What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

  She glided over to the sofa and perched on the arm.

  ‘Ah, school. I wondered when we’d get round to that.’

  Her tone was light, playful, but also deadly serious. I stood up. I was looking at her over the easel.

  ‘Because I’m sorry about that, I really am, and I have been since the moment it happened. I tried to apologize at the time but you wouldn’t let me, and I understand that. I understood it then too. It was your prerogative. So I didn’t pursue you. But don’t think I haven’t often thought about you and wished things had been different and wondered how everything turned out and really hoped everything would be OK.’

  ‘How very gratifying.’

  There was bitterness in her voice. No matter how successful Marianne had been, we both knew countless opportunities had been cut off the day she was expelled for theft. She’d had to make her life the hard way.

  ‘But at least I told the truth.’

  ‘That I was poor and you were rich?’

  ‘That had nothing to do with it. You know that.’

  ‘You mean, if it had been Alice who’d been clutching the tenner they would have dragged you off to the Headmistress without even asking for your side of the story?’

  Marianne’s jaw was set, her cheeks blazing. There had been no university, no leisure, no self-indulgence, no slow-burn achievement in art, no time to watch her baby grow. Instead there had been work, a warehouse, single motherhood, a shop counter, spreadsheets. An exotic mind in a sunless mall. A young woman tapping an older man for a loan. A boy brought up by his granny. The sun created a lemon wedge of light on the floor. Marianne was looking at me intently, as if she’d been waiting for this moment all her life.

  ‘Well, come on then, what was your side of the story?’

  ‘I came from Manchester.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means they would never have believed me anyway.’

  ‘But nevertheless, the truth was—’

  Marianne sliced the air with a horizontal hand, a conductor silencing an orchestra. The sun caught her silver bracelet. I stopped dead, stunned by the venom in her expression.

  ‘The truth was – the truth is – I got back to the dormitory about thirty seconds before you. The ten-pound note was on the floor by Annabel’s locker. I saw it as I was going past her bed to mine and assumed it must be hers. So I picked it up, opened her drawer, and was about to put it in when you came in. You saw the open drawer and the money in my hand and even though you were my best friend you jumped to the wrong conclusion. But before I could explain what had actually happened the others came in and asked you what was going on and you just blurted out I was stealing without having ever asked for my side of the story. That was the end of me.’ She made a small whirring noise like an arrow finding its target. It had been twenty years. ‘I was putting the money back, you see, not taking it out. But if you come in halfway through and you don’t know what’s happening and you don’t bother to ask, then obviously they look the same.’

  Marianne was perfectly still, watching me. I laid down my brush. The colours were dead on the canvas. The ceiling came swirling down.

  I was sitting in the big armchair in the corner of the kitchen, leaning forward, a boxer on the ropes. Franny and Zooey lay unopened beside me. Nell was in her room, texting or Skyping or Facebooking or Snapchatting or Instagramming or Tumblring or WhatsApping or messaging or whatever it is she does all day, because it doesn’t usually include talking to us. Arthur was killing people at Stan Reynolds’ on Sion Hill, hopefully only onscreen. It was the first time he’d walked there alone. My mother would not have approved, but there were mitigating circumstances. The mitigating circumstances were me.

  Ed was sitting on a stool at the island in his thin-lapelled grey suit. It was the one he’d worn to Pete’s party. He looked exactly how I didn’t feel: healthy, bronzed, fit. While I’d been with Marianne he had played tennis, walked to work and bicycled to Bath and back with Arthur. They had swum in the river, jumping off a disused railway bridge, arms rotating, mouths frozen in a silent shout. His blond hair was swept back from his forehead as if he was auditioning for a role in a period drama and the bags under his eyes had completely disappeared.

