The Red House (13 page)

Are you and Dad all right?
She meant to sound caring but she wanted her mother to admit some small compensatory failure.

We’re … OK
, said Angela gingerly.

And it came to Daisy out of the blue. Her mother was a human being. How rarely she saw it. She wanted to reach out and hold her and make everything good again but the intervening years seemed suddenly like a dream and she was five years old, going into town with
Mum to do the shopping. So she turned and looked out of the window and watched the bus rise above the trees and hedges onto a kind of moorland, the gray ribbon of the road and plantations of pine across the valley like scissored green felt.

I’m sorry about Richard
, said Angela.

It’s all right
, said Daisy.
I can look after myself
. This dance she and Mum did. Reaching out and pulling back. Stroking and snapping.

He was being a bully
.

I can’t believe he’s your brother
.

I’m having a bit of trouble myself in that department
.

People counted Dominic as their friend but no one counted him as their best friend. Angela thought of it as cowardice, though she tried not to think of it very often. A failure to engage properly with the world. The mortgage arrears, the car being towed to a scrapyard. Nothing
mattered
enough (in the backseat, Benjy and Alex were playing Benjy’s version of rock-paper-scissors called wee-poo-sick). He thought of it as a blessing once, not being haunted by the terrible wanting that blighted so many lives, but he looked at Daisy’s screwed-up religion, Alex being carted away in an ambulance after that race, Angela trying to save some white-trash kid who’d end up in prison anyway, and he realized that all of them had reasons to be alive in a way that he didn’t.

Raglan Castle was built in the mid-1430s by Sir William ap Thomas, “The Blue Knight of Gwent,” who fought alongside Henry V at the battle of Agincourt …
 (Richard is reading the free information pamphlet thoroughly)
 … but the castle was undermined after a long siege during the Civil War and what remains is largely a picturesque ruin …
Consequently it takes a dedicated historical imagination to stand on the mossy cobbles of the Pitched Court and conjure up the falconers and the manchet bread and the clatter of billhooks, and what Louisa notices mostly is the absence of a café where she might sit in the warm with a cappuccino
and a magazine and rid herself of the image of Melissa naked and broken in a ditch.

Alex walks the battlements of the Great Tower,
which sits at the center of its own moat and is connected to the main fortifications by a drawbridge
. A little single-engine plane is flying overhead sounding like a lawn mower. He thinks about that flight last year in the Piper Cherokee with Josh’s uncle, being frightened during takeoff, then feeling smug about not being frightened anymore, then enjoying it, then being rather bored because basically there wasn’t much to do apart from sit in a cramped seat watching clouds. He glances down into the big stone box of the castle’s main hall and sees Louisa pacing. Now that Melissa has gone he is beginning to realize how fit she is. She’s nearly fifty, which makes it sound pervy if you say it out loud, but she’s in really good nick and he keeps imagining her taking off that cream roll-neck jumper. Big tits. All that hair.

But Dominic is listening to Joe Pass. “Stella by Starlight” from the first
Virtuoso
album. BbMa7 … Em7b5 … A7 … Those incredible runs, just ragged enough to make them feel human. Ever since they arrived at the castle he has been experiencing a disturbing sense of déjà vu for which he is unable to account, having never been to Wales before, until he remembers Robert Plant’s swordfight in
The Song Remains the Same
. It was filmed here, wasn’t it. He’d owned a Welsh farm during his Dungeons and Dragons phase. “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” and so forth. But there’s no one here with whom he can share this satisfying pop-trivia nugget.

Benjy can’t really concentrate on the castle because a weird ginger-haired boy is trying to befriend him.
We’re from Devon … Have you seen
Pirates of the Caribbean …
? My dad’s got a quad bike
. He has a dolphin T-shirt and no eyebrows to speak of. Benjy wants to be left alone because if you concentrate and no one disturbs you the knights stand up from their stone tombs and a cornfield of spears rises beyond the moat.

Do you like football?

He still hasn’t quite got the politics of the playground, that low-grade
scuffle over space and status. He expects more logic, better tactics. He’s spent too much time with his older siblings. He knows quite a bit about homosexuality and communism and income tax, and with Pavel it’s easy because they both like making potions and Lego massacre tableaux, but if Wayne Goodrich calls him a spaz …

That’s my dad
, says the ginger-haired boy, turning briefly,
over there
.

Benjy runs.

The problem with Jennifer …
Richard paused. He had never talked seriously about her with anyone except Louisa.
She didn’t really care about other human beings. I’m not talking about the way she treated me. You make your bed and you have to lie in it. But friends, patients
. The image of that girl in her wheelchair passed briefly through the headlights of his mind.

Dominic was transfixed by Richard wrestling with difficult ideas in real time.
Why did you get married?

We were both ambitious, both somewhat unsentimental, neither of us wanted children. In the circumstances I think that was wise. She would have made a dreadful mother. I’m not sure I would have made the perfect father, but in my darker moments I feel a good deal of regret
.

Dominic wondered if he could tell Richard about Amy, but he didn’t know whether clinical detachment would win out over fraternal loyalty.

Plus
, Richard laughed,
she was a very determined woman who was used to getting what she wanted
.

Dominic had met Jennifer only twice, she had no small talk and she watched the children the way a snake might watch a cat. Yet if she had given him her undivided attention? If she had wanted him …? Benjy appeared out of nowhere and tugged at his sleeve.
Can we go now?

