The House at Midnight (4 page)

It was clear at once that it was dead. It had fallen on its back, its legs bent up and its wings slightly splayed behind it. Its neck was twisted and it looked at us with one open bloodied eye. It was a robin. I pressed the back of my index finger against the red of its breast and felt the warmth of its tiny body. I looked round for Lucas and saw that he was some steps behind me. He was transfixed by the bird. He looked as though he was about to be sick.

'Are you OK?' I asked.

'Will you clear it up?' he asked, looking at me at last. 'There's a dustpan and brush and cleaning stuff in the cupboard next to the kitchen. I'm going upstairs for a moment.' He ran up the stairs past me and I heard his feet on the landings until he reached his room on the top floor. The door closed firmly behind him.

Danny passed Lucas on his way down and reached the hall as I returned with the dustpan and some old newspaper. 'What was all that about? Where's he gone?'

I indicated the bird, the blood around its eye quickly starting to congeal. 'I think it freaked him out.'

'Not like him to be squeamish.'

We parcelled the broken body up in the newspaper and cleaned the floor where it had fallen. Danny wanted just to put the packet in the dustbin but I couldn't. I took the door that Lucas and I had used the previous evening and went outside. The air was so cold I could taste it. I made my way gingerly down the icy steps at the side of the terrace, making sure each foot was firmly planted before moving the other. There was no handrail. When I reached ground-level, I crouched down and used the back of the little brush to dig a hole in the flowerbed that bordered the lawn. I laid the bird and its newspaper shroud gently inside and pushed the earth back over it. 'I'm sorry,' I said, although I wasn't sure why. As I stood to go back into the house, I saw Lucas watching from the window on the top floor. I raised a hand and he lifted his in response.

Lucas stayed in his room for almost an hour and so I gave up on looking round the house and sat in front of the fire with the others and read the paper. Danny lay across Martha, his head in her lap. 'You're getting it in my eyes,' he said, batting at the bottom of the review section she was trying to read.

'I'm not an armchair,' she said.

'True,' he said, wriggling down further.

Michael was using the phone in the hall to ring work. Clearly his boss was aggravated by his absence from the office: I could hear the defensive tone in the polite words that reached us through the open door. I wondered what it was like to have a job that meant being almost permanently available. Despite Michael's assertion that it was nightmarish, I thought it must be exciting sometimes to work at that level.

'I don't know why he puts up with it,' said Danny, shifting slightly.

'We can't all be like you,' said Martha. 'Some of us have to make an effort.'

Danny laughed, pleased with the answer. He was the first to acknowledge that he had no work ethic at all. His quicksilver brain allowed him to do the bare minimum required of him and at the last minute. Sailing so close to the wind seemed to inspire him. At university Rachel had told us that after the sketchiest readings of texts he would come up with insights that completely annihilated the opinions of the rest of their tutorial group, who had toiled over the books for days. We suspected the same was true of his job. He never seemed to be at the office. Lucas would often get calls from him in the middle of the day from parks and cafes by the river or record shops. And yet he had been promoted way above his contemporaries at the ad agency. The quicksilver approach was ideal. Advertising didn't need someone who laboured; it needed someone who, having stared out of the window for most of the meeting, would casually deliver the definitive slogan, the one that the public would adopt into current parlance as naturally as if it was a figure of speech handed down from their parents. He had done it twice and on two of the agency's biggest and highest-profile campaigns, once for a vodka that was now the most ordered brand in the country and once for a new soft drink being launched in the UK by a major American manufacturer. His position as the agency's youngest VP was assured, as was a salary I couldn't imagine seeing before I was fifty, if ever.

We made sandwiches and ate them by the fire. Lucas was still subdued but brushed me away, saying he was fine. At a little past three o'clock, he stood up decisively. 'Come on,' he said. 'I want to show you all the garden before it gets any darker.'

'What are these other doors?' asked Michael, as we went down the corridor.

