Alice waited until she was feeling as strong and as calm as she could before she went up.
When she opened the bathroom door, Lewis was sitting on the edge of the bath. He was trying to rinse his arm off under the tap and holding the bandage at the same time. He looked clumsy doing it and she saw the child in him again. She didn’t know if she’d ever see him just at one age. She wondered if that was what being a mother felt like. She didn’t think she would ever know.
He stopped when she opened the door, not moving. She turned off the tap and sat next to him on the edge of the bath.
‘I know you didn’t hurt that silly girl,’ she said.
He shook his head and bowed it down so that she couldn’t see him. She looked at the pale blood on the tiles, and the blood on his arm that was dark and smeared, but dry.
‘Why don’t we go downstairs and clean you up?’ she said.
Downstairs she put him in the chair by the doors to the garden, and she fetched a bowl with water and disinfectant and cotton wool and took the bandage from him. He watched her and he felt quiet and more himself, but he didn’t have any hope.
She knelt in front of him and wiped away the dried blood and was very careful around the straight lines of the cuts and the places they crossed each other.
‘This is a bad one, isn’t it?’ she said.
He held out his arm and kept it still and his fingers trembled while she did it. When she had finished she wrapped the clean bandage around the arm, very neatly, and tied it, cutting the end in two pieces to do it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and looked at the top of her head as she knelt.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘What you call just like old times.’
She looked up, and she had warmth in her look, and then her face seemed to break up, and she bent her head to hide from him.
‘What am I going to do?’ she asked.
‘I’m not exactly the person to ask.’
She didn’t look up again, so he touched the side of her cheek so that she would.
‘I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror,’ she said.
They were the same then. She rested her face against his hand and her doing it made him feel strong. He bent down to her and lifted her face and kissed her cheek and she closed her eyes and put her hand on the back of his head to hold him and to keep the feeling of not being alone and being forgiven for a little while longer.
To be so lost, and then to find comfort, was strange for Lewis and he didn’t trust it, but it did feel good, that they should be kind to each other, and that being kind to each other – even with what they had done – was a precious thing.
Kit came through the trees, and the trees hid part of her view of the back of the house, and she could see them through the open door, but it wasn’t until she came onto the lawn that she saw more clearly. It was the feeling of intruding upon something that struck her before anything else, before she consciously thought how wrong it was that they should be holding each other like that. Alice was kneeling at his feet and it was that, and her hand on the back of his head and their faces touching, that was all wrong. She walked slowly towards them, without knowing she was still walking, and saw that they didn’t move and that Alice’s eyes were closed. She couldn’t see Lewis’s face because it was behind, but his hand stroked Alice’s hair and Kit thought: it’s all right, he’s comforting her – but then they turned and saw her and she knew it wasn’t all right. They were ashamed and shocked to be seen, and couldn’t hide it. Lewis looked straight at her and Kit stopped noticing Alice, because all she could see was Lewis and try to understand that he was involved somehow with her.
He got up and started to come towards her and she didn’t know what they could say, and didn’t want to say what was in her mind, so she turned away, turned and started to run away. He came after her and grabbed her wrist. He grabbed her wrist very hard and it hurt her and she was frightened. She had never been frightened of him before; it was because of what she had seen.
She pulled her arm away from him and he saw her fear and stopped coming after her. She was almost at the trees and she could have got away, but she stopped – because she had to know.
‘You and her? Is it true?’
‘Yes.’
There was a short silence and then she was very distressed and crying out with it, ‘But she’s your stepmother! It’s like she’s your – she’s your—’
‘No! She isn’t!’
He shouted it because hearing that was intolerable, but she was frightened of him again and he started to talk just to say anything.
‘Kit, it was once. We didn’t mean to – I – she was—’
She turned away from him, and held on to herself with her arms.
He waited and was helpless, watching her back, as she fought with disgust, and when she turned back to him she was calm, and quiet, and closed up.
‘I came to tell you not to worry,’ she smiled a small, bitter smile, ‘because they won’t do anything to you about Tamsin. Daddy hit her. I made you come up to London with me because I knew they were going to blame you for her being hurt, and I wanted it to be impossible. Because you’d have been with me. But it went wrong.’
She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, and seemed tired and muddled.
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. Usually he only does it to me. I’ve never told. I wanted you to know about it. I don’t know why.’
‘He hits you?’
‘They’ll just want to forget about it.’
‘When. When does he?’
‘Oh, almost all the time.’
She undid the middle buttons at the front of her cotton dress and showed him the fresh marks of the stick on her skin.
Lewis was in stillness, with the world exploding around him, and looking at this beautiful girl who he had thought was untouched, and he was blinded by the change in everything.
He held out his hand in wonder, in disbelief. He held out his hand to her because she was so hurt. She shook her head.
‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ she said.
She walked away from him and he stood where he was. Kit was gone into the woods and he was alone.
Lewis stood between the wood and the house, and he could go up to the wood or he could go back down towards the house. He heard a car door slam, and he saw his father come around the side of the house. Lewis’s reaction was a child’s reaction; he thought his father would be able to help, and he ran down the garden towards him.
‘Dad!’
Gilbert had come from talking to Dicky. He had been apologising, and Dicky had made it very difficult for him and, leaving, he had seen Tamsin’s face as she closed the drawing room door. The sight of her, with the vicious bruise around her eye and on her cheek, was still in his mind and when he saw her little sister getting away from his son through the trees, he was very frightened and very angry. They met on the terrace.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Get inside!’
