Alys, Always
It’s shortly after six o’clock on a Sunday evening. I’m sure of the time because I’ve just listened to the headlines on the radio.
Sleet spatters the windscreen. I’m driving through low countryside, following the occasional fingerpost toward the A road and London. My headlights rake the drizzle, passing their silver glow over gates and barns and hedgerows, the CLOSED signs hung in village shop windows, the blank, muffled look of houses cloistered against the winter evening. Few cars are out. Everyone is at home, watching TV, making supper, doing the last bits of homework before school tomorrow.
I’ve taken the right fork out of Imberly, past the white rectory with the stile. The road opens up briefly between wide, exposed fields before it enters the forest. In summer, I always like this part of the drive: the sudden, almost aquatic chill of the green tunnel, the sense of shade and stillness. It makes me think of Milton’s water nymph, combing her hair beneath the glassy, cool, translucent wave. But at this time of year, at this time of day, it’s just another sort of darkness. Tree trunks flash by monotonously.
The road slides a little under my tyres so I cut my speed right back, glancing down to check on the instrument panel, the bright red and green and gold dials that tell me everything’s fine; and then I look back up and I see it, just for a second, caught in the moving cone of light.
It’s nothing, but it’s something. A shape through the trees, a sort of strange illumination up ahead on the left, a little way off the road.
I understand immediately that it’s not right. It’s pure instinct: like the certainty that someone, somewhere out of immediate eyeshot, is watching you.
The impulse is so strong that before I’ve even really felt a prickle of anxiety, I’ve braked. I run the car into the muddy, rutted margin of the road, up against a verge, trying to angle the headlights in the appropriate direction. Opening the car door, I pause and lean back in to switch off the radio. The music stops. All I can hear is the wind soughing in the trees, the irregular drip of water onto the bonnet, the steady metronome of the hazard flashers. I shut the door behind me and start to walk, quite quickly, along the track of my headlights, through the damp snag of undergrowth, into the wood. My shadow dances up ahead through the trees, growing bigger, wilder, with every step. My breath blooms in front of me, a hot, white cloud. I’m not really thinking of anything at this moment. I’m not even really scared.
It’s a car, a big, dark car, and it’s on its side, at an angle, as if it is nudging its way into the cold earth, burrowing into it. The funny shape I saw from the road was the light from its one working headlamp projecting over a rearing wall of brown bracken and broken saplings. In the next few seconds, as I come close to the car, I notice various things: the gloss of the paintwork bubbled with raindrops, the pale leather interior, the windscreen that hasn’t fallen out but is so fractured that it has misted over, become opaque. Am I thinking about the person, or people, inside? At this moment, I’m not sure I am. The spectacle is so alien and so compelling that there’s not really any space to think about anything else.
And then I hear a voice, coming from within the car. It’s someone talking, quite a low, conversational tone. A sort of muttering. I can’t hear what is being said, but I know it’s a woman.
“Hey—are you all right?” I call, moving around the car, passing from the glare of the headlight into blackness, trying to find her. “Are you okay?” I bend to look down into windows, but the dark is too thick for me to see in. As well as her voice—which murmurs and pauses and then starts again, without acknowledging my question—I can hear the engine ticking down, as if it’s relaxing. For a moment I wonder whether the car is about to burst into flames, as happens in films, but I can’t smell any petrol. God, of course: I have to call for an ambulance, the police.
I pat my pockets in a panic, find my mobile, and make the call, stabbing at the buttons so clumsily that I have to redial. The operator’s answer comes as an overwhelming, almost physical relief. I give her my name and telephone number and then, as she leads me through the protocol of questions, I tell her everything I know, trying hard to sound calm and steady, a useful person in a crisis. “There’s been an accident. One car. It looks like it came off the road and turned over. There’s a woman in there, she’s conscious; there might be other people, I don’t know, I can’t see inside. Wistleborough Wood, just outside Imberly, about half a mile past the Forestry Commission sign—up on the left, you’ll see my car on the road, it’s a red Fiat.”
