Alys, Always by Harriet Lane Page A

spill of light beneath her parents’ bedroom door. She was surprised they were still awake.
    When she woke up on Sunday morning and appeared at breakfast, there was an atmosphere in the air, as insistent as the smell of burning. Something had happened. And yet you couldn’t cite anyone’s actions or remarks as evidence of it. If anything, Alys and Laurence behaved quite normally. Too normally. Laurence was as attentive to Alys as he usually was, but he was watchful, too, as if he was waiting for something. And Alys, always distracted and dreamy, seemed preoccupied, almost absent.
    Polly went back to bed with a cup of tea: she had a script to learn for college. An hour or so later, she was padding around the upstairs landing, on her way to run a bath, when she heard her mother’s voice, distinct, every word freighted. The kitchen door was ajar.
    ‘And you can change the dedication while you’re at it,’ she was saying. It was the coldness in her voice that shocked Polly most. Alys was never cold. ‘It’s not a tribute, it’s an insult.’
    Polly didn’t want to hear any more. She was used to thinking of her parents’ relationship as harmonious. Her friends had parents who were divorced: mothers who were on their second or in some cases third husbands; fathers who lived in Geneva or New York with new wives and other, younger children, some of whom were still babies or at kindergarten. But Alys and Laurence were not like this. They were a partnership. They enjoyed each other’s company. Of course they rowed from time to time, but they always laughed at each other’s jokes.
    When Polly still lived at home, she liked to lie in bed at night with the door open, listening to the sound of their conversation spiralling up through the house. It made her feel safe.
    This was different. It was unwelcome. It frightened her.
    She went down the landing to the bathroom and started torun the bath, and when she went back to her room to collect her shampoo, she whistled loudly just to let Alys and Laurence know she was around and within earshot. By the time she’d bathed and dried her hair, lunch was ready. A simple sort of lunch, the sort of thing Alys could always throw together without any fuss: a roast chicken, a pan of diced potatoes with rosemary, watercress salad. The atmosphere was still perhaps a little strained but as before there was nothing you could quite put your finger on. Laurence talked in passing about Nikolai Titov’s forthcoming autobiography. Alys listened, as she always did. Perhaps she spoke less than usual.
    And then after lunch, when Polly looked at her watch and realised she had only twenty-five minutes before the train went, Alys volunteered to drive her to the station. It was all a rush from that point: throwing stuff in the bag; Alys unable to lay hands on the car keys and Laurence finally finding them in his overcoat pocket; an anxiety, as they drove through the narrow lanes, about whether they’d make it in time. When the Audi pulled up in the station car park, the red warning lights were flashing, the alarm was sounding, the gates across the level crossing were coming down. Polly blew her mother a kiss as she ran through the ticket office on to the platform. ‘I’ll call you!’ she shouted, over the clatter and screech of the approaching train.
    Alys waved back, smiling.
    That was their goodbye.
    Laurence rang Polly that evening, around eleven o’clock, and told her what had happened.
    ‘Did you ever ask him what they had argued about?’ I ask, when the room has fallen silent.
    ‘No. How could I? Anyway, I only wanted to remember them together, happy. The disagreement, or whatever it was, only really came back to me when I heard about you.Then I let myself remember. And what you told us made me feel better – that she’d made her peace with whatever had happened.
Affliction
was published and of course it was dedicated to her. Most of them are, did you know? Apart from
The Ha
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, which