Black Rabbit Hall (23 page)

‘Mrs Alton, I did explain that it was going to be very tricky getting the sign-off before we do the necessary repairs and alterations …’ begins Dill, knotting her fingers around her overall’s fabric belt.

‘Endellion, do I really need to spell it out? We cannot afford repairs without income. Money must come first. You are approaching it, like most things, entirely the wrong way round.’

‘But it doesn’t work like that, Mrs Alton,’ says Dill, in a manner that tells Lorna she’s had this conversation many times before.

‘
Make
it work like that, then.’ Mrs Alton stands up to her
full height, levered on the bulbs of her arthritic knuckles. ‘Offer that troublesome little inspector man, I don’t know, some firewood or something. A year’s free mooring. That should buy a blind eye. It always used to.’

‘Things have changed, Mrs Alton,’ Dill protests.

Lorna stares down into the yellowest yolk she’s ever seen, a sun within a shell.

‘Well, do
think
, Endellion!’ barks Mrs Alton. ‘Because we are running out of time.
I
am running out of time. And patience.’ She tosses down her napkin, reaches for her cane and starts tapping towards the door, the two-beat percussion of cane and footsteps receding down the corridor.

‘God, I’m so sorry, Dill,’ whispers Lorna. ‘I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s nothing.’ Dill strokes the dog, who eyes her dolefully.

‘It’s not nothing. I’ve made things difficult for you.’

‘Mrs Alton is just overtired. Really, I’m used to it.’

‘It’s having me here, isn’t it?’

There is just the slightest pause before Dill says, ‘Of course not. She’s rather excitable today, that’s all.’

Lorna’s eyes drop to the plate. She can’t stay on. She’s tangled things at home and now she’s done the same at Black Rabbit Hall. She doesn’t know which way to run, only that she cannot stand still. ‘Dill, I’m going to catch the afternoon train today.’

‘But you had to spend yesterday in bed, poor thing! You haven’t even seen the cove. Surely you’ll stay another night.’

‘I’d love to,’ she says honestly. ‘But … I just can’t. Not now.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t leave.’ Dill looks stricken. ‘It’s so
nice having a bit of company for once.’ She puffs into the chair beside Lorna, refills Lorna’s cup, pours some for herself. As they sip their tea, things normalize a little. It feels like Mrs Alton’s outburst might have cleared the air. Or the pills are finally out of Lorna’s system.

‘Don’t go because of Mrs Alton’s outburst, please, Lorna. It’s just her way. She’s had a tough life. I know it doesn’t look like it.’

‘Well, I guess I wouldn’t want to be rattling around such a big house at her age.’ Or any age, Lorna thinks, wondering why on earth Dill sticks it out. She takes another sip of tea, enjoying the sensation of the warm liquid slipping down her parched throat. ‘Could she not move somewhere … easier to heat, maybe?’

‘Last time I suggested she move she threw a riding boot at me.’ Dill points to a small pink crescent beneath her jaw. ‘She will never leave Pencraw.’

Lorna sits up straighter, sensing that Dill is opening up. This is her chance to get some answers. ‘But why? What keeps her here, Dill?’

‘Well, it’s a long story.’

‘I love long stories.’ Lorna smiles, cradling her cup in her hands. ‘I bet you tell a good one.’

The flattery works. Dill, who is clearly starved of it, brightens. ‘Mr and Mrs Alton were in love a long time ago when they were young, you see,’ she says, in a hushed voice, glancing at the door. ‘But after he left her for Nancy …’

‘No! He dumped her for the first wife?’

Dill’s eyes shine. ‘Years ago. When they were young. Broke Mrs Alton’s heart he did.’

‘Okay, wait, wait … But Mrs Alton did marry someone else, didn’t she?’

‘Two weeks later. Mr Alfred Shawcross.’

‘
Two
weeks?’ She clinks her teacup to the saucer in surprise. ‘Wow. That’s quite some rebound.’

Dill glances at the door again, more nervous now, and lowers her voice further. ‘Mr Shawcross was rich, very rich.’

‘Aha, sweet revenge.’ Just like one of the historical romances her mother used to read. Brilliant. She reaches for some cold toast, spreads it with marmalade and bites into it, wonders why marmalade toast always tastes better cold.

‘So when Mr Shawcross died a few years later – he was old, much older than her – she was left a wealthy widow.’ Dill pauses dramatically, letting Lorna fill in the blanks.

‘Who, after Nancy was out of the picture too, could marry her first, true, love.’

‘Bringing with her a small fortune. It was
that
money that saved Pencraw from being sold off.’

