‘Good. Good. OK. Shall we go?’
At the gate he takes her hand in a firm grip and sets off down the street. She has to keep breaking into a jog every three or four steps to keep up with him, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He hums as he strides along. As they are going over the canal, Alice yanks on his arm. ‘John!’
He stops and stares at her as if he’d forgotten she was with him. ‘What?’
‘Stop walking so fast. I can’t keep up.’
‘Was I walking fast?’
‘Yes. Very.’
‘I wasn’t walking faster than I usually do.’
‘You were.’
‘What’s the matter, Alice?’ he asks, with exaggerated patience.
‘What’s the matter with me? Nothing. I want to know what’s the matter with you.’
‘Nothing.’
‘OK. Fine. So nothing’s the matter with either of us.’ ‘Fine.’
‘Fine.’
He puts his arm around her shoulders and they continue like this to an Italian trattoria opposite the tube station.
John is staring fixedly out of the window, flipping his menu between his hands like a wobble-board. Two mini-cab drivers are having a row on the pavement: the smaller one keeps flicking the back of his hand against the taller one’s shoulder. Alice applies lipstick in a small mirror. As she smooths the dark red mouth on to her face, she looks at him covertly, eyes narrowed. Is he or isn’t he? He doesn’t look any different. Surely having an affair would leave some kind of mark on him? She scrutinises his mouth and neck but sees nothing but the features of the man she loves. The thought of his body with someone else’s makes her heart contract with agony. Even before she is aware of deciding to do it, she is drawing back her hand and by then it’s too late — she’s slapped him right across the face. ‘Are you having an affair?’ she shouts.
The effect is dramatic. The restaurant falls silent, just like it does in films. Everyone is staring at them. The waiter makes as if to come over to their table, then thinks better of it and makes a swift detour to rearrange the flowers on a table by the door. John is regarding her, aghast, his hand held to his face. ‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Are you mad?’
‘Answer the bloody question, John. Are you having an affair or not?’
‘Alice, what on earth makes you think—’
‘Tell me, Alice hisses through gritted teeth, ‘just answer me yes or no.’ She grips her fork menacingly. He reaches over and tries to take hold of her hand. She snatches it away.
He sits back in his chair and looks her in the eye. ‘No, Alice. I am not having an affair.’ He turns to face the restaurant. ‘I’m not having an affair,’ he announces loudly.
Some people continue eating pointedly and don’t look at them; others smile; someone at the back shouts, ‘Good.’
He turns back to her. One side of his face bears the livid imprint of her hand. She bursts into tears and covers her* face with her hands. He lifts his chair around to her side of the table, sits down next to her and gives her his handkerchief. ‘Do you know what?’ She sniffs and wipes her face. ‘What?’
‘You should never cry when you’re wearing mascara.’ She hands him back his handkerchief, streaked with black, and sighs.
John takes her hand between both of his. ‘One thing about being with you, Alice, is that I never quite know what’s going to happen next.’
‘My mother used to say that to me when I was little.’ ‘What on earth made you think I was having an affair?’ ‘Well,’ she says, suddenly accusatory, ‘you were using the phone box outside our house that time, and then you wouldn’t let me see what you were writing earlier on, and when I asked you jokingly if you were writing to another woman you flinched.’
‘I flinched?’
‘Yes.’
He shakes his head and laughs. ‘Well, if you really must know, I was writing to another man. I was writing to my father.’
‘Oh.’ Alice feels all anger and suspicion drain out of her, leaving her feeling chastened and foolish. ‘I didn’t know you wrote to each other.’
‘We don’t. I write to him but he never replies.’
‘How often do you write?’
‘At first I wrote every couple of weeks or so. Now it’s more like every couple of months. I phone him occasionally and leave messages on his answerphone.’
‘What do you say?’
‘I tell him what we’ve been doing. Not work — he gets the paper, I know that much. It’s weird to think he probably reads the articles I write. I tell him what films we’ve seen, the places we go to, what I’ve been reading. That sort of stuff. And I ask him to get in touch.’
‘And he hasn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘No. Not yet anyway.’
