After lunch at Stoneborough the following Saturday Danny suggested a game of table tennis. The table was in the single storey part of the house that formed the second side of the walled garden, at a right-angle to the kitchen. It was a long room with a dark stone floor and a window with a wide still that ran along most of the inside wall. It smelt differently from the rest of the house, musty and unused. Lucas opened a cupboard and got out bats and a ball.
'OK, championship,' said Danny, cracking his knuckles and examining the bats to find the best one.
'Give us a chance to warm up at least,' said Martha. She passed me a bat and started gently patting the ball across the net. It was years since I'd played and it took a while to work out how hard I needed to hit it. The hollow plastic bounce of ball on table echoed off the floor and the low ceiling.
Danny played Michael first and had him running from one side of the table to the other. The ball danced back and forth, mocking him. He put his hand up. 'Take pity on me. I haven't seen the inside of a gym in months.'
'No mercy.' Danny tossed the ball in the air and served it directly at his body.
'Twenty-one-nine to Danny,' said Lucas.
Michael came to sit next to us on the windowsill and pulled his jumper off. 'The man's vicious,' he said.
'There's some beers in the fridge, mate,' Lucas told him. 'There's seven of us, so someone will have to play twice. Danny, you again and Rachel.'
'Here,' said Martha, handing her a bat. 'Do it for the girls.' Rachel looked like she was taking it seriously. She stretched her arms behind her head and squared up to Danny. 'Come on then,' she said.
He smiled slowly and slammed the ball at her. To my surprise, she returned it with interest, directing it at the very furthest edge of the table. Danny got it back, just, but left himself wide open and she tapped it lightly over the net, killing it. Greg, Martha and I cheered. I found I really wanted him to lose.
Danny geared up and took the next two points but Rachel came back again with another demon shot. As Danny stooped to pick up the ball from the floor, I saw Greg wink encouragement at her.
'Way to go, girl,' said Martha, as Rachel took the set.
'Not everything has to be a battle between the sexes, Martha,' said Danny, taking a bottle of beer from Michael. 'Not everything has to be a fight to the death, Danny,' she replied.
I was up against Lucas but it was a foregone conclusion. I sat back down on the windowsill and pressed my feet against the radiator underneath. The stone floor amplified the coldness of the room. Michael put his jumper back on.
Even though his arms seemed to span the table, Greg couldn't get the better of Danny, who punched the ball back at him with venom. He threw his bat down in triumph. 'You and me for the final, Lucas. I hope you're ready to bleed.'
'It's a game, Danny,' said Michael.
'Look,' said Rachel. 'It's snowing.' I turned to the window. The air was saturated with tiny particles that fell too slowly to be rain. As we watched, they grew, becoming soft flakes like duck down. The sky was suddenly filled with grey feathers that turned white as they reached the ground, muting the strong winter brown of the earth in the vegetable beds. Even as we watched, the first layer began to settle.
'Do you think we'll get snowed in?' asked Martha.
'It's happened before,' said Lucas.
'Come on, then.' Danny got a coin out of his pocket. 'Heads or tails?'
I had forgotten how competitive Lucas could be. He had assumed an attitude of expressionless determination. Danny, too, had stopped playing to the crowd. It was clearly important to him in some way to beat Lucas. I'd never seen that in him before; was it new or had I just never noticed? Michael kept score. As they reached nineteen and twenty, there were no two clear points between them. They played on, reaching twenty-three-twenty-four, Lucas now serving. He flicked his fingers up, releasing the ball into the air like a handful of magician's dust, then tapped it lightly over the net. There was a deceptive amount of spin on it and Danny was visibly annoyed not to get his return quite where he intended. Lucas reached and sliced it back, catching it so hard that it bounced three feet. Somehow Danny got his bat on it but didn't have control and sent it long off the end of the table.
'Good game,' said Lucas, putting his bat down.
Danny came round and clapped a hand on his shoulder. He was wearing the ironic smile of the just beaten but there was nothing gracious about it. 'I'll get you next time, mate.'
