Black Rabbit Hall (26 page)

A few days later, Caroline and Daddy return from Paris, smiling, not holding hands. Black Rabbit Hall isn’t ours any more. And everything feels far more dangerous. Will Daddy notice something different? Will some grass stain or dishevelment give me away? It has all happened so fast I feel as if I must radiate a brilliant heat. But Daddy doesn’t notice anything. He asks vaguely if we all had fun – lifting his chin, rubbing the back of his tanned neck – and, not long after, leaves for London on ‘urgent business’.
Not
taking Caroline with him!

Disaster.

Caroline notices far more. She observes that Lucian ‘is looking quite feral’ and that, considering the state of the house, Peggy and Annie ‘appear to have been struck down by some sedentary illness’. Worse, she promises to stay on until the end of the summer holidays ‘to keep an eye on things’ – my blood runs cold – and get the house ‘in order, one that befits it’.

No one knows quite what this new ‘order’ might mean for Black Rabbit Hall – ‘How can we when her whims change as often as her bed sheets?’ mutters Peggy, who thinks daily fresh linen wasteful and unchristian – until Caroline mentions that the house must appear in
House & Garden
magazine one day. This makes all of us, especially
Peggy, shake with suppressed laughter, then subside into a kind of helpless gloom in the still heat.

Happily, Black Rabbit Hall puts up a good fight, rattling and leaking, spewing treacly brown water into Caroline’s bath, as well as an extended family of mice – Caroline’s petrified of mice – scuttling through her bedroom at night (greedy for the oats Toby scatters beneath the bed). Even when Daddy returns the following weekend, Black Rabbit Hall keeps it up. After one particularly eventful night – the cat coughing up hair balls on Caroline’s silk slippers, the lights blowing, a dead crow rotting in their bedroom chimney – Daddy suggests that Caroline spend the rest of the summer holidays in the comfort of Fitzrovia while he ‘makes things a little more to your liking here’. Clearly suspecting that this will not happen – it wouldn’t – Caroline stands in the hall, jaw set, staring up the staircase, like a climber surveying a perilous mountain, determined to conquer it at any cost.

She wants to conquer us, too, of course, and has a variety of tactics up her silk sleeve to do this, all revolving around the abhorrent idea of ‘Our New Family’. For some reason she wants to record the misery. There are endless forced photos: Caroline and Daddy standing stiffly side by side, me and Lucian shifty, Toby scowling, Barney and Kitty arranged like dolls, failing to smile for some fashionable photographer, who has stumbled sweaty and disoriented off the slow London train. Caroline also insists on ‘family luncheons at the proper hour’ in the dining room (‘staff eat in the kitchen’) while the constant threat of ‘family activities’ – walks, sailing, trips to St Ives – hangs over every
summer day like an approaching storm, making me, Lucian and Toby shudder for different reasons.

We quickly learn that the easiest way to detonate such things, send the day spiralling off from the original plan, is by casually mentioning Momma. Within seconds a startling green vein starts to pop on Caroline’s forehead and the whole charade shatters into a million sharp pieces, like a crystal tumbler dropped to the stone flag floor.

As it maddens Caroline when we are late, we also try to be late as much as possible, which is easy enough. Only Kitty – a survivor who prioritizes her food – arrives at the table before the meal is even colder than it is when it arrives after its Alpine trek from the kitchen. Barney usually has to be hastily dressed on account of his aversion to clothes in the heat and Caroline’s insistence on ‘a civility beyond that of apes’, a comment that ensures Toby’s underarm ape-style scratching behind her back while Lucian, loyal to his mother only to a point, tries not to laugh and almost breaks the uneasy truce that relies on them ignoring one another.

It’s not that Lucian hasn’t tried to be friendly, but all attempts are met with utter disdain and indifference: the last thing Toby wants is to have his prejudices contradicted. In a way this is a relief. If they were friendly, would it not make the dishonesty all the harder?

However, Toby does not ignore Caroline: he goads her, drawn to confrontation like a ship to a wrecker’s lamp, knowing he has the enormous advantage of not giving a fig, while Caroline cares far too much. He refuses to join us in the dining room: ‘I won’t play any part or engage in
the sort of forced conversation that makes me want to chop my tongue off and feed it to Boris. I will dine on Twiglets in the comfort of my tree house.’ When Caroline, sherry glass trembling in her hand, tried to exert her authority – ‘I don’t give a damn what you think, young man. We will
all
sit down to eat like a normal happy family’ – Toby crisply pointed out, ‘We are not normal. We are not family. And, thanks to you, we are certainly not happy,’ then casually wandered off, picking dirt out of his fingernails with the tip of his penknife and flicking it at the newly buffed wooden panelling.