‘So he married her for her money? Oh. How depressing.’

‘I don’t think it was just that, actually.’ Dill fiddles with the napkin, stalling. Lorna gets the impression she’s desperate to talk, bursting at the seams in fact, but has been warned against it. ‘The word is that Mr Alton wanted a mother figure for his children. They were going off the rails apparently, wild as you like, after his Nancy died, especially the eldest son, who took her death terribly hard. I think he thought a new wife would steady the ship.’

‘Did she?’ asks Lorna, doubtfully. The faces in the photographs she’s seen suggest otherwise.

Dill shakes her head. ‘I don’t think the children ever accepted her. But she did bring financial security, which is not to be sneezed at, is it? They kept this house.’

Lorna looks around her, taking in the grand ceilings, the crumbling cornicing, the inky oils on the walls. Everything has a price.

‘Nothing was managed on the estate after Nancy died, and the word was that Mr Alton had made some
very
bad investments in London.’ She taps her temple lightly. ‘Not sure he was quite himself by all accounts. Drank far too much. Mrs Alton was the one who kept everything going. But Mr Alton died over twenty-odd years ago now. That’s a long time to live here alone – she was never interested in anyone else – and to shell out. Little wonder there’s nothing left of her own fortune.’ She checks the door once more, whispers, ‘Although sometimes I do wonder if she had less of it in the first place than she let everyone imagine.’

Lorna bends forward, sensing the true story is about to spill out over the table. ‘Surely it’s time for the younger generation to take the reins.’

‘Petal!’ Dill jumps up, as if physically ejected from her chair. ‘Petal, you horrid hound!’

Petal stares sheepishly at a yellow puddle on the floor.

‘You and your bladder problems. Off with you.’ She shoos the dog crossly away and its claws skitter across the floor. ‘Go and find Mummy.’

‘What about Nancy and Mr Alton’s elder son?’ Lorna tries again, cursing the dog for distracting Dill at such a critical moment. ‘You know, the twin boy, the heir …’

‘Toby?’ Dill whispers, as if the name itself is so delicate
it might shatter on airing. ‘Toby has not been seen for decades.’

‘So he is alive? I assumed from the way Mrs Alton was talking …’

Dill looks away, biting the inside of her cheek. ‘I shouldn’t be nattering like this. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into me. I’d really better get on. Clean up the dog’s pee.’

‘I’ll help you.’ Lorna stands and looks around. Anything to prolong the conversation. Why is Toby not here? Where is Lucian?

‘I can’t let you do that!’

‘What shall I use to clean it?’

Dill dumbly hands her a napkin, as if she cannot quite believe the question has been asked because no one has ever before offered to help her do anything.

Lorna swiftly mops it up, trying not to breathe in.

‘That’s ever so kind of you.’

Lorna leaves the sodden napkin on the floor. She draws the line at handling it wet. ‘It’s a lot of work for you, Dill. Why do you stay?’ she asks, touched by Dill’s dedication and loyalty. There’s something so sweetly old-fashioned about it.

‘Me? Oh, I don’t know, really. I can’t imagine any different. Not many places to earn good money around here. Not with board and lodging thrown in.’ She colours, gaze sliding away. ‘I’ve never worked anywhere else, to be honest, Lorna.’

‘No! Really? You must dream of –’

‘Double glazing.’ She looks up with a shy, endearing smile. ‘I dream of double glazing.’

Lorna laughs. She’s about to direct the conversation back to the Alton children when Dill’s face grows suddenly solemn.

‘Lorna, Mrs Alton is ill. It’s a matter of weeks, I’m afraid.’

Lorna’s laughter tails into a shocked silence. ‘No …’ She is so taken aback she doesn’t know what else to say. She thinks of Mrs Alton’s consumptive pallor, the sense of decay that hangs about her, like the scent of wilting cut flowers. It puts her headache into perspective. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘She calls the tumour Nancy.’

Improbably, the world has caught up, the texts loading bullet-fast on the twelfth step of the grand staircase. Lorna stares at them with rising panic, the liberty of being non-contactable lost.

Louise:
Jon freaked out! Wotz going on?

Dad:
Just checking all OK? *@$, how to put iron on non-steam setting?

Jon:
Can u call me bck?

Jon:
Worried now.

Jon:
Hs she locked u away? Call the cops?

Lorna hurriedly thumbs a text to him, something about how she’s only just picked up his messages and has been ill but not to worry and she’s going to get the afternoon train. But for some reason it reads like an excuse, something one
of her toxic exes might have sent in her pre-Jon life, offering the kind of insecurity that drew her, like a moth to a flame. She presses send. Just in time. The signal bars vanish, the window of communication closes.

