The Other Son Read online

  Linda is so pretty and together; she makes a perfect couple with elegantly suited, affable James. Other people’s families always look smoother, look more together from the outside, and that’s only because outsiders never get to see all of the hidden resentments, all of the grimy compromise, all of the unspoken tensions that lurk behind the scenes. Alice, of all people, knows this. And as Ken would point out, she can feel just as proud of Tim, who with slim, pretty Natalya provides a similar tableau of success to that displayed by Linda and James. Yes, plenty of people would look at Tim and Nat with their matching Rado watches and their kids running around in those outrageously pricey Dolce & Gabbana outfits and feel jealous of her and her own wonderful, successful, well-balanced descendants.

  As for the other one, well, Alice loves him too, of course she does. Is her problem with Matt just that she would so have loved her second child to be a girl? The thought has occasionally crossed her mind. Alice has always believed that a daughter would have been an ally for her in that house of men, whereas not only was Matt not her ally, but seemingly he did everything he could to make himself incomprehensible to both of them. Sometimes, just occasionally, Alice has even wondered if he really is her child, wondered if someone didn’t accidentally swap the name tags around in the hospital.

  There’s no doubt about that any more though. Matt has grown up to have Ken’s humpy nose and Alice’s strong chin, her good teeth, and occasionally, when she looks at the back of his head, she’s unable to tell if it’s Matt or Tim she’s looking at. But psychologically, it was, for much of his childhood, like having a foreigner in the house, like having a guest from a different culture, someone from a faraway place with incomprehensible customs. Ken blundered through pretending that his relationship with Matt was ‘fine’, but Alice could tell he felt the same way that she did. She saw the difference in the way he treated the two boys.

  Alice reaches the summerhouse and peers inside to look at the interior. With the exception of one of those Japanese paraffin heaters and a three-piece suite of basket-weave furniture, it’s entirely empty. Too cold to use in winter, probably even with the heater on, but it must be a lovely place to sit and read in summer. It’s a shame she and Ken don’t have a bigger garden. Alice would love to have a summerhouse. She shivers and turns back towards the wake, still thinking about Matt.

  One time, Ken’s father had given the boys some money to spend and Ken had driven them all to a big toyshop – a rare treat. Tim, who must have been eleven or twelve, had chosen a Hot Wheels racing set. It had clip-together plastic tracks and a loop-the-loop and a chicane and four little metal cars to race down the slope. Cars with genuine rubber tyres being something that Ken could relate to, he had seemed almost as excited about those Hot Wheels as Tim was.

  Meanwhile Matt, holding Alice’s hand, had led her on a random meander around the shop, choosing a box of watercolours, and a lampshade that projected stars on the ceiling, and a fluffy pink monkey with battery-operated cymbals, and an Action Man with Eagle Eyes who came equipped with three different military uniforms you could dress him in.

  At the cash register Ken had frowned in disbelief. ‘This is what you want?’ he had asked the boy, brandishing the monkey, which looked, with its stupid expression, almost as surprised at Matt’s decision as Ken was. ‘This rubbish?!’

  ‘It’s fine, Ken,’ Alice had said. ‘He can have what he wants. That’s the whole idea.’

  ‘A monkey and a doll and paints?’ Ken had asked, struggling to hold back something akin to anger. ‘A bloody lampshade?’

  Matt had said nothing; he had merely nodded solemnly and stared at his feet. He had looked as if he might cry at any moment.

  ‘It’s fine, Ken,’ Alice had said again. ‘Let him have what he wants. He’s a child!’

  ‘Fine!’ Ken had declared, pulling the ten-pound notes from his pocket. And Alice had bitten her lip and sighed in relief that Matt had not mentioned the purple plastic horse with brushable mane and tail that he had also chosen, the one toy that even Alice had baulked at, the one thing she had removed from the shopping basket.

  With the image of that My Little Pony still in her mind’s eye, Alice reaches the back door. She steps back into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ Jean says. She’s redone her make-up and looks almost normal. ‘Ken’s looking for you. He says he wants to head off before it gets dark.’

