Page 3 of Happily Ever After
Hugo advanced until I could see him properly. He was wearing a shirt and jeans, had messy pale hair which looked as though he’d just got out of bed, and was incredibly good looking. Sharp bone structure counterpointed huge dark eyes and made him look like a reverse image of Lady Tanith, to whom he bore a very strong resemblance. He had her very slender build with added height, the casual leanness of a greyhound, and I couldn’t stop staring at him. Hugo was, in short, absolutely gorgeous.
‘Will you take the job?’ Hugo asked me casually, as though we’d met at a cocktail party rather than me being stapled to a chair by a cat and him wading through the remains of soft furnishings. ‘Do you think?’
I tried to weigh up what to say. ‘It’s pretty much the only thing I can do’ would make me sound desperate. ‘Over my dead body’, although true, might prejudice him against me, and I really did need the job.
And, whispered that tiny voice inside me, the voice that had kept me going over the years,you know how this goes, don’t you?You fall in love with the son of your employer and marry happily into money and… and… dust, an overweight cat and an absolutely insane mother-in-law, finished my practical side.
‘I’m thinking about it,’ I said, truthfully.
I got a radiant smile. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It would be marvellous to have someone new around the place.’
My eyes rolled wildly, wondering when Igor was going to step out of the shadows. Hugo sounded as though he hadn’t met another human for decades,other than to experiment on,my mind whispered. But it also practically yelled that he was stupendously attractive, well-mannered and rich. A little bit of family insanity could be overlooked for those advantages, surely?
He left the floor-level curtain and came over, perched on the edge of the table his mother had stared at me over and tipped his head to one side. ‘Is The Master bothering you?’
‘I would quite like to stand up,’ I said, adjusting my buttocks so that the chair didn’t cut quite so deeply into my spine. ‘But I didn’t like to move him, now he’s got…’ I trailed off as my attention was caught by the portrait at the end of the library, now picked out by a spotlight of sunbeams which were unwisely making their way through the dust. It wasenormous, bigger than life sized, and the light didn’t reach the top so all I could see was a huge overwrought frame and a pair of painted knees. ‘What is that?’
‘Oh, that’s Grandpa,’ Hugo said, unconcerned, and he leaned forward to sweep the cat from my lap in a movement which seemed suspiciously practised. ‘Buggeroff, Master.’
The cat, seemingly unperturbed, jumped down as though the movement had been all his own idea and he was fed up with sitting on me anyway. The long, creamy body vanished under the table with a wobble of fur, a twitch of a dark tail and was succeeded by sounds of vigorous fur-licking in the shadowy darkness.
‘Your grandfather?’ I stood up stiffly and followed Hugo across the book-littered floor to gaze up at the portrait.
‘Yes. Wait a moment.’ He went to the wall and flicked a switch, whereupon a light suddenly illuminated the entire enormous picture in a spot-lit glare. ‘Oswald Matcham Dawe. OBE, Bart, or something. I’m surprised Mother didn’t give you chapter and verse on him as soon as you came in.’
The portrait showed a man, somewhere in his mid-fifties at a guess. Grey hair, black suit, rather gaunt but handsome and with an air of supercilious melancholy. He looked, I thought, rather like a Jane Austen hero might, a few decades after the story ended. He was framed in a ridiculously overdone gilt box with curlicues, swoops, swags and elaborate flourishes, like the mind of a German medieval sculptor on hard drugs.
‘He was an author. Made his money on the back of some rather dubious business dealings just after the war, retired to take up writing, and established the library. Mother came to Templewood as some kind of companion to his wife, married their son and – well, the rest is history and me and my brother.’ Hugo flicked off the light and the enormous man faded back into the darkness, except for his knees, which reflected the sunlight in a disconcerting way. ‘Would you like a tour of the house? I’m assuming Mrs Compton will be making you up somewhere to stay – the Blue Room, probably, that’s where visitors are usually put.’
The cat under the desk was making horribly squashy noises and the sardine smell kept rising up at me, so I picked up my bag and said, ‘Yes, please.’
‘Excellent.’
Hugo led the way out of the library and I watched his back view with a degree of complacency. He was attractive, he was attentive and he was interesting. I reckoned we could be announcing our engagement within six months, if I played my cards right.
3
NORTHANGER ABBEY – NORTHANGER ABBEY, JANE AUSTEN
We mounted an enormous staircase, carved in twiddly dark wood, curving like an impressive eyebrow over the hallway and up onto a galleried landing which branched off in various directions. ‘This is themosthaunted part of the house,’ Hugo said, leading me off to the right along an upstairs corridor. Occasional glances through the huge windows had told me that this wing of the house looked out over the gardens.
‘I’m sorry?’ As I spoke, the sun went behind a cloud and the wonderful roseate light died to leave us staring down a wood-panelled box into a murky dimness which was giving off a distinct smell of damp plaster.
‘Oh yes. Whole place is riddled with ghosts of course, but this is the worst bit.’ Complacently Hugo set out, touching closed doors and naming as he went. ‘My room, the Green Room, Scarlet Room…’ We rounded the end of the corridor and set out along another, which branched around to the left.
‘Hang on, hang on, can we go back to the “ghost” thing, please?’ I’d stopped moving now, frozen into immobility on the landing. ‘The house is haunted?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Hugo sounded completely blasé about the walking corpse potential. ‘Dreadfully, I’m afraid.’ Then he smiled. ‘No need for you to worry, though. Stay in your room after dark, don’t go wandering around – it’s all perfectly all right.’ Then he went back to his naming of the rooms. ‘The Panelled Room – Mother uses that one for the Sheraton collection, mostly forgeries of course – the Yellow Room – that one’s always kept locked, ah, and this is the Blue Room. We usually put guests up in here, you see.’
He turned the handle and the door swung noiselessly open to show a perfectly ordinary bedroom which had more than a little of the hotel-soullessness about it. There was a big double bed, horrible oak furniture which was too dark for the small amount of light which squeezed in through the inadequate window, and a kettle on a desk. I turned around. ‘It’s fine.’ It was fine. It had a bed. That was really all I asked for. Oh, apart from not being put miles away from the nearest occupants, in a house that was supposedly haunted. ‘Where does Lady Tanith sleep?’
‘In the other wing. She had a suite of rooms of course, originally, but actually she pretty much has the whole wing to herself now that Father’s no longer with us. She doesn’t like disturbance, you see.’ Hugo said this as though having an entire wing of a house so that you didn’t get woken in the night was perfectly normal. Well, of course, it was to him. The idea of just wearing headphones and listening to podcasts so that the drunks arguing outside didn’t wake you, wouldn’t occur to him because it didn’t need to. ‘We don’t usually go down that way.’ He closed the door to the Blue Room and we rounded the end of the corridor. ‘This is a storage room, not much used these days.’ He touched another door, then another. ‘And this is the bathroom.’
This door stood opposite my bedroom, and Hugo flashed me a glimpse of a tiled floor, a high-flush toilet with a cistern the size of a commercial water tank and the end of a roll-top bath. ‘This is why we put visitors in the Blue Room, it’s close to the facilities. En suite, sadly, rather passed us by.’
Unconcerned at my somewhat stunned reaction to his house, Hugo turned us back and we returned to the ‘haunted’ corridor, where I stopped again.
‘When you say “haunted”,’ I said cautiously, ‘what are we talking, here? Mysterious noises or a sheeted figure that moves inexplicably quickly towards you, or people showing you huge holes in their chests?’ M R James had had a hand in my adolescence and took some shaking off, especially in a house like this, straight fromLost Hearts.
