It was late morning when I woke and my room was suffused by a blank light, as if it had snowed during the night. I pulled out the heavy cotton sheets and went over to the window. It was cold out of bed. There wasn’t any snow but the garden was white with frost. I stood for a while looking out at the long expanse of lawn, thinking how good it was to be able to stand there in a T-shirt without anyone to see. The house Martha and I shared in London was overlooked by the back of the terrace behind us and we had to keep the curtains drawn until we were dressed. There wasn’t another house visible from here.
I had been so tired and drunk the night before that I hadn’t paid much attention to the room. Given the size of the house it seemed comparatively small, although it was bigger than any I’d ever had. Being on the top floor, it must have been servants’ quarters in the past. It was still simply decorated. The bed had a wrought-iron frame and at the foot of it there was a stout mahogany chest. There was a small fireplace, too, with an arrangement of dried flowers in the hearth and two crystal candlesticks on the mantelpiece. The walls, unevenly plastered and painted a milky white, were bare apart from a large oil painting over the bed. I knelt up on the pillows for a closer look. It was a classical scene, nymphs bathing in a river, their long blonde hair floating around them in the dark water. On the bank, entranced by his own reflection in the water, lay Narcissus. I wondered if it had always been there or whether Lucas had put it in my room, knowing I would like it.
My dress was in a silken pool on the rug; I picked it up and shook it out by the straps. It would have to be dry-cleaned before it was worn again but I put it on a hanger on the back of the door anyway. I changed into a navy jumper and jeans and put my boots on. Then I packed away my tights and shoes from the night before and made the bed, tucking the sheets in until they covered the mattress like fondant icing. As I pulled the door closed behind me, I checked that everything was tidy as if it were a hotel and not a friend’s place at all.
It seemed that I was first up: everything was silent. I stood at the banister and saw the house in daylight for the first time. I had the feeling of someone left in a vast museum after hours, half alarmed, half excited by being alone with things that other people saw only under supervision. Below me was the whorl of staircases and landings and the chequered hall floor. Looking up, I saw that the roof was domed, something I hadn’t noticed from outside in the dark. At the base of it there was a complete circle of windows and the white winter light poured through them.
Above my head was one of the most spectacular paintings I had ever seen. The inside of the dome was a painted bowl of almost unbelievable richness, myriad shades of blue and gold and pomegranate-pink and red, intricate and at the same time epic. It was like a secular version of a Renaissance church fresco. It depicted a convocation of the gods, a council or a drinking party. I thought of the scene at the beginning of the Iliad where the gods are lounging on Olympus, drinking and squabbling about whose favourite is going to be allowed to win the war while the human warriors are spilling their blood on the plains of Troy below.
At the centre of the tableau a figure I took to be Zeus lay on a golden couch. He was an exercise in controlled male strength, muscular shoulders and arms at odds with the relaxed pose, a head of shining black hair. He wore a white robe bordered in purple, a Midas-worthy amount of gold jewellery around his neck and wrists. There were rings set with huge gems on his fingers. One of his arms dropped idly over the arm of the couch towards a woman with hair the colour of dark chocolate, which wound down her back and over the white folds of her dress. She was on her knees, her spine a smooth curve as she bent to kiss Zeus’ hand. The dress was slipping off her shoulder to reveal the round of one brown breast. At the other end of the couch, also kneeling, was another woman, also dark-haired and identically clothed, although her dress sat demurely on her shoulders. This goddess held Zeus’ feet in her hands, her long white fingers closing gently around his toes. It wasn’t immediately clear which of the goddesses the two women were. The one kissing Zeus’ hand was obviously more sexual. The other was ethereal, her expression contemplative, even a little sad, as she looked away from the group into the sky that surrounded them. Perhaps the first was Aphrodite, the second Hera. Zeus looked straight down out of the picture, as if he were trying to establish eye-contact. His gaze was dark and unreadable. There was no anger in it but also no pleasure, no joy at finding himself king of the world.
