The Truants, page 23
Unnerved and elated by the drilling focus of her eyes, by the proximity of her, I rambled a bit about my idea: while Roger Ackroyd was the famous example of an unreliable narrator, my main focus would be Absent in the Spring, the tragic romance that Christie wrote under a pseudonym. ‘Tell me if I’m screwing this up,’ I asked.
‘Go on,’ said Lorna, her face impassive.
I sat up a little straighter to make my point. When I’d read the romance, the narrator had reminded me so powerfully of my own mother that I had come out in goosebumps. This perfect middle-class housewife who has been emotionally deluding herself all her life. The slow but masterful reveal as the reader begins to see between the lines: that she is, in fact, despised by her children and only tolerated by her husband, who for a long time has been in love with another woman. Her self-deception makes her version of events unreliable.
‘Good,’ said Lorna, sipping at her wine. ‘I like that a lot.’
‘But it’s as far as I’ve got,’ I admitted, sitting back. ‘I need at least one more text.’
‘Sure,’ said Lorna, moving her hips to start the hammock swinging again. ‘And based on what you just said – there’s one obvious choice.’
We rocked for a few moments in silence. ‘Not with you, I’m afraid.’
‘Come on, Jess,’ said Lorna. ‘You are rusty… Unreliable narrators. What year was Roger Ackroyd published?’
‘Um…’
‘Nineteen twenty-six. What else happened that year?’
‘Well… That was the year she disappeared.’
‘Right. And if you remember, some people thought her disappearance was an elaborate publicity stunt to boost sales of Ackroyd. Now, Absent in the Spring. Written twenty years later, in a white heat. It took her just three days to complete, cover to cover. Later she referred to it as the one book that satisfied her completely – the book she always wanted to write. Why? The protagonist wasn’t a straight portrait of Agatha – but she did have striking similarities. She was also a woman who went missing for several days … and while lost, she found the truth. And like Agatha, after her disappearance – during which she saw everything for what it was, suddenly understood it all, her self-delusion and her emotional shortcomings – she came back to “real life” and put the blinkers on again. Plunged herself back into a life of self-deception. Just as Agatha, after Archie left, after her heart had been smashed up, became increasingly private – pathologically so.’
‘What you’re saying…’ I said slowly ‘…is that Christie herself is an unreliable narrator?’
‘Bingo,’ said Lorna, her eyes shining. ‘The woman who, after nineteen twenty-six, could never quite look herself in the eye. Who dodged her own heartbreak for the rest of her life. Which means that the perfect final text to put in your essay…’ Lorna trailed off, looking at me expectantly.
‘Is her autobiography?’
‘Excellent.’ Lorna smiled, took another sip of wine and sat back in the hammock. ‘I knew there was a reason you were my favourite student. A-plus-starred or whatever it is you get these days.’
I grinned and drained my glass. No, I wouldn’t be alone next term, nor for the rest of these three years – because beyond the sadness and regret that trailed Alec’s ghost, the lost friendships, Lorna would be there.
Just then the thunder started: low, deep growls, very distant, like a beast turning in its sleep.
‘We should go inside,’ said Lorna. ‘Looks like it will be quite a show.’
The wind kicked up another few notches, rattling the spoons in the bowls. The ground felt strange after the hammock – like I was still swaying – and my head began to spin. How many glasses of wine had I had?
More rumbles, closer now. A glass fell over and began to roll around the table. Lorna caught it with one hand, unsmiling. ‘Help me clear, will you?’
I helped her gather plates. Her mood seemed to have changed, become a little edgy.
‘Fine to be up here in a storm, is it?’ I asked, a little nervously. ‘I mean, I presume there’s a lightning conductor or something?’
‘Sure,’ she said, briskly. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
We hadn’t long settled in the living room – fifteen minutes maybe, I remember we had started a game of backgammon and were arguing about whether you could stack more than five counters on one spike – when there was a loud banging noise. At first I thought it was the storm – perhaps the wind buffeting a shutter – but then there was more banging and the sound of a voice.
