It was idealized, all of it. The house on Lonsdale Square, where she and Angela had grown up and where Daniel had spent his early childhood, was now more castle than Victorian villa, the grounds more park than London garden. Daniel as a young man was broader of shoulder, more heavily muscled, and when she saw Ben, the breath caught in her chest. A dimpled cherub, doe-eyed perfection: Daniel had captured perfectly the generosity of his little smile, the soft curl of his hair at the nape of his neck; it almost stopped her heart.
She put the book down.
When she picked it up again, as she skipped back and forth through the pages, trying to make sense of where on earth this story was going, she realized that not everything was idealized. Angela, for example, was cruelly depicted, scrawny and scantily clad, a lush, a fall-down drunk. But Daniel, too, suffered in the telling. In Ares, although he was physically beautiful, his character was rotten: he was malicious, he persecuted younger boys at school, occasionally incurring retaliatory beatings, he seduced and discarded young girls, who seemed to appear somewhere on the scale from naive to idiotic, he bullied and humiliated his mother. It was just so bizarre, Carla thought, so unnerving and yet so affecting to see Daniel depicted as monstrous, and to know he had drawn himself this way. What did it mean that instead of making himself the hero of his own story, he had made himself the villain? It cut her to the bone. But as she turned the pages, that bloody bloc of pain sitting just beneath her breastbone began to shift, to dissolve, and was replaced by a feeling of dread, a creeping certainty that she should put the book down, that she should close it and not look at it ever again. But then, around halfway through, she came across herself once more, arriving at Lonsdale Square on a sunny afternoon with Ben in her arms, and she knew immediately what day it was, and she could not look away.
In Daniel’s version of events, Carla is wearing a dress, her hair is long and wavy, falling over bare shoulders, Ben—gorgeous, golden Ben—is smiling and laughing, perched on her hip. From the balcony, Daniel, his pinched face half in darkness, watches as Carla hands Ben over to Angela. Leaning out into the sunlight, over the balcony, Daniel calls and waves to his aunt but she has already turned away, without acknowledging him. His little face falls.
Over the page, night has fallen. Daniel is watching television in the playroom, alone. He gets up and goes upstairs to his mother’s bedroom to look for her, to say good night, but she is not there. So he goes back down to his own room, where he finds that his little cousin has woken up, has climbed off the mattress on which he was sleeping and is now lying in the middle of the floor. He is drawing, scribbling in a book, surrounded by similar books strewn all around him, their pages covered in his ugly scrawl. The anguish on Daniel’s face is vividly drawn: Ben has ruined all of his books, his carefully drawn comic books! Distraught, he calls for his mother, but no one comes. He looks for her, searching room to room until, eventually, he arrives at the study. The door is shut, but he can hear someone inside, making a noise. Carefully, he pushes the door open, and there she is, straddling a man, some stranger, some man he’s never seen before. Her head is thrown back, her red-lipped mouth open wide. She turns, she catches sight of her horrified child and starts to laugh.
Daniel flees the room.
The next scene shows Daniel lying in bed, his imagination a cloud above him in which various scenes play out: in one, he imagines himself hitting his mother’s lover on the head with a champagne bottle; in another, he slaps his mother’s drunken face. Then, the cloud of his imagination dissipates. Daniel props himself up on one elbow and gazes across the room at the little boy, asleep on his side, his long lashes grazing his cheekbones, his head haloed with curls.
In the morning, Daniel goes upstairs to his mother’s room. She is asleep, alone. He leaves her, closing her bedroom door behind him. He returns to the second floor, to his own bedroom where he gently shakes the little boy awake. The child, delighted to see his big cousin, smiles a huge, goofy smile. Daniel helps him from the bed, he takes his hand, he leads him to the study, opens the door. The pair of them cross the room, hand in hand, picking their way through the evidence of last night’s debauchery—clothes strewn around, ashtray overflowing, an empty bottle of champagne lying on its side. Daniel leads the child to the balcony, he opens the doors, and from behind his back he produces a toy—a bright red truck. He offers it to the child, who laughs delightedly, reaching out to grab it, and as he does, Daniel rolls the truck carefully out onto the balcony, toward the broken railing. He watches as the child toddles after it.