Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘That sounds alarming,’ I said cheerfully.

  ‘How about climbing, Alice? Any ambitions? Hey, Adam, are you going to take Alice along next year?’

  Adam turned to me amiably. ‘Maybe you should ask her.’

  ‘Me?’ I said alarmed. ‘I get blisters. I get tired and bad-tempered. I’m unfit. And what I really like is being warm and wrapped up. My idea of happiness is a hot bath and a silk shirt.’

  ‘That’s why you should climb,’ said Daniel, coming over with two mugs of coffee and then sitting with us on the floor. ‘You know, Alice, I was on Annapurna a few years ago. There had been some fuck-up with the supplies. There are always fuck-ups of some kind or another. Usually it’s something like finding yourself at twenty thousand feet with two left mitts, but this time someone, instead of packing five pairs of socks, had ordered fifty. What it meant was that every time I got into the tent I could get an entirely fresh clean pair of socks and put it on and luxuriate in that. You’ve never been on the mountain so you can’t imagine what it was like to put my wet feet into those warm dry socks. But just picture every warm bath you’ve ever had mixed into one.’

  ‘Trees,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Daniel.

  ‘Why don’t you climb trees? Why does it have to be mountains?’

  Daniel smiled broadly. ‘I think that I will leave that question for the famous buccaneering mountaineer Adam Tallis to deal with.’

  Adam thought for a moment. ‘You can’t pose for photographs on top of a tree,’ he said finally. ‘That’s why most people climb mountains. To pose for photographs on the top.’

  ‘But not you, my darling,’ I said, and then was embarrassed by my own serious tone.

  There was a silence as we all lay and looked in the fire. I sipped my coffee. Then, on an impulse, I leaned over, took Deborah’s cigarette, dragged on it and then returned it to her.

  ‘I could so easily start again,’ I said. ‘Especially on an evening like this, lying on the floor in front of the fire, a little drunk with friends after a lovely dinner.’ I looked across at Adam who was looking at me, the light from the fire shimmering on his face. ‘The real reason isn’t any of that. I think I might have wanted to do something like that before I met Adam. That’s the funny thing. It’s Adam who’s made me understand what a wonderful thing it is to climb a mountain and at the same time he’s made me not want to do it. If I were going to do it, I’d want to be looking out for other people. I wouldn’t want them to have to be looking out for me all the time.’ I looked around. ‘If we were climbing together, you’d all be dragging me up. Deborah would probably fall down a crevasse, Daniel would have to give me his gloves. I’d be all right. You are the ones who would pay for it.’

  ‘You looked beautiful this evening.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said sleepily.

  ‘And what you said about trees was funny.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It almost made me forgive you for quizzing Debbie about my past.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You know what I want? I want it to be as if our lives began at the moment we first saw each other. Do you think that’s possible?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Meaning, no.

  Twenty-five

  The history I had learned at school, but mostly forgotten now, fell into convenient categories: the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Tudors and Stuarts. For me, Adam’s earlier life now fell into similar categories: stripes of separated time, like coloured sand in a bottle. There was the Lily Age, the Françoise Age, the Lisa Age, the Penny Age. I never talked to Adam about his past now: it was a forbidden subject. But I thought about it. I picked up little details about the women he had loved, and slotted them into the larger picture. As I did so, I realized that there was a gap in the chronology – an empty space where a woman should have been but wasn’t. It might just have been a year or so without a committed relationship, but that didn’t seem to fit into what I had come to see as the pattern of Adam’s life.

  It was as if I was watching a beloved figure walking across the landscape towards me, always getting closer, when it was suddenly swallowed up in mist. I calculated that it was about eight years ago, this hiatus. I didn’t want to interrogate anybody about it, but the sense of needing to fill in the gap grew stronger. I asked Adam if he had any photos of himself when he was younger, but apparently he had none. I tried to find out, from casual questions, what he was doing at that time, as if I would eventually be able to join the insignificant dots to reveal a significant answer. But while I discovered names of peaks and perilous routes, I never found a woman to fill in the space between Lisa and Penny. But I was the world expert on Adam. I needed to be sure.

