The Red House (19 page)

Look
. Melissa paused and glanced both ways down the landing. She lifted her skirt and pulled down her knickers and there it was, a little bluebird on her buttock where the tan faded to moony white.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
. Daisy wanted to say something complimentary but it seemed indecent.
Did it hurt?
Melissa was letting her look for too long and Daisy was finding it hard to turn away.
He was cute so I didn’t mind too much
. She pulled her knickers up.
If you tell anyone …
But why would she? It felt like her own transgression, not Melissa’s.

Angela enjoyed anything with a Latin flavor, Orchestra Baobab, Buena Vista Social Club (she’d sat through so many assemblies that
English lyrics were always accompanied in her mind by a little white dot bouncing along the words). Alex liked Razorlight, Kasabian, music you listened to on open roads with the window down whereas Daisy loved the rich sweep of choral music so that the portable keyboard at church gave her a guilty longing to be in St. Catherine’s on Christmas Eve, candles and holly-crackle, a church organ and boys like angels. But it was Benjy who listened more intently than any of them, ever since that night when he’d been sick and stayed up watching
Guys and Dolls
with Mum. Singing, dancing, everything squeezed into one vast sticky sugary cake.
My Fair Lady. Calamity Jane
. Why couldn’t you have an orchestra in real life? Sometimes he sang “The Deadwood Stage” or “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” when no one was watching, and when he was walking down the street clicking his fingers, doing wobbly little pirouettes, only four people in the world knew he was doing the dance from the opening scene of
West Side Story
.

But now there was Monteverdi in the background. The roasting tin, battered and discolored like Elizabethan armor. Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon. Angela sees a tiny brown mouse run along the polished wainscot. Something storybook about it here, not like a mouse in the dining room at home. She decides not to mention it.
Let me guess
, said Richard.
The Vespers
? There was something underpowered about him tonight, thought Dominic. Perhaps he and Louisa really did have an argument at Llanthony. Now that he thought about it, yes, Louisa seemed a little flat, too. And when they sat down Dominic seemed to have inherited his seat at the head of the table, along with some kind of paterfamilias role. Indeed everyone’s roles seem to have been reassigned because Louisa was sitting next to Benjy, which wasn’t the place she would have chosen, but she asked him what subjects he liked at school, he told her how much he hated maths and she showed him how to do long division on a napkin. Daisy and Melissa were huddling and Angela and Alex were remembering the disastrous holiday in Barmouth, the food poisoning, those people cut off by the tide and screaming for help. Dominic’s pie was good. He’d sculpted a little dog from the spare puff pastry in the center of the glazed crust which
Benjy was allowed to eat. And afterward, over coffee, while Daisy and Alex washed up, Angela found herself next to Richard and decided on the spur of the moment to tell him about Karen. An exorcism of a kind. Because she had never even told him she was pregnant, and afterward it had seemed too fragile a fact to share with someone who was almost a stranger. But she swerved at the last minute and heard herself saying,
What do they do with dead bodies in hospital?

They’re refrigerated
, said Richard,
then they’re released to funeral directors after any autopsy is done. Why do you want to know?

What about a stillborn baby?
said Angela. The seconds rocked back and forth like water against a dock wall.

Depending on the length of gestation and the wishes of the parents it might be released to the funeral directors and given a funeral of some kind
. He was holding a sugar cube so that it just touched the surface of his coffee, like Benjy did in cafés.

And if not?

It would be taken to a medical waste incinerator and burnt
. He dropped the cube into the coffee.
But this is a rather grisly subject
.

If he’d asked the question she would have told him everything, but he didn’t know what question to ask.

Hang on to your horses
, yelled the shrunken head.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride
. And the bus shot off into the night.

Benjy was insistent and all the other suggestions were too violent or too scary or contained romance which Benjy vetoed strenuously, so they bowed to his choice and, loath as some of them were to admit it, there was a pears-and-custard coziness to it. Spells and potions, the Care of Magical Creatures. Because, ultimately, the place itself is immaterial, Combray, Meryton, St. Petersburg, so long as it’s over the hills and far away, the journey we once took with just a click of the fingers but which grows longer and steeper with the years.

Hey, tiger
, said Dominic. Benjy had curled up with his head on his father’s lap. He was watching the film at an angle of ninety degrees,
but he knew it so well he hardly needed to watch at all.
You should go to bed
.

If only he could sleep here, like he did when he was little, the dance and crackle of the fire, familiar voices, the beasts at bay.

Melissa turned the page and pressed it flat.

The bullet entered Tapp’s chest, lifting him upward and backward. So many intense impressions were compressed into those two or three seconds that they felt like minutes. Tapp looked as if he were performing some kind of modern ballet. I remember with exquisite clarity, looking down and seeing a great tongue of red liquid arcing over the white tablecloth, thinking at first that it was Tapp’s blood, then realizing that it was the raspberry sorbet which had been knocked out of Jocelyn’s hands
.

