When I try now to think back to the week after that party, I find I have almost no recollection of it. It is as if all my mental energy then was concentrated on attempting to assimilate what had happened, leaving nothing left over for the laying down of memory. What I have instead is a sort of impression of that time, one that is physical rather than mental. It manifests itself as a creeping feeling, a coldness over my skin and the contraction of my stomach muscles. It is like the nameless fear that comes at four o’clock in the morning, in the blackest minutes, when it seems the sun might never rise again.
When I have made myself analyse it, I find it has at least three separate strands. One of these, and in many ways the most straightforward, was the sheer difficulty of grasping the fact of Justin’s return, his resurrection. The jaundiced, sickly picture of him haunted me. He seemed to me then – and still does – like a warning, a salutary example like the ones found in old-fashioned books written to scare moral lessons into children. Or perhaps he is more like a character from Greek mythology. There was something Promethean about him, certainly. I have always thought that that punishment was one of the most horrible in all the Greek legends, the relentlessness of that one act of theft being repaid with an eternity of pain born anew every day.
Thinking about Patrick was far worse. I tried in vain to find a way to reconcile this new version of him with the man I had known. It was like listening to two different pieces of music playing simultaneously in one room. I couldn’t conceive of how a person could live with the sort of secret that he had had for all those years, could conduct the business of a life – earning a living, sleeping, eating – while at the base of it all was the knowledge that he had blackmailed his own brother and then abandoned a man, a man completely innocent of any involvement, to die like an animal at the side of the road. How had he been able to be close to his brother’s wife and child – to hold them the very afternoon of the accident, as Lucas had told me that he had?
The only thing that I found in common between the two Patricks was scale. The Patrick I knew had been epic, an Atlas of a man who seemed to carry the world so lightly, so able to deal with the magnitude of it, to be a key figure in many lives, even in mine. The second Patrick had also been mighty, mighty enough to have carried a secret that would have crushed others under its weight and never to have shown the strain. It was a terrifying power and to think about it too hard was to look into places darker than I had ever wanted to see.
Patrick had cast his shadow over our world and now I wanted to run from under it. I wanted to be free of that miasma, the sickening fallout of what he had done, raining down on everything that he had touched and polluting it even now, after twenty years and his death. I wanted to be free of the knowledge that I had liked him and admired him. I had held him up as an idol, the urbane, artistic exemplar of everything I aspired to be and now I wanted to forget that he had ever existed.
The major element of my impression of that time, however, was fear for Lucas. I knew he would be tormented by the knowledge of what Patrick had done, his surrogate father, the man who had made himself indispensable to Claire and worked himself into the substance of their lives like a death-watch beetle. And at the very time he was most vulnerable, he was also presented with his father and his broken, starving need.
I had expected him to be in touch, to want to talk, but there was nothing, no communication at all. I couldn’t decide whether to ring him. On the one hand, I felt compelled to, both by my anxiety and by a pressing sense of duty, but on the other, his silence seemed to indicate that he wanted to be left alone, to be given space to try to come to terms with what had happened. I thought of ringing Diana as a way of getting news while also keeping my distance. I realised, however, that I didn’t have her mobile number; she had never needed to give it to me. I tried ringing directory enquiries for Elizabeth’s cottage in the village but she wasn’t listed.
It is a terrible thing to admit but as that week began to slip into the next, I was glad that the silence continued. I would have been ashamed to tell anyone, even Greg, how much I wanted the responsibility for Lucas to be lifted from my shoulders, the long task finally to finish. I wanted to move on into the world whose threshold was now under my feet, the one Greg had opened up. But I also wanted to put as much distance as possible between us and Stoneborough. Despite everything that had happened, the dread I felt at the thought of the place still seemed potent, not a memory attached to a situation now resolved. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house still had business with us.
Danny was the person it would have been possible to contact. I brought up his number several times but when I saw his name displayed on the screen I couldn’t call it. I just couldn’t bring myself to talk to him. Although I knew that Justin would have found his way to Lucas sooner or later, I held Danny entirely responsible for the high theatre of his appearance at the party, the hideous finale. It fitted Danny’s conception of how life should be, a series of intense experiences to be milked for sensation then forgotten, but this latest piece of puppet-mastery was hard to forgive. The alarm I had seen in his eyes when Lucas saw his father for the first time told me that he’d had no idea of what Justin would tell Lucas but he hadn’t even seemed to have anticipated the profound effect Justin’s reappearance itself would have. His presentation of Justin as a birthday gift was almost psychopathic in its complete failure to understand its potential impact. This time he had miscalculated wildly in the pursuit of his desire to be the person who made the difference in Lucas’s life.
It was nearly three weeks before Lucas called. I was at Greg’s flat getting ready to go to bed when my mobile rang. As soon as he spoke, I could tell he was drunk. ‘Jo?’ he said, his voice thick.
‘Lucas.’ I didn’t know what to say.
He was trying unsuccessfully to suppress tears. ‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said.
‘I don’t know if I can forgive him, Jo.’ He sobbed and tried to swallow the sound of it. ‘I’m trying but in a lot of ways I hate him. When he went, I used to pray he’d come back. I used to make bargains with God – if I get the best mark in the exam, Dad won’t be dead. If I can make Mum happy, he’ll come back.’ He choked. ‘And now he’s here, I wish he’d stayed lost. He’s pathetic. But none of that is anything compared to Patrick. Jesus – for twenty years I let him be a sort of dad to me. It’s fucking sick. What kind of evil bastard was he? And we let him into our lives. With our arms wide open.’