'That's a smaller sitting room, more like a den; this one goes into the pantry, but there's another door to it that runs off the kitchen. That' - he pointed to the last room before we got to the outside door - 'is the flower lobby.'

'Flower lobby?' asked Greg.

'For arranging the flowers for the house.'

In the thickening afternoon light the garden was eerie. The ice hadn't really loosened its grip during the day but I had the sense nonetheless that the garden was bracing itself once more against the coming night. There was silence.

'It's beautiful, isn't it,' said Lucas, looking out across it.

We picked our way down the stone steps and set off across the lawn, the compounded frost on the grass crunching under our feet. Our breath puffed out, feathered and vanished. I shoved my hands in my pockets; even with gloves on, they were quickly cold. After three or four minutes we reached the edge of the lawn and the beginning of the wood. The afternoon was more advanced under the trees. In the gloom I could make out a tangle of undergrowth and fallen branches. It was an old, natural wood; there were different types of trees and no pattern in the way they were planted. Now and again the breeze rushed the bare branches and sent them clattering above us like an ironic round of applause. I pulled my coat around me.

'Cold, Jo?' asked Lucas.

'No, it just looks a bit spooky.'

'More like something out of a fairy tale, you mean. Hansel and fucking Gretel. You could get lost in there and never be seen again. Come on, let's go.' Danny started to walk away. 'The wood is one of my favourite things here,' Lucas said. 'If you walk in a bit, there's a river. It's not that wide but it's great for swimming in the summer, really deep. You can even dive. It's probably frozen now, though.'

'Come on, man,' said Danny again. 'Let's go.'

We followed the edge of the wood around the perimeter of the lawn until we reached the back of the house. Behind it was the walled garden I'd seen from the kitchen window and beyond that an apple orchard. Lucas took us through the kitchen garden and past two old-fashioned wooden-framed greenhouses. There was the low hum of a generator. I looked through the glass to see vines with elephantine trunks and glossy green leaves. 'There'll be grapes later on. He looked after them himself, wouldn't let anyone touch them.'

The path took us to the gravel drive at the front. Lucas looked at his watch. 'It's a quarter to four now. I'm going to go and start cooking so why don't you walk down to the pub in the village? We'll have a drink in the library before dinner.'

'Lucas, you can't stay up here and cook on your own while we're at the pub. Do you want me to help?' Michael asked.

'No, you go; I like cooking on my own. Be careful on your way back up - it'll be very dark. You'll be fine, though: Jo can navigate by the stars.' He touched me lightly on the arm. 'See you later.' He walked up the path and disappeared through the front door.

The White Swan had the forlorn look of a place that had had its Christmas decorations up too long. There was something of the ageing showgirl about the tree in the corner: a good proportion of its needles had dropped and the wink of its lights suggested a desperate eleventh-hour invitation. Along the beams blue and purple tinsel sagged between drawing-pins. A young guy in a baseball cap and empty-looking jeans was feeding the slot machine, his left leg jiggling with the skittering of lights across the display. The publican, a tired-looking middle-aged man, made our drinks and pushed a fistful of packets of crisps across the bar. 'You from the Manor?' he asked and gave an upwards half-nod when we confirmed it. 'Poor bugger.' It wasn't a conversation either side seemed inclined to continue so we thanked him and took our drinks to the table in the corner. I guessed that what went on at the Manor was the subject of much village speculation. At the mention of the place, the fair haired man hunched over the paper at a small table in the inglenook looked up at once and scrutinised us. I looked back at him. His eyes were a burnt-out paraffin blue. He met my gaze and quickly returned his attention to the paper.

'You'd think Lucas would be a bit happier about suddenly having all this money, wouldn't you?' said Danny, throwing his cigarettes on to the table.

'Would you? He had to lose someone he loved to get it,' said Rachel.

'That was ages ago.'

'What do you mean?' I was horrified. 'It was October, and Patrick and Lucas were so close. Patrick was like a father to him, you know that.'

Danny shrugged.

'Are Lucas's parents still alive?' asked Greg.

