Alice Alone, page 1
ALICE ALONE
AMANDA BROOKFIELD
PRAISE FOR ‘ALICE ALONE’
A bright, neat first novel…engagingly ebullient.
The Financial Times
A strong sense of humour, a natural narrative gift and controlled, understated characterisation, signify a promising debut.
Evening Standard
Penetrating insights into the ordinary female condition.
Woman’s Own
A Chekhovian understanding of human beings and their failings.
The Bookseller
For Mark
CONTENTS
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgments
More from Amanda Brookfield
About the Author
About Boldwood Books
FOREWORD
I started to write Alice Alone when I was twenty-five and working as a freelance journalist in Buenos Aires. It began as a short story and grew into my first novel. My over-riding concern at the time was to pick a subject matter as far removed from my ‘real’ life as possible. This was partly from the desire to guard my privacy (and that of my loved ones), but also to avoid falling into the familiar trap of freighting a first attempt at fiction with an overload of self-indulgent autobiography.
So, I set the story in North London and created fifty-one-year-old Alice, an ‘ancient’ protagonist to my then young eyes! I plonked her in the middle of a midlife crisis, brought on by the departure of her youngest child from the family nest and the need to face up to the grim truth that she no longer loves her remote, work-obsessed husband. With no career, no private funds, and no close friends to fall back on, Alice, desolate and desperate, spins off on an increasingly dubious quest for solace and self-fulfilment.
Lucky enough myself to be employed, freshly married, and living a life of adventure in South America, I could not have felt more safely distant from the problems faced by my invented, hapless protagonist. Alice was part of an earlier generation – not mine – and quite frankly, phew! The notion of having to live so dependently, of being part of a society in which a middle-aged woman could not even dye her hair without facing judgement and challenge, filled me with horror. Indeed, as Alice started to come alive on the page, my primary emotion towards her was pity.
Prisons come in many guises, and my authorial aim, in so far as I possessed one, was to turn a wry and tender spotlight on Alice’s state of entrapment. It was only after a few chapters that Alice – under my fingertips – began to take over, morphing into a secret rebel, bent on securing her own happiness at almost any price. A character, fighting her own corner! A decent person making terrible decisions! To me, it was both a revelation and an inspiration that the imagination could unlock such doors, and the reason I am still writing, thirty-seven years later.
Returning to Alice Alone after so long has been somewhat unnerving, not unlike occupying two parallel time zones: the me now, meeting the me then – a creature embodying such a cocktail of wild confidence, naivety, and self-doubt, that I quailed on her behalf. At times, hearing her blithe, narrative voice, cantering through Alice’s ups and downs, dishing out wisdom, while striking the occasional quaint, off-beat note, I didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp out loud. Who was this whippersnapper of a writer?! How dare she put on a show of knowing it all?!
The now me now is wiser, warier. Reconnecting with Alice has been a reminder of how much the world has turned, but also, how little. There are still so many injustices to be resolved, for women, as well as for countless others; still so many prisons to be broken out of. Alice is a woman of her time, fighting for happiness with what weapons she can. Whether that ultimately makes her a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ person is for the reader to decide.
Amanda Brookfield
1
ROBIN LEAVES HOME
Alice, a sturdy, steely-haired woman of fifty-one, stood on the pavement waving goodbye to the last of her three children to leave home. Robin had grown up more quickly than the first two – probably because of them. Although only nineteen, she was already taking the advanced step – or so it seemed to Alice – of throwing herself into the arms of a Birmingham workshop theatre group; and, more specifically, into the hairy arms of its lanky, one-earringed director.
The taxi appointed to the historic task of bearing away her youngest daughter to catch the eleven-forty-five from Euston to embark on her new life, had honked its horn outside their door exactly twenty-two minutes ago. Robin, in her usual whirlwind style, had left everything to the last minute. So the morning had been spent in a flurry of ironing, packing, and scribbling of phone numbers and addresses for passing on to friends. Only during the final seconds, when she was forced to say something along the lines of a goodbye, did Alice notice the hint of a wobble in her daughter’s voice, but it was only a hint and a moment later, the cab door slammed shut and Alice was left standing at the gate of Number 12 Quadrant Grove, Belsize Park, waving into thin air.
