Alys, Always Read Online Free Page A

one of our more famous theatrical knights, but his voice – as fruity and far-reaching as his father’s – makes this difficult.
    ‘Oh, here’s something interesting,’ he’s saying to Mary, waving a hardback in her direction. ‘We should do something big, shouldn’t we?’
    Mary pulls her spectacles low on her nose and inspects the cover. ‘Oh, absolutely – ask for an interview, if he’s doing any. I’m surprised they didn’t push back publication. Maybe it was too late.’
    Oliver finds the press release tucked inside the flyleaf, and picks up the phone. I hear him flirting in a bread-and-butter fashion with the PR. There’s a little shop gossip about a book launch they both attended earlier in the week, and then he says, ‘The new Laurence Kyte … we’d love to have an interview.’ He listens, putting his head on one side and pulling a comedy sad face – furrowed brow, fat lower lip – for Mary’s benefit, though as she is scrolling through a layout on screen his efforts are wasted. ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ he says finally. ‘But of course, in the circumstances … Such a terrible thing to happen. Well, if he changes his mind … Ormaybe we can do something when the paperback comes out? Yeah – you too. Take care, babe.
    ‘He’s not doing any publicity. She sounds sick as a pike,’ he adds, swinging his feet off the bin. ‘Should we get Berenice to review it? Or Simon?’
    ‘Simon,’ says Mary without looking up.
    Oliver puts the book on the shelves, awaiting dispatch.
    Later, when they’ve both gone to morning conference, I go over and pick it up. It’s a novel called
Affliction
. A fairly plain cover, a drawing of a man’s shadow falling over a patch of city pavement: puddles, a cigarette butt, scraps of litter. I turn it over. There’s a small photograph of the author on the back of the dust jacket, nothing too flash, though it’s nicely composed. He’s standing in front of a tall dark hedge, resting his hand on a sundial speckled with lichen. His face is, naturally, familiar. Laurence Kyte. Of course. I wonder why I hadn’t made the connection. I didn’t know he had a place near Biddenbrooke. Beneath the picture is printed in small italic font, ‘Author photograph by Alys Kyte’.
    The biographical note is only two short sentences, as is usually the way with the big-hitters: ‘Laurence Kyte was born in Stepney in 1951. He lives in London.’ No mention of the Booker, then, though he won it five years ago, or was it six? No mention of the ghastly movie Hollywood squeezed out of
Ampersand
; no mention, either, of the rather more successful adaptation – he did the screenplay, I seem to remember – of
The Ha
-
Ha
, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar.
    I flick through the pages. I’ve not read any Kyte but I know the spectrum of his interests: politics, sex, death, the terminal malaise of Western civilisation. In Kyte’s books, middle-aged, middle-class men – architects and anthropologists, engineers and haematologists – struggle with the decline in their physical powers, a decline which mirrors thestate of the culture around them. Kyte’s prose style is famously ‘challenging’, ‘inventive’ and ‘muscular’; usually it’s ‘uncompromising’, too. Not words that do it for me, particularly. I read the first few pages. It’s all very clever. Then I read the dedication. ‘For Alys. Always.’
    I didn’t save Kate Wiggins’ number, but it’s stored on my phone anyway, under ‘calls received’.
    ‘Hello, it’s Frances Thorpe,’ I say when she answers. ‘You called me the other day, about the accident involving Alys Kyte? I’ve had the chance to get myself together a bit. If you really think it would help them, I guess I feel up to meeting the family now.’
    The Highgate house is set back rather grandly from the street: gravel, gateposts, the humped suggestion of a shrubbery. A dingy pile of old snow is lying in the lee of the garden wall, evidently