‘Done,’ he said, quite pleasantly. ‘Now be off with you, my smelly one. Sophie and Thomas as well. Leave me in peace with my girlfriend.’
Roland often told Iona she was smelly. Alice found it offensive, the more so because it was true, but Iona did not seem to mind at all. Roland would wisecrack with her about coal tar soap and brands of deodorant. He would offer to fix her up with a camel driver for a husband. He would enquire whether she were maturing a small batch of Camembert in one of the armpits of the leather biker’s jacket. She would merely hazard in return that his jock-strap came sterilized Optical White, or she would volunteer to drink Jackson’s Orange Pekoe from his groin guard.
Roland handed her the typewriter. ‘Hold it from below now, Iona,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust to the case, all right? That’s a very fine machine you’ve got there.’
‘Christ!’ Iona said. ‘ “Fine machine”. You crazy bloody wanker. I’ll buy you a Goblin Teasmade for your birthday.’
Roland bent down and picked up the coffee mug full of cigarette ends. He planted it on top of the typewriter. Then he held open the door, his affability unaffected. ‘Plotting the great novel then, are we?’ he said. ‘Aiming to steal our mother’s thunder?’
‘Fuck!’ Iona said with feeling. She dropped her last cigarette end in the doorway and extinguished it by grinding it into Alice’s carpet. ‘Hardly need to write a fucking novel then, do I? I can hop off round next door’s ‘n’ get myself fucked by old Koplinski. That’d “steal her thunder”. ‘Night, Roland.’ And she left.
Paul Koplinski produced an afternoon soap opera for housewives’ television. He lived in the house which adjoined the Morgans’, but his house, unlike the Morgans’, was in a constant state of improvement. Builders worked round the clock to open up rooms, glaze walls, insert joists, remove chimney breasts, reposition sections of staircase and turn the garden from Victorian semi into a composite of Hansel and Gretel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Flowerbeds were either raised up or cast down, mezzanine floors appeared overnight, a small clapboard weather porch now extruded from the facade, and the kitchen was gradually fixing its ambience halfway between Catalonia and Tuscany. Paul Koplinski was English, in spite of his name, and came from the Midlands. He wore mirror lenses and tried hard to appear transatlantic, but his battery of whining, downmarket English phrases sabotaged his aspiration. ‘Pop in for a coffay then,’ he said. ‘D’you fancy popping in for a coffay, then?’
Paul Koplinski, Alice had observed the only time she had popped in for a coffee, was big in the business of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Since he maintained a builder’s skip semi-permanently at the front of his house, it had seemed to her that his major hobby was lying in wait to catch the populace in the act of illegal dumping. Yet the skip came to consciousness every morning with a satisfactory new crop of usurping old mattresses, broken furniture and household rubbish. Only the Morgans, as their side passage bore impressive witness, were sufficiently scrupulous never to poach on Paul Koplinski’s expensively rented skip-space.
‘My builders are pushed for space and honestlay!’ he whined at Alice as usual. He wrenched first at an old gas fire, and then at a section of rain-soaked, rubber-backed Axminster and cast them into the road. ‘Look at that! They’ve been dumping on me again!’
‘I’m s-sorry,’ Alice said. That was when Paul Koplinski had asked her to pop in for a coffee and had tried to get lechy. He lived on his own and grumbled about his alimony payments. He was pretty well off, really, Alice thought, but he wanted to be a person who had gold records fixed to his walls. Instead he constructed storylines which morons then wrote up. He had tried to interest Maya in writing up storylines for his soap opera, but she was too dedicated to rewriting her novel – a dreary affair, Paul blabbed, full of battered women and housing problems. Still, she slept with him more readily each time it got rejected. This last he had not told Alice. That was why Alice at once dismissed Iona’s imputation as a destructive adolescent lie. As for Roland, he addressed the matter not at all. It was of no interest to him to contemplate Maya Morgan between the sheets, her husband’s or anyone else’s. As for poor old Iona – one would need to be a peculiarly bent sort of paedophile to get within touching distance. Roland wanted Alice between his sheets. Sweet, pretty, fragile Alice who stammered over his name and provoked in him great climaxes of tenderness.
