The Red House

6: Wednesday

Daisy put the milk back into the fridge, closed the door quietly and picked up the mug. When she turned to leave the kitchen, however, Melissa was standing in the doorway. Coffee slopped out of the mug onto the stone floor. Please. I just…

Melissa refused to move, she pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her hoody and rocked forward onto the balls of her feet as if this had to be squeezed out. I’m sorry about yesterday.

The apology was so unexpected that Daisy didn’t know how to reply.

I just blurted, OK? I didn’t think.

It doesn’t matter. Really. I just need to go back to my room.

Wait. Melissa was angry. This had cost her and she wanted that cost acknowledged. It’s fine being gay. I’m not prejudiced.

I’m not gay. Daisy realised too late how loud her voice was. She paused, listening carefully, terrified that someone else might be in the dining room. Her hands were shaking. She put the mug down. Please. I don’t want to talk about this.

Yeh, well maybe you should.

A sudden stab of utter loneliness. Melissa was the only one who knew, there was no one else she could tell. Daisy reached out towards her. I need you to be my friend. She wanted to be held but she couldn’t say the words.

Cool it, lady, said Melissa.

Daisy saw herself standing in the kitchen, arms outstretched like a cartoon zombie. She’d made an idiot of herself for a second time. She threw herself through the doorway, pushing Melissa aside. She heard Melissa say, You are so spectacularly fucked up, then she was in the hallway and running up the stairs.

♦

Abergavenny. Originally Gorbannia. Alex turned the page. A Brythonic word meaning ‘river of the blacksmiths’.

Brythonic?

Of, or appertaining to the Britons.

What happened to your hand?

Alex glanced casually at his knuckles. Mucking about with that roller in the shed. He’d practised the explanation in advance. Lucky my fingers are still attached.

Dominic had taken over the guidebook. It sits between two mountains, Sugar Loaf and Blorenge.

Blorenge?

Richard appeared in the doorway. Alex hid his damaged hand under the table. Richard walked past and patted his shoulder and Alex thought, Fuck you.

Baron de Hamelin, said Dominic. Tree of Jesse. Blah-blah. Goat’s hair periwigs. Rudolf Hess.

Are you making this up?

Scout’s honour.

Benjy came in with his bowl of Deliciously Nutty Crunch and sat next to Dominic, squishing in close because he still felt bruised by his fears of last night which had not been banished entirely by the daylight.

Hey, kiddo.

Incidentally, has anyone seen Daisy this morning?

Nope.

Melissa?

What?

Have you seen Daisy this morning?

She came down to get some coffee. She seemed in kind of a weird mood.

I’ll pop up and see how she is.

Hey. The town hosted the British National Cycling Championships. 2007 and 2009.

Paris of the West.

Now, don’t be bitchy.

I’ll be back in an hour, said Richard, chugging a glass of water. I’ll grab a quick shower and we can all be off.

Enjoy.

Don’t get lost, said Alex.

♦

He was determined not to return home having spent so much money without running properly, plus he needed to be alone for a while. It wasn’t just Louisa. If he’d hit Alex…Would there have been a better way of alienating every single person in the house? He needed to step back and get some distance.

Squatting on the slate path that led from the front door to the iron gate he yanked the tongues of the trainers and double-knotted the laces. The air was damp but somehow clearer and more transparent this morning. The deep greens of the foliage. You didn’t get this in a city, the way the light changed constantly. He walked over to the wall and put each foot up in turn, leaning forward to stretch his hamstrings. The house looked like an extension of the landscape, the stone quarried from Welsh hills, the rafters from a forest you might very well be able to see from the top of the dyke, the moss, the rust, the burst blisters of weathered paint a record of its passage through time and weather, like the scars and barnacles on a tanker’s hull.

He would jog up the road, walk the steepest part of the hill and start running again when he was past the Red Darren car park, conserve his energy this time instead of wasting it in a private show of failed machismo. He checked his watch. 9:17. Looking around he was both disappointed and relieved that no one was watching as he set off.

♦

Dominic walked past the door of the living room and saw Melissa sitting on the sofa. He went in and stood beside her. She was drawing the little side table. Whenever you saw Melissa drawing a picture you were meant to say how good it was and she was meant to brush the compliment off. She refused to acknowledge his presence. What happened to Daisy yesterday?

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Of course you have.

I thought she was ill. She was relishing the confrontation.

You’re lying.

That’s a pretty serious accusation. I hope you’ve got evidence to back it up.

Who is more likely to be telling the truth, you or Daisy? In his own way he was enjoying this, too.

She laughed. That is quite funny. In the circumstances.

Don’t bugger about. Something happened yesterday and it hurt Daisy a great deal and Daisy means more to me than anyone in the world.

Melissa put her pen down and turned to look up at him. You don’t want to know, trust me.

Trust you?

Seriously, you do not want to know.

Try me.

She leant back and exhaled. She’s a lesbian. She said the word as three distinct syllables.

What?

She tried to get her tongue down my throat. Which is not my bag, I’m afraid.

He felt punched. It was true, wasn’t it?

I think she’s having trouble coming to terms with it. A little show of theatrically fake concern.

You… He had to leave before he lost control of himself. You shut your nasty little mouth.

He walked into the dining room. Everyone was gathered at the table. Alex raised a hand to beckon him. He turned and walked upstairs, two at a time. He went into the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the toilet. An old memory of hiding in the bathroom when he was a child, the comfort of the only lockable room in the house, the bar fire high up, two orange rods in their little silver cage, the green rubber suckers that bit the corners of wet flannels. It seemed so obvious, thinking about it. He should go and talk to Daisy. Would she be horrified or comforted that he knew? Perhaps it was better to say nothing, because underneath the confusion he felt a distaste he would never have expected, the unnaturalness of it, the same distaste he felt about the church, strangers coming to claim his daughter and take her away.

♦

The crumpled tissues, the fly crawling on the sill. Daisy had never thought of killing herself, even before she came to know it as a mortal sin. Now she could understand the seductive promise of oblivion. But what if one woke up in hell? A bowl of cold gluey risotto on the carpet by the bed. She’d left her coffee downstairs, hadn’t she? Why had no one come up to see her? She couldn’t be gay because being gay was a sin. She knew it seemed unkind but who was she to decide? The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous. You didn’t discover God’s love then argue about the small print. You submitted, you had to say, I am ignorant, I understand so little, I am only human. Surely she would have noticed before now, it wasn’t like an allergy to bee stings, something of which you were unaware until it put your life in danger. She should call her friends at church. She could go up to Alex and Benjy’s room and get a signal. Meg, Anushka. Lesley, maybe. They would understand in a way that no one here would understand. So why couldn’t she bring herself to do it?

She missed Lauren. She missed Jack. She needed someone who would simply be interested, someone who would say, Tell me more, not, This is what you have to do. But Lauren was somewhere in Gloucester and she lost the number when her old mobile was stolen. Just thinking about this caused a pain that made her grip the edge of the table till it passed. Jack. She took the mobile from her bag. Flat B, 47 Cumberland Street. She could ring directory enquiries. It was like a thin column of sunlight in the dark of the cell.

She knocked on Alex and Benjy’s door. No answer. So she went in and stood on the magic chair in the far corner of the room. Do you want the number texted directly to your phone? Her hands were shaking, as if the seconds mattered. Eight, seven, seven, zero…

The owner of this Orange mobile number is unavailable. If you’d like to leave a message…

She saw Jack getting up from the table in The Blue Sea. You fucking traitor. Everyone staring, squid rings and tomato ketchup, the bottle of spilt vinegar leaking. The hurt in his face, and something she couldn’t quite see, a figure on the edge of her field of vision that slid away every time she turned her head. She couldn’t do it, she clicked her phone off and sat down on the chair. It looked as if someone had burgled the room, one drawer had been removed and upended, Benjy’s dirty jeans lay on the carpet inside out, wearing a pair of red underpants, a crushed yoghurt drink carton, felt-tip drawings of carnage.

♦

He had judged it rather well, fifty paces running, fifty paces walking, alternating the whole way up. Thirty minutes, not bad going. He said he’d be out for an hour but he was loath to turn around now that he was able to stretch his legs. Twenty minutes more or less would make no difference and he’d be a good deal faster on the way back. His legs were going to hurt like hell tomorrow but he felt better than he’d done all week. A tracery of gritty paths along the spine of the hill, blusters of wind. They’d walked up here only two days ago but how different it felt now, a sense of having earned this altitude, the way one lost any sense of scale when one was no longer able to see a human object.

