I picked up my phone, called Fitz back.
‘Beth? I’m on my way to a class. I can’t talk now. I’ll ring you. Monday, I promise.’
‘No. Wait, just listen. Last night you said something about risk. You said the risk would be yours as much as mine. What did you mean? I want to know.’
There was silence at the other end. I heard a door open and close.
‘Okay.’ He began to speak quickly, urgently. I imagined him having stepped into an empty classroom. ‘I suppose when I said it I didn’t know what I meant, but look at us. We’ve both fucked up — we both have failed marriages behind us. Now we both have someone good in our lives. That’s what we’d be risking if we threw it all up in the air. For something from the past that might not work.’
‘But tell me, before you go—’
‘Beth, I’m supposed to be—’
‘I know. But tell me this. Have you already decided? That it wouldn’t work?’
There was a long pause. I heard children’s voices, faint, giggling.
‘I’ll ring you Monday, Beth. We’ll talk then.’
He rang off. I shut the drawer, gathered up my jacket and bag, and left. Once outside my legs felt leaden, as though they didn’t want to take me anywhere, as though they might just give up, too heavy to lift. And it was only when I was halfway to the tube station, Fitz’s door locked firmly behind me, that I remembered I never put those photos of Kirsty back where I’d found them.
*
Alex was sitting in the window of the café, reading a newspaper. She looked up as I passed, outside, and lifted one hand in greeting. The café was busy with Saturday shoppers and tourists, loud with the chink of cups and plates, the scraping of chair legs, and chattering voices. Alex took her time folding the paper and putting it back in the rack; by the time she’d done this the moment that we might have hugged had gone. She said she didn’t have too long, that she had to meet Adrian later.
‘Sorry, but it’s the only time we have this weekend to do a few things.’
I was feeling squeezed in.
I offered to get the coffee and had to queue for several minutes, my sense of frustration increasing with every prolonged hiss of the machine. Finally it was my turn. I ordered coffee and brownies.
Back at the table it struck me how different Alex looked from when I first saw her, dressed now in jeans, T-shirt and a thin fleece, with less perfect hair and minimal make-up. The sun through the window caught the network of lines and creases around her eyes and mouth, so that I saw something of her mother in her delicately boned face and slight features, and in the way her eyes flitted round the room. It shocked me to think that we were older than her mother had been then.
She said, ‘This is all quite amazing. I can’t really believe how you tracked me down like this.’ There was a sting in that, the way she said it, so that I wondered if she wished I hadn’t. It left me unsure where to start, as though I didn’t have the right to ask anything. Alex had no such problem and got straight to the point.
‘Were you very shocked?’ I tilted my head at her, quizzically. ‘About me and Celia?’
I blew on my coffee to cool it down. ‘What other reaction would there be? It’s not something that happens every day.’
She broke her cake into half, then into smaller pieces. ‘It sort of took me by surprise as well.’
‘What do you mean? You must have agreed to it?’
‘I mean Celia took me by surprise.’ She put a square of brownie into her mouth. ‘One minute I’d bumped into her in St Mary’s A&E, the next she wanted me to move in.’
‘When was all this?’ I asked, trying to construct a time frame of things I knew about Alex. First Empire Road. Then Fitz. Now Celia.
‘Early eighties,’ she said vaguely, waving a hand in the air. ‘I was a mess — I suppose Fitz told you.’ She didn’t wait for confirmation. ‘I was bouncing from one bastard man to another and I thought, Well, that’ll do. A room in a squat with Celia, why not?’
She was rapidly devouring the brownie.
‘So you move in with Celia and next you think, Oh, I know, let’s swap names?’
‘No, not just like that, of course not.’ She hesitated, drank some coffee. ‘It was Celia’s idea.’
‘But you and Celia… I don’t get it. You hated each other.’
Alex gave a little sigh and rested her elbows on the table, chin propped between them.
