Wednesday night was book club night. I picked Arthur up from Richie Railton’s birthday party and gave him and Nell tea. As it was the first half-decent evening of the summer I left Ed, who had texted to say he would be running late, some cold chicken and a tomato-and-onion salad and headed up to Sion Hill. It’s so peaceful in the golden-green sunlight of a West Country evening, lying on the grass overlooking the bridge and the gorge, the Georgian houses with their tall black windows and wrought-iron balconies. I took a Cy Twombly exhibition catalogue because I felt like wallowing in his roses. Ed had worked late on Tuesday night too and therefore reneged on his offer to cook supper. When he did get home he’d simply disappeared into his study. I also wanted to find some space away from Arthur. He’d been in trouble at school and was being a pain. He’d pushed Alfie Warburton into the pond. There was a lot of ‘he said, I said, he did so I did’ (Arthur the innocent party in his telling, as usual). I didn’t listen. Alfie Warburton is a trouble-maker but Arthur has to learn that violence begets violence and punishment. So I decided to get out and to lie on the grass luxuriating in the evening sunshine and the evanescence of Twombly’s brushwork until it was time to walk across Christchurch Green to book club.
There were eight in the book club, including me. They were an odd crew, with more men than is typical. Don’t ask me how they’d got together. I was a late joiner. It was the sheer randomness of the group that attracted me. John was a retired prep school headmaster. Neil did something in software. Peter used to be someone in the City. Fiona was obsessed by fitness and talked incessantly about the musclebound Greek, Costas, who put her through her paces in a Redland gym. Sarah, whose Farrow & Balled Gloucestershire-gastropub-styled kitchen we were sitting in that night, was a bored housewife with a husband who was in London half the week and children away at school. Geraldine was a no-nonsense Scottish GP. Diana was a successful retailer, which meant she talked about ‘sales densities’ and ‘click and collect’ rather than old-hat stuff like selling things people wanted. She wasn’t there that night. And then there was moi.
Sarah provided scalding soup with bread and cheese, olives, brownies, and a warm Côte du Rhone. The soup was pea and ham, the colour of floodlit grass. There was a blue-veined Dolcelatte riper than Gielgud’s Hamlet. It reminded me of Granny Querry’s ancient hands as they warmed themselves on her sherry glass in the drawing room at Highlands, the silk curtains behind stained by her smoke, an ornate gilt mirror speckled black in the corners where the reflective silver had disappeared. Neil turned to me, leaning too close as he always did, his breath smelling of cheese, and said,
‘I saw Ed earlier.’
He stared at me through his blue-tint aviator glasses. I simply said ‘Oh’ because I hate it when people invade my space.
‘On Stokes Croft. At dinnertime.’
I was thinking this wasn’t the most inspiring conversation I had ever had when it occurred to me that if Neil had seen Ed it was the second time he’d been to Stokes Croft in less than a week. Was that surprising? He hadn’t been there for years, at least as far as I knew, but presumably there was a straightforward explanation. There always was with Ed.
‘Was he … was he doing anything?’
‘No. Just walking. I was in the car. I recognized him as I drove past.’
‘I see. And?’
Neil licked thin lips. His tongue was nicotine-yellow. I wondered if he was trying to tell me something.
‘Just it seemed a … a funny sort of place to see him.’
‘Maybe he was going to see someone?’ I thought about reaching for a brownie but decided against. I’d been working too hard to take much exercise. ‘They have babies there too.’
‘Just he looked a bit out of place. You know how it is down there. Don’t expect to see a man in a suit walking.’
‘It’s not Texas.’
I meant it as a joke but Neil gave me a sour look. He was ridiculously thin-skinned. If ever I took a different stance on a book we had read, and I often did, he always took it personally. I’d given up minding. There are some people who never connect.
‘Just saying, you know,’ he said peevishly, but before I could say anything Fiona drummed her fingers on the table and said,
‘Who would like to start then?’
