Alys, Always

by Harriet Lane

  ‘It all seems to have happened very quickly,’ she said, and there was an edge to her voice, a note of concern.

  I bent to stroke the cat, who was purring and arching her back against me, and as I straightened up I said, quite truthfully, that it didn’t feel at all rushed to me.

  ‘Laurence seems lovely,’ she said. ‘But, well – he is a lot older than you.’

  I said how funny it was to hear such a thing. After all, many people would consider me bordering on middle age. ‘It’s hardly cradle snatching,’ I added, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Hester, and then she had the grace to laugh. ‘Of course not. But he has only recently lost his wife. I suppose I have to ask, are you sure? Are you sure it’s what you want?’

  I told her I was, yes. ‘It is absolutely what I want,’ I said, and though she is only aware of a fraction of my ambition I could see that she believed me, and then she hugged me again and said, ‘I’m so pleased you’ve found someone who makes you happy. They do say, don’t they, that if you’ve had one very successful marriage you’re more likely to find another relationship quickly.’ And then she asked me how his children had taken it.

  After that weekend in Biddenbrooke, we mainly heard about Polly and Teddy – who would not return any of their father’s calls – through the Azarias. Jo felt responsible for the situation. When she and Malcolm came round to tell us the latest, she cried and asked for our forgiveness, turning a Kleenex over in her hands as we all sat in the rarely used sitting room, the sage-coloured room that I’d first seen filled with white blooms all those months ago. ‘I should never have said what I did to Miriam,’ she said, pressing the tissue over her eyes. ‘I betrayed your confidence, and now this has happened, the children are so upset … I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

  Laurence was generous. These things happen, he said. No point dwelling on it. The only thing that mattered now was to re-establish contact with Teddy and Polly. ‘Are they both very angry with us?’ he asked.

  Jo didn’t speak, but Malcolm said yes, they were. ‘Less so with Frances, I think,’ he added, as an afterthought. ‘That must be a good sign, don’t you feel?’

  Reading between the lines, it was clear Polly and Teddy were most wounded – on their mother’s behalf – by the Julia Price episode. It seemed to suggest all sorts of hidden horrors, a long history of betrayal. Later, Laurence would sigh and put his head in his hands, saying the whole thing had been a dreadful mistake. ‘One slip,’ he said. ‘One slip, that’s all it took.’ I thought of the girls without names skulking in the darkness behind the fast-fading ghost of Julia Price, and I felt a prickle of contempt: both for Laurence, who imagines I do not know about them, and for Alys, who grasped only a fragment of the truth. The thought made me steely. Never again, I thought.

  But as the days passed, as the Azarias had nothing new to report, Laurence became angry too. As he fretted over what he began to see as his daughter’s intransigence and his son’s priggishness, he started to lose patience with them. I heard him on the phone to Malcolm a few weeks after the initial confrontation, and I was struck by his exasperation. ‘Oh well, if they’ve made up their minds …’ he was saying. ‘No, Malcolm, I can quite see how bloody difficult this is for you, but frankly I can’t see either of them backing down over this.’

  He stood there in the white kitchen, the receiver to his ear, staring out at the garden. It was early evening, and the French windows were open, as they had been for most of the day. I could smell the wisteria – a heavy, clinging, almost narcotic scent – drifting through the house on indistinct currents of air. I went to him and put my arms around him as he listened to Malcolm and drummed his fingers on the window frame and let out little despairing exhalations, as if only just holding back from saying something which really mustn’t be said. ‘No,’ he said eventually, as if in reluctant agreement. ‘No. I take your point.’

  ‘I’m losing them,’ he said, when the call was ended. ‘It’s hopeless.’

  ‘Well, you mustn’t let them go,’ I said. ‘They’re your family. You need each other.’

  ‘Do we?’ he murmured, reaching for me. ‘Do we really?’

  ‘Of course you do,’ I said. ‘You must try to speak to them yourself.’

  ‘But they won’t take my calls,’ he said.

  ‘Well – maybe you should doorstep them. Outside their flats. Outside Polly’s college. Teddy’s gallery. Show them you really mean it.’

  The suggestion was not, I could tell, very appealing, but he agreed it was worth a shot, and that Polly was probably the softer target. The next afternoon he was standing across the street from the drama college when classes finished. She came out in the middle of a group, laughing and joking, but saw him and stopped on the kerb as he crossed the road towards her. Martin hung back, waiting for her, but she waved him on. ‘I’ll catch you up. I won’t be long,’ she said.

  She told Laurence she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. She wasn’t sure whether she ever would be. She and Teddy had ‘a lot to think about’. Then, as he started to reason with her, she simply walked away, her silver satchel bumping against her hip.

  He came home and told me about it, and he slammed his hand down on the kitchen table so the water slopped out of the glasses and the cutlery rattled. ‘Oh, what’s the point,’ he said. ‘She’s being ridiculous. I’ll never be able to make this right.’