‘We had something in common by then, didn’t we? Or should I say someone?’ She pressed some cake down onto her plate with one finger, then licked it clean. ‘You kept that one quiet, didn’t you, about Celia and Pete?’ I shrugged, not about to apologise for that. It hadn’t been up to me to tell her Celia was Pete’s ex. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it just came out of a drunken discussion one night. I thought it was a bit of a laugh. Turned out she was serious.’ She bit on another piece of brownie and brushed crumbs from her lips. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. Get rid of the old me. Fresh start, all that stuff.’
I said I could see that but that if it was me I’d want a completely different name.
‘Yes,’ she said, cradling her coffee, ‘I did suggest that. But Celia had this thing about not destroying our identities. She was on some kind of spiritual kick at the time — she said it would be like killing ourselves off.’
‘Sounds like that’s what you wanted: off with the old, on with the new.’
‘What I wanted, yes. But Celia was, I don’t know, she was a bit desperate for me to have her name and do something with it. Look, she was pretty weird back then. She was still anorexic and I knew she was damaged in some way. I thought, well, if this helps, why not? To be honest, I didn’t really care. I wasn’t exactly in a rational state of mind.’
‘Have you ever regretted it?’
‘No, not really. It’s been so long now. I just am Celia Beaumont.’
‘It must have been complicated to do.’
She shook her head, pushing her empty plate to one side.
‘Not then. We were both living on the margins, paid cash in hand, no tax. Neither of us had a bank account or a passport. All we had to do was call ourselves something different. It was only later that we did it all legally, so I could get a council flat and claim benefit.’
She sat back and folded her arms, as if to say, that’s it, that’s all there is to it, and I realised she wasn’t going to ask what it had been like for me when she disappeared from view so thoroughly.
‘And so that no one could find you,’ I said carefully, dabbing at a splodge of coffee on the table.
She let that hang for a while. ‘It is a bit addictive. Being answerable to no one but yourself.’
‘Can’t you live like that without cutting yourself off completely?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘But don’t you just form new attachments?’
She pressed her lips together.
‘Beth, all these questions. Look, you know more than anyone why I wanted nothing more to do with home.’
I thought of the things she told me about her stepfather. It started when I was fourteen, when I wouldn’t do what he said any more. And Celia’s words. Imagine that all your life you’ve been told that you are shit. That everything you do is shit.
Alex was watching me shrewdly. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I wanted out and that’s what I got.’
‘Yes. You did. But you didn’t just leave them behind, you left me behind too. After telling me what a crap friend I was.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Have you been carrying that round all this time?’
I shoved my plate away so hard that it crashed into my coffee cup. I leaned across the table. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? Did you ever think about me?’
‘Of course I did. I thought about trying to contact you, but then I imagined you at drama school, with a big crowd of new friends—’
‘Instead of which I was working in a record store for twenty quid a week.’
Sh
e stared at me.
‘It wasn’t just you that fell apart. After that summer I dropped out of school, dropped out of everything, for a while. I never did the drama course. I had my own share of useless men, and—’ I stopped. Alex had gone pale and still. ‘Look, I got over all that years ago. I’m not here for some sort of retribution. I just hate that you think it was a breeze for me.’
‘I didn’t know,’ she said.
‘Exactly! You didn’t know, because you disappeared. I lost you, and Fitz, in one fell swoop. One minute you were both there, the next…’ I snapped my fingers ‘…gone.’
A woman interrupted, asked if she could take a chair from our table. Abruptly I said yes. Alex had to move her bag and coat, transfer them to the back of her chair, and I finished off the brownie, which was dry and stuck in my throat.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said, when she turned back. ‘I’m sorry, that I wasn’t around.’
I said well it was all in the past now, and we didn’t speak for a while. At length I said, ‘So you’re in touch with your mother?’ She looked at me a little vacantly. ‘You said she told you it wasn’t me.’
Alex turned to stare out of the window. She cleared her throat.
