Читать книгу The Girl Before You - Nicola Rayner - Страница 9

January 2016

The rattle and hum of trains always make Alice sleepy. She had been up at five to get the six fifteen to Edinburgh from King’s Cross. At the shrill bleep of the alarm, George had groaned and rolled over, burying his face in his pillow as she pulled her clothes on in the dark. His hangovers had got particularly bad since he’d made the move from politics to TV. She’d felt half glad she was out of London for the day.

Edinburgh had made her nostalgic. She and George had visited the city for a couple of days early in their courtship. There had been something special about that weekend: away from the influence of his friends, George was tender and attentive – plus, of course, Edinburgh on the run-up to Christmas was magical.

They’d ice-skated hand-in-hand in the shadow of the castle, warmed up with hot chocolate and even taken a trip on the big wheel. As it was caught at the top of its cycle, hovering between travelling up and coming down, George had looked at her for a long time as if he were going to say something, but didn’t.

Later, in the Vietnamese restaurant where they’d had supper, he listened to Alice’s career plans with particular attentiveness – though family law was hardly the most romantic of subjects – and surprised her by chatting to the waiter in Vietnamese. She’d looked at him so proudly then, with an ache that had long since faded.

Coming out of the restaurant, walking downhill to their B & B, George stopped Alice mid-path with a kiss. The wind was wild that night and, as he stood in front of her, his red scarf flapped in front of his face and her hair blew into her mouth. He almost had to shout it when he said: ‘I love you, Alice Reynolds.’ It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her.

‘I meant what I said,’ he told her that night at the B & B between squeaks of the bed. ‘You have saved me.’ She didn’t ask: from what?

Alice exhales. Her breath mists up the window and she wipes her hand across the cold glass. Taking the newspaper from her bag, she settles in for the journey home. Behind her she hears the refreshments trolley rattling its way through the carriage and decides to have a gin and tonic. There’s no lemon, of course; the surly girl serving looks at her as if she’s mad when she asks, but there’s ice, at least.

As the sting of alcohol hits the back of her throat, she sighs. It has been a good day, work-wise; the conference went well. But she can’t shake the fluttering sense of disquiet, of something coming back for her. She has started waking in the middle of the night, frightened for some reason, unable to remember why. Her doctor has prescribed sleeping tablets. Opening her handbag, Alice touches the small packet with a fingertip. She thinks, for just a second, of having one, so she can sleep all the way back to London, and then pushes the thought away, taking another slug of gin. That will do. She doesn’t need them often.

The train judders to a halt at Durham and as the doors hiss open they let in an icy gust of January air. A large, suited man, carrying a briefcase, folds himself into the seat opposite Alice. She crosses her legs, irritated, tidies the miniature bottle of gin into the brown paper bag the girl had provided and unfolds her paper.

She glances for a moment at a photo of George in the television pages. His first show is airing tonight. She still can’t get her head around George’s new career – he had been in politics as long as she’d known him, president of St Anthony’s student union the year they met. She hadn’t been sure how he would fare as a presenter, but in the previews she had seen he’d done well. His sense of humour came across. The show, the first in a series exploring the lives of famous British politicians, allowed him to make a few self-deprecating jokes and a few at the expense of other people, too. George would just say what he thought and in television today that seemed to be a key requirement. Alice has always envied him that quality. He’s looking jowly, though, she notices – something she never sees when he’s right in front of her.

She skims through the piece but finds she wants a break from work – hers and George’s – and instead gets out a pen to do the crossword. Even then it isn’t long before the letters begin to swim before her eyes. Scrunching up her scarf, she tucks it under her head, insulating herself from the freezing glass of the window. She feels her shoulders unclench and closes her eyes.

As she drifts in and out of sleep, Alice feels as though she is being watched. She opens her eyes once or twice, glances at the man opposite her, but he is hiding behind his paper – reading the story about George. It makes her feel peculiar. A part of her is taken over by a childlike desire to say, ‘That’s my husband – you’re reading about my husband.’ She swallows hard and closes her eyes again. There is a faint smell of something tropical in the air. It’s an unlikely scent at this time of year but pleasant, like sun cream or rum.

The carriage fills up as she dozes. She hears a group of boys get on at York. They sit in a huddle not far behind her, and the hiss and click of their cans of lager permeate her sleep. At one stage, one of them comes over and tries to talk to someone across the aisle from her. ‘All right, darling. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Alice strains to catch the reply and, though the girl speaks too softly for Alice to hear her words, their meaning is clear in the young man’s hasty retreat.

Nosiness gets the better of Alice and she takes a quick look at where she imagines the girl is sitting, but she can’t see much – just a pair of slim legs crossed towards her. She closes her eyes again and drifts off.