Shit and damn. His left foot was suddenly gone from under him and he was tumbling sideways, breaking his fall with his open left hand on a hard little stone. Damn and shit. He rolled over onto his back and waited for a powder of stars to finish passing across his retina. He looked at his hand, a ragged pebbly graze across the centre of his palm, already starting to bleed. It reminded him of school, skidding bikes and falling off climbing frames. He sat up slowly. He had twisted his ankle, hard to tell how badly yet. He waited for a minute then rotated himself onto all fours and stood up carefully using only his right leg. He put a little weight on his left foot and flinched: not good. He tried to walk and realised he could accomplish only a kind of lurching hop. An hour and a half back? two hours? He would not be popular.

♦

The drop in pressure. Bruised purple sky, wind like a train, the landscape suddenly alive, trees bent and struggling, swathes of alternating colour racing through the long grass, the sky being hauled over the valley like a blanket. An empty white fertiliser sack dances along the side of the hill. Windows hammer in their sashes, the boiler vent clatters and slaps. A tile is levered from the roof, cartwheels over the garden wall and sticks into the earth like a little shark fin. The bins chatter and snap in the woodshed, fighting the bungees that hold them down.

Then it comes, like a great grey curtain being dragged down from the hills, the fields smudged and darkened. A noise like wet gravel smashed against the glass. The guttering fills and bubbles and water gushes from the feet of downpipes. Drops fantail on the bench top and the stone steps and the polished roof of the Mercedes. Water pools and runs in the ruts of the drive, drips down the chimney and pings and fizzes on the hot metal of the stove; it squeezes through the old putty that holds the leaded windows fast to puddle on sills. The rain near-horizontal now, a living graph of the wind’s force. All external points of reference gone, no horizon, no fixed lines. The house is airborne, riding the storm, borne on something that is neither wholly air, nor wholly water, Kansas vanished long ago, borders crossed and broken, the ground a thousand fathoms below.

Benjy stands at the dining-room window, spellbound by the sheer thereness of it, the world outside his head for once louder and more insistent than the world inside. Drops scuttle down the gridded panes, marbling the world, everything green and silver, the clatter against the glass now softer, now louder, as the great bead curtain of falling liquid swings back and forth.

Noah’s Ark. And God said I will destroy the world because human beings are sinful. The animals went in two by two, marmosets and black widow spiders, Japhet and Daphet and Baphet. And everyone else was killed, like in the tsunami, cars and walls and trees pouring down the street, people ripped apart in a great wet grinding machine. And when the dove flew over the land there would have been bodies everywhere all bloated and black like in New Orleans. A sudden shadow and the smack of something thrown against the glass only inches from his face. He turns and runs, crying, Mum…Mum…Mum…

♦

Dominic stands in the hallway, water creeping in under the front door, a sound like the chaos between radio stations. He should go and talk to Daisy, tell her it’s all right, tell her they love her, that they will always love her. Why is he so scared of doing this? He has never thought about her as a sexual person. The idea disturbs him in a way he can’t quite identify. All those little waystations. Daisy, Alex, Benjy, the first time they read to themselves, the first time they walked to school on their own. He remembers holding Daisy as a baby, those tiny perfect fingers gripping his thumb, the eczema, the blonde quiff. He imagines someone else holding her now, the two of them naked, and the clash of these two kinds of tenderness is like chariot wheels touching. Out of nowhere he thinks of Andrew, lying in a hospital bed, Amy sitting beside him, head bowed, holding his hand. He feels ashamed for having ignored the message. He has never really solved a problem in his life, he has simply averted his eyes and left other people to do the dirty work. The creak of wood. He turns and sees Daisy coming down the stairs. How are you feeling?

A bit better. She pauses, hand on the little metal dog of the newel post. I’m just going to get something to eat.

He wonders briefly if she is waiting to tell him about the encounter with Melissa but she doesn’t and what he feels mostly is relief, that she seems happier, that he has over-reacted, perhaps, that Melissa was lying, that there is nothing for him to do.

♦

A growing conviction that something was wrong, the hackles of the animal curled in the brainstem. Richard came to a halt so he could listen and watch more carefully. A sudden coldness, something about the quality of the light, a sense that other people were no longer simply absent but a very long way away. It was behind him, wasn’t it? He spun round and saw horizontal rain coming out of a vast wall of lead-grey cloud. A sudden fear, then the rain hit him, a hard cold sideways shower, funny almost, once it had happened, thinking about the story he would be telling later on, about how he had been forced to hop through driving rain in the middle of nowhere wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Ten minutes later and it was less funny because neither the wind nor the rain were slacking off, he was freezing, the pain in his ankle was, if anything, getting worse and it was going to be some considerable time before he got off the ridge. Childish scenarios began to play on repeat in his head: being rescued by the red helicopter they had seen two days ago, losing consciousness and lying down and night falling. He realised that he had not told anyone where he was intending to run.

♦

Louisa makes a jug of coffee and puts it on the dining-room table, sugar, milk jug, a wonky tower of cups. Richard was meant to be back forty minutes ago and the storm is still raging outside. An air of mild emergency hangs over the house and however much people drift away there is a centre of gravity in the room which draws them back.

He’ll turn up in five minutes, says Melissa, showing off about how manly he is.

I hope he fucking dies, thinks Alex. He wonders whether Richard told Louisa about the bollocking. Maybe he has bollocked her in the same way. Alex tries to catch her eye but she is too distracted by Richard’s absence to notice anyone else.

Angela says, Those paths will be a nightmare in this weather. She means to be reassuring, explaining how he will have to take his time, but it comes out wrong. Louisa’s nervousness is starting to infect her. Too many people lost, the membrane between here and the other place thinned almost to nothing by this unnatural weather, waiting for the foolish and the insufficiently loved to stumble through.

This is totally a record. Benjy has built a domino tower of nine storeys.

Alex wants to be asked to go and look for Richard, but he is not going to offer until he is asked. He wants it publicly acknowledged that he is the expert when it comes to running and walking in these hills. He wants it publicly acknowledged that Richard was pretending to be twenty years old and that he has made a fucking tit of himself in the process.

Daisy comes into the room and Melissa says, languorously, Morning, Daisy, but it is only Daisy who notices the barb.

Hello, love, says Angela. How are you doing this morning?

She is hoping Mum will offer to get her some breakfast so they can go into the kitchen and talk, but Angela seems distracted and there is no way that she is going to ask while Melissa is watching, so she heads to the kitchen where she puts the kettle on then leans on the draining board with her head in her hands.

And, Oh! says Benjy, and, Oh! says everyone else, as if they’re watching a firework display but it’s Benjy’s tower which collapsed next door, sending dominoes clattering all over the table and on to the stone floor.

An hour, says Louisa. A part of her wonders if he has done this to spite her.

Benjy is rebuilding his tower, placing the dominoes horizontally this time for greater stability.

He’s Richard, says Angela. He’ll be fine.

But Richard isn’t always fine, he screws up, she knows this now.

You don’t die by getting caught out in the rain, says Dominic.

That’s not strictly true, says Alex. People do die of exposure in the Brecon Beacons. The room ices over.

Alex, says Dominic wearily, that is not helpful.

He’s meant to say sorry but he’s not in the mood for saying sorry. He stands and takes his coffee cup into the kitchen. Behind his back he hears Angela apologising for her son’s foot in mouth disease.

Daisy is still leaning on the draining board, her boiled kettle cooling. She looks up. Sister Daisy. It’s an old joke, so old he forgets it’s a joke.

Not now, OK?

What’s up?

Nothing.

Tell me. His own anger looms so large that he expects her to be angry with Richard for some as-yet-undisclosed reason, but he can hear a tone in her voice he hasn’t heard for a long time.

She could tell him. He thinks she’s a weirdo, anyway. Then she laughs because it’s what he’s wanted to do since they arrived, isn’t it, kissing Melissa, then she remembers. Get off me, you fucking dyke. That stab of panic, the way you can’t rewind time.

What? says Alex. Is she laughing at him?

Now, before she changes her mind. Look, I’m going to tell you something.

Something what?

She stalls. What does she want him to say? That she is forgiven? That no one else is going to find out? That it never happened?

Alex? Mum is calling from the dining room. Sorry. He turns and walks away and she realises that telling someone will solve nothing.

Alex, says Mum. Do you have any idea where Richard went running?

Up onto the ridge, I guess. He has no real idea but he is assuming that Richard was indeed showing off, running up the steepest hill.

Will you go and look for him?

Suddenly he is paid back in full. No problem. He heads upstairs.

