I was stunned. The threat - if I wasn't dreaming - was genuine. 'And in fact,' he said, 'shouldn't I be the one protecting him from you at the moment? It's a bit of a coincidence, isn't it, that you've been friends for years and then, hours after you see his new country house for the first time, you think it might be a good idea to try going out with him after all.'
'You can't think that.' I was horrified. 'You know I'm not like that.'
He looked at me with something not dissimilar to hatred. The shock must have shown on my face because suddenly he laughed and the bitterness in his expression was gone, the shift so quick that I might almost have imagined it. 'Of course not. I'm teasing you, Joanna - don't take everything so seriously.'
'Well, I have news,' said Michael, pushing his supper plate away and reaching for his cigarettes. He lit one and exhaled, looking up to make sure he had all our attention. 'I told my parents.' 'You mean, you came out to them?' Martha reached over and clutched his hand where it lay on the tabletop.
'Shit,' said Danny.
'How? What did you say?' I asked.
Michael had been leading his double life as long as I had known him. He was out to all of us, our other friends and everyone at work but he hadn't been able to tell his parents. Things were especially hard for him because he was an only child and his mother was keen for him to settle down and have children. She was a sweetly old-fashioned woman who longed to have another woman to chat to in the kitchen on family Sundays. Michael adored her and knew how deeply the truth of his sexuality would hurt her.
'John dumped me,' he said.
'What?' said Lucas. 'When?'
'The week after Christmas.'
'You didn't tell us. Last week, New Year's Eve ...' I said. 'I thought we might sort it out.' He ran a hand over his soft blond hair. I noticed for the first time that it was beginning to recede.
'Oh Michael,' said Martha. 'Did he say why?'
'He said I wasn't committed. He said he couldn't be with me if there were bits of my life that I shut him out of. I met his parents and they were great. They made me feel welcome in their house, not like I was some hideous little homosexual. I really liked him. I thought maybe ...' He shrugged.
'So when I was round at my parents', I lost my temper. I was helping Mum clear the table and I thought what a fantastic marriage they have. Nothing flashy, not high passion or drama, just respect and love and a sort of comfort. It's like an anchor. Their life is real, in a way that mine isn't. It made me really angry. I know that they want all that for me but I can't have it. Not their way, at least.'
'What happened?' asked Lucas.
'I just said it. It kind of burst out of me. "Mum and Dad, I am going to tell you something that you are going to hate. I'm gay." I've thought about how I was going to say it - if I was ever going to say it - for so many years. It was like an out-of-body experience or something. I could hear my voice saying the words.'
'Shit,' said Danny again. His face was free of any sign of the violent anger of earlier that afternoon. Instead he was watching Michael with a curious interest. I averted my eyes; his outburst had unnerved me to such an extent that I was finding it difficult to look at him longer than absolutely necessary.
'Yeah.' Michael flicked the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray. 'I swear Dad kind of faded. I'm not joking - he went grey. He dabbed his mouth with his napkin in this really prissy way then folded it up and put it on the table. Then he walked out.'
'Walked out?' I said.
'Of the house. He didn't come back while I was there.'
'What did your mother say?' asked Martha.
'She wouldn't stop crying. I sat with her for hours. She was like a dormouse or something, perched on the edge of the sofa with big red eyes, hunched over her handkerchief.' He ground out his cigarette. 'I put my arm round her at one point and she flinched. Can you imagine that?'
'Think what it would be like if I came out to my mother,' said Martha, trying to lighten his mood. 'She'd probably weep for joy. I don't think she's ever really forgiven herself for being straight.'
Michael smiled weakly. 'Swap you.'
'So what are you going to do?' said Lucas.
'To be honest, I don't know. I don't even want to speak to them at the moment. I'm having one of those weird times when you feel more mature than your parents. You know, when you can almost see their generation becoming obsolete?'
'My parents were obsolete many moons ago,' said Danny. 'Superseded by newer, shinier, more fashionable models.' He topped up Michael's glass and emptied the rest of the bottle into his own. 'Have a drink and try to take your mind off it. You were brave. You'll patch things up again in the long term.'
'I hope so. I'm not sure.'
I watched our images copying us in the glass of the French windows. The garden had been swallowed whole by the darkness and made a mirror backing. Greg and Rachel had arrived just after lunch and now Rachel dragged her chair over so that she was next to Michael. She was listening carefully to him, occasionally asking a question. Danny was standing behind Michael, his hand on his shoulder, conducting a loud conversation with Martha at the other end of the table. Greg was opening another bottle. I was impressed by how quickly he had become one of the group. I caught Lucas's eye in the glass and he winked at me.
