Black Rabbit Hall (13 page)

‘That’s enough, little man,’ says Daddy, resting a hand on Barney’s shoulder. ‘Now, let’s get on with enjoying Christmas, shall we?’

‘We never have guests at Black Rabbit Hall,’ spits Toby, suddenly. He is glaring at Lucian as he talks, puffing up like the kitchen cat to scare a rival off its territory. ‘You always say the Altons stick to family at Christmas, Daddy.’

‘Well, this Christmas is different, Toby,’ says Daddy, wearily, raking his hair off his face, exposing the licks of baldness at either side of his forehead that appeared the week Momma died and seem to spread further every week. ‘I wanted to jolly things along with a bit of company for you. I’m afraid Grandma can’t be here this year.’

‘But Kitty wants Grandma!’ squeaks Kitty, her bottom lip trembling. ‘Grandma brings rhubarb-and-custards in a glass jar!’

‘Why isn’t she coming?’ demands Barney.

‘She’s not terribly well, I’m afraid. And she’s getting a bit old now for such a long journey.’

I swallow hard, thinking of my beloved Grandma Esme on her giant rose-covered sofa in Chelsea. She’s one of the few people who actually talks to me about what’s happened. ‘Your father does not find it easy to discuss feelings,
my darling. I think, like most men, he’d much rather no one mentioned them at all,’ she’d said, before I left, squeezing me against the brooch on her bosom so that I was left with an imprint on my cheek in the shape of a peacock.

‘But she packed me off with so many presents,’ Daddy continues, ‘that I’m surprised the Rolls could move.’

‘I want Grandma Esme,’ says Kitty, with renewed vigour. ‘I want Grandma.’

Caroline puts her hand to her throat and says, ‘Aw.’ I want to tell her that she doesn’t know Grandma or Kitty and has no right to say, ‘Aw,’ in that stagey way, looking at Daddy as she does so because it’s clearly entirely for his benefit.

‘Where’s Aunt Bay?’ Kitty says. ‘Does she need the doctor too?’

‘Aunt Bay’s not sick, Kitty.’ Daddy bends down to Kitty’s height, eyes warm and kind. ‘But the storms over the Atlantic make the passage unsafe.’

My heart sinks. ‘In her last letter she said she was definitely coming.’

He turns to me, not quite meeting my gaze. ‘I know, I know. But it wasn’t fair to ask her to come – Caroline is quite right. Not in this weather. I had to insist she didn’t risk it.’

Why has Caroline had
any
say in this? I feel a creep of unease. Toby frowns at me, thinking the same thing.

‘But what about the peanut butter?’ perseveres Kitty. Caroline must think we’re all obsessed with food, which we are. ‘Aunt Bay always brings a big tub of peanut butter and doesn’t mind if we stick our fingers in.’

‘I might be able to find some up in Truro, love,’ says Peggy.

Kitty scowls. It’s not about peanut butter.

‘Brrr.’ Daddy claps his hands together, tries to change the subject. ‘We certainly haven’t had a Christmas this cold for a long while, have we?’

‘The fires are blazing, sir,’ says Peggy. Daddy has always made her a little nervous. Never more so than now – I feel for her, she’s desperate to make a good impression. ‘I hope Mrs …’ She stumbles, unsure how to address her.

‘Mrs Shawcross.’ She smiles tightly.

I wonder where Mr Shawcross is.

‘I’ve lit a fire in your room, Mrs Shawcross.’

‘A fire?’ Clearly she wasn’t expecting her bedroom to be heated with logs. ‘That sounds rather nice, thank you.’

‘May I take your bag upstairs, Mrs Shawcross?’

It is made from toffee-coloured leather and stamped with gold letters, far smarter than any of ours. We have to sit on our trunks to shut them, or use the ancient steamer luggage chests stamped with peeling Indian labels and smelling of tea.

Peggy strains to pick it up. ‘And may I be so bold as to recommend my famous mince pies, Mrs Shawcross?’ I wish she’d stop repeating Mrs Shawcross’s name. Maybe she’s trying not to forget it.

Caroline glances at her son. ‘You love mince pies, don’t you, Lucian?’

Lucian looks at her as if he doesn’t love anything, neither a mince pie nor her.

‘I always say taking Lucian out of boarding school at the end of term is like taking milk from an ice box.’ Caroline laughs, a shrill sound that lasts a beat too long. ‘He needs time to warm up.’

‘I can light a fire in Lucian’s room?’ suggests Peggy, nerves making her silly.

‘Daddy …’ Kitty’s bottom lip starts to wobble.

‘Yes, darling?’ He doesn’t see it coming at all.

‘Kitty doesn’t want this lady in the house.’

Caroline looks embarrassed rather than hurt.

