Exposure (62 page)

'Oh!' she said, putting her hand on her chest. 'I didn't hear you.'

He looked up at her and smiled. 'Sorry - I should have called before I barged in like this.'

'Well ... hardly. It's your own house.'

'No, exactly.'

'Actually, I was just ... I was just writing you a note, Alistair.'

'Ah,' he said. 'Yes.'

He had come long before she had expected him to. She had intended to be gone by the time he got back and his wilful presence had shocked her. She lost hold of the determination with which she had made all of her arrangements. She was too stunned to speak for a while and she resented the power his presence had over her. She simply stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at him, and after a while she stuttered impatiently, 'Well, I needn't have. Written a note, I mean. I mean, I could have spoken to you directly. I just had no idea when you were coming back.'

'No, I've been extraordinarily self-centred,' he said, with disarming frankness.

She looked down at the carpet. 'Yes,' she consented.

Then he said, rather vaguely, 'I'm afraid I've been putting my past before my future.'

This irritated her—it was no time for poetical-sounding language. She said, 'Alistair, I'd so much rather not talk about it. You've never made it my business before.'

'Yes, I know,' he said, 'but I ought to have done.'

She turned angrily to the hall mirror and feigned an interest in her hair. 'Oh, "
ought."'
She snorted.

'Aren't I allowed to
wish
I had done better? To
wish
I had been a better husband?'

'Not in front of me. It's in poor taste.'

He let his head drop into his hands again and, seeing him reflected in the mirror, Rosalind's body fought contrasting impulses both to hit him and to put her arms round him. She hated him, but he had never looked so dejected before—and yet it was not her job to protect him and it never had been, really. She had done him no favours by protecting him.

Just beyond his right shoe she noticed the edge of her suitcase and the folded jacket and realized that he must have seen these things.

He raised his head. 'Rosalind, will you at least let me say a few things? About the girl? I would like at the very least to offer you an explanation ... of sorts.'

She laughed bitterly. 'Oh, Alistair, what could there possibly be that isn't glaringly obvious to everyone? You think you're an extraordinary case, that's your problem.'

'You might be right,' he said. 'But perhaps there is more to it.'

'No. Everyone's complicated. It's just that you think it's OK for you to do things other people wouldn't dream of doing, simply because you're Alistair Langford—as if somehow you didn't get what you deserved at birth. What do any of us deserve? You think the bad things you do are somehow more ... I don't know ... intellectually sophisticated—that you're guilty of a better class of wrong. But I can tell you, a he is a bloody he!' she said, becoming angry now, 'and you have told
so many!

'Yes, I've told lies.'

'Yes, you have. And I've
helped
you!'

'No, Rosalind - you can't blame yourself for a second.'

'Why not?
Oh—
do they make
allowances
in heaven for people like me? People who need
extra help?'

'I ... no.'

'Then I'll blame myself, thank you. We started this marriage in an atmosphere of pretence. I thought you weren't telling me the whole truth. I thought something didn't add up about your complete lack of interest in your past, or the fact that on our wedding day there wasn't a single person there you hadn't met in the past four years. And I thought it when Mummy said how sad it was that we hadn't even been shown a photograph of your mother. Sometimes I wonder if she knew too.'

'Yes, I wondered that.'

Rosalind shook her head in disgust. 'Oh,
did
you? You're
so
clever, aren't you?'

'No,' he said.

'Honestly, what on
earth
had your mother done, Alistair? How could she possibly have deserved to be rejected like that? Was it murder? Kidnap?
Torture?'
Her cheeks were flushed with anger.

'It was because she didn't know who my father was,' he said quietly.

'What? But your father was killed in—' She stopped herself. 'Oh.
Another
lie?'

'It was
her
He, Rosalind. Well, to start with, anyway. Oh, please—look, I can see that doesn't matter. Obviously I can. The fact is, she never told me a thing about him - except that. I had to tell your parents
something
! The trouble was, I always knew it wasn't true, I don't know how but I just knew.'

