The Likeness: A Novel (56 page)

He lifted a hand and hooked the curtain of ivy aside. The stone of the house was rosy amber in the sunset light, glowing and sweet; the windows blazed like the inside was on fire. “It seemed like such a beautiful idea,” he said. “Almost unthinkably so. The day we moved in, we cleaned the fireplace and washed up in freezing water and lit a fire, and sat in front of it drinking cold lumpy cocoa and trying to make toast—the cooker didn’t work, the water heater didn’t work, there were only two functioning lightbulbs in the whole house. Justin was wearing his entire wardrobe and complaining that we were all going to die of pneumonia or mold inhalation or both, and Rafe and Lexie were teasing him by claiming they’d heard rats in the attic; Abby threatened to make the pair of them sleep up there if they didn’t behave. I kept burning the toast or dropping it into the fire, and we all found that ridiculously funny; we laughed until we could barely breathe. I’ve never been so happy in my life.”
His gray eyes were calm, but the note in his voice, like a deep bell tolling, hurt me somewhere under my breastbone. I had known for weeks that Daniel was unhappy, but that was the moment when I understood that, whatever had happened with Lexie, it had broken his heart. He had staked everything on this one shining idea, and he had lost. No matter what anyone says, a part of me believes that, on that day under the ivy, I should have seen everything that was coming, the pattern unrolling in front of me clean and quick and relentless, and I should have known how to stop it.
“What went wrong?” I asked quietly.
“The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”
He finished his drink in one long swallow and grimaced. “This is foul. I wish we had ice.”
I waited while he poured himself another one, gave it a look of faint distaste and set it down on the bench. “Can I ask you something?” I said.
Daniel inclined his head. “You talked about paying for what you want,” I said. “How did you have to pay for this house? It looks to me like you got exactly what you wanted, for free.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think so? You’ve been living here for several weeks now. Surely you have a fair idea of the price involved.”
I did, of course I did, but I wanted to hear it from him. “No pasts,” I said. “For a start.”
“No pasts,” Daniel repeated, almost to himself. After a moment he shrugged. “That was part of it, certainly—this needed to be a fresh start for all of us, together—but it was the easy part. As you’ve probably gathered, none of us has the kind of past that one would want to retain in any case. The main difficulties there have been practical ones, really, rather than psychological: getting Rafe’s father to stop ringing up and abusing him, Justin’s father to stop accusing him of joining a cult and threatening to call the police, Abby’s mother to stop showing up outside the library high as a kite on whatever it is she takes. But these were small problems, comparatively; technical difficulties that would have sorted themselves out, given time. The real price . . .”
He moved one finger absently around the rim of the glass, watching the gold of the whiskey bloom and dim as his shadow passed across it. “I suppose some people might call it a state of suspended animation,” he said, at last. “Although I would consider that a highly simplistic definition. Marriage and children, for example, were no longer possibilities for any of us. The odds of finding an outsider who would be able to fit into what is, frankly, an unusual setup, even if he or she should want to, were negligible. And, although I won’t deny that there have been elements of intimacy among us, for any two of us to enter into a serious romance would almost definitely have damaged our balance beyond repair.”
“Elements of intimacy?” I asked. Lexie’s baby—“Between who?”
“Well, really,” Daniel said, with a touch of impatience, “I don’t think that’s the issue. The point is that, in order to make this house our shared home, we had to forfeit the possibility of many things that other people consider to be essential goals. We had to forfeit everything that Rafe’s father would call the real world.”
Maybe it was the whiskey, on a hangover and a half-empty stomach. Strange things spun in my mind, sprayed showers of light like prisms. I thought of ancient stories: battered travelers stumbling out of the storm into glowing banquet halls, losing hold of their old lives at the first taste of bread or honey wine; of that first night, the four of them smiling at me across the laden table and the lifted wineglasses and the curls of ivy, smooth-skinned and beautiful, with candlelight in their eyes. I remembered the second before Daniel and I kissed, how the five of us had risen up in front of me breathtaking and eternal as ghosts, hanging sweet and gauzy over the drifts of grass; and that danger drum, somewhere behind my ears.
