Exposure (19 page)

'This was another girl, Mum,' he said.

'Oh. Not Lucy?'

'No.'

'But you were ...'

'No, I know. But this was a different girl.' He lifted a spoonful of soup but his mouth soured with self-loathing and he lowered it again.

'Do try to eat,' Rosalind said. She put some more cheese on his plate beside the untouched salad. 'It only makes things worse if you feel ill.'

Luke had always enjoyed thinking that his mother didn't know how ugly life was. What he liked to think was that for her life was all about Christmas and their birthdays and the garden and Sunday lunch, and that a timeless aspect of her was perpetually engaged in cutting up carrot sticks for him and his sister. But now he found himself faced with a dilemma. For the first time in his life he would have liked her adult advice—or, at least, her adult sympathy—because she must know something about love, mustn't she, even if she was that much older? But he saw that to ask this of her would involve the loss of an ideal, that he would have to bring her out of her Eden. Just then, with principles crushed like muddy cigarette ends wherever he looked, this seemed too great a price.

So, rather than tell her about Arianne, he spread butter on the walnut bread and ate plenty of green salad, like she said. He ate a bowl of strawberries and cream for pudding, like she said. With each mouthful, he felt he was taking in the peace of his mother, the sweet simplicity of his mother. He was not surprised he felt sleepy afterwards.

'What about a snooze, Luke? I'll wake you up at about four so you'll sleep tonight.'

'OK, Mum.' He stood up.

'Good. I think it's just what you need. Oh, no, darling—leave all that. I'll stick it in the dishwasher. You go on up and snooze for a while.'

Her word 'snooze', the vase of flowers she had put by his bed, the full stomach, the faint smell of her scent in every room of the house, the encapsulated story of his childhood ... He lay in the foetal position in the little single bed and then he fell asleep.

It was his first uninterrupted hour of sleep since Arianne had left. He dreamt about his father being mugged. He dreamt the muggers had broken both his father's arms and legs and stripped him naked on the street. At first Luke felt devastated, vengeful. His face contracted with anger as he slept. But when the doctor told him that his father would need to be in hospital for a
very
long time,
he felt oddly relieved. He felt lighter. It turned out that it was all for the best because, actually, he and his mother would live very happily in the house without his father. In fact, life would be altogether better without him. This was the conclusion of the dream.

When he woke up it was to the sound of his mother knocking on his door. Luke felt disgusted by his own imagination, by the violence he seemed to have wished on his own father. Rosalind sat on the end of his bed and looked down at her hands. She had changed her shirt for a dark blue linen one. She had done something to make her hair more bouncy.

'I'm going off to see Dad for a bit,' she said. 'I thought I might as well just go now. Then that's done, isn't it? Are you going to be OK, my darling?' she said.

'I'll be fine.'

'Will you have a nice bath? And I've left some tea-things out—those caramel biscuits you like.'

They had been a passion when he was about twelve. 'Thank you. You're amazing, Mum.'

'No. Not at all.' She tucked her hair behind her ears. 'Far from it. Well, I'd better go.'

'Dad is going to be all right, isn't he, Mum?'

'Oh, yes. Yes, of course. They said he can come home tomorrow,' she told him again.

'I just—I thought you might be trying not to worry me. You aren't just not saying how bad it is, are you?'

'No, no ... It's just the kneecap and the bruising on the shin. Which is bad enough, of course. Poor old Dad.'

'Has he seen the police? I mean, obviously the police are involved.'

'Yes. Actually, they caught them—the two boys. Julian saw them run off and called the police in the nick of time.'

'He actually
saw
them? So this was right near the house?'

'I know. Awful to think of it, isn't it? Just down the road—beside Julian's car.'

'What did they want? Money? Money, of course.'

'I don't know, Luke. They didn't take anything,' she said.

'What?
Nothing?
You're not going to tell me
Julian
scared them off?' He imagined his spindly, myopic godfather getting every last bit of mileage out of this.

