It was almost a fortnight before Lucas called to apologise. It must have been Martha who told him what had happened. I hadn’t trusted myself to in case I lost my temper. By the time he rang, though, my feelings about it, initially so raw, had hardened into a sort of resigned acceptance and I could at least think about it without the primal scream of frustration that had ripped through me at first. The disappointment, however, had not diminished; on the contrary, it seemed to be growing stronger from day to day. More than anything, my job at the Gazette now seemed entirely futile. What was the point of working there if it wasn’t a stepping-stone to something better? I no longer felt I was serving an apprenticeship but instead saw that, unless something dramatic happened, I was there for the long haul, condemned to a future of parochial stories in a run-down office with no chance of a salary that matched those of my peers. The prize had been snatched away and what I was left with was something even tawdrier than I had allowed myself to acknowledge.
I also worried about how it would change Greg’s perception of me. While I had the shot at a job on a national, I felt that I could hold my own with a boyfriend who was doing as well as he was. Now that I had been relegated to the Gazette again, I couldn’t shake the feeling that anyone meeting us as a couple would think I was riding on his coat-tails. Nothing he had said had even suggested he thought this but my own pride made me keenly aware of it.
‘Jo, I am so, so sorry,’ Lucas said now. ‘I really didn’t realise how serious it was. You should have said.’
‘I did try.’ It occurred to me that, having not worked for months, he had ceased to understand what it was like, that there were obligations and one’s personal life couldn’t come first.
‘I don’t know what I can do to make it up to you.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Are you coming up this weekend? Please come. I’ll cook something amazing. Anything you want.’ He sounded desperate but I found I didn’t care.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said. I had made a decision. I would go up to the house that weekend and I would talk to him properly. I needed to find a way to resolve the situation. I couldn’t go on like this, living my life on a piece of elastic that he had only to tug on to drag me back away from the future and into that bizarre stasis that I had started to dread.
Diana was making a stew for supper when we arrived. She was wearing tight jeans with a rainbow-striped belt and her hair was tied in an artfully effortless-looking knot at the back of her head. She kissed me hello and then returned to stir the huge pot on the stove-top. Lucas wandered up behind her and slid his hands round her hips as she faced the cooker. Even with bare feet she was almost the same height as he was, three or four inches taller than me. She took the cigarette from his lips, had a drag and put it back with a smile. She was imbued with a sultry sexiness that I willed Greg not to see. Lucas caught me watching and smiled. I looked away quickly.
But I couldn’t help watching them that evening. They had become very close very fast. The emotional intimacy had been there to start with, of course, in dormant form, but they seemed to have slipped together physically so comfortably, like a hand into a pocket. Lucas had the ease of long familiarity around her and I saw that he knew it and was enjoying the effect it had on me.
We sat at the kitchen table to eat. The double doors were open and the candles that Diana had lit had attracted a couple of moths, which she cupped in her hands and took out into the garden again. ‘I hate it when they do that,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand the idea of their wings being burnt.’
Later in the evening I left the room to go and fetch more cigarettes from the car and I met Lucas in the corridor on my way back. ‘OK?’ I asked, from habit.
‘I’m so happy, Jo,’ he replied.
Despite everything, even my anger about the job, I was jealous. It wasn’t that I wanted him: the idea of being with anyone other than Greg was unthinkable now. It was the pain of being replaced, of feeling the framework that had been around me through university and my twenties crumbling away still further.
As soon as we got up to our room that night I pressed Greg against the wall and kissed him, undoing the top buttons of his shirt and running my hand over his coarse chest hair. I tugged at the buckle on his belt with one hand, pulling my own T-shirt over my head with the other. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said into my hair.
‘Do you love me?’ I pulled his shirt out and pushed the two remaining buttons through, missing his lips in my hurry to kiss him again. He held me away from him by the shoulders, forcing me to stop and look at his face. My eyes were on his mouth, in particular on the full lower lip that I found so compulsive.
‘Let me show you,’ he said. He lifted me up and dropped me gently backwards on to the bed.
One thing that often struck me about the house was how much more we were governed by the weather there. In the city, weather influenced the view from the office window. At Stoneborough, rain changed everything.
