The Red House (28 page)

I know what Maxwell needs to believe, to make sense of things. I allow it. I don’t tell him that I was brought to visit recovering Sebastian in hospital once, just once, before we were separated. He’d been badly bruised, by the accident and earlier by the fall down the stairs, but not disfigured. Even if he had died after I saw him, the hospital had known his right identity, and the Barbour family would have recognised him as not-theirs.

Maxwell was Sebastian, just as his father on the Isle of Wight had told him. Sebastian, stolen from a stranger to replace the developing baby girl that I remember from the scan at the hospital. That’s why our genetic tests never showed a match. Something had happened sometime after that scan – a miscarriage, most likely. My mother’s hard, full belly had been replaced by a pillow-like bump that squished like bread dough at my touch. My father had brought home an offering one night, I now understand, and my mother’s belly had been let to go flat. I fell in love
with my brother the next morning, waking up and finding him in our mother’s arms.

There’s no point in telling him,
I decide
. He’s not Sebastian any more.

A quick, cool breeze rushes over us, and the previous month’s heat feels suddenly deep in the past, as far away as our childhood.

Maxwell’s come up with his own theory, and I let it comfort him.

Imogen faces front; I push from behind, following.

I reiterate my standard for going forward: ‘I’m not interested in looking up any distant Barbour cousins. I just want a clean slate. You and me. I just want to look ahead.’ I brace for her to resist.

Her amiability surprises me. The change in her is bigger than the injury, bigger than the wheelchair. She seems truly to have grown, to have become able to let go of her past.
Perhaps
, I think, relieved, happy and grateful,
the idea of Sebastian’s death, terrible as it is, is freeing for her.

She says, in that lovely voice, formed by that lovely mouth, words that prove how far she’s come and how ready she is to live in the present:

‘You’re my family, Maxwell.’

When Fiona was a child, her fantasy superpower had been to stop time. But, even as a child, she hadn’t been able to enjoy the fantasy uncritically.

If she literally stopped time for everything around her, she would be unable to breathe the stilled, solid air, or to move through it.

What if air were excused? Then she could breathe, and move, but things would still be frozen around her. Pillows would be boulders and grass would be teeth. What she really wanted, when she wished to stop time, was just to stop other people. Make them pause. Make them wait. Let herself catch up, and start them again when she was finally ready.

Fiona opens her eyes. The room is unlit, but not completely dark. It’s the hospital room. Stiff sheets lie lightly on her chest. An IV tube is in her arm. The chair where her mother used to sit is empty.

It seems a very real possibility that sitting up or even
just lifting her head could peel her consciousness from her body, which would stay behind on the bed, too heavy to fly.

She’s not sure if she’s dead.

She waits.

Her mother fills the doorway, carrying a large paper cup. Her handbag swings from her arm, back and forth, and Fiona follows it with her gaze. The light from the corridor behind her mother must reflect off Fiona’s open eyes, because, even in the almost-dark, Morgan Davies recognises that Fiona is awake.

Pandemonium: Fiona’s mother makes a fist around the paper cup and it erupts. She calls out, and nurses run. Lights. Prodding. Fiona submits, unmoving. She lets herself be handled. In the end, she’s pronounced well, though she has declined to speak. She continues to stare at the bag, still hanging from her mother’s arm, still swinging as her mother rocks from foot to foot. They’re all moving, all of them, rushing and poking and leaning over her.

Stop
, she begs in her mind.
Hold still
. She imagines them freezing there, in a kind of cage around her, and her climbing out of it, over them, monkeying out using their shoulders for footholds and someone’s back to jump off of. She imagines running through the night-time hospital, down empty corridors, finding an empty room, and locking the door.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

When Fiona wakes up again, only her mother is left, napping in the chair. It’s dim in the room, as when she woke before. Fiona doesn’t know if it’s minutes later or days.

‘How did you do it?’ Fiona asks. She’d counted the pills. She’d been careful.

‘I didn’t do anything. I was useless. A stranger saved you.’ Mum explains the partial-liver transplant. Fiona receives the information, but doesn’t physically react. She’s moved only her head, once to face her mother to ask the question, and then away after she heard the answer.

On the other side of the room, she’s found a power outlet to stare at. ‘Grandma Ro said that the worst feeling in the world was waking up when she didn’t want to any more.’

Something is ticking. It could be a clock, or a machine measuring something in Fiona’s body. She counts the ticks: …
twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three
—

‘Do you know what it feels like, that the people I love would prefer to die?’ her mother asks.

Fiona starts the count over again.
One, two, three, four
—

Her mother demands an answer.

Fiona complies: ‘It’s not fair to make me live just so that you feel loved.’

‘I can’t
make
you do anything! You can keep on hurting yourself. But people will keep trying to help you. It’s not just me, you know.’

As if to underscore this, a nurse pops her head in. It must be morning, because she flicks on the room lights, buzzy fluorescents. Fiona squints and covers her eyes, her hand sticking out from her forehead like the bill of a cap.

‘How are we today?’ the nurse asks. Without waiting for an answer, she announces breakfast, laying a tray onto
a rolling table, the top of which swings over Fiona’s lap.

Fiona remains flat, shoulders back against her pillow. Hot egg smell reaches her nose, and she opens her mouth to pant.

‘Some toast, sweetheart,’ the nurse recommends, tapping the plastic plate with two triangles on it.

Fiona shakes her head.

Her mother can’t hold off any longer. Even with the nurse still there, she asks: ‘Is that how you really feel? Is this waking up the worst thing in the world?’

Waiting for Fiona’s answer, everything holds still: her mother’s uptilted chin, the nurse’s finger on the plate. It all holds still, and Fiona marvels at her power, working at last.

