At meal times, Father sat in a chair that matched all the others, only his was very much larger and it came with arms. He carved roast English lamb and gave great quantities to Alice whom he had seated at his elbow.
‘Build you up there, shall we?’ he said, affably-ho-ho. ‘My word, Roland, but she’s not very large, now is she? This delightful young woman of yours.’
Alice felt a little put down. Her size ought surely not to signify? And was she all that delightful? Well, at least she didn’t go round saying, ‘But Father, what big feet you have. And, goodness-me-ho-ho, your girth is just slightly on the increase. Let us take him off the home-brew, shall we, Roland?’
‘This is really f-f-f-f. I’m afraid this is more than I can eat,’ Alice said. ‘May I give it to R-roland?’
Father graciously ignored the stammer and talked at her in a mellow, reassuring voice full of easy humour and anecdote. Put in mind of courtship – no doubt by the sight of his son’s proprietorial manner with Alice – he was disposed to retail for her entertainment how he had met his wife. It made a good story and he told it well, but it left Alice feeling uncomfortable. Father, it seemed, had fixed his heart upon a person whom he described as ‘a pretty but excessively pious young lady’ who had been Heather Dent’s best friend in youth. He had pursued her through zealous but self-serving attendance at Holy Communion over a period of some twelve months.
‘But the girl was so unshakeably stone-hearted,’ he said, ‘that my attendance at Communion became protracted into habit.’ Alice envisaged Father kneeling at the altar rail beside the pretty but excessively pious young lady and passing eager smiles to her over the transubstantiated host. She found it a little bit startling. He was so very much like Roland: so jovial and kind; so politely understated in any outward show of spirituality, that Alice found herself wondering if he had any spirituality at all. Peter Dent glanced appreciatively at his wife. Then he returned to Alice.
‘Finally she put me on to Heather,’ he said. ‘Who was, of course, far prettier – only nowhere near so pious.’
‘Oh, Peter,’ said Roland’s mother sweetly, and she did indeed look far prettier than almost anyone. They were a handsome family, Alice could appreciate that. Father was a fine-looking man and so was Roland. The sisters, who were not there, were displayed handsomely, in various stages of childhood, in the photographs upon the piano. Father bent again to Alice.
‘Heather’s friend became a nun,’ he said. ‘Perhaps driven to it by the unwelcome tenacity of my attentions.’ Alice was not quite sure whether she was meant to laugh at this or not. Her smile wavered uncertainly and ceased. She thought, momentarily, about Jem scrubbing floors in a nunnery with a toothbrush.
‘She must have become a C-thathacil-l-l-lic,’ she said, and she blushed a bit. ‘A Catholic,’ she repeated.
Peter Dent laughed and filled her glass for the third time with his home-made burgundy. ‘Oh, good Lord no,’ he said. ‘She didn’t go quite as far as all that.’
Roland smiled at Alice. ‘Careful, there, Father,’ he said. ‘I do believe that Alice has “leanings”.’
Father promptly imposed more lamb upon her and pulled a humorous face.
‘Oh, Roly,’ said Mother indulgently. ‘Don’t be such a tease.’
‘And where,’ said Father to Alice, ‘did you meet this reprehensible young man?’ But there was nothing reprehensible about Roland. Alice sat up very straight while she was at Father’s dining table. Little Miss Deportment. Just in case of unexpected sallies.
‘I was w-walking by the river,’ she said.
‘I flattened her,’ Roland said cheerfully. ‘I ran into her on my bicycle.’
‘Oh Roly,’ said Mother again, but rather vaguely, as though it gave her no real surprise that young men should barge about knocking women over on riverbanks.