She tells me help is on its way and I hang up. There’s quiet again: the trees creaking, the wind, the engine cooling. I crouch down. Now my eyes have adjusted, I can just make out an arm, thrown up against the side window, but the light is so dim that I can’t see any texture on the sleeve. Then she starts to speak to me, as if she has woken up, processed my presence.
“Are you there?” she’s asking. She sounds quite different now. There’s fear in her voice. “I don’t want to be on my own. Who’s there? Don’t go.”
I kneel down hurriedly and say, “Yes. I’m here.”
“I thought so,” she says. “You won’t leave me, will you?”
“No,” I say. “I won’t leave you. There’s an ambulance on its way. Just stay calm. Try not to move.”
“You’re very kind,” she says. The expensive, cultured voice goes with the Audi, and I know—hearing that voice making that remark—that she makes that comment dozens of times a day, without even thinking about it, when people have shown her courtesy or deference at the farm shop or the butcher’s.
“I’ve got myself into a bit of a mess,” she says, trying to laugh. The arm moves, fractionally, as if she is testing it out, then lies still again. “My husband is going to be so cross. He had the car cleaned on Friday.”
“I’m sure he’ll understand,” I say. “He’ll just want to know you’re okay. Are you hurt?”
“I don’t really know. I don’t think so. I think I knocked my head, and I don’t think my legs are too good,” she says. “It’s a nuisance. I suppose I was going too fast, and I must have hit some ice. . . . I thought I saw a fox on the road. Oh, well.”
We wait in silence for a moment. My thighs are starting to ache and the knees of my jeans, pressed into damp bracken, are stiff with cold and water. I adjust my position and wonder how long it will take the ambulance to get here from Fulbury Norton. Ten minutes? Twenty? She doesn’t sound terribly hurt. I know it’s not a good idea to interfere in a car accident, but maybe I should try to help her out somehow. But then again, if she has a broken leg . . . and anyway, I have no way of opening the car door, which is crumpled and pleated between us, like a piece of cardboard.
I cup my hands and blow on them. I wonder how cold she is.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Frances,” I say. “What’s yours?”
“Alice,” she says. I might be imagining it, but I think her voice is sounding a little fainter. Then she asks, “Do you live around here?”
“Not anymore. I live in London. I’ve been visiting my parents. They live about twenty minutes away—near Frynborough.”
“Lovely part of the world. We’ve got a place in Biddenbrooke. Oh, dear, he will be wondering where on earth I’ve got to. I said I’d call when I got in.”
I’m not sure what she means and I’m suddenly frightened she’s going to ask me to ring her husband. Where’s the ambulance? Where are the police? How long does it take, for God’s sake? “Are you cold?” I ask, shoving my hands into my jacket pockets. “I wish I could do more to help make you comfortable. But I don’t think I should try to move you.”
“No, let’s wait,” she agrees lightly, as if we’re at a bus stop, only mildly inconvenienced, as if it’s just one of those things. “I’m sure they’re on their way.” Then she makes a sound that frightens me, a sharp inhalation, a tiny gasp or cry, and then she stops talking, and when I say, “Alice? Alice?” she doesn’t answer, but makes the noise again, and it’s such a small sort of noise, so hopeless somehow; and I know when I hear it that this is serious after all.
I feel terribly alone then, and redundant: alone in the dark wood with the rain and the crying. And I look back over my shoulder, towards my car, the dazzle of its headlamps, and behind it I can see only darkness, and I keep looking and looking, and talking—though she’s no longer responding—and eventually I see lights, blue and white flashing lights, and I say, “Alice, they’re here, they’re coming, I can see them, it’s going to be fine, just hold on. They’re coming.”
I sit in the front seat of a police car and give a statement to someone called PC Wren. The windscreen is coursing with rain, and the noise of it drumming relentlessly on the roof means she often has to ask me to repeat what I’ve just said. All the time I’m wondering what’s going on out there, with the arc lights and the heavy cutting gear and the hoists. I can’t see much through the misted-up window. Rubbing a patch clear with my cuff, I see a paramedic framed in the open door of the ambulance, looking at his watch and pouring something out of a thermos. Some of his colleagues must be out there in the woods, I suppose. Maybe they tossed a coin for it, and he got lucky. No point us all catching pneumonia.
