Black Rabbit Hall (2 page)

‘Oh. Why not?’ asks Lorna, spirits sinking again, wishing him away.

The man frowns, looks unsure how much to tell them. ‘It’s not in any fit state for one thing. The weather gnaws away at houses around here unless you throw money at them. No one’s thrown nothing at that house for years.’ He wets his cracked lips with his tongue. ‘Word is there are hydrangeas growing through the ballroom floor, all sorts of funny things going on.’

‘Oh … I love that.’

Jon rolls his eyes, trying not to laugh. ‘Please don’t encourage her.’

‘I’d better get back on the road.’ The tractor driver looks bemused. ‘You two, take care, eh?’

They watch him stamp away, listen to the thuds as he climbs the serrated metal steps to the cab of the tractor. Lorna doesn’t know what to think.

Jon does. ‘Hold tight! Look out for Bambi. I’m going to reverse down to the crossroads. We’re going back to civilization and a nice cold beer. And not a moment too soon.’

Lorna presses her hand on his arm, enough pressure to show him she means it. ‘It’d be ridiculous to turn back now. You know it would.’

‘You heard what the guy said.’

‘We need to see it for ourselves, if only to discount it, Jon.’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not feeling it.’

‘You and your feelings,’ she says, imitating his earlier comment, trying to make him laugh. ‘Come on. It’s the one venue I’m desperate to see.’

He beat boxes the wheel with his thumbs, considers his position. ‘You’ll owe me.’

She bends over the handbrake, crushes her mouth against the warm bristle of his jaw. He smells of sex and digestive biscuits. ‘And what’s not to like about that?’

A few moments later, the little red Fiat turns off the road, then rolls like a drop of blood down the wet green drive, the canopy of trees locking tight behind them.

Amber, Fitzroy Square, London, April 1968

Momma was lucky not to have been more seriously hurt in the crash. That’s what everyone says. If her taxi had skidded another inch to the right, they’d have smashed the Bond Street bollard front on, rather than just clipping it. Momma got banged about anyway, flying across the black cab with her shopping bags, only saving her face from the glass with her bent-backward hand. Her new fancy hats were not damaged. The taxi driver let her off the fare. Still, not lucky exactly.

Ten days later, she’s still got a custard-yellow bruise on her kneecap, a sprained wrist in a splint. She has to sit, sit, sit on a Saturday morning, rather than play tennis in Regent’s Park or chase my little sister around the garden.

Right now she is sitting in the turquoise chair by the parlour window, her stockinged leg planked on the footstool, staring at the black umbrellas wheeling about the square below. Her eyes have gone distant. She says it’s the painkillers. But I can tell Momma is dreaming of being back at Black Rabbit Hall, or her old family farm in Maine, somewhere remote and wild where she can ride her horses in peace. But Maine is too far away. And Black Rabbit Hall feels even further.

‘Can I bring you some more tea, ma’am?’ asks Nette,
respectfully averting her gaze from the startling bruise on Momma’s leg.

Nette is the new – three months new – help. She has a lisp – impersonation is irresistible – and has moved from an old-fashioned household in Eaton Square, ‘where they’re still pretending it’s 1930,’ Momma says. I think Nette prefers it here. I would.

‘Or another cushion?’

‘No, thank you, Nette. You’re so thoughtful. But I’m quite comfortable, and have drunk so much tea in the last few days that I fear another cup might send me quite over the edge.’ Momma smiles, revealing the gap between her two front teeth that makes her smile seem so much bigger than anyone else’s. She can stick a match in it. ‘And, Nette, please feel free to call me Mrs Alton or, indeed, Nancy. No need to be formal here, I promise.’

‘Yes, ma –’ Nette catches herself, smiles shyly. She picks up the empty teacup and half-eaten Battenberg and slips them soundlessly on to the shining silver tray. Boris beats his tail, gives her his best doggy eyes. Although she’s not meant to give the dog treats – Boris is a fatty, a glutton, and once demolished a pound of butter in one sitting then vomited it up on the stairs – I know Nette feeds him in the kitchen when no one’s looking. I like her for this.

