The Red House Read online

  You hate Richard because he swans around his spacious Georgian apartment on Moray Place four hundred miles away while you perch on that scuffed olive chair listening to Mum roar in the cage of her broken mind. The nurses burn my hands. There was an air raid last night. You hate him because he pays for all of it, the long lawn, the low-rent cabaret on Friday nights, Magic Memories: The Stars of Yesteryear. You hate him for marrying that woman who expected your children to eat lamb curry and forced you to stay in a hotel. You hate him for replacing her so efficiently, as if an event which destroyed other people’s lives were merely one more medical procedure, the tumour sliced out, wound stitched and swabbed. You hate him because he is the prodigal son. When will Richard come to see me? Do you know Richard? He’s such a lovely boy.

  In spite of which, deep down, you like being the good child, the one who cares. Deep down you are still waiting for a definitive judgement in which you are finally raised above your relentlessly achieving brother, though the only person who could make that kind of judgement was drifting in and out of their final sleep, the mask misting and clearing, the low hiss of the cylinder under the bed. And then they were gone.

  M6 southbound, the sprawl of Birmingham finally behind them. Richard dropped a gear and eased the Mercedes round a Belgian chemical tanker. Frankley Services 2 miles. He imagined pulling over in the corner of the car park to watch Louisa sleeping, that spill of butter-coloured hair, the pink of her ear, the mystery of it, why a man was aroused by the sight of one woman and not another, something deep in the midbrain like a sweet tooth or a fear of snakes. He looked in the rear-view mirror. Melissa was listening to her iPod. She gave him a deadpan comedy wave. He slid the Eliot Gardiner Dido and Aeneas into the CD player and turned up the volume.

  Melissa stared out of the window and pictured herself in a film. She was walking across a cobbled square. Pigeons, cathedral. She was wearing the red leather jacket Dad had bought her in Madrid. Fifteen years old. She walked into that room, heads turned and suddenly she understood.

  But they’d want her to be friends with the girl, wouldn’t they, just because they were the same age. Like Mum wanted to be friends with some woman on the till in Tesco’s because they were both forty-four. The girl could have made herself look all right but she hadn’t got a clue. Maybe she was a lesbian. Seven days in the countryside with someone else’s relatives. It’s a big thing for Richard. Because keeping Richard happy was obviously their Function in Life. Right.

  Shake the cloud from off your brow,

  Fate your wishes does allow;

  Empires growing,

  Pleasures flowing,

  Fortune smiles and so should you.

  Some idiot came past on a motorbike at Mach 4. Richard pictured a slick of spilt oil, sparks fantailing from the sliding tank, massive head trauma and the parents agreeing to the transplant of all the major organs so that some good might come of a short life so cheaply spent, though Sod’s Law would doubtless apply and some poor bastard would spend the next thirty years emptying his catheter bag and wiping scrambled egg off his chin.

  Dido and Aeneas. Groper Roper made them listen to it at school. Pearls before swine. Probably in prison by now. Don’t let him get you in the instrument cupboard. It was a joke back then. Interfering with children. Looking back, though, it’s Roper who feels like the victim, the taunts, those damp eyes, the kind of man who hanged himself in isolated woodland.

  Louisa was slowly coming round. Classical music and the smell of the cardboard fir tree on the rear-view mirror. She was in the car with Richard, wasn’t she. So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real. Her brothers, Carl and Dougie, worked in a car factory and lived six doors away from each other on the Blackthorn Estate. Not quite cars on bricks and fridges in the grass, not in their own gardens at least. When she visited they faked a pride in the sister who had bettered herself but what they really felt was disdain, and while she tried to return it she could feel the pull of a world in which you didn’t have to think constantly of how others saw you. Craig had revelled in it. The two worlds thing, Jaguar outside the chip shop, donkey jacket at parents’ evening.

  Wales. She’d forgotten. God. She’d only met Richard’s family once. They liked you and you liked them. Had they? Had she? She’d trumped them by wearing too much black. Benjamin, the little boy, was wearing a Simpsons t-shirt of all things. She overheard him asking his father what would happen to his grandmother’s body in the coming months. And the way the girl sang the hymns. As if there might be something wrong with her.