The sound of it against the glass the next morning, even though it was as light as if the wisteria were rustling against the pane, told me that the plan to spend the day outside was off. By mid-morning it had grown in conviction. As we drank coffee in the kitchen the rain was hitting the ground with such force that it drilled pockmarks into the soil of the raised beds. ‘Weather like this either makes me all pent-up and full of energy or so idle I can hardly move,’ Diana said, watching it.
‘Which is it today?’ asked Lucas.
‘Idle,’ she said. ‘Let’s not do anything. Let’s get some DVDs out and watch them in those big leather chairs in Patrick’s study.’
Greg wanted a bath so I offered to go into Oxford to pick up the DVDs, glad to have the time alone to order my thoughts. Before I went, though, there was something I wanted to check. Making sure there was no one else around, I slipped into the library and closed the door behind me. The atmosphere in there was muted, not hostile but not friendly either. I had the paranoid sense now that the house was conserving its energy, biding its time. Moving one of the ladders along, I scanned the shelf until I found what I was looking for: the George Eliot novels. Sure enough, Middlemarch was missing, the other volumes pushed together to hide its absence. Bloody Danny: he couldn’t even buy her a book.
It was strange to drive Greg’s car, like borrowing someone else’s shoes and feeling the shape of their feet rather than one’s own. I wasn’t familiar with automatics so I took the country route into town, approaching it from Boar’s Hill and parking there for a few minutes to look at the view. It was the postcard angle on the city, just its sand-coloured spires, framed by a rich canvas of green, a rural idyll with a cosmopolitan centre. Today it was hunkered down under the low wet sky. I still hadn’t worked out how I was going to raise with Lucas the fact that I couldn’t keep coming to Stoneborough all the time. I thought again about what I had said to Greg in the car-park at the hospital, that it wasn’t that Lucas wanted me any more, just that I was a symbol of the old order, which he clung to for stability. I understood that need and I also felt the pain of moving on but it had to be done. Perhaps now he had Diana he would feel he was at the beginning of a new chapter. And anyway, I reminded myself, I wasn’t severing the link between us.
On the return journey, I turned the radio off to listen to the swish of the tyres along the wet road and the beat of the windscreen wipers. The rain had set in for the day. The clouds had lowered and compacted, as if someone had smoothed a dove-grey blanket across the sky and tucked it in at the horizon. The drive was like a rain forest, the huge leaves of the chestnuts emerald green and dripping, the potholes filled with water the colour of cold coffee. Even the house itself looked changed. The stone of the façade was dark. I tucked the DVDs under my jacket and made a dash for the front door. I got soaked nonetheless.
In the end, we didn’t put the films on until late afternoon. Though it wasn’t yet six o’clock, the rain was falling so heavily that it was bringing night in early. The sky was shading to indigo and it looked less like August than one of those days in October before the hour goes forward. Up in the study Diana wandered around, looking at things. ‘I love this room. Patrick had such a good eye for design.’ She ran her finger along the top of the bureau, drawing a line in the dust. ‘You ought to ask the cleaner to do in here next week. And it’s about time you went through some of this, Lucas.’ She indicated the piles of paperwork that hadn’t been touched in all the time we’d been coming to the house. ‘I’ll help you.’
Lost in Translation was Greg’s choice and that went on first. We were about halfway through when the door cranked open and we were dragged back into real life by the sight of Danny, dripping wet and exultant. He shook his hair, sending water spinning around him. ‘Here you all are,’ he said. ‘I wondered where everyone had disappeared to. You shouldn’t leave the front door open like that. Anyone could walk in.’
Lucas stood up. ‘I haven’t seen you in days. Where have you been?’
‘You never write, you never call … You’re like a Jewish mother, mate.’
‘I was worried about you, believe it or not.’
‘Sorry, Lucas.’ His voice was sincere. ‘I was in London trying to get some stuff together for this film I’m thinking about.’ That was news. As far as I’d known, Danny had hardly given work a second thought since he’d moved to Stoneborough.
‘Were you with my mother?’ asked Diana.
‘Yes.’
In the silence Lucas turned slightly to touch her shoulder. Danny waved a hand at the screen. ‘Good film. Though I suppose it helps if you’re Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter.’
‘She’s a good director, Coppola or not,’ said Lucas.
‘Admit it, Lucas. Family talks.’ Danny shifted his weight on to the other foot. ‘Listen, mate, could I have a quick word?’
‘Sure.’
‘In private?’
Lucas sighed. ‘OK, but it’ll have to be quick. We’re in the middle of this.’ He followed Danny out and their footsteps retreated down the landing.