‘I didn’t see her for many years. Wasn’t going to. But then when Jamie was about four or five he started asking questions about grandparents. They were doing families at nursery and he’d sussed out that some kids have two sets, while he just had a grandma — Adrian’s mum, I mean.’ She turned back to me, smiled. ‘To be honest, I think he was after more Christmas presents.’
‘So he doesn’t see his father’s parents?’
‘No.’ She didn’t explain why. ‘So, there came a point where I thought, this isn’t fair. To Jamie, that is. I contacted her and…well, to cut a long story short she came down. On her own, obviously. I saw her without Jamie at first. I wanted to be sure I could hack it, having her around. Then the second time we met I took Jamie along, and after that she used to come down once a month.’
Her voice was casually brittle, and when I remarked that her mother must have been shocked to hear from her she just shrugged. ‘Are you still in touch?’ I asked.
‘Jamie is. Once he got old enough I left it to him. To be honest, Beth, it wasn’t some great reunion, no prodigal daughter stuff. We had one conversation about the past and she was still sticking to her version of events, that it was me as much as him, that I exaggerated stuff. I said, “How do you exaggerate a bruise?” and she said how did she know it was him? I just laughed in her face then. She used to see it and hear it. The woman’s in fantasy land.’
‘How much of that does Jamie know?’
‘Not much. Even I thought it wasn’t fair to taint their relationship from the start, although I made it clear to her that I didn’t want Jamie anywhere near Greg. Jamie used to think we all don’t get on, but he may have put two and two together. He has met Greg once, at a wedding that my mother persuaded him to go to. He met David as well, but he didn’t take to either of them — David’s a chip off the old block by the sound of it. My mother says they don’t want to see me and the feeling is entirely mutual.’
She looked at her watch and although my head was brimming with questions I pushed on to what I needed to know. ‘So are you going to tell me? About how she found you?’
She glanced down, pressing her lips tight.
‘Come on, Alex. Don’t I deserve to know?’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But you won’t like it.’
A sudden cold dread took hold of me. ‘Not Fitz?’
‘No.’ When she spoke it was as though she was dragging it out of herself. ‘It was you.’ I felt the blood drain from my face and Alex softened her voice. ‘You were writing to Fitz,’ she went on, ‘those two weeks you were at home. And then you sent him a parcel of books. You bumped into my mother, the day you posted it. Remember?’ I nodded, mutely. ‘Well, she saw it and smelt a rat. She had a friend who worked behind the counter at the post office. She waited till you’d gone and then went in and persuaded her to show her the address. It was against all the rules but the woman knew the situation and did as she was asked.’
My chest felt heavy, as though a great stone had lodged there.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. Although in the end I don’t suppose it made much difference. We were already falling out, weren’t we?’ She leaned over, squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter now.’
‘But it does,’ I said, in an anguished voice. ‘I mean, it did. If you hadn’t run off that night—’
‘What? You might have persuaded me to go back home?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I wouldn’t have done that, ever. And then what else could I do?’
‘But I would have known where you were. And you might have come to me when things were going wrong.’
‘I don’t think so, Beth. I was too jealous of you.’ She saw my surprise and pushed away her cold coffee, picked up her bag. ‘I’ve got to go.’
I grabbed her arm. ‘Not yet, Alex. Sit down. Please.’
She stood firm. ‘I don’t think this is doing either of us any good. I’m sorry it was so awful for you, Beth. I know I behaved badly but at the time I was desperate. I can’t let all this stuff in now. I’m not Alex Day any more.’
She turned on her heel and left. For a long time I stared vacantly out of the window, at the place on the opposite side of the street where I’d last caught a glimpse of her. A man on a bus peered in, our eyes connected briefly. Then it was just people passing, and passing. A girl cleared the table. She looked at me, seemed about to say something, thought better of it. After she’d gone, trying to bring myself back, I had the sense that I was falling, down and down, holding my breath for the crash of landing.
You bumped into my mother…remember?…I’m going to Cornwall this evening…I was too jealous of you…The risk would be mine as much as yours.
