‘It doesn’t sound very modern,’ huffed Alice.
‘It isn’t,’ Christie agreed. ‘But it works. Especially with the rugby boys – they’re the worst. Or you can just muck around, have fun.’ She made it sound like a bad thing. ‘It’s up to you, of course, but did you have fun? Really?’
Alice thought of the previous evening – the flush of flirtation over cocktails, the initial rush of excitement, yes, but with sweatiness, disappointment, the prickling of embarrassment hot on its heels.
‘My mother says these are the years,’ said Christie.
‘The years for what?’
‘Finding the right person. We’ll never have it as good as this – never again be surrounded by so many bright young men.’ She looked hard at Alice. ‘Do you know Magnus? The only decent hairdresser in town. He’s da bomb.’ Christie had the unfortunate habit of trying to pep up her rather conservative way of speaking with occasional street lingo. It didn’t really work.
Alice put a hand to her hair. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘I’m going to take you to see him. He’ll sort you out. My treat.’
As she sat in Magnus’s chair, her hair falling from her in drifts, Alice suddenly felt unspeakably sad, as if she were being shorn of her old self; as if pieces of her childhood were falling away from her. She closed her eyes.
‘It’s going to be so worth it,’ said Christie from behind her, reading her mind. And, strangely enough, she was right. Alice emerged from the salon as if from a chrysalis. Her brown hair became a short blonde bob, framing her eyes and making her look neat, in charge and altogether less mousy.
‘We need to get you some clothes to match,’ Christie said. ‘Let’s start with a dress.’
That night, in her new Karen Millen dress, George, in his final year, noticed Alice for the first time. It was not a style Alice would have normally gone for, with a bodice in turquoise and a hot pink skirt, but it attracted the eye, as Christie put it, and emphasised her tiny waist. It cost her a serious chunk of her student loan, but it was worth it for the reaction it got. In between making eyes at George, she calculated how she was going to live for the rest of the term. She’d certainly have to work through the holidays.
At the end of the night, George walked her back to her room, but she allowed him only to the bottom of the staircase.
‘So, which one’s yours?’ He smiled, looking up the stairs.
‘You’ll see.’ She smiled back. ‘Maybe.’
His mouth looked sulky for a moment; he took a step closer to her.
‘But it would be fun to see it now.’
Keep it light, Christie had said.
‘Yes, but it’ll be something for you to look forward to.’
Alice stepped closer too, glanced up through her eyelashes at George.
He reached for her hand, his eyes glassy, unfocused. It wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it. Standing on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek for a second, inhaling the whisky and aftershave smell of him, then turned quickly and trotted up the stairs.
‘Anna, come back!’ George had called after her petulantly. ‘Anna!’
‘No,’ she shouted back. ‘And it’s Alice.’
Naomi
She always had a temper. She broke my arm as a child – an accident, of course: I’d been cheating at Grandmother’s Footsteps and she pushed me too hard, misjudged her own strength.
Then there was my first boyfriend, Jamie Havers. A boy with brown hair and freckles. He used to follow me around Pony Club Camp when I was eleven. I liked him, but I didn’t want to kiss him, so he stopped talking to me and told the other boys I was frigid. It made me cry.
The day after he dumped me, Ruth asked the boys if she could join in with their game of touch rugby. I remember it was a hot August day and being outside all week had tanned the boys’ noses. Mrs Jenkins, who was in charge of looking after the children at camp, was wedged into a deckchair outside her caravan, keeping an eye on everyone and watching the game.
Ruth considered the scene for a bit and then approached the biggest of the boys. ‘Can I play?’
He squinted down at her. ‘There aren’t any other girls playing.’
‘So?’
‘Let her play,’ said a cheery dark-haired boy who was friends with Ruth.
She hung back at first, running for the ball but not trying too hard. She was biding her time for when Jamie got hold of it, which he did before too long. He was a good player, tenacious and nippy. But Ruth was faster. As he ran for the try-line, she began to give chase and just before he reached it, she caught the edge of his T-shirt in her hand and gave it a yank so that he fell, stumbling, to the floor. Then the pair of them were wrestling for the ball, rolling over and over each other. It got so vicious that the other boys started jeering and even Mrs Jenkins sounded panicked as she heaved herself up from her deckchair to disentangle them.
