Worst Fears Read online

  Alexandra removed the more disturbing memories of Ned from the living room: a pair of his shoes, the proof of the critical essay on Ibsen he had been writing and hoping to finish at the weekend. She glanced at a column or two: apparently Ned found A Doll’s House the worst constructed and most sentimental of Ibsen’s works. Shoes and papers went into a cupboard to wait until she was prepared to face the job of clearing the evidence of his life away in a proper fashion. She ejected the tape from the video machine. Ned had apparently pressed “Stop” some ten minutes into Casablanca. Why Casablanca? She, Alexandra, was the one who so admired Bogart. Ned would dismiss him as a performer rather than an actor. What had induced Ned to watch Bogart on a Saturday night? He could never tell her. She would never know.

  Alexandra sat on the arm of the sofa and stared again at nothing in particular. She supposed this now familiar state of suspension served as some sort of absorption buffer for emotion: it was a drifting, waking sleep. It was not pleasant: on the contrary; but at least while she was in it unpleasant thoughts travelled in a loop, round and round, so you got immune to them. They did not branch out into anything different or worse. She imagined that an animal in a bad situation, caught in a trap, in a vivisection lab, lost and hungry, would feel no worse than this. If you had a poor memory, no language skills, very little sense of time, and a limited understanding of cause and effect, this was what it would be like. Buffered by these constraints, you would not suffer too much.

  Alexandra’s hand went to sleep. She’d been sitting on it. She stood up and shook her arm until the blood returned. It was dark outside. The house seemed alive with unnatural noise. Bangings and creakings came from upstairs. She thought perhaps Diamond had gone up again, and went after him. On her way up the stairs she thought something invisible and unpleasant brushed past her and went ahead of her. She was terrified but went on. She stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Nothing. If anything, everything was now suddenly quieter than it ought to be, as if someone was saying if you don’t like noise, try quiet, see how you like that. She didn’t like it, but on balance it was preferable to bangs and crashes, a sense of whisperings and the movement of invisible entities. There was no sign of Diamond.

  Old houses would do this, of course. She should not attribute inexplicable sounds to supernatural causes. No doubt all her senses were unduly edgy.

  Plumbing would echo through the wooden structure of an old house as referred pain did through the body. Impeded liver function, for example, would surface as a pain in the right shoulder. It had been a warm day: now it was cold: sudden changes of temperature could cause this structure, this material, to contract, that other to expand: noise could come from anywhere, just as did aches and pains.

  All the same, Alexandra turned on all available lights. She even pushed open the door of her bedroom, which once had been her and Ned’s bedroom, and although she didn’t enter it because of the brooding presences within she slipped her hand round the door and turned on the light and went away. Now the house would glow like a beacon to anyone travelling along the top road to Eddon Gurney: we will not be defeated. The road was not much frequented these days—a new bypass siphoned off most of the heavy traffic, which was good for property prices but could make those who lived in The Cottage feel unduly isolated at the best of times. And these were not they: it was as if the here-and-now had slipped, in the aftermath of sudden death, into something shaky and incoherent.

  Property prices, money, wills, insurance claims, documents, certificates: she would think about all these later in the week. There was no hurry. Hamish, Ned’s brother, would help her out. While the Doll’s House run lasted at least she had an income.

  Alexandra turned on all the downstairs lights as well. She went into the kitchen. Diamond was lying beneath the table and not in his basket. She thought she would stay in this room; it seeming less haunted than anywhere else in the house. She moved a chair so that when she sat her leg would be in contact with Diamond’s solid warmth, but no sooner had she sat than Diamond moved away. Well, he was entitled. He had been alone with the body for hours, without help of human kind. Diamond must find her, Alexandra, neglectful and wilfully so. What did he know about the necessity of earning a living? His food just appeared in a bowl.

  Abbie had put a jam jar of summer flowers from the garden on the table. They were browning and failing: they looked as if they needed water, but when Alexandra tested the level with her finger there was plenty there. Perhaps a death in a house made flowers wilt sooner than they should?

