For a long time I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to tell the truth. Eventually, to avoid it, I said,
‘Philips knows.’
‘What do you mean, Philips knows? Who’s Philips?’
‘One of the policemen who interviewed me. The one who came round asking questions that Saturday afternoon. He was sitting in his car right outside the gate when I went out.’
Ed looked paler than usual in the light of the streetlamp.
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Then how do you know he knows? It may have been a coincidence.’
I was staring at the steering wheel.
‘He knows. He was waiting for me. God knows how long he’d been there. When I came out he just looked at me, nodded and drove off. Effectively he was saying they might have called off the hunt officially but he knows we’re guilty and he isn’t going to let it go. That’s what he wanted me to know.’
Ed thought for a moment.
‘Don’t panic, darling, we only have to sit tight. Think about it: if they had anything at all on us they wouldn’t have called it off. He’s bluffing, I promise. Seeing if he can throw you.’
‘And Neil knows.’
‘Neil?’
‘From book club. The one who saw you on Stokes Croft on the night she died.’
‘But he hasn’t got any proof or he would have gone to the police.’
‘He did. That’s why Philips came round that Saturday.’
‘And then they called it off. Because they didn’t have any way of proving it. We were on Brandon Hill. You have to think positively, darling.’
‘But if they both pretty much know, and Marnie’s worked it out, who else does? What are we going to do about it? I’m not sure how long I can go on like this.’
‘There’s no “like this”, darling, they haven’t got anything.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that from here.’
‘Even though the police have officially—’
‘Even though.’
There was a pause so long I thought he might have got out of the car. A welcome breeze wafted through the open door.
‘My darling, I promise everything will be OK. You just need some time to get your head round things. You should go away for a while, relax, de-stress.’
‘Go away?’
‘Yes. I think it would do you good. I think you need some time out.’
‘I don’t need any time out. What I need is to deal with this … this thing, one way or another.’
‘I know. And if you get away for a while I think at some moment it will hit you that this really is the best thing that could have happened for all of us. For the children.’
‘Where do you want me to go?’
It sounded more defensive than I intended.
‘Anywhere you want. Somewhere nice. Take the kids if you want. Leave them here if you want. Go with friends. Go alone. Whatever you want.’ He paused to see if I would brighten up. I didn’t. ‘Forget painting, forget everything, just go away and enjoy yourself. Spend some time on you. Take a girlfriend. Whatever you want, my darling. You’ll be amazed how much good it will do.’
His profile was hard but his voice was soft, encouraging. I suddenly wanted to hug him. He did understand what I was going through and, so far as he could, he wanted to make things better. I looked through the windscreen again.
‘With you?’
He shook his head. ‘Best not.’
He really did understand.
‘For how long?’
‘As long as you want.’ I squeezed his arm.
‘Where shall I go?’
‘Wherever you want.’
‘Europe?’
‘Anywhere.’
I thought for a moment. Should I go where I had been happiest or somewhere I had never been? Where had I been happiest? A reel of images unspooled. Hazy mountains and dusty roads, turquoise sea, lemon trees, olive groves. I had been happiest on holiday with Ed and Nell and Arthur. I never liked the ‘rent-a-villa-with-eleven-others’-type holidays, men showing off, girls jockeying round the pool. Matt, who agreed, once said, ‘There’s always someone no one likes, and if you can’t work out who it is, it’s you,’ which probably tells you more about him than anything else, but I had never forgotten it. Who should I go with? Not the children. They were the question at the heart of everything. A friend? Which one? Marianne was right. There was no one I could share this with.
Ed was right too. I had to go away. It was our only chance. I needed to miss him. I had to make myself realize once and for all that I couldn’t live without him. But it was a high-risk strategy, because what if I found that I could? Ed was not a high-risk man. So for him to be taking this chance told me everything I needed to know about how he was feeling.
And suddenly I knew where I would go. I would go alone. I would go somewhere I already knew, where the memories were cider-tinted, somewhere from before I met Ed that was redolent of paths not taken, unadorned possibility, a different future. Even as I thought it, I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain to Ed why it had suddenly become the place I wanted to go to more than any other. It was a place of unfinished business, from where I had originally placed my trust and hope in the world outside. I had to renew my vows. I said,
‘I’ll go to Highlands.’
‘Highlands?’ Even Ed couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. ‘Are you serious?’
I nodded.
‘Don’t you want to go somewhere more glamorous? Somewhere hotter?’
‘I want to go home.’
‘Really? Not anywhere in the world without your mum? Money no object.’
But in that moment I had never been surer of anything. What I wanted was to go home, the one place in the world I had always felt alone, no matter who or how many people were there. I wanted time to roam across the moor, swim in bone-chilling streams, clamber over boulders, climb crags and tors, buy crumbly white rolls in the village shop, snooze in green hollows. I wanted to return to my childhood, that solitary landscape of stories, where I had thrilled to tales of escaped prisoners and brave children. It was there I had become a reader and because I became a reader I became a painter of portraits, because what is a portrait if not the opening up of a character, the physical manifestation of the story of a life?
