Then Alice
Then
Alice
We glide down the King’s Road in Robin’s open-top car, a shining cream and silver work of art that draws cheers and yells of appreciation from pedestrians and hoots from other drivers.
‘E-type Jag,’ Jake says, incredulous that I don’t know. ‘The most glorious car ever made.’
We have borrowed Robin’s car so that we can drive to Essex to have lunch with my parents, more of an order than an invitation. When I rang home to ask if they’d post my passport, my father said, ‘If you’re planning on going to Italy with some youth we have never met, think again. You can come and get it yourself.’
My mother wrote to me the same day and I spied her round, girlish handwriting with the same pit of gloom that accompanied most of my childhood. Her missives, dictated by my father, have been chequering my life since I started at boarding school.
We thought you might have the decency to introduce your new boyfriend to your family. We haven’t heard from you all term. Come for lunch on Sunday.
Driving out of London along the Bayswater Road, lined with its cheerful display of bad art, clunky nudes and one-dimensional still lifes proudly tacked to the railings, T. Rex turned up to distortion volume on the car stereo, I feel calm and hopeful.
But the moment we turn off the A12 and begin the approach to my village, past the house where I took Scottish dancing lessons as a child and the courts where I learned to play tennis, past Huskard’s, the grim-looking old people’s home with its barred top windows, I become twelve again. Frightened of my father, ashamed of my mother, her weakness, her cowardice, her lack of self-respect. I suppose I love her in some far-off way, but she never once stood up for me; she watched my father berate me for kicks and allowed her silence to be his accomplice.
‘You’re quiet,’ Jake says, reaching out to take my hand. ‘How bad can it be?’ but I can’t find any words to answer him.
‘You didn’t tell me you lived in a mansion,’ he exclaims as we turn into our drive.
‘We only own part of it,’ I am still too choked for proper conversation.
It is a vast and beautiful house, mostly red brick, with black and white gables and three tiers of long, thin windows running across its facade. It was bought as a whole by my grandparents in the fifties and then carved up, so that we only live in the middle section, a large-roomed, high-ceilinged flat overlooking the rose gardens below. A retired schoolmaster lives in the top flat, originally the servants’ quarter, and a couple of bad-tempered Scottish pensioners inhabit the ground floor, and this, growing up, was my day-in, day-out demographic.
I hesitate at the side door, the entrance to our flat, and consider ringing the bell. But the door is open and I remind myself that I am not a visitor, that this is my home.
‘Hello?’ I call, and my voice sounds thin and false even to myself.
In these last moments, I’m uttering a silent plea. Please can it not go too badly. Please can my father be all right.
The stairs lead to a landing where I would expect my parents to be waiting, but it’s empty.
‘They must be in the kitchen,’ I say, and we follow the smell of roasting chicken down the dark corridor.
‘Smells delicious,’ Jake says, still believing this is a normal family gathering. ‘I’m starving.’
In the kitchen, black and white tiled floor of my youth, both parents are at the Aga with their backs to us.
‘We’re here,’ I say, and my mother turns immediately, a wooden spoon held aloft. I see that she is wearing make-up, lipstick, blusher and eyeshadow, an unusual event in her world. She’s dressed up too, in a bright blue trouser suit, the jacket zipped and belted, an orange silk collar peeking out of the top.
‘Hello,’ she says, holding out her hand.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say, but my father doesn’t answer; he continues to stir a pan as if he hasn’t heard us.
I see Jake dart his eyes at me and then my mother, trying to gauge the situation. Are we being ignored?
‘Hello, Dad,’ I say, louder this time, and I watch my mother slide her eyes away from me; she’s not going to help. She doesn’t offer Jacob a drink – always my father’s domain; if he doesn’t give her a glass of wine then she goes without. She stands with her gaze averted, as though she’s fascinated by the rose bushes below.
Eventually, perhaps only a couple of minutes later, though it feels longer, my father turns around. He is smiling, if you can call it that, and I see that while he has been making the gravy, he has drunk half of a bottle of red wine.
‘Hello, daughter,’ he says, a name he never calls me. ‘Or perhaps you have absconded from that role? Perhaps you are now emancipated from your parents?’
‘Of course not. Dad, this is Jacob.’
The best recourse when my father is in this mood is to try and move things on, although with three glasses of wine inside him, I’m not optimistic.
‘Good to meet you, Mr Garland.’ Jake extends his hand, which my father ignores. Instead he allows his eyes to travel over Jake in expressionless assessment. I feel him registering the shoulder-length hair, the flowered choker at Jake’s neck, the long bead necklaces I considered asking him not to wear.
‘Well, lunch is ready, come and sit down.’
We are eating in the kitchen, the table already laid with knives, forks and four glasses, although my father doesn’t pour me any wine. He refills his own, and then pours a couple of inches for Jake and my mother. Our boundaries are set; lunch is to be an endurance test.
You throw a new lover into a situation of extreme awkwardness and you see a different side to them. I would never have expected Jake to try so hard with my mother, asking her about the roses in the garden below.
‘I think they are classic tea roses, and perhaps the purple ones—’
My father cuts across her.
‘It’s not our garden.’
‘But you have a garden here? There’s so much space.’
‘Yes. An acre, the other side of the house.’
