by Harriet Lane
I don’t say anything but I smile at him, and he smiles back, relieved – and embarrassed too; a little awkward – and then the taxi stops outside my flat. I see him inspecting it, glancing out at the unruly hedge, the jumble of bins, the darkened line of windows on the first floor.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he says as I reach for the handle.
‘I’d like that,’ I say, and I gather up my bag and step out of the cab and then I slam the door and the taxi moves off, and I see him turn a little to watch me and the flash as he raises his hand in farewell.
Coming out of the lift, I am drawn to the plate-glass windows on one side of the stairwell. The flat is in a modern block with a porter, an underground car park, communal gardens and – even from this, the third floor – commanding views. I look out, over the hill, with the spill of gardens and parkland around the houses. There are still a few faint scorch marks of autumn left in the trees.
The Kytes’ street is only just out of sight. It can’t have taken her more than seven or eight minutes to walk here.
Mrs Brewer opens the door. She’s probably in her late seventies, a fragile, scented creature with pearls in her ears, wearing a cashmere jersey the same colour as her Labrador Greta. In the dimness of the little hall, they’re both pale shadows, barely there at all.
‘How nice to meet you, Miss Thorpe,’ Mrs Brewer says, putting out her hand. Her gaze is light and glassy, sliding over my face and then coming to rest at a point over my shoulder. The brightness from the atrium must register, I think. I’ve been told what to expect, but it’s still discomfiting.
‘Please do call me Frances,’ I say, but Mrs Brewer laughs, establishing a boundary.
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Maybe when I know you a little better. Won’t you go through?’ She moves sideways out of the hall into the little galley kitchen. There’s the sound of a kettle being switched on and the fridge opening and shutting. When I offer, she says she does not need any help.
In the sitting room, comfortable but decorated in dispiritingly institutional magnolias and peaches, I see that everything is ready for us: the pair of armchairs at an angle by the window, a few pieces of paper on the table, a thick book.
‘Is it light enough for you? Shall I turn on the lamps?’ Mrs Brewer asks, coming through with a small tray. I watch uneasily as she moves towards me but she sets it down on the table without faltering, crisp in her movements, confident that everything is in its place.
‘No, it’s fine like this. It’s quite a sunny afternoon,’ I say.
Mrs Brewer slips into one of the chairs. ‘Please,’ she says, gesturing towards the tray. ‘Help yourself to milk and sugar.’ Patiently, Greta sits, then sighs and drops her jaw on to her paws.
‘Mrs Polter said you haven’t done this sort of thing before,’ Mrs Brewer says, leaning back with her cup and crossing her ankles.
‘That’s right. I just thought I’d see what it’s like. If I can be of some use. That’s the idea, anyway.’
‘How wonderful.’ She smiles towards me. ‘I’m very grateful. I haven’t had a reader for quite some time now. I’ve missed it. Shall we make a start? I’m sure you’ve got your eye on the clock.’
‘Oh, of course,’ I say. ‘What would you like me to begin with?’
So I pick up the letters and read them to her. Nothing interesting, just mailshots from the council about recycling, and a photocopied sheet from the residents’ committee asking for feedback on a proposed new planting scheme. Her son usually comes in regularly to help with this sort of thing, but she says he’s away for a fortnight. Then I come to the paperback. It’s a biography, several years old, of Rudolf Nureyev. The reviews were good, I remember. There’s a bookmark a fifth of the way through, a powder-blue strip of matt card printed with the Welbury Bookshop logo. I take it out and turn it over. Her hands.
On the flyleaf of the book, she has written, ‘To Nancy, “Hope is the thing with feathers …” With love, Alys.’ I wonder why she bothered.
‘You’ve made some progress with the Nureyev,’ I say, turning the pages and pausing on the black and white photograph of the infant Rudolf, a baby peasant in countless stiff woollen layers, sitting on his mother’s lap. She appears amused, relaxed, on the point of speaking, but the child holds his hands formally at his side and his eyes are fixed levelly on the camera. It is a look I recognise.