  Alexandra sat with her head in her arms at the kitchen table. She closed her eyes. She was on a speedboat with Ned: they were on a wide, wide lake; a white foamy wake spread out behind in the deep, still water. They were good close companions on a journey. The day was brilliant, glittery with light. The boat was making for a shore, a beach, a forest; there was a greeny-blue mountain in the background. The boat was suddenly faced with a wall of shadow: a fog. The light in front, over water, beach, forest, mountain, was washed with dark. The boat stopped a fraction before the fog began. Alexandra stayed with it, still in bright light. She remained as she was, suspended; but Ned didn’t stop: he spun suddenly on into the fog. Now he stood on the shore with his back to her; he seemed puzzled, forlorn. She watched him leave the beach and plod on into the dense, dark forest. She called out after him but he didn’t hear, and didn’t look back. There was no helping him. She knew he was beyond help. Nor did her heart go out to him. He was alone. The vision stopped, as a film stops. She was awake, but had not been asleep in the first place. The last frame stayed in her mind, indelible. Herself on the lake, in the sunlight—Ned going on into the forest: tired, so tired, without her blessing. The vision was framed like a picture in the glitter of her own life.

  Alexandra tried to dismiss the vision—for so she saw it—as created by some sort of hotch-potch in her own mind. A doomy mixture. The bourn from which no traveller returns? Whatever a bourn might be. An illustration of Walter de la Mare’s The Traveller in a volume she’d had as a child? The weary voyager turned away, limping on his stick, journeying on into the murk of the forest. But Alexandra could not convince herself that what she had seen was old stuff re-hashed: no, it was too new, too vivid for that. Clearly fresh and framed in her mind. And the dream, or rather vision—and Alexandra could tell the difference, because she had such a clear impression of not having woken but simply of having been in a more perceptive and realer than real state before—was reassuring. She had a blueprint of what had happened, to which she could now refer. Alexandra stayed—Ned went on. Why she had made where he was going into so dire a place, she could not say. Why she had refused him her blessing she did not know. But at least she now had in her head an actual location where Ned could be. She had seen it, and was comforted.

  There was an umbilical cord between them: his for her, hers for him. It would in time pull him back: or would she follow him? Perhaps she would have another vision soon: Ned would reappear on the beach to wait for her; the cloud would be gone; she would join him on the shore in the sunlight. They’d go on into some other form of life, together. That was how it went. She could not accept the finality of death. Here now, then suddenly not here. Impossible. The line between the two states was too sharp and clear to be acceptable. Everything else drifted from one stage to another, grew, developed, faded, dispersed; why should this be different? She felt almost cheerful.

  4

  ALEXANDRA, IN NEED OF conversation, plugged the phone jack back in the wall. It rang at once. During the evening there were seventeen calls.

  Three people hung up as soon as she answered.

  One asked for Jenny and then hung up when Alexandra said, “Wrong number.” Alexandra felt bad for a minute, because after all it might have been for Jenny Linden, whose name was next to theirs in so many address books: Linden, Jenny; Ludd, Ned and Alexandra. Only the L-o’s could intervene and there weren’t too many of those. Though she’d once known a Loseley. But it was
too late anyway: the callers had evaporated.

  One from the theatre. Sam, the front-of-house manager, to say the understudy Daisy Longriff was atrocious, houses were bound to suffer as a result of Alexandra’s absence, but there was no fear of Daisy being asked to take over the role, permanently. Alexandra must just relax and not return before time.

  “A whole crowd of us will want to come down to the funeral, darling,” he said. “So long as it’s in the morning, and not on a matinee day.” Alexandra said apologetically she didn’t think anyone Ned had savaged in his time—and there were many; that was the fate of critics, to make enemies—should feel obliged to come to his funeral. Sam said, “Ned was a man of integrity. The play was always the thing. He spoke as he found. He’ll be sorely and sincerely missed.” Alexandra said, “You mean everyone will want to come to his funeral,” and laughed for the first time since Sunday. She explained to Sam her brother-in-law Hamish was coming down the next day from Edinburgh to arrange everything, including funeral dates: she’d do what she could: otherwise she supposed there’d be a memorial service sometime later, in London.

