The next voice was familiar, but it wasn’t the one she was listening for.
‘Hello, Alice. This is Richard Shoesmith.’
He gave the date, and the exact time of his call, as precise as always. He said that he was back in the country and was coming to Oxford on a brief visit. He hoped to look her up, if she could spare the time.
‘Time is no problem,’ Alice said aloud. She wrote down the number he had given and dialled it. She left a message, as instructed, saying that she would look forward to seeing him.
It was time to feed Meg. Alice lifted her out of the buggy and was rewarded by the flash of a moist, gummy smile.
‘That’s my girl,’ Alice murmured, smiling back and holding her up so their eyes were level. What shall we do, eh? Where shall we head for, the two of us, in this wide world?
Meg’s smile widened, turning her features into one ecstatic beam of delight while her eyes focused on the sun and moon of her mother’s face. Alice swung her higher. They were both laughing now, lost in the moment. The baby kicked and squirmed until Alice swung her down again and hugged her. ‘That’s my girl. Are you hungry?’ Meg’s head lolled, soothed by the vibration of her mother’s voice.
Alice carried her out into the garden and sat down on the bench. Out here in the sunshine was a good place to feed her.
Jo had said that she should start her on solids, but she thought that she would leave it for a week or so. From an open window further down the street came the sound of someone practising the flute.
Richard was wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase. For a moment she thought of Lewis Sullavan. It was a hot day,
and she was in a loose blue cotton dress that showed her arms and wasn’t properly done up at the front from Meg’s last feed. Her hand came up to the buttons and Richard’s eyes went straight to the rough pink-purple scar that jagged her forearm, a visible reminder of the fire.
‘Come in,’ Alice said quickly and stood back to make room. The hallway was narrow and they awkwardly skirted each other.
He followed her into the living room. Her computer screen in the corner workspace was blank, the desk space was bare of books and papers, and Meg sat in her chair in the middle of the floor, clutching an orange rubber rattle that was liberally smeared with drool.
‘So. Here she is,’ Richard said. He lowered himself into an awkward crouch beside Meg, as if to shake hands with her. She gave him a stare and then, predictably, her face screwed up and she opened her mouth to wail.
Alice stooped too. ‘Hey. It’s all right. This is Richard. Hmm? He knows all about the snow and the ice.’ She unbuckled the seat straps and swung the baby on to her hip. She was used to this now, to moving two-headed around their domain and doing everything one-handed.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, or maybe a glass of wine?’
‘Oh, just tea. Tea would be perfect.’
He followed her into the kitchen and watched her fill the kettle. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ Alice said. In a way. In an everyday, don’t-mind-the-tendrils way. Her scar throbbed as it hadn’t done for weeks.
The last time we saw each other, she thought.
The blur of pain and panic, Rook’s voice in her ear, his arms lifting her and carrying her to the helicopter. Then somehow the view backwards, into a wall of mist. Just enough visibility for her to see Richard with Valentin and
Phil holding his arms, Russ grabbing his collar, the others scrambling in his path.
Stop him
, Richard had shouted.
The spectres of what-if rose in front of her all over again. The fire might have trapped some or all of them, or they might have been badly burned and then slowly frozen to death in their meagre shelter. They could have been imprisoned by the ice for six months. Meg might have died as she was being born, or later from exposure. The helicopter might have crashed into the frozen bay.
In retrospect, her own rashness was the most fearful spectre of all.
Gratitude for their escape and her extra good fortune flooded through Alice. She felt weak with it. She put her free hand out and caught Richard’s arm, searching his face for a sign of what he might be feeling. She longed to talk, now, about what they had been through together.
But his handsome face was stiff, closed, with only a flicker of wariness in the corners of his eyes.
‘Good. That’s good. It was quite an escape we had, wasn’t it? You especially. Extraordinary. But here we are. What about your work and so on?’
Alice blinked, but already she understood.
