What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

  As we approached the Suspension Bridge, testament to man’s capacity to conceive, believe and achieve the impossible, Ed said,

  ‘Oh, by the way, Pete asked if I was going to Araminta’s memorial service.’

  I was touching up my eyelashes with a mascara wand.

  ‘Memorial service?’

  ‘Apparently there’s one next Wednesday. Chelsea Old Church. He wondered if I wanted to go with him.’

  ‘You said no, of course.’

  He flicked the car down a gear as we approached the bridge. A Samaritans sign fixed to the stone tower encouraged potential suicides to call.

  ‘Actually, I said yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it might have looked odd if I’d said no.’

  ‘Odd? It would have looked totally normal. It looks far odder to go to the memorial service of a girl who you met once at a party when you were four sheets gone. Why would anyone do that?’

  There was a pause while he fished out a coin for the barrier. Who said men couldn’t multitask? He dropped it into the wire-mesh paw. The barrier-arm lifted and we drove across the bridge. Way beneath us the river was brown between the mudflats. Two tiny figures on the cricket ground beyond: a father bowling to his son. The view from the bridge always made me feel vulnerable, conscious of the height and longevity of the million-year-old gorge, the magnificence of Brunel’s achievement, the despair of the jumpers.

  ‘If he thought it was odd he presumably wouldn’t have asked me.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what he thinks. What about everyone else? What about the police, for God’s sake?’ I felt a squeeze of fear. He had missed the point again. ‘You don’t think they won’t be casing the guest list for the kooky killer who turns up to gloat over everyone trying to catch him? Jesus, Ed, that’s the oldest hook in the book.’

  He glanced towards the traffic lights by the entrance to Ashton Court.

  ‘If I go with Pete it will look completely normal. If anyone asks – which they won’t – I will simply say I only knew her briefly but obviously I’m very sorry about what happened and have come to pay my respects, not only to her but to support Pete, my closest colleague, who’s lost one of his oldest friends. Why is that odd?’

  ‘One of your junior colleague’s girlfriend’s oldest friends. How close is that? How often have you even met Miranda?’

  The lights turned amber and he crunched the gears with a steel yelp. We passed a golf club and some school playing fields. It is a long lonely road, barely a mile from the city centre yet trees bend over the tarmac like a wicked wood in a fairy story.

  ‘It’s a helluva lot less odd than telling Pete I can’t be bothered to have anything to do with a girl whose flat I stayed in less than a week before she died.’

  Ed didn’t like arguments.

  ‘When you were so drunk you can’t even remember sleeping with her. Look, surely you can see you shouldn’t go to the memorial service? Partly because you will draw police attention to yourself, but mainly because, however it happened, you were there when she died. You were involved. It just doesn’t seem right.’

  Silence. More lights. Crossroads. Ed looked grumpy. We turned right.

  ‘I don’t think I really had a choice.’

  ‘You always have a choice.’

  More silence. When he finally spoke there was steel in his voice. It was the first time I had heard it since the night.

  ‘OK then, I have a choice. And I choose to go. I choose to go because it seems the right thing to do and because I killed her. It was an accident, I know that, but I choose to go because I think I should pay my respects to someone I watched die and who is part of my life forever as a result.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you should go. If you are thinking about our future you have to forget the past.’

  Ed changed down unnecessarily, the gears crunching. It was for my benefit.

  ‘So I don’t have a choice any more? There’s a debt I can never repay so I have to do whatever you say for the rest of my life. Is that how it is from now on?

  He twitched at the temples. It made his hairline seem higher than it was. I looked out of the window at the dark trees, a strand of bungalows.

  ‘Go on then, you go, do what you like. But if the police pick you up on the way out and you don’t see Nell or Arthur until they’re in their thirties, so be it.’

  He didn’t answer. He could hear the frustration in my voice. Instead, after a moment or two, from nowhere, I sensed him smile. Then he stifled a chuckle. I didn’t look at him, refusing to be seduced, but that only made him laugh again, louder. It was exactly like it had been when we started going out and he would defuse my outbursts by laughing, and because everyone had always taken me seriously until then, it worked, and I loved him for it, even if I hated it at the time. This time I paid no attention. I just stared ahead, even though his laughter was a sound I hadn’t heard for so many days, a sound so uninhibited and unexpected it could have blown in from anywhere. I sat stony-faced. Ed was alternately looking at me and the road, his whole body beginning to rock, head bouncing off the headrest, becoming ever more incapacitated by my refusal to bend. In the end I couldn’t help it. I grinned. Ed heaved uncontrollably. My smile widened. He tried to speak but it was lost in hysterics. I started to laugh, I had to. He hooted and buckled in his seat. He howled. I laughed. He was laughing fit to burst, tears beginning to roll down his cheeks. Finally I let myself go.

  But the timbre had changed. I suddenly realized he wasn’t laughing any more. He was crying and the tears washing down his face were real. I couldn’t help myself, I began to cry too, unstoppably, for the way our world had changed and for that dead girl and her parents, because I knew how I would feel if it was Arthur or Nell, and we had to pull in at the side of the road because my mascara was smudging and I wanted to turn around and go home, and Ed’s tears meant he couldn’t see to drive, and neither of us could see the way ahead.

