It was the first time Kate had been to Bisley House, but she hardly registered the significance of this as Max turned into the drive. Max, aware that Kate was in no state to see anybody at that moment, led her up the back stairway to one of the spare rooms on the top floor without turning on the lights. It was cold; the entire house was cold except for the living room, in which the log fire burned, and the kitchen with its wood-burning stove, but the duvet, which had a pale green cover of scratchy cotton and a frilled edge, was thick and heavy, and Max found in the airing cupboard a mohair blanket and arranged it inexpertly on the bed. He asked her if she needed anything, and Kate opened her rucksack, which she had packed at the peak of her panic.
“I brought a sudoku book and three packets of beta-blockers,” she said. “The essentials. I could use a T-shirt, though.”
Max brought her some pajamas, thick striped cotton, and a spare toothbrush he had found in one of the upstairs bathrooms. He also brought an enormous bandage that he started to wrap tenderly around the cut on Kate’s hand before giving up and getting a sticking plaster for her instead. He stood by the door, his hand on the handle.
“Please don’t go,” said Kate. She changed out of her jeans and got into bed. Max sat in the chair by the window wrapped in a blanket. “Tell me about you. Just talk to me about anything.”
Max settled back. “We can talk about me. My whole family’s gone mad.”
“Weren’t they already?”
“Yes, but more,” Max said. “My dad won’t make eye contact with me because he thinks I’m going to lead my uncle back into alcoholism, and my uncle is consistently disappointed that he continues to exist. My mother thinks we’re all emotionally repressed and need to turn our pain into art. She probably wants to put us all in her next film, we’re all fucked enough. Only Nicole seems to be completely unmoved by it all. God, I envy her.”
“Nicole has anxiety, doesn’t she?” Kate said. “Isn’t it surprising that she’s so level?”
“She used to,” Max said. “When she was a teenager. I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? She went through all the extremes as a teenager so all of this”—he waved his hand—“all of this bullshit is small-fry.”
On another day she might have asked him why it was that Max believed Nicole no longer suffered anxiety, but at that moment she did not have the strength to open herself up to his vulnerabilities, as well as her own.
“It must be confusing, being here,” she said. “There are so many memories.”
“Exactly. And not all of them mean what I thought they meant.”
“In what way?”
“People aren’t always who you thought they were.”
For a moment, Kate thought Max might be about to let something slip about Lewis, but in fact he was referring to Bernadette, and the will, and as his voice softened Kate slowly tuned out to what he was saying. In her single bed, with him sitting there like a faithful guard dog in the chair beneath the window, under the warm light of the standing lamp, Kate felt heavy, tired. This had once been a servant’s quarters, Max had told her, so it was a walk-through room, with a door on one side and the stairs they’d come up on the other. It made her feel calm to know that if one exit was blocked, there would be another way out, and she fell asleep quickly, her body warming beneath the thick duvet, and Max still there, keeping her company.
She woke in a sweat. It was dark, and Max was gone. She threw off the duvet and reached for her phone; it was one in the morning, she had slept for only a few hours, during which her body seemed to have marinated in its own heat. Her mouth was filled with thick saliva and when she moved she felt a dull pain in her upper abdomen. Spurred by that peculiar vitality available to a person in the moments immediately prior to being sick, she hurled herself from her bed and down the back stairs, through the door of the nearest bathroom on the floor below. She closed the door and crouched over the porcelain bowl of the toilet, where she began to vomit. There was little she hated more than being sick, brought to her knees by her body’s violent rejection of what she had chosen to put into it, choking up bile and pieces of undigested food that had resisted absorption and somehow retained their form.
Instead of climbing back up the stairs knowing that she would only have to run back down again with the next wave of nausea, for a while Kate stayed there in the bathroom, lying on the cold floor with her head resting on the mat beneath the sink, drifting in and out of consciousness, comforted by the certainty that things really could get no worse than this.
By the time morning came, she had managed to sleep for only a few hours in bed and one in the bathroom. When Max came into her room and threw open the curtains, Kate groaned and told him that she would infect him if he didn’t leave straightaway.
“You do look terrible,” he said, sliding hurriedly out of the room. He went to get her a consolatory glass of water, then left her alone for the morning. Feverishly, she dozed until eleven, thinking each time she woke that she should get up, but she was always pulled back into a heavy half sleep in which she dreamt that Max was driving her too quickly through the narrow lanes that surrounded the house, throwing her belongings out the back of the car which, when she turned round to look, she saw was completely open.
