by Rosie Price
An hour or so after the six of them had finished lunch and had moved into the living room to recover, Max’s phone began to ring. A photograph of Kate, sun-drenched and smiling, leaning out the window of the car they had rented in France a few years before, lit the screen.
“Katherine! Season’s greetings,” Max answered, and then, “Is that actually your name, Katherine? God, I’ve missed you.”
Kate didn’t say anything for a moment. Max heard the sound of a car driving past, and then of Kate exhaling. Her voice was small, far-off: “Max,” she said.
“What’s up?” Max got up from the sofa and went to the dining room, whose table was still littered with the remnants of the Christmas massacre: cranberries, bread sauce, the occasional sprout smashed on the tablecloth. “Is everything OK?” he said.
“Not really,” Kate said. She sounded as though she was having difficulty speaking. “I was wondering, well, probably not, but I was wondering if you were still in Gloucestershire.”
“Yes,” said Max, “I am. What’s happened? Where are you?”
“I’m at home,” Kate said, “well, I’m not at home. I left my home in a bit of a rush. I’m stuck in the middle of Randwick and, well, I wondered if I could perhaps come and stay with you.”
There were very few taxi companies working in rural Gloucestershire on Christmas Day, but there were even fewer police cars on patrol, so Max, with the confidence of a man who had already crashed his car twice in his life, finished his drink and set off in the VW they still kept in the garage. It was only twenty minutes or so to Randwick, fifteen on a quiet day like today, and as he pulled out of the driveway and turned up his music, he felt intensely grateful to Kate for giving him such a legitimate reason to leave his house.
She was sitting on the wall outside the town hall, and he could tell even from her silhouette that something was not right. Her shoulders were hunched, and in the second before he turned his headlights off, he saw that her face was pale and her eyes wide. She had her hands in her lap, her backpack and her phone on the wall next to her. Max swung the nose of the car across three parking spaces and put the hand brake on. He walked quickly to her, and as he came closer he saw that her right hand, cradled in her left, was streaked brightly with blood.
When she saw him, she started apologizing. “I was going to ring Claire,” she said. “But her grandparents are there. I didn’t want them to see, I didn’t want anybody to see—”
“It’s OK,” said Max. He squeezed her tightly, and she buried her face in his chest. “Everything’s OK.”
She explained in the car that it was an accident, that she had opened the fridge for milk, and that the crystal platter her grandmother had given her mother on her wedding day, which had been balanced against the door of the fridge and which carried the remains of the Christmas pudding, had fallen to the floor and shattered. She had tried to clear it up, she told him, and that was when she had cut herself, and that was when the ceiling of the kitchen seemed to start falling in on her and when she felt that she had become detached from her body, that she was no longer in her body but floating several inches above it, as if the shattering dish had shattered too her hold on reality. All of this she said in a level voice and with unexpected fluency. Max did not interrupt but listened quietly as he drove. When at last she paused, he spoke.
“Is it like what happened to you a few weeks ago, in the restaurant?” he said.
“It’s exactly like that,” Kate said.
Max spoke carefully. “And do you know why?”
“I have an idea.”
* * *
—
For the rest of the journey, they didn’t speak again about what had happened. It was almost dark, but the sky was streaked with dark pink, and the clouds refracted the light of the dying sun. Max asked Kate if she wanted to stop somewhere along the way, and she said that she didn’t mind, so he pulled in at the top of Bisley Road and wound down the windows, which were beginning to steam up.
“I knocked out my tooth here, once,” Max said, pointing to the fields below them. “I was sledding, and I went right into a badger sett. The nose went straight in and catapulted me about ten feet into the air. It was hidden right in the side of the hill. Bastards.”
Kate did not laugh, but she smiled at least.
“What are you going to tell everyone when I turn up at your house?” she said.
“I don’t know, you had an argument? Your great-aunt threw a Christmas pudding at your head?”
Now she laughed. “OK. I can live with that.”
“They’ll love that you’re coming, anyway.”
“Is Elias there?” Kate said.
“Oh yes,” Max said ominously. “In a big way. And my uncle.”
“Rupert?” Kate said.
“Yeah. Alasdair and Lewis are in the Caribbean.”
Max had already told her Lewis would be away that Christmas, but hearing just how far he was from Bisley sent fresh relief through her body. The panic that had risen in the kitchen at the sound of the splintering glass, at the appearance of fast-flowing blood swelling from her hand, was at last beginning to dissipate. When she got to the house, she would call her mother and tell her everything was all right, that she would be back in a few days. Kate had done her best to clean up and had left a note for Alison to find when she got back from her afternoon walk: she would have to wait for the full explanation. Now that the tide of adrenaline was ebbing away, Kate felt her energy ebb with it too. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the passenger seat.
