The Red House (18 page)

Ten. Ten men
. A little white lie. Did it sound that bad? Only if you knew the dates, perhaps.
I was drinking a lot at the time
. It didn’t seem so awful now that it was out there. She’d been lonely. She’d made mistakes.
Say something. Please
.

I’m thinking about it
. He wanted to know the details and didn’t want to know them.

If only he would reach out and hold her.
I took an AIDS test
. But it didn’t sound reassuring when she said it out loud … Blood and semen.
I’m really sorry
. Why was she apologizing to him? Why hadn’t he saved her sooner?

He couldn’t think of what to say. Was he being a prude? Of course he was, but how did one change?

Richard …?

It disturbs me a little
.

What?
Her anger surprised her. He was disgusted. She tried to keep her voice down so that Dominic or Angela didn’t hear.

I’m just trying to be honest
.

I trusted you completely. The girl. The one who ended up in a wheelchair. I never for one moment doubted you when …

That’s different
.

Why is it different, Richard …?

Because it wasn’t my fault
.

You think I deliberately set out to be …?

He couldn’t stop himself.
You don’t sleep with ten men by accident
. He wasn’t trying to be unkind, it seemed to him to be simply a fact.

Do you actually love me, Richard? Or do you just like having me around as long as I don’t cause any problems?

Of course I love you
. Something perfunctory about his answer. They both heard it but he couldn’t change the tone retrospectively.

I’m not sure you know what love means
. She had never spoken like this before, not to Richard. There was a sickly thrill in riding the wave.

I know what love means
.

So tell me
.

It means …
But what could he say? It wasn’t something you put into words.

She got to her feet.
You come and tell me when you’ve worked out the answer
.

The priory,
fixed amongst a barbarous people
in the Vale of Ewyas, is now a hotel with four bedrooms, each one leading off the spiral staircase of the tower.
We advise guests to arrive during bar opening times so as to avoid waiting outside
. Ruined arches striding away like the legs of a great stone spider. Transepts, triforium, clerestory. Eight hundred years of wind and rain and theft. Sir Richard Colt Hoare sees the great west window fall in 1803. Banks of mown green baize. Holly Hop and Brains Dark in the cool of the vaulted bar. Snickers and tubs of Ben and Jerry’s with wooden spoons under the plastic lids. Traffic making its way up the valley to Gospel Pass against the flow of the ghost ice, stopping for lorries to reverse, idling behind cyclists. Four pony trekkers. A steel, a sorrel, two chestnuts. A brief Jacob’s ladder of sunlight, as if heaven were searching for raiders moving over the earth.

Benjy peels the sandwich apart and licks the jam from each slice in turn.

Smile
, says Alex. Click.

Hey
. Dominic sits down beside Angela. He loves her again. Not loves, maybe, but feels a comfort in her presence which he has not felt for years. He is the one who cares. This does not need to be said. He can spend his forgiveness at his leisure. He’d gone to the toilet in the hotel and texted Amy:
Thinking of you must keep this short love D xx
. He wonders if Angela is actually sick, psychiatrically. This, too, is a consolation.
What do you make of that?
He nods toward Daisy and Melissa who are sitting on a ruined buttress, talking.

Her calves ache and she has a blister on her left heel.
Perhaps Melissa’s leading her astray
. Yesterday, when Daisy walked off, she’d seen it all from her own point of view. Which was Dominic’s point, wasn’t it.
Maybe it will be good for her
.

Why does the religion thing upset you so much?

She didn’t want to talk about this now.
Because she thinks she’s right and everyone else is wrong
.

Doesn’t that cover pretty much every teenager in the world?

Angela felt Karen’s presence.

Actually
, said Dominic,
I think she’s scared that she’s wrong and everyone else is right
. He could hear himself playacting the wise man, but that didn’t stop it being true.

And suddenly Louisa was walking past them toward the bar, staring straight ahead. Dominic thought she might have been crying, but Angela was throwing a wet wipe at Benjy, saying,
You have jam all over your face, young man
.

White skin and loads of black hair
, said Melissa.
Like, on their back as well. That is definitely the grossest
.

