The House at Midnight (5 page)
'Lucas ...'
'Mum kept looking for him. She wouldn't give up. After two or three years Patrick told her that she should stop and that she was hurting herself by refusing to believe he was dead, in the face of all the evidence. He thought it would be best to have him declared dead so she could at least get some closure on it but she wouldn't do it, just in case. In the end he said the one thing that could convince her.'
'What?'
'That Dad had to be dead because if he'd been alive he would have come back to her. She knew that was true. Even if he had had to lie low for a while, he would have found his way back to her.'
My eyes were full of tears. 'Why haven't you ever told me this?'
'Because it was easier not to. Because I was ashamed. I mean, if you're killed in an accident, even if you cause it, it's out of your control, isn't it? But if you kill yourself, it's worse for your family. He abandoned us by choice. We still loved him but he chose to leave us.' He looked up and I saw that his eyes were wet, too. 'I always used to wonder whether, if I'd been different, he might have thought I was worth staying for.'
'Oh Lucas, don't think that. It's not true.'
'I find it so hard that everyone wrote him off as an alcoholic waste of space. I still loved him. He was still my dad. And now Patrick's done it, too.'
I held him silently, feeling him tremble through the layers of shirt and jacket. Over his shoulder I looked out into the darkness that had settled over the room like mustard gas. I had been completely uprooted by the evening: first the seismic shift in our relationship and now this new revelation. I tried my old trick, attempting to anchor myself in the real world by concentrating on the solidity of material things but the room seemed unwilling to help me. The furniture wouldn't pull itself out of the darkness. It stayed back, identifiable only here and there where the gleam of the fire and the candles landed on it. I hadn't imagined it. There was something here, in the house, something unhappy. I felt a sudden need to protect Lucas from it and what it might do to him. And us. On the one hand, the house had finally brought us together. But on the other, it was the cradle for this terrible secret. I could only hope that it didn't have the power to destroy what it had so recently created. Although this had taken me by surprise, I wanted us to have a chance.
My office was on the first floor of a purpose-built sixties block on a side street in Putney, about ten minutes' walk from the river. I smiled at the girl at the desk as I crossed the entrance hall to the stairs. I didn't recognise her but that was nothing new: the receptionists for our building were temps on the whole, mostly Australians and Kiwis who did two or three weeks and moved on, either to another job or another city. I wondered sometimes what it would be like to drop everything to go travelling but I knew I never would. The office was on a street of small local shops but now and again in my lunch hour I walked down to Putney Bridge and looked east over the muddy water racing under me to the City. Even as a child I had wanted to work on Fleet Street, in the days when the printing presses shook the ground itself in the afternoons. By the time I was old enough to work in newspapers, their offices had moved further east to Wapping and Canary Wharf but I hadn't yet given up on the idea.
If the receptionists were temporary, upstairs it was a different story. The editorial staff of the
Putney Gazette
was long service personified and even with my three years there I was the new girl. The editor, Stephen Thomas, joined shortly after I did, which meant, unhappily, that he regarded me as part of the recalcitrant old guard.
The paint on the wall up the stairs was scuffed, which I hadn't noticed before. In fact, the whole place needed painting. I pushed open the door to the office. Somehow I expected it to have changed in the ten days I'd been away over Christmas, shifted on its axis in the same way as other aspects of my life had, but it was all exactly as it had been, even down to its smell, the aroma of gently ageing newsprint.
I stayed at the
Gazette
because I was determined to wrest some career benefit from my time there. After university I hadn't been able to afford to do the year's post-grad journalism certificate so I'd got a job on a magazine for people in the travel industry. The staff there were nice but after a couple of years I'd woken up to the fact that I was still doing the listings pages and not a lot else. I started looking around and finally got my junior reporter's job at the
Gazette.
Having managed it, it now seemed stupid to leave without at least having a decent selection of cuttings to show a new employer. My mother, who applauded tenacity even in situations where most right-thinking people would cut their losses, agreed that staying was the thing to do. Over Christmas, however, my father had poured me a sherry and asked whether I'd seen any jobs worth applying for. He would never say as much but it had been enough to tell me he was disappointed I wasn't making more progress.
I sat down at my tiny Formica desk and switched on the computer. Jane was standing on a wobbling chair taking down the cards from local businesses and advertisers and tossing them into the bin.
'Good Christmas?' I asked.
'Very nice,' she said. 'We had my mother over and then we spent New Year in Reading at Terry's sister's.'
I told her I'd spent the holiday in the New Forest with my parents. It was largely the truth. In the office the memory of my New Year at Stoneborough became surreal. That house, the art, the grounds, getting together with Lucas - it seemed like a fantasy even to me; it would sound ridiculous spoken about here among the cheap office furniture and the pervasive second-best atmosphere of the place.
