She hadn’t had to: Alice had seen it enough in other marriages; though, in truth, it had always been different in her own. In his favour, George never demands too much of her in the way of housework or ironing. Their cleaner, Mrs T, looks after all that. Alice organises the Ocado deliveries, remembers birthdays, writes thank-you notes. What does George do? ‘I bring the fun,’ he would say. Not to mention their house in Notting Hill, which his parents had helped with. Distasteful as it is to think about it, there are advantages to being married to George, there’s no doubt about it.
Alice tries to remember more about the party where she’d seen Ruth, but not much more comes to her. She closes her eyes and tries again, recalls, on a separate occasion, walking into the college bar with her hand in George’s, and seeing Ruth and a friend of hers, Kat, exchange a glance, not a happy one, at the sight of them. They said a few words to each other and got up to go. As they passed George and Alice, Ruth looked as if she was about to say something, but Kat tugged at her sleeve: ‘Don’t.’
‘Do you know those girls?’ Alice had asked after they’d gone.
‘What girls?’ George asked, but then he’d seen Dan and bellowed a greeting at him. And that was that.
He and Dan were inseparable. They’d come up to St Anthony’s from Eton together with Teddy and a couple of others – a gang with a point to prove, perhaps, having not made it into Oxbridge. Alice had always been quite envious of the way George had started with a ready-made group. But of all his friends, Dan had been George’s closest. They made a funny pair – Dan was tall, slim and silent, George stout and loquacious. Dan’s looks would draw the girls to them but George’s charm would make them stay.
Alice had always liked George the most. A little shy herself, she’d found it hard to know what to say to Dan and he never gave much back. Whenever George popped to the bar and left them alone, Alice would find herself tongue-tied, unsure how to interact with Dan on her own. The thing was, she thinks now, it seemed that a part of him enjoyed how uneasy she was, as if it were a game.
When George came back from the bar, he’d say, ‘How are you chaps getting along?’
And once, Dan had said, ‘Oh, we’re getting along famously.’ It was a little piece of nastiness that only Alice could appreciate.
Another time, they’d gone out dancing and Alice, after a tipple too many, started mucking around with a pole, swinging around it sexily and giggling at George as she did.
George had grinned and blown her a kiss, but he’d been distracted by the time she returned to the table.
‘Great dancing,’ Dan had said in a tone that implied he meant quite the opposite. ‘Really sexy.’
Once or twice, when George was in one of his tender moods, in bed perhaps or after a few glasses of wine, Alice might ask: ‘Does Dan like me?’
And George would look completely puzzled and say: ‘Of course, you silly thing. Why would you ask a question like that?’
But it didn’t matter what he said, because Alice always knew, deep down, that Dan didn’t – that he’d never thought Alice was good enough for George. Maybe it was that she’d gone to a state school, or that her family didn’t have as much money as George’s; maybe it was that she didn’t have George’s natural wit, or the confidence of the people who’d grown up in the same social circles as the Etonians. Maybe, she thought on some days, it was because Dan had been in love with George.
She blinks at the laptop screen. No, that was ridiculous. Dan had liked girls. Of course, he had.
But there had been such a strong connection between them, as if they shared some kind of secret. Maybe even a secret related to Ruth Walker – to why she might have hated George enough to shout at him, to leave a room when he entered. Alice sighs. She’s not going to be able to concentrate on anything else unless she does some digging. She picks up her laptop and heads to George’s study.
Kat
October 1999
Dressed in black, Kat smudges her lipstick on her third cigarette. The rush of nicotine makes her feel light-headed, insubstantial. She had been so full of hope for university – had had a rather precise idea about the kind of life she was going to lead. That was why she had picked this wild town on the edge of Britain over a civilised place like London. She had packed a couple of bottles of champagne, nicked from her father’s wine cellar, and cigarettes and the Collected Works of Dorothy Parker – but she had been greeted at the gates by the freshers’ rep, a pale, gangly boy with wispy hair that stuck out in different directions. Not fanciable at all.
