The House at Midnight (26 page)

'Of course. Come and sit down.' He pulled the other armchair over so that it was close to his. 'Do you want a drink?'

He poured me a whisky and I took a sip of it for fortification.

'What do you want to talk about?' he asked, when he was back in his chair. His face was full of anticipation but not, I thought, of anything that he didn't want to hear, which surprised me.

'This is very hard,' I stalled.

'Out with it.' He smiled.

'Lucas, I'm struggling to keep things under control. I feel like I haven't got enough time. There are things I need to get on with now. I'm thirty soon and I haven't got any kind of job that I'm proud of. I'm not doing myself justice.'

He said nothing.

'It's not that I don't enjoy coming here ...' I broke off. 'I just need to start devoting time to other things.'

The look on his face was no longer one of happy expectation. 'So what are you saying? You want to stop coming?'

'No. Of course not. I want to see you, of course I do. It's just that I can't keep coming every weekend, or even every other weekend.'

His expression was stony and he turned away from me to add another inch of whisky to his glass.

I don't know what it was that compelled me to go on and broach the other subject. Perhaps it was my old inability not to talk into an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps it was simple, purely motivated concern, a need to tell him that I was worried on his behalf and still cared deeply about the things that affected him, even as I took a step away from him. Perhaps, though, it was another example of that old impulse of mine to compete with Danny, always to be a better friend than him to Lucas. Perhaps then, when I had seemed to be putting distance between Lucas and myself, I also wanted him to question Danny's status in his life, too.

'Lucas, are things OK with Danny?'

'Why do you ask?'

'No real reason.' The desire to discuss it was gone at once, vanquished by the weight of his tone.

'There must be some reason.'

'I don't know. He's difficult sometimes.'

'It's only you who thinks that.' His voice was rising now and he swigged his drink away in one angry mouthful. 'For some reason you have a problem with him and none of the rest of us understand it. I mean, what is it about him that gets under your skin so much, Joanna? Is it that I'm so close to him? Come on, if we're being honest tonight.' He stared, daring me.

'I don't trust him.'

Lucas snorted. 'Why? What has he ever done?'

I couldn't tell him that under his nose Danny had been sleeping with both Michael and Martha. I couldn't tell him about the threats he'd made to me. Who would he believe, Danny with his silver tongue, or me with my known prejudice against him? I was determined to say something with some substance, though. I couldn't bear him to think that I was motivated by petty jealousy. 'I'm worried that he's using you.'

It was the worst thing I could possibly have said. I realised it as soon as the words left my mouth.

Lucas reared from his chair. His whole body showed his anger, hands in fists and teeth clenched so tightly I thought he might crack them. His face was black. If I'd been a man, I'm sure he would have hit me. I shrank back and he towered over me, looming into my personal space.

'I can't fucking believe you, Joanna. I can't believe you can sit there in my chair drinking my whisky and say that about Danny, the most loyal of all my friends - since school, since before I even met you. Why do you do this? Why do you insist on this over and over and over again? You're wrong. He's my best friend, far better than you ever were. You've never been loyal to me like he has.'

'That's not true.'

'Yes,' he said. 'It is. Why? Are you going to tell me how loyal you are? So loyal you cheated on me?'

I stood up, feeling the floor tilt beneath me. I knew I had to get out of that room. The air was thick and inert; Lucas's fury seemed to be burning off the oxygen. He didn't move and I had to angle my body awkwardly to get past him. I caught the faintest trace of Patrick's old aftershave in the air and the stronger aroma of the whisky on his breath. As calmly as possible, I walked away and pulled the door closed behind me. Then I ran up the stairs.

Greg was working but he put his laptop aside as soon as he saw me.

'I can't do this any more,' I said. 'I'm tired of the control and watching every word I say. I'm tired of being the villain and having my sin thrown in my face. I'm suffocating.'

He put his arms round me and held me but my lungs were so tight I had to stand away from him. It was as if the house had siphoned off all its air. Once I'd started to cough, I couldn't stop. I cursed Lucas for this, for reducing me to a struggling mess of anger, frustration and guilt.

