The Red House (4 page)

The Vauxhall Insignia did a four-point turn and drove off scraping its manifold on the ruts and there was silence in the garden so that the red kite, looking down, saw only a large square of mown grass tilted toward the opposite side of the valley and, sitting confidently at its geometric center, a house, stately and severe and adamantly not a farmhouse. Tall sash windows, gray stone laid in long, thin blocks, a house where Eliot or Austen might have lodged a vicar and his fierce teetotal sisters. A drystone wall ran round the boundary of the property, broken by two gates, one for walkers, one for carriages, both of ornate cast iron now thick with rust. A weather vane in the shape of a running fox. There were rhododendrons and a shallow ornamental pond thick with frog spawn. There was the skull of a horse in the woodshed.

Alex sluiced his mouth under the cold tap and felt his way back across the landing with his eye closed. He lowered himself onto the bed, put the pillow over his head to cut out light and noise and curled into a ball.

Angela had been trapped by Louisa in the kitchen with a glass of red wine. That expensive mildew taste.
Melissa’s vegetarian. I’d happily give up meat as well, but Richard is a bit of a caveman
.

Why did she dislike this woman? The cream roll-neck, the way she held the measuring jug up to the light, for example, as if it were a syringe and a life hung in the balance. Onions fizzed in the pan. She thought about Carl Butcher killing that cat last term.
They were swinging it against a wall, Miss
. She’d recognized the policeman from Cycle Proficiency. Carl’s hard little face. All those boys, they knew the world didn’t want them, bad behavior their only way of making some small mark.
But people eat cows
. Most intelligent thing he’d said all year.

God alone knows how she’s going to survive here
, said Louisa.
A hundred miles from the nearest branch of Jack Wills
.

A yellow tractor and the sun setting over Offa’s Dyke, tumbledown barns with corrugated iron roofs, the hill so steep Daisy felt as if she were looking out of a plane window, no noise but the wind. She could have reached out and picked that tractor up between her thumb and forefinger. This was Eden. It wasn’t a fairy story, it was happening right now. This was the place we were banished from. A bird of prey floated up the valley until it was swallowed by the green distance. The fizzy tingle of vertigo in the arches of her feet. The centuries would swallow us like the sky swallowing that bird. She and Melissa had passed one another on the landing earlier. She said hello but Melissa just stared at her as they moved around one another, spaghetti western-style, everything in slo-mo.

A red Volvo was zigzagging slowly up from Longtown, vanishing and reappearing with the kinks in the road. Down the hill she could see Benjy in the walled garden doing ninja moves with a stick.
Oof…! Yah…!
No one could see her out here, no one could judge her. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the animal that she was trapped inside, that grew and fed and wanted. She wished above all else to look ordinary so that people’s eyes just slid over her. Because Mum was wrong. It wasn’t about believing this or that, it wasn’t about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

Clouds scrolled high up. She couldn’t get Melissa out of her head. Something magnetic about her, the possibility of a softness inside, the challenge of peeling back those layers.

Beers in hand, Dominic and Richard stood looking over the garden wall, gentlemen on the foredeck, a calm, green sea beyond.
Angela tells me you’ve got yourself a job in a bookshop
. Dominic had been unemployed for nine months, apparently.
Bespoke or chain?

Waterstones
, said Dominic.
Best job I’ve ever done, to be honest
. He looked up. No contrails because of the volcanic ash. The way the fields stopped halfway up the hill and gave way to gorse and bracken and scree, that darkness where the summit met the sky, Mordor and the Shire within fifty yards of each other.

Really?
asked Richard. But how did one lose one’s job if one was self-employed? Surely one simply had more or less work coming in. A talented musician, too. Richard remembered visiting their house some years back and Dominic entertaining the children with a jazz version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the
Blue Peter
theme tune in the style of Beethoven. But he made his living composing music for adverts, washing powder and chocolate bars. Richard found it hard to comprehend anyone embarking upon a career without aiming for the top. Which applied to Angela as well, though she was a woman with children, which was different. And now he’d let it all slip through his fingers.

Amazing place
, said Dominic, rotating slowly to take in the whole panorama.

You’re welcome
, said Richard.

Benjy pauses by the hall table and leafs idly through
The Guardian
. He is fascinated by newspapers. Sometimes he stumbles on things that terrify him, things he wishes he could undiscover. Rape, suicide bombers. But the pull of adult secrets is too strong.
Four thousand square miles of oil drifting from the Deepwater Horizon rig … Thirty people killed by bombs in Mogadishu … Fifty tonnes of litter found in a whale’s stomach …
He has been thinking a lot about death lately. Carly’s dad from school who had a heart attack, aged forty-three. Granny’s funeral. There was a woman on the television who had anal cancer.

He puts the paper down and begins exploring the house, entering every room in turn and making a mental map of escape routes and places where enemies might be hiding. He can’t go into the bedroom because Alex is having a migraine so he heads downstairs in search of
a knife to make a spear but Auntie Louisa is in the kitchen so he goes outside and finds a big stick in the log shed. He hacks off a zombie’s head and blood sprays from the neck stump and the head lies on the ground shouting in German until it is crushed under one of his horse’s hooves.

Alex slid his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up slowly, shirt soaked in sweat. His head felt bruised and the color of everything was off-key, as if he were trapped inside a film from the sixties. At least Melissa hadn’t seen him like this. When it happened at school he had to actually go and lie down in the sick bay. He tried to pass it off as an aggressive adversary he overcame by being tough and stoical, but he knew that some kids thought it was a spazzy thing like epilepsy or really thick glasses. He rubbed his face. He could smell onion frying downstairs and hear Benjy battling imaginary foes outside.
Oof…! Yah…!

Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn’t count at school because it didn’t get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of design and technology, a free A Level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink onto a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.

Daisy walked into the living room and found Alex sitting on the sofa drinking a pint of iced water and staring at the empty fireplace.
How are you doing?

Top of the world
. He held up his glass in a fake toast. The ice jiggled and clinked.

Always these stilted conversations, like strangers at a cocktail party.
I went for a walk up the hill. It’s, like, Alex World up there
.

He seemed confused for a moment, as if trying to remember where he was.
Yeh, I guess so
.

A couple of years back he’d been a puppy, unable to sit down for a whole meal, falling off the trampoline and using his plastered arm as a baseball bat. They’d played chase and snakes and ladders and hide-and-seek with Benjy and watched TV lying on top of one another like sleeping lions. He seemed like another species now, so unimpressed by life. Dad’s breakdown hardly touched him. She’d read one of his history essays once, something about the economic problems in Germany before the Second World War and the Jews being used as scapegoats, and she was amazed to realize that there was a person in there who thought and felt.
What do you reckon to Melissa?

She’s all right
.

He was talking rubbish. He obviously fancied her because boys couldn’t think about anything else. She wanted to laugh and grab his hair, start one of the play fights they used to have, but there was a force field, and the rules had changed. She reached out to touch the back of his neck but stopped a couple of centimeters short.
See you at supper
.

You will indeed
.

Richard opened the squeaky iron door of the stove. Ash flakes rose and settled on the knees of his trousers. He scrunched a newspaper from the big basket.
PORT-AU-PRINCE DEVASTATED
. A grainy photo of a small boy being pulled from the rubble. No one really cared until there were cute children suffering. All those little blond girls with leukemia while black teenagers in London were being stabbed every day of the week. He flirted with the possibility of a firelighter but it seemed unmanly, so he built a tepee of kindling around the crumpled paper. An image of the Sharne girl passed through his mind.
She rowed for Upper Thames
. Think of something else. He struck a match. Swan Vesta. The way they lay in the box reminded him of the stacked trunks by Thorpe sawmill. The paper caught and the flame was an orange banner in a gale. He closed the door and opened the vent. Air roared in. His knees hurt. He needed to do more exercise. He imagined making love with Louisa later on, the cleanness of her skin after a shower, the cocoa-butter body wash that made her taste like cake.

They’re hiding in the trees
, said Daisy,
with bows and arrows. And we’ve got the secret plans
.

Secret plans for what?

She peeled a lump of moss off the edge of the bench.
For a moon rocket
.

This is boring
, said Benjy.

She thought about the men with bows and arrows. They were really here, weren’t they, once upon a time. And mammoths and ladies in crinolines and Spitfires overhead. Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another thing. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night.

Angela looked out of the bedroom window. Dominic and Richard chatting at the edge of the garden, the way men did, beer in one hand, the other hand thrust into a trouser pocket, both staring straight ahead. She wondered what they were talking about and what they were avoiding talking about. Forty-seven years old and she still felt a fifteen-year-old girl’s anger at the younger brother who had teamed up with Mum and frozen her out after Dad died. She took the Dairy Milk from the bottom of her case, tore back the paper and the purple foil, snapped off the top row of chunks and put them into her mouth. That nursery rush. Mum and Richard had visited Dad in hospital the
day before he died. Angela wasn’t allowed to go and she was haunted for months afterward by a recurring nightmare in which they had conspired somehow to cause his death. Someone banged a large pan downstairs and shouted,
Dinner
, like they were guests in a country house. Flunkies and silver salvers. She’d better go and join the fray.

Daisy, please
. Angela reached out to grab her sleeve.
Not now
. But Dominic was standing in the way and she couldn’t reach.

What were you going to say?
asked Richard.

Grace
, replied Daisy.
I was going to say grace
.

The room snapped into focus, wine bottles green as boiled sweets, galleons on the table mats. Melissa let her mouth hang open comically.

Fire away
, said Richard who was accustomed to situations where other people felt uncomfortable.

Oh Lord …
People drifted through life with their eyes closed. You had to wake them up.
We thank You for this food, we thank You for this family and we ask You to provide for those who have no food, and to watch over those who have no family
.

Amen and a-women
, said Benjy.

Excellent
. Richard rubbed his hands together, Melissa said,
Fucking Nora
, under her breath and the scrape of chairs on the flagstones was like a brace of firecrackers. Louisa lifted the red enameled lid of the big pot and steam spilled upward.

Alex looked over at Daisy and gave her a thumbs-up.
Nice one, sister
.

Dominic poured two centimeters of wine into Benjy’s wineglass.

Is this place not wonderful?
asked Richard, widening his arms to indicate the house, the valley, the countryside, perhaps life itself.

Louisa was frightened of talking to Daisy. She didn’t know any proper Christians, but Daisy said,
I love that sweater
, and suddenly it wasn’t so bad after all.

Richard raised his glass.
To us
, and everyone raised their glasses.
To us
. Benjy drank his wine in one gulp.

Melissa saw Daisy and Mum laughing together. She wanted to force them apart, but there was something steely about the girl. She wouldn’t back down easily, would she.

Alex couldn’t stop looking at Melissa. That terrible yearning in his stomach. He was imagining her in the shower, foam in her pubes.

Angela looked at Richard and thought,
We have nothing in common, nothing
, but Richard eased back into his chair.
You remember that dead squirrel we found on the roundabout in the park?
He swung the wine around in his glass like a man in a bad advert for wine.
We thought it was a miracle
.