  I let him say it all. I let him talk about how he and Alys had overindulged both children; how they’d been encouraged, almost, to drift through life with no sense of how it really works. ‘We spoiled them both. We made things too bloody easy for them,’ he said angrily, ‘and now I’m going to have to live with the consequences.’

  I listened to him as we sat there at the table, my head bent sorrowfully over my clasped hands, thumb resting on thumb, fingers knitted. Oh, it would be so easy, I thought idly. So easy to allow his resentment to build. To harbour it, stoke it, foster it through various subtle inflections.

  To say things, or not say things.

  But I didn’t have the heart for it. Better, I knew, to be the one to bring them back together again. Like Alys: always ready with the right words; so good at finding common ground, drawing out the best in people.

  The thought of their eventual gratitude amused me.

  So I listened to Laurence, and made comforting remarks when I felt he wanted to hear them; and then, without telling him, I wrote a letter and posted it.

  I met them both in my lunch break in a coffee shop near the British Museum. At first neither would make eye contact. They sat sullenly side by side on a worn black vinyl banquette and said very little. So I talked. I said the right things, as I’ve found I can, watching for the tiny signals – the sighs, the quick consultative glances, the almost imperceptible beginnings of smiles – that herald a thaw. But the signs didn’t come.

  When the minute hand hit twenty past, I said how very sorry I was to have deceived them both. I said I understood that they might never be able to forgive me, but for their mother’s sake I wondered whether they could find it in their hearts to forgive Laurence, who was lost without them in his life. ‘He misses you,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how much he misses you.’

  Suddenly, a fragment of poetry came to mind: a piece of Emily Dickinson. Worth a pop, I thought.

  ‘He won’t give up on you,’ I said. ‘And neither will I. There’s this line from a poem, one particular poem which has always meant a great deal to me, and I can’t stop thinking about it: Hope is the thing with feathers … Thing is, without that hope, he’s finished. He’s clinging to it. So we’ll wait. Take your time. Please, just take your time.’

  I stood up and went to the counter and paid for three coffees, and then I pushed the door open and stepped out into the street.

  I heard her footsteps behind me and when I turned around I knew it was going to be all right.

  So now I leave the papers and my cup on the refectory table and go out into the gar
den. I step beyond the cool shade that falls away from the house and I look up. It’s going to be another hot day: above the shimmering wall of trees, the sky is the thin blue-white of skimmed milk. At some point, I’ll have to think about what to give the Azarias, who are coming for supper. But not just yet.

  Laurence has been in his study since mid-morning, consulting his fluttering wall of colours: planning, plotting, piecing the story together. He’s coming to the end of his first draft. Last week he asked whether I’d be interested in taking a look at it, once he has knocked it into shape.

  I wonder whether this novel will have my name printed at the front upon an otherwise blank page. Well, if not this one, the next one will.

  I’m sitting on the bench stroking the cat, my bare feet in the grass, when he comes out to join me, walking along the brick path that winds between the fruit trees. Without saying anything, he sits down next to me and puts his hand out for mine; and after a moment I place his palm on my belly, even though there’s nothing to feel quite yet, and rest mine on top. We sit there in silence as the sun moves over us.

  It’s very tranquil. A dog barks. Someone turns on a hose. Distantly, a child shouts, ‘Coming, ready or not!’

  I’m listening for it, not quite expecting it yet, but they are early. I do not hear the key in the lock or the feet on the stairs, and neither does Laurence. When they come out of the French windows, we are both sitting there side by side in the sun, the cat twisting around our ankles, enjoying the peace.

  While they make their reconciliations, I stand back. Smilingly, I stand back, my eyes lowered, and I wait for their eventual gratitude.

  Acknowledgements

  My wonderful editor Arzu Tahsin, for being so sure of what needn’t be said.

  For additional insights, Anna deVries, my editor at Scribner.

  The early readers: Rachel Thomas, my parents David and Sara Lane, and my sister Victoria.

  For various kindnesses: Sophie Buchan, Morag Preston and Damian Whitworth, Jane Dwelly, Lucy Darwin, Juliet Knight, Lynne Riley, Daisy Cook, Anna Mazzega, Jane Goldthorpe, Bethany Wren and Natalie Roe.

  Dr Gordon Plant and his colleagues at Queen Square, particularly Merle Galton.

  Clare Johnson, Penny Faith and the Thursday group at Lauderdale House.

  Poppy and Barnaby, who suggested buns for tea, ‘because that’s what they have in The Railway Children’.

  Two people seemed to believe in this book long before I did: my agent Cat Ledger and my husband Stafford Critchlow. For that and other things, many thanks.

  Harriet Lane has worked as an editor and staff writer at Tatler and the Observer. She has also written for the Guardian, the Telegraph and Vogue. She lives in north London.

  Copyright

  A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2012

  by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  This ebook first published in 2012

  by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Copyright © 2012 Harriet Lane

  The right of Harriet Lane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Excerpt from Rudolf Nureyev: A Life by Julie Kavanagh (Penguin Books 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Julie Kavanagh.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 0 297 86504 9

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

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