Telling Lies to Alice - Softcover

Laura Wilson grew up in London and earned degrees in English Literature from Oxford and UCL, London. After a brief foray into the world of teaching, she became a successful editor of non-fiction books. An author with many strings to her bow, she has written history books for children and professes a fascination with the history of the recent past, painting and sculpture, uninhabited buildings, cemeteries and time capsules. She lives in London. TELLING LIES TO ALICE is her fourth novel.
From the Hardcover edition.

Monday 18 May 1970

LENNY MAXTED FOUND DEAD

Farewell Note: Please Forgive Me

The man once voted Britain’s top comic has been found hanged—just three days after announcing his engagement. His fiancée discovered his body, surrounded by sleeping pills and empty gin bottles, in the Wiltshire cottage where he was staying. Maxted, 40, had been dead for several hours. Police do not believe anyone else was involved.

With his partner, Jack Flowers, Lenny Maxted became one of the nation’s best-loved funnymen following the brilliant success of the TV series Please Turn Over for Jack and Lenny. Often praised for his faultless timing, Maxted’s languid manner was a perfect foil to Flowers’s machine-gun delivery. But viewers caught a glimpse of his personal torment when he broke down during a guest appearance with Jack Flowers on the TV show Close Up. The interviewer, veteran broadcaster Geoffrey Wallace, was criticised for encouraging a tearful Maxted to tell the audience about his alcoholism. Flowers commented afterwards, “Lenny isn’t a happy man. He’s been overworking and he needs a rest.”

Maxted had not been seen in public since he announced his engagement to Alice Conway, a twenty-four-year-old former nightclub hostess. He left a farewell note addressed to Miss Conway which included the words “I love you, please forgive me.” Their agent and close friend Donald Findlater said last night, “I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to Jack. There may have been artistic differences in the past, but they were the best of friends.” Jack Flowers is currently on holiday in the Mediterranean.

Maxted’s Battle with the Bottle—Page 5

Prologue

Maynard’s Farm, Duck End, Oxfordshire Thursday 19 August 1976

Ihad the dream again last night. I’m at the bottom of a lake looking through the window of a car. Everything’s gin-bottle green, murky, and there’s a skeleton sitting behind the wheel, dressed as a bunny girl. The ears are perched on the skull, jaunty, the collar and bow tie are hanging round the neck vertebrae and the body’s dressed in the satin costume—black, the colour we all used to want because it was slimming—with two empty cone-shaped cups stick- ing out in front of the rib cage.

Someone comes up behind me and rubs my face with a trail of waterweed. At first I don’t mind because it’s pleasant—sensual, even—but then they start to twist the weed round my head and neck and it’s choking me so I try to grab it, pull it away, but I can’t do it. I lean forward to bang on the window of the car to get help but I can’t reach and I’m being dragged down and I can’t escape and I think I’m going to die.

Then I wake up with the sheets tangled round my neck, feeling guilty, and I can’t make the feeling go away. Because I know who it is, all right. The skeleton in the car.

It’s replaced the Lenny dream, the one where I find his body. Ever since I got that newspaper cutting in the post, three days ago.

One

BODY FOUND IN LAKE

Falling water levels led to gruesome revelations yesterday when a car containing human remains was fished out of a lake on the Ivar Park estate in Wiltshire. A police spokesman said that the skeleton, which has not yet been identified, may have been in the water for several years.

Idon’t know who sent it. There wasn’t a letter, just the cutting, with the date— Sat, Aug 14th ’76—scrawled across the top. Don’t recognise the writing. London post- mark . . . Could be anyone. But why send the cutting to me? That’s what I don’t understand.

I remember the girl who disappeared. Kitty. Another bunny. Lenny’d slept with her. Mind you, he wasn’t the only one, not by a long chalk. It was in the summer of 1969. During our bad patch. Seven years ago. I thought I’d left all that behind. Well, I’d tried to. That’s why I came down here.

Nobody even noticed Kitty was missing. It wasn’t surpris- ing, really. There must have been a couple of hundred people at that party, and from what I can remember, most of them were so out of it they probably didn’t know what planet they were on, never mind anyone else. I don’t think it was actually reported for a few weeks, but I’m pretty sure the police never found anyone who’d seen her after that night—at least, that’s what everyone said.

