Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  We don't really move very far at all in life, he thought.

  But how could he be blamed for thinking he had, for thinking he had been reborn on another planet? The home he and Rosalind had made in Holland Park with the thick damask curtains, the walnut side-tables, the heavy, silver-framed photographs of their children playing tennis and of the place they often took in Italy—every aspect of their lives was a product of the taste his wife had inherited. And that was exactly how he had wanted it. He had wanted to forget where he grew up and to lose himself in another person's world. He had chosen a clean, ordered world with no smell of fried breakfasts or of large, unknown men.

  'Luke?' he called, as he went into the cramped hallway. He could see his son through the back door, in the garden, smoking a cigarette and kicking at bits of loose turf. He watched Luke make a fist with his right hand and turn it over under his eyes as if he was calculating how powerful it might be. Alistair felt aware of violence stored up in people now. 'Luke? I'm back.'

  His son let the fist slacken and blew out a jet of smoke. 'Just having a cig, Dad. Be there in a minute.'

  'No hurry,' he called. Conversation was difficult with Luke. Always had been.

  Alistair walked into his mother's sitting room and looked at all the dusty ornaments. He had not attempted to explain a single thing to his son—and, to his great relief, Luke appeared to be too distracted to ask. This was a surreal situation and could not possibly last—even if Luke had, as his mother put it, had his first heartbreak. Surely his son must be amazed by this past of his father's. After all, he had known precisely nothing about it, until the evening before, when they had arrived in Dover and shared a supper of beans on toast in a dead old lady's kitchen.

  Alistair felt he would have to explain something—somehow. But in a bit.

  His leg hurt a great deal after the walk and the drive and he sat down in the old armchair and breathed deeply. The quiet had the intensity of death. It was not unpleasant.

  He was sitting where his mother had been sitting in the photograph. There were white cat hairs along the arm of the chair. Her chair—angled for the TV. What had she watched? he wondered. She had liked detective stories on the radio when he was little. Detective programmes, perhaps. He pulled a cat hair from the fabric and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. Her cat.

  That he must have shattered his wife's faith in the world in the past few months was another thing Alistair tried hard not to think about. This reality visited him occasionally in the form of a sharp contraction of his stomach and he would immediately pick up a biography or a newspaper in an attempt to prevent thought. He had developed a nervous habit of straightening his shirt cuffs.

  It was a strange fact that, in a life often spent arguing the defence of drug-dealers and thieves in front of sceptical juries, he had never had to defend himself. He was literally lost for words now that he needed them most, when eye-contact with his demure wife was like a blow to the face. He had never wondered before, in his whole career as a barrister, what the defendants told their wives, whether there were scenes in kitchens, in hallways. Whether there were tears.

  Not that he had reached a state of humility now. In reality, the thought that made him throw down his book and pinch the bridge of his nose, as if he was holding the two sides of his head together, was that it could all so easily have gone undiscovered. A few altered details: if his attackers had been fitter and outrun the police, if he had genuinely drunk the awful wine Julian always served and had had to take a cab home, rather than emptying two glasses secretly into the sink and remaining almost sober. Or if Julian hadn't been quite so bloody vigilant. After all, how many Londoners came running out of their warm houses at the sound of a car alarm? They were just part of London's music.

  But Julian's daughter had been brutally mugged only a few months before and any sound on the street would bounce him out of bed and over to the window tearing open the curtains, turning the bedroom pale orange with streetlight. His wife thought perhaps he should see someone about it, talk to someone. Alistair had heard Rosalind on the phone to her.

  The alarm had gone off when one of the boys fell back into the car. To have heard it, Julian and Elise must have been seeing other guests into the hall. Out Julian had jogged. Having taken in what he had initially thought was two joy-riders holding a baseball bat near a neighbour's car window, he had called 999 on his mobile phone. It was only then that he saw his friend crumpled on the ground. He ran back into the house in fear.