‘We grow vegetables,’ I say, surprising myself and perhaps my parents with the pronoun. ‘Courgettes and beans, potatoes and carrots, all the usual. We have fruit cages too, with redcurrants, blackcurrants and raspberries in the summer.’
‘My grandparents lived on a farm; I spent a lot of my childhood there. My grandmother grew every vegetable you could think of. They were almost self-sufficient.’
‘Sounds idyllic,’ my mother says, and I feel hot with shame. Jake’s childhood was the exact opposite of idyllic.
‘This trip to Italy.’ My father has no interest in small talk. ‘Who pays for it?’
‘Well, the record label is paying all our recording costs, and we have a sponsor who has rented the house for the summer.’
‘And why does Alice need to be there?’
‘She’s making a series of drawings of the band. Didn’t she tell you? She’s going to have an exhibition at the Robin Armstrong Gallery.’
‘Alice doesn’t communicate with her parents any more,’ my father says, refilling his glass.
I could protest but what would be the point? When I started at art school, I told myself I would ring home once a week. Then once a fortnight, before it slipped to every month. What happened, I think, is that with the space and distance to review my teenage years of repression and isolation, my parents morphed into caricatures: the tormenting bully, the muted wife. For the first time in my life I was away from them, I could be whoever I wanted to be, and the freedom was addictive. I didn’t want to be reminded of my home life, which became in my head a swirling underworld of doom; it suited me to live as if my parents didn’t exist.
‘Student life is pretty hectic,’ Jake says. ‘It doesn’t leave much time for anything else.’
‘Art school? Swanning around drawing some pretty nude model, you mean? I hardly think so. We wanted Alice to go to Oxford, but she didn’t have the brains.’
There’s a tense little moment of silence. It’s not so much what my father says but the scorn in his voice as he says it.
‘Alice has a real gift. Perhaps you don’t know of Robin Armstrong, but he’s a big deal in the art world. I would have thought you’d be proud of her.’
My mother looks down at her plate of food; she’s hardly touched it, and her hands are fluttering around her knife and fork as if she’s forgotten how to use them. Inside me now is just one burning intention. I will never be like her.
We all watch my father draining and refilling his glass. His greed, his selfishness, his sad, old-fashioned patriarchy: it makes me feel ashamed.
‘I’m sure Jacob would like another glass of wine,’ I say, and my father looks at me in disgust. But he picks up the bottle and empties the rest of it into Jake’s glass.
‘I’m not sure we approve of Alice spending her summer in Italy. She should live here and get a job like everyone else.’
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Jake says. ‘Alice is being commissioned to do a show, and for that she needs to be in Italy, working on her drawings of the band.’
‘A vanity project, that’s all this is. I don’t want Alice hanging around some band with a dubious lifestyle. Don’t think I don’t know what you lot get up to. She’s far too young.’
I would speak, but the threat of tears keeps me quiet, and I will not cry in front of my father. My mother and I are frustrating victims; we don’t react. What happens is that my father’s scornful put-downs escalate; he needles away at us, childlike in his quest for victory.
‘I think you might be surprised by how hard-working we are.’ Jake’s voice is soft, polite, but I know without looking at him that inside he is clenched with anger.
‘Hah!’ My father takes a sip of his wine. Jake, I notice, hasn’t touched his. I understand the rebellion.
‘What is it, if you don’t mind me asking, that you object to? Alice is being paid for her work. This commission will earn her far more money than a summer job washing dishes or whatever else you had in mind.’
‘I object,’ the word imbued with hostility, viciousness, the way only my father can, ‘to all of it. Our daughter is nineteen. We don’t want her spending a summer with your lot, picking up all your habits. Drugs, free love, whatever else it is you’re into.’
‘It’s not up to you,’ I say, pushing my plate away and standing up.
‘I think you’ll find it is for as long as this is your home.’
The moment erupts.
‘I don’t want it,’ I say. ‘I don’t want this home.’
‘If I were you, daughter of mine, I would take that back right now.’
We stare at each other, my father and I, with our matching masks of rage. Why, on the one day when it mattered to me, could he not have behaved? Hate does not have enough bite for how he makes me feel.
‘No. I won’t take it back. Because I meant it.’
‘Then get out. Go on, get out right now.’
My father’s face, always flushed, has turned an alarming shade. Purple madder would be the closest; I used it in Gordon King’s class last week.
‘Fine,’ I say, and now Jake is standing up too. ‘I just need my passport.’
I’ve already spied it on the dresser. I’m wondering if I should make a dash for it, just in case. But my father saves me the trouble. He shoves back his chair, a screech of metal across parquet, picks up the passport and hurls it at my face. The corner catches me just beneath my eye, and the shock of it, more than the pain, and the absolute humiliation, makes me cry, an unguarded, instantaneous reaction.
‘For God’s sake.’ Jake stoops to pick up the passport, then wraps his arm around my shoulders. ‘Let’s just go.’
My father says, ‘You’re going to have to choose between your family and this inappropriate love affair of yours, which, mark my words, you will come to regret.’
I look right into his eyes while the anger coruscates inside me like fuel. I know the answer, of course I do, but I’ll make him wait for it. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six … Mentally I’m counting down until I say the words that will make my family life implode.
‘In that case, I choose Jake.’