‘I haven’t got any romantic intentions vis-à-vis anyone,’ spluttered Alice. ‘And frankly I don’t see it …’
‘Alice, I am speaking openly and honestly. It may not be the way of the young, but it’s my way. Please do me the courtesy of listening. I am told that you value being responsible for organising the sale of this book of Edward’s. And I know that Edward has agreed to recommend that Ophelia be handed the project, and I can quite see that that might be a disappointment to you. But a promise is a promise, and I’m sure that you wouldn’t want Edward to break his word.’
Although Alice kept trying to correct or challenge her statements, Volumnia Beaumont’s way of talking made interruption an impossibility. She continued:
‘You may not have noticed, but Ophelia’s energies have not always been directed towards furthering her career. She is simply not that driven. Sweet natured, other-worldly child that she is, I believe her … focus has been more on romance. If she has shown an interest in the Audubon, it is because other … influences may be at work.
‘Now let me put this bluntly. Edward is a vulnerable and in some ways a wounded man. His own romantic history is not a happy one. He needs now the love of an appropriate woman, one with the right kind of pedigree. My fear is that with your charms, and I do not doubt that they are considerable, you are affecting Edward’s judgement about where his true interest lies.’ And then Volumnia came to the point – a point that Alice assumed would remain unstated: ‘Give him up, go back to London, and the Audubon is yours. Stay here, get in the way, and you know you’ll lose out in the end, and you can say goodbye to whatever it was you hoped to gain from being in the pilot’s seat on your sale. There you have it.’
Whatever Alice was going to say, and she had decided on something crude and Anglo-Saxon, was blocked by the arrival of Semele. Mrs Beaumont, much relieved, stopped to regain her breath, but not before she had sent Alice a ‘think carefully about it’ look.
Semele, who had lost her hat somewhere on the walk, said to Alice:
‘Do you know about real birds, or just birds in books?’
‘I know more about real birds than I do about birds in books, or anything in books. I used to study biology. What I know most about are the birds and animals and plants that live on islands, and how they are different from the ones that live nearby.’
‘There’s a boy at school called Thomas and he has his own binoculars. He says he knows the names of all the birds in England, and can even tell the little brown ones apart. Do you love my daddy?’
Too much had happened for Alice to be particularly surprised at this.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, ‘do you?’
‘Love my daddy? Of course I do. Well, not very much when he’s like he is today, all grumpy and moody and off on his own.’
‘Semele, where’s your mother?’
It was brutally put. Perhaps even brutally intended, and Alice regretted it as soon as she had spoken. But that did not mean she wasn’t interested in the answer. Mentally, she tossed a coin; what would it be: heaven or the attic?
‘Spain.’
‘Spain?’
‘Daddy sometimes likes to pretend that Mummy’s dead, but she’s not; she’s gone to the Costa del Crime with a convicted credit-card fraudster from somewhere called Hartlepool. What’s a credit-card fraudster? They won’t tell me.’
‘It’s someone who … it’s a kind of stealing.’
‘Oh.’
Well, that was interesting. Perhaps it even explained some things.
‘Daddy won’t let me go and see her because he says it’s not the right environment. But I don’t really care. Mummy comes to see me every few months and she brings presents. And I like Grace. Daddy likes Grace too, but he doesn’t show it when you’re around.’
The group had reached a meadow beyond the trees. Sunlight was leaking from between the huge and heavy clouds, turning some purple, some bluey-black, and some just black. The effect would have been pretty without the sure knowledge that more rain was on the way. Lynden rejoined them and the stragglers caught up. Alice saw that Ophelia was thick with Siân Ellis. She didn’t like the combination.
‘I suggest home and something to warm us up before lunch,’ said Lynden, his good spirits miraculously recovered. On the way back he practically gambolled. He moved through the group playfully teasing the women and joking laddishly with Alex and Jeremy. None of it fooled or mollified Alice. When they reached the house she asked Jeremy if he’d give her a lift to the station.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if you must go. I’d rather hoped you might stay till after lunch: I was planning on offering you a lift back to London. Thought it might make the journey go a jot more quickly. And the trains on Sunday are as rare as hen’s teeth, as old Johnny might say. Actually, another reason for the lift was that I thought you might be able to fill me in on the mystery of Johnny’s disappearance. Our host was most unforthcoming. Sure you won’t reconsider?’
