The Red House Read online

  Dominic stands in the hallway, water creeping in under the front door, a sound like the chaos between radio stations. He should go and talk to Daisy, tell her it’s all right, tell her they love her, that they will always love her. Why is he so scared of doing this? He has never thought about her as a sexual person. The idea disturbs him in a way he can’t quite identify. All those little waystations. Daisy, Alex, Benjy, the first time they read to themselves, the first time they walked to school on their own. He remembers holding Daisy as a baby, those tiny perfect fingers gripping his thumb, the eczema, the blonde quiff. He imagines someone else holding her now, the two of them naked, and the clash of these two kinds of tenderness is like chariot wheels touching. Out of nowhere he thinks of Andrew, lying in a hospital bed, Amy sitting beside him, head bowed, holding his hand. He feels ashamed for having ignored the message. He has never really solved a problem in his life, he has simply averted his eyes and left other people to do the dirty work. The creak of wood. He turns and sees Daisy coming down the stairs. How are you feeling?

  A bit better. She pauses, hand on the little metal dog of the newel post. I’m just going to get something to eat.

  He wonders briefly if she is waiting to tell him about the encounter with Melissa but she doesn’t and what he feels mostly is relief, that she seems happier, that he has over-reacted, perhaps, that Melissa was lying, that there is nothing for him to do.

  A growing conviction that something was wrong, the hackles of the animal curled in the brainstem. Richard came to a halt so he could listen and watch more carefully. A sudden coldness, something about the quality of the light, a sense that other people were no longer simply absent but a very long way away. It was behind him, wasn’t it? He spun round and saw horizontal rain coming out of a vast wall of lead-grey cloud. A sudden fear, then the rain hit him, a hard cold sideways shower, funny almost, once it had happened, thinking about the story he would be telling later on, about how he had been forced to hop through driving rain in the middle of nowhere wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Ten minutes later and it was less funny because neither the wind nor the rain were slacking off, he was freezing, the pain in his ankle was, if anything, getting worse and it was going to be some considerable time before he got off the ridge. Childish scenarios began to play on repeat in his head: being rescued by the red helicopter they had seen two days ago, losing consciousness and lying down and night falling. He realised that he had not told anyone where he was intending to run.

  Louisa makes a jug of coffee and puts it on the dining-room table, sugar, milk jug, a wonky tower of cups. Richard was meant to be back forty minutes ago and the storm is still raging outside. An air of mild emergency hangs over the house and however much people drift away there is a centre of gravity in the room which draws them back.

  He’ll turn up in five minutes, says Melissa, showing off about how manly he is.

  I hope he fucking dies, thinks Alex. He wonders whether Richard told Louisa about the bollocking. Maybe he has bollocked her in the same way. Alex tries to catch her eye but she is too distracted by Richard’s absence to notice anyone else.

  Angela says, Those paths will be a nightmare in this weather. She means to be reassuring, explaining how he will have to take his time, but it comes out wrong. Louisa’s nervousness is starting to infect her. Too many people lost, the membrane between here and the other place thinned almost to nothing by this unnatural weather, waiting for the foolish and the insufficiently loved to stumble through.

  This is totally a record. Benjy has built a domino tower of nine storeys.

  Alex wants to be asked to go and look for Richard, but he is not going to offer until he is asked. He wants it publicly acknowledged that he is the expert when it comes to running and walking in these hills. He wants it publicly acknowledged that Richard was pretending to be twenty years old and that he has made a fucking tit of himself in the process.

  Daisy comes into the room and Melissa says, languorously, Morning, Daisy, but it is only Daisy who notices the barb.

  Hello, love, says Angela. How are you doing this morning?

  She is hoping Mum will offer to get her some breakfast so they can go into the kitchen and talk, but Angela seems distracted and there is no way that she is going to ask while Melissa is watching, so she heads to the kitchen where she puts the kettle on then leans on the draining board with her head in her hands.

  And, Oh! says Benjy, and, Oh! says everyone else, as if they’re watching a firework display but it’s Benjy’s tower which collapsed next door, sending dominoes clattering all over the table and on to the stone floor.

