The Red House (7 page)

Why did you do that last night?
asked Angela.

Do what?

You know exactly what I’m talking about. Saying grace. Making everyone feel uncomfortable
.

I think we all should be more grateful for the things we have
.

I think we should also be more considerate of other people’s feelings
.

Oh, like you’re considerate of my feelings?

Don’t answer me back
.

So, what? Just be quiet and do what you say?

You were showing off, and you were patronizing people. I don’t care what you believe in private …

That’s rubbish. You hate what I believe in private
.

I don’t care what you believe in private but I don’t think you should force it down other people’s throats
.

You’re just jealous because I’m happy
.

I’m not jealous, Daisy. And you’re not happy
.

Well, maybe you’re not the expert when it comes to what I’m actually feeling
.

We’ll buy some secondhand books
, said Richard.
Get some lunch. Stop for a walk on the way back
.

That sounds like the most excellent fun
, said Melissa.

Then it’s your lucky day
. He remained poker-faced.
We can only fit seven in the car
.

Good
.

Will you be all right on your own?
asked Louisa.

Melissa flopped her head to one side and rolled her eyes.

Can we walk up Lord Hereford’s Knob?
asked Benjy.

He’ll stop finding it funny eventually
.

I’ll duck out, too
, said Dominic.
If that’s OK
.

Angela briefly wondered if he had arranged some kind of liaison with Melissa and came close to making a joke about it before realizing how tasteless and bizarre it would have been.

Melissa was coming up the stairs when Alex emerged from the bathroom, a sky-blue towel around his waist. Post-exercise fatigue. He made her think of a tiger, that slinky muscular shamble. There was a V of blond hairs on the small of his back. She wanted to touch him. The feeling scared her, the way it rose up with no warning, the body’s hunger. Because she loved the game, the tension in the air, but she found the act itself vaguely disgusting, André’s eyes rolling back like he was having a seizure, the greasy condom on the carpet like a piece of mouse intestine. Alex turned and looked at her. She smiled.
Hello, sailor
. Then turned away.

Dominic sat beside Angela on the bench. There was a scattering of crumbs on the lawn, a couple of sparrows picking at them, and another bird he didn’t recognize.
This’ll be good for us, I think. Being here
.

It’s a lovely place
.

That’s not what I meant
.

I know
.

He remembered a time when they had really talked, sitting by the river, lying in that tiny bedroom naked after making love, faded psychedelic wallpaper and the Billie Holiday poster. Both eager to know more about this other life of which they’d become a part. But now? They weren’t even friends anymore, just co-parents. He wanted to tell her about Amy, to relieve the pressure in his chest, because he was scared, because he had begun to notice the frayed curtains and the smell of cigarettes in Amy’s house and the need in her voice. He had assumed at first that the whole thing was no more than a distraction from lives lived elsewhere, but this wasn’t a distraction for her, was it. This was her life, this dimly lit bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, and the secret door was in truth the entrance to a darker dirtier world from which he wouldn’t be able to return without paying a considerable price. But was it really so bad to have looked for affection elsewhere?
They had both been unfaithful in their way. To have and to hold, to love and to cherish. When had they last done these things? He wouldn’t tell Angela, would he. He would live with it until the discomfort faded and lying became normal.

Poor Benjy
. She examined the inside of her mug.
He was talking about us dying. You know, who would get all the stuff in the house
.

He seems to like it here, though
. Because this was what they did. They acted like a real family. Perhaps it was what most people did.
How are you and your brother bonding?

He remembers everything
. She threw the dregs of her coffee into the grass. The birds flew away.
It scares me. Makes me wonder if I’m losing my mind. Like Mum
.

Who’s the prime minister?

I’m being serious … He could be making it all up for all I know
.

Don’t we always make them up, our childhood memories?
His own mother had slept with another man, the dapper little dentist with the soft-top Mini. Or was it just a spiteful rumor?

They sat for several minutes looking at the view. They had this at least, the ability to sit beside one another in silence.

I have difficulty believing that Richard and I are actually related
. The birds were reconvening around the crumbs.

Maybe you were adopted. That might solve a problem or two
.

Another of his jokeless punch lines. But Richard was calling,
Wagons roll
.

Countryside like an advert on TV, for antiperspirant, for butter, for broadband, a place to make us feel good inside, where everything is slower and more noble, cows and hayricks and honest labor. Somewhere out there, hard by a stand of beech, commanding an enviable prospect of the valley, the house where the book will be written and the marriage mended and the children will build dens and the rain when it comes is good honest rain. How strange this yearning for being elsewhere doing nothing. The gift of princes once, its sweet poison spreading.
Lady Furlough surveying the desert of the deer park, the monsters coiling in the ornamental lake, that terrible weight of hours, laudanum and cross-stitch. What every child knows and every adult forgets, the glacial movement of the watched clock, pluperfects turning slowly into cosines turning slowly into the feeding of the five thousand. School holidays of which we remember only mending bikes and Gary Holler killing the frog, the featureless hours between gone forever.

And now you must do nothing for a week and enjoy it. Days of rest long past the point when we’re rested, holidays without the holy, pilgrimage become mere travel, the destination handed to us on a plate, the idleness of the empire in its final days.

