What Alice Knew

by T. A. Cotterell

‘Please talk to me. I just want to paint you. Nothing else. I won’t be any trouble. Please?’

  I was almost shouting. It didn’t matter. There was no one around to see how mad I looked, pleading with a poacher.

  ‘Please! I’ll pay you.’

  He slung his canvas bag and rod over his shoulder. He shot me a short final stare like an urban fox and turned his back, starting away over the moor as without thinking I leapt into the river and began wading across, struggling against the flow, keeping my balance on the polished stones, the icy water swirling around my hips. He stopped, glanced back and started to jog in the direction of Okehampton. I stopped midstream, soaked, knowing I would never catch him, not with two-thirds of the river between us. My legs were freezing. The river was up to my waist. I knew how ridiculous I must look but he didn’t turn around. Soon he was nothing more than a distant speck, taking his rod and his cap and my last hope with him.

  The room we called the green library was painted Chelsea blue and didn’t have any books in it. There was a mahogany roll-top bureau where Mother wrote her letters, a small, gull’s-egg grey sofa with a dark wine stain the shape of Tahiti that has been there longer than anyone can remember, a nest of tables with cork coasters, two silk-covered single chairs and two leaden-skied landscapes of indeterminate quality, British, late 1940s, signed illegibly. It always amazed me to think they were painted at the time Abstract Expressionism was exploding in New York. Nothing symbolized the derivative, unambitious nature of so much British art better. Mullioned windows looked out to the steep moor at the back of the house.

  I accepted a glass of sherry in a pre-war cut-glass thimble whitened by time and washing and asked about Bridgey and about Matt’s visit. I had long ago learnt there was no point asking directly how my mother was because she would just say she was ‘fine’, as if it was rude to ask. Like any dictator, she asked the questions. Bridgey had taken a job teaching comparative literature at Middlesex University, which Mother supposed was ‘an old polytechnic’. I didn’t tell her I had met Matt at Temple Meads on his way back from Highlands. He definitely wouldn’t have told her. She said his new business venture wasn’t going well but made no reference to the request for money, or to Jo. Knowledge had always been power for Mother. She didn’t make it sound very hopeful and she was probably right. Matt was many things, at his best a lovely fragile poetic man, but he wasn’t a businessman and history showed he wasn’t good at staying clean. Only Jo stood between him and his demons.

  We moved into the kitchen where Diane had left a fish pie big enough for six on the hot plate. I uncorked the bottle of Chablis I’d brought. I served Mother her fish pie and poured us both a large glass of wine. She gave a mouth-turned-down look at the size of my glass but drinking was the best way through supper at Highlands. Mother didn’t drink on her own – ‘Only alcoholics’ – but would tipple away like a Trojan whenever she had company, presumably because that’s what had been considered ‘proper’ in 1952 or whenever it was. We ate the fish pie with purple broccoli from the walled garden. The potato was fluffy and the fish was chunky and tender and fresh. Diane’s husband had caught it. I had forgotten how delicious simple fresh food could be.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  My fork paused halfway to my mouth like a cable car in high winds.

  ‘Yup. Ed’s well, the kids are well. Nell’s working hard. Arthur isn’t. No change there.’

  ‘I meant about the police.’

  I chewed a hunk of fish pie. It was creamy and I could taste the mackerel.

  ‘Oh that, yuh, that’s fine.’

  ‘It must have been awful.’

  I gave a half-laugh to show it had become a family joke, a tale to tell the grandchildren.

  ‘It wasn’t great. But it’s just one of those things. Mistaken identity. It’s done now.’

  ‘And those photographers in the road. Frightful.’

  ‘You saw that?’

  Mother was always in bed by ten o’clock.

  ‘Peggy Marshall showed me on her iThingy. She told me Ed stayed a night with the girl and that’s why you’d been taken in.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t mistaken identity.’

  I ate a mouthful of fish pie to give me time to regroup. Mother instinctively homed in on the difficult truths. Was I going to have to tiptoe my way through conversations forever?

