The Red House

4: Monday

Richard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man. Hello trees, how are you this morning? Pop a couple of Nurofen into the river at Reading to cure everyone’s headache in London. He rinses his mouth with Corsodyl.

The intolerable loneliness after Jennifer left. The noises a house made at night. Learning the reason for small talk at forty-two. Going to the pub. He’d always thought of it as wasting time.

He spits out the mouthwash, sluices his mouth with cold water and pats his face dry with the white towel from the hot rail.

He turns and sees himself in the mirrored door of the cabinet, face still puffy with the fluids that fatten the face in the night, waiting for gravity to restore him to himself. They say you’re meant to see your father staring back at you, but he never does. He pulls the light cord and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.

♦

Alex hoists himself up and stands on the trig point. He is the highest thing for, what? fifty miles? a hundred? He turns slowly as if he is spinning the earth around him like a wheel, the ridges of the Black Mountains receding to the south, Hay down there in the train-set valley to the north. The wind buffets him. He imagines fucking Louisa against the bathroom door. Her ankles locked behind him, saying, Yes, harder, yes, the door banging and banging and banging.

♦

They’ve created the largest fiscal deficit in recent history.

Dominic regretted broaching a subject about which Richard seemed to know rather too much and Dominic too little, for whenever he ventured into the financial section of the newspaper a dullness stole over him as if the subject were protected by a dark charm woven to dispel intruders. So we elect a man who won’t admit to having any actual policies? But he was bowling uphill in fading light.

Down the table Angela was reading the Observer travel section. A message had slipped over the hill during the night. Missing U. Love Amy XX. If he never told her about Amy then he would always be the better parent, the better person, because he loved Daisy unreservedly. And there she was, coming in holding a bowl of cereal. People are greedy and selfish, she said, sitting down as far away from Melissa as possible, though it was only Dominic who noted the geometry. They just vote for people who promise to give them exactly what they want. It’s like children with sweets.

But she wasn’t talking about people. She was talking about Richard and she was talking about Melissa, wasn’t she?

But things improve, said Richard carefully. It’s a messy process but things do get better.

For who? said Daisy.

♦

None of them were greatly interested in the election except as a national soap opera in which the closeness of the result was more exciting than the identity of the winner. Individually, they were passionate about GP fundholding, academy schools, asylum, but none of them trusted any party to keep a promise about any of these issues. Louisa struggled to believe that she could change herself, let alone the world, and saving lives seemed to absolve Richard of any wider duty. Angela and Dominic had once marched in support of the miners in Doncaster and the printers in Wapping, but their excitement at Blair’s accession had changed rapidly to anger then disappointment then apathy about politics in general. Alex was planning to vote Tory because that was how you voted when you were the kind of person he wanted to be. Melissa affected a disdain which felt like sophistication and Daisy affected an ignorance which felt like humility. Benjy, on the other hand, was interested mostly in the fate of the tiger, the panda and the whale, and consequently more concerned about the future of the planet than any of them.

♦

Daisy had never really talked to Lauren till they were swimming for the school, up at six for seventy lengths at the Wheelan Centre before lessons. She was five foot eleven at sixteen, as graceful in the water as she was clumsy out of it, hunching her shoulders and speaking in a tiny voice to compensate, not quite a girl but not a woman either. She wore baggy clothes to deflect attention but when she was in her green Speedo Daisy was mesmerised by the length and whiteness of her legs and neck, the way you couldn’t stop looking at someone with a missing arm or a strawberry birthmark. She attached herself to Daisy with an eagerness that no one had shown since they were six or seven so that they inhabited a kind of treehouse world together. Something about Lauren’s size that made Daisy feel tucked away like a precious thing. Boys called Lauren a freak and kept their distance, though it was clear to Daisy that when she was older and more confident and they were less concerned about the opinions of their peers they would see that she was beautiful. Lauren responded by pretending they didn’t exist, even Jack who hated being ignored by someone who still read novels with wizards in, a scorn she returned in equal measure so that Daisy grew rapidly tired of being the prize in a pointless competition.

But Lauren was the only person who wasn’t fazed when Daisy joined the church. She should have been grateful, but…what was it? Lauren’s smugness about having won the competition by default? The unshakeable puppyish loyalty? So she pushed Lauren away and when Lauren clung on she pushed harder, for surely it was insulting if a friend refused to react to your feelings? She gave up swimming, stopped calling, stopped answering her phone. Lauren knocked on the door once and Daisy asked Mum to say that she was out, and she wasn’t sure which felt worse, the way she was behaving or Mum’s delight at her unchristian hypocrisy.

