At eight, just as the guests were beginning to arrive, the wood began to whisper. A sudden breeze toyed with the canopy, chasing the leaves this way and that, and raising a susurrus that could be heard as far back as the house. The few scraps of cloud that had protected the garden from the vault of the night sky were driven away, leaving the stars to prickle there coldly. The avenue of Roman candles that led round from the drive to the lawn started to spit and flicker, the flames blown out of shape, and the clusters of tea-lights here and there on walls and steps and along the windowsills sputtered and went out.
Lucas had opened a bottle of champagne at seven and I took my glass up to drink while I got ready. I had been trying to stay calm all afternoon but with little success. I was sick with nerves. I had woken that morning with a low-level thrum already established in my ears. The house was preparing itself, I could feel it. The atmosphere had been muted in the early part of the day, as if only warming up, but it was intensifying now. I kept with the others, not wanting to be alone, especially in the hall, where the beat was strongest. I had been taking long routes through the garden all day to avoid having to cross it on my own.
I showered and took my new dress out of its protective cover. It was ruby red, modest at the front but cut deeply enough at the back to hang in two low swags at the base of my spine. I had laid out my necklace on the dressing table earlier and picked it up now but found my hands were shaking too much to do up the tiny clasp.
‘Here,’ said Greg. ‘Let me do that.’
I stood still while his fingers moved gently on the back of my neck. ‘I hate seeing you like this,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry. I am trying not to worry.’
‘It’ll be all right. We’ll have fun tonight and after that things will be easier.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. I’m worried about Martha being near Danny after a few drinks or Danny taking exception to Michael’s new boyfriend. Something, probably something really minor, just blowing up out of all proportion.’
‘It’s good news about Michael’s new man, though, isn’t it?’ he said, changing the conversation. ‘That’s a positive thing. Come on, admit it, worry-wart.’
After two days of Michael being incessantly on the landline or struggling to get enough reception to send a text, Lucas had asked whom he was trying to contact with such urgency. We’d expected work, a deal he was trying to play down so as not to let it dominate his few days off, but instead he’d smiled rather shyly and said that he was seeing someone new, someone he’d met at the party to which he’d taken Martha. Lucas had demanded to know why he hadn’t said something earlier and had issued a late invitation. As the only people who knew about the history between Danny and Michael, only Greg and I had seen the potential for trouble.
I moved over to the window and saw the first guests arriving. Though I had mixed feelings for the place I resisted the idea of strangers flooding Stoneborough, puncturing the invisible shield between the house and the world outside. Although it had often seemed barely to tolerate us, so much had happened here, and that made it our place. On the other hand, perhaps fresh blood was what it needed, an influx of new people to stir the stale, overbreathed air between us, the complicated tangle of emotion and history that we had worked up over the past nine months.
It was a couple I didn’t recognise. The woman wore a dress in kingfisher blue and she shielded the front of her hair from the breeze with a hand by her forehead. They hugged Lucas and chatted to him for a few minutes before another pair appeared. Then they drifted away and walked about the garden admiring Diana’s stage-setting for the evening. From this vantage point Lucas looked high and happy.
A couple of women from the catering company were now going around wind-proofing the tea-lights by putting them in glasses, and the Roman candles created avenues and focal points here and there around the lawn, by the white wooden bench and near some late-blooming roses in the border. There was a long table laid out with ranks of glasses for champagne and two of the dinner-suited bartenders standing by, ready to mix cocktails to order. Up on the terrace tiny fairy lights were woven among the leaves of the creeper just as Diana had described.
While Greg did his tie in the mirror, I sat on the low chair and watched as the lawn began to fill with people. Even from a distance I could read the sense of occasion in their bearing. They held themselves straight, addressing each other in formal silence on the other side of the glass, like film extras providing a quiet but bustling backdrop. There were dresses in every colour, as if an upmarket florist’s had been raided for its rose reds and pinks, irises and magnolias and lilacs and deep evergreens. The skirts fluttered like the wings of exotic birds. It was an old-fashioned scene; the wind might have been blowing not across Oxfordshire but Long Island Sound and Jay Gatsby might have stepped away just a moment before.