Around the main group were arranged a number of other figures. There was an easily identifiable Ganymede with an ornate drinking bowl, his muscles taut under golden skin as he proffered it. A couple of other gods stood a little way back, leaning together conspiratorially. Again, I had no idea who they might be. Near the neat white feet of the goddess I thought might be Hera two children played, round and rosy like putti. Vines grew around the scene, curling up the legs of the couch, the bright-green leaves here and there revealing clusters of fat ripe grapes.
Abruptly the light withdrew and the painting faded. What sun there had been was gone. I gave the ceiling a last look then turned and made my way downstairs. Years of feet had worn away the centre of the pale strip of green carpet that ran down the landings like a stream. All the doors I passed were closed but I didn’t think about what was behind them. My attention was on the art: the walls were bristling with paintings of extraordinary quality. On the main wall of the first-floor landing there was a huge Jackson Pollock. I had never seen one in the flesh before. I had to stop myself reaching out to touch the storm of red and black paint. A little further down at a platform in the stairs there was one of Julian Schnabel’s famous plate portraits. I understood now why all the walls were white. The entire house was a display case for a world-class art collection.
We had breakfast in the kitchen, a large room with a black-and-white floor like the hall’s and French windows that opened on to a walled garden at the back of the house. A long oak table stood in front of the glass and I looked out as we ate. The garden was still ice-bound. A fine film of glittering frost covered the paths and the leafless espalier trees trained up against the far wall. Most of the raised beds were empty, although there was a small herb garden and also a cluster of gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes. A robin pecked at the thin layer of ice on a puddle about five feet away until Martha dropped a knife. The noise reached him through the glass and he looked up and saw us for the first time, before taking off in alarm.
‘You don’t see that very often now,’ said Greg, pointing at the ceiling.
I looked up. It was studded with black hooks. ‘For hanging meat?’
‘Like something out of an S & M parlour,’ said Danny.
‘Imagine having dead animals hanging in your kitchen.’ Martha grimaced and reached for the coffee pot. She poured me another cup, then filled her own.
‘People had to be tougher then,’ said Lucas. ‘Nowadays everyone seems to pretend death doesn’t happen.’ There was a fraught silence, punctured only when Danny took a loud crunch into a slice of toast. Lucas smiled. ‘This is a morbid conversation for the first day of a new year.’
‘Sorry,’ said Michael, appearing at the doorway. ‘Completely overslept, obviously. Don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
‘You work too hard, that’s what’s wrong,’ said Martha. ‘Anyway, we saved you some.’ She got up and took his cooked breakfast out of the oven, where it had been keeping warm.
‘Thank you, you’re a sweetheart.’ He gave her a kiss on the cheek.
After we’d washed up and tidied the drawing room, the others went out in the car to get cigarettes and the papers. Danny went off for a long bath and I asked Lucas to show me the house.
We started in Patrick’s study, the only room on the top floor that was neither a bedroom nor a bathroom. ‘He liked the atmosphere in here and the view,’ said Lucas. I followed him over to the window and saw more or less the same as I had from my own, two doors down. The room itself was remarkably plain. It was painted white, of course, but there was a simple beige carpet under our feet instead of the Turkish rugs and rich fabrics of the rooms downstairs and even my bedroom. The curtains were plain green and there was no art on the walls. Two leather armchairs were the only furniture, apart from sun-bleached cushions on the window seats and a bureau.
I picked up the photograph that stood on top of it. It showed Patrick at what I guessed was his gallery, looking very seventies in a velvet jacket, sideburns and longish black curly hair remarkably like Lucas’s. He was with Thomas Parrish, one of his most famous artists, and a feline woman in a Bianca Jagger-style trouser suit. He looked slimmer but otherwise very like the Patrick I had known. He was in the middle of the shot, his arms around the shoulders of the other two. It was the classic pose of people celebrating their success. Patrick and Parrish were grinning; I suspected they’d had a few drinks. The woman’s smile was less open and although she was looking straight into the camera there was something guarded about her expression.
