As she came, as her grip on things slid away from her, Alice’s hand shot forwards, knocking the book on the floor.
George got to it before she could, glanced at the book before he handed it over. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, holding it out.
Alice blushed, straightened her dress. ‘I think it’s fairly self-explanatory.’
‘But why?’ George asked coldly.
‘I was trying to find out more,’ Alice said, taking it from him. ‘About Ruth.’
George pulled his trousers up, zipped up his flies. ‘Why don’t you talk to me, Al? Instead of snooping around. Reading Richard Wiseman, of all people.’
‘I tried,’ Alice said crossly, sitting down at his desk, looking at the photo frame. ‘Did you change that photo, by the way?’ she countered.
‘What photo?’
‘The one of you and Dan. Did you cut off the red hair?’
George looked puzzled. ‘One of the photos had slipped, so I rearranged the collage.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘Yes, I might have moved the one of me and Dan.’
And he sighed in such a sad, heavy way that Alice felt guilty for a moment, remembered how things had been in the days after Dan’s death, how ashen-faced and silent George had been. They’d been so young for such a loss. Dan and George were barely out of St Anthony’s, just beginning their lives in the real world. After the news, George had retreated into himself. Alice would try to put her arms around him, but he’d gone to a place she couldn’t reach. A place she wasn’t invited.
George crouched down by the desk. ‘Al,’ he said softly. ‘I’m worried about you. Cutting off red hair in photos? What are you talking about?’ He paused. ‘You’re not yourself.’
‘Talk to me,’ said Alice. ‘Help me to work out what has been going on.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Richard Wiseman thinks Ruth might still be alive. Do you think that’s possible?’
He rubbed his nose. ‘It’s possible but not very likely. Ruth was a strong swimmer, but the sea can take anyone.’
He knows that about her, thought Alice. He knew Ruth far better than he let on.
‘Why do you think Richard is so convinced?’ she pressed.
‘Well,’ George sighed, hesitant.
‘Please, just tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘He was infatuated with Ruth. That’s all I know.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
George took a couple of steps towards the fireplace, turning his back on Alice to look into it. ‘They had a terrible row. Not long before she went missing. Almost everyone in college saw it.’
Alice swallowed. ‘What are you saying, George?’
George turned back to her, holding up his hands, unaccountable. ‘I’m just saying he was obsessed.’
‘Were you jealous?’ she asked spitefully.
‘What?’
‘I have to ask – or I’m always going to wonder: were you jealous of Richard Wiseman? Did he steal Ruth from you?’
‘Steal her?’ George laughed nastily. His face curled up into an expression she didn’t recognise. ‘I could have had her back any time I wanted.’
What have I done? Alice thinks now, looking over at George as he sleeps, as if up until that moment she has been standing by and watching someone else live her life; as if she has, through no fault of her own, woken in the middle of the night lying next to a man she doesn’t love.
She has been stupid. No, not stupid, wilfully blind. She remembers a time after he had left college, moved on to the next stage of his life, when she visited him in London. They’d gone out for a meal and drunk heaps, falling on each other as soon as they came through the door. And yet, up in his room, George started tearing the sheets off the bed to change them before they got in. It was most unlike him.
‘Gosh, don’t worry about those now,’ she had said, unzipping her boots. But he had insisted.
A fox shrieks in a neighbouring garden. She guesses now, of course, that he had slept with some other girl in those sheets and he didn’t want Alice smelling her on them. Was it guilt over girls that caused his occasional emotional outbursts? Once in the months after he left St Anthony’s, not long after Dan’s death, he came in late, particularly paralytic. He sat on the edge of their bed and began to cry. ‘I have done bad things. Dreadful things, Alice.’ He cupped her face tightly as she sat up to comfort him. ‘Things I can’t undo.’
The next day, it was as if it hadn’t happened. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, darling,’ he said breezily. ‘Booze blues.’
Naomi
I sometimes get the sense that the same things happen over and over again: that everything is a variation of something that has happened before and that life works like water, in currents, with things tugged away from us and other things returned. That’s the way I think of Nunny as I take him home to show him to my mum.
