says Alix, speculatively, ‘if we know what it is like in one another’s head? You and me? After knowing one another – how long is it – for thirty years and more?’
‘We could only know if we found out that we didn’t know,’ says Liz. ‘If one or the other of us did something really surprising. Really out of character, or that would seem to be out of character to the other person.’
‘Like that defector Esther, you mean? Whom we both thought we knew so well, until she suddenly vanished?’
‘I sometimes wonder about the children. I mean, I’d say it was impossible that Jonathan or Aaron or Alan could turn out to be a murderer. Or Sally or Stella either, not to be sexist about it. But then, one wouldn’t know, would one? Because it wouldn’t be obvious. So it would come as a shock. If one found such a thing out.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I imagine if anyone had been in close touch with P. Whitmore, they might have known. It was because nobody was in touch with him that nobody found him out.’
‘Well,’ says Liz, ‘I think I do know you quite well. I know that you aren’t a murderer, and I can predict, for instance’ – she pauses, watching, as Alix turns over the leaves in the salad bowl – ‘I can predict that you are about to reject the bits of fennel in favour of the lettuce and watercress.’
‘I’ve always hated fennel,’ says Alix, pleasantly. ‘In fact, I don’t like anything with that aniseed flavour, really, it’s about the only flavour I don’t much like. I can’t understand how people can drink Pernod.’
‘People are mysterious,’ says Liz, somewhat guiltily pondering the reason why she has put fennel in the salad at all, when she knew quite well Alix wouldn’t touch it. To test her? To annoy her? To attempt to dominate?
‘Tell me again,’ she says, ‘what P. Whitmore said about the tinned peas.’
The next morning Alix got up early and caught a bus down to Baker Street and Madame Tussaud’s. She did not mention this outing to Liz, who was already seeing a patient when she left. She felt slightly furtive about it anyway, slightly ridiculous, at her age, queuing with an ill-assorted crew of down-market foreign tourists and oddly ill-complexioned provincials. Did she look as out of place as she felt, she wondered, would she be arrested for wrongful curiosity? And she was indeed stopped, at the top of the stairs, by a young woman with a market survey, wanting to know, amongst other things, if and when Alix had last been to visit the waxworks.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alix, ‘About forty years ago, I suppose. With my mother.’
And she wandered on into the dark exhibition, recalling her mother’s reluctance to indulge Alix and her sister in this outing, remembering their pleadings and cajolings and whinings, their eventual success. They hadn’t been able to understand why their mother, who had seemed keen to let them visit the British Museum and the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens and the Zoo, should have tried to draw the line at something they considered equally educational. Nearly everyone at school had been to Madame Tussaud’s, they said, why couldn’t they?
Gazing, now, at the exhibits, Alix could see all too clearly why their mother had thought it unsuitable. Gloomy, morbid, grisly. Horrible history. Guy Fawkes, Mary Queen of Scots about to have her head cut off, Henry VIII with a tableau of his ill-fated wives, the infant cavalier of Yeames’s ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ Right-wing History. Martyrs’ Memorials. Alix moved on, through modern times, where she recognized Princess Di and Boris Becker and the Beatles, but was at a loss to identify many other personalities from the ephemeral world of entertainment; she was amused to see Ken Livingstone, and wondered whether Perry Blinkhorn would ever make it into wax.
She had come, of course, to see the Chamber of Horrors, but could hardly make herself descend the fake-dungeon stairs. She had been frightened by it as a child, just as her mother had said she would be. Her mother, having given in, had washed her hands of them: ‘Well, if you must look, you must look,’ she had said, and Alix and her sister had gazed uncomfortably at treadmills and tortures. It seemed now, forty years on, perhaps slightly less gruesome – but oh dear yes, there were the authentic casts of the severed heads of Louis and Marie Antoinette, there was Marat in his bath. Well, one could hardly call Paul Whitmore all that peculiar in his interests, could one? Yesterday in the British Museum a cluster of perfectly respectable people had gathered to stare at Lindow Man, and here an only marginally less respectable lot were goggling at Marat and a replica of Garry Gillmore in the electric chair. A natural curiosity?
Paul also had been here when he was ten, or so he had told Alix.
Alix walked through quite briskly, but not so briskly that she did not, in the last section, come to a standstill face to face with an effigy of her friend P. Whitmore. There he was, the Horror of Harrow Road. It seemed rude to stare at him, but she did. He shone with a waxy pallor, and looked slightly smaller than he did in real life, though she supposed he couldn’t be. They must get the measurements right, surely? He didn’t look quite – well, real? He was dressed in a grey suit, and stood to attention, alert, helpful, like a shop assistant. Oh dear, thought Alix. She did not know whether to laugh or cry. Poor dummy. There he stood.
She looks at him, he does not look at her. She is reminded of the day when she went to watch his trial. Then, as now, she had felt furtive, guilty, ashamed. She had not been called as a witness, although this had at one stage seemed a possibility, and she had avoided the early days of the hearing. But at the end of the second week she had found herself drawn there, to the Old Bailey, by an attraction more powerful than her natural distaste. In vain did she say to herself, as she stood in the queue waiting to enter the public gallery, that this was her civic right, that she had a right if not a duty to enter a court of justice to see justice being done: in vain did she say to herself that her interest, unlike that of those around her, was prompted by something more legitimate than mere idle sightseeing or muckraking, moneymaking curiosity. She had continued to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, conspicuous, as she sat on the back row of the gallery, as unobtrusively as possible, her eyes modestly lowered for much of the proceedings, occupying as little space as possible, clutching her bag and her shopping basket.
She had chosen, unwittingly, a dull day, not a day of lurid revelations. There had been interminable cross-questioning of a witness who had had a drink in a pub by the canal on the night that one of the victims had been murdered, and who had spoken to Paul at approximately 10.25 – or was it more like 10.35? – for some minutes about a newly released horror movie. There was a long slow rigmarole about fingerprints and a carnival float on a waste lot. Time was spent clearing the court while matters of law were discussed. Time was spent refilling the court to proceed. Alix had watched the judge in his wig and half-moon glasses, making notes, twiddling his thumbs, occasionally almost yawning: she had watched the bewigged counsel, one of them high-coloured, large-nosed, scrubbed, choleric, the other pale as soap. She had watched the faces of the jury, the twelve random citizens, and had tried to read their faces: a handsome neatly suited Turkish lad, a white youth with cropped hair and a scar blaring across one cheek, a perky girl with tufty black Gothic hair and a red necklace, a woman with a soft weary managerial face, a raw-boned man with an open shirt and a gold medallion at his throat, a cashmere-cardiganed Sloane Ranger with smooth blonde hair . . . And she had watched, covertly, Paul. There he had sat, in the dock, impassively, this monster, unmoving, unmoved, expressionless, listening to the catalogue of his crimes, the slowly unfolding drama of his massacres.
And it had been high drama, however slow the pace, however silent the protagonist. His very silence spoke. Alix, then as now, found herself wanting to ask the unaskable. ‘But why? Why? How did it happen to you? Why and how?’ The court was not interested in ‘why’ and its interest in ‘how’ ended where Alix’s began, but nevertheless the raw material was there. She had been transfixed. She had wanted to return the next day, and the next, like an addict, but luckily work prevented her. But she had felt, from that one long day, a bond, a connection, a continuation of that curious relation begun so obliquely on the night that the police had surrounded the house where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer lived. She had felt an obligation.
The wax figure of