Kate woke early. Max was in bed beside her, curled up, breathing heavily. His skin smelt of alcohol, sweat, antiperspirant. She lay still, her head pounding. Max had turned off the light when he’d come to bed, and the heavy curtains were drawn against the morning sun. Daylight was difficult to contemplate. More difficult was the thought of Max waking and having to face him. She slipped out of bed and pulled on a sweatshirt that had been left on the floor. She took her bag and went down the stairs, barefooted and silent.
Sunlight was streaming into the kitchen through the conservatory roof and front window. She caught sight of her reflection in the oven door and saw that her face was streaked with black mascara and that her eyes were puffy.
The kitchen was a mess. On the marble kitchen island were plates of half-eaten food: overdressed salads, squashed burger patties and hummus that had developed a skin overnight. And drinks, drained mojitos with lime and brown sugar in the bottom of the glasses. Lime gone rancid in the heat of the morning. She hadn’t known lime could smell like that, sweet and rotten.
There was a clean pint glass in the cupboard and she filled it with water from the tap. The bag of ice they had bought last night was sitting in the sink, melted, so that the water had leaked out and the plastic was flattened among rind and bottle tops and cigarette papers. She sipped her water. Perhaps she should tidy. Or perhaps she should leave.
There were footsteps upstairs, the sound of a door slamming. Now was the time if she was going to get out of there. She wondered if it would be Lewis coming to find her. But it was William who came down the back stairs, neatly dressed and shaved, and found her there in the kitchen.
“You’re up,” he said. “Are you the only one?”
“I think so,” said Kate.
“Well,” he said. “Breakfast.”
He cleared a space for Kate at the kitchen table, and she helped him to load the dishwasher. He wiped down the table and she sat there, half in a patch of sunlight. William had showered already, he smelt fresh, and soapy. Kate tried to think of something she could say about Rupert: she had not seen William since he’d gone into the hospital. She wanted to apologize for the mess that had been made of his house, given what he was going through, but she couldn’t remember how to form sentences. He opened a window to let out the stale air and asked Kate if she wanted some coffee. She said that she did and, sensing that William wanted something to do, did not offer to help, but sat quietly as he took a fresh packet of coffee beans from the freezer and cut it open with scissors. He ground the beans, apologizing for the noise, and then packed them into the percolator.
“Shall we have some music?” he said. He gave her his iPod, an ancient, chunky thing in white plastic casing, and Kate was reminded of when she had been given that same responsibility, in the passenger seat of Lewis’s car as they’d driven to London two years earlier: that had been the first time she’d met him. She turned the wheel of the iPod; the percolator began to steam.
“Milk?” said William.
“Yes, please.”
William heated the milk in a saucepan, beating it with a little whisk which, he told Kate, he considered to be the most ingenious invention he had ever encountered. People spent thousands on these machines, he said, for steaming milk and for making espresso, and they had no idea that all they needed was this little whisk. William seemed to exist in a state of constant amazement, the world a source of unending fascination. It must be exhausting to live like that. By the time the coffee was made, Kate had still found nothing to listen to.
“There’s nothing here you like, I’m sure. It’s an old man’s music collection.” William poured Kate a cup of coffee and took the iPod from her, and she thought this was just about the kindest thing anybody had ever done. He put on an album by James Taylor, which Kate knew she would not have chosen, but which filled the kitchen with a mellow, calming sound. She drank her coffee and sat listening to the music as William fried bacon and eggs, singing flatly, and carried on tidying around her, rebuffing her attempts to help him. Breakfast was not a good idea, but it was too late now to refuse it, so when he put in front of her a plate of thin white toast, with the bacon and eggs, she armored herself with the knife and fork and began cautiously to move the food around her plate, careful not to breach the soft yolk. After the first mouthful, she realized how ravenously hungry she was, and the nausea she had woken with abated long enough for her to eat half of the egg and a piece of toast and two rashers of bacon.
“What time’s your train?” said William. In fact she had originally planned to stay another day, but William had just given her a way out.
“I’ll have to check the ticket. I think it’s open, so, any time.”
William looked at his watch. “Only eight o’clock. You’ll have to wait a while for the others to emerge. I gather it went on late last night?”
“I think so…but I might just go. I’ll see them all soon.”
Her shoes were where she had left them, at the bottom of the cream-carpeted stairs, and her jacket had been stuffed down the side of the sofa; but she couldn’t find her phone. It wasn’t in her bag or her jacket pocket. She was close to leaving without it, suddenly desperate to get out of the house, terrified that somebody other than William, who was so kind with his whisk and his toast, would come downstairs and find her there, as if she wasn’t supposed to be awake, standing, breathing. But William found it next to the white orchid on the shelf above the sink.
“This yours?” he said, passing her the phone.
“Yes, thank you. I must have left it there,” said Kate. “I went out for ice and must have forgotten it.”
“Oh, right, well, there you are.”
“I went out for ice with Lewis.”
Kate watched William for a reaction, waiting for him to read into this coded statement that which was unspeakable.
“Good,” said William vaguely. “It’s dead.”
She would charge the phone on the train, she said, though she knew her charger was upstairs in Max’s room and that she was not going back up there to collect it.
“Thank you for breakfast.”
“My pleasure. And I shall see you very soon at the flat.”
“You’ll have to come for dinner,” said Kate.
He let her out the front door and turned and went back inside before Kate was halfway up the driveway. Out on the street, she looked up at the windows. She didn’t know if Lewis had gone home last night or if he’d slept in one of the spare rooms. It was enough for her, for now, to imagine that he was enclosed within those four walls while she was out here, in the open air, on the road with her keys and with money in her purse, so that she could leave, she could disappear, while he stayed and slept.