Alys, Always Read online

  Once I get off the main roads, not many people are about. It’s a bleak white winter day: the trees are bare, the patches of municipal grass are scuffed and balding, patrolled by the more desperate sort of pigeon. Now and then the cloud thins enough for a suggestion of the sun to appear, a low ghostly orb behind the council blocks.

  At Brewster Street reception, an empty room without any natural light, there’s no one behind the security window. I wait for a few moments and then I go and knock on a door, and a cross-looking woman comes to the screen and says Sergeant O’Driscoll’s on his break and should be back soon. Annoyed, I take a seat on a moulded plastic chair and, by the fizzing, popping illumination of a strip bulb, work my way through the sticky pages of an old Closer.

  After a while I hear doors opening and shutting, and the buzz of a security lock being released, and then O’Driscoll comes out to fetch me, still licking his fingers and chewing the last of his lunch. He’s young, as Wren was last night, maybe in his mid or late twenties. Younger than me, with lots of product on his hair, a raw sort of complexion, and spots on his neck. He takes me into a side room and pushes some pages over the tabletop: Wren’s notes from last night, typed up, fed through a spellchecker and emailed across the country in a fraction of a second. I read through them carefully while O’Driscoll taps his teeth with a biro, and though of course she hasn’t caught my tone of voice or my turn of phrase, the facts are all correct and unarguable. ‘I’ve got nothing to add,’ I say, putting my hand flat on the report.

  ‘It all seems pretty straightforward,’ O’Driscoll says, passing me the pen, along with the whiff of falafel. ‘If you could just sign – there. The reports are only preliminary at this point, of course, but all the scene evidence confirms your account of what she told you. The driver tried to avoid something in the road, and the black ice, unfortunately, did the rest. And if she was travelling at speed, of course …’

  He lets the words hang in the air while I scribble my name on the line.

  ‘There’ll be an inquest, but it’s just a formality. I doubt you’ll be needed,’ he says, pulling the papers back to his side of the table and rapping them officiously against the Formica so they stack up, then rising to his feet. ‘Well, thank you for your assistance. Get in touch if anything else comes to mind.’ He stands back, holding open the door for me. ‘Oh, there is one more thing I should mention,’ he adds, as I wind the scarf around my neck and shrug myself into my backpack. ‘There’s a chance the family will want to make contact with you. It can be useful for – you know – closure.’ I can tell that he’d like to be making ironic speech marks with his fingers, but knows this would be inappropriate. ‘Part of the grieving process. After all, as I understand it, you were the last person to have a, um, conversation with her. Would you have a problem with that?’

  ‘No, I … I don’t think so,’ I say, not at all sure how I really feel about this.

  ‘Great stuff. Well, if the family wants to be in touch, they’ll do so through the FLO.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, sorry – the Family Liaison Officer. Anyway, they may not feel the need. We’ll play it by ear,’ he says, slotting the biro back into his pocket. ‘This may well be the end of the matter.’

  I stop in the doorway. ‘Who was she?’ I ask, reminded how little I know about her, this person who spoke her last words with only me to hear them. ‘What can you tell me about her?’

  He sighs briefly, probably thinking of the cup of coffee cooling on his desk, and flips back through the report. ‘So, Alice Kite,’ he says, running a finger down the text. ‘Mid-fifties. House in London and a weekend place, looks like, near Biddenbrooke. Married with two adult children.’ Then he’s shaking hands, and saying goodbye, and I’m back out in the cold, retracing my steps to the office.

  As I walk, I hear her saying again, ‘You’re very kind’: an easy remark it had sounded at the time, but now I know how much it must have cost her. It seems strange that I know little more about her than the automatic associations that come with a certain sort of voice, and turn of phrase, and make of car.

  Maybe this will be the end of the matter, as O’Driscoll said.

  ‘Oh, no, you poor thing!’ says Hester. She’s the first person I’ve told. I have no particular confidantes at work, and I didn’t want to call up anyone else simply so I could drop it into the conversation; but I do feel a relief, a lessening of tension, now I’ve finally put it into words.

