‘Exactly. That’s what I was doing.’
‘No. That can be checked.’
‘Good point. Then it wasn’t me.’
‘It wasn’t you.’
‘Because … I was on Sion Hill with you.’
‘OK. Though not Sion Hill. Middle of Clifton, nice evening, quite a lot of people around. Someone might have seen me on my own. We can say we were somewhere else, somewhere we weren’t, then no one is going to remember seeing us, or not. Brandon Hill? It’s pretty big. They can ask as many questions as they want about Brandon Hill and no one can confirm or deny anything. And they won’t be asking any questions about Sion Hill.’
‘Good idea. And we can just say Neil was mistaken. I mean, he barely knows me.’
‘Exactly. It wasn’t you he saw.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
How I wished those words were true.
Lying on my back, hands behind my head, staring at a grey ceiling touched by a yellow sodium sliver from the streetlights sneaking through a crack in the curtains, I thought about what had happened and tried to fit it into the context of my life. It was hard to miss the irony. I had said ‘yes’ to Edward Sheahan on the steps at Tintagel for many positive reasons – I loved him, trusted him, admired him, respected him, believed in him and fancied him like hell – but just as many negative ones. My mother thought he wasn’t good enough, though she parsed it as not being ‘right for me’; my university friends thought he was not interesting enough; my arty friends thought he was too bourgeois. I didn’t marry Ed to prove anyone wrong but I did marry him to prove me right. I also said ‘yes’ because, looking back, when I met him I needed someone resolute and unyielding to hold on to. If it hadn’t been for Ed, I was probably heading for the Moonies or Catholicism, or some other weird sect promising the earth. Never marry a man you meet at a Cure gig or who wears sunglasses on the top of his head.
The reason I wasn’t certain about how I fitted in at the time when I met Ed was that I realized if I wanted to take my art seriously I had to give up all the ties to my past. I couldn’t allow myself to be stretched between high society and low bohemia. I had to succeed in an unfashionable genre without formal training or art school connections. So, like Beckett moving to Paris and writing in French, I sloughed off my past. I sacked my then-boyfriend the day after he proposed, which was horrible and cruel at the time but definitely the best for both of us. In fact, it was his proposal that made me realize I’d prefer to die by lethal injection than live north of Oban, somewhere that was practically in the tundra.
When Ed came into my world, art was the only thing I had to lean on. My family were no use. We might as well not have been related for all the time we spent with each other. Mother had a very strict definition of ‘leaving home’; Bridgey’s capacity to deal with human emotion was confined to Victorian novels; and things would have needed to go very wrong for anyone to consider Matt a safety net. I had learnt to survive on my own. Marnie – briefly – aside, I’d never been that tight with other girls.
My point is that around the time I met Ed I wasn’t fully settled in my art or my life. The attraction of Ed was he knew nothing about art and didn’t pretend to. But he knew what he wanted. I loved that clarity when my own future felt so opaque. He didn’t do nostalgia. And I’d had a lifetime’s worth of nostalgia at Highlands with its sepia-tinted photos of public school rackets teams filled with boys who went into the City or who didn’t come back from the wars. From the moment I met him at John Morgan’s party, toying with a can of Pepsi, wearing a red T-shirt with ‘Halcyon Days’ stencilled in small gold letters above the heart, he exuded supreme confidence in his understanding of the way things were and the way they were supposed to be.
But the roles had reversed. It was my turn. I felt strong, excited to be supporting him, and more than a little frightened. My fear was for Ed and the future, and any effect on the children, rather than anything that might happen to me. Whatever he’d done – I believed him when he said that woman’s death was an accident – I’d said I would support him and when I give my word, that is it. I was going to stand by my man like a buxom, battle-scarred bottle-blonde from Birmingham, Alabama. Which was more important? The lives of four people, all of whom had the capacity to contribute to society? Or a dead madwoman who had tried to destroy our family and for whom nothing could be done? Which was more important? The freedom of a man who was party to a fatal accident – not murder, definitely not murder, not even manslaughter if the truth be told – and who would more than repay any debt by saving countless babies in future, or some abstract concept of justice? Substance or theory? Pragmatism or idealism? The living or the dead? We live in an imperfect world. Justice can be served in many ways.