Chapter 17
When the letter came, eventually, from Miss Trotter’s new secretary, it had been sent second class to Alice’s college and lodged there in the wrong pigeon hole. The address it provided was somewhere in London East. 149 Belbury Close.
‘Council estate,’ said Roland, all too briskly. ‘Still game are we, my poppet?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Alice said.
‘Jolly good,’ said Roland. He said it as though he were awarding her a Venturer’s badge in the Brownies. It was arranged that he would drive down with her that Saturday afternoon and on the way back, rather at his insistence, they would stay overnight in Surrey. That way he could meet his girlfriend’s parents.
The experience was quite the worst that Alice could remember. Worse than the day that Flora’s father had swelled up before her eyes and shed his skin. The place Miss Trotter’s records had provided materialized not as one of a neat row of little council houses which Alice had begun cautiously to envisage, but as a nightmarish, windowless extrusion of vandalized concrete, partly boarded up and sparsely occupied by incoherent and half-drugged squatters.
‘Sh-she n-n-n—’ Alice said. ‘R-roland, she never lived here. Th-this is s-some mistake.’
‘Turning back then, are we?’ Roland said.
‘No,’ Alice said. Roland, though he was anything but happy to leave his beautiful old Citroën unattended, got out and accompanied her through the filth of dog turds, empty syringes and abandoned plastic carrier bags which lay strewn along the concrete waste.
There was nobody in 149 Belbury Close, though through the ruptured plywood of the front door Alice could see that, in the middle of the otherwise empty floor, lay a pile of empty vodka bottles and the demented remains of a heap of miscellaneous furniture to which someone – perhaps to keep warm – had at some time applied a match. The retreat along the narrow, open corridor which led to the staircase afflicted Alice with paralysing vertigo.
‘Close your eyes and give me your hand,’ Roland said firmly. That was what she did. Once across the concrete waste, she registered, a moment before Roland, that the Citroën had been stripped of its wing mirrors. Neither of them spoke for fully ten minutes in the car.
‘I’m sorry, Roland,’ Alice said.
‘I think,’ Roland replied, a little stiffly, ‘I really think, Alice, that the less we say about this venture, the better we both shall like it.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘But I’m still s-sorry.’ She knew that for Roland to lose his wing mirrors bore no comparison with her own horribly raw and bleeding grief for Jem McCrail, but the experience had left her humbled. If any power in the relationship had ever been hers, that was the case no longer. Roland had supported her through this hideous and ill-advised quest. Roland was kind and sensible. Roland was more than she deserved. She belonged to him. Her voice, when it came, was small and supplicant.
‘Can we say n-n-n-n. Not tell my parents?’ she said. ‘Please, Roland.’
‘’Course,’ Roland said. ‘Nothing at all, my darling.’
* * *
It did not help that, in the midst of Alice’s repressed grief and confusion, Mr and Mrs Pilling were evidently incapable of warming to Roland. Though he made laudable efforts, in the wake of Alice’s unhelpful silences, to make himself agreeable, the Pillings were disconcerted by his style. They misunderstood his humour and were affronted by his accent which they took, quite without justification, as a put-down to themselves. His manners struck them as lordly and – since schoolmasters featured for them among the poorer and lowlier categories of humanity – they were roused to silent indignation by the
ease with which authority sat on him. Most of all they were alarmed by his proprietorial air with their daughter. No, thought Mrs Pilling, Alice could not possibly want such a toff. No, of course not. Especially not a toff who was in truth no more than a lackey in a boys’ school.
Roland was not the nice young man whom the Pillings had had in mind. He embodied and made specific for Alice’s parents all the unformulated misgiving they had experienced in watching Alice leave them for Oxford. Furthermore, since Alice was so much more muted even than usual, it seemed to them perfectly obvious that Roland was not good for her. Over ‘drinks’ Alice spoke hardly at all. Even when questioned directly she sometimes did not notice. Roland, in acting to protect her, talked valiantly in her stead with all the good humour he could muster. He did this, though Mrs Pilling distracted him with refreshment which he found both unpalatable and quite shockingly extravagant.