'No,' Rachel said. 'His father died years ago, when Lucas was nine or ten.' She looked at me, a question in her eyes. I nodded. 'Greg, only Lucas's close friends know this but it's probably best if you do, too. His father killed someone.'

He frowned. 'What do you mean?'

'He was an alcoholic,' I said. 'The day he died he was drink-driving. He hit someone, then crashed the car.'

'Lucas won't ever talk about it. His mother died last year, in the summer. She had cancer,' I said.

'Jesus. The poor man,' said Greg.

'He won't talk about his mother either,' Danny went on. 'They were really tight,' he explained. 'I mean, she was nice and everything, as much as you saw of her, but she was quite distant. It was like she and Lucas lived in a fantasy world together. It was only really Patrick they allowed near them. Bit weird.'

It was true that Lucas's relationship with his mother had been intense but I knew that it was quite common for children, especially boys, to try to fill the place of a missing parent and become a surrogate adult. It was also true that he had never talked much about Claire. Part of the reason, I suspected, was because he was very protective of her but sometimes in the past, when I had tried to bring up the subject and he deflected my questions, it occurred to me that perhaps by not talking about her he was almost selfishly keeping her to himself, making sure that no one else could know her or own her as he did. He was proud of her and her books - there was another full collection of them in the drawing room at the house, the titles large in their angular gothic script - and his own ambition to write was inspired by her. But she had been very reserved and at times I wondered whether Lucas might not have been more confident and easygoing if he'd had a mother with a lighter heart.

'Lucas is just quite private,' I said, feeling the need to defend him. 'His mother and Patrick were his world.'

'I think that's a bit reductive,' said Danny. 'What about us? I've been friends with him for years.'

'Was his mother successful?' Greg asked. 'As a writer?'

'Depends what you mean by successful,' I said, watching as he curled his hands around his pint glass, his hand able almost to span it. 'She had a following but most of her fans were adults. The books are actually very sad. There's always a missing parent - normally a missing father. And they're really dark. She didn't make much money, though, which is why having all this is a bit of a shock for Lucas.'

'Who did he spend Christmas with?' asked Michael.

'An old friend of Patrick's, somewhere near here, I think,' I said.

Danny ran his hand through his indie-singer hair and surreptitiously checked himself out in the smoked-glass mirror above my head. Wherever he woke up, he liked to give the impression that he'd just fallen out of bed in a studio in Hoxton. One of the things that had always fascinated me about his appearance was the dark shadowing around his eyes, like thick and expertly applied kohl. It made his eyes especially startling. 'Well, however you look at it, it's an amazing old place,' he said.

'Do you think it'll change him?' Martha asked.

'No,' he said emphatically.

'I hope not,' I said. 'Anyway, you know Lucas. If there's anything he believes in, it's achieving things for yourself.'

'Why bother? He probably never needs to work again.'

'It's called integrity, Danny.' Rachel laid a reassuring hand on his. I held my breath but he flashed her a smile. None of the rest of us, except Lucas of course, could have got away with a comment like that.

I lit a cigarette and took a long drag. I'd spoken to Lucas about work the evening before and he assured me that he had no intention of giving up his job. 'No,' he said. 'I've invested too much. Two years at law school, two more as a trainee and three since then. It would be stupid to leave before I really get anywhere. Anyway, I've got a point to prove.' He grinned. 'Patrick said I wouldn't do it because it was too boring but I told him I wanted a normal job. Now I have to show him.'

I didn't question his need still to do that. Although I knew I should try to talk to him about Patrick, and that maybe he was waiting for me to ask, I was finding it difficult to bring up the subject in any but the most glancing of ways. I didn't have the equipment to do it. His bereavement moved him away from me. Not in the sense that he had become withdrawn, although he had a little. It was more that, with my family complete, I felt I didn't have the right to try to empathise. In fact, I felt guilty for being unscathed.

Chapter Three

'I couldn't remember whether you liked olives or not.' Lucas handed me up a Martini, its surface tilting dangerously in the wide-rimmed glass. A single glossy olive was threaded on to a cocktail stick balanced across it.

