William was waiting for Max at the station with the radio on, and when Max got into the car he turned the volume down only a notch. He was listening to the final five minutes of a panel show repeat that Max recognized from Saturday lunchtimes at Latimer Crescent, when the four of them would sit around the kitchen table and William would laugh too loudly. He wasn’t laughing now, just humming quietly to himself, but until the show ended it absorbed all of his attention.
Max turned off the radio as the credits began to play. “Who’s already here?” he said.
“Your mother,” said William, glancing in his wing mirror, “and Rupert. He’s in good form, actually.” Inevitably, there was a note of surprise in his voice.
“And how’s the house?”
“You’ll see. It’s all rather sad, Max. I’m a little cut up about it, to tell you the truth.”
“You grew up there.”
“Quite. And, well. I just can’t help but feel things are changing for us, Max.”
“What do you mean?”
William shook his head. “Straight after somebody dies, you want to keep everybody together. Overlook differences. Forgive. One feels very resistant to change. But, inevitably, time passes, nearly four years now, and we have to let go of some of the things we’ve been holding on to. Objects, beliefs. Even hope. That’s what your mother is always telling me, anyway.”
“Is this about the bakery?” Max said. “Your sourdough starter?”
“Oh, Christ. No. Little fucker went moldy,” said William. “The wrong kind of mold, I mean, pink and scaly. Started to develop some kind of counter-culture, evidently. I had to throw it away.”
“Did you see Lady Caroline at the station?” Max said. “She had her driver waiting right by the platform. She cornered me on the train, trying to work out whether I was going out with Kate or her friend.”
“Oh, how is Kate?” said William.
Max shrugged. “Yeah, OK. New flat seems nice.”
William fell silent. “Good,” he said after a while.
The “For Sale” sign outside the house came into view at the top of the lane, before even the high limestone walls were visible. When Max had last been to Bisley House its chaos had at least been contained, boxed behind barely closed doors, hidden beneath dust sheets, none of it visible from the outside; but now there stood a dumpster on the front drive that was beginning to overflow with broken pieces of furniture, with those same boxes that had themselves split open. It was dark already, and so were the upper floors of the house: they were keeping to the lower floors, William explained, which had not yet been cleared.
William had insisted on buying a Christmas tree, but the decorations had been packed away somewhere obscure, so it was decorated only in the oversized outdoor lights he had brought in from the front—the same lights Zara had watched him wind around the driveway’s leafless trees the year before. The books had gone from the shelves, and the large spice rack that had hung next to the stove was bare. To Max, Bisley House looked far more like an extravagant holiday house than a home. Before he unpacked he circuited the upper floors and saw that the master bedroom and most of the spare rooms, including the one Kate had slept in last year, had been stripped of their mattresses, their furniture covered in white sheets.
Max was restless. Last year’s Christmas, when Elias, who was spending this year’s holiday in Miami, had managed to either insult or irritate almost everybody, when Rupert had been mostly bed-bound, and Kate had turned up with a bloodied hand before vomiting everywhere, had by no means been perfect. But he quite liked a crisis, and he had enjoyed the feeling of being holed up in Bisley House, shut away with the people he was closest to, keeping the outside world from coming in. This year the house felt too quiet, too empty. So far his mother had spent most of her time trying to work through the last of her notes before they went on to editing, and William, who looked like he had aged about ten years somewhere between London and Gloucestershire, shuffled around the upper floors wearing his mother’s pink woolen hat and gloves and moving boxes from one end of the house to the other.
William had refused halfhearted offers of help from both Max and Rupert, and, on the afternoon Max arrived, the two of them had sat at the kitchen table. Max sat opposite his uncle, who was calmly reading a magazine. Max was waiting for Rupert to say something, but he just kept on turning the pages, sipping the tea he had made for himself, and as Max watched him he felt a sudden urge to rip the glossy pages from his hands. Instead, he got up and found a beer in the fridge.
“Do you mind?” he said a little more aggressively than he’d meant to. The question was only nominal: he had already taken the top off.
“Christ, no,” Rupert said, looking up. “It’s Christmas. How else is one expected to survive?”
