The Red House (2 page)

It’s late afternoon but he hasn’t bothered to pull up the covers or plump the pillows. Gwen’s side is still mussed from when she’d dressed that morning, wriggling into a fresh new suit and bemoaning having to wear tights in August. It’s her first offsite for her new job; she’ll be away a few days. It’s just Morris and Dora and the dog now, and Dora is at summer orchestra in Cambridge, just like Morris had done when he was a teenager.

He glances over at the clock. Gone five.
Actually, Dora should be home.

He finishes dressing and calls out into the corridor, ‘Dora?’ He glances through the open door of her unoccupied room; he calls her name on his way down the stairs. No backpack or flute case dumped by the front door. The dog is still asleep in her basket in the kitchen.

Jesse
, he reminds himself. The dog has a name.

Jesse was a ‘gift’ from Gwen, to ensure that Morris gets out of the house at least twice daily. She worries that he’s becoming depressed and hopes that sunshine and exercise might do something about it.

Jesse dances around his feet, panting. He leashes the eager spaniel, and tamps down an absurd flash of pride at his left hand clicking the little hook to the collar on the first try.
A lot has to be wrong with a person to be proud of leashing a dog
, he chides himself.

She wriggles like a puppy but she’s an old dog. Like Morris, Jesse isn’t useful any more.
At least Gwen didn’t get an injured dog, three-legged or blind or limping. That would have been a bit too on-the-nose.

They go outside.

Lower Cambourne is just about Dora’s age, fifteen. It was built when she was small, all of it new when they moved in, the whole town new, not just the house. It’s convenient and comfortable and practical. Cambridge is near enough that there’s no need for charm or history or character; they can commute for that, just like they do for shopping, and music. The next day, like today, Dora will take the bus in for orchestra and
a cappella
group. Morris will … take Jesse for another walk. It feels fitting to him to
live in a town made of loops and cul-de-sacs.
Around and around I go.

He calls Dora’s phone as he walks. No answer.

He stops so that Jesse can squat, and fiddles a plastic bag out of his pocket. He’s not sure what other numbers he can call. She’ll have already left the concert hall. She’s probably with friends.
Gwen knows their numbers
. No, he decides. Gwen’s working. And everything is fine. Dora’s a teenager. She doesn’t need the level of fuss that’s tempting him.

Gwen would agree with that, he knows she would. Two months ago, Dora and a friend had bunked off school for the day, and he and Gwen had decided together not to overreact. The girls had only taken a bus to the mall at Milton Keynes. The mother of the other girl – Fiona, he recalled; a mousy friend that Dora probably wouldn’t make now but has known since she was little – had got hysterical over it. She’d sworn at Gwen on the telephone when they didn’t join in her outrage.
No wonder her daughter is so timid
, Morris had thought smugly. They’d congratulated themselves on being better parents than that.

Jesse leads him around their usual route. She pauses automatically in front of a certain house, looking to him for a decision. He considers ringing the bell, but knows that he ought to head back home.

His phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out, and would have automatically hit the green button if his thumb hadn’t been needed to hold on to the phone at all. He’s glad that he hasn’t answered when he sees that it’s not Dora; it’s Chloe.

As far as he’s concerned, she hovers worse than Gwen. Ever since his replacement …
No, not replacement
, he corrects himself. The new man is a Detective Sergeant, young and fresh, not someone at his level.
Former level,
he corrects again.
Detective Chief Inspector
. Gwen had thrown a party when he achieved that rank, surprised him at a restaurant. Dora had been proud of him.

The phone quivers again. Chloe, again. He turns it off. He ties Jesse’s leash to a lamp post. His pace quickens up the front walk. A frisson of anticipation travels up his back.

Later, breaking into a light jog to compensate for Jesse’s boredom from having been tied up, he recognises Chloe’s car as it drives towards him, coming from his house. She pulls up alongside, flops the passenger door open, and tells him, ‘Get in.’

Morris hesitates.

‘It’s Dora,’ she says.

He scrambles into the car, dog on lap, and slams the door shut as Chloe peels out towards Highfields Caldecote.

It’s just the next village over. Dora’s friend lives there; Fiona, the timid girl. Dora used to spend hours a week there. Since skipping school, she hasn’t been allowed to associate with Fiona, but Chloe says that Dora’s there.

The long private road dead-ends at Fiona’s family’s houses, a white house and a red barn, on an island of grass.
No, not an island
. That’s what it would be if it were in the middle of all the dirt – dirt which used to be lawns and neighbouring homes – but Fiona’s family’s land is on the edge, more like a cramped beach of grass. The dark, churned-up earth adjacent is so vast and so uneven that it
gives the sense of a sea about to break on that grassy shore, swamping the last two houses, the resisters of development.

