The Red House Read online

  Alex appeared at the door, in his socks, sweating. I think Melissa’s jumped ship.

  In what sense?

  Walking down the road with a bag over her shoulder.

  She suddenly saw it all from Alex’s point of view. Oh, I’m sorry.

  He was still getting his breath back. Bit of a relief, to be honest.

  And she realised that it was her own heart that was sinking.

  Angela is dreaming. The creature is lying in a clean white towel, being offered up to her by a nurse who is unaware that anything is wrong. Mermaid Syndrome. Though what dark fairy tale would this monster inhabit? Eyes no more than slits in a head of wet clay, a ragged fin running across the top of the skull, wasted arms, the two legs fused into a stump. Sirenomelia. Those sweet voices calling from the jagged rocks. The thing is screeching. It wants to be held but she can’t touch it. She is terrified that it will cling and bite and rip. She has the dream every couple of weeks but never remembers it on waking. Baby birds make her cry, certain cuts of meat, the crippled fragment of Voldemort’s soul in The Deathly Hallows. She has no idea why this is. She never had amniocentesis, never even had a scan. She missed appointments, said there was a family crisis, she lied to the health visitor, to the GP, to Dominic. Her body knew something was wrong but she was going to be a good mother and a good mother would never reject a child.

  Melissa walked for twenty minutes, then her bag started to feel really heavy and there was no way she was turning back so she stuck her thumb out hoping an actual human being stopped and not some weird inbred rapist farmer. A tractor came past, a Post Office van, a removals lorry, a rusty Datsun, then a polished black Alfa Romeo slowed down and pulled over. Where are you going? The woman was wearing leather trousers and spoke with a Spanish accent, which was totally not what Melissa was expecting.

  I’ll go anywhere, said Melissa, as if she were in a film.

  Throw your bag into the back seat.

  Stuck on the dashboard there was a toy camel with rubber legs which wobbled when the car went round corners. There was a diamanté cat collar in the footwell. So … The woman lit a cigarette. Are you running away from home?

  … But when we were as far away as a man can shout, pushing rapidly onward, the Sirens saw our speeding ship and sang their high songs: ‘Come here, famous Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans, tie up your ship and listen to our voices, for no one has ever rowed past this island in his black ship without listening to our honeyed mouths …’

  Angela walked into the kitchen and found Louisa making coffee and toast. A sudden memory of the shared house at college. Dahl and joss sticks, Carol getting scabies at the hostel. Are you all right?

  Of course, said Louisa. Why?

  Last night. Richard and Melissa.

  It was nothing.

  No fun stuck in the middle.

  Really, it was nothing.

  Neither of them were on their best behaviour though. On what planet was this a good thing to say?

  Louisa turned and held Angela’s eye. Richard is a good man.

  I wasn’t saying that. But she was saying precisely that, wasn’t she?

  Louisa fitted the plunger into the mouth of the jug. Melissa is a good person, too.

  I know she is. Another lie.

  There are two slices in the toaster if you want. Louisa picked up the cafetière and swept out.

  Was it jealousy, perhaps, this childish desire to drive a little wedge between the two of them, the knowledge that they possessed something she and Dominic had let slip through their fingers?

  A sudden memory of 92 Hensham Lane. Donny getting drunk one night and cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors for a bet. That German girl putting a padlock on her room. Angela remembered the day she and Dominic moved into their own flat. There were earwigs in the bread bin and someone was playing ‘London Calling’ at stadium volume upstairs, but it was theirs, and she could feel the relief even now, nearly thirty years later.

  Dominic ate a spoonful of Shreddies. ‘We believe this to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. We are calling on everyone in the local community to come forward with any information.’ Crack and genocide, then you turned the page and it was cloned sheep and solar power, everything going to hell in a handcart, and heaven just around the corner. It all levelled out in the end. People stopped smoking and got fat. Polio was cured and AIDS killed millions in Africa. When was the Golden Age, anyway? Child prostitution, gin epidemics, the Crusades … Alex sat down beside him with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and a mug of tea. How was the run?