Ivar House was down near Salisbury Plain. Massive. Stables, gardens, woods, the lot. And a lake. Definitely a lake. Kitty’d been wearing her bunny costume. We weren’t meant to take them out of the club, but someone—maybe even Lenny, because he was the one who brought her along—must have slipped the security guard a few quid not to look into her bag. I remember her coming down this huge flight of stairs at Ivar and people cheering, but that’s all. . . . It was weird, though, because they couldn’t find anyone who’d given her a lift or seen her leave the party, and she didn’t exactly blend into the background, dressed like that. Nothing about the costume in the paper, though, but then it’s probably rotted away or been eaten by fish or something after this long. I suppose it would have stayed underwater forever if it hadn’t been for the drought. There must be somebody out there who wishes it had.

To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention at the time. Me and Kitty were not what you’d call the best of friends, but in any case, our whole—well, our whole world, if you like—was pretty free and easy, people coming and going all the time. Even Kitty’s flatmate thought she’d gone off to stay with a boyfriend, but she didn’t know who—not surprising, because Kitty wasn’t exactly famous for saying no, if you see what I mean. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said she hooked up with a rich punter and went off abroad somewhere—you could get yourself very well taken care of if you played your cards right, and she was always pretty good at looking after number one.

I don’t know that it’s her—it just says remains, skeleton. But if I’m supposed to know . . . well, there’s no one else it could be. I didn’t like Kitty—with good reason, I might add, because she was a real bitch, what my granddad would have called a right piece of work. I was pretty glad—no, more than glad, I was delighted—when she didn’t come back to the club. But you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, dying like that. It doesn’t bear thinking about . . . and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Some things you can’t. You try—shut the door—but they’re always there, waiting to jump out at you. Like finding Lenny. I mean, usually, when I think about Lenny, it’s Lenny when he was alive, but if I wake up in the night or it catches me off guard, that’s when it all comes back. The anniversaries are the worst, and the week before . . . just dreading it, knowing what it’s going to be like . . . each year, when it comes up, I think, it has to be better this time, but it never is.

I walked into Lenny’s body. The room was pretty dark and I didn’t realise what it was, but when I looked up all I could see for the first couple of seconds were these bulging eyeballs looking straight at me. His head was like a balloon, up by the ceiling, dark red, and his body just hung down from it like a sack or something. He’d done it with a belt. A wide leather belt. But I didn’t know that till later, because I just took one look and ran straight out again. The guy who was with me—the taxi driver—he got the police. He said I was screaming, but I don’t remember. I just recall a dull feeling, as if my brain needed sharpening—they’d given me a tranquilliser or something—and when I tried to sleep, later, I saw those eyes again, straining to pop out of his face. And I kept telling myself, that isn’t my Lenny, my Lenny’s gone.

That was why I married Jeff, really—I kept saying to myself that I was getting on with my life and getting over what had happened, but really it was because I was trying to hold on to Lenny, or at least keep the . . . I don’t know . . . the feeling of closeness, the life I should have had with him . . . I was trying to re-create it, somehow. I didn’t realise, until it all fell apart, that that was why I’d done it, and perhaps . . . oh, maybe there was a bit of me that always knew it wasn’t going to work, but after what happened with Lenny I was in a mess and I needed someone and he was there. I don’t mean it could have been anyone, Jeff was great-looking and glamorous, talented—he’s a photographer, that was how we met in the first place. He told me he’d look after me and God knows I needed someone to . . . I wasn’t exactly pretending he was Lenny, but I think that’s sort of what I expected from him, which wasn’t fair. Jeff didn’t have that much of a sense of humour and he was quite sort of . . . closed. Tough. More like Jack than Lenny in that way, now I come to think about it. Quite hard, in a way I wasn’t used to, and I thought it meant he was strong, because Lenny’d been so . . . not weak, but . . . well, you looked after Lenny.

It wasn’t just women, everybody did it, even Jack. People always did things for him, and because he was charming and kind and terribly grateful, it made them feel they’d done something useful and good. He used it to his advantage, of course, played it up, but he really could be pretty hopeless. . . . I mean, I’ll never forget watching him trying to open a tin of baked beans, and that was when he was sober. . . . But Len...