by Rosie Price
The kitchen was a mess. On the marble kitchen island were plates of half-eaten food: overdressed salads, squashed burger patties and hummus that had developed a skin overnight. And drinks, drained mojitos with lime and brown sugar in the bottom of the glasses. Lime gone rancid in the heat of the morning. She hadn’t known lime could smell like that, sweet and rotten.
There was a clean pint glass in the cupboard and she filled it with water from the tap. The bag of ice they had bought last night was sitting in the sink, melted, so that the water had leaked out and the plastic was flattened among rind and bottle tops and cigarette papers. She sipped her water. Perhaps she should tidy. Or perhaps she should leave.
There were footsteps upstairs, the sound of a door slamming. Now was the time if she was going to get out of there. She wondered if it would be Lewis coming to find her. But it was William who came down the back stairs, neatly dressed and shaved, and found her there in the kitchen.
“You’re up,” he said. “Are you the only one?”
“I think so,” said Kate.
“Well,” he said. “Breakfast.”
He cleared a space for Kate at the kitchen table, and she helped him to load the dishwasher. He wiped down the table and she sat there, half in a patch of sunlight. William had showered already, he smelt fresh, and soapy. Kate tried to think of something she could say about Rupert: she had not seen William since he’d gone into the hospital. She wanted to apologize for the mess that had been made of his house, given what he was going through, but she couldn’t remember how to form sentences. He opened a window to let out the stale air and asked Kate if she wanted some coffee. She said that she did and, sensing that William wanted something to do, did not offer to help, but sat quietly as he took a fresh packet of coffee beans from the freezer and cut it open with scissors. He ground the beans, apologizing for the noise, and then packed them into the percolator.
“Shall we have some music?” he said. He gave her his iPod, an ancient, chunky thing in white plastic casing, and Kate was reminded of when she had been given that same responsibility, in the passenger seat of Lewis’s car as they’d driven to London two years earlier: that had been the first time she’d met him. She turned the wheel of the iPod; the percolator began to steam.
“Milk?” said William.
“Yes, please.”
William heated the milk in a saucepan, beating it with a little whisk which, he told Kate, he considered to be the most ingenious invention he had ever encountered. People spent thousands on these machines, he said, for steaming milk and for making espresso, and they had no idea that all they needed was this little whisk. William seemed to exist in a state of constant amazement, the world a source of unending fascination. It must be exhausting to live like that. By the time the coffee was made, Kate had still found nothing to listen to.
“There’s nothing here you like, I’m sure. It’s an old man’s music collection.” William poured Kate a cup of coffee and took the iPod from her, and she thought this was just about the kindest thing anybody had ever done. He put on an album by James Taylor, which Kate knew she would not have chosen, but which filled the kitchen with a mellow, calming sound. She drank her coffee and sat listening to the music as William fried bacon and eggs, singing flatly, and carried on tidying around her, rebuffing her attempts to help him. Breakfast was not a good idea, but it was too late now to refuse it, so when he put in front of her a plate of thin white toast, with the bacon and eggs, she armored herself with the knife and fork and began cautiously to move the food around her plate, careful not to breach the soft yolk. After the first mouthful, she realized how ravenously hungry she was, and the nausea she had woken with abated long enough for her to eat half of the egg and a piece of toast and two rashers of bacon.
“What time’s your train?” said William. In fact she had originally planned to stay another day, but William had just given her a way out.
“I’ll have to check the ticket. I think it’s open, so, any time.”
William looked at his watch. “Only eight o’clock. You’ll have to wait a while for the others to emerge. I gather it went on late last night?”
“I think so…but I might just go. I’ll see them all soon.”
Her shoes were where she had left them, at the bottom of the cream-carpeted stairs, and her jacket had been stuffed down the side of the sofa; but she couldn’t find her phone. It wasn’t in her bag or her jacket pocket. She was close to leaving without it, suddenly desperate to get out of the house, terrified that somebody other than William, who was so kind with his whisk and his toast, would come downstairs and find her there, as if she wasn’t supposed to be awake, standing, breathing. But William found it next to the white orchid on the shelf above the sink.
“This yours?” he said, passing her the phone.
“Yes, thank you. I must have left it there,” said Kate. “I went out for ice and must have forgotten it.”
“Oh, right, well, there you are.”
“I went out for ice with Lewis.”
Kate watched William for a reaction, waiting for him to read into this coded statement that which was unspeakable.
“Good,” said William vaguely. “It’s dead.”
She would charge the phone on the train, she said, though she knew her charger was upstairs in Max’s room and that she was not going back up there to collect it.
“Thank you for breakfast.”
“My pleasure. And I shall see you very soon at the flat.”
“You’ll have to come for dinner,” said Kate.
He let her out the front door and turned and went back inside before Kate was halfway up the driveway. Out on the street, she looked up at the windows. She didn’t know if Lewis had gone home last night or if he’d slept in one of the spare rooms. It was enough for her, for now, to imagine that he was enclosed within those four walls while she was out here, in the open air, on the road with her keys and with money in her purse, so that she could leave, she could disappear, while he stayed and slept.
