House of Windows (19 page)

Better the shame of leaving the photograph hidden. Some days he didn’t even remember it was there.

From below, Bill’s voice again, soft but insistent. ‘Do you ever talk about her with him?’

‘For God’s sake, Bill, where would I even
start
?’

A motorbike growled past outside: Nick felt the throb of the engine match the angry beat of his heart.

In the living room he heard Bill sigh. ‘Sometimes you can do more harm saying nothing than saying the wrong thing.’

‘Have you met my son, Bill? Honestly, what does a person
say about this? “I’m sorry your mother went loony tunes and refused to see or speak to you in the two years before she died. I think it stinks too.”’

For a moment there was nothing, perhaps because they were silent or speaking too quietly to be heard.

‘If you and Nick won’t feel I’m intruding, I’ll go with you on Saturday,’ Bill said eventually. ‘But if I do this, Mike, you have to
promise
that on the Sunday you’ll do something with Nick, just the two of you. Drive to the Norfolk coast. Have some fish and chips. Walk on the beach. Just take yourself away from your desk and turn off your phone. And try not to go endlessly on about Nick’s studies. He probably thinks you’d forget about him completely if he didn’t have some brilliant new marks to tell you about.’

‘Oh, give over, Bill. You know as well as I do that Nick’s always been driven to excel with his studies. And, yes, of
course
I’ve encouraged him, but it came from him. It was his idea to come to Cambridge, not mine. He wanted to do this. And maybe I do talk a lot about his work, but it’s the only thing that’s simple. He’s always doing well. It’s something happy we can share—’

‘And that would be fine, if there was other stuff you talked about too.’

For a moment, the house went still, as if the building were holding its breath. When his father spoke, it was softly but with a strange intense note in his voice Nick didn’t recognise. ‘I do try, you know, with Nick. I have these times when I get home at a reasonable hour for a week and then … I don’t
know what happens. It just seems so hard suddenly. And then I think, “Well, I’ll just have a day off,” and suddenly it’s like I can’t face it any more and then I think, “If I’ve already failed, why—” I’m so close to finally making named partner, maybe after …’

Nick crept down one stair then another, but for a while there was silence below.

‘I understand that, Mike, but I worry that in a few years, when you suddenly decide you’re ready to have a bigger part in his life, you’ll find you’ve used up all your second chances. He’s not going to be a kid forever. Soon he’s going to be an adult and then he’s going to turn around and say, “You didn’t want me when I needed you, so why should I want you now that you need me?” And I don’t think you’re going to like it, Mike. I don’t think you’re going to like it at all.’

Nick could only just hear his father’s reply over the bass beat of his blood in his ears.

‘
Thanks
for that, Bill. What a
happy
thought to end the day on.’

‘I’m not trying to make you happy, Mike. I’ve spent the last five years telling myself it wasn’t my business and “what do I know since I’m not a father?” But one day I’m going to be there when you realise what a little bit more time with Nick now would have meant to your relationship and, when you ask me how it happened, I want to be telling the truth when I say I tried to make you listen.’

Nick strained into the silence.

‘What if I don’t know how?’

‘Then you’d better learn, Mike. Somehow you’d better learn.’

Silence again, or if they were speaking it was too softly for Nick to hear.

‘Let’s have a drink, Mike. Let’s just have a long drink. I promise the only topics of conversation will be cricket matches on Fenner’s. Getting our University Blues. Old triumphs from when we were young.’

Nick pushed himself to his feet and crept away upstairs as laughter broke out in the living room. He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, but there was something wrong with the face looking out at him from the mirror: too many shadows, too many angles. His hand fumbled for the light switch. He ended up putting hair gel on his toothbrush the first time round, but it was better in the dark. He didn’t have to face himself there.

This is pathetic
, he told himself, as he skimmed another review of the film he was seeing later. He wasted a further half-hour watching a series of interviews with the actors.

‘It’s meant to be a trip to the cinema, not a research project,’ Tim said, sniggering, when he realised what Nick was doing.

Nick stuck his tongue out and stomped upstairs to get ready. He spent the walk to the Grafton Centre trying out different ways of sounding clever rather than like he’d
studied up. But when the others arrived it turned out they’d already dissected the reviews and specials on the way over from College.

