What the Eye Doesn't See

by Alice Jolly

  ‘Listen, Maggie. If I write about what’s happened to your father, then it’s not because I’m interested in scandal, it’s because I think the way he was treated was unfair. He should never have been arrested and I’m not afraid to say that.’

  ‘Yes, it was wrong.’ I can say that calmly but my skin has gone curly. I don’t want to have this conversation, but at the same time I do, because there’s a part of me that enjoys the drama of this, disgusting though that is. It’s an excellent story, and I was there at the centre of it, and I can’t resist the appeal of that, because it’s never seemed real.

  Like when I signed the statement, in an underground room at Gloucester police station, with a smell of stale ashtrays, and an echo like a tunnel, and someone having a furious row down the corridor. Three ballpoint pens tried to save me. I had to sign the statement on every page and they kept on breaking. The policeman tried each one out on a pad, making squiggly lines, and they worked for him, but they wouldn’t work for me, and I pressed harder and harder, digging deep ridges into the paper. The policeman kept on laughing, so I had to laugh as well. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. An electronic sound, rattling round and round, up to the high ceiling, crossed by pipes as thick as tree trunks. After I’d finally done it, I smiled at the policeman, and shrugged. A formality, his look said, but there was pity in his smile.

  I hide my thoughts, in case he can see them. Blood pumps in my fingertips. ‘It must have been terrible,’ Adam Ferrall says.

  ‘Well, yes, except I didn’t know that she was inside the cottage at the time. Then straightaway I went away to Thailand for three weeks, so I wasn’t around.’

  He nods at me, and his eyes soften with a bedside-manner sympathy, and just for a moment I think – I could tell him it all, the best scoop he’s ever had, and he’d be famous, and it would be because of me, and he’d be grateful to me forever, and I wouldn’t have to think about it any more. I feel the words buzzing on my lips, as I watch his eyes blink, and blink again.

  ‘You know, it really wasn’t fair,’ Adam says. ‘Because it was suddenly all in the press about how he had been at the cottage earlier that day, as though that was a big revelation, but the point is that he told the police that from the beginning.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Fiona and Dad. Geoffrey and Tiffany. They were all close friends. They were round at our house, or we were round at theirs all the time. But the point is that the press were determined to bring Dad down. Overnight their little darling turned into Beastly Priestley. It was the usual tactic – build-him-up, build-him-up, then knock-him-down.’

  ‘But what do you think did happen to her?’ Adam asks.

  He pours me some water and passes it to me, but it won’t go down my throat. What can I say? If you’ve got a love affair, and a tin of paraffin and a dead body, then the possibilities are numerous. Don’t over-explain, just keep it brief. I must use words carefully, he’s a journalist, reading between the lines is his job. My heart flutters around me like a bird.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I assume she had another man. I mean, I don’t want to be mean about her, but she easily could have done. She’d have got bored with Geoffrey.’

  He nods and watches me with unblinking eyes. I’ve got to stop this.

  ‘But Tiffany’s brothers. They’re not happy, are they?’ he says. ‘I mean, they’re not happy with the investigation and the Fire Officer’s Report?’

  ‘No, they’re not, but actually that report is quite clear. Of course, if you really want to go through it with a tooth comb, and put it all together in a different way, then you can make the evidence suggest a different conclusion … But the fact is that the people who wrote that report say that the fire was an accident … and anyway none of that’s got anything to do with Dad. He wasn’t there that night. I mean, I’m sorry for Tiffany’s brothers. Very sorry. But they need to accept that there are some things we will never know.’

  ‘Oh – do you think so?’ Adam says. ‘My guess is that it’ll all become clear in time. That’s the way it always goes. The truth has a life of its own and it tends to make itself known. As I said, it’s what people finally want.’ His unblinking eyes stare at me, then he finishes his sandwich, deftly using his knife to stop a last crust from spinning across the table.

  Suddenly his mobile phone shrieks the William Tell Overture. I leap so that my knees bash against the table. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and presses a button to silence it.

