The Outcast (23 page)

‘Your stepmother is feeling unwell. I want you to take her home.’

He spoke very quietly and looked at Lewis steadily. ‘Now?’

‘Yes, now.’

Alice watched them talking about her; Gilbert exerting his will and Lewis looking like a child – closed up and frightened

– and she wanted to shout at Gilbert for bringing him into it, and at Lewis for being so proud to be trusted.

Gilbert handed Lewis the car keys.

‘Just drive her straight home. I’ll walk back later. Alice?’ Alice didn’t answer. She was looking down.

‘Alice? Will you go with Lewis?’ said Gilbert.

She nodded, hardly looking at either of them. Lewis couldn’t take her arm, like Gilbert had done. He started walking and hoped she’d follow him, and she did.

‘Thank you,’ said Gilbert.

Alice followed him from the terrace and around the corner of the house, and Lewis thought about Tamsin and nearly kissing her. His body felt like it was still there with her, in the roses and the grass, and he didn’t want to be here at all. He’d get Alice home and then go somewhere by himself. He hated this; he hoped she was drunk enough to forget it – and then Kit bobbed up next to him, appearing from nowhere at his side.

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‘Mrs Aldridge? Are you all right?’

Alice stopped, annoyingly, and swayed about. ‘Little Kit Carmichael. Such a sweet girl.’ She patted her face.

‘Can I do anything to help?’

Embarrassment made him angry,‘Thanks.We’re fine.’

He got Alice walking again and Kit let them go, and he was aware of her oddly stricken expression as he left her.

Preston had moved the car and Lewis parked Alice by some rhododendrons while he went to find it. She weaved about and he had to stop her from sitting down to wait. He wished himself anywhere but there.

He brought the car around to the front and opened the door and waited while she got in. He had to lean across her to shut the door.

She was glazed, but her make-up was still perfect. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her without it. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and staring straight ahead like a doll. They started down the drive – and it was good to be driving a car, he almost enjoyed it – but then Alice started to talk.

‘Like a child! Taken home!’ She put on a mimicking voice, ‘She’s not behaving properly. She’s so difficult. Why can’t she behave herself?’

This was all new, her being like this, like the arguments. Lewis paid her no attention. He started to tap the steering wheel to a rhythm in his head.

‘What does she think she looks like?’ said Alice, her words falling over themselves.‘Who does she think she is? One really can’t have people being so very badly behaved, can we? Jesus God! Lewis – God!’

He turned into the drive and stopped the car by the house.

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She shouted suddenly, ‘Look at me when I speak to you!

You’re just like your bloody father. Look at me!’

Her eyes were bright and furious and when he looked at her, she looked away and was quiet.

He got out and opened her door for her, staring at the ground. She scrambled out of the car and he didn’t help her. She went to the front door and got her key from her bag, but she couldn’t open the door with the key and she started to cry. ‘Oh my God. Lewis. I’m sorry. I can’t. Oh God, I’ve no

excuse at all . . .’

He went over to her and took the key and opened the door and gave her the key back.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she kept crying. ‘Don’t cry. It’s fine.’

She leaned on him. He took her into the hall, supporting her, and he took pride in it.

The hall was dark and cooler, and she made herself upright and seemed to pull herself together. He took a breath and stepped away from her again.

‘I’m sorry, Lewis.’ ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Really, I—’

‘It’s fine.’

There was the sound of the clock ticking and the smell of the flowers in the vase on the table and the polished wooden floor and Alice stood there damply, clutching her bag and hat, bewil- dered by herself.

‘Oh, gosh. What a fool. I expect you detest me. Of course you do.You’ve always hated me. I know that you have.’

There was only one response to her. There had always been only one response to her.

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‘I don’t hate you.’

‘I don’t feel very well at all,’ she said, and went to the bottom of the stairs, holding onto the banister.

‘I’m—’ she tripped and he went to help her and they went up the stairs together.

At the landing they stopped, and he let go of her arm.

