‘Well, you don’t.’
‘No, I mean, I’ve let them think it was a one-night stand. If they discovered that it’s someone I actually knew, that I could have easily told him…’
I heard my voice, harsh and critical. ‘They wouldn’t be too happy with you. And Fitz as well, if he found out he has a son he’s never seen.’ I saw Alex’s mouth quiver. I felt nothing, seeing only too well where this was going. I was to be sworn to secrecy. Again. Another bit of her life that I mustn’t betray.
*
5th July 2013
I went to see my mother. She seemed to be the only one I could face, which was appropriate, as the last time I came unstuck it was she who’d made me get out of bed, and wash, and eat.
*
The final week in London had passed mechanically, just work and the hotel room. I didn’t see Alex again and it was doubtful now that I would. I was glad I hadn’t told her about the night with Fitz, especially when after the first few attempts he gave up calling and texting. As the silence between us grew I had to admit to myself that his wanting to talk would have been to say, ‘Let’s stop now,’ not, ‘Where do we go from here?’ The idea of that sat hard with me, a dull ache in my chest, but at least it stopped me agonising over what I knew about Jamie. If I was no longer involved it wasn’t my business. Sod them. This was the perfect excuse to go home and have nothing more to do with any of it, have no one accuse me of betrayal, or collusion. It was their mess and they were welcome to it. I sent Fitz a text saying I was busy, that I’d be going home in a few days, and that I’d call some time to let him know how things had gone with Alex. I thought that was suitably vague, and imagined his face blurring with relief when he read it.
I tried to believe it was all for the best that both relationships had sunk as quickly as they’d resurfaced, but still I dreaded the following week’s leave that would give me too much time alone.
There were things in place for the first weekend. I got to meet Sean’s girlfriend, Monique, a chatty, confident girl with good English, whose enthusiasm washed over everything and left me to simply respond in an easy, friendly way. We were joined on Sunday by my sister Karen and family, up from Birmingham for our mother’s birthday, a day that floated by in a warm haze of laughter and alcohol. I told myself this was going to be easy; all I had to do was look as if I was enjoying myself, and I would.
On Monday Sean and Monique went off on a camping holiday. That same day Linda flew to Turkey. We had shut our virtual office for a week and Linda made me promise to take time off.
‘Don’t answer the phone and don’t look at emails — they’re all being auto-replied and people can wait,’ she said — as though she were the boss, I teased.
But I hadn’t needed to be told because now that everyone had gone I began to shut down, along with the office. I stayed hermit-like inside the house, and without work the routines that normally cemented my life started to chip off, fall away. I had a long list of things I needed to get done: quotes from plumbers, a service on the car, decorating, gardening, friends I’d promised to catch up with. I did none of them. I got up later and later each day; I gave up TV, and radio; I gave up eating, more or less, and then…gave up doing. It was quite amazing how little I could do in one day. Washing up one plate, one mug and one glass might last half a morning; staring out of a window could go on for hours; sitting on a garden bench in the sun might take up an entire afternoon. I just wound down, not as in relaxing but as in stopping. Nothing was required of me, or punctured the little bubble I was in; I heard from no one. Not from Phil, or Fitz, or Alex, or from any of the friends who’d got used to me working away and waited for me to contact them. One evening, sitting in the garden with a large glass of wine, I remembered how easily Alex’s disappearance had become forgotten at school, like a mark in the sand, washed over by other, more juicy bits of gossip. Now I was being erased.
I was left with just my thoughts and the hollow, raw pain they induced. It was tempting to go on, to strip myself to the bone and to gouge that out; it was only the fear of not being able to climb out of the pit that stopped me, that and an image of Sean returning home to find his mother curled up foetally on the floor.
Don’t worry, Monique, my mother’s just having a breakdown.
By Friday I knew I had to re-enter the world. Not just to take up the reins, or to be there for Sean, but to reassure myself I did exist. It was scaring me a little, this letting go.