Alice strode up to Lynden as Jeremy went inside with the others to get his car keys.
‘I’m glad we have the chance to talk at last,’ he began, ‘I wanted …’
‘I’m going back now,’ Alice cut in. ‘Jeremy’s fetching my bag from inside. How long has Grace Harbour been your mistress?’
The clues had been there all along, but it was only with Semele’s innocent words (if they were innocent: Alice suspected that the slip may have been deliberate) that the truth had stepped forward. And what a sordid, common little truth it was. Alice’s anger was more to do with her own embarrassment at inflating Lynden into a gothic hero or villain. How silly she’d been. An ex-wife in Spain, an affair with a plain, but available local. Not very heroic, not very villainous. Just squalid, and ordinary. No wonder he had rages and grumped about the place. No wonder he fancied something a touch more glamorous from the city. And hardly flattering.
Lynden’s jaw collapsed. The life and energy drained from his face, leaving him, within a second, a decade older. He made an inchoate sound, which could have become a ‘no’. Alice thought he might fall to the ground. With an effort he turned away; not towards the house but back down the valley towards the trees. Alice was concerned enough to ask Jeremy, once he appeared, to return again to tell Alex Conradian that Lynden might need some support.
When he came out, Jeremy handed her a piece of paper.
‘There’s a message. Someone called Andrew. Can you phone him on this number. He wants to get hold of Odette, if that makes any sense.’
Andrew and Odette? Did that boy never give up? Despite her mood, she smiled, but not without some small element of regret seeping in. She’d call him when she got back to London. He could wait for Odette.
Jeremy tried all the way to the station to get from Alice what had happened during the night and that morning to make her leave. But she said nothing. She said nothing because she had remembered her dream of the night before, and remembered, more significantly, its message.
FIFTEEN
Of Monkey Nuts and Hard-Boiled Eggs
‘A paper knife?’
Andrew spoke with the kind of whining shriek that signalled incredulity.
‘A paper knife.’
‘A Jacobean paper knife?’
‘Um, no. Not exactly Jacobean. I bought it in John Lewis. Very good stationery department. Much better than Selfridges. Can’t go wrong there, “never knowingly undersold” and all that.’
‘I know John Lewis is never fucking knowingly undersold. But still … And completely blunt?’
‘Well, it had quite a sharp point. Do a lot of damage if you jabbed someone in the eye with it. But the edge, no, you’d have a job to carve your way out of a wet paper bag with that.’
‘And this Neanderthal didn’t realise that instead of cutting your throat in the approved hallal slaughter method, he was barely even giving you a tickle under the chin?’
‘Fair play to the guy: there was an awful lot of blood and gore around. At least half of it w
as his. Perhaps he thought he was slashing his way down to my jugular. Perhaps he knew he wasn’t and was relieved. Takes a certain amount of nerve to kill someone like that.’
Andrew was frankly astounded at Leo’s good mood. Looking at him now lying in the hospital bed was like watching some footage from a documentary on underground bare-knuckle fighting. His eyes were almost completely closed by the swelling purple flesh around them. His lips were bulbous and misshapen, like rotten plums. He had at least five cuts on his face, three of which had required intricate ladders of stitching, and almost all of the space in between the individual cuts was latticed with angry grazes. But even this was more than Andrew could have hoped for as he knelt with Leo’s head in his lap in the narrow street. A small crowd had gathered round them in response to his cries for help, and someone had called for an ambulance on a mobile.
Leo never completely passed out. He couldn’t remember much about the beating, but he’d felt the push of the cold steel against his throat, and the hot, sour lager-breath of the skinhead on his cheek. After that he remembered lying face down, under a huge, crushing weight, which stopped him from moving. His mouth was full of blood. And then he was looking up into a face he knew. Why was Andrew there? He was going to the Angel. He’d mumbled, inaudibly, ‘Angel’. Another man was asking him what his name was, and if he could move his toes. Why? His toes were okay. There was nothing wrong with his toes. Then a clatter and slide as he was put in the ambulance, and then the meaningless flurry of Casualty, and then a bed, and an injection, and then sleep.