  If they had just disappeared off into the night, Alistair thought, the whole world would still hang together. He would still have his job, his reputation, the respect of his wife and children. Had he altered the course of history so minutely as to have stayed a few minutes longer and left after the other guests, by the time of the attack Julian and Elise might already have gone to the kitchen with the empty glasses. The sound of the car alarm might have been overwhelmed by the dishwasher.

  A few touches here and there and Alistair might have suffered nothing more than a serious injury to his leg. He would have had sympathy.

  But within the hour Michael Jensen and Anil Bandari had been signing their names in Chelsea police station and Julian was being complimented on his swift reaction. Three days later, the story was in the papers.

  Alistair's daughter, Sophie, had not spoken to him since. She worked for the Telegraph and, of course, she had been forced to see her own father written about by her colleagues, who hunched, agonized, over their keyboards as she passed with her cup of coffee. He did not know it yet, and neither did she acknowledge it, but this had given Sophie the vocabulary she needed. She had been looking for a way to explain her desire to chuck in her dream job.

  Alistair had no idea how lonely Sophie was. He loved his daughter in an awkward, passionate way. She was the fiercely intelligent girl he might have married. When his wife worried about why Sophie didn't have 'anyone special on the scene yet', he was disturbed by how repulsive he found the idea. He couldn't bear to discuss it. He had snapped his cufflink last time—when Rosalind had suggested they ask James Marsden over for dinner.

  'Anthony's son, you mean? He's an absolute idiot, darling. She'd argue him under the table,' he said.

  'Oh. He's nice-looking, I thought. Friendly, polite. Perhaps you're right, though, darling. You probably are.'

  As a teenager Sophie had been very ill with anorexia and Alistair was still mystified by this and deeply afraid of the sheer will she had shown—six and a half stone and silent at the table. Had he caused this weird illness? He had never referred to it in front of her. And, although she was outspoken about everything else, she had never brought it up with him. Instead, they had fierce arguments about current affairs and while they told themselves they enjoyed the discussions, there was always a subtext of betrayal implicit in the extreme positions they took. She was always the cynic in these arguments, always the one who sensed corruption, while he was the voice of conservative reason. Neither felt they represented themselves fairly in this after-dinner ritual. They would go through sadly to join the other two in front of the news.

  'So, Dad,' Luke said, coming into the room with his hands in his pockets, 'do we take stuff back or what? I mean, what do you want to do with all the ... stuff?' He had picked up one of the ornaments—a little china dog—and Alistair watched him for a moment, longing to remove it from his son's hand. He knew the judgements Luke would be making, thinking his unknown grandmother had been a tasteless, vulgar person. It was unbearable.

  'Are you OK, Dad?'

  'Me? Yes, fine. Just tired out.'

  'You're not meant to walk, are you? Where did you go?'

  Alistair stood up and stretched his leg again. Then he stretched his arms, rolled his head, rubbed the back of his neck, clicked his fingers. 'Oh—nowhere. Just a bit of fresh air. I suppose I'd better call Mummy and let her know what we're planning.'

  'What are we planning?'

  'I'm not sure...' Alistair's voice was unch
aracteristically quiet. He glanced out of the window, through the net curtains. He felt an overwhelming urge to cry. For some reason, he remembered the letters his son used to write home from boarding-school, listing every goal he'd scored, every good mark he'd got. Sophie had never bothered to write. It ought to have been the other way round, really.

  'Well, we'd better say soon, Dad, because Mum called earlier asking if we were going to come back for supper—you know, because it's your birthday and everything.'

  Alistair's wife astonished him: her capacity to suppress the unwanted and lay the table was awe-inspiring. Luke turned away, almost as embarrassed as his father by this inappropriate birthday.

  'Yes, better let her know,' Alistair said.

  'Sorry I forgot, Dad.'

  'Forgot?'

  'About your birthday.'

