The Red House (20 page)

The cool saltiness of the sea air hits me suddenly and hard. I’ve never been to the Isle of Wight before.

It’s early morning, after driving late and sleeping poorly for a few hours in a cheap hotel. I drive up to the ferry dock, wait in the queue, then pull up at the ticket booth and roll my window down. I fill out the forms: car make, colour, registration. My signature, usually under control, veers off the line. An angled camera snaps a little shot of my registration plate. Driving onto the ferry, I marvel at what people have tied to their roofs and their bumpers: bicycles, boats, sun chairs.

I’d grown up in Durham. Now my mother lives in Exeter. Cathedral cities. The seaside is where you go for a visit, not where you live. I feel suddenly untethered, suddenly apart from real life, overwhelmed by an amalgam of childhood weekends and university summer breaks. Summer tourism is in full force around me. Salt, sweat, sand.

When I’d met Imogen in Spain, I’d assumed that our
friendship would run its course there and not follow us home. Realising that we both lived in London had been both thrilling and awkward. There’d been that worry that perhaps the other one doesn’t want to continue and might cross the street to avoid you back in the real world. There’d been my wary, tentative admission that I’d like to see her again. Getting her London phone number had been a fully separate relationship step, a level beyond mere dates at the hotel cafe. For one thing, it meant she was really single, not just away with the girls for a week and flirting for fun.

Have I always doubted her, from the start?
She’s never lied to me, as far as I know, about anything. But I’d wondered then if she really had a boyfriend, or even a husband. I’d looked at her fingers, on which she’d worn a couple of silver rings that could have covered where a gold band had been. It was awful of me to have mentally speculated about her honesty, but it had seemed like a compliment at the time:
too good to be unattached.

Now, here I am, at another beach, doubting her again. What the Inspector had suggested made sad sense. Why did Patrick Bell come into online existence a fortnight ago? If he were the real Sebastian, wouldn’t he have an Internet footprint with much more history? If he’s not the real Seb, who else would know enough to bother? Who would benefit from the story? Imogen. Imogen would, in a twisted way, if you think of drama and attention as benefits.

Certainly my father, even if everything Imogen’s told about the encounter with him is plain truth, wouldn’t have had the information for such a scam. If he’d gone after her, if he went up onto that kerb to hurt her, that wouldn’t in any way lead to an Internet scheme based on her adoption
and loss. Nor would it make sense for him to follow her to Cambridge. Lashing out in the immediate wake of her visit to him, sure. But something planned? If he had anger, if he had a motive to make the past go away, it would make better sense to go after me.

It’s an odd feeling. I’m not scared. I’m … ‘spoiling for a fight’. I’ve read that phrase before but never applied it to myself. This isn’t just for Imogen’s sake, to either track down her attacker or dismantle her manipulative fiction. For the first time in twenty years, I’ve let my childhood feelings catch up with me. I drop the brave face. Imogen was wrong to have come here behind my back, but she was also right about what would be good for me: I want to face my father.

I hadn’t asked Imogen how she’d done it. ‘Gant’ is my mother’s maiden name, which she took back after the divorce, and changed for me as well. Imogen hadn’t known that, and hasn’t ever asked me my original surname, so she must have got it from public records, or from my mother.

Glad I wasn’t part of that conversation.
Depending on when Imogen had asked, that could account for my mother’s sudden dislike of her after we became engaged. She had transformed from doting approval of my theoretical girlfriend – described in brief emails and deliberately casual phone conversations – to intervention. I never told Imogen what was said. It had been an ugly conversation, held in secret while Imogen was at work. My mother and I had met up in London, at a cafe. She’d had her case well-prepared: Imogen’s unstable background; Imogen’s past relationships. Mum’s job had prepared her well for snooping.

At least I know for sure that Imogen’s obsession with her biological family is based in fact. My mother had
confirmed it, but with a twist. Imogen’s plot was correct: mother, father, brothers, car accident, adoption. But the mood she puts on it is off. Reports of the accident record that her father had been drunk that night. He’d caused it. The family in the other car had also been killed. Only Sebastian had survived.

According to my mother, it wasn’t the first time that Joseph Llewellyn had been accused of drink-driving, but there’s no record that alcohol had ever affected his work; his reputation as a surgeon was golden, except for one dismissed accusation from a nurse of what would nowadays be called sexual harassment. So his drinking was either covered up by the hospital, or it was something he saved for his free time. His family time.