At midday she got out of bed and went barefoot across the corridor and down the soft carpeted stairs to the floor below. This wasn’t the same way Max had taken her the night before: at the end of the corridor was a large mirror next to a staircase that would lead her to the ground floor. At the top of the staircase she stopped, catching the reflection of the doorway to the room opposite, whose lights were out and curtains were closed. In the mirror Kate could see the edge of a bookcase and the lower half of a man’s body lying prone on the bed; on top of the covers, shoes still on. For a moment she stood there, trying to work out whether whoever was in the room was awake, but there were no noises. She stepped a little closer, and from the room came a low, quick cough: the legs moved. Kate stepped back from the door and went down the stairs as quietly as she could.
There was the sound of the radio playing from the kitchen.
“What have we done to you?” said Zara when Kate appeared in the doorway. “Max said you were sick. God, I hope it’s not from William. He always seems to be bringing home diseases.”
“It wasn’t you,” Kate said. “I think it was my mum’s Christmas dinner.”
“William and Nicole are out walking the dog,” Zara said. “And Max and Elias have gone for a drive. But they won’t be long.”
“Is Rupert here?” Kate asked. She thought that the room she had seen must have belonged to Max’s uncle, but she hadn’t been sure.
“Somewhere,” said Zara, glancing toward the door. “Upstairs.”
Kate sat down at the big wooden table in the kitchen, her hands on her stomach. Zara sat down with her and brought her a glass of water. As Kate reached for it, she saw Zara looking at the plaster on her hand.
“You know, when I was first depressed, I used to have all sorts of stomach aches and pains. I used to get sick all the time.” She looked at Kate but did not wait for a response and spoke in a matter-of-fact tone that made it easy for Kate to pretend she had not recognized the gravity of what Zara was saying, though, of course, she knew that Zara was telling her that she knew she was carrying something and that her body was rebelling against the strain it was being placed under. “Sadness can manifest itself in all sorts of unexpected ways,” Zara went on. “And it doesn’t take much. It doesn’t have to be a momentous thing for sadness to transform into something far heavier than simple sadness. It can take one little moment, one small catastrophe that pushes you and then you just tip out beyond the boundaries of normal human emotion. And once you’re out there, out of range, it’s very difficult to find your way back. People so often forget that emotion is physical; English people in particular.”
Kate did not know if Zara was trying to allude to something specific when she talked of this one catastrophic moment, but she did not interrupt.
“Think of Bernadette.” Zara gestured at the ceiling, indicating her mother-in-law’s presence in the house. “You didn’t meet her, did you? But she was always sick, always thin, and she never understood that her physical illness was the manifestation of her unhappiness. She never completely loved her husband, I don’t think, and she felt guilty because part of her was relieved when he died. So instead of mourning, her body became a mortuary, and she grew grayer and stonier until she was drained of color and filled instead with sickness. William knows nothing of this, of course. He thinks I disliked his mother whereas really I pitied her because she became a stranger to herself.”
“Like in Margot,” Kate said.
“Margot?”
“Your film. With the hypochondriac who doesn’t understand that she’s miserable.”
Zara nodded, registering only slightly her surprise at Kate’s familiarity with the film.
“Bernadette hated that film,” she said. “Now you know why.”
The door to the kitchen opened, and Kate turned: it was Rupert, she recognized him from photographs, though in reality he was smaller than Kate had imagined him to be. His green cashmere jumper was too big for him, and the belt on his jeans looked as though it was on the smallest notch. Kate recognized the shoes from the bedroom she had passed upstairs.
“We were just talking about your mother,” Zara said, “and her hypochondria.”
“Ah, yes,” Rupert said. He was rooting through his jacket, which was hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “The only diagnosis she would ever reject.”
“You’ve met Kate, haven’t you?”
“I feel like I have,” Rupert said, still patting his jacket pockets. He found what he was looking for: his cigarettes, and then bent down to kiss Kate on both cheeks. “Max has told me such a lot about you. What a pleasure.”
“You too,” said Kate.
“Kate has been a good friend to Max,” Zara said, smiling at her across the table. “She’s kept him grounded these last couple of years. I think we rather owe her.”
Rupert went out for a cigarette, and Zara made Kate a dry piece of brown toast and poured her half a glass of orange juice diluted with water. The smell of toast made her feel a little sick, still, and she was not quite hungry just yet, but she drank the juice slowly, observing the feel of the cold liquid in her stomach, the sugar in her blood. After eating, Zara told Kate to call her mother. Kate had texted already, but it would be better to phone, Zara said, so that Alison could hear her voice. Afterward, she went into the living room where she lay down in a corner of the sofa. She was awake when Max returned, but she didn’t open her eyes when he came into the living room. Instead she listened to him scrunching up pieces of newspaper and quietly moving logs onto the fire, and felt the weight of him sitting down at the other end of the sofa. Kate heard the door and footsteps, as people came into the room, bringing in the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen, and all the while she lay there still, listening to the sounds of the catching fire and Titus’s heavy breathing.