'Are you going to be all right?' he asked.
'I think Lucas and I are going to split up. Although I know tonight wasn't really about him being angry with me. Please don't tell anyone this.' I put my hand on his arm and he shook his head. 'If I'm honest with myself, I know it's not right and it hasn't ever really been. I just wanted it to be. So much. Lucas has been my best friend for years, since right at the beginning of university. But it doesn't translate. I'm trying to force something that isn't there. I'm worried that if I talk to him about it he'll hate me, too. He's paranoid about people leaving him - his father, his mother and Patrick. How can I leave him? I'm the closest thing he's got to family.'
'But you're not going anywhere. Not really. You still want to be around, to be friends. It might take a while to find a way to do it but if you both want it - and Lucas won't want to lose you even if you do split up - you'll work it out.' He continued to look away from me, talking as if he were addressing someone else on the terrace. He moved his feet and I heard the grit between his shoes and the flagstones.
'I'm useless at relationships,' I said.
'That's not true. You've got loads of friends and you and Lucas are a far better couple than a lot I know, even if it doesn't work out. You have fun, you're supportive of each other ...'
'It doesn't feel like that tonight.'
At last he turned round. 'Please don't cry, Jo.' He put his hand on my cheek and turned my face towards him. He looked at me without saying anything. Though I knew my eyes were swollen and my face puffy, I felt suddenly unselfconscious. With his thumb, he brushed away the tears from each cheek in turn, still not breaking eye contact. The gesture felt protective.
He leant in and kissed me, his lips firm and warm on mine. When I didn't immediately move away, he kissed me again and this time I responded. I couldn't quite believe it. Even as it was happening, I was shocked by it. A picture of Rachel flashed into my head. We pulled apart.
'My God, I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to do that.' Despite everything, I registered a feeling of sharp disappointment.
'No, no, I didn't mean that,' he said quickly. 'Of course I wanted to kiss you. But not like this. Not when we're with other people, not when you're upset. I don't want to take advantage of you.' He turned away from me and started to address the darkness again. 'I really like you, Jo. I think you're funny and kind and - well, I just like you. Since that weekend when you saw Rachel and me, I've found it quite difficult to be around you, especially when I see you and Lucas together. And I don't have any right. Apart from anything else, you two have all this history. You've done so much together. All of you have, of course, but particularly you and him. How could I compete with that?'
'I don't think the history is helping us much at the moment,' I said, trying to leaven things.
'Maybe not. But there's also the fact that I'm going out with one of your best friends. I care about her, I really do. For a while, I thought I was falling in love with her but I realise now that it isn't going to work. There's not enough common ground. I don't share her thing about fashion.' He sighed. 'I actually find it quite frustrating, even though she's great at it. And I need to sort it out because she wants to get married and have children and I'm wasting her time. But - and this is so callous - if Rachel and I split up, my line to you is lost. I've no other way of seeing you.'
'What a mess,' I said. 'What a complete bloody mess.'None of us had ever tangled with one of the others' partners before, not even fleetingly and not even when we were much younger, when relationships were less serious. I saw now just how important that had been to us as a group rule, unspoken as it was.
'Have I made a fool of myself?' he said.
I didn't have to think about it. 'No.' I shook my head. 'You know, it's this place, the house. Ever since we started coming here, everything's gone outside normal bounds. Lucas and I getting together after however many years, Danny and ...' I stopped myself just in time. 'Maybe it's because we feel like we're on a bigger stage here. But sometimes I feel as if there's something in the house that's kind of egging us on towards catastrophe. Does that sound ridiculous?'
He took my hand and began rubbing up and down my fingers with the pad of his thumb. 'No, but I think the first seems more likely - that something about the scale of the place makes people act up - I'm thinking of Danny in particular, of course.'
I smiled and we looked at each other again. This time it was me who put my hand around the back of his head, where the soft skin of his neck met the line of his close-cut hair. I pulled him towards me and kissed him. Our mouths became the hot focus of everything. All the desire I had felt in the library and the bath was there, undiminished. But also there was my growing sense of his all-round rightness and how much I liked him. I wanted to get lost in the kiss, absorb him and be absorbed by him. With as little break as possible, he shifted position, swinging one leg over the drop, and in that second I realised that this exact spot was where I had first kissed Lucas. I pulled back.
