Chapter 36 #2
He came toward her again, as if he couldn’t help himself.
‘Yes. You should go to Sevenstones.’ He kissed her breast gently, licking and nibbling at it, then smoothed his hands over her stomach and waist. ‘It’s easy to get to.
There’s a bus to the nearest village now they’ve shut the station.
You could walk from there. Across the fields, even.
’ He was kissing her neck, her shoulder, her lips.
‘The house – it’s in a stone circle. Right in the middle.
They think it’s older than Stonehenge. They don’t know.
But it’s special. It’s deep, deep time, the land there. ’
Deep time.
He was standing up now and looking down at her with a strange expression; as if it was painful to see her, as if he didn’t want to be there.
Alice was sure, despite his lips on hers, despite his expression, his need for her, hers for him, that he was slipping away from her, that something was not right.
She could not believe this was how it was, when only five minutes before they had been closer than a closed shell.
She could smell him, smell her, smell the scent of sex in the room.
Outside, the thudding of the ball and the mitt continued.
‘You could go,’ he said, and he hesitated. ‘You should go.’
Alice sat up, her knees under her chin, the sheet over her legs.
‘I want to go. For Teddy.’ He watched her as he pulled his shirt over his head, and in the split-second his face was out of view she blinked, the heavy weight of grief making her eyelids feel like they were cast in lead.
‘And – and I tried to tell her story, even if just to myself. So someone had heard her. I had this feeling she’d die without anyone remembering her as she was.
And she seemed – she seems so remarkable to me. ’
Tom covered his eyes briefly with his hands, and Alice realized what she’d said. ‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said. ‘I keep forgetting. She’s your mother.’
‘But she wasn’t, not really.’
The others, the ghosts in the room with them: Alice wanted them all to leave.
She wanted to draw Tom toward her, climb on to him, sink down on to him, feel him inside her again.
And these other people, they were all still there.
He began looking around, making sure he’d left nothing behind.
She watched him. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know what I can do. I’ll try to go to see her again. I should go back home. Talk to my dad. I don’t know if he knows.’ He clasped his face in his hands and rubbed it, then stood up. ‘You’re right. I thought perhaps it’d be best like this.’
‘Yes.’ Alice was taken aback by the swiftness of the end of it, but she said, ‘Hey. I don’t think you should see her again. She doesn’t really know who you are. She won’t remember you. It’ll hurt –’
‘I wouldn’t hurt her,’ he said, almost angrily.
‘You,’ she said quietly. ‘I meant you, Tom. I don’t want anyone to hurt you.’
It was almost too hard to say. Her throat hurt.
‘Yes,’ he said, and his face was blank, his eyes fixed on her, haunted, heavy.
‘When you go to England, let me know.’ He stood up from the bed, wrote the address down on a scrap of paper and handed it to her.
‘The key is under the stone to the right of the front door. You’ll remember that, won’t you? ’
Alice nodded, fighting back tears. ‘Of course.’
‘Listen, Alice –’
‘Call me Allie,’ she said, ‘I love it when you call me Allie.’ She tried to sound jaunty, though her mouth was dry and she wanted to cry.
Celia – don’t go, Celia –
‘Allie,’ he said, and it was like a breath of fresh wind in the airless room. ‘Allie, I think I should find somewhere else to stay.’
‘Sure,’ she said, nodding.
‘My job’s the other side of the city. I thought I might see if there’s somewhere I can rent uptown. Laura has space. I should just move in there.’
‘You should,’ she said, biting her lip, hating how fast this was, and yet nodding in agreement. ‘Stay in touch, won’t you?’
His eyes opened as if she’d slapped him, and then he caught her hand and pressed it against her heart. She felt it, warm, felt her heart beating underneath it, felt something pass between them.
‘I don’t want to cause you any trouble,’ he said. ‘You’re married, Allie. I’ll leave my new address at the bookstore, so you’ll know where to find me.’ He jangled his hands in his jeans. ‘Oh –’ He pulled something out of his pocket. ‘Oh, no.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Allie – she gave me something for you. I can’t believe I forgot. I can’t believe it. You left it behind, don’t you remember? The package she gave you, with the letters.’
