The Red House (5 page)

I felt a tether-snap in my mind, a sudden pull.

I was staring; the mother snatched up her child and hurried away.

I walked in the opposite direction, embarrassed, deeper into the Sidgwick Site. I crossed the placid Zen pond in front of the red-lettered all-caps
CRIMINOLOGY
building and into a back car park. I passed through it to a bland academic building where a statue of a Greek figure faced me from inside a glass vestibule. This was Classics.

Another pull, another weight. This time it wasn’t an urge; it was a certainty. I knew what was at the top of those stairs.

Up I went, to where an outsized Ariadne lounged, her toes pointed towards windowed double doors. Through them, I glimpsed the gamut of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. According to the signage, this was a museum of plaster copies of marble originals. I opened the doors.

The picture was clear in my mind: Hercules, huge, bearded, muscled, nude. But he wasn’t there.

There were nudes, plenty. Serene women were covered in flowing drapery, perhaps out of accuracy or modesty, but I suspect that the choice was made mostly to show off the sculptors’ skills. The men were all naked, their bodies lithe and strong, but not massive. Not quite life-sized, most of
them; more two-thirds or half-sized. I walked among them: wrestlers and athletes and soldiers. A mum tried to shush her little son who was excitedly pointing and shouting, ‘Penis!’ I recognised them from the concert hall. Her older children must have been making music there.

I sat down in a chair at the end of the aisle. I breathed deep. Around me, centaurs brawled.

I must be thinking of a different collection, perhaps in London, or that museum in Berlin
… Like everything here, the statue in the window downstairs is a copy. I’d probably seen the original, somewhere where they have the Hercules too. Perhaps not as large as I remember. Perhaps it was a child’s memory, head tilted back to look up.

I stood. My break was almost done; it was nearly time for my singing group. I headed out the way I’d come, through a gauntlet of spears and snakes.

The giant statue was next to the door. I’d missed it as I entered just by walking forward instead of turning around. He was huge, truly huge. Even an adult would have to hinge their neck to look Hercules in the face. I tilted my head so far back that it felt like falling.

‘Hi, Mum. Just leaving you another message. I need to talk to you about the wedding. Im really hopes you’ll come. So do I. Maybe you can visit sooner, actually? I really need to ask you some questions. About my dad. I’m sorry, but … Well, I don’t think I should have to apologise for that, should I? I’ll try again later.’

My mother doesn’t like to talk about my early childhood because that’s when my father was with us. ‘
Emotional abuse
’ is as far as she’ll go with description,
and that restraint is fine with me. All I wanted to know was whether we had ever spent time in Cambridge. We certainly could have. That would explain a lot. Not everything, but enough.

Our hotel room door rattled from Imogen’s key. ‘I’m home!’ she called, as if we were living in a house instead of a room. ‘I got work,’ she announced.

She already has work: she does Spanish translation freelance. Her adoptive parents were employed by the British Council in a sort of cultural ambassadorship, sent to live in various countries for multi-year spurts, hosting artists and actors and authors to dinners and parties on behalf of the country. Imogen lived in Lima for much of her teens. She also speaks good German and decent Arabic.

I closed my laptop and turned towards her from the desk.

Imogen sat on the bed and untied her sandals. She lay back, stretching, then rolled onto her side. Her face was at my elbow. ‘Did you hear me before? I said that I got a job.’

‘I heard you.’
So that’s it, then. She’s decided that we’re moving here
. As with the DNA results, she didn’t feel the need to spell it out. She just moves forward, always, assuming that I’ll catch on.

‘There’s a shop that sells jewellery on King’s Parade. They had an advert in the window for counter help. I’m going to be a shop girl!’

‘You sure you aren’t getting ahead of yourself?’

‘I went for a walk after you went off to the concert hall. Cambridge isn’t that big of a city. Once away from the college, I didn’t recognise a thing, not anything.’ That sounded right; Im’s family had lived in a village and gone
to the village school. All they’d done in the city centre was their music: choir, and occasionally orchestra.

‘And?’ I prompted.

‘Nothing. It’s just a city, a city I’ve never been to before. There’s nothing to stop us moving here. You’re happy, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. But … I wonder if you’ll be bored with shop work, is all.’ She has a Master’s degree.

