Alice sailed down in the bubble lift, crossed the grandiose foyer and walked out into the cloudy morning. There was the smell of river and the dampness of autumn in the air. The faces of people walking towards her had acquired extra definition, she could read the words on the sides of buses crawling over Blackfriars Bridge. All her senses were heightened and sharpened with the intensity of anticipation. She had been insulated by her own circumspection, but now she was going into the unknown.
Becky was waiting. Her legs were hooked round a bar stool made of tortured metal, there was a drink on the table beside her and her head was bent over the Evening Standard. Wings of smooth hair swung forward to curtain her face and then she looked up and saw Alice. ‘How did it go? No, I can see. You’re the polar queen. You’re really going? My God, Al, you are. C’mon, let’s drink to it.’
Alice laughed. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. ‘I’m going,’ she said faintly. ‘I hardly know how it’s happened, but I am.’
‘How long?’
‘Five months. The summer field season. I’ll be leaving at the end of October and I’ll be back in March.’
A drink materialised beside her. A long glass, ice, jaunty coloured straw. She took a long suck and almost choked with the intensity of the taste. Alcohol immediately fumed in her head.
Becky was wearing a khaki combat top with pockets and buttons and epaulettes, but the fabric was contradictory slippery satin. The way the light fell on it and reflected different sumptuous colours caught Alice’s eye. Pete used to talk about colour, she remembered, as if it were food or sex.
Look at this carmine, look at this crocus-yellow. Don’t you want to eat it? Don’t you want to lick it?
‘Alice? Are you okay?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just getting used to the idea.’
‘So let’s talk about it. Tell me all.’ Becky’s appetite for other people’s lives was as keen as for her own.
Alice told her about Richard Shoesmith, and the list of names, and the sharing of work, and the tasks she would have to accomplish before she could leave. All the time she was reminding herself that she was cutting loose from everything she knew and heading for a place on which she had always, from her earliest memories, deliberately turned her back.
Is this how it happens, she wondered, in other people’s lives? The moving on and the changing and the randomness that never seemed to affect her, only the people she knew? And then a series of events and coincidences link together and what was impossible at one moment becomes inevitable in the next?
‘What about the house?’ Becky was asking.
‘Oh, I’ll let it for this academic year,’ Alice improvised. ‘Maybe I’ll travel for a couple of months on the way back. It would be a shame not to, wouldn’t it? I’ve never been to South America.’
Becky was looking at her. ‘What about Pete?’
‘There’s nothing much to tell. He moved out.’
‘Is that it?’
While Margaret was still dangerously ill, Alice stayed at the house on Boar’s Hill. Pete telephoned again and again, and when she wouldn’t speak to him he turned up unannounced at her office one afternoon. She looked up from her desk to see him in the doorway – or a more than usually unshaven, crumpled, wild-haired version of him. He was carrying a bunch of florists’ roses, dark-red.
‘Pete, don’t do this.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘You won’t see me, you won’t talk to me. You won’t let me explain what happened.’
‘I don’t think what I saw needs any explaining, does it?’
He looked around, then thrust the flowers in the jug she used for watering her pot plants. He slumped down on the only spare chair and put his head in his hands. His hair stuck up in spikes, as if he had been running his fingers through it in steady desperation. Of course Pete would turn rejection in love into a piece of performance art. He wouldn’t be shaving, on principle, or eating or sleeping.
‘I can’t sleep. I’ve lost my appetite. Alice, it isn’t funny. Why are you so fucking empirical about everything? I love you and I miss you, that’s all that matters. I want you to come home.’
‘Pete. I came to your studio and found you engaged in oral sex with one of your students. The same one I saw you on the river with, and the one you were kissing at our party. On the other hand Harry saw you in a pub in Bicester, kissing someone entirely different…’
‘What? I don’t think I’ve been anywhere near bloody Bicester in ten years.’
‘…I am empirical, if you mean that I base my reaction to you on the results of observation. How else am I supposed to respond to the evidence? “Oh, look, there’s Peter with Georgia. What he’s doing actually proves how much he loves me.”’
‘I can’t bear it when you’re sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘It doesn’t really matter any more what you can and can’t bear about me.’
‘Alice please.’ He got up again and came to her. He put his arms round her and tried to draw her against him. He cupped the back of her head in his hand and rubbed her hair. It would have been very easy, knowing and missing the warmth and the smell of him as she did, to give way and bury her face in his shoulder and pretend that she believed him. But a pretence was what it would have been, and Alice preferred meagre facts to the most colourful and persuasive elaborations on the truth.
‘I want you to move out. I am going to stay at my parents’ house until you do. You’ve got time to find somewhere else, but that’s what I want you to do.’
His face changed.
Under the veneer of his remorse there had been confidence, because he had assumed that he would be able to win her round. Realising this made her feel still more dismal. If he thought that, it was obvious that Pete had never really known her properly. They had shared a bed and made a home and a life together, and still she might as well have been a stranger, or Georgia, or the woman in the pub. It made her want to cry, but she couldn’t bear to give way to that impulse either. She looked steadily back at him, dry-eyed.
‘I see,’ he said at last.
To do him credit, he didn’t argue any more then. And he packed his belongings and moved out of the house within two days. He left a note for her on the kitchen table, weighted at one corner by the teapot still half-full of cold tea. The note said that he loved her even if he had a strange way of showing it and that as far as he was concerned this wasn’t the end of things between them. Alice crumpled the single sheet of paper into a ball and threw it into the kitchen bin.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she told Becky.
‘I’m sorry, darling. He made you happy, you know. You were happy all this year. You laughed all the time and you didn’t take your responsibilities as seriously