* * *
We built up the fire and opened the bottle of port that Greg had brought up with him from London that afternoon. We pulled the two chesterfields forward so that they formed a V-shaped draught-break between us and the rest of the room. Danny sprawled on the rug like a cat. His T-shirt had ridden up, revealing three inches or so of flesh where his hips joined his jeans, and a faint fuzz of hair was visible tapering down from his navel and disappearing under the waistband. He was playing with the tiny wheel on the side of his new toy. As far as I knew, he'd never expressed the faintest interest in deep sea diving but that hadn't stopped him spending a couple of thousand pounds on the state-of-the-art watch as a late Christmas present to himself. He'd explained to us earlier how it was waterproof to some depth totally irrelevant to a man who never got much wetter than in the bath.
I watched the fire as it blazed, even though the heat and the intense brightness dried out my eyes. Once again, it seemed to me that the house had closed in around the small area that we had staked out. I could feel it beyond the chesterfields and above us, huge and silent. It was Martha who started us on telling ghost stories. Whether she felt the same as I did about the house I wasn't sure but I couldn't imagine a better place for it.
The problem was that, when you've known people for a long time, you know all their stories. The first time I'd heard Martha's, about a couple who go camping in a wood in Maine, we ourselves had been camping. I'd been scared to death then but now, having heard it at least twice since, I wasn't frightened by it. I'm sure, too, that the reaction of the others to my story, about a widow haunted and then murdered by her dead husband, was exaggerated, both to reassure me that I'd done a decent enough job of telling it and also to convince themselves that they'd been spooked by it.
'My God, Jo, that is gruesome,' said Rachel, shivering as she always did.
'I've got one,' said Greg.
We settled down again, excited by the prospect of a new story. Lucas poured more port into my glass and his. Greg was opposite us on the other sofa. Rachel sat on the floor between his legs, her head tipped sideways so that her cheek rested on his thigh. They looked good together, the femininity of her face emphasised by the sheer heft of him. He waited until Lucas had put the bottle down and Danny had found a new position on the rug. When we were all still, he began. His voice was low and confidential.
'About three miles out of the village where my parents live in Worcestershire,' he said, 'there's an old house everyone says is haunted. It's a big place, Tudor, built in grey stone with leaded windows. No matter what time of day it is, it always seems dark. Even at night I've never seen any lights on there. It's surrounded by fields that are never cultivated but there's a stream running through them and sometimes a low mist rises up from it and hangs over them like a sort of shroud. No one ever stays there long. It seems to come on the market every six months and it's always advertised by estate agents in London, never locally. No one local would ever have bought it.'
I watched him as he spoke. He was absorbed in his tale, watching us as we watched him but distant at the same time, as if he were seeing the house in his mind's eye and describing it to us from the image. I'd thought of him as a scientist. It hadn't occurred to me that he would tell a good story, too.
'When I was a child and I used to ask my mother about it, she told me that there was no such thing as a haunted house. Even so, she always took the long way round to avoid that road when we were driving home at night.'
He looked round at us again, confident of our attention. 'The story went that there was a murder there in the seventeenth century. A local girl working in the kitchen had fallen in love with the man of the house and he with her. They started an affair and, unsurprisingly, she got pregnant. The man panicked. He wasn't wealthy himself, most of the money was his wife's, and he knew if the truth got out, he would be destitute.
'To make matters worse, his wife had just announced that, after years of being unable to conceive, she herself was pregnant. The kitchen maid was desperate. She knew that her father would throw her out if he knew she was going to have a child out of wedlock. In the end, she confided in another of the kitchen maids. Their mistress sensed that something was wrong in the house and put this other girl under pressure until she had no choice but to reveal what was going on.
'When he was confronted, the man denied all knowledge of it and claimed the girl was mad. A story began to circulate, put about by the family no doubt, that she was a witch.'
'What happened?' said Martha, leaning forward.
'They put her through a trial, which found her guilty of witchcraft, of course, and then suffocated her to death in the village. They put her under a board and loaded it up with stones until she suffocated. She died and so did her unborn baby.'
'My God,' I said, unable to stop myself.