I stood up and smoothed my own skirt down with damp palms.
‘Ready?’ he asked, holding out his hand.
I had forgotten that Greg didn’t know many of my other friends. The seven of us had grown so intertwined in the house it seemed amazing that those outside the Stoneborough circle hadn’t even met him. ‘Do you feel like a debutante at your coming-out party?’ I asked, as we went down the side steps on to the lawn.
‘More like a semi-domesticated animal being reintroduced to the wild. I like this dress.’ He slid a finger down my lower spine and under the back of the dress into the cleft of my buttocks.
‘You’re not at all domesticated,’ I said, pushing his hand away before anyone could see and instead slipping mine into his pocket with its cool silk lining.
The dark was thickening around us, the cerulean sky deepening to black. There was a string quartet playing and the wind snatched at the music, making the notes burgeon and shrink. In my ears they jarred with the house’s own pulse, which I realised with horror had carried outside its walls for the first time. Its relentless beat was infecting the garden now.
I thought of The Bacchae, Lucas’s and my favourite of the Greek tragedies, and how at the beginning the messenger describes the women of Thebes running wild on the mountain to the inspired Phrygian rhythms of Dionysus himself, that cruel, amoral god come to avenge himself on the city that wouldn’t acknowledge him. We had once seen the play in an antique amphitheatre in Greece at nightfall and I had understood how those women had lost themselves in the ecstatic rhythm of his dance. The beat was intoxicating, like a drug, both then and now here tonight. Though it had always frightened me before, out in the garden it was less civilised and calculated, more natural; there was something seductive about it, as if it wanted me to stop fighting and give in at last. Even as I thought about it, its tempo was increasing and yet instead of feeling dizzy or nauseous as I did inside the house, I was starting to feel persuaded by it. I knew I had to fight it bitterly, like someone slipping into unconsciousness has to resist sleep.
‘Hello, lovebirds.’ Danny was crossing the grass towards us, leading Elizabeth gently by the hand, as if she were a shy child. I had never seen two people more ready for their close-up. Danny’s dinner suit was immaculate – it looked brand new – and so it had fallen to his hair to carry the burden of his rumpled rock-god image for the night. It stuck up obligingly in just the right all-wrong way. Elizabeth looked so young I wondered for a moment if it could really be her. Her dress was a dove-grey silk cut low at the neckline and worn with a Nehru jacket in a pewter shade. Her hair, dark as balsamic vinegar, was down on her shoulders and parted on the side. It gave her a strangely gamine look. I watched her face for a moment as she told Greg how handsome he looked, trying to identify there some trace of the hatred I had seen in her younger self on the film Lucas had shown me. It had been the sort of hatred I imagined must leave a mark on a person, perceptible to someone who knew about it, if not immediately to everyone. She was serene, however; there was nothing in her eyes or the set of her mouth even to suggest that she was capable of such emotion. In fact, if anything, I saw signs of the softness I now knew she had but had never expected when I first met her.
‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.
I realised I had been staring. ‘No. You look lovely.’
‘Thank you. I like your dress, too. Can I see the back?’
I turned to show her and while she was distracted Greg took Danny’s arm and said quietly, ‘Take it easy this evening.’
Danny laughed and began to walk away. ‘Come on, Liz,’ he said. ‘I want to show you off.’
Before throwing ourselves into the thick of it, we took fresh glasses of champagne and tried the dim sum that the waitresses were circulating. It was a shock to realise how much had happened in the nine months that we had been so absorbed by our life at the house, as if everyone else had moved on while our backs had been turned. A guy that Lucas and I had got to know at university had accepted a job in Australia and was due to leave in a fortnight’s time, probably for ever. Sarah and Graham, two of Lucas’s fellow law trainees, had married. ‘We were lying in bed one Saturday and suddenly it seemed like the right thing to do. We got dressed and went and booked the registry office straightaway,’ she explained, holding out her hand and showing me a wedding ring. ‘Shortest engagement ever.’
