Then Alice
Then
Alice
It is a cold night in late January when the phone call comes in. Jake and I are midway through a black and white thriller on BBC2 called The Deadly Affair .
‘Leave it,’ Jake says when I start to get up from the sofa. ‘They can call back.’
The phone rings on and on. It stops, then starts again ten seconds later.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Jake says, crossing the room and snatching up the phone.
As soon as he realises who the caller is, Jake turns his back on me. He is silent, listening to the voice on the other end of phone.
‘I see,’ he says.
He talks only occasionally and I sit on the sofa, ignoring the television, trying to make sense of this one-sided conversation.
‘No, I can’t do that.’
‘Why don’t you go if you care so much?’
‘I don’t owe her anything.’
‘All right, I’ll think about it. But, believe me, I’m not going to change my mind.’
His voice crescendos on this last line, he slams the phone down and throws himself out of the room without another word.
In the kitchen I find Jake pouring whisky into a wine glass, he fills it to the brim. I see how his hands shake as he puts the glass to his lips and swallows down an inch or two of liquid.
He puts the glass down on the table; he still hasn’t looked at me.
‘What’s happened?’
‘My grandmother died yesterday. My mum wants me to go to the funeral.’
‘Isn’t she going?’
He shakes his head, meets my eye for the first time.
‘She’s not coming back from Canada. The flights home are too expensive.’
‘I’d go with you if you wanted.’
‘I am not going anywhere near that bloody hellhole. Why should I?’
Standing a few feet apart, divided by our little Formica table, I can see that his whole body is shaking, with anger or fear.
I think of his confessions at Christmas, the childhood beatings, being locked out of the house on a freezing winter’s night a bit like this one. I walk around the table and wrap my arms around his waist. He allows me to hold him for a few seconds before he wrenches away and I watch him pacing around the kitchen in tiny restricted circles. He picks up his glass and downs the whisky in three or four gulps.
‘Talk to me, Jake.’
He sits down at the table, body curved away from me, face in hands, a cliché of despair.
‘There’s nothing to say,’ he says and he fills up his glass again, though he lets it rest untouched on the table. ‘Nothing.’
Thoughts and ideas run through my brain but I’m scared to mention them. I am thinking, doesn’t this mean it’s over? Both grandparents dead, Jake freed from his childhood. What if he went back to that house as an adult with his lover, with his child soon to be born, and faced the ancient horrors that still haunt his dreams, those quiet unguarded moments of sorrow?
‘Let’s watch the rest of the film.’
He picks up his glass and holds out a hand to me and we return to the sofa, but it isn’t the same. Jake might be watching the screen but I know he sees nothing but his past.
Grimness settles upon Jake like a cloud of dust. He is silent, preoccupied, haunted. The morning after the phone call, he says not one word to me. We shower and dress in silence as if we are flatmates and not lovers and I see that the effort of acknowledging me is more than he can manage.
We leave the flat together and when I walk towards Bar Italia, he says: ‘I’m not going to bother with coffee today. You go.’
He reaches into his pocket and hands me a pound note for my breakfast, but I shake my head.
‘I won’t bother either.’
‘I’ll see you later,’ he says. Then, ‘Sorry.’
I stand in the street watching him walk away, examining the stoop of his shoulders, his laboured gait. I don’t know what to do.
At college, I try talking to Rick about it.
‘He seems so down. One phone call and he’s like a different person. I can’t get any sense out of him.’
‘Maybe it’s brought everything back. He probably just needs space, Al.’
At lunchtime, I go shopping for our supper. Jake always cooks, but I think that tonight I will surprise him. I will make my mother’s chicken, mushroom and courgette casserole, the one fail-safe dish she taught me.
Jake isn’t in the flat when I arrive back in the late afternoon and I miss walking in to the strumming of his guitar or the blast of The Rolling Stones or Fleetwood Mac from the record player. But I’m contented enough as I begin to prepare the casserole, rolling chicken thighs and drumsticks into a plate of seasoned flour. Frying mushrooms, onions and courgettes into a soft, sticky mush, then browning the chicken pieces.
By eight the casserole is ready and Jake still hasn’t come home. I turn the oven down to its lowest setting and then I pace around the sitting room, too stressed to listen to music or read or draw or do anything except stare out at the street below, my whole being waiting for the sound of his key in the door.
In desperation I ring Rick and catch him on his way out to meet Tom at The Coach and Horses.
‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘If Jake’s there ask him to ring me. I am going out of my mind. Tell him I’ve cooked.’
‘Alice, my love,’ the unexpressed laughter in Rick’s voice soothes me. ‘Do you think you might be overreacting just a teensy bit? You are nineteen not forty. So what if Jake wants to go out and get smashed?’
‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘I know you’re right. But Rick—’
I catch him just before he hangs up.
‘Phone me if he’s not in the pub. Please?’
At a quarter to nine I turn the oven off and take out the casserole. I have no appetite for this greasy pale-grey sludge which used to be my favourite thing to eat not so long ago. I return to the sitting room and resume my wait, an unopened book on the sofa beside me, the television on with the sound turned low.
Rick calls at ten. He’s been at The Coach and Horses and now he’s in the French House and there is no sign of Jake.
‘He was here with Eddie earlier, they’ve probably gone on somewhere else. Maybe they went to get some food.’
‘Why hasn’t he called me?’
We are interrupted by the beeps as Rick’s money runs out.
I sit in darkness for a while, the street lamps below throwing occasional stripes of light across the brown carpet. Jake is out getting drunk with his oldest friend, the one person who knows the truth about his childhood. There is no reason for me to worry.
Why then as I lie in bed is my chest tight, my mind a blizzard of fear and anxiety? Beneath the romance and the passion and the euphoria of our love, there has always been this stubborn, inextinguishable truth. The man I love once tried to take his own life. I live in dread of that ever happening again.