‘Come here, you,’ Momma says to me, once Nette’s gone. She pulls up the piano stool beside her, pats it.

I sit down and lay my head on her lap, inhaling her skin tang through the lettuce-green silk of her dress. She strokes my hair. And I feel like both her confidante and her baby and that I could stay here forever, or at least until lunch. Not that her lap will be mine for long: there are too many
of us – me, Barney, Kitty, Daddy, my twin Toby, when he’s back from boarding school. Sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough of her to go round.

‘Your leg looks like a root vegetable, Momma.’

‘Why, thank you, honey!’

‘Your other leg is still nice, though,’ I say quickly, glancing down at it, long, slim, foot stretched, pointing like a ballerina’s, the second toe intriguingly longer than the first, punching out beneath the raised stocking seam.

‘One pretty leg is enough. And the other looks a lot worse than it is, really.’ She wraps a strand of my hair around her finger so that it looks like one of the tasselled red silk ropes that tie back the curtains. We sit like that for a while, the carriage clock ticking, London rumbling outside. ‘A penny for your thoughts?’

‘Grandma Esme says you could have been killed.’ I can’t stop thinking about the crash. The black bollard waiting for the black taxi. The screech of brakes. The hat boxes flying into the air. Things you can’t imagine ever happening, happening. ‘It makes me feel … I don’t know.’

She smiles, bends over me, the tips of her copper hair tickling my cheeks. I can smell her Pond’s face cream. ‘It’ll take a lot more than a cab on Bruton Street to kill me. New England genes, honey.’

I stare at her swollen leg again, look away quickly, wishing I hadn’t. The bruise is making me feel really strange. Nothing bad normally happens to Momma. She doesn’t get flu. Or headaches. Or the thing that Mrs Hollywell, Matilda’s mum, has that means she must go back to bed after lunch most days and sometimes can’t get up at all. On the upside, if this is the bad thing that was going to
happen to Momma then I guess it’s not that bad. At least it’s out of the way.

‘Please don’t worry about me, Amber.’ She smooths my forehead with the pad of her thumb. ‘The young must never worry about their parents, you know? Worrying is a mother’s job. Your time will come for all that.’

I frown at the floor, unable to join the dots between being fourteen years old and becoming a wife and mother myself. What happens to your twin when you marry? What would Toby do then? It bothers me.

‘It’s all right.’ Momma laughs. ‘You’ve got a while yet.’

‘Will you still be able to ride Knight?’ I say, quickly changing the subject. Knight is her Dutch Warmblood. The name makes him sound black but he’s the colour of conkers.

‘Ride Knight? Are you kidding?’ Momma sits up straighter, winces. ‘If I sit in this chair for much longer I’ll go crazy. I can’t
wait
to ride Knight. I’ll damn well hop to Cornwall to ride him if I have to.’

Knowing Momma, this isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.

‘In fact, this evening I plan to talk to your father about leaving for Black Rabbit Hall sooner than normal.’

‘When sooner?’

She shuffles on the cushions, unable to get comfortable. ‘Next week – sooner, if Peggy can get the house ready by then.’

‘Next
week
?’ My head springs off her lap. ‘But the Easter holidays don’t start for another two weeks.’

‘You can bring schoolwork if you want.’

‘But, Momma –’

‘Honey, you spend far too much time with your head in
a book anyway. Missing a bit of school is not going to hurt anyone. Too much school isn’t good for any child.’

‘I’ll fall behind.’

‘Nonsense. Miss Rope says you’re racing ahead of the rest of the class. I’m not in the least worried. Besides, you’ll learn far more at Black Rabbit Hall than in a stuffy old classroom in Regent’s Park.’

‘What sort of things?’ I ask doubtfully.

‘Life!’

I roll my eyes. ‘I think I know enough about life at Black Rabbit Hall by now, Momma.’

She looks amused. ‘Do you indeed?’

‘And I’m getting too old for sandcastles.’

‘Don’t be silly. One is never too old for sandcastles.’