Lucas riffled the edge of a stack of paper with his thumb. ‘As you can see, I haven’t pulled myself together enough to sort through his stuff yet.’ The desktop was like a still life in itself. There were piles of glossy catalogues, letters, invitations, postcards advertising exhibitions. A glass ashtray full of paperclips had found the one paperless patch. I took a step back. It felt like an invasion of privacy to be in the room, let alone looking over the paperwork. It was as if Patrick had only just walked away.
That feeling stayed with me as we did the tour. It seemed as though Patrick were one room ahead of us, slipping away just as we opened each new door. I’ve never been in a house that so strongly bore the imprint of its owner. All houses give clues to the people who live in them, in the decoration and the things left lying around, the photographs, the books, the tennis rackets, but this was something beyond that. It was as if Patrick’s spirit, his energy, his fierce intelligence, the sheer scale of him, was manifested in this building.
Lucas hesitated in front of one door, his fingers on the handle. I looked at him questioningly. ‘My parents’ old room,’ he said and opened it.
We went in and stood just inside. It looked much like any of the other bedrooms on this floor, several of which he had shown me. There was a large double bed covered by an embroidered throw with a wildflower pattern, a small table on either side. The large sash window gave on to the lawns by the front door and the drive beyond that. There was a low Victorian chair by the window and a tall chest of drawers. But if the appearance of the room was unremarkable, its atmosphere was different to that of the rest of the house. It had no energy. Instead the room had a mausoleum air; it was a sad place, closed off from life. I wondered if Lucas had crept away here sometimes, to try to imagine that his parents were still here, waking up in the bed or dressing for dinner. Only two things suggested who its occupants had been. There was no evidence of Lucas’s father but on the top of the chest of drawers there was a brush and hand-mirror set and on the table to the right of the bed there was a silver-framed photograph of a smiling gap-toothed Lucas aged about seven. I didn’t want to pry by looking closer, especially when he was radiating tension beside me. Now I noticed that the throw on the photograph side was slightly rumpled, as if someone had lain down there to be closer to the person to whom the bed had belonged, to catch the trace of her old perfume on the pillows.
‘I just wanted to show you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this room used. I’ll tell the others.’
It was the perfect opportunity for me to talk to him about his mother and Patrick but again, tongue-tied, I let the moment slip away.
On the second landing we stopped and looked at the ceiling. There was no sun to illuminate it now and it looked more remote somehow, although just as beautiful. A door opened behind us and Danny appeared, damp from the bath and naked apart from a small towel tucked neatly around his hips. His body was slim but with just the right amount of gym-worked muscle. I looked away, embarrassed.
‘Who’s who, then?’ he said. ‘I don’t do gods.’
‘What do you think?’ Lucas asked me. ‘I’ve never been able to work it out. Obviously the guy in the middle is Zeus but I don’t know about the women. Hera, do you reckon? But then who’s the other one?’
I looked again for details that would help me interpret it but there were none of the usual symbols, the bows and arrows or winged feet or apples. ‘There aren’t many clues, are there? When was it painted?’
‘It’s modern, actually. Mid-eighties. I was eleven or twelve when it was finished. I remember being shown the whole of it for the first time.’
‘Who’s the artist?’
‘I can never think of his name. I’m pretty sure he was American. There’ll be paperwork; I’ll find out for you.’ As he moved away, I caught the scent of him, the expensive cologne that he once told me he started wearing because it reminded him of Patrick, and a hint of cigarette smoke.
‘Lucas, the art here …’
‘I’m almost frightened by it,’ he said. ‘The responsibility.’
There was a cracking sound above our heads and we looked up. One of the windows around the base of the dome must have been open because a bird had got in and was now thrashing around in the dish of the ceiling, unable to understand how it couldn’t fly through into the false heaven beyond the painted figures. We watched as it grew increasingly panicked.
‘What can we do?’ I said.
‘I’m not sure there is anything.’ Lucas craned up. ‘It’s too high to reach, even if we had a net or something. We’ll just have to hope it finds its way back out or comes further down.’
‘I’ll get dressed,’ said Danny, going into his room.