She could tell he wasn’t used to girls like Kat – not used to girls full stop – and it hadn’t taken much to make him blush into his tea, make his excuses and scuttle off back to his dusty textbooks. Kat had never been one for making an effort with people she couldn’t see the point of. It was something she had inherited from her father. Not a nice trait, she realised, but then her father wasn’t a very nice man.
But if she liked someone, it was another matter entirely, as if a light bulb had been switched on. It had been like that the other night in what passed for this town’s only nightclub. She’d met him a few drinks in, so she couldn’t remember exactly how things had started. There she had been, waiting by the bar, and he seemed to have appeared beside her. Messy hair, dark eyes, low voice. Soothing to be around, a measured way of speaking and holding himself. And she had felt a kind of certainty, a kind of excitement.
And admittedly, she’d had five, or maybe six, vodka cranberries at that stage, so the certainty could have just been an epiphany created by booze and a handsome face. But then she had woken up the next day early and surprisingly clear-headed, sure that something important had begun, and a couple of days later the feeling had barely shifted.
No one she’d asked knew who he was. It didn’t help that she couldn’t remember his name. He was a second year – she recalled that much – and he played the guitar in a band and could quote Dorothy Parker.
And now, at this party, there he is again and Kat, who is never nervous, is experiencing a fluttering feeling in her limbs. Strange how liking someone can distil into a single detail: the smell of his cologne, the feeling of his arm under your hand, the sound of his laugh. With this guy it’s his voice – low and calming – she can catch the cadence of it from where she is standing. He’s talking to a small bloke next to him, with a keen, ratty face. Kat looks at him steadily, waiting for him to glance at her in return so she can smile, or look away, and let it all begin.
But he doesn’t look at her, because he’s looking at someone else.
Kat has seen the girl before at other freshers’ events. She is wearing a long white dress – a bold choice for a redhead and a touch virginal for Kat’s tastes. There’s something knowingly Pre-Raphaelite about the combination. It calls to mind paintings of tragic heroines, tresses weighed heavy with water and flowers. Still, she has a lively, likeable face, but then, thinks Kat, putting out her cigarette and straightening her dress, before making her way to the messy-haired guy, so does she.
‘Hello again,’ she says.
‘Kat, isn’t it?’ he smiles. ‘This is Jerry.’ He jerks a thumb at the boy he’s standing next to.
‘Richard’s in love,’ says Jerry.
Richard. That was it. Kat tries to smile again and looks over at the redhead.
‘Shut up, Jerry.’ Richard stops looking at the girl and turns to Kat.
‘You can’t take your eyes off her.’ Jerry’s mouth twitches. ‘You know what they say about redheads?’
Kat doesn’t believe for a second that this boy knows anything about redheads – or girls, for that matter. The three of them watch as the girl lights her cigarette in a knowing way and makes her way to the drinks table.
‘Go and talk to her,’ Kat says quickly to Richard.
She doesn’t want him to – of course, she doesn’t want him to – but she will never be one of those women. A memory of her mother hovering around her father pops into her head – who holds onto a m
an’s sleeve, who begs him to stay.
Richard bites his lip. ‘Maybe later,’ he says quietly. ‘How are you?’
‘When you like someone, you should just try,’ says Kat, ignoring the question, aware of the irony. ‘Just say hello.’
He smiles. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ He touches her arm to excuse himself. ‘Wish me luck.’
Kat watches Richard as he picks his way across the room. At one point, stuck behind a tight cluster of maths students who won’t make way for him, he glances back at Kat with what looks like a question in his eyes. She smiles brightly and gives him a thumbs-up. As he reaches the drinks table, the redhead is standing with her back to him, which is awkward – so difficult to approach someone like that: do you tap them on the back? Start a conversation with their shoulders? But Kat will never know how that conversation might have started, because there’s a sudden movement in the cluster around the drinks table, a gasp and, as if in slow motion, a glass of red wine slices through the air towards the girl’s white dress. There’s a shriek and the guy who has spilt the drink is moving towards her, all apologies and hands, trying to dab at the jagged stain with his handkerchief.
