by Rosie Price
“Apparently she didn’t want him to spend it all on alcohol,” he told Kate. “I think it was supposed to be an act of kindness, but it just comes across as kind of merciless.”
“Shit,” Kate said. “No wonder he’s been struggling so much. Poor Rupert.”
Max didn’t say anything for a while. They were walking along the ridge of the common between Bisley and Randwick; he was scuffing stones with his shoes. “Maybe,” he said eventually, “I’m wondering if maybe she was going to change it back and then she didn’t. Maybe she was upset, he’d just crashed his car and he was drinking too much. I remember how sensitive she was, on her eightieth birthday, when she thought he was drinking again. So she thought she’d just—” He drew his hand across his neck, made a garroting noise.
“Not just money? He was cut out of the house as well?”
“Everything,” Max said. “Money, house, all the art.”
“That’s harsh.”
Max shrugged. “It is. And clearly it didn’t have the effect she wanted it to. If anything it’s made him worse.”
“Definitely,” Kate said. “I can definitely see how it would make him worse.”
“Tough love,” Max said. “Different generation.”
“Is that really an excuse, though?”
“I don’t see the point in being angry with her,” Max said, a little more bluntly than he had intended. They stopped next to a bench. Max looked at it, considered sitting down, but then kept on walking. “My parents aren’t really helping, in the way they’re reacting. Dad just wants to throw money at the problem. And Mum, well, she kind of indulges Rupert. Going over there with groceries, taping numbers to his fridge and his bathroom mirror. Wants him to call whenever he needs to.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Yes and no. It’s good that he knows we care, but I can’t help but think if he really wants to get better, he’ll just get better.”
They’d reached the car park at the edge of the common. Zara was coming to pick Max up and had offered Kate a lift home.
“I don’t know if that’s how it works,” Kate said now, careful not to be too forceful, reminding herself that if Max wasn’t quite making sense it was because he was in the middle of it all, confused and angry. “It’s an illness, not a choice.”
“Hm,” Max said. “That’s exactly what my mum says.” He got out his phone, held it up for a signal in case Zara had texted, and Kate didn’t say anything else.
* * *
—
William was glad that Max had come to see the house: he wanted his son to be involved in his plans, to feel that he had a stake. After Rupert had spiraled, and once William had realized—too late—what the full consequences of his mother’s actions would be, there was a small part of him that wanted to take a match to Bisley House and all it had come to represent about his family. Stronger than this impulse, though, was his desire to regain ownership of the place that had for decades been his safe harbor—from boarding school as a child and university as a teenager, every Christmas thereafter—and in which his most precious memories had been formed. To Alasdair he had revealed none of this, but had said only that he wanted to “sort through” the house, in response to which Alasdair, who was still thinking seriously about selling, had begun looking enthusiastically into hiring a dumpster.
As soon as Max left and Alasdair arrived, however, it became clear to both brothers that their immediate exercise was an emotional one. The house’s rooms and corridors were contested zones to be taken into the territory of whichever of them was able to prove a greater claim. The experience of trauma, either psychological or physical, carried the most weight in the unspoken hierarchy, so that the concrete step upon which William had lost three and a half of his baby teeth afforded him reign over the wine cellar and all it contained, the red wine symbolic of his childhood sacrifice when, at the age of six, he had hurled himself screaming up the cellar stairs with blood streaming down his neck and soaking into the starched collar of his school shirt, causing the housekeeper to faint. Alasdair had afterward questioned the business acumen of a tooth fairy that rewarded his younger brother’s clumsiness over his own age and experience: a question that culminated in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with said tooth fairy a down payment on his remaining molars.
The spare room, in which Alasdair had lost his virginity at the age of fifteen and three-quarters during a party thrown by the brothers (when Bernadette and Gregor had naively vacated their home for Hogmanay in Edinburgh one New Year’s Eve) and in which Alasdair had suffered the intense trauma of having to comfort his then girlfriend Felicity, who wouldn’t stop crying after she’d bled on the peach-trimmed floral bedsheets, became unquestionably Alasdair’s domain, leaving him well within his rights to strip it of its peach soft furnishings, to unscrew the writing bureau and carry it down to the hallway where he would have it collected and driven back up to his flat in Fulham.