My instinct was to go outside and fill my lungs with gallon after gallon of air that had never come under the shifting taint of the house. I wanted to drive away and never return, rub at the map until it developed a hole where Stoneborough lay, making it untraceable for ever. But Lucas was downstairs and he seemed to me then like the embodiment of the spirit of the place, keeping me there, trapped upstairs. I pushed up the sash window and breathed in as much as my feeble pulmonary system would allow, as if the house were on fire behind me and I was fighting for any air that wasn't permeated with acrid, stinking smoke. I sucked at my inhaler until I shook.

'We'll go first thing in the morning,' he said.

By the time I was calmer, it was late enough to sleep. While Greg was in the bathroom, I lay alone in our bed. I turned on to my side and pulled my knees up towards my chest. At any other time I would have felt comforted in that childish position but now I felt oddly exposed. The room, for all its elegance, had the warmth and comfort of a cell. The bed stretched for feet on either side of me, and the expensive cotton sheets felt starched and cold. The ceiling was impossibly high above my head. As I looked at it, it seemed to get further away still, as if retreating into the ether and refusing to protect me.

And then I felt the boom of blood through my ears and the house's secret pulse. Tonight it was full of gleeful victory; it was whispering about me, laughing at me. The sound now was like the skittering of a million insects, their shiny chitin shells clicking and rustling as they swarmed over one another in a shimmering tide of tiny bodies. I put my hands over my ears to block it but then it became internal, as if whatever it was had moved inside my head and was nestling into the soft tissue of my brain like a parasite. But again, its presence seemed outside me, all around me. I didn't dare open my eyes.

As Greg's footsteps came along the corridor, the jeering began to fade, the pulsing beat to quieten. When he opened the door I was sitting up, looking as calm as I could. I didn't want him to see me like that, almost paralysed by a fear that became absurd as soon as there was someone else in the room. Even to me, it seemed like the behaviour of someone not very far from madness.

He turned out the light and slid into bed behind me, pulling me back against him so that we made spoons. Over my shoulder, his breath smelled of mint. I could feel the warmth of his thighs behind mine and the hair on his chest tickling my back. My pulse began to slow. I reached for his hand and put mine inside it. 'I promise,' I said, 'that when we leave this place things will be normal.'

Sleep came quickly for him but it eluded me yet again. I had feared the return of the terrible pulsing but it wasn't that that kept me awake. Downstairs Lucas was drunk. The sound of his voice reached up through the house like a cold hand. My parents hadn't argued much when I was a child but on the few occasions they had I remembered feeling like this as I lay in my bed, remote from it and unable to catch the words, my heart clutching with fear that what was going on between them would spin out of control and change my world.

Finally he stood in the hall and shouted. I hadn't heard him so drunk since the night we split up; his voice swooped and then soared again, filling the centre of the house. I heard my name and Greg's and angry imprecations. Suddenly, just as I thought I couldn't bear it any longer, it stopped and there were racking sobs. Then, gentle, there was Diana's voice as she led him away.

We woke to a wide bright sky. The rain had cried itself out and the asthmatic tension that had bound the house had relaxed a little, although I could still feel it, pulling at the edges of my lungs with the power of an unhappy memory.

When I slept on an argument I often woke to find that the vehement convictions of the night before had evaporated like pure spirit. Today my determination to leave was as strong as it had been when I eventually slept. We packed as soon as we woke.

Downstairs there was no sign of Lucas or Diana but the kitchen doors were open into the garden. We walked out and followed their voices through the wrought-iron gate into the orchard beyond. There was the low hum of insects in the espalier trees along the back wall and the warm breeze was freighted with the scent of ripening pears. It was too benevolent a day.

From the gate, only their legs were visible; their upper bodies were concealed by the rustling foliage of the lower branches. On the ground were large bowls from the kitchen, some already filled with huge green apples. The sun hadn't yet burnt off the rain and the bottoms of my jeans were quickly soaked by the ankle-length grass. They both saw us approaching, I knew it, but only Diana acknowledged us.

'Hi,' she said. 'These are ripe. We can have an apple pie this afternoon.'

Her tone seemed innocent of any knowledge of an argument. I wondered whether it was her policy for peacemaking, just to pretend that nothing had happened.

'Lucas,' I said. 'We're going to go now.'

A long moment passed before he answered. At last he stepped back and faced me. As he moved he brushed a low branch and dislodged a shower of rainwater, which fell into the long grass. His hangover was clearly giving him hell: he looked as if he might have to turn away and throw up at any moment. His skin had a clammy pallor at odds with the beauty of the morning.

