After the high drama of the past few weeks, I could look at what has (or really has not) transpired since the previous Sunday as a relative respite. Or I could, as I have, see it as being in the cyclone’s eye, vaguely aware that there is an eyewall surrounding me that I might stray into should the storm shift slightly. (Things are bad when gloomy old Alex is telling me not to assume the worst at every turn.) I wish I could say Julian’s challenge to Alex appears to be dormant, if not dead, but there have been a couple of blips.
Right after I spilled (the majority of) the beans about Julian’s unilateral decision that what I really needed was to be kissed sloppily and groped at by my ex-husband and made to feel that I might be on the receiving end of a slap, Alex commenced damage control. He pre-emptively called Will, who was on the final day of a weekend work retreat in Swindon (poor Will), brainstorming a new slogan for his investment company’s indexed fund (“Can you believe it Al, they didn’t like ‘We put big “FUN” in your small cap fund’?”). Will had had a heads up from Miranda that he should avoid all calls from Julian until he received further marching orders from Miranda. (Will and Miranda — that’s a couple that should have happened a long time ago. Will is only too happy to have a bossy Englishwoman order him about, and in Will Miranda would have a faithful servant. Alas, Will said it would be worse than kissing his sister and Miranda has sworn off “keeping it in the family” after dating Jamie in 2013.)
Will was thrilled to (1) have a chance to escape the hotel meeting room he was stuck in in order to deal with “an important family matter” and (2) be the first with the full story, because Will is an incorrigible gossip. (Which is precisely why Alex went straight for Will.) Alex was kind enough to put Will on speakerphone, and hearing his voice for the first time since that dreadful New Year’s reminded me of why I liked Will so much in the first place — bluff and good-natured, with uncomplicated needs (a nice Bordeaux, Match of the Day, potato waffles like his nanny made for him as a boy), slightly bombastic in the most cheerful way. Like a not-evil Boris Johnson.
“So what’s all this about, Al? Hardly like you to call on a Sunday morning. Must be, what, nearly 8 there? Dear god, it’s not Lucy is it?” Will is Lucy’s godfather, and has done an admirable job in spending time with her twice a month in Alex’s absence. In turn, Lucy has done much to help Will settle down a bit and consider something more permanent than the endless march of UCL postgrads he woos and shucks off at alarming speed.
After assuaging Will’s fears about Lucy, who was safe on holiday with Minty’s parents, Alex laid it out pretty bluntly. Julian’s demand that Alex not go to the wedding, communicated via me; the innumerable texts I received insisting on an update; Julian stalking me via Instagram; the ill-advised trip to the new apartment; and most of all, how not only had Julian forced a kiss on me and tried for a second after being rebuffed, but also how his slap had made me feel like it might have been meant for my body, not the table.
“Golly, Al. Fuck me. That’s… not right. I know Julian’s an ass sometimes, but I never pegged him as one to take what wasn’t on offer.”
Alex was silent for a moment as I watched his cheeks pink up and his face pinch in anger before he composed himself slightly. He wrung the duvet viciously. “Are you implying that my girlfriend put herself ‘on offer’ to Julian? After the SHIT he put her through for years, put ME through? Are you calling her a slut? Educate me, Will.”
“Whoa, old boy. Not where I was going at all with that. All I meant was Jules doesn’t have that kind of reputation. Not exactly the sort to end up in a ‘me too’ exposé , if you know what I mean.” Will sounded sheepish.
Alex grunted; his grip loosened on the duvet to my relief (it really is quite a nice one I got at Harvey Nicks a few years back). “You should know that Julian is spreading a rather different version. It’s a fantastic yarn in which Melissa connived her way into his flat and proceeded to ravish him. In his telling, he gave in only because he felt so sorry that she and I weren’t having sex and I was treating her like my skivvy whilst taking most of the support payments he pays her every month.”
“What daft moron would believe that? Oh wait,” Will snorted. “Amanda.”
“Mind like a steel trap, Will,” Alex laughed. “Do us a favor. Give Jamie and Charlie a call, see if Julian’s gotten to them. Let them know the truth.” Alex stroked my arm and pulled me closer to him. “The bastard can’t just leave Mel alone.”