The only rooms considered off-limits were Bernadette’s and Rupert’s. Though the latter had not been inhabited for decades now, William was surprised to find that this was the best-preserved of the three boys’ bedrooms: still the curtains Bernadette had sewn for Rupert herself out of spaceship-patterned cotton, whose edges had been bleached by years of exposure to weak summer sunlight; still the celestial stickers on the ceiling above the bed; still the rickety shelves on the far walls and the broken spines of yellowed books. Alasdair’s and William’s rooms retained few of their original features, by contrast, the single beds having been replaced by doubles, the patterned curtains with dark blue velvet drapes. William wondered how it was possible, despite everything, that his brother could have lain down on this bed, looking up at what was left of his stickered solar system, and concluded that their mother loved him the least.
9
The summer Rupert took his overdose, Lewis had never been in better shape. When he first started working as a doctor it had been all too tempting to try to survive the ten-day runs of fourteen-hour shifts and nights in the hospital on a diet of energy drinks and doughnuts. But Lewis knew the damage such a lifestyle would do to his physique, and corpulence was an inferior state of being that he was not willing to accept, particularly not in his prime of life. While others in his year had spiraled into a cycle of caffeine and sugar, Lewis had been going to the gym six times a week where, for an hour at a time, he maintained eye contact with himself in the mirrored walls as he sweated over iron bars, sandbags, and kettlebells, transforming his body from good into excellent shape. Lewis was a determined man. Once he decided he wanted something, there was little that could stand in his way, and his regime did not just constitute lifting but also cardio in the mornings, high-intensity workouts, plyometrics, and a diet high in lean white meat, leafy vegetables, and egg whites, and low in carbohydrate and flavor. Lewis thought of himself as an exceptional cook and worked under the misapprehension that if he smothered the pale flesh of a chicken breast in powdered spices, parching the already-dry meat of any moisture, and incinerated it under the grill for a full forty-five minutes, then it would taste good. He had nobody to tell him otherwise: Alasdair usually ate out, so he was free to enjoy his arid chicken breast and limp vegetables without criticism.
Lewis would have liked to have cooked more for his father, whose stomach had grown yet larger in recent years, and who found eating so strenuous that he often ran out of breath when tackling a particularly heavy meal. To some extent, Lewis knew that he had his father’s poor habits to thank for his high levels of self-discipline; without the memory of Alasdair in his white vest and checkered boxers bulldozing down the stairs at least once a week, stomach first and swearing, to extract his shirt from the laundry, he might not have taken up rugby at school, perhaps would not have had the incentive to join the gym when he started university, or to sign up for the five-a-side squad when he left at the age of twenty-four. Alasdair’s forehead sho
ne pink and permanently with sweat, he wheezed when he spoke, he never walked if he could take a cab, and he always ate either takeaways or in restaurants. It was at medical school during his first dissection classes, in which Lewis watched the blade of his scalpel slice through the thick yellow fat of his cadaver’s stomach, that it had first occurred to Lewis that his father might not live forever. He had always known that Alasdair’s robustness was a weakness rather than a strength, and though Lewis found it easy to dissociate from the many patients who passed through his care, he was occasionally struck by similarities in the anatomy, diet, or body-fat distribution of the occupants of the beds on his ward and that of his father.
“He’s got nobody to look after him,” Lewis had recently overheard Nicole say to her own father. What Lewis inferred from this was not his own inadequacy as a caring son, but the inadequacy of his mother for leaving, and of his father for failing to persuade her to stay. And, of course, Bernadette—peace be upon her—for being too self-absorbed to encourage her son to take better care of himself. But in the absence of any other suitable caregiver, Lewis was willing to step up and to treat his father to his signature breakfast dish: the kind of thing he would have made for the girl he’d been seeing if they went on another date or if she ever responded to his texts.
