What Alice Forgot (27 page)

I think that’s when the coldness started between us.

Yes, I know. Petty and childish, but there you have it.

Chapter 17

Frannie’s Letter to Phil

I’m tucked up in bed again, Phil. It’s been a long day.

Who should be sitting next to me again in the dining room at dinner tonight? You guessed it. Mr. Mustache.

The man seems to have taken a shine to me. I don’t know why because we have absolutely nothing in common and we appear to disagree on everything.

He was talking about his mustache tonight. He said that he’d always wanted a mustache but that his wife had never let him grow one because it would be “too ticklish when she kissed him.” (Too much information, as the young people say!) He said that after she died, he’d “cultivated this beautiful specimen.”

He asked what I thought of his mustache and I said I thought it was most unattractive.

He roared with laughter.

Then he asked how I’d managed to escape the “shackles of marriage.” (Do you mind!)

You will be astonished to hear that I told him about you. Not the whole story. I just said that I was pretty much an old maid when I finally met “Mr. Right.” I said that we were engaged to be married, but unfortunately the wedding never took place. It wasn’t meant to be.

Mr. Mustache was uncharacteristically quiet. Then he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Frannie,” and touched my hand, and for a moment I couldn’t speak.

He had an unexpectedly gentle touch.

Of course, only a few minutes after that, he was regaling the whole table with the most tasteless “dirty joke” you have ever heard.

“Nick!”

Alice sat bolt upright, her heart racing, her breath shallow. She felt about the bed with her hand for Nick, to wake him up and tell him about the nightmare, although the details were already slipping away and starting to seem silly. Something to do with a . . . tree?

A huge tree. Branches black against a stormy sky.

“Nick?”

Normally he woke up immediately when she had a nightmare, his voice gruff with sleep, automatically soothing her, “It’s okay, it’s just a dream, just a bad dream.” Part of her mind would always think, He’s going to make such a great dad.

She patted at the sheets. He must have gone to get a glass of water. Or had he not come to bed yet?

Nick is not here, Alice. He lives somewhere else. He flew back from Portugal this morning and you weren’t there to meet him. Maybe “Gina” picked him up at the airport. Oh, and you kissed that school principal today. Remember? Remember? Can you just please REMEMBER your life, you fool!

She snapped on the bedside lamp, threw back the sheets, and got out of bed. There was no way she was going back to sleep now.

Right.

She ran her palms down her nightie. It was a sleeveless, shimmery oyster-colored silk. It must have cost a fortune. It was just so stupid that she didn’t remember buying it. She’d had enough. She wanted to remember everything, right now.

She went into the bathroom and found the bottle of perfume she’d used at the hospital. She sprayed it in big lavish swoops and sniffed deeply. She was going to run and jump straight into that vortex of memory.

The perfume assaulted her nostrils, making her feel a bit sick. She waited for the images of the last ten years to fill her mind, but all she could see were the smiling strange faces from tonight’s party, and Dominick’s liquid brown eyes, and her mother smiling coyly at Roger, and the disappointed lines around Elisabeth’s mouth.

All these recent memories were too fresh and confusing. That was the problem. There was no space for all the old memories.

She sat down on the cold bathroom tiles and hugged her knees in close. All those people tonight, trooping happily into her house, helping themselves to glasses of champagne and tiny canapés from white-aproned caterers (who had turned up at five p.m., taking over the kitchen, blandly efficient), standing around her backyard in little groups, high heels sinking into the grass. “Alice!” they said so familiarly, kissing her on both cheeks. (There was a lot of kissing of both cheeks in 2008.) “How
are
you?” Hairstyles were smoother and flatter than in 1998. It made everyone’s heads seem comically smaller.

People talked about petrol prices (how could there be
anything
to say on such a boring topic?), property prices, development applications, and some political scandal. They talked about their children—“Emily,” “Harry,” “Isabel”—as if Alice knew them intimately. There were hilarious jokes about some school excursion she’d apparently attended where things had gone hilariously wrong. There were serious, lowered voices about some teacher everybody hated. They talked to her about jazz ballet lessons, saxophone lessons, swimming lessons, the school band, the school fête, the tuckshop, the extension class for “gifted and talented” kids. None of it made any sense. The conversations were so detailed—so many names and dates and times and acronyms—the PE-something class, the WE-something teacher. On two occasions different women hissed the unfamiliar word
“Botox”
in Alice’s ear as another woman walked by. Alice couldn’t be sure if it was a contemptuous insult or an envious compliment.

Dominick hovered unobtrusively close by, explaining to people that she wasn’t quite herself after her accident, that she really should be in bed. “Typical Alice to soldier on!” they said. (Was it typical? How strange. Normally she loved the excuse to put herself to bed.) It didn’t really seem to matter all that much that she didn’t recognize a single person. Nodding and smiling seemed enough to keep the conversations flowing, while Alice kept being distracted by things in her own backyard: Was that a vegetable garden in the corner? There was a swing set creaking gently in the evening breeze—had the Sultana slid down that slippery dip into her arms?

Now Alice traced her fingertips along the grouting of the white bathroom tiles. (She and Nick had done a tiling course together in preparation for this job—number 46 on their Impossible Dream list.) She didn’t remember doing it. It was possible she had lost
thousands
of memories.

Was Nick in bed with Gina right now?

Gina’s name had come up at the party. It had been awkward. Alice had been talking—or, more accurately, listening—to a woman wearing distractingly large diamond earrings and a man who was obsessively interested in getting another mini-samosa and was watching the caterer’s plates with an eagle eye. The topic was homework and how much of a strain it was on the parents.