Lauren’s height and divorcing parents and the fact that she too had stopped swimming meant that it took a long time for anyone to notice her anorexia. Daisy didn’t believe it had anything to do with her, for that would have been self-centred. But neither did she get in touch to offer help or support. Lauren was in hospital briefly, but Daisy didn’t visit, and when Lauren’s mother moved to Gloucester, taking Lauren with her, Daisy felt a relief that was no relief at all.

♦

Benjy poured three centimetres of vinegar into the big plastic tub.

Now, said Richard, fill the egg cup with bicarbonate of soda.

This is going to be brilliant. Benjy filled it clumsily. Did you do this when you were little, Uncle Richard?

I was far too well behaved. He tried not to think about the children he might have had. I’ll do this next bit myself.

Do you think it will go over the roof?

Let’s see. Gingerly, he lowered the egg cup into the vinegar. The rim of the egg cup sat just proud of the liquid. Perfect. He pressed the top back on to the tub.

Can I do it? asked Benjy.

One shake and then step back quickly.

Ten, nine, eight… Benjy crouched down …two, one…Blast off. He shook the tub and sat his teddy bear on top and forgot to stand back so Richard grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. And nothing happened. Perhaps we should do it again, said Benjy, but Richard could see the plastic lid bulging under the bear. Wait. There was a creak like a ship trapped in ice and the POP was considerably louder than Richard had expected, there was foam all over his trousers and a flatulent smell in the air (sodium acetate?) and while the bear didn’t quite go over the roof it did get stuck in the climbing rose just under the first-floor window. Benjy was whooping and Richard could see it all from his point of view and it really was the funniest thing he’d seen in a long time and Benjy was saying, Again, again, again, which was when Angela appeared from the front door. I thought a bomb had gone off.

♦

I can add you in later, said Alex. Like the reserve goalkeeper. She had no idea what he was talking about, but she ran a quick mental check of her outfit. Ugg boots, patterned tights under denim shorts, lumberjack shirt…She didn’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted but it seemed like the wrong time to piss off yet another person. Smile. Click. Turn towards the house. Click. She knew she looked good. Her only worry sometimes was that she didn’t look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She’d see a girl in patterned Docs or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls. Click. Now sit on the wall. Like some sleazy old guy. Click. You should be a model, love. Give us some arse. I think we’re finished now.

Cheers, said Alex. That’s great.

Except he probably wouldn’t wank over the photo because he was becoming aware of a nastiness in Melissa that clung to her even in his sexual fantasies, though it didn’t matter now because he fancied Louisa instead, and he was proud of the fact that his taste was maturing.

♦

It’s not far. Richard leans over the Ordnance Survey as if he is planning an aerial assault on northern France. A couple of miles at most.

Louisa brushes toast crumbs from her sweater. Those little brown lines are very close together.

Daisy is sitting in the window seat reading Dracula (We need have no secrets amongst us. Working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark).

Angela appears in the kitchen doorway. Any more sandwich orders? I’ve got mozzarella and tomato, cheddar and pickle, jam, ham…

Can you bring those pears and bananas?

Benjy enters, absent-mindedly singing ‘Whip-Crack-Away!’.

Did you flush the toilet?

He turns sullenly and retraces his steps.

Angela hasn’t walked more than a mile in the last ten years but she doesn’t want to abandon ship for a second day running and she is determined to prove Dominic wrong, to be a real part of the family.

Alex is reading the Observer sports section (Bowyer received a gift of a cross inside the six-yard box but headed it wide).

Distantly, the toilet flushes.

Where’s Melissa? Richard finds himself worrying about her in a way that he hasn’t done before. These vague thoughts of fatherhood, perhaps. She hasn’t made a second bid for freedom, has she?

She’s upstairs, says Alex. Beautifying herself. It’s something his father might say.

Louisa thinks about going into the kitchen to help out but she is still uneasy around Angela. She still can’t picture her as a teacher. She had expected more warmth, more openness.

Daisy turns the page (When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless).

Dominic looks at Benjy’s feet. You are not walking up that hill in sandals.