‘And honestly not a way of getting out of buying two rings,’ said Graham, resting his head against hers. I laughed, knowing that I was supposed to. I felt disconnected. Things that would once have been big news to me felt distant and irrelevant, like celebrity gossip. I was nervous of introducing Greg to people who knew Rachel, sure that she would have told them the story. Although I doubted anyone would come out and say anything, I dreaded seeing judgement in their eyes. In fact, no one spoke to me about her at all and somehow that felt even worse, as though what I had done was so bad that it couldn’t even be acknowledged.
In the end it was quite by accident that I overheard someone talking about her. I was waiting at the cocktail table, behind a girl who had been in our year at Oxford but whom Lucas had always liked more than I had. She was talking to a man I didn’t know, maybe her boyfriend. ‘You know I was telling you the other day about that friend of mine? The one who’d set up a boutique in Richmond that was doing really well?’ she said in a voice both irritating for its interrogative tone and rather louder than one I would have chosen to discuss someone known to a lot of the people at the party. ‘I’ve just heard that she won an award for hottest independent fashion retailer. I can’t remember whether it was Vogue or Harper’s. Apparently she’s thinking of setting up a shop in New York now, showcasing new British designers.’
The man she was with nodded distractedly, evidently more interested in the progress of his drink, but I felt as if I had suddenly been plunged into icy water. It wasn’t that I wasn’t pleased for Rachel: she deserved to do well. It was a combination of two realisations. The first was that the others must have known and didn’t tell me. The other was the undeniable fact that Rachel was a success. The award was one thing but the thought of the New York project caused me a physical pang. In my wilder fantasies about my career, I had dreamed of being poached from a high-profile feature-writing gig on a paper in London to go and work in Manhattan. I was so far from that it felt almost hubristic ever to have entertained the thought. And yet for Rachel, it was a possibility, it seemed, and in the near future. To my horror, I felt tears pricking at the back of my eyes and I relinquished my place in the crush for cocktails and found a clear bit of lawn where I could wander undisturbed in the shadows for a minute or two.
When I had regained my composure I rejoined the throng. Lucas was more extrovert than I had ever seen him. Talking to whole groups of people, laughing, embracing new arrivals, making sure everyone had a drink, he was the epicentre of the party in a way he normally resisted. At one point in the evening, I looked over at him and he reminded me of his father on the cine, golden somehow, the camera’s cool focus. On the other hand, it was the first time I really believed in him as the owner of Stoneborough, Patrick’s rightful heir. He fitted the house now. Although he had encouraged us to think of it as ours, tonight it was his. His dinner suit was one of his uncle’s, too. There was something a little retro about the cut of it, difficult to put a finger on. Maybe the slight nip in at the waist or the almost imperceptible flare of the trousers. It had been too good to leave in the cupboard, certainly.
Martha was like a humming-bird. I saw her here and there speaking to people, never staying long with one group but moving on quickly, as if she were looking for someone. She was drinking fast and I thought that when I had a chance I would tell her to be careful. I didn’t want her to lose control tonight. Diana noticed it, too, and asked me if she was OK. I said yes, as far as I knew.
Michael brought his new boyfriend over to meet us. He was a tall, slim man with black-rimmed glasses and cropped hair that was receding slightly at the temples. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes gave him a permanent smile. ‘This is Richard,’ said Michael proudly. ‘Jo and Greg, very good friends of mine.’ Immediately, cutting through the crowd like a shark in a swimming area, Danny appeared at my elbow.
‘You must be the new boyfriend,’ he said, shaking Richard’s hand and holding it a moment or two longer than necessary. ‘Do look after Michael. He and I are very, very close.’
Michael looked horrified but Richard didn’t miss a beat. ‘I’m sorry, you didn’t tell me your name.’
Danny gave it, a small furrow appearing between his eyebrows.
Richard looked upwards with a puzzled expression, as if searching his mental archives.