Nick’s Plan B – to buy the biggest bucket of popcorn available – was more successful: soon the group were clustered round him as they queued.

‘ID,’ said the doorman when Nick presented his ticket.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ muttered Frank. ‘Look, mate, how often do you take a passport to the cinema? Surely a student ID for the Cambridge University Library—’

‘If your little brother is eighteen, I will eat that extraordinarily ugly hat you’re wearing.’

Frank growled. ‘Look, you—’

‘I don’t have any other ID,’ Nick cut in. ‘But I
have
got a ticket and my student—’

‘You can show me a thousand student cards and I won’t believe you’re eighteen. Now, there’s nothing stopping a person buying a ticket from the machine, but it’s an 18 certificate so …’

Nick sighed. ‘See you on Monday, OK, Frank?
In lectures
,’ he added loudly.

The doorman rolled his eyes.

Frank shuffled his feet. ‘Sorry, Nick. Before you go, you couldn’t give me those …’

Shoving the popcorn into Susie’s arms, Nick wrestled his notebook out of his bag, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes. He pushed the book into Frank’s hands then turned away. A chorus of desultory goodbyes echoed after him.

If he’d been a character in a film, he would have screamed at the night skies. At the least he would have turned his face to the clouds and let the rain pour down on him. Instead, he pulled up his hood, dug his hands into his pockets and set off for home.

It was nice to let himself into the house to the sound of music in the sitting room, lively big-band stuff with a happy honking of brass. The stereo was playing at a satisfying volume, though the living room and kitchen were empty, and Nick found himself smiling unexpectedly as he started pawing through the kitchen cupboards, looking for junk food, while his feet moved to the music of their own accord.

‘Maybe you should join the ballroom dancing squad.’

Nick whirled at the voice.

‘That looked like actual dance steps,’ Tim said, an expression of perplexed amusement on his face.

Nick ducked his head. ‘My grandmother taught me,’ he said.

When Tim came and slouched against the counter next to him so he could help himself to the bag of nachos, Nick sighed.

‘I used to go to stay with her in the holidays,’ he found himself saying without quite meaning to. ‘Even before my parents split up, my mum … Anyway, I always used to go and stay with my grandmother and she loved this sort of music. She had this huge garden, or it seemed huge to me. Herb beds, lots of old brick walls with climbing roses and honeysuckle. We used to grow seedlings together. Lupin
and marigold and hollyhock. We’d plant them in the Easter holidays: by the summer they’d be potted up and ready to go out in the garden when Mum dropped me off. It’s funny, I only ever remember it being sunny or storming. Storms were when we’d listen to music and she’d show me how to dance. And then she’d read to me. We used to read together for
hours
. And she
still
found time to cook. This one time she put me on a footstool to mix in the eggs for a cake and I puffed flour in a huge mushroom cloud over the whole table. She just laughed and hugged me so we were both covered in cake mix.’ He shook his head, pasted on a more normal, less wistful smile. ‘It’d be nice to be able to bake stuff now. Wish I’d paid more attention.’

‘You and me both,’ said Tim. ‘My sister was always the one in the kitchen with Mum when it was time to cook. Not sure if that’s ’cos she was the girl or ’cos I liked going to the shed with Dad and she didn’t. Thing about spiders.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you were going to the cinema tonight?’

‘Got carded.’

‘You don’t have much luck with your attempts to socialise, do you?’

‘You mean fate’s telling me to be a hermit and to spend even more time with my head buried in a book? Maybe this is one of the things I need to be wise enough to accept I can’t change.’

‘That’s clearly what it is,’ Tim said, rolling his eyes. ‘Anyway, while we’re on the subject of somewhat-less-than-happy stuff, is there anything I can get for the weekend? You
know, something to cheer you up after … after you visit the graveyard. I mean, it’s been a pretty sucky term. Might as well be sucky with ice cream.’

Nick shrugged. ‘Dad and I are going to Norfolk on Sunday.’

Tim blinked in surprise. ‘That sounds like a good idea.’

‘Yeah,’ Nick said. ‘It was Bill’s.’

‘That looks fresh,’ said Michael, stooping to peer at a poppy wreath at the base of the war memorial. ‘I wonder who left it. Is that a card?’

Nick stared down at his father’s head as he bent to read the message, then turned away along the path that cut to the left through the garden of graves.