Alice was wholly charmed by Mother, but haunted by her too, and not only because her best friend had got her to a nunnery. There was something about her so curiously other, which Alice found both seductive and alarming. She was so handsome and graceful and pliant, as though she sucked her serenity from some opiate nectar. She behaved like a woman in a Renoir painting, caught contentedly in the frame. As though she existed as an obliging emanation of her husband’s gentler and more feminine thoughts; as though she might cease to exist if Father stopped willing her into being – which of course he never would. Good Lord no! He was far too much of a gentleman where women were concerned. Or did Mother feel, as Alice felt with Roland, that there were whole areas of herself that Father did not see? Or had those parts of her simply died over the years from under-exposure? Did she, Alice, behave like that with Roland? Perhaps she did. And was this really all there was of Heather Dent? This person who had spent her life gliding through a company of men. Men, like Roland, who liked drill and radar and mapping and rope and rivers and armoured cars. Men who liked to think of throwing bridges over the Rhine. Men who liked dressing up in khaki and sitting around long tables and talking about ‘the enemy’ – just as if they were all in a film with Sir John Mills? It made Alice afraid. It made her retreat even more from Roland’s very evident passion and honourable regard.
She was very quiet most of the time in Roland’s parents’ house. And Roland, being Roland, merely became the more solicitous for her happiness.
‘The parents giving you a hard time by any chance?’ he said. ‘They think you’re terrific, by the way.’
Alice shook her head. ‘I think your parents are lovely,’ she said. ‘And so are you, Roland.’ But when he bent to kiss her, she stepped backwards. ‘Roland? Why do you think you like me? I mean what is it about me, do you think?’
‘Oh, good Lord, because I do!’ he said impatiently. ‘Because you’re the dearest, nicest, prettiest little thing and why ever shouldn’t I “like” you?’
‘But why?’ Alice said. Roland sighed.
‘Dearest poppet,’ he said. ‘I dote on you. You know perfectly well that I dote on you. Or must I always be telling you?’
‘N-no,’ Alice said. ‘No. I only thought—’ Roland embraced her. He looked at her carefully.
‘You are really fond of me, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I mean really fond of me?’ Alice nodded. Yes, she was really fond of Roland. All the more so for that curiously delicate word he had chosen for the purpose of encompassing her reticent emotions.
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘That settles it. You think too much, you know. I really ought to make you play tennis.’
And that was the weekend. The house so full of jolly male laughter and kindness and teasing. It was like having Roland in stereo, bombarding one with benign misunderstanding; with benign and courteous refusal ever to acknowledge that one might not be quite what one seemed. Being there underlined for Alice a conviction that she was somehow cheating Roland. And she wished so sincerely to be honest. ‘Tis better to Die than to Lie. If ever she endeavoured to indicate as much, Roland invariably laughed at her and temporarily steam-rollered her anxieties out of existence. Or he repackaged them all as evidence of her endearing feminine charm.
Chapter 15
Roland, though he could not seriously approve of Alice’s new landlord, was prepared to regard him for the time being as just another of life’s enjoyable jokes. Privately, he had sanctioned her move from college because he believed that it would license more extended and unsupervised house calls than had been possible in that institution, and lend strength to his intention to make his presence felt in Alice’s bed.
Alice herself was delighted with her digs and very fond of the landlord. She was also rather proud of the speed with which she had found them. The undergraduate grapevine had contended that one began one’s search for a room by knocking on doors at the salubrious north end of the Woodstock Road and then gradually worked one’s way, in the face of rejection, southward and westward towards the houses cheek by jowl with industrial effluence and railway fallout which lined the Oxford Canal. Alice began with the Oxford Canal and found he
rself a room within the hour – an attic room which was large, well lit, and mercifully under-furnished with junk-shop seconds.
The attic was reached via three flights of stairs which were permanently obstructed by Lego bricks, crumpled laundry, old newspapers and unwashed coffee mugs, but, once inside, the room was definitely nice. Alice was especially fond of her desk which was of the lift-up school-classroom sort and had a hole in the top for an inkwell. It was copiously incised with schoolboy graffiti and said ‘Jeffreys is a dunderhead’ across the front.
‘It’s a throw-out from somebody’s Prep room,’ Alice said to Roland. She enjoyed the idea of working at it. She was enjoying the work enormously. In spite of her earlier misgivings, she was finding the course extremely rewarding and had steeped herself in Roman Elegy, even in the face of Roland’s wry smiles. She enjoyed learning Greek and embraced Homer, especially, as enormously simpatico.
