What Red Was

by Rosie Price

  He and Nicole were sitting together at the kitchen table, arguing about the music Max was playing through his phone. Kate sat down without saying anything, and when he began to draw her into the conversation she found she could neither hear nor speak. She searched for words, and as she did Nicole rose up silently, squeezing Max’s shoulder before leaving the kitchen.

  “What’s happening?” Max said. He shifted his seat closer to Kate, held her shoulder, touched her face. “You don’t look well.”

  “I don’t feel well,” Kate said.

  “Do you want some water? Paracetamol? Have you taken something?”

  “No, nothing. Water, please.”

  Glad to have something to do, Max got up and filled a pint glass. He sat back down, and he waited for her to speak.

  “I think I might have quit my job.”

  “Excellent,” said Max, “why?”

  “There’s this man,” Kate said.

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know, just a man.” She started before faltering. “Listen Max, I think I’m going mad.”

  “What did he do? What happened?” Max was looking at her intently now. Despite everything, Kate was glad to have his full attention, even if just for this moment.

  “It just reminded me of something.”

  “Reminded you of what?”

  “Of before.”

  For some minutes they spoke like this, Max inferring from ellipses and pauses what he could, Kate filling those pauses with as much meaning as she could without speaking, hoping that he would understand, that perhaps by seeing the uncontrollable shaking of her leg, her pale face and the drawn look, he would not only see the whole of her history but would also decide for them both that it did not and could not matter, what had happened to her, what she had done and had been done to her. But he wouldn’t engage, it was too terrible a thing to infer, it could not be gestured toward, it demanded to be spoken, and the one thing she could not do was speak it.

  “The look he gave me,” she said, “the man in the restaurant, I’ve been looked at like that before.”

  Max’s confused expression told her that she had lost him.

  “Looked at you like what?” said Max. “What did he do?”

  Kate picked up the glass of water Max had poured for her, waiting for words to form.

  Max took his phone from his pocket—it was vibrating. He put it on the table. Before he silenced it, Elias’s name flashed up on the screen.

  “Do you need to take that?” said Kate.

  The phone stopped vibrating and then started again.

  “Do you mind?” said Max. “I think he’s outside.”

  Kate shook her head. She put the glass of water, still full, back on the table.

  18

  That Christmas, William’s family went to stay at the house in Bisley. Alasdair and Lewis were away, but Rupert was joining them for the entire time they were there, and William was determined that this year’s Christmas would be on a level with those they’d spent together before Bernadette died, when the house would be lit up with white lights, neighbors ringing round every few hours for mulled wine, the smell of cloves filling the kitchen. Max, who was trying to deflect the pressure William had been putting onto this week, had invited Kate and Elias to come and stay, but only Elias had accepted the invitation. Kate felt the obligation to spend Christmas with her mother and couldn’t bring herself to go elsewhere. Like Max, Zara would have preferred to have Christmas in London but, as she explained to Elias as she drove him and Max from the station, William had insisted on maintaining the traditional family trip to the countryside. Elias was sitting in the back seat of the car wearing two jumpers and a coat, his hands folded under his armpits. As they turned out of the station car park, Zara turned up the temperature.

  “Max’s father is very fond of his traditions,” Zara said to Elias, speaking loudly so she could be heard over the sound of the heater, “even the more absurd ones I really hoped we’d cremated along with his mother—”

  “Mum,” said Max.

  “—may peace be upon her,” Zara finished.

  “I’m just happy not to be spending Christmas alone,” Elias said with uncharacteristic diplomacy.

  “Wait until you see Rudolph,” Zara said. “And I’m afraid we’re having a party tomorrow. All the locals are coming to make sure the roof hasn’t fallen in since last time they saw it. I just hope that none of them has a heart attack.”

  Straight after Bernadette’s death, Zara had expected her distaste for Bisley House and all it represented to diminish, but, in the last couple of years, it had in fact intensified, most likely because William had made the decision to adorn himself with the absurdly English idiosyncrasies she’d always associated with Bernadette and her Estate. This year he had dug out from the attic the same fairy lights Bernadette had had put up for her birthday, and he’d bought what he thought were the same brand of expensive, scented candles and put them in the hallways where they flickered rather than shone and wreathed the house with the smell of cinnamon. He had even tried arranging flowers in the living room. The house now felt even more excessively large and dim and the countryside that surrounded it even more expansive. It gave her the creeps.

  It was painful to watch William, so small and insubstantial, attempt to take ownership of the place: balancing precariously on a ladder as he fastened the red nose to the stag head; carefully writing out invitations to their Christmas Eve party on his mother’s stationery, which he then hand-delivered to everybody in the village; even unpacking his suitcase, folding his thin cashmere jumpers and cotton underpants into the bottom of the cavernous oak wardrobe in their temporary bedroom. She had seen this before, in the men in her own family, and in the powerful men they had associated with when she was a child. Their identities were so heavily invested in a past that hardly existed except in their own fantasies that, when it was threatened, they responded with a proprietorial urge to colonize what was left of it.

  “I thought you were going to sell it anyway,” said Elias.

