Black Rabbit Hall (18 page)

She remembers that her own mother kept many of her and Louise’s favourite toys, wrapping them in old tea-towels and tucking them into boxes in the attic. Louise’s have since been brought down, given to her own children. Lorna’s remain, waiting. She always assumed, a little harshly, that her mother was a careful hoarder rather than a sentimentalist, but seeing this room, where toys really have been left to decompose in the damp, she’s no longer so sure. Clearly things she took for granted are not taken for granted by all children. The idea makes her sad.

No, Mrs Alton is just not the type to treasure a child’s beloved toy. But she is the type to treasure old clothes, Lorna thinks more cheerfully, standing up, brushing sand from her knees. After all, Mrs Alton still wears Chanel, albeit ragged. There could be a wardrobe of priceless dresses – Hardy Amies, Yves Saint Laurent, Courrèges – waiting to be discovered. Lorna steps back down the darkening stairway, almost tripping in her haste to get to the chamber floor, fingertips tingling at the thought of all the liquid satins and butterfly-wing silks waiting to be stroked.

The main bedroom on the first floor is enormous, cold and dusty, with an abandoned air. It does not smell of sleep but of time itself, a sort of dead mustiness. Lorna
parts the heavy velvet curtains so that sunlight spills into the room, revealing Tiffany blue walls bloomed with damp. She explores the three doors leading off the bedroom. One opens into a bathroom, a free-standing copper bath stained green. Next to this is a small, pale blue dressing room. There is a silver hairbrush on the kidney-shaped dressing table. A powder puff the size of a side plate. A small portrait of what is unmistakably Mrs Alton in her blonde younger years posed, poised, perfect. Crushingly, nothing is in the wardrobe – tall, white, intricately carved – except a stack of blankets and a lethal-looking hair dryer sprouting wires. Perhaps Mrs Alton has taken all of her prize possessions to her living quarters in the east turret. Yes, that would make sense.

Still one more door off the bedroom. It’s stiff and finally opens with a sigh of dust. Lorna coughs, covers her mouth, looks around, eyes widening as the air clears. Weirdly, this, too, seems to be a dressing room. Painted a pearly clam pink, prettier and bigger, it has its own door leading directly to the landing. Against one wall is a giant Narnia wardrobe, dark wood, carved paws for feet. There is also a wing-mirrored dressing-table, the mercury glass mottled and milky, and a
chaise longue
beneath the window. But it’s the small photograph on the wall that pulls her towards it: a black-and-white photograph of a family – shiny quiffs, lampshade prom dresses, very 1950s – standing on the stoop of a house in front of the stars and stripes of an American flag. The first wife? Oh, God. Did Mr Alton preserve his first wife’s dressing room, while letting his new wife use the smaller one opposite? Oh, poor Mrs Alton.

‘Lorna?’ Dill’s voice sails towards her.

Lorna turns to see Dill standing in the dressing-room doorway, puzzled, beneath a filigree of backlit hair.

‘I … I …’ It occurs to Lorna how it must look – sneaking around the house, poking through a dead woman’s things – and her cheeks burn.

‘It’s your fiancé, Tom. Jon, sorry.’

‘Jon?’ His name sounds strange. As if he belongs in another life entirely.

‘On the office phone. He says it’s urgent.’

Amber, Fitzroy Square, April 1969

‘Go on, say, “Cheese!”’ Barney steps backwards on to the pavement, squinting, camera skew-whiff in his hands. ‘And stop blinking, will you?’

Matilda and I crush ourselves together, arm in arm, heads cocked, her straight brown hair mixing with mine, red and unruly.

‘Done.’ Barney unloops Matilda’s camera from his neck and runs back up the steps into the house, pleased to have helped Matilda at least.

Barney likes Matilda. Everyone who matters likes Matilda. The show-pony girls at school tease her for being too big and too tall and wearing glasses. Matilda says she’s not looking for any more friends. From anyone else this would sound like a cover-up but from Matilda it isn’t. Matilda doesn’t suffer like the rest of us. She’s not bombarded by feelings all the time. Neither does she doubt herself. I’ve never seen Matilda blush, hide her body in the showers or apologize when something’s not her fault. Matilda just is. She doesn’t change for anyone. I cannot bear to say goodbye.

