Alex, says Dominic wearily, that is not helpful.
He’s meant to say sorry but he’s not in the mood for saying sorry. He stands and takes his coffee cup into the kitchen. Behind his back he hears Angela apologising for her son’s foot in mouth disease.
Daisy is still leaning on the draining board, her boiled kettle cooling. She looks up. Sister Daisy. It’s an old joke, so old he forgets it’s a joke.
Not now, OK?
What’s up?
Nothing.
Tell me. His own anger looms so large that he expects her to be angry with Richard for some as-yet-undisclosed reason, but he can hear a tone in her voice he hasn’t heard for a long time.
She could tell him. He thinks she’s a weirdo, anyway. Then she laughs because it’s what he’s wanted to do since they arrived, isn’t it, kissing Melissa, then she remembers. Get off me, you fucking dyke. That stab of panic, the way you can’t rewind time.
What? says Alex. Is she laughing at him?
Now, before she changes her mind. Look, I’m going to tell you something.
Something what?
She stalls. What does she want him to say? That she is forgiven? That no one else is going to find out? That it never happened?
Alex? Mum is calling from the dining room. Sorry. He turns and walks away and she realises that telling someone will solve nothing.
Alex, says Mum. Do you have any idea where Richard went running?
Up onto the ridge, I guess. He has no real idea but he is assuming that Richard was indeed showing off, running up the steepest hill.
Will you go and look for him?
Suddenly he is paid back in full. No problem. He heads upstairs.
♦
Benjy is twitchy and the dominoes are no longer holding his attention. The same fear as Louisa and his mother, but without her ability to hold it back and chop it down. The possibility of Richard dying out there in all that rain. And God said I will destroy the world. Sword-fighting isn’t an indoors thing so he wanders around trying to lose himself in the details of the house, the smallness of things. He runs his fingers over the raised furry pattern of flowers on the wallpaper in the hallway. He looks inside the meter cupboard and imagines the whole house as a steampunk galleon, stovepipe hats and the chunter of pistons. He opens the leather cover of the visitors’ book. The first entry is dated 1994. Max (8) and Susannah (6). Canterbury. We woak up in the nite and saw some bagers. Blue ink which has blobbed on the Y of Canterbury. The Farmoors, Manchester. The Black Bull in Hay does a very nice Sunday roast. Someone has covered a whole page with a superb pencil sketch of the house. John, Joan, Carmen and Sophie Cain-Summerson, plus Grandma and Grandpa. He sits on the stairs and works out which of the brass stair rods can be rotated and which are too stiff to turn. He goes into the toilet and looks inside the cistern. There is an orange plastic ballcock on the end of a rusty arm. When you push it down more water squirts out of the white spout. It looks like something you might find in a harbour, a tiny buoy among the lobster pots and fishing boats. Dad said the house belonged to a family and maybe they come here in the summer and at Christmas. Benjy doesn’t know anyone who has two houses, though Michael’s family have a mobile home by the sea in Devon. He can’t see the appeal of having two homes because you would need your stuff in both houses, fluffy toys, PlayStation, animal posters. Then he finds a secret cupboard on the half-landing which he has never noticed before.
♦
He is in serious trouble, that body shiver, guts and chest. He can’t believe this is actually happening, he is two miles away from the house and he is getting hypothermia, not halfway up K2 or on the Ross Ice Shelf but in bloody Herefordshire. He is a doctor, and it is no longer wholly out of the question that he might die, not in a heroic way, but in a stupid way almost within actual sight of the house where there is a hot shower and a mug of coffee. He wonders if he should head straight down left off the hill to get out of the wind, but if he does that he stands even less chance of bumping into other runners or walkers, nor is he sure if he has the energy to clamber through hedges and over fences should he lose the path. The two options do a little back and forth dance in his head. Stay up, go down, stay up, go down. He realises that he is losing the ability to think clearly. Dying will sort out the Sharne case, if nothing else. He wonders if this is a kind of punishment, though that would be arrogant, thinking atmospheric pressure systems might be arranged in order to impact on his own life, and maybe the idiotic randomness is a more fitting punishment, but what is he being punished for? The rain has turned to hail. He can’t remember precisely what he has done wrong. Shit. He snags his foot on a stone and the pain is both intense and suspiciously far away. He looks down and sees that his ankle is heavily swollen.
♦
The owners? You didn’t want to think about them too much. The idea that all this belonged to someone else. The suspicion that a wealthy family had over-reached itself and had been forced to rent the family silver. They came in the summer and at Christmas, then packed their more personal possessions into a locked cupboard on the half-landing, a stuffed owl under a glass dome, a box of tarnished spoons in purple plush. There was a clipframe of thirty-one collaged Polaroids, fading like photos of hairstyles in a barber’s window, a student rowing eight hurling their cox into the Isis, a black retriever, Barbours and pearls, court shoes and ironed rugby shirts, faces rhyming from picture to picture, the plump girl with the laugh and the Charlie’s Angels hair, the ginger man thickening over the years, playing tennis, posing in front of a Stalinist carbuncle in some Eastern European capital. But the London flat had been burgled during their last stay so they’d left in a hurry forgetting to lock the cupboard.
♦
Alex jogs down the staircase wearing his running clothes and a woolly hat and his luminous yellow cycling jacket. Benjy closes the cupboard quickly, thinking he will be in trouble but Alex doesn’t take any notice because he’s going out for a run in the pouring rain. See you later, Smalls. Benjy waits until the front door bangs behind him and gently lifts the glass-domed owl out of the dusty dark. He is instantly in love with it. Serendipitously, he has already chosen a name for the owl he would have if he were a character in Harry Potter. Tolliver. This is Tolliver. He imagines writing, Dear Pavel…, rolling the paper tight as a cigarette, binding it with red ribbon and giving it to Tolliver who takes it in his sharp little beak and lifts his wide white wings and rises from the sill of the open window, the whole sky full of criss-crossing owls, knitting together a world of which muggles remain utterly unaware.
♦
How eloquently houses speak, of landscape and weather, of builders and families, of wealth, fears, children, servants. Hunkering in solitude or squeezed upwards by the pressure of their neighbours, proudly facing the main road or turning towards 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 kerb. 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.