by Sadie Jones
‘… don’t know what Alice will think about that,’ she heard him say.
Claire got up too and they all went inside. Kit ran to her door, and out and downstairs, and the needle stayed, grinding on the spinning record.
She stood in the hall, with them in the drawing room, and waited to hear if they were going to carry on talking. She heard Tamsin.
‘I told you, I was driving back from the Andersons’, going to see Diana, and he was walking back from the station. I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t seen him.’
‘That’s exactly what you should have done.’
‘Well? How did he seem?’
This was Claire. Kit got closer to the door.
‘Quiet. Fine. I don’t know, like Lewis. I’m terribly hot, any chance of something with mint in it?’
There were noises of exasperation and sighing and walking about, and Kit looked through the hinge of the door. Tamsin was on the sofa, lying back in attitudes of languid casualness. Claire sat down as Kit watched and Dicky walked over to the drinks cabinet.
‘Poor old Gilbert,’ he said.
Kit couldn’t understand why they weren’t asking sensible questions. How long would Lewis be here? What was he going to do?
‘Kit, we know you’re there,’ said her mother, ‘you may as well come in.’
Kit went in.
‘How long is he staying?’ she asked.
‘How should I know? We barely exchanged ten words. He seemed fearfully polite and rather embarrassed, if you want to know.’
‘Well, he would!’ said Dicky, banging bottles about.
Kit had a sudden memory of that very early morning, when Lewis was locked up, and what it had been like, and the way she had felt. She looked down. Her feelings were being made dangerous by his coming back. She thought it must be obvious how she felt. She wanted to be on her own.
The gong rang for supper soon after, and the family talked of nothing else but Lewis all through it, and Kit didn’t say anything, hating them using his name and the things they said. Then, very quietly, right inside, she began to feel joy. He was back. He was there now, at home. He was there.
That first night, as Kit lay sleepless in her bed, Alice lay sleepless in hers, aware of Lewis across the landing and Gilbert next to her, breathing gently. She felt silly for having been frightened of Lewis when he had come into the house. He was the same. No, not quite the same, perhaps stronger. She felt hope and guilt together and reached for Gilbert’s shoulder in the dark and touched him softly. Although he didn’t move at all, she seemed to feel him turn away from her.
‘Just caught me. Catching the eight-thirty?’
Dicky crossed his hall in strides.
‘Thought so. I’ll give you a lift, if you like.’
Gilbert stood in the doorway, very aware of Preston standing on the gravel behind him by the Rolls. Dicky shouted over his shoulder.
‘Off!’
The two men left the house and Dicky slammed the door behind him.
‘That’s all right, Preston. Meet the five-fifteen, would you?’
They both got into Gilbert’s Ford Zodiac and Gilbert pulled away from the house and towards the station.
‘Lewis is back.’
‘I see,’ said Dicky, waiting.
‘Back last night. Eager to make a fresh start.’
‘Did you speak to Accounts about the review?’
‘Mackereth will be there today,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I was wondering if you might find something for him.’
‘For Lewis?’
‘As I say, he’s keen to show he’s changed.’
‘System works, eh?’ said Dicky, and Gilbert hated his casualness about it, and the sarcasm. It wasn’t his son who had been in prison.
‘He’ll want to put it behind him, at any rate,’ he said, evenly.
‘Well, he can hardly expect to walk straight into a job.’
‘I’d thought something menial. At first.’
The ‘at first’ betrayed him, he knew it did.
‘Mortimer tells me in the first quarter his section was up an extra half a percent on estimate.’
‘Yes. I’d rather thought it would do him good.’
‘Lewis?’
‘Yes, Lewis!’
‘Can’t promise anything, old man – boy like that. But I’ll give it some thought. All right?’
‘All right,’ said Gilbert and turned the Ford into the station. ‘Thank you.’
* * *
When Gilbert had left for work, Alice went to her room and Lewis sat at the breakfast table.
The night before had felt all wrong. He had come home ready for things to be different, but when his father took him to the church, he could only see himself the way he had been before. He had imagined comfort in being in his own bed again, but his nightmare had come back and there was no sleep after it. It was an evening from before he was sent away and not what he’d planned. He had lost ground. He stood up and looked around the room and wiped his hands down his trousers because the palms were sweating.
It would be different. He would do anything to make it that way and not let all the bad things find him again. He remembered the nightmare and the feeling of water closing over his head, and on waking the way the scars on his arm had seemed to reach out, making themselves felt.
He hadn’t cut himself in prison; he hadn’t thought of it, except in dreaming. It was a strange, vague memory, a twisted habit a child would fall into, that wasn’t to be looked at.
The house seemed hot and closed up to the morning and Lewis went to the French doors in the drawing room and let himself out into the dewy garden.
There was sunlight and birdsong and nothing else except the air on his face, and he felt freedom for the first time, and the beauty of it. The memory of the night before vanished to nothing. There was the damp sunlit morning all around, and it lived and shone and waited for him.
There wouldn’t be any need for fighting – the life inside him would make things better. He felt his freedom and his youth and that they were unconquerable and, in that moment, with the light glittering garden all around him, he had faith.