The moment trembled and held still. It didn’t move on to the next moment where he would go downstairs again. Instead, she spoke.

‘The thing is, I feel so very badly about everything.’ He didn’t look at her.

‘About what?’ ‘About you.’

There was silence. He was still.

He felt the crisis, the glimpsing of a truth, but it was a murky sort of instinct, and he wanted to get away.

‘Lewis?’

He held up his hand to stop her. She took his hand.

She took his hand and held it. It was wrong that she did that. They both looked at her holding his hand like that. Her hands were small and white and they felt hot from her twisting them together and holding her bag so tightly in the hot car. She gripped onto his hand.

‘You don’t know how it feels,’ she said, ‘looking at you and knowing it’s my fault. I should never have met him. Or I should have been better, but I couldn’t be.’

She looked up into his face and her need was so great he couldn’t look away from her.

‘You were just this little broken thing and I was too young to mend you, and I’m sorry.’

He felt sick with himself and as if he had forced her to say it.

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He wasn’t her fault.The wrongness inside him wasn’t because of her and he didn’t want her apology.

And then she undid the button on his sleeve. She pushed the sleeve softly up his forearm, and he wanted to pull his arm away, but the fascination was too much and he couldn’t move. She pushed up his sleeve and looked at the scars on his arm and, holding his hand with one hand, traced the whiteness of the thin scars with her fingertips.

She touched his scars so lovingly, it seemed. ‘Are you still broken?’ she asked.

She shouldn’t ask a thing like that. He didn’t know the answer. She was undoing something in him and he tried to turn away from her, but he couldn’t turn away.

‘Are you? . . . I need you to forgive me. Can you?’

She went closer and kissed his arm, she kissed the scars on his arm, and it was as if the world quivered all around them.

‘Are you better now?’ she said and came up closer; he could feel her clothes lightly touching him and she kissed his arm again, holding his hand.

‘Don’t do that.’

Alice looked up and her face and her mouth were close to him.

‘Don’t you want to be close? Don’t you? Don’t you want not to be alone, just for one moment in your life? For one single moment to just not be completely alone?’

‘Jesus Christ!’ He pushed her away from him hard, and she went backwards against the door frame.

‘Don’t!’

She was scared of him, so he went to her and he took her face in his hands and soothed her, and kissed her, and felt her tears on him as they kissed.

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There was a moment where they both knew they could choose, but then it started, and his mind was nothing but heat. She held onto him tight from the beginning. She was desperate, and she pulled at him and kissed him, and all he could think about was that he mustn’t. She had her back against the door frame still, and as they slid down to the floor she pulled his shirt out of his trousers, yanking at his belt; she couldn’t get it undone and he helped her. It was fast and hot, and she was kissing him all over his face and licking him and holding on and digging her nails into him. Lewis closed his eyes and felt his face covered in Alice’s kisses and her tongue licking his neck and her hands gripping him, and it was dark and absurd and irresistible. Her skirt was very full and the material got between them and he had to push it out of the way. She pulled at her underwear, taking his hand and pushing his fingers hard inside her, and she was wet and hot and like a dark and clawing thing and he was pulled in and, forcing in, felt horror and lust together. She got herself nearer, wriggling along the carpet and opening up her legs for him, and when he was inside her she started to cry and he hadn’t known you could feel such shame and still be hard and able to carry on. She was tilting her hips up at him, driving herself against him, but she was making gasping sobs and he started to stroke her face to console her, not wanting her to be in such pain. She kept crying, though, and got her foot wedged against the floor so that she could force herself up faster and harder against him. He felt the need for her going, as the horror got bigger than the need to do it, and there was too much dark- ness. As he got quieter, going away inside himself, she was grasping him harder and clinging onto him, and she came then

– and cried out loudly with it, her nails digging into his arm, but before she had even finished coming, still shuddering with it,

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she opened her eyes up wide and stared at him. She pulled herself away, as if she was being burned, and scrambled across the floor. Her hands held onto the door frame, gripping, and she looked at him a second more, before getting inside the room and slamming the door shut.