Bill loitered for a moment, then followed. ‘Is it your grandmother’s plot too?’ he asked, matching his pace to Nick’s.

‘Grandfather’s. My grandmother wanted to be cremated. Mum was meant to put her ashes on the roses at her house but she … she wasn’t well, so I did it.’

‘Have you ever gone back to visit?’ Bill prompted, when Nick didn’t go on.

‘Mum said she couldn’t keep the house with bits of her
mother floating about everywhere, so …’ Nick snapped his mouth shut with an audible click. ‘I don’t know who she sold it to. It would be awful if they’d torn up her garden, chopped down the roses.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’d rather imagine it’s all still there and one day I’ll buy the house back and …’

He opened his eyes, looking on down the path, and there was Roger, standing by one of the graves, a bouquet of lilies – red and gold, her favourites – in his arms. For a moment it was like looking through a camera viewfinder as the focus sharpened painfully then dulled to vagueness and finally resolved to normal. There was a sharp ringing in his ears, like the echoing slow-frame aftermath of a bomb blast in a film.

‘Is that Roger?’ Bill asked, squinting down the path.

Nick nodded as if his head were badly connected to his neck. He hoped his face was blank rather than stricken, but his skin felt tight, his eyes dry with staring.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Bill was saying, still squinting ahead into the sunlight. ‘Have you seen him at all these last two years? Since the funeral, I mean.’

‘We haven’t talked since the morning after Mum … after she got sick. Not that we talked then.’ The words came more easily than he’d expected, his voice calm and level. ‘I got up and he called Dad. Said I had to be gone by the time he got back from work. And that was it. We didn’t talk at the funeral.’

A sound echoed across the graveyard. Roger was staring in their direction. His eyes fixed on Nick with something like rage, or fear, or grief. Suddenly, he crouched to slam his
bouquet into the flower-holder at the base of the headstone with a movement like a sword thrust. Then he stalked off down the curve of the path that led around the far side of the church.

Nick let out a sigh that felt equal parts relief and disappointment. For a moment, he looked away past the moss-grown wall to the village beyond. A woman in tweeds and wellies, surrounded by a pack of dogs, squelched past. She touched her hand to her gamekeeper’s hat when she saw them looking her way.

‘Where on earth has Mike got to?’ Bill asked, making a show of looking around for him.

‘If he doesn’t actually want to come to the grave that’s OK. Everyone deals with grief in their own way, right? I don’t need to make this hard on him.’

Bill looked down at him, his expression torn. ‘Would you rather have a bit of time by yourself?’

Nick shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. It’s good of you to come at all. You didn’t have to.’ He felt Bill watching him as he set off down the path again, cradling his own bouquet to his chest. Glancing back, he saw Michael, phone pressed to his ear, gesticulating wildly. The woman in the wellies stopped to glare at him. One of her dogs paused to pee on Michael’s car.

When he carried on to the grave Bill matched him pace for pace, but then stopped a few steps away as Nick reached the plot and crouched beside the stone, hand hovering in the air over Roger’s flowers. Above them, a cherry tree was just coming into leaf. A sudden wind clattered the branches
together, making Nick recoil and look up with a start of horror entirely inappropriate to the sight of the grey and blue patched sky, the fast-moving clouds. He swallowed, shook his head as if that would push away the echo of the sound of fins beating against shards of glass.

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Bill asked, crouching next to him.

Nick looked away to a cluster of daffodils polishing their budding trumpets against a nearby headstone. ‘I wonder whose grave that is,’ he whispered. The writing had all but been weathered away, what was left obscured by the shadows of the branches swaying across the pocked grey and yellow surface. ‘You can’t read the inscription any more, but someone still visits, leaves flowers. Do you think it’s just the church wardens or the person’s family, even after all this time? Someone who’s still grieving.’

The leaves on the cherry tree were shiny and strange: a deep red-orange, like molten copper.

Nick sighed. He put his bouquet carefully down on the grass, then tugged Roger’s from the grating.

Bill drew in his breath.

Nick dropped the flowers back into the holder, laid his own bouquet along the bottom of the stone, then climbed abruptly back to his feet.

Bill stood too, reaching over to squeeze his shoulder. ‘Do you want … I mean, do you need …’ Bill stopped, took a deep breath. ‘I’ve noticed Mike doesn’t have any photos of your mum in the house. Do you … do you want me to find you one?’

