by Rosie Price
“I put out new pillows—did Max change them? The others were very old, I’m sure William and I had them when we moved here. Max, did you give Kate the new pillows?”
“Uh,” said Max. He was pouring thick batter carefully from a mixing bowl into a butter-saturated frying pan.
“I’m sorry,” Zara said. “It must have been so uncomfortable. Make sure he changes them for you.”
“I slept well, honestly. I was exhausted.”
Zara sat down with Kate at the breakfast table. “How is your mother?” Zara said.
“She’s fine,” Kate said, only a little disconcerted by Zara’s familiar tone, which made her feel as though she ought to have something more to offer. She added: “She’s working. I think the routine is helping her.”
“I’m sure she’s loved having you home,” said Zara, nodding.
“I think I’ve probably been a bit of a nightmare,” Kate said.
“Nonsense. She’ll have loved having you there, and here we are, stealing you away. Now, what work do you have to do? I’d say you can use my office but I’m afraid I have a deadline. Your exams are next week?”
“Not for another month, actually,” Kate said.
“And you’re revising already? You’ll have forgotten everything in a month.”
“I’ve promised Kate we’ll work,” Max said. “It was a condition of her coming to stay.”
“I don’t mind,” Kate said hurriedly.
“Well,” said Zara, standing up and adjusting the tie of her dressing gown, “if you can possibly tear yourself away from your books, there’s an exhibition you must go and see.”
* * *
—
Now that they were both here in London, it seemed unfeasible that they should study. Apart from their holiday in France, it was the first significant stretch of time Kate and Max had spent together outside of term. From her first morning she knew that this time—in which Max’s family passed in and out of the house, too absorbed by their own routines to be fazed by Kate’s presence—was precious. On their second night, Max gave her a tour of his neighborhood, taking her to a Greek restaurant at the end of his road where they drank ouzo and he laughed into his menu while the waiter tried to flirt with Kate. On the third night, they headed to a bar in Soho where Max overrode Kate’s embarrassment at the cost of the bottle they’d bought—the cheapest on the menu—by insisting that he’d drunk more than twice what she had and picking up the whole bill himself.
“You can get a bottle for us on the way back,” he said, as if it were in any way comparable. “There’s a corner shop by the Tube.”
In the mornings they ate pastries and drank coffee, sitting at the kitchen island, listening to music and talking until long after their mugs had grown cold. Each of the family members would come downstairs in turn and make themselves breakfast: cereal for Zara, an English muffin for William, and a kale smoothie for Nicole, who didn’t seem to want to go back to her flat in Camden.
“Why are you still here?” said Max to his sister on the third morning, as if he had only just noticed that she was living there.
“I’m avoiding Josh.”
Nicole had decided that she was breaking up with her boyfriend, but their lease didn’t end until September, so in the meantime, instead of telling him that she was no longer in love with him, she had decided to disappear for days at a time without explanation. Max asked his sister coyly whether her appearance at Latimer Crescent had anything to do with the fact that it was nearly the end of the month, a few days before payday, but was ignored.
In place of studying Max and Kate held film screenings in the first-floor living room of the house, which contained a six-seater sofa and the projector that had replaced the older one Max had installed in his first-year room. The image on this screen was bolder and sharper than the one Kate and Max were used to, and speakers surrounded the linen sofa. Now that Kate saw what Max was used to, their grainy projector seemed far less extravagant than when he’d first set it up. On their last night, once they’d worked their way through the films they’d been studying, Kate suggested that they watch L’Accusé.
“Do you ever think about making films?” she said, as they waited for it to load. “You and Zara could be the next Coppolas.”
Max shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s as fun as it looks.”
Momentarily, Kate regretted putting L’Accusé on. But it was not long before Max paused the film and rewound it.
“I love this shot,” Max said. “It’s so intense. Look at the way the camera stays on her while she watches him.”
Lucille’s face filled the screen: she was eating spaghetti Bolognese, little pieces of minced beef and tomato flecking her chin as she sucked tubes of spaghetti between her lips, watching her lover across the dinner table. Max sat forward in his chair, silhouetted against the blue and red light, and Kate said nothing, not wanting to disrupt his concentration. In that moment the door to the living room swung open, and the lights came on.
“No,” Max said, waving his hand at his father, who stood in the doorway. “We just started watching.”
“Max,” William said. His voice sounded unnaturally steady. “Will you pause it, just for a moment? It’s your grandmother.”
6
On the way to Bisley William listened to repeats of a panel show Max had downloaded onto the car’s stereo. Though he was only distantly aware of the voices of the panelists and the applause of the studio audience, once or twice he heard himself laughing at a joke he would not have been able to recount if anybody had asked him what was so funny. Thoughts surfaced and sank: the conversations he’d had with his mother over Easter about Rupert; her disappointment that Nicole and Max had gone to Italy instead of coming to stay; her complaints of heart palpitations. William knew that for years Bernadette had been fabricating ailments that would justify twice-monthly visits to Dr. Woodfine, who had kind eyes and was rumored to be a distant relation of the Windsors, but her long-standing hypochondria did not assuage his guilt. There was little hope of recovery. William, himself a doctor, knew that the ambulance, the attempts at resuscitation, were only nominal. In his professional life, he had always thought it a cruelty to draw out a life when it had reached its natural end, but nonetheless he drove at an anxious speed, praying to Bernadette’s God that he would reach Bisley before she was declared dead.