Melissa had been sitting at the dining-room table reading when Dominic walked through and said he was going for a walk. The door banged and she became aware of how quiet the house was. She stuck her iPod on.
Monkey Business
, Black Eyed Peas, but the inability to hear someone approaching from behind made her feel vulnerable so she took the earphones out again. She stepped into the garden, wanting the minimal reassurance of Dominic’s shrinking silhouette, but he was gone and the valley was empty. She went back into the living room and rifled through the stack of DVDs.
Monsters, Inc., Ice Age 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
. There was a
Simpsons
case but it contained a PlayStation disc for
Star Wars Battlefront
.

A whir and clang behind her. She span round. The grandfather clock chimed again.
Fuck
. She needed to talk to a normal human being. Megan, Cally, Henry, anyone. She grabbed her phone and headed for the hills.

He’d been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. A town of books. All this learning gathered in and offered up.
Trawling, browsing, leafing
. But now that he was standing in the bowels of the Cinema Bookshop … That smell. What was it, precisely? Glue? Paper?
The spores of some bibliophile lichen? Catacombs of yellowing paper. Every book unwanted, sold for pennies or carted from the houses of the dead. Battersea Books Home. The authors earned nothing from the transaction. Salaries less than binmen, he’d read somewhere. He thought about their lives. No colleagues, no timetable, no security, the constant lure of daytime television. The formlessness of it all made him feel slightly ill, going to work in their dressing gowns. So much risk and so little adventure.

He laid his hand on the bumpy wall of frayed spines and brittle slipcovers. His mother had arranged them according to their height, as a kind of subsidiary furniture. Airport novels and Hollywood biographies. He wished he were better at embracing the chaos, loosening up a little. But the journey was always a circle. You thought you were on the other side of the world then you turned a corner and found yourself in the kitchen with the green melamine bowls and the clown calendar. His neatness, his love of order, the need to keep himself constantly busy, these things weren’t a measure of the distance he’d put between them, these were the things they had in common.

The Golden Ocean. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. The House of Sixty Fathers. They Call Me Carpenter. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive. The Velveteen Rabbit. The Chessmen of Mars. The Eagle of the Ninth. Tarzan and the Forbidden City. The Man Who Could Not Shudder. Typewriter in the Sky. The Naughtiest Girl in the School. Black Hunting Whip. The Secret of the Wooden Lady. Five Go to Mystery Moor. The Drowning Pool. The Courage of Sarah Noble. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Bonjour Tristesse. The Sky Is Falling. The Sound of Waves
.

Holy shit. There was a naked woman tied up. Then another naked woman tied up. Then a naked woman tied up and hanging from the ceiling. Then a naked tattooed woman with her arse in the air and a dildo sitting on a record player in the background. Then a naked
woman with an Egyptian hairstyle on an old-fashioned hospital bed tied up with rubber tubing that actually went into her cunt. And it was, like, actual art that you were allowed to look at. Or was it? Alex flipped the cover shut. Nobuyoshi Araki. Phaidon. Eighty-five pounds. So it
was
art. Holy shit. You could have it on a coffee table. He imagined being the photographer. Actually being there in the room. There was a close-up of a big veiny penis in black and white which was gross, then two naked women on a bed.

Excuse me
.

There were other human beings in the room. The man squeezed past and disappeared into Architecture. Alex stared at the photograph of the two women. He wanted to buy the book. He wanted to steal the book. He wanted to stay here forever. He had to put it down. He couldn’t put it down.

Dominic was thinking of the opening of the second Two-Part Invention, that little canon. When the work stopped he couldn’t bear to listen to music. Sentimental songs were the worst, “The Power of Love,” “Wonderful Tonight” … He had to leave shops sometimes. Just like Coward said.
Extraordinary how potent …
etc. After a couple of months he started listening to Steve Reich and suddenly saw the point of those cool, evolving lines.
Music for Eighteen Musicians, Electric Guitar Phase
. Moving gingerly on to Bach. Another kind of coolness. He ran though the fingering of the Two-Part Invention in his head. Who was the guy on that classical-music quiz show when he was a kid? He played a dummy keyboard and you had to guess the piece from the thumping. Joseph Cooper. That was it.
Face the Music
.

He looked across the valley and heard
The Lark Ascending
in his mind’s ear, that skirling violin, four semiquavers then up and up, pentatonic scale, no audible root, no bar lines even … Melissa. Jesus. Was that Melissa? He started to jog down through the bracken. What in God’s name was she doing? Vomiting? He tripped and fell and got up again. She was on all fours. He slowed, panting.
Melissa?
He touched
her shoulder and she sprang up and screamed, waving her hands like a frightened woman in silent film.
Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean …

It’s … It’s …
She stroked the air in front of her. Angela’s husband. She’d forgotten where she was. She felt naked. Was he going to attack her?

Are you all right?

She mustn’t cry. She held out her mobile. It refused to explain the situation.
I couldn’t get any signal
.

Have you hurt yourself?

No, I haven’t fucking hurt myself
. Deep breath.

You were trying to ring someone
.

I’ve got to …
She turned and walked away and her knees buckled and she tried very hard to make it look like she was sitting down on purpose.

He came over and sat beside her. They said nothing. It was uncomfortable, then it was comfortable, then it was uncomfortable.
So I guess you’re not having a fun time
.

She started crying.
Shit
. She wiped her eyes.