The Other Child (17 page)

There is no point in asking him about Carlo Novak’s library card now. He will only be hostile. He will never open up in this state. She turns and walks back into the kitchen, picking up her mug of tea. It spills on the countertop. She realizes that her hand is shaking.

This is very wrong. She feels as if she keeps finding doors and pushing at them, only to find that he has got there first and turned the key. She makes up her mind then, to go and meet Alex. She will ask him how he thinks he is connected to Greg and then she will know for sure whether Greg lied to her in Marblehead. Once she has established that, she will be able to confront him about it, and about Carlo Novak too, and get to the bottom of this, whatever it is. She switches off the kitchen lights and goes upstairs, leaving him at the dining-room table with his laptop and his papers, preparing his defence.

The Back Bay Fens is a part of the city she has not yet visited. She steps out of the T into sleet and peers at Google Maps on her phone, trying to make sense of the tangle of streets as she dodges the cars and buses that carve up sludge, their yellowed eyes looming at her out of the gloom, tyres hissing on the tarmac. The museum is uncomfortably close to Children’s Hospital, just a few blocks away. She wonders how she would explain what she is doing if she bumped into Greg. She has told him she is going to the Museum of Fine Arts to hear a talk about the Alfred Stieglitz photographs tonight. She told Delia, the nanny, that she’d be home by ten, so if there is time, she will go across to the MFA and then it will not be a lie. But of course she isn’t going to bump into Greg here in the street because he will be inside the hospital complex, in a surgical mask and scrubs, moving meticulously through his other, unimaginable world.

After the suburbs, the city feels colossal and booming; it towers and teeters and roars. Someone bumps against her shoulder – she is blocking the pavement, peering at her phone – so she keeps moving, squinting through the sleet at the brick buildings. None looks like a Venetian-style palace. She calls out to a passing woman walking confidently in heels over the icy pavement, ‘Excuse me? The Isabella Stewart . . .?’ The woman points upwards but doesn’t stop. On the brickwork above her head foot-high letters spell out ‘Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’.

The lecture is in the museum’s concert hall, a tall cube-like structure with red velvet seats going up in layers of balconies. She spots an empty seat on the same level as the stage, third row back, and squeezes her belly past women with expensive hair, men in jackets, students with slashed red mouths, heavy fringes. Everyone seems to be wearing interesting glasses.

The room hushes as Alex walks onto the stage with a handsome woman in a trouser suit. His hair is more grey than she remembered, his beard bushier. He is wearing a navy shirt, a tweed jacket and square black specs. She watches him as the woman gives her introduction, listing his achievements, including a design award and a visiting professorship at Harvard. His gaze travels from face to face as she talks – and then he gets to her. Their eyes lock; he looks briefly startled, but people are clapping now, and the chairwoman is holding out an arm to welcome him to the microphone.

She half expects him to take the stand and address her directly, demand to know what she is doing here, why she has come. The room suddenly feels extremely hot. He clears his throat.

‘Van Valkenburgh has called this garden “a place to get lost”, a place for thoughts – as well as feet – to meander through associations, memories . . .’

Inside her, the baby’s feet dig into the cushion of her gut and she moves her hips so that she is perched on one buttock, trying to rock it off this axis. It gives another jab, then settles on her bladder. She tries to refocus on the stage.

‘. . . Instead of being a means to get from point A to point B, the path curls back on itself, crossing and recrossing. It is designed for play because Isabella Stewart Gardner herself was famous for her sense of humour, her adventurous spirit, her defiance of stuffy Victorian conventions. She walked through Back Bay with a tiger on a lead, she loved the Red Sox, she was scandalous and outspoken and famously said, ‘Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.’ It is this spirit of irreverence and play that the garden captures so perfectly . . .’

His face is animated, his head held high. He has a strong nose and intelligent, deep-set eyes, but his small mouth is lost in his beard. She realizes that it was slightly mad to come and confront Alex like this. She should have emailed him. This feels far too public.

‘Gardner built this place from nothing. She called it her “memory palace”. But memory is never linear,’ he is saying, ‘our memories fold back on themselves, they recur and repeat, there are variations and overlappings and that is, I believe, what Van Valkenburgh set out to achieve here, a small space that would honour the memory palace. Like memory, the Monk’s Garden is confounding, impractical . . .’

