by Rosie Price
When it wasn’t too cold and she wasn’t working, Alison spent her time in the tiny shed on the patch of grass at the back of their house. She had been taking pottery and sculpting classes for the last six or so years, initially at Kate’s suggestion, and believed the sculpting had been part of what had helped her to stop drinking. She had now been almost entirely sober for three years: it was far easier not to drink, she’d once told Kate, now that she had found a way of expressing herself. Kate, who’d still been at school at the time, had looked at the stricken plaster face Alison had been working on, its mouth gaping open in a silent scream, and had wondered with alarm what exactly it was she was trying to say.
* * *
—
Seeing her daughter at the end of every term reminded Alison of how she used to feel when Kate came back from staying with her father. After the marriage broke down and he moved to Devon, Kate had gone to stay for weekends, for whole weeks over half-term, and she had always returned with a different inflection in her voice, with a smarter pair of jeans or new trainers, and interests to which Alison had no means of catering. David’s house was near the sea, and for a while Kate had got into surfing, wearing tight cropped T-shirts and baggy cutoff trousers that showed the braided anklet her father had bought for her one weekend in the summer. But even before Kate began to visit him less frequently Alison could see that this was a phase, just as the guitar had been, and the desire to play the drums—which, despite Kate’s double-pronged attack, both parents had refused to provide—and when, on weeknights, Kate got into her pajamas and sat on the sofa with her mother to watch MasterChef, Alison knew that none of these passions would be definitive, that each was just an experiment in identity.
But the changes in Kate after she had met Max felt more substantial. This was not just to do with clothing, or how she spent her time—though she had started dressing differently, in baggy T-shirts and gold hoops and branded sweatshirts—but with her demeanor. When she got back from their holiday to France at the end of their first year, she kept her phone either in her pocket or a few inches away, and she seemed to be constantly in correspondence with him. She had hinted at but not explained what was going on with Max’s family, and though sometimes she shared with Alison their less personal exchanges—articles from American periodicals, short films and essays, music by which Alison was baffled—whenever Alison asked about the artist or the writer, Kate snatched back her phone and answered only in short sentences. Though Kate had agreed to come to pottery classes with her mother, she ignored the directions of their teacher and instead started to paint one of the bowls Alison had thrown a few sessions ago while warming up the wheel. Kate sat with her shoulders hunched, the sleeves of her white T-shirt rolled up to the tops of her arms. Her hair was tied away from her face, and she was frowning as she concentrated on the delicate blue pattern she was painting around the bowl’s rim.
“It looks lovely,” Alison told her.
“It looks shit,” said Kate, holding up the bowl. “It’s supposed to be this pattern we saw in the South of France.”
* * *
—
Kate came home for Easter of her second year with a subscription to Sight & Sound and a new pair of Nikes. Alison decided to ask her if Max was coming to stay in Bisley. She had ascertained that his grandmother owned the large house just over the other side of the valley.
“No,” Kate said. “He’s away.”
“Have you been to the house?”
“No,” Kate said bluntly, which Alison took to mean that she had not been invited.
“He’s welcome here anytime, you know. We can make up the sofa bed.”
“Thanks,” Kate said, before softening a little. “I don’t know when he’ll next be in Gloucestershire. Maybe I should ask Claire to come over. I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Have I been annoying?”
“No comment,” said Alison.
Claire arrived after dinner with a four-pack of fruit cider and a spare pair of underwear. “In case I get too pissed to drive,” she said, waving them, when Alison opened the door. Alison always appreciated Claire’s refreshing lack of subtlety when it came to the subject of her former alcoholism.
“They’ll help you sober up, will they, love?”
“No, Mum,” Kate said, from the kitchen doorway, “obviously they’re so she can stay over.”
“That was a joke,” Alison said, with only moderate exasperation.
Kate shut the door to the kitchen and they sat at the table, talking and drinking.
“I’m supposed to be revising again,” Kate said to Claire.
“Aren’t you just bored with having to do work?” Claire said. “I would be by now. Jesus, you’ve got a whole other year.”
“Two,” Kate said. “And a bit. I’ve got a year abroad next year.”
“This is exactly why I didn’t go to university.”
Claire had instead taken a promotion from waitress to bar manager at a local pub. She was doing a course in hospitality management and had never expressed disappointment about her decision. But whenever Kate talked about university, she was always careful to focus on the negatives—on the abundance of privilege, the overload of work, the stress—more than the things she valued.
“You were wise,” Kate said wryly.
“How’s your mate?” Claire said.
“Max?”
“The one with the drunk uncle.”
“The Drunkle.” Kate, laughing at her own joke, got out her phone. “I can’t believe I haven’t come up with that already. I need to tell Max.”
“Is that maybe a bit insensitive?”
“He won’t mind. He’s got a dark sense of humor.”
“Humor is a defense mechanism.”
Kate put down her phone. “His family are all kind of repressed,” she said. “So I suppose that makes sense. Apart from the mum. She’s a filmmaker, did I tell you?”
“You did,” Claire said. “Several times.”
“Oh. Well. She’s the exception. As far as I can tell she’s the one trying to get everyone to open up. Not sure how well that’s going.”
