The next day, I took Grant over to Hatherleigh Hall with me.
He’d scrubbed up reasonably well, I had to admit. His hair looked tidily cut and he’d lost the beard to reveal a thinner face that made his lack of chin less noticeable. He sat bolt upright next to me all the way there, almost vibrating with eagerness.
‘You will stick to the story, won’t you?’ I turned into the driveway. ‘You’re not going to blurt anything out?’
‘No! No, honestly, Al. I really do realise now what I could have lost. I just hope Jen will let me come back.’
I stayed silent, so as not to let out a sarcastic comment about his realisation of loss being linked to our driving along a gravelled approach that went on for about a mile. Fields either side held the tarnished bells of oats behind black railinged fences and the house sat in the distance, rising like a mirage on the horizon. Grant’s words about all that he could have lost packed a little less emotional punch when illustrated by this bucolic splendour and evident landed wealth.
Jenna must have seen the car approaching, because she was out in the car park before we pulled up. Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked very young and very impressionable in a sunflower-patterned dress and bare feet, seeming not to feel the ridging of the gravel under her soles.
Grant got out slowly. ‘Hey, Jen,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry.’
Jenna let out a squeal and threw herself at him. He caught her and the two of them locked into an embrace. Grant hid his face in her hair, and she had her arms wrapped so tightly around him that she looked as though she was trying to merge herself with his body. There were no words, just the hug.
I got out of the car now, finding that I had to swallow hard to force down the lump in my throat. The emotion looked genuine on both sides. Jenna had her eyes screwed shut but she was visibly crying, Grant’s shoulders were shaking too, and I berated myself for my previous cynicism. This was what love should look like. A sunlit clasp of arms, a reunion of tears, hair tangling together, cheeks pressed close. I’d never had that. Grant had never greeted me the way he was murmuring softly to Jen, had never held me as though he was afraid that I’d be snatched away at any second. Nobody had.
But then, I reminded myself, I was built to be sensible. I was not the kind of girl who inspires devoted longing in men. All I seemed to inspire was the desire to see me organise the hell out of their lives whilst cooking edible meals with one hand and filing their tax returns with the other. As soon as they realised that they could organise themselves and that ready meals and accountants were a thing, I was redundant. So I took a deep breath, shook my head and straightened my shoulders to stalk past the moulding together of bodies that was taking place on the drive.
Max was circling, worried, inside the nearest door. He was peering out of the little side window whilst pacing on the spot and practically wringing his hands. ‘Jenna seems to be forgiving Grant,’ I observed dryly as I practically cannoned into him.
‘I know, I know. It’s just – she’s so liable to start overthinking. Do you think she believes all that “amnesia” rubbish? Isn’t she going to ask about the wallet and the belt buckle? And the tooth?’
Today Max was wearing a torn sweatshirt over paint-stained jeans. His trainers were flapping at one sole and he looked far more as though he’d spent six weeks on the streets of Peterborough than Grant did. His hair was scruffed up on one side and he hadn’t shaved. It was appalling that someone so badly turned out could look so attractive. I clearly hadn’t shaken off my crush as much as I wished I had.
‘She wants to believe his story,’ I said. ‘So she’ll put herself through any amount of mental gymnastics to make it fit. And, though I say so myself, it’s realistic enough to be credible. All Grant’s lacking is any sign of a head wound, and even Grant can remember to go “ouch ouch” once or twice.’ I looked at Max, with the worry drying his skin into little creases around his eyes and mouth. ‘Try to relax.’
‘They really do seem very fond of one another, don’t they?’ Was that the hint of a tone of wistfulness in his voice? Or wishful thinking on my part, because Max must have had his share of devoted love in the past. And, perhaps, in fact, in the present. I knew nothing about his private life at all. He might have a partner tucked away somewhere in this house, for all I knew. The place was big enough to accommodate a bevy of lovers with none of them knowing about the existence of the others, unless they managed a fluke meeting on one of the million staircases one night.