20
It was the first time Kate had been to Bisley House, but she hardly registered the significance of this as Max turned into the drive. Max, aware that Kate was in no state to see anybody at that moment, led her up the back stairway to one of the spare rooms on the top floor without turning on the lights. It was cold; the entire house was cold except for the living room, in which the log fire burned, and the kitchen with its wood-burning stove, but the duvet, which had a pale green cover of scratchy cotton and a frilled edge, was thick and heavy, and Max found in the airing cupboard a mohair blanket and arranged it inexpertly on the bed. He asked her if she needed anything, and Kate opened her rucksack, which she had packed at the peak of her panic.
“I brought a sudoku book and three packets of beta-blockers,” she said. “The essentials. I could use a T-shirt, though.”
Max brought her some pajamas, thick striped cotton, and a spare toothbrush he had found in one of the upstairs bathrooms. He also brought an enormous bandage that he started to wrap tenderly around the cut on Kate’s hand before giving up and getting a sticking plaster for her instead. He stood by the door, his hand on the handle.
“Please don’t go,” said Kate. She changed out of her jeans and got into bed. Max sat in the chair by the window wrapped in a blanket. “Tell me about you. Just talk to me about anything.”
Max settled back. “We can talk about me. My whole family’s gone mad.”
“Weren’t they already?”
“Yes, but more,” Max said. “My dad won’t make eye contact with me because he thinks I’m going to lead my uncle back into alcoholism, and my uncle is consistently disappointed that he continues to exist. My mother thinks we’re all emotionally repressed and need to turn our pain into art. She probably wants to put us all in her next film, we’re all fucked enough. Only Nicole seems to be completely unmoved by it all. God, I envy her.”
“Nicole has anxiety, doesn’t she?” Kate said. “Isn’t it surprising that she’s so level?”
“She used to,” Max said. “When she was a teenager. I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? She went through all the extremes as a teenager so all of this”—he waved his hand—“all of this bullshit is small-fry.”
On another day she might have asked him why it was that Max believed Nicole no longer suffered anxiety, but at th
at moment she did not have the strength to open herself up to his vulnerabilities, as well as her own.
“It must be confusing, being here,” she said. “There are so many memories.”
“Exactly. And not all of them mean what I thought they meant.”
“In what way?”
“People aren’t always who you thought they were.”
For a moment, Kate thought Max might be about to let something slip about Lewis, but in fact he was referring to Bernadette, and the will, and as his voice softened Kate slowly tuned out to what he was saying. In her single bed, with him sitting there like a faithful guard dog in the chair beneath the window, under the warm light of the standing lamp, Kate felt heavy, tired. This had once been a servant’s quarters, Max had told her, so it was a walk-through room, with a door on one side and the stairs they’d come up on the other. It made her feel calm to know that if one exit was blocked, there would be another way out, and she fell asleep quickly, her body warming beneath the thick duvet, and Max still there, keeping her company.
* * *
—
She woke in a sweat. It was dark, and Max was gone. She threw off the duvet and reached for her phone; it was one in the morning, she had slept for only a few hours, during which her body seemed to have marinated in its own heat. Her mouth was filled with thick saliva and when she moved she felt a dull pain in her upper abdomen. Spurred by that peculiar vitality available to a person in the moments immediately prior to being sick, she hurled herself from her bed and down the back stairs, through the door of the nearest bathroom on the floor below. She closed the door and crouched over the porcelain bowl of the toilet, where she began to vomit. There was little she hated more than being sick, brought to her knees by her body’s violent rejection of what she had chosen to put into it, choking up bile and pieces of undigested food that had resisted absorption and somehow retained their form.
Instead of climbing back up the stairs knowing that she would only have to run back down again with the next wave of nausea, for a while Kate stayed there in the bathroom, lying on the cold floor with her head resting on the mat beneath the sink, drifting in and out of consciousness, comforted by the certainty that things really could get no worse than this.
By the time morning came, she had managed to sleep for only a few hours in bed and one in the bathroom. When Max came into her room and threw open the curtains, Kate groaned and told him that she would infect him if he didn’t leave straightaway.
“You do look terrible,” he said, sliding hurriedly out of the room. He went to get her a consolatory glass of water, then left her alone for the morning. Feverishly, she dozed until eleven, thinking each time she woke that she should get up, but she was always pulled back into a heavy half sleep in which she dreamt that Max was driving her too quickly through the narrow lanes that surrounded the house, throwing her belongings out the back of the car which, when she turned round to look, she saw was completely open.
At midday she got out of bed and went barefoot across the corridor and down the soft carpeted stairs to the floor below. This wasn’t the same way Max had taken her the night before: at the end of the corridor was a large mirror next to a staircase that would lead her to the ground floor. At the top of the staircase she stopped, catching the reflection of the doorway to the room opposite, whose lights were out and curtains were closed. In the mirror Kate could see the edge of a bookcase and the lower half of a man’s body lying prone on the bed; on top of the covers, shoes still on. For a moment she stood there, trying to work out whether whoever was in the room was awake, but there were no noises. She stepped a little closer, and from the room came a low, quick cough: the legs moved. Kate stepped back from the door and went down the stairs as quietly as she could.
There was the sound of the radio playing from the kitchen.
