By now there was little left in Bisley House of either sentimental or financial value, but both William and Alasdair knew that this would be their last chance to retrieve anything they wanted to keep. William started in the attic, shining his torch into all the corners, but the light revealed only loft insulation, in places chewed by what were most likely rodents, and the odd loose nail. He worked his way through the top-floor bedrooms, checking cupboards and drawers, to his parents’ old room, in which the only remaining furniture was the bed frame with its bare mattress, lumpy and yellowing. Here William stopped; he knew he was only making himself feel more raw. He went down the back stairs to get a signal on his phone so he could call Zara.
Alasdair, meanwhile, was finishing up on the lower floors, whose communal spaces were a little more cluttered than the empty rooms William had been roaming above. Lewis, who was driving back with his father that evening, found him in the dining room, standing on top of the mahogany cabinet. Alasdair was lifting the stag head from the wall, and as it came away from its mounting he showered himself with loose plasterboard, sending himself into an asthmatic frenzy.
“You can keep this at the flat until Phoebe and I find our new place,” Alasdair told his son. Lewis, who didn’t want to give the impression that there was anything in the house to which he was not deeply emotionally attached, didn’t ask his father how he expected him to persuade a girl to sleep with him while there was a stuffed stag watching over them, but instead took the head and carried it to the hallway.
It was not a pleasant job. He’d stayed, though, because he wanted Alasdair to know that he was taking something from him in selling the house. Not just the memories, but a future Lewis had imagined for himself. If he’d had the opportunity, he would have brought girlfriends here, friends every other weekend. It would be a good place for a wedding or a stag weekend. Rudolph caught his eye; Lewis did his best to ignore the irony. All the medics he knew went off to Eastern Europe, to strip clubs, but he could have done something really different: a big group of guys down here for the hunting season, shooting partridge in the morning, having them plucked and cooked by dinner. Lewis turned Rudolph to face the wall.
“Did you have many parties here?” Lewis said to his uncle as they were boxing up what was left of William’s room. “Like friends, girls, you know.”
William looked at him with an unreadable expression. “Sometimes,” he said. “Mostly when my parents were out of the country.”
“Did they mind?”
“Christ, no, well, they didn’t know. Apart from the time all the silverware ended up in the upstairs bathtub. Alasdair tried to pretend he was trying to polish it, but…”
“I think this is the nicest room,” Lewis said, “not the master bedroom. I’d sleep in here if this were my house. Which I guess it won’t ever be, now.”
“Rupert’s was always my favorite,” said William.
Rupert’s room was the smallest, and its ceiling was slanted, making it feel like a little girl’s bedroom. To Lewis it had always seemed the least grand.
“I imagine it’s hard for him,” Lewis said in a serious tone, “seeing the house being sold, after everything that’s happened.”
“Oh, he stopped coming down here years before your grandmother died,” William said, flicking the light off as he shuffled the last box out of the door with his foot. He kicked it a little harder than he intended, and something inside made a clanging noise. “Unless he absolutely had to. Couldn’t stand the woman, God rest her soul.”
This place to Lewis was like a favorite wax jacket; not only did it signify the wealth and quality of its owner, but its character was derived from the tears and the scuffs that were yearly repaired by an expertly discreet seamstress so that only she and its owner ever knew of their existence. But now that they were challenging its integrity the house was beginning to fail. Once the sale was finalized the builders would be here, sending dust from its lining, beams creaking in the rooftops, panes of glass splintering under the vibrations of the drills that disturbed the house to its foundations.
It was as Lewis was descending the main staircase that the driveway below lit up and, looking out of the little window on the halfway landing, he saw Kate Quaile standing there, another girl at her side. Kate’s white face was illuminated in the bright floodlight as she stared straight up at the house. She did not look away.
If the light hadn’t come on, he wouldn’t have seen her. But there she was, standing in her fake-fur coat only meters below. Lewis stepped quickly to the side of the window frame. He did not want her to see him. Kate, to Lewis, was dangerous. He did not think much about their night together, which had lost its sepia romance more than a year ago. Lewis knew that he had been wrong about her; he had seen it in her when he’d glimpsed her at the festival in Finsbury Park, fear and suspicion that had hardened into something more like anger. He should have known better than to have played this game with somebody so close to the family. Before and since, it had always been relative strangers.
The problem, Lewis knew, was that these women were ashamed of being what they were, and though he was adept at disinhibiting them, there were women everywhere—women like Zara, women, he feared, like Kate—who wanted to turn other women into victims and use them as pawns in this war they were waging. Lewis peered back around the window frame. By now, Kate and the other girl had gone. He hoped that she had only come to show off the house to her friend, that her being here had nothing to do with him, and he hoped that she thought of him only ever fleetingly, if at all.
The three men went back to London that evening, and on the way Lewis texted a few of his old university friends, whom he hadn’t seen for a while. He needed distracting, didn’t want to go back to the flat on his own. He wished he were driving rather than sitting in the back like a child, while Alasdair and William sat in silence, listening to the low tones of the radio. His phone vibrated in his pocket, three times in fairly quick succession. All three of the friends were away, unable to meet. He wondered whether they were together but dismissed the thought: they would have invited him. They’d talked about going skiing last year, but the plan hadn’t come together.
He needed to do some exercise. It would make him feel better, releasing some of the pent-up, anxious energy coursing through his body. His chest felt tight, as if he’d been doing push-ups. Probably, it was from lifting those boxes. Nicole was always telling him to try yoga—but the thought of Nicole brought into his mind the image of Max, and then of Kate staring up at him, and he felt a little sick.
Lewis didn’t normally drink alone, but when Alasdair left him at the flat with the stag head and a box of belongings he had collected from the house, he opened a beer and sat on the sofa with the television on, scrolling through his phone. One of the friends he had texted had uploaded a picture of himself wearing salopettes and skiing goggles. Lewis opened another beer and tortured himself a little by looking at photos of the holiday, before he found himself looking at Nicole’s Instagram, then Max’s. He’d been sitting here for nearly half an hour, now, and was three bottles down. When, scrolling down Max’s page he found pictures of Kate, he slowed down, holding the phone close to his face, trying to erase from his mind the vision of her looking up at him, replace it instead with these stolen images.
While with one hand he kept on flicking through the photos, pausing and zooming, with his other he undid his jeans and slipped it into his boxers, feeling the subtle ridges of his tattoo. He thought about fucking her, putting his hand around his dick, closing his eyes and then opening them to look at those pictures every time his thoughts were interrupted. He was too drunk and too numb to stay hard, though, and eventually he fell asleep with his jeans still on and unbelted and his right hand down the front of his boxers.