  Richard had been seated next to Louisa at Tony Caborn’s wedding, on what she correctly referred to as the divorcees’ table in the corner of the marquee, presumably to quarantine the bad voodoo. Someone’s discarded trophy wife, he thought. He introduced himself and she said, Don’t chat me up, OK? She was visibly drunk. I seem to be giving off some kind of vibes today. He explained that he had no plans in that particular direction and she laughed, quite clearly at him rather than with him.

  He turned and listened to a portly GP bemoaning the number of heroin users his practice was obliged to deal with, but his attention kept slipping to the conversation happening over his shoulder. Celebrity gossip and the shortcomings of Louisa’s ex-husband, the wealthy builder. She was clearly not his kind of person, but the GP was his kind of person and was boring him to death. Later on he watched her stand and cross the dance floor, big hips but firm, something Nordic about her, comfortable in her body in a way that Jennifer had never been. No plans in that particular direction. He’d been a pompous arse. When she sat down he apologised for his earlier rudeness and she said, Tell me about yourself, and he realised how long it had been since someone had said this.

  Mum was smiling at Richard and doing the flirty thing where she hooked her hair behind her ear. It made Melissa think of them having sex, which disgusted her. They were in a traffic jam and Mika was singing ‘Grace Kelly’. She took out a black biro and doodled a horse on the flyleaf of the Ian McEwan. How bizarre that your hand was part of your body, like one of those mechanical grabbers that picked up furry toys in a glass case at a fair. You could imagine it having a mind of its own and strangling you at night.

  Mine with storms of care opprest

  Is taught to pity the distrest.

  Mean wretches’ grief can touch,

  So soft, so sensible my breast,

  But ah! I fear, I pity his too much.

  He was thinking about that girl who’d turned up in casualty last week. Nikki Fallon? Hallam? Nine years old, jewel-green eyes and greasy blonde hair. He knew even before he’d done the X-rays. Something too malleable about her, too flat, one of those kids who had never been given the opportunity to disagree and had given up trying. Six old fractures and no hospital record. He went to tell the stepfather they’d be keeping her in. The man was slumped in one of the plastic chairs looking bored mostly, tracksuit trousers and a dirty black t-shirt with the word BENCH on it. The man who’d abused her, or let others abuse her. He stank of cigarettes and aftershave. Richard wanted to knock him down and punch him and keep on punching him. We need to talk.

  Yeh?

  Richard’s anger draining away. Because he was hardly more than a teenager. Too stupid to know he’d end up in prison. Sugar and boiling water thrown in his face on kitchen duty. If you could come with me, please.

  Melissa rolled up the sleeves of Dad’s lumberjack shirt. Still, after all this time, the faintest smell of him. Plaster dust and Hugo Boss. He was an arsehole, but, God, she looked at Richard sometimes, the racing bike, the way he did the crossword in pencil first. There were evenings when she wanted Dad to ride in off the plains, all dust and sweat and tumbleweed, kick open the saloon doors and stick some bullet holes in those fucking art books.

  Land of hope and glory, sang Mika. Mother of the free ride, I’m leaving Kansas, baby. God save the queen.

  Hereford, home of the SAS. Richard could imagine doing that, given a Just War.
Not the killing so much as the derring-do, like building dams when he was a boy, though it might be thrilling to kill another man if one were absolved in advance. Because people thought you wanted to help others whereas most of his colleagues loved the risk. That glint in Steven’s eye when he moved to paediatrics. They die quicker.

  Louisa had squeezed his hand at the graveside. Drizzle and a police helicopter overhead. That ownerless dog standing between the trees like some presiding spirit, his father’s ghost, perhaps. He looked around the grave. These people. Louisa, Melissa, Angela and Dominic and their children, this was his family now. They had spent twenty years avoiding one another and he couldn’t remember why.

  Melissa pressed pause and gazed out of the window. Bright sun was falling on the road but there was rain far off, like someone had tried to rub out the horizon. That underwater glow. There’d be Scrabble, wouldn’t there, a tatty box in some drawer, a pack of fifty-one playing cards, a pamphlet from a goat farm.

