“Tell me what it was like,” I said. “Please. I want to know; honestly, I do. I just didn’t know how to ask.”
Rafe shifted his arm away. “All right,” he said. “Fine. It was horrible beyond belief. Does that answer your question?”
I waited. “We were all hysterical,” he said harshly, after a moment. “We were wrecks. Not Daniel, obviously, he would never do anything as undignified as get upset, he just stuck his head in a book and occasionally came out with some fucking Old Norse quote about arms that remain strong in times of trial, or something. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep all week; no matter what time I got up, his light was still on. And the rest of us . . . Just to start with, we weren’t sleeping either. We were all having nightmares—it was like some awful farce, every time you managed to get to sleep someone would wake up screaming, and of course that would wake everyone else up . . . Our sense of time completely disintegrated; half the time I didn’t know what day it was. I couldn’t eat, even the smell of food made me gag. And Abby kept baking—she said she needed to do something, but, God, piles of gooey chocolate things and bloody meat pies all over the house . . . We had a blazing row about it, Abby and I. She threw a fork at me. I was drinking all the time so the smell wouldn’t make me sick, and then of course Daniel started giving me flak about that . . . We ended up giving away the chocolate things in the tutorial groups. The meat pies are in the freezer, if you’re interested. None of the rest of us are going to touch them.”
Shaken up, Frank had said, but no one had mentioned this level of hysteria. Now that Rafe had started talking, he didn’t know how to stop. The words were tumbling out hard and involuntary as vomiting. “And Justin,” he said. “Jesus. He was the worst by a long shot. He couldn’t stop shaking, I mean really shaking—some little smart-arse first-year asked him if he had Parkinson’s. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was incredibly unnerving; every time you looked at him, even for a second, it set your teeth on edge. And he kept dropping things, and every time he did it the rest of us nearly had heart attacks. Abby and I would yell at him, and then he would start crying, like that was going to help anything. Abby wanted him to go to Student Health and get Valium or something, but Daniel said that was ridiculous, Justin had to learn to cope like the rest of us—which was obviously completely insane, because we weren’t coping. The biggest optimist in the world couldn’t have said we were coping. Abby was sleepwalking—one night she ran herself a bath at four in the morning and got into it in her pajamas, fast asleep. If Daniel hadn’t found her, she could have drowned.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded strange, high and shaky. Every word he said had hit me straight in the stomach with a kick like a horse’s. I had argued this with Frank and talked it through with Sam, I’d thought I had my head around it, but it had never been real to me till that moment: what I was doing to these people. “Oh, God, Rafe, I’m so sorry.”
Rafe gave me a long, dark, unreadable look. “And the police,” he said. He took another swig of his drink, made a face as if it tasted bitter. “Have you ever had to deal with cops?”
“Not like that,” I said. I still sounded wrong, breathless, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“They’re bloody scary. These weren’t uniformed cops fresh out of the bog; these were detectives. They have the best poker faces I’ve ever seen, you don’t have a clue what they’re thinking or what they want from you, and they were all over us. They questioned us for hours, almost every single day. And they make even the most innocent question—what time do you normally go to bed?—sound like a trap, like they’re just waiting to whip out the handcuffs if you give the wrong answer. You feel like you have to be on your guard, every second, it’s fucking exhausting—and we were exhausted already. That guy who dropped you off, Mackey, he was the worst. All smiles and sympathy, but he obviously hated our guts right from the word go.”
“He was nice to me,” I said. “He brought me chocolate biscuits.”
“Well, isn’t that charming,” Rafe said. “I’m sure that won your heart. Meanwhile, he was showing up here at all hours of the day and night, giving us the third degree about every single detail of your entire life and making bitchy little comments about how the other half live, which is complete bollocks anyway. Just because we’ve got the house and we go to college . . . The man’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Bolivia. He would have loved a reason to lock us all up. And of course that got Justin even more hysterical, he was positive we were all going to be arrested any minute. Daniel told him that was crap and to pull himself together, but actually Daniel wasn’t all that much help, seeing as he thought . . .”
He broke off and stared away down the garden, his eyes hooded. “If you hadn’t pulled through when you did,” he said, “I think we would have killed each other.”
I reached out one finger and touched the back of his hand, just for a second. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am, Rafe. I don’t know how else to say it. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” Rafe said, but the anger had drained out of his voice and he just sounded very, very tired. “Well.”
“What did Daniel think?” I asked, after a moment.
“Don’t ask me,” Rafe said. He threw back most of his drink with a neat flick of his wrist. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re mostly better off not knowing.”
“No, you said Daniel told Justin to chill out, but he wasn’t much help because he thought something. What did he think?”
