by Sadie Jones
They went to London. He hadn’t driven into town before and they were lost at first and drove around and looked at things and then parked in Soho Square, and he turned off the engine and waited. It was very quiet without the engine noise and the wind going by.
‘I’ve never been out in London at night before,’ said Kit.
‘I should hope not.’
‘Just tea with aunts, and uniforms.’
He lit a cigarette and she pulled down the mirror and got a lipstick out of the pocket of her jeans. She wasn’t used to doing it, and although she didn’t make a mess of it, it was clumsy, the way she did it, and without vanity.
‘There.’ She turned to him, ‘Is it all right?’
She had a black top on and she squashed her hair down – what there was of it – and smiled at him. He found he couldn’t say anything. He nodded. She looked down into her lap and then glanced up at him.
‘Do you quite like jazz?’
There was only one place to go.
They left the car, and the London night was hotter than the country, and dirty-smelling. Lewis forgot everything except that he was alive and that it was good to be alive, and not shut in anywhere, and the familiarity of the street was not a melancholy feeling, but reminded him of the rush he’d felt whenever he escaped there before, and he thought maybe this was the right place to be.
Kit felt joy at being out with him, and on the streets, and thought if nothing else happened in her life she’d be happy.
They stopped at the corner where the club was, and there was a crowd and Lewis pushed past some people and rapped on a door. The panel slid aside.
‘Lewis. Bloody hell!’
They went inside and Tony slapped Lewis on the shoulder as they went down, and Kit held his hand tightly down the steep, dark stair. It was very smoky and there were people standing on the stairs and around the bar. Lewis was walking into the past.
Kit gripped his hand and kept his shoulders in front of her, and stared. It was very busy and the crowd was noisy and moving, and it was the same as it had been, for Lewis, but still shocking because it was so full of energy and heat. Kit pressed close to him and he led her across the room to a table.
There was only one chair and he seated her and looked around for another. He saw then how thrilled she was, and he felt at home and proud to be showing his place to her. He had been twenty-six months in one prison and then two weeks more in a different kind. He was out now.
The band playing was a small jazz band, close together on the stage, and they were playing something hot and fast. There were people near the stage and people listening, or dancing, or just ignoring the music and talking. There was a couple kissing at a table, which Kit was shocked to see and had to look away from because it made her embarrassed.
Lewis put a chair for himself next to her and went over to the bar. Jack was there. Of course Jack was there.
‘Hey, Lewis; long time, man.’
‘Jack.’
They shook hands.
‘You won’t be looking for any trouble with that pretty girl around—’
Lewis turned around to look for the pretty girl and realised he meant Kit, who was watching the band with her chin on her hands. She felt his look and smiled at him, before looking away again. She looked beautiful, he could see that she did. If she hadn’t been Kit, and he hadn’t known she was fifteen, he would have called her a pretty girl, too. She was fifteen, though. He had been fifteen when he met Jeanie. He didn’t know how old Jeanie was. It wasn’t the same thing.
‘How you been keeping, Lewis?’
‘All right, you?’
‘Pretty good. Gin? And the lady?’
‘No. I’ll have a beer. And a … Coke. Thanks.’
He took the drinks and went over to Kit with them. He sat down. Kit leaned forward and sipped her drink and then laughed suddenly and said something to him, but he couldn’t hear. He leaned towards her and she shouted into his ear over the music. She was talking fast, about whether the band had a singer, and wondering if they were from America, and that they reminded her of another band she had read about; and he couldn’t catch everything she was saying, but just listening to her was lovely because she didn’t know what he knew, and she saw it all her way, which was a good way to see things.
The set finished and the lights came up a little, and Kit sat back and looked at him, as if he’d given her the biggest present in the world. It wasn’t a look he was used to. It made him feel uncomfortable.
‘What?’
‘Nothing—’ But she kept on looking at him.
It was odd how being looked at like that made him feel that he was someone different.
‘Well, for God’s sake, we are having a heatwave.’
Jeanie was at his shoulder. Her hand was on her hip, and most of the rest of her seemed to be on a level with his eye.
‘Hello, Jeanie.’
‘Introduce me?’
‘Jeanie Lee. Kit Carmichael. Kit, Jeanie.’
Kit held her hand out very politely and Jeanie took it.
‘Hello there, Kit Carmichael,’ she said, and then she turned to Lewis, ‘That’s jailbait, Lewis.’
She didn’t lower her voice to say it, and Lewis saw Kit’s eyes widen.
Then she leaned down and said, ‘Happy to see me?’
In a funny way he was, but he glimpsed Kit’s face as he stood up and he turned away from the table and spoke to Jeanie quietly.
‘How’ve you been?’
‘Missed you, baby.’ She had always called him that. He’d been one, hadn’t he?
‘Yeah, I was away for a while.’
‘I heard.’ She patted his cheek. ‘My boy’s all grown up now.’
She was good-looking still.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘she’s just a kid, she doesn’t know anything.’
‘That’s easy to see.’