‘John, I had no idea.’
‘I know. I should have told you. I just didn’t want you to get upset. After that time you left . . .’He tails off. ‘It sounds very lame now. I should have told you.’
They eat. People smile conspiratorially at them as they walk past their table. Alice strokes John’s cheek. The red mark fades. As they are leaving, the waiter wishes the bello and bellissima ‘much happiness’ and exhorts them to come back soon.
Later that night, they walk to the postbox together. She pushes the letter through the wide red mouth and listens to it drop on to the heap of uncollected mail. Impulsively, she hugs the postbox and kisses its cold metal. He laughs. ‘He can’t fail to write now.’
Ben hurried up the school steps, the cutting wind blowing open his coat. He’d left the house so quickly he hadn’t even stopped to button it. He’d been a pupil at this school, and when he drove up and got out, he had to stop himself from going in at the boys’ entrance, instead of the main central door for teachers and visitors.
At the reception — just on the right as he came in, in a room where language classes were held in his day — he spoke to a woman with dyed black hair. ‘Hello. I’m Ben Raikes. Someone phoned me.’
‘Oh, yes.’ She got up and came round the desk. ‘Come with me, please.’
As they walked down the corridor, she said, without looking at him, ‘There’s been an incident.’
‘An incident?’
Her hair was tar-glossy with cardboard-grey roots. It hung like seaweed around her face. Her hips were so wide they strained the seams of her skirt.
‘A disciplinary incident. Between your daughter and a sixth-former.’
‘Which one? I mean, which daughter?’
‘Alice.’
‘Oh. What happened?’
‘She hit him.’
In the headmaster’s office was a boy holding a clump of bloodied tissues to his face, and Alice, slumped into a chair, stared at the ground in fury. The headmaster was a compact, lean, bald man. Ben had on occasion played golf with him. They would say hello to each other if they passed on the street, perhaps exchange a few pleasantries about their respective families or the weather, but there was no hint of that now. He sat behind his desk in full authority mode.
‘I’m very sorry to have to call you up here like this.’
He was staring at the boy, so it took Ben a few moments to work out that he was talking to him. ‘Oh. That’s all right,’ Ben said, then realising he should sound more serious, coughed and said, ‘Well, under the circumstances—’
‘Yes!’ the headmaster shouted, making Ben jump. ‘Circumstances! Which one of you would like to explain to me what those circumstances are?’ His gimlet gaze oscillated between the two teenagers. ‘Alice? Andrew?’
He was answered by silence. Andrew’s face was white with pain. Alice scuffed the toe of her boot against her bag, which was lying on the ground next to her. Ben saw that the knuckles of her right hand — clenched against her body — were red, grazed and swollen.
‘You have broken Andrew’s nose, Alice Raikes,’ he announced. ‘What do you say to that?’
Alice r
aised her chin, the blue and red streaks in her hair flicking over the back of the chair. She looked at the headmaster, then at the boy, and said in a clear voice, ‘I’m glad.’ The headmaster tapped his pen top against his thumbnail and looked at Alice as if he’d like to strike her. ‘I see. ’ He forced the words out from between his clenched teeth. ‘And would you mind explaining to your father and I why you’re glad?’ There was a knock on the door and then in the room was a tall, broad-shouldered man with longish dark hair. He looked around the room, taking in his son, whose face was covered with blood, the sullen Alice, the headmaster and Ben.
‘Ah, Mr Innerdale. Thank you for coming. This is Mr Raikes.’
Ben held out his hand.
The man didn’t meet his eyes as he took it, but turned quickly to his son. ‘Are you all right, Andrew?’
‘His nose has been broken,’ the headmaster said, ‘by this young lady here,’ he extended a finger and jabbed it at Alice, ‘who was, I believe, about to tell us her version of events and why it is she’s rather pleased with herself. Alice?’
‘He was chasing me.’ Alice said. ‘He pulled my jumper off me and wouldn’t give it back. I was trying to get him to give it to me, then he ... he kept . . . trying to ... to push me over. So I punched him.’
