Page 30 of Happily Ever After
Another week crawled its way past, like a horror-fiction zombie.
Summer was inching to a close now. The leaves on the beautiful trees all over the estate were lightly touched with burning colours, the flower displays flared and died back to architectural seed heads and vibrant foliage. The tinkle of the pond fountain began to sound less wonderfully cooling and more like a presage of bad weather.
Hugo and I had great fun with his clothing collection, though. Now I had stopped thinking of him as my future, it was a lot easier to take an interest in his ‘hobby’, and he sometimes let me try on some of the couture collection. For the first time in my life I found out what it felt like to wear evening gowns teamed with Manolo heels, and if the price was that the man beside me was similarly dressed – well, that was fine. We’d lock ourselves in the Yellow Room most evenings, once Lady Tanith was safely asleep, and dress up, chat and generally form a friendship which was much better for not having an enormous Dior-shaped shadow over it.
Hugo was fun. He was amusing, intelligent and attractive and I found myself having moments where I would wonder whether I reallycouldmake this my life. But then he’d step out from behind the changing screens in his blonde wig and a dress allegedly once worn by Marilyn Monroe and shoes that cost more than I would earn in a lifetime, and I would know that I couldn’t. He looked better in the dresses than I did too, having the straight up-and-down figure that could be padded in appropriate places, whereas I already had the padding and it wasn’t always in the right place for the dresses to hang properly.
We talked about our upbringing and experiences. I learned more than I needed to know about what boys got up to at prep school, and Hugo found out that life on the road wasn’t a romantic gypsy-idyll of living off the land.
Hugo lived under a weight of expectation. ‘Once it was obvious I’d inherit, my life was over,’ he said sadly, pulling a zip down slightly to give him room to slump onto the floor.
‘Couldn’t you have refused? Told your mother to leave the place to a cats’ home or something?’
Hugo turned big eyes up to me. ‘Wouldyouwant to say no to my mother?’
I thought about this. ‘I see your point.’
‘Besides – I do have a sense of duty. Oh, not to Templewood, that’s just a house, but to Mother. I know she seems to be sensible and stable…’ He busied himself pleating fabric between his fingers, so couldn’t see me rolling my eyes. ‘But she’s very fragile really. When he renounced the estate, Jazz took me to one side and asked me to look after her. It was an easy enough promise back then, she was hysterical and I was thirteen. Over the years I’ve come to realise just how much of myself I’ve had to give up to Templewood.’
Hugo said all this in a completely matter-of-fact way, without a trace of self-pity and I realised that he really did love Lady Tanith. I wanted to ask him what kind of love she had for him; how she could happily require him to live this solitary, undemonstrative existence, all good manners and keeping up appearances. It made me realise that money wasn’t everything, and that I might have lived in a bus but at least my parents – distant and preoccupied though they might have been – had shown that they loved me, when I’d been a child. Once I’d become an adult they’d somewhat cast me adrift and become wrapped up in their own world, but really? Did that matter? I had my freedom, such as it was. Poor Hugo didn’t even have that.
We did have points of contact in our parents though; my father, with his early retirement and large pension fund, sounded similar to Hugo’s father Richard: family wealth, no need to work, cruising through life doing what he wanted. Although, in Richard’s case, this seemed to consist of keeping the estate up to scratch and indulging in even more book buying – half the library stock was down to him, and his trips abroad to acquire more books had, apparently, given Lady Tanith the opportunity to learn how to manage the estate in his absence. Hence Richard’s bequeathing it to her to run on behalf of their sons, rather than directly to his eldest son Jasper.
And when I wasn’t pretending to be a Hollywood star at her first premiere, or listening to tales from Hugo’s boyhood, I was sneezing my way through cataloguing.
There were no diaries. I’d come to terms with that. If Oswald reallyhadkept any, then maybe he’d disposed of them before he set off for Switzerland. Maybe he’d destroyed them in grief when Caroline died. Maybe he’d buried them in the garden, under the arcane workings for the fountain, in the middle of that flowerbed. I didn’t know. They certainly weren’t anywhere that I could find them, in that dusty, still-too-dark room where I sat for most of every day, staring at a spreadsheet until my eyes bulged.
One morning I woke to my ‘day off’ and couldn’t face my usual routine of going for a walk and hoping to meet Jay again, sitting in my room eating a sandwich that I had furtively made whilst avoiding Mrs Compton’s infrequent kitchen activities, and then having an early night. This Sunday being bright and fine, I decided to do some laundry. Not exactly a pastime that was going to bring the men flocking, but then they had so far not hurled themselves through my door whatever my activity, and I needed clean jeans.
