What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

  ‘Mum, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m … it’s just … your father’s singing … it’s so awful.’ I tried to fake a smile. ‘It always has been.’

  ‘But he was only singing to himself.’

  I spun off the bed, Arthur stepping hurriedly backwards, surprised by my sudden movement. If I’d stayed one minute more in the house I don’t know what would have happened. It, Ed, the heat, everything was smothering me, wrapping itself around me, summoning my long-stilled claustrophobia. Without a word to Arthur (there was nothing I could say), I pulled on some trainers and headed downstairs, hurrying past Nell, who waved from the kitchen table, which was piled high with revision books. Oh God! I had completely forgotten my promise to text her this morning to wish her luck in her exams. I hadn’t the energy to wave back.

  I was out the door and halfway down the path before I realized I didn’t know where I wanted to go. Should I head down to the river or westwards towards the gorge? On a summer’s evening the riverside would be a riot of colour, a paseo of dog-walkers, skateboarders and bicyclists, elderly couples taking the air, retirees on balconies, drinkers on quays, their legs dangling over the river. All it needed was Seurat. Scullers would be skimming across the tinted water, windsurfers wrestling with sails, waves scribbling on the hull of the Bristol ferry. A riverbank contains multitudes, as the Walt-man could have said.

  That was the problem. I might have met someone I knew. I didn’t know whether the police had announced anything but if they had I didn’t think I could have handled anyone’s presumption of my relief or their belatedly restated belief in our innocence (‘Of course, Bob and I always knew …’). So instead I decided I’d head towards the Polygon, taking the high-walled tree-lined walkway from Cornwallis Crescent, which was always dark and silent and empty. No sun or sound reaches in. It is a place of perspective and depth.

  I opened our gate and there, sitting in an unmarked blue BMW parked immediately outside, window down, was Philips. Our eyes met. I hovered uncertainly. I wasn’t going to say anything unless I had to, but before I could decide what to do – clearly I couldn’t go back into the house – he nodded slowly, knowingly, at me and gave a serpent smile. I shivered despite the heat. Philips’s arrow-eyed stare was a death sentence. Without uttering a word or taking his eyes off me he reached for the ignition, turned on the engine and, after the merest glance in his wing-mirror, pulled out and glided away.

  I stood still for a few moments until I was sure he had gone. My first instinct was to turn back to tell Ed that Philips was still on our case, but I remembered the bed and the bath, his singing, my empty studio, and I knew I couldn’t go back there yet.

  Feeling completely frazzled, I headed for the sunken path and the Polygon, a Georgian crescent of exquisite proportions, where I sat on a bench and thought about Philips. I couldn’t bear the thought of his triumph, his gleaming face and ridiculous moustache, the calligraphy on his absurd boots, but nor could I bear the status quo. I was caught in a floating world where nothing was grounded, nothing could be resolved. But I knew I would go mad unless I forced myself to think about things that were unconnected to me or Ed or Philips or justice or news or the Internet. So I conjured up Richard Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park’ series in my mind and thought about his rare balance of colour and line. I walked by Hope Square, up Granby Hill, past the Avon Gorge Hotel towards the bridge and Christchurch Green with its shady trees and grand houses. Couples lay on the grass on Sion Hill as I had but Ed hadn’t on the day that woman died. No one watched me pass. Killing time, I wandered down through Clifton Village to Victoria Square where I sat on the low stone wall and felt the warmth of the sun on my face. I watched two small boys in shiny red shirts playing football while their mother or au pair sat on a rug reading Marie Claire and smoking a cigarette.

  When I had wrung Diebenkorn dry I still didn’t want to go home so I tried to remember, as if for an architecture exam, the decorative details of buildings in Manhattan. I started with the Chrysler, my favourite, next the Flatiron, third a brownstone I once stayed in on the Bowery. I was determined not to think about Ed and his secret that in one way had miraculously ceased to exist yet in another had still not gone away. Eventually I stopped thinking altogether and just watched the Square breathe. A man on his haunches was trying but failing to light a disposable barbecue. He looked around irritably, pushed back his straw panama, wiped his forehead and took a swig of beer from a bottle. There was quickness in his movement that hinted at a core of anger. A dyed-blonde in black-jeans-gone-grey slit at the knees and a baggy Homer Simpson T-shirt had kicked off her boots and was lying on her back, a fat paperback for a pillow. Her boyfriend played on his phone.

