The dog heard Daniel’s arrival before Alice. How did animals do it? Their previous Labrador had been the same. Ears alert, stiffened body waiting at the bay window, keenly looking down the drive towards the gate, a good few moments before she herself heard her husband’s expensive tyres crunch the gravel.
For a second, Alice’s chest dipped a little in the realisation that her own day was at an end. No more listening to Radio 4 peacefully, or pottering round the garden, secateurs in hand, without someone requesting a cup of tea or demanding to know why the phone bill was so high.
You only had to look at the print-out to see how steeply it had risen since Garth had gone off on his latest gap year. Not that Garth bothered to phone them much. Every now and then, she received the odd email from Peru or Perth or, recently, a South Pacific island called Vanuatu which she’d had to look up on Google. Why didn’t someone tell you, when your baby was born, that one day he would saunter off into the unknown and not look back?
“Down, down,” she said slightly irritably to Mungo who was now pawing at the back door; a rather pretty stable design in Farrow and Ball duck blue which she had painted herself, to fill in the hours.
Glancing in the mirror, Alice gave herself a taut little smile. Apart from that smudge of earth by her mouth – weeding could be such an intimate business! – she might just about pass one of her mother’s critical observations. Blonde hair loosely tied into a knot at the back (she liked to do that in the summer but preferred it loose when colder). Pale blue eyes which looked better when they had a thin line of kohl beneath. Pearl earrings, that Garth had brought back from his first gap year in Thailand and which had annoyed Daniel. (“Why don’t you ever wear the expensive ones I’ve bought you? God knows what kind of disease you might have caught from some street market tat.”)
The memory made her smile more naturally at herself in the glass. For a minute, she caught a glimpse of the old Alice. The one before it had all happened. The girl she yearned for – yet feared for – at the same time. The one who was now replaced by this perfect prefect image in the mirror before her; immaculate on the outside but damaged irrevocably within.
If it hadn’t been for Daniel, she would have been lost. Yet at the same time, he was unwittingly destroying her with his impossible expectations. “He’s given you safety,” she reminded herself, before walking towards the old coach house where her husband was parking the car. As she did so, she recalled, wistfully, the pony days which had preceded Garth’s discovery of ska, punk, and girls. “Be grateful. You owe him that.”
Mungo was frantic now. Leaping up at Daniel in his dark blue suit as though his master had been away for weeks instead of a mere ten hours. Daniel himself, she observed, looked tired. It wasn’t an easy commute to Exeter. They could move again, her husband had suggested when he’d unexpectedly been seconded to Cornwall. But no. They both loved their seaside home which they had found when Garth had been twelve; more or less the same time that Daniel had accepted there weren’t going to be any more children. A move from London to the south-west, had seemed like a good way to banish any regrets while pushing useless recriminations to one side.
And so it was. If it hadn’t been for her garden – so much bigger than the one in Clapham – and the sea, with its never-ending fringed scalloped waves with maritime sighs that reminded her of the soothing white music she used to play when Garth was a baby, she might not have survived.
“You’re early,” she said, standing on tiptoes for a kiss. Only on the cheek of course. Sometimes, when Alice thought about it (which she tried not to do too much), she could barely remember any other kind of kiss between them. Then she added. “You smell nice.”
Indeed he did. There was still a faint whiff of the morning pine cologne about him although the rest of her husband bore traces of a hard day’s graft. Teaching wasn’t what it used to be, he was always telling her. Too many Aims and Objectives which bore capital letters as an indication of their importance on the annual review.
“My last seminar was cancelled.” Daniel gave the dog an affectionate pat. “Thought we might go out to dinner, if you like.”
Dinner? Years of looking after Garth and making sure that he had not only completed his homework but that she was also well acquainted with his texts in order to have intelligent conversations about Chaucer or practise French conversation on the school run, meant that Alice was not very good at spontaneity. Even though Garth was away on his second gap year now – Durham had, very understandingly, agreed to another deferral – she had created a carefully crafted routine to replace the one that she missed.
Up at 6.30 to make Daniel’s breakfast. Days spent gardening or playing tennis at the club where she had made most of her friends, or, if the weather was bad, at the new glossy gym in Plymouth. (Not that she needed to. Her figure, despite having had a child, remained almost embarrassingly girlish.) Once a month, there was Book Club which could be entertaining, when not poisoned by internal factions. Why did book clubs sometimes bring out the worst in people, instead of the best? And walking, which was always a good way to blast the cobwebs out of her head. She and Mungo loved exploring the coastal path which had, rather amusingly, become a rather fashionable thing to do amongst her old London friends. One, despite doing it for charity, admitted it was more of an excuse to ‘get away from home’.