Two little signs are redundant to the view: they say, ‘The Red House’ and ‘The White House’. Police cars are parked in front, and an ambulance. Morris dashes out before Chloe has fully parked.

Dora’s on the steps of Fiona’s white house, not in the ambulance, not in a police car, though an officer stands nearby. Her knees are drawn up, and she’s hugging them. Morris runs right over. He wants to scoop her up but stops short. She looks different to him: older, haunted, matured by trauma. Then she sucks snot back up her nose and wipes her eyes, ageing backwards towards being his baby again.

He crouches next to her on the step. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asks.

She shakes her head.

‘Good, good,’ Morris says, trying to keep it together. His good hand is squeezing in and out of a fist. Jesse licks Dora’s fingers. Dora pushes at her, so Morris shoos the dog off.

Chloe has told him that Dora had been in the barn. Not with Fiona, but not alone. She’d been in there with one of her music tutors, a new one. Someone called Maxwell Gant. Morris had demanded on the drive over,
Who is he? How old
? Chloe hadn’t known anything yet. Morris stretches his neck to see who Chloe’s talking to now, but it’s just a paramedic. Morris turns and looks around the other way. He wants to see this man.

The dog starts barking. Morris shouts, ‘Jesse!’ She doesn’t stop, though. The yaps are sharp and persistent. He goes after her. Dora follows him around the barn.

Jesse’s around the back. She’s got her nose in the blackberry bushes. She stops barking when Morris picks up her lead. She lies next to the bush and won’t budge, even when he pulls and commands, ‘Up!’

Then he freezes, and he and Dora both remember at the same time. Chloe too; she steps in, hands on hips, belly in silhouette. She tells Morris to get Dora home,
now
.

This is the thing that has them all still and staring, at the bushes overheavy with ripening fruit: Jesse’s a retired cadaver dog.

Instead of students, the college was hosting conferences. Everyone we saw wore a corporate name-tag or a serving uniform. A wheeled trolley was pushed along the pavement. Ten o’ clock – must have been time for morning coffee in some Tudor-timbered parlour.
That sort of thing could be for me someday,
I thought. Not yet, though. That day, we’d slipped in the back gates behind a delivery van.

We weren’t the only ones out of place there. I patted the tyrannosaur’s rough, rusting flank. ‘Seb would have loved these,’ I offered.

‘They’re new. They weren’t here then,’ Imogen said.

The sculptures were fully life-sized but childishly abstract, made of steel slabs slotted together like the stands of paper dolls. They were hulking, cartoonish monsters, somehow cheerful in their arrangement. A football pitch spread out before them, as if their habitat. Around the sports fields, the stone walls of the college penned them in.

I turned in a circle. The older Cambridge colleges are all like this: walls, lawns, courtyards. I breathed deep. When I got back to the dinosaurs, I smiled.

Imogen stood stiff, back against the belly of the stegosaur, looking down. Brown hair fell across her cheek. In Spain, her hair had been slicked back, wet from the sea. In London, it was usually held back in a clip for work. In Cambridge, it was down. It shadowed her. I reached out but she turned her head away.

I tried a joke: ‘Maybe you just didn’t notice them back then …’

It didn’t raise a smile. Even if the dinosaurs weren’t enormous and unmissable, there’s nothing from then that she doesn’t remember. Im’s memories are so sharp that they’d cut themselves into my mind too.

I tried to be logical. ‘Of course things have changed, Im. Twenty years …’

‘Twenty-three,’ she said. Every year counts with her. Every detail, no rounding. ‘You’re right. He
would
have loved these,’ she said, running her finger along the spine of a sloping tail.

Her arm stretched out, which pulled her summer dress taut. She doesn’t show off her body in obvious ways, but she must have known how the thin fabric moved around her. She would never let a bra strap show, or wear leggings without a skirt, but she knows how even conservative clothes hang on her. She knows where they catch and where they flow. She knows what she looks like.

I stepped closer to her. ‘
I
like the dinosaurs. Do you?’
Surely the present matters more than the past. Surely.

‘I do like them,’ she said. ‘I do. They’re wonderful.’ Her
voice wobbled. Tears glistened in her eyes, threatening to overflow.

Frustration crackled inside me, but I forced my hand to reach out, and my mouth to form a comforting ‘Shhhhh …’ I knew that it was my fault, for bringing her here. I put my hand on the small of her back and guided her away.

That’s why we came by car instead of on foot: in case of needing a quick escape. We slipped out through the gate, as it swung open for a college vehicle. We cut over to King Street, where my Mini was squeezed in along the kerb. I opened the doors to release the accumulated heat.

She faced me over the roof. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow,’ she said, and I accepted it as an apology.

