Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘How old is your father, Adam?’ I asked.

  ‘About eighty. I was an afterthought. My youngest sister was sixteen when I was born.’

  Adam’s father – Colonel Tallis, as he told me to call him – seemed alarmingly ancient to me. His skin was pale and papery. There were liver spots on both hands. His eyes, startling blue like Adam’s, were cloudy. His trousers hung slackly on his skeletal frame. He seemed quite unsurprised to see us.

  ‘This is Alice,’ said Adam. ‘I am going to marry her next Friday.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Alice,’ he said. ‘A blonde, eh? So you’re going to marry my son.’ His look seemed almost spiteful. Then he turned back to Adam. ‘Pour me some whisky, then.’

  Adam left the room. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to the old man and he seemed to have no interest in talking to me.

  ‘I killed three squirrels yesterday,’ he announced abruptly, after a silence. ‘With traps, you know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, vermin. But they still come back for more. Like the rabbits. I shot six.’

  Adam came into the room with three tumblers full of amber-coloured whisky. He gave one to his father and handed another to me. ‘Drink up and then we’ll go home,’ he said.

  I drank. I didn’t know what time it was, except that outside it was already getting dark. I didn’t know what we were doing here, and I would have said that I wished we hadn’t come, except that I had a new and vivid image of Adam as a boy: lonely, dwarfed by two aged parents, losing his mother when he was twelve, living in a large cold house. What kind of life must he have had, growing up alone with this stand-in for a father? The whisky burned my throat and warmed my chest. I had eaten nothing all day, and was obviously not going to get anything here. I realized I hadn’t even taken off my coat. Well, there wasn’t much point now.

  Colonel Tallis also drank his whisky, sitting on the sofa and saying nothing. Suddenly his head tipped back, his mouth parted slightly, and a crackly snore came from him. I took the empty tumbler out of his hand and put it on the table beside him.

  ‘Come here,’ said Adam. ‘Come with me.’

  We went back up the stairs and into a bedroom. Adam’s old room. He shut the door and pushed me on to the narrow bed. My head swam. ‘You’re my home,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you understand? My only home. Don’t move. Don’t move an inch.’

  When we came downstairs again, the Colonel half woke.

  ‘Going already?’ he said. ‘Do come again.’

  ‘Do have a second helping of shepherd’s pie, Adam.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Or salad. Please have some more salad. I’ve made too much, I know. It’s always so hard to get quantities right, isn’t it? But that’s why the freezer is so useful.’

  ‘No thank you, no more salad.’

  My mother was pink and garrulous with nerves. My father, taciturn at the best of times, had said almost nothing. He sat at the head of the table and plodded through the lunch.

  ‘Wine?’

  ‘No wine, thank you.’

  ‘Alice used to love my shepherd’s pie when she was little, didn’t you, Alice dear?’ She was desperate. I smiled at her but couldn’t think of anything to say, for, unlike her, I become tongue-tied when nervous.

  ‘Did she?’ Unexpectedly, Adam’s face lit up. ‘What else did she love?’

  ‘Meringues.’ My mother’s face sagged with the relief of finding a topic of conversation. ‘And the crackling on pork. And my blackberry and apple pie. Banana cake. She was always such a slim little thing, you wouldn’t believe how much she could eat.’

  ‘Yes, I could.’

  Adam put his hand on my knee. I felt myself flushing. My father coughed portentously and opened his mouth to speak. Adam’s hand pushed under the hem of my skirt and stroked my upper thigh.

  ‘It seems a bit sudden,’ announced my father.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed my mother hurriedly. ‘We are very pleased, of course we are very pleased, and I am sure that Alice will be very happy, and it’s her life anyway, to do what she wants with, but we thought, why rush? If you’re sure of each other, why not wait, and then…’

  Adam’s hand moved higher. He put one sure thumb on my crotch. I sat quite still, with my hammering heart and throbbing body.

