. After all, it’s not as if Honor actually eats anything,’ says Teddy, and then they both laugh. Carefully, I put the egg back in the copper bowl and go out to join them.

  It is a rather bad supper. Green salad, inexpertly drained; a vegetable lasagne with large hard coins of carrot and lumpy béchamel. We sit at the kitchen table, surrounded by all of Honor’s mess: mustard jars with the lids off, spoons in puddles of tomato juice, a packet of flour standing in its
dusty white shadow.

  ‘Is it OK?’ she keeps asking, but I don’t think she really cares too much either way.

  She works for a TV production company. She’s the baby of the family: the youngest of three, by quite a long way. Her father, it transpires, is an old friend of Laurence’s, a Labour peer, an expert on industrial relations. Her mother is an interior designer. It slowly dawns on me that I’ve heard of her pioneering work with taupe.

  ‘They must all be chuffed about you two getting together,’ I say, and Honor rests one elbow on the table, propping her chin on her knuckles, smiling complacently at Teddy while he says his father’s response was: Oh, thank God. At last.

  But as the evening progresses, I start to wonder about Honor. She’s rather distant with Polly, and sometimes when Teddy is talking about work – sinking all his energies into taking off an oligarch’s girlfriend, or a super-humourless German video artist – I notice her attention slipping away from him, drawn to the window, or the pattern on a teatowel, or the patch of dry skin on her heel.

  Hmm, I think, watching her fiddling with the candle in the silver candlestick, picking at the molten wax so it spills and hardens on the table. You’re getting bored, aren’t you? And you can’t quite bring yourself to admit it yet.

  I offer to do the washing up and after Polly has been outside to have a cigarette she brings her wineglass back to the kitchen and sits on the counter, swinging her smooth brown legs and idly drying the same saucepan over and over again. She has been staying at Nevers for the last fortnight: groups of friends have filtered down from London, though not Sam, with whom she is now on ‘non-speakers’.

  Her brother and Honor arrived last Wednesday. ‘And,’ adds Polly, furtively, ‘she’s driving me crazy. She keeps grumbling about staying in Teddy’s old room – I think she’d like to move into Mum and Dad’s, can you believe it? And don’t start me on the topless sunbathing.’ She mimes sticking her fingers down her throat. ‘It’s good you’ve come. I’d had it up to here with the pair of them.’