Page 13 of Happily Ever After
SATIS HOUSE – GREAT EXPECTATIONS, CHARLES DICKENS
It was another day of dust and data. I’d cleared one complete shelving unit now and several floor piles and felt quietly proud of myself for the empty space, the organised stacking and the text-filled computer screen.
‘No sign of your diaries yet though, Ozzie, my man,’ I said to the portrait. I had to talk to him as there was nobody else present, apart from Old Fishbreath, who had taken up residence under the desk and enlivened moments by occasionally seeping forth to stare at me. ‘Where on earth did you put them? And why hide them?’
Oswald continued with his fixed grimness. I did have to admit that there were traces of handsomeness there, in his cheekbones and the firm set of his chin. I bet he’d turned a few heads when he was younger, alive and not made of paint and canvas. Like his grandson, his eyes were dark brown under stern eyebrows, and there was a sensuousness to the twist of his mouth that made me wonder just what he and Lady Tanith had got up to. I just hoped they hadn’t got up to it on this table.
I was bored with inputting books, so I got up for a stroll around the walls again. These were panelled in a dark wood which increased the air of foreboding, as though any panel may conceal a passage leading to a dead body. Where they weren’t wainscot they were either tattered silk paper, cupboard or shelf. I’d opened every cupboard and moved all the random piles of books, just in case a stack of diaries was behind something else but hadn’t found so much as an old calendar. The room smelled like a second-hand bookshop which had had a flood in the last ten years and looked as though a mobile library had crashed into Thornfield Hall and nobody had bothered to pull the survivors from the wreckage.
Whydid I keep thinking about death and corpses? I had another momentary vision of that figure on the landing this morning amid the memory of the sounds from the attic and some of the other stories Hugo had told me about the house. Death and corpses. Maybe even Oswald was still hanging around, drawn in by longing and loss to tap at windows in the middle of the night?
‘Maybe they aren’t even in here,’ I carried on monologuing to Oswald’s portrait to distract myself from my imaginings. After all, if hewereto be still here in some form, being friendly towards him could only help. ‘Maybe you gave them to a friend to keep. Or you destroyed them. Were they full of lots of Forbidden Love stuff, I wonder? Or were you more of a “today it was hot and we had sponge pudding for dinner” man? No, you were a professional, I bet your diaries were full of long, luscious descriptions of the way your beloved’s hair moved in the breeze from the window and the way she looked lying naked on your…’
I stopped. The cat had poked its head out from under the table and was watching me again. It had a disconcerting way of behaving as though it understood everything I said.
‘What?’ I asked it irritably.
The cat gave me two solemn blinks of those blue eyes and withdrew back beneath the table again.
I wondered where Hugo was and why he hadn’t accompanied his mother on her visit to his brother. There definitely seemed to be some animosity there, I thought, opening another spreadsheet page on the computer. Hugo clearly felt forced to take on the estate because Jasper had renounced his right to inherit – I wondered what Jasper was like and how he had managed to get his own way with Lady Tanith, who looked as though she’d rather bulldoze the place to the ground than let it go out of the Dawe family. Then I thought about what Hugo had said about selling it when she died, and travelling around the world, and whether Lady Tanith had the faintest idea of what he had planned. If she had, I wouldn’t put it past her to just not die, but keep going, getting more and more withered, until Hugo gave up and died first. She already had the lean and dehydrated look of a kiln dried log, a very ‘preserved’ look, not enough body fat and a touch too much make-up. She could probably keep that up for another fifty years if she had to. Plus I was still taking private bets that she drank human blood, and that somewhere in a back room there were the desiccated corpses of lesser estate workers.
Hugo and I at least had something in common, something we could bond over – our generalised resentment of our siblings. I stopped, my hands resting on the computer keys, seeing my face reflected in the screen. I looked a lot like Jude, I knew, despite being two and a half years older. A round face, which gave us a touch of the ‘naughty choirboy’ look, fair hair, although mine was wavy whilst hers was straight. We both tended to a little too much bust and not quite enough hip to balance it out, so we were less hourglass and more balloon that’s been squeezed at one end. She was four inches taller, so on her, it looked good. On me… on me, it made me not heroine material. Not thin enough, not enough of the ingenue and the waif. I didn’t look like someone who needed taking care of, I looked like someone who is at home with the business end of a screwdriver and who knows her way around the internal combustion engine without having to watch a YouTube tutorial. Which, I supposed, was true enough, as Dad had often had me help when the bus wouldn’t start, or when it started making graunching noises halfway up a hill in Dorset.
Jude, of course, hadn’t been theretohelp. She’d been away at school, learning maths and geography and how to behave around other people; being taught things without having to find them out for herself in whichever library we were currently parked near.
