Griff had bought the house in Holford Road for £2 million in 1994, at the end of five years’ regeneration after the losses of ’89. He’d recently had it valued at £15.5 million. He wasn’t planning to sell, it held sentimental value. When he bought it, Bea was five years old, Alex twelve, and Ed was at Eton. They had done a lot of work to it before moving in, and then again when Ed’s eighteenth birthday party got out of hand. Rampaging sixth-formers had smashed chandeliers and crystal vases, and pissed on the sofas and carpets. They had ripped up the oak floorboards and thrown them onto a bonfire of garden furniture, lit with lighter fuel. The neighbours had called the police and the fire brigade. It had made the papers. Griff had been enraged by the high moral tone of the press. Teenage parties often turned into riots. Kids smashed stuff when they were drunk and stoned. Just because these kids went to schools with Latin mottos journalists indulged in end-is-nigh grandstanding. Griff took legal vengeance on the parents of the boys Ed didn’t like, and overlooked the others. The only thing that really upset him had been the large turd on his pillow.
They bought another house nearby, and lived there while they redecorated Holford Road; they put in the garaging, pool, gym, and a glass-box extension, increasing the size by almost two thousand square feet. When they moved back in, he made a profit on selling the second house, so there was no harm done, but when it came to Alex’s eighteenth birthday, having learned a lesson, they hired a club for the night. Bea spent hers in a bar in Prague, InterRailing, so there was no need to bother about hers.
Holford Road was Griff’s favourite house. The duplex on Central Park West, the chalet in Cortina, the manor house in Hampshire, and the house on St Barts were for investment, or entertaining. Holford Road grounded him. Here, he had been through scandal and public disgrace and still hung on to his money. He had reached his fortieth year of marriage in Holford Road; had four fucks serious enough to be called mistresses, and proved himself a gentleman by bringing none of them home – literally, if not figuratively. Griff saw property like any other investment, and cities were only differing markets to him, but Holford Road was more than property. It was a family house. It was English. He was sure his parents had felt the same way about their seven hundred square feet in Whitechapel as he felt about his eight thousand in Holford Road.
Griff’s driver Ashir had collected them from Heathrow in an outsized SUV that could hardly squeeze into the driveway, and started getting the luggage from the back before they had all climbed out. Dan squinted up at the house, adjusting from the darkness behind the tinted windows.
‘Fuck,’ he whispered.
‘It’s just a house,’ said Bea.
Griff, first up the steps, opened the front door. ‘Porsche sweet Porsche,’ he said, as the four of them came into the hall, then he was off down the spiral stairs. ‘I tell you, I never want to see another rented car. That was a nightmare.’
‘Kiss the Merc for me,’ said Liv.
Blessica came up from the kitchen.
‘Oh, Mrs Liv. Oh, Mrs Liv. Home now.’
Overcome with emotion, she ran forward to take the suitcases, her eyes brimming on Liv’s behalf.
‘Miss Bea!’
‘Hi, Blessica, how are you?’
‘I’m so sorry. So sorry.’
‘Thank you. This is Dan.’
Bea and Dan went up to Bea’s room. He didn’t say anything as they went up, but his silence spoke. She heard every exclamation of awe as if she could read his mind.
Her window on the second floor, overlooked the street. Dan put down his bag and went through the dressing room, to explore.
‘Mind if I take a bath?’
‘No, sure.’
Who walks into a house and has a bath? she thought. It was like he had arrived at a hotel. She heard the water rushing from the taps as she turned off the air conditioning and opened the windows. Up in the eaves the ceilings sloped. Liv had redone the room more than once in the ten years since Bea left home, and nothing of her childhood remained. The walls were walnut-panelled now. It was no more strange or painful to be in this familiar-unfamiliar room than anywhere else.
She went into the bathroom. Dan had taken off his T-shirt and was very slowly tipping bath foam into the water, and watching it as it poured. He stirred the water intently with his other hand, then put the glass stopper back in the bottle, wiped it and returned it reverently to the shelf with the others. He watched the bath running for a few more moments, stirred it again, then turned off the taps. In the quiet, he undid his jeans and pulled them off, and then his pants and socks. He kicked them out of sight, so they wouldn’t disturb his view, and lowered himself into the hot water. Consciously, gracefully, he went under, with the wordless sounds of a man in heaven. Coming back up with bubbles on his head he sluiced them from front to back, and rubbed his face, luxuriating.
‘Nice,’ he said.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Bea. She turned to go.
‘Babe.’
She stopped.
‘We should talk. About the money. Get it out the way.’
She nodded. ‘Whenever you like.’ She left the room.
