Before the Ruins Read online

  The young smoker was waiting at the bar. He looked like an advert for a very expensive, morally dubious product.

  “How old are you?” The words slipped out of my mouth. He leaned in to whisper an answer. “As old as all that?”

  When his bridesmaid showed up, I slid off the stool and laughed at how regretful he looked.

  We kept circulating, Peter and I, drinks in hand, floating down green marbled corridors, descending carpeted stairways where there were giant vases and tiny couches for passersby to swoon upon, overcome by the weight of their vast fortunes. So I swooned, falling like a leaf and landing to show the maximum of chest and leg.

  “Fucking socialist death duties, Darling! I’m going to have to sell Granny’s island.”

  “But Kirrin’s been in the family since William the Conqueror, Bunty!”

  I laughed harder than the joke deserved and glanced in the mirror, at my stockinged legs and lipsticked smile, at Peter’s tie undone just so. The self-assured handsome man, the black-haired laughing lady reclining in her midnight blue silk dress. Look how well we were doing in our adult disguises! The children we had been—a boyish girl, a girlish boy—no more than tiny points of light under the skin.

  * * *

  Oliver, patrician as ever, came over to say hello. His bride was waving to him from the other side of the ballroom, and Oliver waved back, beaming, as though he hadn’t seen her in years. I complimented him on his speech. It had been rather good. He’d started off by saying something provocative, about getting married in an age when two-thirds of marriages ended in divorce. Then it had been witty. He’d got some laughs talking about how sweet Aria was, how trusting and kind and determined to see the best in people, which meant that if they ever divorced, he could take her to the cleaners. Finally, he’d arrived at sincerity: He couldn’t imagine not being with her, but if anyone was going to break his heart and ruin him and leave him a shell of a human being, he wanted it to be Aria, because she was worth it. His voice got a little thick toward the end and my eyes had pricked with tears, and I found myself thinking that Oliver would be all right now, that Oliver would be safe, as though marriage was, despite all evidence to the contrary, a sheltered harbor, an Ithaca beyond war and monsters and the wrecking storms.

  “You know, I thought you might be Andrea’s mystery man,” Oliver was saying to Peter. “We all think she’s got one, you know.” Then he asked what I had been like when I was younger.

  “Oh Hobbesian. Absolutely Hobbesian.” Oliver didn’t get it, so Peter explained. “Nasty, brutish, and short. From Hobbes’s definition of the life of mankind.” Oliver had looked away. Peter swallowed and just for an instant a crack opened up and I glimpsed another Peter. The Peter who was always quick and clever, but not quite clever enough to hide it, so people were unkind to him, how unkindness seemed to follow him wherever he went, till he took on a hunted, slinking quality, which was when it really got bad.

  My eyes fell on the smoker. There was something about him. He threw me a wink and then mimed smoking a cigarette from where he sat at a table of friends. When I turned back, I thought I heard Peter say, “She was our queen.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I made my way to the River Doors. It was raining and everyone had gone inside. I counted to three and turned and there was the smoker, and didn’t he look happy. A couple of cigarettes, my drink, a slug from his hip flask, and the evening began to tear like tissue paper. It was like ripping the wrapping off a gift. Inside was a box of glittering fragments and darkness.

  We wandered a few steps into the gardens until we were under a tree. I felt the old, careless joy. Oh Andy? She’ll do anything, she will. The cold rain fell on my bare arms and it fell on London, filling the gutters and flowing into the storm drains. Elsewhere, it fell on woods and fields, on the Savernake Forest and the old earth fort at Barbury, on the manor and whoever lived there now, and—a little further still—on the gravestone at Saint Helen’s, where I still thought nothing on earth would ever bring me.

  “You should have a coat on,” he said. I put my hands inside his suit jacket. The heat was radiating through his shirt. He put his hands on either side of my waist. Even in the heels, I had to get on tiptoe. White shirt, white teeth, dark blond hair. His name is one of the things I lost. I kissed him. Or he kissed me. And it was like finding a door to a warm room unlocked on a cold night and slipping inside. Lovely, until the bridesmaid showed up.