Imogen idolises him. I don’t know if she never knew, or just can’t bear to remember any bad times.

Hypocrite
, I remind myself. I’m as guilty of selective memory as she is, just the other way around. I’ve blocked out any good memories of my father.

I sweat. I’m dressed too formally, too warmly. I couldn’t imagine knocking on my father’s door in shorts and a T-shirt, so I’m in good trousers and an Oxford shirt. The cuffs are tight around my wrists. I’m not in the mood to bare any of myself.

I’d got the address the old-fashioned way: called an island library, asking them to look in their phone books. John Hutter wasn’t alone; he was listed with a wife. Her name wasn’t there, just the concept: ‘Mr and Mrs John Hutter’. I had no assurance that this John Hutter was the one, just Imogen’s assertion, presumably based on more thorough research.

I look up and down the street. No green car. ‘Bright’ green, Imogen had insisted. I put a hand on the weathered grey fence fronting scraggly grass. On the right, there’s a closed garage, with a white SUV in front. I walk around the car and stand on tip-toe to look through one of the windows along the top of the garage door.

The clutter inside brings me back to the barn in Caldecote. No second car, just storage. Junk. The claustrophobia it prompts is almost overwhelming. I back away down the short drive.

I’ve never thought of myself as the kind of person to hoard resentment. I haven’t thought about my father in years. That’s a subject I’d always considered cleaned-out. I was sure my father had been metaphorically left at the kerb for collection long ago.

But now it seems that that isn’t quite true. He’d only been put away in my mental garage, covered with a tarpaulin and forgotten. Grief and anger had been delayed, not got rid of.

A skinny orange cat winds around my feet.
Must be hungry
. Together we approach the front door. I ring the bell.

A flush from upstairs. A slam. I squirm. I turn away from the door, imagining the man or woman behind it to be in some state of disarray: pyjamas, hair uncombed, hands unwashed.

Across the street, a gaudy real estate sign catches my gaze:
FOR SALE OR LEASE, PATRICK REMINGTON PROPERTIES.
The company logo is a swinging silver bell, radiating motion lines, positioned between the first and last names.

Patrick
.

Bell
.

My phone rings. Pulling it makes it spring out of my pocket, and I have to catch it, bouncing it like a too-hot dinner roll. I answer without checking the number. ‘Hello?’

‘Maxwell!’

‘Mum?’

Curtains are being pushed apart upstairs. The house is stirring.

‘Did Imogen get the flowers? She hasn’t thanked me.’

‘What?’

Footsteps inside, coming down the stairs.

She sighs, then raises her voice. ‘The flowers, Maxwell. I apologised!’

The contrast of kind words and belligerent tone forces a smile from me. ‘Mum, I’m sorry. They must have arrived at the hotel while we were out. Things have been …’

The bolt is turned from the inside.

I blurt, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’ll call you back.’ I ring off. I couldn’t let her hear the man’s voice, her ex-husband’s voice. She would know it, instantly, wouldn’t she. Like I will always know Imogen’s voice, even over a phone, even in the background.

Just like I knew Marco, and Hercules
…

I shake it off. I face the door, panicked. Whoever made up Patrick Bell could have once stood at this door, looking out. Was it this man, this sagging, powerless-looking man?

Or Imogen, in a hurry, upset. She’d run out of this door, embarrassed, her fantasy of my happy reunion shattered. Perhaps she was reminded of her own father, of her fantasy versus the reality she has to, on some level, still have within her. Did she need to create Patrick Bell, the
wavering possibility of her lost brother, as an expression of her ambivalence over her past? As a way to manipulate the present?

Or does this estate agent advertise all over the island? All over the country?
It could just be a coincidence. Lots of people are called Patrick. Lots of people have the name Bell. Why not both?

‘What do you want?’ says the man. He’s balding on top; what hair he has is charcoal-coloured and close-cut. He’s wearing belted shorts and a T-shirt, the exact combination that I’ve purposely avoided. I try to imagine this man married to my mother, wearing a dressing gown at breakfast, hairy legs sticking out underneath.