I was tapping at the keyboard, restlessly. Tap tap, random letters expressing my jealousy, my unhappiness that my sister had been assertive enough to get our parents to send her to school. ThatIhad been left behind, teaching myself life from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the Brontës. A string of meaningless consonants showing how unfair I thought it that here I was, inputting data for an obsessive woman, with a ghost on the landing and the son of the house resolutely refusing to become besotted with me, whilst Jude lived a life filled with the normality and domestication that I craved.
Maybe Hugo felt that way about Jasper? That he got to live a normal life, while Hugo festered away here, trying to keep their mother happy? The thought was cheering. So far, Hugo had been pleasant but distant. He was an attractive slender shadow around the house, chatty in an impersonal way and always managing to look busy without actually being seen to do anything in a terribly well-bred way. I wondered what he thought, what he felt, about his life and if he wanted to talk about the resentment he felt towards his sibling.
Maybe I could ask him. After all, I was here to become attached to the heir to an estate. My life so far had been sufficiently unusual for me to know that this wouldn’t be a smooth transition, and sufficiently blighted by having a very attractive sister to know that men didn’t instantly desire me. I sighed and looked at all the little cells that I’d filled in with my restless tapping. Half a page of ‘zzzzzz’ and ‘bdbdbdbdb’. At least it made it look as though I’d done something though.
The library door opened and made me jump. Beneath the table the cat made a little ‘brrp’ noise of startled alarm too and shuffled around my ankles in a disconcerting sweep of blubbery fur.
‘Andi! It’s time to leave for the service!’ Hugo came in, looking around in the dimness for me, which was encouraging. He was wearing a very smart suit, immaculately tailored, and very shiny shoes, which was also encouraging. Maybe he’d dressed up to show himself off to me? It was working. His sharp bone structure looked wonderful above the clean lines of shirt and tie, and his blond hair was neatly brushed. ‘Oh.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing. You look as lovely as ever.’ He smiled at me. ‘It’s just that Mother pulls out all the bells and whistles for the service and you may feel a little bit – out of place? Have you got a nice dress you could pop on?’
Half of me gritted my teeth in annoyance. Lady Tanith was not the boss of me! Except she was, although not really the kind of boss who had any say in what her employees ought to wear. And it might be nice to have a chance to wear a dress and show Hugo that I actually had rather good legs (although I said so myself because I had to, nobody else noticed), and maybe get to talk to him properly.
The other half of me was clenched with worry.DidI have a dress? There wasn’t a lot of call for dressing up when you lived in a bus. All I’d got was the linen one that I’d bought specially for the interview that had brought me here, but that was all in the way of ‘smart clothes’. If I wore that then Lady Tanith would know that was all I had and no doubt look at me scornfully, because, didn’t I know that all employees would be required to dress likeVoguecover models once every month? I sighed. Lady Tanith looked at me scornfully all the time, anyway.
‘I’ll go and change,’ I said, and then, ‘I’ll be quick,’ to his worried frown.
‘Two minutes then.’ Hugo settled himself on the big velvet seat behind the table, where his mother usually sat. ‘Spit spot!’
I dashed out of the room, up the stairs two at a time – which nearly killed me; the staircase had the broad oak treads which made going up at speed feel like a workout – and into my room, where I found the linen dress discarded on the floor with a telltale ring of cat hair on it.
A quick look around told me there was nothing more suitable. Jeans, leggings and T-shirts made up almost the entirety of my wardrobe. Practicality had always been more important than being well turned out and you couldn’t clear a blocked fuel pipe in chiffon so I had never had the need for ‘nice dresses’. The floral printed linen was all I had so I pulled the dress on, buckled on the sandals which had looked so cutely winsome in the shop but which had rubbed my ankles even though I’d hardly had to walk in them, and flew back down again, clip-clopping on the tiles in the hall like a small pony.
At least my hair was clean and brushed, I thought, silently thanking the fountain incident of the morning as I tried to stretch the wrinkles and pleats out of the dress and knock off the cat fur. ‘Ready, Hugo!’ I trilled, as though we were already married and off for a night out. Although where anyone would go for a night out from Templewood was anyone’s guess – the village was a good eight miles away and didn’t seem over endowed with five-star restaurants and nightclubs. Perhaps the Hellfire Club had a mobile branch?
‘So you are.’ Hugo came out to meet me, accompanied by The Master, who sneered. ‘You look…’ He trailed off. The words had had a ‘prepared’ feel; perhaps he’d been working on what to say when he saw me while he sat in the darkness of the library? The fact he felt he needed to say anything at all made me feel slightly warm. ‘Er. It’s linen, yes? I’m sure the wrinkles will come out on the walk. Did you buy it online? There really is some wonderful stuff about that hardly looks chain-store at all,’ he finished.
I looked down at myself. The dress being left on the floor had not done the fabric any favours. The pink roses of the pattern were pleated and creased into patches and swirls of colour as though a sudden frost had passed, and the pale stretches bore distinct paw prints. It looked like a dress that had been worn to commit a bloody murder and then inadequately cleaned.
‘It’s all I’ve got,’ I said. ‘And we’ll be sitting down, won’t we?’