  Good. Yeh, it was good.

  Don’t you ever just want to lie in bed?

  Of course. But you can’t, can you?

  He hadn’t crashed the car or got a girl pregnant, for which they should be thankful, but there was a distance. He thought at first it was genetic, the same self-containment he saw in Richard. But maybe it was just part of being a teenager. Your job is to be completely and utterly in the wrong. They didn’t need you in the end, generations like leaves, the young taking over a world you no longer really cared for.

  All those photographs of Andrew in Amy’s house. Hospitalised seven times with asthma and chest infections. He was moved, at first, by the care with which Amy looked after him, and it was only gradually that he came to resent the way that this young man whom he’d never met intruded upon their most private moments and began to suspect that Andrew’s continual fallings-out with bosses, flatmates and girlfriends were not a symptom of his medical condition but scenes in a long drama of interdependence besides which Dominic was only a sideshow.

  Incidentally, said Alex, I think I saw Melissa hitting the road.

  Richard’s father had died of testicular cancer at the age of forty. Richard was eight, Angela nine. 1972. Hewlett-Packard were making the first pocket calculator and Eugene Cernan was making the last moonwalk. His father was working for the police firearms unit at the time and Richard believed for some years that he had been killed during a shoot-out, though whether this was a lie his mother had concocted or one he had concocted himself and which his mother did not contradict, he never knew.

  He still has his scrapbook of news clippings from that year, 1972 in silver foil on the front cover. Vietnam, Baader-Meinhof, Watergate. His father’s death goes unrecorded. Not even a pause in the weekly entries, because it was not his father’s death which divided his childhood in two, not directly.

  His parents drank regularly, at home, in restaurants, at the squash club, so perhaps it didn’t seem unusual at first, but by the time he was ten he knew that other children’s mothers did not open a bottle of sherry in the afternoon and finish it before bedtime. He and Angela never discussed it. What they discussed was the cleaning and the washing-up and the household bills that fell increasingly to them to sort out. Within a couple of years he was signing his mother’s name perfectly on cheques, and even now when he loses the car keys he finds himself looking in the places where he hid them from his mother thirty years ago, the washing machine, the sugar jar. He was nervous of inviting friends to his house and equally nervous at their houses, wondering what might be happening at home, so that school rapidly became the refuge where the tasks were straightforward and the rewards immediate. Geometrical diagrams. The House of Hanover. He regularly cooked for his mother, put her to bed, bathed her sometimes, and the more intimate the task the more she resented the intrusion. At least when she lashed out she was drunk and uncoordinated and he was able to avoid the second blow.

  Melissa’s gone. It was Louisa, standing behind his shoulder.

  What do you mean, gone?

  She’s taken her bag with all her stuff. Alex thinks he saw her walking down the road.

  So, she hasn’t been abducted.

  I’m being serious.

  So am I. Professional habit. Consider all possibilities. He stood up. Let’s go inside and gather some information.

  Alex came downstairs waving Louisa’s mobile as they stepped through the front door. You can ge
t a couple of bars on Vodafone in our room when the wind’s in the right direction. He handed it back. I left a message.

  Everyone had gathered in the dining room. The scene struck Richard as a little over-dramatic. She vanishes once a week at home.

  But we’re in the middle of nowhere, said Louisa.

  Which is a lot safer than a city centre on a Friday night. Richard’s voice was noticeably slower and softer than usual. She’ll be sitting in a café somewhere, enjoying the fact that we’re panicking. If we ring the police they’ll laugh and tell us to call back tomorrow. Louisa seemed short of breath. He rubbed her arm. She’ll let us worry for a while, then she’ll get in touch.

  Angela was thinking, It’s your fault, and trying hard not to say so, but Dominic was impressed. How did Richard reassure everyone despite knowing nothing? Did all doctors do this?

  If we haven’t heard anything, said Richard, we’ll ring her from Raglan.

  OK, said Louisa, OK.