‘Well, I need some way to meet new people,’ she explained. ‘In London, I had the government work. I need a reason to get clothes on in the morning.’ She tugged her blouse and bra strap down off one shoulder. ‘Do I need an excuse to get my clothes off now?’

Her tan traced the outline of where her bathing suit strap had clung. She is gorgeous gold and gorgeous paper white, take your pick. She undid buttons. I held up my hand.

‘Not now. Sorry.’

She narrowed her eyes and lifted her chin. ‘Fine. I meant I’m going to have a quick wash.’

She doesn’t like it when I say no. She made a show of the rest of the undressing, her back to me. She popped off her bra and slid off her skirt. She gave me every chance to change my mind.

I wanted to. My body was responding already. I –
No, not now,
I told myself. I had to dispel some concerns. That’s how I’d settled on saying it to myself. That phrasing assumes a positive outcome. I needed to be sure, and would become sure, and life would return to normal.

She shut the bathroom door more emphatically than necessary. Most of her personal things had gone in with
her, but a few items were scattered across the dresser top, including her hair brush.

When we did the DNA test a year ago, we swabbed the insides of our mouths. But that wasn’t the only option. I’d looked it up. We could have sent in toothbrushes, or hair.

Im’s hair is thick, so brushing with any vigour pulls some out. I needed that skin tag at the root. I plucked three suitable hairs and slid them into an envelope. A pair of tweezers was also on the dresser. I plucked three hairs of my own and they went into another envelope. There was a mirror on the dresser too. I avoided it. I didn’t want to see myself like that.

I put both envelopes into my work bag. We each have our own laptops, so I knew she wouldn’t stumble on my recent search history of DNA test accuracy. What if the test we sent in a year ago was mixed up or performed incorrectly? What if the results were someone else’s? This new test would be a double-check.

She also wouldn’t see how my Googling had started with legitimate DNA comparison companies that send special kits and require consent signatures, then ended with the more dodgy ones that are willing to bend the rules and get faster results. I didn’t need the results to stand up in court; I just needed to know.

When this test came back, we’d both be sure. That was all. I opened a housing website to search for Cambridge flats. If we wanted to be settled next month, we had to be quick.

Through the door, I heard the bath drain pop. Any moment, she would come into the room smelling of vanilla soap. She would expect me to be affectionate.

Imogen isn’t clingy. She takes time for herself, in the bath, in the gym, working, reading. But when she gives she expects to be received. When she tells a joke, she expects a laugh. When she dresses up, she expects a compliment. When she offers sex …

It’s not just sex,
I reminded myself. Even before we were sleeping together, she was physically expressive with her whole body. She holds hands with friends and kisses as a greeting. She laughs from her belly and quivers when she’s excited. She needed to be close now. Sex was how that came out.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my closed eyes. I saw in my mind that statue of Hercules towering over me. How did I know that it would be there? How did I know that Imogen and Seb had called the horse Marco? No one else knew. That had been their private nickname, which I can’t remember having been told.

In a week
, I assured myself.

In a week, I would know for sure that we’re not related, that the original test wasn’t wrong or misaddressed. I would also know that something else wasn’t true, something I was trying very hard not to consider:

I would know that she didn’t get a result that confirmed relationship, and sleep with me anyway. Or, worse,
because of
that relationship. She loves Seb. She stopped searching the Internet for him when she met me. Maybe there was a reason other than maturity and moving on.

She came out wrapped in a towel. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t molest you,’ she pouted, reaching for her hairbrush.

‘I’m just not feeling well is all,’ I said.
Excuse number three.

Her face softened. ‘Is it the job stressing you?’ she asked. ‘I’ll just rub your back. It will help you fall asleep.’

I turned, pulling my shoulders out of her hands. ‘I’m not ready for bed. We need to look up flats. No point either of us having jobs if we have nowhere to live.’ I felt hypocritical, deflecting physical contact with what could be argued is a similarly intimate interaction, shopping for our first married home.

The difference to me was that one is about intimacy now, and one is a plan for intimacy later. I was happy to plan. I believed in our future. I was sure that, in a week, I’d receive a DNA result that would mock my fears. I’d be shown to be wrong, and then we could be fully happy.