I kissed his cheek and wandered over to the kitchenette to make a pot of coffee and let Will and Alex have a chance to catch up without me. I intrude in Alex’s life too much as it is. These past few weeks have given me pause, made me consider if Alex is not the “tarnished star” in this relationship, and if Al would ever recognize that.
Before I showed up, nothing could come between Jules and Al, who’d looped themselves together back at the start of sixth form. Alex was an interloper, a half-wild, shambolic creature coming to the school after the boys in his year had been together since they were 13. Neither he nor Fenn had ever had a “proper” education. Their father, John, had fully endorsed the idea of homeschooling from before the twins were even born, and he and Cora spent considerable time helping the two develop and further their passions before John’s death. Alex stressed to me that the choice to keep them home rather than attend the village school wasn’t out of snobbery but from John’s belief that he and Cora could develop the children’s talents and tastes more fully themselves. I’m not completely convinced. It’s not like the twins — the “twinnies” as Cora still calls them — ever had much contact with local children and frankly, their lack of socialization still shows at times.
John’s passing was quite unexpected, an unspecified “brief illness” that Al still won’t discuss (though Julian long suspected it was an overdose of sleeping pills, a conclusion he came to from scraps of information Alex and Fenn have discarded from time to time). The twins were nearly eight, and had already found their niches. For Fenn, that was painting and drawing, and since Cora was herself a sculptor and potter, she naturally took a greater interest in her daughter’s progress and achievements. Fenn got short courses at the Glasgow School of Art and week-long trips to London and Edinburgh for enrichment of her artistic leanings, oils and acrylics and charcoal, pastels and canvas and notebooks.
Alex, however, was no artist. (“Couldn’t draw a stickman or connect the bloody dots, and here I was, living with two mad artists.”) He also wasn’t an infant genius like Fenn, who by Cora’s telling basically popped out of the womb with a paintbrush in her hand and was immediately swaddled in an artist’s smock. (Cora is prone to exaggeration.) Little Alexander needed coaxing and coaching — first by John, an economist, and then by a succession of tutors — to find something, anything to settle upon, to engage his racing mind. “All I wanted to do,” Al told me of this time, “was stomp in the stream behind the house, poke at bees’ nests with sticks and snooker cues, run laps with my dog, lie in the grass and listen to the world just exist. They wanted me inside, burning as bright as Fenn. I thought if I refused, they’d leave me alone. When they did not, I did what I thought would make them even more worried: I’d stay inside and try not to leave. Didn’t work, nobody noticed me hiding in the attic for days on end.”
His mathematical gifts were developed by one of the rare tutors who stuck around more than six months. Figures have long been comforting for Alex; when he was stressed or angry or near tears, he did sums in his head. 3+5+7+1 is 16, and 1+6 is 7, and 7 is a lucky number, so it will all be fine. Or 11+2+9 is 22, and 2+2 is 4, and a square has 4 sides, and squares are so logical with their equal angles, so it will all be fine. Numbers were order and light and could be marched and dragooned about to do interesting things. His tutor, Mr. Hardy, opened Alex up to a world where this comforting order was the backbone of all life and life’s achievements, from quarks to the universe, from the architecture of the house they were in to the River Tummel and beyond, beyond, beyond. “It was breathtaking for me, Mel. There was some reason behind all of this, some way to organize and sort the world, so unlike the disasters at home we always seemed to be skirting or living in.” By the age of ten, Alex knew he wanted to be a theoretical mathematician and live and breathe numbers forever. No more mess, no more crying sister, no more affectionate mother who could not decipher her son. Order, and nothing more.