The following morning summer began. The clouds finally parted and the sun blazed away like a cornered outlaw. Breakfast was near-silent. I caught Ed glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as if he was frightened I was going to change my mind.
For the sake of the children, I made out it was a normal day by getting angry with Arthur for not doing his prep and shouting at Nell to hurry up or she’d have to walk. It was a normal day: he hadn’t done his prep, she didn’t hurry and she didn’t have to walk.
Back home after the school run it was anything but normal. My concentration was shot to bits. Usually when that happened I battled on through – nothing will happen if you’re not at the easel – but not that day, when all I could see were cinematic images of Ed in her bed, blood on her chin, those strong white teeth. There were moments when I was almost physically sick. Of course I couldn’t feel my way into colours. There were too many I had to avoid and every shape took on a parallel form, a ghoulish apparition.
Eventually I gave in to the inevitable. I wanted to go for a walk to feel a restorative sun on my face but I couldn’t trust myself to cope with meeting anyone I knew. So I went into the study and surfed the net, catching up on the latest about the manhunt. I tried to keep it generic, newspaper sites, the BBC, nothing to suggest I had anything more than a reasonable and passing interest in the death of a local woman. Yet I couldn’t resist veering off on to gallery sites, group exhibitions and UWE shows, that woman’s old girls’ school association, Sotheby’s, Edinburgh University alumni. In the end even those weren’t interesting enough, but through Pete and Miranda I found her Facebook page and devoured the details of the life she led. I compared it to my own, and I wondered, I was always wondering, why of all the girls in the world that he had never noticed, she was the one who turned Ed’s head.
I was reading an old online review of her Edinburgh degree show when the doorbell rang. I clicked off the page and headed down through the house, glancing at my still life of an old kettle that was hanging on the stairs. It had been a pivotal painting in my creative ‘journey’, if that doesn’t sound too up-itself, the first time I combined foreground figuration and background abstraction, a shift in style as radical for me as putting his canvas on the floor and dripping paint on to it had been for Pollock. Art, like life, is about the journey as much as the destination. Without the blood and sweat and fears you won’t make it to wherever you are trying to go. There will be no deception, no artifice. No art.
I knew who it would be at the door: a delivery man. It always was. The only men who ring our doorbell during the day thrust electronic pencils and signing-machines at me or have packages from some online retailer of sunny colours and Cornish dreams tucked under their arm. Or they are delivering flowers or cases of wine to Ed to give thanks for life. They are our modern door-to-door salesmen, only the sale has already been made.
But what if it was the police? The thought stopped me dead in the hall. It was too late to pretend there was no one at home because I had bounded heavily down the stairs specifically to let whoever was outside know someone was in so they didn’t go away. I walked slowly towards the front door with a sickening sensation in my stomach, not just because I was frightened about who was on the other side but because I wa
s suddenly aware that from now on I would always be frightened about who was on the other side. I would never again be able to hear the doorbell, see a policeman walking towards me or have my name called out in the street without thinking we had reached the end. My days of unthinkingly opening the door were over. My days of not caring what people were saying were over. I gave myself an extra moment to settle my nerves, to take on board the life sentence I had just been handed, to line up our story and to prepare an innocent greeting. Slowly I opened the heavy door.
It was Jerry. Thank God! Jerry was a sunburnt and straggly-haired delivery man. He wore knee-length shorts and a neatly ironed shirt. Jerry delivered flowers to Ed. He and I have got to know each other over the years. We snigger at the cards attached to the flowers: With love, from Keith and Sharon and Apollo; From Michael, Caroline, Django and Gandalf. ‘Which one’s the dog?’ he asks.
Jerry was bending over, preparing to leave the flowers on the step when I opened the door. There was a bald spot on the top of his head. He straightened, smiling – Ed had helped to deliver Jerry and Gillian’s baby, Annie – and held out the flowers, a burst of lilies in a brown paper cone, damp at the bottom, tied with string. They were linen-white, the brutal sun lighting the petals and purifying the green-drenched stalks.