‘Michael and I were an item at the beginning of the year,’ Danny prompted. I felt my eyes widen. I had never heard him even hint at it before.
Richard shook his head, as if mystified. ‘Sorry. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of you.’
Danny’s face was a mask of barely suppressed fury. He said something about leaving Elizabeth on her own and was gone. Michael laughed and squeezed Richard’s arm. ‘Thank you.’
Richard smiled at him. ‘Well, you can’t go round being intimidated by Hoxton poppets like that.’ He took Michael’s empty glass and replaced it with a full one from a passing tray. I hoped that Danny wouldn’t feel the need to retaliate.
The gong was struck for dinner. The big round noise of it filled the garden, its reverberations bouncing off the wall of the house, which loomed over us, above the side of the terrace. There was a surge into the marquee and a bottleneck formed while the guests looked at the board to find their places. I hung back, finishing my drink. The silence of a Stoneborough night had been thoroughly routed. The conversation of a hundred and fifty people melted into one sound like the rumble of industrial machinery, the occasional voice or laugh making itself heard above it. The air was thick with perfume and smoke.
Diana’s design for the decoration of the marquee was inspired. That afternoon we had dressed the tables and the shoulder-height candle-stands with the greenery that we had cut in the wood. There were candles everywhere, making the entire interior a play of light and flickering shadow. Thick church candles were clustered along the tables at the sides and each of the dining tables themselves had a clutch of them, too, offering their own flattering but untrustworthy light. We had woven ivy around them and snaked it out towards the place settings over the heavy white damask tablecloths. Tall dishes spilled grapes from Patrick’s vines, opulent and purple, the tendrils curling around the leaves we had cut with them. The arrangements of ivy and laurel looked so natural it was like the wood had seeded itself here of its own accord during the afternoon and was now growing with some crazy fervour, as if it wanted to claim the place back for the wild.
Diana and I had been into town again to look for other items to suggest the theme and had found wooden pan pipes in Oxfam. These were scattered here and there on the tables and woven in among the greenery. She had also borrowed a papier-mâché goat mask from a friend who worked in costume at the theatre and it now peered out from the tallest arrangement, at eye-level with the guests filing in to find their places, its mad stare oddly suggestive. The candlelight glanced off the cutlery and the glasses and the jewellery of the women as they moved around to find their places, weaving an enchantment that was now more than the sum of its parts, the living breathing soul of the party.
Greg and I were at the same table at dinner but he was on the other side of the round, too far away to speak to. On my right was a man whom I’d met several times before although I couldn’t remember where. It was too rude to ask. He droned on about his job and I was grateful: it saved me having to talk. Whenever I took a sip of my wine, he topped up the glass. A layer of insulation laid itself between me and the world, leaving me inside with the drumbeat it seemed only I could hear. I shut out the crowd and focused on the sound of it and it soothed me. If I gave myself over to it, even temporarily, it had a strange kind of beauty, an intricate and lovely logic. The sounds of so many people having dinner – laughter, cutlery against plates, the chinking of wine glasses – receded. I could lose myself in alcohol tonight, I thought, drown everything in glass after glass of red wine. I wanted to be oblivious and to an extent I was, to the food, the conversation. The only external thing of which I was really aware was the positioning of the members of our group. Even though my own seat faced away from the body of the room, I could feel where the others were as sharply as if a map of them had been branded into my back.
Greg came to talk to me after the pudding dishes had been cleared, crouching down next to my chair. ‘You OK?’ he asked. ‘You’re drinking a lot. You need to stay compos mentis, in case anything does kick off. Come and get some fresh air.’ I pushed my chair back and we wove our way out between the tables. The waitresses were offering coffee and cigars, and people had relaxed and were leaning back in their seats or swapping places to talk to other friends. The sound of their voices, punctuated with raucous laughter, was now approaching a roar.
