‘Is that you?’ I picked up the photograph and held it to the light to see better. He must have been about nine, with dark hair and scowling brows. His mother’s hands were rested on his recalcitrant shoulders. ‘You look just the same, Adam, I would have recognized you anywhere. How beautiful your mother was.’
‘Yes. She was.’
Upstairs, in all the separate rooms, all the single beds were made, pillows fluffed up. There were ancient dried flower arrangements on each window-sill.
‘Which was your room?’ I asked Adam.
‘This one.’
I looked around, at the white walls, the yellow flocked bedspread, the empty wardrobe, the boring landscape picture, the small, sensible mirror.
‘But you’re not here at all,’ I said. ‘There’s not a trace of you.’ Adam looked impatient. ‘When did you leave?’
‘Completely, you mean? Fifteen, I suppose, although I was sent away to school when I was six.’
‘Where did you go when you were fifteen?’
‘Here and there.’
I was beginning to learn that direct questions were not a good method of eliciting information from Adam.
We went into a room that he said had been his mother’s. Her portrait hung on the wall and – a weird touch, this – a pair of silk gloves was folded by the side of the dried flowers.
‘Did your father love her very much?’ I said to Adam.
He looked at me a bit strangely. ‘No, I don’t think so. Look, there he is.’ I joined him at the window. A very old man was walking up the garden towards the house. There was a frost of snow on his white hair, and his shoulders were touched with snow too. He wore no overcoat. He looked so thin as to be almost transparent, but was quite upright. He carried a stick, but seemed to be using it to swipe at squirrels, which were corkscrewing up the old beech trees.
‘How old is your father, Adam?’ I asked.
‘About eighty. I was an afterthought. My youngest sister was sixteen when I was born.’
Adam’s father – Colonel Tallis, as he told me to call him – seemed alarmingly ancient to me. His skin was pale and papery. There were liver spots on both hands. His eyes, startling blue like Adam’s, were cloudy. His trousers hung slackly on his skeletal frame. He seemed quite unsurprised to see us.
‘This is Alice,’ said Adam. ‘I am going to marry her next Friday.’
‘Good afternoon, Alice,’ he said. ‘A blonde, eh? So you’re going to marry my son.’ His look seemed almost spiteful. Then he turned back to Adam. ‘Pour me some whisky, then.’
Adam left the room. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to the old man and he seemed to have no interest in talking to me.
‘I killed three squirrels yesterday,’ he announced abruptly, after a silence. ‘With traps, you know.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, vermin. But they still come back for more. Like the rabbits. I shot six.’
Adam came into the room with three tumblers full of amber-coloured whisky. He gave one to his father and handed another to me. ‘Drink up and then we’ll go home,’ he said.
I drank. I didn’t know what time it was, except that outside it was already getting dark. I didn’t know what we were doing here, and I would have said that I wished we hadn’t come, except that I had a new and vivid image of Adam as a boy: lonely, dwarfed by two aged parents, losing his mother when he was twelve, living in a large cold house. What kind of life must he have had, growing up alone with this stand-in for a father? The whisky burned my throat and warmed my chest. I had eaten nothing all day, and was obviously not going to get anything here. I realized I hadn’t even taken off my coat. Well, there wasn’t much point now.
Colonel Tallis also drank his whisky, sitting on the sofa and saying nothing. Suddenly his head tipped back, his mouth parted slightly, and a crackly snore came from him. I took the empty tumbler out of his hand and put it on the table beside him.
‘Come here,’ said Adam. ‘Come with me.’
We went back up the stairs and into a bedroom. Adam’s old room. He shut the door and pushed me on to the narrow bed. My head swam. ‘You’re my home,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you understand? My only home. Don’t move. Don’t move an inch.’
When we came downstairs again, the Colonel half woke.
‘Going already?’ he said. ‘Do come again.’
‘Do have a second helping of shepherd’s pie, Adam.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Or salad. Please have some more salad. I’ve made too much, I know. It’s always so hard to get quantities right, isn’t it? But that’s why the freezer is so useful.’
‘No thank you, no more salad.’
My mother was pink and garrulous with nerves. My father, taciturn at the best of times, had said almost nothing. He sat at the head of the table and plodded through the lunch.
‘Wine?’
‘No wine, thank you.’
‘Alice used to love my shepherd’s pie when she was little, didn’t you, Alice dear?’ She was desperate. I smiled at her but couldn’t think of anything to say, for, unlike her, I become tongue-tied when nervous.
‘Did she?’ Unexpectedly, Adam’s face lit up. ‘What else did she love?’
‘Meringues.’ My mother’s face sagged with the relief of finding a topic of conversation. ‘And the crackling on pork. And my blackberry and apple pie. Banana cake. She was always such a slim little thing, you wouldn’t believe how much she could eat.’
‘Yes, I could.’
Adam put his hand on my knee. I felt myself flushing. My father coughed portentously and opened his mouth to speak. Adam’s hand pushed under the hem of my skirt and stroked my upper thigh.
‘It seems a bit sudden,’ announced my father.
‘Yes,’ agreed my mother hurriedly. ‘We are very pleased, of course we are very pleased, and I am sure that Alice will be very happy, and it’s her life anyway, to do what she wants with, but we thought, why rush? If you’re sure of each other, why not wait, and then…’
Adam’s hand moved higher. He put one sure thumb on my crotch. I sat quite still, with my hammering heart and throbbing body.
‘We are marrying on Friday,’ he said. ‘It’s sudden because love is sudden.’ He smiled rather gently at my mother. ‘I know it’s hard to get used to.’
‘And you don’t want us to be there?’ she warbled.
‘It’s not that we don’t want you, Mum, but…’
‘Two witnesses from the street,’ he said coolly. ‘Two strangers, so it will really be just me and Alice. That’s what we want.’ He turned his full gaze on me and I felt as if he were undressing me in front of my parents. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘Yes, it is, Mum.’
In my old bedroom, museum of my childhood, he picked up each object as if it was a clue. My swimming certificates. My old teddy bear, with one ear missing now. My stack of old, cracked LPs. My tennis racket, still standing in the corner of the room by the wicker wastepaper basket I had woven at school. My collection of shells. My porcelain lady, present from my grandmother when I was about six. A jewellery box with pink silk lining, containing just one bead necklace. He put his face into the fold of my old towelling dressing-gown, which still hung on the door. He unrolled a school photograph, 1977, and quickly located my face, smiling uncertainly from the second row. He found the picture of me and my brother, aged fifteen and fourteen, and scrutinized it, frowning, turning from me back to the picture. He touched everything, running his fingers over every surface. He ran his fingers over my face, exploring every flaw and blemish there.
We walked along the river, over the icy mud, our hands touching lightly, electric currents running up my