We watched the bird for about a minute, its distress more and more obvious. Suddenly, with a great beating of wings, it swooped and for a moment I thought it had spied the open window. But instead of finding its way out, it threw itself against the glass. There was a dull thud, as if it had hit the windscreen of a car travelling at speed, and then it fell past us and landed below on one of the white flagstones. Lucas and I ran down to it.
It was clear at once that it was dead. It had fallen on its back, its legs bent up and its wings slightly splayed behind it. Its neck was twisted and it looked at us with one open bloodied eye. It was a robin. I pressed the back of my index finger against the red of its breast and felt the warmth of its tiny body. I looked round for Lucas and saw that he was some steps behind me. He was transfixed by the bird. He looked as though he was about to be sick.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked.
‘Will you clear it up?’ he asked, looking at me at last. ‘There’s a dustpan and brush and cleaning stuff in the cupboard next to the kitchen. I’m going upstairs for a moment.’ He ran up the stairs past me and I heard his feet on the landings until he reached his room on the top floor. The door closed firmly behind him.
Danny passed Lucas on his way down and reached the hall as I returned with the dustpan and some old newspaper. ‘What was all that about? Where’s he gone?’
I indicated the bird, the blood around its eye quickly starting to congeal. ‘I think it freaked him out.’
‘Not like him to be squeamish.’
We parcelled the broken body up in the newspaper and cleaned the floor where it had fallen. Danny wanted just to put the packet in the dustbin but I couldn’t. I took the door that Lucas and I had used the previous evening and went outside. The air was so cold I could taste it. I made my way gingerly down the icy steps at the side of the terrace, making sure each foot was firmly planted before moving the other. There was no handrail. When I reached ground-level, I crouched down and used the back of the little brush to dig a hole in the flowerbed that bordered the lawn. I laid the bird and its newspaper shroud gently inside and pushed the earth back over it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure why. As I stood to go back into the house, I saw Lucas watching from the window on the top floor. I raised a hand and he lifted his in response.
Lucas stayed in his room for almost an hour and so I gave up on looking round the house and sat in front of the fire with the others and read the paper. Danny lay across Martha, his head in her lap. ‘You’re getting it in my eyes,’ he said, batting at the bottom of the review section she was trying to read.
‘I’m not an armchair,’ she said.
‘True,’ he said, wriggling down further.
Michael was using the phone in the hall to ring work. Clearly his boss was aggravated by his absence from the office: I could hear the defensive tone in the polite words that reached us through the open door. I wondered what it was like to have a job that meant being almost permanently available. Despite Michael’s assertion that it was nightmarish, I thought it must be exciting sometimes to work at that level.
‘I don’t know why he puts up with it,’ said Danny, shifting slightly.
‘We can’t all be like you,’ said Martha. ‘Some of us have to make an effort.’
Danny laughed, pleased with the answer. He was the first to acknowledge that he had no work ethic at all. His quicksilver brain allowed him to do the bare minimum required of him and at the last minute. Sailing so close to the wind seemed to inspire him. At university Rachel had told us that after the sketchiest readings of texts he would come up with insights that completely annihilated the opinions of the rest of their tutorial group, who had toiled over the books for days. We suspected the same was true of his job. He never seemed to be at the office. Lucas would often get calls from him in the middle of the day from parks and cafés by the river or record shops. And yet he had been promoted way above his contemporaries at the ad agency. The quicksilver approach was ideal. Advertising didn’t need someone who laboured; it needed someone who, having stared out of the window for most of the meeting, would casually deliver the definitive slogan, the one that the public would adopt into current parlance as naturally as if it was a figure of speech handed down from their parents. He had done it twice and on two of the agency’s biggest and highest-profile campaigns, once for a vodka that was now the most ordered brand in the country and once for a new soft drink being launched in the UK by a major American manufacturer. His position as the agency’s youngest VP was assured, as was a salary I couldn’t imagine seeing before I was fifty, if ever.
We made sandwiches and ate them by the fire. Lucas was still subdued but brushed me away, saying he was fine. At a little past three o’clock, he stood up decisively. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I want to show you all the garden before it gets any darker.’