The headmaster didn’t seem to have taken in what she’d said at all. ‘Is that correct, Andrew?’ he said, as if an authority automatic pilot, swivelling his head in the boy’s direction.
‘Wait a minute,’ Ben said, and the boy’s father glanced at him. ‘He was chasing you, did you say? And he pulled off your jumper? And tried to push you over? What do you mean?’ Alice shrugged. ‘He was following me at lunchtime and I started running away and he ran after me. I was wearing my jumper round my waist. And he grabbed it. And,’ she said, turning to him, accusingly, ‘he hasn’t given it back.’
‘Fuck off,’ the boy muttered under his breath.
‘Fuck off yourself, weirdo,’ Alice hissed.
Ben rubbed his forehead. Andrew’s father put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder, as if to restrain him.
‘Right,’ the headmaster shouted. ‘That’s it. No more explanations. It’s clear to me there’s a pair of you in it. As of now, both of you are in detention for a week. Andrew, give Alice back her jumper, Alice apologise to Andrew. And 1 want no more trouble. From either of you. Understood?’
They were silent, Alice’s face set into an expression of defiant indignation.
‘1 said, understood?’
‘Yessir,’ Andrew mumbled, from behind his tissues.
‘Alice?’
‘Yes. Sir.’
Ben was the first to shuffle out into the corridor. Alice kept her head averted from Andrew.
‘Have you got Alice’s jumper, Andrew?’ his father asked him.
Ben watched as Andrew, still holding the tissues to his face with one hand, unzipped his bag and drew from it a large black woollen sweater. The father took it, held it in his hands for a moment, then turned to Alice. ‘Here you are, Alice,’ he said.
Without a word, she took it from him and pulled it over her head. Her hair crackled with static, strands of it flying up as if she was connected to a van de Graaf generator. Andrew never took his eyes off her, Ben noticed. ‘I’m sorry about . . . all that,’ the father said to her. Then he led Andrew down the corridor. Alice rolled up the cuffs of her jumper. Ben stood watching them go.
Andrew never came back to the High School. His parents sent him to a private school in Edinburgh to finish his exams. Alice would see him sometimes in the distance, getting off the five o’clock train, dressed in the impeccable navy and white uniform of his new school. She never spoke to him again. If they passed each other on the High Street or in the Lodge Grounds, they didn’t even make eye contact, as if they’d never met.
I’ve been hearing my father’s voice. I know I’m not imagining it. It’s not so much that I can hear what he’s saying, but that I’m aware of the timbre, the speech patterns, the low volume of his speaking voice, murmuring regularly somewhere just outside me.
I cannot bear it. It makes me miserable. It makes me want to turn, sink, let the waters close over my head. I don’t know what I’d say to him — to explain myself, to explain the whole thing.
It must have been a few weekends after they’d posted the letter. John had been checking the post every day, once in the morning and once in the evening, dialling 1471 if he came in and there were no messages on the machine, just in case — but nothing.
It was a Saturday morning and Alice was in the living room, eating an apple and reading a guidebook to Andalusia. John was upstairs somewhere. She could hear the stamp of his feet and every now and again she would shout something like, ‘John, how do you fancy a few days in Seville?’ or ‘The Alhambra sounds amazing.’
John would always reply in maddeningly mild tones: ‘Sounds good’ was his stock response.
She got up and stood at the bottom of the stairs.
‘John!’
‘What?’
‘Why aren’t you excited about this trip?’
Infuriatingly, she heard him laughing. ‘I am.’
‘You don’t sound it.’
‘Well, it’s just hard for me to be as excited as you are.’ ‘What do you mean?’
He appeared at the top of the stairs and looked down at her. ‘What do I mean? Only that you’ve been scouring that guidebook in every spare moment you’ve had for the past two weeks, that you’ve practically almost packed your rucksack, you’ve been speaking Spanish for months now . . . Need I go on? You generate enough excitment for both of us.’
She was just about to give a cutting retort when she heard a gentle knocking.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
Alice went into the living room to see a delivery man in blue overalls tapping on the window. She and John opened the door. Two men were propping a gargantuan, bubble-wrapped rectangular parcel up against the side of the house. One of them consulted his clipboard. ‘John Friedmann and Alice Raikes?’ ‘That’s us,’ said John. ‘What is it?’
