by Rosie Price
By now there was little left in Bisley House of either sentimental or financial value, but both William and Alasdair knew that this would be their last chance to retrieve anything they wanted to keep. William started in the attic, shining his torch into all the corners, but the light revealed only loft insulation, in places chewed by what were most likely rodents, and the odd loose nail. He worked his way through the top-floor bedrooms, checking cupboards and drawers, to his parents’ old room, in which the only remaining furniture was the bed frame with its bare mattress, lumpy and yellowing. Here William stopped; he knew he was only making himself feel more raw. He went down the back stairs to get a signal on his phone so he could call Zara.
Alasdair, meanwhile, was finishing up on the lower floors, whose communal spaces were a little more cluttered than the empty rooms William had been roaming above. Lewis, who was driving back with his father that evening, found him in the dining room, standing on top of the mahogany cabinet. Alasdair was lifting the stag head from the wall, and as it came away from its mounting he showered himself with loose plasterboard, sending himself into an asthmatic frenzy.
“You can keep this at the flat until Phoebe and I find our new place,” Alasdair told his son. Lewis, who didn’t want to give the impression that there was anything in the house to which he was not deeply emotionally attached, didn’t ask his father how he expected him to persuade a girl to sleep with him while there was a stuffed stag watching over them, but instead took the head and carried it to the hallway.
It was not a pleasant job. He’d stayed, though, because he wanted Alasdair to know that he was taking something from him in selling the house. Not just the memories, but a future Lewis had imagined for himself. If he’d had the opportunity, he would have brought girlfriends here, friends every other weekend. It would be a good place for a wedding or a stag weekend. Rudolph caught his eye; Lewis did his best to ignore the irony. All the medics he knew went off to Eastern Europe, to strip clubs, but he could have done something really different: a big group of guys down here for the hunting season, shooting partridge in the morning, having them plucked and cooked by dinner. Lewis turned Rudolph to face the wall.
“Did you have many parties here?” Lewis said to his uncle as they were boxing up what was left of William’s room. “Like friends, girls, you know.”
William looked at him with an unreadable expression. “Sometimes,” he said. “Mostly when my parents were out of the country.”
“Did they mind?”
“Christ, no, well, they didn’t know. Apart from the time all the silverware ended up in the upstairs bathtub. Alasdair tried to pretend he was trying to polish it, but…”
“I think this is the nicest room,” Lewis said, “not the master bedroom. I’d sleep in here if this were my house. Which I guess it won’t ever be, now.”
“Rupert’s was always my favorite,” said William.
Rupert’s room was the smallest, and its ceiling was slanted, making it feel like a little girl’s bedroom. To Lewis it had always seemed the least grand.
“I imagine it’s hard for him,” Lewis said in a serious tone, “seeing the house being sold, after everything that’s happened.”
“Oh, he stopped coming down here years before your grandmother died,” William said, flicking the light off as he shuffled the last box out of the door with his foot. He kicked it a little harder than he intended, and something inside made a clanging noise. “Unless he absolutely had to. Couldn’t stand the woman, God rest her soul.”
This place to Lewis was like a favorite wax jacket; not only did it signify the wealth and quality of its owner, but its character was derived from the tears and the scuffs that were yearly repaired by an expertly discreet seamstress so that only she and its owner ever knew of their existence. But now that they were challenging its integrity the house was beginning to fail. Once the sale was finalized the builders would be here, sending dust from its lining, beams creaking in the rooftops, panes of glass splintering under the vibrations of the drills that disturbed the house to its foundations.
It was as Lewis was descending the main staircase that the driveway below lit up and, looking out of the little window on the halfway landing, he saw Kate Quaile standing there, another girl at her side. Kate’s white face was illuminated in the bright floodlight as she stared straight up at the house. She did not look away.
If the light hadn’t come on, he wouldn’t have seen her. But there she was, standing in her fake-fur coat only meters below. Lewis stepped quickly to the side of the window frame. He did not want her to see him. Kate, to Lewis, was dangerous. He did not think much about their night together, which had lost its sepia romance more than a year ago. Lewis knew that he had been wrong about her; he had seen it in her when he’d glimpsed her at the festival in Finsbury Park, fear and suspicion that had hardened into something more like anger. He should have known better than to have played this game with somebody so close to the family. Before and since, it had always been relative strangers.
The problem, Lewis knew, was that these women were ashamed of being what they were, and though he was adept at disinhibiting them, there were women everywhere—women like Zara, women, he feared, like Kate—who wanted to turn other women into victims and use them as pawns in this war they were waging. Lewis peered back around the window frame. By now, Kate and the other girl had gone. He hoped that she had only come to show off the house to her friend, that her being here had nothing to do with him, and he hoped that she thought of him only ever fleetingly, if at all.
* * *
—
The three men went back to London that evening, and on the way Lewis texted a few of his old university friends, whom he hadn’t seen for a while. He needed distracting, didn’t want to go back to the flat on his own. He wished he were driving rather than sitting in the back like a child, while Alasdair and William sat in silence, listening to the low tones of the radio. His phone vibrated in his pocket, three times in fairly quick succession. All three of the friends were away, unable to meet. He wondered whether they were together but dismissed the thought: they would have invited him. They’d talked about going skiing last year, but the plan hadn’t come together.