Do you remember that scary German woman?
said Daisy.
Or maybe she was Dutch. The one who used to throw her son into the water and shout, Schwim! Schwim!

You and Alex had a race
.

And I won
.

And he never swam again. Men. Honestly
. Angela laughed. What was it? The carnival release of holiday? Being out of habit’s gravity? Why could they not do this at home?

They had this amazing toaster. At the hotel
.

I’m not sure I remember the actual buffet details
.

Benjy was totally in love with it. You put the bread on this conveyor belt and it came out the other side toasted. He called it the Wallace and Gromit toaster. He must have had, like, ten slices every morning
.

She glanced over Daisy’s shoulder … 
Bandits at nine o’clock
. Daisy turned round. Melissa, in the window seat of the café on the far side of the road, something hunched and beaten about her.

Daisy said,
I’m going to talk to her
.

What? Now?
Had Daisy not noticed? Their two lives were changing course right now.

Perhaps you should give Louisa a ring
, said Daisy, setting off across the road because her mother had become simply her mother again, the person you came back to after the adventure.

Please?
said Benjy, holding up a short wooden sword with a handguard of plaited rope.

Benjy
. Dominic rubbed his eyes.
You’ve already got six of them
.

I’ve got five and they’re different
. He had two broadswords, a katana, a cutlass and a dagger whereas this was a gladius for stabbing in close combat with a groove down the center of the blade to let air into the wound so you could easily pull it out without a sucky vacuum holding it in.

It’s the acquisition, isn’t it
. Richard was holding a hardback book about the castle.
Don’t you remember?
He had slipped into a more
casual register as if the Jennifer conversation had made them friends.
The football cards which came with chewing gum? A part of you knew it was going to be another Peter Shilton, but that didn’t matter
.

You promised
, said Benjy.
You said I’d get ten pounds holiday money
.

I know, but …
Ten pounds was a lot of money.
Why don’t you wait for a few days and then decide what you want to spend it on?

On the far side of the window Louisa was examining the ground in front of her feet and hugging her coat tight around her.

But we won’t come back here again. Ever
. Benjy was desperate now.

Dominic wanted to say that no means no, but you couldn’t say that these days. You had to be friends with your children. He squatted.
You know what always happens. You’ll go into another gift shop tomorrow or the day after …

I’ll get it for you
, said Richard.
My holiday present
.

Dominic’s phone went off. The first ten bars of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” He fished it out of his pocket. Richard was handing the sword to the woman behind the till.
Hullo?

Panic over
. It was Angela.
We found Melissa in a café
.

He felt a vague disappointment. If she’d been murdered they could all go home.
I’ll pass on the good news
. Though when he did this Richard simply said,
Excellent
, showing neither surprise nor relief so that Dominic wondered for a moment if you could shape the future by predicting things with sufficient confidence.

Thank you, Uncle Richard
, said Benjy.

You’re welcome
.

And he was off, through the glass door and out into the sunlight of the car park, thrusting and parrying.
Oof…! Yah…!

Melissa was listening to Cally’s phone ring at the far end when she saw Daisy come in. She was annoyed and relieved at the same time. She hung up.

Daisy sauntered over.
I’m going to get a coffee. Do you want anything to eat or a drink?
Super casual, like they were still back at the house.
She should have left more theatrically, shouldn’t she.
A flapjack would be good
. She’d babysat a mug of cold tea for the last hour.
And a black coffee
.

She watched Daisy walk over to the counter. The steely thing made her uneasy. She had absolutely no idea what Daisy was thinking or feeling or planning. There were Christians at school but they kept their heads down, whereas Daisy … She wasn’t a moose either, she hadn’t got a big arse or a weird face. She knew it, too, something about the way she carried herself, deliberately choosing to make herself look shit, a provocation, almost.

Daisy returned to the table with two black coffees and two flapjacks.
They always put the napkin under the food. Which misses the point, don’t you think
. Like she was thirty-five.
How are you doing?

I’m dandy. Just dandy
.

And how’s Ian McEwan?

Melissa thought Daisy was talking about a real person until she remembered the closed novel lying under her hand.
It’s OK
. They were playing a game, but it was against the rules to say so.
We’re doing it at school
.

I’m reading about vampires
.

Melissa took a swig of coffee and relaxed a little.
Twilight?

Daisy took
Dracula
out of her bag.
Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to do some work for a mysterious count and it all kind of goes downhill from then on
.

OK
, said Melissa, carefully.

Except that Daisy wasn’t playing a game. This was serious. Usually she became tongue-tied and foolish when she wanted someone to like her, but with Melissa … Was this a kind of acting, too? Putting on your best self and coming thrillingly alive? Was this the Holy Spirit? God be in my mouth, and in my speaking.
Sorry about Alex
.

Sorry in what way?

The slobbering
.

Oh, I think I can handle Alex
. Melissa wondered if she could make
Daisy a sidekick for a few days. That would throw Mum and Richard. Her phone vibrated.
CALLY
. They watched it tango across the table. She looked at Daisy. What was her weak point? It wasn’t the religion, was it. But that first night, the way Angela reached across to stop her saying grace … 
Your mum thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t she. We don’t exactly see eye to eye
.