Greg trained his gaze on me, watching me until my odd shyness of him came to the fore and I had to look away. 'But she hadn't finished with him,' he said. 'Soon people started to say that, late at night, you could hear breathing in the house, sometimes just quietly, but then loud and jagged breaths, like someone gasping for their last lungfuls of air. The woman was tormented. She swore that something came to her at night and whispered about her child. That there would be a curse on any first son born in the house. When the woman went into labour, she did give birth to a son and lived in fear that he wouldn't survive. But he thrived and she told herself that she had imagined it all, that there was no curse and it was just a trick that her mind had played on her in the later stages of her pregnancy.'
A log slipped in the fireplace, sending up a spray of sparks. I jumped.
'So?' prompted Martha again.
'One day, when the child was three years old, his father went away on business to London for a month. In the three years, he had convinced himself that the kitchen maid had in fact been evil and he had come to blame her for bewitching him. He had also fallen deeply in love with his son and had made him the centre of everything, his reason for being. He carried a curl of his hair in a locket around his neck. Coming home after this month away, he couldn't wait to take his horse to the stable but rode it into the yard. But his son was playing there and ran to see him. He was kicked in the head by his father's horse and killed outright.'
We were silent. Greg waited for a second or two to let us grasp the horror of it.
'The firstborn son of that house never reaches the age of five. It happened again, in the next generation,' he said. 'And again. It happened in the thirties, too. There are church records to prove it. Lots of people who buy the house don't have young children, of course, but it's the breathing that gets them. No one ever stays there long.'
I pulled Lucas's arms tighter around me, grateful for the solidity of him and the closeness of the others. Danny turned on to his front and reached for his rolling tin. There was something so nonchalant about him that I found him reassuring. Things like haunted houses couldn't exist in a world where men wore silver trainers and hipster jeans, surely. And yet, feeling the weight of Stoneborough around us, I entertained the possibility.
Martha pressed her nose against the glass of the kitchen door, looking at the terracotta pot she had planted with daffodil bulbs to brighten up the patch of concrete behind the house. As yet growth was slow, limited to four sharp green javelins that the compost had stuck forth in response to the weather's martial approach. She sat back down at the table and filled in the answer to a clue in the crossword we had been stuck on. 'It's the change of scene,' she said. 'Always gives you a new perspective If you do the washing-up you're bound to get another one.'
'Nice try,' I said.
'The next place we live, we're getting a dishwasher. I won't move anywhere that doesn't have one.' She flicked back through the paper to see what was on television. 'Do you think you'll move in with Lucas?'
'What?'
'Things are going well, aren't they?'
'It's a bit early, isn't it?' I said.
'You've known each other for years, you've secretly wanted each other for years, he's your best male friend. There has to be a good chance that you'll end up together.'
'I don't know.'
'Come on, Jo.' She reached forward and grabbed my knees. 'Tell me about it. You're like a bloody clam.'
I loved it when Martha said bloody. It sounded totally different in an American accent, as if she were playing an English part in a film, badly. 'He told me he loved me,' I said. 'That's great, isn't it?' She looked delighted for me and I was touched.
'Well, yes.'
'So what's the problem?'
'I don't think I fall in love that quickly.'
'Is that all it is?' She looked concerned.
'Yes,' I said. 'Yes. You know me. Things just take me longer, that's all.' I smiled to reassure her.
The pace at which things were moving wasn't my only concern, though. I couldn't stop thinking about Danny. The memory of my conversation with him was so surreal I'd wondered whether I might have dreamed it. It seemed to have come out of nowhere, a dragon's tongue of rage. I asked myself whether I was to blame: had it been wrong of me to try to talk to him about Lucas? Had I embarrassed him by pointing out his insensitivity? Perhaps, but even so, his reaction was incommensurate with the hurt I could have inflicted, surely?
'My God, Lucas said he loved you. That's great! I'm all up for falling in love but I never meet anyone I like.'
'You will,' I said, feeling more comfortable as the spotlight moved away.
She shrugged. 'The only men I meet are the wife-beaters who come to the shelter to find their families.' To some extent, I could see her point. Her feminist politics had put her in a world where she was surrounded almost exclusively by women. She worked as a fund raiser for a women's refuge in Hammer smith and her commitment to it left her little time for anything else, beyond her friendship with the members of our group. I admired her dedication, though.
I laughed. 'Come on, it's not that bad. It'll happen. Let's go and watch the news. The washing-up can wait until tomorrow.'
On Wednesday I had to go into the West End to do some research for an article so I arranged to meet Lucas after he finished work. I was running late by the time I reached Piccadilly. At a quarter to seven the place was still busy with tourists and people making their way home, streaming down the steps into the tube as I fought my way up and clotting on the pavement by the bus stops. I wove along as fast as I could, hating that odd winter feeling of being too hot in my coat but cold in my feet and hands. I could feel my nose starting to run. One of the late-night hot dog-stands was already in situ and the smell of frying onions reminded me of how hungry I was.