‘They do.’ I wondered if I sounded as wistful.
Grant and Jenna had broken out of the clinch and were standing, face-width apart, staring into one another’s eyes.
‘I think I may vomit,’ Max said. ‘Shall we go upstairs and leave them to it?’
‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘that we ought to stay out here. Leave the flat to them for a while. I’m sure they’ve got a lot of, er, making up to do and I’m pretty sure that they won’t want her brother and his ex-wife listening in. Maybe I should go home.’
Max looked taken aback. ‘But you’ve only just got here!’
‘Max, I live in Pickering, not Melbourne. It’s only half an hour.’
‘Yes, but…’ He looked around, wildly. ‘I thought you’d be here all day! I was going to cook lunch!’
I patted his arm gently. ‘It’s fine. I won’t fade away during the drive.’
‘I’m not rich, you know,’ he said, apropos of nothing. As he was staring out across the acres that bordered the enormous house he lived in, I couldn’t really take this seriously.
‘Well, in that get-up, I never would have guessed it,’ I said briskly. ‘Did you mug a tramp and steal his clothes?’
Max seemed to shake himself, as though he was pulling himself back from a vision that he’d been seeing that he wasn’t at all sure about. ‘What? Oh! No, I was hauling some rubbish out of the old icehouse, we’re thinking of getting it repaired and making it part of the tour.’
I raised an eyebrow and pursed my lips. I hoped that my look encompassed everything I felt about people who say they aren’t rich but own an icehouse, and it seemed to, because he laughed, suddenly. ‘I know, I know, it’s all relative.’ He looked down at his flapping trainers. ‘When I said I’m not rich, I mean, it’s a struggle to keep this place ticking over and, now I come to think of it, that’s a bit insensitive really.’ Now that dark glance flicked up to me and I forced my neck not to go red by sheer mind power. ‘Would you like to come and see? The icehouse, I mean. If we can’t go inside, we may as well do something else.’
‘Max, I really ought…’ But I made myself stop. There was absolutely nothing I really ought to be doing.
‘Please, Alice. Please don’t leave me alone with my sister all loved up and having to pretend that Grant has amnesia. You’re the only other person who knows how bonkers this whole set-up is – and, in fact, now I come to think of it, it was your idea – so you’re the only person I can really talk to. Besides, watching the pair of them doing the whole romantic reunion is making me feel dreadfully inadequate and a little bit lonely.’
He was back to looking at his trainers again.
My stomach was doing curious things. It felt alternately hollow, as though I hadn’t eaten for a week, and fizzing with acid, as if I were excited. Max was trying to keep me here. He wanted to talk to me. I would stop him from feeling lonely. That was activating the effervescence. The knowledge that he was so far out of my league, that he was in the Premier Division whilst I languished at the bottom of the Sponsored By The Local Carpet Manufacturer And Everyone Works On Their Dad’s Farm During The Week amateur league tables kept the hollowness. The best I could ever hope for was Max feeling so desperate for company that I might get offered a half pint of cheap cider, some chips and a quick fumble on the back seat of his car.
Oh, well, I could always go along with the fumble and then plead amnesia. We’d got a precedent.
‘All right. Show me the icehouse, then.’
We started to walk around the house on the crispy gravel, before Max broke off to lead the way along a grassy terrace towards a small clump of trees set into the side of a hillock, which formed a ‘feature’. We walked in silence, broken only by the slop-flop of the sole of his trainer.
‘It’s nothing special,’ he said, as we reached the trees.
I stopped, opened my hands and turned around to indicate the vast acres, the house, the carefully groomed terracing. ‘Max, you have an icehouse. All I have is a place where the toilet freezes solid in cold weather. Believe me, it’s special.’