  One weekend in late March, we returned to his old family house. Adam needed to fetch some of his equipment, which he kept stashed away in one of the large outhouses, so he had hired a van. ‘I don’t have to return it until Sunday. Maybe we could find a hotel for Saturday night.’

  ‘With room service,’ I said. It never occurred to me to suggest we should stay with his father. ‘And an en suite bathroom, please.’

  We set off early. It was a glorious early-spring morning, icily clear. There was new blossom on some of the trees, mist rolling off the fields we passed by on our way northwards. Everything felt newly hopeful. We stopped at a motorway service station for breakfast. Adam drank coffee and didn’t eat his Danish pastry while I had a large bacon sandwich – stringy pink rashers between slices of greasy white bread – and a mug of hot chocolate.

  ‘I like women with an appetite,’ he said. So I finished off his pastry too.

  We arrived at about eleven and, like a fairy story, everything was as it had been on our last visit. There was no one to greet us, and no sign of Adam’s father. We went into the dark hall, where the grandfather clock stood guard, and took off our coats. We went into the chilly living room, where a single empty tumbler stood on a side table. Adam called out for his father, but there was no reply. ‘We might as well start,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’

  We put our coats back on and went out by the back door. There were several old outhouses of varying sizes behind the house for, as Adam explained, there had been a working farm attached to the estate. They were mostly derelict but a couple had been patched up, new slates put on the roof and weeds cleared from their doorways. I peered in through the windows as we passed. In one, there was broken furniture, boxes of empty wine bottles, old storage heaters and, shoved into the corner, a netless table-tennis table. Wooden tennis racquets were stacked on a broad shelf, a couple of cricket bats. There were numerous tins of paint ranged on the shelf above them, their sides dripping with different colours. Another shed was used for tools. I made out a lawn-mower, a couple of rakes, a rusty scythe, spades, forks, hoes, great bags of compost and cement mix, toothy saws.

  ‘What are those?’ I asked, pointing to several gleaming silver contraptions hanging from large hooks screwed into the wall.

  ‘Squirrel traps.’

  There was one building I wanted to go into, for through the broken glass I had seen a grand china teapot without its spout poking out of a large box, and hanging from a hook, a ripped, useless kite. It looked like the place where all the worn-out family effects were kept, the ones that no one wanted, but no one could quite throw away. There were trunks on the floor and stacked containers. It all looked so well ordered and so sad. I wondered if all the things that had belonged to Adam’s mother had been put here, long ago, and never been touched since. I asked Adam, but he pulled me away from the window. ‘Leave it alone, Alice. It’s just stuff he should have got rid of years ago.’

  ‘Don’t you ever look through it?’

  ‘What for? Here, this is where my stuff is kept.’

  I had never imagined there would be so much of it. It almost filled the long, low room. Everything was neatly packed and stored; lots of the boxes and bags had labels on them, with Adam’s bold script slanting across. There were
ropes, of different thicknesses and colours, in steep coils. An ice axe hung from the beams. There were a couple of backpacks, empty and fastened down against the dust. One slim nylon bag was a tent, the other, shorter, was a Gore-Tex sleeping bag. A box of crampons stood by a box of long thin nails. A box full of assorted clips, screws, clamps. Bandages in Cellophane wraps stood on a thin shelf, and on a broader one a Calor gas stove, a few canisters of gas, pewter mugs and several water bottles. Two well-used pairs of climbing boots lay to one side.

  ‘What’s in this?’ I asked, poking a squashy nylon sack with my toe.

  ‘Gloves, socks, thermal underwear, that kind of thing.’

  ‘You don’t travel light.’

  ‘As light as I can,’ he replied, looking around. ‘I don’t carry this stuff for fun.’

  ‘What are we here for?’

  ‘This, for a start.’ He pulled out a largish bag. ‘This is a Portaledge. It’s like a tent you can bolt on to a sheer cliff side. Once I spent four days in it, in a raging storm.’