After five minutes Lucas still hadn’t returned so I went downstairs to make a pot of tea. As I approached the kitchen, I could hear that he had obviously had the same idea. There was the sound of the kettle nearing the boil and also voices. Something about the tone of Lucas’s made me stop. I drew back into the shadow at the mouth of the passage to the flower lobby to listen.
‘I can’t understand why you need more,’ he was saying.
‘It’s what it costs to live these days – things are expensive.’
‘But I gave you a thousand pounds last week.’
‘I know but I’ve been in London. It’s not country prices there. And I want to be able to take Elizabeth out. I can’t let her buy everything for me as if I were some sort of gigolo.’
‘You’ve got your cards. I cleared those for you.’
‘I don’t want to run them up again. I know how stupid that was. You see, I do listen to you sometimes.’
Lucas sighed. ‘Look, OK then, but I won’t be able to get it for you until tomorrow.’
‘Thanks, mate, it’s appreciated. I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the only person I can rely on.’ There was the shuffle of feet and a gentle thump, and I imagined Danny patting Lucas heavily on the back. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘how are things going with Diana?’
‘It’s early days,’ said Lucas.
‘She’s a great girl. You should hold on to her.’
It was very hard to sit through the remainder of the film. I had known Lucas was supporting Danny, he had been open about that from the start, but I had had no idea about the scale of it. A thousand pounds a week – it was hardly credible. I’d never spent that amount – I’d never had it. And Danny didn’t even have to cover rent or other domestic bills: those were all found. It certainly explained why his wardrobe hadn’t seemed to suffer in the months we’d been coming to the house and how there had been a steady stream of new shoes, new jeans, new T-shirts. But I had heard exactly how he had played Lucas: it was cynical and masterly.
As soon as I could, I took Greg aside and we went to our room.
‘Are you going to say something?’ he asked. ‘The credit-card bills were thirty thousand pounds.’
‘I don’t know. How can I? I can’t tell him that I was listening in the corridor and anyway, it’s not my business. It’s his money – he can do what he likes with it.’ I walked to the window and looked out. The garden had disappeared into the darkness but the rain was still beating across the pane.
‘Are you going to talk to him about easing up on the amount we come here?’ he said.
I turned round again, surprised. It was such a sensitive issue between us, one which, apart from my being apologetic and his being decent, we never discussed. I had told him about my decision to talk to Lucas. I wanted to show him I was ready to move on and concentrate on our relationship and I had seen that it had made him happy.
Nevertheless I hesitated now. It was infuriating but just when I had screwed up all my anger about the job and my need to loose myself from the Gordian knot into which I was tied at the house, Danny’s touching Lucas for money had prompted me to feel protective of him again. I looked at Greg, who had arranged his face into a neutral expression. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am going to talk to him. Tonight.’
I found Lucas in the library after supper. He had drawn the long tapestry curtains and the thorough darkness gave the room a winter feel. All that was missing was a fire in the grate like the one we had had on the night in January when he and I got together. He had ensconced himself in one of the armchairs and was reading, a large glass of whisky on the side table at his right hand. His hair was falling forward over his eyes and he seemed thoroughly engrossed. I watched him for a second or two, remembering all the other times I had seen him like that at university, at our parents’ houses, on holidays, in our various flats in London.
‘Lucas,’ I said, shutting the door gently behind me.
He looked up and smiled as he saw me.
‘Can we talk?’ I asked.
‘Of course. Come and sit down.’ He pulled the other armchair over so that it was close to his. ‘Do you want a drink?’
He poured me a whisky and I took a sip of it for fortification.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ he asked, when he was back in his chair. His face was full of anticipation but not, I thought, of anything that he didn’t want to hear, which surprised me.
‘This is very hard,’ I stalled.
‘Out with it.’ He smiled.
‘Lucas, I’m struggling to keep things under control. I feel like I haven’t got enough time. There are things I need to get on with now. I’m thirty soon and I haven’t got any kind of job that I’m proud of. I’m not doing myself justice.’
He said nothing.
‘It’s not that I don’t enjoy coming here …’ I broke off. ‘I just need to start devoting time to other things.’
The look on his face was no longer one of happy expectation. ‘So what are you saying? You want to stop coming?’
‘No. Of course not. I want to see you, of course I do. It’s just that I can’t keep coming every weekend, or even every other weekend.’