He’d woken into a pain beyond any he had ever imagined. The pain was cunning and crude: it combined an astonishingly high level of general agony, with spots of such intensity that they could, for a few seconds at a time, make him forget the background torture. It was a pain that made him want to be sick, to squirm and writhe and cry. After some impossible-to-estimate time consciously adrift on his inland sea of pain, he began to realise what had happened and where he was. And if this was a hospital, they must have ways of taking the hurt away.
‘Hurts,’ he’d said, before he could see anything through the narrow slits between his bruises.
He heard a gasp. Doctors and nurses didn’t gasp.
He peered fiercely. ‘Who?’
A cool, dry hand touched his. A woman’s hand. He still couldn’t see much, just a blur of whiteness. But then something dark against the light; a face. A face he recognised. The face of Odette.
An hour later, the pain pushed back into its lair by strong drugs, good drugs, Leo was able to listen, and to reply with eloquent grunts. He was wheeled away into a pale, terrifying tunnel for a CAT scan. Doctors came and policemen came. Odette stayed, talking to him lightly about nothing at all. She read him stories from the Guardian. He fell asleep when it was dark outside, and she was still there.
He woke up in the middle of the night, raging with fear and pain. People were coming for him. People wanted to kill him. His mouth had oozed blood and mucus, and the nurse had to change his pillow.
Odette came at lunchtime. She brought a brown paper bag, and Leo very nearly burst his stitches when he saw the contents.
‘It’s the one where Ollie breaks his leg and Stan comes to see him in hospital. Within five minutes Ollie’s dangling out of the window, suspended by his bad leg.’
Leo was explaining Odette’s joke to Andrew, who arrived that evening, the Monday. Every other word was accompanied by a wince or yelp, or guttural expletive.
‘Rings a bell, but you know I was never as much of a fan as you.’
‘Well, before the mayhem, Stan gives Ollie a bag with his gift. And what he’s brought are monkey nuts and hard-boiled eggs.’ Leo couldn’t stop another ripple of mirth travelling across his face. It looked grotesque and hurt like hell. ‘You see I’d told Odette how much I liked Laurel and Hardy, you know all my stuff about love and suffering, and friendship, as well as them being just unbearably funny, and she’d remembered this and brought me monkey nuts and hard-boiled eggs. I told you she was amazing.’
Andrew raised his eyes to the heavens, or at least to the strip lighting, and sighed heavily.
It had been a momentous week for Odette. She had found the rampaging Leo of the drinks party exciting and interesting. His small, wiry frame, with the left shoulder lower than the right was, in her eyes, more than compensated for by his face, which she thought the most mesmerising she had ever seen. It seemed to contain whole universes of complexity; geological layers of joy and pain and ecstasy and dread shifted and exposed themselves only to submerge again. But he felt too much like a different species to elicit her desire. It was only when she saw him outside, broken, lonely, that she felt some pang of warmth, and with that warmth, an appetite. She knew very well what she was doing when she took Leo home in the taxi. That it would succeed, in any sense at all, had to wait for the first proper meeting. Almost at once, walking on the Heath with Leo showing off, trying hard not to show off, and then showing off some more, she knew that it was right. Not right, necessarily for ever, or cosmically, but right for now.
Her new business partner, Gerald the artist, picked up that something was wrong, or rather right with Odette, after three days of whistling and all-purpose happiness, combined with an occasional irrational grouchiness, which wasn’t Odette at all. She told him something about Leo, and something of how she felt. From that point on he referred to Leo as the ‘Little Dude’, but his sole contribution to character analysis was that he sounded ‘a bit flaky’. Fine coming from you, was Odette’s silent return.