  ‘Well, no, not entirely, though it was in the context of Ed not being there when she died.’

  ‘Why did Ed go there?’

  ‘Long story. It was after a party.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Painting a portrait. In Suffolk. They now think no one was there when she died.’

  ‘It was suicide?’

  My mother had barely touched her food. She has a gnat’s appetite when she gets her teeth into a subject or, more often, someone.

  ‘No. They think she didn’t take her pills. Or she took too many. They think she fell over and hit her head.’

  ‘Surely they did an autopsy?’

  I made a mental note to concentrate. Mother had not lost her sense of smell. There had been times during childhood when it seemed all she wanted to do was catch us out, while displaying utter indifference about almost everything else in our lives.

  ‘They did. She hadn’t taken her pills.’

  Mother looked dubious. Her hair was thinning at the crown, a pink-blue scalp showing through.

  ‘Would that have made her hit her head?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’m not a doctor.’

  ‘But you’re married to one.’

  ‘Oh yes, so I am.’

  She looked at me sharply. She disliked sarcasm.

  ‘And you must have discussed the case.’

  Coming here was beginning to feel like a mistake. I could have been lounging by the pool in some Tuscan hilltop hotel but instead I was nursing a glass of warmish white and answering questions on the one subject I was trying to forget about. As always, she made me feel like a little girl again.

  Was that why I’d come?

  ‘Of course we have. Only the police didn’t tell us what pills she was on when they saw us, presumably because they thought we were guilty and therefore didn’t want to give us anything to go on.’ Mother looked straight at me, trying to detect sarcasm in my tone. Eventually she gave a nod and pronged a tiny amount of mashed potato. ‘There was no way for Ed to know whether not taking the pills contributed.’ She coughed once but continued eating. ‘And as you know, he’s not a man to give a diagnosis without knowing the facts.’

  ‘That was always his problem.’

  Mother often moved from the micro to the macro in a single leap, a tiny blemish – forgetting your keys, bringing mud into the house – became symptomatic of a major character deformity. She was like a Hollywood thriller in which the ordinary-Joe hero stumbles upon a neighbourhood murder only to find the CIA, the FBI and the White House ranged against him.

  I didn’t rise. Instead I topped up her glass as, artfully late, her hand feigned to wave the bottle away. We ate in silence, cutlery clinking as if we were in a provincial B&B. After the fish there were raspberries from the garden and my mother dug out a knob of bone-hard cheddar and some stale biscuits. Mould crept around the corner of the cheese. I drank another glass of Chablis and began to feel light-headed. I told her about Nell and Arthur and gave a brief and partial account of my trip to paint Marianne, whom she’d forgotten, if I’d ever even told her about her. There was silence. Mother doesn’t return serve.

  ‘Are you all right here? Not lonely?’

  She gave me a wary look. Maybe she thought I was hinting she should move out and we should move in. I wasn’t. Much as I loved it, I couldn’t think of anywhere I would like to live less than on top of Dartmoor. Sheep are sheep and people are people and I know which I prefer. But old people are paid to be cautious. They have a nasty surprise ahead.

  ‘What I mean is it’s not too big?’

&nbs
p; ‘It hasn’t got any bigger,’ she said coldly, turning the cheese knife upside-down and stabbing a triangle of cheddar with the prongs.

  ‘But you’re not getting any younger.’

  Mother gave a contemptuous snort.

  ‘There’s Diane who comes in, and Jim’s obviously around. Joy still comes on Tuesday, though she’s actually past doing anything useful, just drinks coffee and dibs at the silver. Helen does the cleaning now.’

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘David’s niece.’

  ‘David?’

  ‘David Seaton.’

  I looked blank.

  ‘David was the woodsman we used. Unfortunately he was not an honest man. Your father kept using him far too long. I’m afraid that was one of his weaknesses. He was too kind, even when people didn’t deserve it. It always cost him in the end.’