  My fingers have left sweaty rings on the stainless-steel table and I move my hands to cover them. A coffee machine grinds like a dentist’s drill. I look at my watch, and say that I’ve got to go, and thanks for the hot chocolate. Outside, rain slants against the window and heavy drops slide down the glass, running apart, and then together, through the window dirt.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he says. ‘Wait at least until the rain has stopped.’

  ‘No, really. I’m late.’

  ‘You’ll get soaked.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The waitress asks if we want a pudding. Adam takes the menu and holds it out to me. ‘You have something,’ he says. I’m standing up ready to go, but I take the menu because I don’t want to look frightened. He says why don’t I have yoghurt and fruit if I’m not very hungry, but I have chocolate mousse cake. He orders that and another cappuccino for himself, made with double coffee.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve upset you.’

  ‘No, no. You haven’t. Not at all.’

  ‘It was tactless of me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, really. It’s fine.’

  I shrug and pick at the corner of the menu. Adam sits back on his chair and moves his legs out from underneath the narrow table. His feet are beside me, long black shoes, and thick socks. His shadowed eyes watch me staring at the wilting white tulip. I ask if he minds, and then pick up his bottle of mineral water, and carefully tip the rest of the water into the milk bottle.

  ‘It must be hard having someone well known as a father,’ he says.

  ‘No, not really. More of a salutary lesson, to be honest.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, for my Dad’s generation it was all Glittering Prizes and making their mark, but the point is that it didn’t make them happy. I mean, you know Oscar Reynolds? Oil billionaire pouring environmentally unfriendly substances into African rivers? Well, he’s a friend of Dad’s and sometimes he gets drunk and cries because he really wanted to be Laurence Olivier.’

  Adam is laughing.

  ‘Yes, I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it? But the point is that even if he had been Laurence Olivier he wouldn’t have been happy. Nothing would have been enough.’

  ‘So you’re going to do it differently, are you?’ Adam asks.

  I shrug and eat my pudding, licking chocolate from my spoon.

  ‘Tell me about Brussels,’ he says. ‘Why are you going there?’

  ‘I got offered a good job.’

  ‘Better than being a barrister?’

  ‘More worthwhile.’

  ‘What job is it?’

  ‘Aid administration for Poland. I lived in Poland – for a couple of years.’

  ‘Ah.’ He wipes cappuccino froth from his upper lip with his napkin. ‘So it turns out you’re not such a cynic after all.’

  ‘No I’m not. In fact, rather the opposite. It’s just that there are some people in life who snigger in the back row, and I’m one of them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have any ideals.’

  ‘And do you know Brussels at all?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m just glad to go abroad again. I want to see a few places, before I settle down. I mean at the end of the day there’s almost certainly Labradors and the school run in Fulham, isn’t there? So why rush into it.’

  Too late, I remember he lives in Fulham.

  ‘God, sorry, is that the time?’ I look at my watch. ‘Now I really must go.’

  He pays the bill and finds my coat. It’s a wonderful Doctor Zhivago fake fur, but I
’m embarrassed by it now, because it smells doggy when it’s wet. As we go, he puts his hand on my back, steering me out of the door, then his watch strap catches in my hair, and he unhooks it while I stand still, feeling the strand of hair pulling right up to my scalp. His skin is smooth, his cheekbones polished. The untangling takes a while. I keep my mouth shut, trying not to breathe too much.

  On the pavement outside, in the sharp edge of the wind, he says, ‘So when are you leaving?’

  ‘Three weeks. Thirteenth of March.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, I might give you a call – before you go.’

  Why would he do that? Perhaps he wants to tell me his problems – men usually do; I run a kind of unofficial counselling service for men with relationship problems. They ring up all the time, and invite themselves round, and sit mournfully on my bed, and go on and on about how difficult it is to find a woman to suit them, and they stare into my eyes and say – if only all women were like you, Maggie. But they never do anything about it – they seem to think I’m above all that, or perhaps beneath it.

  Or probably he just wants to ask more about Dad.

  ‘You should talk to Gus,’ I say. ‘He’s the person that really knows.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m a little worried about the nature of his evidence.’

