Bernadette's late husband, Gregor Rippon, had inherited Bisley House from his father, who had made his fortune in the mining business. Gregor married Bernadette when she was twenty-one, around the time that he started getting seriously involved in his father’s company, reinvesting the profits into housing projects on the edges of failing factory towns. A few years after the births of their sons, Alasdair, William, and Rupert, Gregor’s father died. By the time he was thirty-five the company he had set up alongside his father’s had begun work on half a dozen council house estates and municipal buildings whose postwar gray and red exteriors existed in defiance of the glowing limestone houses for which Rippon Stone Ltd. had become known.
Kate’s mother, Alison Quaile, had long ago ceased to envisage a life in which she inhabited one of those golden-walled, rose-covered cottages, and had rented the same terraced house, built when Gregor’s company was still young, for almost two decades. The older houses were more attractive, of course, but even those with working fireplaces had thin windows and drafty doors, and around this time of year the mice would shelter from the cold in the wooden rafters. Alison was not inclined to take on the recurring threat of a rodent infestation, and when in the evenings she settled down on her sofa with a woolen blanket wrapped around her knees and a cushion on her lap she was grateful for the double glazing she’d paid to have installed when she’d first moved in, and for the rubber coating that had been put around the edge of the back door, neither of which would have been authorized by the council as alterations to the listed buildings she’d once coveted.
The house was small, though, and every time Kate came back from university, she brought with her an excess of belongings. Before she left for her first term, Kate’s friend Claire had driven her to Ikea to buy new bedding, new towels, and a full set of cutlery and crockery—all of it white—which she put straight into the box at the foot of the stairs. Now, the kitchen cabinets, which Alison had cleared out and organized so that she could easily rotate her own set of hand-painted dinner plates and bowls, to ensure they faded evenly with use, were filled with cheap white plates and scuffed nonstick frying pans. But despite the mess her daughter made of her small home, Alison treasured her presence. Clear-minded, sober, she was now guiltily aware of those blurred years when Kate had been younger and Alison had been drinking too much, and she was determined to make the most of the time they had now. The first winter without Kate had been particularly hard, especially in December, when there was little light and little incentive to leave the house. Alison spent two months anticipating her daughter’s return, ready to accommodate into her schedule the needs of somebody else. After a full term, Kate was tired enough to acquiesce to the love Alison had to give, and the bowls of pasta and cheese sauce and evenings spent watching quiz shows on television were accepted with neither gratitude nor complaint.
When it wasn’t too cold and she wasn’t working, Alison spent her time in the tiny shed on the patch of grass at the back of their house. She had been taking pottery and sculpting classes for the last six or so years, initially at Kate’s suggestion, and believed the sculpting had been part of what had helped her to stop drinking. She had now been almost entirely sober for three years: it was far easier not to drink, she’d once told Kate, now that she had found a way of expressing herself. Kate, who’d still been at school at the time, had looked at the stricken plaster face Alison had been working on, its mouth gaping open in a silent scream, and had wondered with alarm what exactly it was she was trying to say.
Seeing her daughter at the end of every term reminded Alison of how she used to feel when Kate came back from staying with her father. After the marriage broke down and he moved to Devon, Kate had gone to stay for weekends, for whole weeks over half-term, and she had always returned with a different inflection in her voice, with a smarter pair of jeans or new trainers, and interests to which Alison had no means of catering. David’s house was near the sea, and for a while Kate had got into surfing, wearing tight cropped T-shirts and baggy cutoff trousers that showed the braided anklet her father had bought for her one weekend in the summer. But even before Kate began to visit him less frequently Alison could see that this was a phase, just as the guitar had been, and the desire to play the drums—which, despite Kate’s double-pronged attack, both parents had refused to provide—and when, on weeknights, Kate got into her pajamas and sat on the sofa with her mother to watch MasterChef, Alison knew that none of these passions would be definitive, that each was just an experiment in identity.
But the changes in Kate after she had met Max felt more substantial. This was not just to do with clothing, or how she spent her time—though she had started dressing differently, in baggy T-shirts and gold hoops and branded sweatshirts—but with her demeanor. When she got back from their holiday to France at the end of their first year, she kept her phone either in her pocket or a few inches away, and she seemed to be constantly in correspondence with him. She had hinted at but not explained what was going on with Max’s family, and though sometimes she shared with Alison their less personal exchanges—articles from American periodicals, short films and essays, music by which Alison was baffled—whenever Alison asked about the artist or the writer, Kate snatched back her phone and answered only in short sentences. Though Kate had agreed to come to pottery classes with her mother, she ignored the directions of their teacher and instead started to paint one of the bowls Alison had thrown a few sessions ago while warming up the wheel. Kate sat with her shoulders hunched, the sleeves of her white T-shirt rolled up to the tops of her arms. Her hair was tied away from her face, and she was frowning as she concentrated on the delicate blue pattern she was painting around the bowl’s rim.
