Dessert was peaches with blueberries and maple syrup from Stephen’s trees. He had won Olly and Bella so fully that, without asking, they helped him clear the plates. Then they all sat down as he made coffee – grinding the beans by hand and using a cafetière – and put a bottle of port on the table.
‘Can I have some, Mum?’ Olly asked, leaning back in his chair and placing his hands behind his head.
‘’Course you can, son,’ Marcus said, pouring him a glassful.
‘Would you like some too, Bella?’ Stephen said.
‘Yes please.’
Stephen got up and brought the bottle over to her. As he leaned past Lara to pour the drink, his shirt brushed her cheek and her vision flickered in the candlelight.
A flash of lightning lit up the windows, followed, seconds later, by an ear-splitting clap of thunder.
‘It’s nearly here,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ll get a few more candles ready. Storms usually mean power cuts.’
‘Really? I’d have thought they’d have sorted that out in this, the richest country in the world,’ Olly said.
‘The infrastructure’s a complete mess here,’ Stephen said. ‘Every time there’s a storm, the electricity cuts out. The roads are terrible. Have you driven down either side of Manhattan? There are better roads in Kinshasa. Believe me, I’ve been there. They had big floods here about six years ago and they’re still rebuilding the bridges. In the meantime the rivers have flooded again and no one has done anything to prevent it happening in the first place.’
‘I have to say I was pretty shocked at the dilapidation around Trout Island,’ Lara said, allowing the warm port to trickle down her throat. ‘I’d expected America to be far more padded from all that.’
‘It’s the collapse of capitalism in motion,’ Stephen said.
‘Ah yes,’ Marcus laughed. ‘You were a bit of a Trot, weren’t you, I seem to remember.’
‘People have just upped and left their houses,’ Stephen went on. ‘They can’t afford to keep them, can’t pay their mortgages, can’t sell them. Now the banks own them, no one wants to buy them, and they’re slowly returning to the earth. Look at Detroit – large parts of the city are reverting to the rural. People are growing their own food in the empty yards around their neighbourhoods because they can’t afford to shop any more. If you’re sick, you run up bills of millions of dollars and your insurers will refuse to renew your policy. If you’re a poor young person your best career prospect is being shot at in Afghanistan. Now they’re trying to look for natural gas round here and the extraction process will involve chemicals that get into the water table and pollute us all. It’s the vested interests of the powerful against the tiny voice of the people. That’s how it is, here. Welcome to America.’
‘Wow. Why are you here then if you hate it so much?’ Olly said.
‘Olly!’ Marcus said.
‘No, he’s right,’ Stephen said. ‘I often ask myself that. Apart from the fact the work’s here, this country, like it or not, is the nearest I’ve been to calling anywhere home since I left my mum’s house in Manchester when I was sixteen. She’s dead now and I’ve got no siblings, no cousins, nothing. If I belong anywhere, I belong here.’
‘Why don’t you do something about it then? You’ve got loads of money,’ Olly said, emboldened by being treated like an equal.
‘I’m in survival mode,’ Stephen said, looking levelly at him. ‘Sometimes, whatever you believe, you’ve just got to look after number one.’ Then he looked down at his hands, and Lara thought how beautiful he was as the candlelight caught the edges of his cheekbones, working with his words to lay his topography bare.
Again, the lightning flashed and almost immediately the thunder rolled like a bad Foley effect. The room fell silent. Lara felt the sweat prick at her back. One by one, the people at the table brought their drinks up to their mouths, as if in slow motion.
Then, with a sudden release, the rain started. It rattled on the roof and battered at the windows, pouring as if someone had turned on a thousand taps above the house. An adrenaline flash of lightning coincided simultaneously with a shuddering thunderclap.
Stephen got up to shut the windows, to stop the rain flooding in.
And then the lights went out.
AFTER SHE HAD PUT JACK TO BED, LARA CHECKED IN ON THE TWINS
, who had a room each and bedtime reading supplied by Stephen: for Olly a book of Byron’s poetry and Bella a monograph of Alice Neel. Then she went down to join Stephen on a covered porch at the back of the house, where he sat in the light of an oil lamp, looking out at the night. The storm still raged outside, flattening the grass, filling indentations in the ground and turning them into puddles that threatened to become ponds. Marcus, who had finished off the port and half-emptied a bottle of Maker’s Mark, lay conked out on the sofa, his snores competing with the thunder in their ability to set Lara’s nerves on edge.