'Yes, well, one does. We all know if we're being lied to. You can
smell
it.'

He braced himself against the rage he had never once seen in her before. 'But, Rosalind, I sort of went on hoping it
might
be true and ... well, I knew better than to bring it up and be certain it wasn't. I held my tongue and, during the course of my childhood, my mother and I developed a sort of agreement not to address the issue. But you can't
have
that in a family. It's all right between friends or work colleagues, but you can't have lies in a family.'

'No, you
can't.'

'I'm so incredibly ... Rosalind, I ... She was lying about my
father.'

'But she was your
mother.
Wasn't that worth anything?'

He looked at her miserably, asking for understanding, but she did not want him to feel understood. She wanted him to feel exiled, because it was what he deserved.

'You must have hated her so much to do what you did. To say she had
died.
It was like killing. Do you know that?'

'Yes.'

'You actually
hated
her—your own mother.'

'I hated her, yes.'

'And
such
hate.'

'Yes, with my whole heart.'

'But you promised that to me,' she said.

She pressed her temples to stop herself crying. The simple pain her fingers inflicted was a rest from betrayal. The blood pulsed under her fingertips and she suddenly understood why Sophie had made those little cuts on her arm—she saw what her daughter had meant when she attempted to explain by saying it was like changing the channel on the TV for a while - if the film got too scary or sad.

Alistair said, 'Rosalind, I see it's too late, I really do—it's been too late for a good many years, really, but I do want you to know I did the best I could, in some respects, at least. May I say anything in my defence? There were other, more practical reasons for cutting her out of the picture. Yes—a euphemism, I
know.
But please listen to me. All I'm saying is, don't forget how much England has changed, how much attitudes have changed.'

He saw that she was listening. He went on, 'When you and I got engaged your father and mother already saw me as a great disappointment. They wanted you to marry someone with money and land, someone with a title, I imagine—'

'Oh, they were just snobs.'

'Yes, they were. And so was I for playing along with it, but I was young and stupid and they—well, they were from a different age. Do you have any idea how hard it was to convince your father I wasn't a total dead loss?'

Rosalind leant back against the wall beside the mirror and sighed. 'No. I suppose I don't.'

'I can't
tell
you what those intimate little drinks of ours were like, Rosalind. They were
soul-destroying.
They left me in no doubt at all that I was not good enough and the way I saw it was that this was their opinion
without
the addition of my mother. Had they met her, then that load of sentimental rubbish I palmed off about her being a translator and so on—'

'Sentimental rubbish?'

He could not look at her because he had 'palmed off' this 'rubbish' on her, too. He went on, because it was all he could do. 'Rosalind, you have to understand my mother had barely been to school. She was almost illiterate. She was from a completely different background. She was vulgar—yes.'

'Vulgar?
So, naturally, you thought the best thing to do was never see her again? This was a fitting punishment?'

'Not a
punishment.
Why do you say that? I had no desire to punish her.' But as he said this he knew that it wasn't true. He had wanted her to suffer her son's absence, just as he had suffered his father's absence. If she could withhold, then so could he. 'Look, perhaps you're right,' he said. 'No, you
are
right. But there were many reasons. And one of them—a very important reason—was that I wanted to marry you. I desperately wanted to marry you, darling, and I couldn't risk offending your father's ... sensibilities.'

Rosalind knew that her father's 'sensibilities', as Alistair so delicately described his vile snobbishness, had been terminally offended anyway. James Blunt had swiftly established that Alistair would not be inheriting a stately home—or even a manor house. There had been an appalling conversation before a drinks party in which he had come into the room and said offhandedly, 'He does have a decent blazer and everything, doesn't he, Roz? It's just that Lady Seddon's going to be here.'

'Well, he'll probably wear the one he wore last weekend, Daddy.'

'Yes, I imagine he probably will. Oh, darling, you must do what makes you happy, I know that—but do take care.'

