Black Rabbit Hall (10 page)

‘All I’ll say is that we’d be better off putting your nephew in charge of the wedding than Dill.’

‘Not fair. I like Dill.’

‘So do I. But she’s clearly been changing Mrs Alton’s bedpans for the last thousand years and seems to have met barely another living soul, let alone supervised a wedding.’ He winds down his window, lets the warm, damp evening flood in. ‘If you ask me, it’s only because they’re posh that Social Services aren’t knocking on the door.’

The rush of air makes Lorna’s enthusiasm flame up again. ‘Oh, forget Dill and Mrs Alton and everything else for a moment!’ She closes her eyes, feels her hair swish about her neck. ‘Imagine the house full of people dancing! The garden lit up! Kids –’

‘– smashing the antiques. Getting lost in the woods,’ he says drily.

‘The house needs some life, some love, that’s all, Jon.’

‘And at least five hundred grand’s worth of repairs. The buckets weren’t decorative.’

‘Oh, no one will care about the odd leak.’ Well, only Jon’s mother, Lorraine, a glamorous juggernaut of a matriarch – Botox, BMW convertible, big heart – who is never shy of
complaining to café managers if there is toilet paper on the floor of the Ladies or a smudge on a wine glass. She’d grown up ‘outside-toilet’ poor and, now that she is not in the least poor, dismisses anything short of luxurious and absolutely spotless as a point of principle. ‘They’ll enjoy something different.’

He smiles. ‘It will certainly be different.’

‘Jon, it’s
the
house. The one Mum and I visited. Even Dad thinks it is,’ she adds, embellishing only a little.

‘Your old man, bless him, being a wholly credible source of accurate information.’ He winds the window down further, trucker elbow hanging out of the car.

‘Black Rabbit Hall has got soul. That is all that matters,’ says Lorna, with finality.

‘It’s also got dry rot,’ he teases, overtaking a rattling Cortina, fog lights on, snorting black exhaust. ‘And I don’t fancy paying for the privilege of feeling like a toff for the day, thanks all the same.’

Lorna feels ridiculously tearful, aware of how silly and immature it is to cry about a wedding venue of all things, but unable to help herself. Also, she’s not aspirational, not like that. Her mother’s misplaced snobbery, her habit of telling Lorna’s friends’ mothers that Dad managed an ‘executive car service’ rather than drove a black cab had always been excruciating to her and her sister.

‘Sorry.’ Jon reaches across, hitches up the hem of her yellow dress to lay a hand on her bare knee, his eyes on the road. ‘I know Cornwall is …’ he glances at her, hesitates, choosing his words carefully ‘… special to you.’

‘Don’t try to read things into it, Jon,’ she says quickly, warning him off. She knows what he’s trying to imply,
doesn’t want to go there. ‘I just think that house is amazing, the perfect place for a wedding, for us.’

They drive on for a bit in silence, the green fields smudging to graphite squares in the dusk, their normal easy intimacy a little jagged. After a while, Jon pulls up at a junction, turns to face her, his gaze warm and impossible to break. ‘Lorna, I just want us to be married, that’s all.’ He switches on a Cockney accent, the one that always makes her smile. ‘For yous to be me missus.’

‘I will!’

‘And the wedding to be about you and me.’

‘That’s all it’s ever been about.’

He rakes his blond hair off his face. The air thickens between them. ‘Then why can’t I shift the feeling that the moment we stepped into that house it became about something else?’

‘I don’t know what you’re –’ She stops. There
is
something else, irrational, inescapable, a pull she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know how to explain it.

‘It’s all right,’ Jon says, as if reading her thoughts. ‘Let’s just get back, shall we?’ He slams his foot on the accelerator.

Lorna twists in her seat belt, hoping to catch a final glimpse of the house in the distance. But it’s gone. The miles tick past. The sky darkens. A thick eggy fog rolls over the hedges, whirling in the cones of the headlights. But as vivid dreams can fray the neat edge of waking hours, so Black Rabbit Hall stays with Lorna that night, during the days that follow: the smell of beeswax; the hum of the globe; the taste of the past, salty, moreish, on the tip of her tongue.

Amber, August 1968

‘This house needs a woman’s touch again,’ Peggy is saying, voice hushing as voices do when crossing into awkward dead-mother territory. ‘That’s what it needs. Gosh, let’s get some air and light in here, shall we? It’s been four months – God rest her soul – and Mr Alton’s still keeping Nancy’s dressing room like a mausoleum. It gives me the willies.’