I often felt that I was living my life in a lift stuck between floors. On the one hand there was the world of the office and also of my family that, although well-read and liberal, was cash-limited by my parents' teaching careers. On the other were some of my friends with their money and the sophistication that had been second nature to them by eighteen. The savoir faire that Danny had had at university eluded me even now. Initially, fresh from Hampshire and feeling green, I put it down to his having grown up in London but I had isolated other sources from which the sophisticates had drawn their self-assurance. The most obvious was money, of course. Lucas had never been like some of the others and I attributed part of that to his not having grown up rich, with the associated expectation of how the world should treat you.
I opened Outlook. Apart from spam, there were no new emails in my inbox; the most recent were to do with family arrangements and meeting friends for drinks before the holidays. It already seemed a long time in the past. I was disappointed not to have a message from Lucas confirming dinner that evening but told myself firmly that he must be very busy.
After the meeting to discuss the week's paper, I started writing up the most recent wedding reports, the sort of undemanding job I could do when I was thinking about something else. Since Lucas had told me about Patrick and his father, I had been turning the information over in my mind as if it were a Rubik's Cube. It wasn't hard to understand why his father committed suicide: after all, he'd killed a man. Patrick, however, was a mystery. Lucas had said little beyond what he'd first told me. I had lots of questions but it hadn't seemed right to ask them.
I thought about Patrick's memorial service in November. It had been a wet day in London, the sky sodden, the grey of the clouds a perfect match for the drab concrete of the buildings and the wet streets. A gusting wind had made carousels of litter and snatched at the hats of the women who gathered on the steps outside St Thomas's in Mayfair, five minutes' walk from the gallery on Cork Street where, four weeks earlier, the man whose life they had come to remember had been working. The church had been full, to the point where latecomers had no choice but to stand at the back. I wondered how many of them had been real friends. The newspapers had been running the story all week: the charismatic kingmaker of the art world brought low. The archives had yielded enough material to whip the mid-market tabloids into a moralising frenzy, Patrick's suicide painted as the only fitting end for a life such as his. I'd read the pieces every day, furious for Lucas that something that affected him so deeply could be offered up for the entertainment and self-satisfied judgement of those who had never even met Patrick. So what if he had been extravagant? He'd made a lot of money at an age where he'd wanted to enjoy it. What if his group had always been surrounded by women? And perhaps one of his artists had been a heroin addict; surely that couldn't have been unique in the art world?
We had all taken the day off work to support Lucas. Rachel and Michael were sombre but Martha was angry and I had to tell her to keep cool about the paparazzi standing on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, their cameras hungry for the famous faces they knew would come. 'Bloodsucking bastards,' she said. 'He's dead. Isn't that enough?'
I hovered near Lucas as he welcomed people and thanked them for coming. Among the impeccably dressed and wealthy, there were several prominent figures. I saw a very well-known Labour MP and a former BBC foreign correspondent, as well as Louis Finch, the hot black actor everyone was talking about. There were also a number of elegant women who looked familiar but who I couldn't name. III at ease in the formal clothes required by the occasion were a number of bohemian-looking types who I took to be artists, either Patrick's own or friends of his. There was also the cleaning lady from his London house whom I had met when I went to meet Lucas there once. She gave him a hug.
Danny was great that day, I had to admit. He was restrained but efficient, handing out orders of service and showing people to their seats, even if the level of his involvement did cause some confusion. 'I'm so sorry for your loss,' I overheard one of the glamorous middle-aged women say to him. 'I know how close you were.'
'Thank you,' Danny had said seriously before catching my look over her shoulder and hurriedly moving away.
Inside, a dim underwater light had filtered through the stained-glass windows but did little to illuminate the dark wooden pews and many unlit recesses. It smelt richly of dust and the Establishment; I could imagine Patrick undercutting the formality of it all with a levelling remark. Lucas gave a tribute and my heart had ached for him as he stood at the lectern in front of all of those people, holding it together for them when it was he who was most in pain, now left completely alone in the world by his family. I had tried not to notice the tremor in the paper on which he had written his notes.
I hadn't known much about Patrick's previous life apart from the few facts that had made their way into the newspapers; he seemed like someone who had been born just as he was. It had almost been a surprise to find that there had been a process involved in becoming that version of him. From Lucas's tribute I learnt that Patrick had grown up in Northampton shire, one of two sons of a local businessman, and had been educated at grammar school and then Cambridge, where he read English. Shortly after university he met Simon Harcourt, who had started work on his
Elysium
series of oil paintings. Patrick offered to represent him and when Harcourt became a success, other artists began to approach him. Lucas described Patrick as the first of a new breed of art dealer, an entrepreneur who had set up his gallery by his mid twenties, championing off-beat unknowns and making them stars. One of his proteges, as I had known, was Thomas Parrish, a major British player of the seventies and eighties, whose work hung in Tate Modern.
