by Susan Moody
Louise Stone walks along the front with her little dachshund trotting beside her. Despite my deadline, I put down my pen, slip sandals on to my bare feet and hurry after her. She wears a dress that floats behind her like a sail. From behind, she could be a girl. I wonder how it feels to have lost a child, especially a child as wilful, as wicked, as Nicola. There must have been so many occasions when she wished her daughter were elsewhere. How often I’ve reconstructed that afternoon when she heard that Nicola was dead, and wondered whether I’d correctly remembered how the expression of shock and horror and pain which crossed her face had been prefaced by a fleeting, shamefaced look of relief.
She is a brisk walker and it takes me a while to catch up with her. We are away from the houses now. On our left is the shelving beach and the sea; to our right are the shallow cliffs still tangled with bramble bushes, and above them, the short smooth run of grass leading to the Secret Glade. ‘Mrs Stone!’ I call.
She stops, turns to face me, eyebrows raised in enquiry at the summons from a stranger, then her face softens. ‘My goodness, it’s Alice, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You haven’t changed a bit, even after all this time.’
‘Nor you.’ I fall into step beside her as the little dog frisks along in front of us.
She smiles. ‘I knew you’d turn into a beauty.’
‘Well . . .’ It’s difficult to know how to answer this without simpering. ‘Thank you.’
‘Not that it’s any of my business,’ she says, ‘but what are you doing here? I thought you were long gone.’
I explain my circumstances. The divorce, the move to England, my work, the compulsion that led me down here. ‘And you’ve not moved away, after all these years,’ I say. It’s a question, though it sounds like a statement.
‘That’s right.’ She seems on the verge of saying more, then leaves the syllables in the air without further expanding on them.
I want to ask her so many things but my thoughts feel stuck in quick-setting glue. There is almost no subject I can bring up which won’t refer back in some way to Nicola. Why had I ever thought I could talk to Louise about her dead daughter? It’s the very last thing I can mention. Even asking after her son, or mentioning Sasha Elias, or any of the people from those days who she might still remember would have the same effect. ‘Do you still work in fashion?’ I ask finally.
‘Yes. It’s good to have a profession which doesn’t entail going into an office every morning,’ she says. ‘You must feel the same.’
‘Yes.’ We discuss our different jobs for a while. The dog sniffs among the stems of pink and scarlet valerian which push through the shingle on our left, interspersed with tall stands of withered tawny grass and fading yellow flowers whose name I don’t know. The path veers slightly, away from the sea, magnifying the sound of waves crunching the pebbles at the edge of the shelved beach.
‘And how is the lovely Orlando?’ Louise asks. ‘Such a charming boy. So mature for his age, so gifted.’ She sighs. ‘How I envied your mother.’
Again, I expatiate on Orlando and his career. ‘And . . . Simon?’ I ask tentatively.
‘He’s fine. Doing really well. He has his own little business now.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Well . . .’ She laughs a little hesitantly. ‘. . . to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure. I mean, he makes widgets of some kind, but I don’t know what they are. Something really essential for boatbuilders, I know that. He turned into something of an inventor, in the end.’
‘Is he married?’
‘Yes indeed, to a lovely girl, Vicky. They have two adorable little boys, Vincent and Martin. They’re living in Norfolk, now, and we see them quite often, much more than when they were living in Singapore.’
I wonder who this ‘we’ is. Inevitably, the shadow of Nicola, the children she will never have, the dreams she never fulfilled, walks between us. I look at my watch. ‘I’d better be getting back,’ I say, falsely reluctant. ‘I have an urgent deadline.’