Big muscles
. Daisy laughed.
Or tattoos. I hate tattoos
.

I’ve got a bluebird on my arse
. Melissa paused. They were on the edge of the enchanted forest, kings and their judgment far away.
I’ll show you later if you promise not to tell
. And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.

Well, I guess I’ll have to make an exception in your case
. Daisy wondered if the church was a bluebird tattoo. Doubt, that canker in the heart.

Prince Albert had a ring through his penis so he could tie it to his leg. Must have been a monster
. Melissa laughed and everyone turned and wondered what they could be talking about.

OK. You win. That is definitely the grossest
.

So …
Melissa touched Daisy’s arm, to show her she wasn’t mocking her.
Tell me about the religion thing
. It wasn’t envy. More a kind of zoological fascination. And that steeliness … Maybe there was a little envy there.

Daisy paused. She had imagined this moment many times over the past few days but now that it was here … How did she say this without dispersing the nameless thing that hung in the air between them?
Don’t you sometimes wonder if everything is pointless or whether it has some bigger meaning?
The Alpha line. She wished she could have been more original.

Sometimes, I guess
.

Shakespeare, the Pyramids, human beings …
She looked at Benjy playing his Nintendo and really did think it was astonishing.
It can’t be an accident, can it? I mean …
How could she express all that wonder?
You look up into the sky at night and it’s beautiful but it’s terrifying, too. Don’t you think that?

Sort of
. But did she? Her fears lurked nearby with their feet on the ground.

What if you couldn’t stop thinking about it?

I guess I’d take some really strong antidepressants
. Melissa laughed. It was precisely what she would do.

I feel invisible sometimes. I look at myself and there’s nothing there
.

Melissa felt a shiver of recognition. Alex’s attention drifting away. But she wasn’t ready to cross this river.

I used to act
, said Daisy.
As in, you know, drama, plays … And when I was someone else, then I knew who I was
. She’d never said this before.

You should act now
.

What?

It’s an exercise we did at school. You pretend to be someone else for the whole day. Blind person, deaf person, someone with a limp, someone who can’t speak English
. In truth she had never really stopped playing the game.

So what would I be?

Melissa smiled.
I think you should be a real bitch
.

Was that possible, to be someone else? The forest, that faerie magic. My mistress with a monster is in love.

She would never be unfaithful to him. Foolish, perhaps, misguided, but never unfaithful, never dishonest. How odd that her revelation should make Richard certain of this. She wanted people to be happy. Was that the problem, pleasing other men, doling out her favors so prodigally? He wondered if he was simply the first half-decent man who had come along. He was disturbed too by the thought that these men had been what? more adventurous? rougher? more masculine? and that she accepted his shortcomings in return for his reliability, his respectability, his money.

Jennifer’s affair had precipitated the end of their marriage, not because of the betrayal nor her failure to hide it but because he cared so little. He couldn’t imagine her giving herself or being taken. He thought of her as passionate at first. He had never quite known what women wanted, and he was both aroused and relieved to find someone who was so explicit about her needs, but there was always something mechanical about their coupling and he came to realize that the passion was at root an anger whose source he never fathomed.

Did the drinking excuse Louisa’s behavior or compound it? Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance. Who knows what life his mother might have led if his father hadn’t died so unexpectedly. Airport novels shelved according to their height. The green melamine bowls.

They had crossed the top of the Dyke and were walking into a
chill wind rising out of the valley. He zipped the front of his orange waterproof. Misty rain, wisps of cloud trailing up the valley like ragged white curtains.

