‘Did you know the family?’ she said, and felt Paul’s hand tighten on her arm. ‘Or are you just guessing?’
At last the doctor looked uncomfortable. ‘Oh, well, I suppose, you’re quite right. I didn’t really know them, and one shouldn’t, God knows.’ He turned his head. ‘Look,’ he said, already moving off, ‘I think I’m supposed to be making some sort of announcement.’
Mum, unfaithful. BOOM, went the flash in Alison’s head. Dead on the floor in her best skirt. Two glasses on the draining board.
Roger Carter was already at his mantelpiece, holding up a glass and chiming it. Morgan stood tall and triumphant at his side, scanning her audience. Alison felt it move then, uncoiling inside her, the murderous flash of white rage. She knew she should never have come back.
* * *
Paul got her out in the end.
He stood at her side with his head raised, attentive to Roger Carter’s hearty self-satisfaction and she thought, if he looked down at her, if he so much as shifted position it would be over, he would know, she would lose it. But he didn’t move.
In the hotel room before they’d come Paul had asked her where she’d gone in the car. The first glass of champagne inside her, and she’d felt her insides contract.
‘Nowhere much,’ she said, impossibly calm as adrenaline counteracted the alcohol. But suddenly so scared she couldn’t stop herself holding out the glass for another. How weird was she being? It seemed to her as though it was written all over her face, but she had no way of telling. He watched. She drank.
But now in the Carters’ sitting room Paul didn’t look down. Slowly, slowly she felt herself subside, and when at last Morgan’s gratitude and anecdotes and gay laughter stopped he leaned down and said, in a whisper, ‘Thank Christ that’s over. Let’s get out of here.’
‘I’ll get the coats,’ Alison had said, ‘if you say goodbye.’ But Lucy Carter had disappeared from the crowded room, and she didn’t know where to find the coats without her. She retreated into the hall.
It was empty, but standing at the foot of the wide staircase with its mahogany banister Alison heard their hostess’s voice, raised. She followed it to a kitchen and there she was, Lucy Carter, her cheeks red under the room’s bright lights. The girl in her apron was standing over a broken glass looking sulky. ‘They’re upstairs,’ said Lucy, in response to her query, trying to convert her annoyance into a smile. ‘On the bed. My bed.’ Alison backed out again.
The upper floor of the house was warm and stuffy, carpeted and wallpapered with a gallery of doors but to Alison’s relief the first room she looked into was the right one. A vast flounced bed, silver-framed photographs on a dressing table; this was what a happy marriage looked like. Alison couldn’t wait to get out of there. Their coats weren’t far from the top of the pile, she grabbed them, flying around the gallery and down the stairs. Paul was waiting for her at the bottom, with the tall pale man Morgan would be marrying.
‘I said we’d give Christian a lift,’ he said.
It had seemed like an eternity stuck in the baronial sitting room but when Alison got in the back and looked at her watch it wasn’t even nine. As they drove back the high green hedges were just turning darker either side of them and in the front seat the men were talking, but she couldn’t have said what about. She could see the back of Christian’s head: she tried to remember his surname, something Germanic. His head was squarish, and he sat very upright. He and Morgan were getting married: the thought was suddenly awful to Alison. They’d met over a conference table, he’d said when Alison had asked when she’d found herself awkwardly, briefly alone with him in the Carters’ sitting room, and he’d given her that underpowered smile. Morgan refers to it as a merger. Do you see? She’d had to turn away, at the awful metaphor. How could you ever know enough about another person? To shut yourself up with them. And then Paul turned his head a little to say something, she saw the line beside his mouth that had become familiar, the half smile and she thought, he’s different, though.
As they came into the hotel behind the reception desk Jan looked up from under the blond helmet of hair, alert with curiosity, with some piece of news, and on instinct Alison moved to block her.
With Paul at her back she crossed to the desk, looking in her bag. It had begun as a distraction but something was missing, something was wrong. ‘I’ll just go upstairs a minute,’ she said over her shoulder to him. ‘Will you get me a brandy?’ Smiling to forestall any word from Jan until he was gone, out of earshot. Turning back she heard the swish of the bar door behind him. The manageress had a scrap of paper in her hand, holding it out, her expression turning slightly bewildered.