'I'm learning to.' I put it in my mouth and pulled it off the stick with my lips. I felt suddenly self-conscious as I realised he was watching me.

I was sitting on the top step of the library ladder, high enough to give me a perspective on the room. One of the things I liked about Lucas was the trouble he took to make sure other people enjoyed themselves. He had been keen on drama at university and I sometimes thought that that creativity, firmly bottled in his professional life, was now channelled into his hospitality. When we had come downstairs after changing for dinner, the library door was open for the first time. A rosy light fell a few paces out into the hall and Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman' was playing. Lucas, wearing a black corduroy jacket that gave him an air of the Left Bank and with a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth, had been mixing the drinks.

Even by the standards of the rest of the house, the library was an imposing room. Two walls were lined entirely with bookshelves that reached to the ceiling and were policed by ladders that moved across them on runners. At the near end of the room there was a large circular desk with two green glass reading lamps on it and at the other, in front of windows now masked by heavy tapestry curtains, there were leather armchairs in which Greg and Michael were sitting. Martha perched on the arm of Michael's chair, her arm along the back of it behind his head. Danny and Rachel were looking at the picture on the opposite wall, a nude of some proportions.

'New shoes?'

'What? Oh these.' I looked down at my feet, hooked over a lower step. My shoes were black pony skin with two small diamante buckles at the front. I was wearing them with fine mesh fishnet tights. 'Yes.'

'I like them.' Lucas reached out his hand and with the pad of his index finger stroked the arch of my left foot where the leather was cut away.

I am sure my surprise showed on my face.

He drained his glass and balanced it carefully on the edge of the shelf. 'I'm going to get the starter ready. Can you get everyone to come through to the dining room in about five minutes?'

I stayed on the ladder and finished my drink. I was flushed and I could still feel his touch on my skin. There had been a time when there had been nothing I wanted more than for him to touch me in a way that suggested he found me attractive. Now it seemed possible that he might but so much had changed.

If he was trying to make me think differently about him, why now, after all this time, I wondered. There was so much more at stake. At university we could have tried it out and, if it hadn't worked, allowed a few weeks, a term, and gone back to being friends. Now we had history. We were at an age where former relationships were layered up on us like coats of old paint: if you chipped a surface you could seethe unflattering shades that had gone before. Our ten years, more, of friendship had endured all that. It was worth a huge amount to me, too much to put in jeopardy unless I thought there was a chance that it might be right. And although none of us at the house were settled or even heading that way - except Rachel and Greg, maybe - other friends were getting married, buying houses, having children. It was not a time to get things wrong.

And what if I had misread him? A decade of being friends meant we touched each other without thinking now. It hadn't been like that in the beginning; neither of us were naturally tactile people and, as we did get to know each other better, the question of attraction meant we were wary of physical contact, at least until the night he found me with his roommate. For about six months after that we skirted each other hyper-solicitously and then slowly eased into our current familiarity. Perhaps he was now so relaxed with me that it didn't occur to him that I might interpret his stroking my foot as flirtatious.

Then again, if Lucas was showing me his heart and I didn't respond, I might never be given another opportunity. Although at eighteen, through the screen of my own self-consciousness, I'd thought he must have realised he was attractive, I knew now that wasn't true. He had never been confident with women.

'What are you brooding about up there?' said Martha. 'Come and join the party.'

'Actually, I think supper will be ready now,' I said, climbing down. 'Shall we go in?'

After the library, the hall was chill on my bare arms but there was another fire in the dining room. The flames cast a flickering glow on a mahogany table that stretched almost the length of the room and whose surface was so highly polished that there seemed to be two of everything on it, glasses, cutlery and the three silver candlesticks that marked the centre like masts on a schooner. The air was filled with the warm scent of burning wood and roasting meat. Against the back wall there was an antique sideboard with a tray of liqueurs and Benares-ware bowls of oranges and nuts.

