Max managed to endure the forced jollity of William’s Christmas Eve party by staying with Elias and the other smokers in the kitchen garden, just behind the house, where they made their way through a pack of Marlboros. Here it was difficult to be seen and so far easier to avoid having to talk to anybody he didn’t want to, and because William had dragged two large outdoor heaters up from the garage it was warm enough to stay outside for most of the night. Max stood with his back to the wall of the house while Elias gesticulated, cigarette in hand, complaining about his girlfriend. Over Elias’s shoulder, he could see Rupert standing at the edge of the group. He was wearing a long green coat, which Max recognized as having been his grandfather’s; the collar was turned up, and he had a scarf wrapped protectively around his neck. In that coat, he could have been his old self: the Rupert who’d bought Max bottles of wine when he’d been underage because, he reasoned, he might as well drink good-quality alcohol if he was going to drink; Rupert who hadn’t said anything when Max bent the needle on his record player; Rupert who had once picked Max and his friends up from a New Year’s party in his Aston and hadn’t mentioned to his parents when Max threw up in the footwell. It was worth the valet fee, he told Max, just to have material for his wedding speech.
Rupert: collar turned up against the world, but with a sly dimpled smile just visible, as if he was in on a joke that only he understood. Except, of course, that now he had a cup of tea in his hand, not a whisky. And he’d made no attempt to disguise his sobriety, to drink tonic water and lemon or mulled wine, which was hardly alcoholic anyway, as if he didn’t mind that he was diminished, as if he had given up all hope of ever becoming that person again.
By ten o’clock, Max, Elias, and Nicole had managed to escape to the village pub, leaving Rupert in the garden and Zara to negotiate alone the treacherous space between the canapé table and the downstairs hallway, which was patrolled (incredibly slowly) by Lady Caroline, a local ancient aristocrat who had always resented Bernadette’s ownership of Bisley House and so had masochistically attended every Christmas party she had thrown since 1982.
Lady Caroline and her brutal interrogations about the career paths and marriage schedules of the Rippon children were more fearful than even Zara’s wrath at being abandoned, and so Max and Nicole endured their mother’s anger on Christmas morning in their hungover state, comforted by the knowledge that they had made it through the night before unscathed. Zara did not attend church, and their exposure to her rage was limited to breakfast, which Max ate quickly with a large milky coffee in an effort to clear his head.
Elias, who had been especially excited about attending church and had worn a blue velvet jacket for the occasion, spent the entire service flicking to the end of his service sheet, checking his phone, and trying to draw Max’s attention to the deacon, who had fallen asleep in his seat behind the altar. But Max ignored him; he was thinking of Bernadette, of the last time he had come to see her. He’d driven her to church that weekend, and she had insisted on having the windows down and playing the Requiem Mass at full volume. This was a special treat for Bernadette, who had lost her license just after her eightieth birthday when the bumper of her VW Polo had triumphed over the village car park’s freshly built Cotswold stone wall.
They stood up to sing, and Max stared down at his hymn sheet. William had been having trouble looking Max in the eye since dinner the other night, but now he passed Max his own hymn sheet, which was folded to the correct place, and took Max’s from him, turning it to the right page. The singing had always been Max’s favorite part. It took him a moment to find where they were, but when he did, he looked straight ahead and sang as loudly as he could, his enunciation crisp, years of public school and childhood churchgoing having trained his voice to a rich-toned tenor that always surprised people. As he sang, he imagined that the little church might become aglow with the faces and memories of his childhood, that he would be carried by the voices of his family in harmony, each only just distinguishable from the next. But neither Rupert nor Nicole was singing—Elias hadn’t even looked at his hymn sheet—so he could hear only his own voice and the low timbre of his father, half a note behind.
An hour or so after the six of them had finished lunch and had moved into the living room to recover, Max’s phone began to ring. A photograph of Kate, sun-drenched and smiling, leaning out the window of the car they had rented in France a few years before, lit the screen.
“Katherine! Season’s greetings,” Max answered, and then, “Is that actually your name, Katherine? God, I’ve missed you.”
Kate didn’t say anything for a moment. Max heard the sound of a car driving past, and then of Kate exhaling. Her voice was small, far-off: “Max,” she said.