We say our farewells. She does not suggest that we meet again; given the particular flat I have chosen to live in, I do not invite her to come round sometime, not wanting to revive unhappy memories. As I turn, I catch a whiff of her perfume and suddenly I am transported back twenty years, Nicola and I are in Louise’s bedroom, dabbing that same perfume behind our ears. I see Nicola’s tiny frame, her mother’s jewelled bracelets dancing up her arm, diamond earrings swinging, a heavy gold locket round her neck, over the thin gold chain she always wore. I see her snapping open her mother’s enamelled compact and dabbing powder over her freckles, her greenish eyes narrowed as she looks around for some further mischief to make. I see, too, the photograph beside the bed of a man in a double-breasted suit and a stylish black fedora that shadows his face as though he were a black-and-white movie star, and the way Nicola’s expression tightens suddenly as she briefly glances at it. ‘I know, let’s try on Mum’s evening dresses,’ she says, her voice suddenly shrill.
‘Won’t she be cross?’ I wonder, but she ignores me and opens a wardrobe, brings out a couple of silk gowns and hastily pulls one on over her clothes. It sticks, refuses to slide down her body, caught on a button or a zip. She swears, her head swathed in material, pulling at the dress. I hear the silk rip, see Nicola’s hands tug fiercely at the delicate material, her fingers finding the slash and widening it, the pretty pea-green dress ruined.
‘Nicola!’ I gasp, and she stares at me, her eyes cold.
‘She won’t say anything, even if she finds it.’ Pulling herself out of the dress, she bundles it up and throws it into a dark corner of the wardrobe.
As I open the door to my flat, the phone rings and I snatch it up as though I had been waiting for it for days. ‘Yes?’
‘I just wanted to check up on you, see if you’re all right.’
It’s Orlando. His voice soothes me, sets things back to rights. ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’m fine. Guess what? I’ve just been for a walk with Louise Stone.’
‘So she’s still living down there.’
‘Slightly odd, isn’t it, given the circumstances?’
‘You’d think she’d want to get away, start afresh.’
‘Can you imagine Fiona going on living in the same place, if it had been one of us?’
‘Oddly enough,’ says Orlando slowly. ‘I think I can. If it was the place where the last memories she had of us . . . if it was all of us there was left.’
‘I suppose.’
Nicola sways between us in her torn white blouse, her rumpled denim skirt, constantly being destroyed by someone’s rage, or hate, or frustration.
‘Was she wearing a gold chain?’ I say suddenly.
‘What, when we first saw the . . . the body? I don’t remember.’
‘She always used to.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She did.’
‘Thing is, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t round her neck when we found her.’
‘Do you think the murderer took it?’
‘It can’t have been very valuable, surely.’
‘Nor can I believe she was murdered for gain.’
‘I suppose it could have been torn off during the . . . the attack, and fell into the grass. But then the police would have found it.’
‘We wouldn’t know whether they did or not.’
‘I could ask someone.’
He sighs. ‘Alice, you need to put all this behind you. It’s long gone now.’
‘And it’s still right there with us, Orlando. It’s the same for you as for me. You said then that you would never ever forget it – and you never ever will.’
‘This is true.’
‘What bugs me so much is that, if you exclude passing tramps, the murderer is almost bound to be someone we knew. Maybe even someone we liked.’
‘I know.’
‘Funny,’ I say, ‘that she wasn’t . . . she wasn’t sexually molested.’
‘And what conclusion do we d
raw from that?’
‘That the motive wasn’t sexual, I suppose. But she wasn’t wearing underpants when we discovered her, was she?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder if they ever found them.’
‘I doubt it. She wasn’t wearing any that evening,’ Orlando says.
‘How would you know that?’
‘She hardly ever did. Surely you must have realized. We all knew, all us boys.’
Not wearing underpants? I couldn’t have imagined that anyone would dare to go out of the house without them. Or even walk around inside the house. I glimpse again, through the curtain of the past, Julian hunched over himself, Charlie’s shamefaced smirk, David’s hot eyes, while Nicola sat in a corner of the chesterfield in our drawing room. It never occurred to me. Why would it?
Time folds in on itself. At one and the same time I’m standing here, an adult watching the moon slant across the sea, looking at the way my white curtains wave in the cool salt air coming through the window and the ivory glimmer of the magnolias in the next-door garden, and I am also a child again, staring at a dead girl’s body, blackberry juice staining my fingers, the scent of crushed grass giving a deceptive air of normality to something which is so abnormal as to be incomprehensible.