“What is this?” Alasdair said, sticking a spoon into the yogurt piled on his plate. “Müller Light?”
“They’re sweet potato pancakes with low-fat yogurt and blueberry and cinnamon compote,” said Lewis. He sprinkled a little extra cinnamon onto his own portion, bending down so he was eye level with the plate so he could observe as his masterpiece took its final form.
“Jesus Christ,” said Alasdair.
Lewis’s phone buzzed in his back pocket. The message was from Nicole: a photograph of William halfway up a ladder in what looked like the main hallway of Bisley House.
Tweedledum goes climbing, read the text. Lewis showed his father, who squinted at the photo.
“Tweedledum? Who’s that? Where’s Tweedledee?”
“William,” said Lewis. His father was missing the point. “They’re still at Bisley.”
“I don’t know how he has the time,” Alasdair said vaguely. “Doctors don’t work hard enough, clearly.”
“Are you going to start going more often?”
In reply, Alasdair grunted, expending a third of a bottle of maple syrup onto his pancakes.
“William’s always there,” Lewis persisted.
“William’s sentimental.”
“But it belongs to both of you.”
“Well,” Alasdair said, “I just can’t see how it will ever be worth the upkeep.” He wiped his chin with his hand, catching a watery dollop of yogurt that had slid from his pancake. “It’s been a lot of effort, and it’ll only get more expensive. It’s a fucking albatross. Look what it did to Rupert.”
Lewis ate the rest of his pancakes in silence. It didn’t seem fair that his father should be entitled to shut down a conversation in this way, and he rather envied the ease with which Alasdair had taken to weaponizing his own brother’s suicide attempt. He felt, not for the first time, as though he had been excluded from this particular tragedy. Sitting in the waiting room after Rupert was admitted, Lewis had found himself thinking about how it would have been if he was waiting for news on his own father. He would have known his role, he thought, if it was his father in the hospital bed: he would be at the center of the drama, other relatives gravitating around him, adjusting their own concern in appropriate proportion to his. But because it was Rupert, and not Alasdair, Lewis found he was frequently left out of the hushed conversations taking place around him. Even when it came to medical matters, Lewis’s expertise did not grant him access. At the vending machine he had found Max deep in conversation with one of the doctors who was looking after Rupert, but when Lewis had approached, the doctor had cleared his throat and stopped talking. Lewis had got a glass of water and gone back to the waiting room, where he’d sat by Nicole, who’d put her head on his shoulder.
In fact Nicole had been his only reliable confidante throughout the recent crisis. All news seemed to filter through William, and when Lewis was not kept updated, Nicole would text or phone and tell him the latest. Lewis heard about Bernadette’s will via Nicole, before Alasdair had got round to explaining what had happened, and about the details of Rupert’s overdose, and even about the growing antagonism between Bernadette and her youngest son in the months before her heart attack.
* * *
—
Nicole’s birthday was at the end of the summer, the last Saturday of August, and she’d invited Lewis to the barbecue she was having at her parents’ house to celebrate. As he walked from the Tube through the park, the air was thick with barbecue and cigarette smoke from the picnickers littering themselves across the grass. At this point in the summer the flesh on show was less pale than it was in late spring, but it was softer and paunchier after holiday indulgence. Some people never tanned, but just layered burn on burn: especially unappealing on the women wearing tight cutoff shorts and sleeveless tops that exposed their dimpled upper arms. Lewis had his sunglasses on and so was free to look at the bodies of the women sprawled on the grass, sedated by an afternoon of lager and sun. He liked to look.
Nicole had asked him to bring something for the barbecue, and in the chilled aisle of the supermarket, Lewis considered his options. Strictly, he should only be eating lean meat: chicken breast or, ideally but unseasonably, turkey. Perhaps a fillet steak, though even Lewis understood that it was a cuntish move to turn up at a barbecue with a fillet steak. But he deserved an indulgence. Chicken thighs, perhaps. Or ribs. Ribs would be a popular choice, and he liked to eat meat off the bone.
