“Then you understand the difference it made to me,” he said, “meeting the others. The world transformed itself around me: the stakes shot up, colors were so beautiful they hurt, life became almost unimaginably sweet and almost unimaginably frightening. It’s so fragile, you know; things are so easily broken. I suppose this may be what it’s like to fall in love, or to have a child, and to know that this could be taken from you at any moment. We were racing at breakneck speed towards the day when everything we had would be at the mercy of a merciless world, and every second was so beautiful and so precarious, it took my breath away.”
He held out his hand for the glass and took a sip. “And then,” he said, raising a palm towards the house, “this came along.”
“Like a miracle,” I said. I wasn’t being snide; I meant it. For a second I felt the old wood of the banister under my palm, warm and sinuous as a muscle, as a living thing.
Daniel nodded. “Improbably,” he said, “I believe in miracles, in the possibility of the impossible. Certainly the house has always felt like a miracle to me, materializing just at the moment when we needed it most. I saw straight away, the second my uncle’s lawyer rang me with the news, what this could mean to us. The others had doubts, plenty of them; we argued for months. Lexie was-I suppose there’s a kind of tragic irony in this-the only one who seemed perfectly happy with the idea. Abby was the hardest to convince-in spite of the fact that she was the one who most craved a home, or perhaps because of it, I don’t know-but even she came round at last. I suppose, in the end, it came down to the fact that, if you are absolutely sure of something, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually persuade people who aren’t sure one way or the other. And I was sure. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
“Is that why you made the others co-owners?”
Daniel glanced sharply across at me, but I kept my face blandly interested and after a moment he went back to looking out through the ivy. “Well, not to win them over, or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Hardly. It was absolutely essential to what I had in mind. It wasn’t the house itself I wanted-much as I love it. It was security, for all of us; a safe haven. If I had been the sole owner, then the crude truth of it is that I would have been the others’ landlord, and they would have had no more safety than before. They would have been dependent on my whims, always waiting for me to decide to move or get married or sell up. This way it was all of our home, forever.”
He lifted a hand and hooked the curtain of ivy aside. The stone of the house was rosy amber in the sunset light, glowing and sweet; the windows blazed like the inside was on fire. “It seemed like such a beautiful idea,” he said. “Almost unthinkably so. The day we moved in, we cleaned the fireplace and washed up in freezing water and lit a fire, and sat in front of it drinking cold lumpy cocoa and trying to make toast-the cooker didn’t work, the water heater didn’t work, there were only two functioning lightbulbs in the whole house. Justin was wearing his entire wardrobe and complaining that we were all going to die of pneumonia or mold inhalation or both, and Rafe and Lexie were teasing him by claiming they’d heard rats in the attic; Abby threatened to make the pair of them sleep up there if they didn’t behave. I kept burning the toast or dropping it into the fire, and we all found that ridiculously funny; we laughed until we could barely breathe. I’ve never been so happy in my life.”
His gray eyes were calm, but the note in his voice, like a deep bell tolling, hurt me somewhere under my breastbone. I had known for weeks that Daniel was unhappy, but that was the moment when I understood that, whatever had happened with Lexie, it had broken his heart. He had staked everything on this one shining idea, and he had lost. No matter what anyone says, a part of me believes that, on that day under the ivy, I should have seen everything that was coming, the pattern unrolling in front of me clean and quick and relentless, and I should have known how to stop it.
“What went wrong?” I asked quietly.
“The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”
He finished his drink in one long swallow and grimaced. “This is foul. I wish we had ice.”
I waited while he poured himself another one, gave it a look of faint distaste and set it down on the bench. “Can I ask you something?” I said.