♦

Benjy is twitchy and the dominoes are no longer holding his attention. The same fear as Louisa and his mother, but without her ability to hold it back and chop it down. The possibility of Richard dying out there in all that rain. And God said I will destroy the world. Sword-fighting isn’t an indoors thing so he wanders around trying to lose himself in the details of the house, the smallness of things. He runs his fingers over the raised furry pattern of flowers on the wallpaper in the hallway. He looks inside the meter cupboard and imagines the whole house as a steampunk galleon, stovepipe hats and the chunter of pistons. He opens the leather cover of the visitors’ book. The first entry is dated 1994. Max (8) and Susannah (6). Canterbury. We woak up in the nite and saw some bagers. Blue ink which has blobbed on the Y of Canterbury. The Farmoors, Manchester. The Black Bull in Hay does a very nice Sunday roast. Someone has covered a whole page with a superb pencil sketch of the house. John, Joan, Carmen and Sophie Cain-Summerson, plus Grandma and Grandpa. He sits on the stairs and works out which of the brass stair rods can be rotated and which are too stiff to turn. He goes into the toilet and looks inside the cistern. There is an orange plastic ballcock on the end of a rusty arm. When you push it down more water squirts out of the white spout. It looks like something you might find in a harbour, a tiny buoy among the lobster pots and fishing boats. Dad said the house belonged to a family and maybe they come here in the summer and at Christmas. Benjy doesn’t know anyone who has two houses, though Michael’s family have a mobile home by the sea in Devon. He can’t see the appeal of having two homes because you would need your stuff in both houses, fluffy toys, PlayStation, animal posters. Then he finds a secret cupboard on the half-landing which he has never noticed before.

♦

He is in serious trouble, that body shiver, guts and chest. He can’t believe this is actually happening, he is two miles away from the house and he is getting hypothermia, not halfway up K2 or on the Ross Ice Shelf but in bloody Herefordshire. He is a doctor, and it is no longer wholly out of the question that he might die, not in a heroic way, but in a stupid way almost within actual sight of the house where there is a hot shower and a mug of coffee. He wonders if he should head straight down left off the hill to get out of the wind, but if he does that he stands even less chance of bumping into other runners or walkers, nor is he sure if he has the energy to clamber through hedges and over fences should he lose the path. The two options do a little back and forth dance in his head. Stay up, go down, stay up, go down. He realises that he is losing the ability to think clearly. Dying will sort out the Sharne case, if nothing else. He wonders if this is a kind of punishment, though that would be arrogant, thinking atmospheric pressure systems might be arranged in order to impact on his own life, and maybe the idiotic randomness is a more fitting punishment, but what is he being punished for? The rain has turned to hail. He can’t remember precisely what he has done wrong. Shit. He snags his foot on a stone and the pain is both intense and suspiciously far away. He looks down and sees that his ankle is heavily swollen.

♦

The owners? You didn’t want to think about them too much. The idea that all this belonged to someone else. The suspicion that a wealthy family had over-reached itself and had been forced to rent the family silver. They came in the summer and at Christmas, then packed their more personal possessions into a locked cupboard on the half-landing, a stuffed owl under a glass dome, a box of tarnished spoons in purple plush. There was a clipframe of thirty-one collaged Polaroids, fading like photos of hairstyles in a barber’s window, a student rowing eight hurling their cox into the Isis, a black retriever, Barbours and pearls, court shoes and ironed rugby shirts, faces rhyming from picture to picture, the plump girl with the laugh and the Charlie’s Angels hair, the ginger man thickening over the years, playing tennis, posing in front of a Stalinist carbuncle in some Eastern European capital. But the London flat had been burgled during their last stay so they’d left in a hurry forgetting to lock the cupboard.

♦

Alex jogs down the staircase wearing his running clothes and a woolly hat and his luminous yellow cycling jacket. Benjy closes the cupboard quickly, thinking he will be in trouble but Alex doesn’t take any notice because he’s going out for a run in the pouring rain. See you later, Smalls. Benjy waits until the front door bangs behind him and gently lifts the glass-domed owl out of the dusty dark. He is instantly in love with it. Serendipitously, he has already chosen a name for the owl he would have if he were a character in Harry Potter. Tolliver. This is Tolliver. He imagines writing, Dear Pavel…, rolling the paper tight as a cigarette, binding it with red ribbon and giving it to Tolliver who takes it in his sharp little beak and lifts his wide white wings and rises from the sill of the open window, the whole sky full of criss-crossing owls, knitting together a world of which muggles remain utterly unaware.

♦

How eloquently houses speak, of landscape and weather, of builders and families, of wealth, fears, children, servants. Hunkering in solitude or squeezed upwards by the pressure of their neighbours, proudly facing the main road or turning towards the hill to keep the wind and rain out of their faces. Roofs angled to shuck off, walls whitewashed to reflect the sun. Inner courtyards to save the women of the house from prying eyes. Those newfangled precious cars, Austin Morris, Ford Cortina, in little rooms of their own till they were bread and butter and banished to the kerb. The basement kitchen and the attic bedrooms where the servants worked and slept. Bare beams plastered and exposed again when they no longer said poverty. The front room that contains only the boxed tinsel Christmas tree and the so-called silver, where no one ever goes, and where you will lie for two days before your funeral. The new toilet replacing the privy in the garden that now holds only rusted tricycles and soft dirty footballs. Pipes and wires leading to reservoirs and power stations, to telephone exchanges and sewage farms. Water from Birmingham, power from Scotland. Voices from Brisbane and Calgary.

Time speeds up. A day becomes an hour, becomes a minute, becomes a second. Planes vanish first, cars are smeared into strings of coloured smoke then fade to nothing. People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark. Buildings inhabit the earth, growing like spores, sending out tubers, seeding new towns, new villages, new cities till drowned in sand or jungle. Girders and chimneys turning to mulch and rubble. Two thousand years, two hundred thousand years, two million years and a severe and stately house that once sat at the geometric centre of its square garden looking across the valley is now a ghost in the soil a mile below the surface of a snowball earth.

♦

Daisy walks to the window seat at the other end of the kitchen and stares out into the rain. She tries to worry about Richard but can’t do it. How grey the world is. So many words for red. Carmine, scarlet, ruby, burgundy, cherry, vermilion. But grey? She turns and glances into the living room and sees that Melissa has gone at last. The pressure in her chest builds. Mum?

What, love? Angela turns and touches her arm. You look dreadful.

Can we talk?

A momentary pause while Angela absorbs the oddity and intimacy of this. Of course we can.

♦

Alex loves this weather, loves all bad weather, snow, rain, hail, mud, darkness, failing light, becoming a part of the landscape instead of simply observing it. Thoughts cycle as he runs. Song lyrics, conversations he’s had or wished he’d had, sex he’s had or wished he’d had. The encounter with Richard is on repeat as he runs up the road to Red Darren. You’re making me look like an idiot. He thinks instead of Richard lying unconscious in the rain, a big wheeling pan from a film. He is not sure if he still fancies Louisa or not, the way she’s so pathetically worried about Richard. The higher he gets the colder it becomes, the rain turns to hail and for the first time he starts to wonder what will happen if Richard is in actual deep shit and he realises that if he fails to find Richard then everyone will blame him even though he is the only one doing something to find him. Plus, of course, something might have happened which has nothing to do with the weather. Broken leg, heart attack, fallen down some bloody hole. But if he finds Richard and he’s dead by the time he gets there Alex won’t actually be blamed at all. He’ll be the person who found the body.

He’s up on the top now and, Jesus, it is fucking freezing running through this stuff, and it is entirely possible that Richard took another route and turned up at the front door five minutes after Alex left, which will really piss him off. He’s having to pretty much close his eyes on account of the hail. Grey background and white dots coming straight at him like that old Windows screensaver. Was Richard wearing a waterproof? Should have grabbed a spare one from the hallway. Too late to worry about that now. Give Richard his own and earn bonus points. Who would win a fight between the two of them? Alex presumes it would be a smackdown. Richard had a few inches in height and reach but he also had that pudgy middle-aged look men got when they stopped looking after themselves. Fuck. And there he is, up ahead, limping like someone coming out of a war zone.