“This isn’t as sinister as it sounds, you know,” he added, catching something in my expression. “Regardless of what the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”
“And you did,” I said. I felt like the stone bench was rocking underneath me, swaying with the ivy in a slow dizzying rhythm. “You went consenting.”
“I did, yes,” Daniel said. “I understood all of the implications, very clearly. I had thought it all out before I ever embarked on this, and I had decided it was a price well worth paying—I doubt I would ever have wanted children in any case, and I’ve never placed much stock in the concept of one perfect soul mate. I assumed the others had done the same: weighed up the stakes and found the sacrifice worth making.” He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. “That,” he said, “was my first mistake.”
He was so calm. I didn’t even hear it at the time, it wasn’t until much later, when I went over the conversation in my head looking for clues, that I caught it:
was, would have.
Daniel used the past tense, all the way through. He understood that it was over, whether anyone else had noticed or not. He sat there under the ivy with a glass in his hand, serene as the Buddha, watching as the bow of his ship tilted and slid under the waves.
“They hadn’t thought it through?” I asked. My mind was still sliding, weightless, everything was smooth as glass and I couldn’t get a grip. For a second I wondered crazily if the whiskey had been drugged, but Daniel had had a lot more than me and he seemed fine—“Or they changed their minds?”
Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb. “Really,” he said, a little wearily, “when I think about it, I made an astounding number of mistakes along the way. The hypothermia story, for instance: I should never have fallen for that. Initially, in fact, I didn’t. I know very little about medicine, but when your colleague—Detective Mackey—told me that story, I didn’t believe a word of it. I assumed he was hoping we’d be more likely to talk if we thought that it was a matter of assault, rather than murder, and that Lexie might at any minute tell him everything. All that week, I took it for granted that he was bluffing. But then . . .” He lifted his head and looked at me, blinking, as if he had almost forgotten I was there. “But then, you see,” he said, “you arrived.”
His eyes moved over my face. “The resemblance really is extraordinary. Are you—were you—related to Lexie?”
“No,” I said. “Not as far as I know.”
“No.” Daniel went through his pockets methodically, took out his cigarette case and lighter. “She told us she had no family. This may be why the possibility of you didn’t occur to me. The inherent unlikeliness of the situation was in your favor all along: any suspicion that you weren’t Lexie would have had to be predicated on the improbable hypothesis of your existence. I should have remembered Conan Doyle: ‘whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
He flicked the lighter and tilted his head to the flame. “I knew, you see,” he said, “that it was impossible Lexie should be alive. I checked her pulse myself.”
The garden dumbstruck, in the fading gold light. The birds hushed, the branches caught in midsway; the house, a great silence poised over us, listening. I had stopped breathing. Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire.
“What happened?” I asked, very quietly.
“Well, really,” Daniel said, “you know I can’t tell you that. As you probably suspected, Lexie was stabbed in Whitethorn House; in the kitchen, to be exact. You won’t find any blood—there was none at the time, although I know she bled later—and you won’t find the knife. There was no premeditation and no intent to kill. We went after her, but by the time we found her it was already too late. I think that’s all I can say.”
“OK,” I said, “OK.” I pressed my feet down hard on the flagstones and tried to pull my head together. I wanted to dip a hand in the pond and splash cold water down the back of my neck, but I couldn’t let Daniel see that, and anyway I doubted it would help. “Can I tell you what I think happened?”
Daniel inclined his head and made a small, courteous gesture with one hand:
Please do.
“I think Lexie was planning to sell her share of the house.”
He didn’t rise to that, didn’t even blink. He was watching me blandly, like a professor at an oral exam, flicking the ash off his cigarette, aiming it carefully into the water where it would wash away.
“And I’m pretty sure I know why.”
