The Red House Read online

  Ian’s been offered four hundred thousand for the business, said Louisa.

  So he’d be an idiot not to take it.

  But what’s he going to do? She put the milk back in the fridge. He’s fifty-one. Too young to retire, too old to start all over again.

  Richard quartered an onion and laid it between a parsnip and a sweet potato. They’d keep him on as manager, surely. Or would that be beneath his dignity?

  Angela came in with a glass of wine and sat herself on the window seat. Am I interrupting?

  Not at all, said Louisa. She hoisted a stack of white plates from the shelf. I’ll set the table.

  Angela gathered herself. Look. About Juliette. She realised how rarely she apologised, for anything, to anyone. You were right, I did spend a lot of time at her house. She explained, about The Pineapple, about Oscar Peterson.

  It doesn’t matter now. It’s water under the bridge.

  She felt herself bridle. But it does matter. He wasn’t giving enough weight to this. I’m saying sorry.

  He stood to attention, clicked his heels and dipped his head like a tin soldier. Then I forgive you. He leant his weight on to the flat of a knife blade and crushed three cloves of garlic. Besides, I couldn’t wait to get out of there myself. But this is good, though, said Richard, us talking about it, laying ghosts to rest and so forth.

  Except she had never got out of there, had she, not the way he had got out. The ease with which he sailed through his A levels, the confidence with which he strode off into the world. Was it childish to resent someone for being blessed with such good fortune? At sixteen she’d felt so much more skilled at the task of being human than her gauche and solitary brother. Then suddenly …

  He arranged the crushed garlic. I should have visited Mum more. I realise that. How long was it since he’d used that word? Jennifer never liked me having a family. I don’t think that’s a revelation, is it? I didn’t really understand what family meant till I met Louisa. Even Melissa. Because that’s part of the package, isn’t it? You have to work at these things.

  But she wasn’t really listening, because underneath it all ran the fear that it had nothing to do with good fortune, that he had earned this, and she resented him because she could have done it, too, if she’d applied herself properly, become a lawyer, moved to Canada, run a business, and what she saw when she looked at Richard was not his success but her own failure.

  Benjy is playing with his GoGos at the far end of the dining table, arranging them in colour-coded ranks. Gold, silver, red, orange, yellow. They have official names like Pop and Kimy and Kichi which you can look up on the website but Benjy and Pavel have given them names like Spotty Lizard and Pooper and Custard-Dog. They play a flicking game with them, like marbles, but when he’s on his own Benjy likes to arrange them in battle array.

  Angela, Dominic and Daisy like them because they’re rather beautiful en masse and, refreshingly, not weapons, but when Louisa steps into the dining room laden with plates she feels only mild annoyance. She hasn’t really talked to Benjy yet this holiday and the guilty truth is that she doesn’t like him much. Clothes that don’t hang quite right, stained more often than not, flopping constantly as if he is operated by remote control by a person some considerable distance away. Benjy …?

  * * *

  Louisa works for Mann Digital in Leith. They do flatbed scanning, big photographic prints, light boxes, Giclée editions, some editing and restoration. She loves the cleanness and the precision of it, the ozone in the air, the buzz and shunt of the big Epsons, the guillotine, the hot roller, the papers, Folex, Somerset, Hahnemühle. Mann is Ian Mann who hung on to her during what they called her difficult period because she’d manned the bridge during his considerably more difficult period the previous year. She started on reception, learnt how to do the accounts and now did most of the Photoshopping because the boys were just techies, really. Years back she’d started an art degree at Manchester but she hadn’t slept with another woman or been permanently stoned or proud enough of the working-class roots which she was trying to escape, frankly, and while her draughtsmanship was near-perfect the bottom was falling out of the painting and drawing market so she left halfway through the second year. Plus she had some real money because living in a shared house with a dirty fridge and peeling wallpaper held no romance and in truth she had felt uneasy with the idea of being an artist in the first place. Her father said going to university was getting above yourself and she hated him for it, not least because he was throwing her own suspicions back at her. And if Angela and Dominic assumed she didn’t have a job and spent her days, what? shopping? at the gym? then it was an impression she was happy to give because it might not be art, as such, but it was creative and it was hers and it was precious and she didn’t want it picked over by other people.