  “You’re in your competent mood,” said Sam. “That’s better than ‘poor-little-me.’ Look on the bright side: at least you were saved from him falling dead at your feet.”

  “I don’t like to think of him dying alone,” said Alexandra.

  Sam said, “Why wasn’t he in the London flat making you cocoa anyway?”

  Alexandra said, “He had too much work to do,” and began to cry, so Sam concluded the call.

  The next call was from Irene, Alexandra’s mother. She lived with her third husband next to a golf course in Surrey. She had Romanoff blood, way back in the past. “How are you, darling?” she asked. “Has Ned been back to say goodbye to you yet?” And Irene explained, as she often did, that the dead would appear in dreams to the bereaved in order of their closeness and say goodbye. Ned, she implied, was being laggardly, in death as in life.

  “He’s been, mother,” said Alexandra, as diplomatic in Ned’s death as she was in his life. “I expect he was waiting until after the autopsy, when he could settle.”

  “I’d rather not think about that,” said Irene. “As for Sascha, he’s just fine. Don’t worry about him. I’ll keep him here till you’re ready.”

  Alexandra had been to her mother’s to see Sascha on the Saturday afternoon. She had expected Ned to bring the child up to London at the weekend as usual, after nursery school. Then, apart from Saturday night, they’d have the weekend together as a family. Instead Ned had taken Sascha to Irene’s on Thursday and left him there, claiming pressure of work. He’d gone back home and two days later died, around midnight, ten minutes into Casablanca.

  “But I want Sascha with me,” said Alexandra. “I need him. He’s my child.”

  “I daresay you do need him,” said Irene, “but what does little Sascha need? He needs a cheerful mother, an organised home, and proper child care while you’re at work. So I’ll keep him till you’ve got your act together, if you don’t mind, in his interests not yours.”

  “But I have to tell him his father’s dead,” said the daughter.

  “What’s the hurry?” enquired the mother.

  “Shouldn’t one tell a child at once?” asked Alexandra. “Won’t he find out?”

  “Not if he can’t read the papers,” snapped her mother. “Because I’m certainly not going to tell him.”

  Alexandra recalled how the news of her own father’s death had been kept from her for a week or more, till Irene felt strong enough to tell her. She had always resented it. A similar fate was being prepared for Sascha.

  “Okay,” said Alexandra. She was exhausted. Perhaps after she had talked to Hamish tomorrow she would simply drive all the way to Surrey and pick up Sascha. The child-care, Theresa, wasn’t yet back from holiday, but that hardly mattered now.

  It seemed unlikely that Alexandra would be back to work by the following Tuesday. She supposed, speculatively, that it would be possible to back out of the production altogether. They would hardly hold her to her contract. Daisy Longriff might yet get the part of Nora on a permanent basis. It occurred to Alexandra that Longriff would come between Linden and Ludd in an address book.

  “Alexandra,” said Irene. “Now I don’t want to upset you, you’re upset enough already: but there’s something strange going on here.”

  “What?” asked Alexandra. She felt bad-tempered as well as tired. Her mother was convinced, as mothers often are whose own lives are not above suspicion, that Ned was unfaithful to her daughter. Alexandra could explain and explain that these days men could have women friends and women men friends without any sexual sub-text, but Irene would have none of it.

  “What time did Abbie call you?”

  “Six in the morning,” said Alexandra. “From the house. It took me two hours to get over the shock, and I drove down on my own which I shouldn’t have, and ran out of petrol and didn’t arrive till 12, and the ambulance had just taken the body away. It was terrible.”

  “Poor Alexi,” said Irene, in the soothing mother’s voice which at the best of times made Alexandra want to cry. “You still won’t see it. What was Abbie doing at The Cottage at six in the morning? More like half past five, because it seems she called the doctor before she called you.”