He was half on his knees on the floor of the landing, his trousers and shirt undone and sweat coming off him, and the blank closed door to his parents’ room in front of him. He heard his own breathing and no sound from behind the closed door. He got up and did up his trousers and his belt and went down the stairs. He crossed the hall and saw his hand reach out to the front doorknob and – like in a dream – saw his father on the other side of it, with his key in the door, but when he opened

the door there was just the car and the empty drive.

He went back to the drawing room and took the bottle of gin from the cabinet by the door.

The car keys were in his pocket.They hadn’t fallen out while he was fucking Alice.

He went out of the front door and got in the car. He drove out onto the road, holding the bottle in one hand, and drank as much as he could without choking.

The day was hot and sunny; it didn’t know what had happened. You’d think the sky would be black and stormy once you’d had your stepmother on a Sunday afternoon, but it wasn’t. It was high and blue and empty. The road was twisting and Lewis drank some more and then put the bottle between his legs to steer better. He went fast and couldn’t feel the gin at all, and thought that if he could kill himself driving it would be a good thing.The hedges went by and the road straightened out, and he drank some more and went faster and felt darkness. He closed

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his eyes and drove blind for a while, and fast, and waited, and didn’t feel any fear except that it got funny. He opened his eyes and started to laugh, and driving is hard when you’re laughing that much, and he thought of all the people at the party and of his father and of himself fucking Alice on the landing; and he laughed so that he had to lean his head on his arm to keep it upright and drank some more, and it stopped being funny again. There was a bend coming up and he went into it fast, and crashing wouldn’t have mattered if there hadn’t been a car coming around it towards him. He saw the black bonnet of the big car, swinging sedately around the corner towards him, and the face of the driver, staring, and he hit the brakes and hauled the car over and it went up on the bank. A second later and he would have killed himself, and the other man too, but as it was he had time, and the black car swerved and there was a screeching sound from one or both of them, and his car went up on the verge and tilted and nearly rolled, and the other car got by; and Lewis pulled the wheel hard over again, and came to a stop across the middle of the road after the bend, and the engine died. He had spilt some of the gin on himself as the car tipped. He saved the bottle from falling. He wiped the sweat off his face.

After a while he moved the car. He got it as far as a shallow ditch and stopped there. He got out of the tilting car and sat at the side of the road with his head down on his arms.The sun was very hot on the back of his neck and his shirt, and it felt like it was holding him down. His head was crowded. He saw Alice up close to him and her mouth open and trembling as she came; he felt her tongue, licking him, and he heard her shouting at him to look at her. He saw his father’s face and his own slashed up arm and Alice looking at the blood on him when she’d bandaged him

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up, and how she’d hated it. He could smell her face powder as he kissed her tears, he could feel the starched layers of the mat- erial of her skirt knotting around his hands and the blank bare skin underneath, and he felt her hands, pulling him.Then, like a shadow over him, he felt his father standing behind him – and he looked up – opening his eyes quickly and straight into the sun, and in the pain he thought he saw the black shape of his father, looking down at him, and thought he was always there, only now he could see him.

He drank some more and couldn’t sit up any more and he covered his face – and there was Alice, and her dislike for him. Then he remembered she’d kissed his scars and put him inside her, and he thought perhaps she loved him.

When he could, he drank some more. And then he saw his mother under the water, except this time he saw his own foot holding her down. Maybe that had been the truth of it, he thought, and then he passed out.

Kit had lain in bed in darkness and felt her skin tingling and smarting with the beating her father had given her. The night was hot.When she couldn’t sleep, she got up and put her dress on.

She let herself out of the house and walked barefoot down the drive and out onto the road. She thought she might keep on walking and not stop. She was blind in the dark night, but she wasn’t frightened like she had been in her own bed.

She walked away from the village on the side of the road and her feet made no sound.The tarmac was cooling off from the day and mixed with the smell of the dew on the grass. She saw a pale owl flying low and quite near to her and stopped to watch it. There was the sound of a car engine and then bright headlights.