♦

Click. Everyone briefly gathered and posed and smiling at their future selves. Beaches and cathedrals, bumper cars and birthday parties, glasses raised around a dining table. Each picture a little pause between events. No tantrums, no illness, no bad news, all the big stuff happening before and after and in between. The true magic happening only when the lesser magic fails, the ghost daughter who moved during the exposure, her face unreadable but more alive than all her frozen family. Double exposures, as if a little strip of time had been folded back on itself. Scratches and sun flares. Photos torn post-divorce, faces scratched out or biroed over. The camera telling the truth only when something slips through its silver fingers.

♦

If we could rest for a bit longer. Angela’s lack of fitness scared her. Luminous protozoa swam in her eyes.

Richard clicked his phone off and shook his head wearily. You’d think at twenty-five you could arrange for someone to cover for you when you were on holiday. Actual human lives in their hands. I despair sometimes.

Can we have a snack? asked Benjy.

You can have a banana.

But that’s only fruit.

Monkeys like them.

Monkeys eat fleas.

Cool grey air. Angela looked back down the hill towards the shrunken house. So much effort to get, what? a hundred feet up? two hundred? It made you realise that we lived on the surface of a planet, moving backwards and forwards and round in circles, but forever trapped between earth and sky. She pictured the view as a papier mâché model in the school hall. Gold Book for Seacole Class. She thought of the kids who’d never actually seen the countryside. Kaylee, Milo. Mikela’s dad found the whole countryside thing utterly perplexing. ‘ Let’s go for a nice walk’, it should be written on the Union Jack. Though the only time she and Dominic had stayed in a National Trust cottage it had slave trade prints on the walls. Black men in chains being canoed out to a waiting ship.

Daisy sat herself down beside Melissa and offered her the second half of her coffee. Sorry about yesterday. She wanted to tell Melissa about Lauren, but it was too long a story and she didn’t want to give her any leverage. Melissa was saying nothing. Daisy got to her feet. Forgiven or not, she felt lighter for having apologised.

Do you have lots of friends?

Daisy wondered if Melissa was being sarcastic.

You know, like, other Christians?

We are allowed to have friends who aren’t Christians.

Sorry, that was stupid.

Though Dad was right, her old friends had indeed drifted away, and what had seemed at first a kind of cleansing left a hole more painful than she’d expected. She knew it had been there all the time, that her friends had been a bandage over a wound she was now able to heal, but still she couldn’t bring herself to answer the question, so she flipped it round. You must have loads of friends.

Melissa just laughed. I fucking hate all of them. She took a deep breath and turned to Daisy. Sorry about all the swearing.

We’re allowed to swear, too. Though Tim had told her off for saying Shit.

I get so fucking lonely. A brief pause in the turning of the world. There I go again. Fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t stop the tears.

OK, people, said Dominic, let’s saddle up and move out.

Daisy gazed at the ground between her feet. A little archipelago of yellow moss on a speckled grey stone.

Are you coming or not? shouted Dominic.

Melissa’s got a splinter. We’ll catch you up. She watched her mother get to her feet and realised that she was in some pain.

Thanks, said Melissa quietly.

♦

New Leaves split from the Vineyard church in 1999. Tim and Lesley Canning were feeling increasingly alienated by the direction the church was taking. Rock music, the Toronto Blessing, speaking in tongues. They held meetings in their kitchen, spreading out to other prayerhouses as the membership grew, then taking out a lease on a hall vacated by a judo club. They were near the university and provided a safe harbour for young people who were often a very long way from home. Singapore, Uganda, the Philippines. They had a stall at the Freshers’ Fair and ran weekly Frisbee and Donut afternoons during the summer. Most church members went out onto Lever Street for a couple of hours every week as part of the Healing Project. Tim had always disliked banner-waving street evangelism, for surely the Lord saved souls not crowds, so they struck up conversations with people who seemed lonely or broken in some way, many of whom were desperate for help. They formed a circle and prayed and often you could feel the presence of Jesus wheeling around that ring of hands like electricity. One man’s cancer went into remission. A man possessed by demons was exorcised and no longer heard voices in his head.

Daisy found it preposterous at first, but the preposterousness would later became part of the appeal, the sheer distance between the church and the world which had served her so poorly. She accepted the invitation to that first service as proof of her own broadmindedness and needed a great deal of it to get through the sixty minutes. Embarrassment, mostly, at the way these people spoke and sang like over-excited children, and mild disgust when everyone was invited to hug their neighbour and she found herself briefly in the arms of a man who, frankly, smelt. Which would have been her remaining impression had not her beeline for the door been intercepted by a tiny Indian woman with bangles and a surprisingly red dress and a smile which seemed to Daisy to be the only genuine thing she had experienced since her arrival. She held out her hand. Anushka. You must be Daisy.