She looked hard, and he didn’t know if she’d always been so obvious looking, but he remembered how he’d felt about her. It seemed a long time ago. He was worried about Kit.
‘Be sweet, eh?’ he said.
‘You know I can be.’
He had a picture of her in bed with him, in her flat, and how she had tasted in his mouth and the noise she made when he did that to her. Her, and Alice – and Jeanie bent down to Kit and said in her ear, ‘Look after him, honey, won’t you?’
She walked away and Lewis watched her go. She met a man at the bar and he helped her on with her coat and they left together.
Whatever shine there had been on the evening had gone. He waited and felt the flatness and the tension, and he wished he could hide Kit away. He couldn’t meet her eye. She should be in her big, safe house, and part of the clean world where he couldn’t be. He should never have brought her. He hadn’t meant to, he’d just wanted to run away, he hadn’t been thinking about her. He was thinking about her now.
‘Who was she?’ she said, and he could see she was trying to sound casual and he hated himself.
‘Just a – girl.’
‘Did you used to come to this place quite a lot?’ She made it sound so nice.
‘Yes.’
‘And they let you in?’
‘I spent some time here. When it was no good at home.’
‘You’re so lucky. When I run away I can’t go anywhere – the police would bring me back or I’d be kidnapped for a white slave or something. Boys have much more fun.’
He looked up. ‘You run away?’
‘All the time.’ She met his gaze.
‘Why?’
‘Do you read Jean-Paul Sartre?’
She was trying to put him off, and her precocity was lovely, but he knew that she was trying to put him off, and he still wanted to know.
‘No. Why do you run away?’
‘Oh. Just existential crisis, ha-ha, or maybe a difficult home life.’
He remembered her walking barefoot along the road after he and Alice …
‘Why were you on the road
that night? The night I picked you up?’
‘Why were you?’
She was smart. He didn’t say, because I’d just fucked my father’s wife. He could barely sit opposite this clear-eyed girl with it in his mind.
‘Really,’ she looked into him. ‘Why were you?’
‘This is no good. Come on. Let’s go.’
He started up and she grabbed his wrist—
‘Lewis!’
She loved him. He could see that she did and he was terrified she was going to say it again. He leaned forward to her. She was open to him, her face was open to him, and she was alive and hopeful and waiting.
‘Look, Kit. I can only do you harm. I’ve got nothing you need, do you understand? Nothing.’
‘But I know you,’ she said, and he thought she was going to cry.
‘You’ve got some little-girl ideas about – I don’t know what – but you don’t see.’
‘But, Lewis, I can see.’ Her look was steady and she didn’t seem young. ‘I see you. You think you’re dark, and there’s all this darkness around you, but when I look at you … you’re like a shining thing. You’re light. You just are. You always were.’
He seemed to glimpse something, sideways, a way he hadn’t seen, obvious and elusive.
She put her hand out across the table and he could see she was being brave to do it. It occurred to him that she probably hadn’t held a boy’s hand before his, and that he wasn’t a boy, not like that, and he had no right to take it. He could take her hand, and he could have her, and let her think she was right about him, and ruin her, or he could let her go. He reached across the table and gently pushed her hand away from him.
‘Let’s get you home.’
‘I’m not going home.’
‘It’s time.’
‘It is not.’
‘Come on.’
‘Just because you’ve had some absurd attack of spurious conscience?’
‘Your vocabulary must exhaust you. It’s bedtime.’
‘I’m not tired and you think I’m just a baby, to be told—’
‘I don’t think that!’
She was funny, and broke his heart, together.
‘Yes, you do. I’m more grown-up than you are.’
‘That’s a fact. Let’s go.’
‘NO!’
She got up and away from him and went over to the bar, and Lewis watched her and waited to see what she’d do. She checked he was watching and pushed through the people and put herself between two men. She smiled at them. One of the men was the drummer from the band, on his break and drinking. He bent down to her and spoke and she nodded and threw a look over at Lewis that challenged him and made him smile. She was playing, and Lewis could have watched her do it for a while, just to see her, but he thought it might get serious, so he got up. By the time he got over there, the drummer had bought her a whisky. Lewis ignored the drummer and spoke to her.
‘Come on, don’t be childish,’ he said, in her ear.
Kit made a face at him and picked up the whisky. Lewis took it from her and put it on the bar.
‘Hey!’ said the drummer, who was very big, and wearing a patterned shirt, and didn’t know he wasn’t really a part of what Kit and Lewis were doing, which was a private game and pleasing them both. Lewis ignored him. He took Kit’s arm.
‘Let go!’ she said.
‘Let her go,’ said the drummer.
‘Let’s sit down,’ said Lewis.
‘I don’t want to sit down!’
‘She doesn’t want to sit down.’
Lewis saw that he’d have to speak to him.
‘Just forget it, all right?’
This was a mistake. The drummer squared up to him and got very close. Lewis was bored by him and more interested in Kit’s reaction, which was extreme.
‘Sorry,’ she said, very Surrey, ‘you have it’, and she handed the whisky to the drummer, who didn’t stop staring at Lewis.