  Zara sighed. “If it were up to me…” she said, and swung through the open gate and along the driveway. It was dark early now, the winter solstice, and William had wound Bernadette’s fairy lights around the leafless trees that lined the driveway, whose branches glistened with raindrops illuminated by the tiny white bulbs. As the house came into view, Elias whistled.

  “Fuck, that’s nice,” he said.

  The west wing was in shadow, and the windows in the rest of the house were checkered light and dark: two lamps lit the porch, there was the odd light on the upper floors, and on the ground floor in the kitchen and the living room, where Zara had left Nicole critiquing from the sofa William’s wood-fire construction. Rupert was sitting in the armchair nearest the fire and had been watching Nicole’s direction with something that might have been amusement. He got up when Max came in, lifting himself out of his armchair: he was a little less thin than he’d been last time Max had seen him, and he was clean-shaven.

  “Max,” Rupert said, squeezing his nephew’s shoulder. “Merry Christmas.”

  “This is Elias,” Max said. “Rupert, my uncle.”

  Elias shook Rupert’s hand, smiling briefly, before leaning down to kiss Nicole on both cheeks. “Who’s going to give me a tour?” he said.

  Elias made Max show him round the house twice, and they walked its perimeter with the bottle of champagne he’d brought with him, stopping frequently to refill their glasses as Elias burst through the door of each room before circumventing it in awe. Max had learned by now that whenever he went somewhere new with Elias it was necessary to factor in extra time to accommodate the length and volume of his superlatives, and in the doorway to the master bathroom on the second floor he waited with the bottle for Elias to finish.

  “This is really beyond fucking incredible,�
� Elias said. “That is really the biggest toilet seat I have ever seen.”

  Max had to admit that it was an extraordinarily large toilet seat: a winged mahogany throne, complete with a bronze chain flusher, of which he had always been suspicious as a child for fear that he would slide from the polished ledge into the bowl and disappear into the maze of copper pipes that lined the walls of the house. Elias, who had meanwhile climbed fully clothed into the Victorian bathtub, reached up and opened the window above it, which led out onto a flattened section of the roof. He pulled with a flourish a small clear bag of hash from the top pocket of his denim shirt.

  “What time’s dinner?” he said.

  * * *

  —

  This time, Elias had not been exaggerating when he said that this was the strongest hash he’d ever got his hands on. When at last he and Max made it down for dinner, they were glassy-eyed and giggly. Zara knew immediately and was quietly envious of their state, but William was busy carving the chicken he had roasted for dinner and didn’t seem to have noticed.

  Elias was the first to be served. “Do you mind if I have brown meat?” he said.

  “Have as much as you like,” William said. “I don’t eat it myself, reminds me too much of work.”

  “Aren’t you a GP?” said Elias.

  “A surgeon,” William said, nicking the cartilage expertly with the tip of his knife. “Thigh or wing?”

  “Oh, wow. Thigh, please,” Elias said, holding his plate out for William. “So a surgeon, a film director, a lawyer”—he was pointing round the table—“a wastrel.” He waved his hand at Max. “What do you do, Rupert?”

  “Also a wastrel,” Rupert said. He was sitting forward in his seat, his pack of cigarettes inches from his elbow. “I’m not working at the moment.”

  “Sensible man,” Elias said. He had started eating already and took a chunk out of his chicken thigh. “You hardly need to work, with this place. Why don’t you just retire here?”

  “I’d love to,” Rupert said. He smiled. “But it’s not my house, unfortunately.”

  Zara cut across Elias, whose mouth was too full of chicken anyway for him to ask Rupert any more questions. “You do work, darling,” she said. “At the community center.”

  “Ah yes, the volunteering,” Rupert said. He pushed up his shirtsleeves, whose buttons were undone. “Not quite worth the paycheck, you see. I need them more than they need me. But”—he leaned toward Elias, who was watching him with suspicion—“no harm in spreading around the burden a little bit.”

  Elias’s eyes flickered toward Rupert’s wineglass, which was filled with water.

  “I didn’t know you were working,” Max said to Rupert. Max, who was less expert than Elias in disguising the level of his intoxication, looked as though he’d just woken up. “How long for?”

  “Well, Maxie, we haven’t seen each other for a little while,” Rupert said. “But it’s not a big deal. Just to fill the days out a little.”

  “That’s great,” Max said, “that’s, um—” He stopped, arrested by the sensation that his tongue was about to flop out of his mouth.

  “It is,” Rupert said. Zara smiled at him across the table, and William nodded earnestly.

  Elias, who was not concentrating but was moving fast into the snacking phase of his high, reached for a leg from the carcass, which jerked as he tried to detach it.

  “Sorry, Elias, did you want seconds?” Nicole said sarcastically.

  “Have as much as you’d like,” William said, as Max started giggling. William had been quietly watching his son for the past five minutes and now he spoke, his voice stern. “Max. Are you high?”

  “No,” said Max, while, at the same time, Elias nodded.

  “Obviously,” said Nicole.

  “Boys, is that really necessary?”

  “They’re adults,” Zara said.

  “Exactly,” William said, talking to his wife directly now, “old enough to recognize that it’s just a little irresponsible to be getting stoned and drunk in front of a recovering addict.”