“It looks lovely,” Alison told her.
“It looks shit,” said Kate, holding up the bowl. “It’s supposed to be this pattern we saw in the South of France.”
Kate came home for Easter of her second year with a subscription to Sight & Sound and a new pair of Nikes. Alison decided to ask her if Max was coming to stay in Bisley. She had ascertained that his grandmother owned the large house just over the other side of the valley.
“No,” Kate said. “He’s away.”
“Have you been to the house?”
“No,” Kate said bluntly, which Alison took to mean that she had not been invited.
“He’s welcome here anytime, you know. We can make up the sofa bed.”
“Thanks,” Kate said, before softening a little. “I don’t know when he’ll next be in Gloucestershire. Maybe I should ask Claire to come over. I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Have I been annoying?”
“No comment,” said Alison.
Claire arrived after dinner with a four-pack of fruit cider and a spare pair of underwear. “In case I get too pissed to drive,” she said, waving them, when Alison opened the door. Alison always appreciated Claire’s refreshing lack of subtlety when it came to the subject of her former alcoholism.
“They’ll help you sober up, will they, love?”
“No, Mum,” Kate said, from the kitchen doorway, “obviously they’re so she can stay over.”
“That was a joke,” Alison said, with only moderate exasperation.
Kate shut the door to the kitchen and they sat at the table, talking and drinking.
“I’m supposed to be revising again,” Kate said to Claire.
“Aren’t you just bored with having to do work?” Claire said. “I would be by now. Jesus, you’ve got a whole other year.”
“Two,” Kate said. “And a bit. I’ve got a year abroad next year.”
“This is exactly why I didn’t go to university.”
Claire had instead taken a promotion from waitress to bar manager at a local pub. She was doing a course in hospitality management and had never expressed disappointment about her decision. But whenever Kate talked about university, she was always careful to focus on the negatives—on the abundance of privilege, the overload of work, the stress—more than the things she valued.
“You were wise,” Kate said wryly.
“How’s your mate?” Claire said.
“Max?”
“The one with the drunk uncle.”
“The Drunkle.” Kate, laughing at her own joke, got out her phone. “I can’t believe I haven’t come up with that already. I need to tell Max.”
“Is that maybe a bit insensitive?”
“He won’t mind. He’s got a dark sense of humor.”
“Humor is a defense mechanism.”
Kate put down her phone. “His family are all kind of repressed,” she said. “So I suppose that makes sense. Apart from the mum. She’s a filmmaker, did I tell you?”
“You did,” Claire said. “Several times.”
“Oh. Well. She’s the exception. As far as I can tell she’s the one trying to get everyone to open up. Not sure how well that’s going.”
“Max talks to you, though, right? Because of—” Claire nodded her head in the direction of the closed door.
“Yeah, he does,” said Kate, her tone casual. “I’m not really sure if he talks to anybody else, though.”
Since Rupert’s car crash, Max had become less elusive about his uncle’s addictions, and his family generally. Kate remembered what he had said the year before, about being used to people feeling as though they had ownership of his mother, and she had been careful, since then, to give Max far more than she took. And there was a lot she could give: despite what Claire had just said, Kate knew humor was the way through Max’s defenses. Whenever he was in danger of withdrawing, or keeping private whatever mishap Rupert had most recently brought on himself, she knew how to put him back at ease, to make him feel as though whatever disaster might have taken place was instead a minor, passing calamity. When Rupert had slipped and fallen down the concrete steps outside his building, when he’d been found wandering down Albert Bridge Road in the early hours of a cold December morning, when he’d sliced open an artery in his hand breaking through the window of his own flat, Kate was always on the other end of the phone. Even though Claire might not have realized it, she herself had always done the same for Kate when Kate’s own mother was in the grip of her addiction.
“Do you remember sitting here,” Kate said now, “when I got my offer letter? The neighbors came over, you screamed so loudly.”
“Oh, shit, I do remember.”
Kate drank from her cider. Claire never went to the effort of trying to hide her emotions, and once she’d stopped screaming she’d burst into tears. Alison, who did not cry but whose eyes had glittered, had hidden a bottle of champagne at the back of the fridge just in case the news was good. She’d opened the bottle with an expertly soft pop: it had been the only time either girl had seen Alison drink in the last three years, and she had sipped a careful quarter glass in the time Claire and Kate took to finish the rest of the bottle.
“That was a good day,” Kate said. She felt guilty, now, about shutting the door, and she leaned across and opened it just an inch.