  ‘Sounds terrifying,’ I shivered.

  ‘Cosy.’

  ‘Why do you want it now?’

  ‘It’s not for me. It’s for Stanley.’

  He rifled through a Tupperware box packed with tubes of ointment, picking out a couple and stuffing them into his jacket pocket. He took one of the ice axes off the beam and laid it beside the tent. Then, hunkering down on his haunches, he started pulling out little cartons and boxes and examining their labels. He looked entirely focused on his task.

  ‘I’m going for a wander,’ I said eventually. He didn’t look up.

  Outside, it was warm enough to take off my coat. I walked over to the vegetable garden, where a few decayed bolted cabbages swayed, and weeds climbed the frames meant for runner beans. Someone had left the hose tap running slightly, and there was a great puddle of mud in the centre of the garden. It was all rather depressing. I turned it off, then looked around to see if Adam’s father was anywhere in sight, and marched firmly towards the ramshackle building where I’d glimpsed the china teapot and the kite. I wanted to look through the boxes, pick up the objects that Adam had had as a child, find photographs of him and of his mother.

  There was a large key in the lock that turned easily. The door opened inwards. I shut it quietly behind me. Someone had been in here quite recently, for the thick dust only lay over some of the boxes and trunks, whereas others were fairly clean. In one corner I saw the skeleton of a bird. There was a thick, stale smell in the room.

  I had been right, though: it was where old family things were stored. The teapot was part of a china tea-set. There were faint brownish rings round some of the cups still, tidemarks from long-ago drinks. There was a packing case piled high with paired Wellington boots. Some of them were small. They must have belonged to Adam when he was a boy. The largest black trunk had the gilt initials V. T. on its lid. What had his mother’s name been? I couldn’t remember if he’d ever told me. I opened it furtively. I told myself I was doing nothing wrong, just poking around, but I didn’t think Adam would see it like that. The trunk was full of clothes, smelling strongly of musty age and pungent mothballs. I fingered a spotted navy-blue frock, a crocheted shawl, a lavender-coloured cardigan with pearl buttons. Graceful but sensible clothes. I shut the lid, and opened a battered white suitcase beside it. It was full of baby clothes: Adam’s. Jerseys with boats and balloons knitted into the pattern, striped dungarees, woollen hats, an all-in-one suit with a pixie hood, tiny leggings. I almost cooed. There was a christening gown in there too, yellowing with age, now. The chest of drawers to one side, which was missing several knobs and was badly scratched down one side, was full of little booklets which, on closer inspection, turned out to be things like school magazines and school reports. The two girls’ and Adam’s, from Eton. I opened one at random from 1976. He would have been twelve. It was the year his mother died. Maths: ‘If Adam applied his considerable ability to learning rather than disrupting,’ ran the neat italic script in blue ink, ‘then he would do well. As it is…’ I shut up the booklet. This wasn’t just snooping; it felt more like spying.

  I wandered over to the other corner of the room. I wanted to find photographs. Instead, in a small case with a strap wrapped round it twice to keep it shut, I found letters. At first I thought they were letters from Adam’s mother, I don’t know why. Maybe because I was looking for traces of her, and something about the handwriting made me sure they were from a woman. But when I picked up the top bundle and leafed through it, I realized at once that they were from lots of different people, and were written in lots of different kinds of handwriting. I glanced at the top one, scrawled in blue biro, and gasped.

  ‘Darling darling Adam,’ it began. It was from Lily. Some vestigial scruple stopped me reading it. I put down the bundle, but then picked it up again. I didn’t read through the letters, although I couldn’t help noticing certain memorable phrases, which I knew I would be unable to forget. I just looked to see who they were from. It was, I told myself, as if I were an archaeologist, digging through the layers of Adam’s history, through all his familiar periods.