“What have we done to you?” said Zara when Kate appeared in the doorway. “Max said you were sick. God, I hope it’s not from William. He always seems to be bringing home diseases.”
“It wasn’t you,” Kate said. “I think it was my mum’s Christmas dinner.”
“William and Nicole are out walking the dog,” Zara said. “And Max and Elias have gone for a drive. But they won’t be long.”
“Is Rupert here?” Kate asked. She thought that the room she had seen must have belonged to Max’s uncle, but she hadn’t been sure.
“Somewhere,” said Zara, glancing toward the door. “Upstairs.”
Kate sat down at the big wooden table in the kitchen, her hands on her stomach. Zara sat down with her and brought her a glass of water. As Kate reached for it, she saw Zara looking at the plaster on her hand.
“You know, when I was first depressed, I used to have all sorts of stomach aches and pains. I used to get sick all the time.” She looked at Kate but did not wait for a response and spoke in a matter-of-fact tone that made it easy for Kate to pretend she had not recognized the gravity of what Zara was saying, though, of course, she knew that Zara was telling her that she knew she was carrying something and that her body was rebelling against the strain it was being placed under. “Sadness can manifest itself in all sorts of unexpected ways,” Zara went on. “And it doesn’t take much. It doesn’t have to be a momentous thing for sadness to transform into something far heavier than simple sadness. It can take one little moment, one small catastrophe that pushes you and then you just tip out beyond the boundaries of normal human emotion. And once you’re out there, out of range, it’s very difficult to find your way back. People so often forget that emotion is physical; English people in particular.”
Kate did not know if Zara was trying to allude to something specific when she talked of this one catastrophic moment, but she did not interrupt.
“Think of Bernadette.” Zara gestured at the ceiling, indicating her mother-in-law’s presence in the house. “You didn’t meet her, did you? But she was always sick, always thin, and she never understood that her physical illness was the manifestation of her unhappiness. She never completely loved her husband, I don’t think, and she felt guilty because part of her was relieved when he died. So instead of mourning, her body became a mortuary, and she grew grayer and stonier until she was drained of color and filled instead with sickness. William knows nothing of this, of course. He thinks I disliked his mother whereas really I pitied her because she became a stranger to herself.”
“Like in Margot,” Kate said.
“Margot?”
“Your film. With the hypochondriac who doesn’t understand that she’s miserable.”
Zara nodded, registering only slightly her surprise at Kate’s familiarity with the film.
“Bernadette hated that film,” she said. “Now you know why.”
The door to the kitchen opened, and Kate turned: it was Rupert, she recognized him from photographs, though in reality he was smaller than Kate had imagined him to be. His green cashmere jumper was too big for him, and the belt on his jeans looked as though it was on the smallest notch. Kate recognized the shoes from the bedroom she had passed upstairs.
“We were just talking about your mother,” Zara said, “and her hypochondria.”
“Ah, yes,” Rupert said. He was rooting through his jacket, which was hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “The only diagnosis she would ever reject.”
“You’ve met Kate, haven’t you?”
“I feel like I have,” Rupert said, still patting his jacket pockets. He found what he was looking for: his cigarettes, and then bent down to kiss Kate on both cheeks. “Max has told me such a lot about you. What a pleasure.”
“You too,” said Kate.
“Kate has been a good friend to Max,” Zara said, smiling at her across the table. “She’s kept him grounded these last couple of years. I think we rather owe her.”
Rupert went out for a cigarette, and Zara made Kate a dry piece of brown toast and
poured her half a glass of orange juice diluted with water. The smell of toast made her feel a little sick, still, and she was not quite hungry just yet, but she drank the juice slowly, observing the feel of the cold liquid in her stomach, the sugar in her blood. After eating, Zara told Kate to call her mother. Kate had texted already, but it would be better to phone, Zara said, so that Alison could hear her voice. Afterward, she went into the living room where she lay down in a corner of the sofa. She was awake when Max returned, but she didn’t open her eyes when he came into the living room. Instead she listened to him scrunching up pieces of newspaper and quietly moving logs onto the fire, and felt the weight of him sitting down at the other end of the sofa. Kate heard the door and footsteps, as people came into the room, bringing in the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen, and all the while she lay there still, listening to the sounds of the catching fire and Titus’s heavy breathing.
21
The day after Boxing Day, Kate woke early. She lay in bed for an hour, unable to move. Now that her sickness seemed to have receded, that other, more familiar sickness was once again dominant in her body, and she was aware of it even before she was fully conscious. It was the first thing she thought of when she woke up each morning and the last thing at night, though at least now, unlike in the first weeks following the rape, she had managed to attach it to phrases that, alone in the dark, she attempted to assemble into a narrative. She had only lately begun replaying her account silently to herself as if in court, picking holes out of inconsistencies, bringing accusations upon herself until she could no longer bear to think of it but neither could she not think of it, until she resolved never to tell anybody because the horror of being disbelieved was worse than the horror of bearing it alone.