“Cheers,” Max said, pushing his beer toward Rupert’s mug, and clinking it. He paused, and took a sip, studying Rupert’s face as he did so. With the first sip of beer, he felt his momentary aggravation begin to ebb. Rupert’s graying hair was shorter and neater nowadays, his skin less pink: a symptom of sobriety. “Will you never drink again?” Max said.
“I doubt it,” Rupert said. He popped gum from its packet and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Perhaps a sip, every now and again. Half a glass at a wedding. But I could gladly live the rest of my life without being drunk. You know, properly pissed.”
“Really? Even if you feel one hundred percent better? Like, even if someone told you you’d never be, you know, depressed ever again?”
Rupert laughed.
“What?” Max felt defensive and a little bemused. “You’ve been doing so well recently. You seem so much…”
Rupert shook his head. “I’m not laughing; it’s not funny. Don’t worry about me, Max. I’m not missing anything. It might look like it from the outside, but in fact I see everything more clearly.”
Max wanted to ask his uncle what exactly it was that he could see clearly, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer. Instead he tried his best to meet him halfway. “I guess the alcohol does”—he waved his bottle—“blur the edges a little.”
“It does. And sometimes you need that, until there comes a point when you can’t see anything at all.”
“Isn’t that exactly the point?” Max said, taking a swig.
On Christmas Eve, Alasdair, Nicole, and Lewis arrived from London. Alasdair had driven, and Lewis and Nicole turned up in the front hall dead-eyed and yawning, presents spilling from their bags onto the tiled floor. Max wondered whether it was possible that they’d been forced to listen to the cricket coverage for the entire journey, since they both looked very relieved that it was over. Even Lewis seemed happy to see Max, and for a moment Max thought that Lewis was going to hug him, but he was so surprised by the possibility that he kept his arms by his sides, and Lewis instead slapped him on the back. Because Alasdair had been absent for two of the last three Christmases, and Rupert the other, this was the first time the whole Rippon family had been together for the holidays since Bernadette had died, and William was insisting that they do everything as she would have wanted. Tomorrow, there would be no presents until after the queen’s speech, and no champagne until the afternoon. Max smuggled a bottle up from the cellar on Christmas Eve, though, and he snuck into Nicole’s room on Christmas morning before church, wrapped in an old quilt that was making his eyes itch and his nose run, and popped the cork right next to her head.
“Morning!” he said, as she flailed at him in protest, her head still buried in the pillow. Max had been hoping, once Nicole arrived, that things would start to get a bit more lively. It was a promising start: they had time for a glass each before church, and during the service Max stood at the end of the aisle and sang as loudly as he always did. He took communion because it was Christmas, then watched as the priest and his two deacons in their white-and-gold robes went to Lady Caroline, who was sitting on a reserved cushioned chair in the front row, and knelt before her while she took communion. When they got back, though, Nicole refused to have any more to drink until lunchtime, so Max had to disappear upstairs alone every thirty minutes while the turkey was cooking, the alcohol filtering straight through the lining of his empty stomach into his blood. By lunchtime, he was giddy, his mind working through the possibilities of how he might best sustain this excitable mood. Too much food would be a mistake, but he’d have to suppress the inevitable headache somehow.
“When are you going to sign it over?” Nicole said as they were eating lunch. Her question was addressed to both her father and Alasdair, but it was Alasdair who put down his glass, suppressing a belch with authority.
“In the new year, I should think. My lawyer is still talking to Lady Caroline’s lawyer. Or lawyers. She has a whole fleet. She wants to renovate it and actually move in, which seems like madness to me. If I were her, I’d probably tear it down.”
“So we have one more Christmas to wreck the house before we sell it, then?” said Max loudly.
“Absolutely not,” said Alasdair. “She’s already done her best to decimate our asking price. The place needs to be spotless.”
“Not even a little party? Granny would approve.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “You can have a party, but only if you stay on after Christmas to finish clearing the attic.”
“Oh, I’d love to, but I have to go on holiday,” Max said.
“I’m staying,” said Lewis, glancing at his father.
Alasdair grunted. “Lewis doesn’t have anywhere better to be,” he said.