I’d been offered a job in Cambridge, at St Catharine’s, one of the University’s other colleges. Their music director was about to take an emergency leave of absence and I’d been asked to cover this coming year. It was a good offer. It’s a new choir, starting its own traditions with its own liturgy, based around an ancient Greek hymn and candlelight. It’s Cambridge; of course I wanted it. I’d downplayed my excitement, but Imogen knew. The college needed a commitment by the end of the week.

‘Only if you feel you can manage living here,’ I insisted. It wasn’t a lie; I would give up the job for her if need be. It was the calm smile that was a lie. I wouldn’t be happy about it. We got in the car and lowered the windows.

‘You’re so good to me,’ she said, snuggling up as much as she could over the gearbox.

‘I’m the lucky one,’ I said in reflex. It’s true. Imogen is impossibly lovely: wavy hair, swimmer’s body. She regularly
beats me at tennis, reads six books a week, and can speak four languages. She’s a wonder.

‘No, me,’ she said, squeezing my thigh with her hand. ‘I’m the lucky one. Let’s get back to the hotel.’ She breathed deep. The heat had made our clothes stick. The seatbelt emphasised her perfect breasts, a small peak on each side of that diagonal slash. I started the car.

I’m the driver; Im’s too used to London life. She promised to practise when we move out of the city. There was a lot that she had become ready to try. For six years, she’d been an hour away, and she hadn’t even visited Cambridge. But with me, she insisted, she could face it.

‘Tomorrow, we’ll slip in the back again,’ she decided. ‘I don’t want to explain myself to the porters.’

Fine with me
. The colleges don’t mind visitors; I saw a fair few tourists when I interviewed at St Catharine’s. But if she wanted to sneak up on her past instead of confronting it, what would it cost me? ‘Shall we vault over the wall at dawn, then?’ I joked.

Hand off my thigh.
All right, it wasn’t funny.

‘I want our wedding to be at the college,’ she announced.

‘St Catharine’s?’ I asked, hopeful and purposely obtuse.

‘Don’t be silly. Jesus College, dinosaurs and all.’

I didn’t think that that was a good idea.

‘I’ve made an appointment with the chaplain,’ she continued.

‘Before you’ve even managed to walk in past the porters?’ The favourite hours of her childhood had been spent at this college, tagging along with her older brothers to choir. While they’d practised, Im and her little brother Sebastian had been a pair, collecting conkers off the lawns
and running wild in the cloister. Seb hadn’t been old enough to join yet, and she was a girl. Only boys sing at Jesus. Seb would have left her and joined in with the music when he got old enough, but it never came to that.

We drove over the hump of a bridge.

‘Max, I want Jesus College to become an
us
memory. You and me. We’re better than the past. We can make it ours.’

Can we?
I wanted it, too, but … It niggled at me, the question of what made her approach me when we first met. It was on a beach; she was wet and tan, a bright scarf tied around her waist over a sleek red bathing suit. I’d looked over my shoulder, thinking at first that she’d meant someone else.

She asked me everything, even about my family and childhood. My answers were boring, and a little self-pitying: my dad ran off when I was small and my mum and grandmother raised me without him. It was only later that Im said why she’d needed to know so much about me.

She always had to be sure, she’d explained, before she got involved with anyone. Her parents had died when she was eight, and she and her siblings had been adopted out to different families. She’d found her older brothers when she turned eighteen, but Sebastian, the little one, was still unaccounted for. He could be anywhere. She had to make sure he was never across the table from her on a date.

She’d presented it like a compliment. She wanted me, and so had to vet me first. But I know that that wasn’t all. There was something else she wouldn’t admit.

I knew why she’d approached me in the first place. I knew why this perfect woman – in the car with her hand
on my thigh – noticed me on a beach of hundreds. Still, I drove her back to our hotel, for lunch or maybe sex before my afternoon commitment at the University concert hall, assisting at a week-long summer music course. I accepted the situation.

She’s said that she loves me for me; she loves my music, my cooking, my talkative, welcoming friends, and my collection of well-loved, cracked-spine paperbacks. She’s said that she loves us as a pair: for our shared tastes and serious talks and fun in bed. But she hadn’t known any of that on the beach in Spain. She’d only known that I looked like him, like Seb. She approached me then because I look like the grown-up version of her lost brother.

In the car, my leg tensed inside her grip.

She snatched her hand back to her lap. ‘You’re angry, aren’t you?’ she flung at me. ‘I know how much you want this. I want it too, for you. You say it’s up to me, but we both know that you’ll take the job. You
should
. The real question is, will I be able to cope with coming with you?’

‘Im, you know I—’

She put up a hand to stop me. ‘Let me try. I may be hard to be around while I … while I find my footing. But I’m willing to give it my best. Are you willing to let me?’

She lifted her chin; her lips opened just a little.
Beautiful
.

