AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season (16 page)

No one answered and no one was looking at him. Except for Harris. He was at the back of the room, arms crossed, mouth tight, standing square to Bannerman, meeting him.

“Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered in a ragged chorus, except for Harris, who said nothing.

“All right, then.” And he raised his hand to dismiss them.

“Thanks for your help there,” said Morrow, sarcastic and loudly, before the noise of the chairs had gathered enough to drown the comment out. The men heard her, looked at each other and laughed at him.

Bannerman gave her a look that was beyond angry. He was going to make her suffer for that and she knew it.

Before they even got to the outside gate Thomas hated Ella again.

She was working hard to keep crying. Every so often her grief would wane to a whimper, then she would catch her breath, give a forced wail and begin afresh. It was uneven, dramatic and stagy, as if she had something to say and was sobbing so she didn’t have to make conversation.

Moira stroked Ella’s hair with rhythmic sympathy, hushing over and over as Ella bawled so hard that her voice began to fail. She ran out of tissues. The limo driver from the hire firm handed a box back to them when he stopped in a traffic queue. He avoided Thomas’s eye in the rearview mirror, embarrassed.

Ella let Moira hug her, which was unusual. She was clinging to her when they stopped outside the house. The driver of the hire limo pulled on the brake and, in that quiet moment before anyone could speak, Ella lurched across Thomas’s lap for a sight of the oak, shouted, “Daddy, my daddy!” and began to howl uncontrollably again.

Thomas looked out over the lawn. It seemed familiar: “Daddy, my daddy,” and then he remembered that it was a line from
The Railway Children
. Jenny Agutter on the smoky platform and her father stepping down from the train.

He felt a spark of indignation until he remembered the newspaper in his pocket and that he had done things that were significantly more shameful than borrowing a line from a movie.

The driver opened the car door for Moira and she peeled Ella off her bosom, gently shoving her back into her own seat. Her silk blouse was stained with smeary tears. She got out of the car, put her hand back in to help Ella out.

It was a telling moment: Ella’s face was convulsed with misery but her eyes were calculating. She looked at Moira, looked at Thomas briefly, and reached over, taking Moira’s proffered hand, leaning heavily as she shuffled out of the car. It was a cold look, as if she was assessing them and chose Moira as the safest.

Thomas must seem unsafe to her, he must seem like Lars. For the first time he saw how things must look from Ella’s perspective. Lars took him away shopping and to Amsterdam. He ostentatiously donated the sixth-form wing to his school. He even gave him a flat of his own away from the main house, and his own nanny, long after Ella’s had been dismissed. True, Lars and Moira visited Ella at her school all the time, but her school was closer to the house, he was all the way up in Scotland. He had never thought her the loser but it must have seemed unfair to her too sometimes.

As he watched her scramble along the seat and climb out, he saw that Lars and Moira had set them against each other, not always deliberately, and how it was a shame. She was all he had and they didn’t know each other, had never spent time together.

Thomas’s door wasn’t open.

He looked at it, looked for the driver who should have opened it but the driver was carrying Ella’s suitcase from the open boot to the door. He didn’t know that it was his job to let everyone out first and then get the luggage. Hire driver for a limo firm. He was fifty or so, white-haired, probably a failed estate agent who’d been given a big car and someone else’s uniform.

Moira and Ella were up by the front door, Moira looking through a set of keys, watched by Ella, no longer crying, just confused at her mother carrying keys for the house around with her. The housekeeper should have let them in. She should be standing by the door to take their coats.

Thomas opened the car door himself and stepped out. He left it open and sauntered, to give them time to get back into the house and disperse before he got there. He came level with the driver on his way back from dropping the suitcase off.

The driver thought he had come to talk to him and smiled, kindly, and said, “I’m sorry for your sister. Is she not well?”

Thomas looked up and shrugged. “She’s upset.”

The driver glanced up to the door, saw Moira putting the keys in the lock and Ella crying, straight-faced. “She’s more than upset, son.”

Thomas tried to explain. “Our dad just died.”

“Oh,” said the driver, shocked. “I’m sorry.”

“He hung himself. Over there. From that tree,” continued Thomas, realizing that the man was right. Even a truly terrible shock didn’t really, fully explain Ella’s behavior. “She’s young.”