12
Even if William had been looking for signs of disturbance, it was unlikely that he would have found anything strange about Kate’s mood that morning. He did not know her well enough to read the nuances of her behavior. Her sudden departure, her unease, the gravity of her silences as she labored over breakfast: none of this had struck him as particularly unusual. In fact her presence had hardly struck him at all, not least because he was that morning caught up in his own tumult.
Once Kate had left, he abandoned his attempt to clean up the kitchen, and took his coffee to the window seat. Zara would be back soon, at least—she had been away for two nights, at a screening in Maastricht—but still he felt unsettled. The excess of empty beer cans, the sticky smell of alcohol, the light dusting of white powder and loose rolling papers felt like an especially unwelcome invasion. There was a time when a little youthful recklessness would not have bothered William, but in the last year, and in the last two months especially, the excesses of intoxication appeared to him less innocent than they once had.
Last night William had gone for dinner with Alasdair. Rupert was supposed to be coming, too, but he’d canceled at the last minute. He was feeling tired, he’d said. William did not know how to get past the euphemism so he’d accepted it without prying further. He had thought, though, that his evening with Alasdair would at least begin with a conversation about how they both thought Rupert was holding up, or whatever other crudely architectural metaphor was most appropriate to Rupert’s current mental state. Alasdair greeted his brother with a sturdy embrace, but when they sat down, he started talking not about Rupert but about his own business, the value of his flat, the state of his stocks, and the board of his company. William felt like he was having a business meeting.
“Did you go in his room?” said William, when Alasdair stopped talking to tuck his napkin into the top of his shi
rt.
“Whose?” said Alasdair.
“Rupert’s,” William said impatiently. “She kept all his books.”
Alasdair’s lack of response was enough to tell William that he knew what he was trying to say but that he wasn’t going to take the bait.
“How can he think she doesn’t care?” said William. Hopelessness was beginning to rise inside him; he was nearing the edge of what he could articulate.
“Didn’t,” Alasdair said.
“Didn’t,” William repeated.
Alasdair paused for a moment before speaking. “He’s a grown man, Willie. Not a kid. Whatever he decides he wants, or whatever he’s already decided, he’ll do it by himself.”
The starters arrived, and Alasdair used this momentary distraction to change the topic of conversation. As he spoke, wiping lemon juice and fish oil from his mouth with the napkin in his left hand and gesturing with the chopsticks in his right, William struggled to process the image he was painting: a future for Bisley House that had nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with finance. This was not the conversation William had been expecting and, too wrong-footed to respond coherently, instead he drank deeply from the glass Alasdair continued to fill.
William had come home late, his head heavy with red wine, and there had been no way for him to detect the subtle imprint on his and Zara’s duvet where it had been compressed beneath the weight of two bodies: one inert, one active. He had returned to the house not long after the room had been vacated by Lewis and Kate; in fact he had walked in the front door just as Lewis was heading back out into the garden.
No; William intuited nothing, and he had slept dreamlessly while, unconsciously and without guilt, his sleeping body erased the traces of the sins of his nephew. He had been exhausted and had woken the next morning with the feeling that he was already losing a race in which he had not known he was supposed to be competing, and with a horrid, corporeal awareness that as he had slept, his alcohol-infused sweat had soaked into his bedsheets, his body heating with the effort of metabolizing everything he had drunk, his mouth half open against the pillowcase.
* * *
—
When Zara got home a little later that morning, there had been only a little movement in the upper floors of the house. William was still sitting by the window where the sun had been.
“How was Big Al?” Zara said, hanging her jacket by the kitchen door. This was a nickname Gregor had still been calling his oldest son when William and Zara had first started dating, and Zara was the only member of the family who insisted on using it now, partly because she knew it upset Alasdair and partly because she took visceral pleasure in framing the ugliness of those two syllables in her soft French accent.
“Big,” William said, stretching back in his chair. Zara leaned over him, kissed the top of his head.
“Was it bad?”
“Yes,” said William. “I wish you had been there.”
Zara said nothing, she wanted William to volunteer information without being asked. Alasdair and Zara did not much like one another, but they always made an effort to get along, especially when William was present. It was always very draining, sitting across from Alasdair and watching him ingest food while at the same time regurgitating half-formed, half-offensive thoughts he had picked up with the morning paper, particularly now that she couldn’t necessarily rely on Rupert as an ally.
“You never know—he might be the next to go,” Zara said brightly. William looked up at her with an expression of such distress that immediately she was filled with remorse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did he say?”
William shook his head. “He just has no sympathy. No understanding whatsoever. That’s not to say that I know what it’s like to feel that low—that low—but, Jesus, talk about survival of the fittest.”
“It’s fine to be angry. Don’t forget you’re still in shock,” Zara said, “and that you’re a fully functioning human being with more emotional intelligence than a grated piece of parmigiano.”
“You’re too good to me,” William said.