  An hour, says Louisa. A part of her wonders if he has done this to spite her.

  Benjy is rebuilding his tower, placing the dominoes horizontally this time for greater stability.

  He’s Richard, says Angela. He’ll be fine.

  But Richard isn’t always fine, he screws up, she knows this now.

  You don’t die by getting caught out in the rain, says Dominic.

  That’s not strictly true, says Alex. People do die of exposure in the Brecon Beacons. The room ices over.

  Alex, says Dominic wearily, that is not helpful.

  He’s meant to say sorry but he’s not in the mood for saying sorry. He stands and takes his coffee cup into the kitchen. Behind his back he hears Angela apologising for her son’s foot in mouth disease.

  Daisy is still leaning on the draining board, her boiled kettle cooling. She looks up. Sister Daisy. It’s an old joke, so old he forgets it’s a joke.

  Not now, OK?

  What’s up?

  Nothing.

  Tell me. His own anger looms so large that he expects her to be angry with Richard for some as-yet-undisclosed reason, but he can hear a tone in her voice he hasn’t heard for a long time.

  She could tell him. He thinks she’s a weirdo, anyway. Then she laughs because it’s what he’s wanted to do since they arrived, isn’t it, kissing Melissa, then she remembers. Get off me, you fucking dyke. That stab of panic, the way you can’t rewind time.

  What? says Alex. Is she laughing at him?

  Now, before she changes her mind. Look, I’m going to tell you something.

  Something what?

  She stalls. What does she want him to say? That she is forgiven? That no one else is going to find out? That it never happened?

  Alex? Mum is calling from the dining room. Sorry. He turns and walks away and she realises that telling someone will solve nothing.

  Alex, says Mum. Do you have any idea where Richard went running?

  Up onto the ridge, I guess. He has no real idea but he is assuming that Richard was indeed showing off, running up the steepest hill.

  Will you go and look for him?

  Suddenly he is paid back in full. No problem. He heads upstairs.

  Benjy is twitchy and the dominoes are no longer holding his attention. The same fear as Louisa and his mother, but without her ability to hold it back and chop it down. The possibility of Richard dying out there in all that rain. And God said I will destroy the world. Sword-fighting isn’t an indoors thing so he wanders around trying to lose himself in the details of the house, the smallness of things. He runs his fingers over the raised furry pattern of flowers on the wallpaper in the hallway. He looks inside the meter cupboard and imagines the whole house as a steampunk galleon, stovepipe hats and the chunter of pistons. He opens the leather cover of the visitors’ book. The first entry is dated 1994. Max (8) and Susannah (6). Canterbury. We woak up in the nite and saw some bagers. Blue ink which has blobbed on the Y of Canterbury. The Farmoors, Manchester. The Black Bull in Hay does a very nice Sunday roast. Someone has covered a whole page with a superb pencil sketch of the house. John, Joan, Carmen and Sophie Cain-Summerson, plus Grandma and Grandpa. He sits on the stairs and works out which of the brass stair rods can be rotated and which are too stiff to turn. He goes into the toilet and looks inside the cistern. There is an orange plastic ballcock on the
end of a rusty arm. When you push it down more water squirts out of the white spout. It looks like something you might find in a harbour, a tiny buoy among the lobster pots and fishing boats. Dad said the house belonged to a family and maybe they come here in the summer and at Christmas. Benjy doesn’t know anyone who has two houses, though Michael’s family have a mobile home by the sea in Devon. He can’t see the appeal of having two homes because you would need your stuff in both houses, fluffy toys, PlayStation, animal posters. Then he finds a secret cupboard on the half-landing which he has never noticed before.