Ruth came out of the tussle wild-haired, with a scratch down her face, but she laughed off any fuss from me. ‘It’s just rugby,’ she said. ‘Just a fight for the ball.’
Where we were from rugby was a religion. The bar didn’t have a telly – Grandma wouldn’t hear of it – but the locals would gather afterwards to discuss the game. Everyone had an opinion on it.
We knew our father was different, though: he didn’t care as much for rugby as other men did, but he had to pretend. He was proud of the differences he’d chosen – the bow tie and flashy car – but there were ways in which he wanted to be the same, wanted to fit in with the posh crowd. Loo not toilet, lunch not dinner, long-sleeved shirts not short. There was so much to remember and apart from the voice, the slight flatness of his vowels, you’d almost never have known.
‘What do you think about these changes to the scrum rules?’ he asked one day in the bar after a game, cribbing from a newspaper article he’d just read.
‘It’ll make it harder on the pitch. Not that you’d know.’
It went quiet, the hum of conversation dying down for a moment the way it does in films. Dai the Poet had been drinking in The Swan all day. His hands looked swollen on his glass as he handed it to our mother for a refill. No please or thank you.
‘What do you mean?’
Our father wasn’t as drunk as Dai – he didn’t drink like that – but he’d had a couple of beers and you could tell, if you knew him well, when he was about to lose his temper: a quick tightening of the mouth, which Ruth inherited, a change in the focus of his eyes.
Dai’s laughter came out like a breath. ‘Not a game you played at school, I imagine.’
Our mum, with Dai’s glass in her hand, paused for a moment before filling it.
‘Where was that again?’ Dai said. ‘Your school?’
Our father ignored the question. ‘I played rugby at school,’ he said shortly, looking away from Dai as the lie came out.
He never talked about his childhood. And you could see that Dai – I never knew why they called him Dai; he sounded as English as they came – guessed, too, and that it was a test.
When the glass she had been holding shattered on the tiles, our mother didn’t do anything to clear it up, just looked at Dai steadily: ‘I remember coming to see you play rugby.’ She glanced at our dad. ‘He wasn’t very good.’
Later, chopping avocados in the kitchen, she said to us: ‘Public school boys. They are soft on the outside and hard on the inside.’ She held up the stone of an avocado. ‘Be careful of them, girls. They seem so polite, so courteous …’ She paused, looking for the words. ‘I don’t know what those schools do to them.’ She didn’t usually speak to us like that. As if we were already grown up. ‘And the worst thing is,’ she added, looking sadder than I’d ever seen her, ‘he wants to be one of them.’
Kat
November 1999
The first time sets a precedent. George likes doing it in dangerous places, Ruth tells Kat. In places where they might get caught. Their relationship – if that’s what it can be called, for there is no wining or dining or s
nuggling or watching films – involves doing it in risky places. They do it in George’s car a lot at night and sometimes in wild places during the day. When they are particularly bored or drunk they do it in the toilets of clubs, once after hours on the pool table in the college bar. They do it on golf courses and on the beach, though Ruth draws the line at George’s suggestion of the Shack – a tiny stone changing room on North Beach, with dripping tiles and the stench of urine.
Kat doesn’t see Ruth much in these early weeks and when she does catch her there are subtle changes – her eyes glassy, a high colour to her cheeks. Some girls, once they discovered sex, well, that was it. There had been a girl at school – quiet, bookish – and then she’d got into men and completely flunked her exams. Kat knew as well as anyone how unhinged it could make you. But she’d found, though she was still getting to know Ruth, that she missed her when she wasn’t around, missed her loopiness, her irreverence.
When Kat asks, over lunch, how things are going, Ruth goes quiet for a bit. She says eventually: ‘It’s the most exciting sex I’ve ever had.’