  'Oh, God—couldn't matter less.' He wanted desperately to share some kind of acknowledgement with his son. What would it have been like to turn to Luke cleanly and say: 'Look, we both know it's ridiculous to celebrate my birthday. I've spoilt your mother's life and my own and now here we are in the place I grew up and you can see perfectly well I've been pretending—lying, really, since before you were born.' But it was impossible. 'Couldn't matter less,' he said again. His son coughed. Alistair's eyes flickered to the lifeless TV. He imagined switching it on and filling up the silence of that room.

  'So shall we go back tonight or what, then?' Luke said.

  'Yes, I think we should. I just wanted to get an idea of how much there was to sort out.'

  'A lot of it's left to people, isn't it?' Again, his son fingered the ornaments—he was probably wondering who on earth would be glad to inherit them. Ghastly things—that was what he must be thinking. Luke tipped the cat backwards and its mouth opened. He grimaced.

  Alistair took it out of his son's hand. 'Yes, a lot of it's left to people. God only knows who would want all this rubbish, though, right?'

  Luke smiled, barely conscious of what had been said, just glad to have an opportunity to look into his father's sad eyes with affection.

  To Alistair, he seemed to be sharing the joke. He and his son were filthy conspirators in his mother's damp little sitting room.

  Perfect, Alistair thought. You have made this son yourself; you have worked hard all your life to earn his prejudices for him. You bought him the ski-trips, the boarding-school friends with their country houses, the teenage girlfriends with their shiny blonde hair and pashmina shawls. And now you must stand here, he told himself, and laugh with him at your mother's possessions. This is how you finish the betrayal.

  'Come on, let's head back to London,' he said, gently putting the ornament back in its place.

  Chapter 2

  Rosalind and Alistair had met when she was eighteen and he was in his last year at Oxford. It was 1958. Her cousin Philip had asked her along to a May Ball and her mother had insisted she go. She had not wanted to because Philip so obviously thought she was stupid. He was never actually rude to her, but if ever the conversation got on to something serious, like politics, he would worry that she was finding it 'boring' and change the subject. He would ask her about parties, who had been seen about together and so on. There was nothing she could do. Even if she had felt able to insist it wasn't boring, that she wanted to learn and be the sort of person who thought—well, things, she could not have risked contributing an opinion. But she would have liked to listen. She had a way of folding herself between her two white hands and looking out quietly. Sometimes people mistook this for smugness.

  Her mother idolized Philip. Everyone did—but her mother particularly because she had lost her only son when he was two, and Philip had become her favourite nephew. They had an almost flirtatious relationship and when they were on the phone, discussing Rosalind's travel arrangements to Oxford, Rosalind thought it sounded as though it was her mother who was going, not her. Her mother laughed wildly at Philip's exaggerated descriptions of the chaos of preparation going on at his college, at the students' frantic taming of straggly hair and beards, which had seemed to lend them a philosophical air only the week before. Rosalind felt like the incidental component in an arrangement between two more vibrant personalities.

  She often felt like that. She would have preferred to be more like her elder sister Suzannah, who told jokes and informed their father she was interested in Communism, or Buddhism. But when Rosalind listened to the rows Suzannah had with their mother, she buried her face in her pillow and thought how much nicer it was, really, just to be quiet.

  'Cat got your tongue, Rozzy?' her father would say at lunch sometimes. And then he would ruffle her hair as if he was pleased with her for it.

  'Sit up, darling,' her mother would remind her.

  She got out her dress and laid it on the hotel bed. It was one of Suzannah's—a pale lilac, which went very well with her dark hair. She thought of herself as pretty, but not beautiful like her elder sister. Beauty seemed to be something that required more personality. Once, she had stared for a long time at a photograph in a magazine of Marilyn Monroe, her half-closed eyes fixed erotically on the lens. The image frightened her. She wondered what it would be like for a man to kiss Marilyn Monroe—the big breasts pressing on you, the plump arms round your neck. Was that what they wanted?

