The Evil Seed (5 page)

‘You
were the boy
next door,’ she said. ‘And you? Have you found the L-word yet? Does she play
the cello? You always fantasized about a girl who could play the cello.’

‘No, she doesn’t play
the cello,’ said Joe, with a low laugh. ‘But…’ Underneath the light tone
Alice thought she could hear anxiety. ‘I met her quite by accident. You’d never
have expected to see her there, in a dive like the Sluice… you know the
place? They drink the beer, then they eat the glass. Anyway, there was this
girl there, sitting right at the front, all by herself, watching me all the
time. Did you ever hear of anyone going to see a gig and watching the bass
player all the time? The lead singer, yes. That’s the pretty one with the long
blond hair and that kind of fetching undernourished look. But me? I mean, who
am I? I went to the bar to get a beer and she watched me all the way there as
well. It made me feel weird. As if she could see right through me. So I kept
looking away, right? Thinking, pretty soon she’ll get bored and move off But
she never did. And so I took another look at her, and then I went in for a
closer look. And she was waiting, as if she knew. The rest, as they say, is
history.

Alice was silent, taking
it in. She was beginning to feel she understood. This phone call, after all
this time… A complex feeling overwhelmed her; something a little like
regret, but mostly like relief.

‘Good for you,’ she said
at last, realizing that she meant it.

‘Do you mean that?’

‘Of course I do.
Friends, Joe, remember?’

His answering laugh was
a little unsteady, and she could tell that he was moved.

‘God, I’m relieved!’

‘So am I. Now I don’t
have to spend my life looking over my shoulder expecting to see you in pursuit.’

Good laughter together.
Alice held the moment to her, that warmth, knowing that in some way for Joe it
was an exorcism of her, of their wild and bad years, of what he still thought
of as her rejection of him. She felt a sudden rush of unpossessive,
uncomplicated love for him, sad Joe hiding his isolation behind a wall of
facetiousness, Joe who only needed to be needed and wanted and clung to before
he could blossom. She hoped that this girl would be the right one for him now,
hoped that she would like electric folk music, would want babies and marriage
and all the things which Joe had wanted, and Alice had given up in the name of
her freedom.

Something cold and hard
and lonely inside her melted and disappeared, and the relief she felt was like
a blessing.

‘So,’ said Alice. ‘What’s
she like?’

‘Well—’ he began. ‘She’s
different. Different from everybody else. She likes Virginia Woolf and Egyptian
art and chamber music… would you believe that I could fall for a girl who
likes chamber music? She looks a bit like Kate Bush, and… I suppose I’d
better translate that into aesthetic terms you can relate to. You’re so square
you probably don’t get this technical stuff.’

‘Watch it,’ warned
Alice.

‘Well, she has kind of
Rossetti-ish hair, and a kind of Burne-Jones-ish face…’

‘She sounds like a woman
of many parts. I suppose she has a William Morris beard?’ said Alice with a
grin.

‘Well, why don’t you
find out for yourself? You’ll have to meet her; that’s mostly why I phoned in
the first place.’

‘Oh,’ said Alice. ‘Sure,
OK.’

Joe seemed to sense her
reluctance.

‘I mean it, Al,’ he said
firmly. ‘I’d really like you two to be friends.’

For a moment, Alice
hesitated, choked by a sudden poignant regret. Then, with an effort, she
shrugged it off, almost in control again.

‘I’d love to meet her,
Joe,’ she said. ‘And I’d love to see you again, too. I’ve lost touch with too
many old friends to let this one pass me by.’ She tried to stop her voice from
breaking. ‘How about meeting you both in town? Or maybe I could come and hear
your band. Does …’ she paused. ‘Joe, you mutt, you never even told me her
name.

Joe laughed.

‘Didn’t I? Hey, you can’t
expect me to think of everything. It’s Virginia, Virginia Mae Ashley, but
everyone just calls her Ginny. She says Virginia Mae’s too much of a mouthful
for someone like her. Do you still like pizza? We could go for a pizza
somewhere if you like. The band doesn’t play again till Tuesday, but we could
go out, see a film. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds fine.’

‘What about you? You
sound a bit down. You OK?’

‘Of course I am. I’m
just a bit tired. It’s late, you know.’