'I'm going to have a party,' he said suddenly.

'A dinner party?' said Diana brightly.

'A proper party. For my thirtieth. The second Saturday of September. I'll have it here and I'll invite everyone. Everyone we've lost touch with this year. Friends, friends of friends, their friends. An enormous party. We'll have a marquee on the lawn, dinner and dancing. It's relatively short notice but we'll manage. I'll throw money at it.' He reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. He lit one, turning his head away.

He looked at me intently, all his focus on selling me the idea. 'In a way it'll be our party, not just mine. A celebration of our time here. It'll probably be one of the last decent weeks of weather. You haven't had any holiday, have you? Come up for a couple of days beforehand. We'll go out on a high.'

Our friendship, our years of shared history and everything it had meant to both of us hung like his smoke in the air between us. Allow me this, he seemed to say, and after that you're free to go. Let us mark the end of our decade.

'OK,' I said.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We had agreed to go up to Stoneborough two days before the party itself, to help Lucas and Diana prepare. Before we went, Greg and I spent a quiet evening in London. We had supper at a noodle bar in Notting Hill Gate and then walked back down Holland Park to Shepherd's Bush. We opened the window in the bedroom to let in the night breeze with its whisper of autumn and I stayed awake long after his breathing had slowed, listening to the city cooling around us, the clacking of the last tubes through Goldhawk Road station and the Australian voices loud after an evening at the Walkabout on the Green. Normally in London I didn't need Greg to be awake with me like I did in the country; when he was asleep here I just missed him, as if he had been taken somewhere I couldn't contact him. That night, though, I wanted to wrap his body around me and use his lovely solidity as a shield against the new and pervasive sense of foreboding that had been rising around me like a mist that the sun wouldn't burn off.

It was more than a month since I'd seen Lucas and the time only exacerbated my nervousness at seeing him. We procrastinated and delayed so much that it was five o'clock by the time we reached the house the next day. The garden was saturated with the warm yellow light of late afternoon. Everyone was outside and Diana and Michael were playing badminton on the lawn over an old-fashioned string net. Holes in the mesh and a definite sag in the middle bore witness to its long exile in the barn. A cloud of midges hung in the air on Michael's side and his slight form ducked around it as he played. I stood for a minute watching the shuttlecock with its retro crown of feathers beat its way back and forth over the net, lulled by the regular sound of the rubber tip against the taut strings of the rackets.

They finished the game and came up the stone steps to the terrace. 'Hello, sweetheart,' said Michael, pecking me on the cheek. The touch of his skin was hot and damp and its usual tired grey had been vanquished. Sometimes even the thought of a few days off was enough.

Lucas handed me a glass of Pimm's swimming with fruit. He was acutely aware of the unspoken contract between us, it was clear. I could feel it in the distance that he kept, the way he was treating me like a guest again. Three days, I had thought, when he came to meet us at the car with a polite smile, just three days. 'How many people are coming?' I asked now, as he turned back and poured himself a refill.

'Just under a hundred and fifty in total.'

'That's a big party,' said Martha, looking up from her book.

'Yeah, I'm pleased,' he said, fishing an unwieldy slice of orange from his glass and tossing it into the flowerbed below. 'I was worried that no one would bother but it seems everyone's been dying to get up here to see the place.'

'What do you want us to do to help?'

'Actually, Diana and I have done a lot of it. It's largely scene-setting now.'

'We're going to have lots of candles in the garden and sprays of fairy lights woven into the creeper up here.' Diana indicated with her hand. 'We're going for Greek bacchanal meets Roman banquet.'

Michael was moving his thumb over the buttons of his mobile with a practised speed. In return it gave a defiant beep. He tried again and had the same response. 'Can I use the Iandline?' he asked. 'I always forget the reception's so unreliable out here.' He got up and tucked the phone into his pocket.

'Danny's been helpful, too,' said Lucas, avoiding my eye.

Diana laughed. 'Not in practical terms.'

'Well, no, but you remember the CD we had on that night on the terrace? Those DJs who are friends of his? He's got them to do the party, after the jazz group.'

'I think I saw them mentioned in
Time Out,'
said Greg. 'Didn't they do a set at Elysium recently?'