Our dogs, as children, were Midas the golden Labrador and Scipio the springer spaniel. There was a better reason for Scipio’s name than the alliteration, though I can’t remember what it was. I think someone suggested it in the hotel bar. It could have been Dai the Poet, for all I remember, trying, as always, to prove how clever he was.
Ruth loved Midas, but she loved him in a sensible way. It was Scipio who won her raw, all-consuming, never-want-to-let-you-out-of-my-sight love. For years, I kept a picture on my wall of her hugging Scipio. Her face is all but concealed in his fur. It looks almost as though she is inhaling him. That kind of love reminds us we are alive more than other types. But, of course, there is a higher price to pay.
Scipio was a bad influence on Midas. They’d go missing for hours, scrounging picnic scraps from holidaymakers on the beach or chasing rabbits in the neighbouring fields. Sometimes they’d turn up after a few hours, smelling bad. At others, we’d have to go and look for them, with our mum or dad driving slowly through the lanes, while Ruth and I hung out of the window bellowing the dogs’ names.
And then one time, they went missing for a whole day. After school, we went driving around the lanes as usual, shouting and shouting until our throats hurt. When we woke the next morning, Midas was waiting outside the hotel, looking guilty, but there was no sign of Scipio. In the days that followed, Ruth learned a rhyme – a sort of prayer, really – from a Catholic friend of hers: ‘St Anthony, St Anthony, bring what I’ve lost back to me.’ She recited it over and over in the car as we drove up and down the lanes looking for her dog. But he never came back.
I think of this as Carla and I make our way through the Pembrokeshire lanes towards my mother’s cottage. Carla was the first woman I took home to Wales. When I told my mum about her, she just sighed and said: ‘I always thought it would be Ruth who’d do that sort of thing,’ as if I had moved in with a woman to make some sort of point. But then she met Carla – and Carla, being Carla, won her round.
The second time I saw the woman from Roberto’s was in school prayers. The sun was streaming through the stained-glass windows. And there she was: dark eyes, high cheekbones, a scarf sweeping her messy dark hair up into a sort of turban. It was a strong face. It had a ferocity to it.
‘Who’s that?’ I hissed into Jess’s hair.
‘The new Spanish language assistant,’ Jess whispered back. ‘She was being given the grand tour yesterday.’ She glanced at me. I probably looked like death. ‘Are you OK?’
I nodded and looked down at my hymnbook. The chaplain ran through the day’s notices. ‘And a warm welcome to our new Spanish language assistant, Miss Wick, who joins us from Argentina for the summer term.’
‘That’s her,’ Jess told me unnecessarily.
Spanish. That was bad for me. I did Spanish A level, which would mean one-on-one conversation sessions with the language assistant. I almost missed my first one, almost pretended to be ill that morning – something I’d never normally do – after spending the night tossing and turning. But Spanish meant too much to me. And the feelings weren’t all bad. My body felt
different, shaken by fairground sensations of walking on tightropes, or the teetering imbalance you feel at the top of a rollercoaster. In the end, I persuaded myself it was like sitting out a fever. That I would just have to sweat it out and one day I would wake and the sickness would be over. And I couldn’t avoid language class forever.
Miss Wick, on the other hand, hadn’t looked flustered, not really. Slightly embarrassed, perhaps, but not shaken by the magnitude of it all in the way I was. I was both relieved and disappointed. Had it meant so little that she could sit and joke about it?
‘You are a schoolgirl – a student?’ she’d corrected herself. ‘I thought you were older.’ And that had been that. She had switched to Spanish and told me a bit about herself: she was Argentinian, but she had lived in the UK for some time. She’d studied fine art at Goldsmiths and worked in galleries in London in the years since, though she was hoping to do a master’s soon. Did I have a favourite artist?
I nodded and tried to find the right words. As I talked I looked at her face. It was not quite as I remembered it. Had I idealised her? In the event our conversation was easy, and it was easy enough to mask how I was feeling, but as I looked at Miss Wick’s face and told her why I loved Frieda Kahlo, I realised I hadn’t idealised her, not at all.
