I drank. I didn’t know what time it was, except that outside it was already getting dark. I didn’t know what we were doing here, and I would have said that I wished we hadn’t come, except that I had a new and vivid image of Adam as a boy: lonely, dwarfed by two aged parents, losing his mother when he was twelve, living in a large cold house. What kind of life must he have had, growing up alone with this stand-in for a father? The whisky burned my throat and warmed my chest. I had eaten nothing all day, and was obviously not going to get anything here. I realized I hadn’t even taken off my coat. Well, there wasn’t much point now.
Colonel Tallis also drank his whisky, sitting on the sofa and saying nothing. Suddenly his head tipped back, his mouth parted slightly, and a crackly snore came from him. I took the empty tumbler out of his hand and put it on the table beside him.
‘Come here,’ said Adam. ‘Come with me.’
We went back up the stairs and into a bedroom. Adam’s old room. He shut the door and pushed me on to the narrow bed. My head swam. ‘You’re my home,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you understand? My only home. Don’t move. Don’t move an inch.’
When we came downstairs again, the Colonel half woke.
‘Going already?’ he said. ‘Do come again.’
‘Do have a second helping of shepherd’s pie, Adam.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Or salad. Please have some more salad. I’ve made too much, I know. It’s always so hard to get quantities right, isn’t it? But that’s why the freezer is so useful.’
‘No thank you, no more salad.’
My mother was pink and garrulous with nerves. My father, taciturn at the best of times, had said almost nothing. He sat at the head of the table and plodded through the lunch.
‘Wine?’
‘No wine, thank you.’
‘Alice used to love my shepherd’s pie when she was little, didn’t you, Alice dear?’ She was desperate. I smiled at her but couldn’t think of anything to say, for, unlike her, I become tongue-tied when nervous.
‘Did she?’ Unexpectedly, Adam’s face lit up. ‘What else did she love?’
‘Meringues.’ My mother’s face sagged with the relief of finding a topic of conversation. ‘And the crackling on pork. And my blackberry and apple pie. Banana cake. She was always such a slim little thing, you wouldn’t believe how much she could eat.’
‘Yes, I could.’
Adam put his hand on my knee. I felt myself flushing. My father coughed portentously and opened his mouth to speak. Adam’s hand pushed under the hem of my skirt and stroked my upper thigh.
‘It seems a bit sudden,’ announced my father.
‘Yes,’ agreed my mother hurriedly. ‘We are very pleased, of course we are very pleased, and I am sure that Alice will be very happy, and it’s her life anyway, to do what she wants with, but we thought, why rush? If you’re sure of each other, why not wait, and then…’
Adam’s hand moved higher. He put one sure thumb on my crotch. I sat quite still, with my hammering heart and throbbing body.
‘We are marrying on Friday,’ he said. ‘It’s sudden because love is sudden.’ He smiled rather gently at my mother. ‘I know it’s hard to get used to.’
‘And you don’t want us to be there?’ she warbled.
‘It’s not that we don’t want you, Mum, but…’
‘Two witnesses from the street,’ he said coolly. ‘Two strangers, so it will really be just me and Alice. That’s what we want.’ He turned his full gaze on me and I felt as if he were undressing me in front of my parents. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘Yes, it is, Mum.’
In my old bedroom, museum of my childhood, he picked up each object as if it was a clue. My swimming certificates. My old teddy bear, with one ear missing now. My stack of old, cracked LPs. My tennis racket, still standing in the corner of the room by the wicker wastepaper basket I had woven at school. My collection of shells. My porcelain lady, present from my grandmother when I was about six. A jewellery box with pink silk lining, containing just one bead necklace. He put his face into the fold of my old towelling dressing-gown, which still hung on the door. He unrolled a school photograph, 1977, and quickly located my face, smiling uncertainly from the second row. He found the picture of me and my brother, aged fifteen and fourteen, and scrutinized it, frowning, turning from me back to the picture. He touched everything, running his fingers over every surface. He ran his fingers over my face, exploring every flaw and blemish there.
We walked along the river, over the icy mud, our hands touching lightly, electric currents running up my spine, wind in my face. We stopped of one accord and stared at the slow, brown water, full of glinting bubbles and bits of debris and sudden, sucking eddies.
‘You’re mine now,’ he said. ‘My own love.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I’m yours.’
When we got back to the flat, late and sleepy on Sunday night, I felt something under my feet on the mat when I went through the door. It was a brown envelope with no name or address on it. Just ‘Flat 3’. Our flat. I opened it and pulled out a single sheet of paper. The message was written in large black felt-tip:
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.
I handed it to Adam. He looked at it and pulled a face.
‘Bored with using the phone,’ I said.
I’d got used to the silent calls, day and night. This seemed different. ‘Somebody came to our door,’ I said. ‘Pushed it through our door.’
Adam seemed unmoved. ‘Estate agents do the same thing, don’t they?’
‘Shouldn’t we call the police? It is simply ridiculous just to let this go on and on and do nothing.’
‘And tell them what? That somebody knows where we live?’
‘It’s for you, I suppose.’
Adam looked serious. ‘I hope so.’
Fifteen
I took the week off work. ‘To prepare for the wedding,’ I said vaguely to Mike, although there was nothing really to prepare. We were going to be married in the morning, in a town hall that looked like the presidential palace of a Stalinist dictator. I would wear the velvet dress Adam had bought me (‘and nothing underneath,’ he’d instructed me), and we would haul two strangers off the street to witness the ceremony. In the afternoon we were driving up to the Lake District. He had somewhere to take me, he said. Then we would come home, and I would go back to work. Perhaps.
‘You deserve time off,’ said Mike enthusiastically. ‘You’ve been working too hard recently.’
I looked at him in surprise. Actually, I had hardly been working at all.
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I need a rest.’
There were a few things I needed to do before Friday. The first I had been putting off for a long time.
Jake had arranged to be there when I turned up on Tuesday morning with a rented van to collect the rest of my things. I didn’t particularly want them, but I didn’t want to have them in our old flat either, as if one day I might return to that life, step back into those clothes.
He made me a cup of coffee, but stayed in the kitchen, bent ostentatiously over a folder of work, which I’m sure he hardly looked at. He had shaved that morning, and put on a blue shirt, which I had bought him. I looked away, tried not to see his tired, clever, familiar face. How could I have thought he had made those phone calls or sent those anonymous notes? All my Gothic thoughts died down, and I just felt dreary and a bit sad.
I was as businesslike as possible. I stashed clothes into plastic bags, wrapped china in newspaper and put it into the cardboard boxes I had brought along, pulled books off the shelves and then closed the gaps that marked where they had been. I loaded the chair I’d had as a student into the van, my old sleeping bag, some CDs.