“It’s not a rant,” Daniel said, but he was smiling at her, a mischievous flash of a grin. “It’s a monologue. If Hamlet can have them, why can’t I?”
“At least I understand the Hamlet rants,” I said plaintively. “Mostly.”
“What’s he saying, basically,” Rafe informed me, turning his head on the hearth rug so that those gold eyes were inches from mine, “is that politicians are overrated.”
That picnic on the hill, months before, Rafe and me throwing strawberries to shut Daniel up in the middle of another rant. I swear I remembered it: the smell of the sea breeze, the ache of my thighs from climbing. “Everything’s overrated except Elvis and chocolate,” I announced, raising my glass precariously above my head, and heard Daniel’s sudden, irresistible laugh.
Drink suited Daniel. It put a vivid flush on his cheekbones and a spark deep in his eyes, loosened his stiffness into a sure, animal grace. Usually Rafe was the resident eye candy, but that night it was Daniel I couldn’t take my eyes off. Leaning back among the candle flames and the rich colors and the faded brocade of the chair, with the glass glowing red in his hand and dark hair falling across his forehead, he looked like some ancient war leader himself: a high king in his banquet hall, shining and reckless, celebrating between battles.
The sash windows flung open to the night garden; moths whirling at the lights, shadows crisscrossing, soft damp breeze playing in the curtains. “But it’s summer,” Justin said suddenly, amazed, shooting up on the sofa. “Feel the wind, it’s warm. It’s summer. Come on, come outside,” and he scrambled up, tugging Abby up by the hand as he went past, and clambered out the window onto the patio.
The garden was dark and scented and alive. I don’t know how long we spent out there, under a huge wild moon. Rafe and me crossing hands and whirling on the lawn till we fell over in a panting giggling heap, Justin tossing a great double handful of hawthorn petals in the air so that they fell like snow onto our hair, Daniel and Abby dancing a slow barefoot waltz under the trees, like ghost lovers from some long-lost ball. I threw flips and cartwheels straight across the grass, fuck my imaginary stitches, fuck whether Lexie had done gymnastics, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this drunk and I loved it. I wanted to dive deeper into it and never come up for air, open my mouth and take a huge breath and drown on this night.
I lost the others, somewhere along the way; I was lying on my back in the herb garden, smelling crushed mint and looking up at a million dizzy stars, on my own. I could hear Rafe calling my name, faintly, at the front of the house. After a while I picked myself up and went to find him, but gravity had somehow gone slippery and it was hard to walk. I felt my way along the wall, keeping one hand on branches and ivy; I heard twigs snap under my bare feet, but there wasn’t even a flicker of pain.
The lawn was white in the moonlight. Music streamed out through the windows and Abby was dancing by herself on the grass, spinning slow circles, her arms outspread and her head back to the enormous night sky. I stood by the alcove, swinging a long trail of ivy with one hand, and watched her: the pale swirl and dip of her skirt, the turn of her wrist holding it up, the arch of her bare foot, the dreamy drunken sway of her neck, in and out of the whispering trees.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” said a voice, softly, behind me. I was way too drunk even to be startled. It was Daniel, on one of the stone seats under the ivy, with a glass in his hand and a bottle on the flagstones beside him. The moon shadows turned him into carved marble. “When we’re all old and gray and starting to slip away, even if I’ve forgotten everything else my life has ever held, I think I’ll remember her like this.”
A swift painful pang went through me, but I couldn’t figure out why; it was much too complicated, too far away. “I want to remember tonight too,” I said. “I want to tattoo it onto me so I don’t forget.”
“Come here,” Daniel said. He put the glass down and moved sideways on the bench to make room, held out a hand to me. “Come here. We’ll have thousands more nights like this. You can forget them by the dozen if you want to; we’ll make more. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
His hand around mine was warm, strong. He pulled me down on the seat and I leaned in against him, that solid shoulder, smell of cedar and clean wool, everything black and silver and shifting and the water murmuring on and on at our feet. “When I thought we’d lost you,” Daniel said, “it was . . .” He shook his head, took a quick breath like a gasp. “I missed you; you have no idea how much. But it’s all right now. Everything’s going to be all right.”
He turned towards me. His hand came up, fingers tangling in my hair, rough and tender, moving down across my cheek, tracing the line of my mouth.
The lights of the house spun blurred and magic as the lights of a carousel, there was a high singing note above the trees and the ivy was whirling with music so sweet I could hardly bear it, and all I wanted in the world was to stay. Strip off the mike and the wire, into an envelope and down the postbox to Frank and gone, skim off my old life light as a bird and home straight here. We didn’t want to lose you, silly thing, the others would be happy, the rest of our lives they would never need to know. I had as much right as the dead girl, I was Lexie Madison as much as she had ever been. My landlord throwing my awful work clothes into bin liners when the rent dried up, there was nothing there I would need now. Cherry blossom falling soft on the drive, quiet smell of old books, firelight sparkling on snow-crystalled windowpanes at Christmastime and nothing would ever change, only the five of us moving through this walled garden, neverending. Somewhere far in the back of my mind a drum was throbbing hard for danger, but I knew like a vision that this was why the dead girl had come a million miles to find me, this was why Lexie Madison all along: to wait for her moment to hold out her hand and take mine, lead me up those stone steps and in by that door, lead me home. Daniel’s mouth tasted of ice and whiskey.