Alice looked at the small packet he was holding in his hand, brown paper, with string wound round and round it, and she thought of The Sound of Music , and smiled, a sweet, piercing sadness in her heart.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She felt hollowed out, but something shifted inside her, feeling hopeful too. The bulk of it sat in the palm of her hand. She raised it up and down. ‘I’ll open it later.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Do you –’ He stopped. ‘Do you want to go and get some breakfast, or a coffee? I have to go to work –’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I’m working at the store today. I’ll grab some breakfast later.’
‘Of course,’ Tom said, buttoning up his shirt. ‘That’s – okay, then.’ He stared at her as if he didn’t recognize her. Then he paused at the door. ‘Goodbye, Allie.’
‘Oh. Sure. Bye, Tom. Thanks,’ Alice said brightly, as if she’d just sold him a poster.
He left without saying another word. She heard him going down the stairs, the bang of the front door.
The moment he was gone, Alice pulled apart the string bow, tore open the paper. There was a letter, folded around something.
Dear Allie
I’ve been collecting these this past year to mark your sixteenth.
I’ve been saving. I borrowed from the bank to buy the orchards from Wilder, and it hasn’t done so well, but these are my own savings, built up bit by bit since the day you were born, for you.
I don’t know when you’ll need this money.
But one day, you might. And one day, I might not be here.
Things are not good with me at the moment, and I don’t know what the future holds.
I wanted to tell you I trust you with this money.
And the animals are to look after you. And Allie, finally, I wanted to tell you that you are beautiful, and perfect, and clever, and extraordinary, and you must not let life tell you otherwise.
Carry on, carry on being wild and passionate and clever and impulsive.
Move into the light, for it is where the best decisions are made and remember –
You didn’t come this far just to come this far.
I am seeing you today, at Mackie’s, for our sundae. I think it will be the end for me. I can’t see a way. I will leave this with Teddy, and tell you to make friends with her. She has a strange way of telling me what I need to hear when I need to hear it. She needs friends. We all do.
Your loving father,
Bob Jansen
Inside was a thousand dollars, and several china animals.
Two ponies, one grazing, one whinnying. Two dogs, a tiny sausage dog and a wolfhound, gambolling in different poses.
Two red squirrels, chewing ears of corn.
One otter, on its back, paws folded, face smiling in ecstasy.
And another raven, its dark eyes shining. It stared at Allie.
Alice let her gaze slide over all of them, so still apart from her eyes moving that she realized after a while she was stiff.
She picked up the roll of cash and stood up, pulling the T-shirt off again so she was naked, stretching up, reaching out, her body illuminated by the morning sun.
The dollar bills fluttered slightly in the breeze from the window.
She turned back to look at the bed again. Treasures.
I love you , she said to herself. I love you. I love you. I love you.
She thought about the treasures on her windowsill in the room she shared with Jack.
All lined up against the grimy glass, waiting for her to take them someplace else.
Under the bed she kept the headscarves in which she’d wrapped the treasures when she left Orchard and a drawstring bag she’d made last winter.
Inside the bag were little scraps of cloth she’d collected here and there, making dresses, alterations for friends.
Curtis’s gingham uniform, a discarded orange-and-red floral headscarf of Ginger’s, one of Merlin’s cheesecloth kaftans, a Liberty cotton handkerchief she’d stolen from Tom early on and, most recently, a pair of half-burned curtains after she and Callie set fire to them by accident one evening.
Her mementoes of her time at St Mark’s Place.
Like Maria in The Sound of Music . She thought her dad would have enjoyed that, repurposing them to house her treasures.
Soon, she told herself, there’ll be a place where I can unwrap them once and for all, putting them out where I’m going to stay. One day soon. But I have to get there first.
She lay down on the bed, surrounded by the treasures, looking out at the pale June New York morning.