It was an old joke. John always started. He’s the headmaster. Plus, we’d been reading an unpublished manuscript written by his nephew. He looked around gravely, as if lecturing junior assembly on why you shouldn’t run in the corridor. Headmasterly hairs grew out of his ears and nose and oval leather patches covered the elbows of his tweed jacket. He wore black lace-up Oxfords, each as shiny as the bonnet of a new car, and owned a holiday cottage in Padstow.
John outlined the plot of the novel – he always did, even though we had all read it – and suggested various themes. Fiona rejected his interpretation, as she always did. Peter agreed with her, as he always did, for no better reason than to wind John up. Neil scratched notes in green ink. People who use green ink often see themselves as mavericks. They are usually a pain to be around. I bet Oscar Wilde used green ink, and Rupert Brooke. Jim Morrison. Only Neil wasn’t Oscar Wilde, much less Jim Morrison. He was Neil. Geraldine offered qualified support to John. The argument went in circles. It was almost as if they preferred it that way.
I got home after eleven and tossed my house keys into the basket on the marble shelf by the door. Ed’s mobile was beside it. Normally he took it to bed in case of an emergency, even when he was off duty. I picked it up to take upstairs. Idly, I pressed the space bar and was greeted by the ‘unlock’ rectangle. I typed in his password but it didn’t open. Fat fingers? My fingers are paintbrush slim. I typed it in again. It still didn’t open. I focused, tapping in the letters with exaggerated care. Ed had used the same password for as long as he had needed a password. Phone, bank, laptop, tennis club, iTunes, Amazon, First Great Western, you name it, pension, they were all the same, the name of some saurian band that trod the boards in the 1970s, 99 or 999 added where necessary. I hit ‘enter’. No dice. Weird. If anyone had asked me I would have said Ed didn’t even know how to change a password. He must have had Arthur’s help. I headed upstairs, my mind ticking oddly. Something didn’t feel quite right but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I didn’t stop at our bedroom but crept into Nell’s instead. A full moon created a silvery sheen in her room. She had twisted the pillow into a neck-brace but was sleeping peacefully, breathing evenly. Nell had blonde hair, petrol-blue eyes, a haughty nose that pierced the air like a keel, porcelain skin and a wide friendly mouth. She had inherited my bone structure; Arthur had my sense of infinite possibility. Nell was precious and beautiful and I hadn’t seen enough of her recently, though I always thought that whenever I stopped to think about her. I straightened and flattened the pillow and kissed her lightly on the temple. She shifted on the bed and flung an arm across her face, a wrist as delicate as glass. It reminded me how fragile the life we construct for ourselves really is. I kissed her again but by the time she stirred I was gone, pushing open the door to Arthur’s room.
He looked up immediately, hair ochre-tinted in the glow from the shadeless bulb on the landing. I stroked his cheek with a finger. It was so soft an advertising company would bottle it.
‘Can’t sleep?’
His little head nodded on the pillow.
‘Any reason?’
His head moved side to side. His mouth was open and the tips of his teeth were showing.
‘You’re not frightened of anything?’
Side to side.
‘OK. Well, you just snuggle down and think nice thoughts.’
Up and down.
‘Mummy?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Why is Daddy sad?’
‘He’s not sad. When was he sad?’
‘Tonight.’
‘What do you mean he was sad?’
‘He was just …’
‘Sad?’
Up and down. Their heads look so small when th
ey don’t understand. It makes you remember they’re still children.
‘Did he say he was sad?’
‘No.’
‘So why do you think he was sad?’
‘He was crying.’
‘He was crying?’
‘Little tears.’
‘Little tears?’
I was becoming an echo. But he seemed so un-Arthurish, as if he was turning outwards rather than inwards and was blinded by what he found.
‘He turned away. He didn’t want me to see him cry.’
‘I see.’
Only I didn’t see. Ed never cried. Occasionally he got beaten up by some particularly appalling pregnancy or birth story, but it had to be outside the realm of twenty years’ obstetrics experience, the sort of thing that couldn’t be described in words or pictures, and even then he never cried. Perhaps his Saturday-night hangover had caught up with him. I smiled reassuringly but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. Ed never kept anything from me. We always told each other everything. To try to put any negative thoughts out of my mind I added:
‘Well, don’t you worry your little head. I’m sure it was nothing or just things he had to deal with at work. When you spend your life with pregnant mothers and babies you see a lot of unpleasant stuff, and that can be really stressful. It can build up inside you, maybe without you even realizing, and sometimes it all gets too much and you need to release some emotion. I’m sure that’s what it was. So you just go back to sleep, my darling.’