  Finally, I drifted home, time passing as I tried to get my head round the fact – yes, the fact, Marianne! – that if Philips didn’t get us I was going to have to live with Ed’s lie forever. Would that affect my art forever? All art is a quest for truth, every picture a set of problems that has to be solved with integrity. I sat on a bench on the parched grass on Clifton Hill staring out over the haze of south Bristol. There was no solution. In the end I had no choice but to walk back down the hill home.

  For some reason, before I opened the front door I looked through the window into the kitchen. Immediately I wished I hadn’t. Ed, Arthur and Nell were sitting around the island eating roasted salmon with pesto, Nell’s favourite, roaring with laughter. Arthur was literally bent double. He’d pushed his plate away and his forehead was on the side of the island and his shoulders were rocking. Nell was giggling the way she did when she couldn’t stop; every time she slowed she’d catch Ed’s eye and start again. She leant into him. His arm was around her. He pulled the levers. Whatever he’d said, Ed was beaming, his place in the centre of his family secure once again, the unqualified love of his children assured. I stood outside for more than a minute watching them laugh at their private joke.

  The laughter faded into an embarrassed silence when I entered the kitchen. No one had heard the front door.

  ‘Hi.’ I tried to sound relaxed, as if the fact they were having a full-on belly laugh after I had stormed out didn’t mean anything at all. ‘You’re obviously having a good time.’

  My bonhomie sounded as hollow as it was. There was a stifled giggle from Nell. Arthur pulled his plate towards him. Ed said,

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, you were gone so long I did the salmon. Nell’s choice.’ He glanced at Nell, who pulled a face to stop herself laughing again.

  ‘So I see.’ I didn’t want to sound irritated.

  ‘Did you have a nice walk?’

  It was obvious he was only being polite but there was eagerness in his voice. Ed wanted everything to be as good for me as it was for the three of them, the clock turned back to a time before Peter Spurling’s party. I could hardly blame him. But you can’t reverse time.

  ‘Fine.’

  My downbeat response did nothing to affect his demeanour.

  ‘Anything you’ve forgotten?’ he asked cheerily. Arthur raised an eyebrow at Nell and gave a brief final snort. Ed gleamed with pleasure.

  ‘Um …?’

  ‘Book club?’

  Book club! The first since the night that woman died. I could see from his face he hadn’t made the connection. To stop myself saying anything I might regret, I glanced at the kitchen clock. Twenty past eight.

  ‘Yup. Geraldine rang to see where you were.’

  For a second I wondered whether I could face book club, but even as I wondered I knew it was preferable to this room with its sawn-off joke, a supper suspended by my presence. It would be better for everyone if I went.

  ‘God, I better go.’

  I looked around for my bag.

  ‘On the sofa. And there’s a card for you on the table.’

  I could hear the relief in his voice. I grabbed my bag and the pink envelope, mumbled, ‘Thanks, see you later’, and headed for the door, acutely conscious I was taking my atmosphere with me. There was
silence until I shut the front door. I imagined an explosion of laughter accompanying it. To take my mind off the scene I was leaving, I pulled open the envelope and took out the card. There was a hand-drawn vase of unidentifiable flowers. They were in bright colours, as if it was a primary school project. Inside, in big loopy handwriting, was written: Dear Alice, You sing beyond the genius of the sea. Matt has told me lots. Hopefully we will meet. I can never thank you enough. Love Jo.