Like all her friends, Alice’s single teenage ambition had been to get married and have a family. A tedious year’s secretarial course had secured her a job in a legal firm, which in turn had secured her a husband in the form of Peter Hatton, a struggling young barrister. They had both been completely inexperienced. Alice, because she had only ever got as far as holding a sweaty hand at the end of the occasional party, and Peter, because he had been brought up on a closeted nine years at Radley and Oxford. The first of his few attempts at entertaining a girl on his own had nearly put him off women for life. It had been a second cousin who came to his college rooms for tea during his final Oxford term. Permission from the Dean and Master for this momentous event had been secured only on condition that Peter’s bed be removed from his room and parked in the corridor for the duration of her visit. The tea itself had not been a wildly successful affair. It was at the instigation of their respective parents that the meeting had been arranged in the first place, and neither found the other particularly interesting or attractive. The obvious removal of the bed (round which Violet had to squeeze her sizeable frame to get to the door of Peter’s rooms) did not add to any mood of relaxation. As for Peter, any aptitude he had for small talk was seriously impeded by an obsessive preoccupation with the idea that if he ever had the nerve to ravish his dumpy cousin, he could just as easily do so on the sofa or the floor. The importance of the bed seemed to him negligible.
Alice had found this an extremely amusing story when Peter first told it to her, as they lay confessing the meagre extent of their respective sexual experiences after a very clumsy first attempt on their honeymoon night. She had laughed, partly from relief that her own lack of expertise did not matter. But she had felt something else too, dimly, and quickly suppressed: a tiny, spontaneous twist of disappointment that Peter was not after all the ‘man of the world’ that he had till then implied and in which she had taken pleasure in believing. Being good dinner-party material, this story had been repeated by Peter many times since. He usually began: ‘I’m sure Alice won’t mind if I shock you with the tale of my first encounter with a woman…?’ and ended, ‘…which taught me never to be shy again!’ and other such phrases which implied, falsely, that this inauspicious start had developed into a rollicking bachelorhood. Some dinner-party stories can be introduced again and again, like old friends. This one seemed to Alice to be pulled out like one of Peter’s dirty hankies – loved by him, and an object of embarrassment and irritation to her.
They never did become very adept at making love. How the children had been conceived out of a few minutes of self-conscious fumbling on both their parts always struck Alice as a true miracle of nature. But once Simon, then Kate two years later, and finally Robin appeared, she had felt utterly contented. It must be easier, she often thought, to have a marriage like theirs, in which the couple make so few demands on each other. There was seldom any question of an argument because they simply did not discuss any topic capable of sparking heated reactions. Peter had given Alice everything she wanted: a comfortable home in North London, plenty of money and the children, whose upbringing he left entirely to her. They ate together, went out together, entertained together, and sometimes made love together – about once every three months, to be exact. Even on these occasions, communication was kept to a minimum. Peter would climb into Alice’s bed without saying a word, usually while she was cleaning her teeth. When she returned from the bathroom, he would be lying there quietly, waiting for her, his eyes closed. Long since used to his shyness in these matters, Alice would turn off the light before getting into bed and putting her arms round him. Afterwards he would say ‘goodnight, darling’ in a gruff, humble way and then slip back between his own sheets on the other side of the bedside table.
She had made the children the sole focus of her life. The day when they would all finally have left home for good seemed distant, impossible, unthinkable. After Simon had taken a lucrative job as a lawyer in Chicago, there had still been Kate and Robin to look after. Then Kate had left to teach at an English school in Madrid, and now Robin, just twenty-two minutes ago, had finally taken herself off to a new life in the Midlands with this Bob Tupper character. For the first time, Alice was alone.
She had watched many of her acquaintances preparing for this same moment in their lives. Coming from perhaps the last generation of non-work-conscious women, few of them had careers to fall back on. Instead, they tried to cope with the change by joining bridge groups, going to History of Art classes, or leaving their husbands. None of these options appealed to Alice. She had hoped, very simply, to be able to heave a long, contented sigh at having done an enjoyable job well and to spend the rest of her life basking in the afterglow of the achievement, fuelled by memories of earlier days and frequent contact with her offspring. The fallibility of these hazy hopes was quickly becoming apparent. It had been naive and foolish to suppose that by the time the crunch came, she would feel old and settled. That was the last thing she felt. Added to that, the careers of Simon and Kate had made keeping in close touch well-nigh impossible. And now Robin – by far the most rebellious and independent of the three – had opted for a frighteningly liberated lifestyle in which Alice knew she could play no part.
They had met Bob once. Robin had brought him home for a weekend a month or so before, in preparation for the earth-shattering news that this was the man with whom she had decided to share her life (marriage not being part of the free social expression on which the theatre workshop was based). Alice had concentrated so hard on trying not to appear shocked by Bob’s shaven head, single earring, and obvious physical attraction for her daughter, that she was hardly aware of what the four of them found to say to each other. But her overall impression of him was not favourable. Once he was safely ensconced in his battered Volkswagen van and back on the road to the Midlands, she had tried, gently, to talk Robin out of following him up there a few weeks later. Her motive was a selfless concern for Robin’s welfare. Given the choice, she would not have trusted Bob with money for the milkman, let alone the responsibility of looking after her beloved nineteen-year-old child. But when Robin stoutly refused, Alice had felt the first pricking of loneliness: the first anticipation of how she would feel as she turned from waving to the taxi and entered the empty house.
