The Crooked House (3 page)

In
the underwear shop Kay was handling the merchandise, holding something up that dangled straps and buckles, more apparatus than lingerie.

‘Complicated,’ said Kay. ‘Isn’t it always? But he said he wanted you to come?’ She stroked a slip, dark-red satin and lace, wistful. Alison couldn’t imagine her in it, Kay who only ever wore clothes like school uniform to work. But what did Kay dream of? Who knew what anyone dreamed of, and just as well.

Alison couldn’t begin to explain how complicated, not to Paul, not to Kay. She’d never told anyone, and she never would: she didn’t have to. It had been a decision made long ago, easily, it was the simplest way. Her aunt had agreed: the therapist Alison had seen for three years in a Portakabin at the local hospital had been less easy with the decision, had asked her – they weren’t allowed to tell you, only to ask – if she thought there might come a time when she had to talk about it, a time when she had someone she could trust? For the sake of a quiet life Alison had pretended to agree, but she knew that time wouldn’t come, that there existed no such
person. The therapist herself was a worn-down woman with an alcoholic’s face, puffed and red – even at sixteen Alison could see what listening to people’s horror stories had done to her.

Alison had read the address on the stiff gold-edged card, and it had ballooned inside her, a horizon, houses popping up along a road, a whole landscape.
St Peter’s on the Wall, and afterwards at The Laurels, Dyke End, Saltleigh
. With Paul looking at her, puzzled, she’d had to close her eyes so he wouldn’t see. In the dark behind her eyelids she had felt sweat bead on her upper lip, terror mixed with queasy longing. She had felt for a moment as if she might actually be sick.

‘He tried to persuade you?’ Kay’s eyes were watchful behind the slip’s lace, that she was holding up like a veil for the lower part of her face like a desert bride.

He had tried very hard: he might even have thought he’d succeeded. She’d kept her eyes closed and could feel him stroking her hair gently, as if she was an animal that needed calming, where they stood beside the mantelpiece.

‘She’ll have written the guest list a year ago,’ he said easily at her ear. His lips were on her cheek, just brushing it. ‘She’ll have got some underling to write the cards.’ Then he stepped back and Alison opened her eyes, smiled carefully.

‘But still,’ she said. ‘You know. It’s embarrassing, it’s … I don’t want you to ask her if you can bring me. They have seating plans, all that, I’m sure they need to keep numbers down. Why not just leave it?’ She shifted, disguising a tremble. ‘It’s just a wedding. One day in our lives.’ He wasn’t smiling, though. Was he testing her, was she the kind of shrill woman who’d set up a complaint about not being invited? She could get through that test.

‘I won’t even need to ask her,’ he said. ‘She’ll be mortified. She knows we’re together.’ He had set the card back on the mantelpiece, and Alison, still naked from bed, had wrapped her
arms around herself. Mortified? From what she remembered of the woman they’d met in the pub, it seemed unlikely.

‘I mean it, Paul,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’ He didn’t answer; she had gathered her things and gone to work. A week ago.

Now Kay was looking at her.

‘Cow,’ she pronounced. ‘Like I said. She obviously did it on purpose, to cause trouble. She’s met you, right?’ Alison frowned, nodding. Kay shrugged. ‘You’re competition.’

Alison frowned more fiercely, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said sharply. ‘Have you seen her? I’m not competition.’ Kay just laughed.

‘She’s done it, too,’ she said. ‘Hasn’t she, though?’

‘Done what?’

‘Caused trouble between you.’ She dropped the dark satin into Alison’s hands and for a moment its cool, slippery weight stirred up a thought of Paul, a desire to see him. ‘Are you going to let her do that?’

The saleswoman stepped up smartly as if on cue, a haughty foreign girl with high-arched eyebrows and breasts cantilevered under her uniform, barely containing her impatience. ‘You try this, madam?’ she said.

