'No, no. Don't, darling. You must go. It's ... important,' he said. Then he slapped his forehead. 'We're meant to be going to Julian's for dinner.'
'Tomorrow night?'
'Yes. I—I forgot to say.'
'Oh, Alistair. Well, we'll cancel that, too.' She had just enough room in her mind to think how unlike him it was to accept a midweek invitation to dinner and how unlike him it was to forget to tell her about it. She squeezed his hand, attributing his uncharacteristic vagueness to the news, even though she knew it had preceded it. She had noticed an odd, hunted expression on his face and a new habit of jumping as she walked into the room.
'No, let's not cancel anything,' he said. 'You go to Sussex. I'll go to Julian's. It's probably the best thing for me. I'll explain I didn't warn you—all my fault.'
'You really think so?'
'I do. I think it's best we carry on as normal. It'll be best for me that way.'
'Well, if you're sure.'
'I am.' His voice sounded sure, too. The flawless performance was his only protection from an evening alone with his loving wife.
When Rosalind thought over the events a few weeks after this, she couldn't help dwelling on the subject of fate. This was a concept Alistair had always laughed at—he thought it a preoccupation of neurotic women, like her sister Suzannah, and at first she felt embarrassed. It was her instinct to check whether her thoughts would bear her husband's scrutiny. But suddenly she pushed open the french windows and went out into the garden, thinking angrily that it was not exactly as if Alistair's brilliant mind had been right about everything, was it?
But before this came the night of Julian and Elise's dinner, the night of the attack, of the whirring car alarm and the two figures running away in the dark.
Afterwards, at the hospital, when the doctor had examined his leg, Alistair found he was still clutching the litde card Rosalind had written for Julian and Elise, to apologize for her absence. The words were smudged with his sweat:'...so disappointed I can't be there ...' he read,'...have been lovely ... miss out on Elise's delicious ...' He was in a great deal of pain and he read his wife's gentle words while the doctor asked him if he could move his toes and rotate his ankle.
After his X-rays, he was told that Rosalind was on her way and he was put into the private room he would stay in for the next week. Detective Inspector Pendry sat on a chair by Alistair's bed. He spoke highly of Julians swift telephone call. 'That's a good friend you've got there,' the efficient policeman told him.
Two constables in a nearby squad car had caught the attackers on the high street minutes after the attack. Just half an hour later they were signing their names at Chelsea police station.
'I must just ask you a few questions,' Detective Inspector Pendry said, taking out a notepad. 'First, do the names Anil Bandari and Michael Jensen mean anything to you?' he said.
Alistair had never heard of Anil Bandari. The other name, though—the other name he did know. He felt his mouth go dry with fear. Michael Jensen was a defence witness in the Giorgiou case, a friend of the defendant.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I've never heard of either of them.'
When Detective Inspector Pendry had gone, Alistair thought it all through with terrifying clarity, resolving the outlandish details into a story that really did fit into his life.
There could be no doubt as to the motivation for the attack: it was an act of revenge, the lashing out of a male ego. It was about a girl.
He could not believe Karen's indiscretion had been malicious. She would have seen it as something to giggle about. He felt absolutely sure of this and amazed that he did. But he trusted Karen—he trusted that her betrayal had not been a desire to expose him to anger and violence, but merely to make a joke at his expense. She would only have wanted to laugh about it with someone, to entertain a friend with a funny story about her adventure with an old barrister. He imagined her talking excitedly with a drink and a cigarette in her hand. He remembered how sad she had been that she didn't have a camera to record the way the hotel room looked. She was young enough to find private experience lacking and to believe it must be validated by the envy or approval of another, no matter what the risk.
Obviously it had got back to Giorgiou. And that proud, vain young Greek could never have let it pass—although Karen had said he was openly unfaithful himself. He could picture the reaction: 'What? Karen? With the prosecution barrister?' the spoilt mouth would have asked. 'With the barrister who is trying to put me away?'