‘Yes …
ah …
I’ll get off in a minute. Let you get some sleep. There’s just one more
thing, but the fact of it is that … I’m in a bit of a quandary here, and
normally, you know I wouldn’t ask you, but… well … Ginny’s new to Cambridge,
and she doesn’t have very much money … I wondered if you’d mind putting her
up?’

‘Joe—’

‘Tell me if I’m out of
line,’ he went on, ‘but it would only be for a day or two. I can’t offer her a
place in my digs because the landlady wouldn’t allow it. We’re looking for a
flat or something, but you know how hard it is to get something decent in
Cambridge at this time of year, when all the good places have been snapped up
by the students or the tourists. It would only be for a little while, maybe
just a few days, while we find somewhere else, and failing that, I’ve got a
friend who lives in Grantchester who’s going off to the States on Friday, and
he says we can use his house as a stopgap, so even if the worst comes to the
worst it would only be till the end of the week.’ He stopped. ‘Alice? What do
you think?’

Alice sighed inwardly.

‘I suppose it’ll be all
right,’ she said, as he had known she would. ‘Where is she staying now?’

‘Nowhere yet,’ replied
Joe. ‘She’s just come out of Fulbourn.’

‘Fulbourn?’

‘They’ve offered to put
her up for a while, but I hate the idea of her having to stay in that rotten
place any longer than she has to. Just looking round there’s enough to give
anyone terminal depression.’

‘Oh, no. Are you
serious?’ You never really knew with Joe; years earlier, when they had been
good friends, before intimacy had come to take their friendship away, Alice
would have been able to say: ‘Fulbourn? Well, she must be a nutcase if she sees
anything in you, but here, the link between them was still too distant, still
too fraught with bad memories, to allow more than a momentary easing of the
tension.

‘You mean … Was she a
patient?’

Joe tutted. ‘Honestly, I
knew how you’d react. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know, one person in
three has a breakdown at some time or other. Your mother told me that you were
pretty close to it yourself, when you went through that bad patch of yours, so
don’t try to make it sound as if she—’

‘Don’t be silly. That
wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was …’ Searching for the right words. ‘How
is she?’

Joe’s answer sounded a
little cold; Alice wondered whether she had overstepped the mark. After all,
what claim on Joe’s private life could she have now?

‘It’s not that I don’t
want to tell you, Al,’ he said, ‘but after all, it’s Ginny’s private life we’re
talking about here. I don’t think I should have the right to tell people about
her private life without asking her first, and I’m not sure how much she wants
people to know about what happened to her. I only told you about Fulbourn so
that you’d know to be careful of what you say and how you talk to her. She’s
still very vulnerable, you know.’

So am I, thought Alice,
but let it pass.

‘Al? You don’t mind, do
you?’

Alice said: ‘I don’t
mind.’

‘Good.’ The relief in
his voice was apparent. ‘Besides, she’s fine. You’d never think her life had
been touched by so much crap. She’s only eighteen, you know, she’s got
everything to live for. You’ll love her, Al. Everyone loves her.’

He broke off for a
moment, laughed quietly to himself. ‘I think this is it, Al. You know, the
L-word. It’s funny, isn’t it? I never used to think that I’d feel this way; I
thought that there was only room in my life for the music, playing and grafting
and getting bottled off stage, and all in-the hope that the graft would pay
off. And in a funny way, it has. If I hadn’t played the Sluice, I wouldn’t have
met Ginny. God knows what she was doing in the Sluice in the first place. But
ever since then she’s been bringing me luck. Everything’s been looking up for me.’

Alice was silent for a
long time. She hated the idea. More than hated it. Not because she loved Joe
any more, but because it was all wrong. It wasn’t like Joe to talk like this.
Joe only cared for himself and his music and his ambitions; Joe was charming,
likeable, amusing, but underneath, he was unscrupulously selfish. He didn’t
put himself out for anyone, didn’t really consider what other people might be
feeling …
he was usually too much involved with his own enthusiasms.
And he never mentioned what he called the L-word — she had thought he never
would.

But Joe was a friend …
had been, anyway, and she had behaved badly, as she always did when a good
friendship went the bad way into intimacy. Maybe this was her chance to make up
for that. And more than that, she was conscious of a desire to see him again,
to talk to him, to remake their old, comfortable companionship. When he had
laughed with her, laughed with the good laughter of old times recalled and
recaptured, she had felt warmed, and had known that it was the friendship she
missed coming back, and that she would do what she could to keep it, even if it
meant putting up Joe’s girl. She gave an unwilling laugh.