When Alasdair arrived that evening, William had just got back from the hospital. They ate dinner together—a ravioli dish Bernadette’s housekeeper had made and refrigerated in a Tupperware labeled with today’s date—and Alasdair chose wine from the cellar. As they drank their way through the first bottle of red, the two brothers began to talk instead of their father, who had always been amused by Bernadette’s hypochondria. The irony surrounding her unexpected death would have delighted the man who had once convinced his wife that oregano, a distant relation of marijuana, could cause psychosis if consumed in excessive quantities.
“He would have been glad that she didn’t see it coming,” William said to his brother. “She was always so afraid of death.”
Rupert arrived the next day. He’d lost his license after his car accident, so William picked him up from the station and the three of them read through the will. Afterward, Rupert took a long walk around the grounds, leaving his brothers with the family lawyer. When they were finished, William went outside to find Rupert, who was sitting on the wall at the top of the garden, smoking. William sat down next to his brother but couldn’t think of anything to say that would comfort him.
The time between death and burial was filled with administration: William and Alasdair took meetings with their accountant, William booked the parish church for the funeral, and Alasdair negotiated caterers’ fees. They took turns fielding calls from Dr. Woodfine, who was trying, without integrity, to establish whether he was about to be sued for profess
ional negligence.
At the funeral reception Max sat with Rupert. They were both drunk, but Rupert more so: he was holding on to a glass of the free bar’s Scotch as if it were the only thing keeping him upright. Max sympathized. He and Lewis had been among Bernadette’s pallbearers, and when they’d stepped through the doors of the church and the Requiem Mass had started to play, his shoulders had tensed beneath the weight of the coffin and, for the first time, he had understood that Bernadette was really dead. Now, though, at the bar with Rupert, he was fully subsumed by his bereavement, free to wallow without being taken by surprise.
“I missed Easter,” he said to his uncle. “I knew she would be upset, but I still missed it.”
“She was a very sensitive woman,” Rupert said, shaking his head and swilling his glass. The movement was too vigorous, and he slipped a little on his stool. He paused, and righted himself, before he spoke again, and Max did not notice the look Rupert had of biting something back. “She tended to take things to heart.”
Rupert was drunk the next morning, too, and came down to breakfast wearing Gregor’s silk dressing gown tied loosely around his thin waist. He stood swaying by the Aga, peering into the bowl of eggs collected that morning by William.
“Did you know,” Rupert said, turning to face the kitchen table, “that if you squeeze an egg like this”—he held the egg at both ends—“you can’t break it. But if you squeeze it this way”—he laid the egg flat on his palm now and closed his fingers around it—“it will…” He squeezed as tightly as he could, screwing up his eyes as he did so, and they waited for the crack—but the egg remained whole. The noise of William pushing his chair back jolted Rupert, so that he swung his arm down and smashed the egg against the edge of the worktop. The yolk split, dribbling between his fingers as he lifted his hand, bemused. Zara was instantly at his side with a tea towel in her hand, and she wiped his fingers as she would a child’s, while Max and Nicole looked on. Nicole bit her lip and caught her mother’s eye; Zara shook her head gently. William stood halfway between the table and the counter, momentarily paralyzed.
“Have you showered?” Zara said. “Why don’t you have a shower? Come on, William will bring you some coffee.” She glanced round at her husband as she led Rupert from the kitchen. William walked slowly to the sink and put the kettle on, then he stood, his hands resting on the countertop, his head bowed, waiting for the water to boil.
* * *
—
After the funeral, Max returned to complete the final term of the year. During these weeks, he sat with Kate in the library while she passed him notes and helped him memorize them, lifted his head from his hands and made him tea even though he rarely drank it. Kate did not remember her own grandparents, three of whom had died before she was born, but she knew how close to Bernadette Max had been, and his childlike desire to uncover his memories of her—old photographs, letters, gifts she had given him that he had not wanted at the time but which now he treasured—was something Kate was careful to indulge. He was separated from his family, here, and Kate understood that she needed to be more than a friend to him. If she came home from the library late and saw that his light was still on, she would climb the stairs to his room and knock, and, just as she had done when they’d been together in France, she would clamber into bed with him and talk until he fell asleep.
“I just keep thinking that she died angry with me.”
“Surely she wouldn’t have actually been angry, would she?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “She was quite Old Testament, sometimes. One of my earliest memories is of her putting salt instead of sugar in my grandad’s coffee. He threw up on the drawing-room carpet.”
“She did that on purpose?”
“Apparently he didn’t vote for her roses in the Bisley Blooms Contest.”
