The Red House (25 page)

‘Never talk about my wife,’ he said. ‘You’re not fit to say her name. Do you understand that?’

Rowena agreed. As soon as his wife had their baby, or perhaps when the baby was weaned, or perhaps after another baby, he’d get Isobel back to himself and not need Rowena any longer. She had to take what she could get.

Weeks later, their pattern had become comfortably re-established. He rolled off her, and stretched, and she knew that there would be a few minutes of basking, followed by efficient re-dressing and arrangements for another time. He didn’t like her to talk after, so she was quiet, and heard rain stippling the roof, and, outside, a sound like a kitten mewling.

She got up, which disturbed Joseph, but she didn’t care. The cat sounded in pain. She pulled a sheet off her bed to cover herself, mindful of his view of her sags and dimples. She dragged open the barn door. It was dark out. It was night, after her shift. Rowena squinted. The sound wasn’t
coming from a cat. On the grass, Laura, on her hands and knees, rocked and cried.

Rowena pulled her up and staggered her into the barn, out of the rain and the mud. She laid Laura on the orange sheet that had fallen off from around her. ‘How far along are you? How long have you been having contractions?’

Laura grunted her answers. Rowena reached down into the wet between her legs. Her hand came up black. In the lamp light of the Red House, that’s what red looked like. It was blood.

‘Joseph, call for an ambulance!’ she instructed him, in her professional tone that brooked no argument. He didn’t move, so she barked again. This time, he obeyed, and exited.

As far as she knew, the phone at the White House was dead, unless Laura had revived it. He would have to call from his own house. That would take time. She lied to Laura, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be here soon.’

She reached again under Laura’s dress. She felt the push of a baby’s soft crown under her hand.

I’ve never taken the train between London and Cambridge. It’s been there all these years, hauling commuters back and forth, but I’ve never been tempted to leap onto it. I knew that Cambridge would have changed. I knew that I had changed. I knew that Sebastian wasn’t there and that my older brothers were grown men, moved far away. I knew that our parents were dead. I’d returned to Cambridge only for Maxwell, so that he could take the job.

Today I take the train away from Cambridge, to London. I’m clumsy in my wheelchair, after another night in Addenbrooke’s following the attack in the car park. Maxwell didn’t come to see me. I’m relieved. I don’t yet know what to say to him. This is my chance to figure that out.

King’s Cross is the Harry Potter station, with the back half of a luggage trolley stuck into a wall for children to pose with, as if about to access a hidden, magical platform. Families queue; parents fiddle with cameras; half the children are excited and half are bored. I used to want
children more than anything, even just yesterday. Now I see them as they are: dirty, demanding, whole people, separate from the adults who carry them around. That’s why our mother had four, I’ve realised. She’d been trying for the one that would finally finish the job, but there was only more urge, never any satisfaction.

My older brothers remember the fights. Ben had alluded to them when we’d found one another twelve years ago, but I’d flicked the reference away, with a literal wave of my hand. I’d rushed words in its place, reminding them of how our mother had made picnics under the college chestnut trees, how she had helped stage our own dramatic communion ceremony at home because the college chaplain had given me and Sebastian blessings instead of wine when we lined up at the rail. Of course, Robert and Ben had remembered none of this. They have different memories, from inside the rehearsal room and within the choir stalls. They had been singing in East House while Sebastian and I were mollified with a blanket and grapes under the trees. They had been handed the cup of wine in the service, and invited to drink, they and all the other choirboys, even though some of them were not that much older than I had been.

I understand now why most elite choirs require boarding school. At Jesus, in contrast, there were all these parents to be placated, all these individual school schedules to be managed. The older local boys came straight from their schools, on their own, usually early and rowdy. They played football on the grass and pounded on the rehearsal room piano. The younger boys, and those with a commute, came with parents and siblings in tow, adding more noise
and chaos. I’d run around the courtyards as if they were my own garden, and only from this distance do I realise what a distraction I must have been, and how in the way. It’s a sudden fizz of humiliation. I had loved the choir, but had been nothing to it in return, only a nuisance.

I wonder if I’m a nuisance to my brothers as well.

Robert had agreed to meet me here, under the station’s vaulted ceiling. A canopy of criss-crossed steel rises up from a central funnel to spread out high over the main lobby, and it’s lit in a bright purple glow. I take the lift to the mezzanine, and save him a seat at a flimsy metal cafe table. The noise and bustle all around comforts me. In a private space I might have cried or argued. In public, I will only be able to nod, accept, and move on. It’s the best way.