‘You should be coming with me, Amber,’ she says, picking up her overnight bag from the stone step and swinging it over her shoulder so that the messages we scribbled each
other last night on the inside of the strap are hidden. She starts to walk down the steps, stops. ‘Last chance to change your mind? I’m sure Mummy could still get you on the flight.’

I bite my bottom lip to stop myself saying, ‘Let’s go!’ and bolting down the steps with her into the sparkling spring sunshine, away from the anniversary of Momma’s death.

Greece for the Easter holidays. Matilda says we’ll turn as brown as our school brogues and eat salty black olives and swim in a sea that doesn’t scald you scarlet with cold. Fred and Annabel will be there too, which is particularly exciting as Annabel has dropped out of Swiss finishing school to work in a Kensington boutique and have sex: she says that sex is like smoking, horrible the first time, but if you persevere it can start to feel quite nice, and then you cannot imagine life without it.

‘Amber? Come. Please.’

‘I can’t – really.’ It’s not that Daddy would stop me: he’s become so vague recently he can be persuaded into most things. But I haven’t seen Toby for a whole term now. I miss him so much, even the things about him that frustrate me, especially those: the way he makes every moment so intense. It’s hard to explain any of this to Matilda, who simply thinks her brother Fred is irritating and to be avoided, so I don’t even try.

A few days after I’d found Toby sitting on my bed in the dark, incandescent with fury that I’d ‘sneaked into Lucian’s room to be Nursey’, he was expelled, and shunted to a new school in the depths of Hertfordshire. To be fair, he’d hit a notorious bully, who just happened to be a cabinet
minister’s son, taking out a tooth. Daddy was furious about this – the boy’s father is a founding member of his London club – and even more furious, I think, that Toby has grown so unlike him: Toby with his brilliant, quicksilver brain – ‘like a ferret in a sack’, one tutor wrote – his disrespect for school and loathing of rugby, the sheer bloody-minded impossibility of him. Momma, of course, thought all these traits (admittedly less marked then) charming – ‘The world doesn’t need another dull old-school tie,’ she’d say – and would advise Toby to be true to himself and find ‘that little precious thing that makes you happy’, as if you could sort through life as you would the beach, slipping the shiniest bits into your pocket. She never wanted Toby to be anything but who he was.

‘Last chance?’ asks Matilda, shaking me out of my thoughts.

I feel the dead weight of Black Rabbit Hall on my shoulders. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to.’

The Hollywells’ driver arrives. Matilda blows me kisses from behind the car window, then she’s gone, taking all the carefree fun of being fifteen with her.

The train judders west, slowly at first, through the sooty bricks of Paddington, then speeding up as the houses get smaller and lower and cleaner and the gardens lengthen before disappearing entirely into a rush of fields, green, yellow, green, the view somehow synchronizing with the flavours of the boiled sweets – lime, lemon, lime – that I shake out into my palm. Other things too. The push and pull of Black Rabbit Hall.

Toby – who has been there a week already as his new
school finished earlier than ours – is sucking me towards the place, like a magnet. But there’s the opposite charge too, the knowledge that this new Easter holiday – one year on, how have I survived it? – will push Momma even further back into the past, widen the gap between now and the last moment I heard the click of her riding boot on the kitchen floor. Someone will take a photograph of us all and she won’t be in it. Worse, the house and gardens will be stirring with life – wallflowers, bluebells, dew steaming off the lawns in the morning – and she loved that. She’d hate to miss it. Momma’s pleasure in spring was one of the pleasures
of
spring. I wonder then if all children just love the things that make their mothers happy. If that’s what it comes down to, really.

Momma liked trains too, especially sleepers. But the open road made more sense to her. Before we were all born, she and Daddy drove from America’s east coast to its west in a green Cadillac so she loved the drive to Cornwall. This time last year we were driving down in the Rolls, oblivious to what was going to happen, Daddy at the wheel, Momma singing at the top of her voice, seats down in the back, Barney and Kitty rolling about in sleeping-bags, my head on Toby’s lap, book swaying over my head, windows wide open waiting for the first smell of the sea.