Kat smiles and says, before she can stop herself: ‘Well, it’s the only sex you’ve ever had, really. Still …’ She clinks her glass against Ruth’s. ‘Well done.’
‘Thanks.’ Ruth looks irritated.
‘At least one of us is getting some,’ says Kat, trying to make up for it.
They’re at the Two Pheasants on the outskirts of town. Kat had wanted to go somewhere new and she’d heard about the four-legged stuffed pheasant mounted on the bar. The two pheasants, which had been sewn together by a taxidermist with a dark sense of humour, were encased in glass sharing four legs, two heads and, weirdest of all, three eyes. Other stuffed animals peered out from dark corners of the room – a surprised-looking fox, a dishevelled owl.
‘It’s creepy, isn’t it?’ Ruth had said when they’d arrived.
Kat laughed. ‘It’s kitsch, darling. I thought you’d love it. The owner’s an aging burlesque dancer – with an eye for a pretty boy, I think.’ She’d looked towards the barman, who had looked straight back at them. Well, at Ruth, really. His hair was unruly and there was a glint of silver at his ear, like a pirate. He’d seemed distracted when Kat ordered their food, kept glancing over to where Ruth was huddled in the corner.
‘That guy we bump into sometimes,’ Ruth says suddenly. ‘Richard?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You like him, don’t you?’
Kat looks down at her food. ‘I suppose I do.’
‘Why are you weird about it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you talk about everything else so openly. Why are you so weird about him?’
‘I’m not weird,’ Kat says pertly, adding, ‘I think he likes you.’
Ruth blinks. ‘He doesn’t know me.’
‘Well, sometimes …’ Kat doesn’t know how to end the sentence, so she starts again. ‘Does that matter?’
Thinking of Richard makes her feel guilty. The last time they’d chatted he’d brought up the subject of Ruth and George again. ‘It’s not just sour grapes,’ he said with a short laugh. ‘Honestly, Kat, he’s bad news.’ He looked for a moment as if he were going to say more, but in the end he just said: ‘He hurts people.’
Kat weighs up the moment. ‘Be careful, Ruth. I know what it feels like now: you feel all sexy and liberated,’ she says. ‘The endorphins are flowing. You feel amazing.’
‘Shh.’ Ruth looks embarrassed. The barman glances over again.
‘But it’s usually followed by a crash. Especially with someone like George.’ Kat lights a cigarette. ‘It’s the un-Holy Trinity: he’s got a reputation. He’s not in love with you. And sooner or later he’s going to get bored.’
‘Ouch.’ Ruth shifts in her seat. The leg of her chair scrapes across the floor. She takes a cigarette, lights it and inhales angrily. They sit in silence for a while. ‘Honestly, I know it’s not the love match of the century, but I can cope with it.’
‘OK.’ Kat stubs her cigarette out. She smiles. ‘I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk about the sex again.’
At the bar, Kat finds herself peering back at the pheasant to see if she can find the seams, but the lighting in the pub is too dim and the taxidermist has done too good a job. She feels uneasy about Ruth and George, that she hasn’t done enough to pass on Richard’s warning, but then Kat had been in similar situations lots of times and, like Ruth, she had never seen things for what they were until it was too late. What could one do?
The barman is polishing a glass, which he puts down for a second to serve her. Kat’s about to give her order, when he leans in over the bar, rather close to Kat’s face, and says in a low voice: ‘Why is your friend ignoring me?’
Kat follows his gaze and turns back to Ruth, who is fishing around in her handbag for something. She is sometimes surprised by her friend’s effect on men. Ruth is looking scruffy today, anyway, a bit tired. Maybe it’s her red hair: she is sitting in a pool of light under a window and the sun catches in it in a spectacular fashion.
Kat laughs uneasily. ‘I don’t think she is.’ It was an odd way to approach a girl, if that’s what he was doing.
‘So, she hasn’t said anything about me?’ he persists.
‘No,’ says Kat shortly. ‘No, I’m afraid, she hasn’t.’ She sizes him up – good-looking, dark curly hair – still, there was something she didn’t like about him, which struck a false note. He’s wearing an earring in his left ear, but his voice is well-spoken, as if he’s trying to be something he’s not. A trust-fund student pretending to be a pirate.
