*
The building was dark and she should have felt scared going through it, but the gloomy silence chimed more with her mood than the billing and cooing of her parents. Clutching the biscuit tin, she went up the stairs, remembering how she and Tate had stood there in the gathering dark. From the window, the unlit Christmas decorations were tawdry, just clusters of light bulbs on wire. She climbed up to the door and unlocked it, primed to turn off the burglar alarm, but saw light coming from under Alistair’s door. She checked the alarm and found it off. Just like in Tate’s flat.
‘Alistair, is that you?’ she called and got a single, ‘Yes,’ in reply. He was lying on his back in a sleeping bag, his jacket folded up to make a pillow. He looked like a depressed slug and Grace remembered that, in what seemed like another life, he had been on the point of answering a call from Emma.
Emma. Grace had been a lousy friend to her.
She wondered when Alistair was going to ask her what she was doing in the office so early in the morning, but he either didn’t care or had no idea what time it was.
‘Alistair,’ she said gently, ‘I have some really difficult news to tell you. Tate … well, it seems that somehow he’s mixed up in the two robberies.’
She expected him to struggle out of his sleeping bag, shocked, incredulous. She waited for a flurry of additional questions. There was no reaction. He was blinking and breathing but that was about it.
She upped her volume. ‘Tate has been helping someone steal the icons. Those arguments we had, they were probably staged. Anyway, he’s in it up to his neck because they’ve found the missing icons at his flat. It’s a big flat, an expensive one. Belongs to a Russian.’
‘Well, that’s just bloody brilliant,’ Alistair said to the ceiling. ‘
That
just about puts the tin hat on it. Anything more? Gilbert been nicking lead from the roof of the
National Gallery? You running a prostitution ring in your lunch hour?’ He turned to look at her. ‘And the police, I can expect a visit from them, can I?’
‘I think so.’
‘Fantastic. Can’t wait for that. Tate a thief. Marvellous. Marvellous. Well that’s the company down the toilet too.’
Too?
‘It might not be that bad, Alistair.’
He shook his head vehemently as if he didn’t want to be comforted. ‘The company was on shaky ground before this, everyone pointing the finger. Now they’ll ban us from everywhere … won’t even be allowed to walk past the art hung on the railings by the park. They’ll all want to know if I checked Tate out, where he came from, references, qualifications. All the things you said I should look into. Why didn’t I listen to you, Grace? I didn’t bother with any of it, went on my instincts.’ He started to laugh as if he’d forgotten she was there and now the sleeping bag looked more like a straitjacket to her.
When he appeared to have exhausted himself, she asked him if he’d talked to Emma.
He nodded, just one sharp motion down and up.
‘And how did it go?’
His turned a face towards her that plainly said,
I am sleeping in my own office in a sleeping bag, how do you think it went?
‘I’m really, really sorry. Should I ring her and—’
‘No. She wants to be left in peace to think.’ He was back talking to the ceiling. ‘It’s been a shock. She needs time to get used to the idea.’
Grace thought that was a strange thing to say. The
idea
? Having an affair seemed more like an action than an idea. And ‘get used to’ made it sound as if this thing with the other woman was going to continue. Well, Emma wasn’t French; there was no way she was going to put up with Alistair having a long-term mistress.
Grace checked Alistair’s body language to see if she dared ask him any more. Difficult when everything from his neck down was encased in puffed nylon.
‘So … you told her about the affair?’ she tried.
He pulled the sleeping bag up higher.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I told her about the cross-dressing.’
*
How much later it was when Alistair said, ‘You can close your mouth now, Grace,’ she didn’t know. Probably only seconds, but in those seconds Grace had re-examined all of Alistair’s secretive behaviour and seen it quite, quite differently. It was like one of those optical illusions that you viewed one way and saw a young, attractive woman,
but viewed another and saw an old lady with a hat. Only in this case there was no young woman. Never had been. There might possibly be hats, though.
‘How long has … ?’ she began, before having a go at, ‘Emma, she … ?’ then finally settling on the more solid shore of, ‘I understand now what you were keeping in this cupboard and, before that, your briefcase.’
He nodded. ‘And when there was no one in the office, I’d come back here and be Stacey.’