I wandered off to the library to find something new to read. The snow was falling steadily and I planned to sit in one of the leather armchairs and watch it cover the long expanse of lawn down to the wood. Away from the table tennis, a strange silence had settled over the house, as if the snow had muffled sounds inside as well as out. It was the sort of silence that veiled an expectancy, like in the moment, lying in bed alone in the house, when you hear a sound and lie rigid waiting for the footfall of the intruder on the bottom of the stairs. The thought of being snowed in at Stoneborough gave me a flash of pure panic for reasons that I couldn't explain. I stood in front of the fire and looked into the spotted antique mirror over the mantelpiece. The familiarity of my reflection was reassuring. But then I realised I had started to look behind me and I swung round to face the room, as if I expected something to be there. I laughed out loud at myself to pierce the buzzing in my ears. I was determined not to be intimidated by the atmosphere of the place and run off to be in the safe company of the others. I had to learn to spend time alone here. This was my boyfriend's house.
On the nearest ledge there was a stack of old oranges pined paperbacks and I shuffled through them until I came to
The Rock pool
by Cyril Connolly. Patrick had had great taste: I'd never come across a collection of books before in which almost everything interested me. I took the book over to the window and sat in the armchair, angling it so that I could see as much of the room as possible.
It took a few minutes to calm my nerviness but I was just beginning to settle down when out of the corner of my eye I saw the door open. My heart bumped. Lucas's curly black head appeared and I breathed out. I could see in the mirror that he thought I hadn't noticed him so I carried on reading, pretending not to know he was there. He approached my chair from behind and put a hand on my shoulder. Even though I knew it was coming, I jumped.
He laughed and sat down on the floor in front of me. 'You OK?' he said. 'You disappeared.'
'Fine. Just wanted to be quiet for a while and watch the snow.' I looked at his face, the eyes locked on mine and sparkling, the freckles on his cheekbones. I ran my hand through his hair and watched it spring back as my fingers passed over it. I wanted to ask him about the house and whether he was aware of the atmosphere, too. It might make me feel less irrational if someone else felt it in the same way but I knew that, if he thought I was probing him about Patrick again, I risked another situation like the last one. I couldn't do it. Not knowing was the price of keeping things on an even keel, at least for now. Wednesday evening had given us a scare. We had seen how easily this tentative new thing between us could unravel. We had spent most of the morning making love and dozing, the winter light falling through the window on to the bed. I knew I was hoping that we were stitching each other more tightly into our personal tapestries, tight enough, with luck, never to come unpicked.
'I was going through the cupboard in Patrick's study the other day,' he said, getting up again. 'I found some cine films.'
'Did you? What's on them?'
'I don't know. I tried watching them but I couldn't get the projector machine to work. Greg looked at it for me this morning and he reckons he's fixed it. We're going to go up now and watch one, if you'd like to see. Maybe one of Patrick's artists made them.'
The cardboard box was on the desk. Whoever had packed up the films had clearly been conscious of keeping them secure: there were multi-layered belts of masking tape around the box in several places. It looked as if Lucas had tried to unpeel them and then given up and taken his penknife to it instead. Inside, the tapes were packed in two rows. Each cassette was numbered and next to its proper neighbours.
The projector was set up on a table in the middle of the room, its eye on the blank white wall in front of it. Greg fitted the first cassette into the machine and snapped on the power while Rachel and Martha drew the curtains. An oblong of light, rounded at the corners, appeared on the wall. Once he was sure the tape was running smoothly, Greg turned off the main light and went to sit next to Rachel on the window seat.
I had taken the desk chair and Lucas came to sit on the floor in front of me, leaning his head back against my legs.
Suddenly the wall was animated. I felt Lucas tense.
In front of us was Patrick, alive again.
He was young - our age, late-twenties, perhaps thirty. He was slimmer than when I'd known him and it made him seem even taller. He looked about seven foot. He was in blue jeans and a navy polo-neck, his hair black-brown and curling over the neck of his jumper. His face was broad and open, radiating that peculiar energy I'd never encountered in anyone else. He pulled a big grin and bowed, flourishing like a court jester at the Manor behind him.