Of course, none of that turned out quite the way he expected. When Alex was 15, his father’s younger brother, his uncle Barnaby, came to stay for what was meant to be a week, and turned into six months. Barnaby had been turfed out by his wife for squandering much of their savings on baccarat in Estoril and a French whore in Lille. (Sometimes the predicaments my posh friends and their families have found themselves in sound like they might have been scenes cut from a Bond movie or cut out as too OTT for a Danielle Steele novel, but reality can be even less believable than fiction.) I met Barnaby at Alex’s wedding and, well, he was so witty and gorgeous and urbane, like a mostly-tamed Alex. Had I not been decidedly in love with Julian at the time I might have run away with him to Estoril for a second shot at winning the lost fortune back. (“Uncle B is a consummate cad,” Alex had warned Julian before the big day. “Keep an eye on him around Mel, she’s just his type: willing to buy any amount of flowery tosh that a moderately handsome man might slide her way.” Julian was far too up his own fundament to understand that insult was meant for him, too.)
By Alex’s telling, it was Uncle B who hit upon the idea that Alex could be the key to saving the entire Carr family, including himself, from penury. Alex wasn’t aware that since John’s death, Cora had been leaning on Barnaby for the occasional handout “for the sake of the twinnies,” and with Uncle B’s money in perpetual flux, that tap needed to be turned off. From the age of 12, Al had been working towards his qualifications for university, as Mr. Hardy and the other tutors saw no reason not to get him moving towards his eventual goal of becoming a mathematics professor. Without much else to do in the old house (Cora had tried to get Uncle B to clean out the attic with little success), Barnaby took a keen interest in his nephew’s education, sitting in on a few of Alex’s sessions and asking sharp questions about what the “point” of all these maths was, if it wasn’t to lead to a comfortable life, which surely Alex wouldn’t ever obtain as “an assistant professor at some shabby former polytechnic over the border.”
No, Uncle B had another plan for Al. When Barnaby wasn’t losing it all at the tables, he was making a tidy profit through investments in hedge funds. (Barnaby had, like Alex would eventually, married a rich woman who was more in love with him than interested in paying close attention to where her money was going until it was gone.) One evening, about three months into his visit, Barnaby sat Alex down for an introduction to whisky and a friendly chat about his future. Alex could, by Barnaby’s telling, take his singular gifts in mathematics and steer them into something more practical.
“Applied mathematics, Alexander. I’m sure you know of the field,” Uncle B told him, sloshing another finger of Edradour into Al’s Mr. Toad mug. “Fascinating stuff you can do with it. All kinds of things. Your dad was an economist, of course, that’s one path. I know you study a few computer languages, a career in IT could be for you, too. But what if I told you there’s a way to use your maths to make enough money that you’d never have to worry again? Enough that your mum and your sister could live in this house without fear that the roof would cave in again? Enough to have a lovely house of your own, and a fast car, and whatever woman you wanted?”
At fifteen, Alex wanted a fast car far more than any woman, if highly-strung Fenn and Cora and their dramatics were anything to go by, but the idea was distinctly appealling to him. Barnaby sketched out the basics of investment banking and hedge funds for his nephew, and how a brilliant young man from a good family might make a killing for himself down in Edinburgh or London, enough to bring order to the untidiest life. “The first night I got drunk,” Alex told me, “and the first night I was made to understand that the straggly ends of my family could only be groomed through my efforts.”
The problem was that Alex himself was a straggly end. The Carrs’ plan to educate the twinnies at home trapped the children into a bubble of two into which few others intruded. Alex was a little luckier than Fenn, since Cora allowed him to take the bus into Pitlochry on his own, and Mr. Hardy regularly shepherded him through Perth and Dundee to escape the stifling atmosphere at home. Still, Alex was keenly aware from his occasional interactions with other boys his age that he was… odd. 5,000 miles away I was listening to Blink-182 and Destiny’s Child, sporting butterfly clips in my hair and extremely low-slung jeans on my body, having sleepovers with Jen and Jenn, and hanging out at the mall in Burbank. Meanwhile, Alex was wearing out an old Nick Drake tape on his Walkman as he stomped around Pitlochry, and favoring old flannel trousers he fished out of a trunk of his father’s clothes he found in the attic. (“Don’t even ask me about my showering habits, Mel. I was a foul little beast until Julian found me.”) He didn’t watch much television, except for football matches and EastEnders, which Cora and Fenn viewed religiously, even the omnibus episodes. About the only thing he shared with boys his age was a love of video games (Uncle B had gifted him with a PlayStation when he was 12) and graphic novels, Watchmen being a particular favorite.