He needed to do some exercise. It would make him feel better, releasing some of the pent-up, anxious energy coursing through his body. His chest felt tight, as if he’d been doing push-ups. Probably, it was from lifting those boxes. Nicole was always telling him to try yoga—but the thought of Nicole brought into his mind the image of Max, and then of Kate staring up at him, and he felt a little sick.
Lewis didn’t normally drink alone, but when Alasdair left him at the flat with the stag head and a box of belongings he had collected from the house, he opened a beer and sat on the sofa with the television on, scrolling through his phone. One of the friends he had texted had uploaded a picture of himself wearing salopettes and skiing goggles. Lewis opened another beer and tortured himself a little by looking at photos of the holiday, before he found himself looking at Nicole’s Instagram, then Max’s. He’d been sitting here for nearly half an hour, now, and was three bottles down. When, scrolling down Max’s page he found pictures of Kate, he slowed down, holding the phone close to his face, trying to erase from his mind the vision of her looking up at him, replace it instead with these stolen images.
While with one hand he kept on flicking through the photos, pausing and zooming, with his other he undid his jeans and slipped it into his boxers, feeling the subtle ridges of his tattoo. He thought about fucking her, putting his hand around his dick, closing his eyes and then opening them to look at those pictures every time his thoughts were interrupted. He was too drunk and too numb to stay hard, though, and eventually he fell asleep with his jeans still on and unbelted and his right hand down the front of his boxers.
40
Zara had finished shooting just before they went to Bisley House for Christmas, and in the new
year they’d moved on to edits. It was the end of January when at last she got in touch with Kate, asking if she wanted to meet. She’d given herself the afternoon off because she needed to recuperate, she said. It was a cold, bright day, and they met at the Sun Gate of Battersea Park. “Equally inconvenient for us both,” Zara had said when she’d suggested it. She was wearing a knee-length fur coat and sunglasses with a baseball cap.
“It’s secondhand,” she said, brushing the coat, “I couldn’t buy fur new. Titus would never forgive me.” Kate was not sure what she’d been expecting, but Zara did not offer an apology for having fallen out of contact, but rather an explanation. To Kate, this was a relief. The thought of the message she’d left, and the fact that she had assumed some kind of right to work on the film just because of the charity Zara had already shown her, made her feel embarrassed.
“We were terribly behind,” she said. “We’ve had to work like dogs to catch up, which is why you haven’t heard from me in rather a long time. I’m sure I’m overestimating my own importance, but I wonder if you were at a very vulnerable stage when all of this started. The film.”
“You know how it goes,” Kate said. “Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it isn’t.”
“I do know. I don’t mind telling you I went into the worst depression I’ve had for years when I first started trying to map it out. I don’t know whether Max told you, but there’s a rape scene. Right at the beginning. Very graphic, very violent. It brought me right back to the day it happened, I thought I’d never find my way out.”
“He didn’t tell me,” Kate said, surprised. Zara, though, was not.
“He probably chooses to believe it doesn’t exist,” she said. They were walking toward the river, along the gravel path that crossed the park, and by the fountains Zara stopped to buy coffee for them both.
“It’s made me very angry,” Zara went on, “which I think is good. It’s healthy. It’s made me think of you rather a lot, which is why I suppose I don’t feel that we’ve been out of touch for very long. You’ve been in my thoughts.”
They were walking side by side, up the steps toward the river. In the flower beds the crocuses had forced themselves through the cold, winter soil, and were just beginning to bud, white and light purple.
“I wonder if you mind me asking,” Zara said, “do you feel angry?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said carefully, “which means probably I don’t.”
Zara nodded. “Fear is far easier to live with. And if there is anger, it’s safer turned inward. It’s taken me years to realize that. Too many years.”
“Better late than never,” Kate said, because she couldn’t think of anything less trite.
“You see, I’m not sure that’s true,” Zara said. She looked sidelong at Kate. “Did I tell you that mine is dead? The one who raped me. And I never confronted him. So it really is too late; I have no outlet, no living cause. It’s all buried, and now that I’m here to excavate it, it’s too late to really matter.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe that’s why you’re making the film.”
“Maybe,” said Zara. “But I can’t help but wonder, what if I’d spoken up at the time, before it was too late? Who might I have helped? Who else suffered because of me?”
Kate did not answer. She had no answer. They walked in silence a little longer, to the edge of the park and along the riverfront. Zara took Kate’s empty coffee cup from her and threw it in the bin. Kate pulled her scarf up around her face. They were a long way from the entrance to the park.
“What about your boyfriend, are you still with him?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “You’ve never met him, have you? It’s been about six months now.”
“You’ll have to come for dinner soon.”
Andrew hadn’t even met Alison yet. She imagined him now, sitting down for dinner at Latimer Crescent, elbows on the table and playing with his wristwatch, taking in the posters and the awards, wearing a half smile behind his hands that only Kate could see. She flushed, warmth flooding her stomach at the thought of him.
“I’d like that,” she said, before saying, dumbly: “He likes food.”