Lucas put his head round the door next to it, which led from the kitchen. 'Danny, why don't you take that end of the table, Rachel and Greg on either side of you, Michael and Martha in the middle, then Jo and I?'

There was asparagus soup to start, then a huge joint of glistening beef that Lucas carved into slices so fine they were almost translucent. There were bowls full of roast potatoes, green beans, calabrese, parsnips, carrots. Horseradish circulated in a tiny silver cauldron with a blue-glass inside.

'You've outdone yourself, mate,' said Danny, spooning another couple of potatoes on to his plate.

There were five or six bottles of wine on the table and, though I was drinking quickly, my glass never seemed to get emptier. All the time we were eating I was aware of Lucas next to me as if I could feel the heat of his body. Down the table Michael was telling one of his ludicrous anecdotes involving colleagues of his and bonding visits to City strip clubs. Martha and I still found it amazing that he got taken along on these jollies but he was obviously popular on the teams he worked with and was dragged along for the fun, regardless of the fact that he wasn't at all interested in the dancers. Rachel was laughing, her head tipped right back, displaying her long neck and bringing her small breasts higher in her dress, a fact that hadn't escaped Danny, who was leaning in dangerously, ostensibly to hear better.

'It's going to be very hard to go home after this,' I said to Lucas.

'Come back at the weekend,' he said, topping up my glass again. I looked at his hand as it held the bottle, twisting it to avoid spilling any. He had very deft hands; he could shuffle a pack of cards like no one else I knew. They were lovely to look at, too, with long straight fingers and rounded nails.

Artist's hands, Martha said.

'Jo,' he said. 'Come and have a cigarette with me.' He pushed back his chair and dropped his stiff cotton napkin on to the seat.

'Where are you two going?' asked Rachel, looking up.

'Outside for a cigarette.'

'Can't we smoke in here?'

'Of course you can.'

We went out on to the terrace, just as we had the evening before. I was glad to have the coat that Lucas had taken from the stand in the hall for me, despite the smell of dust on it. I wasn't sure, it might have been accidental, but I think that as he had helped me put it on his fingers had very lightly stroked the nape of my neck. The skin there still tingled. Again, the cold and silence outside made everything hyperreal, the stretch of lawn and the trees beyond all washed in pallid moonlight. We sat down on the balustrade and I swung my legs over, careful not to snag my tights.

'Cigarette?' He lit two and passed me one of them. The cold had sobered me up a bit and I was surprised when he suddenly took my spare hand. I felt the pressure of our fingers against each other. 'You're freezing,' he said and slipped my hand inside his jacket, holding it against his chest. Very faintly, I could feel his heartbeat. I looked up at him. He was watching me intently, as if he were trying to read my face.

Then he kissed me. He rested his lips very gently on mine, nearly motionless, testing to see if I would pull away. Almost imperceptibly, he moved up so that my top lip was between his. Little by little, he increased the pressure and then we were kissing properly. I had imagined it so many times I could hardly believe it was happening. He moved his leg back over the balustrade so that he was astride it and pulled me closer to him, his lips hardly leaving mine for a second, his hands pressing against the small of my back. I dropped my cigarette behind me and put my arms around him, feeling the furrows of his cord jacket under my hands.

He pulled away and took both my hands in his, holding them in the triangle of space between his knees and my thigh. We looked at each other sombrely, then smiled.

'I've wanted to do that for a very long time,' he said, making my stomach jump.

He pulled me back to him and we kissed again. Now the surprise was fading, I had a hunger for him. I wanted to fill up my senses with him, taste him, hoover up the smell of him, run my hands all over him.

We stayed outside as long as we reasonably could. When we got back in, the others had made coffee. Rachel pulled out the chair next to her for me. 'So?' she said,
sotto voce.

'What?'

'You and Lucas. Spill the beans. Or at least tell me whether he made the first move.'

I couldn't help it; even though I wanted to keep it between Lucas and myself, I smiled and gave the game away. 'Yes, he did,' I said quietly.

