The Red House (4 page)

The first time we were going to sleep together, she booked us a weekend room at a country house hotel. The formality of the arrangement seemed unnecessarily complicated. She had a roommate; that I understood. But my place was fine. It was clean and comfortable. I just wanted to be with her. I just wanted to not stop. But Imogen likes to make things special. She makes events.

So she booked us into a room with a curtained bed and outsized bath. She showed me the pictures from the website on her phone. I drove, distracted by her obvious anticipation beside me. She was practically bouncing in the seat, singing along with the radio. Her exuberance had halted when I signed the guest register for us. I’m left-handed, something I’d never hidden but it had not yet come up in front of her.

I took the key and smiled, but her anticipation was gone. Instead, she stared, mouth slack, and her hands clutched one another, whitening the knuckles.

She bolted. I chased her into the car park, but she was gone, somehow gone, despite the wide lawns and the low flowerbeds, without walls or hedges or thick trees near enough to have hidden her. I found her between two vehicles, sitting on the ground, back up against a wheel. Her head rested on her knees.

‘You never told me you’re left-handed,’ she accused.

I didn’t answer. What could I say?

‘Sebastian’s left-handed. I taught him to write an S myself.’

‘Lots of people are left-handed,’ I said, far too reasonably for her.

‘We can’t …’ she began. ‘We have to be sure.’

‘I’m sure,’ I said. I was born in Durham. I’m named after my Aussie grandfather.

‘I want a test.’

‘A test? What kind of test?’ My mind had gone to a quiz of some sort. A pub quiz, about my childhood and family. Or an exam, requiring quotes from supporting documents, maybe footnotes.

‘A DNA test. There are places that do them by post.’

It sounded shady to me.

‘I need it,’ she insisted. ‘I need to be sure.’

She knew the drill. It occurred to me then that she must have done this before.

We ordered a kit, and swabbed our mouths. We sent them away in the post and parted. She said she didn’t know how to be with me, what kind of love she was supposed to have for me. It was the first time she had said ‘love’ meaning me. We didn’t see each other while we waited.

When the results came through she waited for me at work. I ran a teenagers’ choir as an after-school activity. We were just finishing a Handel finale, bellowing out grand chords over the tinny school piano. I saw her over the heads of the children, smiling, beaming.
Good news, then.
Of course it was. I had never expected it to be anything else, but the reality of it having finally arrived made me, in that moment, giddy.

At rehearsal’s end she pulled me to her. ‘Take me home,’
she’d said, without any preamble. ‘Now. Quickly.’ That’s how I’d learnt that we aren’t related. That’s how I knew we were free.

Here, in the Cambridge hotel, she emerged from the bathroom in her dressing gown, wet like on the beach in Spain. She posed in the doorway, that same happy look on her face as on that day, the day she’d got back the DNA results, like she had a present for me, like she had good news. Her face glowed.

I’d never asked to see the results for myself, I suddenly recalled. From her behaviour, the results had been obvious.

Something knotted in my gut, but I ignored it. How could I receive that look with anything less than gratitude? ‘Hello, beautiful,’ I said, forcing my mouth into an appropriate answering smile.

All couples have more or less the same ingredients to their relationships: the first spark, first sex, declaration of love, decision to commit, in some order or other. Telling someone else your own love story is as boring as telling them what you dreamt last night. But those similarities – that uniform structure – make the few true differences pop.
First DNA test,
I reminisced wryly. How many people share that?

I stifled a laugh.

Imogen pulled her wrap tight around her chest, embarrassed.

‘Im …’ I said.

She rallied. ‘If you love me come get me,’ she dared me, letting the neck of her dressing gown fall open again.

I hesitated.

‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I lied.

‘Come here then,’ she said, but I couldn’t move. ‘Is it because I proposed?’ She calls it a proposal, but it hadn’t been formal or even planned; one morning two months ago she’d blurted out, ‘
Let’s get married
,’ and I’d agreed that that was a wonderful idea.