When, at last, she wakes up properly, Alice feels sticky and hot. The sun has gone down and the lights on the train have been switched on. She squints out of the window into the darkness, trying to work out how far they’ve got, but there’s now too little light for her to tell – just dark, indecipherable shapes whistling by. She looks for a second at her own face – pale, almost haggard in the dark glass. It’s not a flattering light; she runs a tired hand through her hair.

She scans other faces in the reflection. The man opposite her is looking at photographs on his smartphone, running his fingers over the screen. Alice thinks she spies the flesh tones of naked skin and holds her gaze a little too long, trying to make out what the shapes are – porn? Glancing up, the man catches her looking at him in the window. The faintest of smiles flickers on his lips, but Alice frowns and looks away.

On the other side of the aisle, a mother and her small daughter reading together cause her a twinge of pain. She still has them: phantom visceral experiences. Nothing dramatic like giving birth or breast-feeding – maybe because she doesn’t know what they would feel like – but other sensations. She’d bought a friend’s child a cardigan recently, a dear hand-knitted thing, and she’d had the sense, as she held it, of dressing an infant: pushing its arms into the sleeves, the wriggly feeling of resistance in the child’s limbs; it had been so strong, so clear, that she felt the weight of the baby in her arms for a moment.

Alice’s gaze falls upon the girl who’d been chatted up, two seats behind the mother and child; she is sitting by the window, facing Alice. Her face is obscured by a curtain of hair and the angle at which she’s sitting. Her hair is an almost shockingly bright red and the sight of it – the feeling of envy Alice experiences as she looks at it – stirs a sense of déjà vu. Alice shivers, pulls her scarf tighter around her shoulders. She feels spooked. Just for a second she has pictured the girl’s hair under water – spread out like seaweed. Why would she think of that?

The cadence of the train changes as they enter a tunnel. The world outside – smudged grey before – becomes reflective black. Alice glances at herself again. Her reflection now is sharper, harder-edged. She can see more detail on her face. She runs a finger along the rings beneath her eyes and thinks about an old university friend she’d bumped into at the family law conference. He had aged well. He was so thin at college but he’d grown into his face now; he still carried himself in the same way, though: calmly, lightly, as if he knew his place in the world.

They had been close during Alice’s early days at university. He would fetch her for lectures and listen to her chat on the way there. In the morning light, St Anthony’s looked like a film set. There was no one else around to worry about or impress and he had a soothing presence.

One morning, he had asked her to his room for a smoke and Alice, unused to marijuana, had giggled and giggled. They ended up lying on his narrow bed listening to reggae, their slender arms round each other, feeling almost weightless. Alice had never felt so relaxed. She had longed for him to kiss her, but he hadn’t.

When she’d told Christie about him, her best friend had simply said, ‘Dopehead,’ screwing up her nose. And, not long after, Alice had got together with George. They passed the dopehead once after a black-tie do. Alice had had a couple of glasses of wine and was teetering on her heels. She had shrieked his name as he slunk past. ‘This is George,’ she said, proudly pushing her new boyfriend forwards. The boy never really talked to her after that and at the conference, though he had been friendly, that wariness had remained.

Alice brushes a hand over her eyes. Later, she will wonder why her gaze returned to the girl with red hair. She looks back in the dark glass to where the girl had been sitting and sees she has moved into the aisle seat. She is reading and her hair is pushed back.

She looks up from the book and towards Alice. Hers is a memorable face – not one Alice would forget. Her skin looks pale against the black backdrop of the glass. Her eyes are like black holes but, for a fraction of a second, there is a telling tension around them as she squints in recognition and then looks quickly away. Alice stares. She can’t move. For seconds she is frozen. As she stands and turns to look at the girl straight on, she notices the edges of her field of vision are starting to turn black, like looking down a tunnel. She takes a step and starts to speak, but her own voice sounds strange, as if she’s listening to it through water. Her ears feel like they need to pop. She says abruptly: ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ and feels her knees buckle.

She slumps back in the seat, staring up at the luggage rack. The man sitting opposite her pops into her line of vision. ‘Are you OK? Can I get you some water?’

Alice sits up slowly and looks over to where the girl had been. There is no one there. She feels washed out, diluted. She asks: ‘Did you see a girl with red hair, just opposite?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘But I was just looking at my baby.’ He waggles his mobile at her and Alice glances at a photo of a naked infant. ‘You look terribly pale.’

Alice tries to control her breath. The man is looking at her closely.

‘I had a shock,’ she says quickly. ‘She looked so like someone I was at university with. But she …’ Alice lowers her voice so the little girl across the aisle won’t be able to hear. ‘She drowned – the girl – so it couldn’t have been her.’ She realises she sounds a bit mad.