With a slight, surprised shake of her head, she starts it all up again: footsteps in the corridor, cleaners’ swooshing mops, growls of cars outside. She repeats her answer, which had surprised even herself, this time by moving her lips into the pucker of ‘no’. Not the worst thing in the world. For Ro, maybe, but not for her.

Then, ‘Please,’ Fiona says, stopping the nurse who’s halfway out the door. ‘I’d like a drink of water.’ She pushes herself up to sitting. Her body comes with her.

Her mother’s held breath whooshes out. She inhales in its place fresh surprise, relief, and gratitude.

Fiona drinks.

Her mother sobs into her hands.

Dora’s eyes follow her father’s fingers. He wraps some kind of band around the top of his right palm, and slots the bow of his violin into the plastic grip attached to it. This way,
he squeezes the bow between the base of his thumb and the bottom of his first finger, instead of by their tips.

He pulls the bow across the strings. Sound falls out of them. Music is often cartoonishly depicted as unfurling from an instrument, the bar lines curling like a banner in the wind. But these notes fall, just drop, heavy with confession:
this is where I’ve been.

Gwen smiles. She’s awake, at home, sewn up, loopy from medication, and teary to see her husband’s damaged hand in use. She’d urged him to go back to his youthful self, to explore what dreams he left behind when he chose police work to follow. ‘You can go back to university,’ she’d suggested. ‘Do anything. You can start a new phase of life.’ But who wants to be in a classroom with eighteen year olds, or at the bottom of a work ladder in some other field? She hadn’t known that he’d followed her advice in one small way: he’d gone back to his instrument.

The notes fall faster now, quick and tapping, like hail on a roof. Dora cries. The woman in the blond ponytail, the woman in the house with the dried-flower wreath on the door, teaches violin in schools. She helps disabled students make music. Jesse had waited patiently, tied up outside her house, while Morris struggled with relearning scales and simple folk songs.

His head is tilted to hold the instrument down with his chin. Gwen has always loved that position, that way that violinists have to lean and curve.

‘It’s not a job,’ is all he says, in apology, abruptly splitting the bow and violin from one another. A hobby falls far short of where he needs to get to consider himself useful again.
But
, he wonders,
maybe now
…

The only good that his injured hand had ever done him was to prevent him from making a fist at DS Spencer in the middle of Parkside station, when the sergeant had refused to see reason about arresting Dora. Morris had had to force himself to keep still, and managed all of himself except his head. That part of him just twitched, side to side, without him meaning it to:
no
.

Spencer had leant across the table and said, ‘Mr Keene …’
Mister
, not DCI. Mister, which is how Morris is addressed by a clerk holding his credit card or by teachers at Dora’s school, not by a goddamn sergeant on Morris’ own force. ‘Mr Keene,’ he’d said, ‘I know she’s your daughter. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not wrong because she’s my daughter,’ Morris had told DS Spencer. ‘It’s wrong because you’re a goddamn idiot to look at your case and see this as the answer.’ Then he’d got his mouth back under control. His physical anger had had to go somewhere, and it had seemed to spread and thin throughout Morris’s whole body, turning his bones into iron rods. His mind had focussed, and the action around him had seemed to slow, syncing up with his compromised self for the first time in months. Or, he’d considered later, perhaps, in that flash of outrage, he’d caught up with life again.

Perhaps what Morris can do, as meagre as it is, is at least as good as what overeager DS Spencer brings to the table.
Better
, Morris thinks.
I’m not who I want to be, but I’m better than him
. Perhaps that’s reason enough to go back. Perhaps that’s reason enough to try.

‘Play it again,’ Gwen asks, eyes closed above her smile. The pills make her sleepy.

Dora, on a chair next to her mother’s bed, closes her eyes, too.

They don’t see that Morris’ eyes also close. He doesn’t need the written notes to tell him what to do. This is music he knows in his gut. This is the stuff he learnt as a young teenager, now relearning, baby steps for his hobbled hand.

They can’t see it, but the music fills up the room from the bottom, note by note. They rise up with it, floating.

This book was written with much generous support and assistance. Susie Dunlop in London, and Cameron McClure and Randall Klein in New York, challenged me with their high standards. Thank you all for the push, and thanks to Lydia Riddle for the finishing touches.

I’m grateful to all of my early readers from various stages, for encouragement, comment, and critique: Derek Black, Mimi Cross, Laura Gerlach, Robin Gwynne, Sophie Hannah, Ella Kennen, Mary McDonald, Kate Rhodes, Katy Salmon, Susan Van Valkenburg, Amy Weatherup, and Marianna Fletcher Williams. Special thanks to my sweet Gavin, for support on every front.

For research assistance, I’m grateful to Anthony Armstrong and Jane Campbell, Sarah Christensen, Françoise Barbira Freedman, Keith Ferry, Peter Glazebrook, Sheila Jackson, Vandy Massey, Rod Mengham, Nick Pritchard, Maiah Seul, and Kathy Whitehouse. Any inaccuracies are the result of my choice or error, not of their expertise.

I must thank those good sports who allowed their University roles to be referred to: Edward Wickham, Director of Music at St Catharine’s College; Mark Williams, Director of Music at Jesus College; and especially the late John Hughes, Chaplain and Dean of Chapel at Jesus College, for cheerfully volunteering to appear in two scenes. His good humour and gentle wisdom are much missed.

Also thanks to Robert Dixon and Ben Morris, Jesus College organ scholars, for lending their names to Imogen’s brothers, and especially to Ben for an intimidatingly thorough proofread.

Lastly, thanks to the choristers of Jesus College. In the four and a half years that we have been part of the choir so far, we have seen many boys pass through, starting as little kids and leaving as almost-men. It’s as wonderful as Imogen remembers, and we’re glad to have shared it with you.

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