“Wow.”
“So, she died with a wrath.”
“Well.” Kate paused. They were both looking up at the ceiling of Max’s room, arms tucked by their sides. “When people are gone it’s easy to romanticize them. But I think there is a value in being true to her memory.”
“If she was a cantankerous bitch, you mean?” Max was laughing now.
“I wouldn’t go that far. She’s gonna have friends in high places,” Kate said, pointing to the sky.
“Granny, mea culpa.” Max turned to Kate. “I’m tired. Can we watch something? Will you stay here and sleep?”
* * *
—
Apart from his grandfather, who had died when Max was twelve, Max had never lost anybody he’d been close to. The realization of loss arrived in small, unexpected waves: when Max found a shopping list in her handwriting at the bottom of a carrier bag, when the email address he had set up for her auto-filled on his phone, when old acquaintances of Bernadette’s got in touch through William. On one such occasion, when an automated subscription letter for Bernadette arrived at his parents’ house, Max took it to his father.
“For Granny,” he said solemnly, holding it out to him.
William, who was drinking coffee and reading the paper, looked at his son over the top of his glasses and took the letter. He turned it over and glanced at the addressee but didn’t open it.
“We should cancel that,” he said.
During the summer, Kate came up again to stay with Max in London. They would both be abroad for their third year, and because they had no work to do, the July and August days seemed simply to hollow out, each becoming indistinguishable from the next. They needed each other: she him, to escape the monotony of her life at home, as much as he her, and they filled those long days with afternoons on the sofa, curtains drawn against the sunlight, Max circling around Bernadette’s memory while Kate nudged him gently ever closer to accepting the loss of her.
For Kate, staying in Latimer Crescent had lost none of its charm. She loved the evenings when William would cook for them, when the five of them would eat together, Max and William quiet, Zara carrying the conversation, telling Kate anecdotes from the set that her husband and children had already heard countless times, while Kate listened intently. At home, Kate often ate on her knees in front of the television, and every day she was at Max’s house she could hardly wait until William started pouring out a bottle of wine and handing round snacks before dinner, which, in its formality, was more intimate than any of the meals Kate could remember experiencing with her own mother. Later, Max and Kate experimented with William’s drinks cabinet, inventing cocktails that were only occasionally superior to the cheap red wine they were used to drinking during term time. Max always peaked after the first couple of drinks; his skin flushing and his quick speech quicker still, his reminiscences becoming freer. Kate loved the story of the time he’d fallen from an apple tree in Bernadette’s garden and his grandmother had driven him in her Sunday best to the hospital.
“It was the only time I ever heard her swear,” Max said, smiling as he sat back on the sofa. “She wound down her window and told this woman that I was gravely wounded, and she needed to get out of the way so we could go to the hospital. Then she called her a whore as we were about to drive off, but the window needed winding back up with both hands so it took us ages to actually go anywhere.”
“I would’ve liked to have met her,” Kate said. “She sounds brilliant. And mad.”
“She would have loved you,” Max said.
Toward the end of the summer Max went back to Bisley House to help his father and Alasdair sort through Bernadette’s possessions. They pulled up into the drive, and Max found that he was expecting his grandmother to open the kitchen door. The house was still and quiet, and Max saw that the ivy had been stripped from the front wall, leaving fossil-like markings on the limestone. On the first afternoon, he walked to the apple tree and found the spot where Rupert had once helped him add his initials to those—Rupert’s, William’s, Alasdair’s, and Gregor’s—already on
the trunk. Later, he moved among the upstairs rooms of the house with a set of cardboard boxes into which he intended to organize both his grandmother’s possessions and all the constituent parts of his grief. His grief, though, lacked loyalty, and as he opened up her dressing table, her large oak wardrobe, and the embossed shoeboxes stacked against its back panel, it was not Bernadette he thought of but his grandfather, who had died eight years earlier. There was the razor Bernadette had kept in its leather case, whose red handle was engraved with Gregor Rippon’s initials, and which felt heavy in Max’s hand. He held up the razor, one side of his face reflected in its blade, and it occurred to him that he could not remember what his grandfather had looked like, much less whether he’d been clean-shaven or bearded.
“Just leave it in the cupboard,” said a voice behind him. Alasdair had been standing in the doorway. He had a black trash bag in his hand. “We’ll sort through the bedrooms later.”
7
Kate and Max had both applied to live in Paris for their third-year placements, but when the letters came only Kate had been accepted by the Sorbonne.
“I think it will be good,” Max said to her when he phoned to tell her that a university in Medellín had taken him at the last minute. “I think maybe I need some distance. And there won’t be many English speakers on the course, so at least I’ll get good at Spanish.”
Max was becoming frustrated by the accumulation of family silences around the death of Bernadette. For reasons he did not yet understand, his father had started to avoid mentioning his grandmother by name, and it was somehow impossible not to follow his lead: Bernadette’s car became the Polo, her house was now only ever Bisley House, her cherished art collection just a commodity.