‘Oh, it’s really exceptional,’ she says. ‘My late husband was on the board at Covent Garden, we used to see a lot of ballet, obviously before – and this is so marvellously written, it brings it all back. But I can’t remember where we got to. It has been a few months … Longer than that, actually.’
I leave the silence, trusting she’ll fill it.
‘I don’t know what Mrs Polter told you,’ she says, lifting her cup, her face turned again to the window. ‘I had a reader, a very good one, someone who became a friend. She died last winter.’
‘Oh, how sad,’ I say, watching her, the tremor on the surface of the tea. ‘Was it unexpected?’
‘A car accident,’ she says. ‘She chose the book for me. It was a birthday present.’ I see her face working as she confronts something, maybe for the first time. ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘perhaps it’s not such a good idea after all. I think I’d prefer it if you started something new.
‘Of course, this must bring it all back,’ I say. ‘It must be very painful for you, I do see that.’ A tiny involuntary flinch, an expression of distaste so fleeting I almost miss it; but just enough to irritate. ‘I like the inscription,’ I add. ‘Hope is the thing with feathers …’
‘Emily Dickinson,’ she says, shortly. ‘That was a poem that always meant a great deal to her.’ Now she’s placing her hands on the arms of her chair, preparing to get up. ‘There’s an Elizabeth Taylor I put aside, a collection of short stories my son recommended,’ she’s saying, but I’m suddenly getting tired of all this, so I open the book again and turn back to the page marked by the slip of blue paper.
‘Oh, but this looks fascinating,’ I say. ‘I’ve heard such good things about it. And you’ve reached the part in Paris, when he defects. How exciting! Just listen to this:
“The room, they told me, had two doors. Should I decide to go back to Russia, one door would lead me discreetly back into the hall from where I could board the Tupolev. Should I decide to stay in Paris, the other door led into their own private office … By now I was locked in, safely alone, inside that small room. Four white walls and two doors. Two exits to two different lives.” ’
I see Mrs Brewer open her mouth, trying to say something, but I carry on anyway, running my finger along the text, and soon I forget to monitor her reaction, I’m just in thrall to the story, carried along by the dancer’s will, the fierceness of his desire to become something else.
Laurence rings me a few days later and I meet him at a brasserie not far from his house. It’s pretty busy but we sit at a quiet table towards the back, and because it’s a cold, wet evening we both order steak frites and he picks a good bottle of red. The waiters dance around us, adjusting our glasses, bringing new knives, pouring the wine and then standing back, waiting for his approval.
He’s quite different tonight: open, reflective. With a little encouragement he talks about his early life, his father who died young from TB, and his mother, who raised him while holding down a job in the brewery down the road. Books were always a way out, he says. He worked hard for his places at grammar school and Oxford. Of course, things could easily have been very different.
I listen to him talking about his life, and it seems to me I’m an expert and subtle prompt, suggesting the themes that I’ve picked up from his novels and the interviews he has given to journalists over the years. I can see him puffing up a little with pleasure as, like someone shining a pocket mirror at the sun, I show him his own legend: the self-made man, creative, autonomous, significant. People never tire of their stories. Laurence is no exception.
I ask him whether success h
as interfered with his freedom, whether he finds it obscures the world sometimes. ‘Oh, hardly,’ he says. ‘My sort of fame, if you can call it that – it’s a very small thing. Well, it hardly ever happens but just occasionally, if I’m in a departure lounge or in a restaurant, someone might approach me, and if you could see the way they sidle up, convulsed with shame, desperate not to intrude … just to tell me they’ve been affected by something I wrote … Well, that sort of thing is not hard to bear. I can live with that.
‘After all,’ he says, ‘it’s not as if they want anything from me. No one wants the shirt off my back.’
He used to think he led a charmed life, but – and here he glances down at his hands on the tablecloth – things don’t look quite that simple any more.
Then he changes the subject, asks me about my childhood near Frynborough, a little about my parents. Of course, he’s closer in age to them than he is to me. When that becomes apparent, he smiles.