‘Imogen!’ Robert says, bending to kiss both of my cheeks. I had warned him about the wheelchair over the phone, explaining that it’s only temporary and blaming it on a climbing accident, so there’s only a flicker of pity, quickly replaced by his usual easy smile. He leans back in his chair, feet apart, shoulders back. He’s grown up confident despite being orphaned, which had at first puzzled me. Then it had clicked together and made sense: he and Ben had always had each other.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I say quietly. I’m always aware that I’d been more desperate to find them than they me.

‘You would have liked the concert last night,’ he tells me. He plays the organ, all over the world. It’s only luck that he’s in London for that now. Tomorrow he’ll take the Eurostar to Paris, to catch up with his wife and daughters, who have begun their holiday without him.

‘I wish that I—’ I begin.

‘Of course you couldn’t have come,’ he quickly adds, tracing my wheelchair with his eyes.

‘I know. I do wish that I could have.’

Robert nods, and queues to get coffee for us both.

In the past, Maxwell has asked me why I don’t play any instrument. I could blame my adopted family, who didn’t make me practise, but I had been old enough that I could have made myself practise, if I’d wanted it. I could blame the college choir for having cast me as an outsider, a permanent tagalong, but that’s not fair either. In all the schools I’d ever attended, it was the girls who dominated singing, and the boys who made fun of it.

I’ve heard Robert play, once. I travelled up to Edinburgh for it. As with so many chapels, churches and cathedrals, he’d been hidden and anonymous in the organ loft. Without him in sight, it had been as if the building itself were breathing out the music. I’d found the experience near-overwhelming. ‘I think I’m a born listener,’ I’d answered Max when he asked.

Maxwell and I don’t have a real piano in our flat; the neighbours would never put up with it. Max has an electronic one that he practises on with headphones. If the television and radio are off, and nothing is cooking or in the dishwasher, I hear the gentle presses and clicks of the keys under his fingers. I play a little game, to figure out what he’s playing from that alone. I love musicians, without wanting to be one myself.

Robert returns with a tray. Our lattes have been put into paper cups. Probably this location doesn’t even have proper mugs, expecting that all their customers are in a hurry. Nevertheless, I feel rushed, annoyed, and judged.
Robert reacts to my frown. ‘Did I get it right?’ he asks.

I stretch out a smile for him. ‘Of course. Thank you.’

He puts a chocolate-dipped shortbread between us. ‘To share,’ he says, breaking off a piece for himself.

I twist my face and blink fast to keep the tears in. I try to remember what we all used to like for treats when we were little. I can’t. I remember what I’ve told people about our childhood, over and over, but not the childhood itself any more, not enough to walk around in it and spot things that I haven’t already consciously claimed.

‘What is it that you wanted to talk about?’ Robert prompts.

Again, guilt. I’ve been silent too long, wasting his time. ‘Mum and Dad.’ Suddenly cold, I press my palms against my warm cup.

Robert leans back again, brushing shortbread crumbs off his lap. He looks down. ‘What about them?’

‘Do you remember, when I asked if either of you had become a doctor, like Dad? Ben said … He kind of croaked a laugh, and then said that he would never be like Dad. Then you said you play the organ, and Ben said he teaches. We talked about something else. Why did Ben say that, about not being like Dad?’

‘You really batted it back whenever either of us referred to our parents as less than perfect. I didn’t think you would ever want to know.’

I turn my head away, speaking only sideways. I’ll give him the words, but not my eyes. ‘I need to know it now,’ I say. This is what I’ve come for.

He nods, and pushes out a deep breath. In relief? Or dread? I twist my hands together. Robert speaks. ‘Dad
wasn’t always nice to Mum. They argued a lot. Sometimes they drank too much, both of them.’ He’s still looking down. I have to lean forward to filter the words through the background buzz of boarding announcements.

‘I don’t remember that,’ I admit. ‘I try, but all I remember is …’ Sebastian. I remember Sebastian, and chestnut trees, and a special goblet. Mum had let us glue plastic gems onto a real wine glass to make our own communion cup.

Robert says, ‘I’m not saying that there weren’t good times too. There were. It just wasn’t perfect.’

I nod. ‘Did Dad cheat?’ But it doesn’t need to be a question. ‘He cheated on Mum, didn’t he.’

‘I was eleven. I honestly don’t know.’

I do. I’d remembered. I feel older for a moment, like I’m the big sibling, more world-weary, more full of knowledge. I consider telling Robert about the neighbour in the barn, but recognise that the urge springs from a desire to shock him. That would be unkind.