  When Melissa came into the dining room Mum was laying the table while the little boy loaded half a million plastic creatures into a rucksack.

  You and Daisy seem to be getting along pretty well.

  Melissa was going to duck the question and head into the kitchen but Angela was sitting on the window seat looking kind of intense so she did a comedy pirouette and leant against the radiator warming her hands. She felt like an idiot. Yeh, she’s OK. If only they hadn’t made such a Royal bloody Command Performance of marching into the dining room together.

  She seems like a really genuine person.

  Melissa examined the pattern of cracks in the flagstones because, much as it hurt to admit it, Daisy was right. They knew Michelle was crazy and perhaps she had meant to kill herself, and there was no one she could say this to. It was dawning on her, like the clouds parting and the angels singing and a great load of shit pouring down, that she didn’t actually have any real friends. Cally was probably stitching her up right now, and she could see Alicia and Megan laughing like a pair of fucking witches. She pushed herself upright and marched into the kitchen through the cloud of serious adult vibe and opened the fridge door. Medical necessity.

  Are you OK? Richard was wearing oven gloves like a big pair of woolly handcuffs.

  Hook Norton. Organic Fucking Dandelion. I’m right as rain, Richard. She grabbed an Old Speckled Hen, stood up, shut the fridge door, twizzled, clinked Angela’s wine glass with the beer bottle. Cheers, my dear. And exited.

  There were two shelves of books to the right of the chimney breast in the living room, so dulled by time and sunlight that most eyes slid over them as smoothly as they slid over the floral curtains and the walnut side table. Some were doubtless holiday reading left behind by the owners and their paying guests (A Sparrow Falls by Wilbur Smith, Secrets of the Night by Una-Mary Parker), some appeared to be gifts which had been banished to the second home (Debrett’s Cookbook, Fifty of the Finest Drinking Games), some must surely have been bought for amusement only (Confessions of a Driving Instructor by Timothy Lea, How to Be Outrageously Successful with Women by John Mack Carter and Lois Wyse), while other tattered paperbacks bore glorious noir covers that no one had seen for years (Fatal Step by Wade Miller, Plot it Yourself by Rex Stout). Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey and Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, however, had clearly slipped through some breach in the fabric of the universe and now sat waiting patiently for rescue.

  When you are speaking to an older person, said Alex, show that you are very alert and are paying due attention to what is being said to you.

  What’s this? Dominic opened the fizzy water.

  Pictorial Knowledge.

  Benjy, mate, this is you, said Alex. To loll awkwardly, ask for sentences to be repeated, be inattentive and uninterested is sheer bad manners.

  Can you clear some space, please? Richard bore the chicken aloft.

  That looks delicious. Dominic rubbed his hands.

  Broadly speaking we should take a bath every day whenever that is possible.

  Alex …

  In the absence of a bath, a quick sponge down and then a brisk rub with a rough towel does a great deal of goo
d.

  Daisy, said Richard, are you going to say grace?

  It’s all right, I don’t have to.

  Go on, said Richard, I’m getting rather fond of it.

  Melissa looked at the chicken with disdain.

  Dominic said, Worry not, it was smothered with a silk pillow after a long, fruitful and contented life.

  It’s OK, said Benjy, because chickens aren’t very intelligent.

  Some people aren’t very intelligent and we don’t eat them, said Melissa.

  Mentally Handicapped Person Pie, said Benjy.

  That is not funny, said Angela.

  It is a bit funny, said Alex.

  Richard returned with the roasted vegetables, borne similarly aloft.

  I think it’s an amazing vocation, being a teacher, said Louisa.

  Vocation, thought Angela. Maybe that was what she’d lost.

