What Red Was Read online

  It was only when they were halfway through a game of 21 that it occurred to Max that perhaps he shouldn’t be playing cards with his gambling uncle, but by this point Rupert was on a roll, and Max was putting up just enough of a fight for his uncle to be taking real pleasure in beating him. They kept on playing until Rupert’s eyes got tired, and he said that the headache was beginning to return. He sank back into his bed, and Max passed him a plastic cup filled with water.

  “You can keep these,” Max said, putting the cards back in the pack.

  “Solitaire,” Rupert said. He closed his eyes and grimaced. “I can smell the fumes from those fucking apricots from here. I suppose I should eat them.” He opened his eyes and looked at Max directly. “I’m going to tell you something, Max, because I know nobody else will.”

  Max leaned forward.

  “If, in your old age, you are unlucky enough to have to have a serious operation, it’s vitally important that you know the general anesthetic gives you the worst fucking constipation you will ever have in your life.”

  Rupert sighed, dragging the plastic box of grapes toward him.

  3

  It was October, and Zara was taking the evening train from Paddington to Stroud for her mother-in-law’s birthday. Because this year was Bernadette’s eightieth, celebrations were imposed on the Rippon family even more forcefully than usual. Nicole and William had set off from London that afternoon, but Zara had been in development meetings all day, and would be the last to arrive. The concourse was packed with commuters, and she sat outside a café, the peak of a cap borrowed from her daughter’s wardrobe pulled low. It was rare that she was actually recognized in public, but she liked to have her eyes covered, to see more than be seen.

  Whenever Zara took the train to Gloucestershire to see William’s family she traveled first class. This little luxury meant she could board at the last minute, and that she could delay stepping off London soil for the countryside for as long as possible. When the train was four minutes from departure, she drained her coffee and made her way up the platform. William had messaged from Bisley to ask her to bring flowers, which he’d forgotten to pick up that afternoon, so Zara had bought a bunch of lilies from the supermarket in the station, stripping off the plastic cover and the label to disguise their source. The long-stemmed flowers, with her heavy bag, had the advantage of taking up the majority of her table and so warned off anybody who might try to share it with her.

  Zara liked this first part of the journey, when the train passed familiar London landmarks: the car park in Royal Oak whose outer walls were pale pink concrete set with high white slabs that looked like tombstone teeth, the graffitied fence surrounding the tower block in whose shadow she walked daily on her way to the Tube. Here, she was seeing the city in negative, its underside exposed, stripped of the pedestrian’s intimacy but somehow, to her, more vulnerable. Zara had been born in Marrakesh, where she lived with her parents for several years until they moved to an apartment in Paris’s seventh arrondissement. Grandeur was the preserve of a city, and Zara did not think she would ever comprehend the desire to inhabit these spaces outside of it. Reaching the edge of London made her feel anxious: the horizon gave her a kind of vertigo. She took a beta-blocker from the packet she had borrowed from Nicole’s medicine cabinet. She put on her glasses, which at least gave her some means of framing the expanse of land she could see from her seat next to the window. It unnerved her to be stranded in this wide, boundless place.

  The pill had only just begun to take effect when the train pulled into the station—her heart was at least beating a little less violently—but in the back seat of the taxi to Bisley she closed her eyes as the driver took her, at a mercifully unhurried pace, through the narrowing lanes.

  * * *

  —

  The large iron gates to Bisley House were closed, and when the taxi pulled up outside Zara could smell woodsmoke on the fresh autumn air. She paid the driver and got out, pushing open the gate and leaving tracks in the gravel as she dragged her bag to the front door. Bernadette’s gardener had chopped and stacked logs in the open garage next to Gregor’s old Porsche and strung fairy lights across the driveway to the front of the house. It was dark, and the light behind the curtains of the living room was the soft, flickering light of the hearth. Zara opened the front door without knocking: Bernadette never locked it, even when she was out. However impressive the house’s exterior, inside it would always remind Zara of the setting of one of those depressingly English postwar films in which soldiers return from the battlefield to the homes of their wealthy families to drink tea and repress their trauma. The rooms were always dark, and though at this time of year Bernadette filled them with soft lamps and candles, the glow seemed to be absorbed by the burgundy sofa, the mahogany, and the coarse, colonial carpets. Zara caught sight of her reflection in the gilt mirror: she was sure that the lighting in this place aged her.