  Mother looked slightly flushed. She was rarely so garrulous. I took a sip of wine and – out of nowhere, because this was not Mother’s kind of conversation – asked,

  ‘Do you miss Dad?’

  She picked up her napkin and dabbed her lips as if a thought had crossed her mind for the first time for so long she had forgotten it ever existed. She turned to look at the dresser. Her profile was less dramatic, her brow less an agony of frozen formality than I remembered, forehead wrinkled like shallow contours on an OS map.

  ‘I always missed your father,’ she said, and put her hands on her lap. I assumed that was it and was thinking about another line of conversation when she added, ‘even when he was alive. He was a good man. He just couldn’t see it himself.’

  It was the most intimate thing she’d said to me about him in the thirty years since he’d died.

  ‘In what way?’

  She looked out across the empty paddock to the dark hills beyond. Her triangular cut of cheddar was untouched on her plate, Diane’s squat jar of homemade pickle unopened. There was a long pause, a silence passing back through the years.

  ‘He didn’t understand things weren’t perfect. That they never could be.’

  I thought there was going to be more but her mouth opened and shut like a fish. I had never seen my mother in such a reflective mood. Maybe she really was getting lonely. Maybe it was Matt setting out on another doomed expedition – this time on the Yorkshire coast but it could have been anywhere, the ending always the same – that had dislodged her memory. Maybe it was having me at Highlands without the membrane of Nell and Arthur to turn the visit into an arm’s-length exercise in logistics rather than flesh and blood or raw emotion. Whatever the reason, I sensed she was feeling more open, perhaps more vulnerable, than I’d seen her before. I topped up her glass. Maybe she’d had more sherry before dinner than she should have. She took a sip without seeming to notice it had been refilled.

  ‘Was he like that when you met?’

  ‘Yes, though it wasn’t as obvious as it became.’ There was a lengthy pause, as if she had to wait while long-buried emotions re-formed. ‘There was a sort of grandeur in the beginning, a yearning for a better life, an indifference to the world as it was. Initially it was very attractive, that doomed youthful romantic sensibility of wanting more from life than it could ever deliver. Unrealistic, yes, but very attractive in a young man just down from Oxford. He was good-looking too.’

  There was another pause while she picked at her cheddar and memories. I didn’t say anything. It would be fatal to interrupt her flow. These thoughts might never resurface.

  ‘Of course he never found it. And a sense of failure sort of hardened in him. It wore him down. He never liked the City. Never wanted to work there. There were so many like that in those days, young men who didn’t want to follow their fathers into family businesses or on to estates or into the City or the army, but they did because they’d been brought up to do what their fathers wanted. It wasn’t like today. There were some very unhappy young men around in those days. They were at all the best parties. Grandpa Tenterden had always got what he wanted. That’s where your father got his expectation, only he didn’t have the power he needed to satisfy it. Grandpa had the power. It’s a lesson I tried to teach you three: expectation breeds disappointment.’

  ‘You certainly did.’

  ‘Bridgey understood. I’m not sure you or Matthew ever did.’

  There was an obvious point to be made about the world not moving on without the expectation things could be better, but now was not the moment.

  ‘What should he have done?’

  ‘I don’t know. A job away from his father. Something in the theatre perhaps. He always loved the theatre. But Grandpa would never have allowed it. A sailor even. He always loved the sea. You remember he kept that boat at Brixham? Not that we ever went anywhere on it, mainly because he was never here and I was totally uninterested in boats. But then we got married and he needed to make money for you three and there was this place to keep up.’

  There was a ting! of steel on china as her knife slipped on the cheddar. I thought of Matt in Whitby with Jo, with their wonderful love and impossible fishing net business. Outsiders are drawn to the sea.

  ‘And he was on his own when he died?’

  She nodded dreamily.

  ‘Mmm. I sometimes wish I’d been there. You never know. It might have been different.’

  ‘But you never went to London with him.’