‘I’ve been thinking about her. Hoping she’d come back in …’
Kat sighs. ‘She hasn’t been in here before.’ Why won’t he just take her bloody order?
He laughs and picks up a glass. ‘How would you know? Do you do everything together?’
Kat feels wrong-footed. She looks back at her friend. Maybe Ruth has been here before.
His voice becomes a whisper. ‘She was here last week on her own, looking for a pick-up. We spent the evening together.’ He is polishing the glass very slowly. ‘Doing it all night,’ he adds unnecessarily. ‘And now nothing. No reaction at all. It’s like we’ve never met.’
Kat looks back at Ruth again. Strange that she hadn’t said anything. ‘Right,’ she says vaguely, not sure what to make of it. She doesn’t feel like a drink so much any more. She’d been wrong about this pub: maybe it wasn’t nice, after all. Maybe there was something sinister about it.
‘She might have been dicked around before, but we’re not all the same,’ he says as she walks away. ‘Some of us have feelings.’
Ruth is looking at her by the time Kat reaches the table. ‘What was all that about?’
‘He thought he knew you.’ Kat puts her cigarettes into her handbag and slings it over her arm. ‘Let’s get a drink somewhere else.’
Ruth looks at him and laughs. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’
Kat glances back at the barman as they leave the pub. ‘That’s what I said.’
Alice
March 2016
Everything seems to have mellowed while Alice was doing what she now thinks of as her house arrest. Now her first trimester has passed, she has returned to work to find colleagues in shirtsleeves, crocuses pushing up in the window boxes outside her office. She’s feeling a lot better: not entirely herself, but stronger nevertheless and happy to be around people again.
Her client, Elizabeth Gregory, is clearly feeling better, too. Her bitterness has mellowed. She’s been growing out her bob, letting her grey hair wave to her shoulders. Her clothes are different, as well. Today she’s wearing a long, flowing skirt and a loose blazer. There’s no sign of her Eighties power suits, or the tight fury around her mouth Alice had spotted before.
‘You know what I find strange,’ Elizabeth says now. ‘I never once saw him on the loo.’
‘You wanted to see your husband on the loo?’ Alice asks, st
ruggling to keep a straight face. She knows Elizabeth well enough to tease her.
The older woman shakes her head, smiling. ‘It’s not about that. It’s about intimacy. I lived with him for thirty-nine years and we never did that in front of each other. I don’t even know how many people he’s slept with.’
‘Well, lots of partners don’t know that information about each other,’ says Alice. She has absolutely no idea if that’s true or not, but she doesn’t have a clue how many women George has slept with. She dreads to think. ‘Relationships are different.’
Since her separation from her husband, George’s former colleague, Elizabeth had got in touch with an old flame through Facebook. She looks happy for it, happier than Alice had ever seen her. Her husband’s relationship with his researcher, meanwhile, had fizzled out and he was desperate to win his wife back, but the balance of power had changed. Elizabeth was determined not to return.
‘It’s what I’m gaining I need to focus on,’ she tells Alice. ‘I want passion. I want intimacy. It’s my turn for that.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Alice smiles politely, ‘I think it might be worth being discreet about it at the moment – what with the press interest.’
She’s concerned that Elizabeth’s new relationship is distracting her from the bigger picture. It’s an enormous thing to lose a partner: the one close witness to most of your adult life. George is no picnic, but it’s hard to imagine life without him. She had read recently about the effect of losing a long-term partner being like a loss of self because it was, actually, in a way, a loss of yourself. We store memories in other people: that’s why she can’t change a plug and George doesn’t know anyone’s birthday. Even Teddy’s.
It was a sleepy Sunday in her first year when Alice had first seen him. She and Christie were sitting on the lawn outside the bar enjoying a gin and tonic on an unseasonably warm March afternoon that had brought everyone out of their rooms into the quad. A lank-haired second year strummed the chords from ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ by an open window. Alice was finding it hard to concentrate on her book.
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