Scene Forty-Five
No matter how much Alice tried to disguise it from herself, a subterranean thought had kept niggling away under the surface that she found it impossible to totally ignore, especially after her uncomfortable interview with Becky's defence solicitor and his delicately phrased questioning of her professionalism. As the days rolled on, her life with George was tranquil enough but she was more than ever aware of how Becky might be faring right now. She realised that this instinctive sympathy for others' suffering could not be denied and she couldn't in all conscience just coldly ignore it and that was what mattered most in she faced the prospect of being asked hard questions when she gave evidence , Becky was in an infinitely worse situation of being accused of grievous bodily harm and facing her whole lifestyle being opened up to legal scrutiny. She knew enough of the trials she'd witnessed just how searching the questions could matter how badly Becky had behaved, Alice could not in all good conscience wish that on her. In the meantime, she dithered and delayed and she otherwise devoted her life to the self assured George who knew her own mind, had definite views but didn't want people falling at her feet as the Angel of nothing else, George kept her slim feet firmly planted on the ground and had no time for games, something Alice deeply related to and was in love was all very confusing, emotionally speaking.
George and Alice popped round one evening to Nikki and Helen's flat after they'd come back from the antenatal clinic and were glad to be out of the rain that had bucketed down the moment they stepped out of George's car. While the squalls briefly blasted at them, it felt somehow good to be sheltering under the one umbrella, or so George felt as Alice, being taller, gallantly sheltered them. Helen opened the door and, at six months, the pregnancy was very noticeable on her and she clearly relished every moment of it.
"Come in and have a cup of tea," Nikki exclaimed in the background much as her mother might have behaved while Helen kissed Alice, then George.
"I'd better be careful how close I get to you," George said wittily. "I think I remember enough of when I was carrying Charlie if I'm prodded enough."
"You weren't the Idealised Mother then," Helen said, her eyes twinkling.
"Indeed I wasn't," exclaimed George, carefully steering her memories towards a positive outcome."I cursed and I swore and called John every name in the English Dictionary and doing ante natal exercised and being pushed and prodded during all kind of tests by women in white coats wasn't my cup of tea. Still, it all happens for the best as Charlie is now the dutiful hard-working daughter after sowing her wild oats in all manner of political crazes."
"That's where weve come from now. Helen's classified as a young mother and with all this IVF, they're not taking any chances. At any rate, we've passed the twenty week's scan to check for abnormalities and, so far, so good,"Nikki beamed, a whole souled smile on her face as she called out loudly from the kitchen making tea for them all."
"Still, we're not so self centred to turn away from our normal conversation and bore you stiff about babies and and I made a vow that, while we're not going to shut up about our happy news, we do want to talk about the world outside our the weight off your feet."
"It's nice to settle down after the tumult of past experiences,"George observed with a look that aimed to include them all. "There's nothing wrong about the 'all ends happily after' epilogue though I used to think of it too frightfully sickly sweet for my taste."
There was a murmur of agreement but in Alice's depths, a discordant note was struck However, she laughed along with the others.
Finally, Alice could bear the tension no longer. She was in a hurry so she hadn't got time to tell George, and she managed to squeeze in some time on her rounds to call in on Becky.
As soon as Alice went off the beaten path from where her duties took her, she had this unsettling feeling of illegality. She vowed to herself that she wouldn't claim more than the motor mileage she would otherwise have claimed and she wouldn't seek a repetition of the visit to Mrs Elliott that had landed her in her present predicament. In such a frame of mind, she knocked timidly on Becky's front door. It opened and let in the gaping darkness which a thin and unkempt looking woman filled. With a shock, Alice realised that this was Becky.
"Alice, thank God you're here. You're the answer to my prayers. I've been going out of my mind counting the days to the trial and nothing to think about except ..maybe after all we've been through, you'd come and rescue me. Come in, come in."
Her ingrained social worker instinct made her enter the flat. The front living room was a wreck with bottles of wine, lager and assorted clothing strewn everywhere not to mention the reek of stale alcohol. Alice was horrified how far down she had sunk not that she hadn't seen such scenes before in her life. It's just that it hadn't touched her so closely and personally before.
"What's happened to you? Isn't there someone looking after you?"Alice stammered only to be greeted by some sort of indefinable sound emanating from the other room. It took Alice a while to decipher the stream of slurred sound as a very very drunken woman.