I drained my glass and moved down on to the cushions next to him. I slipped my feet out of my sandals, pressing them on to the flagstones to feel the warmth baked in by the sun. When everyone stopped talking, the silence in the garden was so absolute it seemed to have depth. Looking out over it, I saw a scene that might have been the same for a hundred years. Generations had been seeded, grown and fallen here but it was unchanged. In a sudden access of understanding I saw that we were completely incidental. The house owned and governed this garden and it would continue, regardless of us. In that second, I pulled my feet off the stone and shoved them back into my shoes. I had fleetingly - the sense that the warmth I felt there was the heat of a body, evidence of the house's beating heart.

The next day Greg drove into town with Lucas and Michael to choose the wine. While they were gone Diana, Martha and I carried blankets down on to the lawn and stretched out to sunbathe. I spread the news review section of the paper in front of me and embarked on a piece about us foreign policy. In minutes, however, the sun had sapped me of all resolve and I lay with my head on my forearm, the sun heavy on my back, the nape of my neck damp.

'This is probably the last bit of sunbathing weather this year,' said Martha.

'I love autumn, though.' Diana rubbed tanning oil on to her calves. The muscles there were defined, slightly too much to fit the ideal. 'I get that feeling of anticipation about it. All the good things are in autumn - Halloween, bonfire night, then Christmas. It's like a time to get on with things after the holidays, life starting up again.'

'What are you going to do?' I asked. 'Isn't it difficult to be a professional photographer, even if you're good?'

She sat up and took a pack of cigarettes from her bag. She lit one and I watched the wraith of smoke rise until it disappeared against a sky the colour of a drop of ink in water. 'A small gallery in London wants to show four of my pictures. It's been on the cards for a bit. I won a competition while I was doing my MA and got to know the guy who owns it.'

'That's great,' I said. 'Congratulations.'

'Thanks.' She took a long drag and exhaled slowly. 'He also put me in touch with another photographer who exhibits there, a really good one actually, and he's offered me a job as his assistant, which gives me a way to earn some money and learn at the same time.' She turned to face me. 'It will mean moving to London.'

'Is that a problem?' said Martha, not understanding.

'From my point of view, no. I want to. But it means leaving Lucas.'

'Oh.'

'Yeah.' She flicked the ash from her cigarette into the grass. 'I have to do it. It's too good an opportunity.' There was anxiety in her eyes. 'I'm torn because I want to be with him but then, he has to know that I can't live here in a bubble. I have to be part of the real world.'

She leant forward and undid the clasp on her bikini before pulling the neck strap over her head. 'Do you mind? While the boys aren't here? It's odd, it doesn't bother me to be topless in front of them but sometimes I think they get embarrassed.' She lay down and settled her shoulders against the blanket. I glanced at her from behind my sunglasses. There was nothing self-conscious about her. She looked as natural a part of the scene as the grass, the trees and the sky. Feeling prudish I undid my top, too, and stretched out next to her, hoping, although there was no one to see, that I looked more confident than I felt.

'Are things going well otherwise?' I said. I launched the words up into the air. I couldn't have said them if we'd been face to face: her relationship with Lucas was none of my business and I had no right to ask. Somehow, though, I felt strangely responsible for both of them, Lucas for the old reasons but Diana, too. Knowing Lucas's volatility made me want to open a channel for her to talk if she needed to.

'I love him,' she replied, frank and unembarrassed. 'I did when we were children, too. We were so close and he wasn't like the other boys I knew. He was kind. I suppose he was sensitive, even then. I want to look after him now. He's had a tough time. He needs someone to love him and get him better again.'

I said nothing, unsure whether she counted me among the reasons for his tough time.

'He told me that he's talked to you about his drinking,' she went on. 'He worries that he's like his father, doesn't he? I try to tell him he's not. I mean, I know he's drinking way too much and he has to stop but his dad was in a different league. He was a complete slave to alcohol, Jo; even when I was six or seven I could see that. And maybe that would happen to Lucas if he carried on but I won't let it.'

'You'll be good for him,' I said.

She turned on her side and looked at me over the top of her sunglasses. 'I hope so. I hope he lets me. He's still very caught up in other things. Sometimes he's so distant that I can't get near him.'