How else did she fill her day? Ah yes. Mending broken china; something she still described as a ‘hobby’, feeling too embarrassed to call it a business. There was also the occasional foray into Garth’s room with its garish posters on the wall; clean-smelling air without the usual whiff of BO; and too-tidy floor and desk. Even though it hurt to go in, Alice found it mildly reassuring – as though her son’s possessions were waiting for him to return just as she was. What else? Preparing dinner of course; a ritual which, to her shame, had all too often become, since Garth’s departure, an elaborate TV tray affair in front of a good box set.
It was a pattern that she and Daniel had fallen into as if by some unspoken agreement, in order to rescue the conversation from the ‘How was your day’ banalities. A pattern which she clung to like the orange lifebelts strung along the sea front.
Now she regarded the prospect of tonight’s restaurant dinner with apprehension. How would they manage without the support of television to fill in the long conversation gaps between courses? She could see it now. Daniel would talk about the latest drive to recruit foreign students (necessary to fund the coffers) and she might chat about tennis or her book or that little jug which was proving tricky to repair. Both would feign interest in the other’s snippets.
Indeed, usually, dinner out was an ordeal to be reserved for anniversaries and birthdays. Was this why Daniel had suggested it? Alice racked her brain as they walked past the bed of lupins she had been weeding that afternoon – such wonderful rich heads of purples and pinks! – to ensure that she hadn’t forgotten a special date.
It seemed unlikely. Ever since she had married Daniel, she had become one of those organised women whom her mother despised so much. The type who wrote down exactly what they gave friends and family each Christmas so they wouldn’t present a similar gift next year. The sort who not only had a birthday book but also remembered to post presents well in advance in case the post played up.
If she was in control, Alice kept reminding herself, nothing could ever go wrong again.
“Is it a special occasion?” she now asked as Mungo zoomed into the house before them, returning with one of Daniel’s shoes as a welcome-home gift.
Her husband frowned at the left brogue; creased by the dog’s enthusiasm. “Does it have to be, in order to dine out with my wife?”
Instantly, Alice knew she’d made a mistake. It was so easy to do so when your marriage was made of egg shells, papered over with Designer Guild paint, television suppers, and unspoken recriminations.
“Of course not.” They were in the kitchen now with its honey pine dresser, studded with Emma Bridgewater botanical mugs hanging from cup hooks. On the marble island in the middle sat a bowl of plums from the garden. One, she noticed irrelevantly, had a hole where an animal had worked its way in and might still be there; drowning in juicy flesh.
The image made her shudder.
“That would be lovely.” She glanced at the Victorian clock over the Aga with its mahogany surround and large digits, from which she’d taught Garth how to tell the time. Only five o’clock. Mungo had already had his afternoon walk; usually she gave him another good run at about six before Daniel got back but if they were going out for an early supper, she’d need to do it now. Otherwise he might not last. Mungo was a bit like Mum. Both acted younger than their age. Both were inconsistent. All over you one minute; distant the next.
“I’ll just whip round the park while you have a shower, shall I?” she added. Daniel always liked to head for the bathroom when he got home. Wash first. Then dinner, followed by the papers, a little music perhaps, and an early night. Sometimes, when Alice considered the amalgamation of their set ways, she could persuade herself that it was these which constituted a firm marriage and that the ‘other’ part, as they called it in old-fashioned novels, wasn’t necessary. After all, lots of people their age didn’t have sex any more. There had been a survey about it only the other week in The Times.
“A walk? Good idea.” Daniel was, she could see, still tense around his mouth from her reaction to his invitation to dinner. It wasn’t until after they’d married that she’d learned how to handle these moods which could go as quickly as they had come. “Mollify and distract.” That’s what her mother had advised years ago. “Works for temper tantrums and for husbands,” she’d added with all the certainty that came from having added a long marriage to the list of her achievements. Now Mum wore widowhood almost as a badge of honour. “In my day,” she was fond of announcing to whoever would listen, “we took our vows seriously. Even if we weren’t particularly happy.”
Whatever she might think of her mother, Alice told herself, there was no doubt that the mollify and distract technique could be very effective in smoothing troubled waters. “Cup of tea first?” she suggested, putting on the kettle. Daniel nodded and Alice wondered, not for the first time, if his students could see past that handsome jawline and fair looks to see the real Professor Daniel Honeybun.
“Second thoughts,” he now said, his firm voice slicing through her movements, “I’ll put on the kettle myself.” He glanced at her cut-off denim jeans, still muddy from the garden, and blue sneakers. “Why don’t you go for that walk now? We’ll go out as soon as you’re back and changed.’