‘Do you ever think about Polly?’ I ask Carla. Polly was her first love, her sixth-form girlfriend.
‘Hardly ever.’ Carla glances over at me, smiling. ‘Are you thinking of Miss Wick again?’
‘Only fleetingly,’ I smile back.
‘Well, it’s different for you.’ She puts a hand on my leg. ‘She broke your heart.’
My mother is at the kitchen sink as we pull up at the cottage, the window a bright rectangle against the dusk outside. She glances up as we arrive and waves at us, looking older than I remember.
As she comes outside to greet us, a tea towel is still thrown over her arm.
‘There he is,’ she says, holding out her arms for Nunny.
I pass him to her and she looks down at his impassive face.
‘What does it mean?’ she says quietly. ‘Who can have sent him?’
I don’t know how to answer this.
‘Richard’s looking into it,’ I say. ‘I sent him a photocopy of the handwriting on the package – one of his friends is an expert.’
‘Does he have a sample of hers?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘A letter.’
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ She looks from me to Carla and back.
‘It is weird,’ I agree. ‘It’s beyond weird.’
I’m not sleeping well: the dream is back. Ruth running through the streets in St Anthony’s, my voice echoing back at me as I call for her. Once, instead of the shoes, I came across Nunny in the dream, lying on his back, looking up at the sky with his blank marble eyes. I’ve found myself getting out of bed in the night to check Nunny is still there, or sending strange emails to other relatives of the missing – just a select few I’ve come to know over the years – to say: has anything like this ever happened to you?
‘Could it be her?’ my mum whispers. ‘Dare we hope?’
Dare we hope? ‘I don’t know.’ That’s the simplest answer. I don’t know.
She brings him to her face. ‘He still smells of her.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘though that might fade.’
My mother, who has lost more people than most, knows that the shirts and jumpers, the cuddly toys and dressing gowns, even the pillows, where a human’s scent is strongest, all lose the scent of the person eventually, come to smell like dust and mothballs and everything else in the house. She cradles Nunny like a baby, like a lost child. It will be better, I tell myself, when ours comes along.
We never saw Scipio again. Our father found his body, eventually, in a field miles away from the hotel and buried him there so that we wouldn’t see. A farmer had shot him for chasing sheep and not even called to let us know. Ruth seemed to sense it before she heard the words. She screamed and screamed, and fought and lashed out at our father, who had spent the last hour burying her dog, the mud still smeared on his cords.
The weekend after Scipio had died we went for a walk together through the autumnal fields. Ruth said mournfully, ‘Scipio would have loved this,’ and she started to cry, but our dad gripped her hand very tight and said: ‘Look over there, look at the sheep. He would have been chasing after them; we would have been chasing after him.’
I wonder now if he was saying: it was inevitable.
That terrible pain of losing Scipio – I sometimes think it was a kind of training for the greater one that was to come. The person who taught us about the inevitability of loss – did he have any notion of the fact he might be coaching us for his own?
Was it inevitable, too, that our father – so alive and unstuffy, thrumming his fingers on the table, laughing loud, teaching us how to wink, and ride horses, and do equations – was it inevitable, from the beginning, that his heart would give in so early, that he would burn out so much sooner than everybody else? Lesser men, stuffier men, men who wore normal shoes and drove normal cars, who didn’t always push for something more. All the men in the world who would still be alive when the one we loved the most had gone.
Kat
March 2000
It had been Luke who had first suggested going to the Peak District for Kat’s birthday, she recalls now. She hadn’t been keen – suspecting it was just an excuse to get her away for a dirty weekend. A good friend of Richard’s, Luke was soft on Kat. Why did life always work out that way? He was nice – kind and funny with a decent dollop of cynicism. Kat liked his freckles, his green eyes, and the way he always laughed at her jokes. But he wasn’t Richard.