Even faith needs an occupation. The morning had promise, but Lewis only had himself and the house and the garden and woods beyond it, and he didn’t leave the garden. He went to the untouched shelves in the house and fetched books to read and cigarettes to smoke, and loved every grass-drenched hot, bright moment of his freedom.
He and Alice ate lunch together. He still had his joy and felt too big and too alive for the room and had nothing to say that wouldn’t have sounded odd, so he kept quiet. He would have liked to be friendly to her, but when she looked at him, which was rarely, her brittleness made him want to get away. Her nerves made him nervous too, and they went their separate ways as soon as they politely could.
Afterwards he went out into the garden again, which was hot now, with flying things and dry air.
He walked down to the tennis court and there was a sound of crickets in the grass and the heat came off the ground at him. He found a racket, an old one, and a ball and stood back from the wall to hit the ball at it. The ball didn’t have much bounce to it and the racket was pretty much ruined, so he had to hit it really hard to get anywhere. Hitting it hard was good and he took his cigarette out of his mouth to do it better and enjoyed getting a sweat up with it. It was hard work, and mesmeric, and pleasing. The bang of the ball on the brick, and its bounce after, was the main sound, but his brain registered another and he stopped. He heard it again, rustling.
The court was backed by bushes, rhododendrons, thickly layered, going back up to the boundary of the garden, where the woods started. Lewis looked into the dark of them, where the sound was coming from, and saw movement.
‘I can see you,’ he said.
Kit came out of the bushes. She had summer dust and twigs in her hair, which was very, very short and at first he thought she was a boy. Then he saw the dress. Then he realised who she was.
‘Kit?’
‘Hello.’
She looked funny. She looked like a beautiful child; she hadn’t been a beautiful child before.
‘You cut all your hair off.’
He had to say it, it jumped out at you, that she had such short hair, and it made her all eyes and neck and naked ears. She seemed to writhe with embarrassment.
‘What are you up to?’ he said and she squinted up at him in the sunlight, her face contorted with anxiety.
‘Nothing. Heard you were back.’
He shrugged, ‘I’m back.’
‘How are you?’
He gestured, as if to say, ‘As you can see’, but not saying anything. She squinted some more and stood on one leg. She was exactly the same and too easy to tease.
‘You get sent to prison for spying, you know,’ he said and she glared and started to walk backwards into the bushes.
He hadn’t meant her to go, but the sight of her walking backwards was funny and he laughed, and she made a face and tripped over something, and he laughed again and she slipped away into the dark and was gone. He heard her running.
This was how it would be then, the local freak show, all the kids would be out to have a look. Well, it wasn’t anything to him. He went back to the tennis wall, but it was pointless now, so he lay down and smoked some more and thought he’d have to get some work soon or he’d run out of cigarettes as well as going crazy.
In the early evening Lewis went to meet his father at the gate as he had used to as a child. He walked down the drive in the deep shadows of the trees, looking at the low sun on the field ahead of him. His skin felt alive from being in the sun all day and the cool shadows were soft around him. He heard the car before he saw it, and then it came around the big bend, and slowed, and stopped. The windows were down and Gilbert leaned across, his face looking hot from the train and his hat on the seat beside him.
‘Lewis. What are you doing?’
‘I thought I’d meet you.’
‘Why?’
Lewis opened the door and got in, holding his father’s hat carefully.
‘Dad—’
‘What did you do all day?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘I was in the garden.’
‘All day?’
‘Most of it, sir. Look, I’ve been wanting to say—’
Gilbert took his hat from Lewis’s hands and put it on the dashboard in front of them.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve been wanting to apologise.’
‘You’ve done that. We got your letters.’
‘Not just that.’
‘Well, what?’
A silence.
‘What, Lewis? I told you, I expect things to be different – nothing like it was before – that—’ He choked on the words, ‘That thing you did to yourself—’
‘No! I stopped it!’
‘Then what do you have to say?’
‘That I came back to—’
‘To?’
‘To make it better.’
The words sounded empty out loud; they had sounded brave and hopeful when he’d thought of them.
‘Well, prove it to us then, all right? Prove it to us.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Gilbert eased the car down the drive, slowly. He stopped at the house and they both got out. He left Lewis and went inside without saying anything else.
Lewis was used to waiting and having nothing to do and he found it easier to do it lying on his bed. That had been his habit in Brixton – the gym first, trying to get tired, and then lying on his bed, and waiting, and finding the strength he needed to redeem himself. He would lie on his bed in his cell and stay still and let his mind go – making up stories, picturing places he’d read about – except that now he was home, when his mind went, it didn’t go anywhere good.
There was no breeze at all and the heat made him restless and he was sweating and he half slept, and he thought about walking back from the station and seeing Tamsin. He thought of her wrists, coming out of her white gloves, and how they had been golden and the forearms golden too, and he thought about the hollow of her wrist where it had gone inside the glove and he pictured the little dark groove there, narrower than a finger, into her palm. He could hear raised voices downstairs. Gilbert’s voice and then Alice. His door was a little open and he heard her clearly as she came up to the landing.
