I looked towards the door of the pub.
It was then that I saw Rose. She was sitting, reading a book, at a table by the front door. In front of her was a small glass of white wine. Had she followed me here, I wondered, or had she been there all along?
Ravi smiled bitterly. ‘What are you thinking right now, Alex?’
I smiled defensively back and he carried on talking. ‘You’re thinking that we don’t even make buildings, Alex, that really we offer a kind of management service, and that I’m being pretentious and architecty. You’re thinking that I’m overworking the metaphor of the ice wall, and that I should shut the eff up and play the hand I’ve been dealt.’
Rose was looking at me now, and for a moment my gaze met hers.
Stay away.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That is not what I’m thinking.’
‘You are,’ he said. He drained the rest of the beer in his glass. ‘I would.’
I went to the bar again, wondered whether the pub had another way out, wondered how soon I could decently leave. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to walk straight past Rose. Send a clear message.
Did Ravi know Rose? He gave no sign of having seen her, but he was lost in his own misery. I was certain he was about to tell me that the ice wall above him would break apart, that it would fall into the sea, that a wall of water would sink his boat.
‘Alex, the bank still loves us, you know,’ he said as I gave him his third pint. ‘We still have seventy grand in the client account; we still have a reputation. I mean, it’s beginning to get a bit frayed around the edges, but on paper we’re a legitimate operation. We are standing in a beautiful new boat with a group of high-value individuals watching a pristine cliff of unbroken ice. That is where we are. We are in the great Antarctic Ocean, and it’s a glorious day. And no one can see the fissures and the cracks,
no
one. But
I
can hear the ice moving on itself, and
I
know that cliff is going to fall, and when it does the wave will sink our boat. And I’m the captain of the boat, and I will be the last man off and it will take me down with it.
That’s
why it’s a good metaphor.’
He drank down half of the new pint. I looked at the ceiling.
‘You know, Alex, I still go to work as if nothing has happened, knowing I can’t rescue this, but still sort of believing I can. Do you know what I spent the rest of the morning doing, Alex? After I’d humiliated myself by shouting outside your house? Pitching for new work. And do you know why? Because you called and asked to meet me. Your telephone call gave me hope. It got me thinking about new clients. New possibilities. First time in weeks. And then
you
come into the office, and I can see that you’re not a new client, and that everything is going down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I thought of the business he and Bryce had built up. I thought of the tea he had spilled, and wondered whether it was still pooled there on the level surface of his perfect white table.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, and meant it. The man was ruined, and he knew it. Friends in another life, perhaps, but in this life there was nothing I could do to save him. It would be as much as I could do to rescue what was left of my own family.
I did not see Rose slip from the pub as I left, but I heard footsteps in the street behind me, and turned to find her there at my side.
‘You know Ravinder,’ she said.
‘You followed me here.’
‘He’s a good guy.’
‘I love my wife, Rose,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I need to speak to you about that. Please listen to what I have to tell you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really need to be at home. Please don’t follow me.’
She followed me. Five minutes of my time she wanted. She had to speak to me. No, I said, and walked on. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer, she said, not on this. It was too important. I needed to know, she said. Millicent needed to know. For the sake of our future happiness. This is insane, I said. No, she said, this is not insane, Alex. If there is one thing this is not, it’s insane.
‘This
is
insane,’ I said.
‘Hear me out,’ she said.
I walked on. The streets grew dirty and the air grew bad. She matched me step for step.
She didn’t look insane. She looked determined.
I relented.
Coffee.
I took her to The Cheeseria! The Cheeseria! smelled of other people’s babies, of soured milks, of some nameless rot, topped by a shrill note of ammonia. The Cheeseria!, with its capital T and its exclamation mark; with its two tiny tables, and its unpasteurised cheeses. Essence of fucking cheese.
I ordered double espressos. The last thing The Cheeseria! made you want was milk in any form.
‘I need to clear something up with you, Alex. And Millicent won’t speak to me.’
At the other table a girl of twenty-five sat talking loudly at a mobile phone, held six inches from the side of her head. ‘He’s an obligate carnivore, Mum. Yeah, so no brown rice.’
