‘I’m a taxpayer, do your damn job,’ I snapped at Kidson.
‘Right, I’ve tried to be patient, but this conversation’s over. If you feel like you’re not being taken seriously, then you’re at liberty to make a complaint.’
‘I demand that you write down what I’ve told you,’ I shouted and heard myself as others must: pompous, patronizing, superior. Old Cookie. ‘At least, make a record of it in your book.’ I leant across, seized his hand and pen and forced it down on to his pad. There was a little crack and he snatched it away.
‘If you weren’t a sad old man, I’d nick you for assaulting a police officer. Now piss off back to whichever stone it was you crawled out from under.’
All I want to do now is put my house in order and with that in mind I have a confession: I may have neglected to give you full disclosure on one aspect of this. I’ve explained to you about my penchant for walking at night, haven’t I? How it’s a diversion and supplies the gentle exercise my consultant advocated. Well, I was taking one such constitutional in Southampton city centre on February 4. Let’s just say it had come to my knowledge that Alice was in the city that evening.
Probably just as well Kidson and his cohorts hadn’t done their job brilliantly or I might have some explaining to do.
When I’d eventually arrived home, Fliss – it was late but she’d stayed up, she was beside herself with worry – had enquired about my flushed, spooked demeanour; she was fearful it was some hitherto invisible symptom of my condition.
‘If I give you this, will you stop following my wife?’ I said this morning, handing over yet another envelope to the boy with tattoos. It’s not the money, Larry, that’s not important, but I have to protect Fliss.
‘Ironic, isn’t it, Iceman, how you’re so determined to look after her when you’re the one who’s done stuff that could destroy her? Alice only had to share a house with me for a year, but your missus has had to do it with you since 1976.’
It caught me off guard, him mentioning that year.
‘It’s written on the back,’ he said, winking. ‘The wedding photo on your bedside table.’
I appear to have got myself into rather a pickle, Larry.
Yours as ever,
Jeremy
Email drafted, but not sent, by Alice Salmon,
10 December 2004
I’ve really gone and done it this time, Mum. You hear about stuff like this and I prided myself I’d never let it happen to me, but now I have and how could I be so stupid?
‘What do you make of our little gathering?’ he’d enquired, as we’d stood around in huddles forcing conversation. ‘We host this soiree on the same day every year; it’s quite a tradition.’
‘I’d hate to see you lot when you’re not having fun,’ I said, wine recklessness buoying me.
‘I knew your mother,’ he said.
‘Lucky you,’ I replied. The awareness swam past me. I was on my fourth glass.
‘Your mother, how is she?’
What am I going to do? My memories are shattered … box files, a lamp with frilly tassels, him insisting I called him Jeremy rather than Professor Cooke, classical music. ‘Chin-chin,’ he’d said. ‘Bottoms up.’ I’m not even sure what I’m alleging. They’d assume I had a crush on him, like a few of the other students. He’s famous. Should I confide in another lecturer? Or Megan? I took care of her, he’d probably claim. She rather over-indulged. Another fresher who partook of a surfeit of booze. Silly girl.
Why am I even blaming myself? It’s him who shouldn’t have let the situation arise. But if I speak out, where will it end? What if I have to drop out of uni? They’d ask me questions and I won’t have the replies: a stupid slapper who can’t take her alcohol and who never learns. All that remains is his onion breath, his cracked laugh, starchy shirt, dry tanned skin, reptilian.
‘Look at me,’ he’d said. ‘Focus.’
And I’d hung on to him as the world swam. I’m scared, Mum.
I shouldn’t have even been there. Keep the old duffer sweet, I’d decided when he’d proposed I join them for drinks, because a couple of his ex-students had ended up on the nationals and contacts like that are invaluable. He’d paraded me in front of a load of old crusties. ‘Remember this one’s name,’ he’d said. ‘She’ll be famous one day.’
I’d prayed the ground would open up and swallow me.
‘She’s planning a career in the media.’
‘Haven’t definitely made my mind up.’
‘A case of –’ and he paused pretentiously – ‘ “not knowing what you’ll be but knowing yourself as you are”. Shakespeare,’ he added smugly.
‘I do know! Hamlet. And you got it wrong. It’s “we know who we are, but not what we may be”.’
‘Touché,’ he said. ‘Chip off the old block, you are.’
The waitresses kept topping up my glass, and the cloying sense of apprehension that typically seized me in situations like that evaporated. It was like slipping out of a pair of heels at the end of the night.
‘What is it they say?’ I’d heard one of his colleagues snigger. ‘An A for a lay.’
Why didn’t I go to the union, Mum? Would have been safe there. I’d have stuck to lager, played pool, hung out with Meg and Holly and Jamie T. We’d have gone back to halls, had coffee, the lads carelessly tossing a rugby ball around, Usher or Kanye West coming from Doncaster Will’s room.
His office was a cross between a study and a bedroom. ‘The outside world’s a dangerous place when you’re this drunk,’ he said. ‘But it’s safe in here.’
Him, helping me out of my skirt. ‘Your hair’s like your mother’s,’ he’d said.
