Elizabeth is looking at some paintings that have been leant
up against the wall, their blind sides showing. She goes
through the canvases quickly, as though leafing through
an outsize book, scanning each one before flicking it back
to rest against her left hand. She finds the one she is looking
for and slides it out of the stack on the edge of its temporary
wooden frame, pulling it into the centre of the room.
She rests it against the wall and, before she stands in front
of it, the camera shows us the picture. It is unmistakably
Lucas's mother, Claire, a portrait of her painted in the library
downstairs, that serious head still with its youthful beauty,
the shine about her we'd seen in the cine with Justin, despite
her awkwardness. From the style, it is clear that the same
artist painted this picture.
Elizabeth walks to the table in the corner of the room and
picks up a Stanley knife. She finds her place in front of the
picture again, positioning her feet like a ballet dancer. Even
when she thinks herself unseen, she plays to an audience. Her
thumb rubs slowly up and down the knife's grey granulated
handle. Stepping up to the picture, she incises a line across
Lucas's mother's throat with a surgical cleanness. So alive is
the picture that it is a surprise that no quick line of scarlet
springs up as the knife passes. She steps back, considers
her work, then throws herself at the painting, all self-consciousness
gone. She stabs at it, her hair (lying, the muscle
standing out in the arm that plunges the knife into the sturdy
canvas again and again and again.
I stared at Lucas, aghast. 'What ...?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'When the party's over, I'm going to find out.'
'When did you find it?'
'Last week. As I said, this was the last.'
'Why would she ...?'
'I've no idea. l just don't know.' He sat down on the arm of the chair next to mine.
Perhaps it was because we'd been laughing earlier that I was comfortable enough to take his hand like I used to and rub my thumb against his fingers in our old gesture of comfort. There was a moment when we looked at each other in the semi-darkness, the world shut out along with the light by the thick curtains. I heard Diana's high laugh as if it were coming to us through a great depth of water. 'I'm sure it won't be anything, Lucas. It'll be OK.'
'I hope so. I don't know what to think. But thank you.' He leaned in and gave me a gentle kiss on the cheek.
Greg and I cooked supper and the six of us ate at the kitchen table. The room was hot from the oven and I opened the French windows to let in some fresh air.
'Well, this is it,' said Diana, spooning carrots on to her plate. 'This time tomorrow, we'll be invaded.'
There were footsteps in the hall and Danny appeared in the doorway. 'Bloody hell, what's going on here?' he said. 'Are you getting ready for a party or a siege?' He had clearly spent much of the week in the garden: his arms, where the cap sleeves of his T-shirt ended, were the colour of toffee. I glanced at Martha, who was looking at her hands. 'So, are you looking forward to it?' he asked Lucas.
'Yes, of course. It should be good.'
'I've got a surprise for you, too. That's all I came to say, really, that your present's just arrived and I'll bring it with me tomorrow. It's really special. In fact, I bet it'll be the best birthday present you've ever had.' He seemed very pleased with it, whatever it was.
Lucas feigned polite enthusiasm but I could see why he wouldn't be much thrilled by the idea. Danny would have put it on a credit card, I thought, so Lucas would end up paying for it anyway.
At eight, just as the guests were beginning to arrive, the wood began to whisper. A sudden breeze toyed with the canopy, chasing the leaves this way and that, and raising a susurrus that could be heard as far back as the house. The few scraps of cloud that had protected the garden from the vault of the night sky were driven away, leaving the stars to prickle there coldly. The avenue of Roman candles that led round from the drive to the lawn started to spit and flicker, the flames blown out of shape, and the clusters of tea-lights here and there on walls and steps and along the windowsills sputtered and went out.
Lucas had opened a bottle of champagne at seven and I took my glass up to drink while I got ready. I had been trying to stay calm all afternoon but with little success. I was sick with nerves. I had woken that morning with a low-level thrum already established in my ears. The house was preparing itself, I could feel it. The atmosphere had been muted in the early part of the day, as if only warming up, but it was intensifying now. I kept with the others, not wanting to be alone, especially in the hall, where the beat was strongest. I had been taking long routes through the garden all day to avoid having to cross it on my own.
I showered and took my new dress out of its protective cover. It was ruby red, modest at the front but cut deeply enough at the back to hang in two low swags at the base of my spine. I had laid out my necklace on the dressing table earlier and picked it up now but found my hands were shaking too much to do up the tiny clasp.
'Here,' said Greg. 'Let me do that.'
I stood still while his fingers moved gently on the back of my neck. 'I hate seeing you like this,' he said.
'I'm sorry. I am trying not to worry.'
'It'll be all right. We'll have fun tonight and after that things will be easier.'
'I don't know,' I said. 'Something doesn't feel right. I'm worried about Martha being near Danny after a few drinks or Danny taking exception to Michael's new boyfriend. Something, probably something really minor, just blowing up out of all proportion.'
'It's good news about Michael's new man, though, isn't it?' he said, changing the conversation. 'That's a positive thing. Come on, admit it, worry-wart.'