Richard wonders if this is really happening, and is sufficiently compos mentis to know that his unsureness is not a good sign. Not quite on the Glasgow Coma Scale yet. Alex, is it? In a luminous yellow jacket like a security guard. Shorts and a woolly hat. Richard, says Alex, in a casual golf-club manner. Long time no see, a pint of the usual? and so forth. Richard says, I’m in a bit of a state. So Alex removes his luminous yellow jacket. Take this. But Richard’s hands are so numb that he can’t grip it well enough to get his arms into the sleeves. His teeth are chattering. His teeth haven’t chattered since school. Alex puts the woolly hat on his head. Cader Idris on the recorder. Frozen milk lifting the foil caps on the chunky bottles. Before Dad died. Here, let me help. He thinks of nurses helping elderly patients into cardigans. That girl in her wheelchair. Then the jacket is on and he realises he’s going to see Louisa soon and he understands now quite how frightened he was and it is possible that he is crying about this, though hopefully the rain will disguise the fact. Alex lifts Richard’s arm over his shoulder. Come on, keep it up, or it’s me who’ll freeze to death. Richard swings his good leg, hobbles, swings his good leg, hobbles. Alex is pushing him faster than he wants to go. It hurts a lot, but it’s a good thing, going faster. He remembers the conversation of last night. He will apologise later. A hot bath, he can have a hot bath, but, God almighty, this ankle. Thanks for this.

Just keep walking.

♦

Angela shuts the door and Daisy thinks of headmasters’ offices and doctors’ surgeries. They sit beside one another on the sofa looking into the empty stove. Daisy wishes it was lit but that’s Richard’s job. What’s the matter?

You have to promise…

I have to promise what? asks Angela.

She’s standing on the high board. One bounce and don’t look down. I tried to kiss Melissa.

Angela is genuinely unsure if she has heard correctly but knows that she cannot ask Daisy to repeat it.

For God’s sake, Mum, say something.

She shuffles through her memory of Melissa and Daisy in the dining room this morning. And I’m guessing Melissa wasn’t too keen on this.

I’m not being funny, Mum.

Neither am I. It feels like a TV drama. Are you saying you’re gay?

The words are thick in Daisy’s mouth. She cries into Mum’s shoulder. Angela can’t remember the last time she held Daisy like this. Mostly Daisy is relieved that Melissa no longer has the same leverage.

Have you told anyone else? She remembers Daisy abandoning her in the street the other day and feels as if she has won a competition to regain her daughter’s affection, beaten Melissa, beaten Dominic. She rubs her hand in a circle on Daisy’s back. Ten years vanish. Those nightmares. I don’t mind if you’re gay. She squeezes Daisy a little harder.

Daisy pulls back. I’m not gay, OK? Panic in her voice.

OK. Angela is treading carefully because this is veering rapidly away from the script.

I’m not gay, OK?

So you kissed Melissa because…? It sounds accusatory but she’s trying to understand. A click of the latch and Benjy is standing in the doorway. Later, yeh? He backs out. She turns to Daisy. Did you join the church because of this? Suddenly it all fits together.

That’s not why I joined the church. The old anger in her voice. Why the hell is Mum doing this now?

Sorry, says Angela. She holds Daisy’s hands. Again a flash of Karen, real and possible daughters, the Daisy that might have been if the church didn’t have its claws in her. She should say, I’ll help. I’ll stay out of the way. Just tell me what you want me to do. But why is it any different from her being in love with a violent boyfriend? There are so many ways of crushing a human being. Are you going to talk to someone at church?

Why would I talk to someone at church?

What would they say?

What has this got to do with anything?

Listen to me, says Angela.

Daisy puts her face in her hands.

I love you. Maybe you’re gay, maybe you’re not. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me. But you have surrounded yourself with people who…

Daisy takes her face out of her hands. No. Stop this. You’re not listening to me. This has got nothing to do with the church. This has got nothing to do with you and your prejudices. Where is this stuff coming from? She’s opened a bottle of something poisonous but it has no label and she can’t find a way of putting the top back on. I made a mistake. I made a stupid mistake. She stands up.

Daisy, wait, I’m sorry.

Just…fuck off, OK? And the door bangs behind her.

Angela sits for a whole minute. The lopsided tick of the grandfather clock. Then she kneels and opens the door of the stove, takes an old edition of the Daily Telegraph from the basket and starts making balls of paper to place in the bed of ash. She is standing on the far side of the room watching herself. She lays a little raft of kindling along the top of the crumpled paper and takes the matches from the mantelpiece. She’s screwed up, hasn’t she, yet again. This has got nothing to do with you. A door had opened and she’d slammed it shut. Christ. Alex and Richard. She checked her watch. What a mess of a day.

♦

Everyone else had left the dining room so Dominic and Louisa were alone. Angela was having the conversation with Daisy that he should have had. What did he feel? Thankful that it was now Angela’s problem? Aggrieved at his exclusion? Shame at his procrastination? Mostly a return of the torpor that had laid him low before Waterstone’s, the sense of life going on elsewhere, too fast, too complex, too demanding to grasp as it swung occasionally through his purview.

But what Louisa felt mostly was anger, anger at Richard who was meant to stop her feeling scared, anger at herself for being so self-centred, anger at the stupid timing, discovering how dependent she was precisely when she discovered how fallible he was. She thought about him not being there and she was terrified by what might happen to her.

The living-room door opened and banged shut. Louisa jumped, thinking it might be Richard, but it was Daisy and things had obviously not gone well. Louisa disappeared into herself again. Dominic got to his feet. I’ll be back. He left the room and suddenly there was no one and the house was silent and she imagined running after him and looking in one room after another and finding them all empty and shouting and no one replying, just the sound of the wind and the rain hammering on the windows.

♦

They were well down the road now, past the junction, only a few hundred metres to go. The rain was easing a little, but Richard was leaning on him heavily, his steps becoming less regular and more unsteady. They fell clumsily onto a verge and Alex had great difficulty getting him to his feet. The ends of his fingers were yellow. Richard? But Richard’s words were slurred and Alex was ashamed of having imagined him being dead and because this was really starting to freak him out. Come on. Bloody walk, OK? I can’t do this on my own.

♦

Angela was kneeling in front of the open stove cupping a lit match. Richard had made the fire every day so far and it was disturbing to find herself stepping into his empty place. The paper caught. She sat back and closed the squeaky metal door. I’ve just been talking to Daisy.

I guessed.

Where did she start? She kissed Melissa.

I know, said Dominic.

What do you mean, you know?

I talked to Melissa.

You discussed this with Melissa?

Talked, not discussed. Daisy wouldn’t say what was wrong, so I asked Melissa.

When?

Today, this morning.

Dominic and Daisy and their charmed circle. When were you going to tell me?

I don’t think she wanted anyone to know.

Of course she didn’t want anyone to know, because those bloody people have convinced her she’ll go to hell. Was this what they thought at the church? She wasn’t entirely sure. And you were just going to leave her feeling shit about herself? Why were they doing this? Their daughter was suffering and they were using it as an excuse to rehash arguments that had been going nowhere for years.

What did you say to her? asked Dominic. Just now?

I said I loved her. I said what any halfway sane parents would say. She paused and rubbed her face and took a long deep breath. Please, let’s not do this. Dominic was staring at his feet, hands in pockets. Shamefaced? Or just biting his tongue? I mentioned the church, OK? Because I always do. She held her hands up in surrender. The clatter of a chair being knocked over in the dining room. She says she’s not gay. She says it was an accident. The fire blazed in its dirty window. Will you talk to her? Because she won’t listen to me and if she thinks she’s a bad person because of that place…

I’ll talk to her. But what if they were wrong? What if loving God was easier than loving other human beings? Was an easy life such a bad thing to want? Later on, maybe. When things have calmed down a little.

She looked into the flames. It was meant to be relaxing, warmth in the darkness, keeping the wolves away, but the heat-proof glass made her think of some infernal substance caged at the reactor’s core, a little fiend on a treadmill. Those photographs, her hunger to see them is so strong. She is reading a magazine or watching a film sometimes, she sees someone and wonders for an instant if it’s him. Big men, strong men, flawed but honourable, men you can rely on when the chips are down, this righteous anger they keep to hand, like a holstered weapon, ready to use as a last resort. The opposite of Dominic. All those presumptions you carry with you your whole life, about what a family should be. What a husband should be. What a father should be.

♦

Louisa wrestled the door open and they spilt clumsily into the hallway dragging several coats to the floor and tearing one of the pegs from the wall. Oh my God. Richard?

I’m OK. He sounded drunk.

She threw her arms around him but Alex gently peeled her away. Downstairs bathroom. Take his other arm. Mum and Dad were sitting in the living room doing absolutely bugger all. Jesus. Richard. You’ve got to help us.

I should call an ambulance.