Uncle B had a plan to remedy Alex’s jagged edges: school. Real school with other students, real school with a proper classroom and teachers and a chalkboard and computers that didn’t run on a dial-up modem, real school with a uniform and houses and rules that were enforced, where Alex and his sister didn’t dictate the rhythms of the day as they fancied. Real school where shouting at a tutor didn’t result in mere hand-wringing from Cora but in consequences that had bite. Real school hundreds of miles away from home, a school in England, where he could take his A-levels. Alex was all in for this plan, even if leaving home occasionally caused him mild panic attacks in the months leading to his departure, and even though he’d never been further south than Glasgow. Barnaby took control of the entire process, according to Alex, from selecting a school to organizing an interview in Dundee with one of the school’s Old Boys to selling Alex’s sad story of a grand old family gone to seed to secure a bursary large enough that little of the money in trust needed to be touched. All was done with the utmost efficiency. Uncle B had a mission: to unhook this branch of the family from his own and place the yoke on the neck of a boy just about to turn sixteen.
To be sure, Cora put up a fight to keep her Alexander with her. She banished seedy old Uncle B from the house, back to his terraced house in Edinburgh where his wife welcomed him back with only the mildest of dressings down, and weaponized Fenn’s love for her brother into a constant stream of guilt-inducing meltdowns. (“If you leave Mummy and me, Al, I will never, ever trust you again. First Daddy, then you. You’re all worthless, you all leave.”) While Alex was taking a couple of Standard Grade exams down in Perth, his mum hid his PlayStation in the chicken coop and cut up his letter of admission to the school, leaving the small pieces on his bed laid out in a design that read “NO.” Upon Al’s return, Cora packed a bag and left the twins to their own devices for two weeks; she was going to Edinburgh to talk some sense into Uncle B. (“She shoved forty quid in my hand, kissed my cheek and told me not to drink all the gin.”)
It was Uncle B who won in the end, of course, since September found Alexander in Somerset, wondering what he’d done by falling in line. Mr. Hardy — who now insisted upon being called “Robert” — had driven Alex and his steamer trunk of new school clothes and bedlinens down from Perthshire, since Cora claimed to abnegate all responsibility for Alex’s education after his “rebellion.” (“Attending a minor English public school is probably one of the least rebellious things I’ve done in my life, but to my mother it was a hanging offense.”) Within his first seventy-two hours at school, Alex discovered several things about himself. While he missed Fenn, he preferred being one amongst many students, not just two. The terrifying prefects of his children’s literature were not echoed in the presence of the young man who welcomed him to his house and showed him his new digs. There were girls here, and he was clearly an object of fascination to more than several of them. (“I’d never seen so many girls in ever-so-slightly-too-unbuttoned shirts in my life bending over before me, Mel. Took me a good two weeks to really understand what it meant.”) And his personal hygiene was atrocious and needed to be remedied immediately, if he were to keep the attention of the girls who flicked nervous glances at him in the dining hall.
The last of these he learned from Julian, of course. Julian had not expected to find a strange Scottish boy in his rooms that September, but his roommate of the past three years, Sebastian Talbot, had dropped out without any warning to travel to Australia with a girl named Amelia he had met at Glastonbury that summer. Julian’s recollection of meeting Alex is of throwing open his door and finding “something that looked like it was all hair and legs, like a particularly fuzzy and nightmarish spider” trying to fit a sheet onto one of the beds and fighting a losing battle to do so. Alex remembers Julian freezing for a moment, then saying icily, “Please leave. Sebastian can make his own bed.” Then, “Good god, what is that smell?” (I am pleased to say that Alex is delightfully well-groomed these days and rarely misses a shower, one of the few things I can thank Julian for.)
Hm, woolgathering again. I hadn’t meant to go into a full disquisition on how Alex came to England to get himself partially tamed and save his family from ruin, but as Julian always used to say, I do tend to overshare given half the chance.