The driver
hmm
ed, muttered “terrible” but Thomas saw him glance back up to Ella. She was following Moira in the door but her hair had not been brushed at the back and the way she held her head, dipped sideways, mouth hanging open, she really did look odd.

He didn’t like the driver talking about a member of the family like that. He couldn’t discount it on the grounds that the man was being nasty. He wasn’t nasty. And he didn’t seem stupid either.

“Well, goodbye, sir.” The driver shifted his feet to move and Thomas held his hand out. The driver looked at him and hesitated. They weren’t supposed to shake hands but Thomas wanted to meet his eye, like an equal, to show him they weren’t all broken.

The man hesitated and then took Thomas’s hand, pumped it, looking him in the eye and smiling.

“Goodbye,” said Thomas, hoping he sounded as authoritative as Lars but nicer. “And thank you for your service.” He backed off, taking the steps up to the open front door.

Inside, Moira and Ella had dropped their coats on the floor next to the suitcase. It looked as if they’d melted out of them. Thomas picked them up and looked around for a place to put them.

He stepped over to a big door and opened it. The light came on automatically. He’d never been in here before.

It was a small, square cloakroom with hanging rails around three sides, grouped by person, outdoor shoes on a rack and a high shelf with neat wooden boxes, each with a handwritten label: “Lars’s gloves,” “Moira’s hats,” “Scarves.”

As Thomas hung the coats up the door fell shut slowly, sealing him in. He listened for the click, thankful when the light went off. And then he stood still and enjoyed being there, in the windowless dark.

A phrase formed in his mind, slowly rising to his consciousness:

We should not be seen
.

His head dropped slowly forwards to his chest and he stood like that until his neck began to hurt. Still he stayed there, his breathing constricted by the bend in his windpipe, a deep burn on his neck and shoulders, spreading down his arms. He never wanted to raise his face to the world again.

And then Lars spoke to him.
You fucking wet cunt. Stay there, you useless cunt. Do nothing. Just fucking stay there
.

Thomas lifted his head, pushed the door ajar, tripping the light on again. Slowly he reached into his pocket for the newspaper.

On another page Sarah Erroll was photographed at a party, flanked by other girls with pixelated faces. She smiled, uncomfortable, wishing, he felt, that the photo was over and done with and she could stop being seen. She didn’t look very nice. Thomas thought she looked a lot prettier in real life.

It said that Sarah was twenty-four, younger than Nanny Mary. After leaving school at eighteen she worked in a champagne bar in the City of London, the Walnut, but she had left to go home to Scotland and care for her mother.

Lars drank in the Walnut. He ran up a legendary bill for wine one night: fifty grand or twenty grand or something. She must have met him there. Sarah may have looked up as Lars came to the bar, looked up with a dreamy smile. Maybe Lars saw that she wanted to be invisible and he liked that about her.

He looked at her picture and felt, for the first time, that she was a real person who existed independently of Lars, or him, or Squeak, or any of this. He saw her standing in a cupboard in her own messy old house, with her head down, then she looked up and her face was a bloody pixelated mess.

He threw his shoulder to the door and scurried out into the hall. He couldn’t face being alone so he picked up Ella’s suitcase and climbed the stairs up to the first floor, walking along the corridor, keeping his gaze down to avoid mirrors.

He rarely came up to this bit of the house. He’d forgotten it was nice and warm. The doors were tall and solid, the panels around the door handles were made of warm russet copper, etched with winding flowers and little sun motifs. Ella’s rooms were right at the end, next to the door to the master suite. He knocked formally, unsure if Moira was in there with her. He heard a sniff and stepped around the door.

“Your bag, ma’am.”

Ella’s rooms were high ceilinged; a living room with a deep bay window, a bedroom and a large bathroom beyond it. She had chosen the furniture herself, everything in pink. Even the widescreen TV above the fireplace had a pink surround.

She sat alone in the middle of her rose-patterned sofa, legs folded prettily under her, looking out of the window. She seemed tiny all the way over there. She was slim, winsome, had straggly blonde hair and an elfin face. Her eyes were red from crying. Looking at her Thomas thought he could see what Lars had liked about Moira once.

He set the suitcase flat on a footstool, ready for unpacking.

“You’re a fucking creep,” she said, very loudly. “I fucking hate you, you creepy fucking creep.”

Thomas froze by the wall. She was looking at the window and he tried to see if she was talking to his reflection. She turned, abrupt, and shouted adamantly, “Thomas! I know you’re here!”

