The Ice Twins (18 page)

But then he remembered his daughter had no friends. She kept telling him this:
Daddy, no one will play with me.

It cut him to pieces. Because it was no wonder no one would play with her: all the other children probably thought she was crazy. The kid with a dead sister, come back to life. The freak.

And it was all her mother’s fault. Could he ever forgive her? All he ever did was forgive her, time after time. Yet he needed to love and absolve Sarah, once again, if this was going to work.

But too often he felt the violent opposite of love.

‘OK, let’s go.’ He shouted down the hall, ‘Sarah? Sarah!’

‘Yes, ready.’

The three of them assembled in the kitchen; Angus picked up the torch and guided his little family down the pebbled path to the lighthouse beach, where they climbed on board, and he poled the boat away, into the Sound, and then steered them towards the Selkie.

It was a cold night, clear and sharp; the stars were reflected perfectly in the waveless waters of the sea channel; Knoydart frowned, a row of black burqa’d women on a very dark purple horizon; the sea lochs shone under the moon.

Angus moored their boat at the Selkie pier, where the rigging of the other boats chimed in welcome.

The brief car journey to the Freedlands’ big bright house was silent: each member of the family staring out of a different window, at a different darkness.

Angus had wondered if he should cancel this social engagement, given the ongoing horrors of his daughter’s bewilderment: given
everything
. But Sarah had insisted they had to aim for normality. Even though they were struggling, they had to pretend they were doing OK – as if that might, magically, make things OK.

So here they were, in a simulacrum of nice London clothes, stepping inside the big angular house, and there in the enormous kitchen, doyenne of her expensive copper pans, was Molly. Laughing by the Aga, Lady Bountiful standing over trays of canapés. Two other couples were sipping Aperol spritzers from elegant glasses by the kitchen table, and everywhere Angus inhaled the smell of decent cooking: something he missed on Torran, with their primitive kitchen.

‘Just a bit of roast pork, I’m afraid,’ Molly said, apologetically, as she took their coats. ‘Not quite up to Michelin tonight.’

They stepped into the open-plan living room, with its expansive windows, and its pricey views of the Sound of Sleat; flutes of something bubbly were dispersed.

‘Here,’ said Josh, ‘I’ve actually got some nice wine: Trentodoc by Ferrari, proper Italian champagne, none of that prosecco rubbish.’

‘How would you know, Josh? You haven’t had a drink in ten years.’

‘I can tell by the bubbles. I am still allowed bubbles.’

Everyone joked in a faintly effortful way: Molly made elegant introductions between the couples. Gemma Conway, who Angus had met once before in London, with Josh, then her husband Charles (rich, London, art dealer) then a younger American couple, Matt and Fulvia (rich, New York, banking); there were no other children. These couples were here for the big posh wedding at Kinloch: to which he and Sarah were not invited.

Angus didn’t care about the wedding, he cared about his daughter. Alone, again? Why couldn’t these ridiculous people have brought at least one kid between them, someone for her to play with? Angus struggled with his irritation, even as the other adults doted, dutifully, on Lydia – for about three minutes of clear boredom – then returned to their glasses of sparkling Italian wine and grown-up conversation.

After that his daughter stood there mute and alone with Leopardy the Leopard under one arm and Angus wanted, fiercely, to save her from all this, and take her away, take her to live on Torran. Just the two of them. On his family’s island. Eilean Torran.

Where they belonged. Where his grandmother had been happy. Where he’d been happy with his brother as boys. Where he could be happy with his little girl.

Angus listened and watched as his daughter asked her mother if she could go upstairs, and play video games.

‘Mummy, please, I can play with Dada’s phone, it’s got Angry Granny on it and everything.’

‘But—’

‘Mummy. Please. I’ll be quiet?’

Sarah rolled her eyes, meaningfully, at Angus, but he had no desire to keep
Lydia
down here: where she would be bored, and possibly start acting up. And he could imagine the ways she might act up, if she wanted.

His daughter was haunted. And he knew why.