‘For you, Mrs Sheahan.’
For me? This was unusual. The last time I had been sent flowers was when I had Arthur. Nell had given me some once, for Mother’s Day, but those were from the garden. I took the bouquet and envelope and slid out the card. It was embossed with the fleur-de-lys. Jerry was looking away, either to show a professional discretion or because he had looked at the card already. My Darling, I can never thank you enough. I want to be with you forever. Ed xxxx. I tried to look happy, but I was churning inside.
‘Oh! They’re from Ed. What a nice surprise!’
‘Dr Sheahan?’ Jerry had always called Ed ‘Dr’ Sheahan even though almost every letter he ever received was addressed to ‘Mr’. ‘An anniversary?’
I strangled an involuntary laugh.
‘Birthday?’ Jerry’s children were still in high chairs, every birthday a major event. I shook my head. ‘Whatever,’ he added, ‘they’re lovely.’ He knew who paid his Christmas tip. I looked down at the card. There were an unprecedented four kisses, not the usual three. I looked at Jerry. He looked at me. He was wondering what had happened for Ed to send me flowers.
Ed looked up from the Financial Times, which for some unfathomable reason he always buys on Thursdays after his game of men’s doubles. Why Thursday? Why the FT? (Why doubles?) Because … I don’t know. Why shouldn’t he only buy it on Thursdays? He was sitting in the wicker armchair in the bathroom, waiting for the bath to fill. There was a towel around his neck, a glass of Diet Coke balanced on the armrest, white-socked feet planted squarely on the white wooden floorboards. He was still wearing his tennis gear, the casual tick of Nike on his pressed shirt and shorts. Ed has the broad shoulders and sturdy calves of an Agincourt bowman, and similar subtlety. Plan A: hit the ball as hard as you can; Plan B: hit it harder. When he stands close to me I can feel his height and strength. It’s a benevolent power but there are unreachable fathoms. His life is not tethered to its past. I asked,
‘Anything?’
He turned a page, his arms high, opening and closing like butterfly wings.
‘Not really the paper for it.’
‘No news is good news.’
‘Yup.’
‘People talking about it at work?’
‘Nope.’
‘People talking about you at work?’
‘Why would they talk about me?’
‘About you behaving oddly?’
He frowned. Ed doesn’t do lateral. His mind proceeds in a straight line from symptom to diagnosis. I learnt that early on in our relationship when I gave him the Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens. He read my favourite poem, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, very slowly, saying nothing, eyebrows knitted and mouth pursed, before eventually looking up and saying coolly and unashamedly: ‘I don’t understand a word of it.’ I loved him for his refusal to bullshit. His lack of pretension was such a contrast to the students I met with their art school sophistry and annotated copies (green ink, of course) of E. E. Cummings or Fleurs du Mal.
Ed shifted on the wicker chair. His head was back, his face looking up like a satellite dish.
‘Is anyone saying: “Why is Mr Sheahan sending his wife flowers for the first time in fifteen years?” ’
‘I think you rather over-estimate the interest in my private life.’
‘Well, did you order them or did you ask Karen?’
‘I did. Though I did ask her what—’
‘Exactly. So Karen knows you sent me flowers. So whoever Karen has her coffee breaks with knows you sent me flowers. Which means the girls on reception know you sent me flowers. Which probably means everyone at St Anthony’s knows you sent me flowers.’
‘You seem to think no one at the hospital does anything but gossip.’
I arched an eyebrow ironically.
‘And then there’s Jerry.’
‘Who’s Jerry?’ His tone suggested I’d entered the theatre of the absurd.
‘The delivery man.’
‘Jerry.’ He said the name slowly as if he’d never heard it before and was keen to try it on his tongue.
‘Jerry who regularly delivers flowers to you but never to me.’
‘OK. I sent you flowers. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I did it because I thought you would like them. I wanted to say thank you. I wanted to make you happy. I’m sorry I tried.’
I dropped to my haunches beside him. My voice came out as a conspiratorial hiss.
‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘What don’t I get?’ He stressed the final word.