*
Aware that I’d lost more weight and that there were bags under the bags under my eyes, I was prepared for the questions my mother would throw at me, so I forestalled them.
‘I’ve seen Alex.’
We were sitting in the back room of her flat, with the patio doors wide open; the temperature was in the eighties.
‘Alex?’ My mother’s brow furrowed as she puzzled over this. ‘You mean, that Alex?’ When I confirmed this she stared at me, her mind searching for some kind of reference point. ‘When? Is she here?’
‘No, Mum, she lives in London. Always has, it turns out, ever since…’
I trailed off, looking at my mother’s veined hands where they’d paused from knitting waistcoats for rescued greyhounds, her latest charity. When I thought of my mother it was often like this, sitting in her favourite chair with a pair of knitting needles darting to and fro, a ball of wool spinning at her feet. It had to be something serious to make the needles stop their clacking, something that needed her undivided attention. She peered at me now over the top of her vari-focals, her china-blue eyes bright and alert.
‘I thought she…’
‘Thought what?’
‘Well, I never liked to say it, but I thought she might be dead. You know, drugs or something… You actually saw her?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re sure it was her?’
‘Mum, I don’t mean just saw her in the street — I met her, spoke to her.’
The needles began their clicking again; she was finishing a row, intent on each stitch, taking time to think. At the end of the row she laid the knitting down on the coffee table at her side.
‘And how did you find her, after all this time?’
I told her everything, every single thing — apart from jumping into bed with Fitz. She sat very still, looking down at her hands in her lap. She made no comments, but now and then her head bobbed up, a shrewd look in her eyes. When finally I told her about Jamie her intake of breath was audible. Stupid, I thought, why tell her something to condemn Fitz with? But when I stopped and my mother spoke her thoughts were further back than that.
‘There was always something secretive about Alex,’ she said. ‘There was all this bubbly stuff on the outside but something brewing on the inside. She was slippery. A little eel. And you followed her round like you were her shadow, letting her tell you what to do.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said sharply.
‘Well, that’s what I saw. She clicked her fingers and you jumped.’
‘How can you say that? We just liked doing the same things.’
‘Yes, only…oh, well, it doesn’t matter now. But I’m not at all surprised she’s hidden herself away and then the minute you find her she’s dictating the terms.’
‘Mum, you sound like you never liked her.’
‘Oh, I did like her. You couldn’t help but like her. But she was slippery, that’s all.’
‘She had reason to be, didn’t she?’
‘You mean her stepfather?’
‘Both of them. Her mother just let it all happen.’
‘Hmm.’ She paused. ‘You always said you never knew any of what was going on, before Alex ran off.’
I sensed a question. ‘And I didn’t. Despite what everyone thought she never told me anything. Well, only that they argued, but who doesn’t argue with their parents?’ I got a knowing smile. ‘That’s what all that “bubbly stuff” was about, keeping it hidden.’
‘Camouflage,’ my mother said.
‘Yes.’
That was about the only thing we agreed on. The more we talked, the more I found my version of Alex slipping, distorted by the prism of my mother’s memory. Alex monopolised me, she said. I gave up other friends for her and then I started to behave differently. Where I had always thought, always told others, that Alex and I did everything together, my mother remembered that I did everything Alex told me to. I was looking down the years at the person I thought I was, only to find that for my mother she wasn’t there. Instead there was a girl who trailed round after her braver friend, liking what she liked, doing the things she did. It rocked me a little, this new view of my younger self.
‘You were her shadow,’ my mother repeated, taking up her knitting again. ‘And when she disappeared off the face of the earth that’s all that seemed to be left of you. A shadow.’
‘It wasn’t just about Alex, though. You know that.’
The needles halted momentarily. ‘But it began with her, didn’t it?’
I remembered something. ‘She said she was jealous of me. The other day, when we met, she said she’d always been jealous.’
My mother smiled, shaking her head.
