Читать книгу The Girl in the Shadows - Katherine Debona, Katherine Debona - Страница 12

Chapter 5

Alice

Evening was settling on the city and the streets were busy with people easing themselves out of work and into the weekend. The bar opposite her apartment was filling up. Alice’s image reflected back from a dozen pairs of sunglasses as she passed the tables outside.

The barman raised his head as she walked towards him.

‘Oui?’ he asked, setting down the glass he was pretending to polish.

‘Avez-vous une bouteille de champagne?’

‘Champagne?’

‘Oui, champagne. Je suis censé célébrer.’

‘You’re supposed to be celebrating?’

Alice pulled her hair away from her neck with one hand and fanned her face with the other. ‘I don’t suppose you have any Bollinger?’

‘That’s an expensive bottle for someone celebrating alone.’

Alice shrugged, searching the wall of bottles behind the bar. ‘My father’s buying.’

‘Your father?’ The barman looked beyond Alice to the street outside.

‘Oh don’t worry, he’s not here, but I feel that I should include him in this in some way. After all, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.’

‘And why are you here, in Paris? A beautiful young woman shouldn’t be alone in Paris.’

Alice met his eye, half a smile on her lips. ‘Just the champagne, please.’

The barman watched her for a moment then stood. ‘Okay, but we only have Laurent-Perrier. Is that good?’

‘Absolutely,’ she replied. ‘Any chance I can borrow a glass as well?’

***

Alice opened the window, pushing aside the wooden shutters and allowing the warmth of the air to seep into the dusty room. She dangled her legs over the lip of the windowsill, sneaking bare toes in between iron railings that saved her from a four-storey fall to the pavement below. Reaching back into the room she picked up her glass of champagne, raising it in mock toast before taking a long sip. The text she had received earlier from her friend Emily still circled her mind.

You got a first!!! I always knew you could do it. Your dad would be so proud. Hope the search is going well. Call me x

Would her father be proud of her if he knew she had spent the day searching for clues to uncover the lies he’d told? Would he congratulate her as she looked into the face of every middle-aged woman she passed, hoping to miraculously bump into her mother? Or would he sigh and stroke his beard, leaving the room without uttering a word?

She scrolled through her other messages, most of which were from Stefan, each of them near identical. They were all about how he was missing her, how she was hurting him, how he was beside himself all alone. Nothing about her, asking why she was in Paris and not on her way to Africa as planned. Did it ever occur to him that once, just once, life might be about something other than him?

Her fingertips found the chain around her neck, slipping down to the angel figurine that rested against her breastbone. It was one of the few gifts she had ever received from Stefan. He bought it for her after seeing a postcard of two cherubs and exclaiming that was what their daughter would look like. This had followed a particularly heated argument about his wife.

Not for the first time Alice had announced she wouldn’t see him any more, that she’d had enough of skulking in libraries and sneaking from his room in the early hours so as not to be caught by prying eyes. The fact his wife still lived in Stockholm, that their marriage was now merely one of convenience, did nothing to quell Stefan’s resolution that he could not be seen with another woman, let alone one he was supposed to be mentoring.

Alice’s father wasn’t the only one who had secrets. Stefan wasn’t technically a professor, rather a graduate teacher who was assisting Professor Mitchell, but still. It was against the rules and Alice didn’t do against the rules. At least, that’s what people were supposed to think.

To the outside world she was the girl who never put a foot wrong. She came home straight from school, got good grades, even joined the debate team and never questioned why. She didn’t have a boyfriend because her father considered it a distraction, but also none of the boys at school managed to catch her interest. Then she went to university and a whole new world opened up.

On a cold Tuesday morning at the end of her first term, Stefan stopped Alice as she was leaving a lecture and asked if she wanted to go for coffee in order to discuss that week’s essay.

Sitting opposite one another in the cramped café – his smooth, tanned hands curled around a cappuccino – he asked innocuous questions about the course and whether Alice had a preference for English or French literature. She told him that in fact Nabokov’s Lolita was her all-time favourite, whilst she imagined those fingers trailing down her spine.

