No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

‘No,’ Laurence says, ‘nothing else today. I’m going home. Family time.’

‘Bullshit,’ Amit says, laughing.

‘No,’ Laurence tells him. He asks for Amit to get him a car and he loosens his tie. He texts Deanna: I’m coming home.

The house looks exactly as Laurence has been picturing it: the same ramshackle wooden walls; the same dock that stretches off out and over the water; the same view behind it, the mountain and the houses in the distant opposite, and the sun above them. The driver takes them along the dirt track that runs down the hill towards the shoreline and Laurence watches the house get closer, as if it is becoming more real, and it reveals itself to him in broken windows and splintered wood. He feels the peace washing over him, a sense that this is meant to be – at least for now. Barely ten minutes from their other house, yet it feels like a different place entirely. He winds the window down and smells the air, listens to the sound of the tires on the gravel.

Laurence watches as the driver takes the car back up the hill, leaving him alone outside for a second. There’s just him. He can’t hear his family, not at that moment; and then he goes up to the front door, which is opened wide, and inside. He hears them upstairs, singing some song that he vaguely recognizes from the radio. Deanna is mostly humming the melody, but the kids know every word. He doesn’t shout to let them know that he’s here, not yet.

He walks through the downstairs, which is open-plan, a living area with 1950s wood-framed sofas around a fireplace, then the kitchen behind and the table for four, the units that are the same wood as everything else. The man who owned this place must have been a carpenter, he thinks; maybe he did this all himself, and built the house with his own two hands. There are gun racks on the walls, empty slots of what was once there; and a hook with a dust outline shape of what was clearly a mounted animal head. Laurence stands by the window at the end of the house, looking out over the water.

‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks him. She’s at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t hear her come down.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘It went well.’

‘I love you,’ she says, and he smiles.

‘It’s so peaceful here,’ he tells her. ‘This is amazing.’ He’s transfixed, staring at some far-off point in the distance. There’s a thin layer of mist stopping him from seeing what’s actually over the other side of the lake, only the thin shapes of what have to be houses and trees, but that isn’t stopping him. ‘I wasn’t joking when I said that I had always dreamed of this,’ he tells her.

‘I know.’ She stands next to him while the twins run around behind her. ‘Thank god you’re here. There’s no running water.’

‘I’ll turn it on,’ he says. He doesn’t stop staring out at the lake.

The cellar door off the kitchen opens onto stairs that go down into total darkness. There’s a smell of more than damp: of absolute wetness, wet mud and wet stone. Laurence and Deanna both peer down into the black.

‘Looks like it’s flooded down there,’ Laurence says.

‘Could be from the lake.’

‘Could be.’ He pulls off his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves.

‘You should change,’ she says.

‘Didn’t bring anything,’ he replies. ‘I can get this cleaned. It’ll be fine.’ He opens his toolbox and looks for the torch. It’s not there, so he takes out his cellphone and turns the brightness up, holding that out in front of him as he takes the first few steps down. The stairs are wooden, a stained and polished pine, and they creak underneath his weight. He puts his free hand out to the wall to steady himself. ‘I’ll do this,’ he says. ‘You stay up there and call for help if I die.’

‘Don’t,’ she says.

‘It’s fine. Joke.’ She hears him smiling. He steps down again, a few more. In front of him he can see the floor now, the bottom of the steps, and there is water there. He can’t tell how deep, because it’s black with dirt and grime. ‘Pass me a stick or something?’

‘Wait,’ she says, looking around. There’s nothing. She runs past the kids, who are now playing with their phones on the sofas, sitting in little clouds of dust that puff around them every time that they move (like Pig-Pen, she thinks, from the Peanuts cartoons), and she goes outside to the trees that line the road. She finds a branch and takes it back to him, passing it down.

‘About time,’ he jokes. He holds it in front of him and steps down again, watching the stick go into the water until it stops. ‘Ankle level,’ he says. He sits on the steps and they creak horrifyingly, as if they’re being pulled off the walls.

‘We need these replaced,’ Deanna says.

‘They’re fine. They need oiling or something, maybe a supporting strut.’

‘You say that as if you know what it means.’

‘It’s a strut. It supports.’ He pulls off his shoes and socks and folds the bottom of his suit trousers up to his knees. ‘Or something.’

‘You’re not,’ she says.

‘What else am I going to do?’ he asks. He steps down into it and the water swirls around his feet. He gasps. ‘Cold,’ he says. ‘Jesus, that is cold.’

‘Can you see the water pipes?’

‘Give me a second,’ he shouts back. From where Deanna’s standing at the top of the stairs she can’t see him now, only the faint flashes of his phone’s light as he swishes it around. ‘Okay, got it,’ he says. ‘It’s rusted to hell.’

‘Can you turn it?’

‘I don’t know. I need a wrench or something.’ She picks up the bag and takes the first few steps down, and they groan. He wades closer and she places it slightly further down the stairs, within his reach. He grabs at it, stepping up. His feet are filthy, she sees. ‘I’ll get on this,’ he says. ‘You tell me if it works?’

She stands at the sink and turns the taps on, and there’s a dribble of brown sludge from them and a gurgling, but no water. She waits, as the clangs of him struggling with the pipe echoes through the stairwell. She thinks about Lane and how it’s been a while since she last called to check in, so she dials the house; but there’s no answer; she dials her daughter’s cellphone, and there’s still no reply. She leaves a message and then tries again, letting the phone ring and ring.

‘Shit,’ she says.

‘Mom!’ Sean shouts, hearing the word.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ she mutters back. ‘Laurence,’ she calls, ‘I can’t get hold of Lane.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ he shouts up to her.

‘I told her to stay in the house.’

‘So go and pick her up. Force her to come here, be with us. She can help me dredge the cellar out when I’ve got this working.’ She hears the noises still coming, the strain in his voice as he fights against the decades-old plumbing of the house, trying to make it habitable. When they moved into their first apartment, there was a superintendent to fix anything that broke; when they bought their house in Staunton itself they had it gutted and renovated and made as modern as possible, switches and buttons put in, digital rather than analog to run their lives by. Working with the old is new to them.

‘I’ll take the kids,’ she says. ‘We won’t be long.’

‘Bring me a Coke?’

‘Sure,’ she says. She goes to the kids. ‘Come on,’ she tells them, ‘we’re going back to the house for a little while.’

‘I want to stay here,’ Sean says. He doesn’t look up from his game, but Alyx does.

‘You can’t.’

‘Mo-o-om,’ he says. He hits the whine in his voice, a note that he and Alyx have perfected over the duration of their lives; some pitch that manages to work in the same way that Deanna’s angry voice does. It’s worse when it’s in harmony.

‘Fine,’ she says. She shouts to Laurence. ‘Sean’s staying up here.’

‘Can I swim now?’ Sean asks.

‘When your father’s done,’ she says. Alyx stands up and coughs away dust, and she and Deanna leave. Sean sits and listens as the engine starts, then he watches them drive up the track until they’re gone.

Laurence struggles. It’s hot down in the cellar, or he is; he sweats, and he hears the patter of it dripping into the water around his feet. He tries again, because he’s sure that there’s some movement; an almost-infinitesimally small amount, but it’s still movement. Eventually this will open up the sluices. He stands still, planting his feet in the murky water, and he really fights the thing. It doesn’t move and he doesn’t move. Total stillness.

The light has gone out on his phone, some sort of standby mode having kicked in, and he’s in the dark now, but he doesn’t stop. This is necessary. The house means something. Securing it, actually working on it, that’s a way of making their future seem as if it’s going to happen. His phone rings, Amit’s name on the screen; the photo of his grinning face that was taken on their first meeting.