*

When the talk is over she urgently needs to go to the toilet, and when she gets back to the lecture hall most people have gone already. There are small groups chatting here and there as they gather belongings, but the stage is empty. She feels a wave of relief that Alex has gone. She will email him – that will be much easier than a face-to-face conversation.

She glances at her watch. Joe will be asleep, there is no need to hurry home. She doesn’t have the energy to walk to the MFA – she’ll see the Stieglitz photographs another time – but she might as well take advantage of the ticket and have a look round the museum, which has been kept open specially for half an hour after the talk.

She passes along a glass corridor from the modern extension to the original building, and finds herself in a cloister that looks out onto a palatial, glass-roofed indoor courtyard. She stops and gazes at the unexpected greenery. The courtyard is dotted with Roman statues and plinths, tall ferns, a mosaic with Medusa’s head at its centre. At one end, two fish spout water from an ivy-covered wall. Looking up, there are tall arched balconies leading from rooms that are packed with the art and artefacts collected over a lifetime of travel. A few people are wandering through the cloisters on the other side, but the place is hushed, church-like and very chilly.

She perches on a low wall next to a Roman tomb with carved figures gathering grapes. Perhaps, between restless bouts of travel, society dinners, trips to the Opera, the Symphony, Fenway Park, Isabella herself sat in this spot to remember the husband she lost, or the little boy, her only son, who died when he was not even two years old. The courtyard has the hallmarks of a sanctuary, but there is something lonely about these echoey shadows. It must have felt desolate when all the guests had gone.

She hears footsteps behind her and startles as a man clears his throat.

‘Magical, isn’t it?’

She turns. His feet click on the stone floor as he comes to a halt in front of her and the light falls on his face.

‘I’m glad I found you – I thought maybe you’d left,’ he says. ‘I saw you at my talk. We’ve met before, haven’t we, in Marblehead?’

‘Yes, yes, we have.’ She stands up and holds out her hand. ‘I’m Tess.’ His hand is smaller than she’d expected, soft-skinned. Up close his face looks weary and his beard coarse, as if sprinkled with iron filings. The urge to photograph Alex, exactly like this, close up, with the shadows of the cloister etching the lines around his eyes behind the thick-framed glasses, is briefly overwhelming.

‘So, is this just a coincidence?’ he says.

‘No, not really. I saw you were talking so I came along.’

‘And did you enjoy hearing about the Monk’s Garden?’

‘Yes. I’ve never been to the museum before.’ She looks around at the courtyard. ‘It’s quite a place.’

‘She certainly left her mark.’ He looks around and puts his hands in his pockets. ‘I sometimes feel like this place is more about loss than memories, you know? She’s built it and filled it with timeless objects, but there’s still this sadness at its heart.’ He straightens, and looks at her. ‘But listen, Tess, did you want to talk to me about something?’

‘Well, sort of. I just . . . I kept thinking about bumping into you on the beach. You were so convinced that you knew my husband and, I don’t know . . . I suppose I just wanted to know why.’

‘Because I do know him.’ He maintains steady eye contact.

‘He says you mistook him for someone else.’

‘And you don’t believe him.’

‘Oh no – yes, I do, of course I do.’

‘Then why are you here?’

She looks across to the other side of courtyard. A man is photographing a woman leaning against a pillar. The camera flashes, illuminating the cloister and the shadowy stone figures behind them.

‘You want to know how I know your husband?’

‘Well, yes, I want to know how you
think
you do.’

‘Did you see the Monk’s Garden yet? It’s cold out there, but you have a coat and you really can’t come here without seeing it.’

He guides her through the cloisters, then through a door into a garden. A grey brick path winds away through spindly trees. In the distance traffic hums and roars, but the sounds are muffled by high walls. The sleet has stopped, but it is bitterly cold. She struggles into her coat and they begin to walk, their feet crunching on sprinkled salt and grit.

‘OK, so,’ he says, ‘years ago, when your husband was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, he was in the same class as my brother.’

She feels the chill spread through her chest.

‘So?’ Alex slows down. ‘Do you believe me now? They were classmates for a while, until your husband transferred to another school.’

‘No – wait – there you go. He didn’t transfer to any other college; he did his undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh; it was accelerated, he was there three years not four, and then he went to Harvard Medical School.’

Alex shakes his head. ‘He did a semester and a half at Pitts, then he left.’

She feels her shoulders relax. ‘It’s the wrong person, Alex, see? You’ve mixed him up with someone else.’