Curtains rattle along a rail. A thin line of light spills through the edges of the doors. I huddle into the cloud of a fur-lined coat, press myself against the back of the wardrobe. I’ve always loved Momma’s wardrobe, the giant mahogany paw feet that look like they might start lumbering across the room at any moment, its bloated belly full of silky dresses, furs (sable, mink, fox), the teetering column of circular hat boxes, mothy cashmere. It’s the last place on the estate that still smells intensely of Momma: the waxy scent of her red lipstick in its bullet-gold case, old saddle leather, the bread-dough tang of her skin in the morning before she showered. I remember Momma by her smell. She’d understand: she used to sniff us all the time. But I suspect Peggy and Annie will think it’s weird – and Daddy doesn’t want any of us here messing up his memories – so I sit very still and try not to make a sound.

‘The house just feels so dark these days,’ continues
Peggy, sucking a sigh through her teeth. ‘Dark and stagnant, however many windows I open.’

I’ve begun to realize this too. Without Momma’s light, airy presence, Black Rabbit Hall feels heavy and still, too old and tired to move.

‘Well, the children aren’t helping matters,’ says Annie, thinking Peggy is having a dig at her cleaning. ‘I could make a sand dune just with what’s in the stair carpet. And they never stop tramping river mud through the place. It’s like a bog in their bathrooms. I’m not paid enough, Pegs, I’m really not.’

‘Come, Annie …’ Peggy sounds irritated now. ‘Hardly the time.’

‘I’ve never seen kids go feral so quick. They look wild. And they
are
wild, Peggy, wilder than any God-fearing kids should be, let alone a grand family such as the Altons. Everyone in the village is nattering about it.’

‘Well, let them.’ I hear a complaint of springs that can only mean Peggy’s flumped down on Momma’s baby-blue
chaise longue
by the window. ‘If they’ve got nothing better to do than gossip about wretched children who’ve lost their ma.’

‘I’m just saying they’re not the same smart city kids who stepped off that London train at the beginning of the summer, that’s all,’ mutters Annie, under her breath. A swoosh of a polishing cloth on wood.

‘No.’ Peggy sighs. ‘That they’re not.’

I can only remember that early-July day vaguely: leaving Paddington in the morning, the grimy swing of the train door in the evening, Toby throwing his bag on to the sun-scrubbed platform. A lifetime ago already.

After Momma’s funeral, Daddy decided that the best thing for all of us was to continue precisely as if nothing had happened. The next day Toby left for boarding school as normal; Kitty, Barney and I returned to Fitzroy Square and day school in London. The alternate reality of that summer term quickly took over, our broken lives held up by tight white elastic socks and the industrious routines of our earnest new nanny, Meg, who has a streak of grey hair like a badger, and says, ‘Now, now, it’ll all work out fine,’ a lot, when it clearly won’t.

Looking back on that school term now, I’m not sure it was actually me sitting at the pen-pocked desk, shooting my hand up to answer questions on Prospero and osmosis to prove that I was the same star student and nothing had changed, debating the merits of the school tuck shop’s various boiled sweets with Matilda, as if I still lived in a universe where boiled sweets might actually matter. It was someone acting me, I think: I was huddled in a tight ball somewhere else, hands over my head, trying to protect myself from the unendurable sadness that would swoop down without warning, bloodied claws outstretched.

At least the days snipped past, vanished as soon as they’d happened, leaving nothing behind: everything felt inconsequential, pointless, and I missed Toby dreadfully. In a blink it was the end-of-term school fête: Union Jack bunting, fat strawberries and dollops of cool sweet cream, a shrill starting whistle and a fierce charge of mothers in fluttery pastel dresses, with thudding bare feet – but no longer my mother, who always won the mothers’ race, light and graceful as a doe – and the summer term finished. It was time to return to Black Rabbit Hall for the
summer holidays. Because that is what Altons do at the beginning of July. And nothing must change.

I even allowed myself to believe it wouldn’t: that Black Rabbit Hall had such power of inertia that we would all just return to the days before the storm and Momma would still be there, the beads of her string bikini bouncing at the back of her neck as, whooping, she ran into the sea.

Counting down the days until we left for Cornwall, I’d lie in my bed in Fitzroy Square trying to conjure it all up: the pipes clanking, the bigness, the safeness. But when we got back here it wasn’t the same. There was no safe feeling left, just an unhinged, manic freedom.