“Sensible boy,” said Zara.
Thinking of Andrew made Kate want to know more about the film. She wanted to be able to tell him about it, when they saw each other later that night. He would be interested, impressed by what Zara had divulged to Kate.
“What’s the film called?”
“Late Surfacing,” said Zara.
“I like it.”
“I didn’t come up with it,” Zara said. The film seemed no longer to be at the forefront of her mind. “Have you thought about whether you would confront him?”
“Who?”
“Your rapist,” Zara said. “Hypothetically. If you saw him again.”
“I don’t think I would,” Kate said. “I don’t see how I could.”
Zara’s silence widened the distance between them: she walking at a serene pace, wrapped in her vintage furs, her arms crossed at her chest and leather gloves holding the edges of the coat around her; Kate, her hands thrust deep into her pockets, drew her shoulders up around her ears.
“I can see why you’re thinking about it,” Kate went on, “now that you’ve been forced to. But I’ve been trying all this time to escape what happened. Or at least to find a way to live with it so that it doesn’t dominate me. And I don’t see how making myself lose more than I already have is going to help.”
“Why would you be losing more?”
Kate had led them to the other side of the park, now, the side that was closer to her bus stop.
“Just emotionally,” Kate said. “It’s exposing. Makes you so vulnerable.”
“Particularly if you know him.”
Kate tensed but kept on walking. She only ever remembered giving the impression that her attacker was a stranger, but perhaps she had said something to make Zara think otherwise. Or perhaps Zara was talking about her own rapist. She felt a little queasy, the taste of foamed milk and coffee coating her tongue, caffeine in her system.
“I don’t know,” Zara was saying now, “it’s just that I regret never saying anything, that’s all. There could have been countless others.”
“That’s his responsibility, not yours.” Kate was only repeating what she’d been told, but in fact it was far easier to believe it when she wasn’t talking about herself.
“Did you know that you can report to the police anonymously?” Zara went on. “I didn’t know that. I found it out while I was doing research for the film. They keep it on file, but they don’t even need to take your name, a friend can do it for you, just over the phone, and leave their details. They just need a way of getting hold of you if there are any other reports, and they want to use your evidence.” She paused. “If you wanted to, you know, I would be happy to do it for you,” she said.
Kate had been watching her shoelace loosen as Zara spoke. She stopped, now, and knelt down to retie it. Zara stopped too, stood by and waited as Kate slowly wound the lace back into its bow. Kate glanced up at Zara’s black leather boots, the thick heels, looked down at her own muddied trainers. There were so many worlds between them. She stood up.
“I didn’t know that,” Kate said. “But the principle is the same. It’s his responsibility to stop, not mine.” Her voice, now, was louder than she meant it to be. “It’s not my problem.”
Zara bit her lip, then nodded. “If that’s how you feel,” she said.
41
When she saw Andrew later that night, she didn’t tell him about her meeting with Zara. She didn’t want to think about their conversation, much less encourage any curiosity about what it had been like to see her after all this time. Since she’d got back to London after Christmas, they had both been working long hours, he on a film he would be entering for festivals in the summer. That evening,
he didn’t call until nearly ten to say he was finished, and she arrived at his flat half an hour later with leftovers and a half bottle of wine. When he opened the door he looked exhausted, dark circles beneath his eyes, sweat marks on his T-shirt.
She heated up the chili while he showered, and he came in wearing joggers and a thick blue sweater, smelling of soap and aftershave.
“You didn’t have to make yourself smell nice just for me,” she said.
“Trust me. I really did.” He put his hands behind his head, inhaling appreciatively. “I smell good.”
“That’s my chili con carne,” said Kate.
They were hungry, and they ate quickly, he shoveling chili onto his fork while she asked him about the shoot that day. The film was only twelve minutes long, and the crew was small, but it was the first time since he’d been a student that he’d been able to get the funding together to make something of his own.
“We’re going to the Ponds tomorrow,” Andrew said. “In Hampstead. I really regret that scene. It’s gonna be freezing.”
Kate knew the scene he was talking about—he’d shown her an early version of the script back in the autumn. It was the first in which the two main characters were filmed together. Kate had met both of the actors at Andrew’s flat before Christmas. Megan had a slender neck, long, thin legs, and probably no scars on her thighs. Kate could not imagine her putting her eye to the open top of a bottle she’d emptied alone, or bolting upright in the middle of the night, chest seized, gasping for the light. She thought of Megan breaking the still surface of the pond with her bare feet.
He was looking at her. “What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing, I was just thinking about when it’s finished,” she said.
“I can’t even contemplate it,” he said. “Feels like an impossibility.”
After they’d eaten Andrew got into bed. Kate brushed her teeth with the toothbrush she’d started leaving at his house, which neither of them had acknowledged, and got into bed beside him. He turned toward her, kissed her a little, put his hand under her T-shirt in a gesture of sleepy arousal, but left it resting there on her belly without moving until his breathing deepened and he was asleep. Kate lay still, eyes open, looking up at the ceiling, not wanting to disturb the warm hand on her stomach. Now, his hand was covering the breadth of her waist, offering desire and protection. It took her a long time to fall asleep.