Oh yes, I did mention a few blips. Will’s investigation into the spread of Julian’s spiteful lies about me revealed that the false version of the afternoon I spent in the 31st floor flat had reached not only Jamie and Charlie, but also Bex, Sasha and (unsurprisingly) Annabelle. Jamie and Bex proclaimed themselves Team Alex, but refused to uninvite Julian. (“Come on,” Jamie told Will, “let them sort it out between themselves. Not our game to play, Will.” “Besides,” butted in Bex, “it’s going to be awfully fun to watch them play it.”) Charlie, Sasha and Annabelle, according to Will, thought the truth was likely to lie somewhere between the two versions of events.
Annabelle called me this past week to explain her rationale: “Jules can be an utter fabulist, sweetie, but it can’t be completely true that every day with Alexander is sweetness and light. Surely you two fight from time to time — I mean, it is Alex we’re speaking of, and his fuse is rather short. And maybe you were a little flirty with my brother without realizing how it might look, and he misread you?” Her comment troubles me, and I do not speak of it to Alex, because I worry that there may be at least some truth to it. (I know, I know, I shouldn’t be keeping secrets.) After all, I did touch Julian’s knee gently, I let him take my hand not once but twice, let him stroke my knuckles then my palm. I took him in my embrace first, not the other way around. If I had truly wanted to let Julian know I was not interested, even after the hand-holding and words of regret, I could have walked out of the apartment without another word. Instead, I wanted to be held, I wanted to be protected by him. Why should I blame him when I was so unclear?
Julian — and we presume it’s him each time — has also taken a page out of the Alexander Carr Playbook for Harassment: 4 a.m. hangup calls. Mostly inflicted on Al, but once on me. Al keeps his ringer on at night because he doesn’t want to miss a call from the UK, which very well might come through in the wee hours given the time difference. Lucy had a bad tumble at school one morning and Minty called him at 3 a.m. with the news that their daughter was in hospital with a large lump on her head. Thankfully nothing was terribly wrong, but since then he’s made sure to keep the phone on. After the first call, Alex blocked Julian’s number. Each successive call has been from a different UK number, so blocking has given Alex no respite.
This past Tuesday, he could hear Julian breathing down the line and ice tinkling in a glass, and Alex took the opportunity to break his vow never to take a call from Julian again. Even though it was 4:03 a.m., Alex was sufficiently conscious to record the call. Jenn has since told me that it can’t be used for anything in court since California’s a two-party state, but it made him feel better knowing he could play it for others who doubt Julian’s current modus operandi.
Despite the early hour, Al let rip. “You fucking WANKER! Get a life, you tosser — nothing better to do, eh Jules, than call me up? Can’t even come up with a new trick of your own, had to steal mine, you cheap bastard. All that money to throw around, that big flat, the house you bought for your bitch of a mother in Newport Beach, and what do you have? NOTHING. I have everything you want — your girl, peace of mind, a loving mother, and a child. You will NEVER have any of these. NEVER. Now fuck off, you little shit, and take your obsession with calling old chums somewhere else. I hear Amanda’s free these days.”
“Temper, Al,” Julian slurred at him. (“You can hear he was quite deep in his cups, Mel. I felt almost sorry for the bastard.”) “I’ve been telling you for years that your temper will take it all from you, and it already did once. Don’t need to go there again.”
“That’s rich, you sick fuck. It was YOUR temper that destroyed your marriage. You blame me but it was you, Jules. It was all you, you cunt. You were the one who broke Melissa through your need for complete control. You were the one who pushed her out of your ‘perfect marriage’ towards me.”
On the recording, I could hear Julian start snickering. “Better keep a closer eye on our Mel, Al. She can spin a very pretty tale, very convincing, all that faux-naive nonsense. She’s always been particularly talented in that regard. Why don’t you ask her about Seattle sometime? You might enjoy that story.”
Alex put the phone down immediately after that. “I don’t want to know what ‘Seattle’ means, Mel, I won’t dignify his insults and drunken reveries.”
But I know what “Seattle” means. It’s a message communicated to me, not Al. Stay in line, Melissa. No secret is safe from me. Shelter in place, the storm is coming.
meandering again 