‘Knickerless Nicola, Charlie used to call her,’ Orlando says.
‘You never liked her.’
‘I loathed her. She was a vicious little creature. But even so, nobody could have wished such a death on her.’
‘I know. Oh God. Orlando. It’s all so terrible. And it goes on being terrible, even after all this time. It’s like a curse.’
‘It is a curse. It’s our curse, and there’s nothing we can ever do about it.’
‘Would it make any difference if we knew who was responsible?’
‘Knowing’s not going to expunge what we saw.’
‘It’s the same time of year here. The blackberries are ripening, and it’s another boiling hot summer, just like then.’ Through the window I see the garden gate open and Mrs Sheffield appear. Walking up the path, she glances at my windows, but doesn’t see me. ‘Orlando,’ I tell him. ‘I have to go. Mrs Sheffield’s come to call. Vi, I suppose I should call her.’
‘Say hello from me,’ he says, and there is laughter in his voice. ‘Give her my very fondest love. And keep some for yourself, Alice, sweet Alice.’
‘My dear, how pleasant you’ve made it.’ Vi sits in my big armchair. I’ve shown her round, poured her a drink, pushed some olives in her direction. ‘Modernizing the bathroom and kitchen makes such a difference. And you’re so wise to have the window-seat built in. I never got round to it before the war and afterwards, well, there just wasn’t any money. You’ve done a really nice job in here.’
‘Well, it’s a lovely room to start with.’
‘It was our drawing-room, of course, when Freddie was alive. We used to love looking out at the sea.’
‘Me too.’
‘Endlessly fascinating, isn’t it? You wait until you see it in the winter storms.’ She laughs. ‘But of course you’ve been here in winter, haven’t you? I keep forgetting.’ She glances at the piano stool. ‘Did you ever sort out about the music?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Orlando – I’m sure it’s something to do with him.’
‘I can’t quite see why. By the way, he sent – and I quote – his very fondest love.’
‘Did he indeed?’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘He always was a charmer.’
‘Still is, I guess.’
‘He was such a funny little boy. So amazingly bright, so solemn. I do hope he’s happy.’
Orlando’s happiness is something it has never occurred to me to question. Is he? I am ashamed that I never thought to ask. ‘He seems to be.’
Her gaze takes in my work table and the open books and papers. ‘Look, my dear, I know you’re tremendously busy, and I don’t want to take up your time. But the reason I’ve come – apart from inquisitiveness, because I wanted to see what you’ve done to the place – the reason is I thought I’d have a farewell party before I shake the dust of the place off my feet, and I’d really love you to come.’
‘That would be great.’
She gives me the date, a Saturday four weeks from now, in mid-September. The year is already turning. In the gardens along The Beach, dry brown leaves drop lightly to the dry soil beneath and gather at the edge of flower beds. Not autumn, not yet, but preparing.
‘The movers will be coming in on the following Monday, so it’s the last opportunity I’ll have to say goodbye to everyone,’ she says. ‘And if by any chance your lovely Orlando is around, you absolutely must bring him. I’ll hope very much to see him.’
‘As a matter of fact, he will be. My birthday’s around that time and he’s coming down.’
‘Yes.’ She frowns. ‘Of course, I should have remembered. It was at your birthday party that poor Louise Stone’s daughter was killed, wasn’t it?’
‘Not at, so much as after. And somewhere else.’ I make a sudden decision. ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking of having a few people here, a sort of combination house warming and birthday. Do come.’
‘I’d love to.’ Standing up, she smiles at me, puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘I hope it all works out for you, Alice.’
Once, I’d thought she was as old as the hills. Watching her walk away from me into the hazy glow of the town, she seems to carry her years far more lightly than I do. I hope it works out for me, too. I stare at the telephone. Shall I lift it, dial Orlando’s number, ask him if he’s happy?