  Real countryside now, the land buckled and rucked. A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused. Blustery wind, trees dancing, flurries of orange leaves, a black plastic sack flapping on a gate. The road a series of bends and switchbacks. Richard driving too fast. Low pearly cloud. Turnastone. Upper Maescoed. Llanveynoe. They broached the top of a hill and the view was suddenly enormous. Offa’s Dyke, said Richard. A dark ridge halfway up the sky. They made their way into the valley on a single-track road sunk between grassy banks like a bobsleigh run. Richard still driving too fast and Mum gripping the edge of the seat but not saying anything and … Shit! yelled Louisa, and Fuck! yelled Melissa, and the Mercedes skidded to a crunchy halt, but it was just a flock of sheep and an old man in a dirty jumper waving a stick.

  Two gliders ride the freezing grey air that pours over the ridge, so low you could lean a ladder against the fuselage and climb up to talk to the pilot. Spits of horizontal rain, Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob. Heather and purple moor-grass and little craters of rippling peaty water. By the trig point a red kite weaves through the holes in the wind then glides into the valley, eyes scanning the ground for rats and rabbits.

  This was shallow coastal waters once, before the great plates crushed and raised it. Limestone and millstone grit. The valleys gouged out by glaciers with their cargo of rubble. Upper Blaen, Firs Farm, Olchon Court. Roads and footpaths following the same routes they did in the Middle Ages. Everyone walking in the steps of those who walked before them. The Red House, a Romano-British farmstead abandoned, ruined, plundered for stone, built over, burnt and rebuilt. Tenant farmers, underlings of Marcher lords, a pregnant daughter hidden in the hills, a man who put a musket in his mouth in front of his wife and sprayed half his head across the kitchen wall, a drunken priest who lost the house in a bet over a horse race, or so they said, though they are long gone. Two brass spoons under the floorboards. A twenty-thousand-mark Reichsbanknote. Letters from Florence cross-written to save paper, now brown and frail and crumpled to pack a wall. Brother, my Lungs are not Goode. The sons of the family cut down at Flers-Courcelette and Morval. Two ageing sisters hanging on through the Second World War, one succumbing to cancer of the liver, the other shipped off to a nursing home in Builth Wells. Cream paint and stripped pine. The fire blanket in its red holster. The Shentons – 22nd to 29th March – We saw a deer in the garden … Framed watercolours of mallow and campion. Biodegradable washing-up liquid. A random selection of elderly, second-hand hardbacks. A pamphlet from a goat farm.

  Dominic had asked for a people carrier but a Viking with an earring and a scar appeared in a metallic green Vauxhall Insignia. They had bags on their laps and the windows were steamed up and spattery with rain. Benjy was squashed between Mum and Daisy which he enjoyed because it made him feel safe and warm. He had been lonely at home because he wasn’t allowed to play with Pavel for a week after the fight and getting blood all over Pavel’s trousers, but he enjoyed being on holiday, not least because you were allowed pudding every night. He had never spoken to Uncle Richard but he knew that he was a radiologist who put tubes into people’s groins and pushed them up into their brains to clear blockages like chimney sweeps did and this was a glorious idea. An articulated lorry came past riding a wave of spray and for a few seconds the car seemed to be underwater, so he imagined being in the shark submarine from Red Rackham’s Treasure.

  Alex totted up how much the holiday was going to cost him. Two missed shifts at the video shop, two dog walks. A hundred and twenty-three quid down. But the hills would be good. Lots of kids thought he was boring. He couldn’t give a fuck. If you didn’t earn money you were screwed. He’d get through college without a loan at this rate. He rubbed his forehead. Tightness behind his left eye and that sour taste in the back of his throat. Fifteen minutes and the pain would arrive, flurries of lime-green snow sweeping across his field of vision. He opened the window a crack and breathed in the cold air. He needed darkness. He needed quiet.

  Oi, said Dad, but when he turned he saw the expression on Alex’s face. Do we need to pull over?