  But Dominic and Richard were talking about Raglan. And then I realised, said Dominic. It featured in The Song Remains the Same.

  He’s improving my mind, said Louisa. He takes me to galleries. Museums, operas. She leant in close. Alex could smell her perfume and see her breasts inside her shirt. I’m not so keen on the opera.

  Melissa stared at her plate but she had lost the power to influence the atmosphere in the room. Richard patted her forearm gently and she didn’t protest.

  I felt rather deserted when you ran off across the road.

  I’m sorry, said Daisy. The desire to save Melissa. It seemed laughable now.

  What’s the most horrible way to die? asked Benjy.

  Huntington’s disease, said Richard. You go insane and lose control of your body slowly over many years. You can’t sleep, you can’t swallow, you can’t speak, you suffer from epileptic fits and there’s no cure.

  But Benjy had meant it to be a funny question.

  A young doctor had stood beside her bed and explained why the foetus was deformed. He seemed pleased with himself for knowing the biology behind such a rare syndrome. She got the impression that she was meant to feel pleased, too, for having won some kind of perverse jackpot. The following morning they took the lift to the ground floor and entered a world full of mothers and pregnant women. She felt angry with them for parading their prizes so brazenly, and relieved that she herself had not become the mother of that thing. She cried and Dominic comforted her but he never asked why she needed comfort, because it was obvious, surely. She combed her memory to discover what she’d done wrong. She’d smoked during that first month. She’d stumbled getting off a bus on Upper Street. If only she could find the fault then perhaps she could turn back time and do things differently and arrive at the present moment all over again but with a baby sleeping in the empty cot.

  Dominic came back into the bedroom holding his toothpaste and brush. What’s the matter?

  I look at people and I think they’re Karen.

  He remembered his grandmother dying when he was eight, seeing her everywhere. All those old ladies with white hair.

  I think she’s still alive. Out there. Watching. Waiting.

  He was tired and this was scaring him. She’s not out there, Angela. She’s not watching. Had she ever been alive?

  Don’t you think about her?

  Sometimes. Though he rarely did.

  I hear her voice.

  How long have you been thinking like this?

  Not so much before, but recently …

  You’ve got a real daughter.

  I know.

  And you give her such a hard time.

  Dom …

  It’s not about the religion, is it?

  Please, not now.

  You’re angry with her. He felt the giddy excitement of climbing a great tower and seeing the shape of the maze through which he had stumbled for so long. She’s not a consolation prize. She’s a human being.

  Louisa sat on the edge of the bath, the little yellow tub of face cream in her hand. Melissa’s disappearance had rattled her, not so much the thought of what might have happened as what else she might do, what else she might or might not say. Hard to believe it now, the facts blurred by the alcohol she’d drunk to blunt the unexpected loneliness after Craig walked out. Fifteen men, or thereabouts. She wasn’t greatly interested in counting. One in the back seat of his BMW, with his trousers round his knees, his hand over her mouth, calling her a dirty bitch so she wondered if it counted as rape, though rape meant saying No, not just thinking it, which meant having some actual self-respect. One of them was a scaffolder. Blind drunk every time.

  Annie had taken her to Raoul’s that first weekend and she could feel them circling now Craig’s scent was fading. Annie said she was punishing herself, but some things were just accidents. You took the wrong path and night fell. She never drank at home but the places she went for company were places where you drank, and if you were scared of going home you kept on drinking. Melissa encouraged her rebellion at first, then came back from a friend’s house one morning to find a man she didn’t recognise sitting at the breakfast table and said, Who the fuck is this? and Louisa couldn’t say anything because, in truth, she didn’t know who it was, not really. Even now she can’t bring a name to mind. Or a face.

  She didn’t fall for Richard so much as grab him as she was swept past, fighting to keep her head above the water. They didn’t have sex for six weeks while she waited for the result of an AIDS test. He thought she was just being old-fashioned. She thought that if she let go of the past it would be carried away by that same flood, but it was dawning on her for the first time that she would have to tell him before Melissa did. Forgive and forget. She was beginning to understand what it meant. You couldn’t do the forgetting until someone else had done the forgiving.