And then I heard my father’s voice, as though he were there beside me. It was what he’d said after Empire Road, once he knew the whole story, his gruff voice tinged with disbelief.
‘What were you thinking of, Beth? What were you thinking of?’
*
23rd June 2013
For the third time in one evening I climbed the attic stairs to Sean’s room, where I could lean against the skylight and look down on the mosaic of roofs and gardens below, absorbing the quiet warmth of this space under the eaves. The only sounds up here were those of birds’ feet scratching in the guttering and the ticking of contracting wood, but somehow these served to calm the ticking, scratching thoughts in my head. Like the edges of the now darkening landscape they softened and blurred.
When Sean leaves home, I was thinking, I’ll claim this room for my own. It will enfold me like a womb, with its sloping beams and red walls and door at the bottom of the stairs. This is where I’ll come to lick my wounds. I’ll play loud music and read books and curl up in bed with Love Film. I’ll write letters I never send and bad poems that I’ll keep in a folder at the back of a cupboard. I’ll take up photography and blues guitar, I’ll eat cheap chocolate and expensive olives, I’ll drink white wine and sometimes gin, and generally just do whatever comes into my head. There will at least be that consolation when all this goes down the pan. Being free to do what I want.
It was Sunday evening, nine o’clock, and next week would be the last of my work in London. After that, we’d be as we were before then, Alex, Fitz and me, living in different cities with just the slenderest thread of connection between us.
Alex, I felt certain, would never contact me, so that all I’d be left with was the new knowledge that it was me after all who brought her mother down to Empire Road, and sent Alex running off to where I couldn’t reach her. What was it Fitz said? ‘You’d have to be prepared for anything. Like it or not.’
And then Fitz. If he and I did speak again I imagined he’d say something like, ‘Beth, I’m sorry, that night was a mistake. Let’s not
do anything stupid.’ He’d say, ‘Give me a call next time you’re down — we could have a drink,’ while secretly hoping I wouldn’t. Only one thing seemed to contradict this picture I was painting, and that was the look on his face as we’d made love: a mix of certainty and trepidation. I’d reached up and placed my palm against his cheek, and he’d turned his face into it, his lips brushing my skin as he’d said, ‘This is right, isn’t it?’
When I thought of that a solid pain dragged at my guts.
I went downstairs, pulled a half-finished pot of Greek yoghurt out of the fridge, chopped banana and poured honey into it, and then took this to my laptop with a third glass of wine, deciding that tidying up my emails might keep the dogs at bay. I dealt with my work account first, then went into my Hotmail address and went through the same process with personal stuff, a second round of displacement activity that was nearly displaced itself when I reached Celia’s emails to me. I resisted reopening them, rejected the impulse to delete, and finally placed them in the bland useful info folder. Despite its name this contained possibly my most useless collection of information — things I knew I should delete but hadn’t quite got round to yet — and seemed appropriate enough.
Celia/Alex. Alex/Celia. It was still so weird, to think that Alex was Celia Beaumont. And her son, which name did he have? I remembered how her eyes wavered when I asked how old he was. Twenty-two, she’d said, which would mean born in 1991. Suppose she was lying? That day she came to the farm: I’ve got something to tell you. I’d seen what I’d thought was excitement in her eyes but brushed off the fleeting idea of her being pregnant, thinking that wouldn’t be a cause for joy. But suppose she had been? She wouldn’t have been the first to think that having your own child would make up for the lack of a loving family.
I went to the laptop and logged into Facebook. Then sat and stared at it for a while. Jamie what? If Pete was the father then I had never known his last name; he preferred to be anonymous. And if he had Alex’s name, which one — Beaumont or Day? Eenie-meenie-miney-mo. I typed Jamie Beaumont into the search box; the drop-down list showed one who lived in Rome. I clicked to go to profile, and found myself staring at an old photo of Fitz. I checked the search box but, no, I was not going mad and I had typed in the right name. I was looking at Jamie Beaumont, born not1991, but 1983.
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