“OK,” muttered Thomas.

She smiled and turned away. Thomas moved along the wall, coming to a table display of small china ballet figurines. He was puzzled and hurt. “Am I creepy?”

She gazed over at him, considered him. “No. Put that down.”

He looked at his hand, a little relieved because her comment was appropriate: he was holding a figurine. He wrapped his hand tighter to get a reaction. Ella chewed her cheek and looked at it. Evidently it wasn’t one of her favorites because she shrugged.

Thomas put it down again. “All that sobbing in the car, bit put on, wasn’t it?”

She shrugged.

“Lars tell you about his other family?”

Ella’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Knew anyway.”

She waited, making him ask.

“Why?”

“Oh, he’d take me to Harrods, buy eight dresses, give me four. Stupid fucking creep. She must be my age, then. Or my size anyway.”

“He’s definitely my age. I needed to be told…”

“Hmm.” She seemed pleased to have that over him.

“Think Moira knows?”

She shrugged one shoulder carelessly. Now that he was closer and could see out of the window he realized that she could see the oak and was probably talking to it and to Lars and not to an invisible man or anything.

“How did you hear he was dead?”

“Oh, that fucking chump Mrs. Gilly called me out of French and told me. Took her fucking time about it as well, dancing around the fucking bushes, ‘prepare yourself, my dear.’ Really fucking ominous.”

They were both thinking that Moira should have been the one who told them. Ella looked at him hard and whispered, “She off the…” she nodded at the door, “you know?”

“Yeah. Well, her mouth isn’t dry.”

Ella nodded. “She can see properly as well.” And she did the face Moira used to do, shutting her eyes and opening them superwide, as if her eyeballs were drying out. “When did she…?”

“Past few weeks, she said.”

Warily Ella watched the door and whispered, “Because people can go bonkers when they come off them. Kill their family and so on. Have you heard that?”

Thomas couldn’t remember if he had or not. “Don’t know.”

“They get, like, shotguns, go around the house and blast your face off while you’re sleeping.” She looked worried. “I mean I’d be first. You’re all the way downstairs but I’m just next door…”

“She seems OK. Ella, that was all an act earlier, wasn’t it? You’re not mental.”

Ella smirked at the door. “We still got guns here?”

“Some. In Lars’s office safe downstairs.”

She chewed her lip. “Hmm.”

It was quite pleasant, speaking to each other.

“Housekeeper’s gone. All the house staff have gone,” he said. “She sacked them.”

Ella frowned. “That’s stupid. Who’s going to do everything?”

“You are. We had a vote before you got here and you’ve to do it all now.”

She smiled at that. “Really, though, who’s…?”

“We’ve got to sell. We’ve got to move.”

Ella looked around her little world, at her little armchairs, her pink mini-fridge, the telly. She set her face to the window and when she spoke again her voice was very low. “Will we get to go back to school?”

Thomas didn’t think so. Three hundred k a year was bugger all. You couldn’t pay for schools out of that. He didn’t have to say it. Ella’s well-practiced eyes brimmed again.

“I’ve only been there for a fucking year. I’ve just got used to it there.” She became suddenly very angry. “I’m not going to a fucking comprehensive, anyway, I’ll get stabbed, or raped or something. I want a home tutor.”

“Don’t talk shit, Ella, we’re
broke
. There’s no money for a home tutor. There’s no money for
anything
.”

“They can’t make me go to a comprehensive, I’ll get bullied.”

He looked at her. The sunlight was behind her, making a halo of her hair, picking out the blue in her eyes. Her school skirt had ridden up her leg, baring her downy thigh. She looked pretty and posh and slim. “I don’t think you will.”

Ella sensed a compliment coming, tipped her jaw coyly to catch it. “Don’t you?”

“No.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, so she prompted, “Why not?”

He walked over to the window bay, skirting the arm of her sofa, and pulled the curtain back, looking out over the front lawn. “Just don’t. Think you’d be top fucking dog in a new school. They don’t board, the other family. They go to day school.”

“Fuckers. Lars tell you that?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky.” Day school when boarding was an option meant your parents wanted you at home, it meant local friends and a social life, it meant normal. “Which schools, do we know anyone there?”

“Never said. He was supposed to come to St. Augustus’s, though. Next term.”

Ella’s eyes widened. “
With
you?”