  The birthday dinner was in one of the large dining rooms, in which guests were overlooked by the severed and mounted heads of ancient stags. At Christmas, Bernadette put tinsel around the antlers of her favorite, and one year had attached to the end of its muzzle a red nose: mercifully, Rudolph had not yet been dressed for the festive season. On the table were decanters of red wine, and Zara could smell rich beef from the kitchen.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said. Rupert, who was nearest the door, got up to greet her. “How’s your head?” Zara said, as she kissed him on both cheeks.

  “The skull’s intact,” he said, “it’s just what’s inside that’s causing me problems.”

  “Sara, you’re here at last.” Bernadette, who had always taken great care never to pronounce her daughter-in-law’s name correctly, was sitting at the head of the dinner table, wearing her evening pearls over a new cashmere twinset and heavily misted with Chanel No. 5.

  “Happy birthday. These are from all of us.” Zara handed over the lilies, which Bernadette held from her at arm’s length.

  “Thank you,” she said. “William, will you get a vase?” She waved at him, then sat completely still for a moment before sneezing twice, violently, pressing a napkin to her face. Bernadette tilted the bouquet toward her, so she could inspect the flowers: three were in bloom, the rest still tightly closed buds. Carefully, she put her napkin inside the mouth of each of the open flowers, closed it tightly, and tugged, pulling the stamens from each stem. She handed the napkin to William, opening it up so he could see the bright orange. “Throw that away, will you?” she said. “Lily pollen stains dreadfully. Not that I’d be able to stand it anyway, with my hay fever. Put them in the kitchen, William.” Bernadette turned to Zara. “You’re next to Lewis.”

  Moving to her seat, Zara bent down and kissed Max—who had only in recent years overridden his impulse to flinch at such gestures—and then Nicole. Nicole caught her hand, twisting in her seat and widening her eyes: Zara’s daughter was a reliable confidante when it came to Bernadette’s mild madness, and the subtle drama over the lilies would be discussed later that night.

  * * *

  —

  Before the beef, there was fish: salmon with lemon and dry bread, and white wine, which Zara drank instead of the heavy red that William’s brother Alasdair kept trying to pour for her. Everybody was already a little bit tipsy, and Zara needed to catch up in order to endure the evening.

  “How is medical school, Lewis?” said Zara to her nephew, as the meat arrived.

  “Pretty good, yeah. I graduate this year, so, finals.” Lewis did not often go to the effort of constructing full sentences.

  “My first boyfriend was a doctor too, you know,” said Zara. “A surgeon, like William. I had just moved back to Morocco, and he was something of a hero. I found it all very sexy for a time, but I’m afraid he turned out to be surprisingly stupid.”

  “Really?” said Lewis. “Can’t imagine you going out with somebody stupid.
”

  “Ah, that was a long time before I met your uncle. You can’t imagine how different things were.”

  In fact, Lewis could imagine, and indeed had—though not for a few years at least. When he’d been at boarding school he had rashly boasted to his friends that his uncle was having an affair with an actress who had appeared in sexy French films. William had not been having an affair with Zara, of course, they were married, and she was not an actress but a director. Fortunately for Lewis, these inaccuracies made his aunt impossible to track down when, inevitably, he ended up searching for pictures of Zara actress; then Zara French actress; and finally Zara sexy French actress—he didn’t know her maiden name—during break time with half a dozen pubescent boys crowded around his computer, whose fan made a loud whirring noise as the ancient monitor began to overheat.