In Waters tone's I couldn't immediately see Lucas and I wondered if he'd gone to look for me in another part of the shop. Then I caught sight of him further back, partially hidden by some freestanding shelves. He was wearing his long black woollen coat and had stuffed his scarlet scarf loosely into a pocket so that about a foot of it trailed rakishly out. He'd been to the barber's, I noticed, and his hair was cut tightly against his neck. I walked up behind him quietly and put my arms round his waist.
'Hello,' he said, turning round and kissing me. He handed me a book. 'Look, this is out in paperback now.' It was
Under Jupiter's Eye,
a novel written by a guy who had been three or four years ahead of us at university. We had gone along together to see him read from it when the hardback first appeared about six months previously.
We browsed for a while and then I found an empty chair and settled down to start the collection of John Cheever short stories I'd bought. I'd meant to get it out of the library but there was something so appealing about the chunky virgin paperback that I'd given in to temptation. Lucas could take hours in a bookshop but I didn't mind at all. It was one of the things we had in common and besides, watching him move between the tables reading the backs of the books was like observing an animal in its natural habitat. This was Lucas's world, much more than a corporate law firm. I had always known he wanted to write, but having a father like his had left its mark. He was proud of the fact that he was managing what Justin hadn't: working hard at something, achieving success through application, even when it bored him, even now, when there was no financial necessity for him to do it. Twenty minutes or so later I looked up and saw him making his way to the till. I packed away my book and went over. 'Shall we walk back?' he said, sliding his purchases into the bag he had slung across his body. 'I feel like it tonight.'
We crossed Piccadilly, less busy now, and walked up Sackville Street. At the top, I felt a pressure on my hand. Lucas pulled me with him and we took a left towards Cork Street and stood outside the gallery. It was empty. The Heathfield name had been removed from across the front and there was nothing at all on display, not even a single picture on an easel to keep up appearances. There was a discreet card in the bottom left-hand corner of the window giving a telephone number and email address for enquiries. Lucas stood still, looking through the glass. Only his chest moved, inflating and deflating, pushing out regular clouds into the night air. About five doors down there was a burst of noise as a door swung open then shut again. Someone was having a private view, like the one we'd been to in the empty building in front of us. Lucas paid no attention. I squeezed his hand, not knowing what to say but wanting to remind him that he wasn't there on his own.
He turned to me, as if coming round. 'Let's go,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I just wanted to see what it looked like.'
We walked a little way up the road without talking. 'Do you want to stop for a drink?' I asked, hoping it might lift his sudden melancholy.
'Let's keep going.'
I waited a minute or so before speaking again. 'Lucas, have you had any more thoughts about why ...?'
'You know I haven't. I told you, didn't I? He was successful, he wasn't ill, he had friends, he had me. I don't know. I don't want to talk about it, OK?'
We walked on again. He had dropped my hand and despite my nudging it against his hopefully while we waited to cross Regent Street, he didn't try to hold it again.
'Did he have a girlfriend?'
He stopped in the middle of the pavement, causing loud annoyance from the man walking behind who stumbled in the effort to avoid him. 'What is the matter with you? I said I don't want to talk about it. Why does no one listen to me?'
I felt as if someone had reached in and given my stomach a hard squeeze. The thought that I had upset him hurt me more than the sharpness of his tone. I was ashamed of myself and embarrassed. I lowered my head and carried on walking, a little further apart from him. I took my bag off my shoulder and carried it in my arms, held tight against my chest. We crossed Soho in silence.
We walked without talking for about a quarter of an hour and I began to wonder how long he could keep it up. He was striding up Charing Cross Road and I struggled to keep pace in my work heels. I considered going home. Obviously he didn't want me around now. I imagined what it would be like, going back alone on the tube and having to explain to Martha why I was home when she wasn't expecting to see me until the following day. I began to feel very low.
As we rounded the corner into Lucas's road he stopped again and turned to face me. His face looked sad and serious in the halogen glow of the street lighting. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be unkind. I'm still raw.' His eyes were bright, with a suggestion of tears in them.
I nodded. 'I'm sorry, too. I shouldn't have asked. It's none of my business.' I wanted to comfort him but something held me back.
'I want you to be involved in my life. Everything. Just give me time on Patrick, OK?' He blinked quickly and gestured towards the pub. 'Shall we? I feel like I need a drink now.'