‘I love house hunting,’ she said, grabbing up her own laptop. She was on the bed again; I was still at the desk. ‘Number one, I need a bathtub. And no automatic lights!’ That was a callback to our weekend away last winter, in a supposedly luxury apartment that had had motion-triggered lights, even in the bathroom with the Jacuzzi tub and bookshelf. Every ten minutes the room had gone black and she’d had to throw a roll of toilet paper at the detector on the opposite wall to trigger the lights on again. It became our favourite vacation story. When we bathed there together, we prepared by stacking a pyramid of loo rolls and a basket of scented soaps in arm’s reach. The soaps required more skill, because they were small and didn’t always work. I made rules. Imogen tallied points. We added more and more hot water and stayed in for over an hour. When we’d run out of things to throw, we’d giggled in the dark.

‘Ooh, look,’ Imogen said, tilting her screen towards
me. She pointed to the list of nearby villages in the sidebar. ‘Highfields Caldecote.’ That’s where she’d lived when she was small.

‘We need to live in Cambridge,’ I said firmly, not acknowledging the reminiscence. ‘We want to walk to work, remember?’

‘I don’t mean to live, I just …’

I shook my head. ‘Not yet. Cambridge is enough to start with, don’t you think?’

She nodded, but she clicked the link. She turned her screen slightly away, so that I couldn’t see what she was typing. I could guess, though. Maybe her old home had been up for sale in the recent past. Maybe there were photographs.

I began to type ‘houses flats Cambridge’ and auto-complete suggested the recent search ‘how accurate are DNA tests?’ I angled my screen away in the other direction.

I felt light. I’d just sent the hair samples next-day-air, and now that they were out of my bag I found my arms swinging and my steps bouncing as I left the post office.

My music was done for the day. One of the girls had missed
a cappella,
which threw off the harmonies a bit, but we’d been able to make it work. I crossed the street and ducked into the mouth of a large, high-end mall full of summer shoppers, tourists, teenagers.
Where did Im say that she was going to work?
Someplace on the high street, across from King’s College. Not here, inside the clearly labelled
Grand Arcade
, with its high, arced skylights and shiny floor slabs and very expensive shops. Im prefers the historic storefronts. I joined the swell of anonymity. My
skip turned into a shuffle in the crowd. Guilt over the mistrust inherent in what I’d just done slowed me to a near-halt.

Maybe I can get Im to go back to London, to get started on subletting our flat. I’ll say I need more time here to prepare for the job. Then, within a week, I’ll know for sure that I was wrong. I’ll dispose of the results, pretend I never suspected. Everything will slot back into place. We’ll marry in the chapel, if that’s what she wants. I’ll suggest this now, and say that I’m meeting someone for a working meal, don’t wait up
. I couldn’t face sitting across a table from her tonight. I couldn’t make light conversation, not with what I’d accused her of by posting those hairs.

I bought a croissant as an excuse to stop and sit, at a cramped little cafe table sprinkled with other people’s crumbs. I pulled out my phone. I’d turned it off before rehearsal, and forgotten to turn it on again. A dissonant electronic jangle announced calls missed, voicemails left, texts received.

The Bursar at St Catharine’s (or ‘Catz’ as I should start calling it if I want to fit in), who’s a friend of an old teacher of mine, wanted to meet up for a coffee. One of the flats that Im and I had emailed about last night was free, and did we want to come round for a look? My mother called. No message, but I recognised the number on the screen. Then the phone lit up with that same number again, and almost jumped in my hand as it rang.

‘Mum!’ I said, too loudly, trying to hear myself over the nearby conversations bouncing around the vast mall interior.

‘Maxwell, you didn’t answer before.’

‘Yes, I know, Mum. I was working.’ I could barely hear her. I stuck a finger in my other ear.

‘You asked me about your father.’

I wished that I hadn’t phrased my messages to her that way. I’d only meant that I needed to know about that time of my life, the time when we were all together, and whether we may have ever been to Cambridge or even lived here. I curled my shoulders protectively around the conversation. ‘Yes. I only meant …’