Simply Heaven (12 page)

‘Well, it’s just good to see the old place back on form,’ says Roly. ‘Always been a tad envious of you, old boy. Not many people have got to grow up in heaven.’

Rufus sighs. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ he says complacently. ‘Simply heaven.’

And I’m looking at it, and thinking: please don’t let them ask me to join in right now, because I’m not sure I have the self-control. Because if Bourton Allhallows is heaven, then God’s got some sense of humour. Bourton Allhallows isn’t heaven: it’s Gormenghast. It’s post-Danvers period Manderley.

Oh God. We’re closer now, close enough for me to see the forests of broken drainpipes, the great green slashes where years of rainwater have worked themselves into the walls. And – my blood runs cold – as I watch, a raven flies over the moat, and lands on what I’ve been trying to deny my eyes were seeing: the branches of a small tree that’s growing out of the hole in the roof. The branch bends beneath its weight, and the bird flaps its wings for balance, disturbing a handful of its roommates, which set off on a pivot of irritable flight.

A tree. There’s a tree growing through the roof of my new home.

Roly shifts down a gear as the road gets steeper towards the bottom of the valley, and says: ‘Seriously, Melody. You’re a lucky girl. Used to come and stay here in the hols. Happiest days of m’life. You can’t help but be happy in a place like this.’

I glimpse the stable block as we go past, behind another collapsed wooden gate. Unpainted doors hang off hinges, bits of dilapidated farm machinery lurking in the darkness beyond. Here’s what I see as we get closer. Window lintels leaning at drunken angles over split and peeling sills. Buddleia sprouting from cracks in masonry, and straggly lavatera bushes, six feet high, sprouting unchecked from the drains at the bottoms of rusting downpipes.

I crane upwards. There are boards across some of the upper-floor windows, close to the hole in the roof. And of the whole, I can make no sense at all. It’s as though every generation that’s passed through this building has felt it necessary to add a bit. A grim jumble of architectural styles tacked one on to the other with the carelessness that only bonded labour can achieve. And hanging over it all, yew trees; the sort of trees you see in boneyards: black, dense and dripping.

‘There we go,’ says Roly, cranking on the handbrake. ‘Roof, grab a couple of brace of those birds, will you? Seriously. You can hand them out to the poor or something if you can’t eat them.’

I don’t suppose the poor would be all that grateful for four rotting game birds with their feathers still on. I’d’ve thought they’d probably prefer a six-pack and some vouchers for Mickey D’s. But maybe the English poor are different from our lot.

I unlatch my door, step down on to slippery flagstones. Perkins, tail going like the clappers, stands up to exit with us. Roly shouts at him to stay.

‘God, let the poor chap have a pee, at least,’ says Rufus. ‘How long’s he been locked up in there?’

‘Suppose you’ve got a point,’ says Roly. ‘And he’s not touched any of the pheasants. Good chap. You’re a good old boy.’

The dog leaps down, trots off, tail pluming, in doggy fashion, to relieve himself against a yew tree.

Somewhere high above us, an overflow pipe trickles, the water arching out to splatter the widest possible area of the yard. Rufus looks up at it, sighs. ‘Damn. No-one’s sorted that out yet.’

‘Where’s it coming from?’

‘One of the lavatory overflows, I think. Just never been able to work out which one.’

‘How many are there?’

He shrugs. ‘Thirty-six that I can think of. Could be a couple more people have forgotten about. Bit of a habit of changing interior walls. We lost the chapel for a hundred and fifty years.’

‘Stop it. You’re just showing off, now.’

‘And there are at least three secret corridors.’

‘Can it, Wattestone.’

‘And a dungeon, though there’s not much left of it, given that it’s below the water table.’

I give him a look. He grins. ‘Welcome home, Mrs W. Bourton Allhallows salutes you.’

Roly pulls the handle off the back door. ‘Shit, sorry,’ he says.

‘N’e’mind,’ says Rufus. Takes the handle from him, lays it down on a moss-covered stone toadstool and opens the door with a hefty kick. ‘It’s not like it’s the first time.’

‘Jeez,’ I say.

‘It’s a family house,’ says Rufus. ‘They all have quirks.’

‘Got any ghosts?’ I ask.

‘Only eight or nine,’ he says dismissively. ‘You hardly ever see them.’

‘Well, which are the main ones?’

‘Um … there’s a nasty old bloke who wanders about in the main courtyard at night with a knife. He tends to give people a bit of a shock if they don’t know about him. Otherwise it’s just the usual run of nuns and monks and fever victims.’

‘And Eloise,’ says Roly.

‘Oh, yes. Yes, you need to watch out for her. She can be a bit of a frightener.’

‘Who’s Eloise?’