Wren closes her notebook. “That’s all for now,” she says. “Thank you for your help. Someone will be in touch with you in the next day or so, just to tie up the loose ends.”
“Is she going to be okay?” I ask. I know it’s a stupid question, but it’s the only thing I can think of to say.
“We’re doing our best. My colleagues will be able to update you in the next few days. You’re free to go now. Will you be all right to drive yourself to London? It might be sensible to go back to your parents’, spend the night there instead.”
“I’ve got work tomorrow. I’ll be fine,” I say. I reach for the door handle, but PC Wren puts a hand on my sleeve and squeezes it. “It’s hard,” she says, a real concern in her voice, and the unexpected kindness makes my eyes swim. “You did all that you could. Don’t forget that.”
“I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t do anything. I hope she’s okay,” I say. Then I open the door and step out. The rain and the wind come at me like a train. The woods, which had been so quiet, are now roaring: machinery pitched against the ferocity of a sudden winter storm. Caught in a huge artificial glow, a group of people are huddled close together, their fluorescent jackets shining with water, forming a screen around the car.
I run along the road, back to the Fiat, and get in, and in the abrupt silence of the interior I listen to my breathing. Then I start the engine and drive off. The wood falls away behind the car, like something letting go, and then there’s not much to see: the flash of cat’s-eyes and chevrons and triangles, the gradual buildup of the suburbs strung between darkened retail parks and roundabouts.
At home in the flat, once I’ve taken off my wet clothes and had a warm shower, I don’t quite know what to do with myself. It’s late, nearly eleven, and I don’t feel tired, and I don’t feel hungry, but I make some toast anyway, and a cup of tea, and grab the blanket from my bed and wrap myself in it. Then I sit in front of the television for a while, thinking about Alice, the voice in the dark; and, more distantly, about her husband. He’ll know by now. Perhaps he’ll be with her, in the hospital. Their lives thrown around like a handful of jacks, coming to settle in a new, dangerous configuration, all because of an icy patch on the road and a half glimpse of a fox. The thought of this, the random luck and lucklessness of an ordinary life, frightens me as much as anything has tonight.
For once, I’m glad to be in the office. I get in early and sit at my desk, sipping the cappuccino I picked up at the sandwich bar on the corner. The cups are smaller than the ones you get at Starbucks, but the coffee is stronger, and today, after a bad night’s sleep, that’s what I need. I look at my emails and check the queue: a few people have filed copy over the weekend, but not as many as had promised they would.
You’d have thought working on the books pages of the Questioner would be a doddle, that the section would more or less run itself; but every week it falls to me to rescue some celebrity professor or literary wunderkind from hanging participles or apostrophe catastrophes. I’m a subeditor, an invisible production drone: always out in the slips, waiting to save people from their own mistakes. If I fumble the catch, I’ll hear about it from Mary Pym, the literary editor. Mary is at her best on the phone, buttering up her famous contacts, or at J Sheekey, where she takes her pet contributors as compensation for the disappointing nature of the Questioner’s word rate.
One day, it is assumed, Mary’s expenses (the cabs, the first-class train tickets, the boutique hotels she checks into during the literary-festival season) will have to be curtailed, as those of the other section heads have been. But for now, she sails on regardless. Stars still want to write for Mary, despite our dwindling circulation and the mounting sense that it’s all happening elsewhere, on the Net.
No sign of Mary yet, but Tom from Travel is in, and we exchange hellos. Monday is a quiet day at the office: the newsroom on the west side of the building remains peaceful and empty until well into Tuesday. At the point when my weekend begins, when I’ve sent the books pages to press on Thursday afternoon, the newsroom is just starting to come to life, limbering up for the final sweaty sprint to deadline in the early hours of Sunday morning. Once or twice I’ve done a Saturday shift on the news-desk, and it’s not to my taste: the swearing and antler-locking, the stories that fall through at the last minute, the eleventh-hour calls from ministers attempting to reshape a page lead. I always associate deadlines with the sour smell of vinegar-soused chips eaten out of polystyrene shells, a smell that is circulated endlessly by the air-conditioning so that it’s still just perceptible this morning.