A year on, that’s all gone, all the insignificant bits you don’t think you’ll miss but do. Daddy says I’m old enough to manage the others on the train without Toby – ‘I dare say it will be far easier without your twin brother, as most things are these days’ – and that we can no longer afford to waste money on luxuries like chauffeured cars because the investments aren’t working as they should.

It doesn’t feel that easy.

Every time my head drops against the window, Kitty pulls at my sleeve, demanding I cut the crusts off Nette’s cheese and pickle sandwiches or read to her (
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
, over and over), or else Barney needs the loo. As I don’t want to leave Kitty on her own in case something terrible happens – Nanny Meg leaves her newspaper open in the nursery and it’s full of terrible things happening to children at the hands of strangers who look just like the passengers in the corridor outside our compartment – we all have to tunnel into the narrow aisle, Kitty moaning, Barney holding his crotch, Boris beating his tail. We clear our own compartment pretty quickly.

By the time we get to the station, Barney, Kitty and Boris are all asleep. I have not slept. Olive groves, Greek boys and hot white alleyways, heavy with the scent of jasmine, have kept me restless on the itchy carpeting of the seat. They distract me from an irrational terror that Toby might die just before we arrive.

‘Wake up! We’re here!’ I shake their shoulders.

Barney sits up, rubbing his eyes, but I can’t rouse Kitty. We struggle out of the train on to the empty platform, Kitty slumped in my arms, her sweaty cheek stuck to my neck, Barney dropping bits of luggage, Boris barking. The train rumbles down the track, leaving us alone on the platform, separated from Toby only by a taxi ride and the river Fal.

‘Amber?’ Barney squints up at me.

‘Not now, Barns.’ I’m sweating under the dead weight of Kitty, unable to see the taxi, hoping that Peggy has not forgotten to arrange one.

‘It’s just that Kitty’s wetting herself.’ He points to the back of Kitty’s skirt, drops splashing to the platform.

The taxi driver is called Tel and fat, car-tilting-to-the-right fat, but nice. Most Cornish taxi drivers are pretty nice, I’ve discovered, and always seem to have a cousin once removed who worked at Black Rabbit Hall or know Peggy’s sprawling family down the coast. ‘This Easter is going to be a scorcher.’ He smiles at me in the mirror, dangling his elbow out of the car window, like a cut of meat. ‘Hope you’ve packed your cossies.’

‘We have, thank you,’ I reply politely and stare out of the window, hoping he’s not going to talk all the way to Black Rabbit Hall, or complain about the wee smell, which is quite strong, even though I managed to shove Kitty into fresh knickers and stuff the soiled ones into an empty sandwich box.

But Tel doesn’t say anything, either because he knows about Momma and feels sorry for us or because the smell is masked by other smells, like Boris. But he does wind down his window. It jams halfway. Sea air rushes through the gap and blows our heads from London to Black Rabbit Hall. We slowly feel more like ourselves. Familiar landmarks blink by: tea shops, old people’s homes, undertakers, the King Harry Ferry grinding across the glassy green river on clanking chains. More twisting lanes. Then, at last, the sign at the bottom of the drive. My heart starts to beat faster. Boris’s ears arrow.

Black Rabbit Hall rises on the hill, daring us to doubt its existence ever again. Toby sits on the steps, waiting.

‘Toby!’ I jump out of the cab, flying across the gravel.

We hug tightly and it feels like all the bits that are
scattered – the parts of me that never settle without him around – root back to their rightful place. But I quickly spot the difference in him. It is not just that Toby is taller, skinnier, his body hardened and sharpened, as if he’s spent the last few months bare-fist fighting in a pit, there’s something else too: a wariness in his manner, as if he has forgotten how to be with someone he trusts. There are things going on behind his gold-flecked eyes that I can’t quite read. I’m about to ask him what the matter is, what he’s been up to these last few days down here without us, when the last of our bags hits the gravel, puffing up golden dust.

‘That’s yer lot,’ shouts Tel, turning the car back down the drive. He winks at Toby. ‘Nice motor.’

I follow the blaze of Toby’s eyes to the gleam of dragonfly blue beneath the bushes, its silver snout more bullet than motor-car.