‘What are these other doors?’ asked Michael, as we went down the corridor.
‘That’s a smaller sitting room, more like a den; this one goes into the pantry, but there’s another door to it that runs off the kitchen. That’ – he pointed to the last room before we got to the outside door – ‘is the flower lobby.’
‘Flower lobby?’ asked Greg.
‘For arranging the flowers for the house.’
In the thickening afternoon light the garden was eerie. The ice hadn’t really loosened its grip during the day but I had the sense nonetheless that the garden was bracing itself once more against the coming night. There was silence.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it,’ said Lucas, looking out across it.
We picked our way down the stone steps and set off across the lawn, the compounded frost on the grass crunching under our feet. Our breath puffed out, feathered and vanished. I shoved my hands in my pockets; even with gloves on, they were quickly cold. After three or four minutes we reached the edge of the lawn and the beginning of the wood. The afternoon was more advanced under the trees. In the gloom I could make out a tangle of undergrowth and fallen branches. It was an old, natural wood; there were different types of trees and no pattern in the way they were planted. Now and again the breeze rushed the bare branches and sent them clattering above us like an ironic round of applause. I pulled my coat around me.
‘Cold, Jo?’ asked Lucas.
‘No, it just looks a bit spooky.’
‘More like something out of a fairy tale, you mean. Hansel and fucking Gretel. You could get lost in there and never be seen again. Come on, let’s go.’ Danny started to walk away.
‘The wood is one of my favourite things here,’ Lucas said. ‘If you walk in a bit, there’s a river. It’s not that wide but it’s great for swimming in the summer, really deep. You can even dive. It’s probably frozen now, though.’
‘Come on, man,’ said Danny again. ‘Let’s go.’
We followed the edge of the wood around the perimeter of the lawn until we reached the back of the house. Behind it was the walled garden I’d seen from the kitchen window and beyond that an apple orchard. Lucas took us through the kitchen garden and past two old-fashioned wooden-framed greenhouses. There was the low hum of a generator. I looked through the glass to see vines with elephantine trunks and glossy green leaves. ‘There’ll be grapes later on. He looked after them himself, wouldn’t let anyone touch them.’
The path took us to the gravel drive at the front. Lucas looked at his watch. ‘It’s a quarter to four now. I’m going to go and start cooking so why don’t you walk down to the pub in the village? We’ll have a drink in the library before dinner.’
‘Lucas, you can’t stay up here and cook on your own while we’re at the pub. Do you want me to help?’ Michael asked.
‘No, you go; I like cooking on my own. Be careful on your way back up – it’ll be very dark. You’ll be fine, though: Jo can navigate by the stars.’ He touched me lightly on the arm. ‘See you later.’ He walked up the path and disappeared through the front door.
The White Swan had the forlorn look of a place that had had its Christmas decorations up too long. There was something of the ageing showgirl about the tree in the corner: a good proportion of its needles had dropped and the wink of its lights suggested a desperate eleventh-hour invitation. Along the beams blue and purple tinsel sagged between drawing-pins. A young guy in a baseball cap and empty-looking jeans was feeding the slot machine, his left leg jiggling with the skittering of lights across the display. The publican, a tired-looking middle-aged man, made our drinks and pushed a fistful of packets of crisps across the bar. ‘You from the Manor?’ he asked and gave an upwards half-nod when we confirmed it. ‘Poor bugger.’ It wasn’t a conversation either side seemed inclined to continue so we thanked him and took our drinks to the table in the corner. I guessed that what went on at the Manor was the subject of much village speculation. At the mention of the place, the fair-haired man hunched over the paper at a small table in the inglenook looked up at once and scrutinised us. I looked back at him. His eyes were a burnt-out paraffin blue. He met my gaze and quickly returned his attention to the paper.
‘You’d think Lucas would be a bit happier about suddenly having all this money, wouldn’t you?’ said Danny, throwing his cigarettes on to the table.
‘Would you? He had to lose someone he loved to get it,’ said Rachel.
‘That was ages ago.’