‘I’m so sorry, Caroline,’ says Daddy, picking Kitty up. She pushes her face into his neck, peering out at Caroline between her fingers. ‘The children are still a little unsettled, I’m afraid.’

‘Don’t you dare apologize, Hugo. I quite understand. Listen, Kitty.’ She speaks more softly, leans in too close. Kitty backs away. ‘I know I must look like a stranger. But your father and I have known one another for many years. And now I hope to get to know you too, don’t I, Hugo?’ The look she shoots him is not one I understand. ‘I want us all to be best friends. You. Me. Your little doll.’

Toby makes a quiet snort of cynicism in the back of his throat that everyone pretends they haven’t heard.

Daddy nods, pulls at his collar, hot all of a sudden. As if he’d rather be anywhere else. ‘Indeed. We must all get to know each other.’

My mind flings back to the conversation I overheard huddled in Momma’s wardrobe in the summer, the hushed voices seeping through the brass hinges: ‘Let’s hope the man has the good sense to remarry. And quickly.’ I think of the stream of pies and cakes arriving at the door of Fitzroy Square, the women with their craning necks and made-up puffy lips, whispering, ‘How
is
Daddy, darling?’ to Kitty as she weighs up the donated cake tins in her hands, trying to guess the flavour of the contents. And I’m
struck by a sickening sense of everything moving too fast, mechanisms pumping hard where we can’t see them, like the pistons beneath our seats on the train that carried us away from London a few days before.

Caroline touches Kitty’s arm. ‘Maybe you can show me around Pencraw Hall later.’

‘We don’t call it Pencraw Hall,’ growls Toby. ‘
Momma
calls it Black Rabbit Hall.’

Lucian shoots Toby a look of grudging respect.

‘Black Rabbit Hall? Goodness. How … how charming.’ Caroline smiles. It does not reach the frozen blue of those eyes. ‘I’ll be sure to remember that, Toby.’

Later that evening I overhear Caroline call our house Pencraw Hall many times. Not once does Daddy correct her.

‘She must think we’re dumb-rabbit stupid.’ Toby plunges his penknife into the flesh of the big old oak. He never goes anywhere without it just in case the world ends and he needs to cut himself out. ‘All this fake niceness. All the “Oh, Hugo, what beautiful children!” It makes me want to pick her eyelashes off one by one. Like legs off a spider.’

‘Except you wouldn’t do that to a spider,’ I say, buttoning my coat with numb, clumsy fingers. We are hunkered in the marshier bit of woods. The sky is marble-white. The tide is out and the mud flats look both dreary and deadly, pocked with eel and crayfish holes, fog lapping at the far reaches: winter in the raw, not Christmassy at all.

‘No. I respect a spider. A spider has a right to be here,’ he says, pale face straining as he gouges the blade into the bark. Like Momma’s, Toby’s colouring changes with the
seasons: freckles fading, glowing red thatch of summer hair dimmed like a lamp.

‘Her lashes aren’t real.’

He looks up, curious. ‘How do you know?’

‘If you look carefully you can see a sticky white glue line,’ I explain, having familiarized myself with Matilda’s older sister’s secret make-up box.

‘Right.’ He looks impressed by my powers of observation. ‘And have you noticed the way she’s always trying to touch Daddy?’

‘Horrible.’

‘And she refused every mince pie.’

‘Weird. What can it mean?’

A heron stalks its way along the bank, stabbing its long beak into the cold mud to pluck out creatures left squirming by the tide’s retreat. Toby tracks it, blade at rest, thoughtful for a moment or two. ‘Control.’

‘Maybe we should offer her a raw limpet instead. That might loosen things up.’

‘Did you see her face at lunch when Peggy brought out the stargazy pie?’

Remembering the look of appalled horror on Caroline’s face, I start to giggle uncontrollably, seized by a mad, mirthless mirth that makes my front teeth cold. Stargazy pie – one of Peggy’s favourite recipes passed down from her mam – involves six shrivelled pilchard heads poking out of slits in the pastry lid. ‘I’m going to request conger eel next.’ I snort, regaining my breath.

But Toby’s face is sombre, which kills my laughter. He is carving the ‘B’ of his name. ‘I reckon she’s scared of us,
you and me.’ He leans back, squints at his handiwork. ‘She’s scared we can see through her.’

‘Well, we can.’ This isn’t totally true. I can’t quite work out if Caroline’s a fairly nice woman who is nervous and has somehow, through social accident, landed in the wrong place at Christmas or a calculated troublemaker pretending to be fairly nice. Not that it matters. She shouldn’t be here. Neither should she have suggested Aunt Bay did not fly out to see us because of bad weather. Aunt Bay is not scared of flying. She says she has pills for that.