The less Caroline can control us, the more she asserts her authority over the house. To general disbelief, she announced the appointment of a new live-out trained cook – this is akin to shoving the Queen off her throne and hiring a ‘more professional’ one – hurtling Peggy into a white-faced wordless fury, involving much crashing of copper pans and slamming of pantry doors.

Bartlett started yesterday.

It is all too peculiar for words. While Peggy is soft, round and getting rounder, Bartlett is skinny and stooped, rather like a bent soup spoon. Peggy and Annie are on high alert – ‘Never trust a thin cook’ – and suspicious of her spotless white apron, muttering beneath their breath about how Bartlett won’t get her hands dirty dismembering eels, and doesn’t know her stargazy pie from her hog’s pudding. I haven’t dared tell Peggy that I think this is the point: I’m not sure Caroline ever fully recovered from the sight of blackened pilchard heads poking through that pastry lid. We haven’t had any Cornish family dishes
since Bartlett started. I never thought I’d miss them but I do.

Lunch today was a whole salmon, dead-cold, fairy-pink, studded with medals of green cucumber, far more formal than anything we’d normally eat. The boiled potatoes were smooth and white as eggs, with not so much as one muddy eye. The silver has actually been polished – we pull faces into the convex mirrors of spoons – and now gleams on an unfamiliar tablecloth, something lacy and Victorian, dug out from the archaeological depths of the linen cupboard. And the napkins are confusing, forced into stiff fan-shapes that Barney flicks over with his fingers.

Daddy – shockingly – has also agreed to the garden having what Caroline calls ‘rejuvenation’ and Toby calls ‘desecration’. After declaring that ‘the beds have gone quite rampant!’ – making Lucian and me pale at the table – Caroline fired Black Rabbit’s loyal gardeners (‘stuck in the past and older than the yew hedge’) and hired a band of new ones, who arrived in a shiny black van with ‘Ted Duckett and Son’ picked out in gold lettering on the side, and started hacking at Momma’s beloved rambling roses.

Caroline has also hired a fat man in half-moon spectacles – he has a meaty pink stump rather than a little finger – to fix the clocks. (‘A hell of a job,’ he huffed, sticking his doughy face into the weights and toothed cogs of Big Bertie, Barney peering over his shoulder, mesmerized by the glorious ghastliness of the finger stump.) Although the clocks are now supposedly accurate, it has made little difference to anyone’s timekeeping. We are so used to adding a loose hour or so that it has merely confused us and
we’ve gone back to judging the time by the rumble in our stomachs and the slip of the sun.

I’m sure if Caroline could hire a man to come and correct our settings – make us like her, forget Momma – she would. But she can’t. And she hates that. She really hates that. She has tried being nice – presents! – and being vile. Neither makes a blind bit of difference. She walks into a room and makes the walls contract, so that even the biggest room here soon feels like a stuffy metal lift trapped between floors. If Daddy’s not around, she doesn’t bother pretending to like us and eyes us all, even Lucian, with undisguised irritation, as if her life would be so much more enjoyable if we didn’t exist and she had Daddy to herself.

Daddy will not hear a word against her. He is loyal to her version of events, mostly, I think, because she has his ear first and can prepare the ground in her favour. When I told Daddy that she behaves very differently to us when he is away, he sighed. ‘Caroline warned me that you’d say something like this, Amber.’ And when I said I thought her ‘vinegary’, he became furious: ‘How exceptionally ungenerous, when she is so very fond of you!’

Oddly, her presence sends him into a strange state of dumb passivity: he ambles about the estate now, absent-eyed, with a glass of whisky in his hand, while Caroline continually refills his glass and coos, in the soft voice she only uses with him, ‘Don’t you worry, everything’s being taken care of, my darling,’ as if he were a giant baby. Worse, Daddy doesn’t seem to mind one bit.

Toby says Daddy’s just relieved not to be in charge any more. That Momma dying made him suddenly old, and the old are like infants: ‘They want to be led.’