‘Oldest trick in the book,’ Jerry breathes next to her, looking towards the student with the handkerchief: a sturdy-looking chap with aquiline features and an air of unshakable confidence.
‘What?’
‘George Bell,’ says Jerry. As if that explained something in itself. ‘He’ll be saying, “Let’s get you out of those wet clothes.” Something like that.’
‘Right.’ Kat makes out the back of Richard’s head in the shifting crowd.
‘Classic George.’ Jerry smirks. ‘He’ll always pick the most beautiful girl in the room and do that sort of thing.’
Kat blinks, pushes a strand of hair behind her ear.
What is Richard doing in all this kerfuffle, as George passes the redhead a cloth, as he pours her another drink, as he lifts his hand, briefly, to wipe away a few drops, real or imagined, from the girl’s hair? There he is. Kat catches a glimpse of Richard’s face, pale and grimacing, as he turns back towards them.
‘What happened there?’ she asks.
‘George happened,’ he says in a low voice so Jerry won’t be able to hear. He looks into his drink.
Kat can catch the odd word of George’s plummy voice across the room. ‘Who’s he?’
‘He is’—Richard pauses for a moment as if to find the correct phrase—‘an unspeakable cunt.’
Kat, usually unshockable, blinks at the word. ‘Why?’ she wants to say.
She looks at the girl again, who glances over at them. She narrows her eyes slightly as if in recognition of something. Kat smiles tightly and wonders if Richard has noticed.
The moment passes. The girl seems to be getting ready to go somewhere with George. She picks up her bag and turns her face towards him to say something as they leave. Kat can’t hear what she says, but George laughs heartily and presses a casual hand into the small of her back.
Then, Kat would think later, if things had gone otherwise that night, that moment, everything might have been different. But, instead, she takes another sip of warm white wine and sees, from the corner of her eye, George’s group sashay out of the party, the outline of a white dress as they move away.
And though it should be a relief, though things should brighten, shift, now her rival has gone, that is not the case. She just can’t win Richard’s attention back, nor recapture the magic of the other night and all her usual tricks – a way of telling an anecdote, her hand on his arm, a certain sideways smile – fail to pique a reaction. Or maybe it’s her. It seems to Kat there’s a heaviness to everything she does tonight – the stories aren’t coming out right. The rhythm of how she tells them is wrong. Or the intonation. She can’t tell. But Richard and Jerry’s smiles are polite more than anything. Jerry’s glance darts around the room, while Richard keeps looking at the door. And even Kat’s thoughts drift to the girl in the white dress, the way she walked across the room like a dancer, the way she had caught Kat’s eye before she left.
Some girls had things easy, but Kat had always had to try. To be entertaining: that was the most important thing; that was something she’d learned from Dorothy Parker. And if nights like this made you feel sad and defeated, then you went to bed and woke up the next day and, generally, in Kat’s experience, the darkness would have shifted.
Eventually, Richard finishes his drink and slips away saying something about the library.
When it’s just the two of them, Jerry perks up. He moves closer to her when she speaks. His polite smiles become forced laughter. Occasionally he touches her, on the shoulder, her waist, as if testing something.
‘Where did Richard go again?’ Kat asks, anticipating another touch, stepping away, leaving his hand hanging for a moment in the space between them.
Jerry rolls his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t bother with Richard, if I were you,’ he says. ‘When he likes someone, that’s it.’
Kat looks down at the art deco cigarette case in her hand, her remaining cigarettes lined up like soldiers. It was a present from her father for her eighteenth birthday last year, but she suspects his latest wife, his third now, only seven years older than Kat, might have had something to do with it. Should she bother with another cigarette or not? The feeling of light-headedness is back.
‘That’s it,’ says Jerry again. ‘Richard won’t be swayed from his course.’