‘Of course it’s not because you proposed,’ I snapped. She’s become paranoid about it, as if she’d violated the proper order of things and bad luck will follow. ‘Of course I want to marry you,’ I’d said then, and said again in the hotel. ‘It’s just the church,’ I threw out there, as explanation. She knows that I was briefly devout.

‘You know it’s not the religion I want for the wedding,’ she said, snuggling up against my chest, only her thin dressing gown and my T-shirt between us. I held still. ‘It’s the music, and the memories and … it will be like my family is there with us.’ She stroked my arm; my hands hung still, unresponsive. She pushed me and went to cry in the bathroom. I heard her through the door.

I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to embrace her. But not … It didn’t feel right. Not there, not then, with her suddenly a young girl again in her mind. She was too fragile. That was how I justified it to myself.

Well, which is it? Her fragility, or the church?
I seemed to be full of excuses.

She came out of the bathroom, holding the skimpy hand towel with which she’d wiped her face. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We should do the premarital counselling. Where are those forms?’ She upended her bag. Receipts and tissues wafted. The folded papers hit the bed and fanned out, leaving little room for the two of us.

Last night we’d read the questions and agreed to sleep on them. Now we were in a dimly-lit indie coffee shop near the college. I hadn’t thought anything of the name until we stepped inside.

Paintings, drawings and photographs of clowns’ painted faces, exaggerated costumes and contorted poses covered the wood-panelled walls. They looked down at us, beyond us, pointedly away from us. Im and Seb used to come here to Clowns Cafe often with their mum, while their brothers practised.

Imogen reminisced about the sung services in the chapel. I already knew what she’d say, because evensongs follow a set liturgy at churches all over the world. Most of the words, even the prayers, stay the same, repeated each evening beside a rotation of Bible chapters and psalms. It’s the musical settings of the words that vary, a wide repertoire shared by thousands of musicians. I relaxed. Imogen and I come from a similar class and culture; of course we would share similar memories and understandings. Any seeming déjà vu shouldn’t surprise me.

‘I’d like hot milk with chocolate on top,’ she ordered. ‘That’s what Sebastian and I always got, because it looked like Mum’s coffee,’ she told me. I, more in keeping with the weather, got a fresh orange juice. Imogen insisted on a tiny round table in the back where she and Sebastian had always sat. It felt too small for us.

We hunched over the counselling questionnaire together. Round clowns’ eyes read it over our shoulders.

I read them out loud, and stopped there, thinking,
That one is going to release floodgates in Im
. This is the sum of it: Im’s father adored her mother. Im’s mother adored her babies. Imogen worships their perfection. We’d been hashing this out for months; I’d been trying to persuade her to release her parents as an ideal.

She put her hand on mine. ‘This one’s going to be hard for you, huh?’

That’s right; I have parents too
. ‘There’s not much to say. I can’t recall ever seeing them in the same room together so I really can’t comment on their marriage.’

‘This isn’t a joke,’ she pouted.

‘No, but a sense of humour is helpful, don’t you think? I lack marital role models; fine. That doesn’t funnel me into a replay of whatever-it-was that happened between them when I was too young to notice.’

‘No!’ she said. She smacked the table and her cup jumped on its saucer. ‘You weren’t too young to notice. You were too young to put it into words in your mind, to make conscious memories of it, but you
noticed
. Children
notice
…’

‘I know, I know …’
Back to her, I see
. I cut to the real point: ‘Sebastian remembers you, Imogen. Perhaps not your name, but he remembers the happiness and the love and the safe feeling. I should never have implied otherwise.’ I sighed; I leant back in my chair.

‘Why do you keep bringing him up?’ she asked me.

The conversation at the next table lulled and the milk steamer behind the counter stilled at the same moment. I ducked my head and lowered my voice. ‘Me? Why do
I
keep bringing him up?’
That’s a joke, right?

She looked at me, unblinking. ‘Are you jealous of him?’

‘Jealous? Of … of whom?’ She couldn’t mean what it sounded like she meant.

‘You’re an only child of a single mother. You’re used to one-on-one devotion. But love isn’t finite, Maxwell. I can love my brothers and love you. Like we’ll love our babies and still love each other.’