‘What do you mean?’ I was horrified. ‘It was October, and Patrick and Lucas were so close. Patrick was like a father to him, you know that.’
‘Are Lucas’s parents still alive?’ asked Greg.
‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘His father died years ago, when Lucas was nine or ten.’ She looked at me, a question in her eyes. I nodded. ‘Greg, only Lucas’s close friends know this but it’s probably best if you do, too. His father killed someone.’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He was an alcoholic,’ I said. ‘The day he died he was drink-driving. He hit someone, then crashed the car.’
‘Lucas won’t ever talk about it. His mother died last year, in the summer. She had cancer,’ I said.
‘Jesus. The poor man,’ said Greg.
‘He won’t talk about his mother either,’ Danny went on. ‘They were really tight,’ he explained. ‘I mean, she was nice and everything, as much as you saw of her, but she was quite distant. It was like she and Lucas lived in a fantasy world together. It was only really Patrick they allowed near them. Bit weird.’
It was true that Lucas’s relationship with his mother had been intense but I knew that it was quite common for children, especially boys, to try to fill the place of a missing parent and become a surrogate adult. It was also true that he had never talked much about Claire. Part of the reason, I suspected, was because he was very protective of her but sometimes in the past, when I had tried to bring up the subject and he deflected my questions, it occurred to me that perhaps by not talking about her he was almost selfishly keeping her to himself, making sure that no one else could know her or own her as he did. He was proud of her and her books – there was another full collection of them in the drawing room at the house, the titles large in their angular gothic script – and his own ambition to write was inspired by her. But she had been very reserved and at times I wondered whether Lucas might not have been more confident and easygoing if he’d had a mother with a lighter heart.
‘Lucas is just quite private,’ I said, feeling the need to defend him. ‘His mother and Patrick were his world.’
‘I think that’s a bit reductive,’ said Danny. ‘What about us? I’ve been friends with him for years.’
‘Was his mother successful?’ Greg asked. ‘As a writer?’
‘Depends what you mean by successful,’ I said, watching as he curled his hands around his pint glass, his hand able almost to span it. ‘She had a following but most of her fans were adults. The books are actually very sad. There’s always a missing parent – normally a missing father. And they’re really dark. She didn’t make much money, though, which is why having all this is a bit of a shock for Lucas.’
‘Who did he spend Christmas with?’ asked Michael.
‘An old friend of Patrick’s, somewhere near here, I think,’ I said.
Danny ran his hand through his indie-singer hair and surreptitiously checked himself out in the smoked-glass mirror above my head. Wherever he woke up, he liked to give the impression that he’d just fallen out of bed in a studio in Hoxton. One of the things that had always fascinated me about his appearance was the dark shadowing around his eyes, like thick and expertly applied kohl. It made his eyes especially startling. ‘Well, however you look at it, it’s an amazing old place,’ he said.
‘Do you think it’ll change him?’ Martha asked.
‘No,’ he said emphatically.
‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘Anyway, you know Lucas. If there’s anything he believes in, it’s achieving things for yourself.’
‘Why bother? He probably never needs to work again.’
‘It’s called integrity, Danny.’ Rachel laid a reassuring hand on his. I held my breath but he flashed her a smile. None of the rest of us, except Lucas of course, could have got away with a comment like that.
I lit a cigarette and took a long drag. I’d spoken to Lucas about work the evening before and he assured me that he had no intention of giving up his job. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve invested too much. Two years at law school, two more as a trainee and three since then. It would be stupid to leave before I really get anywhere. Anyway, I’ve got a point to prove.’ He grinned. ‘Patrick said I wouldn’t do it because it was too boring but I told him I wanted a normal job. Now I have to show him.’
I didn’t question his need still to do that. Although I knew I should try to talk to him about Patrick, and that maybe he was waiting for me to ask, I was finding it difficult to bring up the subject in any but the most glancing of ways. I didn’t have the equipment to do it. His bereavement moved him away from me. Not in the sense that he had become withdrawn, although he had a little. It was more that, with my family complete, I felt I didn’t have the right to try to empathise. In fact, I felt guilty for being unscathed.