'Greg ...'
'We should go inside. We need to sort things out. Not tonight, though. Just kiss me once more and we'll go in.'
He pulled me towards him again, twisting his hands in my hair.
I think we both became aware at the same time that we were no longer on our own. We broke apart to find a figure standing just outside the flower-lobby door. Rachel.
'Tell me this isn't what it looks like,' she said, her voice carrying over the flagstones in the stillness of the night.
Greg closed his eyes and lowered his head. 'Shit,' he said, just audibly. He looked up at her again. 'Rachel, I'm sorry.'
She came closer, as if approaching an animal she knew could hurt her very badly and yet by which she was nonetheless fascinated. 'Sorry?'
'This is the first time,' he said.
'I can't believe this is happening,' she said. Even in the half light her face was a screen for the emotions flashing across it in quick succession: genuine disbelief, bewilderment, anger. 'Tell me I'm asleep and this is a nightmare.'
Greg swung his leg back over the balustrade and stood. He made to walk towards her. She took a corresponding couple of steps back. 'Rachel.'
She made a dry sound that was somewhere between a choke and an ironic laugh. 'Is this where you tell me you can explain?'
'Please don't. It's a mess but please let me talk to you.'
'I don't want to talk to you, now or ever again. You've ruined it. I thought we had something really good. How wrong can you be?A friend of mine, too. Jo, you fucking selfish cow.' She turned and ran back into the house, slamming the door behind her. Greg and I looked at each other in horror.
'I'll go after her,' he said.
'Shit. Shit. Lucas.'
* * *
I expected the house to be mayhem when we got inside but it was strangely quiet. As when I'd left it, the only light came from the two table lamps on the chest in the hall and the bright strip under the drawing-room door. I thought of the eye of a storm, the deadly stillness, the inevitability. I imagined a tornado sitting over the house, the first half of the damage already done, the second coming any minute. It filled me with a sickening dread; at that moment I wished I had walked in to find it all breaking over my head rather than suffer the anticipation. I took a deep breath and opened the door, indicating to Greg to stay back so the others didn't see us together, just in case there was any chance, however remote, that the situation was salvageable. Inside, Michael, Martha and Danny were in the same positions they'd been in when I'd walked out. It was like a flashback. Although it was less than half an hour ago, that scene already belonged to a different era.
'Jo, are you OK?' said Martha, looking up with concern. 'I was going to come find you but Greg said he would go.'
'It's fine, it's fine,' I said, having almost forgotten that, as far as she knew, the major event had been Lucas swearing at me. I felt about as unworthy of anyone's sympathy as it was possible to be. 'Where's Rachel? Where's Lucas?'
'Don't know about Rachel but Lucas is throwing up,' she said.
'Calling God on the great white telephone,' said Danny without opening his eyes.
'He completely overdid it,' Martha said. 'Well, you saw him. He was on a total mission even before he screamed at you.'
'I'll go and talk to him. Where is he?'
'In the downstairs loo but he won't want to talk. I tried,' said Michael.
I closed the door behind me and faced Greg. 'Do you think she's with him?'
Upstairs there was the sound of a door closing and quick footsteps. Rachel appeared at the top of the steps, holding her weekend bag. I felt, more than heard, the first opening pulses of the house's secret rhythm. There was something sly in it now, knowing, taunting. I shook my head to rid myself of it but it only gathered pace, as if trying to match the beat of my heart. I looked up, wanting to see the picture on the ceiling. It was hidden in the darkness, too high to be touched by the light from the lamps, but I had the sense that the people up there were craning down to see what drama the house was cradling now. I could almost hear the creak of the couch as Zeus leaned forward, waiting. I said a silent prayer. Please don't let it come out like this. Please let me tell Lucas myself, decently.
'Haven't you had enough of sneaking around?' said Rachel, descending towards us. Guilt made it impossible for me to look at her.