‘That’s what she’s called … your—’
‘Yes. She’s been coming to me for years. Since I was a boy.’ She heard the defensiveness go out of his voice. ‘I just love the feel of the clothes, Grace. The wigs. They calm me. I like looking pretty. I like being feminine. I like shopping for underwear and make-up.’ His laugh was at himself. ‘Tied myself in knots trying to hide my shopping trips.’
‘Right. But …’
‘I’m not gay, Grace,’ he said gently, ‘that’s what you want to ask, isn’t it? Or some permutation of that question. Do I feel trapped in the wrong body? Would I like to be a woman? No, I’m not gay, not bisexual. It makes me happy, makes me feel more like myself a lot of the time. That doesn’t mean I don’t love Emma. I do. I desire her, all those things.’ There was a movement as if, inside his sleeping bag, he was shrugging. ‘As they say, it’s complicated.’
Grace was fearful of asking something insensitive, but she didn’t need to worry: Alistair seemed eager to talk, unprompted.
‘I loved my first wife, too,’ he said, ‘but Gemma couldn’t cope with it. My fault – I should have told her before we got married, but you’re so scared, Grace. You find someone you love and you don’t want to lose them, but you can’t fight this other need you have … She wasn’t mean about it, Gemma; in fact, she felt guilty that she couldn’t live with it. She’d always thought she was really open-minded, a live-and-let-live kind of person. Sure it was the guilt that made her give me the lease to this place.’
‘So, the guy upstairs?’
‘Her dad? Yeah, he knows.’
Alistair’s face was suddenly crumbling. There were tears and he pulled the sleeping bag higher up around him while struggling to sit. It felt natural for Grace to put her biscuit tin on his desk, get down on her knees and help him – a big, lost man in a slippery sleeping bag.
‘I don’t know what Emma will do. I should have told her earlier. I’m such a coward. But you see, after Gemma I didn’t think I should be with anyone, not in a full-time relationship. Then I met Emma and just hoped it would all go away, that I could fight it. Sometimes I do: I have
regular purges of all my stuff, try to tell myself it’s over. Keep everything locked down.’
Grace looked across at her biscuit tin.
‘It always comes back, the urge … no, the
need
to buy, to dress up.’
Alistair sniffed loudly. ‘You end up skulking around and being furtive when really you’re desperate to tell the people who love you and take a chance that they’ll come to understand.’ His smile was brave and totally unconvincing. ‘You hope they’ll even see it as just another thing that makes you who you are.’
While he got himself back under control, Grace pictured Emma’s reaction and wondered whether she would come to think of this as just another facet of the man she loved.
‘I’ve disgusted you, haven’t I?’ she heard him say and she rushed to assure him he hadn’t.
‘It’s just it’s such a complete surprise, and what with being in the police station all evening and a lot of the night—’
‘Why were you there?’ he said, snapping back into boss mode.
‘I told you, I was at the flat with Tate. It looks bad, you know, me being at the robberies, then at the flat. I’ve been released on bail, and I think if Dad hadn’t been there, they might have kept me longer.’
Alistair was struggling to get out of the sleeping bag. ‘But this is dreadful, Grace. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t listening properly. Tell me again. You must be dead on your feet.’
Alistair continued to wriggle about and as he emerged, bit by bit, she saw he was dressed in a blue velvet skirt and a green blouse.
It didn’t seem as strange as she thought it might. Perhaps that was because he had forewarned her, or perhaps after the day she’d had, nothing would ever seem strange to her again.
‘That’s a nice blouse,’ she said, ‘it suits your eyes.’
He gave her an uncertain smile before kicking the sleeping bag away. Now it no longer looked like a straitjacket but like a discarded chrysalis and Alistair was a colourful, slightly dishevelled butterfly.
CHAPTER
31
It didn’t take long for the news of Tate’s arrest to spread. The first indication was a call from Gilbert, who had arrived to do his nine o’clock tour at the National Gallery and was told he wasn’t going to be let in; he’d have to ring his office.
Gilbert’s response to the news Grace gave him was a series of exclamations and strangled noises – and she was only giving him the edited lowlights.
‘I’m coming right round,’ he said. Grace looked at Alistair, who for now had changed back into his uniform of chinos, striped shirt and lace-up suede shoes, and knew there were a few other revelations Gilbert was going to have to get used to at some point. Alistair was as monumentally miserable as you would expect a man to be whose marriage and business were imploding.