‘What do you want to clear up with me, Rose?’
She was looking levelly back at me. She didn’t look insane or predatory. She wasn’t holding my gaze for longer than she should, or touching my hand by accident, or arranging her body to draw my gaze. There was nothing aggressive or frightening about her.
‘Alex,’ she said at last, ‘Alex, what did my brother tell Millicent about Lana?’
‘That she was his little girl. That she died when she was one. That his marriage fell apart after that.’
‘That’s what I thought you said. Christ.’
I could see the pain in her, though she tried to blink it away. Then she frowned and made a point of looking at the girl at the other table.
‘Mum, we love him too,’ the girl was saying, ‘but he’s a cat. Yeah. So no brown rice.’ She must have realised that we were staring at her then because she gave a silent ‘oops’ and went outside to finish her call.
‘Lana was my daughter,’ said Rose at last.
The stain of incest. That most ancient of crimes. It made a horrible kind of sense.
Rose must have caught the look that crossed my face.
‘No, she was
my
daughter. Not Bryce’s. God, the thought.’ She smiled for a moment, then pain erased the smile from her face. She rested her elbows on the table, pressed the tips of her fingers into her forehead.
‘He told Millicent she died when she was a year old,’ I said. ‘Viral meningitis.’
‘She was less than a year old. Ten months. And they call it meningitis. Just meningitis. But otherwise he got it about right.’ She bent over, dug into her bag, and produced a photograph of herself sitting in a blue plastic chair, breastfeeding a baby in the middle of a hospital ward.
‘I debated whether to show you this. Long and hard. Forgive me if this is the wrong decision.’
In the middle of the baby’s forehead was a colourless plastic tube with a red screw valve, held neatly in place by surgical tape. A thinner tube ran directly under the baby’s translucent skin.
‘I’m not a fan of melodrama, Alex,’ she said, ‘despite what you think of me.’
‘God, Rose.’
There was nothing insane about Rose – I could see that now – though she looked tired and disarrayed.
‘Towards the end they started running out of veins. Hence the cannula on the forehead.’ She gave a little laugh, making light of her suffering. How alike she and Millicent were in that. As if it embarrassed them that their grief showed.
The photograph had been taken by Lana’s father. Yes, they had been married. He was a good man but they were no longer together. The strain of losing Lana had pushed them in different directions. Suffering had coldly worked its fingers between them and drawn them apart. And no, Bryce had never been married. And no, Bryce had never come close to losing a child.
Rose had coped: barely at first, then increasingly well. Lana’s father had not. Rose had left, had found a new career in a new town, but it had taken her some years to get back on her feet.
‘If I’ve behaved in any way inappropriately, Alex, it has never been intentional.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I should be apologising to you. I misread you. I should have listened.’
That attraction, that sense of a secret shared: it was Rose’s secret, and we did not share it. She had done what neither Millicent nor I could.
How do you move on?
If there was a part of Rose that I wanted, it was her answer to that question.
‘What, Alex?’
I was staring at her. ‘I feel terrible, Rose.’ I should stop staring at her. I forced myself to look away. ‘What happened to you was worse than what happened to us,’ I said. ‘Worse than I can imagine. And you dealt with it so much better. I feel ashamed that I misread you.’
‘It isn’t a competition, Alex.’
‘You did though. You coped.’
And then Bryce took her story and told it to Millicent as his own. How did it feel, I wondered, to be used in that way by your brother? To have your pain repackaged and sold on to someone else?
She must have guessed at my thought. ‘He wasn’t a sociopath, Alex,’ she said. ‘He was a lonely man who envied what other people had, and never understood how they had got to where they had got. Anyway, I thought you should know.’
‘He told Millicent your story,’ I said. ‘He pretended it was his.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, he did.’
Bryce used Millicent’s grief over Sarah as the means of her seduction. He lied to and humiliated her.
Of course she killed him.