‘Obviously,’ I sputtered.

‘This whole week you haven’t let a conversation go by without bringing up Seb. But that’s my job. I’ll bring him up when he comes up; you don’t have to.’

‘You’re the one who brings him up.’ I had to take a stand on that.

She shook her head. We’d both pushed back from the table, leaning away in perfect symmetry.

Imogen was the first to crack. ‘Look at us. It’s as if we’re going to upend the table and wrestle on the floor.’ She forced her mouth into an apologetic smile.

I answered with a nod. We leant in again, cautiously and consciously. I looked over my shoulder, but no one in the cafe was paying attention.
This only matters to us
, I reminded myself.
No one else is going to care if we fall apart.

My voice cracked. ‘I’m worried about you, Im. This city is bad for you.’

‘No,’ she said, wagging her head back and forth. ‘Just
because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s bad.’

‘Fine. This city is
difficult
for you. Why put ourselves through it?’

She covered one of my hands with one of her own. ‘This isn’t just for you. I know you want the job; I want you to have it; but you’re not the only reason why I’m here. It’s time, Maxwell. I need to face this place and all that it stirs up in me. I’m lucky to have you with me. Can you imagine if I’d tried this on my own? I’d have done something crazy. I’d have ended up riding the horse statue, or ringing the chapel bell by swinging from its rope.’

I snorted a laugh. ‘You’re far too elegant to do either of those.’

She raised one delicate eyebrow. ‘Is that what you think of me? “Elegant”? Hello, remember me? We live together.’

‘You do snore sometimes, after wine,’ I admitted.

‘I don’t!’ she protested, laughing and covering her eyes with her hands.

I reached and touched her cheek. It was wet.

‘I’m happy, Max. I am. It’s just that big emotions come out of me in the form of tears. Bad feelings, good ones. Doesn’t matter. If the feelings are big, my eyes leak.’

‘Which big feelings are these right now?’ I needed to know.

Her gaze darted around the room, fast and almost frantic, at last coming to rest on a crude painting of a harlequin juggling dozens of balls. ‘All of them,’ she said. ‘Every feeling you can think of.’

The Sidgwick Site had surprised me on Monday. It’s near enough to the city centre that I’d expected at least Victorian
architecture, if not earlier, but this is where Cambridge has gathered its modern, statement buildings. Concrete and glass; curves and slants. These are departments, not colleges, squeezing in between Sidgwick Avenue and West Road: Law, English, History, Divinity, Criminology, Classics and Music. The West Road Concert Hall was where I was spending my afternoons for the week.

The holiday music course has been ongoing in Cambridge for decades. String orchestras and ‘everything else’ orchestras, from beginner through advanced, are the main show, playing cinema themes and classical’s greatest hits, alongside general choirs and more specialised groups, like my
a cappella
girls.

Unlike at Jesus choir, young Imogen had joined her brothers in the summer orchestra. It was held at West Road even back then. She played violin with the beginner strings while their mum looked after Seb.

Im told me about it only after I was asked to coach the
a cappella
group. It hadn’t come up before, I suppose because these memories don’t include her parents or Seb. What she did describe isn’t nearly as vivid as the choir memories, so I didn’t have the same sense of eerie recognition as I’d had at Jesus. The concert hall and its environs were fresh to me. Out for a walk between a meeting and a practice, away from the stifling warm rooms overfull with adolescents, I felt briefly free, which must be why I did it. Giddy happiness is the only sensible explanation.

It was a childish action: I ran up a wall that slants over a bicycle-parking alcove. I couldn’t have been the first. Not only is any slope naturally tempting, but on this one the concrete surface is patterned as a checkerboard in relief,
creating unintentional footholds. I scampered up.

It was only at the top that it occurred to me:
I’m a grown man
. I sheepishly skidded down. I looked around; no one had bothered to notice me.
Of course I’m not the first
, I comforted myself. Freshers must do it all the time. Then my point was proved: a toddler in a harness clambered up, his mother hovering anxiously.