The engraving inside, though, that must have been her father: ‘Faute De Mieux’ by Dorothy Parker. He was a huge fan, too – sometimes it was the only thing that Kat could be really sure they shared.
‘It’s funny,’ she says, snapping the case shut. ‘I’m just the same.’
Alice
Standing in George’s study, Alice enjoys the quiet order of the room for a moment. She has no idea if he guesses that she comes in here when she’s alone in the house. It’s one of the things they never talk about. She’s always careful to leave it as she found it. She pops in sometimes as if she’s looking for something, though she is not sure what. She’ll wander around, picking up the odd book or trinket – a fountain pen, an ornament – and wonder where they came from. When they moved into the house, so much just arrived from George’s parents and if she ever asks, George just shrugs and says, ‘That old thing? My ma would know.’ It’s a source of irritation to Alice, who would have liked to fill her home with cleaner contemporary pieces, rather than so much creaking dark wood that he seems to care for so little himself.
His study is one of the tidiest rooms in the house. It’s at the front of the building overlooking the street, though the shutters keep out the light. Political biographies and history books line the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, as well as the odd spy thriller. Alice runs her finger along the spines. Quite a few of them are from his days in St Anthony’s. For such an unsentimental person, George doesn’t like to throw much away.
She settles in the dark leather armchair by the fireplace and switches on her laptop. First, she does an image search for ‘Ruth Walker’ but, though her screen is filled with lines and lines of Ruth Walkers, of all ages and sizes, in gym kits and business suits, grinning in Facebook photos or pouting on Instagram, Alice’s Ruth Walker isn’t there. Nor are there photos of her in any of the articles Alice can find. The first story to come up is an old one from a local paper in the Free Library under the headline ‘Tragedy strikes in St Anthony’s’.
The dress of St Anthony’s student Ruth Walker has been found on South Beach this morning after a three-day police search. Ruth was last seen swimming on 23 June in the early morning after the university’s memorial ball. Walker’s family fear the worst …
Alice blinks. She remembers the day after the ball. Waking up to a terrible hangover and the pouring rain, all the bunting and balloons of the night before mashed up into the mud, to say nothing of empty bottles, plastic glasses, cigarette butts strewn throughout college. Cleaners scowling through cagoules, g
rim-faced porters trying to organise the students while their parents arrived in four-by-fours to pick up their children. And by afternoon, murmurs about the news – had anyone heard? Did anyone know any more? The pulsing blue light of the police cars outside. A different world from the night before with its clowns and fairy lights and the treacly wall of heat in the quad as she had wandered through it hand in hand with George. Sitting on his lap as they watched some stand-up comedy, tutting as he and Dan heckled. And later dancing with her friends, spinning so her dress flew out around her, thinking in that moment she would never feel so carefree.
Alice gives herself a shake. She returns to her search. Most of the articles that the internet throws up are written by Richard Wiseman, Ruth’s boyfriend at college, now a writer for a leftie national George wouldn’t allow in the house. (‘They’ve never got anything nice to say about me, darling.’)
They’d gone everywhere together, Ruth and Richard. She could see them traipsing around college, lighting each other’s cigarettes, sitting next to each other in the library. Richard had been good-looking in a ruffled sort of way: scruffy dark hair, faded jeans. He’d fronted a college band. Alice remembers seeing Ruth dancing at one of his gigs, leaping up and down with an abandon Alice had envied. These days he looked older, more tired, in his byline photograph, and his face had hardened in a way that Alice couldn’t recall from college.
Ruth Walker and the subjects of mental health and missing people seemed to have shaped a lot of Richard’s journalism. He’d even written a book called The Disappeared about unsolved cases with a chapter about Ruth, who appears in his writing as ‘my ex-girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or ‘my student girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or occasionally ‘my girlfriend Ruth Walker’. Alice wonders how Richard’s current girlfriends, or wife, feel about this. She notices most of the articles are from a few years back. Perhaps the obsession petered out.
The Girl Before You Page 3