They didn’t talk that day. He was waiting for her to broach the subject. She meant to, but found she couldn’t speak. It was enough managing being home, and spending as little time in the evening with her parents as she could. It wasn’t hard to avoid Liv, who was on the phone constantly, enlisting party planners and friends, and Griff retreated to his study. They all went to bed early.
‘Are you sad, babe?’ said Dan, in the face of her quietness.
It was wrong to use grief as an excuse for the distance between them. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Goodnight.’
At five o’clock in the morning she snapped awake. The dawn light made the bedroom dreamlike, with no shadows, an umber rendering of a room that she was not part of, as if she were observing it from another place. She knew why she had woken like that. Like someone had pushed her. It was Monday; seven days exactly since Alex had died. The police had come to Paligny a week ago to tell them. They must have found Alex’s body at about the time she had woken. She lay wakefully, staring, and seeing only the white road, and the car wreck, and thinking it was as if a new life had started then, in a new landscape. She turned to look at Dan. She didn’t want to risk waking him by getting up, and have to speak, if only to say, Go back to sleep, so she lay still. She felt each second of each minute of the three hours until he woke, at eight o’clock. It was a meditation on loss, marking it. Seven days to the moment. There was no possibility of company in that feeling; it wasn’t her choice to be alone with it.
She pretended to be asleep when Dan got up. She didn’t think he believed her. When he had gone downstairs she sat up, and found Capitaine Vincent’s card in her bag, and called him. He did not answer, and she left a message.
‘Capitaine Vincent, it’s Beatrice Adamson. Please call me, if you need anything.’
She said something else, about wanting to help, but that wasn’t really why she’d called him. Her thoughts weren’t clear and she knew she sounded emotional. She wished she could delete the message. He wasn’t her friend, but he felt like an ally, and she couldn’t separate herself. She would have liked to see him.
Later that day, her brother Ed and his wife Elizabeth arrived from Tokyo. They were staying in a hotel, and came by Holford Road to say hello. Elizabeth was a cool, correct person, whose expression became intent whenever she looked at her husband. Efficiently affectionate in public, their private lives were unguessable. They had left their children in Tokyo, but showed pictures on their phones. Ed’s feelings were put aside in his mother’s presence, as they had always been. He shadowed her politely. He looked very like his father; as tall, but not so broad, and wore a handmade suit. He and Bea hugged. They had never known one another well.
‘We still can’t believe it’s happened,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Are the papers still snooping around?’
‘Not that I know of,’ said Griff. ‘Arun told them to fuck off, but I don’t know if it made any difference. They might not know we’re here.’
They sat in the sitting room, drinking coffee, except Liv, who opened a bottle of champagne and walked in and out with her glass, on the phone, busy making plans. Her voice rang out from room to room.
In the afternoon, Alex’s friend Will came over for band practice. There was something of Alex about him. They’d been at school together, and both loved art and music, and had been rebels. He brought his daughter, Nell, who was four. She sat on one of the stools at the island unit and watched from a distance as he tuned his guitar. Like his father, he worked at Merrill Lynch now. The other guys in the band walked about the garden with Liv, deciding where the stage should go. Across the room, Dan was making a sandwich with Blessica, pretending he couldn’t find the fridge behind the spring-loaded cupboard doors. She was giggling. Will was sitting on the leather sofa near the garden, and Bea was holding his iPad, where he could see the tuning app.
‘Your daughter’s lovely,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ said Will. ‘You have kids? I guess you’re way younger than us.’
‘Not way. But not yet.’
‘Daddy! Play,’ said Nell, swinging her feet.
He played a Beatles song, ‘Blackbird’, halfway through, with a few false starts.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked when he stopped. ‘I’m sorry.’
Bea nodded. ‘It’s OK, I cry a lot.’
‘Look, I’m sorry about Alex. It’s just shit. It’s such a shit thing to happen.’
She appreciated his nerve in not letting it be too huge and terrible to name.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Do the police know anything yet?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Your mum is being amazing. I don’t know how she does it.’
He paused for her to agree, but she didn’t.
‘She’s given me a whole specific set list,’ said Will. ‘“Blackbird” we always play, but most Beatles songs not so much. She’s got loads of those, and loads of Oasis, but I’m pretty sure Alex hated everything after “Definitely Maybe” – pretended to, anyway. We thought we were so cool.’
‘You were,’ Bea smiled. ‘So cool. Just play what you want to play. You were his friend.’
‘She’s his mother. They were so close, weren’t they?’
When she didn’t answer he said, ‘She was always the mother all the guys – I mean,’ he corrected himself, ‘she was so good-looking, we were all totally in awe of her.’