  “Sorry,” Max mumbled.

  “The recovering addict?” Rupert said. “Is that what we’re calling me, now?”

  “There’s no need to be embarrassed, Rupert,” William said patiently. “We don’t necessarily need to be intoxicated to enjoy ourselves.”

  Rupert exhaled, hissing loudly.

  “I just want you to be comfortable here,” William said.

  “Comfortable?” Rupert started laughing. But it wasn’t his old, warm laugh: this laugh was just a little too loose. “Have I come here to die? About fucking time.”

  “That’s in very poor taste,” William said, looking down at his plate somberly.

  “Forgive me, William, for daring to try to lighten the mood,” Rupert said.

  Max put his head in his hands. The weed was making him feel heavy; he wished Rupert would stop talking.

  “Well,” William said, “I’m sorry I insisted that you come. I thought some company might cheer you up a little.”

  “We just want you to be supported, Rupert,” Zara said, translating—too late—for her husband. She looked across at him in support, but he did not look back.

  “No, no, I quite see what you’re saying,” Rupert said. He had his hand on his cigarettes. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Cheer up. What an ingenious idea, Willie. That’s quite the miracle cure. Tell me, have you thought of entering the medical profession?”

  Elias, who had been scraping at the bone of Max’s demolished wing, put down his knife and looked up at Rupert, then back at William.

  “Is there any more of that delicious chicken?”

  19

  Max managed to endure the forced jollity of William’s Christmas Eve party by staying with Elias and the other smokers in the kitchen garden, just behind the house, where they made their way through a pack of Marlboros. Here it was difficult to be seen and so far easier to avoid having to talk to anybody he didn’t want to, and because William had dragged two large outdoor heaters up from the garage it was warm enough to stay outside for most of the night. Max stood with his back to the wall of the house while Elias gesticulated, cigarette in hand, complaining about his girlfriend. Over Elias’s shoulder, he could see Rupert standing at the edge of the group. He was wearing a long green coat, which Max recognized as having been his grandfather’s; the collar was turned up, and he had a scarf wrapped protectively around his neck. In that coat, he could have been his old self: the Rupert who’d bought Max bottles of wine when he’d been underage because, he reasoned, he might as well drink good-quality alcohol if he was going to drink; Rupert who hadn’t said anything when Max bent the needle on his record player; Rupert who had once picked Max and his friends up from a New Year’s party in his Aston and hadn’t mentioned to his parents when Max threw up in the footwell. It was worth the valet fee, he told Max, just to have material for his wedding speech.

  Rupert: collar turned up against the world, but with a sly dimpled smile just visible, as if he was in on a joke that only he understood. Except, of course, that now he had a cup of tea in his hand, not a whisky. And he’d made no attempt to disguise his sobriety, to drink tonic water and lemon or mulled wine, which was hardly alcoholic anyway, as if he didn’t mind that he was diminished, as if he had given up all hope of ever becoming that person again.

  By ten o’clock, Max, Elias, and Nicole had managed to escape to the village pub, leaving Rupert in the garden and Zara to negotiate alone the treacherous space between the canapé table and the downstairs hallway, which was patrolled (incredibly slowly) by Lady Caroline, a local ancient aristocrat who had always resented Bernadette’s ownership of Bisley House and so had masochistically attended every Christmas party she had thrown since 1982.

  Lady Caroline and her brutal interrogations about the career paths and marriag
e schedules of the Rippon children were more fearful than even Zara’s wrath at being abandoned, and so Max and Nicole endured their mother’s anger on Christmas morning in their hungover state, comforted by the knowledge that they had made it through the night before unscathed. Zara did not attend church, and their exposure to her rage was limited to breakfast, which Max ate quickly with a large milky coffee in an effort to clear his head.

  * * *

  —

  Elias, who had been especially excited about attending church and had worn a blue velvet jacket for the occasion, spent the entire service flicking to the end of his service sheet, checking his phone, and trying to draw Max’s attention to the deacon, who had fallen asleep in his seat behind the altar. But Max ignored him; he was thinking of Bernadette, of the last time he had come to see her. He’d driven her to church that weekend, and she had insisted on having the windows down and playing the Requiem Mass at full volume. This was a special treat for Bernadette, who had lost her license just after her eightieth birthday when the bumper of her VW Polo had triumphed over the village car park’s freshly built Cotswold stone wall.

  They stood up to sing, and Max stared down at his hymn sheet. William had been having trouble looking Max in the eye since dinner the other night, but now he passed Max his own hymn sheet, which was folded to the correct place, and took Max’s from him, turning it to the right page. The singing had always been Max’s favorite part. It took him a moment to find where they were, but when he did, he looked straight ahead and sang as loudly as he could, his enunciation crisp, years of public school and childhood churchgoing having trained his voice to a rich-toned tenor that always surprised people. As he sang, he imagined that the little church might become aglow with the faces and memories of his childhood, that he would be carried by the voices of his family in harmony, each only just distinguishable from the next. But neither Rupert nor Nicole was singing—Elias hadn’t even looked at his hymn sheet—so he could hear only his own voice and the low timbre of his father, half a note behind.