Rosalind smiled and shrugged at him, as if to imply that she understood his scepticism but that this was what had happened. In fact, she knew perfectly well that Julian had not scared them off. He had told Rosalind the two men were already running away when he came out of the house. They had just
not taken anything.
Julian had said he thought it was rather odd, and didn't she?

'Look, I don't know much about it, darling. Dad hasn't wanted to talk about it yet,' she told Luke.

'Really? Has he not?'

Now nothing sounded right to him. His father was relentlessly logical—that legal mind of his would have sorted the facts from the impressions before he had even begun to feel the pain in his leg. ('That's not a coherent argument, Luke. It's all fuddled with
emotion
,' he heard his father tell him—as he had on so many occasions when Luke attempted to make conversation with him.) Instinctively, Luke thought that part of his father would simply enjoy an opportunity to show the nurses and the police what a great lawyer he was. This was how essentially weird Luke found Alistair. As a child, if ever he had cried, his father had been ready with a rational solution. This he would deliver in due course, when hysteria had subsided appropriately, with the full authority of his forensic detachment.

Luke felt Rosalind waiting for him to say something. He took in her anxious face. 'Well, when you think about it, Dad's actually really lucky,' he said. 'They must have been the worst thieves in London.'

'Yes, they must.'

Rosalind laughed, in obvious relief. Then she stood up and quickly started moving his clothes from the overnight bag into his empty chest of drawers. He watched her refolding the T-shirts and rolling up a pair of socks that had come undone. It was intensely reassuring to watch.

He had no idea then that she needed to do this just as much as he needed to watch it being done.

When she had finished, she said, 'Well, I suppose I should go. I won't stay all that long, but the traffic will be a nightmare. I imagine I'll be back at about six thirty. I'll be quicker if I possibly can.'

She leant down and kissed him, just as she used to when he was little and he pretended to be ill so as to get off school, so as to be kissed by his mother in just that way.

 

The velvet-textured silence of a car had always been a thinking space for Rosalind. She felt solitude wrapped around her, luxurious as a cashmere shawl. In a twenty-year period in which she had done more than her fair share of kissing goodbye at the airport, of loading shopping-bags into the boot of the car, of dropping Alistair off at King's Cross or Sophie at piano or Luke at rugby, she had learnt to value these moments of peace. First came the modern, high-tech thunk as the door closed, and then, suddenly, immunity.

After the shock of what had happened to Alistair, she wanted nothing more than to sit alone and think for a while, but the builders had been in repairing the conservatory roof and twice when she had been sitting on the steps with her coffee one of them had called out jarringly, 'Cheer up, love. Might never happen.'

Whether it was her sister or her friends or the builders, somehow there was always someone around wondering what she was thinking about, asking if she was all right, if she had a headache. She did not have a bloody headache!

Was Luke watching her from his window now? She started the car and moved off. Someone was always ringing the doorbell, selling something, delivering something. The world was not private enough. An image of the desert came into her mind: red sand blown gently into ripples. She had never seen a desert.

She indicated left and got on to the main road. And, again, she found she was thinking about their friend Julian on the night of the attack. He had insisted on staying with her in the hospital waiting room while Alistair was taken off to have his head X-rayed. Julian had handed her a ribbed plastic cup of scalding coffee. 'Ooops—I think I might have pocketed your change,' he said.

'What?'

'For the coffee. Your change.' After a lot of searching, he pulled twenty pence, bright and shining, out of his pocket and handed it to her. She looked at him as if he had handed her a watermelon.

Julian contracted his eyebrows. 'D'you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking that it just is a bit strange, isn't it, Roz,' he said, 'that they
didn't try to take anything
? Not money, not his watch or his wallet or whatever.
Nothing.'
He was thinking of his daughter's mugging. They had taken her money, cards, earrings, her coat, her shoes.

Rosalind brought the cup to her lips. She did not drink.

'The police were very odd about it,' he told her. 'I mean crazy, really. They asked me if there was any reason anyone might be getting revenge on him.'

'Revenge?'

'I know.
Barmy.
They have to rule things out, I suppose.'