  ‘We are marrying on Friday,’ he said. ‘It’s sudden because love is sudden.’ He smiled rather gently at my mother. ‘I know it’s hard to get used to.’

  ‘And you don’t want us to be there?’ she warbled.

  ‘It’s not that we don’t want you, Mum, but…’

  ‘Two witnesses from the street,’ he said coolly. ‘Two strangers, so it will really be just me and Alice. That’s what we want.’ He turned his full gaze on me and I felt as if he were undressing me in front of my parents. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘Yes, it is, Mum.’

  In my old bedroom, museum of my childhood, he picked up each object as if it was a clue. My swimming certificates. My old teddy bear, with one ear missing now. My stack of old, cracked LPs. My tennis racket, still standing in the corner of the room by the wicker wastepaper basket I had woven at school. My collection of shells. My porcelain lady, present from my grandmother when I was about six. A jewellery box with pink silk lining, containing just one bead necklace. He put his face into the fold of my old towelling dressing-gown, which still hung on the door. He unrolled a school photograph, 1977, and quickly located my face, smiling uncertainly from the second row. He found the picture of me and my brother, aged fifteen and fourteen, and scrutinized it, frowning, turning from me back to the picture. He touched everything, running his fingers over every surface. He ran his fingers over my face, exploring every flaw and blemish there.

  We walked along the river, over the icy mud, our hands touching lightly, electric currents running up my spine, wind in my face. We stopped of one accord and stared at the slow, brown water, full of glinting bubbles and bits of debris and sudden, sucking eddies.

  ‘You’re mine now,’ he said. ‘My own love.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I’m yours.’

  When we got back to the flat, late and sleepy on Sunday night, I felt something under my feet on the mat when I went through the door. It was a brown envelope with no name or address on it. Just ‘Flat 3’. Our flat. I opened it and pulled out a single sheet of paper. The message was written in large black felt-tip:

  I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

  I handed it to Adam. He looked at it and pulled a face.

  ‘Bored with using the phone,’ I said.

  I’d got used to the silent calls, day and night. This seemed different. ‘Somebody came to our door,’ I said. ‘Pushed it through our door.’

  Adam seemed unmoved. ‘Estate agents do the same thing, don’t they?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we call the police? It is simply ridiculous just to let this go on and on and do nothing.’

  ‘And tell them what? That somebody knows where we live?’

  ‘It’s for you, I suppose.’

  Adam looked serious. ‘I hope so.’

  Fifteen

  I took the week off work. ‘To prepare for the wedding,’ I said vaguely to Mike, although there was nothing really to prepare. We were going to be married in the morning, in a town hall that looked like the presidential palace of a Stalinist dictator. I would wear the velvet dress Adam had bought me (‘and nothing underneath,’ he’d instructed me), and we would haul two strangers off the street to witness the ceremony. In the afternoon we were driving up to the Lake District. He had somewhere to take me, he said. Then we would come home, and I would go back to work. Perhaps.

  ‘You deserve time off,’ said Mike enthusiastically. ‘You’ve been working too hard recently.’

  I looked at him in surprise. Actually, I had hardly been working at all.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I need a rest.’

  There were a few things I needed to do before Friday. The first I had been putting off for a l
ong time.

  Jake had arranged to be there when I turned up on Tuesday morning with a rented van to collect the rest of my things. I didn’t particularly want them, but I didn’t want to have them in our old flat either, as if one day I might return to that life, step back into those clothes.

  He made me a cup of coffee, but stayed in the kitchen, bent ostentatiously over a folder of work, which I’m sure he hardly looked at. He had shaved that morning, and put on a blue shirt, which I had bought him. I looked away, tried not to see his tired, clever, familiar face. How could I have thought he had made those phone calls or sent those anonymous notes? All my Gothic thoughts died down, and I just felt dreary and a bit sad.

  I was as businesslike as possible. I stashed clothes into plastic bags, wrapped china in newspaper and put it into the cardboard boxes I had brought along, pulled books off the shelves and then closed the gaps that marked where they had been. I loaded the chair I’d had as a student into the van, my old sleeping bag, some CDs.