Rafe jiggled his glass and watched the ice cubes clink off the sides. He obviously wasn’t planning to answer, but silence is the oldest cop-trick in the book, and I’m even better at it than most. I leaned my chin on my arms, watched him and waited. In the sitting-room window behind his head, Abby pointed to something in the book and both she and Daniel burst out laughing, faint and clear through the glass.
“One night,” Rafe said at last. He still wasn’t looking at me. The moonlight silvered his profile and lay along his cheekbone, turned him into something off a worn coin. “A couple of days after . . . It might have been Saturday, I’m not sure. I came out here and sat on the swing seat and listened to the rain. I thought that might help me sleep, for some reason, but it didn’t. I heard an owl kill something—a mouse, probably. It was horrible; it screamed. You could hear the second when it died.”
He went silent. I wondered if this was somehow the end of the story. “Owls have to eat too,” I offered.
Rafe shot me a quick, oblique glance. “Then,” he said. “I don’t know what time, it was just starting to get light. I heard your voice, under the rain. It sounded like you were right there, leaning out.”
He turned and pointed up, at my dark window above us. “You said, ‘Rafe, I’m on my way home. Wait up for me.’ You didn’t sound eerie or anything, just matter-of-fact; in a hurry, sort of. Like that time you rang me because you’d forgotten your keys. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.” A light cool breeze drifted across my hair and I shivered, a fast, uncontrollable jerk. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but this story was something different, pressing like a cold knife blade against my skin. It was way too late, more than a week too late, to worry about whatever damage I was doing to these four.
“ ‘I’m on my way home,’ ” Rafe said. “ ‘Wait up for me.’ ” He stared into the bottom of his glass. I realized that he was probably fairly drunk.
“What did you do?” I asked.
He shook his head. “ ‘Echo, I will not talk with thee,’ ” he said, with a faint wry smile, “ ‘for thou art a dead thing.’ ”
The breeze had moved off down the garden, sifting the leaves and fingering delicately through the ivy. In the moonlight the grass looked soft and white as mist, like you could put your hand right through it. That shiver went over me again.
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t that tell you I was going to be OK?”
“No,” Rafe said. “Actually, no, it didn’t.
I was sure you had just died, that second. Laugh if you want, but I’ve told you what kind of state we were all in. I spent the whole next day waiting for Mackey to appear at the door being grave and sympathetic and tell us the doctors had done everything they could but blah blah blah. When he turned up on Monday, all smiley, and told us you’d regained consciousness, at first I didn’t believe him.”
“That’s what Daniel thought, isn’t it?” I said. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. “He thought I was dead.”
After a moment Rafe sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he did. Right from the start. He thought you’d never made it to hospital.”
Watch your step around that one, Frank had said. Either Daniel was a lot smarter than I wanted to tangle with—that little exchange, before I went out, was starting to worry me again—or he had had reasons of his own for thinking Lexie wasn’t coming back. “Why?” I demanded, doing offended. “I’m not a wimp. It’d take more than one little cut to get rid of me.”
I felt Rafe flinch, a tiny half-hidden twitch. “God only knows,” he said. “He had some bizarro convoluted theory about the cops claiming you were alive to mess with people’s heads—I can’t remember the details, I didn’t want to hear it and he was being cryptic about it anyway.” He shrugged. “Daniel.”
For several reasons, I figured it was time to change the tone of this conversation. “Mmm . . . conspiracy theories,” I said. “Let’s make him a tinfoil hat, in case the cops start trying to scramble his brain waves.”
I had caught Rafe off guard: before he could help it, he gave a startled snort of laughter. “He does get paranoid, doesn’t he,” he said. “Remember when we found the gas mask? Him giving it that thoughtful look and saying, ‘I wonder if this would be effective against the avian flu?’ ”
I had started giggling as well. “It’ll look gorgeous with the tinfoil hat. He can wear them both into college—”
“We’ll get him a biohazard suit—”
“Abby can needlepoint pretty patterns on it—”
It wasn’t all that funny, but we were both helpless with laughter, like a pair of giddy teenagers. “Oh, God,” Rafe said, wiping his eyes. “You know, the whole thing would probably have been hysterical, if it hadn’t been so Godawful. It was like one of those terrible sub-Ionesco plays that third-years always write: great piles of meat pies popping out of the woodwork and Justin dropping them everywhere, me gagging in the corner, Abby asleep in the bath in her pajamas like some post-modern Ophelia, Daniel surfacing to tell us what Chaucer thought of us all and then disappearing again, your friend Officer Krupke showing up at the door every ten minutes to ask what color M&Ms you like best . . .”