Every fibre in her being screamed out for a call to Alice to get some feedback through Andrew about what Leo might be thinking. But somehow the same reticence and determination not to spoil their luck that kept Leo away from the phone prevented her from telling all to her best friend. And anyway, for all she knew it might be over by the weekend, and then what a fool she would feel for talking about love.
Frankie had phoned very late on Wednesday night. Odette and Leo had been talking and drinking coffee in the ICA bar that evening. He’d invited her to go and see one of the films in the Tarkovsky season. They’d even managed to get as far as taking their seats, which Leo said were the most comfortable in London, and perfect for snoozing. But after fifteen minutes of the opening shot, which followed a bicycle being wheeled across a bleak horizon, they looked at each other and knew that what they really wanted to do was to sit next to each other back in the bar, poking gentle fun at the arty punters (who would have, as Leo conceded, every right to poke fun back, as he had worn one of his black polo-necks to this, the spiritual home of the black polo-neck), and each playing Columbus and cartographer with the other’s mind.
‘Where have you been all night, you filthy slut,’ said Frankie. She didn’t remotely suspect that there might be a boy involved: she assumed working late, or just not answering the phone.
Odette couldn’t resist it. ‘Oh, you know, just out with the boyfriend down the ICA. Like you do.’
Frankie spluttered, cursed, laughed, wheezed, yelped (the cigarette she was smoking had fallen from her mouth and threatened to initiate an inferno in her ironically-worn, but still very comfortable, pink fluffy mules) and jeered all at the same time.
‘I knew it, I knew it! That’s why I phoned,’ she lied, in her wonderful cheese-grater of a voice, given its broad, lung-lacerating shape by years of Benson’s and now finished to perfection by the finer-grained Marlboro Lights. In fact her call was triggered by a more general loneliness and a desire to get the girls together, as they hadn’t had a group natter for weeks and weeks. She’d also felt the urge to pass on her enlightening experience involving anal sex while wearing a tampon, but now she thought she’d save that for when Odette’s love life with the new beau needed spicing up a little, say next week.
Odette refused to give her any of the gory details; didn’t even mention that they’d done nothing more than kiss. And what a kiss: so still, so perfect, so sweet. His kiss was strong magic. But
his talk was better.
Odette and Frankie pencilled in two Fridays ahead for a get-together. Odette promised she’d make sure Alice came, and that she herself would come equipped with all the information Frankie could ever want, short of precise measurements of girth, length, and turgidity.
She was, of course, exactly on time at Granita. Leo had spent that one night, the Thursday, in her flat chastely, well, not that chastely, but chastely enough, on the sofa bed. She’d made it up for him and they kissed passionately, with her calves pressed against the hard, tubular steel of its frame. She knew then that she had only to fall over backwards and new things would happen. But she didn’t. Not then. Nor would she tonight: she had no intention of wrestling with the awkward mechanism, pulling, twisting, folding out, clamping down. She sat and thought through what would happen. She had no moral objections to sex early in a relationship, merely practical ones, to do with being hurt and maintaining self-respect. And even they had remained more theoretical than practical, given the lack of opportunities she’d had. Matthew had, of course, been a mistake. But Leo was no Matthew. There was nothing slick or manoeuvring about Leo. His way was always to try to make you think the worst of him, to paint the warts alone. It was only under special lighting that you got to see the faint outline of the masterpiece sketched under the gaudy cartoon.
And half an hour late, that was forgivable. This wasn’t his patch. And he’d wanted to have a drink with that nice, amusing friend of his, Andrew. Alice’s friend, of course, too. And you could tell that he liked her. What a shame she was still so wrapped up in her morbid obsession with the dead refugee. And then the pointless complication of the aristocrat in the country. Why couldn’t people see the world the way it was, the way that she saw it?
And where was Leo? Forty-five minutes late. She could feel the self-doubt begin to rise in her like damp rot. And the aimless questions: Did he really want me? Was he ever going to come? Was there someone else (not that, surely not that)? Have I been misled again? Perhaps he had only ever wanted a friend, and the unspoken knowledge that they shared that this night would be the night had scared him off. He was repelled by the idea of sleeping with her. And who wouldn’t be?
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