My life has been full of sandcastles. My first memory is of Toby, bent over on the beach, frantically digging, sand flicking over his shoulder in a golden arc. (He is left-handed, I am right, which means we can stand close together and not knock spades.) When it’s done he sticks two razor-clam shells – ‘Us,’ he says and grins – on the very top: we are three years old.

‘Apart from anything else, the air in London is just terrible,’ Momma continues. ‘And the relentless drizzle! My goodness, will it ever stop?’

‘We spend most of our time in Cornwall wearing mackintoshes.’

‘Yes, but it’s a different kind of rain in Cornwall. It is! A different kind of sky too. A clear sky with stars. Shooting stars, Amber! Not that smoggy old thing.’ She points at the grey ceiling of clouds outside the window. ‘Hey, don’t look like that. It’s something else, isn’t it? What is it?’

‘It’s Matilda’s birthday party in nine days,’ I say quietly, imagining all my classmates giggling into Kensington Palace’s orangery in pastel party dresses; Matilda’s older brother, Fred, down from Eton, the way one side of his mouth curls up when he smiles; Matilda herself, my closest friend, who is kind and funny and never pretends to be less smart than she is, unlike all the other girls. ‘I absolutely cannot not go.’

‘It’s a shame it’s Matilda’s, I know. But it’s still one party, honey.’

I don’t say that I’m not the type of girl who gets invited to lots of parties. But I think Momma knows this because her voice goes soft: ‘It may not feel like this now, Amber, but you have many parties to come, I promise.’ She nods over to the window. ‘Take a look out there. At the street. What do you see?’

I gaze out of the window at the crescent, the rivers of wet pavement, the black iron railings, the planet of grass in the centre of the square where we sometimes eat Bovril toast on sunny Saturday mornings. ‘People shaking and closing their umbrellas?’ I turn to her, wondering if this is the right answer. ‘A nanny pushing a pram?’

‘You know what I see? I see a whole world waiting for you, Amber. Look, there’s a young woman in a neat little skirt suit walking to work.’ Note: Momma doesn’t work but she wears a navy skirt suit from Paris for church on Sundays. I guess that’s work too. ‘I see a couple on a bench kissing …’ she raises one eyebrow ‘… rather passionately, I must say.’

I look away from the embracing couple quickly – obviously I wouldn’t if Momma wasn’t sitting next to me – and wonder
how it would feel to kiss someone like that on a public bench, so lost in the kiss I didn’t care who saw.

‘I guess what I’m
trying
to say is that you’re going to have lots of fun before you get married.’

School. Finishing school. A job at Christie’s, maybe. It’s hard to see that there’s much room left for the fun bit before it stops.

‘So you’re not going to worry about missing one party?’ Momma fixes the dress flat over her thighs where my head has rumpled it.

‘Suppose.’

‘Not a very convincing answer.’

I try to hide my smile beneath grumpiness, enjoying the pretence that Momma needs my approval, the pretence that I might not give it, that it matters at all. I know I am lucky like this. My school friends all get bossed about by their mothers, polite, faintly irritated Englishwomen in stiff dresses who never seem to throw back their heads and laugh so that you can see the wiggly bit in their throat. My mother can ride bareback. She wears denim jeans when we’re in the country. And she’s by far the prettiest mother at the school gate.

‘Never forget how privileged we are still to have Black Rabbit Hall. So many of Daddy’s friends have had to demolish their country houses and sell off the land, or open their homes to the public, awful things like that. We must never take it for granted.’

‘It takes ages to get there.’

‘We’ll all drive down together. It’ll be fun.’ She nudges me. ‘Hey, maybe one day they’ll open an airport on the Roseland.’

‘That’s never going to happen.’

‘Well …
good
.’ She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘We don’t want to make it too easy, do we?’

‘Then it wouldn’t be our special place.’ I say this shamelessly to please her. And it does.

‘Exactly!’ She grins and her eyes glint from green to yellow, a leaf and its underside. Filled with light again, distance gone. ‘I always say to Daddy that Black Rabbit Hall is the one still sane point in this mad, changing world. It’s our safe, happy place, isn’t it, Amber?’

I hesitate. For some reason it feels as though everything rests on my answer.