‘Was that what they argued about?’ I ask. ‘What else? Did they argue more after Sebastian came?’
They must have. They couldn’t have done what they did and not been changed by it for the worse.

‘Imogen, all parents argue more after a baby’s born.’ Robert, a father himself, is back to being the authority. I’m the little one again.

I wait, but he doesn’t say anything else. He’s making me ask for it, bit by bit. ‘What happened the night they died?’

Robert pushes his cup away. He shakes his head.

I beg him, ‘I don’t remember. I honestly don’t remember. Please tell me.’

He pushes his face towards me, punishing me with a
harsh tone for making him say it. ‘They were arguing about something. Dad stomped upstairs. Sebastian followed him, and I don’t think Dad knew he was there. Mum shouted up after Dad, and Dad whirled around, and … Sebastian got kicked backwards. He fell all the way down. They took him to go to the hospital.’ He shrugs, drops back. ‘They didn’t come back,’ he finishes.

‘Dad kicked him?’

‘I don’t think it was on purpose. I don’t know.’

‘But he was angry.’

‘He was always angry!’

People are staring. Robert curls his shoulders in embarrassment, and apologises for raising his voice.

I remember the stairs themselves perfectly, times playing peekaboo between the rails, and fairy lights wound around the bannister at Christmas. But I don’t see our father there on the landing, or our mother at the bottom, or Sebastian tumbling down. ‘Was I there?’

‘We were all there. You were little. You’re lucky you remember the good things,’ he offers me.

‘I remember seeing Sebastian in hospital, before they split us up. He was all bruised. They said it was from the accident. Do you think that some of it was from the …?’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Did Dad ever—’

‘Imogen,
stop
,’ he insists. ‘I know that this is news for you, but Ben and I dealt with it a long time ago.’

You haven’t dealt with all of it,
I think, with a mental sneer. I feel suddenly powerful in my new understanding, instead of cowed by it. He doesn’t know everything.

‘We got a good family, Imogen,’ he continues. ‘So
did you. I’ve got a family of my own now, and you have Maxwell … Is anything ever going to be enough?’

‘What about Sebastian?’

‘What about him? He hasn’t registered to be contacted, so I assume that he doesn’t want to be.’

‘What if he doesn’t know? What if his new family lied to him?’

We’ve had this conversation before. The first time, I’d been desperate to convince Robert to join my search. Now, I’m curious about his defences, his reasoning. I want him to convince me.

Robert retorts: ‘Maybe with not knowing, he’s the happiest of all four of us. Did you ever think of that?’

Those two sentences are what I’d come for. I feel a lightening, as if permission has been granted. I say out loud, to divert him with an explanation for my relief, ‘You said “the four of us”. That’s nice to hear.’

‘You’ll always be my sister.’ He smiles. He takes the last of the shortbread, which I haven’t touched. The scatter of crumbs and the balled-up napkin on his side of the table strike me as suddenly familiar. Had he always been the ‘messy one’? Had I been neat, even then?

‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.
Now
is what matters.’

He nods, and smiles, relieved to be past the necessary ugliness. He shows me photos of his girls on his iPhone. He tells me that Ben is moving to the States to work on a PhD. I nod in return, but share nothing of my own life. Robert finally has to ask me, ‘How’s Maxwell?’

I consider carefully before answering. ‘He’s the best thing in my life.’ I feel like I’ve been delivered from the
past to the present by train, and stepped out of the rail car blinking into bright sunlight.

Robert smiles indulgently, like the older brother he is, as if he’s proud that I’ve learnt to balance on a bicycle or swim in the deep end. ‘You’ll both come and visit us, won’t you? We have a spare room.’

I’ve not seen his house before, but I imagine it, down to the colours on the duvet, a hideous maroon and brown that Robert and his wife are quite right to relegate to the least-used bed. The vividness of this fiction surprises me. It’s at least as real as everything else in my head, all those remembered scenes that I’ve given so much power for too many years.

‘We’d love that,’ I answer for both Maxwell and myself.

I imagine the hideous guest quilt being too thin, and Maxwell and I giggling and pressing together for warmth underneath it on a cool night. I make myself stop there, reminding myself that whether Robert’s wife cooks breakfast, or his daughters complain about their school uniforms, or the dog jumps and licks too much, is up to the future. I make a conscious decision to stop planning, instead to look around, and to listen. I hear, beyond the loudspeaker and chatter and footsteps, beyond the rolling baggage and chugging trains, the bright lilt of a distant busker playing a trumpet for coins.