  * * *

  When I finally found Peter, he was sitting alone in the American Bar. I thought he’d gone, that I had, not for the first time, ruined everything. I called a waiter and ordered us two glasses of champagne, feeling the panic draining away. The smile Peter gave me was thin.

  “Some things don’t change.”

  “You were four hours late.”

  Peter looked at his hands. His voice was tight. “It has, of late, been hard to get away.”

  But I didn’t ask. Once again, I missed the chance.

  “Did you have fun?” When I didn’t reply, Peter said, “He looks like David. That young man. When you think about it.” It was a little bit like having a bomb thrown at you from a very great height, watching it turn as it fell toward you through the air.

  “Do you think so?” I took my drink in a gulp.

  “Is it because of David that you’re not with anyone?”

  I signaled the waiter for another. “Do you remember when everyone used to say they didn’t mind gays as long as they didn’t ram it down their throats? But it’s heterosexuality that’s rammed at people, Peter.” I started laughing. “Like a shopping cart, right in the back of the knees.” I got up and mimed it for him, earning a worried look from one of the barmen. “Seeing someone nice?” Ram. “I know a lovely chap, just your sort.” Ram. “What about kids?”

  Next, I remember standing at the sink in the marble bathroom. In the mirror, the bridesmaid’s hot, hurt eyes were boring into mine. Beside her, I looked like the wicked queen: black hair, now turning to frizz, gray eyes, mouth red, like someone’d slapped it.

  “Sometimes I look so much like my mother,” I told her.

  Two whiskies, and the night was black streamers. I had Peter’s hand in mine, and we were dashing up the Strand and then along the Mall. Saint James’s Park was a pool of darkness and as we slipped in among the pathways, I asked Peter if he’d ever gone cruising there.

  “Not even a little? Not a Coldstream Guard or a member of the Household Cavalry? No, not even a little member?”

  He shook his head. The water gleamed. There was no one there, not a dog, not a jogger.

  “I’m thinking of inventing an app,” Peter was saying, “and when you open it, it will give you a history of all the crimes that have ever taken place in the surrounding area. All the murders and robberies and incidences of gross indecency and … slight indecency? Minor indecency? Going back to when records began.”

  “Here Bishop Barnaby famously burned on a pyre his loyal servant Robert for serving his tea tepid.”

  “Exactly.”

  The cold was getting to my head. I crouched down and put a hand on the grass to steady myself. The earth was folded in on itself. Bleeding cold. I felt it reaching up my arm.

  “‘And no birds sing.’”

  “What?” Peter said.

  “Where’s that from? ‘And no birds sing’?”

  “Keats. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’”

  “Ah, the one about the fairy who enchants the knight.” I owed my reading to Peter. He was my friend, my special friend, my very best. I demanded a haircut like his, shoes like his. I tried complaining that I couldn’t see the board in a ploy to get glasses so I could be like Peter. No one expected anything of me, but if Peter was on the clever table, then so was I, even if it meant murder. I wasn’t going to let him escape me through the pages of a book.

  My fingers sank through the grass into the dirt. To lie down, to get inside it, to be covered over. Just for a bit. Drinking thoughts. Peter
pulled me up and led me over to a bench.

  “Do we have anything to drink?”

  “Nope.”

  I opened my handbag and inside there was someone else’s pack of cigarettes, and a clutch of bar miniatures.

  “Looky, looky.”

  “That’s the girl I remember.” Out in the darkness, I heard the water part and glimpsed a serpentine neck dipping beneath the surface. He fell silent for a moment. “I saw David, Andy.”

  I’d always thought it was Peter who was keeper of the great silence. Had it been me? And if so, for how long? I opened another little whiskey, a fairy-sized bottle of oblivion.

  “And?” I felt a little rocket of rage going up. At an airport baggage carousel, wife and child in tow? On YouTube or giving a Ted Talk? Crouched on a pavement, begging for spare change?

  “Does it matter?”

  “How did he look?”

  But Peter didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I was happy.