‘Who’d have thought the old sky would have had so much water in it,’ Lara said as she sat down, slightly apart from Stephen on a cushioned swing that was the only available seating.
Stephen smiled and looked up at the murky sky. ‘I wish it was a beautiful night,’ he said. ‘It’s like a piece of heaven here when it’s still and clear. We’d have built a bonfire. It’s shooting star season too, though of course you have to be out on the open land round the front to really get the full panorama. Once I saw one arc right through the sky. I swear it landed. I swear I heard a bang and saw a flash. But then again, the mind can play tricks.’ He stopped suddenly and turned to her. ‘Tell me you’re happy.’
‘What?’ Lara said.
‘Tell me you’re happy with him.’
‘Of course I am,’ she said, shifting in her seat. ‘Of course I’m happy.’
‘I need to hear that,’ he said, searching her out. But Lara kept her eyes firmly on the streaks of rain that, caught in the glow cast by the oil lamp, looked like slashed silk, whirling in the wind. ‘I need to hear that, because if you’re not happy, what was our sacrifice worth?’
‘I love my children,’ she said, drawing her arms around herself, hot again despite the chill misted into the air by the rain. She wanted to run away, into the stormy forest.
‘And you love him?’
She hugged herself tighter and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hear this. Despite everything, she had never allowed the words to be spoken out loud.
‘It wasn’t fair, what happened,’ he said eventually. ‘We were too weak. Too conventional. I thought I was doing the honourable thing. But had I been bolder, I would have fought for you. Guns at dawn. Bella and Olly: they could have been mine, you know.’
Lara looked sharply up at him.
‘I could have raised them as my own. They wouldn’t even have known.’
‘Stop this,’ Lara said. ‘This is all in the past. We can’t change it now.’
He reached across the swing seat for her hand.
‘I need to go now,’ she said, getting up. She suddenly felt protective of Marcus, sorry for all he stood to lose. She needed to go through to the house and wake him, to walk him upstairs and climb into bed beside him, with her clothes on and her hands over her ears.
‘Don’t go,’ Stephen said, standing and reaching again for her. He caught her arm and drew her towards him. He was much taller than her, almost a foot taller, and she wouldn’t have been able to resist him even if she had wanted to. She looked up at him as he took her hands.
And there it was. The part of him that had lodged so firmly in her DNA long ago thrummed inside her, as if she had never known anything different. She felt his heartbeat through his palms, heard his breath as if it were her own.
If it hadn’t been for the crash of a nearly empty bottle of Maker’s Mark hitting the floor, sent flying by Marcus’s foot as he shifted his position on the sofa, who knows where Lara and Stephen would have ended up. But the sound sprang them apart. Then, distracted, they went indoors to clear up the glass, the whisky and Marcus, who was messily, blearily awake. By then, Lara had regained her senses enough to touch Stephen on the cheek and shake her head as she whispered goodnight to him. He placed the oil lamp in her hand and pointed her in the direction of the bedroom she was to share with her husband.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, leaning in close to help her as she hoisted Marcus’s arm around her shoulder to lead him up the stairs. ‘That was mad.’
Placing the lamp on a table by the bed, she tumbled Marcus in between the sheets and went into the small en suite bathroom, where she took off her shoes and trousers, splashed her face with cold water and removed her contact lenses, avoiding her own gaze as much as possible.
She felt stirred up, sick, excited – the same as she used to when she was forced by her parents to attend weekend riding lessons. Her fear of horses – all so impossibly huge against her own, runtish height – and the threat of something going really, badly wrong, always saw her spending Saturday mornings on the toilet, jodhpurs round her ankles, not sure if she wanted to empty her bowels or throw up. She knew now that for a young girl, when sex seems nothing more than a remote and messy thing adults do, that feeling was a trial run for desire.