Nodding as if the message was exactly what she’d expected, thank you, taking the number Jan handed her, thrusting it casually into her pocket as if it could wait. But as she turned the corner of the big staircase and was out of sight of all of them, she ran.
Sitting in the hotel room with her hot cheek pressed against the big window and her bag in her lap Alison dialled the number, looking down into the lit circle of gravel where the cars were parked. She stared down at the contents – purse, bits of paper, old tampons – but it wasn’t there, her scarf wasn’t there, but she couldn’t think for the phone’s tinny ring in her ear. It’d be in the car.
The voice answered, the voice from long-ago, lower than before, rougher, but that old jeering familiarity. ‘I knew it was you,’ she said, then softly, ‘Ez.’
Coming back down later Alison had made herself yawn as she came into the bar and they’d both looked across at her. Christian had got to his feet, incorrigibly polite in a European sort of way, nodding. He had the very faintest accent. He was South African by birth but had lived everywhere: Switzerland since university, he had told her that in the car, apologetically.
She didn’t sit down. ‘I don’t think I could eat anything after all those canapés,’ she said, looking at the sandwiches that had just been set down on their table, and it seemed to her that Christian averted his eyes from her thin arms when she said it. She yawned again to stop the blush. ‘I might just head up.’
Paul was up there before she’d removed the dress. He set both hands on her shoulders to keep her in place and then, once she was there, obediently still, he began meticulously to undo the tiny buttons, one by one. She could hear his breathing.
‘It’s from 1943,’ was all he said, his breath on her neck. ‘It has the clothing mark, clothes produced under rationing.’ Carefully he hung it in the wardrobe. Turning, she saw what he wanted next. And then he turned off the light.
* * *
He had hurt her.
In the dark Alison explored the new sensations. The inner part of her thighs, her neck where he had tugged her head back, on the soft insides of her upper arms. She had been pulled apart. She had offered quiet determined resistance and he had exerted silent force. He had made her still, holding her down while he entered her with a blunt repetitiveness until he had pulled out and come on her, making a sound in his throat as he did. Only when he was off her and lying at her side did he touch her kindly: she’d let him stroke her. Patiently, he restored her. She didn’t know if she’d wanted it; her body hummed and whispered to itself in the aftermath, still excited. Did you always know?
She didn’t know how she would get away in the morning, but she would. She had to. A children’s playground out along the spit, carved out of the marsh, she didn’t remember it but she’d find it. ‘Not too early,’ she’d whispered into the phone. ‘I’ll need to … give me time to think of something.’ She felt her body stiff with panic, her strategies and evasions deserting her, her lies looking ever balder, more obvious.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t recognise you?’ The rough, sad, mocking voice. ‘I’d know you anywhere.’ She felt joy bubble up, even knowing it was wrong, that old perverse longing, trailing fear. My friend.
Gina.
She slept.
Chapter Fifteen
It was cool and grey in th
e early light and Sarah Rutherford, called from her bed at six, leaned across the steering wheel of the patrol car.
Thursday morning, and she thanked Christ for small mercies it wasn’t race day yet, with all the idle gawpers that pulled in. Beyond them the ambulance was leaning alarmingly in the soft ground, but in the end it didn’t look like them getting stuck in the mud would make a difference to the outcome. She gazed at the men in fluorescent jackets struggling knee-deep in mud to retrieve something past saving.
They’d got almost right to the scene, thanks to the shingle track Jennings of all people knew about. He spent his weekends walking here, he’d told her gloomily on the way, as Sarah drove too fast between the hedgerows in the thin dawn light. If she turned her head just a little she’d be able to see the skewed black roofline of the Grace house, a way back along the sea wall, but she didn’t turn, she didn’t need to. Creek House came to her in nightmares, it wasn’t going anywhere. She could hear Jennings, outside the car and leaning on the roof muttering something into his walkie-talkie about timing, trying to chivvy a forensics team as he watched the paramedics grappling in the mud. Too late.