Millicent wasn’t home in time for supper. I ate with Arla and Max. Arla and Max talked to each other; I didn’t say very much. Then Max looked meaningfully at Arla, and Arla looked meaningfully at Max, and Max nodded, and Arla nodded. Then Arla asked if she could take Max to the cinema to celebrate his last day of primary school. Some kind of sci-fi all-nighter. ‘Planet of the Apes’, or something. The good ones, said Max, not the crap ones. Sure, I said. If she could get him in, why not? It really
was
kind of an all-nighter, said Arla. OK, I said. Really? said Max, was I sure? Yes, I said, I was sure.
I gave Arla £80. ‘Too much,’ she said.
‘Take it,’ I said.
I sat in the front room waiting for Millicent. After a time I realised that the sun had gone down and that I was sitting there in the dark. The streetlight shone orange through the window. Most of the time, nothing happened. Cars passed; silhouetted figures slouched home from the pub.
Some time after one she opened the door. She turned on the light, and saw me at once. She smiled her empty smile.
‘Home alone?’
‘Yes.’ I smiled back. ‘Last day of school. Arla wanted to treat him.’
‘OK.’
She took off her shoes, placed them with more than usual care by the front door, then began to walk upstairs. ‘I’m super-tired,’ she said, as if that explained where she had been. Still that smile.
I heard her close the bathroom door behind her, heard her slide home the lock, heard the sound of water running down the outside of the building. She was brushing her teeth.
I went upstairs. I made a dip in the bedclothes, and fetched the box from the back of my wardrobe; I tipped the baubles and the letters gently from the box, left them in a pile in the middle of our bed. I closed the bedroom door, felt the latch click. I went back downstairs.
I heard Millicent unlock the bathroom door. Then she opened it very slowly and walked towards the bedroom. There was a measured quality to her movements, a deliberateness that was meant to signify something – what?
I heard her open our bedroom door, then stop at the threshold. The house breathed.
‘Alex,’ she said.
I said nothing.
‘Alex,’ she said again. I sat where I was. After a while, I heard her feet on the floorboards again.
‘Yes?’ I said.
She was halfway downstairs. She wasn’t smiling now.
I stood up. She came and stood before me in the living room.
‘You were going to go to sleep,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I was.’
‘And we need to talk.’
‘What in the world kind of a weird statement was that up there?’ she said.
‘You were going to go to sleep,’ I said again.
‘Aren’t you tired, Alex?’
‘Millicent,’ I said. ‘I know.’
‘What do you know, Alex?’ she said. ‘What do you think you know?’
‘I know what you did. I half-know why you did it.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t think that you do. I don’t think you know the half of it.’
I tried to take her in my arms, but she was standing so stiffly that it was impossible. She pushed her arms down and away, a gesture of rejection, stepped away from me slightly.
‘Don’t leave us, Millicent.’
‘Please don’t use Max against me.’
‘Then don’t leave me, Millicent. We can sell the house and slip quietly away. Together.’
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh my God, Alex.’ She was looking at me properly, her eyes searching mine. ‘Jesus. You think …’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think that now.’
‘How can you think that, Alex?’
I went upstairs and fetched the other letters, the ones that she had retrieved from Bryce’s house. They were still in the inside pocket of my rucksack. Then I took the Florentine leather gloves from the back of one of the shelves in my wardrobe.
She was standing where I had left her, looking smaller than ever. I handed her the letters, and the gloves.
‘I intruded into your privacy,’ I said. ‘I needed to know.’
She nodded.
‘Why didn’t the police find them?’
‘He hid them in his bookshelf,’ she said, ‘in the spine of one of my books, in case that detail amuses you.
Marriage for Cynics
. In plain sight.’
‘But you’d think they would …’
‘I don’t
know
how they missed them, Alex. But they did.’
We stood in silence for the longest time. Eventually I went into the kitchen to find wine. When I came back into the living room, Millicent was sitting on the sofa.
‘What was he threatening you with?’ I said.
‘Alex,’ she said. ‘You are wrong.’
‘You asked him to leave you alone,’ I said. ‘It’s there in your letter. What was he threatening you with?’