Page 8 of Happily Ever After
I could go back to the library, switch on the ageing computer which had turned out to be stuck in a corner forming a useful shelf for more books, and clear another tiny section. Or hunt about amid the volumes for anything that looked as though they might be diaries. I had my hand on the library door handle before the thought of the silence which lay in that room, overseen by the enormous figure of Oswald himself, gave me second thoughts. No, before work, before breakfast, I’d allow myself a few minutes of illusion and wander the acres, looking pensive. The fresh air, after all this dust and brooding, would be good for me and I could pretend to be an Austen heroine again, despite the lack of muslin, reticule and willing clergymen.
The front door was immovable. However the metal sheets were jammed in, I couldn’t budge them, and I had no idea where there was another door to the outside, so I improvised. I hauled at one of the long sash windows in the moan-free Morning Room until I wiggled it high enough for me to be able to squeeze myself through and managed, with a great loss of dignity, to clamber out and drop the considerable height down onto the narrow area of lawn which lay outside.
It was further down than I’d thought, and I landed awkwardly, pitching forward to lie on the grass, which was damp. But it felt wonderful to be out of the house and to feel the sunshine first hand, so I just lay for a moment, face down, enjoying the smell of the gardens, the soft prickle of the grass against my skin and the warmth on the back of my neck. Maybe it wasn’tsobad here, after all.
Then I rolled over and screamed.
The gardener was standing over me, armed, this time not with shears but with a huge metal rake with enormous tines. Backlit by the bright early sun, this gave him an Edward Scissorhands silhouette.
‘Are you all right?’ He looked down on me, shifting the rake so its metal teeth now lay level with my head.
‘Yes,’ was all I could say, still prone and now aware of dew seeping through my shirt.
‘Need a hand?’ He moved the rake again. I couldn’t take my eyes off its threatening shininess.
‘No, no thanks, I’m fine,’ I gasped.
He was wearing a slightly better-fitting T-shirt this morning, I noticed. His hair was longish and dark and his legs, which were very visible between his cut-off jeans and huge boots, were tanned. I was thwarted in my momentary recall ofLady Chatterley’s Lover, read furtively under the covers over a couple of very overheated summer nights, when he grunted, nodded to me briefly, and headed off away across the smooth acres of mown lawn, with the teeth of the rake bobbing and springing beside him like an enthusiastic metal terrier.
I waited until he was well out of sight before I stood up. Then, forgetting to be an Austen heroine, I went and sat by the edge of the pond for a while, until someone turned the fountain on, when I decided it was probably time to go back in and see if anyone was awake.
I wandered around to the back of the house, where I found an open door which led into the kitchen, where Hugo was sitting on a stool eating Rice Krispies dry out of the packet with his hand.
‘Oh, good morning!’ He sounded bright and breezy and not at all surprised to see me trailing in, slightly damp from the fountain’s unexpected resurgence, and dusted with more than a few grass cuttings from my close encounter with the lawn. ‘We’ll have to forage for ourselves this morning. Mrs Compton sometimes does breakfast, but she’s having one of her “moments” lately and only doing it for Mother. She’s devoted to Mother, for some reason. Perhaps she’s quietly putting rat poison in all her food, or something.’ He fisted another batch of Krispies into his mouth thoughtfully. ‘Wasting her time, of course, Mother’s immune to most of the major causes of death.’
He gave me another beaming smile which took the sting out of his words a little but did make me wonder about the familial relationships.
Marry Hugo, I thought.Turn house into hotel. Exorcise ghosts. Rescue imprisoned older brother. Never, ever have to throw myself on Jude’s mercy for somewhere to live…‘How long have the family owned Templewood?’ I asked, trying for pertness, and sitting down on the stool next to Hugo.
‘It’s not ancestral or anything.’ Hugo pushed the Krispies box towards me and shook it, but I averted my eyes. There was a loaf of bread sitting on the long oak table and I’d spotted a toaster. ‘Well, it is, sort of. It was Grandma’s family home, although Mother tries to spin it so that it was Oswald who bought it. But really it came when he married her, although I thinkherfather bought it from an impoverished aristocrat in eighteen hundred and something. Hardly Norman conquest stuff.’
I got off the stool and began to make toast. I had been hoping that the bread would be a handmade artisan loaf, although I had to work hard to imagine the irritable Mrs Compton handmaking anything that you couldn’t use a steamroller to manufacture, but it turned out to be a supermarket loaf deprived of its wrapper.
‘And it’s just you and your brother? No other siblings?’ Hugo was easy to talk to anyway, which was encouraging. And he wasn’t married, unless his wife was chained up in the attic. Which absolutely wouldn’t surprise me.
‘Yes, and there’s nine years between us. But, as I said, Jazz doesn’t want the bother of managing the estate or the house; he has a cottage out there, in the estate village.’ A vague thumb indicated the window. ‘And Mother won’t change anything that was here in Oswald’s time. So we live with crumbling tiles and peeling walls, in case the Great Man gets upset, even though he’s been dead for fifty years.’ Hugo sighed.
‘What would you like to do with the place? When…’ I stopped myself in time from saying ‘when your mother dies’, because I was half-convinced that Lady Tanith kept herself going with the blood of virgins already. ‘…When you inherit.’
The kitchen was beginning to smell of toasting bread now, a little bit more homely and less like a post-apocalypticPride and Prejudice.
Hugo sighed again. ‘Honestly?’
I nodded.
‘Sell it. I want to go and live in Paris. Or America. Anywhere but here. Or, maybe, travel around, see places. I envy you your upbringing so much, always somewhere new, new things to see and experience. I never go anywhere.’
He was looking at me now as though I were some shining example of ambition. As though being born in a bus and never staying anywhere long enough to make friends, or form any social connection of any kind, was something laudable. But then, if he sold this place he’d be able to afford to travel first class and stay in hotels where, presumably, he wouldn’t have to fill the water bowser every morning and chip the ice off the blankets in winter.
I was enjoying feeling as though, in Hugo’s eyes at least, I was an achiever. I had something of value – I’d travelled. ‘Yes,’ I said, determined to Kerouac my childhood as much as necessary, ‘it was full of wonderful experiences.’Also some pretty shit ones, but we won’t go into those right now.
The toast popped, and Hugo and I sat side by side on wooden stools at a table which could have seated twenty, eating. I kept looking around, agog at so much space just to prepare food; at the massive range oven along one wall, the racks of pans suspended from the ceiling and the dusty shelves of plates and serving ware filling the walls. I tried to ignore the ominous crack which ran the width of the ceiling and the fact that the fridge humming to itself in a corner, like an unattended child, was tiny.
‘Right.’ Hugo jumped up at last, folding the now-empty packet into a small square of cardboard and dropping it neatly into a plastic tub. ‘I’ll be upstairs, if anyone wants me, not that they will, but Mother may ask.’
‘I’ll go and start work in the library, again.’ I’d only done about an hour so far, and was already dreading that echoing silence.
‘Cheerio, then. I’ll see you at lunch.’ Hugo waved a hand and sauntered out of the kitchen, leaving me wondering what he did around here all day. Did he work? Was he managing the estate? Although I found it impossible to imagine him giving orders to staff. There was a kind of floppy reticence to Hugo that made me think he wouldn’t be that effective at management.