  Except that she wasn’t OK, thought Angela, she was simply obeying orders, like a dog with a stern owner.

  Benjy stood on the flagstones of the utility space between the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. It contained a chest freezer, a dishwasher and a deep china sink set into a long wooden draining board as thick as an old Bible. The chest freezer was made by Indesit. He picked up a battered octagonal tin from the window sill. On the lid it said Dishwasher Tablets in Dymo Tape and bore an orange sticker reading If ingested seek medical attention. The tin rattled as he turned it over. On the bottom the label said Praline Cluster and Coffee Cream and Turkish Delight.

  Angela announced that she’d skip the castle and take the bus into Hay. There’s a bus? Richard had said, incredulously. Possibly pulled by cows, she’d replied, a little too tartly and there was a sudden chill in the room. Daisy said softly, I’ll go with Mum, because she wasn’t any keener on Richard’s company than Mum was, which meant that Dominic had to go to Raglan to accompany Benjy who never knowingly turned down a castle.

  So Angela and Daisy found themselves walking down the hill to the little stone bridge, just the scuff of their boots and the rustle of their waterproofs. A dirty white horse observed them from behind a gate. Angela was angry with Daisy for hijacking her solitary expedition and simultaneously relieved that she wasn’t going on her own. So much of one’s self depended on the green vase and the rotary washing line that turned in the wind and she was slipping her moorings a little. Daisy liked silence but Angela was used to the clatter and echo of four hundred children in one building. Richard’s Mercedes passed them en route to Raglan, Dominic, Alex and Benjy waving like passengers on a steam train.

  Where do you think Melissa is? asked Daisy.

  But Angela had forgotten about Melissa completely.

  Melissa stood on the corner paralysed. Where the fuck was she going to go? Dad wasn’t going to fork out for a plane ticket to France without an explanation. Donna in Stirling? She looked around. A shop selling windchimes. A shop selling green wellingtons and crappy silk scarves like the Queen wore when she took the corgis out for a shit. Scabby public toilets. People from London pretending to enjoy the countryside. She checked her wallet. £22.68 and a debit card that might very well get swallowed by the machine on the far side of the road. God, she was hungry.

  Do you think Benjy’s OK? asked Daisy.

  I think Benjy’s fine, said Angela.

  He seems lonely.

  He’s good at being on his own, said Angela. The little bus growled up a steep and sudden incline. A tiny church with a garden shed for a tower. A woman hosing a Land Rover down in a muddy yard. If you can’t be alone you join a gang, you drink instead of going home, you marry the first person who comes along because you’re scared of going back to an empty house.

  Daisy thought of her mother as stupid. What other reason could there be for the constant friction? Then she said something like this and Daisy remembered that she was a good teacher, and what Daisy felt wasn’t admiration or guilt but fear, because if her mother was in the right then she was in the wrong.

  The bus idled while a red Transit reversed into a driveway for them to squeeze past. Farmhouses with roses and swingseats. Farmhouses with chained-up dogs and rusted cars. A hunchbacked woman at the front of the bus, so old and ragged she must surely have come from a gingerbread cottage up in the hills.

  Are you and Dad all right? She meant to sound caring but she wanted her mother to admit some small compensatory failure.

  We’re … OK, said Angela gingerly.

  And it came to Daisy out of the blue. Her mother was a human being. How rarely she saw it. She wanted to reach out and hold her and make everything good again but the intervening years seemed suddenly like a dream and she was five years old, going into town with Mum to do the shopping. So she turned and looked out of the window and watched the bus rise above the trees and hedges onto a kind of moorland, the grey ribbon of the road and plantations of pine across the valley like scissored green felt.

  I’m sorry about Richard, said Angela.

  It’s all right, said Daisy. I can look after myself. This dance she and Mum did. Reaching out and pulling back. Stroking and snapping.

  He was being a bully.

  I can’t believe he’s your brother.

  I’m having a bit of trouble myself in that department.