'At last. I had almost given up hope of it ever happening.' She put a cup on a saucer for me and filled it from the pot. 'He's talked to me about you for years.'

I looked at her in astonishment. 'Why did you never say anything?'

'Not my secret to tell.'

It was very late by the time the others went to bed. Greg and Rachel were first, then Michael and Martha, who collared Danny and took him upstairs, picking up an open bottle of red and pressing it into his hand by way of persuasion. Lucas took a decanter from the sideboard and we went back to the library.

The fire had almost gone out but he coaxed it back to life with bellows and another round of kindling and small coals. I sat down on the rug and took the half-inch of whisky he handed me, twisting the cut-glass tumbler so that it glinted with the light of the new flames. The first sip burned my throat.

Lucas sat down next to me. 'Did you notice the others watching us?' he asked. 'When we got back in, I thought I was going to die laughing. I've never seen such poor attempts to act normally.'

'Rachel was on to us,' I said.

'They all were. They were monitoring us so closely I was beginning to feel like the subject of an MIS investigation.' He kissed me and pulled away again with a big smile.

I had another sip of the whisky and kept it in my mouth, breathing over it to feel how it burned. I liked the glow it left when I finally swallowed. Kissing Lucas felt a bit like smoking on my sixteenth birthday: I knew I could now but the glamour of having not been able to still lingered.

'Are you happy?' he asked. 'Is this all right with you?'

'You look worried,' I said.

'I don't want to get it wrong. It's too important.'

I rubbed my cheek against his, my nose in his hair. He smelled of cooking. 'You won't,' I said. 'You can't.'

The bumps and laughter upstairs stopped as the others went to sleep and the night took over. Little by little the house closed in around us. Lucas had turned off the lamps so the only light we had came from the fire and the two candles on the mantelpiece.

'I've hated every single one of your boyfriends. None of them seemed to realise what they had. And I wanted to hit them when they hurt you.'

'Why didn't you say something earlier?'

'I know you, remember. You're very single-minded. I thought that if you wanted me there's no way I wouldn't know about it. Like the Mounties ...'

'I always get my man,' I finished. 'That's rubbish. You only get the things you're not afraid to go after.'

'Maybe it's the house,' he said.

'Yes, now you're a man of property I'm prepared to consider you,' I said.

'That's not what I mean.' He pulled away from me, picked up the poker and started stabbing at the embers. 'Being here makes me think you should go for what you want, stop wasting time.'

'Carpe diem,'
I said. 'But why now?' I laughed at my bit of drunken wit but then saw the look on his face.

'Life's short, Jo. No one seems to realise. We act like we've got all the time in the world.'

He lit a cigarette without offering me one and looked straight ahead into the fire. 'I've never told you about my father,' he said suddenly.

Immediately the rushing sensation I'd experienced the previous evening started up again in my ears. 'How do you mean?'

'I've never told anyone the truth about it and I still don't want people to know. It feels important that you do now, though.'

I said nothing and waited for him to go on. There was dread in my stomach suddenly, its cold weight like a stone.

He turned and looked at me. His face was grave. 'My father wasn't killed, Jo.'

'What?' Now I was confused. 'How do you mean?'

'I always told you that he died in the accident that day but he didn't - or not how you think.'

'I don't understand.'

'He committed suicide, too. Both my dad and my uncle.' He put his hand over his face, covering his eyes. 'I mean, fuck.'

'Lucas ...'

'Oh, some of the original story is true. It's true that he was pissed and that he was driving back from the pub in the village and he ran a man over, or hit him, I don't know. The one sure thing is that Dad vanished. He abandoned the car and disappeared. We never heard from him again. He left his wallet with all his cards and his bank accounts were never touched. Patrick tried for years to find out what happened. After the police failed to come up with anything, he tried private detectives and looking himself but he never found a trace. Dad must have been so frightened and ashamed of what he'd done that he took himself off somewhere and committed suicide. Maybe he just walked into the sea.'