She does not warn them she is coming. Or she does not warn herself that she is going. It’s a Saturday afternoon. She drives through patient country rain, parks in the courtyard. Dogs run out to greet her. They follow her through the rain to the door. There is an old stirrup bell here but no one ever rings it. She goes into the room with the waxed jackets, the cut-glass bowl with its shotgun cartridges. In the kitchen she finds Slad’s wife, a heavy woman dicing meat, a bone-handled knife in one hand, its blade as long as Maud’s forearm. She has never shown much friendliness to Maud, though Maud has never seen her show much friendliness to anyone other than Magnus, who treats her as a serf, a serf’s chattel. Mrs. Rathbone, she says, is lying down. Mr. Rathbone is in his workshop and won’t thank anyone for disturbing him.
‘And Tim?’
‘In his room,’ she says.
‘Upstairs?’
‘How could he manage stairs?’ says Mrs. Slad. ‘He’s in the little room. Off the music room.’
Maud thanks her. She does not say that he managed the stairs at the cottage, managed them all right and carried things down. She goes out of the kitchen, through the morning room and along a short windowless passage to the music room. Rain-light on a faded carpet, on the scuffed black of violin cases, the glass face of a tall-clock. On the piano, the photographs are arranged in tilted rows like a solar farm. Children kneeling by a Christmas tree. Children in their school uniforms, hair neatly parted. Children with dogs, children on the knees of their parents. There are, she knows, at least three generations of them there, children smiling for the camera, or caught between one stride and the next, one gesture and the next, arms flung out, hands and fingers blurring into air.
To the left of the piano is another door. Through it, softly, a woman’s voice.
She taps on the door and goes in. Tim is in bed, a single bed with wooden legs on casters, perhaps a child’s bed. Bella is on a chair beside the bed, a book in her hand. She is wearing a turtleneck dress of light grey cashmere, her hair scraped back and held with a clasp of muted silver.
‘Hello, Maud,’ she says. ‘Would you like to speak to Tim? He’s a bit drowsy, I’m afraid. A bad night last night.’
She too looks tired, a slight shadowing under her eyes as if, selflessly, she shares the burden of bad nights. She stands, puts the book on the chair, and with a quick smile at Tim she leaves the room.
In the bed, Tim has the covers pulled up to his throat. He is not looking at Maud. Perhaps he is not looking at anything. On the small round table under the window are various medicines. She can see that one of these, from its trade name, is a benzodiazepine. She could, if she chose, tell him the drug’s metabolizing enzymes. Could recite them to him like lines of poetry.
‘The neighbours were scared,’ she says. ‘They’re afraid you’ll set fire to the house.’
‘I thought about it,’ he says.
‘Did you burn them all?’ she asks.
He nods.
‘Even the Lacôte?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t burn anything else,’ she says.
‘What do you want?’ he says.
‘Are you staying here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not coming back to the cottage?’
He moves his head on the pillow, rolls it in a narrow arc.
‘Are you with Bella now?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Maud.’
‘What?’
‘Is that relevant? Who I’m with? Who you’re with? Is it relevant?’
He shuts his eyes. He looks very like his mother. The book on the chair is Vanity Fair, a paperback with a creased spine, a man and woman on the cover, dancing formally.
There are things she was going to tell him. Things whose relevance she thinks he would not question. Now she sees that if she tells him these things he will start to scream.
In the music room Bella is sitting on the piano stool looking as if it is only a kind of politeness that keeps her from playing.
‘Goodbye,’ she says.
‘Goodbye,’ says Maud.
* * *
When she returns to the kitchen Mrs. Slad has gone but Tim’s father is there, leaning against the sink, arms folded, apparently studying the toes of his shoes. He looks up. ‘Come through,’ he says, and leads her to what the family call the small drawing room. There is no one else there. At one end of the room is a sideboard too large for the room, its shelves filled with porcelain dogs and more pictures of children. In the grate is the remnant of a morning fire. Tim’s father leans down to it, prods it, then picks out from the wood basket a quarter log and lays it in the embers. All the wood comes from his own land.
‘A drink?’
‘No thanks.’
He goes to the table under the window, one of several about the house known as a ‘drinks table’. Into two heavy glasses he pours two measures of Scotch.
‘Never trust a man who doesn’t drink,’ he says. ‘Applies to women too, I think.’
He grins at her. She takes the glass, touches it to her lips, feels the small burn where her lips have cracked.
‘So you’ve been to see Tim.’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did you think he looked?’
She considers for a moment—the sallow face on the plumped-up pillow, the eyes that seemed, the moment before he shut them, to be pleading with her. ‘Tired,’ she says. ‘Sad.’
‘Sad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sad. Mmm. Well, yes, we’re all of us over here, Maud, a bit sad. You appear to be bearing up, however. I’m told you’re back at work. Got the old lab coat on again.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Good for you.’ He looks away from her. His face is flushed. When he speaks again it is with a voice that comes from somewhere much deeper inside of him, a voice he has been keeping hidden.
‘Tim is not sad, Maud. Tim is devastated. My wife is devastated. I am devastated. Even bloody Magnus is devastated. Only you, you and perhaps your extraordinary parents, seem to be managing.’
He empties his glass, carries it over to the drinks table. With his back to her he says, ‘I always rather admired you. The way you didn’t try too hard to make people like you. Most people do, don’t they?’
He pours another two fingers of Scotch into his glass, turns to her again. ‘We used, in the family, to talk about you quite a lot. Does that surprise you? Two schools of thought, really. One, that you were a bright girl, a bit shy, a bit gauche, a bit unworldly but basically all right. The other school, quite a big one, had you down as cold-blooded, entirely self-absorbed and not really all right at all. One thing that both schools were agreed upon was that you hadn’t the slightest interest in being a mother.’
‘That‘s not true.’
‘Oh, I think it is. I never saw the least evidence of any maternal instinct. I don’t mean you were cruel. That would have taken a measure of engagement, some effort of imagination. No, no. In your own rather pathetic way you tried. But something was missing. Something fundamental. You reached for it and it simply wasn’t there.’
He acts it out. The reaching, the clasping at air, the expression of open-mouthed surprise.
‘Why are you saying this?’ she asks.
‘We saw you, Maud. I saw you. Everyone did. It wasn’t difficult.’
He moves closer, close enough for her to smell his leathery aftershave, the whisky. He takes hold of her left hand, lifts her arm, slides up the sleeve of her sweater.
‘Look at it,’ he says. ‘Who would want this on themselves? I’m sorry, but there’s something very wrong with you and I wish to Christ Tim had never laid eyes on you. I wish none of us had.’
There are tears on his cheeks thick as varnish. He has given way to something, or something has given way inside him. She frees herself from his grasp, turns away from him towards the door.
‘Don’t you dare!’ he shouts. ‘Don’t you . . .’ He lunges at her.
He is, in his fury, very strong. For half a second she is in pure flight, then her feet tangle with the end of the sofa and she slams into the base of the sideboard, lies there, dazed, while porcelain dogs and picture frames tumble onto the floor around her. Slowly, she gets to her knees. He reaches down for her and helps her to stand. He says he is sorry and sounds as if he means it. He draws her to him, holds her tightly, one hand smoothing the hair on the back of her head. His shoulders are heaving; his breath is very hot. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘don’t ever come back. Do you understand? Don’t ever come here again.’