‘I have to talk to you.’
‘Inside! You’re not to leave this house.’
The habit of assuming his father’s superiority was very deep in Lewis and he followed Gilbert into the drawing room. Alice wasn’t there. Gilbert went over to the drinks cabinet and started to cram the bottles from the top into the cupboard below, fumbling with them. Lewis watched him and kept thinking, like a child does, that if he could explain, then everything would be all right, and his father would do something and there would be fairness. He could see his father didn’t understand, and he needed to explain to him.
‘You’ve been at the Carmichaels’?’
‘Yes, I’ve been there and I have never been so humiliated. I was humiliated – for you, for what you’ve done! I had to let Dicky Carmichael rub my nose in your filth!’
‘Tamsin? I didn’t hurt her. She—’
He didn’t want to get sidetracked with this. He was thinking of Kit, and he needed to help her, and he didn’t know how to do it. He was frightened he’d lose himself again and he needed to explain, and not lose the hold he had on what was important. He felt the bandage on his cuts, firm and holding, and he shook his head – shut his eyes just quickly – so that he could think. Gilbert was closing the doors of the cabinet and trying to lock them.
‘So bloody lying and deceit are the latest of your sins?’
Gilbert straightened up from the locked drinks cabinet, and Lewis grasped the significance of his trying to hide away the bottles like that; that he was hiding the liquor from him, but Lewis wasn’t thinking about drink, he wasn’t thinking about anything but Kit, and he was trying to be heard and he wasn’t being heard, and Gilbert was facing him and shouting at him and trying to keep him down, like always, trying to keep him down and keep him small and keep him from doing anything.
‘We’ve had violence,’ he was saying, and his voice was shaking with his absurd anger, ‘we’ve had drunkenness, we’ve had a sick form of self-abuse that most people would find hard to imagine, and now you’re—’
‘I didn’t hurt her!’
Lewis tried to keep hold of the thread in his mind and not let his anger break it, but his father was shouting at him.
‘If you think I’m going to let you come back into my home and destroy my life with your—’
Then Lewis went for him – and Alice came into the room as he went for him – and he saw his father’s fear and felt nothing about it. He put his hand on his father. He put his hand on him and grabbed at his neck, his collar and the lapel of his jacket. His father felt weak in his hand, and his hand felt big as he pushed him down. He had enough of himself left not to carry on with him, but he kicked the drinks cabinet, the front of it, and the wood splintered under his foot. His father went down to the floor and the light, decorated doors broke into pieces, and the smell of the liquor, as the bottles smashed, the mixing, sweet, alcohol smell, came up and hit him, and he left, as Alice pressed herself against the wall.
The air seemed to stick to him as he forced his way through it. He ran the path along the edge of the trees and into her garden. He was pouring sweat, and the quiet smell of cut grass and the still beauty of the house were evil to him. He started to shout her name and ran the length of the house looking for her, and it was nothing to him that as he went, and as he shouted for her, he smashed his fist into the glinting mullioned windows. He shouted for her, but she didn’t come. He didn’t feel the sagging lead as he hit the windows, but he shouted Kit’s name and thought she must come to him.
He stopped, and yelled her name again to the blank house. There was a man, not Dicky, another man, coming around the side of the house and he heard screaming from inside and Dicky’s voice shouting, and then he saw Kit. She was looking down, from a window above him, and not moving. He was distracted by seeing her, and the man reached him and threw his shoulder against his chest and got him down. He held Lewis down and tried to force his head sideways with his knee on his chest. Lewis twisted his body and kicked the man hard in the face and didn’t think about it, but got up when he could. He saw Dicky come out of the house, but he couldn’t go for him because he had a shotgun in his hands. Lewis saw the man he’d kicked was Preston and that he was bleeding, with his hands up to his face on the ground. There was still screaming. Lewis started to run towards the trees. There was a gunshot, but he was in the trees by then and it was just to scare him, not aimed at him.
The woods were very close and dim, like being underwater, and there was a strong smell of wild garlic and the sap from the trees and nettles. Lewis went away from the path, and through brambles and dead leaves that were years old. When he got to where he couldn’t see a way forward any more he stopped and rested, leaning his hand against a tree and getting his breath.
He shut his eyes and he saw Kit very clearly. His whole body was numb and light and he kept thinking of Kit and that he loved her, and that now he knew that he loved her.
He saw her in his car, in London, smiling at him, and he remembered her dancing with him and the feel of her. He thought of her leaning against the tree in her damp dress that sunny afternoon, and talking to him, but letting him be quiet too. He thought of the sweetness of her. It was stupid to feel happy thinking about her, but when he saw her in his mind he did, or at least could imagine happiness. He thought that the idea of hurting such a girl was too bad to think about, and that letting a girl like that be hurt was just as bad.
He noticed his right hand was stinging and he looked at it and couldn’t understand why it had small pieces of glass stuck into the side of it and the heel of it, where his wrist started, and then he remembered the windows.
He sat down against the tree to pick the pieces of glass out, and the hand started to shake badly and the small cuts burned.
He rested his head on the back of the cut hand for a while and tried to think what to do. It was difficult to concentrate.
Leaving Kit there was intolerable.
Perhaps if he could talk to her, then things would be all right. It was a stupid sort of clarity, but it gave him something to hold on to.