Two hours left before she leaves, Lorna realizes with a pang. For all its oddness and tragedy, she knows she will miss Black Rabbit Hall, as you do miss places that make you rewrite your own map, if only slightly, places that take a bit of you away, give you something of their spirit in return. The feeling is made more poignant because a wedding at Black Rabbit Hall seems unlikely now. A wedding anywhere not entirely certain. It’s as if the door to her future is blocked by the past.

She drops the phone back into her bag, hears a faint thudding coming from outside, the sound of a dusty rug being beaten with a broom. She wonders if it’s Dill. She looked so crushed when Lorna had told her she was going to try for the five o’ clock train, and ever since has kept a polite distance, turning off the rush of stories and candour like a tap. Mrs Alton also seems affronted, vanishing into the dark belly of the east turret, leaving Lorna to drink a cup of instant coffee in the sunroom alone while the dog pees against the skirting board. This time, she leaves the mess alone.

How to spend her last precious hours? The moment she steps off the train at Paddington, she’s sure it will be impossible to conjure up Black Rabbit Hall again, to believe it exists at all. Everyday life takes over far too quickly.

The cove, of course. She mustn’t miss it. Dill is quite right.

Lorna takes off her shoes – rather childishly, she wants to feel Black Rabbit Hall between her toes – and crosses the lawns to the woods, happy to be out in the warm summer air. She deliberately goes past the carved-up tree in the woods (she kisses her fingertips lightly, presses them against Barney’s name), then walks through the seeding long grasses on the banks of the creek until she finds a nice spot in the dappled shade of a tree. She tosses in a stick, dreamily watching it bob on the luminous green water, remembering how, when she was a kid, Louise would deliberately get their Pooh sticks muddled at the finish line so Lorna could win. She’d forgotten that. She’s forgotten so many precious things from childhood. The way long grasses catch and pull between bare toes. The way Louise would swing her hand and declare it ‘fairy fate’ that they were sisters. Even though Lorna couldn’t explain ‘fairy fate’ in words then or now, it makes a funny sort of sense here. She throws in one more stick. Then, putting her shoes on, she cuts across the sun-buffed fields to the cliffs.

She finds a rickety white bench, a little too close to the crumbling cliff edge. Pressing her bare feet down on the fine blades of grass, she shields her eyes with her hand and admires the cove below. It is like an illustration from a 1950s children’s book, lolly-shaped, nestled into jagged grey rocks, pristine and wild, its rubbly narrow beach path resisting easy access. She can imagine smugglers’ boats sliding on to the sand. She can imagine all sorts of things. It has that air about it, a sense of things having happened here. Also, slightly unsettling, a sense that things
might be
about
to happen. Partly for this reason, partly because she’s worried that she’ll miss the last London train of the day, Lorna doesn’t hang around, slipping on her shoes and walking quickly away. But the imprint of her bare feet on the grass remains, a little bit of her left to await her return.

Amber, June 1969

A bead of sweat slips down my nose. I wipe it away on a silk scarf, peering at Peggy through the crack in the wardrobe door, appreciating the tender way she feather-dusts Momma’s things on the dressing-table, wishing she’d get a move on. Peggy’s
so
slow today, wiping her brow with the back of her wrist, swaying a little, as if every movement is making her feel sick. I hope she’s not sick in here. Like she was in the kitchen garden yesterday morning. A stomach bug, she says. I hope I don’t catch it.

Peggy clicks the door behind her at last. I scramble out into the room, feet prickling with pins and needles – glad to be free of the hot furs and even hotter feelings – and sit down on the dressing-table’s stool to breathe. The wardrobe is stuffy right now, but it is the only place I can think about Lucian without worrying that Toby will see the pictures in my head.

Toby suspects, I’m pretty sure of it, but he has no proof. If he did he would have confronted me. And the truth is that nothing
has
happened since the kiss at Easter. Daddy’s announcement on the last day of the Easter holidays, crashing into us like a ball into a huddle of skittles, means it never can: ‘You are to have a mother again,
children. I hope you will warmly welcome Caroline as such, and Lucian as your new elder brother.’

A brother. How can he ever be a
brother
?

Matilda says it is possible, as long as I’m not wilfully romantic. She says I must train myself out of yearning for Lucian, much as you can train yourself to like the bitter taste of the olives she ate in Greece. I must fall for someone else. I am sixteen now, the perfect age for courting. How about her brother, Fred? Could I not fall in love with him instead? He’s always been sweet on me and is a good dancer. I can’t tell her that Fred now seems far too dull and far too innocent.