  “Jesus,” said Alexandra, “I don’t know. Mushrooming; leaving edible fungi at Ned’s door. Taking her students out to look at an English dawn. Needing a telephone: the students are always en crise. Whatever.”

  “Darling,” said Irene. “You’re in denial.”

  Alexandra slammed the phone down. It buzzed again.

  Dr. Moebius said, “I’ve been trying to get through to you for hours, Mrs. Ludd. There’s either no reply or the line’s busy. Now it’s very late.”

  “There’s always tomorrow morning,” said Alexandra, with a temper better reserved for her mother. “What’s your hurry? People are a long time dead.”

  “It was you I was concerned about,” said Dr. Moebius, a little stiffly.

  “I have not seen you since your husband died.” Dr. Moebius headed the local Health Centre. He was known to be a pleasant man, a bad diagnostician, and gullible; much given to acts of faith. He was as likely to recommend acupuncture as surgery, meditation as medication. He was a favourite with terminally ill patients, who looked forward to having him at their death beds. He would pray, and believed in heaven.

  “I could do with some sleeping pills,” said Alexandra. She had searched out the carton in the bathroom cabinet but found it empty. She’d remembered it with at least eight tablets left. Perhaps Ned had needed them in her absence.

  “Not a good idea,” said Dr. Moebius. “Lime tea’s just as efficacious and easier on the liver. I wanted to tell you the autopsy report is in. Massive myocardial infarction; a heart attack, in layman’s terms. What we all supposed. Unfortunately the forensic people have only done half of what I required, so the body has had to go back to them. Technically I should have asked your permission first, but Mr. Lightfoot’s ambulance was on its way back to the lab, empty—”

  “You wouldn’t want to waste the opportunity, I can see,” said Alexandra. “But if my husband died of a heart attack, isn’t that all you need to know?”

  “That’s not the point,” said Dr. Moebius. “The labs take liberties. I asked for a brain dissection—there was a possibility of cerebral haemorrhage. It was not the lab’s decision to take. They cut corners. You’ve already viewed the body, in any case.”

  “I have not,” said Alexandra.

  “Oh,” said Dr. Moebius. “Mr. Lightfoot said you had.” It seemed perfectly possible to Alexandra that Mr. Lightfoot was right. What did she know? She was only the wife.

  No sooner had that call finished, when her mother was back on the line.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Irene. “I’m not offended. I know how upset you are and how difficult for you this is. But why haven’t you asked Abbie what she was doing at
The Cottage at five in the morning?”

  “Six.”

  “Half past five,” conceded Irene. “Well? Isn’t it an obvious thing to ask? How can you deny you’re in denial?”

  “But one would, wouldn’t one?” remarked Alexandra. There was such a sharp dividing line between the world in which Ned was alive and the world in which Ned wasn’t, there seemed something indecent in trying to link the two. “And then Ned died” was like a tidal wave which swept through your dining room carrying everything before it, flinging all familiar bits and pieces everywhere, snapping and sheering in its violent onward rush. To try and retrieve and piece together this one mingy little detail seemed almost impolite. Had he been frightened? Or was it all too sudden? Did he gasp for air: look round for help and find her not there? Ten minutes into Casablanca? What could he have found so upsetting in Casablanca? Did one need to be upset to have a heart attack? Or did it just happen? He’d switched the video off: had he walked about the house feeling uneasy, searching for breathing air?

  “Darling,” said Irene, “are you okay?”

  “Things just suddenly hit me,” said Alexandra. “Sorry.”

  “People are like quarks, darling,” said Irene from her house at the edge of the golf course. “They wink out of one part of this universe and wink in somewhere else, simultaneously.”

  “You’re optimistic. Ned’s plodding up a hill somewhere,” said Alexandra bleakly, “in a hideous, doomy fog, and I can’t help him.” But she told her mother she’d ask Abbie for more detail, and her mother went away.

  The next call was from David, a colleague of Ned’s. He was weeping and incoherent. He’d only just heard the news. Alexandra was sympathetic and comforting, but she held the phone a long way away from her ear.