‘Come on!’ she said to him.
‘You wanted the lady, go with the lady,’ said the drummer and Lewis wanted to laugh, and then there was a whistle and a blast on the trumpet, and the drummer looked up and was distracted.
The rest of the band were back up on the stage and the lights were going down and he couldn’t stay and hit Lewis, even if he’d really meant to. He stared at him again and left.
‘Lewis!’
‘I wasn’t going to fight him.’
‘Yes you were!’
‘You’re so easy to tease.’
‘No, I’m not. You are. I hate whisky. Are you in love with Tamsin?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you kiss her?’
‘She wanted me to.’
The singer came on. She was black and very voluptuous, and she was wearing a white satin dress, and she moved very slowly as if she had to drag her feet along. She reached the centre of the stage by degrees, hips first and feet after, and then she gave a slow smile.
‘Help,’ said Kit.
The band started to play again and it wasn’t like before, it was an old Gershwin song, but not recognisable at first because of the way they did it, with double bass and the piano climbing in and out of the bass, and it was only when she started to sing that they knew it. Her voice was warm and scratchy, playing with the rhythm, and the song was about loving somebody and regret, and people started to dance.
Kit stood away from Lewis and looked at him and held out her hand.
‘What do you want?’ he said, and she smiled at him.
He took her outstretched hand and let her pull him out onto the floor.
She was in his arms and it was a new feeling, and she felt just right to him. She had her head close to him, but not touching, and when he bent down he could feel the softness of her hair, and her hand was resting on his shoulder. He held her hand to dance and put his other hand behind her, at the top of her back, and then after a while a little higher so that his thumb rested in the perfect hollow at the back of her neck, where her hair stopped and her neck began. His thumb fitted there and he didn’t need to move it, or stroke her, to know that she felt it, and he wouldn’t have done anyway because it was right the way it was. She was a fine girl and he felt her fineness and his surprise at finding her and he didn’t question it at all. He forgot that she wasn’t for him and all the reasons she wasn’t for him.
Kit felt as if she was holding fire in her two hands and not getting burned.
When they walked back to the car they didn’t talk, but Lewis took her hand and held it.
They drove out of London feeling that they were very far apart from each other in the car, and so she moved across and put her head on his shoulder and he drove with one hand on the wheel and the other arm around her.
Kit was asleep when they came into the village and the sun was just up.
She woke when the sirens started, and because Lewis had to pull the wheel over to get the car into the verge, and the car swerved and then bumped up onto grass. A police car was in front of them, and another behind, and the sirens stayed on and there were policemen coming out of the cars and coming fast at them and Lewis was dragged out and cuffed, with his face pressed down onto the roof of the car.
Kit’s door opened and Dicky leaned in, pulling her out and away towards his car, and when she saw her father she screamed for Lewis. He hadn’t fought until then, but he fought when she screamed and they couldn’t hold onto him, and had to hit him in the side and in the head to get him down into the police car. He was still fighting though, because he could still hear Kit.
People came out of their houses to see it and stood staring as Lewis Aldridge got arrested again and Kit Carmichael was rescued from him by her father. They stayed out in the street for a long time talking about it and waiting to see if anything else would happen, but apart from Preston coming down to the village to collect the Jaguar, nothing did.
Chapter Eight
The feeling of the handcuffs was familiar to Lewis and the time in bet
ween wearing them, and in between being locked up, became shadowy very quickly.
In the middle of the day he was brought out of his cell and put into a room and questioned about Tamsin: hitting her and what else he’d done to her, and what he had done to Kit and where they’d been. It was the same room he’d been in after burning the church. He didn’t answer very well. He was stunned from being hit in the head and wasn’t sure what he could answer because he couldn’t remember what had happened, or if he was there because of Tamsin or because of the church or because of Alice. He wasn’t sure why his father was standing next to him sometimes and then not there, and why he wouldn’t speak to him, but then he realised his father wasn’t really there – he was just imagining he was there. There was Wilson, and another policeman who came in and out, and they were talking about him and saying he was insane and asking him stupid things to try to catch him out, and he knew that was what they were doing, but he couldn’t follow them anyway. His mind closed up to get away from it and he lost himself.
Kit was locked in her bedroom, which she was used to. In the drawing room, Dicky sat next to Tamsin when the chief inspector came to see her. She wouldn’t press charges against Lewis and she made it very clear that he hadn’t raped her. When the inspector tried to get details from her about what Lewis had done, Dicky stopped him. There was to be no discussion about it; she was intact.
Lewis was let go late in the afternoon. Wilson telephoned Alice to say he was coming home and, after she put the telephone down, she stood in the hall and waited, and pictured him walking back through the village towards the house. She gripped her hands together and stared at the front door and after a long time he came in.
His face was empty and it made her stay very still when she saw it. It was a look she remembered from before he was sent away and she understood why it frightened people, but it didn’t frighten her; she had known him for so long and he had never hurt her. He went past her, and up the stairs.