‘Their mother wouldn’t stand for it, all this a-roaming about the countryside from dawn to dusk,’ says Annie, shaking me out of my thoughts. ‘Not even an American, Pegs.’

I want to shout that Momma wouldn’t mind at all. She was the one who’d wake us up to watch the red sunrise and make us sit, yawning, bleary-eyed, complaining but happy, wrapped in doggy blankets in the car, drinking hot chocolate from a Thermos.

Then I doubt myself: it gets harder and harder to know what she’d think. Or remember her face, her real face, not just the face from a photograph. I remember random things more vividly, a tiny biscuit crumb stuck to her lipstick as she smiled, the patterns of freckles across her nose. Other times, when I’m asleep, I hear her voice so clearly – ‘Honey, lend me a hand in the stables this morning?’; ‘Pancakes or crumpets? Peggy is demanding an answer’ – that it wakes me up with a jolt, certain she’s in the room. But she isn’t. She never is.

One hundred and twenty-three days ago she was alive. And getting older. Now she won’t get any older. In April it would have been her forty-first birthday. (I imagined her in the bronze dress, the one she’d wear with her tiger-eye earrings, that turned her hair a blaze of red and her eyes green as lettuce.) We planted a plane tree in Fitzroy Square and lit a candle on a pink cake adorned with a tiny American flag on a cocktail stick. As we walked away, mouths full of icing and sponge, I wondered how many of her birthdays we’d celebrate: dead people’s birthdays go on forever. Do we stop when she gets to the right age to die? Like eighty. Or seventy-five. Daddy didn’t answer.

Toby and I were fifteen in May. We couldn’t face a party so Daddy took us to the cinema in Leicester Square. We stumbled out of the dark, smoky theatre unable to remember what we’d just seen. I didn’t tell any of my friends that it was my birthday, apart from Matilda, because it’s embarrassing enough being the Girl Whose Mum Died – the head threw a special assembly, crucifying – and I don’t want to attract any more attention.

I am attracting attention outside school, though. When I walk down the street men stare much more than they ever did. Secretly, I quite like it. But Toby tried to hit one last week, a stringy boy with bulgy eyes, smoking, leaning against the red telephone box in the village.

I shift, trying to get comfortable, realizing how long my legs have grown, flamingo legs folding right up to my chin. I’m half an inch taller too – Toby double that. I’m finally wearing a proper bra. (I have never missed Momma more than when I was struggling out of my shirt in the stuffy Rigby & Peller changing room, watched by new nanny
Meg.) It’s a relief to have a proper woman’s body at last because I no longer feel like a girl inside. You can’t feel like a girl if you haven’t got a mother, I told Matilda. The generations jump about like months in a leap year. You have to grow up.

Barney and Kitty don’t have a mother either, just a gap where she used to be. And as big sister, I have to try to fill it.

I’m pretty bad at all the Momma things – bedtime stories, kissing cut knees, untangling knots in fine baby hair – but I try to copy what she did and hope it’s better than nothing. I remembered to put a coin beneath the pillow when Barney lost a tooth. I covered the dappled grey rocking horse with a blanket because it reminded him of Knight and made him cry. I poke the stuffing back inside Raggedy Doll’s neck when it sprouts from the stitches, go along with the ritual of putting her to bed in the cradle, tucking the doll beneath her lacy sheets. I worry about Kitty being too cheerful – ‘Worrying is a mother’s job’ – and not understanding the finality of death: yesterday I found her pushing Raggedy Doll around the stables, searching for Momma. I worry when Barney wets the bed or pours hot water down the ant hole on the terrace. I talk to Daddy about why he might have dropped to the bottom of the class at school and all the other bedwetty things, and Daddy mutters that he doesn’t know what he’d do without me. And that makes me feel proud but panicky. It makes me want to push my siblings away as well as hold them close. And sometimes it makes me cry a bit. Those times, the times it feels like someone’s hollowed out my heart with an ice-cream scoop, I slink into this wardrobe
and pretend the dangling silk scarves are Momma’s long hair.

I came in here after Boris appeared at breakfast with Momma’s wooden Mason Pearson hairbrush between his teeth. It still had her copper hair in it. I always pay a quick visit after those nights when I wake up and forget Momma is dead for a few blissful moments, then remember. Or when I push open the drawing-room door, expecting to see her stockinged feet up on the footstool, but they’re not there and my brain flings back to dark places. What do her feet look like now? Are they just a marble-bag of bones, knuckly white joints, like the ones in Toby’s collection?