  First there were letters – short and scrappy – from Lily. Then, in black ink and with the familiar looped and cursive elegance of French script, letters from Françoise. These were usually long. They weren’t passionate, like Lily’s, but their raw intimacy made me wince. Her English was exceptionally vivid, charming even in its occasional slips. Under Françoise were a couple of miscellaneous letters. One from a rapturous Bobby and the other from a woman who signed herself ‘T’, and then a succession of postcards from Lisa. Lisa liked exclamation marks and underscorings.

  And then, below Lisa – or before Lisa – came a series of letters from a woman I had never heard of. I squinted at the signature: Adele. I sat back on my heels and listened. Everything was quite quiet. All that I could hear was the rattle of wind in the loose slates above me. Adam must still be sorting through his stuff. I counted through Adele’s letters; there were thirteen, mostly rather short. Under her letters were six from Penny. I had found the woman between Lisa and Penny, Penny and Lisa. Adele. Starting with the bottom one, presumably the first that she wrote to him, I began to read them.

  The first seven or eight letters were short and to the point: she was making arrangements where to meet Adam, naming a place, a time, urging caution. Adele was married: so that was why Adam had remained silent. He was keeping their secret even now. The next letters were longer and more tormented. Adele clearly felt guilty about her husband, whom she called her ‘trusting Tom’, and a host of others, parents, sister, friends. She kept begging Adam to make things easy for her. The final letter was her goodbye. She wrote that she could no longer continue to betray Tom. She told Adam that she loved him and he would never know how much he had meant to her. She said that he was the most wonderful lover she had ever had. But she couldn’t leave Tom. He needed her, and Adam clearly didn’t. Had she been asking him for something?

  I laid the thirteen letters on my lap. So Adele had left Adam for her marriage. Maybe he had never got over her, and that was why he didn’t talk about her. He may have felt humiliated by her. I pushed my hair back behind my ears with hands that were slightly sweaty with nerves, and listened again. Was that a door I heard shutting? I gathered up the letters and put them on top of the ones from Penny.

  Just before placing the rest on top, covering up that layer of the past with more recent pasts, I noticed that Adele had written her final letter, unlike all the others, on formal family paper, with a letterhead, as if she were emphasizing her bonded state. Tom Funston and Adele Blanchard. I felt a stirring of memory, like a prickle down my spine. Blanchard: the name was dimly familiar.

  ‘Alice?’

  I shut the case and pushed it, unstrapped, back into position.

  ‘Alice, where are you?’

  I scrambled to my feet. There was dust all over the knees of my trousers, and my coat was filthy.

  ‘Alice.�
��

  He was near by, calling me, getting closer. I walked as quietly as I could towards the shut door, smoothing my hair as I did so. It would be better if he didn’t find me here. There was a broken armchair piled high with yellow damask curtains in the corner of the room, to the left of the door. I pulled the chair out slightly and crouched down behind it, waiting for the footsteps to go past. This was ridiculous. If Adam found me in the middle of the room I could just say that I was looking around. If he found me hiding behind a chair, there was nothing at all I could say. It wouldn’t just be embarrassing; it would be violent. I knew my husband. I was about to stand up when the door was pushed open and I heard him step into the room.

  ‘Alice?’

  I held my breath. Maybe he would be able to see me through the heap of curtains.

  ‘Alice, are you there?’

  The door shut again. I counted to ten and stood up. I went back to the case of letters, opened it and retrieved Adele’s final letter, adding theft to my list of marital crimes. Then I shut the case and this time I strapped it up. I didn’t know where to put the letter. Obviously not in any of my pockets. I tried stuffing it into my bra but I was wearing a tight-fitting ribbed top, and the wodge of paper showed. What about my knickers? In the end I took off one shoe and hid it in there.

  I took a deep breath and went to the door. It was locked. Adam must have locked it when he went out again, as a matter of course. I gave a hard push, but it was solid against me. I looked around in panic for some kind of implement. I took the old kite off the wall and slid the central arm out of the ripped material. I poked this through the lock, though I am not sure what I hoped to achieve. I heard the key clunk to the ground outside the door.