Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

The house stood alone on a stretch of road at the outskirts of the village: two storeys of red brick with the year ‘1907’ pricked out in black paint on a stone above the front door. From the outside at least, the place did not look very different, though there were new high gates, and a yellow alarm box prominent beside an upstairs window, and in the centre of the driveway a little fountain – cherub and urn – as in a country hotel. Alec parked the car between a Range Rover and a green MG, and as the brothers gently levered Alice from her seat, an old Labrador limped over the gravel to meet them, snuffling at the hem of Alice’s coat, as if the mink, dead half a century ago, still leaked some subtle feral stink.

‘Shoo,’ sighed Alice, but the dog was full of doggish interest in her, and followed them to the front door. Larry tugged at the craftwork iron bell-pull (a plain electric buzzer in Grandma Wilcox’s day), and after a minute the jangling was answered by a young man, twenty, twenty-two, who stood in the door frame, pale and pretty, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, looking at them as if good style meant a level of unresponsiveness that bordered on the moronic. Evidently, no one had told him who this gaunt and weirdly dressed woman might be. He leaned against the door and drawled, ‘I’m Tom.’

‘Yes,’ said Alice, and letting go of her sons she staggered past him into the dark of the hall.

‘We’ve come to visit,’ said Alec, hurrying after her, afraid that she would crash disastrously on to the tiles.

‘Name of Valentine,’ added Larry, grinning at the boy’s discomfort and following the others inside.

‘We’re Valentines too!’ said Kirsty. ‘Do you have a bathroom for my little girl?’

By the time they were all in the house, Stephanie Gadd had emerged from one of the downstairs rooms, a woman in the vicinity of fifty, youthful, vigorous, dressed casually but punctiliously in navy blue slacks and a chiffon blouse. She had a string of pearls at her neck, which she turned and tangled in her fingers as she spoke.

‘Well done!’ she cried. ‘Did you have an awful journey? Tom had a B of a time coming down from London.’ She smiled at her son, lingeringly, then, without turning, gestured to the man behind her. ‘And this is Rupert, my other half.’

‘Really pleased you could make it,’ said Rupert. He grimaced and shook hands, squeezing hard as if he hoped to communicate dumb sincerity through the force of his grip, though when Larry squeezed back, much of the colour left the older man’s face.

Tom was asked to show Ella and Kirsty to the downstairs loo. The others were led into the dining room where an elaborate buffet lunch was laid out on snowy tablecloths.

‘Just finger food, I’m afraid,’ said Stephanie. ‘I don’t think people want anything substantial when the weather’s this warm.’

Alice was seated between Alec and Rupert. She would not be parted from her coat or stole, and sat in her place like the last days of a Hollywood starlet, or one of those women undone by absinthe in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

When Kirsty and Ella came back, Stephanie handed out the plates and invited everyone to help themselves. On Sundays they were very informal and she hoped that was all right. Rupert drew the cork from a bottle of wine and held up the bottle to the light. He said he belonged to a wine club – ‘nothing too serious, just some chaps’ – but they had been impressed by this red from Peru.

‘Just pour it, darling,’ said Stephanie. She made an elaborate female solidarity face at Kirsty, who did her best to return it.

At the window end of the table, Tom Gadd, still unbuttoned, occupied his chair with a kind of doomed elegance, toying with a slice of Parma ham, a stuffed olive, then, with a blatant yawn, excusing himself to make some phonecalls.

Alice sipped at a glass of mineral water but ate nothing. For several minutes towards the end of the meal she appeared to be asleep, but when Stephanie returned from the kitchen carrying a tray of sliced peaches and freshly made meringues, saying how sorry she was she didn’t have more, that it wasn’t more special, that it was just something to ‘fill a hole’, Alice silenced her, calling out in a voice retrieved with visible effort, and saying, ‘ Please! Please can we see the house now?’

There was an instant’s confusion. The skin on Stephanie’s face tautened, as though her self-control might be far more fragile than her manner had so far suggested. But she recovered herself, set down the tray, and touched her pearls. ‘How very thoughtless of me,’ she said. ‘Of course you can see the house now. Rupert!’

‘Absolutely,’ said Rupert, springing from his seat. ‘Are we all going together?’

They started in the lounge, filing in behind Stephanie, who, sketching freely in the air, explained how they had knocked through and enlarged and finally forced upon these simple rooms a type of luxuriousness. In each of the rooms there came a moment when they gathered around Alice as though to witness a public act of recollection, but her gaze was distracted. She frowned as if they had brought her to the wrong house, or she was searching for something in particular, something that wasn’t there, the fine end of a thread that would lead her back.

They went upstairs, Alice at the front clutching on to Larry’s arm, the others inching up behind them.

‘You have a beautiful home,’ said Kirsty.

‘How kind,’ said Stephanie. ‘We keep our little place in London, but it’s not the old London now.’

‘Can’t buy a morning paper,’ said Rupert, ‘unless you speak Portuguese or Urdu.’

‘ Un moment! " called Stephanie, striding to the head of the column. She opened the door at the far end of the corridor and announced the master bedroom. ‘We brought the mirror in Italy,’ she said. And then to Alec: ‘Do you know Siena well?’

Larry, who thought he might be able to have a lot of fun at these people’s expense, picked up a photograph from the mantelpiece beside the mirror. Two boys in cricket whites in the school grounds of some middle-ranking English public school. The boy with the bat was recognizably the languid Tom. The other boy, slightly older, blond-brown hair in a flop over one of his eyes, held up a ball as though he had just taken five wickets and was trying not to look too pleased with himself. At the far left of the picture there was the green flutter of a woman’s dress, and the dark green brim of her hat. Larry put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, catching sight in the mirror of Stephanie Gadd staring at him with an expression he had last seen on Betty Bone’s face in the San Fernando Valley.

At the window, Alice was gazing down into the garden. It was smaller than the one at Brooklands, and neater, running down a slight incline between beech hedges to the bank of a stream. The others joined her.

‘There,’ said Alice, a voice barely audible. ‘There…’

‘Do you mean the old willow?’ asked Stephanie.

Alice nodded, pressing on the glass with her fingertips.

‘You want to go into the garden, Mum?’ asked Alec.

She turned to him and smiled, beamed at him as if she were surprised to find him there, and his suggesting that they go out somehow made it possible. ‘What an angel,’ she said. And then turning to Stephanie Gadd, she repeated it: ‘My son is an angel.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanie, her hand straying towards the pearls again. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

For a few minutes the garden gave Alice new strength. With her stick she moved on her own across the trimmed lawn with more energy than she had been able to muster in weeks. It was mid-afternoon, the velvet hour. At the point of farthest visibility, the air was silver and slate, darkening nearer the horizon, almost purple. Something was building out there, new weather, but it was still a long way off, and might, in the end, come to nothing.