If I thought Daddy actually loved her, maybe I wouldn’t judge him so harshly. But it is always Caroline who reaches for his hand, not him for hers. Caroline who rests her hand on the thigh of his yellow cord trousers. Caroline who anxiously awaits his return, dressing up, ankling down the staircase in her heels, pausing on the lower step, frowning across at the portrait of Momma, like a woman checking her reflection in the mirror, not liking what she sees. Although Daddy compliments her regularly – ‘Charming dress, darling’ – he says it with little passion. There is none of the embarrassing smooching that there was with Momma, no long kisses or secret lights-off drawing-room dancing, no softening in his eyes whenever she walks into a room. I think Caroline’s aware of this. When he’s in London, she sometimes sits at the dining table, chin in her cold-creamed hands, just staring flatly at his chair, as if she’d never expected it to be so empty.

She’s growing suspicious too. I’m sure of it. Lucian thinks I’m worrying unnecessarily – ‘She’d never guess in a million years, Amber’ – but in recent days I’ve noticed her razor gaze cutting to Lucian then back to me, as if something about us doesn’t make sense. And she’s endlessly probing Lucian: where has he been? With whom? Why has he got bits of hay sticking to his shirt?

I can’t help but feel that things are taking shape, even though I can’t see that shape yet, that a sequence of small irrecoverable moments is hooking fast together and pointing in one direction like the barbs of a feather.

Lorna

Leaning against one of the carved posts of the bridal suite’s bed, Lorna slips the photographs into their brown envelope and sighs heavily. Will she ever know why her mother kept visiting Black Rabbit Hall? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe she’s reading too much into those photographs. Trying to force a narrative shape on random events. After all, her mother was odd in many ways, an obsessive character drawn to old houses, the comfort of repetition. Maybe she just liked the drive. Yes, that could be reason enough.

She shouldn’t dwell on it. She should get organized for the journey home. She stands up straight, scans the room – its prettiness a little tarnished by memories of her day spent doped – for things she’s left behind. She always leaves something behind. This time it’s her bronzer and the lid of her lip salve, rolling on the frayed edge of the rug by the door. She reaches for it and, as she does, spots strange dots in the dust immediately outside. About two centimetres in circumference, up the corridor, a wide footstep apart. The marks of Mrs Alton’s cane, she suddenly thinks. Perhaps she had not merely imagined that someone was standing in the doorway watching her sleep. The idea is not a pleasant one.

Lorna retrieves the lid, then goes into the bathroom to refill her Evian bottle at the tap. It’s so close today and she feels dehydrated so she’s going to need it. The water spluttering out of the rusty tap is very brown, browner than it was yesterday. The heat probably. Not wanting to risk sickness on the long train ride home, Lorna pours it out. She’ll find the kitchen. The water there will surely be cleaner. She has time. Just. And she can drop off her bag in the hall.

Surprisingly, Lorna finds her way easily, as if it wants to be found. Large, cheerful and square, its walls painted a peeling cerulean blue, sunlight pours through its paned window on to a homely wooden table that feels like the heart of the room. Opposite, there is an old range cooker, blackened with grease and age. Copper pans and oversized enamel kitchen implements hang above it. Cutlery – silver gone black – protrudes from grubby ceramic jars on the warped wooden work surfaces: Lorna sees each piece being pulled out by impatient children’s fingers. Bowls, so many bowls. Someone must have been a keen cook. There is a larder too, circular air holes punched into its door in the shape of a heart. She can’t resist.

Her mouth drops open. While the usual supermarket coffee, tea bags, sugar and pasta are on the most easily reached shelf, the ones above are crammed with things that look older than her – faded, ancient tins of marrowfat peas with vintage labels, a tin of Spam, like the ones Nan used to keep at the back of her cupboard. Hearing a faint rustling and fearing a mouse, Lorna quickly shuts the door and steps away.

Right. Water. No more poking around. No more
diversions. She needs to put her London head back on. After a tussle with the copper tap above a bath-sized butler’s sink, the twisting cord of water finally runs into something that looks less of a health risk. She leans over, fills her bottle. And that’s when it catches her eye, the blue and white apron hanging on the brass hook beside the sink. Something about it takes her aback. She’s seen it before. Where?

Lorna’s brain searches for the association, alighting on one possibility then another. Finally she’s got it: the housekeeper in the background of the photographs. Yes, she thinks. The round pretty face. The striped apron, always in that apron. Yes, it’s hers. She puts down her water bottle, picks the apron off the hook. Amazing it’s still here, although perhaps not, given the state of the larder. She rubs it between her fingers because the fabric feels soft and old and she loves old fabric and … and her fingertips keep moving back and forth across the blue embroidered letters on the hem, catching on the drag of the years, back and forth, back and forth, until she is under her Barbie duvet with a flickering plastic torch, running her fingers across the ink of the Ps on the birth certificate, over and over, too many Ps ever to forget.