‘Sounds good to me,’ she
said. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’ll like having her here. I can even put you up too,
if you like. I’d be glad to have you both.’

As she spoke the words,
they were almost true. The last of the old resentment melted, and Alice felt an
easy warmth for this girl Ginny, whom she had never met. It was so good to feel
the rift beginning to close at last, as if the sourness and emptiness had been
there all this time, half-felt but in disguise, touching everything with cold
…
Alice realized that Joe was talking.

‘We could meet at your
place, if that’s all right,’ he was saying. ‘We’ll have tea or something, then
we’ll go and have a pizza, or see a film, or both. Does that sound good?’

‘That’s fine.’

Alice must have
hesitated for an instant, because Joe picked up on it at once.

‘Hey, Alice? Are you
sure?’

Alice made her voice light.
‘I’ll look forward to it, Joe. Keep playing those blues, hey?’

‘Hang in there. I’ll be
round at about six. I tell you, things are going to be just great. You won’t be
disappointed.’

One

I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE WAS ANYTHING I COULD
HAVE done to avert what she had planned. As I said, she was very clever, and
she knew my failings only too well. When I hauled her, dripping, into the cab
with my coat flung protectively around her shoulders, myself only half-dressed,
with my shoes and hat and tie still abandoned by the edge of the Cam, she must
have smiled to herself, as such creatures may. She must have smiled through her
lavender eyes as I hastened to revive her with my little flask of brandy,
panting around her like an eager dog. There was nowhere to take her except to
Grantchester and my landlady’s house, nothing to do but to take her in (she was
shivering now and could walk shakily from the cab to the door of the house), to
explain as best I could and to watch helplessly as she was whisked away upstairs
by a concerned and clucking Mrs Brown to an unknowable and half-defined realm
of hot water and soft pillows.

Lucky that she was such
a kind, easy-going old soul. Other, more suspicious landladies might have
treated my strange visitor with less consideration; but Mrs Brown was by far
the best woman in my long and varied experience. She provided sympathy,
attention, and tea — her all-purpose cure-all — then left Rosemary in the best
bedroom, threatened me with the direst consequences if I were to disturb the
young lady, and retired to her business, supremely unruffled, as if I brought
half-drowned ladies to the house every day of the week. Bless her.

Left on her own in the
best spare room, her bright hair washed, and wearing one of Mrs Brown’s
starched linen nightdresses, how Rosemary must have laughed. Laughed at the
foolishness of it all: at our kindness, our misplaced sympathy; my hopeful
adoration. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I spent the rest of that
day in a haze. I did not dare leave the house in case some new development
arose; in case the girl disappeared. Her face haunted me. The memory of her
silent floating on the water filled me with poetic thoughts. I spent the long
enchanted hours lying in my room, reliving those dreamlike instants again and
again, my ears tuned to the slightest sound from that secret, silent room in
which she slept, my heart bursting with a kind of music. Mrs Brown came and
went with cheerful, concerned efficiency. A vase of early cherry-blossom found
its way into the sleeping girl’s room, then a number of patchwork cushions; then,
at about half past four, a tray of tea and biscuits. At five Mrs Brown
announced that the young lady might like to get up and have some hot soup; and
at six I found myself sitting at the dinner table, shaking with anticipation,
staring at the extra place set by my landlady, my head feverish and my hands
clenched out of sight in my lap.

I was love-lorn, I
suppose; what young man would not have been? She had stepped out of a fairy
tale for me, a white Ophelia borne from nowhere on a muddy wave and a whisper
of morning. The threat of scandal, the riot of speculation which might have
arisen later from the society of which I was a part did not even enter my mind;
for me, Rosemary might have been new-born there and then, like Venus from the
wave. And it was with these thoughts in mind that I waited for my first glimpse
of her, half afraid to look, as if I might see some hitherto unsuspected flaw
in her perfection. I need not have worried. A quick moth-like sound on the
stairs, a clip of high heels, and suddenly, she was there, her features,
blurred by the movement of light and shade in the passageway, coming into
abrupt relief as she stopped in front of the window. Her hair was a nimbus of
flame in the sunlight, her figure trim and childishly slight. Her face was
pale, her eyes lost and haunted, but even then she was the most beautiful woman
I had ever seen. Even then. Even now.