  ‘So you were coming back from Mum and Dad’s, and you just saw the wreck on the road?’

  ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘Was it, you know, traumatic? Could you see everything? Was she in distress?’

  I know Hester’s really asking: was she covered in blood? Was she screaming? She sounds almost disappointed when I describe the scene, the oddly formal nature of my conversation with Alice, which in any other circumstance might be comical. ‘How are you doing, really?’ she asks, dropping her voice, inviting a greater intimacy.

  ‘Oh, not too bad,’ I say. I adjust my position on the sofa and switch the phone to my other ear. I’m wondering whether to tell her about the times over the last few days when I’ve found myself back kneeling in the wet bracken, searching for the emergency lights in the distance, desperately willing them to appear. These memories feel every bit as sharp and shocking – as full of panic and uselessness – as the reality was. I have the sense the remembered experience is becoming more clearly delineated as the days go on, and I wasn’t expecting that.

  The sound of the crying, too, has begun to assail me at unwelcome moments, moments when my mind should be empty, when I’m at my most vulnerable. Late at night as I lie in bed, buried under a comforting weight of blankets, sliding towards sleep. Or early in the morning, long before the grey dawn. I’ve started to wake up very early, and sometimes I can’t be sure whether I’m hearing Alice, or the sound of foxes out in the gardens.

  ‘Will you just put that back, darling. No: I said, put it back,’ Hester is saying, and the moment passes. She comes back on the line. ‘I must go and start their bath,’ she says. ‘How were Mum and Dad, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Same old.’

  We laugh together, back on more stable territory, and she invites me over for lunch on Saturday. I know I’ll be expected to offer to babysit that evening, as long as I haven’t made other plans; but to be honest a few hours of Playmobil and an M&S curry in front of Charlie’s extravagance of TV channels sounds pretty good right now. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night. I should know.

  Once the call is over, I put a pan of water on the hob. I’m chopping tomatoes for the sauce while the onions and garlic soften, and the radio is on, and I have a glass of wine, and the flat’s looking nice, everything in its place, and the pendant above the kitchen table is casting a cosy pool of light over the daffodils in the blue jug. Because of the warmth of the kitchen, they’re just starting to shoulder their way out of their frowsty papery cases.

  It’s not bad, I think. You’re not so badly off, are you?

  A tiny movement outside the kitchen window catches my eye, and I stop and lean over the sink and look out, down on to the street, and I can see – in the illuminated triangles beneath the street lamps – that snow has started to fall, slowly and steadily.

  It falls and falls, for days and days. It seems, for a while, that the snow is the only thing happening in the world. It catches London off guard. Buses are left abandoned on roads. Schools are closed. Councils run out of salt. And when I wake up in the morning, my first thoughts are not of Alice, but of hope that the snow is still out there, still working its disruptive, glamorous magic.

  On my day off, I walk across the Heath, through a sort of blizzard. All the usual landmarks – the paths, the ponds, the play areas, the running track – are sinking deep beneath lavish drifts. Under a pewter sky, Parliament Hill is glazed with ice. Blinded by flurries, people are tobogganing down it on dustbin lids, carrie
r bags, tea trays stolen from the cafeteria near the bandstand. The shrieks and shouts fade quickly into insulated silence as I walk on towards the trees, their branches indistinctly freighted with white. Soon the only sounds are the powdery crunch of the snow beneath my boots, the catch of my breath.

  When I reach Hampstead, the flakes are falling less furiously; now they’re twinkling down, decorous and decorative. I trudge up Christchurch Hill and Flask Walk, looking in the windows, which are always cleaner – more reflective, more transparent – than the windows in my part of town. I see earthenware bowls of clementines, books left face-down on green velvet sofas, a dappled rocking horse in a bay window. A tortoiseshell cat sits beside a vase of pussy willow, its cold yellow eyes tracking me without real interest. I pass on a little farther and am peering down into a basement kitchen when the person who is moving around in front of the cooker notices me and comes to the window and tweaks the angle of the plantation shutters, denying me my view.