‘You left these behind in your room.’ Dill puts down her small wire basket of eggs and pulls from her overall pocket the brown envelope containing the photographs, offering it to Lorna. She doesn’t make any mention of the fact that Lorna is sitting on the floor of the kitchen, face buried in an old apron. She’s seen far stranger things at Black Rabbit Hall.

Lorna can barely move her arm to take them. She has stiffened on the linoleum floor, has no idea how long she’s been there, only that the sunlight hitting the copper pans is gold and thick, and it wasn’t this dark when she first walked into the kitchen.

‘I couldn’t find you, Lorna,’ Dill says politely. ‘We had to send the taxi away.’

‘The taxi’s gone?’ She rubs her eyes, which are red and dry, but is far too shocked to cry. A black woodlouse lumbers across the floor, avoiding the puddle of water spilled from the water bottle that slipped from Lorna’s hands.

‘It’s gone six.’

‘My train …’

‘There’s nothing tomorrow. Bank holiday. But the morning after.’ She smiles uncertainly. ‘Mrs Alton will be pleased you’re staying on another night or two.’

The floor is sticky against her thighs where her skirt has rucked up. She imagines herself stuck to it for ever, like an insect on a fly paper. How will she ever get from here to a train, the normality of London, to her life as it was? It feels unreachable.

Dill hovers uncertainly. ‘Lorna, is, um, everything okay?’

Lorna stares down at the apron on her knee. Its waistband is shiny, once tightly tied. She imagines her mother loosening it as her belly got bigger. Did she use the apron to hide her pregnancy? Was she single or already married? Did her employer abuse her? Oh, no, please. Don’t let her be a product of rape. That has always been one of her worst fears. To discover the genes of some beast helixing inside her.

‘A cup of tea?’ asks Dill, hand lost in her hair, not quite knowing what to do next.

‘Yes, thank … thank you.’ If only Dill would leave the room she could try to pick all the bits of herself up again, scrape herself off the walls, put herself back into some recognizable form.

Dill smiles shyly, nods at the envelope in Lorna’s hands. ‘I had a peep, hope you don’t mind.’

‘Oh.’ She looks down at the envelope. No, none of this is possible. Why would her mother keep returning to the place where Lorna’s biological mother lived and worked? It doesn’t make any sense. Why risk Lorna accompanying her?

‘I think I took those photos.’

‘Sorry?’ Lorna must have misheard.

‘I’d sit at the front of the drive when I was a kid, while Mum was working up at the house. Did I mention she worked here?’

Lorna numbly shakes her head. She doesn’t know. She wasn’t listening hard enough. To herself, to any of this.

‘Plonk myself high up in the tree and wait for local friends to pass. Mrs Alton didn’t like the village kids on the estate, you see, so I’d wait for them at the end of the drive.’

Something somewhere is knitting together: a little girl’s feet dangling from a tree; scuffed brown Mary-Janes – ‘Say cheese!’

‘She was pretty, I remember that, your mum, her mustard coat. For some reason I remember that coat.’

The mustard coat. She’d forgotten it until this moment but now remembers it exactly, the pill of the wool, the
glossy big brown buttons. Her mother had worn it all year round: she was permanently cold.

‘She stood in that drive staring up at the house like it was … I don’t know … Buckingham Palace or something. Always asked if I’d take a photograph for her. Gave me a bag of fudge as a thank-you.’

The hairs on Lorna’s arms lift as she remembers the candy-striped paper bag of fudge in her hand. The envy and disappointment when her mother made her pass it to another girl. The girl with the shoes. The camera.

‘My age you were, only you had better clothes and sounded so exotic, coming from London. Do you remember it? Me?’ Dill glows with excitement.

‘I – I think so. Yes, I do.’

Dill shakes her head in amazement. ‘Well, isn’t that something? You were right all along, Lorna. You definitely have been here before.’

Lorna bows her face to the apron.

‘Is it something I said?’

‘It’s not you. Sorry. You see, it’s the apron …’ Lorna tries to explain, sniffing. ‘The name on the apron.’ She holds it up for Dill to see. ‘Look.’

‘Peggy, that’s right,’ Dill says, puzzled. ‘Peggy Mary Popple. That apron belonged to my mum.’