Faintly, Max registered that Lewis was watching him as he ate. Lewis had worked efficiently and methodically through his meal, both elbows on the table so as to guard his plate. Only when he was finished did he sit back in his chair, both hands resting on the table and making little folds in his paper crown, his wristwatch gleaming in the light of the chandelier above them.
“Might as well make the most of it,” Lewis said now, in response to his father. “While we still can.”
“Well, if you feel that strongly about it, I’d be quite happy to leave you to finish here on your own,” said Alasdair, “save me the trouble of wasting another week’s holiday in the middle of nowhere.”
“No, no, I’ll stay too,” William said. Zara looked at him sharply, but William didn’t look back.
Max, oblivious to these loaded looks, took the opportunity to slip out of his seat, mumbling that he was going to the toilet, but turning left instead of right at the door to the dining room and up the back staircase to his bedroom. There, he rifled through his things and found the little plastic bag he was looking for. He hadn’t brought it here on purpose, and it did seem like a bit of a waste, but it was Christmas, after all, and it was raining. He deserved a treat. Max tapped out a little of the white powder onto the wooden chair at the end of his bed and sat cross-legged on the floor rolling a ten between his thumbs and forefingers. He wished Elias were here. Or Kate, she’d never really been into this, but she would at least have been in on it. He needed this, just a hit of energy. That was what Rupert didn’t understand. It was real life that was blurred around the edges, real life that contained ambiguity. Intoxication: this was real, tangible clarity. He leaned over, snorted the line, sat back as his thoughts came into focus, senses came alight. In this state, there was nothing but the perfect geometry of his surroundings. Crisp corners, clear edges. He put the bag in his back pocket, and went back downstairs.
Max was relieved to leave Bisley House once Christmas was over. On Boxing Day, he’d hardly left the sofa, but the next day he walked the lower floors one last time and then went down to the walled garden, which in the summer was heavy with the scent of roses and freshly turned earth. He’d always hidden here when they’d played hide-and-seek, because Nicole had hay fever and would be doubled over with a sneezing fit as soon as she came close to finding him. The far wall was covered by a creeper with white blossoms, which Max supposed was Lady Caroline’s winter jasmine. Nostalgia threatened, but he shook it away. Lady Caroline would be here, soon, pushing her own grandsons to take unsuspecting local girls to view the jasmine. Quite how this plant was supposed to inspire romance, Max was not quite sure. Things must have been very different in Lady Caroline’s day. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine her downloading Embers.
He’d texted Kate to ask her if she wanted a lift back to London, but she told him she was staying a few days longer, which was a surprise to Max, as he knew she usually tried to shorten her stays in Randwick as much as possible. Zara was driving him and Nicole, while William stayed at the house to help clear it out. Rupert was already back at his flat, having taken the first train running on Boxing Day. Nicole sat in the front, inflicting her music on Zara and Max, while Max speculated about Alasdair and Lewis’s relationship.
“I think they both have abandonment issues,” Max diagnosed, slumped in the back seat of the car, “since Aunt Sylvie left.”
“Wouldn’t that mean they’re both really clingy?” Nicole said. “I’ve always thought that Alasdair didn’t like Lewis that much. God, that sounds awful.”
“Maybe abandonment issues that manifest as a deep-seated distrust of women?” said Max, astounded by his own insightfulness.
“Sylvie was a bitch, though,” Nicole said. “Do you remember when she threw my dinner in the bin because I complained about the olives?”
“That was you,” said Max. “You threw the dinner she’d cooked for you in the bin after you complained about it.”
“That does sound a bit like me,” said Nicole. “I hate olives.”
“Seriously, though, I think they’re both a bit fucked. Maybe you should introduce them to some of your therapists, Mum.”
Zara raised an eyebrow at Max in the mirror. “Don’t drag me into this,” she said, mockingly defensive. “I’m not even related to them. This is your family, your flesh and blood. Take it up with your father.”
“You married into it, though,” said Max, who was in the mood for a debate. “That makes you even more responsible if they’re all fuckups. You chose to be part of it. The rest of us didn’t.”
“Responsible?” said Nicole. “How?”