He’ll be OK. We just need to warm him up. Would he, though? Alex wasn’t sure. But an ambulance wouldn’t get here for, what? an hour on these roads? Whoa. Richard stumbled sideways again, Alex just managing to keep him upright this time. Get the bath running. Louisa ran ahead through the kitchen. Relief and panic, about what might have happened, about what might still happen. Almost there. He manoeuvred Richard through the kitchen. Up ahead he heard the twist and thunder of the hot tap. An image of Callum rocking back and forth on the pavement weeping, the broken end of the shin bone pushing up under the skin. Across the utility room, Richard unstable on the bumpy stone floor, like a child or an old man, the onion smell of his sweat. They negotiated the chicane of the bathroom door, into the steamy air, Louisa’s hands literally flapping. How were they going do this? He lowered Richard onto the toilet seat, put a hand behind his neck and removed the hat and the yellow jacket. Shoes. Louisa yanked them off. No way he was going to be able to remove Richard’s other clothes but it didn’t matter. This would not be elegant. He heaved Richard on to his feet, sat him on the edge of the bath then stepped in behind him, muddy trainers turning the water brown. He pulled Richard backwards and let him slip arse-down into the water, legs flopping in after, spraying brown water up the wall and all over Louisa’s shirt. Result. Alex stepped out and tentatively let go. Richard held himself upright. Go and get a hot drink. I’ll stay here. Louisa stepped out of the bathroom. The hot water continued to rise.

Richard is frightened, endorphins spent way back, cold at the base of his spine, in his pelvis, under his ribs. His teeth are still chattering. Alex says something but Richard is not sure what. He has an abscess, he needs to tell someone this before they put him under. Come away, fellow sailors, your anchors be weighing. His father stands in the doorway, arms crossed, that surly expression, letting the tension mount. Richard wonders if he is going be picked up and slapped across the legs. The smell of cigarette smoke and Old Spice. God, this hot water stung.

The ping of the microwave and the clicky slam of the plastic door and Louisa reappeared with what looked like a mug of warm milk. Made Alex think of waking up in the night when he was a child. He can smell honey, Louisa doing her folded napkins and hospital corners even now. She kneels and offers it to Richard. He takes it in his hands, which is a good sign, though he clearly can’t move his fingers independently. Christ, what a strange picture. Richard in his clothes in a bath of oxtail soup, Louisa leaning over in a flowery shirt, muddy footprints over the white fluffy mat, like some grubby dogskin carpet. He sees the bloody graze on Richard’s hand and looks down at his own scabbing knuckles. Louisa takes the mug and puts it down on the corner of the bath and starts to remove Richard’s running vest. The bath almost full now. It feels uncomfortably intimate, watching her do this, the hair on Richard’s chest, pudgy man breasts, the sheer bulk of him, pathetic and threatening at the same time. Alex feels he should leave but he can’t. He imagines Louisa on top of Richard, naked. Is it stupid not to ring an ambulance? He turns and sees Mum and Dad in the doorway. Louisa is oblivious but Angela says, quietly, How is he? Alex simply shrugs to punish them for being so fucking useless.

Can we do anything?

Food, says Alex. He remembers an episode of Born Survivor. Have we got any chocolate? Something soft and sugary. Though his intention mostly is to get them out of the bathroom, because he has earned his place here in the centre of the drama and they haven’t.

I’m on it, says Dominic.

♦

It never occurred to Melissa that Richard might be in any kind of danger, he being the person who sorted out other people in danger, but when she came downstairs to make herself a mug of coffee she found Dominic heating a tin of soup and Angela said, He’s in the bath, and Melissa wondered who the hell she was talking about.

Alex brought him back, said Dominic.

He’s going to all right, said Angela.

We hope.

And then it dawned on her, but Alex had appeared in the doorway, sopping wet, still wearing his trainers. We’re out of the woods, I think. He went to the bread bin and cut himself a two-inch doorstep. I need a shower. Melissa, can you go and grab some warm clothes for Richard?

She bridled but now was clearly not the time. Sure. Sweetness and light. She turned and headed back into the dining room.

Alex took a large bite of bread. Give me a shout if you need help, yeh?

Then he, too, was gone and Dominic felt proud of his son. The young taking over the world; maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

♦

Daisy stepped on to the landing and saw Melissa disappearing like a hotel chambermaid bearing a folded pile of clothes. Then Alex appeared in his towel, with a chunk of bread in his mouth. Bit of an adventure downstairs.

Yeh?

Twisted his ankle. Touch of hypothermia. He’s in a hot bath. He gently moved her aside. Now I need a shower or I’m going to go the same way.

Suddenly she couldn’t bear the idea of being alone any longer. Can I come into the bathroom with you?

He raised his eyebrows. If you really want, I guess. Because, after all, it was the kind of day when the normal rules had been temporarily suspended, so they went in, she shut the door behind her and sat on the toilet. Vosene, Miracle Moist, Louisa’s chequered pink washbag. He turned the shower on, took another bite of bread, placed the remaining crust on the rim of the sink then dropped the towel and stepped behind the big plastic panel, turning away from her to protect his modesty. Dints in the side of his bottom, the muscles in his back, unexpectedly at home without his clothes. She remembered how she felt about her body when she was swimming, not caring what it looked like, just enjoying the way it worked. They felt like the children, again.

So you’re a bit of a hero, then?

I wouldn’t go that far. But she could hear the pride in his voice. God, this feels good. His pleasure in the hot water oddly more intimate than the sight of his body.

She liked being in here together, hiding almost, comforting and secret. But he’s all right now? His silhouette blurred and fogged behind the steamy plastic.

I think so. He bent down to clean the mud off his ankles. He was pretty far gone when I got him back to the house. Squirting shampoo onto his hair. What a pillock.

I saw he’d bought loads of new running kit.

Not looking very new now.

She sat quietly for a while. He turned the shower off and stepped out, turning away from her to pick up his towel and dry himself. Like a model, but like a little boy, too. He put the last piece of bread in his mouth and said, Right. I need to pee at this point in time, which feels kind of weird so you might want to, like, stand over there and look the other way.

I think I might be gay. As if someone else had spoken on her behalf, as if someone had pushed her off that top board. Time stuck, rippled banners of light on the water’s surface way below, the ring of cold and the blue silence.

You think? He really had knitted his brows, as if he were struggling with a crossword puzzle.

Does that sound totally insane?

A bit. Lesbian. Christ. He’d never met a lesbian, never really thought about them outside porn, except they weren’t really lesbians. Too good-looking. Or was that being prejudiced? Does this mean you’re not a Christian any more?

I’m scared, Alex. She was going to cry. And now you have to say something. Please?

He had to think about this and it was complicated. If she was male it would freak him out, trying not to picture the sex part. But this? He imagined her having a girlfriend which would be sort of like having two sisters. Unless the girlfriend was horrible, or ugly.

Please?

He tried to sit down on the toilet seat beside her but it was too small, plus he was half naked, so he knelt beside her and gave her an inelegant hug.

I kissed Melissa.

What?

I kissed Melissa.

Holy shit. Is she a lesbian, too?

It was kind of an accident. She ripped off four squares of toilet paper and blew her nose.

He moved to the edge of the bath. I kissed her, too. She wasn’t too keen on that, either. He expected Daisy to laugh but she didn’t seem to have heard. She is pretty fit, though.

She called me a fucking dyke.

And suddenly he got it, why she was terrified. The shit she was going to get. Losing all her friends because of the church, those sanctimonious arseholes kicking her out, maybe. He wanted to slap Melissa’s face. Is this, like, a new thing?

No. Yes. I feel like such an idiot.

They were silent for a few moments. This flatness. Surely the moment deserved more, mariachi trumpets, a thunderbolt striking her dead. I told Mum.

And…?

She was crap. As usual.

Christ, said Alex. This is one bizarre day. Daisy looked offended. Bizarre in a good way. You know, Richard not being dead after all, and you… What? You not being dead either?

Alex? Dominic was calling from downstairs.

Alex stood up. OK, now I really have to pee. Go and tell Dad I’ll be down in a couple of minutes, yeh?

She didn’t move. He felt it, too, a sense that the event should be marked in some way. But how?

Dad shouted again. Alex…?