If I had thought about it, I would have expected Daniel to be a fairly crap kisser, in a meticulous kind of way. The fierceness of him took my breath away. When we pulled apart, I don’t know how much later, my heart was running wild.
And now, I thought, with one tiny clear drop of my mind. What happens now?
Daniel’s mouth, the corners curving in a tiny smile, was very close to mine. His hands were on my shoulders, his thumbs moving in long gentle strokes along the line of my collarbone.
Frank wouldn’t have batted an eyelid; I know undercovers who’ve slept with gangsters, given out beatings and shot up heroin, all in the name of the job. I never said anything, not my business, but I knew well that was bollocks. There’s always another way to what you’re after, if you want to find it. They did those things because they wanted to and because the job gave them an excuse.
In that second I saw Sam’s face in front of me, eyes wide and stunned, clear as if he were standing at Daniel’s elbow. It should have made me cringe with shame, but all I felt was a wave of pure frustration, smashing over me so hard I wanted to scream. He was like this enormous feather duvet wrapped all around my life, smothering me to nothing with holidays and protective questions and gentle, inexorable warmth. I wanted to fling him off with one violent buck and take a huge breath of cold air, all my own again.
It was the wire that saved me. Not what it might pick up, I wasn’t thinking that straight, but Daniel’s hands: his thumbs were maybe three inches from the mike, clipped to my bra between my breasts. In one blink I was as sober as I’ve ever been in my life. I was three inches away from burned.
“Well,” I said, stalling, and gave Daniel a little grin. “It’s always the quiet ones.”
He didn’t move. I thought I saw a flick of something in his eyes, but I couldn’t tell what. My brain seemed to have seized up: I had no idea how Lexie would have got herself out of this one. I had a horrible feeling that she wouldn’t have.
There was a crash inside the house, the French doors banged open and someone erupted onto the patio. Rafe was yelling. “—
Always have to make such a huge fucking deal out of everything—”
“My God, that’s rich, coming from you. You were the one who wanted to—”
It was Justin, and he was so furious his voice was shaking. I widened my eyes at Daniel, jumped up and peeped out through the ivy. Rafe was pacing up and down the patio and raking a hand through his hair; Justin was slumped against the wall, biting hard at a nail. They were still fighting, but their voices had dropped a notch and all I could hear was the fast, vicious rhythms. The angle of Justin’s head, chin tucked into his chest, looked like he might be crying.
“Shit,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder at Daniel. He was still on the bench. His face blurred into the patterns of leaf shadow; I couldn’t see his expression. “I think they broke something inside. And Rafe looks like he might hit Justin. Maybe we should . . . ?”
He stood up, slowly. The black and white of him seemed to fill the alcove, tall and sharp and strange. “Yes,” he said. “We probably should.”
He moved me out of the way with a gentle, impersonal hand on my shoulder, and went out across the lawn. Abby had collapsed on her back in the grass in a whirl of white cotton, one arm flung out. She looked fast asleep.
Daniel knelt on one knee beside her and carefully hooked a lock of hair off her face; then he straightened up again, brushing bits of grass off his trousers, and went to the patio. Rafe yelled, “Jesus Christ!” spun round and stormed inside, slamming the door behind him. Justin was definitely crying now.
None of it made any sense. The whole incomprehensible scene seemed to be moving in slow, tilting circles, the house reeling helplessly, the garden heaving like water. I realized that I wasn’t sober after all, in fact I was spectacularly drunk. I sat down on the bench and put my head between my knees till things stayed still.
I must have gone to sleep, or passed out, I don’t know. I heard shouting, somewhere, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me and I let it go by.
A crick in my neck woke me. It took me a long time to work out where I was: curled on the stone seat, with my head tilted back against the wall at an undignified angle. My clothes were clammy and cold and I was shivering.
I unfurled myself, in stages, and stood up. Bad move: my head went into a sickening spin, I had to grab at the ivy to stay vertical. Outside the alcove the garden had turned gray, a still, ghostly, predawn gray, not a leaf moving. For a second I was afraid to step out into it; it looked like a place that shouldn’t be disturbed.
Abby was gone from the lawn. The grass was heavy with dew, soaking my feet and the hems of my jeans. Someone’s socks, possibly mine, were tangled on the patio, but I didn’t have the energy to pick them up. The French doors were swinging open and Rafe was asleep on the sofa, snoring, in a puddle of full ashtrays and empty glasses and scattered cushions and the smell of stale booze. The piano was speckled with shards of broken glass, curving and wicked on the glossy wood and the yellowing keys, and there was a deep fresh gouge on the wall above it: someone had thrown something, a glass or an ashtray, and meant it. I tiptoed upstairs and crawled into bed without bothering to take off my clothes. It was a long time before I could stop shivering and fall asleep.