  Despite his aura of well-being, Ed had been visibly shocked when I told him why I’d come home a day earlier than expected, even though he tried to hide it. He knew nothing short of a crisis would have made me give up on a portrait – this was my career, my life – so he tried to take the news calmly, murmuring ‘uh-hmm’ and ‘OK’ at regular intervals and attempting to see things from my perspective. Eventually he asked me to fetch the unfinished portrait, which I’d refused to leave with Marianne. ‘Not even as a memento?’ she’d cooed, ostentatiously tearing up the cheque I’d left to cover her deposit. I propped it up in front of him against the mantelpiece. I could hardly bear to look at it.

  ‘I thought it was an article of faith that you never gave up on a painting.’

  I felt puffy and cloud-like, defeated.

  ‘It was.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘Everything.’

  He opened his hands like a priest. I was rocking in my chair. I owed Ed an explanation, much as I had owed Marianne one. Hers was easier. She wasn’t vain and she had never had any interest in the portrait. Her interest was me, and in Ed, and in some sort of payback for how I had failed her – no, more than failed her, how I had taken her prospects and her life away. The portrait was simply a vehicle to buy time and intimacy. Her job was done. No wonder she released me from my contract with a flourish.

  When Ed saw I wasn’t going to answer he picked up the photo I had taken of Marianne in pose, flicked its corner, looked across at the portrait and said,

  ‘I think it’s perfectly good. More than that, I think it’s …’ he was shaking his head, struggling for the right word, ‘… great.’ In spite of everything, I almost smiled. Ed could always be relied upon to deliver an opinion with the minimum of drama. He’d learnt it at work. ‘Obviously I’ve never met the woman but from her photo the portrait seems spot on. I don’t get what was the problem.’

  ‘Because it’s not her.’

  He held up the photo next to the portrait.

  ‘You’re joking. You must be. I honestly wouldn’t know which is the real her. I would recognize her in the street.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Please, darling, tell me this is some sort of game? Tell me you brought this back because you needed to touch it up or work on the background or she had to go on a business trip or there was some other reason for finishing early? Please tell me you didn’t really refuse to continue? Because from where I’m standing this is the real deal.’

  I examined a knot in the wooden floorboard. It was hourglass-shaped, like Munch’s The Scream. I knew I could never make him understand, but I owed it to him to try.

  ‘I should never have gone. I wasn’t in the right place to do it. I should have known that.’

  ‘But … what’s wrong with it? Look at it … It’s great.’

  I looked at the portrait like a criminal forced to confront the evidence.

  ‘It’s a likeness, but it’s not her. It’s a picture, not a portrait. There’s no essence of Marianne. I didn’t capture her. I failed completely. I knew it and she knew it. There was no way back.’

  ‘But I thought you said there was always a way back, that you could always work stuff up, scrape paint off, start again? I don’t get why you had to give up on this. I mean, you haven’t even started the background.’

  Ed was staring at me, willing me to give an explanation he could understand, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t revisit that huge bare room with its floor-to-ceiling glass, its merciless sun. I didn’t want to think about Marianne in her dark suit, or her theories, her remorselessness, the sense I was the one being interrogated, intimidated, analysed, judged, hunted down, captured for posterity.

  ‘Because it’s not a portrait of Marianne
, it’s a portrait of me. At best it’s a portrait of us, of everything that’s happened.’

  ‘I don’t understand. It’s self-evidently not you.’

  ‘It’s a portrait of me in the presence of Marianne. It’s a study of my weakness, my arrogance, my failure to understand and, in the end, my humiliation. You can see it in those drilling eyes. I don’t expect you to see it, but I can tell you, that’s what it is. It’s not a portrait of Marianne. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t lay a finger on her. The idea it was me painting her portrait and not the other way round was a joke.’

  Ed stared at the painting determinedly, as if by looking at it hard enough he could make some sense of what I was saying. His cheeks were pale. He didn’t understand but there was no other way I could explain.

  ‘That’s ridiculous! It doesn’t look anything like you.’

  ‘Ed, I promise I tried. Maybe it started out as a portrait of her, but it became a portrait of us, Marianne and me, our relationship, our history, and then, because of the way she was, that shaded into my relationship with you, and that woman, and everything that’s happened. I didn’t want it to, I fought it, I promise I did, but she … well … she was on home ground and she was too strong. In the end I realized I could no more paint her portrait than run her business.’

