Telling Lies to Alice (14 page)

“Well, you know it was called
White Rabbits,
don’t you? One of the jokes was that these two magicians had a couple of rabbits in their apartment—part of the act—but they kept breeding so each time there was an interior shot there’d be a few more and by the end they were all over the carpet and the furniture and everywhere. . . . Probably the funniest thing about it, but they were all over the set, shitting on everything . . . I nearly sat on one once. Christ, it was a nightmare, the whole thing . . . some bright spark at the studio had the idea they were going to bring back slapstick. Never thought to ask if either of us could actually do it. I don’t think they’d even seen the act. We knew it was a disaster, right from the beginning. . . .” Jack shook his head.

“You can feed them if you like.” I fetched the carrot bucket. The guinea pigs heard the rattle and rushed to the wire netting, squeaking.

“They won’t bite, will they?”

“Jack, they’re guinea pigs, not lions.”

He lowered the carrots gingerly into the pen. The noise stopped immediately. “All these animals . . . they’re substitute children, aren’t they, really?”

“Are your children substitute pets?” I shot back.

Jack said nothing. I couldn’t see his face. He was still for a moment, then stood up without looking at me and began walking back to the house. Irritated, I almost shouted, “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it!” but there was something about his shoulders that stopped me. It was the same as last night—that weary, defeated slope—and again, it reminded me of Lenny.

All the same, I felt angry. Stupid, Christmas-cracker psychology . . . There was some truth in it, though. I’d messed things up where people were concerned, so I’d made myself a family of animals, instead. Like my mother.

It hurt. Sod it, I thought. I’m not going after him. He can stew in it. I stayed outside for a couple of hours—there was lots of stuff that needed doing, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. At half-past six I fed the horses, then headed back to the kitchen with a fistful of bay leaves and sprigs of thyme and a plastic carrier bulging with wadded damp newspaper, sawdust, and guinea-pig droppings. I stopped beside the dustbins, took the lid off one, and started rummaging around for the envelope that had held the first newspaper cutting. “Lost something?” I turned to see Jack leaning against the side of the house. He’d washed and changed and looked much happier.

“No . . . just . . . tidying up. Here . . .” I handed him the herbs, plonked the smelly carrier on top of the other stuff, squashed it down a bit, and clapped the lid on top—bang go my chances of finding anything now, I thought. “I’m going to have a bath, okay? Then I’ll start cooking. I’ll only be about half an hour.”

“Fine.” I caught a whiff of Jack’s breath as I went past. He’d had a drink. Or two.

“Now what?” he said irritably, catching my eye. I didn’t answer. “I’ve told you, Alice,” he shouted after me, “I’m not like Lenny.”

Sitting in the bath, I thought, oh yes you are.

Afterwards, I pulled a long dress out of the wardrobe on the landing. Halston—I hadn’t worn it for ages. I paused in front of the long mirror in the door. Jack was moving about downstairs. I could hear him talking—not the words themselves, but a steady rhythm of speech. It sounded as if he was reciting lines. I took my shoes off, then turned and pushed open the door of his room.

I walked round to the end of the bed and looked down at Jack’s suitcase. The shirt he’d been wearing was crumpled on the floor next to it. I sat down on the end of the bed and nudged it aside with my foot. Underneath were a hairbrush and a brown glass bottle of pills. I didn’t recognise the name. I opened the case. There was an empty chest of drawers in the room, but he hadn’t unpacked.

Carefully, I lifted one corner of a pile of folded clothes. Another pill bottle. Two more in the side pocket. I didn’t recognise any of those names, either, but I’d have bet on uppers, downers, or sleepers—or maybe all three. At least that explained the behaviour, I thought: up one minute, down the next. And with the booze as well . . . It was more than that, though. Something else . . . Kitty? If it was an accident, why not just go to the police? There was definitely something more. Something worse. But what?

I rummaged on the other side of the case, under Jack’s toilet bag, and found a rectangular box. Brown cardboard. Too narrow for shoes—in any case, there was a lumpy drawstring shoe bag sticking out from under the bed. Drab green. I caught a glimpse of a Cash’s name tag sewn into the top. Must have been one of his daughters’, for school.