Hugo had shown me the washer-drier machine, hidden away at the back of the boot room behind a panelled cupboard door designed to keep the signs of domestic drudgery from the upper class, and I occasionally braved the wrath of Mrs Compton to wash my things.
Today she caught me. ‘Slut,’ she muttered, walking past me as I wandered back upstairs with my knickers on display in a plastic basket. I thought this was a bit over the top as none of my underwear had any slutty tendencies and all my knickers were quite substantial. I just smiled. Mrs Compton seemed to suffer from a form of class-orientated Tourettes and couldn’t stop herself from bursting out in epithets when she saw me. She could, however, restrain herself nicely in the vicinity of Lady Tanith and Hugo, so I didn’t think it was a psychological problem, other than that occasioned by thinking I was beneath everyone.
I took the load of clean and dry laundry back to my room and began sorting through my remaining clothes for other things to wash. The dress needed cleaning. We were, I was aware, looming up to the next twenty-first. I was dreading having to dress up, but I was looking forward to the slap-up breakfast and three course dinner that resulted. I pulled the dress out and laid it on the bed, then went for a rummage in the cupboard I used to keep my clothing in.
There at the front was Jay’s jumper. The one he’d draped around me when I’d been soaked, sitting in the icehouse entrance on the day of the storm. I hadn’t seen him around much since my tour of the garden, except as a figure on the horizon in big boots and donkey jacket, wielding loppers or a digging tool that looked as though he may be off to a day of serial murdering, so I’d forgotten that I still had his jumper.
He’d asked for it back twice. Here it was, smelling slightly musty. I should take it back, just in case he came up to me during the memorial service to ask for it again, and then I’d have to answer questions from Lady Tanith and Hugo about how I knew Jasper. I really didn’t want to give Lady Tanith any more excuses for pursing her lips at me and sighing.
I picked up the jumper, pushed it into the carrier bag that had been my repository for my worn and dirty clothes, and set out. It gave a purpose to my day off and, I reasoned, was merely an extension of my usual stroll around the grounds, although why I needed to justify my activities to myself I wasn’t sure. Something of Lady Tanith and Mrs Compton’s attitudes perhaps were getting to me more than I cared to admit.
The day had come in misty. Not cold, or warm, just a grey envelope that curtained the world from Templewood, and echoed the dust that I encountered every day. I set out along the path to the estate village, feeling as though I were fighting my way through a haunting. The gravel crunched into the silence, trees were bleak outlines, and drooping autumn flowers occasionally flopped from their restraining beds like sanatorium patients trying to escape.
It was further to the gate in the yew hedge than I had remembered. My jeans and trainers were damp by the time I got there, and the wrought-iron curlicues of the metal gate held beads of water, prism-copies of the grey surrounding me. It was all very atmospheric and portentous. Even the yew, sagging under the weight of its own history, had pleated and curved into horrific shapes that could, to the susceptible, look like agonised faces. I opened the gate, trod my careful way through the churchyard, and on out the other side into the little square of houses.
I knew Mrs Compton lived in one. She had an army of ‘day girls’ – most of them older than her – who came in to help with the never-ending task of trying to keep Templewood clean, or at least habitable, so some of those must live here too. And there must be other garden staff, although I’d only ever seen Jay, but he wasn’t single-handedly keeping the flowerbeds in line and the further reaches of the estate grass cut. There were the carpenters and joiners and plumbers and others who worked locally and were entitled to an estate cottage and whom I occasionally saw wandering about at a distance.
They just weren’t in evidence now.
Even though it was a Sunday afternoon, all the houses looked deserted, in their square surrounding a green which bore a maypole like the mast of a schooner which had sunk into the ground. No children played, no dogs barked. It looked like the opening titles of a horror film. I realised that I had no idea where Jay lived, in this Village of the Damned. I couldn’t go around and knock on every door, could I? I was half afraid that doing so might awaken something that had been better left asleep, so I walked a small circle on the grass of the village green and tried to look for clues.
All the cottages were identical. Low eaves of thatch, which meant that the upper stories had windows that poked out through the reeds. Small lower casements, diamond-paned in black. Identical red doors, with a glass panel, letting light into, no doubt, identical hallways.
But only one had a climbing rose, past its best now but still spurting its way over the façade in a last show of petals. An immaculate flower border lay under the single downstairs window, bearing a late display of dahlias with their pom-pom heads decorated with fog-sequins like a button box overturned.
It was somewhere to start, anyway, so I crossed the green, leaving a trail of silver footprints behind me, and knocked on the door.
After a few moments of hush, there came a shuffling, and Jay opened the door. He was wearing a fleecy suit and enormous knitted socks.
