The Red House (20 page)

That’s wonderful
. Richard had approached so quietly and Melissa had been so absorbed in her drawing that she didn’t hear him till he was standing behind her.
I didn’t know you could draw so well
.

I am a woman of many mysteries, Richard
. She turned and saw that he’d just returned from a run.
Are those new shoes?

They meet you at the other end
, said Alex,
and drive you back to your car
.

I’ll come
, said Benjy.
Canoeing is cool
.

Which meant that Dominic had to come, too, for Health and Safety reasons.

Count me in
, said Louisa, because last night’s anger had softened into a sense of superiority. Richard was normal, and she had been released from a childish respect she should never have felt in the first place.

Alex was running his hand slowly over the map, as if he could feel the texture of the land under his fingers. Contour, castle, cutting.
We can stop for lunch at the Boat Inn, Whitney
.

Angela?

You must be joking
. She was ferrying a bouquet of dirty coffee mugs to the kitchen.
Drop me in Hay. I’ll get some stuff for supper
. She caught Louisa’s eye and looked away.

Louisa wondered if she should tell Dominic. Or Richard. Did Angela need help or was it a secret they should keep between themselves?

We’ll stay here
, said Daisy.

You go and do boy things
, said Melissa.

You two sound as if you have a secret plan
, said Dominic.

That’s for us to know
, said Melissa,
and for you to find out
.

Richard swilled the pan, flipped the brush over and used the wedged rear to scrape the cooked egg off the pitted aluminum base. They were experiencing a minor difficulty and he was making a hash of it, that was all. He rinsed the little tattered rags of cooked egg into the sink where they collected in the poker wheel over the plughole. He lifted it free and banged it clean on the edge of the bin. He’d run several hundred meters up the road that morning then been forced to walk, having underestimated the incline and overestimated his fitness. Ashamed of returning to the house, he had walked up to Red Darren where he sat half appreciating the view and half pretending to appreciate it and being horribly aware of the stupidity of this combination. He squeezed a worm of lemon washing-up liquid onto the pan and waited for the water to run hot. He remembered the first time they had made love, the bulge of flesh above her waistband, plump and creaturely, the little fold where the curve of her bottom met the top of her thighs, the way she lay propped on her elbows afterward like a teenager making a phone call. He moved the brush in swift circles and zigzags and figure eights, each calligraphic figure swiftly overwritten by the next. Those images. Two days ago they’d been a treasury of golden coins through which he could run his fingers, but now?
Of course I love you
. At this precise moment he felt only a dirty panicked entanglement.

Dominic appeared in the doorway.
Ready to rumble
.

He dried his hands.
Two minutes
.

The Mercedes pulls away and the sun is out. Angela climbs the steps to the ugly block that contains the tourist information office and the public toilets. A Goth girl with Halloween hair and a pierced lip is pushing a young man in a wheelchair. Cerebral palsy, perhaps?
I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet
. One of her mother’s gems. But in what kind of bizarre accident did you lose your feet? She’d never thought about that. Theo with Down’s, the cheeriest kid in Year 8. So you couldn’t assume anything. Though God knows how he’d cope when the hormones and the tribal stuff kicked in. Some ghastly special school, no doubt. She was trying hard not to think about the encounter in the kitchen. Handing Louisa so much ammunition in one go. The crazy lady with the imaginary daughter. She is going to buy some books. The
Yellow Sun
thing still unread at the bottom of her case. Hasn’t read a book properly for months, come to think of it. She remembers being ten years old, jammed into that triangular recess behind the sofa with a tattered paperback.
The Log of the Ark. My Name Is David. Stig of the Dump
.

You have to wear this by law, young man
. Mike handed Benjy a life jacket of tatty orange rubber. Wiry and suntanned, work boots, ponytail.
And I strongly suggest that the rest of you wear these
. He took four more from the back of the Land Rover.
But as long as they’re in the boat when you drown I’m in the clear, legally
. He put his hands on his hips.
No swimming from the boat. No extra passengers. No alcohol. Give me a call half an hour before you need picking up. If I hear nothing by three I put out an APB
. The mobile rang in his back pocket.
God bless you and all who sail in you
. He extracted the phone.
Brian. What can I do you for?

Benjy put the life jacket over his head. It smelled of mildew and the air inside a balloon. Richard dragged the green Osprey into the shallows,
Alex the Appalachian.
I’ll take Benjy
. In truth he wanted to take Louisa, but he could still prove himself by paddling faster than the two men paddling together.

Dominic chucked the map into the boat. It was like a greasy-spoon menu. Water had seeped under a corner of the dog-eared laminate, blurring the ink. He turned to Louisa.
Willing to place your life in the hands of two rank amateurs?

She stepped in. A disbelieving wobble then she was airborne. Waterborne. Holding her breath slightly. The faint tremor of magic. Like climbing into a loft, or vaulting the orchard wall.

Water loosening something in all of them. Jacques Cousteau.
The Man from Atlantis
. The twang and clatter of the diving board on its rusted roller.

Louisa is lying in the paddling pool at Mandy’s house. Compared to the balcony Mandy’s garden feels like a country park. She is seven years old and there is just enough water to lift her clear of the bottom. If she squints a little she can no longer see the pine tree or the roof of the chapel or the pink starfish on the pool’s rim. Then she waits … and waits … and finally it happens. She floats free, neither her head nor her feet touching the plastic. The world has let her go, she is flying up into that burning edgeless blue.

It’s so boring
. Melissa blew a smoke ring.
So dreadfully boring
.