  Again, she felt frightened. She got visits from this world of emotion she had not yet begun to understand. It was like seeing a ghost. The expression in Monroe's eyes belonged to it, and the time her sister had come home drunk and there was blood in her knickers and on her petticoat, leaves in her hair. Suzannah kept laughing, saying she couldn't believe that was all it was. She laughed all the way up the first flight of stairs, stopping outside their parents' bedroom to say, 'It's just so... silly —what you're expected to do. It's so ... silly,' and Rosalind had had to put her hand over her sister's mouth. She'd had to undress her. The next morning Suzannah had slipped a gold bracelet she knew Rosalind liked under her door with a note that just said, 'Thanks.'

  Rosalind put on the bracelet and tightened the clasps on her pearl earrings. She was pleased with the way she looked when she was all dressed up. She knew she fulfilled most of the criteria—slim, not too tall, even complexion, clear eyes. And she knew Philip was only half joking when they walked towards the college gates and he draped his arm over her and said she would do his reputation no end of good. It was a cool evening and the light rain pattered on the streamers and balloons. They got under cover as soon as possible, and Philip called out to a friend of his, who looked slightly comic in a dinner jacket several sizes too large for him. 'Al!' he shouted. The friend turned and grinned at them and they went in behind him in the queue. He had dark hair, blue eyes and very pale skin. He was so pale, in fact, that Rosalind wondered if he was all right. She watched his sharp eyes bounce from her face to the pavement to the church spire and back again.

  'Al, this is Rozzy. Rozzy, this is Al.' They had not had a chance to shake hands before Philip was introducing her to someone else a few places along.

  Alistair thought she was the shiniest, cleanest-looking person he had ever seen. How did a person get that clean and shining? You had to come that way, he thought. There was a dinginess about him you could never scrub off. He stared at the incredible symmetry of her curls. A lot of the girls he had passed on the way had flowers, ribbonish things, but she just had the shining dark curls. It was almost intimidating, so resolute was its simplicity. She was like a haiku, he thought—he had been reading some that afternoon with his tea. He would have liked to be able to pay her a compliment, but he had no idea what it was appropriate to say. When he arrived at Oxford, it had taken him only a few days to abandon his own voice for Philip's public-school one. He still found quite often, though, that he did not know what to say in the new voice.

  He had felt increasingly insecure throughout the week—as he had each year—watching the college transformed into a playground of coloured lights, balloons and white marquees. He knew where he was with his books in
his hand, walking back across the quad from a tutorial with Philip, patiently explaining whatever his friend hadn't understood. They were a good pair: Philip did the frivolity and Alistair did the more academically confident sarcasm, and together they believed in nothing at all. Philip relied on Alistair for help with his essays and in their first term began to take him out for lunch or dinner to say thank you. Soon Alistair helped with all Philip's essays and Philip paid for all Alistair's meals.

  But now, in Philip's spare dinner jacket, aware that the sleeves were too long and that he did not know how to dance, oddly chastised by the irreproachable prettiness of this girl Philip had not even bothered to mention, Alistair wished he could just go back to his room. But he would have felt like a failure. This was the first ball he had come to—he had earned enough in the last holidays to buy himself a ticket and he had been determined not to leave Oxford without having been to a single one, no matter how awkward and unprepared he felt.

  Philip handed him a glass of champagne. 'Drink up,' he said. He knocked back his own glass in one and Alistair felt panicky. Recklessness frightened him—because life took so much thought, so much control.

  When Philip died in his early fifties, essentially of alcoholism, Alistair remembered those gestures of his, each one arriving in his mind like a drum beat. It was a strange funeral, full of flamboy-antly dressed homosexual men with tragic faces. At the last minute Philip's partner had felt unable to do the reading and Alistair was asked to do it instead. He had felt frightened in case anyone imagined he was gay, too—and ashamed that this was how he thought when his old friend had died. There had been genuine love between them, even if they had drifted apart as Philip's lifestyle became less and less conventional and Alistair's more and more so. Philip always complimented Alistair on his clothes—and Alistair silently appreciated the depth of compassion from which this sprang. Philip had come to understand him in the early Rosalind days and he was someone who never judged or forgot the importance of what he had learnt about a person.