Alice squeezed whatever it was under the wrapping. It felt hard and cool.
‘No idea. Sign here, please.’
‘Who’s it from?’
‘Sorry,’ they shrugged, ‘no idea.’
It was flat, incredibly heavy and had ‘fragile’ stickers all over it. They speedily tore sheet after sheet of bubble-wrap off it.
‘What on earth is it?’ said Alice after a while, sitting down on the floor for a brief rest, panting.
‘It must be a painting,’ said John, looking down at it, his head on one side. ‘It’s the right shape.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I can see gold. It’s got a gold frame. Who do we know who’d send us a painting?’
‘I don’t know.’ He seized an armful of the discarded bubble-wrap and tossed it into the air. It floated down on top of Alice, who lay flat on her back, watching it descend slowly towards her from the ceiling.
‘This reminds me of a game my grandmother used to play with us,’ she said from underneath a pile of bubble-wrap. ‘Kirsty and I used to lie on the hall floor and my grandmother would stand on the landing above and throw the bedsheets to be washed on top of us. We loved it. We had to stop, though, because once a sheet caught a plate that was hanging on the wall. It fell and broke and a piece of it cut me, just here, next to my eye.’
John loomed into her vision above her, blurred by the plastic she was looking through. ‘Where?’ He lay down on top of her. There was a ricochet of bubbles bursting beneath them.
She giggled. ‘Here,’ she said, indicating her eye.
He kissed her through the rustling plastic, pinning her to the floor. She struggled, laughing and breathless. ‘John, don’t. I’ll suffocate.’
He ripped away the sheets, diving down towards her, and then began pulling off her clothes.
‘No, wait. I want to see what the parcel is.’
‘We can do that later,’ he s
aid, standing up to pull off his trousers.
She peeled off her T-shirt. ‘We should at least close the curtains.’
‘Why?’ he asked, lying down on top of her again. ‘Who’s going to be in our garden on a Saturday morning?’
‘There might be some more removal men with more mystery packages for us.’
‘Well, that’s their look-out. If we want to have sex in the privacy of our own living room, that’s our business.’
After they’d got dressed again, they pulled more and more layers off the package. A shiny surface began to emerge and John went to sit down on the sofa to watch Alice remove the final few sheets. It was a huge, gilt-edged mirror, decorated with ornate Gothic curlicues and fat, floating cherubs holding swathes of material over their genitalia. She stood back, amazed. ‘My God. It’s hideous.’ She darted forward again and touched a smiling, golden cherub with her fingertip. ‘Who would send us such a thing?’
He was staring at it, his head propped up on curled fists. ‘It used to hang in my parents’ bedroom. It’s a family heirloom, brought over from Poland before the war.’
Alice crossed the room and clutched his arm. ‘Your father’s sent it?’
‘It must be him . . . unless it was my uncle . . . No . . . it’s definitely from him. That’s very weird.’
She shook his arm again, perplexed by his sudden depression. ‘But it’s a good thing, isn’t it, John? I mean, he’s sent it to both of us.’ She waved the delivery note in front of his face, which had her name next to his. ‘Doesn’t it mean he’s kind of . . . well . . . accepted it?’
He got up and began pacing about. The bubble-wrap, beginning to take over the whole room, swirled about in the movement of air caused by his violent strides. ‘I don’t know, Alice. I don’t know what he means by it.’
‘Maybe you should call him.’
He stopped pacing and rubbed his hand over his head, thinking. ‘Mmm. Maybe. I’m not sure I could. What would I say? I’m so angry with him for all this shit.’
‘But you want to make things up with him, don’t you? You know you do. Isn’t it time to put all the shit, as you call it, behind you and swallow your pride? He’s probably as frightened of speaking to you as you are of speaking to him.’ ‘Maybe you’re right. But I don’t know if I could handle a phone conversation with him yet. I mean, it’s been almost a year.’ ‘Well, write him a card or something and ask him to meet you.’