Richard’s recuperation in Greece had been a process of sweeping up, tidying away broken glass and ashes, and locking away chunks of bleeding memory. It was all out of sight now and he would bend his attention back to a rigidly ordered world. Palaeontology, mild academic disagreements, university and departmental administration. He wouldn’t dream any longer of living up to his grandfather, even of being his father’s suitable son, because he couldn’t. That dream lay in pieces.
Her heart lurched with sympathy for him, but she withdrew her hand. ‘I’m not doing much work at the moment, because of Meg. And how are you?’ she asked gently.
‘I’m pretty well. Needed a rest, you know.’
‘Of course.’ It was the opposite of what she wanted but she found herself playing his game, nodding and not probing. She wondered why he had come here. They took their tea into the garden and Richard sat down on the rustic bench.
‘Do you want to go back to the ice?’ she asked at last, looking at Meg rather than at him. There was a silence, in which they heard the flautist practising scales.
‘I do regret the loss of the gastropod. We were on to something there, you know.’
‘There are others, probably. Waiting to be found.’
‘That will be good. For Kandahar.’
The question burst out of her. ‘What about
you
, Richard?’
With an effort, and almost inaudibly, he answered, ‘I did my best. I…wish it had turned out otherwise, of course. No. I won’t be doing another season.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Ah. Yes. Well, there it is. Now, I’ve got a little present to give the baby.’
‘That’s very kind.’
He went off to retrieve his briefcase and brought out a rectangular box. Alice opened it and found a kaleidoscope with heavy metal cylinders and glass eyepiece, more like a proper instrument than a toy. She put it to her eye and turned the drum. The beads were chips of blue and silvery glass, and the mirrors multiplied them into the form of a snowflake.
‘Thank you, it’s beautiful. I’ll keep it safe until she’s old enough to appreciate it.’
Now he looked at his watch.
‘Richard, do you remember the camp out at the Bluff? The first one?’
Not the second, when Rook had been with them.
He answered warily, ‘Of course.’
‘We talked a lot, then.’ Exchanging histories, recognising one another in the straitjackets the past imposed.
‘Yes.’
‘If you want to talk any more, about Kandahar or anything else, I am here.’
‘Thank you,’ Richard said. She knew that he wouldn’t talk to her. It was quite likely that they would never see each other again.
He began to gather himself together. He was going to meet an American palaeontologist, he said, who was briefly in Oxford. He mentioned the man’s name and asked if she knew him. Alice shook her head.
All the way to the front door she didn’t ask what was uppermost in her mind, but then as he was mumbling a formal goodbye she caught his arm again. ‘Have you heard anything from Rook? Have you any idea where he might have gone?’
She saw the flash of pain in his eyes clearly enough now, and realised why he had come. It had been in order to find out if she was still wearing her straitjacket. Maybe he wanted to make her his co-conspirator, sweeping up the memory of a failed season together and locking it into a cupboard. This was so like him, and the woman she had once been understood the impulse perfectly.
Sadness and sympathy bled through her once more. What had happened was partly her fault. In the ice-bright, thinskinned hyper-reality of Antarctica she had begun to be attracted to him and then the avalanche of events and emotions had carried her onwards, and she had rejected him. He had been hurt, she now understood, more deeply than she had realised.
‘I don’t know anything about Rooker,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted out. ‘I’m sorry for everything that happened.’
He frowned. ‘The fire was an accident, you know.’
‘Of course it was.’
‘And the weather was…what it is. Of all people, I should have been better prepared. “Remember This”’ – he smiled – ‘“When I Am Best Forgotten.”’ He swept up his briefcase, holding it against himself like a shield. Alice made a clumsy move to kiss his cheek but his formality obstructed her. Their hands met instead and he shook hers.
‘I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ he said.
‘And you,’ she called after him as he headed down the path past her roses. If he heard, he didn’t look back.
Alice sank down on the bottom stair and rested her chin in her hands.
Richard and she were moving in opposite directions. He was retreating and she was admitting to herself what a different world really meant. She wanted to be the person she had been at Kandahar.