‘Beth, for someone who spends her life telling people how to “read” others—’ she’s quoting from my own garbled explanations of my work ‘—you never really worked Alex out, did you? Of course she was jealous of you. You had everything she didn’t. So to make things equal she had to have all the power. You don’t need a diploma in Human Management to understand that.’
After a moment she asked, ‘So how was it left, between you two?’
*
Alex broke the silence, while I was still considering all the implications.
‘I know you’re thinking I should have told him.’ I didn’t answer, staring down into my gin. ‘Well, I might have done, only I didn’t know I was pregnant until weeks after I’d walked out. I was always missing periods because my body was so messed up by then. When I did realise I’d already met up with Celia, already decided to ditch the past. So I made another decision. I wouldn’t tell Fitz.’ She glanced at me. ‘Now you’re thinking that wasn’t my decision to make.’ I shrugged. ‘It was too tempting, Beth, to have a completely fresh start.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t go the whole hog and get—’
I saw the look in her eyes, remembered that I was talking about her son, apologised. She waved one hand, dismissing it.
‘It was never an option. Well, for a few hours, days, maybe.’ She stood up to pour more tonic, then turned to face me. ‘Once I’d decided to go ahead I just wanted to get things right. I didn’t want anyone to pull me down.’
‘Why would Fitz have pulled you down?’
‘Look, Beth, Fitz is… He’s not some kind of saint. At the time we got together I was in such a mess I hated everybody and they usually ended up hating me. In the end I even made Fitz behave badly.’ She swallowed some of her gin. ‘What I really mean is that every time I saw Fitz it would have reminded me of how low I sank. Too much drink, too many drugs, the kind of men I ended up with. I thought I was so grown-up,’ she went on, ‘after Pete and all that I thought I could handle anyone, but I was wrong. In fact, compared to some, Pete was a little lamb.’
She told me some stories then, things that made me go cold: black eyes and ripped-out hair, floors thudding up to meet her, weeks spent in a refuge.
‘Oh, Alex.’
‘It’s okay, I’m over all that.’ She waved a hand in the air. ‘It all happened to someone else.’
I frowned, not quite seeing that changing a name meant stuff just disappeared, but how would I know? She sat back down.
‘What did you mean, Fitz behaved badly?’
‘Oh, Beth, take that look off your face! I’m not saying Fitz beat me up, just that faced with my spitefulness he could dish it out.’ I stared at her, reflecting on Fitz having a broken marriage and what Dan called a complicated love-life.
‘Look,’ Alex said, ‘I wish I could say that I’m sorry about Fitz. But then it would be like wishing I’d never had Jamie, and I couldn’t ever do that.’
‘I don’t want you to apologise for it,’ I said, disowning the jealous moments I’ve had, in search now of a bigger prize than her saying sorry. ‘But I think you should—’
‘No. No way. I can’t tell him now.’
I thought then that I must tell her about Fitz and me, but, really, what was there to say? And why reveal how gullible I still appear to be?
‘What if,’ I said slowly, ‘in a few years’ time, Jamie decided he really needed to find his birth father. Won’t that be worse than if you told Fitz yourself now?’
‘If it happens it happens. I’m not about to bring everything down on my head for no reason. And,’ she went on as I opened my mouth to reply, ‘you’re assuming that Fitz would welcome Jamie with open arms, but…’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked, incredulously.
‘Whether I do or don’t I know that it’s not up to you, Beth, to decide what’s right and what’s wrong.’ She looked at her watch and immediately stood up, grabbing her bag and jacket, draining her gin. ‘Thanks for the drink. I have to go.’
‘Alex—’ She turned. ‘How did you do it?’
‘What? How did I do what?’
‘How did you become someone else so completely? How did you disown Alex Day?’
She was startled by my question and almost came back into the room, loitering by the door, her face softening. Suddenly I remembered an old photo of her, taken at my house, in my bedroom. I’d been mucking about with my dad’s old Brownie camera and somehow caught a look on her face; affection, I suppose you’d call it. Now, it was as though I’d suddenly reached back into the past and from it plucked the old Alex.