Mary arrives, her coat over one arm, her enormous handbag open to show off the gigantic, turquoise Smythson diary in which she keeps all her secrets. She’s on her mobile, unctuously attending to someone’s ego. “I’ll get it biked round immediately,” she says. “Unless you’d rather I had it couriered out?” She cocks her head to one side, manhandles the diary onto my desk, and makes a note in her exquisite copperplate. “Absolutely!” she says, nodding and writing. “So thrilled you can do this. There is the worry that he’s going off the boil rather. I’m sure you can make sense of it for us.”
She ends the call and moves on to her desk without acknowledging me. “Ambrose Pritchett is doing the new Paul Crewe,” she murmurs a few moments later, not looking around, as her terminal bongs into life. “Filing a week on Thursday. Can you get the book to him before he leaves for the airport at ten forty-five? He wants to start it on the flight.”
I look at the clock. It’s nearly ten already. I don’t know where the preview copy is, and I know I can’t ask Mary. That sort of thing drives her up the wall. (“Do I look like a fucking librarian, darling?”) So I ring the courier desk and book an urgent bike, and then I start to search through the shelves where we store advance copies. I try to file books by genre and alphabetically, but as neither Mary nor her twenty-three-year-old deputy Oliver Culpeper (every bit as bumptious as he is well connected) can be bothered with that approach, it’s not exactly a foolproof system. Eventually I find it, nudged behind Helen Simpson and the confessions of a cokehead stand-up with whom Mary shared a platform at Hay last summer. By the time I’ve written a covering note and shoved the Crewe in a padded envelope and taken it down to the couriers’ office, it’s quarter past. I’m standing in the elevator lobby, looking at my reflection in the stainless steel doors, when my mobile rings. I don’t recognise the number.
“Frances Thorpe?”
“Speaking,” I say. Somehow I know it’s the police. It all comes back, the feeling of last night: the dark, the rain, the uselessness. I swallow hard. My throat is dry. In the doors, I see a pinched, nervous-looking girl, with blue shadows under her eyes: a pale, insignificant sort of person.
“I’m Sergeant O’Driscoll from Brewster Street police station. My colleagues in Fulbury Norton have passed on your details. It’s with regard to the road traffic accident last night.”
“Oh,” I say, as the lift doors open. Road traffic accident. Why do they say that? What other sort of accident could there be on a road? “I’ve been thinking about her. Alice, I mean. Is there any news? How is she doing?”
“We were hoping you could come down to the station, so we could go through your statement with you,” he says. “Just to make sure you’re happy with it. Just in case anything else has occurred to you in the meantime.”
“Well, yes, I could do that. I don’t have anything more to say. I’ve told you everything. But if it’ll help . . . How is she?”
There’s a little pause. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Miss Thorpe, but she was very badly injured in the incident. She died at the scene.”
“Oh,” I say. Then: “How awful.”
The lift doors part on the fifth floor and I go back to my desk and write down the details on a Post-it.
At lunchtime, I leave the office, wrapping my red-and-purple scarf tightly around my throat and pulling it up over my mouth against the slicing cold, and start to walk, skirting the mainline station with its multiple retail opportunities, passing the old gasworks and the new library, cutting down several Georgian terraces and crossing the canal with its motionless skin of litter. Every so often, I walk by a cafÉ or a cheap restaurant with steamed-up windows, and the sound of coffee machines and cutlery comes out as someone arrives or leaves, and then the door swings shut and the sound dies away.
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, no one is behind the security window. I wait for a few moments, then I 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. “Midfifties. House in London and a weekend place, looks like, near Biddenbrooke. Married with two adult children.” Then he’s shaking hands, and saying good-bye, 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?” Hester 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 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. 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 streetlamps—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, carrier 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 facedown 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 tea shop, 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. A small photograph of the author is 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’s 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.”