The body was hardly distinguishable from its churned element, a coated thing hauled from the slime, slipping in their arms, streaking and spattering them while they struggled to get a purchase. The mud was black underneath, and stank. Arms, legs, trousers all in a slick of grey, hair matted, a shoe clogged, an ankle exposed blue-white against the sludge as at last between them they got him onto a stretcher.
Out in the estuary two barges duelled on the horizon, while others gathered further off, smudges beyond the power station, jockeying already, a day ahead of the start of the race. The tide crept in.
* * *
The man in decorator’s overalls Alison had glimpsed the day before was leaning over the desk in reception, his mop of hair dusty and stiff from behind and a paint-spattered bucket on the floor beside him.
‘Eight hours, I heard, give or take. Plod pulled him out the mud out past Mulville’s Hard. There’s a police car out there now. They say the race’ll go ahead tomorrow though.’
He spoke in a hoarse whisper to Jan behind the reception desk. She smiled stiffly over his shoulder at them and, nodding, Alison turned away, not wanting to be seen listening. And there was Paul, smiling down at her while the words echoed in her head. Police car? And as his smile persisted the question evaded her and the things Paul had done to her came back with a secret, fearful jolt, that hum setting up again like electricity in power lines. Her body loosened and aching at the joints, tenderised.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she heard herself say. ‘I thought out along the sea wall.’
His smile hovered. ‘There’s some good walking, I seem to remember,’ he said, and as if anticipating what she might feel thinking of him here with Morgan, his hand brushed hers, the touch of his forefinger on her wrist. ‘I expect she’s got some maps.’ A nod towards Jan. ‘Don’t get lost, will you?’
‘I’ll ask her,’ said Alison, placating him so he wouldn’t see inside her head and know that she could have traced those paths blindfolded.
Turning at the sound of her voice the decorator leaned and picked up his bucket of tools. She saw his eyebrows white with dust, his stubble, his shock of hair and then he was past her and walking out through the front door, a skinny, stooped figure, old before his time.
I know you.
Jan did have a map, a photocopy of a hand-drawn thing that Alison just accepted, hardly focusing. I know you. She turned away and Paul was still there, waiting, his hands in his pockets.
‘Sure you’ll be all right on your own?’ he said lightly. She stood in front of him, awkward, her face tilted up, and he leaned and brushed her dry lips with his.
‘I won’t be long,’ she said.
‘And then there’s the rehearsal. You don’t need to come to that,’ he said, and shifted, uneasy. She thanked Roger Carter in her head for his rudeness. ‘Honestly.’
She nodded, hiding her relief. ‘Whatever.’
The decorator’s van was out there on the gravel and his name still on it: Simon Chatwin. Faded, the same lettering as he’d had thirteen years before. When he’d been brown from windsurfing, something otherworldly about him, something strange and beautiful about him. Simon. He’d tried to persuade Alison into the back of the van, once, after the kiss in the yard she’d glimpsed inside it, sacking laid down. She’d said no, but she’d lain awake wondering, for nights after. Lain awake thinking of the rough skin on his hands. She walked on past and out into the road, the map she didn’t need in her pocket.
* * *
The playground had been there all the time, snug behind the dyke on the power station side, instantly familiar. It had just been hiding from her, and when she pushed through the low gate she knew why. The twins: this had been their place, until the accident. The heavy wood and iron swingboats, ready to crack a child’s skull, had gone. The girls had used to stand up on them, hanging crosswise as if in rigging, wild and hollering as they flew higher, but as Alison heard the creak of the playground gate something else came back to her. Here: something had begun here.
The lopsided roundabout had also gone, but she could still see it in her head. Letty on her side half under it, an awful sound catching in her throat. Mum had come running, fetched by Joe, Letty white with pain and not letting anyone touch her but the blood soaking her shirt where some broken-off cast-iron shaft under the thing had gouged her. Esme begging, Mads stiff and pale perched up on the roundabout, her eyes gone dark. The ambulance had arrived within minutes that had seemed hours with Mum’s two hands like a vice round Letty’s arm the whole time to stop the blood. That had been the start of a new phase, of hospital visits and doors closed on Esme and Joe.