The room was spinning, a sick feeling. ‘Rest now, little one,’ he’d said.
A blanket over me, get it off, too hot, can’t breathe, suffocating, get it off me … I’m so ashamed, but it’s him who should be: him, him, HIM. ‘Sleep tight,’ he’d said, ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite.’
Then waking on a sofa, my hand in his. ‘You were having nightmares,’ he’d said gently. ‘You were shouting in your sleep.’
‘Get away from me,’ I said, springing up.
Outside, normal sounds – the beep of a delivery lorry reversing, two lads play-fighting, a girl laughing. The previous few hours … shadows, shapes, fitful sleep, him helping me sip water, like you used to with medicine when I was small, informing me that I’d caused quite a stir at the reception but he wouldn’t hold it against me, though I ought to be careful, not everyone was like him, girls in that condition ‘ended up in all manner of unpalatable predicaments’.
I didn’t have my top on, my skirt was in a rumpled pile on the floor. I felt sick, pushed him away, pulled my clothes on and ran.
You always said I could always confide in you, Mum, but I can’t send this …
Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,
25 June 2012
Larry,
I can’t get Alice and Liz out of my head. I even dreamed of them last night. Woke up and Fliss asked if I was OK; I’d been muttering in my sleep. I didn’t tell her I’d been consumed by a vision of Liz’s hair, that long lustrous sweep. ‘It’s like a mane,’ I distinctly recall saying to her one afternoon.
‘Thanks very much,’ she laughed, ‘for comparing me to a horse.’
We were on the bed in a cheap hotel beside the A36. Despite our disrobed state, there was no embarrassment or shame; that habitually came later. Margaret Thatcher’s voice was coming out of a small black-and-white TV in the corner. The Falklands. 1982. Fliss battered into my brain, but I pushed her back out, stroked Liz’s face. ‘You make me feel incredible,’ I said to this woman who wasn’t the one I’d married six years earlier, this latest addition to the teaching staff who I’d first seen waltzing across the quad – she didn’t walk, she waltzed as if she was moving to music – a couple of months before. She smiled; her teeth stained from the not very good red. It occurred to me that this was the me I could have been: the type of man
who pays cash for hotel rooms in the afternoons. I am that person, I thought. ‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ she replied.
Larry, it’s like a confessional, sharing this with you all over again. I was seeing myself anew: I wasn’t deconstructing someone else’s behaviour or picking over the bones of someone else’s existence, I was living for the moment, in the present, not some era thousands of years ago. I touched her black hair, each strand a package of DNA. Forget DNA, I thought stroking it, this is her, this is Liz. It felt like everything was changing: politics, rules, society. Maybe this shrill grocer’s daughter was right: anything was possible.
‘Aren’t we the odd couple?’ she asked playfully. ‘Well, my darling artefact?’ She never tired of teasing me about how I was nearly eleven years her senior.
I reached out and she made a little noise and it brought to mind a sound Fliss made.
Stop thinking, I thought, Stop damn well thinking.
‘Do you never get scared?’ she asked afterwards – Liz did.
‘I’m rarely anything else,’ I replied. There were lots of obtuse questions and cryptic answers, but that was the second occasion she’d asked me that particular one. It had come up the previous night as well as we’d dressed for dinner.
She lit a cigarette, enquired if I’d like one and it gave me a rush of gloom: that she didn’t know whether I smoked. She could have been being ironic, I suppose. ‘I’m trying to quit,’ she said, exhaling a thin trail of smoke.
You simply have no idea that I don’t smoke, I’d thought. You have no idea that I don’t smoke, any more than you have no idea that I’d like to establish an orchid greenhouse or can’t abide over-hot climates – the fortnight Fliss and I had in Leukaspis was purgatory – or, for that matter, that I was mildly allergic to shellfish. We lay on the bed and I checked my watch: Fliss and I were attending a faculty function that evening.
‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘Do you never wake up petrified?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of where you might end up?’
Pale sunlight filtered through the drawn curtains. ‘I’ll probably end up in the same office I am now, just arthritic and curmudgeonly.’
Men hit a point, my PhD tutor once told me with what at the time even I considered to be near crushing pessimism, when all they can do is try to fuck their way out of it. It won’t work, he informed me, but you’ll try all the same. Is that what I was attempting to do with Liz? I didn’t know if I was going to leave Fliss; if I could leave her. Hard to believe now for such a premeditated man that I didn’t have a plan. All I had was fear: fear that this could be my last chance to get whatever it was that was beyond my imagination. I’d whistled past eighteen and twenty-one and thirty, oblivious to those milestones, preoccupied with my scientific ambitions, but by then I’d have been rapidly approaching thirty-five and the landmark chafed at my consciousness. Halfway to my threescore and ten. Fear of another complexion, too. What if this was just the start, if there’d be more Elizabeths? I’d hoped she’d pick up on my answer, say: Curmudgeonly, don’t you mean more curmudgeonly? Because then we’d laugh and that would draw an end to that particular, pernicious conversational thread. But instead she watched the cold flickering and faraway images of dead Argentinians laid out in a line in a hole in the ground and asked: ‘Do you think we’re fated to be together? Destined to keep coming back to each other, whoever we end up with? That happens.’ When I failed to respond, she said: ‘At least I know I don’t know my own mind. You’re one of the cleverest men I’ve ever met, but somehow you’re one of the most … hopeless.’