  Geraldine had lived alone in a flat-fronted Victorian cottage in Redland since her divorce. Her husband, also a GP, ran off about fifteen years ago with a younger GP at the practice where he and Geraldine were partners, leaving her and their three then-teenage children. He was in his late forties when he cut, exhausted by the hamster-wheel of paying the mortgage and school fees, taking two holidays a year, never having any spare money. As if she wasn’t. He’d found someone, much younger as it turned out, who he said understood him, who loved him for who he was rather than what he could provide. One tired cliché, six lives repointed, the children damaged in some structural but indefinable way. Geraldine’s eldest, already a mum, had started a new family, but the emptiness would be as hard to fill as an echo. When I told Ed, he’d shaken his head and said, ‘How can you do that to your own kids?’ Those were the days when he – we – could afford to take the high road.

  Book club was purring along on familiar lines when I finally arrived. John was in charge, as usual. Diana was absent without apologies, as usual. Peter was drinking too much, as usual. Neil was Neil, with his margin-notes in green ink, though I did catch him giving me a funny look. Fiona was as waspish as ever. She was wearing black Lycra with yellow Day-Glo safety stripes. Sarah was silent. Geraldine clucked around pouring Australian Chardonnay and Chilean Merlot and cutting thick slices of homemade bread to go with her Keralan fish stew. She’d said, in her fading Morningside accent as she opened the front door, ‘I thought about you. I was going to call. But I thought it was probably the last thing you’d need.’ It reminded me that, to everyone else, Ed and I were still the local stars of Bristol’s best-known murder manhunt, even if it had been downgraded to a simple inquiry into whether a woman had taken her pills or not. Unexpectedly, I felt a lump in my throat and struggled to get out the words ‘Thank you’.

  Franny and Zooey – my choice – was not a popular one. The universal view was that Franny was a spoilt brat who needed a good shake. Peter, holding his wine glass with the base on his palm and rolling it around in a circular motion, said, ‘I even felt sorry for that berk she was with. What was that lovely line he had about having to be dead or bohemian to be a poet? Or being some clown with wavy hair? Love it!’ I didn’t have the energy to defend her, though I’d loved the book ever since I read it in a single sitting at Didcot Parkway waiting for a delayed train to Oxford to meet a boy. To me, Franny had always been an idealist who wanted nothing more than for the world to be perfect and was struggling to understand why it couldn’t be, and that hurt.

  We left in ones and twos, hooting our goodbyes and enthusiasm for the next meeting. I found myself on the pavement with Neil as the door closed behind us. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head. I hadn’t smoked for years. If I started again doing the job I do, I would be on fifty a day within a week. His match flared as we headed towards our cars. A pair of female students in matching sports vests staggered past, giggling, supporting each other, fresh out of The Kensington. Neil shifted to snatch a second look as they passed, blew a smoke ring which rose and widened and flattened and said,

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Yup, thanks.’

  ‘What with the police and all?’

  ‘Yup. All done. Not that there was anything anyway.’

  ‘Only you were a bit late. For dinnertime.’

  I stopped dead. Where had I heard that word – ‘dinnertime’ – before? I suddenly remembered and immediately recoiled.

  ‘Oh my God! It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Me? What?’

  I hissed, ‘Who told them.’

  ‘Told who what?’

  He glanced at me sideways.

  ‘Who told the police you’d seen Ed in Stokes Croft on the night of the murder, the accident, whatever they now think it was, on the night that girl died. It was you, wasn’t it? At dinnertime. That’s what you said to me.’

  The micro-pause, his eyes glancing upwards, looking for an answer. There wasn’t one. I’d nailed him.

  ‘You fucking idiot! Why did you do that?’ Neil had taken a step back. I obviously looked as if I meant violence and certainly I was pent-up enough, but his naked fear brought me to a halt. In a softer but still compulsive voice, I said, ‘You did, didn’t you?’ He tapped his cigarette nervously with a finger but said nothing. The ash fell on to the tarmac. ‘Why? Why did you do that rather than come to us? Because we might have killed you?’ He didn’t answer, just looked at the road. ‘For God’s sake, we’d had a bad enough time as it was, without some guy turning up on a Saturday afternoon trying to force me into some sort of confession just because you’d said you’d seen Ed when you hadn’t.’

  Neil looked as if he was fighting some internal battle. After a few moments he said quietly,

  ‘I did see him.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it a lot. It was definitely your husband.’

  ‘It’s not possible. Anyway, you hardly even know what Ed looks like.’