Lewis had forgotten how brightly lit Latimer Crescent was in summer. The door was open, and downstairs the walls of the living room were lined from floor to ceiling with deep, white bookcases. On the glass table were heavy art books, fashion magazines, a few of which had Zara on the cover or mentioned in the headline. Ribs had been a good choice: hazardous to the white walls, the cream sofas, the clean double-page spreads of those magazines. He only wished he’d brought more sauce. He went out through the conservatory to the back garden, which had been filled with thick white candles on silver dishes, and at the far end of which was a large barbecue.
Nicole had told him six, so he’d arrived at six, but as soon as he went outside he saw that he was early—there was hardly anybody there. It was an irritating quirk of Nicole’s friendship group that they never seemed to arrive anywhere on time; but he felt his prompt arrival marked him as an insider, as family. Nicole was standing next to the barbecue with Max and a girl Lewis recognized as the friend he had given a lift to, the one he had assumed was Max’s girlfriend. Max was bending over and blowing on the coals while the girl looked on.
“You came,” Nicole said, and he hugged her with one arm, holding the bag of ribs away from her. She was wearing a black dress that was cut off at the tops of her thin arms. Lewis had always been impressed by how well Nicole looked after herself; she had a tan and clearly had not spent her entire summer climbing the attics of Bisley House. She looked a little tired, though, not quite as determinedly energetic as she had been on the phone a few days earlier.
“Do you know Kate?” she said now.
Lewis nodded but didn’t say anything. Max was sending up plumes of ash and Kate was laughing. There was an empty bottle of wine on the table; they had started drinking a while ago. Without saying anything, Lewis leaned past Max and slid the vent on the front of the barbecue open.
“Shit, Lewis,” said Max, “and you brought us food. You’re my favorite guest so far.”
“Oh, thanks,” Kate said, shoving Max playfully. She smiled at Lewis.
“You need to be careful,” Max said to her, blowing on the coals again. Fueled by the oxygen Lewis had let in, they were beginnin
g to glow red. “If you don’t step up your game I’m renting your room out to Lewis instead.”
“You’re a snake,” Kate said.
“You’re living together?” Lewis said abruptly.
“We will be, in September. If Kate works out how to stop being so fucking insufferable,” said Max. They were drunk and showing off, insulting one another to show him how close they were. Kate shoved Max again and this time he stumbled, crashing into the edge of the table where Lewis had just put his ribs.
Nicole was looking at Max with a mixture of amusement and disdain. “It’s you who needs to be vetoed, Max,” she said. “I vote we give Lewis your room.”
Lewis had not known that Max and Nicole were moving in together, and though he laughed along with Nicole, he didn’t look at Kate. He would have moved in with them if they’d asked him. Probably he had been right: Kate and Max were fucking, or at least Max wanted to fuck her—for this, Lewis couldn’t blame him.
It wasn’t long before people started arriving: Nicole’s friends in large, impenetrable groups, and a few outsiders who gravitated to where Max had started grilling. Lewis stood near him with a beer, watching as he started cooking the ribs he had brought: the grill hadn’t been quite hot enough when he’d put them on. When the sauce started dripping down into the coals, hissing and turning black, Lewis took the tongs from his cousin and started shuffling the ribs, lifting them from where they’d begun to droop down between the bars so he could rectify the damage Max had done. But as soon as Lewis took over Max disappeared, leaving him there to manage the meat.
From here, Lewis could see Kate over the other side of the garden, talking with her arms folded to a man he didn’t recognize, looking far less comfortable than she had been with Max. She was wearing light blue jeans, tight, with a rip above the knee, and a top that showed her arms, which were freckled in the sun. Her nose, too, was freckled, but the freckles were obscured a little by her makeup. He liked her clothes, the jeans made her look younger than she was, like a nineteen-year-old on holiday with her family. He liked her eyes, too. They were intelligent. Probably, she was intelligent, in a naive kind of way; “bright” was the word his father used when describing the women he worked with or female friends of Lewis’s who were not especially attractive.