"Becky, let's split this bottle of wine and come back to bed," it finally said, articulating words against the odds of them being heard. It horrified Alice that her ex-lover's alcoholism had grown to the point of taking over even at a moment like this.
"What about the trial, Becky?"Alice urged, her memories of past court cases coming back to her mind. She hadn't been closely involved as her friends had been in their various trials but she tried to summon up memories of trials she'd witnessed. The trouble was that it was one thing to watch how experts like Jo and George operated. It was quite another thing to be the one in charge and Alice tried to wing it as best she could. "You've got to work out what you're going to say, what started it off. You picked up the knife instinctively to defend yourself against your mother. You and I know how dangerous she have to stick to the same story that I'm going to tell.I care about you but you have to be strong for yourself."
That was the start of a nightmare couple of hours after which Alice gave up in despair after a series of ricochetting conversations between the three of them. Alice's efforts in grabbing Becky's wandering attention was continually interrupted by her drunken partner tempting her to become equally stupid drunk as she was. Even when she momentarily engaged Becky's attention and tried to get her to come up with a credible story that a jury might believe and tie in with Alice's clear headed version, her ex-lover was manic in jumping from one point to another in no particular order and end up in talking at length about her feelings, how she couldn't cope with the thought of being shut up in prison miles from anywhere where there was no one around who cared for her. It was at that point that her tiresome partner would break into the conversation loudly coming up with all sorts of irrelevant rubbish. Finally, Alice looked at her watch and noticed with horror that it was a quarter to eight. Feeling that she had become totally peripheral and starting to worry about George, she made a shamefaced exit and went back to her car. It was a cold pitch-black night, spitting down with rain but the bleak inhospitable night felt more comfortable than the madhouse she had just left. Without turning on her mobile, she sped off down the road to the safety and security of hers and George's house and let herself in.
George had been used to Alice coming in at irregular hours thanks to the nature of her job but always phoned in when she was likely to be late so that George could cook the dinner. This time, the hours ticked away and still no response on her mobile which was switched off and a mixture of annoyance and concern swilled around in George's emotional system till she heard the door open. By then, the dinner had been ruined.
"What on earth happened to you Alice? Why on earth are you smelling like a brewery?" George demanded, the words coming out more aggressively than she'd intended.
"Only one of my more troublesome clients. She and her friend had been acting up. It wasn't what I'd been led to believe," Alice said looking away from George's direct gaze. She'd been worrying how George would react to her visiting Becky so she decided to embellish her story.
George picked up something not quite right about Alice's manner. She'd lived with her for long enough to know her little habits. Her mind cast out for the likeliest possible explanation for the unusual combination of facts and the smell of cheap lager led her to the horrid suspicion who she'd been seeing.
"You've been visiting Becky, haven't you," George said as a flat statement in ominously quiet tones.
"All right so I did," Alice said in an agitated fashion, not wanting to dwell on the hellish last few hours. She feverishly sought the nearest justification to hand. "I know what she's like when she's under stress with the trial coming on and wanted to talk over what we'd say when we came to give evidence. I tried to get her to concentrate but I didn't get very far."
"You did what?" exclaimed George as her anger blazed up, clean missing the partner's world weary sense of futility in her partner's voice. All she realised was just how much suppressed emotion she'd been bottling up as Becky had kept reappearing just when she had thought that Alice had learnt the lesson and saying she had. As everything boiled over, she latched onto what was nearest and safest for her.
"What on earth do you think you were doing, Alice. I thought you knew well enough that you and Becky shouldn't have talked with each other about the wounding before the court hearing."
"I don't see what I've done wrong George," Alice retaliated, the accumulated stress starting to get to her. "Didn't Nikki and Helen support Sally-Anne and Karen and especially each other when Helen was accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act?"
George rolled her eyes skyward and summoned up a degree of self restraint as she sought to put the mind straight of this dreadfully well meaning woman who just didn't get wasn't worth saying how Nikki and Helen played things very carefully all the time Helen was coming up to trial and giving evidence in court. At most any discussion took place within the presence of either Claire Walker or Jo or herself or some such combination.