19
Unsurprisingly, we all woke up late, with hangovers from hell and a collective foul mood. My head was killing me, even my hair hurt, and my mouth had that walk-of-shame feel, swollen and tender. I pulled a sweater over yesterday’s clothes, checked the mirror for stubble burn—nothing—and dragged myself downstairs.
Abby was in the kitchen, smacking ice cubes into a glass. “Sorry,” I said, in the doorway. “Did I miss breakfast?”
She threw the ice tray back into the freezer and slammed the door. “Nobody’s hungry. I’m having a Bloody Mary. Daniel made coffee; if you want anything else, you can get it yourself.” She brushed past me and went into the sitting room.
I figured if I tried to work out why she was pissed off at me, my head might explode. I poured myself a lot of coffee, buttered a slice of bread—toast felt way too complicated—and took them into the sitting room. Rafe was still unconscious on the sofa, with a cushion pulled over his head. Daniel was sitting on the windowsill, staring out at the garden, with a mug in one hand and a cigarette burning away forgotten in the other. He didn’t look around.
“Can he breathe?” I asked, pointing at Rafe with my chin.
“Who cares?” said Abby. She was slumped in an armchair, with her eyes closed and her glass pressed to her forehead. The air smelled musty and overripe, cigarette butts and sweat and spilled booze. Someone had cleaned the shards of glass off the piano; they were in a corner of the floor, in a small, threatening pile. I sat down, carefully, and tried to eat without moving my head.
The afternoon oozed on, slow and sticky as treacle. Abby played halfhearted solitaire, giving up and starting over every few minutes; I dozed, off and on, curled in the armchair. Justin finally appeared, wrapped in his dressing gown, eyelids fluttering with pain at the light coming through the windows—it was sort of a nice day, if you were in the mood for that kind of thing. “Oh, God,” he said faintly, shielding his eyes. “My head. I think I’m getting the flu; I ache everywhere.”
“Night air,” said Abby, dealing another hand. “Cold, damp, whatever. Not to mention enough punch to float a cruise ship.”
“It is not the punch. My legs hurt; a hangover doesn’t make your legs hurt. Can’t we close the curtains?”
“No,” said Daniel, without turning around. “Have some coffee.”
“Maybe I’m having a brain hemorrhage. Don’t they do things to your eyes?”
“You have a hangover,” Rafe said, from the depths of the sofa. “And if you don’t stop whining, I’m going to come over there and throttle you, even if it kills me too.”
“Oh, great,” Abby said, massaging the bridge of her nose. “It’s alive.” Justin ignored him, with an icy lift of his chin that said last night’s fight wasn’t over, and sank into a chair.
“Maybe we should think about going out, at some point,” Daniel said, finally coming out of his reverie and looking around. “It might help to clear our heads.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” Justin said, reaching for Abby’s Bloody Mary. “I have the flu. If I go out I’ll get pneumonia.”
Abby slapped his hand away. “I’m drinking that. Make your own.”
“The ancients would have said,” Daniel told him, “that you were suffering from an imbalance of the humors: an excess of black bile, causing melancholy. Black bile is cold and dry, so to counter it, you need something warm and moist. I don’t remember which foods are associated with sanguinity, but it seems logical that red meat, for example—”
“Sartre was right,” Rafe said, through his cushion. “Hell is other people.”
I felt the same way. All I wanted was for it to be evening so I could go for my walk, get out of this house and away from these people and try to wrap my head around the night before. I had never, in all my life, spent so much of my time surrounded by people. Up until that day it hadn’t even registered, but all of a sudden everything they did—Justin’s dying-swan act, the snap of Abby’s cards—felt like a full-on assault. I pulled my sweater over my head, burrowed into the corner of the armchair and went to sleep.
* * *
When I woke up the room was empty. It looked like it had been abandoned fast, in some sudden emergency—lamps on, shades tilted at odd angles; chairs pushed back, half-empty mugs and sticky rings on the table. “Hi,” I called, but my voice soaked away into the shadows and no one answered.
The house felt huge and unwelcoming, the way a house sometimes does when you come back downstairs after you’ve closed up for the night: alien, withdrawn, focused on its own private business. No note anywhere; the others had probably gone for a walk after all, to blow the hangovers away.
I poured myself a mug of cold coffee and drank it leaning against the kitchen sink, looking out the window. The light was just starting to turn
gold and syrupy, and swallows were diving and chittering across the lawn. I left my mug in the sink and went up to my room, involuntarily walking quietly and skipping the creaky stair.
As I put my hand on the door handle I felt the house gather itself and tense around me. Even before I opened the door, before I smelt the faint wisp of tobacco smoke on the air and saw his silhouette sitting broad-shouldered and motionless on the bed, I knew Daniel was home.