  In the high street I go into an expensive teashop, grab an empty table in the window, and order a cup of hot chocolate and a pistachio macaroon. An elderly man in a dashing scarf sits at the next table, working his way through a newspaper full of weather stories: cancelled flights, ice-skating in the Fens, the plight of Welsh hill farmers. Outside, strangers are sliding around, clutching at each other for stability, laughing. There is a strange festive atmosphere: the usual rules do not apply.

  I drink my hot chocolate and get my book out of my pocket and start to read, shutting everything out, enjoying the sense of being part of something and yet at arm’s length from it. I do my best reading in cafés. I find it hard to read at home, in absolute silence.

  ‘Is this seat taken?’ someone asks. I look up reluctantly. It’s a young woman with a toddler in a snowsuit, his round cheeks scalded with the cold.

  ‘I’m just going,’ I say, knocking back the dark syrupy dregs of my drink. Then I leave her to it.

  I’m nearly home when my phone rings. Someone introduces herself as Sergeant Kate Wiggins. She says she has been assigned to the family of Alice Kite, to help them through ‘this very painful time’. As I listen, the unwelcome sensations begin again: the prickle of panic, of helplessness. Feelings which, over the last few days, have started to recede a little.

  I know what she’s going to say before she says it.

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ I say quickly, without having to reflect. And saying the words, I feel the fear losing purchase, just slightly.

  Kate Wiggins pauses. ‘I know it must be difficult for you,’ she says, in an understanding voice. ‘You’ve had a very traumatic experience. Sometimes, witnesses find that meeting the family can actually be cathartic, on a personal level.’

  ‘I don’t want to. I’ve told the police everything that happened. I don’t see what a meeting would achieve. It would just stir things up again.’

  ‘Of course, it’s not helpful to generalise but quite often, in circumstances like this, the family isn’t looking for answers. They just want to meet the person who was there. To say thank you, really. I know, for example, that Mrs Kite’s family, her husband, her son and daughter, are relieved she wasn’t alone at the end. I think they are grateful to you and it would mean a lot if they could meet you and tell you that themselves.’

  ‘Well – I have stuff of my own going on,’ I say, desperate to get her off the phone. ‘It’s not really something I feel up to right now.’

  ‘Absolutely. Take your time,’ Kate Wiggins says generously, seizing on the tiny opportunity I’ve clumsily afforded her. ‘There’s no hurry. Let me know when you feel ready.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, pretending to take down her number. ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I go home and do my best to forget all about it.

  Oliver is doing the post, tearing apart corrugated cardboard parcels to reveal novelty golf guides and pink paperbacks with line drawings of high heels and cupcakes on the covers, chucking most of them into a large carton bound for Oxfam or (if he can be bothered, which he usually can’t) eBay. There’s an idiotic tyranny to the post delivered to the books desk: wave after wave of ghosted memoirs and coffee-table photography retrospectives and eco-lifestyle manuals, none of which even vaguely fit the Questioner’s remit. Maybe one book in ten is put aside, waiting to be assigned to a reviewer.

  I do my best to have nothing to do with Oliver, the son of one of our more famous theatrical knights, but his voice – as fruity and far-reaching as his father’s – makes this difficult.

  ‘Oh, here’s something interesting,’ he’s saying to Mary, waving a hardback in her direction. ‘We should do something big, shouldn’t we?’

  Mary pulls her spectacles low on her nose and inspects the cover. ‘Oh, absolutely – ask for an interview, if he’s doing any. I’m surprised they didn’t push back publication. Maybe it was too late.’

  Oliver finds the press release tucked inside the flyleaf, and picks up the phone. I hear him flirting in a bread-and-butter fashion with the PR. There’s a little shop gossip about a book launch they both attended earlier in the week, and then he says, ‘The new Laurence Kyte … we’d love to have an interview.’ He listens, putting his head on one side and pulling a comedy sad face – furrowed brow, fat lower lip – for Mary’s benefit, though as she is scrolling through a layout on screen his efforts are wasted. ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ he says finally. ‘But of course, in the circumstances … Such a terrible thing to happen. Well, if he changes his mind … Or maybe we can do something when the paperback comes out? Yeah – you too. Take care, babe.