Karen should have known her friend better. Why had she not known her friend better? He closed his eyes in desperation. But she was very young, he thought, and we all have our quota of mistakes to make and learn from. This episode had undoubtedly been her short, sharp tutorial on discretion.
It was possible that even Giorgiou could not have foreseen the ultimate outcome of his revenge. That the men had been caught was the factor no one could have predicted. If only they had got away, it might have been passed off as a mugging and Giorgiou would still have inflicted his punishment on Alistair's leg. But Julian, the good neighbour with his mobile phone, had ensured the bad guys were caught, and now there was the signature, 'M. Jensen', scrawled in the police book, signalling something curious, something to be looked into, to anyone who cared to notice.
Alistair lay in his hospital bed, waiting for someone to notice, his hours punctuated by visits from the doctor, the physiotherapist and the nurses—and his increasingly suspicious wife.
Astonishingly, he managed to cling on through Rosalind's initial questions, buying himself more time. But the questions quickly took on the essential theme: why had the police come back three times to visit him? Wasn't it strange that muggers had not even attempted to take anything?
One moment had been almost comic—if it's possible to laugh as you dig your own grave. Rosalind had arrived in a determined mood, as if she was going to insist on some kind of explanation. Alistair told his heart to enjoy the last moments of its former life. Within seconds he would have to tell her about Karen. But one heartbeat—literally one heartbeat!—before he began to speak, a nurse came in, saying it was time for his bed-bath.
Miraculously, Rosalind was defeated by this interruption, and after the wash was done, she talked only about Luke, who had come to stay that day and was terribly upset about a girlfriend.
On her few visits after that, before he was discharged, Alistair feigned sleep and listened to her sitting silently beside him for as long as he could. And when he woke, plainly too weak and confused to be interrogated, she seemed too preoccupied with their son to ask him questions anyway. She didn't stay long—she must hurry home, she said, she was desperately worried about poor Luke. When he looked back on it, he wondered if this wasn't her way of clinging on, too. They had always been accomplices in that sense.
But on the morning after she brought him home, to the newly laundered bed and the cut flowers on the dressing-table, there was no longer any way to avoid what had happened. The sun shone outside the bedroom window, a tray of toast and coffee sat beside him on the duvet and already the filthy papers were waiting in the shops.
Again, Alistair was sure it had not been Karen who had sold the story. It occurred to him that his faith in her might spring from the false intimacy, the false expectation of loyalty he had always thought would be created by casual sex, but this did not ring true. He remembered the tenderness with which she had said goodbye to him in the hotel bathroom, while she sang along to the TV. No, it had not been her, he thought—she was too good-natured. She laughed too naturally. It might have been many people: the indiscreet friend, one of the attackers or even one of the police. But not Karen. And, anyway, the long delay between their night together and Giorgiou hearing of it and the papers being alerted had a brutal clumsiness to it, which suggested a stranger's involvement. Had Karen felt guilt towards Giorgiou, or spite for Alistair, or even plain greed for a newspaper pay-off, she would have told her story immediately, a couple of months ago.<
br />
So, Rosalind had checked he had everything he needed and went out as usual for The Times at around nine. All that morning he lay ignorantly in their bedroom drifting in and out of sleep, distantly aware of ghostly doorbells and phones, of Rosalind's feet hurrying to answer them. He began to wonder who all her visitors were and why they did not come up to see him. Why did she not come up to see him? He put the breakfast tray on the floor and picked up a book.
At last, at around one thirty, he was actually hungry and thirsty and called out to her: 'Darling? Darling, I've finished my water, I'm afraid. I'm so sorry about this.' He was embarrassed to be so dependent on her.
He heard her feet coming slowly up the stairs and leant back on his pillows. Then he took in the white, pinched face in the doorway, the improbable coffee splash she had left unsponged on her shirt. 'Darling?'
'No,' she said.