Peter – no doubt, she thought, because he had never allowed himself to feel particularly close to any of his children – had been infuriatingly philosophical about the whole affair. The weekend produced one of the rare occasions on which Alice actually tried to have a discussion with her husband about how she felt. Peter had been as pragmatic as usual and of little comfort.
‘Everyone’s children go through this stage,’ was all the reassurance he offered her. ‘Robin will soon get bored with it all – you know what she’s like. Anyway, I think it will be good for her to learn to stand on her own two feet. I’d be far more worried if she didn’t want to leave home.’
‘But Peter, how can you not mind what she’s doing? It’s almost as if you don’t care what happens to her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous – of course I care. But we’ve got to trust her. She’s tough enough. If we say no to this plan, and to Bob, then she’ll only go ahead anyway and hate us into the bargain.’
Alice knew that, as ever, his practical view was maddeningly sensible. But the whole business upset her; especially when he said, as he did several times: ‘You’ve got to face it, dear: the children have all grown up now. We must get on with our lives and let them get on with theirs.’
It occurred to her – although she never mentioned the fact – that Peter had always done just that anyway. For him, there would be no change. He would continue to get up at seven-thirty, eat the breakfast she prepared, sit in the traffic for thirty-five minutes and be at his desk a little after nine. On Saturdays he might play golf if the weather was fine or have lunch at his club if it was not. On Sundays he would spend three hours reading the newspapers and then do some work on his book. He was writing some sort of analysis of taxation and company law – Alice could never remember what, exactly. It was two years since he had started working on it and she had long since given up the pretence of showing any interest in the subject or trying to understand what it was all about. The book was simply part of Peter’s weekend routine – a routine that only involved her where meals were concerned. If the writing wasn’t going well, he would spend the evening watching television, making sure he got to bed no later than ten-thirty so as to be fresh for Monday morning. Not having Robin around would not make a scrap of difference to the rhythm of his life.
For Alice, it was a different matter. And as she bustled self-consciously round the kitchen, with the sound of the slamming taxi door beating repeatedly inside her head, she was shocked at this new sense of loneliness. It was irrelevant that she had had years to prepare for such a moment. Like waiting for someone to die; the moment when it comes is still devastating. She felt now what she had always known deep down, but never had to face: that the pleasure in her life had come from making a home for and looking after the children. The fact that, in the process, she had cooked and washed for her husband, had been purely incidental. The full force of this realisation made her feel light-headed with panic. As she mechanically scraped the dried egg off the breakfast plates and loaded the washing-up machine, a cold, evil little question kept popping obstinately into her brain: ‘What are you going to do now, Alice?’ it said. ‘What on earth are you going to do now?’ Mercifully, the question was answered, in the short term at least, by the telephone.
‘Hello, Alice Hatton speaking.’
‘Alice, my dear, how are you? It’s Leonie Cordell here, calling after far too long, I know, to ask you and Peter if you would be free for dinner this evening… I’m aware it’s dreadfully short notice, but you know how we Cordells are – always planning things at the last minute. My dear, do say yes – we’d love to see you both.’
‘How very sweet of you, Leonie… but I really…’
‘Geoffrey’s just rung from the office to say that he bumped into Peter this morning, who seemed to think that you would both be free. We’re planning to have some of the trout that Geoffrey caught in Scotland last season – they’ve been cluttering up my deep-freeze for far too long – so it should be rather a treat for all of us.’
‘Yes, well, that sounds wonderful – we’re both very fond of trout.’ Even as she spoke, Alice secretly marvelled at her ability to sound relatively normal, and to talk sensibly about trout when what she felt like saying was: ‘Leonie, Robin has just left home. I feel desolate because I now realise the extent to which I do not love my husband. I feel more like attending a funeral than a dinner party. I don’t think I could bear an evening of your prattle…’
‘Splendid. Shall we say seven? I know it’s quite early, but it gives us plenty of time for a few naughty cocktails before dinner. Geoffrey’s got some lethal new concoction he wants to try out on us all. Terrible man – I don’t know how I’ve put up with him all these years.’ Her voice tailed off into a well-rehearsed tinkle of a laugh, designed to convey enviable matrimonial happiness.