Bea made some sound, she didn’t know, something non-committal.
‘It’s got to be tough for a girl to have a mum like that,’ he said. ‘She looked about fifteen.’
‘Daddy!’ shouted Nell from her stool. ‘I’m bored.’
Gratefully, Bea left him, and went over to her. ‘Bored?’ she said. ‘Oh no, that’s awful!’
Nell giggled. ‘Please may you spin me?’ she said.
Standing nearby, Dan watched Bea spin the stool. The little girl tipped her head back. Will played some more chords and sequences, and then sang ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, from start to finish, perfectly.
‘We didn’t know it was David Bowie’s song,’ he said, as the kitchen clapped. ‘We thought it was Kurt Cobain.’
Liv came from the terrace to the threshold of the garden door, commanding attention.
‘Oh, Will! That was gorgeous. Thank you so much. We’re going to have the tables in the garden, if the weather holds. Would you rather play on the terrace, or shall we put the stage at the end?’
‘Hey, whatever suits you, Liv,’ said Will.
She sat next to him, and touched the neck of his guitar. ‘Isn’t it lovely? Could you bear to show me a chord? Do you mind?’
‘No, sure,’ he said. ‘Here, like this.’
When the caterers and decorators came and started to lay the dust sheets to protect the floors, Will left. Griff withdrew to his study, and Bea to her room. Dan stayed downstairs, at the island unit with a cup of tea and a croissant, watching Liv and the party planner talking to the workmen in the garden. Blessica had put a slice of butter on a saucer in case he wanted it, and a glass dish of honey. Now she was wiping inside a cupboard. Dan wondered if her apparent adoration for the family was genuine, or if it was like a salaried form of Stockolm syndrome; her own family were in the Philippines. His phone buzzed with a text from Bea.
Come up?
She was summoning him. She was ready to talk. Blessica wouldn’t let him clear his plate, she took it from him, and thanked him like he was doing her a favour. He went upstairs.
‘So … shall we sort this out?’ said Bea, when he came into the bedroom. She was on the floor, with her back against the bed.
‘You want to?’ said Dan.
She nodded. He sat down beside her on the floor.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘OK?’ His forearms rested on his knees, his hands were clasped, his head bowed, waiting.
‘This thing,’ she said, then stalled.
‘What thing?’
‘The money.’
‘Yes.’ His heart beat fast, quickening at the mention of it, along with a kick of shame.
‘We have to control it,’ she said. ‘We have to be distant enough from it. It’s very important.’
‘OK.’
‘We have to decide what we want, and stick to it.’
‘Sure.’
‘The rest can be put into a trust, and not accessible.’
He felt the thrill, the danger of the taboo. Her trust, her fortune, in all this talk of death, like treasure in a fairy tale.
‘I don’t want to suddenly find I’m sharing stuff with Ed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like this house. Deciding whether to sell, what to do with it and all the other places.’
He’d never heard her voice shake. ‘What other places?’ he said.
‘The apartment in New York. Hampshire. The house on St Barts.’
He had been tantalised by these words before, but hearing her say them now made him breathless.
‘Ed can have all that stuff,’ she said, ‘and worry about what to do with it all – he likes it.’
He put his hand on her knee, to steady himself. He felt almost dizzy.
‘I just want it clean,’ she was saying. ‘So whatever comes to me is controllable. Otherwise it’s our whole lives. It’s a recipe for madness.’
‘We don’t need to be rich,’ he said. ‘You’ll never be like them.’
He kept his hand on her knee and waited.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Have you thought?’
‘Yes.’ It was time to put a number on it. He tried not to sound as though he’d planned it. ‘If we sell our flat, we won’t walk away with much.’
‘True.’
‘So, what if we get a better flat?’
‘With a mortgage,’ said Bea.
‘Why?’
‘Who doesn’t have a mortgage?’ She was scandalised.
‘Who, Bea? Very lucky people, that’s who,’ he said. ‘All right. A mortgage. But small.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Agreed.’
He tried not to rush. ‘And, like you said, I need to take some time out. I’ve only got my foundation, I was thinking I could do a degree, maybe. But then, that’s three years. I’ll be thirty-three. So maybe not. Maybe I could just take a few months to think about it.’
‘Good idea.’
‘And that will cost money.’
‘How much money?’ she said.
‘Like … twenty-five grand?’
‘Twenty-five, OK.’ She sounded relieved.
‘Or thirty,’ he said. ‘Thirty – say, thirty-five grand for a year. That’s a salary, right?’
‘It’s more than mine.’