‘Of course I am,’ I said, dragging my gaze back to the road.

‘It’ll be fun living in a university town. It will remind me of my youth.’ She’s thirty-one, five years older than me. We’d got into a habit of joking about the age difference to stop others from doing it for us.

I hate having to do that. No one would say anything if
our ages were reversed. ‘When exactly is this meeting with the chaplain?’

‘Tomorrow,’ she answered, casually, as if that weren’t a little soon. She leant her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Her chest lifted with breath.

I’m aware that our relationship has an element of the practical about it. I’m the man that she happens to be with when she’s decided she needs a baby, so I’m the one who gets to marry her. I could worry about it, and wonder if she really loves me better than everyone else, but it seems easier to simply consider myself fortunate.

‘All right,’ I said carefully, as the car rolled us forward.

Are we supposed to admit that we live together?
I’d had a brief fling with devout Christianity when I was a teenager, and half-remembered youth-group soundbites panic me when I encounter clergy. I reminded myself that, despite the blunt name that had been assigned to Jesus College more than five hundred years ago, it’s fundamentally secular.

I tried to relax in the chaplain’s office, but felt too warm despite the open window. The room was made up like a lounge in someone’s house, with soft sofas and throw pillows, and I felt like I was sinking into the seat and wouldn’t be able to get up.

Imogen answered the chaplain easily. ‘We’re both in London at the moment, and looking for a home here together.’

The chaplain didn’t fish any further than that, asking: ‘And what attachment do you have to the college?’

I wasn’t sure how much Im would want to get into.
Do we need a reason
? I wondered. Surely lots of people
marry in a college just because it’s a grand architectural backdrop …
But would that offend the chaplain?

‘My brothers were choristers,’ she answered simply.

She was at ease. Not just with wedding talk but with the college in general, after a brief initial stiffness. She’d greeted the dinosaurs this morning; they’re part of her memories now, she said, her
new
memories of Jesus College. A friend of mine once worried to me that Imogen lives in the past, but he’d got that wrong. Im lives in the future too. She choreographs the present as memories for future Im. It’s as if all these years leading up to her old age are just the packing of the suitcase instead of the trip itself.

‘Max?’ she prompted me. I’d missed what the chaplain asked.

‘Do you have any special preferences for the service? Are you content with the use of the Book of Common Prayer?’ the chaplain repeated for my benefit.

‘I am,’ Im said, a love of ceremony flashing in her eyes.

‘I don’t mind,’ I said, then immediately worried that I sounded indifferent. I added, ‘I don’t want her to obey me, if that’s all right.’

‘If you choose the 1662 vows, “obey” is part and parcel. But the 1928 and 2000 revisions provide an alternative,’ the chaplain reported, precisely, like a schoolboy determined to get full marks. He looked too young, younger than I had expected.

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

Imogen apologised on my behalf, but the chaplain overrode her and answered. ‘Thirty-four,’ he said, still smiling, still unperturbed.

Older than me, so I couldn’t really complain. He’s older
than Im as well, by three years. I nodded. ‘I just … expected a fatherly figure, is all,’ I over-explained.

‘Will your father be coming to the wedding?’ he asked, cutting right to that soft part I didn’t realise I’d exposed.

‘No, I … I only meant that I expected you to be older than me. A generation older, not just a handful of years.’

‘If you’re uncomfortable …’

‘No,’ insisted Imogen, raising her eyebrows at me in warning.

‘No,’ I agreed.
There, I lied to a priest for you.

He walked us to the chapel, explaining the history of the college, really selling it. I’d made it clear that we hadn’t settled on a venue yet, so he was making sure that we knew every advantage the college has to offer.

The outer chapel is a large, echoey space that rewards looking up with an elaborate ceiling. It wasn’t exactly as I’d pictured it from Im’s stories, but it was recognisable in that dream-way where a place doesn’t look like, say, your old primary school, but it
is
your school, it just is, and you know it despite the visual mismatch.

Imogen sucked in a breath. She looked around, all sides, clutching her hands tightly in front of her stomach.

At first I’d thought that she was mad to suggest having the wedding in Jesus chapel, but I suddenly saw that it was a necessary hurdle. She had to prove that she could do it. If we sidestepped it, married at St Catharine’s or a random church or the Register Office, the chapel would always hang over her. It would be heavier than a memory – it would be a ‘might have been’.

The chaplain led us through a doorway cut into a carved wooden screen, into the inner chapel, a small,
tight jewel-box of a room. In it, two long stalls faced one another, each with three rows of bench seats, ascending. It was a fashion, once upon a time, for worshippers to face one another instead of facing the altar. He described the options of the current daytime sunlight, shining through the stained glass and smearing coloured light across the stone walls, versus the more dramatic evening candles and pin-prick spotlights.