Grace worked through the list of people who were booked on tours that day, informing them that they wouldn’t be happening. Money would be returned. After that, when
the phone rang, they took it in turns to pick it up and put it right back down again.
‘Most of the calls will just be people shouting at me,’ Alistair had explained when he’d done it the first time. ‘Real trouble will come and find us.’ Grace knew that was true. Hadn’t it already? Anything urgent would come up those stairs or appear on her mobile. Not that she was paying any attention to that either, unlike Alistair who was holding his like a charm. She guessed he was waiting for a sign, any sign, from Emma.
That made her feel wobbly, fretful … something.
So did looking at Tate’s chair, but still tears would not come. It was as if being hit on the head by the unicorn had sent her tear ducts into shock; all that happened was her nose ran.
To occupy her mind, she turned on her computer and saw the emails from her sisters. The titles were enough:
Mum, a new stage in self-expression, Dad and how to nurture him
and
Lines to lie on broken hearts
. She had no idea what development in Felicity’s involvement with Jay they were referring too, but whatever it was, it was out of date already.
She was about to delete them, shaking her head at her sister’s collective stupidity, when she thought of her mother getting fooled and fleeced by Jay and of her own experience
with Tate and didn’t feel superior any more. She let them stay.
Gilbert arrived with the flurry of questions she had expected to receive earlier from Alistair, and as they waited for the police to tank up the stairs and the phone continued to ring and not be answered, Grace filled him and Alistair in on what had happened in the flat, leaving out the sex, but putting in her father.
Gilbert wasn’t fooled by the leaving out bit.
‘So, you and Tate?’ His eyebrows had a knowing lilt. ‘You started off by fighting and finished by … how would you describe it, Grace?’
‘Getting on better. We were getting on better.’
‘Until your father pops out of the wardrobe like some demented cuckoo in a clock. That must have taken some explaining to Tate?’
When she didn’t reply, Gilbert said, ‘I feel there are some gaps in your story, Grace, but goodness, Tate a thief? Hard to believe it of him. He seemed so open … and Corinne and Joe and that clingy one, are they involved?’
Grace only felt capable of hunching up her shoulders in answer and Gilbert kept on repeating how he couldn’t believe it of Tate, until she was relieved when Alistair got up and said, ‘Where are those bloody police? This is torture.’ He completed a couple of tours of the room, avoiding the
rocks that were now all over the place, before standing on his tiptoes and peering out of the window, his head pressed to the glass to get a view first up the street and then down.
Gilbert’s mobile rang, which made all three of them start. ‘Sorry, it’ll be Vi,’ he said, but on answering it, he didn’t talk about the normal things he talked about with Vi. He ended with a hurried, ‘Of course.’
‘Violet’s not ill is she?’ Grace said when Gilbert’s phone was back in his jacket.
‘No … and it wasn’t Violet. It was Tate. They’ve released him. Not been charged. He’s going home to grab a shower and then he wants to see us. Acar’s.’
‘Released? No charge? Well, come on then, let’s get down there,’ Alistair said.
Grace leapt to her feet at the promise of seeing Tate again.
‘Uh, Grace.’ Gilbert’s tone was delicate. ‘Not you. He expressly asked
not
to see you.’
*
Grace spent the time that Gilbert and Alistair were at Acar’s clutching her biscuit tin and forming a close relationship with the sofa. For the most part she was face down on it, but she did roll over on her back to ring her father.
Felicity answered. ‘You’ve just caught me. I’m going home. On. My. Own.’ The huffiness level was high, which
alerted Grace to the fact that James Bond had fallen off his pedestal. Might even have shot himself in the foot. Or somewhere higher.
‘I’m in pain here, Mum,’ she said and got straight back, ‘Don’t talk to me about pain. My aura’s throbbing, I can feel it.’
‘Now, Grace,’ her father said when he was put on, ‘I want you to know that everyone makes mistakes in life. Sometimes the evidence seems to point one way but, well, I won’t bore you with the facts—’
‘Yes, you will. You bored me with your fantasies; the least you can do is bore me with the truth. Wait a minute.’ She got a tissue out of her sleeve and wiped her nose. Still running. Still no tears. ‘Right. Talk until I tell you to stop.’