Roland observed that Alice’s mother drank an alcoholic liquid which came the colour of glacé cherries. In the context, he resigned himself to drinking whisky, thinking that to ask for beer might be construed as inappropriate. She offered him a platter of dubious red pulp on crackers. The pulp contained lumps of black olive which was not a thing he cared for. Though his ears might well have been deceiving him, he thought she had called it some sort of mole. Puréed Surrey mole? Surely not! Roland ate rather a lot of it, in order that his negative feelings towards it should not become too apparent. And how on earth was it that his sweet, rather plainly dressed Alice should have a mother like this, with those artificial streaks in her hair and decked out in gold jewellery just for a Saturday night at home? Evidently he was wrong about the apple and the tree. Or else Alice was a miracle.
‘And what about your new room, my lovey?’ Mrs Pilling said. ‘Tell us all about it, Alice.’ Alice, sunk in wretchedness, answered not at all. She appeared not even to hear. Roland had never seen her like that. She was like a deaf mute. As he watched her sit and play with her fingernail, his heart went out to her. Cover for the darling girl, he thought. Keep the parents off her back. In doing so he reached without thinking for a form of innocuous but class-bound humour which came to him very easily.
‘The poor dear girl,’ he said, ‘is billeted in the most frightful tip.’ He spoke just as he might have done to amuse his own dear mother. ‘Alice has fallen among filthy Marxists,’ he continued. ‘ “Filthy” being the operative word. It’s my belief that she’ll get back to find the Department of Health and Public Safety has placed a cordon around the premises.’
The Pillings were both offended. Roland sensed too late that his public were not with him and found that his hosts were staring at him with hostility and distaste.
Roland was far too polite to dream of voicing criticism to Alice of her parents. He was also far too ready to think the best of them. They were thoroughly decent types, the Pillings, resourceful and straight. Bit short on humour, to be sure, but then the old boy came from up north. And – God Almighty – had the poor dears really thought he was suggesting that their darling daughter was wallowing in filth? How absurd! But seriously, Roland thought, hats off to the poor old things. Given that they were hardly educated people to say the least, they had really done Alice proud – even if they did seem to watch her far too much, as though she were an item on the television. How frightful to be an only child, he thought, and be burdened with all that overbearing concern. No wonder the poor kid stammered. And all that flashy money. That was a teeny bit embarrassing; teeny bit omnipresent, so to speak. He had not realized that building contractors could manage to get that rich.
Roland, like his parents, was careful with money and fairly modest in his needs. It never crossed his mind that the Pillings simply enjoyed spending their money. He decided, charitably, that their conspicuous expenditure denoted a pitiable state of insecurity. The poor things, he thought, with their millionaire sofas and gadgetry and their swimming pool and their house on the Costa del something-or-other. If only one could reassure them that it simply wasn’t necessary to go in for such obvious display.
Roland’s alimentary tract was groaning as he reflected on Mrs Pilling’s food. Whatever had it all been for? The poultry so messed about with pine nuts and red wine. And following so hard upon the puréed mole. Oh help! And then there were two kinds of pudding – the ‘Passion-Fruit’ whatever and ‘Mango Brûlée’. (Had she really called it ‘Mango Brûlée’?) I mean whatever had happened to caramel custard, if one was wanting to be a bit splashy? Or raspberry fool? His own mother managed so splendidly with the greengages and red currants which grew in the kitchen garden.
After the meal was over, Roland searched the visitor’s bathroom cabinet in vain for indigestion tablets. Then he went for a walk instead. He was delighted when Alice met him on the way back, though she had done so mainly to avoid her mother’s talk.
‘My darling, my baby!’ Mrs Pilling had said. ‘You’re not serious about this man?’
They turned and walked on in silence for more than half an hour. A silence which Roland loved and relished. What a marvellous girl Alice was! All the more so, now that he could appreciate her background. Here was Alice, the last person on earth to hanker after fancy furniture and hair tints and expensive tropical fruits. He stopped and kissed her. Alice was rather wooden.
‘You’re thinking about your friend,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, dearest poppet. I’m afraid I failed you.’
‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Please. You tried.’
Roland’s stomach suddenly protested audibly in the darkness. ‘Do excuse me, I’ve eaten far too well.’ Alice said nothing. She knew that Roland liked boarding-school food. ‘Tell me, Alice,’ he said, with scrupulous politeness. ‘That reddish purée—’
‘Guacamole?’ Alice said. ‘It’s avocado and tomatoes.’