Nick flinched. ‘I’ve got a picture,’ he whispered. ‘In my room.’

‘Oh. Good. Just thought I should check: you know, in case.’

Nick nodded without lifting his eyes from the gravestone, his throat working. ‘Do you think I should stay a bit longer?’

‘It’s up to you, Nick. What do you
want
?’

Nick laughed, an oddly cheerful sound. ‘I want to stop dreaming about the fish dying.’ He turned away, let his feet lead him down the path away from the war memorial. ‘The fish tank broke. The night she got sick. I tried to gather them up but they were so quick. So desperate. There was this angel fish. It kept flapping about over my toes. I couldn’t seem to get hold of it. It kept arching about in the splinters of glass. It was the strangest noise. Like tinkling and clapping together. I scooped it up eventually and got it back in the water, but I guess there wasn’t enough left or I hurt it when I grabbed it, or maybe it had shredded itself on the glass, but when I put it back in the water it was dead already.’

There were no words to describe the way it had floated to the surface, belly-up, already beyond hope.

‘By the time I caught the next one there was no water left to put it in. It felt so strange in my hands: like a butterfly trapped against a window. And then it wasn’t anything.’

Bill waited for him to continue, but they walked on, a full circle around the church and then they were back at the war memorial.

Michael saw them, held up a hand as he turned away to
finish his call. He slipped his phone back into his pocket with a smile. ‘Right, shall we go find some lunch?’

There were good bits to the day. The way the car sailed smoothly down the long straight road, field after field after field rushing by. The way the road curved to the left and suddenly the landscape was endless woods, all bracken and fern, yellow and brown with damp. The sudden flash of a lichened silver birch, the darkness of stunted firs. The way the world opened out into a horizon of sea and sky.

They stopped and wandered a stretch of deserted pebble beach, pointing out shells and interesting bits of seaweed while the sky faded to palest yellow, the sun colourless above the hard grey water. Over the roar of the wind and the waves, the gulls screamed relentlessly.

Now the storm outside the house, clawing around the chimneys, sounded little different.

A yelp. Nick spun to see a figure looming in the kitchen doorway.

The light flicked on, momentarily blinding him.

‘God, Nick,’ said Tim, sounding shaken. ‘Gave me a heart attack. Eyes glinting in the dark.’

Nick blinked against the brightness as he watched Tim’s gaze move from the glass in his hand to the whisky bottle on the counter. When Tim looked up to his face again, he met his housemate’s eyes defiantly, lifting the glass and drinking
deeply, jaw tightening as he forced back his reaction to the burn of the alcohol. ‘You going to tell my dad?’ he croaked as nastily as he could manage over the urge to cough.

Tim crossed the kitchen to lean against the table. ‘How many glasses is that?’

‘My first. Thought I’d try it. It’s what everyone else seems to do when things go wrong. Not sure why, though, so you needn’t worry. I’ll be done after this.’

Tim sighed. He pushed away from the table to fetch down a second glass, poured his own measure of whisky then put the bottle away.

‘Are you going to tell him?’ Nick repeated.

‘Not if this is just a one-off. I make no promises if it’s the start of a habit.’ Tim swilled the liquid about the bottom of his own glass. ‘You could try talking to me about it, you know. My sister bottled things up after our parents died. Didn’t do her any good.’

Nick snorted, taking another deep swallow from his glass.

‘I might just understand,’ Tim said gently, taken aback when Nick’s head snapped up, a sneer twisting his face: an expression far too old for it.

‘You don’t know how I feel,’ he hissed.

‘Maybe I don’t,’ Tim found himself saying before he could stop himself. ‘I lost
both
my parents after all.
And
my sister moved halfway across the world.’

Nick pushed himself away from the counter, gulping back the last of his drink with a sound midway between a cough and a bark of laughter. Slamming the glass down on the
counter, he glared at Tim with a depth of disdain that made Tim’s jaw clench with anger.

‘You
don’t
know how I feel,’ he whispered, voice sharp as broken glass. Then he was gone, flitting out of the kitchen and away up the stairs.

Tim cursed under his breath, resisting the urge to punch a fist into the counter. Instead, he fetched out the bottle again. It took two further glasses to wash away the freshness of the sting of his anger at Nick. At himself.