But before I can change the subject he sees something in my expression, something that betrays me, and he’s opening his mouth, about to ask a question, when I remember an anecdote Audrey Callum told me about Sean Templeman, and somehow I manage to distract him with this. His laugh, when it comes, is both a blessing and a disappointment to me.
After the meal, we are helped into our coats and then we go outside, into the rain. ‘Let me walk you home,’ he says, and I say, ‘No, really, it’s fine, it’s not far away,’ and then quite shyly, quite tentatively, he puts his hand out and touches my cheek and next he’s bending down towards me, and I’m kissing him back, I’m kissing him, and it’s everything I knew it would be.
Some cars go past. The rain falls on us.
Then he says, very softly, ‘Come back with me,’ and I say I will.
It rains all night. I’m aware of it from time to time, the steady ceaselessness of it and the occasional gusts of wind which make the sash windows rattle a little in their frames.
In the morning I inch away from the warmth of his body and the tangle of bedding, and step across the room. I open the door carefully, not wanting him to hear, not wanting him to wake.
The distant sound of rain on the rooflight outside Polly’s bedroom comes down the staircase. I think of her little bedroom up there, the walls painted the colour of a robin’s egg, the string of chilli-pepper lights.
I wonder what she will do when she finds out.
In the bathroom I wash my face with very hot water, using a white flannel which I take from the pile in the airing cupboard. I find a new boxed toothbrush in the mirrored cabinet and unwrap it and clean my teeth. Two robes hang on the hook behind the door: I take down the one which belonged to Alys, a slippery length of oyster silk, and I pull it on and knot the belt, and look at myself in the mirror. Then I take it off and pull on the navy waffled cotton one, which is much too big for me, so I have to fold back the sleeves. Then I go downstairs. The oatmeal-coloured carpet is soft under my bare feet.
On the half-landing below I pause on the threshhold of Laurence’s study. Curiosity makes me push open the door. It swings back a little to show me the computer on the trestle table, the ugly office chair, the white blinds pulled up to reveal the racing sky and the solemn aspect of the house opposite set back behind thinning trees.
I move into the room, drawn to the wall to the left of the desk. At first glance I think it’s covered with hundreds of tiny bright fluttering wings: yellow and pink and orange, lifting and falling slightly in the draught from the window or the draught created by the open door.
When I go closer I see that they’re Post-its, covered with Laurence’s tight black writing. The words are clear enough, but the meanings are cryptic, mysterious. ‘N and R’, they say, and ‘Bach cantata’, and ‘D’s running’ and ‘R knows about D’s episode – but how’.
It’s his new novel, I realise. He’s plotting it out, marshalling his characters, experimenting with them. Deciding fates.
I imagine him here, lolling back in his chair, frowning and biting his lip, glancing up from the screen to check the fluttering wings on the wall. I imagine him peeling a fresh note from the pad when a new detail comes to mind, and rearranging the coloured sheets, plucking them off and placing them elsewhere, smoothing a finger over the adhesive strips.
He’s shaping the narrative, making it twist and fragment and re-form. He’s working his way towards a resolution.
It’s a pleasing thought. Poignant, too. Here in his study I confront his own sense of himself, and it makes the same impression that I get when I see him with Charlotte or the Titovs or in a public place. Here, as in the wider world, he’s in charge, at the helm, the shaper of destinies.
I leave the room, closing the door softly behind me, and go on downstairs to make some tea. Mrs Polter from the volunteer reading scheme has left a voicemail on my mobile but I delete it without listening to the rest of the message.
For all my planning, I never thought beyond this point. Some instinct – could it be superstition? A disinclination to tempt fate? – had always prevented me from imagining anything after the actual moment of achievement. This makes the things that happen now all the more exciting, of course – all the more strange and vivid and new – but the sense of danger is also very strong. I’m used to being a few paces ahead but suddenly Laurence and I are walking in step, neither of us knowing what is coming next.
This is the critical moment, I tell myself, trying to regain control. This is where it could all go wrong.
But it’s difficult to remain level-headed. Laurence has knocked me off balance. Somehow, I hadn’t fully anticipated this. Over the preceding months, he’d come to represent so many things and as a consequence the man himself had somehow lost definition, become easy to overlook.