She put the paper on the bed and left the room.
The Sun headline read:'FAT CAT QC BEDS SEX-KITTEN WITNESS', and there was Karen, photographed by a battered front door, looking amazed, looking about fourteen.
His eyes skimmed the opening paragraph, picking out the phrases printed in bold, 'London's trendy Ridgeley Hotel', 'quaffing expensive champagne' and then, further down, '"She looked young enough to be his daughter," said barmaid Angela Jessop, 23. 'They had even interviewed the staff.
He put the paper down and laid his hands neatly at his sides. 'Rosalind?' he shouted. 'Rosalind?'
But a few minutes later it was his son who came into the room.
Chapter 11
It was the kind of summer's day that has Londoners staring up at the sky and speculating about the hole in the ozone layer. TV and radio voices carried through open windows, reciting weather statistics, saying 'heatwave' and 'global warming' and 'possible water shortages'. It was already stiflingly hot at ten to nine. There was primitive fear on the tube trains—of thirst, suffocation, fire—as they thundered through their network of underground tunnels.
As he dressed, Luke thought how glad he was not to be on the Piccadilly line on his way to work. He could imagine the smell of it. This was his second week off. He had told the office there had been a death in the family—which, of course, there had—but he knew they would all have seen the papers and assumed his father was the reason Luke had asked for compassionate leave. He imagined he was much talked about next to the big photocopier outside Sebastian's office. He really didn't care.
He went down the stairs for breakfast. On the way he heard his father moving around and felt glad that he and his mother would be alone for a bit. He knew his father hung around in the spare room long after he woke up. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the sound of the toaster popping up.
'Morning, darling. Did you sleep?' Rosalind said.
'Nope. Did you?'
'A little. A few hours. Oh, the pair of us.' She shook her head and put out toast and marmalade and coffee. 'I'm afraid I dropped the eggs, Luke. All six of them broke, would you believe it?'
'Oh, Mum.' Luke rubbed her arm.
'But there's cereal, too. And my yoghurt—not that anyone else likes it. Look, is that going to be enough for you?'
'Mum, you must stop worrying and look after yourself. You do need to, after ... everything.'
'Yes,' she said, 'I know.' She looked desolate for a moment and Luke was sorry he had even referred to it. She seemed to hold herself together so long as no one mentioned that anything was wrong. He understood this because they were essentially similar. When things had fallen apart with Arianne he noticed that he himself had developed what Sophie referred to as their mother's 'first-lady' smile. It was a relentless kind of smile, used to ward off bad spirits. Rosalind did it at him over her coffee cup and he wondered how she would cope while he and his father were away for the day in Dover.
The plan was to go and look at the house with the surveyor and put it on the market. They were also going to pack up the rest of the clothes and funny ornaments and old bits of furniture. Luke felt no connection with the idea that he had had a grandmother—or had always had a grandmother—whom he had never met. It was as if no one had owned that litde house and those possessions: they had fallen out of the sky with an incalculable significance, like a doll found in a bush where a plane once crashed.
As for the other issue, what his father had done with that slutty-looking girl, it was incomprehensible and too psychologically threatening to contemplate. Luke simply couldn't stand any more disillusionment just now. Instead he worked himself up into a deep resentment of his sister, who had not been round once since the story came out in the papers. Resentment was a welcome relief from humiliation and it was not without its sensual qualities.
'Have you spoken to Sophie?' he asked.
'I called her this morning.'
'Right. So when's she coming over?'
'She's not.'
Luke's face reddened. 'What?'
'She isn't planning to come over just yet, darling.'
'She's not coming over.'
'No, Luke.'
'Why? Why not?'
'She just won't, darling. She says she can't face seeing him.'
Luke felt intensely angry with Sophie. Couldn't she tell their mother needed them at the moment? Was he the only one with any sense of family responsibility? He didn't exactly want to spend time with his father himself, but he was doing it, wasn't he? Because that was real life, that was being an adult, both of which were things Sophie didn't understand—for all her brilliant exam results.