‘Well, we’re not entirely sure. We call her Eloise after Heloise and Abelard, you know?’

All Greek to me so far. I nod, understandingly.

‘You’ll recognise her,’ says Roly, ‘from the long white nightdress and the fingernails.’

‘Fingernails?’

‘Sort of bloody stumps. The usual, in a walling-up.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nasty thing.’ Rufus pauses in the doorway. ‘Bit of a habit back there for a while. Probably four or five of them about the place: it’s one of the reasons you keep coming up against dead ends.’

‘What’s walling-up?’

‘Nasty sort of medieval murder. Punishment for recalcitrant brides, slutty daughters, that sort of thing. Family went in for it in a big way, apparently, though of course it was always a secret. Murder not being any more legal back then than it is now. They used to knock ’em out and stick ’em in a bit of corner, or cellar, whatever, and build a wall across them so they’d come to in the dark and starve to death.’

‘Scratching feebly at the bricks,’ says Roly, with more relish than I would say was strictly necessary.

‘God, that’s
terrible
.’

‘I know,’ says Rufus. ‘Well, people
were
pretty horrid back then. Constantly impaling each other and so forth.’

‘And your family made a
habit
of this?’

‘So the story goes.’

Roly’s big hand clamps heavily down on my shoulder. ‘So you’d better watch yourself, young lady,’ he leers into my face, and bellows with laughter as he sees me react.

We go inside. A long whitewashed corridor, patched with more damp. Off to our right, a huge furnace roars and burps, metal walls thundering as though there’s someone inside hammering to get out.

‘Christ,’ says Rufus, ‘she’s turned the heating on. In November. She’s
really
pushing the boat out.’

We go up the corridor. I glimpse rooms full of dust and junk: piles of mismatched china, three giant perambulators, a pantry full of evil-looking Kilner jars. It’s the sort of place where spiders lurk, fat and shiny from generations of undisturbed gorging. It smells of mice.

Rufus is hurrying forward, and, in the voice of a suburban housewife, is going: ‘It’s my babies! My boys!’

Jeez. He’s been living here so long, he’s made pets out of the rats.

The door bursts open, and three solid shapes hurtle forward, grab him, just as I imagined, by the neck, with large, slobbering mouths, knock him to the floor. As I cast about for a stick to beat them off with, all I can see is a whirl of paws and tails and slobbering tongues. And I realise that Rufus is laughing, clutching them about the torsos, not, as I’d first thought, to fight them off, but with the sort of great big affectionate hugs I thought he reserved for me. And he’s going: ‘Ooozamyboooys! Wuzza wuzza idga
boy
-boys! Voo-voo boof! Boof!’ and other noises I can barely interpret beyond the fact that they’re obviously sounds of affection. And they’re licking him over every piece of available skin and – horrors! – he’s letting them. Not just letting them, but sticking his chin out to give them extra space. Fat, wet, dog tongues all over his face, and, with extra-special accuracy, all over his mouth as well. I make a mental note not to let him near me till he’s had a wash.

Gradually, as the squirming and panting slows down, I separate the muddle into disparate shapes. Seems like Rufus is getting love from a bulldog, a black retriever and a pug. Eyes shining like a ten-year-old, he looks up at me and treats me to a huge grin.

‘These are my babies,’ he says.

‘Uh-huh,’ I tell him back. ‘Glad to know you’ve not got any of the human type.’

He ignores me. ‘Darling, meet Fifi, Buster and Django. Sit!’

It takes me a second to work out that the final command isn’t aimed at me. It’s only when the dogs obediently line up with their backsides on the ground, tongues lolling in huge smiles, that I’m completely certain.

‘Which one’s which?’

He ruffles the head of the retriever, which responds by offering a polite paw. Despite myself, I’m drawn downwards, take it in my hand and shake it. If Pops could see me now. ‘This is Django,’ says Rufus.

‘How do you do, Django?’

Django rolls his eyes and broadens his grin. The pug, unable to contain himself, says ‘fuff’ and rubs his backside across the flags. Looks like someone needs their glands squeezing. Bags not me. Big brown pop-eyes moisten with emotion and one ear lops piteously. I take his paw and shake it in turn. ‘Fifi, right?’

‘Buster,’ says Rufus. He throws an arm round the neck of the bulldog in that homoerotic I’m-going-to-strangle-you pose that men keep for their best mates after rugby. ‘
This
is Fifi.’

Fifi has little pink-rimmed eyes and great big vampire teeth. They’d be threatening if they didn’t stick upwards from his lower jaw. Instead, they make him look like a goof.

‘The face that launched a thousand quips,’ I say, and can’t resist pulling his ears. We follow him into a kitchen that’s – well, medieval. Literally. The only thing that would make it more authentic would be a hunchback in the corner.