Matilda says if I’m to see Lucian strictly as a brother, I must remind myself that he farts, picks his nose and pees all over the loo seat. Do this, and how can the attraction not fade? But I’ve done exactly that. Nothing has faded. It’s quite hopeless.

Worse, I can’t resist replaying the kiss over and over, adding bits, making it go on longer, relocating it to different settings: beach, cliff ledge, the long grasses by the creek. Everything reminds me of him: I see someone with dark hair and a loping gait in the street and my heart flips; I sit on a bench in Fitzroy Square and think about the couple Momma and I spotted kissing from the window, so lost in the kiss that they didn’t care who saw, and how – on that one miraculous spring afternoon – I kissed someone in just that way.

I cannot help but remember Lucian’s sweetness to Barney and Kitty, his unshowy forgiveness of Toby, the quiet delight he takes in Black Rabbit Hall. Sometimes I swear
I can hear the faint strum of his guitar through the floorboards, even though there is no guitar in this house now.

‘Amber?’ The door bursts open. Toby swaggers into the pink room with an angry, hard-bodied energy that can barely be contained within his vest and shorts. ‘What are you doing in here?’

‘I like to be near Momma’s things.’

He stands behind me and our eyes clash in the mirror. ‘I found a cake in the larder.’

‘A cake?’ I run my fingers over the boar bristles of Momma’s hairbrush. All the wavy red hairs have gone from it now, plucked out and squirrelled in our secret places. It makes me think of something Matilda said: that if Momma had lived longer she’d have become irritating because all mothers become irritating eventually. Touching her hairbrush, I find this impossible to believe. ‘What about the cake?’

‘Five cakes. Different sizes.’

‘So?’

‘Don’t be thick. A
wedding
cake, Amber. Peggy’s rotten wedding cake.’

‘Ugh.’

He lets out a wild hoot. ‘I let Boris at them.’

‘That is so – so dumb-rabbit stupid, Toby.’ I shake my head, trying not to laugh. As terrible as it all is, he can still make me laugh like no one else. ‘Peggy will feed
you
to the dog for that.’

He picks a long white hair off my bare arm and, puzzled, holds it between his fingers, glancing at me, then across to the wardrobe and away. I breathe again. I need one place he won’t follow me.

‘Peggy will only make another cake.’

‘Well, if I were her I’d sprinkle the sponge with rat poison. It’ll be far worse for her when they’re married. It’ll be worse for all of us.’ He squats beside my stool, bouncing as if he’s on springs. ‘The moment the ring is on Caroline’s finger she’ll become even more monstrous, believe me.’

I turn my face to the side, try to see myself in the mirror as Lucian might have seen me, in profile, on the passenger seat. ‘But she’ll have what she wants then.’

‘That’s not how Caroline works.’

I roll my eyes.

‘What?’

‘Don’t make it worse, Toby. It’s bad enough.’ I stare at myself in the mirror, mind turning. A moment passes. ‘Caroline has yanked us all out of school early just so she can have a June wedding. She
must
be worried that Daddy will change his mind, Toby. Maybe …’

‘No, Caroline will make sure this wedding happens.’ Toby rips at his thumbnail with his teeth. ‘And then she’ll ruin Black Rabbit Hall. She’ll destroy all our places.’

‘Not the woods. The beach.’ They still absorb Toby, the fortresses of old planks and chicken wire, the cold wet sand and the vault of sky. They are the places he is happiest. In his blood. It occurs to me then that, in a funny way, Toby is Black Rabbit Hall, more than anyone else is anyway. ‘She can’t destroy those.’

‘The house, then. The bits with people in them.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know I don’t mean you.’

I get up from the stool, weighed down by the responsibility of being his more rational other half, and peer through
the ivy pawing at the window. ‘No more doom-mongering. Momma told us the world was a good place, remember?’

‘That’s because she didn’t know what was going to happen to her.’

Outside, the garden is in full bloom, untended, spilling over itself. ‘I’m glad of that.’

‘Why? If she’d known, she wouldn’t have gone out looking for Barney. She’d still be alive.’

I turn to face him, exasperated. ‘But she
didn’t
know. None of us knows anything. Ever. Not until it happens!’

‘The problem is I do, Amber.’ He covers his nose with his hands, breathing hard, as if trying to restrain panic. ‘I don’t want to. But I do. And I’ve got a chart showing exactly when.’