Daisy stood demurely with her hands crossed in front of her.
Surely, madam …
But she couldn’t think of what to say.

You have to say, “My lady.”
Melissa fixed her with an icy look.

My lady
.

Melissa took another sip of Richard’s brandy.
I was so very dreadfully bored yesterday that I ordered the stable boy to pleasure me in the rose garden
.

Daisy burst out laughing.
You’ve got this out of a book or something
.

The icy stare again.
You have to do this properly
. It was the exercise they’d done at school. Because there was no way she was going to be
blind or deaf or limping. Carriage wheels on the gravel.
Pok … Pok …
The gamekeeper shooting rabbits.

Was it satisfactory, my lady?
Because Daisy was good at this game, too.

I’m afraid not
. Melissa turned and held her eye.
He whacked my bottom and shouted “Tallyho.”

There was an ecstasy in not laughing, like stubbing your toe and closing your eyes and letting the pain rise and die away. But it was Melissa who choked first, dropping her cigarette and rolling sideways onto the bench. It was like being with Lauren, but different, Melissa’s self-sufficiency, not quite knowing the rules, seduction almost, just a hint of danger.

Melissa sat up.
OK, now I really am dreadfully bored, darling
. She handed Daisy the last few dregs of the brandy.
Let’s walk up that hill over there
.

Wow
, said Daisy.
You’re really getting into this whole countryside thing
.

I am a woman of many mysteries
.

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney,
Death of a Naturalist
and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like a prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum.
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white … Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack …
Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of
free knitting
or
free juggling
. This, for example. She extracted a book at random.
Spiders
by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages
 … the hatcheries of the moon … the earth in my father’s mouth …

They were on a ferry. Richard was eight or so. He has no memory of the location, only that it was a chain-link ferry and this seemed
extraordinary, the idea of being guided by underwater machinery. Rusted metal, sheer bulk and sea spray. He can’t see his father but he knows he is there because he emits some kind of radiation that throws all his needles to the right.

He has three photographs in a tattered brown envelope in the bottom drawer of his desk. He should have brought them along to show Angela. His father leaning against the bonnet of the Hillman Avenger, his father pushing a wheelbarrow in which both he and Angela are sitting, his father on a beach with a concrete pillbox in the dunes behind his right shoulder as if he is posing during a lull in the D-Day landings. Sideburns, burly arms in rolled-up sleeves, a cigarette always. Richard remembers the camera’s soft brown leather case, the rough suede of the inner surface, the saddle smell.

In spite of everything he had been rather proud of having a father who died prematurely because all the best adventures happened to orphans, though he can think of no incidents from his childhood which might count as adventures per se. He told other boys at school that his father had been a soldier, that he was a spy, that he had a false passport, that he had killed a man in Russia. He remembers a conversation with the headmaster.
If this becomes a habit you will find yourself in great difficulty later in life
. The only moment he had ever felt genuine shame. Aftershocks every time he remembers, even now. It never occurred to him to tell anyone what was happening to his mother. It would be different nowadays, of course. Taken into care, possibly, which was an astonishing thought.

There was a gull. Was this part of the same memory? It landed on his head and he screamed and his father was laughing in spite of his tears. The scratches bled and scabbed and for days he kept finding crumbly nuggets of dried blood in his hair.

Benjy is trailing his hand in the water, watching the glitter and flex of the light, the silky fold in front of his fingers. He wonders if there’s anything down there that might bite his fingers, a pike
perhaps, or a crayfish, but it is a small fear and he’s learning to be brave.

When he was six he had an imaginary friend, Timmy, who had shaggy blond hair and a Yorkshire accent and the sandals Benjy coveted in Clarks with green lights that lit up when you stamped. He was oversensitive, which annoyed Benjy sometimes, though at others Benjy liked having someone he could take care of. Because adults forgot how porous that border was, the ease with which you could summon monsters and find treasure in any basement. Besides, adults talked to themselves. Was that any more rational? And on the glacier, when the ends of your fingers are black and your companions are gone into the howling dark? You open your eyes and see to your surprise that there is a person sitting calmly at the other end of the tent. They seem familiar, but this is such a long way from anywhere. You know your brain is starved of sugar and oxygen. You know your hold on reality is slipping. But that green duffle coat. You thought they’d gone away, but you realize now that they have been waiting patiently through all these years for the moment when you needed them again.

XIX

i went out for a walk

under the canopy of high trees

and waited upon the firemakers

restlessness

uncertainty

ice dissolves in the ponds

that warm wind rising

it begins

the savannah bubbles and overflows

60 million stars babbling in unknown tongues

gooseberry wild plum peppermint

every cell on fire

hoops and carols and colored eggshells

the raven stiff-legged dancing

and the hatcheries of the moon

blown open

How sad they must be, those only children. Growing up in a house of adults, outnumbered, outgunned, none of that unbridled silliness, no jokes that can be repeated a hundred times, no one to sing with, no one to fight with, no one to be the prince, to be the slave. But siblings can be cruel, and companionship refused is worse than loneliness, and you could cast your eye over any playground and not tell who comes from a brood of seven or one. But later, when parents fall from grace and become ordinary messed-up human beings and turn slowly from carers into people who must be cared for in their turn, who then will share those growing frustrations and pore over the million petty details of that long-shared soap-opera carry that means nothing to others? And when they are finally gone, who will turn to you and say,
Yes, I remember the red rocking horse … Yes, I remember the imaginary bed under the hawthorn tree
.