  ‘I did go. Not often. You were too young to remember.’

  ‘Anyway, you always refused to drive in London. That’s what taxis and buses were for, you said.’

  ‘Not drive in London? What’s that got to do with it?’

  She stared at me as if I was mad, and in that nanosecond I realized something was wrong. This was more than a cross-purpose conversation. An idea began to form in my peripheral vision, shrouded in darkness but definitely within reach.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have been driving.’

  ‘No. I know that.’

  ‘So why would it have been different if you were there?’

  ‘Because …’

  She stopped and glared at me.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because … oh nothing! Alice, this is boring. I’m tired.’

  I shook my head because … something long-buried was surfacing, becoming clear.

  ‘Because he didn’t die in a car crash.’ It was not a question.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  There was residual hauteur – thirty years of power – but it was fading fast. I focused on her like an electric beam.

  ‘But it wasn’t an accident in a car, was it?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘It was what?’

  ‘It was …’ Mother was never at a loss for words. She looked bewildered for a moment, ten years older, before her shoulders slumped.

  ‘Mother, how did he die?’

  Silence. She stared at the tablecloth. My eye was caught by an orange in the wire-mesh fruit bowl. I waited. I was here for as long as it took. Eventually, she said in a voice so soft I could hardly make out the word:

  ‘Suicide.’

  A single key on a piano. A solitary note of acceptance and defeat.

  ‘Suicide?’

  The bible and gun? The razor blade and the hot bath? Whisky and the pill? The rope and the chandelier? The open window, an unforgiving pavement?

  He’d always loved the theatre.

  ‘But why? Lots of people are unfulfilled at work. Why did he do it?’

  Mother looked down again. She’d aged twenty years in two minutes. I wasn’t sure I could bear it.

  ‘Because he was homosexual.’

  She gave a bitter look as if to say, ‘You asked’. It was true. I had asked. I had dredged up all the unhappiness – and I was glad I had. It was as if someone had switched on a light. For the first time I could see everything clearly.

  ‘He was gay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bi, I guess.’

  ‘If it makes a difference.’

  ‘But no one kills themselves just because
they’re gay. Not since the 1950s anyway.’

  She pursed her lips.

  ‘And he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to stay for?’

  A single shake of the head.

  ‘Or anyone?’

  Another shake.

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t much use as a father, as you know. I don’t actually think it made much difference to you three.’

  ‘But there must have been another way. So he was gay? He could have played the field in London and the family man in Devon. I don’t get why he had to kill himself.’

  ‘Word was going to get out.’

  ‘So? It was the 1980s, not the 1880s. Apart from you, Grandpa T was probably the only person who mattered. And he didn’t exactly do gossip. I shouldn’t think he even knew where Soho was, or anywhere outside the City or St James’s.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What don’t I understand?’

  ‘He’d been arrested. He was going to court. It would have been in all the papers.’

  ‘Arrested for what?’

  ‘He never told me exactly. I didn’t want to know. A young man … a public lavatory.’

  ‘Don’t tell me: a policeman.’

  She winced. I wanted to reach out and hug her but she turned away. Mother was not built to receive sympathy. Neither parent knew how to take it, or to give it. Neither knew how to touch. She was twig-wristed, paper-skinned.

  ‘Oh, poor poor Dad. And poor you. Did he leave a note or anything?’

  A quivering finger scratched the table, long nails, picking as if it was an old wound. A microscopic nod.

  ‘Have you still got it?’

  She wasn’t looking at me but at the sideboard behind my head. The sun was dipping beyond the hill, bathing the kitchen in a flycatcher light.

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘That he was sorry. That he loved us all. That it was the only way the rest of us could continue as we had. It wasn’t long. He’d scrawled it on a seaside postcard, a picture of Beachy Head. “Explore Wonderful Beachy Head” it said.’ She gave a wistful-angry-sarcastic puff and I found myself wondering how cold she must be that she’d been able to keep everything to herself all these years. ‘They found it in his car.’