‘Wow, whose is that, Toby?’

The twisted scowl on his face is my thrilling answer.

Lucian smokes at the edge of the woods, like a dead person come brilliantly back to life. My stomach lurches. I hadn’t expected to see him again, which is why it’s been safe to think about him in the stuffy dark of my bedroom all these months, pillow clamped hot between my thighs, reliving the hard smoothness of his stomach beneath my fingertips, the sticky warmth of his blood, the way that snowy winter’s night in his bedroom pulsed with heat and stars.

And here he is! His sports car in the drive! Smoking in our garden! It is so improbable, so unexpected, that I can
do nothing but stare dumbly. The cigarette travels with compelling speed back to his mouth the moment he exhales. He flicks his fringe – longer than I remember it, winging across one eye – off his face, grinds the cigarette out with his shoe, lights
another
.

‘Smoking himself silly.’ Peggy appears at my shoulder, making me start. ‘Will you go and tell him it’s time for tea?’

I nod, but am unable to move from the kitchen window. The idea of approaching Lucian – talking to him! – fills me with terror. What if he takes one look at me and
knows?

‘He must be hungry. Came down from London this morning to meet his mother, who wasn’t here, of course.’ Peggy shakes her head, tuts beneath her breath. ‘I don’t believe he even had lunch.’

‘When is she coming?’ I can already hear the chilling tack-tap of Caroline’s heels across our hall.

‘This evening. With your father, I believe. Manners, Kitty. Use your cake fork, not your fingers. You’re not a skipper.’ She sniffs, looking rather put out. ‘I was only told yesterday. Been rushing around madly ever since, getting things ready. Of course, sod’s law, there’s something nasty brewing in the first-floor bathroom pipes.’ She suppresses a small smile. ‘Now sit yourself down, Amber,’ she says, mercifully forgetting about me going to get Lucian.

I lock myself between Barney and Kitty, heat of the range against my back.

‘You’re all of a fidget today.’ Peggy eyes me curiously. ‘A slice of fruit cake?’ The door slams. She looks up. ‘Oh, Toby, there you are. I was wondering where you’d got to.
Oh, just look at you. All skin and bones! Is the new school canteen that bad? Don’t worry, I’ll cut you a good fat slice. No, not you, Kitty. Not unless you want to turn into Billy Bunter.’

Toby wedges in, foot scuffing anxiously on the floor, muttering about how we must spend tomorrow morning on the beach, first swim of the year. Peggy topples cake on to our plates, chattering to anyone who will listen. ‘A
birthday
present that car was!’ She lowers her voice, a raindrop gleam in her grey eyes. ‘Can you imagine? Don’t you be getting any funny ideas, Toby.’

‘Unlikely,’ he says, and for the first time since we got back, we laugh.

We know that we’re lucky to get a bicycle for our birthday. Most of the time we’re given things we don’t particularly want, a gold brooch handed down from a great-aunt we don’t remember, Grandpa’s chipped glass marbles in an ivory box. Only Aunt Bay is known for her brilliant presents, deliciously plasticky things, smelling of America, often edible.

‘Can we have a ride in the car? Lucian’s car?’ asks Barney, standing on tiptoe, trying to catch sight of it through the window.

‘Certainly not. Sit down.’ Peggy bends over Kitty from behind, firmly wrapping her fingers correctly around the fork. ‘It looks like a right death trap. I wouldn’t set foot in it if you paid me.’ She wipes her brow with the back of her hand and looks up at me, irritated, remembering what she’d asked a few minutes ago. ‘Amber, will you
please
go and get Lucian in for tea? No, really. Now.’

‘Tea,’ I say matter-of-factly, scared to meet his eyes. But I can see he is looking at me, through the strands of his fringe, shyly. The shyness is surprising.

‘Sorry about turning up again like this.’ He digs into his black blazer pocket – he’s dressed all in black, like a highwayman – pulls out another cigarette and lights it with the kind of chunky silver army lighter that Toby would kill for. ‘It’s my girlfriend’s party in Devon in a couple of days. Ma insisted on me visiting her at Pencraw first.’ He pulls on the cigarette. ‘But she’s not here.’