The Red House (27 page)

How eloquently houses speak, of landscape and weather, of builders and families, of wealth, fears, children, servants. Hunkering in solitude or squeezed upward by the pressure of their neighbors, proudly facing the main road or turning toward the hill to keep the wind and rain out of their faces. Roofs angled to shuck off, walls whitewashed to reflect the sun. Inner courtyards to save the women of the house from prying eyes. Those newfangled precious cars, Austin Morris, Ford Cortina, in little rooms of their own till they were bread and butter and banished to the curb. The basement kitchen and the attic bedrooms where the servants worked and slept. Bare beams plastered and exposed again when they no longer said
poverty
. The front room that contains only the boxed tinsel Christmas tree and the so-called silver, where no one ever goes, and where you will lie for two days before your funeral. The new toilet replacing the privy in the garden that now holds only rusted tricycles and soft dirty footballs. Pipes and wires leading to reservoirs and power stations, to telephone exchanges
and sewage farms. Water from Birmingham, power from Scotland. Voices from Brisbane and Calgary.

Time speeds up. A day becomes an hour, becomes a minute, becomes a second. Planes vanish first, cars are smeared into strings of colored smoke then fade to nothing. People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark. Buildings inhabit the earth, growing like spores, sending out tubers, seeding new towns, new villages, new cities till they are drowned in sand or jungle. Girders and chimney turning to mulch and rubble. Two thousand years, two hundred thousand years, two million years and a severe and stately house that once sat at the geometric center of its square garden looking across the valley is now a ghost in the soil a mile below the surface of a snowball earth.

Daisy walks to the window seat at the other end of the kitchen and stares out into the rain. She tries to worry about Richard but can’t do it. How gray the world is. So many words for red. Carmine, scarlet, ruby, burgundy, cherry, vermillion. But gray? She turns and glances into the living room and sees that Melissa has gone at last. The pressure in her chest builds.
Mum?

What, love?
Angela turns and touches her arm.
You look dreadful
.

Can we talk?

A momentary pause while Angela absorbs the oddity and intimacy of this.
Of course we can
.

Alex loves this weather, loves all bad weather, snow, rain, hail, mud, darkness, failing light, becoming a part of the landscape instead of simply observing it. Thoughts cycle as he runs. Song lyrics, conversations he’s had or wished he’d had, sex he’s had or wished he’d had. The encounter with Richard is on repeat as he runs up the road to Red Darren.
You’re making me look like an idiot
. He thinks instead of Richard lying unconscious in the rain, a big wheeling pan from a film.
He is not sure if he still fancies Louisa or not, the way she’s so pathetically worried about Richard. The higher he gets the colder it becomes, the rain turns to hail and for the first time he starts to wonder what will happen if Richard is in actual deep shit and he realizes that if he fails to find Richard then everyone will blame him even though he is the only one doing something to find him. Plus, of course, something might have happened which has nothing to do with the weather. Broken leg, heart attack, fallen down some bloody hole. But if he finds Richard and he’s dead by the time he gets there Alex won’t actually be blamed at all. He’ll be
the person who found the body
.

He’s up on the top now and, Jesus, it is fucking freezing running through this stuff, and it is entirely possible that Richard took another route and turned up at the front door five minutes after Alex left, which will really piss him off. He’s having to pretty much close his eyes on account of the hail. Gray background and white dots coming straight at him like that old Windows screensaver. Was Richard wearing a waterproof? Should have grabbed a spare one from the hallway. Too late to worry about that now. Give Richard his own and earn bonus points. Who would win a fight between the two of them? Alex presumes it would be a smackdown. Richard had a few inches in height and reach but he also had that pudgy middle-aged look men got when they stopped looking after themselves. Fuck. And there he is, up ahead, limping like someone coming out of a war zone.