  I smile, head towards my bike and flick my scarf over my shoulder, but the wind blows it back in my face, and I taste musty wool in my mouth. The rain has stopped and for a moment there’s sun, the first in weeks. He puts my two plastic bags in the basket and I lean down beside my bike and search through my Bermuda Triangle bag for the key to my bike lock. Out of the corner of my eye I can see his shoes still next to me on the pavement. Raindrops shine on them.

  Finally I have to lift everything out of my bag. There’s a half-eaten bar of chocolate, used tube tickets, a snot-encrusted handkerchief, a Tampax, one of Nanda’s letters and a pile of other junk. My ticket for Brussels is caught in the wind, and blows down the street. Adam runs after it, catches it as it flutters against the wheel of a car and dries it on his handkerchief. For no reason, I feel tearful. When I’ve finally got the key I reach down to try to undo the lock but everything is wet from the rain, and the key won’t go in. Still he’s standing beside me.

  ‘Let me do it,’ he says, so I hand over the key without looking at him. ‘You know your front tyre is worn out,’ he says. ‘You ought to get it fixed.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps.’

  ‘And the gear wire isn’t connected either.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I’m just about to get that fixed as well.’

  In fact, the gear wire has been like that for two years.

  I get on my bike, and sit with one foot resting on the pedal.

  ‘So I’ll call you,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, if you want.’

  I wobble away on my bike and try not to start expecting anything.

  At Moulding Mansions I start packing. One of my old school socks dangles over the gaping jaws of a black rubbish bag. I bin it, I bin it not. Beside me there’s a pair of shoes I tried to dye, a manicure set with most of the pieces missing, and a ghoulish plastic monster with orange nylon hair, which Sam won for me at a fair. These things cling. ‘Packing is agony,’ I say. ‘What to take with you and what to leave behind?’

  ‘Maggie, do you really think you’ve got any choice?’ Sam says. He’s stretched out on the floor beside me, opening a bottle of wine. Rough-faced, with battered shoes, he’s too large for London. He should be tilling the fields in a Thomas Hardy novel. Like me he’s from one of those families where everyone has to do something extraordinary all the time. Except he’s not very extraordinary, so he spends his day auditing on the M25.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘What’s going on with you?’

  I open my mouth. ‘Perhaps just the edited highlights?’ he says.

  I drop a cushion on him and push a pile of books into a box. Sam is not at his best. Earlier this week his Australian girlfriend, Debbie, explained her priorities to him. Basically, he comes third after her horse, and her job, but above soft furnishings, and fashion in fifth place. He’s decided to give it some time, confident that soon he will supplant the job, if not the horse.

  The front door slams. Tyger is back from consulting a witch in Dagenham. Clearly the metaphysical forecast wasn’t good. She sidles into my room with a packet of fags in her hand. Stepping over Sam, she pours herself wine, sits in the pink armchair and returns to the subject she’s been flogging for days.

  ‘I still don’t get it, Maggie, I just don’t get it. Why are you going away?’

  I don’t know what to say. She knows nothing about the voices in my head, the treadmill of my thoughts. I keep packing – hat boxes from the top of the wardrobe, scarves from the end of my clothes rail, a Chinese hat from the curtain rail, postcards from the wardrobe door. Gloves are spread out on the bed like withered hands. Striped woolly ones, long pink satin evening gloves, mittens, and old-fashioned sheepskin motoring gauntlets.

  Tyger peers at me over the top of a pair of sunglasses, shaped like flowers, which she’s picked out of one of my boxes. ‘And what I particularly don’t get is how Maggie the Chess Player – who can’t take a decision unless she can see ten moves ahead – decided this without a word of consultation.’

  It’s true that on this occasion there was no ‘to take it, to take it not’. When they rang to offer me the job I said yes before they’d finished the sentence. Later I asked Nanda why I did that and she said – but, of course, my dear, that’s how it works. One agonises about small decisions but large decisions make themselves.

  ‘So?’ Tyger says. ‘So?’