‘You and Daddy, you’re not going to get divorced?’
Where did that come from?
‘No. Why do you ask that? We’re very happy together. I love your daddy and he loves me, and we both love you two.’
‘You don’t love your work more than you love Daddy?’
‘No!’
‘More than you love us?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Promise?’
‘Cross my heart.’
He gave a little nod, I hope of belief, nodded and turned away. There was something preternaturally defenceless in the curve of his back and the sharp angle of his shoulders poking out of the duvet. I watched him for a little while. Why had he asked that? He didn’t move. Eventually his shoulders hunched and he curled into himself, legs out, as if he was a question mark.
On Friday night I was lying in my bath, steaming in peace, tweaking the taps with my toes to keep a hot tide flowing, skin glazed and glistening with oil, a single star in my own firmament. It’s a giant, claw-footed bath, which is how a bath should be, the showerhead lying heavy and bronze on its cradle.
I reached down to pick up The Times, which lay on the wicker table on top of water-stained back issues of the New Yorker, and started leafing through the pages. On page six a large headline trilled ‘SOCIETY GIRL DIES’. It’s not the sort of story I usually read – ‘there’s no such thing as society’, as the old matadora said – but the word ‘Bristol’ caught my eye. You don’t have to be a hearse-chaser to take an interest in a newsworthy death a mile or so from home.
I read the article, written in the breathless prose of the provincial stringer, in a single gulp. A thirty-two-year-old mature art student at UWE had been found dead in her flat. There was some background. She had studied History of Art at Edinburgh and worked at Sotheby’s before moving to Bristol to study to be an artist. There was no sign of forced entry but the police were treating it as suspicious.
The dead girl had lived in the Carriage Works. I know the Carriage Works. It’s a nineteenth-century building in the Bristol Byzantine style, three storeys, each with an arcade of semicircular arches. It was abandoned for years before being converted into upmarket flats for people on the fringes of the arts or the media, or accountants who play at being those types at weekends.
But it was none of this that made my heart stop. The detail that made me dip under the water and hold my breath for as long as possible as I tried to work out how it hung together before eventually coming up like a seal and flooding the floor was that the name of the girl in the colour photo accompanying the article, a picture of a girl in a low-cut dress and a royal blue ribbon choker at a Dering Street opening, and the name in lights in the article, was ‘Araminta Lyall’.
Araminta Lyall. Araminta Lyall? I knew that name. Where had I heard it? I racked my brains. Pete! When we spoke on the phone on Sunday morning Pete had said the last person he had seen Ed talking to was a girl called Araminta Lyall.
‘Ed!’
I stared at the face in the photo. It was pretty in the way of a Hollywood usherette. Araminta Lyall had long blonde hair and a narrow, angular, Modigliani face, medieval and sloping, sardine-silver eyes. She looked wayward but compelling.
I flung the paper back on to the chair and slid under the water again. When I surfaced Ed was sitting on the side of the bath, expressionless as an assassin, arms dangling, copper wristband turning turquoise, his right hand an inch from my head. He had just got back from South London, having driven there and back to put flowers on his parents’ graves. They died within six months of each other (heart attack/broken heart). He went twice a year, on their birthdays, taking a day off if necessary, a pilgrimage of love and thanks for everything they sacrificed for him. It was his only link to his past.
‘Hey! You gave me a fright.’
‘You called.’
‘Have you seen the paper?’
‘Nope.’
I glanced towards the wicker chair. He leant forward to pick it up, turned it over and started reading.
‘Is that the girl from last Saturday night? Where you stayed on Stokes Croft?’
He didn’t answer but as he read the tips of his ears began to redden. I levered myself out of the bath. Without looking up Ed pulled a pair of towels off the rack and handed them to me. I wound them around my hips and shoulders and took a third, wrapping it around my head like a turban. Eventually he folded the paper, Araminta face up, and said,
‘Poor girl.’