  ‘I’ll leave my plants, shall I?’ I asked Jake.

  ‘If you’d prefer.’

  ‘Yes. And if there’s anything I’ve overlooked…’

  ‘I know where you live,’ he said.

  There was a silence. I swallowed the tepid remains of my coffee, then said, ‘Jake, I’m very sorry. There’s nothing I can say except sorry.’

  He looked at me steadily, then smiled, a thin smile. ‘I will be fine, Alice,’ he said then. ‘I haven’t been, but I will be. Will you be fine?’ He put his face closer to mine, until I could no longer focus on it. ‘Will you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, drawing back. ‘There’s nothing else I can do.’

  I had thought of driving to my parents’ house and leaving all the stuff I didn’t need there, but just as I didn’t want things to be waiting for me at Jake’s so I didn’t want them to be waiting for me anywhere at all. I was beginning again, fresh. I had a giddy sense of burning off my past. I stopped at the first Oxfam shop I saw and gave the astonished assistant everything: books, clothes, china, CDs and even my chair.

  ∗

  I had also arranged to see Clive. He had rung me at work, insistent we get together before I got married. On Wednesday we met for lunch at a dark little tavern in Clerkenwell. We kissed each other awkwardly on both cheeks, like amiable strangers, and then sat at a small table by a fire and ordered artichoke soup with hunks of brown bread, and two glasses of house red.

  ‘How’s Gail?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, probably all right. I haven’t seen her that much recently, actually.’

  ‘Do you mean it’s over?’

  He grinned ruefully at me, a flash of the Clive I knew so well and had never stopped feeling uneasy about. ‘Yeah, probably. God, you know how hopeless I am with relationships, Alice. I fall in love, then as soon as it gets serious I panic.’

  ‘Poor Gail.’

  ‘I didn’t come to talk about that.’ He poked his spoon moodily into the thick, greenish soup.

  ‘You wanted to talk to me about Adam, right?’

  ‘Right.’ He drank some wine, stirred his soup again, then said, ‘Now that I’m here, I don’t know how to say it. This isn’t about Jake, okay? It’s… well, I met Adam remember, and, sure, he made every other man in the room look feeble. But are you sure you know what you’re doing, Alice?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Literally, it doesn’t matter.’ I found that for the first time since meeting Adam I wanted to talk about how I felt. ‘Look, Clive, I just fell utterly in love with him. Have you ever been desired so much that –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was like an earthquake.’

  ‘You used to make fun of me for saying things like that. You used words like "trust" and "responsibility". You used to say’ – he pointed his spoon at me – ‘that only men said things like "it just happened" or "it was like an earthquake".’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  Clive looked at me with a clinical interest. ‘How did you meet?’ he asked.

  ‘We saw each other on a street.’

  ‘And that was that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You just saw each other and leaped into bed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s just lust, Alice. You can’t throw away your whole life for lust.’

  ‘Fuck off, Clive.’ He seemed to accept that as a reasonable answer. So I continued, ‘He’s everything. I’d do anything for him. It’s like a spell.’

  ‘And you call yourself a scientist.’

  ‘I am a scientist.’

  ‘Why do you look as if you’re about to cry?’

  I smiled. ‘I’m happy.’

  ‘You’re not happy,’ he said. ‘You’re unbalanced.’

  And I had arranged to meet Lily, although I didn’t know why. A note had been left for me at the office, addressed only to ‘Alice’. Perhaps she didn’t know my full name.

  ‘I need to talk to you about the man you stole from me,’ it read, which should have made me throw it away at once. ‘It is urgent and must remain secret. Do not tell him.’ She had given a phone number.