He may be old, he may be given to pomposity and self-regard; but all the same, I can’t help it: I love the way he makes me feel. I love it when he says, ‘What have I done, to deserve someone so good?’ And I love the way he starts to need me.
Quite gradually, I find myself falling for him. It feels like falling too: as if I’ve lost my footing, with all the potential for indignity that implies. As if there’s a chance of being hurt at some point in the future.
But for now I’m simply suspended between states. Am I falling, or flying? I can’t be sure.
I find my thoughts colonised by him, the things he tells me, the way he holds me.
Of course, I worry that this will work against me. I worry that I will lose my advantage, the clarity of my perspective. But at the same time, I find I can’t do much about it. I have to trust him. After a while, I stop worrying.
We don’t talk about the future. Not yet. And we meet only in secret: at his house, or my flat. The day before he comes to my flat for the first time, I remember to inspect it with critical eyes, searching out the things he mustn’t see here. Alys’s cashmere shawl. The old silver thimble I took from the inlaid box in his bedroom at Nevers. An alabaster egg.
Polly’s umbrella I decide can stay: it’s anonymous enough, he won’t notice that. But I fold the egg into the shawl and put the thimble in an envelope, and then I drop them off at a charity shop that I pass on the way to the office. I no longer need these talismans. Perhaps they’ll bring luck to someone else.
When he rings the bell that evening I let him in and he comes up the stairs and I’m waiting for him, feeling a little shy and nervous, as I usually do at the moment of meeting, and he holds out his arms and the anxieties melt away.
After a while he lets me go and moves around, examining things, much as Polly had done that evening in the spring, although the sitting room looks different now. The bookshelves are an even white, the cushions on the new wheat-coloured sofa are luxuriously plump and firm. I’ve thrown out the clip-frame art. The flat smells of ironed bedlinen and furniture polish and the expensive tuberose-scented candle which is burning on the side table.
He glances through my books, and I see his attention going to the line of Laurence Kytes,
my project for the year.
‘You see, I’m your greatest fan,’ I say, lightly.
He pulls out the hardback of Affliction, and flicks through it, pausing for a moment on the dedication page. For Alys. Always. Then he shuts it and slides it back in between the others and his eyes move on to the mantelpiece, over the stack of invitations, the fossil from Golden Cap. Then he comes over to me. ‘Oh, that’s just as well,’ he says, and he sounds almost serious, more serious than I could have hoped.
We do not talk about Alys yet, though I imagine we may some time soon.
One Saturday morning I tell him about running into Honor, and the claim she made, and how easily I discounted it. I don’t tell him that I know he’s innocent because I was watching the scene from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. I let him believe I simply believe in him.
But he’s too exasperated to notice my trust, my faith. Perhaps he will remember it at a later point.
He pulls himself up against the pillows and tugs his hands through his hair, reminded of something tiresome from very long ago. ‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘How ridiculous. What if she tells the children? What if they fall for her story?’
‘They won’t,’ I say. ‘If I know she’s lying, they will too. Anyway, she says she doesn’t want to hurt them.’ But of course I have my doubts.
I’ve lost touch with Polly since the summer. She doesn’t need me now; my occasional texts mostly go unanswered. It certainly makes my life a lot easier but part of me misses her and the drama that trails around after her like scent or cigarette smoke.
Laurence sees her from time to time, and tells me the latest: he’s met the new boyfriend, a fellow student, a bright boy from Stoke-on-Trent. She looks well, very happy. She’s sticking at the course. Bamber’s pleased with her.
Teddy I know less about. He works hard and meets his father for dinner in town. Laurence suspects he’s still moping after Honor.
Our affair – carefully protected from both the past and the future as well as from the other people in our lives – settles into a sort of pattern. Naturally it’s not like real life; and though in some ways it’s better than that I’m aware, as the weeks pass, of a gradual restlessness, a sort of vague dissatisfaction creeping up on me. Little things begin to annoy me: if he’s listening to music or the radio, the volume is usually turned too high; and sometimes, talking to him on the phone, I have to repeat myself.