  Dougie drifts in, with a joint in his hand, and Biggles cradled in the crook of his arm. He stretches out on the floor, propped against black plastic bags, and falls asleep with his mouth open. From outside in Bridewell Street tyres screech. Upstairs there’s banging and dust drops from a crack in the ceiling. I’ve decided that in Brussels I’m going to rent a flat where everything is white – white walls, white curtains, white rugs on the floor, white sheets on the bed. Nothing like Thwaite Cottages, nothing like Moulding Mansions.

  ‘I mean, this isn’t just a bloody flat-share agreement, you know,’ Tyger says. ‘It’s a way of life. You, me, Sam. We’ve always lived together. I thought we’d all end up in the same old people’s home, when the moment comes. But now I don’t know what’s happened to you, Maggie.’

  I don’t know what’s happened to me either. What she says is right. All of us come from families where there’ve been more divorces and deaths than hot dinners, so we were never going to do marriage and domesticity, or ambition and Glittering Prizes. But then Sam and I got proper jobs, and I got bored of this Peter Pan world of posh kids trying not to fit in. Or that’s what I tell myself.

  ‘I mean, what happened to Maggie the Moral Crusader? Maggie, Defender of the Poor, Oppressed and Wrongly Accused?’ Tyger says. ‘Why give up the law when you’re just about to make money out of it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I suppose the corners I wanted to defend turned out not to be right angles. Anyway I’d rather work abroad. It’s anonymous. You can do what you want. I’ve never really liked London. It’s really the most provincial place.’

  ‘Ha bloody ha,’ Tyger says. ‘More like it’s to do with Ned the Nerd. Who frankly isn’t worth leaving the country for.’ I turn my back on Tyger and step over Sam to lift blankets down from the top of the wardrobe. A good girlfriend is one who can judge the moment to start slagging off your ex-boyfriend. Tyger’s timing is not great.

  ‘I’ve got to say that, with the best will in the world, Ned was actually pretty boring,’ Sam says.

  ‘In my view there’s a lot to be said for being boring.’

  Tyger sighs, takes meat skewers out of her hair and starts picking out knots with a comb.

  ‘No, it’s true,’ I say. ‘Boringness is really underestimated. You know, I’m often standing at a bus stop and I see people there – and they’ve
managed to get themselves out of bed, and they’re going to work, or doing whatever else. And I feel like saying – Well Done, Very Good Effort. Because it’s actually hard, you know. Even that’s hard.’

  Tyger stands up and gives me a beady stare. ‘You know it seems to me that suddenly all you want is a comfortable little life with a two-bedroom mortgage.’

  ‘Tyger,’ Sam says. ‘For God’s sake, give it a break.’

  But Tyger has gone. I should go after her and try to explain, but the truth is I can’t be bothered. It’s like people who are dying – they check out early, lose interest in earthly stuff. That’s what I feel like about this house, it’s like I’ve left already. The air around us is pale blue, sweet and powdery. Dougie wakes with a start, sending Biggles rolling onto the floor. He struggles to his feet and steadies himself against the wall. ‘So what’s going on?’ he says.

  ‘Dougie. We were just saying life’s a bit complicated, that’s all,’ Sam says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dougie says. ‘Yeah, you’re right about that.’ He stares up at the ceiling and waves one hand high through the air. ‘I mean it’s like one of those … what do you call it? Like an electronic machine, you know …’ He stops to pull up his trousers. ‘All buttons and flashing lights, and you’ve got no idea how to work it, so you press each button, then you press them all together. Then you hit it, and you cry with anger and frustration.’ He picks up Biggles, opens the wardrobe door, realises he’s not going to get out of the room that way, and then shuts it again. ‘Probably there were Operating Instructions, but you lost them years ago.’

  In Cannabis Veritas.

  MARCH

  Max

  Often I think of Tiffany. But in a way that is partial, disconnected. Dipping and wobbling, an image flashes in front of my face, and then is gone. The camera lurches. Suddenly I see a close-up of a single detail. Red fingernails, a bracelet of gold hearts, blonde hair in the dark. I don’t know if it’s because I can’t remember more. Or whether memory is kind.