She left it another day, though – and she didn’t phone him even then. Instead, after work, she wandered through the scuffed institutional corridors of his department, past students not much younger than herself, when she knew his teaching would have finished for the day. Of course, Paul might not be there, it was that kind of job, not a nine to five. But he was there, glasses on, frowning down at a sheaf of papers. He pushed the chair back and smiled, delighted. Not triumphant – if he’d given her any indication that he’d been playing a game with her, she’d have been out of there without pausing for breath. But he just looked relieved and happy, sitting there in his shirtsleeves, and then he was grabbing his jacket with one hand, her arm with the other.

It
was warm out, and the streets were swarming with workers just released and in high spirits. The trees were in full leaf as they walked through one square and then another. Paul talked about nothing, about his weekend – he’d walked by the river, seen an old friend – about his students. Not pausing until they reached a corner she hadn’t known existed, up an alley that led nowhere, a tiny French-looking bar no more than a hole in the wall with some wicker brasserie chairs and two zinc tables.

He knew a lot of places. Paul had been born in London. He’d told her once, a rare moment, in some restaurant after more wine than they usually drank, that when he finished school and came back to the city to attend university and saw the crowds and the secret streets he could disappear into, it was like life starting. She had just nodded, not telling him,
That’s just how I felt.

He sat her at one of the tables and went inside.

Alone on the pavement Alison tried to go over what she’d planned to say if the wedding came up, but it evaporated. Perhaps he wouldn’t mention it at all, she decided. She was wrong. He emerged holding two glasses and Alison realised she’d been holding her breath.

‘Morgan says she couldn’t bear it if you didn’t come,’ he said, setting the glass down in front of her. It was champagne. She sat very still; it was as if her thought processes had slowed, she needed to get out of this. There was a clamour in her head,
No, no, no, no
. She put the glass to her lips, drank. All right, she told herself, as it hit. Alcohol on an empty stomach: the best kind, Kay would say. Calm down. Pretend it’s no big deal.

‘I told you she’d be mortified,’ Paul said, looking at her earnestly. He sat back in the wicker chair. ‘She gave the list to some company months ago, like I said. It’s not like we see each other much, she had no idea.’ The barest trace of a side-long glance to look for her reaction.

She
smiled, straining not to show what she felt. ‘That’s nice of her,’ she said, sipping.

Thinking, Isn’t there a form of words?
Plus one
. Then reminding herself, she didn’t want to have been invited. She didn’t care what message Morgan Carter wanted to send. The wedding was in a month, at the end of June; there wasn’t a detail she had forgotten from that gold-edged invitation. There would be time to think of something.

And with that thought, with the memory of the silhouette of the church on the marsh, something else entered the equation too, swimming in on the champagne. A kind of exhilaration, a kind of bravado: I could do it. I could go back. I could show them. And a kind of longing, because Esme was there, buried somewhere, or wandering on the marsh; Esme who’d swum in the grey salt estuary warmed over the mud, who’d played hide and seek with her sisters between beached dinghies. Alison felt hard, turned to stone, when she remembered that girl.

‘So, you’ll come?’ said Paul, his hand out on the table, fingers at the stem of his untouched glass. He’s trying, she thought with a kind of wonder, he’s trying to hold on to me, he wants to play it right. And if I say no? It occurred to her that he had probably already made his decision. He was like her – or like she’d been before she met him: a solitary. He’d walk away. It was how Paul was made. It was, she realised, why she kept coming back, knocking on his door. She felt sick, all over again.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ she found herself saying. ‘Yes.’ He raised his glass to her empty one then, and the champagne-euphoria drained out of her system as quickly as it had arrived. Too late.

‘Did you know your father had a gun?’

She’d shaken her head, no. No, no, no. Her father was a
joiner and cabinet-maker, he had a workshop in part of an old sail-loft in the village, it was neat and cosy. A whole wall of tools, some bright, some dull: rawls and gouges, chisels and adzes, he told her the names. She remembered the feel of their worn handles, hung in size order, another wall of little drawers, stacked rough lengths of wood, maple and ash and oak, just ordinary-looking until he turned them into something else. A cabinet with bottles of tints and varnishes. Her father humming, dreaming. No gun.