‘Let her go upstairs if she wants,’ he said in a curt whisper, to Sarah.

His wife nodded, and turned, to explain to Molly – as she returned from the kitchen. Molly was flushed from cooking, and distracted. She laughed and said:

‘Of course! Of course she can go upstairs. God, I wish there were more kids here for Kirs, I mean, um um um, Lydia to play with, um …’

Molly paused, clearly embarrassed. Josh frowned at his wife; he and Molly had been told about the Kirstie–Lydia thing only the other day. Molly’s mistake was entirely understandable. But awkward. The other guests were, it seemed, unaware of any of this. A puzzled silence descended on everyone, then Josh said:

‘No, really, it’s not for want of trying. We may have to adopt bloody llamas at this rate.’

Molly chuckled uncomfortably and the moment passed. Pleasantries were swapped. The wedding was discussed, then the weather. Charles asked Sarah about property prices and the value of Torran and holidays in the Maldives, and as the chatter drifted in its middle-class way Angus surged with unspoken resentment.

These rich people with their villas and their auctions and their stock options: what did they know? These people had never had to worry about anything. Why was he listening to this bourgeois prattle? His granny was a farmwife, his mum a humble teacher, his dad a drunken docker, a wife-beater, an alcoholic. Angus
knew
. And they didn’t.

Angus drank.

And drank. And brooded. He wondered if he was able to keep it together for just an evening any more; he wanted to walk out as they sat down to langoustine, served with some of Molly’s best mayonnaise and fresh bread.

The food was predictably delicious; his mood was worsening. He wanted to say it out loud: my life is nothing, it is falling apart, my daughter is dead and my other daughter is mad. And sometimes I have terrible and serious fantasies about hurting my wife
because she wants to have a funeral for a child who is still alive.

He wanted to announce this, calmly. He wanted to watch everyone else turn and stare in horror. Instead Angus said:

‘We need interest rates to stay low, of course.’

‘Oh, they will, another crash would kill the country off completely, there’d be lepers on Pall Mall.’

The wine came: plentifully. Angus noticed that his wife was drinking too much, as well, almost as much as he was drinking.

‘Oh yes just another.’

Just another, just another, just one more.

The main course was suckling pig – local – with excellent crackling, damson plum sauce, and a tremendously fashionable vegetable he could not identify, and then the conversation moved on to death, and ghosts.

Why the hell were they talking about this? At this time?

Angus ploughed his way through his tenth glass of wine. He sat back and slurped and wondered if his teeth were stained red by the wine, as Gemma Conway pronounced:

‘Chatwin is rather good on this, in his Australian book, he says our fear of ghosts is a fear of predators, of being prey.’

Molly put down her fork, and came back: ‘I’m sure I read that you can mimic ghosts, or the effect of ghosts, by subjecting people to a subsonic growl – you cannot hear it, the same growl used by predators to terrify their prey.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. They’ve tested it, on people, the subsonic noise cannot be registered by the ear but we hear
it in our minds, that’s the nameless dread people describe when they experience ghosts!’

Try being me, thought Angus, try being me and my daughter, about six months ago, in Camden, if you want Nameless Dread.

He looked round the table. His wife still looked anxious: slurping wine too fast. And she was silent, of course. From nowhere, from the past, from some dim, barely understood part of himself, Angus felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for her, a sudden sense of fraternity, and mutuality. Whatever else divided him and Sarah – and it was so much, it was surely
too
much – they were going through this nightmare together. He could almost forgive her for everything else: as she was his comrade-in-arms, in this.

And he had loved her once, quite intensely.

But how did that work? How could he still entertain these feelings about Sarah even as he daydreamed, wildly, about making her suffer for what she’d done? Perhaps when you had a child together there was always a residual connection of love, even if it was later drowned. The love was still down there: like a sunken ship.

And when you shared the
death
of a child you were bonded for eternity. And they had not only shared the death of a child, they had shared it twice, and now they had resurrected the other. He and Sarah, they were grave robbers. Necromancers. Raisers of the dead.

