Page 12 of Happily Ever After
‘Over there.’ He pointed with a corner of toast towards the window.
‘How far away?’
‘Oh, it’s still on the estate. We just don’t use it very often, because it’s inconvenient and none of us has had even the slightest interest in religion since we left pre-prep.’
‘But you go along with Oswald’s remembrance services.’
‘It doesn’t cost anything and it keeps Mother happy,’ Hugo repeated, putting his cup into the saucer. ‘Anyway. How are you, Andi? Did you sleep well?’
I remembered the disturbed night. The ghostly vision on the landing. ‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘I got up to use the bathroom and saw – well, I’m not sure what I saw. A ghost?’
Hugo didn’t seem surprised. ‘What did it look like?’
I tried to remember. Actual horror was what I could mostly recall. ‘Tall, blonde. Wearing a dress of some kind. I didn’t really look, to be honest, I was too scared.’
He nodded slowly and took a sip from his cup. ‘Her name was Marie. Oswald apparently used to host huge parties for the literati up from London. Everyone got really drunk and there was scandalous behaviour.’
I wondered if Oswald had held these parties simply to cover up his affair with Lady Tanith – what’s a little more ‘scandalous behaviour’ when everyone is up to it?
‘Marie was the “friend” of someone at one of the parties. Apparently she wandered off upstairs, went out onto the balcony very drunk, and it came away from the wall. She fell onto the path and died of a broken neck.’
So the ghost was real. I had no idea how to process that thought. I had seen a real, genuine ghost. Ghosts walked Templewood. Any fear I’d felt on that dark landing had gone now, replaced by a tremulous sympathy, and the prosaic way in which Hugo spoke about her death made me even less fearful. Whatever ghosts were, it was just a ‘thing’. Another weirdness in Templewood, where the oddnesses were stacked up so far that they almost reached the ceiling.
No wonder the slim, elegant Marie still walked the landing. I tried to imagine what she must have felt as she fell, and hoped she’d been too drunk to know what was happening. ‘That all sounds straight out of a standard ghost story,’ I said.
Hugo gave me a look I found impossible to interpret. I wondered if my levity had upset him; after all, this was his family home. Then he drank more tea and stood up. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘Like I said before, probably best if you don’t go out of your room after dark, if you’re worried about meeting ghosts. This place is riddled. Right. I have to go and do some work. I’m guessing you’ll be in the library? I’ll come and fetch you when it’s time to head over to the chapel. Oh, don’t worry, the service is very informal, a couple of hymns and a quick homily and we’re back in time for high tea. Mrs Compton always puts on a good spread on the twenty-first.’
‘Everytwenty-first?’ I buttered another crumpet. If it was going to be a whole month before we got food like this again, then I was going to stock up while I could. ‘You have a memorial service every month?’
Hugo came back into the room and closed the door again. ‘My mother,’ he began, and gazed at the ceiling for inspiration. ‘My mother wasdevotedto Oswald.’
I remembered Lady Tanith’s shining face when she spoke about him, and the twinge of sympathy I felt for her plight. ‘But wasn’t he her father-in-law or something?’
‘Yes. And forty years older than her, which was why she and my father had quite an age-gap relationship. But she admired Oswald’s writing and he – well, he drew inspiration from her, according to Mother.’
I’m not sure that’s all he got from her, I was too full of crumpet to say. The thought of Lady Tanith loosening her stays sufficiently to have wild, abandoned sex, and the grim Oswald letting go enough to be any good at it, really upset my world view.
‘She was so devastated when he died, Mrs Compton told me in strictest confidence that they thought they might have to have her put away.’
‘Well, it’s never too late,’ I said cheerily.
‘I’m sorry?’
She could be your mother-in-law…‘I meant, it’s never too late to celebrate someone’s life,’ I said quickly. ‘So I suppose having memorial services for fifty years after someone has died is…’ I tailed off. There wasn’t a single spin I could put on it that didn’t make Lady Tanith sound unhinged.
‘It’s all we’ve ever known,’ Hugo said simply. ‘The twenty-first is Oswald Day. Not so bad for me, but tough on Jasper. His birthday is the twenty-first of November; I don’t think he ever had a birthday celebrated on the actual day as it’s been taken up by family meals and then the service in the chapel.’
I felt a momentary sympathy for the as-yet-unseen Jasper. ‘What does your brother do now? If he’s renounced the estate?’
‘He’s a designer,’ Hugo said vaguely. ‘Anyway. Better pop.’
I waved him off and filled my pockets with toast-and-bacon sandwiches to take to the library. I had really begun to wonder about the absent Jasper. Surely the son of the house, even one who had renounced his birthright, might be expected to be around sometimes? If the twenty-first was important to Tanith, why did her eldest son not pop over, for old times’ sake?
The memory of those footsteps in the attic plucked gently at the back of my brain and I shivered. No. It was birds, that was all. Birds. Definitely.
With the reassurance of a proper lunch warm and bacon-scented in my hand, I headed back to work.
7