His expression was stony and he turned away from me to add another inch of whisky to his glass.
I don’t know what it was that compelled me to go on and broach the other subject. Perhaps it was my old inability not to talk into an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps it was simple, purely motivated concern, a need to tell him that I was worried on his behalf and still cared deeply about the things that affected him, even as I took a step away from him. Perhaps, though, it was another example of that old impulse of mine to compete with Danny, always to be a better friend than him to Lucas. Perhaps then, when I had seemed to be putting distance between Lucas and myself, I also wanted him to question Danny’s status in his life, too.
‘Lucas, are things OK with Danny?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘No real reason.’ The desire to discuss it was gone at once, vanquished by the weight of his tone.
‘There must be some reason.’
‘I don’t know. He’s difficult sometimes.’
‘It’s only you who thinks that.’ His voice was rising now and he swigged his drink away in one angry mouthful. ‘For some reason you have a problem with him and none of the rest of us understand it. I mean, what is it about him that gets under your skin so much, Joanna? Is it that I’m so close to him? Come on, if we’re being honest tonight.’ He stared, daring me.
‘I don’t trust him.’
Lucas snorted. ‘Why? What has he ever done?’
I couldn’t tell him that under his nose Danny had been sleeping with both Michael and Martha. I couldn’t tell him about the threats he’d made to me. Who would he believe, Danny with his silver tongue, or me with my known prejudice against him? I was determined to say something with some substance, though. I couldn’t bear him to think that I was motivated by petty jealousy. ‘I’m worried that he’s using you.’
It was the worst thing I could possibly have said. I realised it as soon as the words left my mouth.
Lucas reared from his chair. His whole body showed his anger, hands in fists and teeth clenched so tightly I thought he might crack them. His face was black. If I’d been a man, I’m sure he would have hit me. I shrank back and he towered over me, looming into my personal space.
‘I can’t fucking believe you, Joanna. I can’t believe you can sit there in my chair drinking my whisky and say that about Danny, the most loyal of all my friends – since school, since before I even met you. Why do you do this? Why do you insist on this over and over and over again? You’re wrong. He’s my best friend, far better than you ever were. You’ve never been loyal to me like he has.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is. Why? Are you going to tell me how loyal you are? So loyal you cheated on me?’
I stood up, feeling the floor tilt beneath me. I knew I had to get out of that room. The air was thick and inert; Lucas’s fury seemed to be burning off the oxygen. He didn’t move and I had to angle my body awkwardly to get past him. I caught the faintest trace of Patrick’s old aftershave in the air and the stronger aroma of the whisky on his breath. As calmly as possible, I walked away and pulled the door closed behind me. Then I ran up the stairs.
Greg was working but he put his laptop aside as soon as he saw me.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of the control and watching every word I say. I’m tired of being the villain and having my sin thrown in my face. I’m suffocating.’
He put his arms round me and held me but my lungs were so tight I had to stand away from him. It was as if the house had siphoned off all its air. Once I’d started to cough, I couldn’t stop. I cursed Lucas for this, for reducing me to a struggling mess of anger, frustration and guilt.
My instinct was to go outside and fill my lungs with gallon after gallon of air that had never come under the shifting taint of the house. I wanted to drive away and never return, rub at the map until it developed a hole where Stoneborough lay, making it untraceable for ever. But Lucas was downstairs and he seemed to me then like the embodiment of the spirit of the place, keeping me there, trapped upstairs. I pushed up the sash window and breathed in as much as my feeble pulmonary system would allow, as if the house were on fire behind me and I was fighting for any air that wasn’t permeated with acrid, stinking smoke. I sucked at my inhaler until I shook.
‘We’ll go first thing in the morning,’ he said.
By the time I was calmer, it was late enough to sleep. While Greg was in the bathroom, I lay alone in our bed. I turned on to my side and pulled my knees up towards my chest. At any other time I would have felt comforted in that childish position but now I felt oddly exposed. The room, for all its elegance, had the warmth and comfort of a cell. The bed stretched for feet on either side of me, and the expensive cotton sheets felt starched and cold. The ceiling was impossibly high above my head. As I looked at it, it seemed to get further away still, as if retreating into the ether and refusing to protect me.