  I thought of the note that had been pushed through our door. The paper was different, the writing was small and neat, like a schoolgirl’s. Completely different, but what did that mean? Anyone could disguise their handwriting. I realized that I wanted it to be Lily, and not Jake. I should have shown it at once to Adam, but I didn’t. I persuaded myself that he already had too much to worry about. Klaus’s book was coming out soon. Already two journalists had rung Adam, wanting to interview him ‘about being a hero’, and asking questions about Greg and his moral responsibility for the death of the amateur climbers whom he had led up the mountain and left to die. He was contemptuous of the word ‘hero’, and simply refused to comment on Greg’s behaviour. But I often heard him and Klaus talking about it. Klaus kept going on about the fixed line, and how he didn’t want to be judgemental, but how could Greg have been so careless? Adam repeated, over and over, that above eight thousand metres people cannot be held responsible for their acts.

  ‘There, but for the grace of God, go all of us,’ he said.

  ‘But you didn’t,’ I interjected, so that the two men turned to me, benign and patronizing.

  ‘That was my luck,’ he replied, very soberly. ‘And Greg’s bad luck.’

  I didn’t believe him. And I still thought something had happened up in the mountains that he wasn’t disclosing to me. I would watch him at night, sometimes, as he lay asleep, one arm on my thigh and one flung above his head, his mouth slightly open and puffing with each exhaled breath. What dreams sucked him under to where I could not follow?

  Anyway, I decided to meet Lily without telling Adam. Maybe I just wanted to see what she was like; maybe I wanted to compare myself to her, or to get a glimpse into Adam’s past. I phoned her, and she told me, talking quickly in a low hoarse voice, to meet her at her flat in Shepherd’s Bush on Thursday morning. The day before the wedding.

  She was beautiful. Of course she was beautiful. She had silvery hair, which looked natural and a bit greasy, and the tall leggy look of a model. Her grey eyes were huge and wide apart in her pale triangle of a face. She wore a faded pair of jeans and, in spite of the inclement weather, a tiny grubby T-shirt that showed her perfect midriff. Her feet were bare and slender.

  I gazed at her and wished I hadn’t come. We didn’t shake hands or anything. She led me down into her basement flat, and when she opened the door I recoiled in horror. The tiny, muggy flat was a tip. Clothes were flung everywhere: bowls were heaped up in the sink or stood in dirty piles on the kitchen table; a stinking cat-litter tray stood in the middle of the floor. There were magazines, or bits of magazines, strewn about. The large bed, which was in the corner of the living room, was a mess of stained sheets and old newspapers. There was a plate with half a piece of toast on the pillow, and a half-empty bottle of
whisky nearby. On the wall – and this nearly made me flee – there was a huge black-and-white photograph of Adam, very serious. And as soon as I saw that, I started to notice other signs of Adam. Several photographs, which had obviously been ripped out of books about climbing, were propped up on the mantelpiece, and he was in each of them. A yellowing newspaper article was Blu-tacked to the wall with Adam’s picture gazing out of it. By the bed was a picture of Lily and Adam together. He had his arm around her and she was gazing up at him, rapt. I closed my eyes briefly and wished there was somewhere to sit down.

  ‘I haven’t cleaned for a bit,’ said Lily.

  ‘No.’

  We both stayed standing.

  ‘That was our bed,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking at it. I wanted to vomit.

  ‘I haven’t changed the sheets since he left. I can still smell him.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, with an effort, for I felt that I had walked into a terrible dream, and was trapped in it, ‘you said you had something urgent to tell me.’

  ‘You stole him from me,’ she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘He was mine and you came along and stole him from under my nose.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. He chose me. We chose each other. I’m sorry, Lily. I didn’t know about you, but anyway…’

  ‘You just smashed up my life without thinking of me,’ she looked around her disastrous flat. ‘You didn’t care about me.’ Her voice sank. ‘Now what?’ she said, in a kind of listless horror. ‘Now what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Listen, I think I ought to just go,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t help either of us.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, and took off her T-shirt. She stood there, pale and slim. Her breasts were small, with large brownish nipples. I couldn’t make myself look away. Then she turned around. Livid weals striped her back. ‘He did that,’ she said triumphantly. ‘Now what do you say?’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, rooted to the spot.