'Welcome to the house of fun,' said Danny.
Now Patrick stepped to the side of the picture and the camera focused on the house, delivering it to the screen in considered sections. Clearly the cameraman - or woman had an artist's eye: this was not an amateur home video. It panned up from ground-level, the stone path to the front door, the lines of yew trees on either side. Fewer of the flagstones were cracked, I noticed, and the front door was painted green. Otherwise the house looked the same. In the flowerbed that ran round the bottom of the front wall crowds of daffodils were jostling, the centre rings of their flowers like egg yolks against paler outer layers.
Patrick was back in the picture now, springing up the front path. He darted in and out of the yews, hiding behind one and then running out from behind the next, like one of those scenes in films where people chase each other in and out of hotel rooms all the way up a corridor. He paused, laughing, at the front door and produced a key from his pocket. He put it in the lock and made a show of trying to tum it. The door yawned open in front of him and a group of people stood ready inside, laughing at how funny they were. Normally I would have found such staginess irritating but Patrick somehow made it charming, his great height adding an unintentional comic note.
The camera stopped first on a dark-haired woman. There was something familiar about her, although I didn't think I'd met her before.
'That's my mother,' said Lucas without moving. I looked again and then I saw it, but even so the woman in front of me was more like the sister or perhaps cousin of the one I'd met several times. Claire had had a more developed case of Lucas's reserve. My mental image was of her emerging to greet us from her silent, ordered study on the first floor of her house in West Hampstead. Her hair had been cut in a disciplined long bob, the front of it run through with silver seams that Lucas had, without success, urged her to dye. She had had an assessing gaze and looked at one a second or two longer than felt comfortable, as if wanting to make sure she'd got you right.
By contrast, this woman on camera looked alive and open, with none of the wariness of that Claire. She looked like someone who was happy and unrestrained. But I supposed when the film had been shot she hadn't lost her husband and brought Lucas up on her own. I wanted to communicate to the woman on the wall what a good job she would do and to say thank you, both things I would never have dared even to think in the presence of her later avatar.
'Is your dad here?' asked Martha.
'I didn't see him, no.'
The cameraman moved on across the group, introducing others, mostly men. Even if we hadn't known the relative ages of Patrick and Lucas's mother, it would have been easy to date the film to the seventies. These people wore their trousers tight at the top and flared from the knee, and a small, fair woman had her hair tied back from her face with a Pucci-printed headscarf folded into a wide band. It was clear, too, that this was an artistic set. Apart from Patrick, the men looked dishevelled in a faintly self-conscious way. Two or three of them had beards and one had a particularly extrovert moustache.
'Imagine having to show your kids pictures like that.' Danny laughed.
'He didn't have kids. That's Peter Hampton, the sculptor. He was one of Patrick's best friends. He died of Aids in New York five or six years ago.'
'Sorry.'
'Don't worry about it. You weren't to know.'
The camera moved on. The soft tint of the film was like amber, preserving everything in perfect high-lit detail. It stopped again on another woman. Although she was with the others, she was marked out. Her skin shone and her hair, which she wore long and down, gleamed a rich chestnut colour. She was wearing a polo-neck like Patrick's but black, and her tiny hips were gloved in a pair of tight trousers that widened below the knee. The camera rested on the planes of her face for a moment and she smiled at us knowingly down the years, confident that the challenge of her beauty would remain unmet.
'Who is that?' asked Danny, his voice low as a wolf whistle.
'That's Elizabeth Orr. She's a family friend. She and Patrick used to go out, years ago.' Immediately I thought of the conversation I'd overheard at the gallery. The woman who'd eclipsed all the others.
On the wall, she laughed and showed a mouthful of sharp white teeth. Her hair fell forward to cover one eye and made her face a stunning chiaroscuro. I realised I'd seen her somewhere else. Where was it? The photograph behind us now, on top of the bureau. She was the woman in the white trouser suit.
'Why the hell did he let her go?' said Danny. 'She's incredible.' I looked at his face, his profile illuminated by the light from the wall. He still hadn't taken his eyes away.