‘I saw you the other day,’ he said, head bent forward and dark blonde hair falling over his brow. ‘In the faculty library.’

‘Oh?’ Alice replied, blowing into her tea.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Do what?’ Placing the cup on the table she met his gaze. Technically she had done nothing wrong, but the university frowned upon students swapping their work, said it only encouraged plagiarism. Alice knew that even if the other student chose to copy her essay, she could feign ignorance, claim she had no idea that’s what they wanted it for; but putting yourself under scrutiny wouldn’t be the smartest move.

He smiled. Alice smiled back.

‘You know, I could report you. Get you into all sorts of trouble.’

‘But you won’t.’ Resting her chin on her hand she noticed his eyes lingered on her mouth.

‘No, I won’t.’

Alice reached out her hand to steal a lump of sugar from the bowl between them, dipping it into his coffee and watching the slow spread of brown over white. Bringing it to her lips she sucked at the bitter juices followed by a kick of sweetness.

‘Where’s your room?’ she asked.

The angel necklace he gave her was from the shop opposite the library. It was his way of reeling Alice back in, reminding her that he was fully aware of her own dirty little secret. And she was powerless to resist. For all her common sense, despite everything her father had taught her, she couldn’t walk away from the one person who broke her heart every time they kissed. Every time he smiled, his face creasing against the pillow. Every time he whispered against her ear whilst they made love, hidden away from the world in his attic room.

Alice tried to convince herself it was nothing, just an affair. A clandestine affair that could be stopped at any time. She flicked through the hundreds of photographs on her phone, pausing at a closeup of his face in profile, a stolen moment during a lecture one morning. Her finger hovered over the delete button.

It had been over a fortnight now since they had spoken, nearly a month since they had lain encircling one another. Alice knew it would end when she left the city. She had promised her father it would end. His disapproval when he found out was almost as painful as learning of his diagnosis. Things changed in that moment and he began to distance himself, as if he were ashamed of her in some way.

***

‘You have to end it.’ Her father sat forward, allowed Alice to place another pillow behind him.

Roles reversed, she now the carer instead of the child. She knew how much he loathed being indebted to anyone, hated how the medication made him physically weak, especially when his mind was still raging.

‘Why?’

‘Because people are beginning to talk.’ He winced as he lay back, the pain that was never vocalised now etched all over his clean-shaven face. ‘It’s been going on for too long, Alice, and you deserve better.’

‘Define better.’ She couldn’t help it, toying with him even though she knew he was right, even though he was sick. She was so used to him fighting her battles alongside her that it irritated when he pointed out her mistakes.

‘Just because they’re no longer living together doesn’t mean there isn’t something between them. Don’t be the reason for ending a marriage.’

‘What would you know about marriage?’

‘More than you.’ His eyes closed and she understood the conversation to be over.

***

When he died part of her was desperate for Stefan, for the familiar comfort of him, but it was impossible to speak to someone with a ready-made family waiting back in Sweden whenever he wanted. And now? Now more than ever she yearned for space, a never-ending stream of space stretching out between them too far for him to claw her back to his bed. She avoided his calls, deleted his messages without listening to them – afraid at the fragility of her heart and what it would mean if she allowed herself to hear even one utterance, one exhalation of breath that she longed to feel against her skin.

***

Alice looked across the street to the bar. She didn’t need to hear what anyone was saying; the pitch of their voices, the scent of the air, it was full of clues, telling her where she was in the world. It was yet another thing her father had taught her, taking her to different cities and impressing on her the importance to understand a culture from personal experience. He said it was necessary to taste the atmosphere, to wrap yourself up in the feel of a place in order to truly know it.

He encouraged her to find her own truths: what made each city special to her. She did so by taking photographs. Her father would often turn around to find she had wandered over to take a picture of a dog tied to a lamp post, waiting for his owner to return. Or an abandoned newspaper next to an empty coffee cup in a café. He would smile then, watching as she collected memories in the things that made her take a second look.