‘She’s been murdered.’
‘It doesn’t actually say she was murdered.’
‘She didn’t die of old age!’
‘I guess.’
‘And the police are treating it as suspicious. What was she like?’
Ed looked back at the paper as if the photo might hold some clue.
‘I didn’t really talk to her – at least, not until I was already too far gone. I talked to someone else, some guy, in the taxi going back to hers, went up to her flat to call a cab, was given a drink and that was it. I crashed out pretty much straight away.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that!’
‘That’s all I remember.’
‘Well, you’ll have to do better than that for the police.’
Ed frowned, his bottom lip turned down.
‘The police? Why would I talk to the police? I don’t know anything about her. If it wasn’t for this photo I’m not sure I could even remember which one she was or what she looked like.’
‘Of course you’ll have to talk to the police. They’re not doing their job if they don’t come and see someone who spent a night with her a few days before she was murdered.’
‘I didn’t exactly “spend the night” with her.’
‘Whatever. They’re bound to want to speak to you.’
Ed stared at me as if weighing the truth of my words.
‘But that’s ridiculous. Why would they? I mean, I hardly knew her.’
‘You went to her flat. Shouldn’t you ring them and tell them?’
‘What? You want me to ring the police to ask for an interview to tell them I met her once but didn’t know anything about her? They’re going to think I’m some sort of nut.’
I knew what he said was true. And yet … and yet. Someone had died. Surely he had to do whatever he could? Almost before the thought had formed in my head I heard myself asking:
‘By the way, what were you doing on Stokes Croft on Wednesday evening?’
‘Wednesday
night?’ Ed looked genuinely surprised. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘Sure?’
He frowned for a moment before his face lightened.
‘Oh yes, I went to St Andrew’s on Wednesday night. I crossed Stokes Croft, if that’s what you mean. I had to visit an ex-patient who’s had a difficult time to lend some moral support. I walked. Through Kingsdown and up through Montpelier. That was the night I said I was going to be late. Why?’
He seemed so calm and his response so logical I wondered why I had asked.
‘Just Neil from book club mentioned he saw you.’
‘Oh … OK.’
He looked slightly perplexed. He clearly couldn’t see why I’d raised it, and suddenly nor could I.
‘And why did you change your mobile password?’
‘Why did I change my password?’ He rocked back theatrically, smiling. ‘Is this an inquisition? Because they asked us to at work. They’re trying to drag us dinosaurs into the twenty-first century. Is something worrying you, my darling?’
‘No … well, yes. Maybe, I mean, I don’t know, just … things have been a bit weird lately.’
‘What do you mean “weird”?’
‘Well, sort of a lot of one-offs.’
‘Such as?’
‘So, like you getting drunk and stopping out overnight. And Lucy Rennell telling me Marnie Latham said she was still in touch with me and then the very next day getting those flowers with Marnie’s initials on them, and that woman from the medical charity who didn’t know about surgeons being mister. I don’t know … it just feels like a lot of slightly odd things have happened at once.’
‘You think the charity woman might have been Marnie Latham?’
I thought for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to me.
‘No. I don’t. At least, not unless her voice has changed.’
‘Which it could have done.’
‘It’s possible, suppose, but it was very different.’
‘OK, well the others: so I got drunk. It doesn’t usually happen, but it did. Even now I’m not quite sure why I did. I think it must have been the combination of a lot of things. Work. Exhaustion. The unexpected liberation of a party with no medics, no one I knew, no one of my blood group. The fact you weren’t there but these people I’d never met before had heard of me through Pete and you through your work. I’ve never had that before, which is hardly surprising given the sorts of places I go, and I think because I was knackered I responded in a way I never normally would. As for Marnie saying you’re still friends, that is a bit weird but I wouldn’t worry. She’s never been in touch and if she was going to be she probably would have been by now. Maybe she was just winding Lucy up? And the flowers, that is a coincidence as I’m 99.9 per cent certain they are from Mima Langton—’
What Alice Knew Page 4