‘The trick is,’ she said, ‘to keep moving. And don’t look back.’
After she’d gone I sat on my bed, in the hotel room, watching the light fade.
*
It was only when I was going, already at the door, that my mother said, ‘We were a bit harsh with you, your dad and me.’ I turned my head sharply. ‘Over that boy, man, now, what do you say his name is?’
I imagined his name was seared into her memory. ‘Fitz.’
‘Your father was very angry.’ I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. ‘I knew how hard it was for you,’ she said, ‘but he saw it in black and white and nothing I said made any difference.’ She nudged her glasses further up her nose, watching my face. ‘You don’t still have feelings for him, surely?’
‘No, Mum, of course not.’ I attempted a smile to hide the stab of recollection; Fitz’s hungry mouth on mine.
I hugged her close. ‘I’ll see you at the weekend.’
*
When I got home I paced around the house, suddenly jolted out of lethargy but with nowhere to put that energy. It felt like a slow, gathering rage. I went in and out of rooms, picking things up, putting them down, noticing things that needed doing and not wanting to do any of them, then upstairs and into the small room at the back, my office, which greeted me quietly. It smelt of paper and plastic and jasmine oil. I ran my hand along the cool wood grain of the desk, imagining myself in here next week, glued to my PC, getting back in touch with work and forgetting about London. Would I be able to do that? On the work phone the light blinked at me, telling me I had messages, and despite Linda’s instructions I pressed play. At the beginning of the week I’d left a short message to say I was on annual leave but still one or two people had left requests or queries. Not urgent, they all said. No worries. Hope you’re having a good holiday. Then out of the blue Fitz’s voice.
Beth, are you there? If you are will you please pick up? There was a short pause. Okay, you’re either not there or… I’ve left you alone because I thought that was best but I need to know what’s going on in your head. You said you’d ring. I know it’s a mess but can’t we talk about it? Another silence. Fuck, just ring me, Beth.
Moti
onless, I stared at the red light that blinked for a few more seconds and then stopped. Then I hit the rewind button, skipped through all the others and listened to Fitz again, grasping at detail, trying to read his voice, finally registering that this had been left two days ago. How did he get this number, my work number? Dan, that was how. And then rang to catch me out, hoping I’d pick up, not knowing it was him.
I went over to the window and stood there for several minutes, looking down on a ginger cat that strolled across the lawn and through a gap in the hedge, my thoughts scrabbling this way and that for what to do. Fitz might not want to know.
I went to find my mobile and rang him. He answered straight away.
‘I just got your message,’ I told him. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at home..’ His voice was guarded. In the background I could hear music, The Pixies. ‘I’m supposed to be going down to Cornwall tomorrow.’
‘Supposed to be?’
‘Yeah.’ Silence. ‘You’re not the only one going through a crisis here.’
‘Right. Yes.’ I squeezed my hand into a fist. My nails dug into the palm of my hand. ‘Don’t go.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t go. I’m coming down. We can talk, like you said. Can you put off going?’
‘Yes, I think so. I’ll find some excuse.’ He hesitated, but pride or something stopped him prolonging the conversation. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then?’
We agreed that I’d text him when I got there. After that I looked on my phone for Alex’s number, the number unknown that I hadn’t yet saved to contacts. I rang from my landline, using Fitz’s trick, and when she answered told her I had to see her. Just that. No apologising. No pleading. Just that I had to see her. I let her suggest a time and place. I thought she was worried, although that wasn’t my intention.
Chapter Nine
6th July 2013
The café-bar that Alex named was just off Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a huge place with high ceilings, massive chandeliers and a sea of gilt-framed mirrors.
‘I’m going to a show,’ she’d said. ‘I can meet before that.’ And then, ‘I won’t have long.’
Looking for Alex Page 24