Angus was drunk and confused and he didn’t care.

Molly was still talking: ‘And that’s why people get spooked in old houses, cellars, churches, these places have echoes and resonances, timbres of the air, thanks to the topography, and these air vibrations cause the same subsonic vibrations as predators growling.’

‘Almost too neat an explanation. For ghosts.’

‘Has everyone got enough wine?’

‘This suckling pig really is excellent, you totally killed it, Molly.’

‘They say when people are mauled by cats, they go into a kind of quiescence, a kind of Zenlike state.’

‘How would they know, if these poor wretches have been consumed by tigers? Do they interview them in heaven?’

‘Charles!’ Gemma playfully slapped her husband.

The New York woman spoke up: ‘If that theory is right, it kinda makes the entire Bible a kind of growl by God, threatening everyone with death!’

‘The booming voice of Jehovah. The fire in the trees. Is this wine really Rioja, Josh? Gran Reserva surely, it’s terrific.’

‘I’ll have more wine, yes,’ said Angus, ‘thanks.’

He reclaimed his glass, full and heavy, and he drank half of it, in one deep slug.

‘Does that disprove the existence of God, the fact it can be explained as a fear of predation, of death?’

Charles intervened: ‘Well, I’ve always been of the opinion that we are meant to be believers. After all, children believe by nature – they are instinctively faithful. When my kids were six they implicitly believed; now they are grown up, they are atheists. It’s rather sad.’

‘Kids also believe in Santa. And the Easter bunny.’

Charles ignored his wife: ‘Therefore life is, perhaps, a kind of corrosion? The pure true believing soul of the child is rusted, over time, polluted by the years—’

‘You haven’t read enough Nietzsche, Charles, that’s your problem.’

‘I thought you said his problem was internet pornography?’ said Josh, and everyone laughed and Josh teased his pompous older friend again, and Gemma made a deprecating joke about calories, but Angus stared at Charles, wondering if he was, actually, quite profound. Every so often this annoying London art dealer said something startling or curious that everyone half ignored, and yet sometimes, somehow, right now, these remarks made Angus want to vehemently agree, and he wondered if Charles, the art dealer, knew the effect he was having. And then Charles said this:

‘It’s not so much my own death that is intolerable, it’s the death of those around me. Because I love them. And part of me dies with them. Therefore all love, if you like, is a form of suicide.’

Angus stared. And drank. And listened. And Josh had an argument about rugby with Gemma and Sarah, and Angus wanted to shake this man by the hand, to lean over and say Yes, that’s so true, everyone else is wrong. Why are they ignoring you? Everything you say is absolutely
right
– the death of those we love is so much worse than our own death, and yes all love is a form of suicide, you destroy yourself, you surrender yourself, you kill something in yourself, willingly, if you really love.

‘I’m going to get Lydia,’ said Sarah. She was standing up, beside him.

Angus was jolted from his reverie. He wiped the wine from his lips, and turned, and looked up. ‘Yes. Good idea.’

The plates were cleared away; Angus helped. By the time he returned to the dining table, carrying dishes for the dessert – brown bread ice cream with some salted caramel thing, his daughter
Lydia
was there with her mother, by the big black windows that looked onto the Sound.

‘She can have some ice cream?’ said Molly. And Sarah touched Lydia on the shoulder.

‘Oh yes, darling, ice cream, your favourite?’

Angus watched. There was something amiss with his daughter.

Lydia was staring at the darkened windows. The view of the moon on the waters, the silhouettes of firs and alders. But the uncurtained windows also, of course, reflected the light within the room: the table and chairs, the art on the walls, the adults and their drinks. And the little girl standing in her dress with her mother by her side.

Angus realized what was happening. Too late.

Lydia screamed:

‘Go away, go away, I hate you!!’

And she ran at the window and she charged into the glass with her little fists raised – and the glazing cracked and shattered with a terrifying crash; and then there was blood. So much blood. Too much blood.