♦

I’ve done bad things. They were sitting apart from the others, far enough away to feel private but near enough to prevent Richard shouting or storming off. That bell-jar feeling, everything muffled and far off. She really did think she might vomit.

Are we talking about a criminal record of some kind? He laughed, not hearing the crack in her voice.

No, not that.

He heard it now, but didn’t think of Louisa as someone who had done anything of great significance, either good or bad, rather as someone who had put herself at the service of others so that they could do things of significance. Tell me.

She closed her eyes. There was no way back. After Craig and I split up I slept with a lot of men.

How many? The doctor talking.

Ten. Ten men. A little white lie. Did it sound that bad? Only if you knew the dates, perhaps. I was drinking a lot at the time. It didn’t seem so awful now that it was out there. She’d been lonely. She’d made mistakes. Say something. Please.

I’m thinking about it. He wanted to know the details and didn’t want to know them.

If only he would reach out and hold her. I took an AIDS test. But it didn’t sound reassuring when she said it out loud…Blood and semen. I’m really sorry. Why was she apologising to him? Why hadn’t he saved her sooner?

He couldn’t think of what to say. Was he being a prude? Of course he was, but how did one change?

Richard…?

It disturbs me a little.

What? Her anger surprised her. He was disgusted. She tried to keep her voice down so that Dominic or Angela didn’t hear.

I’m just trying to be honest.

I trusted you completely. The girl. The one who ended up in a wheelchair. I never for one moment doubted you when…

That’s different.

Why is it different, Richard…?

Because it wasn’t my fault.

You think I deliberately set out to be…?

He couldn’t stop himself. You don’t sleep with ten men by accident. He wasn’t trying to be unkind, it seemed to him to be simply a fact.

Do you actually love me, Richard? Or do you just like having me around as long as I don’t cause any problems?

Of course I love you. Something perfunctory about his answer. They both heard it but he couldn’t change the tone retrospectively.

I’m not sure you know what love means. She had never spoken like this before, not to Richard. There was a sickly thrill in riding the wave.

I know what love means.

So tell me.

It means… but what could he say? It wasn’t something you put into words.

She got to her feet. You come and tell me when you’ve worked out the answer.

♦

The priory, fixed amongst a barbarous people in the Vale of Ewyas, is now a hotel with four bedrooms, each one leading off the spiral staircase of the tower. We advise guests to arrive during bar opening times so as to avoid waiting outside. Ruined arches striding away like the legs of a great stone spider. Transepts, triforium, clerestory. Eight hundred years of wind and rain and theft. Sir Richard Colt Hoare sees the great west window fall in 1803. Banks of mown green baize. Holly Hop and Brains Dark in the cool of the vaulted bar. Snickers and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s with wooden spoons under the plastic lids. Traffic making its way up the valley to Gospel Pass against the flow of the ghost ice, stopping for lorries to reverse, idling behind cyclists. Four pony-trekkers. A steel, a bay roan, two chestnuts. A brief Jacob’s ladder of sunlight, as if heaven were searching for raiders moving over the earth.

Benjy peels the sandwich apart and licks the jam from each slice in turn.

Smile, says Alex. Click.

Hey. Dominic sits down beside Angela. He loves her again. Not loves, maybe, but feels a comfort in her presence which he has not felt for years. He is the one who cares. This does not need to be said. He can spend his forgiveness at his leisure. He’d gone to the toilet in the hotel and texted Amy, Thinking of you must keep this short love D xx. He wonders if Angela is actually sick, psychiatrically. This, too, is a consolation. What do you make of that? He nods towards Daisy and Melissa who are sitting on a ruined buttress, talking.

Her calves ache and she has a blister on her left heel. Perhaps Melissa’s leading her astray. Yesterday, when she walked off, Angela had seen it all from her own point of view. Which was Dominic’s point, wasn’t it? Maybe it will be good for her.

Why does the religion thing upset you so much?

She didn’t want to talk about this now. Because she thinks she’s right and everyone else is wrong.

Doesn’t that cover pretty much every teenager in the world?

Angela felt Karen’s presence.