  I was having a nightmare about the Smoke Men.

  OK, said Alex. We’re on two mountain bikes. Because this was something he often thought about when he was falling asleep himself. We’re riding through a forest. It’s summer and I’ve got a picnic in a rucksack.

  With bacon sandwiches, said Benjy, and a flask of tea and two KitKats.

  We’re going faster and faster and suddenly we come out of the trees and we look down and see the tyres aren’t touching the ground any more.

  Are they magic bikes?

  They’re magic bikes and we’re flying and we’re getting higher and higher and we can see the fields and a river and a steam train and cars. There are birds flying underneath us and there’s a hot-air balloon and the people in the basket wave at us and we wave back and I say to you, ‘We can go anywhere in the world.’ He stroked Benjy’s hair. Where do you want to go, little brother?

  I want to go home, said Benjy.

  Monday

  RICHARD SLOTS THE tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man. Hello trees, how are you this morning? Pop a couple of Nurofen into the river at Reading to cure everyone’s headache in London. He rinses his mouth with Corsodyl.

  The intolerable loneliness after Jennifer left. The noises a house made at night. Learning the reason for small talk at forty-two. Going to the pub. He’d always thought of it as wasting time.

  He spits out the mouthwash, sluices his mouth with cold water and pats his face dry with the white towel from the hot rail.

  He turns and sees himself in the mirrored door of the cabinet, face still puffy with the fluids that fatten the face in the night, waiting for gravity to restore him to himself. They say you’re meant to see your father staring back at you, but he never does. He
pulls the light cord and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.

  * * *

  Alex hoists himself up and stands on the trig point. He is the highest thing for, what? fifty miles? a hundred? He turns slowly as if he is spinning the earth around him like a wheel, the ridges of the Black Mountains receding to the south, Hay down there in the train-set valley to the north. The wind buffets him. He imagines fucking Louisa against the bathroom door. Her ankles locked behind him, saying, Yes, harder, yes, the door banging and banging and banging.

  They’ve created the largest fiscal deficit in recent history.

  Dominic regretted broaching a subject about which Richard seemed to know rather too much and Dominic too little, for whenever he ventured into the financial section of the newspaper a dullness stole over him as if the subject were protected by a dark charm woven to dispel intruders. So we elect a man who won’t admit to having any actual policies? But he was bowling uphill in fading light.

  Down the table Angela was reading the Observer travel section. A message had slipped over the hill during the night. Missing U. Love Amy XX. If he never told her about Amy then he would always be the better parent, the better person, because he loved Daisy unreservedly. And there she was, coming in holding a bowl of cereal. People are greedy and selfish, she said, sitting down as far away from Melissa as possible, though it was only Dominic who noted the geometry. They just vote for people who promise to give them exactly what they want. It’s like children with sweets.

  But she wasn’t talking about people. She was talking about Richard and she was talking about Melissa, wasn’t she?

  But things improve, said Richard carefully. It’s a messy process but things do get better.

  For who? said Daisy.

  None of them were greatly interested in the election except as a national soap opera in which the closeness of the result was more exciting than the identity of the winner. Individually, they were passionate about GP fundholding, academy schools, asylum, but none of them trusted any party to keep a promise about any of these issues. Louisa struggled to believe that she could change herself, let alone the world, and saving lives seemed to absolve Richard of any wider duty. Angela and Dominic had once marched in support of the miners in Doncaster and the printers in Wapping, but their excitement at Blair’s accession had changed rapidly to anger then disappointment then apathy about politics in general. Alex was planning to vote Tory because that was how you voted when you were the kind of person he wanted to be. Melissa affected a disdain which felt like sophistication and Daisy affected an ignorance which felt like humility. Benjy, on the other hand, was interested mostly in the fate of the tiger, the panda and the whale, and consequently more concerned about the future of the planet than any of them.