  A year later, by which time Lewis had realized that it was perhaps not socially acceptable to search the Internet for nude photographs of one’s aunt, even if the nudity was artistic, and even if the aunt wasn’t a blood relation, he found himself denying flat out that he had ever claimed to have an uncle who was nailing a French actress.

  “Sara, wasn’t it?” Lewis’s friend, Robbie, had said, turning from his computer screen, both hands resting impatiently on the keyboard.

  “Don’t know who you’re talking about,” said Lewis. His right hand twitched.

  They were in Robbie’s bedroom, which was musty and windowless: Lewis lying on the floor playing with a book of matches, and Alex on the bed.

  “Who’s Sara?” said Alex.

  “Robbie’s imaginary fuck,” said Lewis.

  Robbie, wounded, turned back to his computer. “She’s not imaginary,” he said.

  Zara certainly was not imaginary. For one thing, had she been, she would still look the way she did in those pictures online which, of course, Lewis had looked at more than once. Her hair would have been smoother: thin and silky, rather than the black, wiry bun into which it was now twisted at the nape of her neck. And her smell: her smell unnerved him. Lewis had not seen Zara for two years at least and he hadn’t remembered that slightly musty smell—was it amber?—which smelt to him not like those floral scents with which the girls on his course doused themselves but something more elemental, more threatening. To Lewis, this was the smell of a middle-aged woman.

  Across the table, Max was leaning back in his chair so that Rupert, who was sitting on his left, could listen in on the anecdote he was telling his grandmother. As he spoke, Bernadette was gripping the edges of the table, convulsing with laughter that was surely exaggerated for Max’s benefit. Rupert was looking down into his glass, glancing up as Max’s voice modulated with the pace of the story. He was a little glazed, but he was smiling. Max paused, and Bernadette reached across and took both her grandson’s hands in hers, leaning in close.

  “Tell me,” said Bernadette, “is this Kate a girlfriend of yours?”

  Max had talked about Kate to Bernadette before, in their fortnightly phone calls and in the letters he sent to her, and he could tell that she had been waiting for the right moment to ask him this.

  “I’m going to tell her you said that,” Max said, getting his phone out of his pocket. “She’ll hate it. No, she’s just a friend.”

  “Ah, Kate. Darling Kate,” said Zara. She and Lewis were both watching Bernadette. “He likes her too much to go out with her—so will probably end up marrying her.”

  “Have you met her?” Lewis said, who was enjoying being in Zara’s confidence.

  “Who?”

  “Katie, or whatever her name is.”

  Zara dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin.

  “I have, yes,” she said. “Only briefly. But she’s been a good friend to Max, this last year, and I have to say it is a comfort to know one’s children have support.” Zara nodded in Rupert’s direction, discreetly. “And, you know, there’s something in the way he talks about her—he admires her. He speaks about her as though she is resilient, or clever.” Now she rubbed her forefinger and thumb together, taking her time to find the words. “Just that…shiny something. Not love, really. But she is one of those friends you make when you are young, who makes you see the world differently than you did before. Someone who dazzles you.”

  Lewis nodded in agreement, but the truth was that he could not imagine meeting somebody who had a better way of looking at the world than he did. Occasionally he had thought that it might be nice to swap places with Max, who seemed to be liked by everyone, and so seemed to get what he wanted. But then, Lewis so often got what he wanted even without needing to be liked.

  “What does she look like?” Lewis asked Zara.

  Zara shrugged. “Oh, you know. Hair. Eyes. Pale.”

  “She doesn’t sound very special.”

  “Well, I’m not the one to say, I can’t see her through my son’s eyes.”

  In case there was anybody present who had not yet developed gout, cheese boards were making their way down the table. William, who had gone to the cellar for port, was now bounding around the room, filling up glasses.