But at least about the icehouse he was right, it wasn’t special. Apart from being attached to a bloody great big house with gardens plural, it was a brick-lined hole in the ground inside an echoing cavern. There was a prosaic ladder leading into the hole and rubble sacks full of junk inside the little gate that led in, obviously where Max had been clearing it out.
‘You see? It’s a big dark pit into which they used to pack ice from the lake in winter. They’d cover it with straw and it would stay frozen into the summer.’
‘That’s a lot of trouble to go to for out-of-season snowballs,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood.
Max gave me a stern look. ‘You are far too intelligent for that remark,’ he said, leading me back out and closing the metal gate behind us.
I wanted to simper ‘Am I?’ and fish for compliments using fluttered eyelashes as bait, but that sort of behaviour didn’t wash from someone who has SENSIBLE practically carved into her forehead, so I just said, ‘Yes, sorry.’
He rested his head against the bars of the gate and leaned in a defeated way. ‘I don’t have enough disposable income, I don’t work out, I care too much about my sister and I spend too long working,’ he said, slightly muffled, yet his voice echoed hollowly around the brick cave. The echo gave his words the sepulchral nature of one denouncing their entire life, which, I suppose, he was.
‘What?’
‘That’s the litany of failings that past girlfriends have given as a reason for breaking up with me. Oh, apart from one who was lovely but definitely didn’t want children. And I do.’ He kept his forehead pressed against the gate as though he were staring into the darkness beyond.
I had no idea what to say. And, even worse, I had no idea why he was saying this. It was none of my business. Then I wondered if seeing Jen and Grant had shaken up old memories. ‘Relationships can be hard,’ I said, channelling the Reddit relationship forum, which was about the only knowledge I had of interpersonal connections these days, apart from borrowing Malcolm’s rucksack, which was hardly tawdry threesomes in cheap hotel rooms. ‘If your exes broke up with you for those reasons, then they weren’t the right person for you,’ I added, now channelling Dear Deirdre, whose advice column Sheila insisted on reading aloud for the edification of the office.
Max took a deep breath and straightened up. ‘No, they weren’t. That is becoming apparent,’ he said. When he turned to face me, the pressure of the gate had formed a giant red groove down the centre of his forehead, like a solipsistic brand. The thought made me laugh.
‘What?’ it was his turn to ask.
‘You look like you’ve got “I” on your face.’
He raised his hand and felt the mark, then started to laugh too. ‘Well, that’ll teach me to be so self-pitying, won’t it? Self-obsession makes you look like a dick.’
We moved away from the dark oppressive hole and out into the sunshine, which seemed brighter in contrast. Somewhere away to our right, water sparkled, and I presumed this was the lake that had produced the ice for the icehouse. But somehow the grounds didn’t seem so overdone now, more like an extension of Max. After all, someone had to own places like Hatherleigh Hall, so why not him? It was an accident of birth that had given it all to him. He’d hardly gone out and bought the place, like an overpaid footballer desperately in search of somewhere to put his money, had he?
‘Did you grow up here?’ I asked casually, as we walked, and in his case flopped, back along the smooth lawn towards the house.
‘Until I was eight.’ Max looked across at the square chimneys and stolid portico, set firmly into green acres as though someone had pressed a Lego house onto a board. ‘Then I went away to school. Then there was university – I didn’t really come back until I started my PhD, just before Dad died.’ I noticed he didn’t mention his mother. That struck me as odd, but there was something about his manner, the brisk way he picked up the pace until we were virtually sprinting over the lawn, that told me that the omission was deliberate. ‘Do you think they will have finished consummating their relationship again yet?’
‘I’d give them a bit longer,’ I puffed.
‘Oh, well. I suppose I can make us some coffee in the house kitchens.’ Max set off along the corridor that I’d followed Jenna down before, past the obvious ‘below stairs’ décor of whitewash and flagstoned floors. ‘It’s what the public expects,’ he said, seeing me looking at the dreary paintwork. ‘They want things to look original, otherwise I’d have got the place plastered and properly heated years ago. The crowds come for the whole Downton Abbey vibe and the history, so that’s what we have to give them. Costs a fucking fortune,’ he finished slightly dismally, turning through the doorway into the huge room where Jenna had made scones the first time I’d been here.