After two days of Michael being incessantly on the Iandline or struggling to get enough reception to send a text, Lucas had asked whom he was trying to contact with such urgency. We'd expected work, a deal he was trying to play down so as not to let it dominate his few days off, but instead he'd smiled rather shyly and said that he was seeing someone new, someone he'd met at the party to which he'd taken Martha. Lucas had demanded to know why he hadn't said something earlier and had issued a late invitation. As the only people who knew about the history between Danny and Michael, only Greg and I had seen the potential for trouble.
I moved over to the window and saw the first guests arriving. Though I had mixed feelings for the place I resisted the idea of strangers flooding Stoneborough, puncturing the invisible shield between the house and the world outside. Although it had often seemed barely to tolerate us, so much had happened here, and that made it our place. On the other hand, perhaps fresh blood was what it needed, an influx of new people to stir the stale, overbreathed air between us, the complicated tangle of emotion and history that we had worked up over the past nine months.
It was a couple I didn't recognise. The woman wore a dress in kingfisher blue and she shielded the front of her hair from the breeze with a hand by her forehead. They hugged Lucas and chatted to him for a few minutes before another pair appeared. Then they drifted away and walked about the garden admiring Diana's stage-setting for the evening. From this vantage point Lucas looked high and happy.
A couple of women from the catering company were now going around wind-proofing the tea-lights by putting them in glasses, and the Roman candles created avenues and focal points here and there around the lawn, by the white wooden bench and near some late-blooming roses in the border. There was a long table laid out with ranks of glasses for champagne and two of the dinner-suited bartenders standing by, ready to mix cocktails to order. Up on the terrace tiny fairy lights were woven among the leaves of the creeper just as Diana had described.
While Greg did his tie in the mirror, I sat on the low chair and watched as the lawn began to fill with people. Even from a distance I could read the sense of occasion in their bearing. They held themselves straight, addressing each other in formal silence on the other side of the glass, like film extras providing a quiet but bustling backdrop. There were dresses in every colour, as if an upmarket florist's had been raided for its rose reds and pinks, irises and magnolias and lilacs and deep evergreens. The skirts fluttered like the wings of exotic birds. It was an old-fashioned scene; the wind might have been blowing not across Oxfordshire but Long Island Sound and Jay Gatsby might have stepped away just a moment before.
I stood up and smoothed my own skirt down with damp palms.
'Ready?' he asked, holding out his hand.
I had forgotten that Greg didn't know many of my other friends. The seven of us had grown so intertwined in the house it seemed amazing that those outside the Stoneborough circle hadn't even met him. 'Do you feel like a debutante at your coming-out party?' I asked, as we went down the side steps on to the lawn.
'More like a semi-domesticated animal being reintroduced to the wild. I like this dress.' He slid a finger down my lower spine and under the back of the dress into the cleft of my buttocks.
'You're not at all domesticated,' I said, pushing his hand away before anyone could see and instead slipping mine into his pocket with its cool silk lining.
The dark was thickening around us, the cerulean sky deepening to black. There was a string quartet playing and the wind snatched at the music, making the notes burgeon and shrink. In my ears they jarred with the house's own pulse, which I realised with horror had carried outside its walls for the first time. Its relentless beat was infecting the garden now.
I thought of
The Bacchae,
Lucas's and my favourite of the Greek tragedies, and how at the beginning the messenger describes the women of Thebes running wild on the mountain to the inspired Phrygian rhythms of Dionysus himself, that cruel, amoral god come to avenge himself on the city that wouldn't acknowledge him. We had once seen the play in an antique amphitheatre in Greece at nightfall and I had understood how those women had lost themselves in the ecstatic rhythm of his dance. The beat was intoxicating, like a drug, both then and now here tonight. Though it had always frightened me before, out in the garden it was less civilised and calculated, more natural; there was something seductive about it, as if it wanted me to stop fighting and give in at last. Even as I thought about it, its tempo was increasing and yet instead of feeling dizzy or nauseous as I did inside the house, I was starting to feel persuaded by it. I knew I had to fight it bitterly, like someone slipping into unconsciousness has to resist sleep.
'Hello, lovebirds.' Danny was crossing the grass towards us, leading Elizabeth gently by the hand, as if she were a shy child. I had never seen two people more ready for their close-up. Danny's dinner suit was immaculate - it looked brand new - and so it had fallen to his hair to carry the burden of his rumpled rock-god image for the night. It stuck up obligingly in just the right all-wrong way. Elizabeth looked so young I wondered for a moment if it could really be her. Her dress was a dove-grey silk cut low at the neckline and worn with a Nehru jacket in a pewter shade. Her hair, dark as balsamic vinegar, was down on her shoulders and parted on the side. It gave her a strangely gamine look. I watched her face for a moment as she told Greg how handsome he looked, trying to identify there some trace of the hatred I had seen in her younger self on the film Lucas had shown me. It had been the sort of hatred I imagined must leave a mark on a person, perceptible to someone who knew about it, if not immediately to everyone. She was serene, however; there was nothing in her eyes or the set of her mouth even to suggest that she was capable of such emotion. In fact, if anything, I saw signs of the softness I now knew she had but had never expected when I first met her.