  “I’ll be sick if I have any more,” Nicole said, pulling a face and waving her father away as he leaned over her shoulder. She pushed her hardly touched dessert toward the middle of the table. Lewis’s father, Alasdair, bellowed with pleasure and slapped his brother on his shoulder. There was no danger that Alasdair would be sick; his belly, already distended, seemed only to take on a more solid form the more he filled it, as if he were filling it with purpose. When he came to their side, William put down his bottle in front of Zara, exchanging it for the cheese board. Lewis, who had watched the way people responded to William as he circled the table, poured for Zara, and then stood to pick up Rupert’s empty glass.

  “I shouldn’t,” Rupert said, rolling his eyes in Bernadette’s direction.

  “Come on,” said Lewis, “you need something for the toast.”

  “You’re not drinking, are you, Rupert?” Bernadette, who was watching her son, addressed him loudly across the table. “You know,” she said to Max, only slightly lowering her voice, “I told your uncle he could only come today if he didn’t drink. It interferes with his antibiotics.”

  Max glanced over at his mother, who shook her head, ever so slightly.

  “The shits,” said Max sympathetically. “That’s what you get if you mix antibiotics and alcohol. Terrible shits.”

  Lewis sat down with Rupert’s glass still in his hand. Zara took it gently from him and filled it from the water jug.

  “Voilà,” she said, passing the glass back across the table. “Something for the toast.”

  Zara patted Lewis’s arm, confirming that his humiliation had not gone unnoticed. As her skin touched his, he had a flickering urge to put his hands around her wrist.

  4

  Bernadette's late husband, Gregor Rippon, had inherited Bisley House from his father, who had made his fortune in the mining business. Gregor married Bernadette when she was twenty-one, around the time that he started getting seriously involved in his father’s company, reinvesting the profits into housing projects on the edges of failing factory towns. A few years after the births of their sons, Alasdair, William, and Rupert, Gregor’s father died. By the time he was thirty-five the company he had set up alongside his father’s had begun work on half a dozen council house estates and municipal buildings whose postwar gray and red exteriors existed in defiance of the glowing limestone houses for which Rippon Stone Ltd. had become known.

  Kate’s mother, Alison Quaile, had long ago ceased to envisage a life in which she inhabited one of those golden-walled, rose-covered cottages, and had rented the same terraced house, built when Gregor’s company was still young, for almost two decades. The older houses were more attractive, of course, but even those with working fireplaces had thin windows and drafty doors, and around this time of year the mic
e would shelter from the cold in the wooden rafters. Alison was not inclined to take on the recurring threat of a rodent infestation, and when in the evenings she settled down on her sofa with a woolen blanket wrapped around her knees and a cushion on her lap she was grateful for the double glazing she’d paid to have installed when she’d first moved in, and for the rubber coating that had been put around the edge of the back door, neither of which would have been authorized by the council as alterations to the listed buildings she’d once coveted.

  The house was small, though, and every time Kate came back from university, she brought with her an excess of belongings. Before she left for her first term, Kate’s friend Claire had driven her to Ikea to buy new bedding, new towels, and a full set of cutlery and crockery—all of it white—which she put straight into the box at the foot of the stairs. Now, the kitchen cabinets, which Alison had cleared out and organized so that she could easily rotate her own set of hand-painted dinner plates and bowls, to ensure they faded evenly with use, were filled with cheap white plates and scuffed nonstick frying pans. But despite the mess her daughter made of her small home, Alison treasured her presence. Clear-minded, sober, she was now guiltily aware of those blurred years when Kate had been younger and Alison had been drinking too much, and she was determined to make the most of the time they had now. The first winter without Kate had been particularly hard, especially in December, when there was little light and little incentive to leave the house. Alison spent two months anticipating her daughter’s return, ready to accommodate into her schedule the needs of somebody else. After a full term, Kate was tired enough to acquiesce to the love Alison had to give, and the bowls of pasta and cheese sauce and evenings spent watching quiz shows on television were accepted with neither gratitude nor complaint.