‘We don’t have to light the range to heat the water, do we?’ I asked, slightly warily, as I stared around the echoing space. ‘Or find a flunky to do it for us?’
‘Nope.’ Max bent to a low-level cupboard with a wooden door thicker than the one that kept my house secure. Inside, there was an electric kettle and jars of coffee and sugar. ‘The staff use this as their kitchen when we’re not open. Well, they use the housekeeper’s room through there, but this is where the kettle lives.’ He nodded to a door almost concealed in the wall.
‘This place—’ I looked up at the ceiling, racked with beams from which hooks of varying sizes hung. ‘It’s almost as if it’s not real – I’ve never been anywhere that felt so much like a film set. I can’t imagine a family growing up here.’
‘It’s just a house, Alice.’ Max plugged in the kettle. ‘I’d really rather hand the whole thing over to someone else to manage and get on with life, writing books and teaching, but managers cost money and the finances are pared to the bone as it is. It’s duty, not love, keeping me here.’
‘Would Jenna take it on?’ I thought of the dichotomy of Jenna, the emotionally frail and the bike-riding badass. Then I imagined Grant as the other half of the team and instantly could see him as the ineffectual lord in every TV drama ever, foppishly wandering around in baggy trousers with a spaniel at his heels.
‘I dunno. Maybe.’ He changed the subject. ‘So, how did you get on with all the papers yesterday? Anything interesting in there? Sorry I didn’t see you off, I had to go down to Home Farm to see about some fencing.’
We entered a more neutral discussion about what to keep, what to throw away and what to possibly donate to the Beck Isle Museum in Pickering, where they’d made the just-gone history of local life a tourist attraction. It kept us busy until there was a sudden appearance in the doorway of Jenna looking radiant and Grant with his arm around her.
‘I’ve proposed,’ he said proudly. ‘We’re going to get married.’
A sudden flashback to my wedding day filled my mind. Registry office in winter, my mother very frail by now, Dad long gone. All my workmates had attended, Grant had had two of his gaming friends, and we’d gone for a fish and chip supper afterwards. It had felt like a day brushed under the carpet, a formality to be gone through. Grant had looked smug that day, though. Happy enough but with a tiny tinge of ‘now I don’t have to try at all any more’.
Today he looked genuinely delighted. Almost handsome, in fact, with his new haircut and slightly rakish sideburns.
‘Wow. That’s – congratulations, both of you.’ I stepped in and hugged them both. ‘You’ll have to divorce me first, though, Grant.’
A fleeting expression of slight panic crossed his face, but Jenna beamed. ‘It’s fine. I’ll take care of the details,’ she said. She was absolutely radiant, her skin flushed and her eyes sparkling. Despite the unlikeliness of the pairing, Grant and Jenna genuinely seemed made for one another.
I pushed down the thought that he’d need to work on his desire to fake his own death to avoid difficult conversations.
‘We should have champagne,’ Max suddenly announced. ‘There’s some in my study.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to drive.’
‘Er, Al, there’s about fifty million bedrooms in this place.’ Grant, still surfing the wave of recent sex and having proposed to a half-share of the estate, waved a hand. ‘I’m sure you can stay over.’
‘Oh, yes, do stay!’ Jenna, still clutching Grant’s arm as though she feared he might be swept back to Peterborough if she let go, beamed at me. ‘Let’s open all the champagne and have a party!’
Max met my eye. He made a ‘this is out of my hands’ sort of face and spread his hands wide. But now a lot of the tension had gone from him, there was a little bit of amusement in his face and a spark in those dark eyes that told me that seeing his sister so happy was buoying him up too.