‘It’s laughably obvious what Caroline wants.’ He picks out more of the tree’s flesh with a brutality that makes me wince, and looks up at me, checking my reaction as he speaks. ‘To get into Momma’s shoes, Amber. That’s what.’

I close my eyes, picturing an ugly foot shoving its way into Momma’s riding boots, the soft leather moulded to the shape of her high arches, her second toe slightly longer than the first. Ballerina’s feet, Daddy used to say. ‘She won’t. They won’t fit.’

‘Just let her try.’ He presses his hands to his neck, squeezes so that his face goes red, the blade in one hand sticking upright, threatening to shave off his left ear. ‘Die! Die!’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’ His intensity scares me sometimes. He acts out as if he means it. ‘You shouldn’t joke about things like that.’

He releases his neck, annoyed. ‘Who’s going to hear?’

I glance uneasily at the spot where Knight bucked, a few yards into the woods, beside the beech covered with yellow fungus ears. The feeling of being watched returns.
There’s a presence in the woods today, and it can only be hers. ‘Momma might hear.’

‘Hope so,’ he says more cheerily, bending down to the bark again. ‘She’d hate Caroline.’

‘Momma didn’t hate anyone, Toby.’ I think of the gap in Momma’s smile, the way it invited you right inside her, like a door ajar. It was her natural resting expression, as Matilda’s mum’s is a frown. When people commented on her cheerfulness she’d say, ‘I have a lot to smile about,’ in a way that wasn’t smug, but genuinely thankful.

‘Well, she’d laugh at her too,’ Toby decides. ‘She’d definitely laugh at Caroline Shawcross.’

Probably. Momma used to find English pomposity very funny, and Caroline is full of it. I lift my chin, prepare to impersonate: ‘Peggy, the water gushing out of my bath taps is
rusty
! It is brown! Quite brown! Is it safe? You’re sure? Goodness. Well, if you’re absolutely sure it’s safe to bathe in such water I … I suppose one must just brace oneself.’ It’s not a very good imitation but it works. I’m pleased. It’s not easy to make Toby laugh today. After that everything softens a bit.

I reach idly for the rope Toby tied from the upper branches one long hot summer a year or two ago, hold it in my clenched palm, remembering how it felt to fly free across the river, careless with ordinary joy. Toby stares at my hand, the rope, his mind turning over the same thing. The evening light ripens, then blanks back to white again.

Toby, still staring at my hand, says, ‘You don’t like him, do you?’

‘Who?’ I hold the rope tighter.

‘Lucian. The spawn.’

‘Don’t be insane!’

Toby looks back to his blade, stroking his thumb along its edge, testing its sharpness. I can tell that he’s not satisfied by my answer. He chips away another large flake of bark, jaw tense. ‘Don’t trust him. Lucian and his mother are cut from the same cloth, Amber.’

I think of Lucian’s height, the surprising muscular heft of his shoulders, the cliff jut of his jaw. Yes, I can see Caroline in him. But there is something else, something that makes you want to stare at him for another reason. I don’t understand it. It’s not that Lucian is handsome, not like Fred Hollywell, with his movie-star blond hair, easy charm and ribbon-blue eyes. Lucian is rude, silent and dark. The air around him is not still.

Toby stares at me coldly. ‘You’re thinking about him right now.’

‘You don’t know what I’m thinking,’ I say, feeling the betrayal of a blush heat my cheeks.

‘I do.’

‘Not any more.’ He flinches at that and I immediately wish I could take it back. It’s like denying we’re twins. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean …’

‘Get lost, Amber.’

I leap off the low branch, twigs snapping beneath my leather boots. ‘Fine. I’ll go back to the house. You’re in one of your funny moods.’

‘Do what you like.’

I hesitate. For some reason I don’t fancy walking back on my own. And I don’t want to leave Toby like this either. ‘Come with me.’

He shakes his head, lips pressed tight. I know he’s angry
with me for thinking about Lucian. For cutting him out by not admitting it.

‘Shall I bring you back a coat?’

‘Who are you? My mother?’ he scoffs.

It’s my turn to flinch. ‘It’s cold out here. Your lips are sort of purple.’

‘Did you know that you can freeze a scorpion in a block of ice for hours, then crack it open and the scorpion will walk out alive?’

I shake my head, stuffing my hands deep into my pockets to warm them. I hate Toby’s funny moods now, their simmering violence.

‘I’m like a scorpion, Amber.’

‘Suit yourself. Freeze, then.’ I walk away through the snatch of scrub and branches. After a couple of minutes, I turn to see if Toby’s following me. Normally he’ll catch me up, sometimes put an arm around my shoulders to say sorry. This time he doesn’t. He’s still in the tree, stabbing at it repeatedly. Then I can no longer see him at all. I feel a wave of unease.