He let out a long, shaky breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Without looking at me, he stretched an arm over and rumpled my hair. “We missed you, silly thing,” he said, almost roughly. “We don’t want to lose you.”
“Well, I’m right here,” I said. “I’m going nowhere.”
I meant it lightly, but in that wide dark garden the words seemed to flutter with a life of their own, skim down the grass and disappear in among the trees. Slowly Rafe’s face turned towards me; the glow from the sitting room was behind him and I couldn’t see his expression, only a faint white glitter of moonlight in his eyes.
“No?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I like it here.”
Rafe’s silhouette moved, briefly, as he nodded. “Good,” he said.
To my utter surprise, he reached out and ran the backs of his fingers, lightly and deliberately, down my cheek. The moonlight caught the tip of a smile.
One of the sitting-room windows shot up and Justin’s head popped out. “What are you two laughing about?”
Rafe’s hand dropped away. “Nothing,” we called back, in unison.
“If you sit out there in the cold you’ll both get earaches. Come look at this.”
* * *
They had found an old photo album somewhere: the March family, Daniel’s ancestors, starting in about 1860 with vein-popping corsets and top hats and unamused expressions. I squeezed onto the sofa next to Daniel—close, touching; for a second I almost flinched, till I realized the mike and the phone were on my other side. Rafe sat on the arm beside me, and Justin disappeared into the kitchen and brought out tall glasses of hot port, neatly wrapped in thick soft napkins so we wouldn’t burn our hands. “So you won’t catch your death,” he told me. “You need to take care of yourself. Running around in the freezing cold . . .”
“Check out the clothes,” Abby said. The album was bound in cracked brown leather and big enough that it took up both her lap and Daniel’s. The photos, tucked into little paper corners, were spotted and browning at the edges. “I want this hat. I think I’m in love with this hat.”
It was an architectural fringed thing, topping off a large lady with a mono-bosom and a fishy stare. “Isn’t that the lampshade in the dining room?” I said. “I’ll get it down for you if you promise to wear it to college tomorrow.”
“Good Lord,” Justin said, perching on the other arm of the sofa and peering over Abby’s shoulder, “they all seem terribly depressed, don’t they? You don’t look a thing like any of them, Daniel.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Rafe said. He was blowing on his hot port, with his free arm draped across my back; he had apparently forgiven me for whatever it was that I, or Lexie, had done. “I’ve never seen such a goggle-eyed bunch. Maybe they all have thyroid problems, and that’s why they’re depressed.”
“Actually,” Daniel said, “both the protruding eyes and the sombre expressions are characteristic of photographs from that period. I wonder if it had anything to do with the long exposure time. The Victorian camera—” Rafe pretended to have a narcoleptic attack on my shoulder, Justin produced a huge yawn, and Abby and I—I was only a second behind her—stuck our free hands over our ears and started singing.
“All right, all right,” Daniel said, smiling. I had never been this close to him before. He smelled good, cedar and clean wool. “I’m just defending my ancestors. In any case, I think I do look like one of them—where is he? This one here.”
Going by the clothes, the photo had been taken somewhere around a hundred years ago. The guy was younger than Daniel, twenty at most, and standing on the front steps of a younger, brighter Whitethorn House—no ivy on the walls, glossy new paint on the door and the railings, the stone steps sharper-edged and scrubbed pale. There was a resemblance there, all right—he had Daniel’s square jaw and broad forehead, although his looked even broader because the dark hair was slicked back fiercely, and the same straight-cut mouth. But this guy was leaning against the railing with a lazy, dangerous ease that was nothing like Daniel’s tidy, symmetrical poise, and his wide-set eyes had a different look to them, something restless and haunted.
“Wow,” I said. The resemblance, that face passed across a century, was doing strange things to me; I would have envied Daniel, in some unreasonable way, if it hadn’t been for Lexie. “You do look like him.”
“Only less messed up,” Abby said. “That’s not a happy man.”
“But look at the house,” Justin said softly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is, yes,” Daniel said, smiling down at it. “It really is. We’ll get there.”
Abby slipped a fingernail under the photo, flicked it out of its corners and turned it over. On the back it said, in watery fountain pen, “William, May 1914.”
“The First World War was coming up,” I said quietly. “Maybe he died in it.”
“Actually,” Daniel said, taking the photo from Abby and examining it more closely, “I don’t think he did. Good heavens. If this is the same William—and it may not be, of course, my family has always been singularly unimaginative when it comes to names—then I’ve heard about him. My father and my aunts mentioned him every now and then, when I was a child. He’s my grandfather’s uncle, I think, although I may have that wrong. W
illiam was—well, not a black sheep, exactly; more like a skeleton in the cupboard.”