  Ed turned the photo upside down, sideways, looked at the back, mystified, shaking his head, trying – somehow, anyhow – to see if he could see what I meant. I looked at the Munch-grain in the floor. I couldn’t help him understand. I heard a squeak as his stool pushed back and he came over to me, sat on the arm of the chair, placed a cupped hand under my chin, lifted my head until our eyes met, mine reluctantly, and said,

  ‘Darling, you have to try to understand that what we are doing is for the best. For me – yes, of course, obviously it suits me – but also for you and the children. If you can just try and get your head around that I promise it really will make everything a whole lot easier.’

  It is often said that everyone who was old enough remembers where they were when they heard JFK had been assassinated. I can believe it, because I can remember exactly where I was when I heard Princess Diana had died – the equivalent example of a world-famous person mown down in my lifetime. I was at JFK since you ask, though I’ve always preferred the airport’s original name, Idlewild, a beautiful word which lacks the sleazebag connotations that accompany the Kennedys and ‘Camelot’ these days. That’s the land of liberty, though: shiny on the outside, worms within. I was waiting at baggage carousel seven with Robin Seldon, who I trekked round the US with the summer I left school, when the news came through. I always thought Diana’s death must have been a welcome release. She had nowhere to go. I’m beginning to understand what she went through.

  I heard Ed’s news in the kitchen. I was sitting at the island, my brain dead, my fingers hooked into a mug of tea, leafing aimlessly through a copy of Hello! that Nell must have picked up somewhere. Its priorities hadn’t changed. Simon was on his speedboat with two interchangeable girls. Gwyneth was swimming off a yacht off Malibu. A blonde lady, all boots and bosom and botox, someone I promise I had never seen before, was inviting me into her ranch-style Surrey house to tell me how the death of Joss (her husband? her daughter? her horse?) had made her value her privacy more than ever.

  I was looking at her bleached hair and leathery skin, her bereft but unbowed expression, but I was thinking of all the cameras and lights and microphones and people and wires trailing across oceans and plains and beaches and streets and staircases, turning real lives into make-believe for the armchair gratification of the unknown. I was thinking of the black-eyed cameras shoved in my face in the road and Isherwood’s famous opening line when Ed appeared, momentarily as a ghostly presence beyond the door, then in person, broad and solid. He was in his suit but his tie was loosened, top button undone. There was triumph in the flare of his nostrils. He glanced around the room to check I was alone and said,

  ‘Have you heard the news?’

  His voice was excited in a way that was ‘sooooo not Daddy’, as Nell would have said.

  ‘Gwyneth is in Malibu?’

  ‘No? What—’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  His face cracked into a smile. It felt like one I hadn’t seen since the Plantagenets were on the throne.

  ‘They’ve called it off.’

  ‘Called what off?’

  ‘Called the murder inquiry off. The police. They’ve called the manhunt off.’

  His face was so bright, so eager like a schoolboy’s, I could only manage –

  ‘Oh darling!’

  – before I felt the walls cave in and tears (of joy? of despair? of both?) burst out. I didn’t want him to see me cry, so I pulled him to me and buried my head in his chest. I held him tightly for the first time in ages, as if my life depended on it, which is what I should have done all through these past weeks.

  ‘I got an email from that guy Pullen, the DI who pulled you in. You got it as well. Surprised you haven’t seen it.’ I didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to know I hadn’t opened an email since I got back from Marianne. There couldn’t be any good news. ‘Said they’d followed every lead and testimony and nothing had led anywhere. So they’d come to the conclusion it was an accident and are going to shelve the investigation unless anything new turns up. Nice of them to let us know. They now think she hadn’t taken her drugs – there were none in her body at the autopsy, but apparently there should have been – she was on various prescriptions – and she slipped and hit her head. Case closed. Or, not quite closed, but left in a file marked “Do not open unless further evidence emerges”.’