‘PROF … PROFFFFFF!’
‘Christ, that’s Nino,’ said Lorna, standing up quickly. ‘What the hell’s he doing out in this?’ More banging, the sound of some disgraceful swearing in Italian.
Lorna shot the bolt and Nino practically fell inside.
‘Stupid fucking turista,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I told him not to go off the path. Just take a piss in the sea! Who cares if anyone sees?’
‘What happened?’ asked Lorna quickly.
Nino said something rapidly in Italian that I didn’t catch. Before he’d finished speaking she was moving purposefully to the kitchen.
‘How big is he?’ she called out briskly. I heard the fridge door open.
‘Quite heavy,’ said Nino. ‘Maybe one hundred kilos.’
‘When?’
Nino checked his watch. ‘Just under twenty minutes ago. I ran back.’
‘Is he panicking? If he’s panicking, it will be worse.’
‘He’s not exactly happy.’
‘You’ll have to take me there, then run for more help.’
I could hear her rummaging in the fridge, the clinking of bottles. I stared at Nino. ‘What’s going on?’
He scowled and shook his head and called out a few more things to Lorna in Italian.
She came back into the living room with what appeared to be a medical kit. Unzipping it quickly on the coffee table, she fingered a syringe and some tiny bottles, holding each one briefly up to the light. Vials, I thought in astonishment.
‘Can someone tell me what’s going on?’
‘Snake bite,’ said Lorna shortly. ‘A hiker. On the footpath. Need to get there quickly.’
I felt something jump in my chest. A thrill of fear, and something else. Excitement perhaps. Purpose. ‘Can I help?’
‘Yes, you can,’ said Lorna, slipping the bottles back under their elastic holdings. ‘Torches and waterproofs in the hall. If the storm breaks before the Guardia arrives it’s going to be very wet and very dark out there.’
‘It will break,’ said Nino bitterly. ‘And everyone will say I am a shit guide and I shouldn’t take them in a storm. But we had plenty of time, I was on schedule—’
‘Them?’ interrupted Lorna quickly.
‘Yes,’ said Nino. ‘A girl too. La figlia. Maybe twelve or thirteen. Molto bella. But stupid. Kept wanting to stop and take photos on her phone. I was telling her, we need to move. I know the island, I know the weather. Now look. She is crying on the side of a cliff and her father has poison climbing his leg.’
Lorna zipped the bag and stood up.
She turned to me. ‘Jess, are you in?’
I didn’t hesitate. ‘Of course.’
‘Let’s get a fucking move on then.’
33
Even though it was only late afternoon the storm clouds had now almost completely blotted out any light. It could have been eight or nine o’clock at night. As we came into the ghost village, there was another rumble, directly above. A second later a jagged streak of lightning, impossibly dramatic, cracked the sky.
‘We should take cover,’ said Nino nervously.
‘We don’t have time,’ said Lorna, not breaking stride. ‘Keep moving. And watch your feet, for God’s sake.’
More lightning, sheet this time: the world flashing on and off.
‘No one should be walking in this,’ muttered Nino. But he didn’t turn back, and in fact quickened his step. We both did. It was impossible not to obey Lorna in this mood. I wouldn’t have been surprised if just then all the ghosts in the village rose up to follow her.
We were through the ruins and onto the grassy slope when there was a loud clap, an abrupt silence. Then a hissing noise, like the sound between radio channels.
A moment later I felt it on my head and shoulders. The rain had started.
At some point during that walk down – were we still on the grassy slope, or was it later when we had hit the cliff path? – I remember Lorna turning to look at me. Her hair darkened and plastered down by her cheeks, her eyelashes spiked with rain, face serious with purpose, but alight, alight, alight and saying, ‘This is it, Jess. This is living. This.’
But when I think about it, as vivid as it seems, that memory – so vivid that I could reach out and touch her cold, wet cheeks, trace the pattern the rain was making down them, trembling on the bow of her upper lip – I think it must have been a dream, because she couldn’t have said that. Not the real-life Lorna.