  ‘He’s not doing any publicity. She sounds sick as a pike,’ he adds, swinging his feet off the bin. ‘Should we get Berenice to review it? Or Simon?’

  ‘Simon,’ says Mary without looking up.

  Oliver puts the book on the shelves, awaiting dispatch.

  Later, when they’ve both gone to morning conference, I go over and pick it up. It’s a novel called Affliction. A fairly plain cover, a drawing of a man’s shadow falling over a patch of city pavement: puddles, a cigarette butt, scraps of litter. I turn it over. There’s a small photograph of the author on the back of the dust jacket, nothing too flash, though it’s nicely composed. He’s standing in front of a tall dark hedge, resting his hand on a sundial speckled with lichen. His face is, naturally, familiar. Laurence Kyte. Of course. I wonder why I hadn’t made the connection. I didn’t know he had a place near Biddenbrooke. Beneath the picture is printed in small italic font, ‘Author photograph by Alys Kyte’.

  The biographical note is only two short sentences, as is usually the way with the big-hitters: ‘Laurence Kyte was born in Stepney in 1951. He lives in London.’ No mention of the Booker, then, though he won it five years ago, or was it six? No mention of the ghastly movie Hollywood squeezed out of Ampersand; no mention, either, of the rather more successful adaptation – he did the screenplay, I seem to remember – of The Ha-Ha, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar.

  I flick through the pages. I’ve not read any Kyte but I know the spectrum of his interests: politics, sex, death, the terminal malaise of Western civilisation. In Kyte’s books, middle-aged, middle-class men – architects and anthropologists, engineers and haematologists – struggle with the decline in their physical powers, a decline which mirrors the state of the culture around them. Kyte’s prose style is famously ‘challenging’, ‘inventive’ and ‘muscular’; usually it’s ‘uncompromising’, too. Not words that do it for me, particularly. I read the first few pages. It’s all very clever. Then I read the dedication. ‘For Alys. Always.’

  I didn’t save Kate Wiggins’ number, but it’s stored on my phone anyway, under ‘calls received’.

  ‘Hello, it’s Frances Thorpe,’ I say when she answers. ‘You called me the other day, about the accident involving Alys Kyte? I’ve had the chance to get myself together a bit. If you really think it would help them, I guess I feel up to meeting the family now.’

  The Highgate house is set back rather grandly from
the street: gravel, gateposts, the humped suggestion of a shrubbery. A dingy pile of old snow is lying in the lee of the garden wall, evidently out of reach of the winter sun on the rare occasions when it might appear; otherwise there is little sign of it left in the front garden and the wide front steps have been scraped clear of ice. Apart from the glow of the stained-glass fanlight – smoky purple grapes spilling forth from a golden horn – the house itself is in darkness. It’s five o’clock, teatime, but could just as well be midnight.

  A security light clicks on as I walk up the steps and press the bell but I hear nothing: no chime, no footfall. I was nervous enough about this meeting to start with and now, before I’ve even gone inside, I’m feeling caught out, on the hop.

  Perhaps I didn’t press the bell hard enough? Perhaps it’s broken?

  I wait another few seconds, just to see whether anyone’s coming, and then press it again, firmly this time, though with a similar result. A moment passes, and then I hear the sound of light footsteps, followed by the snap of the lock. A trim-looking young woman in a zippered fleece and knee-length corduroy skirt opens the door.

  ‘Frances,’ she says, clasping my hand and looking me squarely in the face, an onslaught of sincerity. ‘I’m Kate Wiggins. The family’s downstairs.’

  In the hall, I take off my scarf and jacket. There’s a worn scarlet rug underfoot, Turkish, by the look of it. A tall pot of umbrellas and cricket bats. A rack of wellingtons and shoes and hiking boots. A wall of coats, slumped there like so many turned backs.