Actually, said Dominic, I think she’s scared that she’s wrong and everyone else is right. He could hear himself play-acting the wise man, but that didn’t stop it being true.

And suddenly Louisa was walking past them towards the bar, staring straight ahead. Dominic thought she might have been crying, but Angela was throwing a wet wipe at Benjy, saying, You have jam all over your face, young man.

♦

White skin and loads of black hair, said Melissa. Like, on their back as well. That is definitely the grossest.

Big muscles. Daisy laughed. Or tattoos. I hate tattoos.

I’ve got a bluebird on my arse. Melissa paused. They were on the edge of the enchanted forest, kings and their judgement far away. I’ll show you later if you promise not to tell. And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.

Well, I guess I’ll have to make an exception in your case. Daisy wondered if the church was a bluebird tattoo. Doubt, that canker in the heart.

Prince Albert had a ring through his penis so he could tie it to his leg. Must have been a monster. Melissa laughed and everyone turned and wondered what they could be talking about.

OK. You win. That is definitely the grossest.

So… Melissa touched Daisy’s arm, to show her she wasn’t mocking her. Tell me about the religion thing. It wasn’t envy. More a kind of zoological fascination. And that steeliness…Maybe there was a little envy there.

Daisy paused. She had imagined this moment many times over the past few days but now that it was here…How did she say this without dispersing the nameless thing that hung in the air between them? Don’t you sometimes wonder if everything is pointless or whether it has some bigger meaning? The Alpha line. She wished she could have been more original.

Sometimes, I guess.

Shakespeare, the pyramids, human beings… She looked at Benjy playing his Nintendo and really did think it was astonishing. It can’t be an accident, can it? I mean…How could she express all that wonder? You look up into the sky at night and it’s beautiful but it’s terrifying, too. Don’t you think that?

Sort of. But did she? Her fears lurked nearby with their feet on the ground.

What if you couldn’t stop thinking about it?

I guess I’d take some really strong antidepressants. Melissa laughed. It was precisely what she would do.

I feel invisible sometimes. I look at myself and there’s nothing there.

Melissa felt a shiver of recognition. Alex’s attention drifting away. But she wasn’t ready to cross this river.

I used to act, said Daisy. As in, you know, drama, plays…And when I was someone else, then I knew who I was. She’d never said this before.

You should act now.

What?

It’s an exercise we did at school. You pretend to be someone else for the whole day. Blind person, deaf person, someone with a limp, someone who can’t speak English. In truth she had never really stopped playing the game.

So what would I be?

Melissa smiled. I think you should be a real bitch.

Was it possible to be someone else? The forest, that faerie magic. My mistress with a monster is in love.

♦

She would never be unfaithful to him. Foolish, perhaps, misguided, but never unfaithful, never dishonest. How odd that her revelation should make Richard certain of this. She wanted people to be happy. Was that the problem, pleasing other men, doling out her favours so prodigally? He wondered if he was simply the first half-decent man who had come along. He was disturbed, too, by the thought that these men had been, what? more adventurous? rougher? more masculine? and that she accepted his shortcomings in return for his reliability, his respectability, his money.

Jennifer’s affair had precipitated the end of their marriage, not because of the betrayal or her failure to hide it, but because he cared so little. He couldn’t imagine her giving herself or being taken. He thought of her as passionate at first. He had never quite known what women wanted, and he was both aroused and relieved to find someone who was so explicit about her needs, but there was always something mechanical about their coupling and he came to realise that the passion was at root an anger whose source he never fathomed.

Did the drinking excuse Louisa’s behaviour or compound it? Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance. Who knows what life his mother might have led if his father hadn’t died so unexpectedly? Airport novels shelved according to their height. The green melamine bowls.

They had crossed the top of the dyke and were walking into a chill wind rising out of the valley. He zipped the front of his orange waterproof. Misty rain, wisps of cloud trailing up the valley like ragged white curtains.

♦

They’d reached the gravel track above the house. You OK? Dominic was calling. I’m fine. Angela paused before heaving herself over the stile. She needed a hot bath and Savlon and the sheepskin slippers she hadn’t packed. She looked up. English Oak. Quercus robur. She’d done a biology degree in a previous life. Pedunculate, not sessile, because of the stalks under the acorns. She parcelled the knowledge and gifted it to children who forgot it straight after their exams. Or before. Mitochondria and ribosomes, the carbon cycle, Banting and Best. Nature with a capital N. How strange that she disliked it en masse. Walks on the heath and the occasional safari park with Benjy. Penguins and fruit bats. That was her limit, really. She’d been passionate once, collecting moths with a torch and a muslin net. Blair’s Shoulder-knot, Magpie, Goat, Codling. It all faded. Hard to feel passionate about anything now. She thought about her mother. It was physiological, of course. Myelin breakdown, neural tangles. But you couldn’t help wonder. Being bored of life, wanting to let go.