The longest I’ve had to sit here this summer holiday was in the first week: one morning Peggy started frantically removing all the stuff in the pantry ‘left over’ from when we were last here – Easter – which meant throwing away the things we ate when Momma was alive. Toby was mad about that too. But Peggy insisted it would upset our stomachs, even though she’s not one even to scrape the mould off the top of the jam and hates wasting anything. It was about something else.

Luckily, Toby rescued a small half-empty jar of Bovril from the bin for me. I now have it safely hidden in my knicker drawer. I unscrew the lid to smell the sandwiches Momma and I used to eat on lazy, happy Saturday mornings. The girl I was – quietly confident, trusting, full of certainties – is somewhere in that gloopy, inky pot.

Toby is different too. He gets angry a lot now and he didn’t before: angry with Momma for dying; with me for not being Momma; with Peggy for not being Momma; with Barney for chasing rabbits that day; with Barney for
no longer chasing rabbits; with Daddy for shutting down – it’s like Daddy’s had a power cut and we’re still waiting for someone to fix him. I don’t like being around Toby’s anger too much or it seeps into me too.

But I can still see the old Toby sometimes: I can see the old Toby more easily than I can see the old me. I think that’s true for him too, in reverse. And we still laugh at stupid things. It feels disloyal to laugh with Momma dead. But it feels worse if we don’t. We get these fleeting unexpected bursts of silly happiness that come from nowhere, glowing embers shooting on to damp ground. So anything is possible: that’s what Momma always said. Well, most things. I’m not about to go looking for her in the stables like Kitty.

My leg cramps and I stretch it out, knocking a shoe to the floor of the wardrobe.

‘What was that?’ says Peggy. ‘Did you just hear something, Annie?’

I freeze, heart in my mouth, wondering how on earth I will explain myself.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Those bloody mice again.’

I muffle a sigh of relief in cupped hands.

‘What was I saying? Oh, yes. I politely said to Mr Alton that the kids need to be brought in hand. Especially Toby. He slept on a bed of sticks in the woods last week. Did you know that?’

‘Rather him than me. What did Mr Alton say?’

‘That Toby’s been a right pain in the neck – all sorts of problems at school – and if he’s happy and out of trouble for once then let him be. And, oh, yes, had I starched Mr Alton’s white shirts for his trip to Paris?’

‘Sounds like he just wants them out of his hair, Pegs.’

My stomach goes watery. Is that true? It can’t be.

‘Little troupers, those kids.’

‘But Barney’s gone flat as a pancake. Toby, well …’ Something in Annie’s voice cracks.

‘Toby will calm down,’ says Peggy, firmly. ‘Amber will make sure of it.’

‘She’s too young for all this, Pegs.’

‘Time is a great healer. We must remember that.’

Everyone says this. Or, worse, ‘In time, you will feel better …’ That’s like promising to someone who has lost their leg, ‘In time, you will grow another.’ Anyway, I don’t want to feel better. I don’t want ever to forget Momma.

‘Well, let’s hope the man has the good sense to remarry,’ says Annie. ‘And quickly.’

‘Remarry?’ Peggy’s voice squeaks.

‘It’s all anyone can talk about at the Anchor, Pegs. How will he cope with four growing kids without a wife? The man desperately needs a wife.’

I scrunch a bit of fur into my fist, struggling not to shout, ‘Daddy will never remarry because he will never find another woman like Momma!’ Grandma Esme has told me many times – now the stuff of family legend – that she’d introduced Daddy to all sorts of suitable Englishwomen, ‘dressed up irresistibly for a good Season of husband hunting’. He wouldn’t commit to any of them. ‘Your daddy frustrated many a determined young lady, the rogue.’ Grandma’s eyes always light up when she gets to our favourite part of the tale, Daddy meeting a ‘landowner’s daughter from America with poppy-red hair and a thoroughly improper laugh’ at a party. That was it. ‘He was
like a lovesick puppy,’ she’ll say, shaking her head so that her chins wobble. ‘Neither Grandpa nor I could talk any sense into him. We told him no American girl could cope with the harshness of Cornish country life.’ She’ll kiss my forehead at this point in the story, and end, ‘How wrong we were! I’m so very glad he took not the blindest bit of notice of us. Very glad indeed.’ Thinking of Grandma makes me miss her horribly. She’s too old to come to Black Rabbit Hall as frequently as she once did.