‘I would say it’s personal, Gilbert! I would say cheap-looking is personal.’
Lewis went to his door. He could see her, the back of her, as she stood at the top of the stairs. She was wearing a black evening gown that had a deep V-shape at the back, and her hair piled up, with her pearls sitting on her bare neck. Her gloved hand rested on the banister. He heard Gilbert.
‘Alice. It’s a question of what’s appropriate. If you want every man in the room—’
‘Not every man! Just—’
‘Enough!’
‘Why can’t you—’
‘For God’s sake! Just change. This endless attention!’
She turned, quickly, and she was crying. She caught him looking and he shut the door. He didn’t want to know this. He didn’t want to see her like that and he didn’t want to know anything about her and his father. They hadn’t used to argue, it had been all politeness before. He leaned against the door and heard her go to her room and the door closing. He waited and he heard them leaving soon after.
Apart from going down to the kitchen to eat something, he stayed in his room for the rest of the evening; he was more comfortable there.
Chapter Two
Kit lay on her back on the sofa and watched her family upside down and thought about Sartre, and his play No Exit, and wondered if her family was her hell and she was being punished for something terrible she couldn’t remember doing when she had been alive.
‘Kit! Will you take your feet off the sofa? How many times do you have to be told?’
‘OK.’
‘And please don’t use that expression. We are not Americans.’
Dicky was at the fireplace.
‘It crossed my mind to tell him that I wouldn’t trust that boy to feed my dog. I’ve every right to turn him down flat.’
‘You certainly have. I think it’s the most extraordinary presumption, after everything you’ve done, and in very poor taste.’
Claire was working on her tapestry. The fading light falling on her from the window made her look faded too. She always seemed to Kit less substantial than other people, like something that had been washed too many times and lost its colour. The only time Claire seemed really to be there was when she was angry; her coldness had some life to it.
‘We’ve all had to bear the cost of that boy’s crime already,’ Dicky said. Kit tried not to stare at him and tried to keep her loathing to herself. Tamsin was opposite Kit, with a magazine and a sherry and dipping in and out of the conversation when she felt she could influence it.
‘They let him out after two years!’ said Dicky. ‘It’s an outrage.’
‘He must have behaved himself,’ said Claire.
‘I wish he’d stayed where he bloody well was!’
Didn’t they have anything else to talk about? Wasn’t there somebody with cancer or an illegitimate baby? It reminded her of how it had been just before Lewis was put away, every school holidays – Lewis Aldridge, and nothing clever, nothing kind, just judgement and gossip.
‘You’d incarcerate him indefinitely, I suppose. He didn’t commit murder!’ She said it furiously; she hadn’t meant to speak, and Tamsin glanced up from her magazine.
‘Shut up, Kit, nobody’s impressed,’ she said.
‘Actually,’ said Claire, ‘one doesn’t really want a person like that anywhere, does one?’
What a vision, what an extraordinary vision; all the people one doesn’t want anywhere, where would they go? Kit imagined vast rows of buildings housing all the people one didn’t want anywhere, and w
anted to go there immediately. There was a silence. Tamsin flicked through her pages and, after a while, looked up.
‘Daddy,’ she said, idly, ‘couldn’t you put him to something in the quarry office, or somewhere? Something it doesn’t matter about. Then Mr Aldridge will be pleased and you needn’t worry too much.’
‘I expect I’ll do something like that, it’s just a bloody bore, that’s all.’
Tamsin sipped her sherry.
‘I’ll telephone now, shall I? I expect you could see him in the morning.’
She got up and wandered out of the room, and Dicky didn’t stop her. Kit watched her go, and heard her pick up the telephone. If she were older, if she were blonde, or appealing, perhaps she could get him a job and ring him up and not be just an unwanted shadow. She heard Tamsin laughing her social laugh and then she came back into the room, smiling to herself, and Kit felt her mean heart and was ashamed of it.
‘I spoke to Mr Aldridge. He was awfully pleased. Thank you, Daddy. To forgive is divine, you know,’ she said.
‘My good girl,’ said Dicky, and kissed her, while Claire sewed and didn’t look up and Kit continued to sit. ‘Good girl,’ he said, stroking her cheek.
Tamsin had waited at the bottom of the drive for him and beeped the horn, and Lewis grabbed the toast from his plate and his jacket and ran out to her. The morning was cool and the top was up on the Austin.
‘Now don’t sulk and try not to be peculiar.’
He did up his tie and smiled, that’s what he mustn’t be: peculiar. She was so very friendly it was impossible not to be drawn in, and it was easier to be in the car with her too, because she had a cardigan over her dress and there were no bare arms to distract him. Her legs were completely covered, in a full skirt, and the coolness of the morning, and the fact that it was morning, made the whole thing less self-conscious than it might have been. Her charm was the same, though, and the conspiratorial, smiling glances.
The quarry office was twenty minutes out of the village, jerry-built and perched on the edge of the abyss of the quarry. It looked as if a strong wind would blow it in. Probably what Dicky was hoping for, Lewis thought. Tamsin drove in a wide arc to the door and stopped.