‘Which is not much, living in London. So. Thirty-five, to live for a year. And not go back to fucking Foundations of fucking Holloway ever again.’ He gave her a flash of a smile.
‘A year, from September,’ she confirmed.
‘Yes.’
She relaxed, a little. She smiled.
‘Oh.’ His face fell. ‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘We won’t get a mortgage, will we? If I’m not working.’ He put his other hand onto her knee, for emphasis, talking straight into her face. ‘We should buy the new flat without one.’
As she felt the walls close in, he felt them dissolve – the ceiling, blown clear off, to open sky.
‘Go on,’ she said, looking into his eyes.
His pupils were dilated, his hands were warm. ‘OK, well, say … we get a flat with no mortgage.’
‘Everybody wants a home,’ she said. ‘Everybody needs to own something. Simone Weil calls ownership one of the “needs of the soul”. You’re right, I’m sorry.’
‘No mortgage, then?’
‘No.’
‘Great,’ said Dan. ‘Then we should get a house.’
‘A house?’
‘Then we don’t have to move, when we have a baby.’
He said it easily, but the silence that followed was like the hush after a bomb blast. She lost her bearings.
‘I saw you with that little girl,’ said Dan.
‘Nell?’
‘You want one. A baby. We want one.’
‘I know –’
‘So, let’s get a house.’
‘But I don’t –’
‘Just that, OK? Bea, a house, come on. Nothing massive. Three bedrooms.’ His voice sounded restricted, his fingers stroking the sensitive skin behind her knee. ‘So the house, and the money for the year. This is good, but what about now?’
‘Now?’ she asked quietly.
‘For travelling. We don’t have a tenant now.’
‘No, but we’ve got the Cushion.’
‘The Cushion.’ He laughed, dismissing it.
‘What? It’s fine. We worked it out. We’ve got nearly four grand.’
He made a noise, derisive. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Be a lot less stressful if we top it up. We could put a few grand in there – maybe, ten?’
‘We’re only away three months.’
‘We could stay in places with, like, clean bathrooms?’
‘No, we’ve decided on a house.’
‘Babe –’
‘A house!’ she said.
‘Puritan.’ He smiled, his hand moving on her thigh.
‘So is that it?’
‘We’ll need to work it out properly,’ he said.
‘But that’s enough?’
‘Sure.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s not extreme,’ he said.
‘No. You’re right. It’s a house.’
‘And a baby.’
‘A baby,’ she said.
He kissed her again. She loved the taste of him. She had missed it. He was kissing her. He wanted her. His need was urgent. It caught like touchpaper. His fingers pressed into her thighs. A house. And money. A three-bedroom house and a year to breathe. Thirty-five thousand pounds, in a house without a mortgage. He fucked her on the floor while caterers and electricians passed through the rooms below, and afterwards lay sweating by her side.
‘Christ, it’s hot up here,’ he said.
He got up and put on the air conditioning. He flicked the temperature arrow down; twenty-one, twenty, nineteen.
‘D’you mind?’ he said. ‘It’s all over the house, one more room isn’t going to make any difference.’
Linen beanbags, mismatched chairs; lavender, cornflowers, roses. Decorations filled the house. Tea lights in silver glass hanging from the trees. Fattoush, baba ganoush, labneh, samboussek, batata harra. Food for North Africa because Alex had loved it. Broderie anglaise cloths for France, because he had loved it there, too. A stage for his friends’ band, draped with white, and a white backdrop. White amps and speakers.
‘I love it,’ said Liv. ‘It looks like that John Lennon video. It’s gorgeous. No black, anywhere. I don’t want black.’
And that night, Bea dreamed she was holding Dan’s hand, leading him. She saw an enormous snake ahead of them. She looked at it and thought how funny it was to dream something so obvious and Freudian as a snake. Commenting on it she felt safe, but the snake was in front of them on the road. It was standing upright, as tall as a tree, with many body parts, but it was still a snake. It’s like a tree but not like a tree, she thought. She looked down, for Dan’s hand, but it wasn’t in hers. Her hand was severed at the wrist. The paralysis of a nightmare crept over her body. She tried to search for Dan, holding the stump of her wrist in front of her. The snake was huge and tall above her. There was bark on its body, which clicked and creaked as it swayed. Dan was looking down at her from the branches now, saying, Stop, and she was hanging from the tree, choking. She felt the weight of her body, swinging.
‘Stop it!’ said Dan.
She opened her eyes. The snake was towering behind him. He couldn’t see it. She woke up. His hand was clamped over her mouth like a kidnapping. She struggled, crushed under his body. He took his hand away.
‘You were yelling,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’