‘Jeffreys …’ Roland said. ‘Jeffreys … There is a Jeffreys in the Third Form. Son of, for an absolute cert. He’s a dunderhead too. In my experience, Alice, the apple never falls far from the tree.’ Roland had already inspected the accumulation of dust on the stairtreads of the landlord’s house and had deduced to his satisfaction that in such an establishment a young woman’s private life would be a matter of careless disregard.
Alice, meanwhile, felt that her new domicile was broadening to her experience in other ways. She had put away her clothes in the drawers of a somewhat rickety old chest which were lined with pages from the London Review of Books. Then she had stowed the cardboard box full of Jem’s stories in the alcove alongside the chimney breast.
The room was in the house of one Dr David Morgan and his Californian wife, Maya. While Maya was almost invisible, through dedication to her typewriter, David certainly was not. It was he who had received her in the hall on the afternoon of her first enquiry. He had come to the door with his bespectacled, harassed look and with a saucepan full of scorched greenish vegetables in his hand. There was an assertive backdrop of child protest emanating from the nearby downstairs loo.
‘Come in,’ David said, and he looked round, without real expectation, for a landing pad for his saucepan.
‘There’s no paper!’ screamed the child. ‘David! There isn’t any paper!’
‘Coming, William,’ David called mildly and gave the saucepan to Alice. It contained an encrusted lava of half-carbonized spinach and split peas. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and he looked around once again in the faint hope of finding a roll of toilet paper among the medley which cluttered the staircase.
‘There’s no paper!’ screamed the child persistently. David sifted through a pile of old newspapers, testing them, Alice thought, for quality.
‘Excuse me,’ he said again.
‘DAVID!’ screamed the child, like a demented tyrant. ‘I said there’s NO PAPER!!’ David smiled absently at Alice.
‘Well, how fortunate,’ he said, apparently to the air in general, ‘that we subscribe, in this establishment, to The Times Higher Educational Supplement.’
Alice drew a small packet of tissues from her handbag and passed them over at once. ‘You might w-want these,’ she said. David looked at her in wonder.
‘A woman who keeps Kleenex about her person,’ he said. ‘You’re not from America, are you?’
‘No,’ Alice said. ‘I c-come from Surrey.’
“Course, Maya’s from America,’ he said, inexplicably. ‘But she exists in reaction to such things. Stick the pan in the sink for me, would you?’
‘DAVID!!’ screamed the child, like Rumplestiltskin about to go through the floor. ‘THERE’S NO PAPER!!’
‘Excuse me,’ David said once more, and he moved off towards the lavatory.
In the kitchen every surface was a little bit sticky with a compound of cooking fat and dust. Leaning towers of books rose above strewn crockery, dropped underclothing and yesterday’s food. Alice scraped the carbonized pulses into the dustbin. Then she added the saucepan to the sink, which had the look of a miniature scrapyard. On the radio somebody was halfway through a talk on Jackson Pollock and the Cold War. When David came in, he asked her to sit down.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to tell me your name.’
‘I’m Alice,’ she said.
‘Forgive me,’ David said. ‘I suppose I know you. You’ll be one of my tutees.’
‘N-no,’ Alice said. ‘I c-c-came b-b-b—’ She stopped and breathed deeply and started again. ‘Can I be your lodger, please?’ she said.
David laughed. ‘Why ever not?’ he replied. He removed a pile of clothing from the chair opposite hers. Then he sat down and spoke philosophically. ‘Our previous lodger has just shipped out and left us an astronomical phone bill. You don’t look to me like a person who would run up phone bills.’
‘No,’ Alice said, but she felt immediately that his benevolence required insurance against exploitation. ‘You sh-sh-. You oughtn’t to trust people,’ she said. ‘You should p-put a lock on the phone.’
David smiled. ‘You have a stammer,’ he said, as though this was a matter of considerable academic interest. ‘Like your creator. All his sisters, too. Did you know that? All the Dodgsons stammered.’