So she hadn’t been that fussed, but then Ruth had seemed interested – and, not long after, so had Richard, funnily enough, and now the four of them are on a road trip in Luke’s old banger, while he tries to inspire some enthusiasm for the whole venture.
‘Come on, Kitty,’ says Luke, who has persuaded them all it would be a good idea to have a look at Chatsworth before getting on with the more important business of getting drunk. ‘You love Nancy Mitford’s books. Don’t you think she’s a sort of British Dorothy Parker?’
‘Chatsworth wasn’t hers,’ Ruth interrupts. ‘It belongs to that other one – Debo.’
‘There were actually six Mitford sisters in total,’ Luke points out a touch smugly.
‘I know that,’ Ruth says, rolling her eyes. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Who’s your favourite, then?’ challenges Luke.
‘Jessica, of course,’ Ruth fires back. ‘She was the commie.’
‘You’re a regular red, Ruth,’ he laughs.
‘She was the only one with decent politics,’ continues Ruth, marking the points off her fingers. ‘And she was a writer – though she doesn’t get as much credit for it as Nancy.’
Ruth’s mood is bright and brittle today. Currently, she veers from a sort of mania to being sulky and withdrawn. She and Richard remind Kat of those Alpine weather houses – when one of them is up, the other’s down. She can’t tell what’s going on.
‘Plus,’ Ruth adds dramatically, ‘she risked everything for love.’
‘Of her cousin,’ says Kat. ‘Very sexy.’ It’s stuffy today. She winds down the smeary window for some air.
‘Who’s your favourite?’ asks Luke.
Kat closes her eyes, enjoys the sensation of the breeze on her face. ‘Unity,’ she says, smirking.
Richard emits a snort from the back. It’s practically the first noise he’s made all journey. He and Ruth are sitting as far away from each other as they possibly can, and Richard has spent most of the journey looking out of the window in sullen silence. This is not quite the trip Kat had envisaged for her birthday. She’d hoped to be in the back with Richard, or at least with Ruth. As it was, she and Luke are sitting in the front like parents, with Ruth talking too much, too brightly, and Richard not at all.
He had come to s
ee her recently and chatted for ages about films and music like he used to and then, as he was leaving, he said in a voice that was clearly trying to be neutral, unsuspicious: ‘You still see much of Ruth?’
‘Of course,’ Kat said.
He was standing in her room in his scruffy duffle coat, with his hair messy, his face sad. He said: ‘She ever mention me?’
And Kat had thought of saying, ‘She told me she’d given you a blow job. She said it was a mistake.’ But instead, she screwed up her nose as if she were actually thinking about it, feigning nonchalance in the same way he was. Only more convincingly. ‘No, not really.’
It was true, in a sense: she and Ruth didn’t talk about him much and when they did, Ruth adopted her shiny voice, as cold and bright as marbles. As if nothing could touch her.
‘Did Dorothy Parker ever visit Chatsworth?’ she asks Kat. No one in the car – apart from Richard – seems willing to allow a moment’s quiet to fall.
‘I don’t think so,’ Kat says, though in truth she has no idea. ‘I can’t imagine it would have been her scene. All those toffs. She would have been too sassy for them.’
‘Like you,’ says Luke loyally.
‘Maybe I’m thinking of Charleston?’ Ruth persists.
Kat shrugs. ‘I’m not sure. She must have known someone from Bloomsbury.’
‘They lived in squares and loved in triangles,’ Luke says portentously. But his words are met with silence by the rest of the car.
Kat looks out at the landscape and notices how crags have started to loom threateningly above them. She wonders if the trip is a mistake.
It’s a sunny day. Ruth springs from the car as soon as they get there and bounds towards the house enthusing about the Painted Hall and Sculpture Gallery. Richard heads for the café in the stables, muttering about finding a cup of coffee, while Kat and Luke are left trailing behind Ruth as she moves briskly, chatting to the guides, stopping suddenly at a piece of furniture or a painting – and then darting off. Inside, the house is cooler, but the incremental effect of gaudy gold paintings, luxury, privilege makes Kat feel strange, almost jet-lagged.
The Girl Before You Page 12