♦

He lay on the sofa, big jumper, mug of sweet tea, left leg up on Louisa’s lap. She put the bag of frozen peas aside and began winding the elderly bandage around his ankle. First aid box under the sink from circa 1983. The door of the fire was open so that he could feel the heat on the side of his face. Franck in the background, the violin and piano sonata, Martha Argerich and Dora Schwarzberg. There, that should do it. He felt a little queasy on account of the Mars Bars Alex had forced him to eat in the bath, that jittery fatigue and joint ache like when you had flu. Louisa fastened the bandage with a safety pin. Little waves of anxiety rose and fell, the body’s alarm system saying, This is not right, though he knew, objectively, that he was recovering. Just clipped the edge of severe hypothermia, if he remembered the textbooks correctly. Louisa lifted his ankle and slipped a cushion under it to raise it a little higher. Paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing in the final stages. Always unnerved him that image, the body of the old man naked in the cupboard. Bit of a shock to find that dying might be unpleasant after all. He’d always assumed that the brain shrank to fit the little door you left by, Montaigne being knocked off his horse and so on. Die in a hospital, that was the lesson. Decent morphine driver. But it felt good, being looked after like this. Louisa laid the frozen peas back over his ankle and picked up her Stephen Fry. Ridiculous that it should take such a big adventure to make them do this, simply sit next to one another doing nothing. But that pillbox, the one behind his father. They went inside, didn’t they? He and Angela. He can remember the smell of urine and a smashed Coca-Cola bottle. Camping or caravan? Chips out of newspaper, trying to surf on a blue lilo.

Richard? She touched his shoulder.

He came round. I’m just tired. She was examining him but he couldn’t read her expression. Her words of last night. Your plays. Your films. He was selfish, wasn’t he? All those years with Jennifer, two single people sharing a house. You’re right. I do expect you to fit in with my life.

I shouldn’t have said those things.

But they’re true. Up there on the hill, he had forgotten about her, hadn’t he? He thought he might die and he didn’t remember that he had a wife. I worry that you might have married the wrong person.

Hey. Come on. She rubbed his shoulder.

Trade Descriptions Act and all that. I wouldn’t want you to think…It’s not a binding contract.

You’re exhausted. She put her arm around him. Let’s talk about this later, when you’re warm again.

♦

How extraordinary that it should happen so quickly. Like flipping a coin. Inexplicable that she had not known before. Had it been standing behind her all along like a pantomime villain, visible to everyone apart from her? What strangers we were to ourselves, changed in the twinkling of an eye. Jack, too, of course, she understood now, that sense of betrayal, stone circles at midsummer, all those signs that meant nothing till the sun poured into the burial chamber. Katy Perry, Maurice, that article in the Guardian magazine, Mulholland Drive. She wanted to be held by someone who had been here before. Lesbian. The word like some creature lifted from a rock pool, all pincers and liquids and strangeness. Melissa of all people. What a fool she’d been. The church. There wasn’t really an argument, was there? Meg, Anushka, Lesley, Tim. Fait accompli. And the walls came tumbling down. So who was she now? She sank down so that she was squashed into the nook beside the wardrobe. The safety of a tight space. She hadn’t done this since she was six, hiding from the monsters. She lifted Harry from the carpet and hugged him tight, rocking gently back and forth. Seedy passageways and sad hotels. Dogshit through the letter box.

Bizarre in a good way. No mariachi trumpets, no thunderbolt. But he just shrugged and accepted it. Mr Normal. What more did she want? When you get the chance to be saved, you have to take it. Silvered Bible flashing on the beach. How quickly she had found her faith. The twinkling of an eye. And now the footmen were turning back into mice and she was sitting in her sooty rags by the fire.

♦

Dominic stopped halfway up the stairs. He imagined Alex in hospital, imagined Benjy in hospital. Like a lump of meat he couldn’t swallow, finding it hard to breathe. His own fear of anything medical, just that blood pressure cuff at the doctor’s, the tear of the Velcro and that squeezy black bulb. Maybe she was moist and wretched, but when was the last time he had felt real joy? She’d wanted to move to New Zealand, but he could feel the same pull, clean air, blank slate. And how far had he got? Life is not a rehearsal. The irksome truth of barroom platitudes. He had to call her.

♦

Richard was falling asleep against her shoulder, twitching gently like a dog dreaming. What was it about this house? Throwing everyone out of kilter, her and Richard, Angela in the kitchen at night, Daisy and Melissa being enemies then friends then enemies again, her own stupid confession. That chill, maybe it was our own ghosts. Maybe that was why she hated old houses, because we all had past lives that rose up. As if you could wipe out history with downlighting and scatter cushions. You might have married the wrong person. Perhaps he could see what she had spent so long trying not to see, that she was still the girl with the second-hand shoes, hanging over that woozy drop at the Hanwell flat, scooters and discos and Penny flashing her knickers so they could steal packs of John Player Special from the corner shop. Working in a petrol station now, that weird chance encounter last time back. The fire was going out, but if she moved she might wake him and she was scared that this might be the last time she was able to hold him like this.

♦

They were having an improvised buffet lunch at the dining table when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Daisy paused in the doorway looking uneasy. It took Alex several seconds to remember because he’d helped dress a naked Richard five minutes ago, which had kind of taken up most of his short-term memory. He glanced across at Melissa. Fucking dyke. He decided to make this as obvious as he could. Daisy…He lifted his arm so that she walked over and stepped under it and let him squeeze her shoulders. He looked directly at Melissa and saw it in her eyes, she knew that he knew, Mum, too, a beaten look about her. And it was glorious and funny, seeing his parents and Melissa on the same team for once, at the other end of the pitch, several goals down. He turned to Daisy. What can I serve you from this fine spread?

But Daisy said, What on earth is that?

Tolliver, said Benjy, because the owl was sitting under its big dusty belljar in the centre of the table.

Cupboard under the stairs, said Dominic, trying to pull the family back together. Belongs to the owners.

The owners, said Daisy. She’d never thought about them, looking around as if she might be able to see them.

Alex did her a plate of cheese and oatcakes and assorted dips and they sat side by side eating, their radiant togetherness gradually driving everyone else out of the room apart from Benjy. Mum and Dad both touching Daisy on the shoulder as they exited, as if they were leaving a wake and she were the bereaved wife. Then they were gone and Benjy was building a model bridge out of hummus and carrots so Alex said, quietly, Are you going to get a girlfriend, then?

Alex. God. It’s not like buying a toaster.

My bad.

Girlfriend. The lurch of the world. She remembered a freezing January morning. Coming out of the Wheelan Centre. Smoky breath and mauve sky and the street lights going off. She and Lauren had held hands for ten, fifteen seconds, no more, then someone was walking towards them along the pavement and they’d let go. Like cuddling up when you were half asleep and pretending it never happened. Lauren. For now we see only as a reflection in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. It wasn’t simple, was it, or quick? The coin flipped, and flipped, and flipped.

Time speeding up now, Lauren answering a door in a street Daisy doesn’t recognise. Husband, two kids, the telly on in the background, face tired and lined but beautiful. We were at school together…? Are you sure…? Turning and running down the street in tears. And now she was crying for real and Alex rubbed her back and said, Come on, girl. Benjy looked up. Is Daisy OK? And Alex was genuinely unsure if she was crying because she was happy or sad. It was all getting a bit beyond him. So Benjy got off his bench and came round and sat on the other side of Daisy and wrapped his arms around her and said, Daisy sandwich, because that’s what they used to do with him when he was sad. They squeezed and let go.

Shit, said Daisy, wiping her eyes with an abandoned tea towel. Shitting shit.

♦

They play cards, they eat toast, they watch Monsters Inc. and Richard says, This is actually rather good, like the queen getting a mobile phone for Christmas, and everyone laughs because he has suddenly become more teasable. The chequered rug, perhaps, the fogginess in his voice, the way Louisa is nursing his foot. Though it is extraordinary, isn’t it? thinks Angela. She can remember the thrill of getting a colour television, she can remember when the Thunderbirds puppets were at the cutting edge of animation despite the fact that you could see the wires used to raise their eyebrows, whereas now…? You can’t tell the real dinosaurs from the animated ones, as someone said somewhere.

Melissa tries to ring civilisation but they’ve swung out of the signal’s orbit once again, so that when Angela challenges her to a game of Scrabble she is so spectacularly bored that she agrees and the two of them play as if it is a fight to the death. Orts. Beguine. P alanx for ninety-five. Benjy and Alex concoct a fantasy in which the ginger man and the girl with Charlie’s Angels hair are merely outer coverings for jelly-like aliens who feed on elderly people. Richard listens to Idomeneo (Colin Davis, Francisco Araiza, Barbara Hendricks…). Daisy looks at the pages of Dracula but the words just swim. Alex reads Andy McNab and Louisa reads Stephen Fry and Dominic goes away to start making supper and the rain stops and the world looks as if it has been serviced and mended and given back.