“What’s up?” Max got up from the sofa and went to the dining room, whose table was still littered with the remnants of the Christmas massacre: cranberries, bread sauce, the occasional sprout smashed on the tablecloth. “Is everything OK?” he said.
“Not really,” Kate said. She sounded as though she was having difficulty speaking. “I was wondering, well, probably not, but I was wondering if you were still in Gloucestershire.”
“Yes,” said Max, “I am. What’s happened? Where are you?”
“I’m at home,” Kate said, “well, I’m not at home. I left my home in a bit of a rush. I’m stuck in the middle of Randwick and, well, I wondered if I could perhaps come and stay with you.”
There were very few taxi companies working in rural Gloucestershire on Christmas Day, but there were even fewer police cars on patrol, so Max, with the confidence of a man who had already crashed his car twice in his life, finished his drink and set off in the VW they still kept in the garage. It was only twenty minutes or so to Randwick, fifteen on a quiet day like today, and as he pulled out of the driveway and turned up his music, he felt intensely grateful to Kate for giving him such a legitimate reason to leave his house.
She was sitting on the wall outside the town hall, and he could tell even from her silhouette that something was not right. Her shoulders were hunched, and in the second before he turned his headlights off, he saw that her face was pale and her eyes wide. She had her hands in her lap, her backpack and her phone on the wall next to her. Max swung the nose of the car across three parking spaces and put the hand brake on. He walked quickly to her, and as he came closer he saw that her right hand, cradled in her left, was streaked brightly with blood.
When she saw him, she started apologizing. “I was going to ring Claire,” she said. “But her grandparents are there. I didn’t want them to see, I didn’t want anybody to see—”
“It’s OK,” said Max. He squeezed her tightly, and she buried her face in his chest. “Everything’s OK.”
She explained in the car that it was an accident, that she had opened the fridge for milk, and that the crystal platter her grandmother had given her mother on her wedding day, which had been balanced against the door of the fridge and which carried the remains of the Christmas pudding, had fallen to the floor and shattered. She had tried to clear it up, she told him, and that was when she had cut herself, and that was when the ceiling of the kitchen seemed to start falling in on her and when she felt that she had become detached from her body, that she was no longer in her body but floating several inches above it, as if the shattering dish had shattered too her hold on reality. All of this she said in a level voice and with unexpected fluency. Max did not interrupt but listened quietly as he drove. When at last she paused, he spoke.
“Is it like what happened to you a few weeks ago, in the restaurant?” he said.
“It’s exactly like that,” Kate said.
Max spoke carefully. “And do you know why?”
“I have an idea.”
For the rest of the journey, they didn’t speak again about what had happened. It was almost dark, but the sky was streaked with dark pink, and the clouds refracted the light of the dying sun. Max asked Kate if she wanted to stop somewhere along the way, and she said that she didn’t mind, so he pulled in at the top of Bisley Road and wound down the windows, which were beginning to steam up.
“I knocked out my tooth here, once,” Max said, pointing to the fields below them. “I was sledding, and I went right into a badger sett. The nose went straight in and catapulted me about ten feet into the air. It was hidden right in the side of the hill. Bastards.”
Kate did not laugh, but she smiled at least.
“What are you going to tell everyone when I turn up at your house?” she said.
“I don’t know, you had an argument? Your great-aunt threw a Christmas pudding at your head?”
Now she laughed. “OK. I can live with that.”
“They’ll love that you’re coming, anyway.”
“Is Elias there?” Kate said.
“Oh yes,” Max said ominously. “In a big way. And my uncle.”
“Rupert?” Kate said.
“Yeah. Alasdair and Lewis are in the Caribbean.”
Max had already told her Lewis would be away that Christmas, but hearing just how far he was from Bisley sent fresh relief through her body. The panic that had risen in the kitchen at the sound of the splintering glass, at the appearance of fast-flowing blood swelling from her hand, was at last beginning to dissipate. When she got to the house, she would call her mother and tell her everything was all right, that she would be back in a few days. Kate had done her best to clean up and had left a note for Alison to find when she got back from her afternoon walk: she would have to wait for the full explanation. Now that the tide of adrenaline was ebbing away, Kate felt her energy ebb with it too. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the passenger seat.