‘I really haven’t.’ Alex shrugs. They both wait, almost patiently, at this impasse. The trees are like tall, silent waiters, balancing frost on their thin, outstretched arms.

‘I think this is what I’m most curious about,’ she says, eventually. ‘Why you’re so sure you haven’t mixed him up, when you so obviously have?’

‘I recognized him the moment I saw him. He hasn’t changed that much. He’s aged of course, his hair is receding a little,’ Alex’s hand flutters towards his head, ‘but he still looks pretty much the same as when my brother brought him to Florida, when I was twenty years old.’

‘Honestly,’ she can’t keep the exasperation out of her voice, ‘you’re thinking of someone different.’

He slows again and looks at her. ‘I promise you, Tess, I’m not.’

She walks on, stepping ahead of him.

‘This is really silly.’

‘I’m telling you, he was only an undergraduate at Pitts for one term.’

Alex doesn’t have a coat. He must be freezing in his tweed jacket, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the temperature. She clutches her coat around her belly. ‘Why on earth would you keep saying this, Alex?’

‘Because I could never ever forget his face.’

‘Why not? Why couldn’t you mix his face up with someone else’s? Why couldn’t you have forgotten someone’s face?’

‘I could never forget his face, Tess, because he almost killed me.’

She stops.

‘You want the whole story now?’ Alex shoves his hands into his pockets, his eyes fixed on her face. She nods.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘I was on spring break with my girlfriend Patti, my brother and a couple of his friends, including Chuck.’

‘Chuck? My husband’s called Greg.’

‘Well, in those days he was called Chuck, and he’d zeroed in on Patti; he was constantly by her side, making her laugh, bringing her cocktails, rolling her joints. I could tell she was attracted to him – why wouldn’t she be? He had a supreme self-confidence, he was very good-looking, athletic, charismatic, slightly wild, and very, very smart. He seemed to know something about everything, like he had a photographic memory or something. Anyway, I pretended not to take him seriously, but there was a lot of tension between us, for obvious reasons.’

The path twists back on itself and she realizes that they are crossing a spot where they’d walked just a few minutes before. The garden is tiny. She hugs her coat tighter, burying her chin in her scarf.

‘So, one day,’ Alex continues, ‘he offered to take me cave diving – he said he had a licence. I knew he probably didn’t, but I didn’t want to lose face in front of Patti, so I went. We hired the gear and drove down the coast. Chuck went in first and I followed, but I had a bad feeling, I knew how stupid it was. There was an underwater sign saying, ‘Go no further. There is nothing in this cave worth dying for.’ We went past it, into a tunnel. Chuck went first and I followed. It was only just wider than my body with the air tank, and there wasn’t even enough room to bend my knees so I just focused on the inch of rock ahead of me. And then I got wedged. I couldn’t turn around, I couldn’t move and I felt the beginning of panic – I don’t know if you’ve ever felt real panic, Tess, but it’s like this electric feeling in your spine, this icy blankness spreading through the back of your brain. I was trying to calm myself – I already knew that panic kills divers. I’ve read up about it since, and a lot of divers drown because they panic. Sometimes they remove their own air tank.’

‘They do that?’

‘Nobody knows why – it’s maybe the body’s instinct to be free? I don’t know. But anyway, I was tugging on the lead rope and after a bit I saw Chuck’s mask. He came up so his face was against mine. I remember there was this dead look in his eyes – no warmth, no reassurance, no emotion, nothing. He shoved a hand past my shoulder to my air tank. I guess he released it because I could move again.’

‘So he saved you.’

Alex ignores her. ‘We got through the tunnel and dropped into a cave but there was silt, the water was thick with it, there was no visibility at all. I’d already decided to go back, but I was feeling really panicky and I couldn’t see Chuck. I somehow made it back through the tunnel, but then I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get up to the surface. The last thing I remember, I was standing in a beautiful garden, talking to my mom and telling her I loved her.’

‘You were drowning? How did you survive?’

‘Pure luck that a couple of experienced divers found me and got me out. I was in bad shape; I had to be airlifted to hospital.’

She realizes she has been holding her breath.

‘And what about Chuck?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He must have come up after you.’

‘He did, but I never saw him again. People saw him, he returned the hire car – but he didn’t show up back at the condo, didn’t collect his things, didn’t come to the hospital and after the break he wasn’t at Pitts anymore. Nobody knew where he’d gone.’