  ‘I’ve met him a couple of times at yours on the book group. I googled him after you were arrested. His picture was in the paper.’

  ‘Twice? And googled. Oh, right, well, that’s definite then.’ Neil looked slightly ashamed. ‘And we weren’t arrested. They just wanted to ask some questions.’

  To my surprise, Neil began shaking his head and looking squarely at me. He had a renewed confidence that made me nervous.

  ‘It was him. I know it.’

  ‘It can’t have been.’ I had to nail this now.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I was with him at six o’clock, on Brandon Hill.’

  Neil gave an involuntary squeak of triumph. His face was weaselly.

  ‘Then why didn’t you say that? When I told you originally that I’d seen him you should have said I couldn’t have done as you were on Brandon Hill together. The fact you didn’t say that was what made me tell the police when I saw in the paper Ed had been arrested. I thought it was important evidence.’

  I was almost hyperventilating, but it was more out of anger than fear now. What sort of stone had Neil crawled out from under? At least I’d wrongly Judas-ed Marnie to her face. I said as coldly and deliberately as I could,

  ‘Because you said you’d seen him “at dinnertime”. Those were your exact words. But we were eating our supper at Sarah’s when you said it. So naturally I assumed you used “dinnertime” to mean “lunchtime”. If I’d thought you meant “dinnertime” as being six o’clock, of course I would have said you were mistaken.’

  Neil’s crime-fighting glory dissipated. It was replaced by a half shrug and a grinding jaw. Sherlock with aviators but no deerstalker. He dropped his cigarette into the road, crushing the glow with his shoe, frowned, ground his teeth but said nothing.

  ‘So next time you want to accuse my husband or anyone else of murdering someone who it transpires has in fact died by accident, please will you at least have the decency to accuse him to his face? People like you make me sick. Goodnight.’

  I turned my back on him and walked away. But as I did I was sure I heard Neil say, as if he was confirming it to himself or repeating into a hidden microphone for the benefit of someone listening in, ‘I know it was him.’

  I was sitting in the car thinking about Neil because I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to see Ed. I didn’t want to be reminded of the suppertime scene, the aborted joke. So I parked outside our house and just sat, watching the dimming outlines of the treet
ops and the lights along the river.

  At midnight I switched on the news to take my mind off my own insoluble problem. My life, this problem, was so removed from the global stage. Out there in the unreal world a bank was reaching the point of no return. If it couldn’t do some sort of deal, it was toast. They played a clip of the CEO protesting he was good for his debt and asking for time to sort out his lines of finance. He sounded a hard man, someone who would do whatever it takes. He must have done whatever it took to become the boss of such a hornet’s nest of ambition and greed. And he had taken whatever he could. Maybe that’s why the market was taking everything back. Or maybe it just didn’t trust him. That was sad. Because when families and children depend on someone, you need to be able to believe in them.

  The car door clicked on the passenger side. For a terrible moment I thought I was going to be attacked but Ed’s head appeared, pale and ghostly. He wiped away the hank of hair that flopped over his forehead.

  ‘Darling, are you all right?’ There was real concern in his voice.

  ‘Yuh. What are you doing out here?’

  He slid into the passenger seat, the door open, left leg dangling over the road like a child on a bike without brakes. I could hear his breathing and my heart pumping, feel his physicality beside me. At that moment I wanted to be anywhere in the world rather than in a car with my husband. Ed put his hand gently on my arm. I stiffened. I couldn’t help it. He sensed my discomfort and his arm dropped on to the gear stick. He was wearing the beige shirt with breast pockets he bought when we went on safari.

  ‘I was worried. I wondered where you’d gone.’ He leant forward and, hand poised over the ‘off’ button of the radio, said, ‘May I?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Book club. You knew that.’

  ‘Not this late. I was worried.’

  I looked out of the windscreen at the back of the car in front. It was a Volvo estate. Such is normality.

  ‘Please. I know you’re stressed, my darling. It’s been a very hard time for you, I know that, for both of us, and – believe me – I’m really sorry and I really appreciate your support and everything you’ve done and put up with.’