  ‘It virtually is dark,’ Alice replies. ‘The sun’s setting now.’

  ‘I know,’ Jean says with a shrug. ‘But you know what Ken’s like.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice says. ‘Yes, I know what Ken’s like.’

  2

  APRIL

  Alice stands in front of the bathroom mirror brushing her hair. She needs to go to the hairdresser’s, she thinks – her roots are showing through. But she doesn’t look so bad this morning; at least she doesn’t look as old as she has been looking. Winter has never been kind to her skin generally, but the flu she suffered in March seemed to age her by about one hundred years, dried up her complexion and left her looking as wrinkled as a tumble-dried sheet. Luckily this morning it looks like she might be returning from the dead, though it could just be an impression caused by the softer glow of the sunlight filtering through the frosted window of the bathroom. Or perhaps it’s just that her mood is also lifting now that the flu is behind her, now that the days are getting longer and the first flowers are blooming in the back yard.

  From downstairs she hears the sound of the front door and notices as her body relaxes. Today is Sunday so Ken will be off to the newsagent’s for his Sunday Times. It’s one of the few of his many, many rituals that Alice actually likes, because if she’s honest, she would probably rather get up to an empty house every day. She’s not much of a morning person, never has been really, and these silent Sunday mornings where she can just stare into the middle distance instead of talking to Ken, where she can listen to the house creaking instead of struggling to ignore the bad news spewing from the television, have always felt like little gifts from God.

  She puts down the hairbrush and quietly opens the bathroom door. She holds her breath and listens. She hears the central heating boiler fire up. Other than that, the house is silent. She really is alone. She exhales slowly and heads downstairs.

  In the kitchen, she fills and switches on the kettle, then looks out at their small back garden. Yes, the light this morning is lovely, and it makes her want to be somewhere else, on a beach perhaps, or in the woods. On a mountain in Scotland or on a ferry going somewhere new. She suddenly wants to be anywhere but here – a familiar spring feeling that has haunted her regularly throughout her life. Perhaps she can convince Ken to go for a drive in the country when he gets back.

  Automatically, unconsciously, she pulls a mug from a hook, drops a teabag in and pours on the boiling water. She sits at the kitchen table and warms her hands on the cup, notices the steam rising, sees dust motes floating in the sunlight.

  She reaches for her Nokia and checks the screen. She has missed two calls from Dot and has a voice message. She smiles at this unexpected good news. Dot has been strangely absent for the last two weeks – it happens occasionally, generally when things are bad with Martin. She’s glad Dot’s back. Perhaps, if there’s football for Ken to watch, she can go for a walk with Dot instead.

  Alice raises the phone to her ear and simultaneously raises the mug to her lips. But at the sound of Dot’s brittle voice, she frowns and puts the cup back down, somehow the better to concentrate on the voice message. Because Dot doesn’t sound much like Dot today.

  ‘Hi, Alice, it’s me,’ the message runs. ‘I’ve finally done it. I’ve left him. I, um . . . I need to talk to you. I’m staying in a little place in Edgbaston. It’s near Edith’s place but don’t tell Martin; he doesn’t know where I am. Oh, and don’t tell Ken either, please. You know those two are thick as chalk and cheese. Anyway, um . . . call me back, will you? Bye.’

  Alice lowers the phone and frowns at
it. As thick as chalk and cheese? Dot means as thick as thieves, surely. She swallows with difficulty. She wants to listen to the message again, but can’t remember which button to press and can’t risk deleting it, so she hangs up and dials her voicemail again. But even on the second and third listening, the message makes no sense to her. She understands what the words mean, she can hear what Dot is saying, but their meaning seems so out of context as to be almost an impossibility. Because when Alice last saw Dot she had not been about to leave Martin, not at all. In fact, no woman in her seventies that Alice has ever known has been about to leave her husband. It’s simply not something that happens in Alice’s universe. She hangs up, then redials and listens to the message for a fourth time, and then she puts down the handset and stares at it – suddenly strange, suddenly alien to her, the bearer of surreal news. Eventually, after fifteen minutes, her brain starts to adjust. The idea that her best friend might truly be leaving her husband begins almost to make sense.