'Is something wrong?' she asked.
I realised I had been staring. 'No. You look lovely.'
'Thank you. I like your dress, too. Can I see the back?'
I turned to show her and while she was distracted Greg took Danny's arm and said quietly, 'Take it easy this evening.'
Danny laughed and began to walk away. 'Come on, Liz,' he said. 'I want to show you off.'
Before throwing ourselves into the thick of it, we took fresh glasses of champagne and tried the dim sum that the waitresses were circulating. It was a shock to realise how much had happened in the nine months that we had been so absorbed by our life at the house, as if everyone else had moved on while our backs had been turned. A guy that Lucas and I had got to know at university had accepted a job in Australia and was due to leave in a fortnight's time, probably for ever. Sarah and Graham, two of Lucas's fellow law trainees, had married. 'We were lying in bed one Saturday and suddenly it seemed like the right thing to do. We got dressed and went and booked the registry office straightaway,' she explained, holding out her hand and showing me a wedding ring. 'Shortest engagement ever.'
'And honestly not a way of getting out of buying two rings,' said Graham, resting his head against hers. I laughed, knowing that I was supposed to. I felt disconnected. Things that would once have been big news to me felt distant and irrelevant, like celebrity gossip. I was nervous of introducing Greg to people who knew Rachel, sure that she would have told them the story. Although I doubted anyone would come out and say anything, I dreaded seeing judgement in their eyes. In fact, no one spoke to me about her at all and somehow that felt even worse, as though what I had done was so bad that it couldn't even be acknowledged.
In the end it was quite by accident that I overheard someone talking about her. I was waiting at the cocktail table, behind a girl who had been in our year at Oxford but whom Lucas had always liked more than I had. She was talking to a man I didn't know, maybe her boyfriend. 'You know I was telling you the other day about that friend of mine? The one who'd set up a boutique in Richmond that was doing really well?' she said in a voice both irritating for its interrogative tone and rather louder than one I would have chosen to discuss someone known to a lot of the people at the party. 'I've just heard that she won an award for hottest independent fashion retailer. I can't remember whether it was
Vogue
or
Harper's.
Apparently she's thinking of setting up a shop in New York now, showcasing new British designers.'
The man she was with nodded distractedly, evidently more interested in the progress of his drink, but I felt as if I had suddenly been plunged into icy water. It wasn't that I wasn't pleased for Rachel: she deserved to do well. It was a combination of two realisations. The first was that the others must have known and didn't tell me. The other was the undeniable fact that Rachel was a success. The award was one thing but the thought of the New York project caused me a physical pang. In my wilder fantasies about my career, I had dreamed of being poached from a high-profile feature-writing gig on a paper in London to go and work in Manhattan. I was so far from that it felt almost hubristic ever to have entertained the thought. And yet for Rachel, it was a possibility, it seemed, and in the near future. To my horror, I felt tears pricking at the back of my eyes and I relinquished my place in the crush for cocktails and found a clear bit of lawn where I could wander undisturbed in the shadows for a minute or two.
When I had regained my composure I rejoined the throng. Lucas was more extrovert than I had ever seen him. Talking to whole groups of people, laughing, embracing new arrivals, making sure everyone had a drink, he was the epicentre of the party in a way he normally resisted. At one point in the evening, I looked over at him and he reminded me of his father on the cine, golden somehow, the camera's cool focus. On the other hand, it was the first time I really believed in him as the owner of Stoneborough, Patrick's rightful heir. He fitted the house now. Although he had encouraged us to think of it as ours, tonight it was his. His dinner suit was one of his uncle's, too. There was something a little retro about the cut of it, difficult to put a finger on. Maybe the slight nip in at the waist or the almost imperceptible flare of the trousers. It had been too good to leave in the cupboard, certainly.
Martha was like a humming-bird. I saw her here and there speaking to people, never staying long with one group but moving on quickly, as if she were looking for someone. She was drinking fast and I thought that when I had a chance I would tell her to be careful. I didn't want her to lose control tonight. Diana noticed it, too, and asked me if she was OK. I said yes, as far as I knew.
Michael brought his new boyfriend over to meet us. He was a tall, slim man with black-rimmed glasses and cropped hair that was receding slightly at the temples. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes gave him a permanent smile. 'This is Richard,' said Michael proudly. 'Jo and Greg, very good friends of mine.' Immediately, cutting through the crowd like a shark in a swimming area, Danny appeared at my elbow.
'You must be the new boyfriend,' he said, shaking Richard's hand and holding it a moment or two longer than necessary. 'Do look after Michael. He and I are very, very close.'
Michael looked horrified but Richard didn't miss a beat. 'I'm sorry, you didn't tell me your name.'
Danny gave it, a small furrow appearing between his eyebrows.
Richard looked upwards with a puzzled expression, as if searching his mental archives.
'Michael and I were an item at the beginning of the year,' Danny prompted. I felt my eyes widen. I had never heard him even hint at it before.
Richard shook his head, as if mystified. 'Sorry. I'm surprised I haven't heard of you.'