For her eighteenth birthday they had travelled to Venice where he bought her a vintage Leica from a shop hidden in amongst the multitude of tourist traps. The walls were covered in photographs taken by the shop’s patron, hair slicked back from a face lined with stories. He had smiled at her choice of camera, telling her that a true photographer could capture a moment without the need for a filter or Photoshop.

Together she and her father had explored the Weihnachtsmarkt in Berlin, Alice being led by her senses from one sugar-laden stall to the next as her father sipped on a gluhwein. He showed her how the sunset cast a different light over the river in Budapest than it did on the sea in Barcelona. He taught her about ancient people in Rome, Cairo, even Yucatán. But he never brought her to Paris.

One of the few things Alice had always known about her mother was that she was French. It was how her father explained her natural ability to learn the language, but he steadfastly refused to set foot in Paris, despite her protestations, saying that he had no desire to revisit the city that had brought him so much sorrow. At the time Alice believed he was referring to her mother’s death, but now she wondered if it was something else that had made him run from the past.

Her phone beeped with another text. Swinging her legs into the room she put her glass down on a small side table, next to her Leica that was safely strapped into its case. She bent over the bed to read the text message.

Call me. Please. I’m going crazy without you.

Straightening up she went over to the compact en suite tucked away in the corner of the room and slid open the door. Turning on the tap she watched the water circling round the plughole, descending into darkness. She held her wrists under the steady flow, staring at her flushed reflection and waiting for her blood to cool.

How was it that he had this effect on her, even hundreds of miles away? She could imagine him bent over his phone, brow furrowed, as he tapped in a message. Was he in their café? Making notes as he finished off his usual order of smoked salmon on rye with a triple espresso? Or was he nursing a pint of bitter in the Turf, tucked away in the corner table by the bar and reading a copy of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet?

Stop it, she told herself, slamming her hands against the porcelain sink. You made a decision to leave, to cut all ties. A frightened face looked back at her. But what if he knew everything? Would that make him run to me, or back to her?

Her phone began to ring and she clasped her hands over her ears, willing the noise to stop. She sank onto the bed and lay back against the soft covers, noticing a spider busy making a web around the light fitting on the ceiling. She traced the delicate lines through the air with her fingers and was rewarded with a memory of walking across the school lawn one autumnal morning. Her father had shown her the symmetry in the webs that were entangled in the holly bushes that flanked the main entrance, dewdrops hanging from every thread.

Standing up she crossed back to the window, draining her glass and leaning over the railings to watch someone exit the bar. A woman looked both ways down the street. As her head turned Alice’s eye was drawn to something on her face. Holding up her phone she took a couple of photographs, zooming in on the woman as she walked over to a girl who was smoking in the shadows.

Alice reached over and retrieved her Leica, unbuckling the straps and easing the weight of the camera into her palm. Sliding off the lens cap she checked the settings and peered through the viewfinder. She was too high up to catch any of their conversation, but the woman’s movements seemed to suggest penance, one hand resting on the girl’s arm. Then a rise and fall of her shoulders, a sigh, before she turned and walked away, the click of her stilettos echoing off the cobbled street.

Alice followed the woman with her lens, the light from a street lamp illuminating the flush on her cheek before she slipped round the corner and was gone.

Alice walked over to the far side of the room where she had pinned up a map of the city. Next to this were dozens of photographs: some new, some old. She touched her fingertips to one of her and her friends taken at her twentieth birthday party last summer. They were grinning at the camera with sticky lips and tanned arms.

Another was of her father, head tilted back to watch the fireworks from the window of the Great Hall at school. Around him were dotted memories of people and places, links to Alice’s past that pulled at her whenever she looked at them. In the centre was the one she had discovered of her and her mother, an image now so engrained on Alice’s mind that she saw it every time she closed her eyes.

She was going about this in completely the wrong way.

Think, came her father’s voice. Use your head, not your heart.

Picking up a notepad and pen Alice began to circle points on the map.