Lorna hears Dill call. But she keeps running, faster now, into the dazzle of evening sun. She crashes through the washing on the line, fights the sheets with her hands, into the kitchen garden, flattens the tomato plants. A flip-flop flies off her foot. The kitchen-garden door swings shut behind her. The ground surface changes. The patio, hot as
plates. Dry spiky grass. Sharp gravel biting into the sole of her foot. Another flip-flop lost. She keeps running. She must keep running. She must outrun Dill’s stuttering explanation: her own Big Bang, every bit as catastrophic as she’d feared.

A tea dance. A tipsy tryst in the church hall. A single housekeeper wowed by a Scandinavian fisherman – ‘father unknown’ – who had left for a foreign port before she’d got his full name or the trawler’s. Not a naïve young woman but an older woman, someone who should have known better, who went to church and dreamed of marriage to the local baker but got a bellyful of fatherless twins instead. And kept only one.

She’d kept only one. It was not her.

She was not chosen.

Lorna speeds up, trailing a plume of dust. But she can’t outrun that rejection. And she is crying so hard that she cannot see. And all she wants is to go into the darkness of the woods. To disappear.

‘Whoa! Stop!’

The voice is familiar. A voice from another life. But Lorna doesn’t stop. She sees a blur of a car – squat, dirty silver – and hears the bristle of its engine as it reverses back down the drive. A screech of brakes. The slam of a car door.

‘Lorna!’

She’s grabbed. She’s entangled in the smell of scent and shampoo. She sobs into Louise’s neck, like a baby.

Louise explains that Jon is going out of his mind because she wasn’t on the train and no one can get hold of her and he’s stuck on site and – ‘Bloody hell, Lorna, what on earth’s
happened? No wonder I got such a bad feeling about this. Shall I call the police? A doctor?’

No, no, no. Lorna tries to explain. She really tries. But it doesn’t make sense. And she can tell Louise doesn’t believe her at first. That Louise is making the soothing uh-huh noises she makes to Alf when he rambles nonsense. But then there is a moment: Louise is frowning down at Lorna’s bleeding dirty feet, as if the feet reveal a truth, and something changes between them. She takes both Lorna’s hands in her own. ‘
I
’m your sister,’ she says softly. ‘Lou and Lor, joined at the hip, remember? Lou and Lor. That’s all that matters.’ She squeezes Lorna’s hand. ‘Fairy fate.’

Fairy fate. Lorna wonders how she could ever explain to Louise that it was simple once – before she’d seen the apron – but that it would never be so simple again. Because she’s coloured herself in, filled in the gaps. She’s no longer a biological family tree of one, something ownerless to be claimed. There is a history. No great love affair. Just a small, shameful mistake. A rejection. A real twin sister with whom she feels little connection.

‘Are you sad, Aunty Lorna?’ Stubby fingers cup her knee. ‘Have you lost the rabbit?’

There is something about the sight of Alf, his huge grin, his simple anticipation of it being returned, that makes Lorna’s breathing come easier. She wipes her tears away, knowing how he hates people crying, unless there is an injury that explains things and requires him to stick on a plaster. ‘I can’t believe you’re here, Alf.’

‘Daddy said there were too many kids to look after me too.’

Louise rolls her eyes above his head.

‘So Mummy put me in my car seat and gave me Wotsits. Grandpa didn’t use the map because he said taxi drivers don’t need maps. But Grandpa got lost.’

Lorna clamps a hand over her mouth. ‘Dad’s not here? Please tell me Dad’s not here.’

‘Insisted. He said he guessed what it might be about.’ Louise winces, eyes flicking towards the car. ‘I went with it, sorry.’

The car’s passenger door flings open and Doug stumbles out into the dusty evening sunshine, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and rubbing sleepy eyes beneath his glasses. ‘Wowzer.’

Lorna is so stunned by the unlikely sight of her father in his ridiculous shirt that at first she is speechless. Then she collects herself and is just furious. ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

‘Dad, I think you and Lorna might have a bit of chatting to do.’ Louise shoots him a hard stare. ‘Come on, Alf. Let’s go for a walk, a bit of adventure.’

Alf’s round face grows serious. ‘But I want to find the black rabbit.’

‘That’s just the name of the house, Alf. We can chat about it as we walk, eh?’ Louise takes his hand and pulls him away from the car. But he breaks free of her grip and runs back to Lorna, hugging her legs tightly. ‘Don’t be sad, Aunty Lor,’ he shouts, in his too-loud voice. ‘I’m going to be the black-rabbit finder.’