The effort has, however, done him good. He was never so resolute, never so strong, never so full of volcanic energy …
But Daisy couldn’t read, didn’t want to read, didn’t want to be anywhere but here. She hadn’t felt this eagerness for life in a long time. She’d meant to bring Melissa into the fold.
I get so fucking lonely
. The harvest of souls. But she didn’t want to break the spell. Was it so wrong to have found a friend?

Louisa washed her face and patted it dry with the blue towel. She opened the mirrored cabinet and when she closed it again he was standing in the doorway behind her.

I’m really sorry
.

Sorry was cheap, as Mum used to say. Buyer’s remorse, soiled goods and all that.
Well, I’m sorry, too
. Now both of them had said it and had not meant it.

Why didn’t you tell me before?

She took her toothpaste out of the cupboard.
And given you the chance to back out?

I wouldn’t have backed out
. Was this a lie?

She brushed her teeth. Briefly he was another man looking at her. Other men. He felt dizzy. He closed his eyes.
I feel like a little boy sometimes
.

But she didn’t want to be married to a little boy.

Marja, Helmand. The sniper far back enough from the window to stop sun flaring on the rifle sight. Crack and kickback. A marine stumbles under the weight of his red buttonhole. Dawn light on wild horses in the Khentii Mountains. Huddersfield, brown sugar bubbling in a tarnished spoon. Turtles drown in oil. The purr of binary, a trillion ones and zeroes. The swill of bonds and futures. Reckitt Benckiser, Smith and Nephew. Rifts and magma chambers. Eyjafjallajökull smoking like a witch’s cauldron. Sleep shuffling the day’s events like a pack of cards. Cups and coins, the Juggler, the Traitor. Spearheads and farthingales smashed and scattered in the cities of the dead. The planet warming. Cadmium, arsenic, benzene.
Baby, please
. A ranch burns on the prairie. Brando and Hepburn pace their silver cages, over and over. Every mind at the center of space and time. The fierce little star of
now
. Sparrows flying through the banqueting hall
where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counselors
. A brief passage of warmth and light between darkness and darkness. The stepfather’s hand over the child’s mouth.
Mein irisches Kind, wo weilest du?
A blue whale cruises the abyssal cold. Viperfish, fangtooth, gulper eel. A Burlington Northern pulls out of Fort Benton hauling hoppers of grain. Inter-cloud lightning over Budapest. The tide turning in the Thames.
Arklow Surf
to White Mountain, Cymbeline to Ford Jetty, vast Christmas trees of light above the black water. Vultures on a Tower of Silence. Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. A boy of twenty-three presses a button. Seven thousand miles away a Hellfire missile fizzes from the underside of a Predator drone. Three houses of stone and packed earth. A girl wakes and has no time to remember the dream about the birds.

Angela is standing in the kitchen. Moon-blue dark. A shuddery jingle as the fridge motor cuts in. What woke her? Whose kitchen is this? The fear that has haunted her ever since her mother became ill, that she would go the same way. Names refusing to come. Lost objects. Keys, wallet. The mind’s ordinary stumbles magnified perhaps. But sometimes … this utter blankness. Terrified of the simplest questions.
What year is this? What are your children’s names?
She touches her own face but cannot remember what it looks like.

Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his counselors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, O king
.

He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God
.

L
ouisa had woken just after two. Halfway along the landing a sliver of light vanished from between the floorboards. Or was it her imagination? She waited, listening. Nothing. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep if she didn’t check, and there was no way she was going to wake Richard, not now, so she made her way downstairs, the oak creaking under her feet. Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, more alive than he ever was during the day, black table, black sideboard, the glowing gray circles of the plates on the dresser, as if a whispered conversation had been interrupted. The cry of a bird outside. She stepped into the kitchen and saw a silhouetted figure in the shadows at the far end. Jesus H. Christ. She flipped the light to find Angela standing beside the fridge, eating a bowl of Frosties, an open bag of caster sugar on the chopping board.

I didn’t want to wake anyone
.

Louisa could see now that the shabbiness was symptomatic of a bigger problem.

Comfort eating
, said Angela.

You scared me rigid
.

I was embarrassed
. Angela put the bowl down delicately, as if she were stepping away from an angry dog.
So I turned the light out
.

Angela …?
Was she sleepwalking?

I’ve been feeling a little unsettled
. Something oddly formal about
this.
I had another child. Before Daisy. Her name was Karen. She was stillborn
.

Louisa was sympathetic to friends who were depressed but this was something stranger and more worrying.

It’s her birthday on Thursday
, said Angela.
She’ll be eighteen. Would have been eighteen
. She rolled and crimped the top of the sugar.
I’m going back to bed now
. She walked carefully round Louisa and out of the kitchen.

In other circumstances Louisa would have washed the abandoned bowl but she couldn’t dismiss the idea that it was charmed in some dark way. She waited for the muffled clunk of a door overhead then followed Angela back upstairs, turning the lights on as she went so that there was no darkness at her back.