  “Delirious, Peter. Absolutely delirious.”

  “Why can’t you just be fucking happy, Andy?” He rubbed at his eyes. “Just be fucking happy.” And for a horrible second, I thought Peter was going to cry.

  “Look, I am happy. We’ve gone to the ball. We’re having a nice time, aren’t we?”

  “We’ve never really spoken about what happened at the manor. Not just … I mean all of it.”

  “Accidents happened at the manor. Just accidents. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  “There’s something, something I should tell you—”

  “I grew up,” I said. I don’t know why I thought that was the correct response. Everything was getting away from me. “I grew up!”

  “Is it because of Joe?”

  The reflex, never buried that deep, surfaced in one white-hot second: I curled my fingers round the little bottle and lashed out with my fist, catching Peter on the brow.

  Horrible. Horrible. I took off along one of the paths. I could hear him calling for me. Saying he was sorry. My breath was all wrong, sawing in and out, and I heard myself crying, distantly crying, the sound of a woman in distress. Someone should help that woman, I thought.

  Emerging from the park, I found myself stumbling under the faded neon of the streetlamps in front of Buckingham Palace. Further on, there were guards up by the gates. The palace looked like an enormous wedding cake, white and clean and gleaming; a wedding cake or a doll’s house, a doll’s house built for a nation. I wondered which room the Queen was sleeping in? Or was she awake, peeping out from behind a curtain at the nocturnal subjects of her realm? I wondered if we ever kept her up nights with the worry of us.

  There were steps up on the left. I sat down on them, or sprawled. The Mail was missing a tremendous opportunity for an upskirt pic.

  Joe had been my mother’s last boyfriend. He’d made my life hell from the age of thirteen to fourteen, before going out one night in his car and never coming back. Joe was the reason I couldn’t stand Midlands accents and disliked beards and never took unlicensed cabs, in case one day I got in and Joe’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. Joe was why I would never have a dog, because you owned a dog and put it on a lead, you told it what to do, and made it love and fear you, and that sort of thing was up Joe’s street, not mine.

  When Peter arrived, I was gazing up at the palace facade, working out if it was possible.

  “Easy.”

  “What?” He sat down beside me and gently put my bag in my lap.

  “To climb.”

  “Think you could still do it?”

  “Maybe not in these shoes.”

  Peter gave me a smile that was just a twist of the mouth. I took his chin in one hand and touched his brow lightly with the fingers of the other. Peter winced.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Me too. For all of it.”

  I could have said all of what? But I didn’t, because I was afraid there were things we might say to one another that would mean the end of everything. And I couldn’t afford to lose Peter. That’s what it came down to.

  After that, I got what I’d wanted, because we went back to the beautiful and very expensive room, and we lay upon the bed in the dark and I think I remember Peter taking my hand. But the sadness had arrived. It was always sad to see Peter, really. That was why we saw each other so rarely.

  He was gone when I woke, along with a few chunks from my own personal wedding video. I didn’t call him. I remembered enough. I didn’t want filling in. I thought that by not calling him, that night could become just one more thing we didn’t talk about. Instead, I collected my things and took the tube home, public transport as a form of penance. On the way from the station to my flat, I stopped and bought twenty quid’s worth of low-end, highly processed sugars and fats, because I was already convinced that at home an episode would be waiting for me there. And it was.

  But what was waiting for Peter? That was the question. What was waiting for Peter that caused him to break the habit of twenty years, the habit he had kept religiously, of calling his mother every Sunday after Evensong?

  CHAPTER 4

  APOCALYPSE II

  We took Marcus’s way down from the roof. As I dropped into the long, wet grass, I felt a snail shell shatter under my heel, then something small and slimy squish against the ground. After wiping my foot on the grass, I went over to where I’d left my shoes and sat down to put them on. Peter left the stranger talking to Emma and shot over.

  “He’s a friend of the family who own it.” Marcus had gone over to investigate. I saw him shrug. “He’s at school with their son. His name’s David.” Peter stopped. A bubble of enthusiasm had been rising in his voice. When he spoke again, he had assumed his lazy, lecturing tone. “The parents are in America. They’re British but his father’s got business there. They’re coming back in the autumn.”