“Max talks to you, though, right? Because of—” Claire nodded her head in the direction of the closed door.
“Yeah, he does,” said Kate, her tone casual. “I’m not really sure if he talks to anybody else, though.”
Since Rupert’s car crash, Max had become less elusive about his uncle’s addictions, and his family generally. Kate remembered what he had said the year before, about being used to people feeling as though they had ownership of his mother, and she had been careful, since then, to give Max far more than she took. And there was a lot she could give: despite what Claire had just said, Kate knew humor was the way through Max’s defenses. Whenever he was in danger of withdrawing, or keeping private whatever mishap Rupert had most recently brought on himself, she knew how to put him back at ease, to make him feel as though whatever disaster might have taken place was instead a minor, passing calamity. When Rupert had slipped and fallen down the concrete steps outside his building, when he’d been found wandering down Albert Bridge Road in the early hours of a cold December morning, when he’d sliced open an artery in his hand breaking through the window of his own flat, Kate was always on the other end of the phone. Even though Claire might not have realized it, she herself had always done the same for Kate when Kate’s own mother was in the grip of her addiction.
“Do you remember sitting here,” Kate said now, “when I got my offer letter? The neighbors came over, you screamed so loudly.”
“Oh, shit, I do remember.”
Kate drank from her cider. Claire never went to the effort of trying to hide her emotions, and once she’d stopped screaming she’d burst into tears. Alison, who did not cry but whose eyes had glittered, had hidden a bottle of champagne at the back of the fridge just in case the news
was good. She’d opened the bottle with an expertly soft pop: it had been the only time either girl had seen Alison drink in the last three years, and she had sipped a careful quarter glass in the time Claire and Kate took to finish the rest of the bottle.
“That was a good day,” Kate said. She felt guilty, now, about shutting the door, and she leaned across and opened it just an inch.
5
Max had missed Easter in Bisley House that year because he’d gone with his mother and sister to southern Italy. Zara had been consulting on a film there and had managed to get a room for Nicole and Max covered by expenses. He had spent most of the week by the pool, he told Kate over FaceTime when he got back, and hadn’t done any of the work he was supposed to.
“So there’s that,” he said. He was sitting in his kitchen; behind him Kate could make out a tall silver fridge and a cream wall. “And Granny’s cross I wasn’t there with her, but then she’s always cross about something. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Kate said. “A bit sick of home, and I keep being horrible to my mum, I don’t know why.”
“That can happen sometimes,” Max said. “How long have we got left?”
“A whole week.”
“Is it only a week?” He was turning to look at something on the wall, out of view. “You should come and stay.”
“In Bisley?”
“No.” Max pulled a face. “I’ve been exiled for missing Holy Week. Come to London.”
“To your house?”
“Yes! And bring some work as well. I should do some of that.”
“OK,” said Kate. She couldn’t stop herself from grinning into the camera. “When? I’ll look at trains.”
“Great, wait, no, don’t get the train. My cousin can drive you, he’s over at Bisley. Let me find out when he’s going back to London. I’ll text you.”
He messaged that afternoon to tell Kate that Lewis could give her a lift the following day. Kate gave Max the postcode and waited for Lewis outside her mother’s terraced house, with a bottle of water, her backpack, and a suitcase full of books. She couldn’t tell whether she had equipped herself for a school trip or a romantic mini-break; perhaps, perversely, it was both.
Lewis drove a red Golf with a low, growling engine. He was better-looking than she had expected: a square jaw, straight nose. He had short, sandy hair and his face was clean-shaven. The windows were down—it was one of the first warm evenings of the year—and Lewis stayed in his seat, one of his hands on the steering wheel, the other on his phone, as he waited for her to get in the car. Kate struggled with her suitcase, heaving it into the boot, and got into the passenger seat.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” said Kate.
Lewis took Kate’s backpack from her lap and put it on the back seat. As she buckled her seat belt, he pulled away from the curb and turned down the hill back through the center of Randwick, whose red-brick buildings and rust-faded cars made Kate feel embarrassed.
“Thanks for coming to collect me,” said Kate.
Lewis said nothing, but leaned across her, and reached into the glove box, searching with one hand while he kept the other on the wheel. Kate leaned back to make room for him. He was wearing a black T-shirt, the sleeve of which rode up a little to show the muscle of his upper left arm as he reached over her. He found what he was looking for: a cable, which he plugged into the stereo at one end and his phone at the other, while they waited at the traffic light at the bottom of town.
“My price,” he said, passing Kate his phone and reciting his passcode. “You have to keep me entertained.”
Kate didn’t mind choosing the music, particularly since it meant they didn’t have to speak. Lewis seemed like the kind of person who would put the conversational burden on whomever he was with; the kind of man who said things like “tell me something interesting about yourself.” As they turned onto the motorway Lewis closed the windows and turned up the music. He was driving quickly, but that seemed appropriate to the mood and the music, to the fresh spring evening. Kate chose not to feel anxious whenever he had to slam on the brakes, but forty miles from London Lewis reached behind his seat with one hand and, after a moment or two of rooting around in what sounded like a box of ice, retrieved a bottle of beer from the cooler he had stashed there.