  Julian Noone had pale eyes that circled like searchlights. Many a potential investor, company FD and, if the rumours were true, pretty maiden had been trapped in their beam. As he swooped in to kiss me they seemed to be on maximum power. I had the uncomfortable feeling he had clocked my red eyes and reapplied mascara and suspected a row in the car. He was wearing an expensive shirt, burnt sienna, with a ludicrous cutaway collar and four buttons at neck and cuff, which made him look like a celebrity chef. Greying chest hair was visible at his throat. Ella’s blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders and her teeth shone. She was wearing a brilliant turquoise shirt with its sleeves furled, ‘Joseph’ written across her breasts in sequins, and Escada sport jeans so tight she must have shaved her legs to get into them. I caught Ed glancing downwards to her décolletage as he leant forward to kiss her hello. He minutely raised an eyebrow.

  While Ed struggled to find common interest with Ella, Julian fixed on me, pouring us both large glasses of a pricey Chassagne-Montrachet. Ed had lime and soda, Ella a crackling G&T. Having asked how my art was, and made an insider’s observation about the difference between headline and actual revenues at the big auction houses, Julian moved smoothly through the gears, using art fakes as an intro to financial markets. For those who play with it, money is like water: it always finds a way in.

  ‘You see,’ he said, topping up my glass even though it was half-full, ‘the stock market is no different to any other. When any market gets a sniff something’s wrong it’s like a dog looking for a bone. It keeps sniffing around and no matter how often a dealer or a company says everything’s kosher it won’t let it alone. It’s a confidence thing, like a sixth sense, an intuition that can’t be satisfied. The market will always get there in the end.’ He leant back in his chair and said smugly, ‘As the man said, bankruptcy happens slowly, then quickly.’

  I nodded and looked pretty. When we sat down in the middle of their vast dining room Julian refilled our glasses with a joie de vivre that suggested he was not planning to invest in some overseas mark
et after dinner. I held up my hand, but he poured the wine anyway. I was already feeling light-headed and knew I shouldn’t drink more, but Julian was so charming and enthusiastic it was like trying to fend off a puppy. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. His brand of positivity had been in short supply of late. So while Ed splashed in Ella’s shallows, Julian probed the nexus of art and money (he owned an early Caulfield and a late Kossoff, a drawing of Spitalfields, not one of his best) and roamed the byways of ‘high f’nance’ as he pronounced it. Eventually we swung round and talked as a group, moving through the dinner party staples – holidays, schools, politics, the death of Araminta Lyall (Ed mentioned he’d met her at a party but offered so little colour the conversation moved swiftly on), marriage and divorce. Julian’s brother had just separated. With Ed turning back to Ella to explain how NHS under-funding manifested itself daily in a practical way (though not without surreptitiously catching my eye and touching his water glass with a forefinger), Julian re-ran the argument that kicked off his brother’s marriage’s death waltz. They were running late in the car on the way to watch their son play hockey at a school they couldn’t find. Why were they late? ‘He said, she said.’ That’s how it started. Symptom not cause. On the day it was the Winchester one-way system, but it could have been anything. Julian uncorked a Margaux that Hemingway would have written a florid sentence for, and said,

  ‘Apparently 69 per cent of all break-ups are kicked off by a row in the car.’

  I didn’t need any more wine, but I did need a night off. I could feel Ed looking at me as I let Julian fill my glass. I didn’t catch his eye.

  ‘Where on earth did you get that ridiculous statistic?’ I teased.

  He feigned hurt.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘I just want to know where you got that absurd stat.’

  ‘Lies, damn lies, eh?’

  I forked my last potato. I was feeling slightly giddy, but warm and in control. It almost felt as if life had returned to normal.

  ‘No.’

  ‘ “No” meaning …?’

  It wasn’t hard to see how in different circumstances – dinner in Knightsbridge, a meeting in Mayfair – people did what he wanted.

  ‘Just, we had one on the way here and I was wondering whether we were going to join the 69 per cent.’

  ‘A break-up argument?’ he ventured eagerly.

  ‘A 31 per-center.’

  As soon as I said it, I knew I had made a mistake. The wine was talking. Julian leaned forward, interest flaring, and I remembered his searchlight-stare when we arrived and he took in my red eyes and reapplied mascara. For a moment I wondered whether he had steered the conversation round to divorce and his brother’s argument in Winchester on purpose – and as I thought it, I knew he had. I felt a bolt of fear, but before I could move the conversation on he said,

  ‘Really? What about?’

  I screeched into reverse.

  ‘Oh, nothing really.’

  ‘Come-come, my dear, you can’t leave a man dangling.’

  A smile as dangerous as the Doom Bar. I took a sip of wine to buy time to think, but all it did was make me realize how much I had already drunk. My toes felt pinched in my heels.

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘It never is.’

  ‘Just the usual.’

  ‘But you know the way here well enough. Come on, there’s no need to be so secretive. We’re all friends.’ I handed my plate to the girl-next-door they’d employed to cook for the evening. ‘We’ve all been there.’