'Where are you going?' said Greg.
'Home.'
'Have you called a cab?'
'My car's here. I'll drive. I just want to go. Leave me alone.' She struggled as he tried to take her bag.
'Rachel, however much you despise me at the moment, I'm not going to let you drive tonight. You've been drinking.'
'The time where you had any influence on my decisions has gone.' Her composure deserted her at last and she burst into tears. 'You idiot,' she said, 'I really loved you.' My heart filled with pity for her and then, a fraction of a second later, with shame that I, supposedly her friend, was the cause of her misery. She shook her bag out of his grip and turned to me, hostile again. 'I just can't believe you've done this. Bad enough what you've done to me but I can't believe you'd cheat on Lucas. How could you? After everything else that he's been through.' Her words caused me a visceral pain that sliced up through my stomach like a cutlass. 'I hope you can live with yourself, Joanna, because I don't think I could. It's taken me ten years to realise what you are but I know now. I just want to forget I ever knew you.' She spun away as if the sight of me was repulsive.
The drawing-room door opened and Martha came out. 'What's going on?' she said. 'I heard shouting.'
'Nothing,' I said automatically.
Rachel snorted. 'Why don't you tell her, Joanna? Tell Martha what a lovely friend you are.'
'What's she talking about, Jo?' Martha looked at me and the thought that she was about to discover what I'd done made me want to cry. Guilt was roiling in my stomach. I could feel it burning my cheeks, too, and I couldn't get my eyes to meet hers for more than a second. The pulsing in my ears put in a couple of extra beats as if in a merry little flourish.
'We're all drunk and overtired,' said Greg. 'Why don't we call it a day?'
There were footsteps from the direction of the cloakroom and Lucas appeared in the mouth of the corridor. Even in the dim glow of the table lamps I could see that he was as pale as wax. He was unsteady on his feet and braced himself against the wall. 'What's happening?' he said. 'Why are you all out here?'
'Something's going on,' said Martha.
I stood there, looking at Lucas. My anger with him for his hurtful remarks was forgotten; all I could think of was the pain that I was going to inflict on him, surely inevitable now. I couldn't understand how the evening had suddenly turned my life on its head, how I could go from trying so hard to make a go of things with him to kissing Greg outside and now this, the revelation in front of everyone of what I'd done. I was trapped - no way backwards and no way forwards without pain, for me and people I cared about. There was no undoing it. I was going to leave Lucas just as surely as his mother and father and Patrick had done but having hurt him first.
Michael and Danny had come to the drawing-room door now, drawn like Martha by the raised voices. Everyone's attention was on me.
'If you won't tell them, then I will.' Rachel turned to him. The air seemed to shimmer with the potential energy of the chaos she was about to unleash. 'Lucas, just now I went to see if Greg had found Jo and if she was OK. I found them out on the terrace - and they were kissing.'
Lucas looked at me. His face showed no change of expression apart from a slight widening of the eyes.
'Lucas ...' I said.
'Is it true?' He looked only quizzical. I didn't think I could bear it, watching him absorb the news.
'No. Yes ... I don't know. It's not like you think. It's ...'
'Oh come on, Joanna,' Danny piped up from the doorway. 'It's been obvious for weeks that there's something going on between you two. Every time you're in a room together you're either staring at each other like zombies or pretending the other one doesn't exist.'
I turned to look at him in disbelief. He knew that nothing had ever happened. He had been watching me minutely for weeks, letting me feel the pressure of his surveillance. If anything had happened, he would have known almost before I did. In his eyes now, there was a light like glee. It was the moment he had been waiting for, when I was exposed as the cheat and the liar and he revealed as Lucas's one true friend. My hatred for him burned with a new intensity. I wanted so much to ask about his secret involvement, to see how he liked his affairs broadcast in public, but I could see Michael's stricken face behind him. And completely inappropriately my heart had leapt at the thought that Greg had been watching me, too.
'So, while we've been here, you and he have been meeting in London? You've been sleeping together?' The pain was there in Lucas's voice now, as unmistakable as a knife wound.