  He is in serious trouble, that body shiver, guts and chest. He can’t believe this is actually happening, he is two miles away from the house and he is getting hypothermia, not halfway up K2 or on the Ross Ice Shelf but in bloody Herefordshire. He is a doctor, and it is no longer wholly out of the question that he might die, not in a heroic way, but in a stupid way almost within actual sight of the house where there is a hot shower and a mug of coffee. He wonders if he should head straight down left off the hill to get out of the wind, but if he does that he stands even less chance of bumping into other runners or walkers, nor is he sure if he has the energy to clamber through hedges and over fences should he lose the path. The two options do a little back and forth dance in his head. Stay up, go down, stay up, go down. He realises that he is losing the ability to think clearly. Dying will sort out the Sharne case, if nothing else. He wonders if this is a kind of punishment, though that would be arrogant, thinking atmospheric pressure systems might be arranged in order to impact on his own life, and maybe the idiotic randomness is a more fitting punishment, but what is he being punished for? The rain has turned to hail. He can’t remember precisely what he has done wrong. Shit. He snags his foot on a stone and the pain is both intense and suspiciously far away. He looks down and sees that his ankle is heavily swollen.

  The owners? You didn’t want to think about them too much. The idea that all this belonged to someone else. The suspicion that a wealthy family had over-reached itself and had been forced to rent the family silver. They came in the summer and at Christmas, then packed their more personal possessions into a locked cupboard on the half-landing, a stuffed owl under a glass dome, a box of tarnished spoons in purple plush. There was a clipframe of thirty-one collaged Polaroids, fading like photos of hairstyles in a barber’s window, a student rowing eight hurling their cox into the Isis, a black retriever, Barbours and pearls, court shoes and ironed rugby shirts, faces rhyming from picture to picture, the plump girl with the laugh and the Charlie’s Angels hair, the ginger man thickening over the years, playing tennis, posing in front of a Stalinist carbuncle in some Eastern European capital. But the London flat had been burgled during their last stay so they’d left in a hurry forgetting to lock the cupboard.

  Alex jogs down the staircase wearing his running clothes and a woolly hat and his luminous yellow cycling jacket. Benjy closes the cupboard quickly, thinking he will be in trouble but Alex doesn’t take any notice because he’s going out for a run in the pouring rain. See you later, Smalls. Benjy waits until the front door bangs behind him and gently lifts the glass-domed owl out of the dusty dark. He is instantly in love with it. Serendipitously, he has already chosen a name for the owl he would have if he were a character in Harry Potter. Tolliver. This is Tolliver. He imagines writing, Dear Pavel …, rolling the paper tight as a cigarette, binding it with red ribbon and giving it to Tolliver who takes it in his sharp little beak and lifts his wide white wings and rises from the sill of the open window, the whole sky full of criss-crossing owls, knitting together a world of which muggles remain utterly unaware.

  How eloquently houses speak, of landscape and weather, of builders and families, of wealth, fears, children, servants. Hunkering in solitude or squeezed upwards by the pressure of their neighbours, proudly facing the main road or turning towards the hill to keep the wind and rain out of their faces. Roofs angled to shuck off, walls whitewashed to reflect the sun. Inner courtyards to save the women of the house from prying eyes. Those newfangled precious cars, Austin Morris, Ford Cortina, in little rooms of their own till they were bread and butter and banished to the kerb. The basement kitchen and the attic bedrooms where the servants worked and slept. Bare beams plastered and exposed again when they no longer said poverty. The front room that contains only the boxed tinsel Christmas tree and the so-called silver, where no one ever goes, and where you will lie for two days before your funeral. The new toilet replacing the privy in the garden that now holds only rusted tricycles and soft dirty footballs. Pipes and wires leading to reservoirs and power stations, to telephone exchanges and sewage farms. Water from Birmingham, power from Scotland. Voices from Brisbane and Calgary.

  Time speeds up. A day becomes an hour, becomes a minute, becomes a second. Planes vanish first, cars are smeared into strings of coloured smoke then fade to nothing. People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark. Buildings inhabit the earth, growing like spores, sending out tubers, seeding new towns, new villages, new cities till drowned in sand or jungle. Girders and chimneys turning to mulch and rubble. Two thousand years, two hundred thousand years, two million years and a severe and stately house that once sat at the geometric centre of its square garden looking across the valley is now a ghost in the soil a mile below the surface of a snowball earth.

  Daisy walks to the window seat at the other end of the kitchen and stares out into the rain. She tries to worry about Richard but can’t do it. How grey the world is. So many words for red. Carmine, scarlet, ruby, burgundy, cherry, vermilion. But grey? She turns and glances into the living room and sees that Melissa has gone at last. The pressure in her chest builds. Mum?