I opened the box. Inside, surrounded by tissue paper, was a grey canister. It looked as if it was made of metal. It had a screw top and a flat base and reminded me of the plastic jars of loose sweets in the village shop, only smaller.

I listened for a moment—Jack’s voice sounded louder now, more confident—then closed the lid and slowly eased the box out of the suitcase. It wasn’t heavy. There was a white label stuck on one end:
Enfield Crematorium
. It was an urn.

For a split second, I thought,
Lenny?
and almost dropped the box, but I knew it couldn’t be because we’d scattered Lenny’s ashes round his parents’ gravestone. I read the rest of the label:

Susannah is Jack’s eldest daughter. Or was.

And I’d just asked him if his children were substitute pets. Oh,
great.
I put the box back in its place and went back to my own room.

Why hadn’t he
said
anything? I tried to remember the conversation we’d had when he arrived. He’d talked about Rosalie . . . and Val, although that was only because I’d mentioned her. I hadn’t asked about Susannah. To be honest, I hadn’t remembered her name until I saw . . . God, how thoughtless. But I’d been so taken aback when he arrived, and what with . . .
everything
. . . How old must she have been? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Illness, car crash, drugs? . . . She was the reason they’d got married. Lenny’d told me—as soon as Jack had finished his National Service, there was Val’s dad. “My daughter’s got a bun in the oven. You marry her, or else. . . .” So he had.

I barely knew Val, but I’d always felt rather sorry for her. She had the big house and all the mod cons, but she was stuck out in Hertfordshire and most of Jack’s life was in London—which suited him down to the ground, but she must have felt pretty left out. . . . I’d met his daughters just once. We’d been for a picnic on Hampstead Heath, Lenny and me, Jack and the girls. No Val. I think he was looking after them for the weekend because she was in hospital or something. He had a Bentley at the time, a huge blue thing that Lenny teased him about, and they’d arrived in that with a massive hamper of food from Harrods or somewhere. They were teenagers—Susannah must have been about sixteen—but they seemed younger. Very quiet, and beautifully dressed in checked gingham, one in blue, the other in pink; little hostesses handing round the food and putting everything away afterwards. That’s about all I remember. They didn’t seem to know Jack very well. It was like they weren’t . . .
familiar
with him, if that’s the right word. I got the impression he didn’t spend much time with them. It was all quite sort of . . . solemn, because Lenny wasn’t jokey with them, either. When I first met Lenny and he’d told me that story about being at Jack and Val’s when the neighbour threw the burning dildo over the fence, I’d assumed he spent quite a lot of time there, but I don’t think he and Val really got on. . . . He never said anything negative about her, but they obviously didn’t like each other much. Jack didn’t seem too bothered. He never talked about his family. When he’d talked about Rosalie and her art project, it was the most I’d ever heard him say. Keeping the two halves of his life separate, I suppose. Lenny told me that Jack liked being married because it gave him the perfect excuse not to get serious with anyone. He said Jack’s way of looking at it was that the worst had already happened—he’d been caught—so as long as he stayed married and
in the net,
so to speak, it couldn’t happen again. If one of his girlfriends wanted more, if she was pregnant or something, then Jack would say she’d have to get rid of the baby because Val wouldn’t give him a divorce, so—nothing doing.

I went over to the mirror. Now who’s going in for amateur psychology, I thought. He’ll tell me if he wants to. In the meantime—
cooking
. Just about the last thing I wanted to do, but . . . I put on some lipstick. And blusher. Mascara, even. I felt stunned. What a terrible thing to happen. Poor Susannah. No wonder Jack was in such a state. Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents; it’s the wrong way round. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t talk to Val about it—things like that drive people apart, don’t they? Poor Jack. No wonder he needed to escape.

I went downstairs.
Charley’s Aunt
was on the kitchen table. Eustace was sprawled on his back on the rug, and Jack, drink in hand, was leaning down from the sofa to rub his tummy.

“Okay, coq au vin coming up.”