  She reaches for her phone again and is dialling Dot’s number when she sees Ken’s shadow fall upon the patterned glass of the front door, hears his key in the lock. ‘Hiya,’ he says, stepping into the hallway.

  ‘Morning,’ Alice replies, putting down the phone.

  Ken approaches, the soles of his brogues tapping the hall tiles as he walks. He enters the kitchen and drops the considerable weight that is the Sunday Times on to the kitchen table. ‘It’s all Greece again,’ he says.

  ‘Grease?’ Alice asks.

  ‘Greece. The country. The euro and all that palaver.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alice says, nodding, still stroking her mobile phone.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ken asks.

  Alice nods. ‘Yep,’ she says. ‘You?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ken tells her, pulling off his coat and hanging it in the hall before returning to the kitchen. He looks at Alice questioningly. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ he asks with unusual perspicacity.

  Alice forces a smile. ‘Yes,’ she insists. ‘I’m fine! I, um . . . I was thinking that I might nip out to the shops.’

  ‘Really?’ Ken asks. ‘We went yesterday. We got a whole carload of stuff, nearly a hundred and fifty quid’s worth.’ Trust Ken to bring everything back to money.

  ‘I know. But I fancy some fish. You know how it is when you just fancy something, and today I fancy fish.’

  ‘There’s fish in the freezer,’ Ken says.

  ‘I fancy some fresh fish. It’s almost a craving.’

  ‘Maybe you’re pregnant,’ Ken laughs.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s Sunday, love,’ Ken says. ‘You’d have to go to—’

  ‘Tesco,’ Alice says. ‘Yes, I know.’ Tesco is perfect, Alice thinks. Tesco is in Edgbaston.

  Knowing that Ken will find out about Dot soon enough and wondering why she is bothering to lie to him, Alice pulls on her coat, grabs her car keys from the hook and glances back at Ken.

  ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ he asks one more time, frowning deeply.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice says crisply. ‘I just want some fish, that’s all.’ She’ll have to come clean later, but for now, she simply doesn’t want to deal with Ken’s reactions until she has at least some handle on her own.

  Outside in the sunshine, in something of a daze, she slides into the car, fastens her seat belt and pulls sharply away. She accelerates quickly to the end of the road, drives faster than usual through King’s Heath, and then unexpectedly, even to herself, pulls abruptly off the main road on to a lane leading to the cemetery. She feels younger this morning – younger and, like life, unpredictable. It’s strange.

  She parks on the gravelly hard shoulder, turns off the engine and then pulls her phone from her handbag.

  Dot answers immediately. ‘Alice?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Is it true?’ she asks, aware that she’s sounding abrupt.

  ‘I’ve been trying to phone you,’ Dot says.

  ‘I know. I heard your message. Is it true then?’

  ‘That I’ve left him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course it’s true. It was the Spain trip that, you know . . . broke the camel’s back. D’you know what that bastard did? He only went into Thomson’s and cancelled my whole—’

  ‘Dot,’ Alice interrupts. ‘I’m in the car. I’m on my way to Tesco’s.’

  ‘Tesco here? The Edgbaston one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then come. I’m just around the corner. And I need to see you.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘I’m in the same building as Edith from gym class. On Skipton Road. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, just about.’

  ‘Then come. I’ll make a pot of coffee.’

  ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  ‘Park in bay thirty-four.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘That’s my space. They get funny about that stuff here.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Bay thirty-four,’ Alice repeats. She clicks on a button to end the call then returns the phone to her handbag. She shakes her head vigorously as if to dislodge something, then exhales slowly, starts the engine and swings the Micra around, spitting gravel as she does so.

  She’s feeling most peculiar, she really is. This Dot thing has left her feeling quite shaken up. She feels jittery and nervous. Her heart is beating faster than usual. She has a bead of sweat on her top lip. And then she works it out – she’s feeling excited. She hasn’t felt excited about anything for so long that the feeling is barely familiar to her, but, yes, that’s definitely it. She’s excited. But why?