Richard wonders if this is really happening, and is sufficiently compos mentis to know that his unsureness is not a good sign. Not quite on the Glasgow Coma Scale yet. Alex, is it? In a luminous yellow jacket like a security guard. Shorts and a woolly hat.
Richard
, says Alex, in a casual golf-club manner. Long time no see, a pint of the usual? and so forth. Richard says,
I’m in a bit of a state
. So Alex removes his luminous yellow jacket.
Take this
. But Richard’s hands are so numb that he can’t grip it well enough to get his arms into the sleeves. His teeth are chattering. His teeth haven’t chattered since school. Alex puts the woolly hat on his head. “Cader Idris” on the recorder. Frozen milk lifting the foil caps on the chunky bottles. Before Dad died.
Here, let me help
. He thinks of nurses helping elderly patients into cardigans. That girl in her wheelchair. Then the jacket is on and he realizes he’s going to see Louisa soon and he understands now quite how frightened he was and it is possible that he is crying about this, though hopefully the rain will disguise the fact. Alex lifts Richard’s arm over his shoulder.
Come on, keep it up, or it’s me who’ll freeze to death
. Richard swings his good leg, hobbles, swings his good leg, hobbles. Alex is pushing him faster than he wants to go. It hurts a lot, but it’s a good thing, going faster. He remembers the conversation of last night. He will apologize later. A hot bath, he can have a hot bath, but, God Almighty, this ankle.
Thanks for this
.

Just keep walking
.

Angela shuts the door and Daisy thinks of headmasters’ offices and doctors’ surgeries. They sit beside one another on the sofa looking into the empty stove. Daisy wishes it was lit but that’s Richard’s job.
What’s the matter?

You have to promise …

I have to promise what?
asks Angela.

She’s standing on the high board. One bounce and don’t look down.
I tried to kiss Melissa
.

Angela is genuinely unsure if she has heard correctly but knows that she cannot ask Daisy to repeat it.

For God’s sake, Mum, say something
.

She shuffles through her memory of Melissa and Daisy in the dining room this morning.
And I’m guessing Melissa wasn’t too keen on this
.

I’m not being funny, Mum
.

Neither am I
. It feels like a TV drama.
Are you saying you’re gay?

The words are thick in Daisy’s mouth. She cries into Mum’s shoulder. Angela can’t remember the last time she held Daisy like this. Mostly Daisy is relieved that Melissa no longer has the same leverage.

Have you told anyone else?
She remembers Daisy abandoning her
in the street the other day and feels as if she has won a competition to regain her daughter’s affection, beaten Melissa, beaten Dominic. She rubs her hand in a circle on Daisy’s back. Ten years vanish. Those nightmares.
I don’t mind if you’re gay
. She squeezes Daisy a little harder.

Daisy pulls back.
I’m not gay, OK?
Panic in her voice.

OK
. Angela is treading carefully because this is veering rapidly away from the script.

I’m not gay, OK?

So you kissed Melissa because …?
It sounds accusatory but she’s trying to understand. A click of the latch and Benjy is standing in the doorway.
Later, yeh?
He backs out. She turns to Daisy.
Did you join the church because of this?
Suddenly it all fits together.

That’s not why I joined the church
. The old anger in her voice. Why the hell is Mum doing this now?

Sorry
, says Angela. She holds Daisy’s hands. Again a flash of Karen, real and possible daughters, the Daisy that might have been if the church didn’t have its claws in her. She should say, I’ll help. I’ll stay out of the way. Just tell me what you want me to do. But why is it any different from her being in love with a violent boyfriend? There are so many ways of crushing a human being.
Are you going to talk to someone at church?

Why would I talk to someone at church?

What would they say?

What has this got to do with anything?

Listen to me
, says Angela.

Daisy puts her face in her hands.

I love you. Maybe you’re gay, maybe you’re not. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me. But you have surrounded yourself with people who …

Daisy takes her face out of her hands.
No. Stop this. You’re not listening to me. This has got nothing to do with the church. This has got nothing to do with you and your prejudices
. Where is this stuff coming from? She’s opened a bottle of something poisonous but it has no label
and she can’t find a way of putting the top back on.
I made a mistake. I made a stupid mistake
. She stands up.