♦

The owner of this Orange mobile number is unavailable…

Jack. Hey. It’s Daisy. Remember? She looked around at the moraine of boy-crap. I’m halfway up a small mountain on the Welsh border. We’re on holiday. Listen… She looked out of the window. Benjy was on the lawn getting sopping wet, doing Ninja moves with a stick, except it wasn’t a Ninja weapon, was it, it was an umbrella and he was Gene Kelly. I’m really sorry. I think I understand now. If that rings any kind of bell then give me a call, yeh? It would be really good to hear from you.

♦

Gingerly, Angela thinks about Karen, about the birthday, just grazing the subject, like touching an electric fence with the back of your hand to stop your fingers gripping the live wire. Nothing. It’s the photographs of Dad, as if there’s been an absence all along and she’s been trying to fill it with the wrong person. A weight begins to lift. A little anxious, still, that Richard might not be able to find the pictures, that they might get lost in the post, that Dad might be turning away or obscured somehow, that he might not be looking at her.

♦

Big pie, two enamelled baking tins, Idomeneo in the background, Odo da lunge armonioso suono…In the distance I hear the sweet sound summoning me aboard… Tomato sauce with onions and garlic, because they’d been planning to swing by whatever supermarket they could find in Abergavenny before the Richard debacle, so Dominic has offered to make what he has christened rather grandly Olchon Valley Pie which will include pretty much anything he can find in the fridge and cupboards, parsnips, carrots, spinach, butter beans, pasta shells, pine nuts, chopped apricots, the last two of which will turn out to be an unexpected hit. All topped off with mashed potato and that weird cheese with the lost wrapper no one can identify. And on the side, to prevent Richard getting anaemia, slices of Saucisson Sec Supérieur à l’ancienne. Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc, McGuigan Hallmark Cabernet Shiraz, Hooky Gold, Bath Ales Barnstormer, apple juice, mango juice, strawberry and banana smoothie. Fizzy water. Pistachios.

♦

Are you going to say grace? asked Richard, which created an unexpected silence. He scanned the room. Melissa was grinning. Have I put my foot in it somehow?

Not at all, said Daisy. She lowered her head. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.

They sat down and Dominic pushed the big slotted spoon into the pie and Benjy said, I want lots of cheesy topping.

Louisa leant in close to Angela and whispered, What was all that about? and Angela said, Oh, it’s nothing.

But Daisy could feel the coin flipping again, because it wasn’t a fait accompli. You couldn’t give your faith away like that. It wasn’t a coat or a bicycle, it was a language in which you’d learnt to speak and think. God be in my head and in my understanding. Prayer, faith, redemption, consolation, how did you hold the world together without these things?

Richard shifted carefully in his chair, trying to find the least uncomfortable position, the Nurofen not quite taking the edge off. He looked across the table at Louisa. He had been humbled. Was that too dramatic a word? He had always seen his self-sufficiency as an admirable quality, a way of not imposing upon other people, but he could see now that it was an insult to those close to you. He had never been interested enough in Louisa’s opinions, her thoughts, her tastes, her life. A stab of shame. If this becomes a habit you will find yourself in great difficulty later in life.

Daisy glanced sideways at Melissa, trying not to catch her eye. Had she misunderstood completely? Was this simply one more stage in her spiritual journey, a test she had failed and must retake? She tried to unpick her thoughts and feelings but there were too many. That smashed plate, so hard to see the broken pattern. The afternoon with Jack, Melissa pulling down her knickers to show her the bluebird tattoo. She is pretty fit, though. Lauren’s hand in the cold dawnlight, images so vivid she was scared to bring them before her mind’s eye for fear that they would spill out and be visible to everyone. The Lord is the stronghold of my life.

♦

Dominic got a signal a couple of hundred yards up the road. He turned and leant against a fence and looked back down towards the house, golden windows swimming in the gathering dark. He could feel his heart beating. As always, the desire to carry on walking, to put this all behind him, over the hills and far away. He had to do it now, the longer it went on the more he would hurt her. Seven rings, eight. The hope that she wouldn’t answer.

Dom.

Amy.

I’d almost given up on you.

We’re in a valley. The reception is non-existent. Sinister, the pleasure one got from lying well. How’s Andrew?

He’s doing OK.

He felt cheated. You said he had to go into hospital.

He should be out tomorrow.

I thought he had pneumonia.

So did the doctors.

Had she been lying, too? It would make him feel better. Listen.

What?

Do it. I’ve realised something. Over the last few days.

Dom?

You and me.

What are you saying?

I’m saying…

I love you, Dom. Crying now.

But she didn’t love him, did she, she needed him, that was all, needed someone. This was not his job.

Don’t do this to me, Dom.

The way she said his name, like a child tugging at his sleeve, she suffocated him. How was it possible to explain that? A sudden anger at the way she used her weakness to manipulate him.

Dom?

I’ve made a mess of everything. It was meant to be a performance but he had unexpectedly stumbled on the truth. I have to stop running away. A balloon swelling and rising inside him. From work, from responsibility, from Angela, from Daisy, from Alex, from Benjy. Why had he not done this before?

I don’t know what I would do without you. Is this real? Or is she crying wolf? You’re leaving me.

He let this hang. He felt shitty and noble at the same time, but people did this every day, hurting people for the greater good. Collateral damage.

And you’re doing it over the fucking phone.

The anger in her voice gave him more purchase. You want me to lie now and say it to your face when we next meet?

I want you not to treat me like dirt.

The Japanese paper lantern, her little breasts, the way her hip bones stuck out when she lay on her back. Suddenly he wanted her. What if he cashed in his advantage and re-established the relationship on more advantageous terms?

I’m not letting you do this to me, Dom.

The phone went dead and the great silence flooded in. The coloured screen hovered in the dark, then dimmed. She had outplayed him. He was angry that she managed to have the last word and frightened that it might not be the last. He had never thought before about what she might do to herself, or to him, or to his family. He put the phone back in his pocket and turned to look up the hill. A monumental wave of absolute dark that looked as if it was about to crash down upon him.

♦

It seemed like a good time to mend fences after the marijuana thing and the Richard thing and the kiss thing so she offered to help Mum wash up after supper and while they were doing the glasses, she said, I have some excellent gossip.

I’m not sure I want to hear this.

Daisy’s gay.

OK…said Louisa carefully. This was what scared her. How good Melissa was at keeping you on the back foot. The hoarder and user of secrets.

She tried to kiss me.

Melissa was too good a liar to risk inventing something as wild as this.

When we were out for a walk. She took the tea towel off the rail of the Aga and folded it neatly into a square one-eighth of its original size. I said it wasn’t really my thing.

It was a peace offering, something freshly killed brought back to the cave. Louisa didn’t want to be part of this, but it was too intriguing to drop. I thought she was a Christian.

I think she might be having a bit of trouble in that department.

Then Louisa put two and two together. The girls were friendly, then they weren’t friendly. Were you horrid to her about it?

I’m just worried about her, that’s all. Regaining her balance after being wrong-footed.

That wasn’t what I asked you.

Like I said, I told her I wasn’t into that kind of stuff.

Nor was that.

Why do you have to blame everything on me? Why is it always me who’s done something wrong? She spun and swept out of the kitchen.

Louisa would find a way of talking to Daisy tomorrow, apologise for whatever her daughter had done this time.

♦

So, tell me about the photos. Angela leant across the table and refilled Richard’s glass, the Cabernet Shiraz finally doing what the Nurofen had failed to do.

They’re Polaroids. Is that the word? The ones you had to shake.

Describe them to me. It sounds crazy. But this is her father.

OK. So…Richard rubs the corners of his mouth and looks over her head as if the pictures are hung, poster-sized, on the far wall. One must have been taken on holiday. He’s standing in front of a pillbox in the dunes. Normandy in 1968, I suspect, or possibly the Scilly Isles a couple of years later.

She is taken aback yet again by the clarity of her brother’s memory. But him, what does he look like?

He’s wearing one of those check shirts, thin brown stripes on a cream background. He’s enjoying this. You have thirty seconds to remember all the objects on the tray. His sleeves are rolled up, he’s smoking, he’s smoking in all three photos, actually. God knows how long he would have survived if the testicular cancer hadn’t got him.

His casualness grates, but she knows that they are navigating through strong currents and she must keep the tiller straight.

Number two. He’s leaning on the bonnet of the car, green Hillman Avenger, that long radiator grille with the square headlights at each end. Looks like he’s just polished it. I think there’s a shammy leather on the roof. He’s wearing a short-sleeved white shirt.

Tell me about him. Not his clothes but him.

There is something disturbing about her intensity. Do you really not remember?

Just tell me.