Something moved in the distance. Was it…? She had to stop this. If she talked to someone, maybe. A ticking clock and a box of tissues on the pine coffee table. She’d never asked Richard about Jennifer, why they were together, why they weren’t any more. Dominic was right. She thought of herself as someone who cared, but she spent all of that concern at school. She put her foot on the little wooden step and lifted her aching leg.

♦

We push an introductory needle into the femoral artery.

Is that in the groin? asked Benjy.

It is indeed. Richard reached over and picked up the jigsaw piece with the picture of the man being hanged. Bingo. He handed it to Angela.

Louisa was watching from the window seat. He wasn’t even thinking about it, was he? At least Craig blew up and cleared the air. Had she made a monumental mistake? The degrees, the books, the music.

This, said Melissa, staring at the jigsaw, must surely be the most boring activity in the universe. But the edge was gone.

I think I’ll save jigsaws until I’m in an old people’s home, said Daisy. The two girls. Their little freemasonry.

I’ll be in there soon enough, said Angela. Sherry at five and drama students coming in to do hits from the seventies. Except there wouldn’t be sherry, would there, given that Richard wouldn’t be paying this time round. Some council place. Dettol and the TV at Guantánamo volume.

Melissa found the man playing the lute.

X-rays are pretty harmless, said Richard. Pilot. That’s the job to avoid. Lots of breast cancer among female cabin crew.

Is this subject entirely appropriate? said Angela.

Alex came and sat beside Louisa. There. He handed her a glass of wine. He was flirting, wasn’t he? She hotched a centimetre closer so that their shoulders were touching. Richard glanced over. She clinked Alex’s glass. Cheers.

♦

Dominic sliced the florets off the head of broccoli and placed them in the steamer then opened the oven briefly to check on the sweet potatoes. How odd that it was such a manly profession now. Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay. I wouldn’t give that risotto to my fucking dog. He folded back the waxed wrapper, sliced a little pyramid of butter from the corner of the block and dropped it into the pan. Exile on Main Street in the background. Best double album in the history of popular music. Unless Blonde on Blonde was a double. Maybe second best, then. Recorded in that château the Gestapo had used. ‘Tumbling Dice’. Keith Richards falling asleep with a syringe still stuck in his arse. All corporate hospitality now and VW sponsorship deals. Bob Dylan doing adverts for ladies’ underwear. He dropped the sliced onion into the fizzy butter. He’d been vegetarian himself when he was a student. Animal fats in everything before BSE. Biscuits, ice cream. Shopping down the kosher aisle in the Stamford Hill Safeway with the Hasidic housewives and their fifties wigs. He washed the spinach in the colander and pressed it onto the onion. How odd to feel this contentment at the expense of Angela’s failings. He was going to end the Amy thing when he got home. Couldn’t see the point now. It was all about self-worth, wasn’t it, trying to make himself feel better. He didn’t need it any longer. The spinach darkened and shrank. Karen, the daughter he never had, blessing him from beyond the grave. Pint of full-fat in the microwave. But this thing with Daisy and Melissa. I kind of like her, actually. Unquote. That clumsy teenage eyes-down embarrassment he hadn’t seen for so long. He’d help Angela get back on track, make the family work again, be a real father. He poured a little cone of flour onto the buttery spinach and stirred it in. He could take some private pupils again. Earn a little extra money. That honeyed scent of the sweet potatoes roasting. Everything was going to be all right. Physical Graffiti. That was a double album, too, wasn’t it? Maybe Exile was third best.

♦

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 flavour, 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 discoloured like Elizabethan armour. 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 under-powered 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 seemed 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 centre of the glazed crust which Benjy was allowed to eat. And afterwards, 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 afterwards 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 cosiness 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 upwards and backwards. 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 realising 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 zeros. 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 centre 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 counsellors. A brief passage of warmth and light between darkness and darkness. The stepfather’s hand over the child’s mouth. Mein Irisch 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. Intercloud 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. Moonblue 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 counsellors, 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.