Even though the entrance to the marquee was open, it was noticeably colder outside. I felt the goose pimples rise on my arms and rubbed at them. The wind, gaining strength all the time, lifted my hair and blew it around my face. It was gusting around the marquee, causing the sides to billow and shake like slack sails. We went up the steps to the terrace and sat down among the huge sheepskins and terracotta oil lamps that Diana had planned as a chill-out area for later. The air seemed purer away from the marquee and I was grateful for it. Greg pulled me towards him and brought me inside his jacket. We were silent for a minute or two.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘What are your thoughts on moving in together?’
‘Really?’
The light from the lamp played over his face, casting one side into darkness and illuminating the other, showing me one serious eye. ‘I don’t want only to see you at weekends and now and then in the week. I want to be with you properly, Jo. Share your life and have you around to share mine.’
‘That sounds very adult,’ I said, laughing a little.
‘We are adults,’ he said.
I knew that, of course, and yet in another way I think I hadn’t really known it until then. I saw suddenly that I had been stuck in my previous stage of development, like a butterfly too long in its chrysalis form. I hadn’t made any effort to move on while it was still possible to drift along without real commitments, in stasis. And this past year had been part of that, an excuse to drift a little longer and to imagine that we were a group apart from ordinary life, at least while we were at the house. I was ready to leave the group behind now. I was hungry for normal life. Normal adult life.
‘We don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he said.
I smiled. ‘I do want to. Very much.’
He kissed me gently. ‘I love you.’
From the tent there was the sound of a fork ringing against a glass and the growl of conversation slowly began to subside. I didn’t want to go back inside. It felt like a retrograde step now, when there was suddenly a huge new vista spread out in front of us. I wanted to stay where I was inside Greg’s jacket, the noise from the party like the music played over the credits at the end of a film, a reminder of what has happened but also the end of it. Reluctantly, though, we got up and went slowly down the steps. The edges were now demarcated with candles but it was a long way down for anyone who lost his footing in the dark. Greg went first, holding his hand out behind him so I could follow. I remembered the night Lucas had fallen.
Rather than create a disturbance by pushing back to our table, we stood at the back of the marquee to hear Lucas speak. He was already on his feet, holding his glass. Someone at a table near us wolf-whistled. It was a strange feeling to look at him, the focus of the room. Being the host endowed him with a sort of celebrity status. Here, again, was the Lucas that I had loved: a little diffident, generous, intelligent, handsome in an understated way. But that fond nostalgia was cut through with a red streak of nameless fear, like a ribbon of blood in water.
He took a sip of wine and began. ‘First, thank you all for coming tonight.’
‘The pleasure’s mine,’ said someone loudly, causing a laugh.
Lucas smiled. ‘It means a lot to me to see everyone here, enjoying this house. As I’m sure most of you know, last year I lost both my mother and an uncle to whom I was very close. That’s my excuse for dropping off the face of the earth for so long. My uncle – Patrick – left me this place and whenever I look around here I am reminded of him. He was hugely important to me when I was growing up and I miss him every day. I know that he would be happy if he could see Stoneborough tonight.’ He took another sip of wine. ‘The main thing this past year has made me realise is how important your friends are. You know who you are.’ He raised his glass. ‘Thank you – I’ll never forget it.’
My eyes flicked over to Danny’s table. I wanted to read his expression, to see his face as he congratulated himself on being one of Lucas’s true friends. He wasn’t there. I scanned the room quickly but couldn’t find him. As I turned back, however, I caught Lucas’s eye and he smiled.
He cleared his throat, as if preparing to deliver bad news. ‘You may also know that tomorrow is my thirtieth birthday.’ There was an ironic cheer. ‘In ordinary circumstances this would have been a dire prospect but, at the risk of being sick-making, I’m going to say that circumstances haven’t been ordinary since I met Diana again. Diana was a childhood friend of mine, and if I haven’t already introduced you to her tonight, I will. She’s the most beautiful, talented and sexy woman I know.’ He looked at me again and this time it felt like a challenge. He was staring quite openly; it must have been obvious to other people. What the hell was he trying to do? To break the contact, I looked instead at Diana. She was sitting next to him, driving the tine of a fork through the linen of her napkin, eyes down and acutely embarrassed at being the object of so much attention. ‘I’d like to be with her for the rest of my life,’ Lucas went on. Diana stopped puncturing the cloth and reached up to put her hand on his arm, making him bend down to catch the words that she murmured. ‘Apparently I’ve got to shut up now – I’m being embarrassing.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, a toast. To my mother and to Patrick and to Diana.’