I reached Highlands at the end of a long drive. It’s always a long drive, wherever you come from, because after you leave the M5 and A30 you have to pick your way high up on to the moor, where the roads are windier, bridges narrower, tractors heavier, streams deeper, fords wider, dry-stone walls less forgiving, passing places less frequent and, for those who don’t know their way around from birth, signposting less obvious.
As my old Golf climbed on to the moor I began to breathe more easily. Every mile was taking me away from Ed. Every mile was taking me towards a place I used to call home. If I didn’t feel any better with the window down and pure moorland air rushing through the car, at least I felt a tiny sense of hope that didn’t dissipate as it usually did when I reached the moss- and lichen-covered, weather-battered gatepost with its rusty legend, ‘Highlands’.
The house was Victorian and grey, slate-roofed, Gothic-windowed, a city of chimneys and empty rooms. If you didn’t already know how bleak it could be inside, the architecture offered early indication. An elbow of outhouses containing old scythes and rusting car parts that would never be used again stood to one side. Alice Sheahan’s First Law of Agriculture: ‘The profitability of any farm is in inverse proportion to the number of unidentifiable rusting objects half-buried upon it.’
Mother, who had been watching and waiting or heard the car on the remnants of gravel, opened the side door and waved at me to come in that way. She has never met me at the front door, not once in my whole life, even though she always greeted Matt out front, no matter what state he was in – often when he would have preferred to sneak in the back way. Not that I mind. Who’s counting? Anyway, the back door befits
a craftswoman, a portraitist, a seeker of the reality behind the painted façade. You don’t find that when you arrive at the front door or are welcomed into a tastefully decorated hall as artificial as stage flats. Rembrandt never used the front door, especially the old impoverished Rembrandt, author of the greatest self-portraits of all. Has anyone anatomized themselves and their failure so brutally?
The back door opened to reveal a familiar inky rectangle. I had spent so much time with my nanny, Maud, back there that I could navigate my way into the kitchen blindfolded. The worn brick passage dipped past the larder and there were three low stone steps up to the kitchen, smoothed and bowed from footfall. The larder had a whirring fan, a hospital-blue light behind a wire mesh and a dangling flycatcher, an analogue piece of cardboard manufactured circa 1970. It was possibly the latest gizmo in the house. I would slip in after primary school and dip my finger into the lemon curd that Maud made, or lift the gauze fly-resister off a half-eaten leg of lamb and tear off a piece to dip in mint jelly, always dodging the mould. At least, I did until Mother caught me. Stealing was not tolerated. I’ve never eaten lemon curd since.
She shielded her eyes from the sun. Mother was as erect as ever, her tweed coat too formal and surely too hot, a salmon scarf wound around her throat. She looked older and smaller, her strong straight nose capable of sniffing out children being children at a hundred yards seemed less well defined but her thin lips were still primed to condemn. There was a prickle of teeth when she smiled. She was always harder on me than on Matt or Bridgey because I was the one who fought back. Matt just took the pain and glided away, further into himself. Bridgey’s nose wasn’t out of a book long enough for her to be in trouble or to realize she was in trouble. Their pliancy made me bolder. It was as if one of us had to stand up for childhood. But it also gave my mother strength. She was fleshier around the jowls than I remembered and her hair was snowy, but although she was smiling it was not obviously with welcome. She’d never had a mummy’s face.
No matter. I wanted to be here. I was pleased to see her. I hadn’t been down since Christmas. Her mouth moved as if she was practising speech, trying it out to see what it was like. She had lived alone too long.
‘Mother.’
‘Alice.’
We hugged. Her skin felt cold and papery. She disengaged a moment too soon, as if human touch was alien, and said,
‘Why don’t you take your case up to your room and then come down for dinner?’
‘I thought I might go for a walk first if that’s OK? Stretch my legs a bit.’
She nodded and gestured me into the house and we lapsed into silence. She has never managed small talk. I walked down the passage, past the wicker basket with ball-stained cricket bats and tennis rackets in wooden presses, listening to her rickety steps behind me. The familiar smell of apples mixed with coconut matting. The kitchen was painted a colour so faded it had become indeterminate. A four-barred wooden clothes-rack was hanging from the ceiling, lowered by rope and pulleys. It had probably hung there since the Boer War. The thin-legged Formica table stood in the centre, laid for two. There was no tablecloth. It reminded me of a long-gone boyfriend, Tom Carbine, and the question he asked on his first trip to Highlands, one that had resonated down the years: ‘Why does your mum want to live in 1950s Budapest?’
We reached the hall. I stopped at the foot of the stairs.
‘What time would you like to eat?’
‘Seven fifteen. If you would like a sherry I will be in the library at six forty-five.’
‘Is there any of that lovely local cider?’
‘No.’
Welcome home.