‘Oh, all right,’ I said, probably sounding a bit grumpy. After all, what did I have to dash home for? An evening in with the TV, listening to Next Door Right’s attempts to persuade her unholy triumvirate of children to actually go to bed, at full volume? Waiting for the slam that indicated that Mr Next Door Left had taken the dog for its final walk? Everything that served to double underline my single status, my lack of any dependants. Sensible Alice, there behind her drawn curtains with a cup of tea, whilst everyone else threw caution to the winds. Except, possibly Mr Next Door Left, whose well-trodden evening walk route I could map in my head. ‘Why not?’ I added, with a little bit more animation.
‘Party on!’ said Grant, that well-known party animal.
We went up to the flat, into a room I’d not seen before. A piano sat beside an open window with a balcony jutting beyond, like a book cover for a novel where the musical hero goes deaf and spends the whole book wafting around being angsty and handsome. A far more prosaic television took up one corner, faced by a saggy sofa. Someone had left a pair of downtrodden slippers and a badly folded copy of The Guardian on the floor, which reassured me that the flat was actually lived in and not kept visually pristine whilst everyone lived in hunched squalor in the attic.
Max fetched champagne and glasses and we all got rather tipsy rather quickly and very giggly. I tried to moderate my intake – I wasn’t at all sure about staying over, and someone needed to make sure that Grant didn’t become drunk enough to blurt out the truth about his amnesia – but it was useless. The champagne was far too drinkable, buttery and vanilla-y, with a hint of strawberries. We drank a couple of bottles before deciding we were hungry and went en masse to the kitchen, where I had confused memories of laughing hysterically at Max’s attempts to make risotto while Grant danced on the table…
… and the rest of the evening was all a blur. There was some kind of memory, or it may have been a bad dream, of my playing the piano and singing an indecent song that I’d learned at school, but it was all fragments. As though everything after the risotto was a jigsaw with the pieces broken up and scrambled and only parts of the picture being whole. And, from the feel of it, as I gradually swam into consciousness, someone had sat on the box.
It was dark, for which I was grateful, and I didn’t have a headache, for which I was practically ecstatic. But my mouth tasted as though I’d licked those worn slippers, I had a strange pain in one ankle, and I was lying on something soft with my head dangling in space. There was a telephone ringing somewhere.
‘Assa phone,’ I mumbled indistinctly.
When a voice beside me said, ‘Yeah. Noisy phone. Make it shut up,’ and there was the sensation of someone turning over, sobriety returned with an almost audible whoosh.
‘What the hell? Who are you?’ I jack-knifed to a sitting position, clutching what turned out to be an eiderdown to my fully dressed chest.
There was a moment of silence, presumably as a similar level of awful dawning memory arrived at the figure beside me. Then, ‘Alice?’
‘Max?’
The distant phone stopped ringing. The silence was almost worse.
‘Er,’ said Max. ‘Have you got clothes on?’
I felt around a bit. ‘Yes. All of them. Even my shoes.’
‘Me too. So that’s a good thing?’
I had no idea why he made it a question. ‘Where are we?’
‘Hang on, I’ll find a light.’ There were sounds of groping, then the bed dipped, there was a lot of blundering and swearing and then a weedy illumination appeared. At first, it seemed that I was in a tent with no flap, but as my vision cleared, it became apparent that it was a four-poster bed, with the curtains partly drawn around it. There was an enormous wooden cabinet by the bed but that was all I could see. Even Max had become invisible.
‘Is this…’ I had to clear my throat. I really, really needed a glass of water. ‘Is this your bedroom?’
From somewhere in the Stygian gloom, Max snorted. ‘No, of course it bloody isn’t,’ he said mildly. ‘I may have delusions of grandeur, but I’ve got a perfectly ordinary bed. I think we’re in the Blue Room. I vaguely remember something about giving you a tour of the house yesterday – this must have been as far as we got.’
‘Why is it dark?’