There was a bright painted climbing frame, all curves, instead. The old slide was still there and on the bottom of it, knees together, feet apart, sat Gina hunched in a parka.
The wonky pushchair sat empty beside her. Her child – her daughter – was tangled in the climbing frame, hair hanging down. Thursday morning but Alison didn’t need to wonder why she was there. Gina might even have had a child just to keep her off school, just to show them.
‘You’re back.’ She was the same old Gina, just roughened round the edges. Her lips looked bruised, high cheekbones under reddened skin, dark under the eyes. Heavier but careless of it; everything about the way she sat and her black gypsy stare said that she didn’t give a fuck. She fished in the parka’s pockets and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She stuck one in her mouth then shook another out for Alison, lit them both without asking and Alison didn’t say no. It had been thirteen years since she’d smoked and she felt it hit the back of her throat. The child was perched right way up in the climbing frame now and still, watching them.
‘I had to,’ said Alison, suddenly helpless to explain it. ‘The wedding.’
The cigarette hung in mid-air halfway to Gina’s mouth. ‘The wedding?’ Scornful. ‘Not her? Not that Morgan Carter bitch? You didn’t come to my wedding.’ And laughed suddenly, a machine-gun rattle. She took a drag and with her eyes screwed up against the smoke said, ‘You never even knew her.’
‘Did you get married?’
Gina shook her head, blew out a plume, eyes flicking over to the girl. ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘Not the marrying kind, am I?’
‘It wasn’t me she invited,’ said Alison, pleading. ‘They don’t know. It was him. My … my boyfriend. Paul. No one knows I’m here.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Gina, her voice rich with scorn, ‘sure they don’t.’ Tilted her head to look round the smoke. ‘Boyfriend?’
‘What do you mean?’ Alison said, trying to catch her breath, sidestepping the idea of Paul. ‘You didn’t tell anyone? How did you find out where we were staying?’
Gina looked at her, expressionless. ‘Only one place to stay,’ she said, ‘in this poxy little dump.’ Alison gazed, waiting. ‘I don’t tell,’ Gina went on, with
grudging pity. ‘I tell no one, I don’t say nothing. You know that. You know me.’ On the climbing frame the girl was threading her way down, hair swinging. Her mother’s long legs.
‘The police,’ said Alison. ‘After. After.’ She searched her brain for words but she was dumb. Gina leaned in, their faces very close, smoke on her breath, the sore-looking cheeks Alison suddenly wanted to touch, to kiss.
‘I don’t tell,’ Gina repeated, and she jerked back, flicked the cigarette away. Her eyes were flat now. ‘You stupid or something? Me, tell that one?’ She meant Detective Sergeant Sarah Rutherford.
‘She’s all right,’ said Alison. Gina didn’t seem to hear. ‘Tell her what, anyway?’ she said. ‘That we was doing mushrooms, that night? And where would that have landed me?’
Alison stared, thirteen years of trying not to wonder, and in a blink the panic rushed back in, the hairs on her neck stood up. ‘We … I didn’t know,’ she said, her lips numb. ‘I was up in my room and I was feeling so … so … messed up. My head was all over the place. I…’ That sensation, of being out of control, sitting up there and listening to sounds that didn’t make sense and having no idea what would happen if she stepped out of her room, flooded back in an instant. The chunk and clatter of a gun being re-loaded.
Gina stared back, eyes narrowed, realisation dawning. ‘Christ,’ she said, disgusted. ‘It’s not like you took anything. You didn’t swallow enough to get a cat going.’ Shook her head wonderingly. ‘You never,’ she said. ‘You never thought you was high?’
‘We didn’t know, did we?’ said Alison, feeling a sob in her throat. ‘Not then. Not even you knew how much you needed, to get out of it. I didn’t know.’ Gina’s arm went out and was round her shoulders and suddenly, roughly, she tugged Alison to her, Alison’s face burying in the parka hood.
‘Fuck,’ said Gina, reverently, somewhere above her. ‘You were up there, though. All the time he was doing it. That true?’
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