We broke into single file as we hit the cliff path. Nino first, his head pitched low against the rain like a bull about to charge. Then Lorna. Then me.
I knew I shouldn’t look down at the sea but I did: cascading rain, white-flecked waves churning far below. After that I tried not to. The path was slippery. We had drunk quite a lot of wine. For God’s sake, don’t fall.
It felt like ages, but in reality they weren’t far along, not even halfway to the road. They were waiting just below the path, under a hanging rock. A middle-aged man lying on the ground, a girl crouching beside him.
He was huge, swarthy, barrel-chested, with blunt features made frightening by his grimace of pain. To one side of him, his daughter – with a narrow, white face and one of those elongated, prepubescent bodies, her legs so skinny they looked like they could never hold her up – was alternating between sobbing and talking shrilly to him in German. To the other, Nino was struggling to cut the bottom off the man’s trouser legs with the small scissors in his penknife. Someone – surely Nino, I couldn’t see how the girl would have managed it – had propped the man’s injured leg on a boulder.
They all looked up as we arrived, with varying shades of relief. ‘Are you a doctor?’ said the man in accented English. The bags under his eyes were enormous and dark.
Lorna smiled at this (‘I am, as it happens’) and with a few more very casual words of greeting – okay if I sit here? – and a nod to Nino, who turned and headed off to fetch the Guardia, she crouched down and unzipped the medical kit. Stabbing the needle quickly into one of the vials, she loaded it with clear liquid.
The girl looked at the syringe and gave a squeal of horror. Her father started talking to her rapidly in German, his voice low and tense.
Lorna looked past him and over at the girl. ‘Now you’re probably thinking what terrible luck for your dad to be bitten by a snake and to be caught in the storm,’ she said conversationally. ‘But if you think about it, what are the chances that someone with an antidote would be round the corner, ready to help? Now that’s what I call luck.’ She held the vial down low, so it was out of the girl’s eye-line, but I could see she was inverting it several times as she spoke, mixing the liquid with something already in the bottle so that it went cloudy. ‘That’s an impressive walk you’ve done today, by the way.’
The girl sniffed and held back her tears and I saw her father’s face relax a bit. I glanced at Lorna. Clever, I thought.
She was still chatting away as she looked at his ankle, asking me to point the torch. I could see the red swelling on his upper foot with two tiny dots in the centre like someone had made marks with a purple felt-tip pen. Lorna seemed unfazed, asking if he had any allergies. ‘Pussycats, ponies, penicillin?’ Take a moment, she was saying. There’s no rush. This is important. ‘Nino gave you lunch in the ghost village, did he? I bet he told you he’d caught the rabbit he cooked for lunch? Actually he gets them from the freezer in the supermarket down at the port.’
I was just thinking that Lorna would have made a wonderful doctor – calm, without my mother’s chilliness – when I was surprised to see that her hand, poised with the loaded syringe in it, had begun to tremble. Looking at her face, I saw it break – anxiety, fear. Something starker, even.
Then she stabbed the needle, depressing the syringe.
And I thought, So you are human after all.
34
‘Use my sink. There won’t be any water downstairs,’ said Lorna, coming out of her bedroom and tossing me a towel. She was rubbing her hair with her own. ‘I’ll get us drinks.’
Her bedroom was like mine but bigger, with the same raw walls and floors. A large bed made up with white sheets, a canary-coloured dressing table with a mirror. I stumbled through into the bathroom, splashing my trembling limbs with hot water and rubbing myself dry as best I could. The open tap gave out a long, plaintive note and my face in the mirror looked wild, my eyes bloodshot from the cold and rain, my teeth stained red from the wine we had been drinking, what seemed like an aeon ago. It had taken another hour and a half for the Guardia Costiera to arrive, wearing hi-vis jackets and carrying a stretcher, the beams of their headlamps slicing through the rain. Nino had left with them, still insisting on his experience as a walking guide.
I don’t know what made me stop to look, but as I walked back through her bedroom I glanced at her dressing table again. Paused, took a few steps closer.