Sitting at the breakfast table with his fist clenched, Luke entirely forgot that he had been brought home by his mother for his own sake and all but carried up the stairs like a child asleep after a long bout of tears.
'What about seeing you, though?' he said. 'That's my whole point, Mum. That's what this is all about.'
'She just can't face it all yet. Luke, it was terribly embarrassing for her at work.'
'Uh-huh.'
The Telegraph had covered the story, like all the other papers. Sophie had watched colleagues file copy about her own father. It wasn't that Luke didn't sympathize: it was just that they were always making allowances for Sophie's greater sensitivity. She always got away with looking after herself—because she was so very sensitive.
'She's very sensitive, darling,' Rosalind said. 'You know that.'
Yes, he knew that. Any minute she might cut up her arms with a razor blade so you saw the scars when she reached out for her cup, or she might turn up on the doorstep weighing five and a half stone, shaking and crying. He knew all about it. He wanted to bring the subject back to himself. As usual, he felt he was doing the dutiful, boring stuff while everyone worried about his sister's feelings.
He really didn't want to drive his father to Dover. He had already done the journey once a couple of days ago and that had been awkward enough. Apart from the fact that the idea felt unreal, distasteful—even sinister, like everything connected with his father at the moment—the truth was, he did not want to give up another whole day that he might have spent lying on his bed, thinking about Arianne. He was also terrified that Alistair might attempt to explain himself—although there was no precedent for any kind of personal discussion in their relationship. But Luke had noticed a kind of mellowing in Alistair since they first visited Dover. There was something approaching sentimentality in his eyes and, instinctively, Luke thought it might go with making confessions.
When Luke thought about what this conversation might sound like, he was aware that he had never before rehearsed dialogue in his mind in which he heard the other person speak and then struggled to breathe, let alone to do an impression of his own voice. 'Mum, do you really think I should go to Dover with Dad? I mean, is it strictly necessary?' he said.
Rosalind furrowed her brow, 'Luke, you've got to. You've just got to. He can't drive all that way with his leg.'
'I know that. I just don't understand why he can't just send people in or whatever. Why does he have t
o go himself?'
'Because it was his mother, Luke. They're her things—and that was his childhood home. Anyway, the house has to go on the market and it belongs to Dad now. You have to deal with that kind of thing in person. You just have to. You and Sophie always have this idea about sending people. Where does it come from? What people?'
Rosalind looked at her son and wondered frantically for a moment if she had done everything wrong—not only marriage, but Luke and Sophie too. Were they spoilt and irresponsible? Was that why Sophie couldn't find a husband, why Luke went to pieces like this and showed off about his salary all the time?
'Removal people, Mum, that's all. Look, it just feels so weird, is all I'm saying—doing him a favour.'
'I know, I know,' she said, softening with compassion again as she watched her son's hurt face. 'My poor darling. But, Luke, it's you or me driving him. That's what it comes down to.'
'God, hasn't he got any friends?'
'Not at the moment, no.'
'No, I suppose not.' He put his hand over hers and felt a rush of love and protectiveness and pride that he was such a good son. She looked gratefully at him and then she heard Alistair limping and tapping his stick down the stairs, and flashed her eyes. 'He's coming.'
Rosalind behaved as if her husband was literally dangerous, yet he couldn't have seemed more cowed as he came lumbering in. He attempted to grin casually—a sort of prolonged wince—and then he drummed his fingers on the sideboard in a bright litde flourish: it betrayed his heartbeat. 'Morning, darling,' he said, unable to meet her eyes.
Rosalind took her full coffee cup over to the sink, tipped out the contents and washed it. 'Good morning.'
They listened to the fridge humming.
'Goodness, ten fifteen already,' Alistair said. 'Well, shall we head off soonish, Luke?'
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