  When she gets to Avery House, she finds Dot standing in the car park. She’s wearing a rather Vicky Pollard purple velour tracksuit, which is so out of character that Alice has to blink twice before she manages to convince herself that this is indeed Dot.

  The second she climbs from the driving seat, Dot hugs her.

  ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ Alice asks.

  Dot looks down at herself and then laughs in surprise. ‘Don’t worry, these are just my pyjamas,’ she says. ‘Lazing around in your jim-jams until ten in the morning is just one of the pleasures of being single. One of many pleasures. Come inside. Come see my new place.’

  ‘Are you really single?’ Alice asks as she locks the car. ‘Or is this just some—’

  ‘It’s real,’ Dot tells her. ‘Come and see.’

  She leads Alice across the car park and into the shabby lobby of the small tower block. It’s not an elegant or refined building in any way, but it is clean, and when she opens the front door to her apartment the sun is shining on to the sofa, a pot of coffee is steaming on the table and a novel lies open next to it.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ Dot says, gesturing at the space.

  ‘You need to tell me what’s going on here,’ Alice says, ‘because this is all a bit too much for my brain to take in.’

  ‘I know,’ Dot replies, sitting on the sofa and patting the space beside her. ‘Take your coat off, come and sit down, and I’ll tell you everything. I’ve been dying to tell you, Alice, but I couldn’t. I hope you’ll understand. I hope you’ll forgive me.’

  Over coffee, Dot tells Alice her story. She tells her about the secret bank account she opened three years ago. She tells her how she squirrelled money away. She tells her about her surreptitious hunt for an apartment and how Edith from gym class mentioned this one to her a month ago. ‘It’s only one hundred and twenty a week,’ she says. ‘That’s cheap for round here.’

  Alice listens and struggles to get her brain around the fact of Dot living alone. She also tries to forgive her for keeping the secret for so long. Because in Dot’s own words, she’s been planning this for years. She’s been saving and house-hunting, consulting divorce lawyers and seeing pension specialists, and all of it without a word to anyone. And Alice can’t help but feel a little hurt by her best friend’s lack of trust.

  But then they start to talk not of the past but of t
he future, specifically of Dot’s future as a single woman. Alice asks her how she feels, if she’s scared, if she feels lonely. And Dot replies that no, she’s not scared, and no, she doesn’t feel lonely. She feels, for the first time in years, relaxed, she says. She feels, for the first time since her thirties, optimistic and excited. The tears in her eyes reveal her words to be true and they are so convincing and somehow so familiar to Alice (who only this morning was savouring Ken’s hour-long absence) that her happiness for her friend drowns out her resentment. She feels proud of Dot’s bravery and surprisingly jealous, too. And there, again, is that strange feeling of youthful excitement. Her heart is racing again. What’s that all about?

  It’s only when Alice gets home that she realises she has completely forgotten to buy fish – her supposed alibi for the trip out. But as she enters the lounge – hesitating between the truth and a ‘surprise run on fish products at Tesco’ – Ken glances up at her looking outraged, and says, ‘You’ll never guess who phoned while you were out.’

  ‘Martin?’ Alice offers.

  ‘You know about this?’

  Alice nods. ‘Dot phoned me while I was out. I was, um, so surprised I forgot all about the fish.’

  ‘It’s un-ber-loody-lievable,’ Ken says. ‘What did she say? Martin doesn’t even know where she is.’

  ‘I don’t know either. She didn’t say. I think she’s in Brum somewhere, staying with a friend.’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘She’s gone crazy, that’s what Martin says. She needs help, you know – proper professional help.’

  ‘She sounded OK. I think she just had enough of him,’ Alice says, fiddling with her headscarf, reluctant to remove her coat, not with Ken looking this angry.

  ‘Enough of him?!’ Ken says. ‘They’ve been together thirty years. More than thirty years.’