I know that object, I thought, I really know it. And yet I’d never seen it before. A little bone china statuette of a rearing horse, gold detailing on its mane and tail.
I stared at it, my head whirling. Familiar, and yet not. I could have sworn…
And then it came to me, with complete clarity.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Maybe only minutes but it seemed like an age. My brain felt like a pinball machine in which all the little balls had been released at once. A coincidence. It had to be a coincidence. Little china statues of rearing horses, how clichéd – there must be millions of them in the world.
But the detail, exactly as he’d described: the gold paint on the mane and eyes, the china so translucent it looked almost blue. I was back in the old estate as he told me the story of his brother sweeping everything from his mother’s dresser out the window to the terrace below. I was back with Alec, the mist rolling over the grass, the drum of wings as the pigeon burst noisily out of the ruin, his laughing eyes.
I bent down in front of the figurine, picked it up with a slightly shaking hand, and held it to the lamplight, half-expecting to see cracks running through it from where it had been glued back together. No cracks, although it looked old enough – flecks of the gold-leaf had worn off, one of the eyes was almost blind. A coincidence, surely. A cruel one. I put it down on the dressing table and turned to go back to Lorna.
I was halfway out of the bedroom before it struck me.
The colour of the dressing table.
Alec had said his mother’s was painted yellow, too.
‘When was he here?’
Lorna was looking through the open terrace doors at the rain. She turned, wearing a puzzled smile. ‘When was who here?’
‘Your horse, the dressing table…’ The words rolled from my mouth like stones.
Her face suddenly lost expression. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t understand.’
‘That way you roll cigarettes … exactly as he did, those two taps at the base of the hand. I thought everything was reminding me of him, that I was seeing ghosts. But you picked it up off him, didn’t you?’ I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine at all. The ragazzo Nino was asking you about when we arrived … ‘Alec has been here to the island, hasn’t he? He’s been in your bed too. Lying in your sheets, looking at that little horse…’ My legs were trembling. I slumped down into a chair, my voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Hasn’t he?’
I opened my mouth as if to laugh, realised that the gurgling feeling coming up through my throat was hysteria, and shut it again.
For a long while, Lorna didn’t say anything. She stood staring out at the storm, her face very pale and still. Come on, I thought. Come on. Say something. Anything to stop this grotesque scenario unfolding in my head. Help me back to what life was a few minutes before, grief-stricken but orderly.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what story he told you, Jess. I really don’t. But, yes. Alec was here. He was here with me.’
And it was done. A bright knife plunged deep into my soul. People talk a lot about heartbreak. Losing Alec was that; the blood that came out between my legs was that. But soul-break? This was a different feeling altogether. More like madness. Like all those rules you took for granted, like gravity, or breathing, or the meaning of a smile, had evaporated. Everything, now, was in play.
Lorna was watching my face with concern. ‘Alec isn’t… He isn’t … who you think he is.’
‘Wasn’t?’ I said bitterly.
‘Isn’t,’ insisted Lorna. My head reeled again and for a wild, wild moment I thought: She’s going to say he’s alive. That the whole funeral had been some sick practical joke. There was no body in the coffin. That he was still here on the island, somewhere, under these stormy skies.
‘Jess,’ she said gently. ‘The only Alec I care about is the one still living in your head.’
‘Please.’ Suddenly it was harder for me to breathe, like we were at very high altitude. ‘No clever words. Just give me the facts.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Okay. Ask me anything you like.’
More lightning: sheet this time, the blackness of the night sky stuttering. ‘When did it start?’
‘We met at the beginning of autumn term, before I met you. A drinks party for post-grads with fellowships, at Jon the Don’s,’ said Lorna.
‘Straight away then?’ I felt my legs shaking. That strange itchiness behind my eyes.
Lorna bit her lip, looked away. ‘The first time … Jess, you saw us.’
‘No.’ I shook my head, not wanting to see. But too late. A flash of myself running, Nina Simone’s voice loud and throaty in my ears. His body through the window of the hearse. A white hand clasped against the window, the pale underarm of a redhead.