The chicken was a big, dead lump in my hands. As soon as I took it out of the fridge, Eustace rolled over and trotted across the kitchen to sit beside me, drooling and shuffling on his rump. His concentration on the meat was total, adoring. Mine wasn’t. I shouldn’t have agreed to this, I thought. I’m going to mess it up. I struggled with the knife and dug my fingers into the flesh, trying to tear pieces away from the carcass. The thought of somebody actually putting any of it in their mouth and chewing and swallowing made me feel queasy. Under the thick white skin the meat was pink and glistening, breast, thighs, legs . . . I had a sudden image of drowned Bunny Kitty in the car, her bosom sitting snugly in the costume like two plump pillows; the pink, healthy cleavage turning first blue-white then putrid green as she sat there dead and strapped behind the wheel . . . Was she? Behind the wheel? Had I read that, or just imagined she’d been in the driver’s seat? Could they even
know
where she’d been sitting? I glanced down at the chicken’s disjointed carcass. Wouldn’t the bones separate, anyway? It’s only flesh—tissue—that holds us together, and if it had rotted away, wouldn’t they just float apart? I pictured the leg bones like a heap of sticks in the footwell, the rib cage lolling on the seat beside the skull . . . I dropped the knife and rushed to the sink, hands over my mouth.

“Alice!”
I turned my head and saw Jack coming towards me. He looked unsteady.

“Are you going to throw up?”

I shook my head. “It’s passed. I’ll be all right now.”

He rubbed the back of my neck. I could smell whisky. “Too much sun, you silly girl. You’d better sit down.”

“Honestly, I’m fine.”

“Come here.” He put a hand behind my head and pulled me towards him, his fingers caught up in my hair.

I shook him off and ducked under his arm. “I want to know if you’ve learnt your lines, first.”

“For Christ’s—” Jack began, then stopped abruptly. “You can hear me if you like. While you peel the onions. As long as I get a reward.”

“Okay.” I took the bowl of vegetables over to the table and sat down, propping the play open against a pair of candlesticks. “What page?”

“Seventeen.”

“It says here,
’he never attempts to act the woman. No effeminate female-impersonation business.
’ I told you it wasn’t like real drag.”

“Oh, you’re an expert now, are you?” Jack yanked a chair into place opposite me, sat down, and banged a bottle of Glenfiddich down on the table. Almost a third of it was already gone. “I have read the fucking thing, you know.”

“I know you have. Where did you get that?”

Jack’s eyes glittered. “At the back of your corner cupboard. You were hiding it from me, weren’t you, Bunny Alice? And all its friends and relations.” He looked triumphant.

The cold, hollow feeling in my stomach was horribly familiar. I willed myself to keep calm. “Quite honestly, Jack, I’d forgotten what was in there. Didn’t you see them last night?”

“No, because last night I got palmed off with Johnnie Fucking Walker.”

“Which you took out of the cupboard yourself, remember? I had nothing to do with it. Listen, if you want this meal before midnight, you’d better let me get on with it.” I picked up an onion and leant forward to look at
Charley’s Aunt
.

Jack poured himself what looked like a quadruple measure of whisky and waved the glass at me. “Go on.”

“Right, Lord Whatsit appears at the window carrying a large gladstone bag, and he climbs in. Now you.”

Jack started reeling off his lines in a monotone. “ ‘Where the dickens are you? I wanted to borrow some fizz. I wonder where they keep it . . .’ ” I listened, peeled, chopped, and gave the cues. He was surprisingly fluent, given the amount he’d had to drink, and he’d learnt quite a lot of pages.

I got up to fry the chicken, taking
Charley’s Aunt
with me. Jack followed. “ ‘How do you do, Sir Francis?’ Did you ever come across Danny Watts?”

“That’s not in it.”

“I know, but do you remember a bloke called Danny Watts?”

“No. What’s that got to do with anything? I’ve lost my place now. . . . Oh, yes. ‘How do you do?’ ”

“ ‘I’m Charley’s aunt from Brazil—where the nuts come from.’ ”

“Hey! You were looking over my shoulder!” Jack backed away, looking sheepish.

“Have you been cheating all the time, reading it upside down?”

“I do know
some
of it,” he said indignantly.

“How much?”

“I don’t know—
some
. A few pages.” He finished his whisky. “Can I do anything?”