She moved to the bedroom window to close the curtains, but found herself held there, her myopic eyes searching out some sort of form in the darkness. Tiny splashes of water sieved in through the fly screen and chilled her burning skin. All she could make out was a velvety blue, where trees and creatures and God knows what else lurked. She was just about to break away when, without warning, a sickening fork of lightning shot straight down into the lawn, shocking the entire back garden into illumination. As Lara flinched from the window – she had heard that lightning could strike right into houses – her weak eyes picked out the blurred form of a woman, standing in the rain at the edge of the forest. But, as the almost simultaneous clap of thunder battered her eardrums, everything plunged back into darkness.
Lara rubbed her eyes, which still held the imprint of the figure. She squinted up to the fly screen and held her breath, trying to force her eyes to work better. But she could see nothing. No movement in the inky black, no sound except the rattle of the rain on the roof above her head, and no more lightning to show her anything else or to make sure she wasn’t mistaken.
She closed the curtains and went to her side of the giant bed. It was stupid to trust her eyes when there couldn’t logically be anyone out there, up here, in this weather; she couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of her without contact lenses. And that, with the storm, the flash and the senseless state she was in, must have led her to see things that weren’t there.
Ridiculous. What a ridiculous evening altogether.
She blew out the lamp and slipped in between the sheets, huddling her arms around herself on the very edge of the bed, burying down into Stephen’s shirt, which she still had on. She could hear Marcus snoring where he lay, six feet away, on his back, his ginger curls splayed around him like the mane of a drugged lion.
What now, she thought. What now?
She had no idea. The only thing she was sure of was, as if it had been in that smashed whisky bottle, the genie was now out there, roaring about with the thunder and lightning, and there was very little chance he was going to put himself away again.
THANKS TO ALICE NEEL, BELLA DREAMED OF DISTORTED WOMEN
hurling babies over their rippled shoulders and bubble-fat twins rolled over and over on a crumpled bedspread. The lightning flashed her half-awake from time to time, and an insistent grunting and scratching somewhere beneath her window gave her an insomniac hour with the duvet pulled over her head, trying to convince herself it was forest wildlife and not some madman clawing his way up the wall to her room.
The whole unsatisfactory night was crowned when she woke at five and lay in the watery dawn light, unable to get back to sleep in case she missed her opportunity to be in Trout Island in time for her date with Sean. She didn’t know whether it was then, in her morning doze, or before, that she heard footsteps on the landing outside her room.
At eight, delicious smells finally pulled her from her bed and downstairs to the kitchen area, where Stephen, his back to her, stood working at the stove in running shorts and a close-fitting T-shirt.
‘Morning,’ she said. Stephen jumped.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You took me by surprise.’
‘Smells good.’
‘There’s tea in the pot.’ He motioned to the centre island counter, where a knitted cosy sat on a squat, fat teapot. ‘I’ve never got into that American habit of starting the day with coffee. Need me PG Tips first.’
‘Cheers.’ Bella poured herself a cup in one of the hand-thrown mugs he had put out.
‘You’re the first up,’ Stephen said, returning to his frying pan, which Bella saw contained thick pancakes. ‘After me, of course. I like to get out for my run before it gets too hot.’
‘Mum runs, too.’
‘Does she? That’s new.’
For a moment, Bella couldn’t quite believe she was here, in Stephen Molloy’s kitchen, as he cooked breakfast. Even though he was old enough to be their father, she and her friends all had a bit of a thing for him. Unlike her dad, he clearly looked after himself. He didn’t have even a hint of an old bloke’s beer belly, and his shoulders were as toned as Sean’s.
But then again, it was his job to stay fit. Whereas, she supposed, her father was more of a character actor so it didn’t matter too much what he looked like. And what would it be like for her if he
were
as good-looking as Stephen? Wouldn’t it be, to say the least, a bit embarrassing having all her friends mooning about over her dad? No, she was glad she had comfortable, average Marcus for a parent.
‘Did you hear the porcupine in the night?’ Stephen said. ‘He comes and gnaws at the deck-post just under your window. Makes a hell of a racket.’
‘So that’s what it was,’ Bella said. ‘I thought you only got porcupines in Africa.’
‘Yeah, sorry. I forgot to warn you.’
Bella perched on a tall bar stool at the island counter. ‘Food smells great.’
‘I thought I’d treat you to a great American breakfast.’ Stephen stopped and smiled at her. ‘God, you’re like your mother.’