  I lifted my head and squeezed out happiness.

  ‘Oh darling, that’s brilliant news.’

  And maybe just for a moment I thought it was and that we could go back to where we had been before Peter Spurling’s party. But when I caught sight of Ed’s face, I realized he hadn’t really heard my words because he was so wrapped up in his triumph and relief and joy, and my pleasure drained away. I could hardly blame him for being ecstatic, but his ecstasy only took account of what he had been through, not what I was still going through or what would be wrapped around us forever. Ed had always looked forward but his unconcealed delight, his apparent deafness, spoke volumes. Everything was all right again and the world according to Edward Sheahan could just roll right on. There was no scope for doubt, no room for justice, no need for truth. No place for me.

  ‘Let’s go out to dinner? Somewhere special.’ His eyes were alight and his tone expansive.

  I disentangled myself. I couldn’t face dinner out, not à deux. But I didn’t want to rain on his parade so, in a deliberate voice that tried to disguise my despair, I said,

  ‘I’m not sure it’s a cause for celebration, even though it’s great news. I mean, someone still died.’

  It was as if someone had switched a lamp off. There was a pause before he said quietly but firmly,

  ‘Darling, nothing can change the past. But what has changed is the future, our future.’

  ‘Her parents’ future?’

  He gave a long sigh, frustration written across his face like bankruptcy.

  ‘Darling, accidents happen. Look at the news any night of the week. War, flooding, disease, poverty, drought, death of every kind – it’s around us every day. Most of it isn’t even an accident, it’s a part of life. What’s happened today may not end brutality in Somalia and it won’t save the NHS, but it saves us and, more importantly, it saves the children.’

  ‘It saves you.’ I tried to sound ironic, or playful, but I could see in his look that I hadn’t pulled it off.

  ‘OK, yes, and it saves me.’

  ‘And that’s a good thing.’

  And it was. I reached up and put my arms around his neck. He bent down to kiss me on the mouth. His arms were around my back and they pulled me to him. I felt the softness of his lips swimming against mine and I began to feel guilty again. It wasn’t a case o
f either/or. Binary outcomes belong to the world of maths. This was about people, real people, eating drinking sweating swearing greedy frightened people. Even if these lips did kiss that woman, even if this body slept with that woman and even if as a direct result she lost her life, maybe she really did bring it all upon herself.

  Don’t we all?

  Ed was singing in the bath. His voice wasn’t bad, though it wasn’t good either. He was singing the sounds of the words of the ‘Ode to Joy’ but not the words, which he doesn’t know because he can’t speak German. That makes it sound as if he was singing the tune, but he wasn’t doing that either. Really he was just making an ‘Ode to Joy’-like noise to tell the world all was well and he was happy with his place in it again.

  Next door I lay on our bed staring out at a cyanic sky. Gradually his singing began to get on my nerves. It shouldn’t have, because it was entirely understandable he felt reborn, but it did. What could I say? I didn’t feel reborn. I felt as if I was lying in a field of black tulips, their heads bowed. My skin prickled and my legs ached. My brain was in a vice. I could see my empty studio, the primed canvas, clean brushes, fresh paint on the palette, but all I could think about was the impossibility of walking up one flight of stairs and starting work, because all I could hear was Ed, his voice blocking out everything.

  I had to get up, get out, go anywhere to get away, but the heat was oppressive, my limbs too leaden to move. I couldn’t breathe. The air was static and there was no noise from the open windows, only Ed filling the house with his joy. I put my thumbs in my ears and pressed my nose with my fingers, my eyes shut, but he had started repeating ‘Freude, schoener’ over and over again at full volume. The invasive, unstoppable noise – it wasn’t singing, not as anyone halfway musical would consider it – made me feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, strapped in my chair, driven mad by force-fed Beethoven. I couldn’t stand it any more. I screamed,

  ‘Please, Ed, SHUT UP!’

  The singing stopped mid-word. I opened my eyes tentatively. Arthur was looking down at me with a worried expression.