An irrational flash of disgust flares in me, along with a sudden insight:
Is this what my mother feels when she looks at Imogen?
Mum has been guilty of being overly attached to me, true, but haven’t I been as guilty of it in return? We’d been a pair. For all that I’ve wanted a father all my life, did I ever really want a man to come live with us? Would I have liked having this man, this pathetic, scrawny man, sharing our one bathroom and scowling at her over petty arguments?

Forgiveness wells up in me, for all her faults. She’d been near my age now when she married. She’d been near Imogen’s age when they divorced. She’d done her best.

‘What do you want?’ the man repeats.

‘I don’t know,’ I admit. ‘I don’t know what I want.’ Then, as the man starts to close the door, I put my hand out, palm first, as if to say
stop
. ‘Please, Mr Hutter? I’m Maxwell Gant. May I come in?’

John Hutter leaves the door hanging open and walks
towards the lounge chair that’s his obvious throne. I close the door carefully shut, and follow him.

Besides the framed photos that Imogen had described, the room is filled with seaside themed dust-catchers, like ceramic lighthouses and carved wooden birds. The pegs by the door drip baseball caps and floppy sun-hats. On the table with yesterday’s post are a set of car keys and a smeared bottle of sunscreen. You could seal the house up in a black plastic bag and drop it anywhere in the world, into a rainforest or onto an ice floe, and it would still be a ‘beach house’. That’s the essence of the home, with or without the beach.

I lower myself onto a sand-beige cushion within a wicker sofa frame.

‘Mr Hutter, a friend of mine came to see you about two weeks ago. Do you remember her?’ I resist the urge to describe Imogen, or to offer her name. I want to keep myself from babbling.

‘I remember a woman,’ the man answers.

A clock in the room marks the hour with a bird call, something like
kck-kck-kree.
I jump, then say, ‘She’s my fiancée. She was hoping you would come to our wedding.’ I squeeze my eyes shut and wobble my head. ‘I’m not even sure you’re the right person.’ It comes out with a laugh at the end. ‘Imogen – that’s my fiancée – she’s looking for my father.’

‘That’s what she told me.’

‘She said that you said you don’t have a son.’

The man leans back in his chair, and turns his head to the corner. The wallpaper pattern is made up of little bird footprints, blue on white. ‘I know what I
said. Then Jackie – that’s my wife – joined us and there were … misunderstandings.’

‘Misunderstandings?’

‘Jackie hasn’t been the same, physically, since our second daughter was born. I tell her I don’t mind, but …’ His shoulders go up, down. ‘A woman doesn’t want to hear that you ‘don’t mind’ her body. They’re looking for something more flattering. That’s a tip.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, automatically, floating wherever the conversational current pushes. Jackie is in some of the photos, always with a child or two in front of her, hiding her hips.

‘Jackie made things unpleasant, so the woman left. Isabelle, is it?’

‘Imogen.’

‘Imogen. She left.’

‘Did you go after her?’ I ask, direct for the first time this whole conversation.

‘No. Why would I? I was glad it was over. Except for Jackie’s grumbling.’

I’m not sure what Jackie was on about. Did she hate that Imogen was digging into her husband’s past, or just hate that Imogen’s bodily perfection was in her husband’s line of sight? It crosses my mind: Jackie’s not here right now. Maybe she’s out in her car. Maybe her car’s bright green …
Imogen complained that Patrick Bell never called on the phone. What if that’s because ‘Patrick Bell’ is a woman?

‘Now you show up,’ the man adds.

‘Sorry, I’m not sure exactly where things stand. Are you John Hutter, once married to Muriel Gant?’
And don’t you count your son?

The man scratches the back of his sunburnt neck. ‘I told that woman the truth. I never had a son. But if you’re asking if I was married to Muriel … Well, that’s eight years I’d like back. I put up with Jackie now because I know what real crazy is.’

I skip a breath. ‘You
are
John Hutter? Muriel’s ex-husband? I’m pretty sure that makes you my father.’ Even as I say it, other possibilities jump out at me, most obviously adultery. Just because I’m Muriel’s doesn’t make me her husband’s too.

The man’s quick to answer back, with magnified sarcasm: ‘I’m pretty sure your name’s not Maxwell, then. Unless the bitch changed it. She could have done it, too. She never liked the name you came with.’