  People counted Dominic as their friend but no one counted him as their best friend. Angela thought of it as cowardice, though she tried not to think of it very often. A failure to engage properly with the world. The mortgage arrears, the car being towed to a scrapyard. Nothing mattered enough. (In the back seat, Benjy and Alex were playing Benjy’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Wee, Poo, Sick). He thought of it as a blessing once, not being haunted by the terrible wanting that blighted so many lives, but he looked at Daisy’s screwed-up religion, Alex being carted away in an ambulance after that race, Angela trying to save some white-trash kid who’d end up in prison anyway, and he realised that all of them had reasons to be alive in a way that he didn’t.

  Raglan Castle was built in the mid-1430s by Sir William ap Thomas, ‘The Blue knight of Gwent’, who fought alongside Henry V at the battle of Agincourt … (Richard is reading the free information pamphlet thoroughly) … but the castle was undermined after a long siege during the Civil War and what remains is largely a picturesque ruin … Consequently it takes a dedicated historical imagination to stand on the mossy cobbles of the Pitched Court and conjure up the falconers and the manchet bread and the clatter of billhooks, and what Louisa notices mostly is the absence of a café where she might sit in the warm with a cappuccino and a magazine and rid herself of the image of Melissa naked and broken in a ditch.

  Alex walks the battlements of the Great Tower, which sits at the centre of its own moat and is connected to the main fortifications by a drawbridge. A little single-engined plane is flying overhead sounding like a lawn mower. He thinks about that flight last year in the Piper Cherokee with Josh’s uncle, being frightened during take-off, then feeling smug about not being frightened any more, then enjoying it, then being rather bored because basically there wasn’t much to do apart from sit in a cramped seat watching clouds. He glances down into the big stone box of the castle’s main hall and sees Louisa pacing. Now that Melissa has gone he is beginning to realise how fit she is. She’s nearly fifty, which makes it sound pervy if you say it out loud, but she’s in really good nick and he keeps imagining her taking off that cream rollneck jumper. Big tits. All that hair.

  But Dominic is listening to Joe Pass. ‘Stella by Starlight’ from the first Virtuoso album. BbMa7 … Em7b5 … A7 … Those incredible runs, just ragged enough to make them feel human. Ever since they arrived at the castle he has been experiencing a disturbing sense of déjà vu for which he is unable to account, having never been to Wales before, until he remembers Robert Plant’s swordfight in The Song Remains the Same. It was filmed here, wasn’t it? He’d owned a Welsh farm during his dungeons and dr
agons phase. ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’ and so forth. But there’s no one here with whom he can share this satisfying pop trivia nugget.

  Benjy can’t really concentrate on the castle because a weird ginger boy is trying to befriend him. We’re from Devon … Have you seen Pirates of the Caribbean …? My dad’s got a quad bike. He has a dolphin T-shirt and no eyebrows to speak of. Benjy wants to be left alone because if you concentrate and no one disturbs you the knights stand up from their stone tombs and a cornfield of spears rises beyond the moat.

  Do you like football?

  He still hasn’t quite got the politics of the playground, that low-grade scuffle over space and status. He expects more logic, better tactics. He’s spent too much time with his older siblings. He knows quite a bit about homosexuality and communism and income tax, and with Pavel it’s easy because they both like making potions and Lego massacre tableaux, but if Wayne Goodrich calls him a spaz …

  That’s my dad, says the ginger boy, turning briefly, over there.

  Benjy runs.

  The problem with Jennifer … Richard paused. He had never talked seriously about her with anyone except Louisa. She didn’t really care about other human beings. I’m not talking about the way she treated me. You make your bed and you have to lie in it. But friends, patients. The image of that girl in her wheelchair passed briefly through the headlights of his mind.

  Dominic was transfixed by Richard wrestling with difficult ideas in real time. Why did you get married?

  We were both ambitious, both somewhat unsentimental, neither of us wanted children. In the circumstances I think that was wise. She would have made a dreadful mother. I’m not sure I would have made the perfect father, but in my darker moments I feel a good deal of regret.