After the speech, we went to find Martha. We found her talking to Michael and Richard, with whom she seemed to have formed an instant rapport as she sometimes did with people. She was laughing as we joined them. ‘Richard’s trying to set me up with a friend of his,’ she explained.
‘Have you met him? Is he nice?’
‘Yes, at the party where they met.’ She waved a hand at Michael. ‘I’m trying to tell Richard I’m not interested in a relationship at the moment.’
‘And I’m trying to tell her that’s rubbish,’ he said. ‘And John’s gorgeous.’
When the jazz started, we all danced. The music was excellent. All three members of the band looked retirement age and the navy blazers they were hotly stuffed into wouldn’t have been out of place at an old servicemen’s reunion but the music they played was jaunty and golden. The notes ran out and pushed themselves forward, eager to beguile and seduce, then took a step back, played it cool. The dance floor was soon packed. It was now very hot inside the marquee and after the first number Greg took off his jacket and slung it over the back of a nearby chair. I took my inhaler from the pocket and had two surreptitious puffs. The tension, the heat and the density of the smoke were all affecting my lungs. The formal face of the evening was now beginning to slip. People were considerably less composed than they had been three hours previously. The rivers of champagne, wine and cocktails were doing their work. I was surrounded by big leering eyes, hungry to consume every sensation the evening had to offer, the drink, the food, the music, the female flesh exposed by all the expensive dresses. The image, a sort of hideous carnival of desire, made me sick and claustrophobic. The girl dancing next to me gave up trying to salvage her chignon and let her hair fall over her shoulders with abandonment, making me think again of those bacchant women on their mountainside, shaking off the restraints of their normal lives. The hands of the man she was with ran all over her, not caring who saw.
I lasted two more songs then had to stop because of my breathlessness. I threaded my way out towards the exit and emerged gratefully into the fresh air. I stood quietly, drawing lungfuls of it and savouring the feel of the cold wind on my face and bare arms.
‘Jo.’ Suddenly Diana appeared in front of me. She had the look of a ship’s figurehead, shoulders left bare by her dress, the wind blowing her hair back from her face as if she were breasting the waves. ‘Have you seen Lucas?’
Perhaps it was my conscience that made the pulse quicken in my temples, perhaps it was some sixth sense of intensification, a subconscious realisation that the evening was narrowing.
‘Are you looking for me, Diana?’ Lucas emerged from the marquee. Greg and Elizabeth were just behind him.
‘Danny asked me to find you. He says your present is ready.’ She tried to keep her shawl under control as the wind threatened to whip it away.
Lucas looked annoyed. ‘Couldn’t it have waited until tomorrow?’ He raised his voice to make himself heard and the words billowed around us.
‘He says you’ll want to see it.’
‘What?’ He leaned in to hear her.
‘I said, he says you’ll want to see it.’
‘I don’t know what he’s got you,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He wouldn’t even tell me.’
‘Come on, then. Quickly.’
For reasons that neither Greg nor I could explain later, we followed them inside. When the front door shut behind us, it was like entering a different world again, the party disappearing as if it were only a dream, the sombre silence of the hall becoming reality. The place was in darkness except for the light from the two lamps on the low chest. The ceiling was hidden but I had the sense that the people up there were craning down to see what was going on. I could almost hear the creak of the couch as Patrick leaned forward. He was waiting.
Behind us the drawing-room door opened and Danny appeared. He was flushed. ‘Lucas,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’
I turned to look at Lucas but he was staring in the direction of the drawing room. His face was ashen. I turned again. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. Standing behind Danny was a man.
‘Justin,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Lucas,’ said Diana. ‘Your father.’