I didn’t have much time so I headed straight for the place we called ‘the bracken stream’, even though it was the widest part of the river on our land. I planned to spend the day there tomorrow if the weather was good, take a picnic, swim, read, snooze in the sun, think, but, first things first, at that moment I simply wanted to see it again, dip my fingers into it, lay my face to the soil, feel the moor beneath my feet. If you fell asleep at the bracken stream and woke with the sun slanting golden-green through the trees and playing on the water you’d think you’d died and been reincarnated as Laurie Lee. It’s the place that meant most to me here. More than my bedroom, which never felt safe with Mother and Joy the joyless cleaner coming and going; more than the old playroom where I would sit drinking tea with Maud until Mother found us and found tasks for us to do; more even than the treehouse in the woods, which wasn’t really a treehouse at all, just a hollow in the trunk of a great beech, and was Matt’s place anyway. It was always full of his pipes and bongs and Rizla papers and the dope he kept in the transparent plastic bags he was given cash in by Mr Sawter, the old bank manager in the village. Mr Sawter never did work out why Matt always asked for his money in coins.
Our old worn path through the fields had long since disappeared, swallowed by nature, but I could still take the right lines, every boulder and tree a landmark. I reached the river quickly, luxuriating in my freedom and solitude. The bank was shaded by oaks and willows and ash, the evening sun poking through, dappling the translucent water. Silver-black fish glinted and twisted in the shallows. Smooth pebbles shone on the river bed. A spider spun its web between ferns. I found my old grassy hollow. It was a couple of yards back from the stream. I lay down and looked up at the sky where the evening sun – the planet’s obstetrician – poured down on to my face. The ground was warm and moulded to my curves, exactly as I remembered. It was as if I had only been here yesterday, as if I was the same shape as when I was a teenager.
I was lying there like a farmyard kitten, my mind a beautiful blank, when I heard whistling on the breeze. I pressed into my dip, praying whoever it was wouldn’t stumble over me. This part of our land had no right of way. It couldn’t be Jim, the farmer, because he always went home on the stroke of five, even though he never wore a watch, and no one else would come down here, except maybe a poacher. I felt a moment’s fear for my mother. Were gangs roaming around the house while she sat in the library doing the Times crossword and nursing a thimble of sherry?
Keeping my head down, I turned on to my front. On the far bank an unshaven man in dirty jeans and a tatty sweatshirt was heading towards the river. He was wearing a black LA Dodgers cap with gold piping, the peak pulled low. A fishing rod and a canvas bag were slung over his shoulder. He looked in his early twenties but beneath the peak and the stubble it was hard to be sure.
I glanced at my watch. Ten to six. I had fifteen minutes at most before I had to head back if I was going to change for dinner and catch my mother in the library, which I ought to do tonight if no other. I lay motionless as the man prepared his bait. He worked smoothly, efficiently, familiar with his business, comfortable in his private landscape, a natural man in a natural world, fishing in the way man had been doing for thousands of years. I felt the tension draining from me, as if I could lie happily in my green bower forever, simply watching him set up his rod, lay out his hooks and bait, catch his fish.
And suddenly I knew what I had to do. I had to paint him. Immediately the idea excited me and I felt an artistic stirring I hadn’t experienced since Ed’s confession. This man, whoever he was, offered an escape from everything unnatural that had happened. He could be my bridge back into art and into life. It would be a non-psychological work, a portrait of an everyman going about the hunter-gathering business of killing to put food on the table to feed his family. Doing what men do. I didn’t need a Marnie or a Marianne, or even a Julie. I didn’t need someone I had to psychoanalyse down to their last fingernail. I just needed some way of pouring my soul into someone wholly alive in a landscape I loved. It was as if I had stumbled upon a single chance to reconnect with an elemental truth that was part of us all.
As he worked with his bait I marked out the composition in my mind. I would paint him here in his natural element, low in the water, casting his line. To paint him in a studio or from photographs would destroy the thing that
made him him and here here. I wanted to paint the Dodgers cap. I wanted to paint the bracken stream. I wanted to paint the whispering trees. I wanted to paint my solitude. The title would be A Thousand Years.
The man cast with a lazy flick of the wrist, the hook hooping out over the water. A hawk hung high in a pink sky. Slowly I got to my feet. I didn’t want to disturb the fish. I called across the water.
‘Excuse me?’
He looked up, pushing the peak of his cap up his forehead, squinting across the river into the sun. There was grime on his face and his cheeks were hollow. It took him a moment to register.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’
He didn’t respond.
‘But can I ask you a favour?’
He wiped his hand on his sleeve.
‘It may seem a bit odd …’
I couldn’t read his look. All I could hear was my voice booming across the lazy river.
‘… but I was wondering … if I could paint you? Your portrait?’
He stood perfectly still. Then, as if the word portrait unleashed some prehistoric poacher’s fear of identification, he flicked a strong supple wrist and hooked his worm out of the water.
‘No, hold on a sec! You can keep fishing.’
As smoothly and efficiently as he’d unpacked, and never taking an eye off me, he reeled in his line and threw away the bait.
‘Please don’t go. You can fish here. There’s no problem.’
He paused for a moment but then continued. Oh why was he on that side of the fucking river? Why couldn’t I get up close and show I didn’t want to cause any trouble?
‘Look, honestly, I don’t mind. I could get you fishing rights here whenever you want.’
He stopped for a moment and looked across at me, but even as he did I realized I’d made a mistake. I’d established ownership. I was the class that punished poachers.
What Alice Knew Page 22