  Alex shook his head.

  Ten minutes, OK?

  They turned off the main road and suddenly they were out of the rain, the world cleaned and glittering. They roller-coastered over a little summit and Offa’s Dyke hove into view, a gash of gold along the ridge, as if the sky had been ripped open and the light from beyond was pouring through.

  Holy shit, Batman, said Benjy, and no one told him off.

  Beeswax and fresh linen. Louisa stood in the centre of the bedroom. A hum from deep underground, just on the limit of hearing, a chill in the air. Hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Someone had suffered in this room. She’d felt it since childhood, in this house, in that corridor. Then Craig bought Danes Barn and she couldn’t bear to be in there for more than five minutes. He told her she was being ridiculous. A week later she heard about the little boy who’d hidden in the chest freezer.

  Melissa walked down the cold tiles of the hall and into the bright rectangle of the day. She took her earphones out. That silence, like a noise all by itself, with all these other noises inside it, grass rubbing together, a dog yapping far off. She dried the rain from the bench with a tea towel and sat down with Enduring Love, but she couldn’t hang on to the words because she’d never spent more than five consecutive days in the countryside before. Kellmore in Year 11. Ziplines and Bacardi Breezers. Kasha’s epileptic fit in the showers. There really was absolutely nothing to do here. She had two joints at the bottom of her bag but she’d have to smoke them up there with the sheep. Richard stoned. Jesus. Imagine that. Goodness, I don’t think I’ve realised how amazing this Mozart Piano Concerto is. We haven’t got any more biscuits, have we? But it was beautiful, when you thought about it, this huge green bowl, clouds changing shape as they moved, the smell of woodsmoke. A banana-yellow caterpillar reared up like a tiny question mark on the arm of the bench. She was about to flick it away when she imagined it having a name in a children’s book, but suddenly there was a green taxi bumping through the gate and Alex and his little brother spilt from the door like clowns from a circus car.

  … stunning views of the Olchon Valley … Grade 2 listed … sympathetically restored … a second bathroom added … large private garden … shrubbery, mature trees … drowning hazard … mixer taps … a tumble dryer … no TV reception … £1,200 per week … all reasonable breakages … American Express … the septic tank …

  Dominic helped the driver unload while Benjy retrieved the briefcase hinge from a crumb-filled recess. Richard hugged Angela with one arm, his mug of tea at arm’s length. Post-rain sparkle and the dog still yapping far off. Daisy shook Richard’s hand and unnerved him slightly by saying, It’s good to see you again, as if she was a colleague, so he turned to Benjamin. And how are you doing, young man?

  Melissa held Alex’s eye for two seconds and he forgot briefly about the nausea. Unzipping. Maybe normal service really was being suspended. But Melissa saw how much he wanted her and how naïve
he was and the week seemed no longer empty. She walked slowly towards the front door, his gaze like sun on her back. Bitch, thought Angela, but Alex could see the first flurries of green snow and had to get to the bathroom. She had that glossy, thoroughbred look, thought Daisy. Hair you shook in slow motion. Leader of some icy little coven at school. But being fashionable and popular were shallow things which passed away. Daisy had to remember that. Shallow people were people nevertheless, and equally deserving of love.

  The Vauxhall Insignia did a four-point turn and drove off scraping its manifold on the ruts and there was silence in the garden so that the red kite, looking down, saw only a large square of mown grass tilted towards the opposite side of the valley and, sitting confidently at its geometric centre, a house, stately and severe and adamantly not a farmhouse. Tall sash windows, grey stone laid in long, thin blocks, a house where Eliot or Austen might have lodged a vicar and his fierce teetotal sisters. A drystone wall ran round the boundary of the property, broken by two gates, one for walkers, one for carriages, both of ornate cast iron now thick with rust. A weather-vane in the shape of a running fox. There were rhododendrons and a shallow ornamental pond thick with frogspawn. There was the skull of a horse in the woodshed.

  Alex sluiced his mouth under the cold tap and felt his way back across the landing with his eyes closed. He lowered himself onto the bed, put the pillow over his head to cut out light and noise and curled into a ball.