He was raging and although I tried, there was nothing I could do to calm him. Eventually he started sobbing so hard he couldn’t speak at all and he hung up without saying goodbye.
I heard nothing the next day so after work I called the house. Diana answered on the third ring. She sounded flustered. It was early evening, maybe half-past seven, but she told me that Lucas was asleep and she hadn’t wanted the sound of the telephone to wake him.
‘He’s finding it difficult,’ she told me, when I asked. ‘He’s started seeing his father a bit but it’s going to take a lot to build up trust between them again. I just hope he can keep it together. Danny’s spending a lot of time with him; he’s cut right back on the amount he sees my mother. I think he’s trying to be especially supportive, to make up for bringing Justin here like that.’
She sounded tired and I asked if she was all right.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, then hesitated. ‘Actually, Jo, it’s hard. Lucas is drinking and he’s quite bad-tempered. I’m trying not to make a big thing of it because I know he has so much else going on but it isn’t easy. He’s got terrible insomnia, too – that’s why he’s in bed now. He can’t seem to sleep at night. He says that he lies awake and all he can think about is how he’s surrounded by everything that’s happened and it’s choking him. He said he feels like it’s sucking the air out of his lungs.’
I could imagine it. Even the thought of the house now induced in me a wave of that claustrophobic feeling, the sickness and shortness of breath. The hideous drumming of the night of the party that hadn’t faded until we were out of the village. I never wanted to experience it again. I thought of Patrick’s terrible triumphant eyes looking down on everything that happened within those walls.
‘He’s got to sell the house,’ I said. ‘He’s got to sell it and get out. He shouldn’t be there any more.’
‘He won’t hear of it. I suggested it and he got angry with me. He thinks he’s tied here, that there’s some bond between him and the house. And he’s watching the films constantly. I think he associates them and the house with that time – when it all started to go wrong.’
After that first time, Lucas called me often, almost always late at night and always drunk. The conversations varied. Sometimes he was angry and he railed against Patrick and his father with a corrosive bitterness. Sometimes he was in the grip of a deep depression and spoke of how he was unpicking his memories of Patrick now and sewing them up again with different thread. I answered every time or, if I’d been unable to for some reason, I rang him back as soon as I could. The calls made me hollow with sadness, partly because of my powerlessness to help him. Time seemed only to be making the situation harder for him, as the weeks passed and there was no sudden deus ex machina to give an alternative version of the story, one in which Patrick and his father were redeemed. All there was was the dull realisation that these were the facts that he would have to live with for the rest of his life.
There were times, too, when he would go on long melancholic rambles through our past. It was as if he had a rosary between his fingers and all our memories were beads on it. He would ask me whether I remembered the time we went skinny-dipping in November or the dinner we’d co-hosted in London that had started on a Friday and finished on Sunday night. It wasn’t just the drunken escapades or the running jokes or the episodes of bad behaviour to which he went back. Often the times he remembered were the quiet ones, the hours in the university library burning the midnight oil before finals or lying on the grass among the remnants of a picnic in the University Parks afterwards, the times when we’d been so close, in such harmony that we had hardly needed to talk at all.
* * *
In a polarisation that seemed especially cruel, my relationship with Greg was making me intensely happy. I could swing from an extreme of helpless anxiety about Lucas to the sort of euphoria that made me grin at strangers in the street. It was a sort of energy that I could tap into at any time just by thinking about him. In fact I wonder whether, if it hadn’t been for that potent source of joy, I would have been able to listen for so long without being slowly eaten away by Lucas’s misery.
Something else that made me happy was that Martha, too, seemed to be enjoying life again. Despite her initial protestations that she wasn’t interested, Michael and Richard had set her up with Richard’s friend John. Her affair with Danny had made her cautious but it was obvious that she was starting to fall in love with John, and he with her. The first time she invited him round for supper I had seen how he watched her as she laughed and moved about the kitchen. He was a banker but about as far removed from the straight, conventional stereotype as it was possible to imagine. His face moved with a kindly mischief that matched hers.
As the year drew to a close Greg and I spent our Saturdays visiting estate agents and looking round houses. Eventually, after seeing countless shabby places, we found a flat that occupied the top two floors of a tall house in Kilburn. Once we’d put in our offer, things happened quickly and by the middle of December we were able to move in.
‘Isn’t it a bit adult?’ Greg teased, after we went to sign the contracts. ‘Buying a place with me?’ It hadn’t even occurred to me. The only part of the process that had caused me the faintest touch of anything apart from excitement was how much larger his contribution to the down-payment had been. The savings I had been able to make from my salary at the Gazette over the years were negligible: the sum I had put in was less than a tenth of the whole.
Even though we weren’t going to spend Christmas there, I put up some holly and hung a big sprig of mistletoe from the light fitting by the front door. Whichever one of us was home from work first that week would race to the door as soon as we heard the other’s key and wait, poised, under it. It was often a while before we were in a position to start cooking supper. We made love all over the flat, in amongst all the stuff we hadn’t yet unpacked, the bags and boxes that carried the things we brought from our separate lives to the one we were building together.