Thick black hair, sideburns, big man, big biceps. He doesn’t like this. It conjures his father a little too vividly. Rusted metal and sheer bulk and sea spray. Blood in his hair. He wonders whether it was not the gull, he wonders whether it was his father who hit him, whether he has misremembered. Why do you want to know so badly?

He’s my father. Wasn’t it obvious? If it was me who had the photographs and if you’d never seen them, wouldn’t you be curious?

No. I really don’t think I would.

Why not?

Because he was not a very nice man.

She shakes her head. Not disagreement, but disbelief.

Do you really not remember?

She is trying to work out a solution which will allow them to disagree diplomatically. We all look back and see things differently. She says this quietly, amused almost, as if it is he who needs to be calmed down.

That’s true. He sits back and takes a sip of wine. He wants to let it go, send her the photographs, have done with it, but this is more than simply seeing things differently. Do you not remember him hitting us?

Everyone hit their kids back then. Though she is unsure precisely what Richard means by hitting.

I remember you being sick in the car. We were driving to Hunstanton one summer. You kept asking to pull over but he wouldn’t, as per usual. So you were sick and then he swerved into this gateway and took you out and put you over his knee and slapped your legs. He was so angry, he just kept on hitting you. The memory upsets him more than he expects.

Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to mess this up for me?

Because you are ill. The thought suddenly clear and sharp. He veers away. I think you were scared of him, too. And I think you’ve forgotten.

Dad was not a monster.

I’m not saying he was a monster.

Then what the hell are you saying?

I’m saying he got angry. I’m saying he didn’t care much about other people. I’m saying he didn’t know how to deal with children. And he scared me and I don’t particularly like looking at the photographs because it makes me remember what that felt like.

Is this what Mum told you? Is this her version?

I don’t remember Mum saying a single thing about him after he died. The grieving process, 1970. He wonders if he should reach out and hold Angela’s hand but he is not very good at judging these things.

You and Mum, she says. You visited Dad in hospital, the day before he died. I wasn’t allowed to go. I hated you for that. I had this recurring dream in which you’d both killed him. She tries to make it sound like a joke but she can’t, because she still has the dream sometimes.

You didn’t want to go.

What?

Why on earth would you not be allowed to go?

Because that’s what Mum was like, because she enjoyed manipulating people, because she never wanted other people to be happy.

After he died, after she started drinking, when she realised she was pouring her life away, then she was difficult, then she enjoyed manipulating people. He pauses and readjusts his focus. I think it was the only power she had left.

Why wouldn’t I go to the hospital? He was my father.

He shrugs. He still can’t quite grasp why this is so important to her. I guess the extraordinary thing is that I wanted to go myself. He is looking for a way of saying this which isn’t accusatory. Why would anyone want to see their father dying. Me…? I don’t know. Maybe there was a doctor waiting to get out even then. He wonders, on some deep level, if he did indeed want his father to die, whether he went to make sure it was happening, to say good riddance, to be certain he wasn’t coming back.

Stop. Wait. This is too much.

Sorry. He holds up his hands.

She wants him to be wrong, but he’s not inventing it, is he? He has no axe to grind, and she has no story of her own to pit against his. She stands clumsily. I need to be on my own for a while.

Going upstairs her legs feel weak. Is Dominic still out on his walk? The room is empty. She sits on the edge of the bed. The blankness again. What year is this? That woman on the train, red string, liver-spotted hands. I can’t quite… Dad slapping her in the lay-by, a picture half forming on the wet grey surface of the shaken photo. If she has the past wrong, does she have the present wrong, too? Her father is vanishing again. The empty doorway. Stems and slime. Another figure materialising in the dark rectangle. Thickening in waves. A high buzzing sound. Karen. She has betrayed her, forgotten her, let her slip away. Rainbow-coloured windbreak, flicking the hair out of her eyes. She’s laughing and it is not a kind laugh. Her birthday. It’s tomorrow. In all the excitement over the photographs Angela had forgotten. She is going to be punished for this.

♦

How are you doing?

Richard was sitting up in bed with Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad closed on his lap. Better. Significantly better. He should have bought something trashy to read, though that was even harder work in his experience, like listening to someone play an instrument badly.

She sat on the bed and took her earrings out, leaning her head first to one side then the other.

I’m worried about Angela.

I never told you. She laid the earrings carefully in the lacquered Indian box with all the others. Elephants and jasmine flowers. I found her in the kitchen the other night.

Found in what sense?

She was standing in the dark, eating a bowl of cereal.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Because I was angry with you and I wasn’t sure that Angela wanted the fact broadcast.

He laid Stalingrad aside. Are you still angry with me?

When you said it wasn’t a binding contract…

I don’t appreciate you enough.

Is this a crappy roundabout way of saying you don’t love me?

I think… He shifted up a little straighter in bed. I think actually it’s a crappy roundabout way of saying I’m not terribly keen on myself.

Richard…

Wait. Downstairs the front door boomed shut. Dominic coming back from his late-night ramble. When you asked me whether I loved you or not…

Stop. Listen. Do you enjoy being with me?

I do.

Do you want me to be happy?

Very much so.

Do you find me attractive?

I think you know the answer to that.

What would you do if I left and you were on your own?

I’d think I’d very possibly fall to pieces, not immediately maybe, but…

Would you risk your life for me?

I’d risk my life for many people. A small child running into the road, a woman drowning in a river. Correction. I think I would actually give my life for you. If it were me or you. Lifeboat, burning building. He had never thought about this before.

Bloody hell, Richard. If that’s not love… She sounded genuinely annoyed.

I’ve never really loved anyone, or been loved, come to think of it, as an adult, I mean. He looked at his hands as if the notes written on his palm no longer made sense. Dear God, that was breathtakingly mawkish, wasn’t it? The other men, by the way. Am I allowed to feel a little jealous?

They were horrible and I was having a shitty time. She laid her head on his lap. Incidentally, Daisy’s a lesbian. Apparently.

He looked at the ceiling. He felt suddenly exhausted. You’re going to have to tell me that again in the morning.

♦

Daisy wants happiness, of course, to belong, to be loved, but more than this she wants her life to have some kind of shape, not just this pinball zigzag from one accident to another. Even tragedy will do, so long as she can say, I see now what it means. This is who I am.

Has she discovered the truth or lost her way? What will happen at church, at school, at home? Jack hasn’t rung back and she doesn’t know what this means. She has no idea what Mum or Dad really feel, no idea, in truth, what she feels herself, except for a yearning so intense and nameless that she doesn’t know if it is a longing for a girlfriend, or for God, or simply for those everyday discomforts which now seem in retrospect a blessing. She can’t read, can’t even lie down, so she paces, now staring out of the window into the dark, now squatting in the corner of the room, now sitting on the chair and rocking gently back and forwards. Do not be fooled, this is not a place.

♦

Benjy lay for a while looking at the inverted cream pyramid of the lampshade. It reminded him of a film in which someone was wheeled into an operating theatre and the camera was looking up at the ceiling from their point of view. This, in turn, made him think of Carly’s dad from school having his heart attack which made him think about Granny’s funeral and he was scared that he might have one of those dreams that wasn’t quite a dream. He looked at the clock. 11:30. Mum and Dad might still be awake. He went out on to the landing, walked to the top of the stairs, looked over the banisters and saw that the lights were on in the dining room. When he went down and stood in the hall, however, he could hear no one. Mum…? Dad…? He was afraid of stepping through the door for fear that someone was behind it holding their breath.

He was going to turn and walk silently back upstairs when he heard a beep and saw a light come on briefly in the pocket of a coat hanging by the door. It made him jump at first but it was a text message arriving on a mobile phone and this made the house seem more modern and humdrum. The phone was in Dad’s coat. Mum allowed him to play the games on her phone, but he was never allowed to play on Dad’s. So he invented a story in which Dad was receiving a vital message from someone who was in grave danger and who needed help. He would look at the message and take the phone up to Dad who would be cross at first then really grateful. He paused beside the coat, listening again to the silence. If it wasn’t a message calling for help he could simply put the phone back and no one would know. He slipped his hand into the pocket and extracted it. He wanted a mobile of his own, not really for making calls, but for the way it felt so right in the palm of his hand, like a gun or a dagger. He pressed the main button and the face lit up. In the background was the photograph of him and Daisy and Alex on the big pebbly beach near Blakeney, and in the centre of the screen was a little blue square saying Message. He tapped it. Blakeney vanished and the message said, call me I can’t bear this any longer amy xxx and he didn’t know whether this was an emergency or a secret, only that he had done something very wrong.