They’d reached the gravel track above the house.
You OK?
Dominic was calling.
I’m fine
. Angela paused before heaving herself over the stile. She needed a hot bath and Savlon and the sheepskin slippers she hadn’t packed. She looked up. English oak.
Quercus robur
. She’d done a biology degree in a previous life. Peduncular, not sessile, because of the stalks under the acorns. She parceled the knowledge and gifted it to children who forgot it straight after their exams. Or before. Mitochondria and ribosomes, the carbon cycle, Banting and Best. Nature with a capital
N
. How strange that she disliked it en masse. Walks on the heath and the occasional safari park with Benjy. Penguins and fruit bats. That was her limit, really. She’d been passionate once, collecting moths with a torch and a muslin net. Blair’s Shoulder, Magpie, Goat, Codling. It all faded. Hard to feel passionate about anything now. She thought about her mother. It was physiological, of course. Myelin breakdown, neural tangles. But you couldn’t help wonder. Being bored of life, wanting to let go.

Something moved in the distance. Was it …? She had to stop this. If she talked to someone, maybe. A ticking clock and a box of tissues on the pine coffee table. She’d never asked Richard about Jennifer, why they were together, why they weren’t anymore. Dominic was right. She thought of herself as someone who cared, but she spent all of that concern at school. She put her foot on the little wooden step and lifted her aching leg.

We push an introductory needle into the femoral artery
.

Is that in the groin?
asked Benjy.

It is indeed
. Richard reached over and picked up the jigsaw piece with the picture of the man being hung.
Bingo
. He handed it to Angela.

Louisa was watching from the window seat. He wasn’t even thinking about it, was he. At least Craig blew up and cleared the air. Had she made a monumental mistake? The degrees, the books, the music.

This
, said Melissa, staring at the jigsaw,
must surely be the most boring activity in the universe
. But the edge was gone.
I think I’ll save jigsaws until I’m in an old people’s home
, said Daisy. The two girls. Their little freemasonry.

I’ll be in there soon enough
, said Angela.
Sherry at five and drama students coming in to do hits from the seventies
. Except there wouldn’t be sherry, would there, given that Richard wouldn’t be paying this time round. Some council place. Dettol and the TV at Guantánamo volume.

Melissa found the man playing the lute.

X-rays are pretty harmless
, said Richard.
Pilot. That’s the job to avoid. Lots of breast cancer among female cabin crew
.

Is this subject entirely appropriate?
said Angela.

Alex came and sat beside Louisa.
There
. He handed her a glass of wine. He was flirting, wasn’t he. She hotched a centimeter closer so that their shoulders were touching. Richard glanced over. She clinked Alex’s glass.
Cheers
.

Dominic sliced the florets off the head of broccoli and placed them in the steamer then opened the oven briefly to check on the sweet potatoes. How odd that it was such a manly profession now. Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay.
I wouldn’t give that risotto to my fucking dog
. He folded back the waxed wrapper, sliced a little pyramid of butter from the corner of the block and dropped it into the pan.
Exile on Main Street
in the background. Best double album in the history of popular music. Unless
Blonde on Blonde
was a double. Maybe second best, then. Recorded in that château the Gestapo had used. “Tumbling Dice.” Keith Richards falling asleep with a syringe still stuck in his arse. All corporate hospitality now and VW sponsorship deals. Bob Dylan doing adverts for ladies’ underwear. He dropped the sliced
onion into the fizzy butter. He’d been vegetarian himself when he was a student. Animal fats in everything before BSE. Biscuits, ice cream. Shopping down the kosher aisle in the Stamford Hill Safeways with the Hassidic housewives and their fifties wigs. He washed the spinach in the colander and pressed it onto the onion. How odd to feel this contentment at the expense of Angela’s failings. He was going to end the Amy thing when he got home. Couldn’t see the point now. It was all about self-worth, wasn’t it, trying to make himself feel better. He didn’t need it any longer. The spinach darkened and shrank. Karen, the daughter he never had, blessing him from beyond the grave. Pint of full-fat in the microwave. But this thing with Daisy and Melissa.
I kind of like her, actually
. Unquote. That clumsy teenage eyes-down embarrassment he hadn’t seen for so long. He’d help Angela get back on track, make the family work again, be a real father. He poured a little cone of flour onto the buttery spinach and stirred it in. He could take some private pupils. Earn a little extra money. That honeyed scent of the sweet potatoes roasting. Everything was going to be all right.
Physical Graffiti
. That was a double album, too, wasn’t it. Maybe
Exile
was third best.