“I said more intelligence. I didn’t say how much more. I’m supposed to have Issa over tonight, there’s a project she wants to talk to me about. Do you want me to cancel?”
“It’s OK,” William said. “I can just about handle Issa.”
He reached over and squeezed her hand. In the first years of their marriage, he often told her that if she ever left him then she would leave a better person than she’d found. When he said this she always laughed, but never did she disagree. It was true that she had forced William to talk, and to listen when she needed to talk. At first it baffled her, how zipped up he was, and she tried to push him to feel things he didn’t want to feel, convinced that there must be more than what was on the surface. About a year into their relationship, confused by the fact that she had not once seen him cry, she took him to see a film called Left Bank, which began with a cold-blooded murder lost in the violence of the sixties race riots. After that opening scene she had tried to reach for his hand, but he had shifted away from her and sat so motionless that Zara assumed he had fallen asleep. It was only when the lights came up and he refused to look at her that she realized he had been sobbing silently for the duration of the film.
These last couple of months, and indeed the last two years, had tested William’s emotional capacity to and then beyond its limits. She guided him as best she could through the sadness that enclosed him, and, distressed though she was by the measures Rupert had taken, neither did she want to ignore those glimmers of pride she felt when William railed against Alasdair’s very stunted emotional range. It might have been tempting to use these moments to turn William against his eldest brother, but she resisted, and instead tried to comfort him with the realities of the situation. He needn’t worry about the house, for a start: Alasdair wouldn’t be able to do anything without their agreement. He should stop worrying about trying to please everybody and think instead about what he actually wanted.
“Otherwise you’ll lose sight of yourself,” she said, “and you won’t be any good to anybody at all. Least of all Rupert.”
Upstairs, she unpacked, and put the clothes from her bag into the laundry basket, on top of the sauce-splattered shirt William had worn the night before. In the bathroom, she noticed that her moisturizer had been moved and that her facecloth was hanging in a different place from where it was usually kept. Sometimes when William was hungover he pampered himself with the same toiletries he had mocked her for buying, and she assumed that today had been one of those days, though usually he opted for bubble bath and clay masks rather than her age-defying moisturizer. It was possible, too, that one of Nicole’s friends had used the bathroom that morning; either way, and contrary to what Lewis had said to Kate the night before, Zara did not particularly mind. She liked the feeling that the house was lived in, that her children, though grown, still felt at home enough here to share it with their friends, just as they had done when they were teenagers. She showered and felt the tension in her body give way beneath the powerful stream of just-below-scalding water, and did not bother to ask William when she went back downstairs, clean-clothed and moisturized, whether any of Max’s friends had been using their bathroom.
13
When Kate arrived back at her mother’s house, every window had been flung wide. The white plastic front door was unlocked, and it opened with the sound of the rubber seal unsticking. Alison was cleaning; Alison never cleaned. But she had chosen today to put on her old thin denim skirt, vacuum the beige carpet, and abrase the skin of her hands with bleach. In the hallway, Kate stood and listened to the sound of the vacuum cleaner, waiting to announce herself. There was a bang, the noise stopped, and Alison swore.
“I could have robbed you,” said Kate, as her mother came down the stairs holding a split vacuum bag trailing gray dust.
“You co
uld of,” said Alison, “I wouldn’t mind in the slightest.” She kissed her daughter on the top of her head. “Hungover? I thought you were coming back tomorrow.”
“No, I was always coming home today.”
Kate was not sure why she felt it necessary to lie. Years of minor disobediences and deceptions had perhaps conditioned her this way, but more urgently she felt that her torn jeans were burning a hole in her bag, that she needed to take a shower. Kate went to her room where she closed the curtains, leaving the window open, and lay on her bed. She didn’t move for a long time, only when Alison called her downstairs to ask if she wanted pizza for dinner. Kate didn’t answer, but went down half an hour later and sat with her mother, who squirted mayonnaise from a bottle onto her plate, and who ate with her body turned toward the television while Kate looked at her food and wondered whether the cardboard packaging hadn’t been removed from the pizza or if it just tasted that way.
After showering, she got back into bed and lay there in her towel, her hair still wet. In the dark, she listened to the radio and was reminded by the hourly blips that time continued to move. Kate slept a little, and with her half-sleeping mind conjured shapes into her bedroom that in the light from the radio took the form of intruders who did nothing but stand over her and watch so she was not sure if they meant her harm or if they were there to protect her. Either way she woke with her heart thumping and her palms sweating and knocked her lamp off her bedside table trying to turn it on and spilt a cold cup of tea—a cup that had been there before she’d gone to London, before she had seen Lewis, before—over the carpet, and the shadows disappeared back into the slowly shifting outline of her childhood curtains.
At four, she was woken again by the conviction that she was both pregnant with Lewis’s child and had contracted some disease from him, and so she and the baby, to whom she was already completely attached, were sure to die soon. She knew that there was nothing she could do right now, except perhaps go into the bathroom and scour herself out, so instead she lay still—as still as she had lain the night before—and waited to fall back to sleep.