  I momentarily considered lying, but I knew I had to stick as closely to the truth as possible if I was going to line the barricades.

  ‘Oh, just about a funeral. Nothing much.’

  ‘Nothing much to whoever died. Who was he? She?’

  ‘Someone Ed knew. He thought he should go, I thought he shouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The girl reappeared with a wheel of camembert and a hillside of grapes. I felt my neck beginning to prickle. This was the first time I had had to think on my feet about that woman. I clenched my fists under the table.

  ‘What is this, Julian, twenty questions?’

  I gave an overly relaxed laugh. He didn’t answer. The candles felt bright on my forehead and my cheeks were hot.

  ‘Okaaaay … because he hadn’t seen them for years, not since we left London. So it seemed a bit, I don’t know, prurient to suddenly get in touch now. It’s not as if a funeral is the obvious place for catch-up.’

  ‘But Ed said old friends are always old friends and you have to support them.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Had I blurted out agreement too eagerly? Julian leant back in his chair thoughtfully, wiggling his fingers like a dentist warming up. I glanced at Ed. I could tell he was listening intently even if he seemed to be giving Ella his full concentration as she waxed about the Provençal villa they had just bought.

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘Yes. Silly, I know. That’s marriage, I guess.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound much.’

  I relaxed and reached for my wine. I had got away with it.

  ‘I guess we’re the 31 per cent.’

  ‘But compared to the Winchester bypass, maybe death is a big thing.’

  ‘Anything can be a big thing. It’s what you make of it.’

  ‘Never trust a rowing couple.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I just did.’

  He looked at me shrewdly, lips glistening in the candlelight. I felt like a finance director caught fiddling the books. How easy it was to let the conversation move the wrong way, how deceptively easy to lie. The problem, I knew, was the more lies we told, the greater the risk of discovery. Lies compound like debt until you can no longer pay the interest. And, it struck me as I turned away to see Ella cut a sliver of camembert so thin it was almost transparent, that was only part of the problem. The real problem was how was I going to live with an infinite lie when my work was forged in the cauldron of truth?

  Soon after, I accidentally knocked over my glass and amongst the chaos and salted tablecloth and apologies that followed, Ed was almost indecently quick to his feet, saying it had been a lovely evening but was that the time I think we really ought to go.

  The moment our car turned on to the road, the Noone electric gates gliding silently shut behind us, hiding the spotlights in the grass that lit up as we drove down the drive, creating a magical Eden, Ed gave a theatrical sigh. I had slumped into my seat. My head felt thick. Our headlights picked out the midnight-blue canopy of the trees as Ed said,

  ‘Darling, how did you let the conversation go there?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. It just happened.’

  ‘It’s like you told me with the flowers. We have to concentrate. We can never let the guard down.’

  ‘I know. I’m really sorry. It just appeared out of nowhere.’

  ‘I guess we’ve got to make sure things don’t appear out of nowhere, particularly with someone like Julian. He hasn’t made that much money without being able to sniff out a weakness.’

  I was annoyed by his words. It was obvious he didn’t like Julian or approve of his job, so he was implicitly recasting his shrewdness in the most unfavourable light. I had drunk too much and the car felt oppressive.

  ‘What? You go and kill someone and somehow the fallout is down to me?’

  ‘You know that’s not what I’m saying.’ His voice was steady.

  ‘What are you saying then?’

  ‘I’m just saying that if we’re going to get away with this, we can never talk about it or anything to do with it ever again. Not at home. Not in the car. Not on top of the Mendips. Not when there’s nobody within a hundred miles. Not ever. It didn’t happen.’

  He didn’t want a fight. He wanted equilibrium. But I was angry and frustrated and I didn’t. I wanted to register that because of him I was going to have to live the rest of my life under the smothering blan
ket of his secret.

  ‘I see, you screw up and I have to do everything exactly the way you want.’

  His manner was calm. He kept on looking at the road.

  ‘Darling, you know I can’t be permanently in your debt. It won’t work. We’ll never be able to stay together.’

  Tight with drink and angry as I was, I knew he was right. No marriage can survive inequality in the long term. Whatever passed between us, however unfair it seemed, I had to bite back the bitterness. The moral high ground was the road to the gallows. The only way through this was to work as partners-in-crime. He was making the same point I had made in the car on the way to the Noones’: the only way we could have a future was to forget the past.

  Afterwards we drove in silence, stopping only to pay the toll on the bridge. As he fished in his pocket for change he leant towards me, looking for a connection, a softness or gesture, but I couldn’t give it to him, not then. I sat rigid in my seat and stared straight ahead at the barrier and I felt the tears forming, because in my mind’s eye I could see the outline of his head on that woman’s pillow – sanity is the capacity to edit – and I knew I was trapped.

  The following Wednesday, on the day of that woman’s memorial service, I was awake-not-awake, in a warm dreamy state I wanted to last forever, when I was woken by Arthur’s urgent hand.

  ‘Mummy, there’s two men who want to see you at the door.’