Daisy, wait, I’m sorry
.

Just … fuck off, OK?
And the door bangs behind her.

Angela sits for a whole minute. The lopsided tick of the grandfather clock. Then she kneels and opens the door of the stove, takes an old edition of
The Daily Telegraph
from the basket and starts making balls of paper to place in the bed of ash. She is standing on the far side of the room watching herself. She lays a little raft of kindling along the top of the crumpled paper and takes the matches from the mantelpiece. She’s screwed up, hasn’t she, yet again.
This has got nothing to do with you
. A door had opened and she’d slammed it shut. Christ. Alex and Richard. She checked her watch. What a mess of a day.

Everyone else had left the dining room so Dominic and Louisa were now alone. Angela was having the conversation with Daisy that he should have had. What did he feel? Thankful that it was now Angela’s problem? Aggrieved at his exclusion? Shame at his procrastination? Mostly a return of the torpor that had laid him low before Waterstones, the sense of life going on elsewhere, too fast, too complex, too demanding to grasp as it swung occasionally through his purview.

But what Louisa felt mostly was anger, anger at Richard who was meant to stop her feeling scared, anger at herself for being so self-centered, anger at the stupid timing, discovering how dependent she was precisely when she discovered how fallible he was. She thought about him not being there and she was terrified by what might happen to her.

The living-room door opened and banged shut. Louisa jumped, thinking it might be Richard, but it was Daisy and things had obviously not gone well. Louisa disappeared into herself again. Dominic got to his feet.
I’ll be back
. He left the room and suddenly there was no one and the house was silent and she imagined running after him
and looking in one room after another and finding them all empty and shouting and no one replying, just the sound of the wind and the rain hammering the windows.

They were well down the road now, past the junction, only a few hundred meters to go. The rain was easing a little, but Richard was leaning on him heavily, his steps becoming less regular and more unsteady. They fell clumsily onto a verge and Alex had great difficulty getting him to his feet. The ends of his fingers were yellow.
Richard?
But Richard’s words were slurred and Alex was ashamed of having imagined him being dead and because this was really starting to freak him out.
Come on. Bloody walk, OK? I can’t do this on my own
.

Angela was kneeling in front of the open stove cupping a lit match. Richard had made the fire every day so far and it was disturbing to find herself stepping into his place. The paper caught. She sat back and closed the squeaky metal door.
I’ve just been talking to Daisy
.

I guessed
.

Where did she start?
She kissed Melissa
.

I know
, said Dominic.

What do you mean, you know?

I talked to Melissa
.

You discussed this with Melissa?

Talked, not discussed. Daisy wouldn’t say what was wrong, so I asked Melissa
.

When?

Today, this morning
.

Dominic and Daisy and their charmed circle.
When were you going to tell me?

I don’t think she wanted anyone to know
.

Of course she didn’t want anyone else to know because those bloody people have convinced her she’ll go to hell
. Was this what they thought
at the church? She wasn’t entirely sure.
And you were just going to leave her feeling shit about herself?
Why were they doing this? Their daughter was suffering and they were using it as an excuse to rehash arguments that had been going nowhere for years.

What did you say to her?
asked Dominic.
Just now?

I said I loved her. I said what any halfway sane parent would say
. She paused and rubbed her face and took a long deep breath.
Please, let’s not do this
. Dominic was staring at his feet, hands in pockets. Shamefaced? Or just biting his tongue?
I mentioned the church, OK? Because I always do
. She held her hands up in surrender. The clatter of a chair being knocked over in the dining room.
She says she’s not gay. She says it was an accident
. The fire blazed in its dirty window.
Will you talk to her? Because she won’t listen to me and if she thinks she’s a bad person because of that place …