Page 4 of Happily Ever After
Under my feet the scarlet carpet had given off little puffs of dust where we’d walked and these were winking and dancing in the sun that had now deigned to shine again through the huge windows.
‘Oh, there’s all sorts. Up here there’s supposed to be a lady who walks,’ Hugo said carelessly. ‘Fairly modern, that one, and she appears during the day as well as at night. A guest of Grandfather’s who fell off the balcony and broke her neck. Or something.’
I thought of the young woman I’d seen through the balcony window. The hair at the back of my neck tingled and the skin of my spine tried to crawl into my underwear and hide. No. Surely not.
‘And then there’s the noises, footsteps and so on, occasional ghastly scream, that sort of thing, all very standard in a house this old. There’s a ghost horse in the old stable block, but that’s mostly disused now, and we haven’t heard him forages, and sometimes something moans in the Morning Room. I’ll show you that in a bit. Are you having your things sent on? Mother wants you to start as soon as possible, I gather.’
For a moment he looked out of the huge window at the acutely angled balcony. I could see from this side that the windows were, in fact, full-length doors that opened, presumably so that the balcony could be accessed, although now it would only be accessible to someone with a desire to see the entire garden at ninety degrees. Below, in one of the borders, the gardener was clipping something with his deadly shears. He still looked scruffy, and the T-shirt clearly only fitted where it touched because it hung around him now like – I tried not to think – an affectionate ghost. The clipping looked to have a degree of ferocity about it too. I shuddered and added him to my list of ‘things to be avoided’, which was lengthening by the second.
Haunted. Of course Templewood would be haunted. I was overwhelmed with a sudden longing to leave. The bus might be inadequate, but at least it was a known quantity and not full of people who were, in the words of my taxi driver, ‘barking’. I could make the best of van life, I’d been doing it my entire life; it was a roof, of sorts, over my head and didn’t, as far as I knew, have any ghosts at all.
Ahead of us, where the ornately carved stairway ushered us down into the cavernous reception hallway, the cat appeared, waddling its way up along the carpet towards us, preceded by the smell of elderly fish.
‘I don’t really have muchtosend on,’ I said, trying to decide whether or not to mention that, as my parents were currentlyen routeto Montreal and my sister, whose idea this whole awfulness was, lived in Cornwall, there was nobody to send anything anywhere. If I told Hugo that, at least it would establish my credentials as a single woman, available for matrimony. But it would also let him know that nobody would miss me, should the gardener lose what little sanity he had left and stab us all to death in the middle of the night. Or even Hugo himself for that matter. He had, so far, seemed perfectly well-balanced and normal, but you surely couldn’t be the offspring of Lady Tanith and live in a place like this without having an awful lot of something restrained under that smooth surface polish.
‘Oh. Right-o.’
With one hand on the Gothic balustrading, Hugo began to walk down the gentle half-oval of the polished staircase to the hall below. I followed carefully. The treads were uneven as though something very big and heavy had once walked up alternate steps.
‘I live alone,’ I said. I wasn’t sure now whether I was setting out my credentials for being marriage-worthy or establishing that nobody would come looking for my body for weeks.
‘That’s nice,’ Hugo observed vaguely. He didn’t seem inspired to plot my immediate demise, which was encouraging.
Behind us, the cat, disappointed at having reached the top of the stairs just in time for us to start descending, sat like a fat cushion and watched us go.
‘In a converted bus,’ I tried again for a reaction.
‘How very unusual.’ He still sounded vague and that annoyed me. This was my one point of interest, my one conversational opening. It normally got some kind of a reaction other than polite acknowledgement.
‘My parents are Ed and Iris. OfRoad Life,’ I went on, despite Hugo’s obvious lack of follow-up questions, and to let him know that I did have people who would miss me. Eventually. ‘You know, the TV programme?’
‘I don’t watch much television.’ Hugo gave me a beaming smile as we reached the bottom of the creaky staircase. ‘There’s one about somewhere, Mother keeps it for the staff. But this is the Morning Room, come on in and have a look.’
He crossed the hall, with its chequerboard tiling and niches, and opened the door to a small sitting room with yellow walls and a collection of mismatched tables and chairs dotted around, like a furniture orphanage. ‘Mother writes her letters in here.’
Suppressing annoyance from his lack of curiosity about me, I continued to follow him around the downstairs. Hugo enumerated the rooms, announcing their name and purpose as though he were an estate agent trying to sell me the place. I stared about me as we went, a little afraid of what I might see. All the rooms were big, with high, chilly ceilings and enormous windows that contained wonderful views like architectural postcards. Curtains that were made from enough fabric to form several circus tents hung, bedraggled and dusty in each, paint peeled in those rooms that were sunny and in those at the back of the house, where the view was of distant moorland safely restrained behind some extensive hedging, there was a smell of ash and burned wood. Either it was chilly enough to need to light fires in there even on summer evenings, or there had been a recent conflagration. From the state of the place, it was hard to tell which of these applied.
Reassuringly, no ghosts manifested, although the chill had begun to seem supernatural.
‘And here, obviously, is the library again.’ Ignoring the makeshift metal nature of the front door, Hugo swept me around back into the room in which I’d been interviewed and flung open the double doors. ‘Ah, Mother.’
Lady Tanith was sitting on one of the overstuffed chairs in a corner, with a book on her lap. She’d turned on the light over Sir Oswald, I noticed, so his slightly resigned features shone above the room, somewhat dimmed by the amount of dust in the air from the fallen curtain which still pooled beneath the window. She looked posed, as though she’d not been sitting reading, but rather waiting for us to come back in.
Behind us, the cat marched determinedly into the room and jumped onto the library steps, causing several books to fall to the floor amid puffs of yet more dust and the cracking of aged covers.
I looked at the little tableau with an increasing feeling of trapped desperation. It wasn’t supposed tobelike this! Templewood Hall was meant to be a shabbily lived-in house, with wonderful possibilities, window seats and comfortable nooks to curl up in. Lady Tanith was supposed to be a delightfully vague and dotty dowager, with amusing habits and a need for rescue. Narrative causality dictated that I would sweep in, being regularly called a ‘breath of fresh air’, and redecorate, befriend my employer – possibly causing her to start dating a winsome retired professor from a nearby village, but that was optional – before marrying Hugo and starting a new dynasty who would nurture the Templewood estate into the future.
What narrative causality had failed to mention at any point, was that Lady Tanith would be insanely besotted with a sardine-scented cat, that only demolition would serve to make Templewood more attractive and that I would be staring at a pair of painted knees seen through volcanic levels of dust, trying to impress. Ghosts and the air of incipient horror movie were almost the least disappointing elements.
So far, only Hugo was coming up to expectations.
There was a silence, broken by the sound of the cat beginning to lick itself again and a distant clock ticking.
Eventually, Lady Tanith put her book down on a side table, looked at me and sighed. ‘Well, you’re here now,’ she said. ‘You can get started. I need you to catalogue my books onto the computer. It’s in here somewhere.’ She gazed around as though the computer may be lying in wait under a table. ‘Hugo, would you go to the kitchens and tell Mrs Compton that there will be another person for dinner?’ She waved a hand of dismissal.
‘Of course.’ Hugo dipped his head in acknowledgement, but I was mildly encouraged to see him give me a small wink as he did so.
Lady Tanith continued to watch me as I stood completely disorientated. ‘Well? Go on then, girl.’