One of the reasons they had bought their house in this sought-after seaside town, not far from Plymouth, was because of the park. It went on for miles, weaving its way inland as though purposefully trying to distract tourists from the sea like a jealous sibling.
Alice varied her walks. The beach first thing in the morning when she would jog along the front, nodding a cheery hello to the other runners whilst plump, screaming seagulls pecked at leftover fish and chips thrust into bins by the tourists. The park at lunchtime. Sea in the afternoon. Park again in the evening. On the lead in winter and off if it was summer when she could see the dog clearly.
When they’d first got Mungo, the vet’s assistant had advised them to walk him a lot. “It’s the ones that don’t get enough exercise who misbehave,” she had warned them. Yet, sometimes, Alice suspected that it was her who needed to get out, more than the dog.
Now, as he ran in front of her eagerly chasing the ball (no wonder her right arm, though slender like the rest of her, bore traces of muscle!), Alice felt a welcome peace seeping through her. It was so beautiful with the river running through it. The grass, freshly cut by the council, smelt as fragrant as the Chanel which she always wore. Number Five, she would say when asked although she had skirted, for a time, with Number 19 before returning guiltily, like a repentant wife.
Incredible really, she thought, putting up her hand to shield the sun from her eyes, that it was already early evening yet it could be the middle of the afternoon. So light! So summery. And yet, at the same time, quite empty. Earlier, when she’d been here at lunchtime, there had been the usual coterie of mothers and pushchairs with toddlers clutching the sides or else riding their trikes, wobbling precariously on stabilisers. The memory, as usual, had made Alice’s heart lurch, recalling Garth’s early years and her mother’s warning to ‘make the most of it because it doesn’t last’, even though at the time it had seemed to go on for ever.
Now, as Alice threw the second ball – two were advisable because it encouraged Mungo to come back – it felt as though she was almost on a stage set. No one else was around, save a young couple sitting on a bench just over there, under a clump of willow trees. It was quiet too. Unusually so.
The girl had auburn hair, she observed. About the same age as Garth, perhaps. Very thin, willowy and almost nymph-like in stature. What was she wearing? From this distance, it looked like a very short black skirt under an orange T-shirt. Still, that’s how girls dressed nowadays, wasn’t it? The other day in the shopping centre, she’d seen a young teenager – surely no more than twelve – wearing laddered tights under blue denim shorts, begging for money. The extent of homelessness, even in a city like Plymouth, often shocked her. Where had that girl’s parents been?
Often, Alice had secretly imagined what it would have been like to have had a daughter. She would have called her Victoria, she’d decided. Vicky for short although her daughter would have spelled it differently with an ‘i’ because she would have been adventurous. Able to stand up for herself. Not like Alice.
Meanwhile, the boy, who seemed older, wore a leather jacket and was sitting on the bench, legs outstretched, looking out across the park but not in a searching manner. More of a nothing-to-do-way.
Alice recognised that. Sometimes when she went for a long walk with Mungo, she took a break and sat for a while; wondering what Garth was doing and trying not to text because everyone said that you had to let go at that age.
Had the couple just had a row, wondered Alice? They were just sitting there, side by side, without even touching or, as far as she could see, talking. It struck her that this could be her and Daniel in an hour or so’s time, facing each other in a restaurant, searching for something to say. Why couldn’t he just have come back later as normal so they could have their usual TV supper (the chops were already marinating in honey and ginger in the fridge although she supposed they would last until tomorrow) and then they would have been saved that painful non-conversation.
“Other ball,” she instructed Mungo who had come up clamouring for the second. “Find the other ball first.”
It took him a while to find it amongst the newly mown grass cuttings by the river and, when he did, Alice realised the bench was now empty. The girl was walking gracefully – almost floating – towards the hedge that ran between the park and an old cottage which Alice had often admired; not that anything would ever possess her to leave their white Regency townhouse which she had taken such care over; with its mix of old and new; original fireplaces and flagstone floors covered with rich red and gold rugs from Liberty.
Meanwhile, the auburn-haired girl was moving very slowly; very deliberately. Almost as though in a film. Extremely straight. Quite erect with a certain out-of-world air that one could not help but admire. If this had been evening, one might have been forgiven for imagining she was a ghost.
Curiosity made Alice wonder if the girl had got up from the bench in a huff. A lover’s tiff perhaps. Or maybe the couple were merely friends and she was walking back home from college. Then again, she didn’t appear to be carrying a bag of any description. Nor had she left one on the bench.
Alice noticed details like that. You should be a writer, a teacher had once said at school. But when she had ventured to mention this to the sixth-form careers ‘department’ (a plain, uninspiring room, manned by a part-time woman with tight grey curls), she was told that it was ‘very difficult to get in’ and that she’d be far better off as an English or art teacher – leaving the path clear for other more deserving would-be novelists. In the event, neither had happened.