  David was about our age. His hair was on the blond side; he had nice jeans on and a faded T-shirt in forest green. I could feel the day threatening to turn. He had more right to be there than we did, but he was uninvited. He came and the day I had planned so carefully was turning. Some people spoiled things. I cast another look at him, only to find him watching. He was humming as he came over and it took me a couple of seconds to pick up the melody.

  “But if you’re the queen of the castle,” he said, “does that make us the dirty rascals?”

  I had begun building a spliff. Now I let the lighter go out and blew out the tiny ember from what was a fast-diminishing eighth. The hash gave out a little plume of smoke. A few paces away, Em had her arm through Peter’s, as though holding him back.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  He sat down on the step, but not too close, and leaned back on his elbows, the toes of his shoes burrowing among the gravel. He was humming again and looking out over the lawns. Together, we followed the path of a white butterfly as it danced toward a sunken little pond, its surface covered in lily pads.

  “These parents of your friend not about then?”

  “In Boston for the summer,” he said. His voice was neutral, not posh, but not local either.

  “And you’re what? Keeping an eye on it for them?”

  I handed him the joint and his eyes met mine for a second before I could look away.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  * * *

  We ate the picnic I’d brought under the pear tree. There were mini pork pies and Scotch eggs, pasties, a Walkers multipack of crisps, and everyone’s favorite chocolate bar: a Crunchie for Em, a Boost for Marcus, Peter’s Wispa, and a Mars for me. Em snapped a bit of her Crunchie off and gave it to David and then we all followed suit, so that there were four little pieces of chocolate lined up before him on the blanket like offerings.

  “What should I have brought you?” I asked. We waited expectantly while he thought about it. Would it be something posh? Cadbury’s Bourneville, or—worse—a red Bounty? Perhaps he only ate Ferrero Rocher. In town, the nice cars had a tendency to slow down to let the
kids in Marlborough College uniform cross the road while ignoring the rest of us. Then there were the plummy, carrying voices in Waitrose, the shops that sold evening wear, skiing and sailing kit, or displayed magnums of champagne in the window with strawberries around Wimbledon.

  “Imagine it’s the last day on earth, just before the apocalypse. It’s the last chocolate bar you’re ever going to eat,” Peter said. I flashed him a look.

  “The apocalypse?” David said. “Well, in that case, I think it would have to be a Curly Wurly.”

  “But a Curly Wurly is all holes!” Em’s voice was hot with outrage.

  David lay back on the grass. He was lean and a little shorter than both Peter and Marcus. Whereas Peter burned, Em freckled, and Marcus and I tanned, the sun turned his skin a tawny color. His hair was a dirty blond, the kind that would lighten in streaks. He made me think of summer, not June, but of the shorter days of July, the heavier quality of the air.

  “It’s the holes I want it for. They have a very special flavor,” David said.

  After a bit, I offered him the hash and he took a turn skinning up. He did it neatly with deft fingers. David had nice hands. It was the first time I remember noticing whether someone’s hands were nice or not. The joint went round. There was a little rabbit-shaped cloud up above all on its own. At some point, Peter started up. When I tuned in, he was talking about Oxford.

  “… an offer from Balliol. Of course I have to get the results. Law’s very competitive.” He was starting to speed up. “Do you know today’s the apocalypse? Andy’s … well, someone said it was going to be today, so we decided to pretend that it was, which is why we came here. Andy’s idea. She has a bit of a thing about this place. What would you do if it were the last day on earth? It’s funny, because I’d still want to know what happened at the end of my book. So I’d probably end up reading right through it.” On and on it went, without a pause for breath, Peter, like a trackside bookie, giving David the inside information on all of us. “… and Marcus’s uncle keeps an eye on it for your friend’s family, and Marcus is learning the business,” and “Em’s an artist, very talented. She’s really into Blake,” and finally, “Andy just wants to climb, she wants to be the English Catherine Destivelle.”