I was sure he would bite on that one, positive—for a month now, he had to have been wondering—but he shook his head. “I don’t need to know,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, at this stage—if it ever did. I think, you know, that all five of us have a ruthless streak, in our different ways. Possibly it goes with the territory; with having crossed that river, into being sure of what you want. Certainly Lexie was capable of great ruthlessness. But not of cruelty. When you think of her, please, remember that. She was never cruel.”
“She was going to sell up to your cousin Ned,” I said. “Mr. Executive Apartments himself. That sounds a lot like cruelty to me.”
Daniel startled me by laughing, a hard, humorless little snort. “Ned,” he said, with a wry twist to the corner of his mouth. “My God. I was far more worried about him than about Lexie. Lexie—like you—was strong-willed: if she decided to tell the police what had happened, then she would, but if she didn’t want to talk, no amount of questioning would get anything out of her. Ned, on the other hand . . .”
He sighed, an exasperated puff that blew smoke out of his nose, and shook his head. “It’s not just that Ned has a weak character,” he said, “but that he has no character at all; he’s essentially a cipher, composed entirely of the jumbled reflections of what he thinks other people want to see. We were talking earlier about knowing what you want . . . Ned was all fired up about this plan to turn the house into luxury apartments or a
golf
club, he had sheaves of complex financial projections showing how many hundreds of thousands we could each make over how many years, but he had
no idea
why he wanted to do it. Not a clue. When I asked him what on earth he wanted to
do
with all that money—it’s not as though he’s exactly on the breadline as it is—he stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. The question was completely unintelligible to him, light-years outside his frame of reference. It wasn’t that he had some deep longing to travel the world, say, or to quit his job and focus on painting the Great Irish Masterwork. He wanted the money purely because everything around him has told him that it’s what he should want. And he was utterly incapable of understanding that the five of us might have different priorities, priorities that we had established all by ourselves.”
He stubbed out his cigarette. “So,” he said, “you can see why I was worried about him. He had every reason in the world to keep his mouth shut about his dealings with Lexie—talking would blow any possibility of a sale right out of the water, and besides, he lives alone, as far as I know he doesn’t have an alibi; even he must realize that there’s nothing to prevent him from becoming the prime suspect. But I knew that if Mackey and O’Neill were to give him anything more than a cursory interrogation, all that would fly straight out the window. He would become exactly what they wanted him to be: the helpful witness, the concerned citizen doing his duty. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world, of course—he doesn’t have anything to offer that would constitute solid evidence—but he could cause us an awful lot of trouble and tension, and that was the last thing we needed. And it wasn’t as though I could gauge him, get some sense of what he was thinking, try to steer him away from disaster. Lexie—you—I could at least keep an eye on, to some extent, but Ned . . . I knew that getting in contact with him would be the worst thing I could possibly do, but, my God, it took everything I had not to do it anyway.”
Ned was dangerous territory. I didn’t want Daniel thinking too much about him, about my walks, about the possibilities. “You must have been raging, ” I said. “All of you, at both of them. I’m not surprised someone stabbed her.” I meant it. In a lot of ways, the amazing thing was that Lexie had made it this far.
Daniel considered this; his face looked like it did in the evenings, in the sitting room, when he was deep in a book, lost to the world. “We were angry,” he said, “at first. Furious; devastated; sabotaged, from within our own gates. But in a way, you know, the same thing that betrayed you in the end worked for you in the beginning: that crucial difference between Lexie and you. Only someone like Lexie—someone with no conception of action and consequence—would have been able to come home and settle back in as if nothing had ever happened. If she had been a slightly different kind of person, then none of us could ever have forgiven her, and you would never have made it in the door. But Lexie . . . We all knew that she had never for a moment intended to hurt us, and so it had never really occurred to her that we could be hurt; the devastation she was about to cause had truly never seemed like a reality to her. And so . . .” He drew in a long, tired breath. “And so,” he said, “she could come home.”