The girl was kneeling down now. She appeared to be looking for something while the boy was standing up, quite straight. His eyes were fixed in the same direction as earlier, not moving, as though he was a figurehead on a ship. Alice was close enough to see these things although not quite close enough to be certain. It looked like the girl was putting a plaster on the boy’s knee. Indeed, his trousers were, she was pretty certain, on the ground and the girl’s mouth was …
A hot red flush crawled over her cheeks. Surely not. It couldn’t be. Not here in the park where there might be anyone around. Besides, it didn’t fit with the girl’s appearance. She’d seemed so young. So graceful. Too insubstantial for something as basic as lust.
Confused, unsure what to do, Alice glanced around, aware she was shaking. Surely someone else could step in. Stop them. But the park was still deserted save for her and Mungo who was worrying at her for the second ball.
“Ouch! That hurt. Bad boy,” she said out loud as his teeth grazed her hand. Throwing it in the opposite direction from the couple, she tried to walk on but her gaze was curiously drawn back, Lot-wife style.
Oh my God. Alice, who didn’t like to use His name (it seemed wrong when you were a regular at Evensong, a service which she found far more soothing than the more informal, modern-worded morning service), found herself moving closer to the couple; drawn by an invisible force.
The girl was lying on the ground now, her legs clearly up in the air in a v-shape. The boy was on top. His head down. There could be no doubt now. She could even see a small bluebird tattoo on the girl’s slim neck.
Something had to be done. Didn’t the couple realise they were in a public place? Any minute now, some mother with a gaggle of children on their way to Cubs or back from the beach after a late day out, might come across this … this spectacle. It could traumatise them for ever!
Alice’s right hand closed over the mobile phone in her pocket. She could call the police but, then again, might that not be as traumatic for the girl as it had been for her, all those years ago? Could she really inflict on her the same horrors that had stamped the old Alice, on the cusp of womanhood?
Besides, supposing this couple were in love? What if they had just got carried away? What if Garth was doing something similar with a girl on a foreign beach? Would she really thank a stranger for reporting them?
Better, surely, that she made her way back. “Home,” she called out to Mungo. It was one of the few words he obeyed, providing she had sufficient treats in her pocket. Swiftly slipping the lead over his head, she took a left over the bridge, heading for the short-cut. Just as she reached the furthest point of visibility, she glanced back.
The couple were still on the grass in the same position. At the main gates, she could see someone else entering. On a bike. Good. Let that person deal with it then. Breaking out into a jog, Alice felt the heat still searing through her body along with an icy feeling, as though she had flu.
“You were quick.” Daniel was already dressed in his smart brown hound’s-tooth patterned sports jacket; catching up on the paper in the spacious kitchen which had doubled up as a den when Garth was little, with its squashy sofa in the corner. Now it was her ‘office’ where she took calls from clients, carefully noting down their needs in the little black book on the small lavender and pink mosaic-top table, which she’d made herself at a crafts workshop.
“Was I?” Alice glanced at the clock. It felt as though she had been out for an age yet it had only been twenty minutes.
“Did you run?” Daniel took in her hot, dishevelled appearance with a look that might either be amusement or disapproval. It was hard to read his mind nowadays; a criticism which he, ironically, had thrown at her the other month.
“Yes. No. Sort of.”
She ought to tell him, Alice thought, as she busied herself, putting out fresh water for Mungo and scooping out his evening ration of dry food. But that would mean mentioning the ‘sex’ word. Why spoil the evening before she’d given it a chance? “I’m just going to have a shower. Won’t be long.”
Then she heard it. They all did, including the dog who tore past to the window, barking furiously. The sound of a siren. In London, it had been so familiar as to be unremarkable. The whirring of rescue helicopters was another matter. They were used to that here – amazing how people ignored the Danger sign on the cliff edge. But sirens were unusual unless someone had slipped in the high street and broken a leg, as had happened last month to an old lady from church. The snap, apparently, had been audible.
“Sounds like something’s happened in the park,” said Daniel looking out of the window. He squinted as he tried to focus; time and time again, she had to remind him to wear his new tortoiseshell glasses. Vanity or forgetfulness, she wondered. Both played their part in her husband’s life. ‘Did you see anything when you were there?” he added curiously.
“No.” Alice heard her voice coming out like someone else’s. Just as it had done all those years ago. “No. I didn’t.”
It was wrong to lie. How many times had she told Garth that? But far worse than the mistruth, was that strange feeling down below her waist, that had started when she had first seen the couple and which was still there now.
An excitement mixed with a disgust that made her want to gag.
Would the past
nevergo away?