Roly peels off his Drizabone – well, shapeless waxed coat – and drops it on to the back of a wooden chair. Rufus does the same with his jacket on the one next to it. On the table, three platters and two copper baby baths stand, filled with the sort of canapés you used to see in the seventies: cheese-and-pineapple cocktail sticks, listless-looking, pale vol-au-vents filled with what looks like coronation chicken, cheese biscuits smeared with greyish-pink pâté and topped off with a little chip of green olive, potato chips that smell even from a metre away like ersatz bacon and some stick-like things that I’m not sure aren’t some sort of practical joke. I pick one up, sniff it. Smells a bit like Vegemite. Only disgusting.

‘Shall we take some of these?’ I ask their retreating backs.

Rufus turns, says: ‘Oh, yeah. Good idea. Mummy’s always forgetting them because she barely eats herself. We’ll be living on stale bacon snaps for a week if we don’t get them down people’s throats.’

He takes the stick things. Roly takes the vol-au-vents. I opt for the cheesy pineapples. I follow them through a large door covered in shreds of green baize on the far side of the room.

They lead me up some stairs. Dark, unventilated, lined with more black wood. As we near the top, I catch a low rumble from the far side of another green baize door at the top. The rumble of a distant tidal wave. The hairs prickle on the back of my neck. Rufus barges through the door, which swings back on Roly and, in turn, swings back on me. We’re in a hallway – shiny wooden floors and wooden panelling, a white, arched ceiling covered in diamond-patterned plasterwork, a collection of high-backed oak chairs lining the walls. At the end, no more baize, but a panelled oak door in a frame carved with vine leaves. And from behind it, the sound, louder, now, and more ferocious, like the roar of baying bloodhounds.

‘Hell,’ says Rufus, ‘how many people did you say?’

‘Sounds like a few,’ understates Roly.

Sounds like more than a few. It sounds like my mother-in-law has lined up the entire cast of
Braveheart
to jeer my arrival. I can envisage them, faces painted blue, banging on their shields in anticipation. The roar gets louder and louder as the door gets closer. Now it’s the roar of the New York subway, the sound of labour riots.

Rufus puts his hand on the handle and pushes the door open. I glimpse, behind a mêlée of olive green and navy blue, a cavernous hall lined, like the passageway, with wooden panelling, a huge expanse of hanging hammer-beam overhead, flashes of tapestry and metal against stark white paint.

The noise level suddenly drops.

‘Hello, everybody,’ says Rufus.

And a hundred voices bellow his name.

Rufus is immediately consumed by a rugby scrum of people who all seem to want to hit him at once. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this trial-by-combat form of greeting after the pummelling he got at Moreton-in-Marsh, but the sight of all these hands rising into the air and slamming down on his back, his shoulders, his head – whatever spare bit of body is available – is a bit alarming. Maybe it’s just the crazy-mad surroundings, the collection of armour and weaponry hanging on the walls, the head-high wooden panelling that lines the cricket-pitch-sized space, the fireplace the size of a Soweto shanty, but I feel that these people aren’t just touching him through affection, but because they believe that the physical contact will miraculously cure them of leprosy.

I’ve barely made it through the door, and the flailing elbows haven’t let me get much further. Eventually, my canapés and I fetch up against the wall, hemmed in between a suit of armour and a high-backed wooden chair whose low, embroidered seat has caved in so far that it almost rests on the floor. Roly has pushed his own tray into the hands of a sabre-toothed blonde and battered his way to the other side of the room, standing under what looks remarkably, even to my untrained eye, like a Caravaggio, and is already replacing an empty champagne glass on a tray with his left hand while lifting another off with his right. I peer around to see if I can identify any of the rest of the family. A woman who must be Tilly – she has Rufus’s slightly almond, slightly oriental-looking eyes – sits on one of those couches with the boxy frames you can open up by undoing the ropes at the top, in a huge bay window. Apart from the eyes, there’s not a whole lot of obvious family resemblance – Tilly is short and ginger, her hair curly where his is straight and floppy – but she’s the only woman in the room who’s stuffed a cantaloupe up her dress so I guess this must be her. She is drinking fizzy water and shoving the contents of another bowl of the stick things into her mouth like she thinks someone will take them away if she doesn’t get on with it. Beside her is a tiny little old woman, maybe the size of my thumb, who wears a hat and seems to have something wrong with her neck: her head tilts to the left, pointy chin jutting from powdered dewlaps beneath a smile of practised sweetness. She must be about a hundred. I guess this must be Granny Wattestone. I’ve never spoken to someone that old before. I don’t think I’ve ever
seen
someone that old before in the flesh.