  What, love? Angela turns and touches her arm. You look dreadful.

  Can we talk?

  A momentary pause while Angela absorbs the oddity and intimacy of this. Of course we can.

  Alex loves this weather, loves all bad weather, snow, rain, hail, mud, darkness, failing light, becoming a part of the landscape instead of simply observing it. Thoughts cycle as he runs. Song lyrics, conversations he’s had or wished he’d had, sex he’s had or wished he’d had. The encounter with Richard is on repeat as he runs up the road to Red Darren. You’re making me look like an idiot. He thinks instead of Richard lying unconscious in the rain, a big wheeling pan from a film. He is not sure if he still fancies Louisa or not, the way she’s so pathetically worried about Richard. The higher he gets the colder it becomes, the rain turns to hail and for the first time he starts to wonder what will happen if Richard is in actual deep shit and he realises that if he fails to find Richard then everyone will blame him even though he is the only one doing something to find him. Plus, of course, something might have happened which has nothing to do with the weather. Broken leg, heart attack, fallen down some bloody hole. But if he finds Richard and he’s dead by the time he gets there Alex won’t actually be blamed at all. He’ll be the person who found the body.

  He’s up on the top now and, Jesus, it is fucking freezing running through this stuff, and it is entirely possible that Richard took another route and turned up at the front door five minutes after Alex left, which will really piss him off. He’s having to pretty much close his eyes on account of the hail. Grey background and white dots coming straight at him like that old Windows screensaver. Was Richard wearing a waterproof? Should have grabbed a spare one from the hallway. Too late to worry about that now. Give Richard his own and earn bonus points. Who would win a fight between the two of them? Alex presumes it would be a smackdown. Richard had a few inches in height and reach but he also had that pudgy middle-aged look men got when they stopped looking after themselves. Fuck. And there he is, up ahead, limping like someone coming out of a war zone.

  Richard wonders if this is really happening, and is sufficiently compos mentis to know that his unsureness is not a good sign. Not quite on the Glasgow Coma Scale yet. Alex, is it? In a luminous yellow jacket like a s
ecurity guard. Shorts and a woolly hat. Richard, says Alex, in a casual golf-club manner. Long time no see, a pint of the usual? and so forth. Richard says, I’m in a bit of a state. So Alex removes his luminous yellow jacket. Take this. But Richard’s hands are so numb that he can’t grip it well enough to get his arms into the sleeves. His teeth are chattering. His teeth haven’t chattered since school. Alex puts the woolly hat on his head. Cader Idris on the recorder. Frozen milk lifting the foil caps on the chunky bottles. Before Dad died. Here, let me help. He thinks of nurses helping elderly patients into cardigans. That girl in her wheelchair. Then the jacket is on and he realises he’s going to see Louisa soon and he understands now quite how frightened he was and it is possible that he is crying about this, though hopefully the rain will disguise the fact. Alex lifts Richard’s arm over his shoulder. Come on, keep it up, or it’s me who’ll freeze to death. Richard swings his good leg, hobbles, swings his good leg, hobbles. Alex is pushing him faster than he wants to go. It hurts a lot, but it’s a good thing, going faster. He remembers the conversation of last night. He will apologise later. A hot bath, he can have a hot bath, but, God almighty, this ankle. Thanks for this.

  Just keep walking.

  Angela shuts the door and Daisy thinks of headmasters’ offices and doctors’ surgeries. They sit beside one another on the sofa looking into the empty stove. Daisy wishes it was lit but that’s Richard’s job. What’s the matter?

  You have to promise …

  I have to promise what? asks Angela.

  She’s standing on the high board. One bounce and don’t look down. I tried to kiss Melissa.

  Angela is genuinely unsure if she has heard correctly but knows that she cannot ask Daisy to repeat it.

  For God’s sake, Mum, say something.

  She shuffles through her memory of Melissa and Daisy in the dining room this morning. And I’m guessing Melissa wasn’t too keen on this.