‘I’m not convinced I’m suited to polygamy,’ I replied obtusely.
‘There’s such a thing as polyandry, too.’
This felt like safer ground. ‘Indeed,’ I replied. ‘Masai women, among many others, practise it – a perfectly logical adaptation to high mortality rates among infants and warriors.’
‘You can’t blame the women for keeping their options open,’ she said, the half-smile on her face disappearing, ‘if their men are as rubbish as ours.’
It occurred to me this conversation wasn’t theoretical at all: it was about us.
I wondered if having sex again would help. Earlier, it had dawned on me it was like the law of diminishing marginal returns: sleeping with someone other than one’s wife wasn’t as bad after you’d already done it once. Even now, I’d thought, naked with a near stranger in a hotel, I can’t not be me: dull, pedantic, academic.
A child began crying in another room and we sat. I knew, even then, that in the months and years to come I’d tell myself that we’d both been adults, that no one had forced her to do this, any of it, that it took two to tango. It was a central tenet of one of my first-year lectures: individual accountability. Along the corridor that child’s cry reached a crescendo and then stopped. ‘I wonder if that’s a little boy or a little girl,’ I said, but she wasn’t listening. I’ve changed you, I thought. Whatever you might have been when you first waltzed across the quad, now you’re a woman who fucks a married man in a hotel room then puts the same underwear back on and checks out, just as I’d made my wife someone who left me food in the warming oven of the Aga and didn’t probe too closely when I was ‘away with work’ – as she’d been under the impression I had been more frequently this summer.
Liz stretched across me to grab the wine glass on the bedside cabinet, downed the contents, then took up the unburnt inch of her cigarette and sucked on it. A plume of ash fell on my leg. ‘For God’s sake, Elizabeth,’ I snapped. ‘Be careful.’
‘Yes, we’d hate anyone to get hurt here, wouldn’t we?’ She laughed: hurt, hollow, the genesis of hate. ‘Don’t you want children one day?’
‘Ah yes, that. Them.’ Fliss and I had pretty much given up on a family by that stage, despite us being poked and prodded by a small army of medical professionals. Some of the old rancour swelled up in me; it made me want to tell Liz how degrading it had been, how emasculating: how the human race would have become extinct if it had been left to couples like us.
‘Maybe we’re simply not destined to have a baby,’ Fliss had said. ‘Maybe it’s going to be just you and me.’
I’d baulked at the prospect of that ‘not’. ‘Don’t say that,’ I’d retorted. ‘We’ll keep trying until it happens.’
‘Maybe it’s just not in God’s plan for us. Besides, that wouldn’t be so awful, would it, if it was just the two of us?’
Liz said: ‘Because I do want kids. Ideally one of each, but mainly a girl. That’s unusual, isn’t it? It’s boys that women are supposed to want.’ She was off again. She could be like this, tumbling from optimism to despair in the time it took her to smoke a cigarette.
The news had left the Falklands for Washington and that garish, glorified actor Reagan on his pet subject, the so-called nuclear deterrent. I said: ‘Some people might argue the world’s sufficiently dangerous that you’re doing the next generation a favour by not bringing them into it.’
‘What if my daughter inherits all my bad traits and none of my good ones?’ she asked.
‘You haven’t got any bad ones.’
She merely snorted at that. ‘If I have a baby girl, when I have a baby girl, I’ll be terrified she’ll be too much like me, poor lamb.’
I touched her skin, her soft, thin skin and it occurred to me that maybe it would be with this woman that I have the son I’d always so wished for.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘You haven’t answered my question. Do you never get scared?’
‘Never mind being an academic, you could be a journalist,’ I said, reaching out again for her hair.
‘You’re insatiable,’ she said.
‘Hardly.’
‘What are you then?’ she said. ‘What are we?’
I should have known that was the beginning of the end.
Alice Salmon’s ‘To Read in 2012’ Kindle collection
Trespass – Rose Tremain
How to be a Woman – Caitlin Moran
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
The Brightest Star in the Sky – Marian Keyes
The Snowman – Jo Nesbo
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Fifty Shades of Grey – E. L. James
Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert
The Help – Kathryn Stockett
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Article on Southampton Star website,
15 March 2012
Alice best friend reveals dead pet threat
The best friend of dead river girl Alice Salmon has thrown fresh controversy on the case by revealing Salmon received a ‘death threat’ just days ahead of her February death.
Speaking exclusively to the Star, Megan Parker claimed previously reported threats were ‘merely the tip of the iceberg’ and said the 25-year-old had been ‘living in fear for her life’ after flowers had been left on her doorstep with a ‘sinister’ note.
What She Left: Enhanced Edition Page 13