She studied the worn patch of carpet at the bottom of the stairs, where everyone who descended placed their right foot. She knew for certain now that Meg and she would have to leave Oxford. The first imperative was to try to find Rooker; after that she had no idea. Nor did she have any idea where to begin her search. All she did know was that she must do something, very soon, or the tendrils would wrap round her and hold her for ever. She would be like Richard, always keeping a version of herself hidden in case the daylight fell on it.
A similarity struck her. Rooker had his cupboard too, with painful truth swept up and locked away inside. The truth had something to do with
I am a murderer
, of course. Would he have told her even that, she wondered, if they had been in an ordinary place at an ordinary time?
Left alone in her baby seat in the garden, Meg began to cry and Alice stood up at once. Rooker’s claim, that was
the place to start. Exactly how to go about it was still a mystery.
In the end it was Russell who gave her the answer.
He telephoned one morning at 6 a.m. Alice was in the little box room that had become Meg’s bedroom, changing the baby’s nappy and talking to her. Meg always listened in apparent fascination, her eyes fixed on her mother’s face.
‘Alice? Sorry if it’s the middle of the night or something.’
‘This is fine, Russ.’
‘Got a bit of info for you.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s a little place called Turner, between here and Christchurch. I’ve got a mate here in Dunedin who’s interested in genealogy, family history, all that kind of stuff? Does a lot of his research on the Internet, but also searches in local records, death certificates, that kind of thing?’
‘I know the kind of thing.’ She bit back hard on her impatience.
‘Well, he grew up about twenty miles from Turner. I was round there a few days ago, taking back a cement mixer I’d borrowed because I’m doing a bit of work on extending the deck out back here, Kathy’s idea. I was asking him about how you set about finding a person’s history, just out of interest more than anything, and he asked me for a name. I gave him Rook’s, since I’d been talking to you. Seemed to ring a bell with him, although he couldn’t place it then. Anyway, to cut a long story short…’
Please
, Alice silently begged.
‘…he came up with something. Sad story, in the local paper. He’d seen it in the archives when he was hunting up something to do with his own relatives. Woman called Rooker, committed suicide, not long after a friend of hers died in a fire. The friend was a bit of a boozer…I’m
reading between the lines here…lived in a caravan and it was burned out one night with him inside it. She’d been questioned, but it doesn’t sound as though she was a suspect. Quite a big story, for this part of the world.’
The hair stood up on the nape of Alice’s neck. Fire.
A friend of my mother’s died in a fire
.
‘My mate even sent me a photocopy of a newspaper article. Here it is, 1967. It mentions that she had one son. Must be our Rooker, by my calculations.’
‘Could you scan it and e-mail it to me, Russ? Everything you’ve got?’
‘Will do.’
By that evening she had it in her hand. Almost a full page of the
Turner & Medfield Clarion
, smudged from the photocopier of Russ’s friend, but still legible. There was a posed photograph of a woman, looking back at the camera lens over her shoulder, an actress’s pose with one eyebrow raised and her dark-painted lips parted.
Tragic suicide
. There was another photograph, much less clear, of the fire victim. Lester Furneaux seemed to have a soft, elongated face and a scarf at his throat.
By coincidence almost the same information reached her two days later, in a fax marked ‘From the office of Lewis Sullavan’.
There it was. The other side of the world. She and Meg would go to Turner, New Zealand, and try to find out what had happened long ago to the child, James Rooker. There was only the smallest chance that any thread would lead onwards from there, let alone to wherever Rook was now, but Alice was sure that this was where the key to the cupboard lay.
Rooker and Frankie drove in her battered VW up to the lake shore. It was a two-hour journey and the three children
in the back seat were sticky and squabbling. Every so often she half turned from the wheel and swiped at them. The car swerved briefly.
‘Stop that, Jackson. Leave your sister alone. If you want to go in a boat you better sit up and quit fighting.’
Jackson folded his arms and sulked. Frankie’s daughter Corinna caught Rooker’s eye and gave him a sly, turned-in smile exactly like her mother’s.
‘When will we be there?’ the little girl asked.
‘Twenty minutes.’ Frankie sighed. ‘Please God. Jackson, will you
stop
that.’
At last they turned into the parking lot.