‘Because it’s three o’clock in the morning.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘And we don’t have big main lights in these rooms, it’s bad for the furnishings, so I’ve turned the emergency lighting on.’
‘This is an emergency, and I need a bit more light than that.’ I swung my legs over the edge of the bed but couldn’t feel the floor. ‘And I need water. Lots of water.’
Max came into shadowy view at the end of the bed. He looked rumpled and half-asleep still. ‘If this is the Blue Room, then we’re not far from the main staircase. We can go up to the flat.’
‘Right.’ I couldn’t quite muster the bodily organisation to get myself up off the bed and instead just slumped backwards, realising that I was still quite drunk. ‘Or stay here.’
‘I’m glad you said that.’ Max crawled onto the bed beside me. ‘I’m not sure I can find the door. Maybe, maybe we should camp out here until it gets light.’ He shuffled a bit closer. ‘Unless you feel sick. This bed is Elizabethan and I’m not sure we’d get vomit out of the hangings.’
‘No, I’m fine.’ More than fine, in fact, with Max’s warmth against me, feeling his breath puffing against my cheek. He seemed to be very close, but it was too dark to see. He must have pulled the curtains around the bed again when he got back in.
‘Good.’ There was movement and his voice got a little further away from my face. ‘The Blue Room,’ he began in the tones of one reading from a tourist brochure, ‘is in the original part of the house, which dates from the reign of Henry VIII. Most of the rest of that house was demolished and rebuilt in the reign of Queen Anne, leaving only the central portion as original. The furniture and hangings are mostly Elizabethan, the exception being the chinoiserie cabinet by the bed, which dates to the early eighteenth century, the beginning of the popular Rococo movement.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I wanted to go back to sleep now. The lingering remnants of the champagne had caught up with me.
‘Sorry. Force of habit. I do the house tours, y’see. And I think I’m still very drunk.’
‘Well, let’s sleep it off and try to tiptoe up to the flat as soon as it gets light enough to see. Before Grant and Jenna are awake, anyway. With any luck, they’ll think we crashed out in separate rooms,’ I said, trying to inject some sense into the situation. ‘And then, when I am sober enough to see, I can make an early start on sorting the papers again.’
There was a pause. I thought Max had fallen asleep, his breathing was regular and soft, and I wanted to make sure he was fully asleep before I let myself drop off, in case I snored. When he spoke, it was so unexpected that I jumped. ‘I really like you, Alice.’
‘Don’t start that again,’ I said sternly.
‘But I do! Why don’t you believe me?’
There was enough alcohol in my system to disable my usual speech filters. ‘Because you’ve got a big house and an estate and you’re gorgeous and clever and I live in a terraced house that my parents left me and I’m big and plain and I make sure that windows go in the right houses.’ The words came out in a machine-gun burst. ‘Now, shut up and go to sleep.’
Another moment, broken by some wriggling. ‘Alice,’ he said eventually. ‘I want to show you something.’
‘If it’s your dick, then prepare to say goodbye to the Elizabethan bed, because I will tear it apart and batter you to death with one of the posts,’ I said briskly. I wasn’t afraid, I’d had more willies waved at me than I knew what to do with. The fitters’ humour could be somewhat robust and the #MeToo movement hadn’t really made much of an impact in our tiny square of North Yorkshire.
‘Of course it’s not my dick! Good God, woman, what do you take me for?’ said Max, sounding so upper class that it made me laugh. ‘And stop laughing. My reproductive equipment is not something to be sniggered at.’ He somewhat spoiled the effect of this haughty retort by sniggering himself. ‘Sorry, sorry. Like I said, I’m still really drunk. But in vino veritas and all that. And please don’t pretend not to know what that means, you’re better than that.’
‘All right, sorry. What do you want to show me?’
This time, the pause went on and on until I realised Max had fallen asleep again. Carefully, I crept my body a few centimetres further away, just in case, because I didn’t want to snore in his ear, and let myself drop back into a grateful stupor again.