“Open this?” he said.
“What, for you?” said Kate.
“Oh, yeah,” said Lewis, not looking at Kate but glancing in the rearview mirror. “There’s probably enough for you to have a couple too.”
“You can’t drink while you’re driving.”
Lewis shrugged. “I’ll open it, then,” he said, positioning the neck of the bottle in the corner of his mouth between his straight, white teeth.
Kate, who had once had to go to the hospital with Max after he’d attempted to open a beer with his teeth and had bitten off the neck of the bottle, slicing open his gum and one side of his lip, grabbed Lewis’s before he had a chance to bite down.
“Fucking hell,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
So Lewis drank, and he drove, and Kate, defeated, drank more, as if sobriety were a question of context. By the time they reached the M25 she had relinquished her anxieties, content in the perfect powerlessness of the passenger seat. In fact, Kate liked Lewis. He didn’t have Max’s warmth, but his reticence made her feel that it was important he should like her. He did use the word cunt more than was comfortable. Somewhere outside Swindon, Kate thought about calling him out on it with a joke she’d once heard.
“Utter cunt,” Lewis said, overtaking a lorry that was sitting in the middle lane. Kate heard the voice of her old Spanish teacher, who she’d stayed in touch with after leaving school: “He’s neither warm nor deep enough to be called a cunt,” she had said serenely, her soft accent draining the word of any threat. But Lewis had already cut back in front of the lorry, which receded in the wing mirror, and she thought the joke would be lost on him.
* * *
—
She did not tell Lewis that this was the first time she had been to Max’s house, but she knew they must be getting close when he turned off the main road they had taken into London, and then again onto an even smaller road that curved round into Latimer Crescent. The houses here were large and white-fronted, the road lined with magnolia trees whose large pink petals had not yet fallen to the pavement where they would later turn to mulch in the rain. The cars here were all Mercedes or BMWs or Porsches, parked in gated driveways. Kate leaned forward a little in her seat, trying to guess which was Max’s house. Lewis parked and sat in the driver’s seat looking at his phone.
“I’ll be there in a second,” he said to Kate.
Kate, who had been waiting for him to get out so she could follow him to the right house, unbuckled her seat belt. “I can’t remember which number it is.”
Lewis looked up at her now, then nodded in the direction of the house closest to them.
“The buzzer’s on the gate,” he said.
“Right.”
Kate had not met Nicole before, but she knew as soon as she opened the door that she was Max’s sister: she had his thin wrists, green-gray eyes, the same warm skin tone. Nicole looked past Kate to see where Lewis’s car was, ignoring the large dog that skittered past her and hurled himself at her guest. Kate crouched down, holding his scruff as his tongue flailed toward her mouth.
“Is this Titus?” Kate said.
“Yes, he’s a terror really. Did Lewis drive you?” she asked. “Did he manage not to crash?”
“Just about,” Kate said.
Nicole stepped back into the hallway. “I can’t get in the car with him. Gives me anxiety. You’re Kate, right?”
“Yes. You’re Nicole.”
Nicole showed Kate into the kitchen, which was bigger than it had looked on Max’s camera: a large, high-ceilinged room with
a large iron range and a marble island, in the middle of which stood a large bunch of fresh-cut flowers, peonies and white roses.
“Such pretty flowers. Is it somebody’s birthday?”
“Someone Mum worked with,” Nicole said, waving her hand. “Max is somewhere.” She looked back out onto the road. “Is Lewis coming in?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kate said, glancing behind her at the front door.
“So rude.” Nicole went outside, and Kate heard Lewis’s voice a few minutes later, the sound of footsteps going upstairs, and Nicole shouting Max’s name again. There were no other sounds in the house, so she supposed that Zara and William were out. It seemed slightly absurd, she realized, that she still had Zara’s number saved from that emergency phone call last summer, and she felt suddenly conscious of the contrast between her battered backpack and her worn trainers against Zara’s immaculately tiled floor.
“Kate!” A door at the far end of the kitchen burst open, and Max came in, wearing gym kit and headphones. He grabbed her, pulling her into a sweaty hug. “You’re here,” he said.
Kate pushed him off. “I’ll hug you when you’re less disgusting. Have you been running?”
“Gym,” Max said. He stepped back and, unabashed, sniffed his underarm. “What’s the time? Can we have wine yet?”
After dinner, Max put Kate in the spare room opposite his. She slept deeply and drunkenly, but the wine had been good and in the morning she woke with only the slightest of headaches. She took a long shower in the shared bathroom. There was no lock on the door, but the water was hot and the jet was powerful, and Kate felt so unusually at ease with the possibility that she might at any point be interrupted that she stayed standing under the spray until the mirror had completely steamed up.
It was while Max was making elaborate pancakes that Zara—who had got back late the night before—came downstairs, wearing a long cream dressing gown and with her hair loose around her shoulders. Kate found herself sitting up a little straighter when Zara came into the kitchen, half expecting to have to reintroduce herself, but she leaned down and kissed Kate on both cheeks, asked her if she’d slept well in the spare room. She smelt of moisturizer and powder.