* * *

Greg and I drove into town on our own the next day, to give ourselves a break. We went for coffee at Georgina's, the tiny cafe tucked under the glass-panelled roof of the Covered Market. The students wouldn't be back until the end of the month so we had a table to ourselves. The speckled bowls of rice and pasta salad behind the glass counter and the scent of toasted bagels took me back to the afternoons in our final year when Lucas, Martha and I came here for tea, on breaks from the lower reading rooms of the Bodleian. Rachel, doing English, worked on the floor above us and was more conscientious. Occasionally, though, she would join us and the four of us would find a space together on one of the long pine tables. It was strange to find it exactly the same, the old carpet as dangerously wrinkled as ever and the newspapers in their position on the low bench at the top of the stairs. The same film posters covered the ceiling and they were playing
Park life
by Blur, an album that had been released while we were students. It was as if my old life were continuing and I had somehow slipped into a different existence, from which I might look over and see my younger self drinking a mug of tea and moaning about how much work there was to do before the exams. Now, though, I was sitting with Rachel's ex-boyfriend and she and I didn't speak any more. I felt the familiar guilty black tug at the bottom of my stomach.

'I wonder if Lucas invited Rachel to the party,' I said.

Greg clicked the catch on his watch open and shut. 'He did. She said no. I asked him yesterday.'

'You didn't tell me that.'

'Sorry.' He added sugar to his coffee and stirred it without meeting my eye.

I expected him to go on but he didn't. A sudden anxiety gripped me. 'Do you still love her?' I blurted out.

'Of course not. How can you ask me that?' He looked flabbergasted. 'But I do like her and I regret that she had to be hurt for us to get together. That's all. God, Jo, how can you even think ... when you and me are like this?'

'Sorry, sorry, I ... That was ridiculous. Sorry.' I pretended to rummage in my handbag, mortified to have doubted him. A few moments passed in which he contemplated the scars in the table's wooden surface and I feigned a fascination in the posters on the ceiling above us.

'What did you want to do in town?' I said, as Damon Albarn started in on the chorus of 'Girls and Boys'.

'A couple of things. I thought we should get Lucas a present,' he said.

'What do you buy the man who has everything?'

'Lucas doesn't have everything, though, does he? He's not a consumer, not like Danny. He buys books and CDs but it was Danny who bought the TV. He doesn't have many clothes, either. He spends all his money on food and drink and entertaining. This party alone must be costing thousands.'

'That's what matters to Lucas, having friends around him,' I said.

'I had one idea,' he said. He opened his bag and found the book he was reading,
The Count of Monte Cristo.
He was a big reader of classics. I wondered what the Count had to do with Lucas's present. Greg flipped through the pages until they fell open and he took out a photograph that he handed to me.

When I saw what it was, I was taken by genuine surprise. The picture showed us all in the drawing room at Stoneborough that first evening, New Year's Eve. We were dancing. Danny was with Rachel, his hands on the waist of her punky silver dress. She looked exhilarated, beaming with what was unmistakably a look of love at the photographer. I realised with another lurch of my stomach who it must have been. Martha, Michael and I were in a loose circle, as if around an imaginary handbag. We had drunk quite a bit by that stage. Martha's cheeks were rosy and my hair had abandoned any presence of a style. Michael was cutting a particularly interesting move involving the drawing of his fingers across his eyes. Behind us was the room itself, so impressive to me then, so familiar now. The fire was burning and the low lamps cast their pools of golden light over the rich reds and greens of the traditional furnishings. Lucas was sitting the dance out. He watched from the chesterfield with an amused expression. When I saw photographs like this, I understood the wisdom of his no-dancing policy.

'I thought we could have it blown up and framed for him,' said Greg. 'What do you think?'

I looked back at it. The nostalgia was so strong it was painful. 'He'll love it.'

We finished our coffee and went down the steep stairs into the market. Again, nothing seemed to have changed. The flowers massed in buckets outside the florist's on the corner could have been the same ones we came to buy for each other after exams and the air still carried the iron tang of the carcasses hanging up outside the butcher's, a bloody top note against the anonymous vegetable smell of the place. Although the market was small, it was still possible to get confused in the net of its aisles. Greg led me out towards the High Street and then, to my surprise, ushered me into the expensive dress shop there.