‘You don’t get that everything’s changed. Irrevocably. There’s a manhunt going on out there and they are looking for you. Your name’s in the frame because you were with that woman at her flat a few nights before she died. You don’t get that although the police haven’t come here yet they may arrive at any time. They may already be asking someone the right questions, noting the answers, joining the dots. Who knows when there’s going to be a knock on that door?’
‘I don’t see what that has got to do with flowers.’
‘What it has got to do with flowers, my darling, is that if the police join the dots they are going to ask lots of questions of everybody you have spent time with since that woman died. And one of those will be Karen. And when they ask her if you have behaved in any way differently over the last three weeks she might – just might – suddenly remember the flowers and say, well yes, there was one thing, a man who she had never known to send flowers to his wife suddenly did, and the police might – just might – wonder what you or your wife did to make you send her flowers for the first time in living memory, birthdays and anniversaries included. And what will you say if they wonder that out loud in a bare room with no windows and a single bulb? What will you say if you know they are asking me the same question at the same time in another room with no windows and a single bulb? And there’s no conferring. But we have to say the same thing or the game’s up.’
Ed looked suitably contrite. The sword above his head was considerably larger than the one above mine.
‘I’m sorry, darling, I really am.’
And suddenly, I felt sorry for him. Ed was not a man who attracted pity, he commanded respect. Yet at that moment he looked so defenceless, a single man on the run with the nation’s police and press ranged against him. He shifted in his chair, a dagger of sunlight slashing his face.
‘That’s what you’ll say, but you can never say it enough – not to me, not to that woman, not to her parents, not to the judge or jury, not to Nell and Arthur. But that’s not my point. My point is nothing must change in our lives. If you never sent me flowers before, don’t start sending them now. If you never washed the car on a Sunday afternoon, don’
t start washing it now. The only way we can survive if the police come knocking is if nothing – nothing at all – has changed in our lives. That way, when we sit in separate rooms with bare bulbs and two-way glass and are asked questions we don’t know the answers to, we can give our answers confidently, because we know how we each think and behave and, so far as we can, we’ve nailed our lies and our alibis together. Yes?’
He nodded meekly.
‘Because I’ve put my head in the noose for you. I will go to jail too for protecting a husband who slept with another woman and then killed her. And where will that leave the kids?’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘That will be for the court to decide. The facts themselves are indisputable.’ I tried not to let bitterness seep into my voice. ‘You fucked her. She threatened your family and marriage. You were the only person there when she died. We only have your word it was an accident.’
‘Stop it! You don’t think—’ He turned away, jaw working, Y-shaped vein throbbing on his forehead.
‘No, I don’t, but that’s because I know you. I’m not the jury, though. Look at the facts. A woman who could have ruined your marriage or reputation died violently. You were the only person present when she died. Those are the only facts. Everything else is your word.’
He looked at me, unblinking, grinding his teeth.
‘ “He said, she said, he did, she did.” Just like Arthur and Alfie Warburton. Yes, I do believe you, but I won’t be on the jury and the only fact we have is that woman ended up dead and Alfie wound up in the pond. Arthur was the one punished because for all the “he said, I said” there was only one fact.’
I was almost hyperventilating. Ed nodded. I could see he wanted to help me calm down, but he knew and I knew there was nothing he could say or do.
The following Saturday we went to Julian and Ella Noone’s for dinner. They lived in a large castellated house in Failand, a couple of miles outside the city over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Julian was a successful fund manager who could read a balance sheet, a business situation and a handshake. Ella could spot a brand at ninety yards. We’d become sort of friends after Ed delivered their second son, Oscar, a birth with brutal complications, and they insisted on taking us out for a swanky dinner. Ed, who had no interest in money, didn’t have much in common with Julian, who did. I could talk kids and schools and London shops with Ella, but only as long as it didn’t happen too often or last too long. I liked Julian, though, and – I think – he liked me. He was intelligent and interested in a lot of things, art amongst them, and through business he had learnt how to hide his motives, which kept things interesting. That was why I would have liked to paint him, and the reason he would never ask.
What Alice Knew Page 8