“It’s three a.m. and I’m sticking paddle-pop sticks together to make Erin’s early settler’s house, and I tell you, something inside me just snaps”—the earring woman clicked her fingers and her diamonds flashed.

“I can imagine,” Alice had murmured, although she couldn’t. Why hadn’t this Erin kid done her own homework? Or why hadn’t they done it together? Alice imagined laughing happily with a sweet daughter while they glued together paddle-pop sticks and drank hot chocolate. Also, Alice was
great
at that sort of thing. Her kid’s early settler’s house would be the best in the class.

“Well, they’ve got to learn discipline, haven’t they? Isn’t that the point of homework?” said the man. “Hey! Excuse me! Are they samosas you’ve got there? Oh, kebabs. Anyway, these days you can just Google anything.”

Did he say giggle? Goggle? Alice’s head ached.

“You can’t Google an early settler’s cottage made of paddle-pop sticks into existence! Anyway, I bet
you
don’t have to help them with their homework, do you?” The woman had given Alice a womanly “Men!” look, which Alice had tried to return. (She was sure Nick would have helped.) “I’m sure Laura has it all done by the time you get home from work. I remember hearing Gina Boyle say once that she thought homework should be—”

The woman had stopped herself mid-sentence with an exaggerated wince of embarrassment. “Oh, I’m
sorry
, Alice. How insensitive of me.”

The man had given Alice a brief, brotherly hug around the shoulders. “It’s been so hard for you. Oh, look! Let me get you a samosa.”

Alice had been horrified. Did
everyone
know that Nick had cheated on her with Gina? Was it public knowledge in this strange, cliquey circle?

Dominick had appeared from nowhere, gently extricating her. She was starting to rely on him. She even found herself looking for him in the crowd, thinking vaguely to herself, “Where’s Dominick?” while at the same time imagining telling Nick the story: “So, this guy acted like my
boyfriend
for the whole night. What do you think of that?”

Elisabeth and Ben had come to the party, too, because Alice had told Elisabeth she would have a panic attack if she didn’t come. Ben was even huger and grizzlier than the man Alice had remembered meeting. He looked like a woodchopper who had escaped from a fairytale picture book, and he was particularly conspicuous amongst all the other smooth-faced men with their neat button-down shirts and neat gym-toned shoulders. He seemed fond of Alice. He told her he’d been “thinking a lot about their conversation the other day” and then he said, “Oh, but of course, you probably don’t even remember it,” and slapped himself lightly on the side of the head. Elisabeth had folded her lips together and looked the other way. “What did we talk about?” Alice had asked. “Not now,” Elisabeth had said tersely.

Elisabeth and Ben hadn’t circulated much. They talked a lot to Dominick—whom they didn’t appear to have met before. It was strange, seeing Elisabeth cradling one drink and sticking to Ben’s side. She used to march her way from person to person at parties, as if it were her duty to talk to every single person.

Actually, the funny thing was that she thought she could have managed that party even without Elisabeth or Dominick or even Nick there to help her. Even though it had been surreal and dreamlike, meeting all those strange people who knew her name and intimate details about her health (one woman had tried to drag her into a corner to continue a conversation from a few weeks ago that appeared to be about Alice’s
pelvic floor
), she hadn’t ever felt that normal feeling of party panic. She seemed to know instinctively how to stand and what to do with her arms and her face. She could feel herself being gracious and vibrant, actually telling people the story of how she’d fallen over at the gym and thought she was ten years younger and pregnant with her first child. The words rolled smoothly. She made eye contact with everyone in the circle. She was
delivering an anecdote.
It appeared she had become very normal and accomplished, now that she was nearly forty.

Maybe it was because she looked so good that she’d felt so confident. She’d chosen a blue dress from her wardrobe with detailed embroidery around the neckline and hem. “Oh, you always have the most
gorgeous
clothes, Alice darling,” Kate Harper, the woman from the lift, had said. Kate’s rounded vowels had become even rounder the more she drank, so by midnight she sounded like the queen. Alice couldn’t stand her.

The party had finished up around one a.m. Dominick had been one of the last to go, kissing her chastely on the cheek and saying he’d call tomorrow. There didn’t seem to have been any question about him staying the night, so maybe their relationship hadn’t progressed to that point. He was a very nice man, someone she would happily recommend as a single man to a friend, but the thought of taking her clothes off in front of him was laughable.

Then again, maybe he had just been discreet because he knew she had begged Elisabeth and Ben to stay the night. (She hadn’t liked the idea of waking up in this strange new world without company.) Maybe they had quite an active sex life.

She shuddered.

Less than twenty-four hours till she saw Nick and the children and everything would finally fall into place.

The bathroom floor was becoming cold. She stood up and surveyed her tired, thin face in the mirror.
Who have you become, Alice Love?

She walked back into the bedroom and considered trying to go back to sleep but she knew it would be impossible. Hot milk was the answer. Of course it wasn’t the answer at all. It never cured her insomnia, but the ritual of it and the feeling that you were doing something that the magazines always recommended for insomnia was soothing and helped pass the time.

The door to the spare bedroom was closed as she crept down the hallway. She had been pleasantly surprised to discover a spare room (previously one of their many junk rooms) all set up with a double bed, chests of drawers and spare towels. “Was I expecting someone to stay?” she’d asked Elisabeth.