Читать книгу The Girl Before You - Nicola Rayner - Страница 13

Standing in George’s study, Alice enjoys the quiet order of the room for a moment. She has no idea if he guesses that she comes in here when she’s alone in the house. It’s one of the things they never talk about. She’s always careful to leave it as she found it. She pops in sometimes as if she’s looking for something, though she is not sure what. She’ll wander around, picking up the odd book or trinket – a fountain pen, an ornament – and wonder where they came from. When they moved into the house, so much just arrived from George’s parents and if she ever asks, George just shrugs and says, ‘That old thing? My ma would know.’ It’s a source of irritation to Alice, who would have liked to fill her home with cleaner contemporary pieces, rather than so much creaking dark wood that he seems to care for so little himself.

His study is one of the tidiest rooms in the house. It’s at the front of the building overlooking the street, though the shutters keep out the light. Political biographies and history books line the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, as well as the odd spy thriller. Alice runs her finger along the spines. Quite a few of them are from his days in St Anthony’s. For such an unsentimental person, George doesn’t like to throw much away.

She settles in the dark leather armchair by the fireplace and switches on her laptop. First, she does an image search for ‘Ruth Walker’ but, though her screen is filled with lines and lines of Ruth Walkers, of all ages and sizes, in gym kits and business suits, grinning in Facebook photos or pouting on Instagram, Alice’s Ruth Walker isn’t there. Nor are there photos of her in any of the articles Alice can find. The first story to come up is an old one from a local paper in the Free Library under the headline ‘Tragedy strikes in St Anthony’s’.

The dress of St Anthony’s student Ruth Walker has been found on South Beach this morning after a three-day police search. Ruth was last seen swimming on 23 June in the early morning after the university’s memorial ball. Walker’s family fear the worst …

Alice blinks. She remembers the day after the ball. Waking up to a terrible hangover and the pouring rain, all the bunting and balloons of the night before mashed up into the mud, to say nothing of empty bottles, plastic glasses, cigarette butts strewn throughout college. Cleaners scowling through cagoules, grim-faced porters trying to organise the students while their parents arrived in four-by-fours to pick up their children. And by afternoon, murmurs about the news – had anyone heard? Did anyone know any more? The pulsing blue light of the police cars outside. A different world from the night before with its clowns and fairy lights and the treacly wall of heat in the quad as she had wandered through it hand in hand with George. Sitting on his lap as they watched some stand-up comedy, tutting as he and Dan heckled. And later dancing with her friends, spinning so her dress flew out around her, thinking in that moment she would never feel so carefree.

Alice gives herself a shake. She returns to her search. Most of the articles that the internet throws up are written by Richard Wiseman, Ruth’s boyfriend at college, now a writer for a leftie national George wouldn’t allow in the house. (‘They’ve never got anything nice to say about me, darling.’)

They’d gone everywhere together, Ruth and Richard. She could see them traipsing around college, lighting each other’s cigarettes, sitting next to each other in the library. Richard had been good-looking in a ruffled sort of way: scruffy dark hair, faded jeans. He’d fronted a college band. Alice remembers seeing Ruth dancing at one of his gigs, leaping up and down with an abandon Alice had envied. These days he looked older, more tired, in his byline photograph, and his face had hardened in a way that Alice couldn’t recall from college.

Ruth Walker and the subjects of mental health and missing people seemed to have shaped a lot of Richard’s journalism. He’d even written a book called The Disappeared about unsolved cases with a chapter about Ruth, who appears in his writing as ‘my ex-girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or ‘my student girlfriend Ruth Walker’ or occasionally ‘my girlfriend Ruth Walker’. Alice wonders how Richard’s current girlfriends, or wife, feel about this. She notices most of the articles are from a few years back. Perhaps the obsession petered out.

Alice copies and pastes the most interesting of the links and emails them to herself. Then, almost out of habit, she has another wander before leaving the room. She goes to George’s desk and tries the drawers. They are locked, as always. The feeling she has as she tries them is always the same: a sort of shame. It’s a similar feeling she gets when she goes to an acquaintance’s Facebook page and their privacy settings mean she can’t see what they’ve been up to. It’s not something you could ever talk about – only a snooper knows when they’ve been locked out. She never used to think of herself as a snooper, but she’s got worse over the years. And it’s become easier, too, with social media to find people, to peek at the way their lives are now. It’s this period in particular, the university years, she can’t leave alone. She scratches away at it like a scab.

Alice perches on the desk. There’s a framed collage of photos on it, which Christie and Teddy had put together for George’s thirtieth with Alice’s help. There’s a photograph of his parents at Ascot, standing to attention for the camera, with his father ruddy-cheeked, his mother in a monstrous hat. Another of George and her with Christie and Teddy on holiday in Greece, all looking a bit sunburned and worse for wear. There’s a photo of Alice on their wedding day. She remembers it being taken, one of the last in a long, long session of photographs, and how, by that stage, her head was beginning to ache with the strain of the tight hairdo, the hairspray, the clips, the constant smiling.

There’s another of George and Dan in black tie at the memorial ball. They look so young – like children. It doesn’t fit with her memory of George and his gang as impossibly sophisticated and cool.

The brrr of the landline makes her jump. It’s an old-fashioned, heavy thing on George’s desk. Alice looks at it guiltily for a second before picking it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, darling, it’s me.’

‘Hello you.’ Alice stands up as if caught out.

‘What are you up to?’

‘Oh, you know, pottering.’ She glances down at the photo in her hand.

He pauses. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, of course. Just enjoying my Saturday. How was the interview?’

‘Not bad. Are you OK? You seemed a bit strange last night.’

‘Well, I’d had a strange day. That’s all.’

Alice’s attention returns to the photograph. She picks it up to examine it more closely. George, rosy-cheeked from drinking, is clutching a bottle of champagne in his right hand with his left thrown around Dan’s shoulder. A little out of focus, there’s a cluster of people in the background.

‘Yes, I know,’ George says, more sympathetic than he might usually be.

‘Well …’

Alice wants to wind things up, to be left to her snooping alone. She’s never paid much attention to it before but there’s someone standing next to George, just out of the photo. There’s a sliver of a white shoulder, the strap of a dress and a thin slice of long hair.

Where had Alice been by this stage of the night? She must have been in bed; she’d still been recovering from glandular fever in her first year. She certainly hadn’t made the survivors’ photo. They had never bought one of their own but she’d seen them in the staircases or loos of other people’s houses when they’d all initially made the exodus to London. You didn’t see so many of them now – tasteful black-and-white photos of weddings and children had replaced student snaps.

‘I sometimes think we’re all stuck,’ George says quietly at the other end of the phone.

Alice sits down; this is unusually reflective for George. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

‘That what happened to Dan stopped us in our tracks somehow. That we’re all still there – stuck at that time at the end of uni.’ He laughs suddenly. ‘Or maybe I’m just talking bollocks. It’s probably the hangover.’

‘No,’ says Alice. ‘I feel the same.’

She wants him to say more, for this version of her husband to stay on the phone, but then he’s making his excuses, signing off, leaving her with the dialling tone ringing in her ears, the framed photograph still in her hand.

The thing is, she thinks, looking down at the photo, the thing she’d been thinking during the call, the thought she couldn’t fight, is that the hair in the photograph is red, bright red. Maybe she is stuck, but maybe it’s to do with this feeling – which she had even back then but was too ashamed to admit – of being left out; of knowing there was something she wasn’t being told.