Their relationship had never really recovered. The implications of this simple question were too vast and too blatant. A decent blazer meant the right sort of background, the right sort of values, the right sort of future.

Rosalind felt a twinge of pity for her husband, 'But you could have told
me,
Alistair. Surely. And if not right away then at some point in
nearly forty years of marriage!'

He shifted frantically in his chair as if he had received an electric shock. 'I know! Rosalind, I'm an idiot -
please!'

'If only you
were
an idiot one could defend it. But you're a
clever man.
I always believed you were a clever man.'

'Until now, I suppose,' he said self-pityingly.

'Don't,' she said.

'I'm sorry. I haven't much dignity. I've realized I have nothing left.' He watched her for a moment as she blinked and breathed and let her eyes move about the hallway. This was the woman who had given him two children, who had endured hours of loneliness while he worked at weekends when she might have demanded his attention. This was the woman who had been father and mother to their children at times, facing the other parents at the sports days with no husband on her arm. And in spite of all this she had been faithful to him—he knew that, really—and on the day he was made a QC she had put on a new pale blue suit with pride that had made her tremble. What was the value of anything if he did not bring it to her? No, she had never caught his allusions to Homer or Pope, but she had cared for his happiness more than any other human being. He could not bear to be exiled from her sympathy. 'Rosalind, may I tell you something?'

Aware immediately that he was asking her to do something for him, to be available to him in some way, her face contracted in a frown. 'What? What about?'

'About my father.'

He saw the frown relax and he continued, 'Do you remember the woman who called about my mother's death?'

'Ivy?'

'Yes, Ivy.' Of course Rosalind remembered her name, he thought—this was his considerate wife. 'Well, my father was—
is
—Ivy's husband. His name is Geoff Gilbert. I went to see him yesterday.'

Rosalind walked over to the stairs and sat down. 'Goodness.'

'He's in a retirement home in Dover. But the thing is, Rosalind, it turns out his mind's completely gone. He had absolutely no idea who I was.'

She shook her head in disbelief.

Alistair smiled. 'D'you know, it's rather funny, really—in a pathetic sort of way? I mean, he was just two streets away. I just never knew he was my father. And then, at long last, when I finally do ...'

'It's too late,' Rosalind said. She put her hand over her mouth and drew her eyebrows together in that expression of deep compassion he had always admired. He loved her for the way she loved other people—for the depths of emotion she had suffered for the sake of her children, even if this had made him jealous at times.

'Yes, too late,' he said, shrugging.

This phrase plainly had resonance and she looked at him, certain now that as soon as he had seen her packed bag he had assumed she was leaving him. The right thing to do was to tell him she had not yet decided to do this, but something prevented her speaking. Of course, this was in part merely a desire to keep control of a situation in which she had felt utterly helpless, but it was also curiosity about what Alistair would say with no fictions to bolster him.

'Well,' he said, 'somehow I can't quite believe this is what happened in my life—that this was the story, if you know what I mean. But there it is. Your parents were right - I wasn't good enough for you.'

'You talk as though you were dead.'

'I suppose I might as well be when all I have to offer my wife is the supremely useless word, "sorry".' He looked at her. 'I won't insult you with a whole load of rhetoric. You have always spoken plainly to me. I merely want you to know that I regret what happened, that I regret what
I
did—
me, myself—
with that girl, in every cell in my body. I'm always afraid to speak simply,' he said.

'Oh, all your stupid fear,' she replied bitterly.

'Yes.
God -
all my stupid fear.'

She stared at him for a while and eventually she folded her hands in her lap in the way she always did when she had reached a conclusion. 'It seems to me,' she said, 'that loving someone is all about fear, really.'

He looked confused. 'I don't think I ... I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

'It seems to me it's all about seeing the fear—the
stupid
fear - on another person's face and somehow loving them anyway. If only you had trusted me to love you
anyway'