And then I felt the boom of blood through my ears and the house’s secret pulse. Tonight it was full of gleeful victory; it was whispering about me, laughing at me. The sound now was like the skittering of a million insects, their shiny chitin shells clicking and rustling as they swarmed over one another in a shimmering tide of tiny bodies. I put my hands over my ears to block it but then it became internal, as if whatever it was had moved inside my head and was nestling into the soft tissue of my brain like a parasite. But again, its presence seemed outside me, all around me. I didn’t dare open my eyes.
As Greg’s footsteps came along the corridor, the jeering began to fade, the pulsing beat to quieten. When he opened the door I was sitting up, looking as calm as I could. I didn’t want him to see me like that, almost paralysed by a fear that became absurd as soon as there was someone else in the room. Even to me, it seemed like the behaviour of someone not very far from madness.
He turned out the light and slid into bed behind me, pulling me back against him so that we made spoons. Over my shoulder, his breath smelled of mint. I could feel the warmth of his thighs behind mine and the hair on his chest tickling my back. My pulse began to slow. I reached for his hand and put mine inside it. ‘I promise,’ I said, ‘that when we leave this place things will be normal.’
Sleep came quickly for him but it eluded me yet again. I had feared the return of the terrible pulsing but it wasn’t that that kept me awake. Downstairs Lucas was drunk. The sound of his voice reached up through the house like a cold hand. My parents hadn’t argued much when I was a child but on the few occasions they had I remembered feeling like this as I lay in my bed, remote from it and unable to catch the words, my heart clutching with fear that what was going on between them would spin out of control and change my world.
Finally he stood in the hall and shouted. I hadn’t heard him so drunk since the night we split up; his voice swooped and then soared again, filling the centre of the house. I heard my name and Greg’s and angry imprecations. Suddenly, just as I thought I couldn’t bear it any longer, it stopped and there were racking sobs. Then, gentle, there was Diana’s voice as she led him away.
We woke to a wide bright sky. The rain had cried itself out and the asthmatic tension that had bound the house had relaxed a little, although I could still feel it, pulling at the edges of my lungs with the power of an unhappy memory.
When I slept on an argument I often woke to find that the vehement convictions of the night before had evaporated like pure spirit. Today my determination to leave was as strong as it had been when I eventually slept. We packed as soon as we woke.
Downstairs there was no sign of Lucas or Diana but the kitchen doors were open into the garden. We walked out and followed their voices through the wrought-iron gate into the orchard beyond. There was the low hum of insects in the espalier trees along the back wall and the warm breeze was freighted with the scent of ripening pears. It was too benevolent a day.
From the gate, only their legs were visible; their upper bodies were concealed by the rustling foliage of the lower branches. On the ground were large bowls from the kitchen, some already filled with huge green apples. The sun hadn’t yet burnt off the rain and the bottoms of my jeans were quickly soaked by the ankle-length grass. They both saw us approaching, I knew it, but only Diana acknowledged us.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘These are ripe. We can have an apple pie this afternoon.’
Her tone seemed innocent of any knowledge of an argument. I wondered whether it was her policy for peacemaking, just to pretend that nothing had happened.
‘Lucas,’ I said. ‘We’re going to go now.’
A long moment passed before he answered. At last he stepped back and faced me. As he moved he brushed a low branch and dislodged a shower of rainwater, which fell into the long grass. His hangover was clearly giving him hell: he looked as if he might have to turn away and throw up at any moment. His skin had a clammy pallor at odds with the beauty of the morning.
‘I’m going to have a party,’ he said suddenly.
‘A dinner party?’ said Diana brightly.
‘A proper party. For my thirtieth. The second Saturday of September. I’ll have it here and I’ll invite everyone. Everyone we’ve lost touch with this year. Friends, friends of friends, their friends. An enormous party. We’ll have a marquee on the lawn, dinner and dancing. It’s relatively short notice but we’ll manage. I’ll throw money at it.’ He reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. He lit one, turning his head away.
He looked at me intently, all his focus on selling me the idea. ‘In a way it’ll be our party, not just mine. A celebration of our time here. It’ll probably be one of the last decent weeks of weather. You haven’t had any holiday, have you? Come up for a couple of days beforehand. We’ll go out on a high.’
Our friendship, our years of shared history and everything it had meant to both of us hung like his smoke in the air between us. Allow me this, he seemed to say, and after that you’re free to go. Let us mark the end of our decade.
‘OK,’ I said.