Well, it must be ruled out quickly, she thought. There was no place for this concept in their lives. The word gave off the same neon glare as the miniature envelope of white powder she had once found in Sophie's old winter coat, as the times when Suzannah had turned up drunk on the doorstep and had to be rushed out of sight of the children. Worst of all, it gave off the same glare, the same deafening static, as the shocking magazine she had found in Luke's room when he was about fourteen.

In fact, Luke's 'livewire' friend, Ben, had bought the magazine for him as a birthday joke. Luke hadn't known what to do with it, how to dispose of the evidence, feeling afraid he would be judged not only by God but also by the dustmen, whom he had often seen looking meditatively into the bin lorry while the rubbish churned. So he hid it. In fact, Rosalind's had been the only eyes to look through it, taking in the spread legs, the clitoral close-ups, the crotchless knickers and peep-hole bras. She put it back carefully in his right ski boot and hurried back to the phone to say, sorry, Luke's boots were a size ten, so they'd be no good for her friend Charlotte's son Rory.

'Oh, God, Roz, I'm sure it's a standard question, really,' Julian had said, causing her to feel even more worried. 'It's just that it's the middle of the night. Everything feels
extraordinary
in the middle of the night, doesn't it? We all need to sleep.'

She nodded at him, with the flat-lipped smile of resignation people use to restore order to the face. 'Exactly,' she said. Then she took a sip of the coffee and felt consoled by the way it burnt her throat—like pouring boiling water on filthy ants in the kitchen.

'You do look tired, Roz.'

'Do I? Not surprising, I suppose.'

'Yes. What a stupid thing to say,' Julian said. 'I'm sorry. Why do people say that?' He was a self-absorbed man, who often picked himself up on tiny points of grammar or found a loose thread in his sweater with an overly dramatic expression of shame. It irritated her. There was something repulsively effeminate about it and she felt grateful for Alistair's occasional brusqueness with her, what she saw as his masculine impatience to get on with important work. She was glad she had never succumbed to the charm of all those love-letters Julian had written her a million years ago. He was certainly a loyal friend now, but it was a mystery to her that Elise put up with his endless puns and his frivolity and his nervous glances in the mirror.

She gazed at him and felt a wrench of guilt. When had she started finding people she loved so irritating?

Now she parked the car, feeling deeply confused. Why did she suspect her own husband of—what?
What,
exactly?—so easily? An educated man, a successful man, an eminent barrister, she told herself. She thought of him quietly reading the biographies or histories he got for Christmas with a cup of coffee beside him. In a dislocated memory he glanced up and smiled as she passed through the room with a plant pot for the conservatory, and she smiled back, appreciating their life together. Children home for Easter, him reading, a lily waiting to be potted. This was trust.

But part of her had always known that Alistair's excellent legal mind told her the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. What was more, she knew she had made way for his dishonesty in the first place. There were places in that mind of his that she watched him go to—as if he was visiting a long-term mistress whom she had come quietly to accept.

The nurse led her down the corridor to Alistair's room. His head swung round as she came in. He looked up at her—as if he had forgotten to lock the bathroom door, she thought. A book lay unread on the sheets beside him. 'Hello, darling,' he said. He leant forward so she could kiss him.

She chose the very top of his forehead. 'How's the leg doing?' she said.

They both looked at the plaster.

'Not bad at all. Really not bad. The painkillers are fantastic. Everyone's been marvellous.'

'We must write and thank the nurses,' she said.

'Yes, darling. You always have the right ideas.'

She was not really listening to him. He was staring at her sentimentally and it frightened her. Everything was beginning to frighten her. Her son had literally thrown himself on to her in the hallway at his flat—a drowning man.

What had happened in the air? It was like a curse, she thought—like a curse from ancient times: 'a blight on fathers and sons'. She said, 'The nurse said the police were in again.'

'Yes, that's true. Yes, they were,' he said. He was using the level voice designed for the less-educated members of the jury. For the first time she was aware that it was entirely inappropriate.