‘No,’ Alice said. She wondered how it was that Jem had never told her that Lewis Carroll stammered. And all his sisters too. ‘Actually,’ she said candidly, ‘I’m not called after that Alice at all. I’m called after Alice Springs in Australia.’ David laughed with pleasure and shook her hand.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘I’ve destroyed the children’s supper. Do you possess any talent, Alice, for recycling carbonized spinach?’
‘Oh gosh,’ Alice said. ‘I th-threw it away. I’m sorry. Have you got a lot of children to feed?’
‘Only three,’ he said. ‘A four-year-old and two in junior school. I also have a somewhat itinerant teenage stepdaughter. Why does it feel like thirty-five? I make heavy weather of it, I suppose.’
‘Do you l-look after them on your own?’ Alice said.
‘Oh no. But Maya is really very busy right now. She’s trying to finish something.’
They took stock of the fridge’s contents. Its gasket was somewhat malfunctioning which had caused a build-up of stalactites in the freezer box.
‘The f-fish f-fing-ingers are all in prison,’ she said.
‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘They’ve been in there quite a while. The kids have all been vegetarians since we took them to the Rare Breeds farm. Only trouble is they don’t very much like vegetables.’
‘Do they live on treacle?’ Alice said. ‘Like the sisters at the bottom of the well?’ David laughed.
‘My stepdaughter is a vegetarian too,’ he said, a little warningly. ‘That’s in a manner of speaking. She’s rather fond of grass. And the odd magic mushroom. Let me not mislead you into thinking that this is a well-ordered and problem-free environment.’
‘But I like it here,’ Alice said. ‘I really do.’ She made her mother’s Tahini Temptation and a bowl of Damson Delight with a plastic tub of plums that had gone past their best at the back of the fridge.
‘Are you a being from earth?’ said David. ‘Or what manner of being are you?’
Maya and David Morgan’s house, both inside and out, was so stridently unimproved that it emboldened Alice with a curious, perverse pleasure. A small element of subversive relish which Roland, all unwittingly, had always helped to suppress in her, but which she had experienced in such large, heady measure all those years ago with Jem. Somehow, in a small way, it brought her alive as Roland never did. When he sensed it – which was seldom, because his presence naturally modified it – it made him just as irritable as his beautiful manners permitted. He was never directly irritable with Alice, but rather at its source. His irritation took the form of jovial, ideological sniping against David and Maya Morgan.
‘Typical bloody Labour voters,’ Roland once observed, as he passed over the Morgans’ threshold. ‘Tell them a bloody mile off from the
umpteen unwashed milk bottles.’
It ruffled Alice a little when he carried on like this. To be sure David Morgan voted Labour, but Maya, being an alien, couldn’t even vote. And, to be sure, the Morgans did seem to have a remarkable number of uncollected milk bottles on the doorstep. In addition, groundsel and plastic dustbin bags adorned the pathway to the front door and, at the back, the garden sprouted a single but flourishing crop of abandoned cardboard boxes. The garden was approached along a damp, concreted side passage which existed as an obstacle course of disused children’s bicycles, broken garden tools, rotting dining chairs, and – inexplicably – a large roll of well-rusted chicken wire.
But Alice was always protective of David Morgan against such knee-jerk sallies. She had liked him and respected him from the first. He was simply a busy, kind, harassed and evidently penniless academic of exactly the sort about whom Miss Trotter had been so ridiculously anxious. His causes were always scrupulously egalitarian, his integrity unimpeachable and two of his three young children were at the local state junior school.
David’s front windows, which faithfully reflected his egalitarian inclinations, appeared to exist not so much for the admission of sunlight as to serve as community notice boards for the propagation of information. Notices large and small gave a wealth of detail concerning Woodcraft Folk jumble sales, meetings campaigning for the preservation of local nursery schools and for the protection of union rights. They appealed for unilateral disarmament and declared themselves to be against apartheid, against compulsory redundancies, against acid rain and against tyrannical state encroachment upon local government and public services. Many of them had already passed the sell-by date, but this was not policy on David’s part. It was neglect. He was busy and over-committed to his students and his children and he clearly found domestic organization extremely difficult. And Maya, being airy-fairy and preoccupied, really didn’t help him much at all.
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