"Hadn't you realised how your evidence could be turned around so easily, that you could so easily shape up as a prosecution witness as much as a defence witness? Can't you see that any halfway decent barrister will worm out the fact that you and Becky have history and use your tete a tete to crucify you and discredit your evidence?"
"It's because I've seen Becky at all. That's why you're angry with me," blurted out Alice very foolishly. It shifted the whole axis of debate onto an emotional level.
"And you know why?"George shouted, an unexpected tremor in her voice as she let everything pour out in one solid stream of words. "If you let her drag you into her world, she'll drag you down and down and down. Every time you go round to see her, she messes around with your head so you promise you won't ever go round again- till the next time. Remember the time you threw some crockery at the wall after the last time you visited her. You can't seem to get that frightful woman out of your system no matter what she's done and I can't stand being the competition. I've had enough. I'm going out."
"But wait," protested Alice as it started to cross her mind that George had been her security that she'd taken for granted. "You can't do that."
"Can't I just. Just watch me now," retorted George as she grabbed her handbag and was off out the front door leaving behind a swirl of cold air from outside.
"She's driving me mad, mad," ranted George as she stomped back and forth across the carpet in John's bedroom, clicking her fingers as John winced with horror at the reckless way that Alice had alarm bells rang in his head and every instinct as to the due process of law throbbed like raw nerve endings exposed. "I've tried to be reasonable, the understanding consort but this comes out of the blue just when I thought she'd got this Becky thing out of her system."
"'The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,'" quoted John. "That was an expression I remember my father saying to keep me on my toes but I really feel sorry for you in being haunted by this woman.
"Pour me another drink,"demanded George peremptorily. "A large Martini dry and go easy on the lemonade. Just for once in my life, I want to get fairly drunk and, after that, who knows what might happen?"
John blinked at George's sudden change of mood that suffused her last words along with the delicious smile that spread across her face. This was as clear a bold sexual proposition that he'd ever heard in his life that reminded him forcibly of happier days in their youth. John felt a strong twinge of conscience as he carefully weighed up the ethics of the situation. George and Alice were partners, something he felt was insoluble and George was untouchable. He really considered whether or not he should do the honourable thing and reason with George as to whether or not she really knew what she was doing, would she regret it in the morning. He set against this the fact that George knew exactly what she was doing and hadn't made any suggestion that this was a deeply passionate moment of love's awakening but something she needed on this night with no promise of any further commitment. He shook his head in wonder that, at this precise moment, she was standing in the shoes that he once wore, that she was the one driven mad by the inconstancy of a partner, something that he had been serially guilty of and, relatively speaking, he was the innocent party.
He went to fill up George's glass and a measure for himself as well with the curious feeling that he wasn't betraying his newly found principles despite appearances to the contrary.
Alice remained at home, pecking desultarally at the remains of the overcooked meal that George had dumped on the side. She remained frozen to the settee and emotionally devastated. It hit her hard that she lost what she most loved while pursuing a fantasy. Without George's vibrant presence, the house felt drained of energy. She hadn't the slightest idea what to do as the minutes ticked away. Finally, she summoned up the energy to phone up one of her friends to work out what the hell she should do. She opted finally for Sally-Anne as someone whose non-judgmental manner she could face when it was starting to steal over her how incredibly foolishly she had acted. She didn't dare think of what George might be doing.
Fortunately, Monday night was Sally-Anne and Trisha's quiet night. They were lying in their darkened living room, watching a DVD which Trisha loved but was not up Sally-Anne's street. When her mobile rang, she trailed her fingers through her lover's blond hair, kissed her forehead and took herself into the hallway.
"George has done what?" Sally-Anne said before the undertone of misery in Alice's voice made her sharpen up as the remaining miasma of the Hollywood love story in the living room was sharply dispersed. "Tell me what's happened. I'm here for you."
As Alice's uncertain voice trailed its way towards its conclusion, Sally-Anne made up Alice's mind in her practical way.
"It's easier to say than do, but you've no choice to sit tight and wait for George to come back as I know she will. The ball is in her court to decide what to do. I wouldn't deny that a drink or two won't help but try to settle down as best as you can. I can't believe that you cannot mean everything to George and she'll calm down and realise it but you'll need to face up properly to your ex. Take care," Sally-Anne said softly, sounding more confident than she felt.
With that, Alice finally lay down in the double bed which felt far too big to her right now.