He smiles kindly. ‘Did you know her well?’

Alice looks down at her lap. ‘Not particularly,’ she says eventually. She tries to recall the girl’s name. She used to know it. Christie would remember. She adds: ‘I’m not usually like this. I’m a lawyer.’ As if that makes a difference.

On the tube home, it comes back to her: Ruth Walker. Alice murmurs the words to herself in the noisy carriage. It was a name she’d heard a lot the summer that Ruth drowned. She hadn’t really known her, but stories and superstitions about Ruth’s death had rippled through the student community at that time and somehow things had never been quite the same afterwards. Her name became a way of chiding a friend for staggering home alone drunk or turning down the suggestion of an impromptu night swim. It was as if a shadow had been cast over them – though, of course, her disappearance hadn’t been the only loss that summer.

Perhaps for this reason, she promises herself she won’t say anything that night. But then a few glasses of wine loosen her resolve. It’s simply too good a story. It’s just a kitchen supper with Christie and Teddy to celebrate George’s first show, which they guffaw their way through after too much Sauvignon Blanc. Alice’s feeling rather giddy and emotional, and it suddenly feels important – imperative – to tell the story out loud, to someone other than George, who had merely held a hand to her forehead and asked how she was getting on with those tablets. She wishes she hadn’t told him about those either.

So when she finally says it, her voice sounds strange – a touch too high – as she stands up to clear the plates. ‘You remember that girl Ruth?’ She talks over her husband’s shaking head and addresses the table beyond. Christie’s the only one really paying attention, as usual. George is looking rather pale and Teddy is holding an empty champagne bottle up to the light to see if there’s anything left. ‘The one who drowned,’ Alice adds.

And that seems to get their attention: Teddy puts down the bottle, George murmurs, ‘Not now, darling.’

Christie frowns. ‘What about her?’

Alice leans her hip against the dresser, still holding the plates. ‘I had the weirdest experience,’ she says. Pronouncing the word ‘experience’ is a struggle: she is drunker than she thought. ‘I was coming back from Edinburgh today and there’s this girl in the aisle opposite … woman, really – well, our age. In her thirties. And she looks the spit, the absolute spit of Ruth – or how she would look now. Extraordinary. And she died – what? – fifteen years ago.’

‘Spooky,’ breathes Christie, ‘a doppelgänger – do you think we all have one? I remember hearing, actually …’

‘No,’ says Alice firmly, not about to surrender the conch so easily. ‘It wasn’t just a resemblance; it was more than that. I couldn’t help myself: I got up to say something. Now here’s the thing …’

‘Now here’s the thing,’ mimics George, stabbing the air with a fork.

‘Shut up, George,’ says Alice. She considers leaving the anecdote unfinished. Tonight, after all, is a celebration.

But Christie, scraping her pudding plate with a teaspoon, is waiting for the end of the story.

‘What happened?’

Alice pauses. ‘She disappeared,’ she says eventually. ‘I felt very odd – had a sort of turn – and when I looked again she had completely vanished.’

Before taking a tablet, Alice tries to send herself to sleep by making lists in her head: clients she needs to email, thank-you letters to be written, ingredients for the week’s suppers or, on happier days, things she would like to do – perfect her Italian, learn how to knit. But today she can’t focus on the lists. Her attention keeps getting tugged back to the woman on the train and the look that flickered across her face.

And just as she is sinking into sleep, half-dreaming, half-awake, Alice’s drifting mind alights on a memory of a party. She was on the periphery, uncertain of herself: a first year at this third-year gathering. She remembers spotting George. She had started to notice him at parties. On the other side of the room, his arm propped him up in the doorway as he surveyed the scene – with the careless arrogance, she had thought then, that only the obscenely good-looking or wealthy could afford. George, with his squat looks, hadn’t been particularly blessed in the former department, though he made up for it in self-belief; but he’d had Dan with him – tall and chiselled. Yes, it may well have been to him, next to George, that her eye was first drawn, before she noticed the approach of the girl with red hair, who charged towards George, holding her face inches away from his, and shouted something with such vehemence that Alice had flinched.

Was that detail added by her drifting mind, in the process of a memory becoming a dream? Alice wonders, suddenly awake. Had George laughed in her face and had she, the girl, spat some invective at him before storming off? Had it been at this same party that George later appeared by Alice’s side with a warm glass of wine in his hand and said, ‘I saw you looking,’ in such a way that had made her laugh?

‘I think you knew her,’ Alice says aloud to her gently snoring husband.

‘What, darling?’ His arm, heavy with sleep, slumps over her body.

‘That girl,’ says Alice. ‘Ruth. I think you knew her.’