'Come on, wake up. You've got to stop daydreaming, Joanna,' said Stephen, as he dropped a batch of local-council documents on my desk. 'About the pedestrianisation of South Street. Not particularly exciting but all part of serving an apprenticeship, eh?'
I had to go, I thought, picking up the papers. This had to be the year I left the
Gazette.
My apprenticeship had become an elephant's pregnancy.
The place Lucas had chosen was in Soho. There was a small reception area at street-level but the restaurant itself was at the bottom of a long flight of stairs. It had clearly been a cellar of some sort originally; the room consisted of small alcoves serviced by a central hub from which the waiting staff operated. The murmur of voices and some gentle oriental music were the only things I could hear. It was a classic seduction venue and the thought both horrified and thrilled me.
I was shown over to an alcove in the corner. Lucas was waiting for me, his dark head bent over the wine list. He had come straight from work and was wearing a suit, a look that I liked on him, although it impressed me less on other men. Lucas looked as if he had just come out of a successful meeting. Danny, on the other hand, who wore anything else with panache, always looked like a young offender before a court appearance if he wore a suit. Lucas stood as he saw me, smiled and gave me an ambiguous kiss close to my mouth. I made to sit on the couch opposite but he moved along and indicated that I should sit next to him. I lowered myself down carefully.
We made small talk in a way that I couldn't remember us ever having done before. Scrutinising the handwritten menu self-consciously, I felt a twinge as I realised the prices weren't included on it, then made a decision just to enjoy it and eat toast for the rest of the month if necessary.
'What do you think of it?' he asked, as our waiter silently retreated, having taken the order that Lucas, as the knowledgeable one, had given him.
'The restaurant? Wonderful - it's like having supper in a shrine.'
He picked up his napkin and pulled it out of its ring of woven reed. 'I came here with Danny once, a few years ago.'
'Danny?'
'You know what he's like. It was when I was at law school and really strapped. He'd just got that massive pay rise, do you remember, a couple of months after the vodka campaign? He used to take me to all sorts of crazily expensive places.'
'He's such a show-off,' I said. I had my own views on why Danny was so lavish towards Lucas. He'd once even taken him to Barcelona for a week. While I didn't doubt that he meant to be generous, I also suspected that he used his money as another way to promote his role as the senior partner in their relationship. I knew I did something similar with my younger brothers, albeit on a much smaller scale. While it was lovely to be able to treat them occasionally, it also made me feel good that I was in a position to do so.
'He's just over-generous. Now he won't have to be generous with me any more. But I'm glad he brought me here. Otherwise I wouldn't have known about it and I've had this fantasy since about coming here with a woman I was in love with.'
'So are you a regular?' I said, hoping that the jokiness of my tone would mask the seriousness of the question. It was a risk but I had to be sure.
'No.' If I hadn't known better, I would have described the expression that ran across his face as disappointed. 'This is the first time.'
'Flatterer,' I said, in my relief.
'That's not flattery.' He fixed me with one of his candid looks. I stared at him, unable to break eye contact. I was beginning to feel as if I were being fitted for new contacts, an optician dropping different lenses in front of my eyes every two seconds. Whenever I was getting used to the situation, Lucas upped the stakes. I wasn't sure how it worked, getting together with someone whom you'd been close to for a long time. Could you say straight away that you were in love?
'Jo.' He took my hand. 'I know this is all happening very quickly and I don't expect you to tell me that you love me but do you think you could fall in love with me?'
I looked at his large honest eyes and saw the entreaty in them. I thought of his kindness and his warmth and how much I had wanted him. 'Yes,' I said. 'I do.' A huge smile lit up his face.
The waiter brought over the first of our dishes, tiny spring rolls and dumplings like purses tied up with chives. I took a spoonful of the sweet chilli sauce.
'Can I ask you something?' I said.
'What is it?'
'Do you promise not to be insulted?'
'Within reason.'
'Is all this because ...'
'Patrick's dead and I'm grieving?'
'Yes.'
'I wondered whether you would think that. I thought about it myself. I've tested myself - that sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? - to see if I think about this more when I feel really low. And I don't.' He took a sip of wine. 'I did think about you when it was bad and it helped. But I felt better just knowing you were around. I know some people might think that a romantic thing is a stronger tie than friendship but I don't, not with you. You're my best friend.'