I don’t. Perhaps I’m afraid of the answer.
SEVEN
By six o’clock, the courier has roared away down the road with my manuscript translation stowed in his saddlebag. The evening stretches ahead of me, flat and uneventful. I am not only restless but also uneasy, besieged by insistent ghosts.
Seated at the piano, I play for a little, but am unimpressed by my lack of expertise. Once, although I was never gifted in the way Orlando is, I was considered an adequate player. Not any more. Muss i’ denn, I sing softly. Must I then, must I then, to the city away, and leave my heart here?
Where is Sasha Elias now? He hovers between the folds of my gauzy white drapes. Because of him, I dreamed away my adolescence; his memory still hangs over me, weighting me down. I know how foolish I am. Apart from a brief meeting, I haven’t set eyes on the man for twenty years. He could be anything now, anywhere. He probably barely remembers me. I know all the counsels of wisdom that I must move on, that what I remember is an adolescent fantasy. Yet I cannot help recalling the green star in his eye, the aniseed smell, the touch of the exotic that he brought to my dreary post-war life.
If only I could find him again, surely, surely I would be able to let slip the dogs of the past? But so far, my enquiries have led me nowhere. I am not sure exactly what I search for. A final end to Nicola, a new beginning with Sasha? Is either possible?
My morning’s mail waits for me on the marble mantel. I slit open envelopes containing bills for this and that, brochures, a request from a publishing house wanting to discuss a translation of one of their prestigious foreign authors. There are personal letters, too. One from Fiona, one from Bella, Orlando’s weekly news bulletin. I glance through the first two then more slowly read the third, typed on a piece of A4 paper. He tells me more about his work in Boston, critiques a concert he has attended, writes an account of a trip to Atlanta. Ends by saying that he’ll see me soon.
His voice echoes in my ear. Eventually I put his letter back on my work table and get up, find my keys, go out into the night. Warm air sits on my shoulders like a feather boa. Behind curtained windows, lamps glow. In the yacht club, steel cables tap faintly against aluminium masts.
I walk a couple of hundred yards down the road to Glenfield House and stand looking over the garden wall. The front garden is shadowed, the hedge separating it from the gravelled drive is neatly trimmed, giving off the faintly sour scent of privet i
n summer. I can smell something dry and peppery – early chrysanthemums, perhaps – and a faint drift of dying phlox.
None of the windows in the house are illuminated, and with a quick look up and down the pavement I slip inside the gate and tiptoe alongside the hedge until I reach the gap which leads into the front garden. The eight cast-iron steps from what had once been our drawing room are freshly painted and gleam in the street light’s glare. I stand on the top step. There is the occasional sound of cars in the distance, the rustle of leaves from the shrubbery, a radio playing, seagulls shutting down for the night. Inside the bamboo clump, the lily-pond frogs chatter gently.
I close my eyes. Force myself to concentrate, blocking out the lights, the sounds of the here and now, thrusting myself back into the past. What really happened that night? Twenty years ago I’d stood exactly where I am now, and seen Nicola turn, heard the squeak of the gate opening, behind the hedge. In the drawing room behind me, people had been moving en masse towards the dining room, and after a moment, I’d trailed after them. Was there something I’d seen which if only I could prise it from the locked box of the past, might provide some clue?
Concentrate, Alice. If you saw anything, it must still be lodged inside your skull.
She’d been standing by the hedge. Inside the drawing-room, Leslie Hutchinson crooning Smoke Gets In Your Eyes was playing on the turntable. I could hear Callum’s voice calling to someone, the laughter of girls, someone singing along to Hutch. Anything else? Think, Alice.
I try to squeeze the memories from the vault at the back of my head where I’ve contained them for so long, but I can dredge up nothing that seems remotely significant. I’d watched Nicola for a moment or two, that’s all, then turned away and followed the crowd into the passage leading to the dining room, hurrying so I could accidentally find myself standing beside Sasha Elias.