‘Ah,’ Roland said. ‘Ah yes. Ah yes, of course. I see.’
Once Alice had returned from her disturbing trip to 149 Belbury Close, she saw, with some relief, that Iona had replaced My Last Duchess in the box beside the chimney breast. She picked up the books now and read them from beginning to end. Doing so confirmed for her that the story was really quite remarkable. It was, just as Jem had said, ‘a more sustained work of greater maturity’. It was quite different from all the other stories.
When she got to the part about the human hand in the hunting dogs’ burial ground, the time had advanced well into the small hours. She remembered Claire’s confusion over the Catholic goddess and Flora’s well-aimed, poisoned dart. ‘Of course they have a goddess.’ Even Jem had been lost for words. What a mystery Flora was. As much so in her own way as Jem. Yet Jem’s warmth could touch Alice, even now. And Flora? Was Flora capable of warmth, Alice wondered. Or had her father’s perennial thou-shalt-not made its way to the core of her being? Did all those years of companionship over the Sindy dolls’ dream-home and the pink and white brides mean nothing to her? Was there a coldness within Flora that no hot water bottle could cherish? Alice struggled to suppress her thoughts on Flora. She focused again on the goddess. Did Catholics have a goddess? They had a Queen of Heaven. A peasant girl who had assumed the throne after carrying the heavens within her womb. How curiously radical Jem’s religion was, with its insistent raising of the humble and meek. She wondered now, in passing, why it had no appeal for her charming, egalitarian landlord. But then David didn’t want thrones at all, not for anyone, regardless of gender. And had Jem, like the Queen of Heaven, been humbly born? She had always seemed so much more like the Queen of the Night. And how did 149 Belbury Close square with the man of letters? And above all, where was Jem? Where?
Alice returned to the text. She read on right to the end. Jem’s novel reached a final climax as the demon Umberto, having caught his wife red-handed in cahoots with the aged gardener, had flung her into the Ferrari and driven her at speed along the Amalfi coast with intent to fake an accident and pitch Gabriella over a cliff. He was fortuitously aborted in this design by a sudden cascade of falling sheet metal from the roo
f of a small white van which had appeared, as if from nowhere, to impede his perilous way forward. Umberto was dramatically decapitated. The car, veering to the seaward side, had its fall broken by rocks. Gabriella, as she recovered from unconsciousness, became aware that the man wrenching open the twisted passenger door had begun to address her in an Aberdeenshire accent.
‘Angus!’ Gabriella said. ‘Oh my own dear Angus.’ Before Umberto had flung her into the Ferrari, Gabriella had managed to leave a few vital messages upon the Highlander’s answering machine. Angus, who had by now become an eminent brain surgeon, had also recently inherited a red sandstone castle which rose majestically from a cliff-top over the North Sea. Alice put down the book. She heard Jem’s voice across the years, countering Claire Crouchley’s barracking jibes.
‘Well,’ Jem had said. ‘Since a severed head is more than even a Highland brain surgeon can fix, off they go, back to the lochs and the purple heather. What’s to stop them?’
‘But how is it Gabriella has a baby?’ Claire had said. ‘I thought she couldn’t have any children.’
But that, of course, was poor Umberto! The Demon Padrone was infertile. Gabriella’s baby, a beautiful dark-eyed girl, had been conceived, out of wedlock, on the journey back from Amalfi. The act had been committed in the sleeping car of the Flying Scotsman. Alice now wondered whether Angus had produced from his rucksack a bottle of Laphroaig. And had he ‘taken instruction’?
Chapter 18
Roland had met Dr Gubbins at a schoolmasters’ conference shortly after he had met Alice. Then, a good while later, he had run into him at Twickenham. Dr Gubbins, the headmaster of a boys’ public school in the north of England, had, on both occasions, been very much impressed with Roland. He had prolonged the contact beyond the rugby match by proposing that Roland accompany him to a restaurant, to which Roland had readily agreed. For Dr Gubbins the occasion had provided an extended opportunity to size up Roland for a job. He had a shrewd eye for what he was after, and it seemed to him that Roland, for all that he was still very young, was of the sort that these days was becoming rarer than gold. He paused in the act of forking up Scottish salmon.
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