Joe didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps, he wanted to be in a band, always off at some gig, hitching home at two in the morning. It was Esme who’d sit in the workshop with her dad when she came home from school – or at least she did at the beginning.

The policewoman talked to her in the front room of the foster family’s house. She could still remember the swirled carpet, the layered net at the windows and the smell of their kitchen. Not a bad smell, just different, someone else’s cooking: they had a microwave and shiny red units. They’d bought fish and chips, the first night, the anxious foster parents and Aunt Polly at the table between the red cupboards, watching Esme eat. She hadn’t got even halfway through it although it had always been her favourite. The batter like glue in her throat. Polly kept her coat on and her bag on her knee as if they were about to leave, although the police didn’t let them go for a week.

‘In the pub he was asking for a gun, for rats, apparently.’ The policewoman’s voice was soft, concerned. ‘Do you remember there being rats?’

Uncertainly Esme nodded. ‘Mum and Dad had a row about the rats,’ she said. ‘She wanted to call someone. An inspector.’ She’d never seen them, though she’d heard her father tell her mother that one had been in the bin when he’d taken the lid off. ‘He didn’t want an inspector.’

‘That
was all the row was about?’ The policewoman’s voice made her feel sick, suddenly. She held still.

At the beginning, when Esme would come into the workshop, down the path from the bus stop, past the little marina, with the salt wind off the marshes in her face after a day in stifling classrooms, there would be something taking shape in the little wood-lined room. The sail-lofts were tall, on stilts for the spring tide to come up under them, steps up to windowless rooms, one above the other, her father’s the first. She remembered a table with different kinds of wood in the top, and her mother coming down to see it when it was finished, running her hand over it, standing close to him.

The woman was watching her.

‘They loved each other,’ Esme blurted. ‘They didn’t have rows.’ Her eyes starting out of her head, trying not to remember.

Everyone’s parents had rows.

‘You’d been out,’ the policewoman said softly. ‘That evening. That’s right, isn’t it?’ The policewoman had come to the house with a man, a male police officer. He was making tea in the foster family’s kitchen and when she asked the question he was coming back in with two mugs, brimming. Joe always made tea too full, you burned your hand taking it off him. Lazy, Mum always said. A good way of not getting asked to make the tea.

‘Yes,’ Esme said, submissive as if she was in a teacher’s office. ‘I was supposed to be sleeping over at Gina’s.’ She’d told them this three, four times.

The policewoman took the tea, winced. ‘Why did you come home?’ Her voice was light and quiet. Polly on the sofa stirred, shifted forward to listen.

‘We fell out,’ Esme said, looking into the policewoman’s face. Why did she keep asking? Esme hadn’t spoken to Gina since it happened; days passed, four, then five, and no one was in touch. ‘I hadn’t brought my hair straighteners.’ It sounded stupid.
‘We were going to do makeovers.’ The policewoman smiled and Esme suddenly wanted to shove her, to jump up and run out, to keep running. She fixed her eyes on the tea.

‘Did you see your father when you got home?’ said the woman, very quiet now.

Esme was still, hunched. ‘He wasn’t there,’ she said. The policewoman waited. ‘I think he was at the pub.’

Because he always was. Usually he was there till closing time: ten was early for him to come home. She wasn’t going to tell the woman that, though. There were other people the police could ask.

Throughout that week the police kept Esme with the foster family, always gentle but always insistent. Always the same questions. Once Polly went in to the police station, leaving her in the car outside, and she heard a door slam. She heard Polly shouting, ‘She’s only a child. Can’t you see what you’re doing to her? You think she did it?’

Did they? She was the only one left.

‘So,’ the policewoman said. ‘It’s possible your father didn’t know you were in the house.’