Black Rabbit Hall (11 page)

‘Well,’ says Peggy, sounding flustered, ‘it’s going to be one brave lady to take on this old pile.’

‘You’ve got a pretty enough face, Pegs.’

‘
Annie!
’

‘Well, he needs a fancy version of you, doesn’t he? Someone practical. Motherly. Oooh, Pegs, you’re blushing!’

I smile into the sable. Ridiculous. They’re both completely ridiculous.

‘Honestly, Annie. If anyone could hear you.’

‘Well, I bet he wouldn’t step on his partner’s toes at the village-hall dance! Or stink of pilchards.’

‘Stop it, Annie.’

‘Not the kind of brute to jilt a young woman at the altar either.’

‘Annie, for the love of God …’ I hear the hurt and anger in her voice, then realize Toby’s story about her past is true. Oh, poor Peggy.

‘Sorry, Pegs. Sorry. All I’m trying to say is that our Mr Alton is not going to be on the widowers’ shelf for long, mark my words. Oh … crikey.’ Her voice flashes with embarrassment. ‘Toby! We were just … just freshening your ma’s dressing room …’

‘I’m looking for Amber.’ I know from the low growl in his voice that he has heard the tail end of their conversation too. ‘Have you seen my sister?’

‘I was searching for ages.’ Toby is standing at my bedroom window. He scratches the back of his sinewy calf with his toenail. The sole of his foot is hard and dirty. None of us has worn shoes for weeks. There are still splatters of grey river mud behind his knees. ‘Where were you?’

‘About.’ I lie back on the bed, tugging Momma’s cheesecloth mini-dress down over my legs, and pretend to read Aunt Bay’s letter. (I know it almost line by line, having read it five times already.)

I need one place that is my own.

Fidgety and fierce today, bare-chested in ripped Scout shorts, he presses his hands on the window frame and leans into the view, as if he’s squaring up for a fight, shoulder-blades rising on his nut-brown back like fins. All the swimming and climbing have made him strong and lean, knotted his once skinny shoulders and arms with muscle. His hair is matted and curled, sun-bleached bright as a bonfire. His fingertips are stained with blackberry blood. Annie’s right: he does look wild. ‘What does Aunt Bay’s letter say, then?’

‘Sold a painting. Lost an inch from her hips on some diet. Oh, and she’s got homes for all the kittens in the Chelsea Hotel. That’s good, isn’t it? They can all stay near each other. I hate the idea of them being separated …’

Toby rolls his eyes, pretending not to care. But we both love Aunt Bay’s letters. They arrive deliciously randomly, sometimes three or four in the same month – fast, fizzy, in
looping writing that somehow reads like she talks – then she goes silent for weeks, which is also reassuringly in character.

‘She’s coming to visit soon anyway.’

‘Please, God, don’t let her go swimming naked in the creek again.’ Toby is funny about nudity. We both are. The bathroom door is now locked when we bathe. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Messing about in the ballroom.’

Toby holds the windowsill and lifts his feet from the floor, soles on the wall below, like a swimmer launching from the end of a pool. ‘There’s something I want us to try, Amber.’

I don’t like it when he says ‘us’. ‘You’re breaking the windowsill.’

He springs down, barely making a noise. ‘Put that letter away, will you? I know you’ve read it a hundred times.’

I stuff it between bed and wall to savour later.

‘Shove up.’ Toby wedges next to me. His skin feels hot and dry along my arm and he smells of sweat and sea. He throws one of his legs over mine. It’s surprisingly heavy and I’m reminded again of how time has pulled our once-similar bodies apart. No one could call Toby pretty now. He’s changing so quickly.

‘Amber,’ he says, resting his face on his hand and staring at me intensely through the blaze of his lashes.

‘What?’

‘Limpets. Eating them raw. Off the rocks.’ He grins his crazy-man grin. ‘What do you think?’

‘Ugh. No, thank you.’

‘You really can eat them raw. People do.’

‘Mad people.’

He sits up on the side of my bed, rumpling my eiderdown. I kick one of my bare feet on to his lap, my toes wiggling in the breeze from the window. He holds my foot, fingers curling lightly around my heel. ‘We need to learn how to survive, Amber.’

Not this again. Just as I imagine people dying all the time now, Toby imagines the world ending in different ways. He reads books on warfare and tales of survival against the odds in bleak, wild places and wakes up each morning prepared to meet impending catastrophe head on.

‘We don’t have to survive and certainly not on raw limpets. Or those nettles you boiled up to a disgusting soup on the fire. If you’re hungry why can’t you just pinch some ginger biscuits from the pantry? Or make one of your crushed-Twiglet sandwiches or something?’

He looks at me as if I’m stupid. ‘You’re just not getting it.’

I remove my foot from his lap, dangle my hand to the floor, searching blindly for
Wuthering Heights
. ‘Getting
what
?’

‘We’ve got to know how to look after ourselves, Kitty and Barney.’

‘Right. What about Daddy?’

‘He could die.’

‘He’s not going to die.’ I pick up the book, hold it above my head and fold back the turned page corner.

‘Everyone dies. We’ve got to be prepared for the worst. Bad stuff happens.’

‘The bad stuff
has
happened.’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m talking about worse stuff.’

I quickly turn the page, even though I haven’t read it. ‘How on earth could anything be
worse
?’

‘I don’t know but … I sense that it can. I dream about it all the time. It’s like …’ I see something pass over his eyes like a cloud, and I know that whatever he’s thinking of is as real to him as the book in my hands. ‘A black dot getting bigger. A hole. Maybe a meteorite hitting us or something.’

‘A meteorite!’ I lick my finger, ready to flick another page. ‘How exciting.’

‘You’re not taking it seriously.’ He lies back on the bed, arms crossed behind his head, revealing a damp red puff of hair in each armpit. ‘Amber?’

‘What?’

‘Will you promise me something?’

I put my book down, stare upwards, inverting the room in my head so that the white ceiling becomes the floor and the green lampshade a solitary tree in a snowy field.

‘We stick together, whatever happens?’

‘That’s always been the deal.’

‘Promise?’

‘I already have. Ugh, Boris.’

Boris shuffles through the door, bedraggled, wet, a creature of the mud. ‘Sit,’ I say, before he gets any ideas about joining us on the bed.

‘There’s one more thing,’ Toby says, ruffling Boris’s filthy ears with his toes.

‘What?’

A slow grin curls the sides of his mouth. ‘You’ll try a limpet?’

‘Just absolutely no. Never.’

The limpets are not as disgusting as they sound, just chewier, sandier and more alive. I say, ‘Sorry,’ to it as I swallow. Next time I’m definitely raiding the pantry.

‘Don’t pull a face,’ grins Toby. Secretly he’s impressed. Eating raw limpets is not something I’d have done when Momma was alive. But after Momma dying, the small things don’t matter so much. You don’t feel a scratch on your foot if you’ve gashed open your head. Anyway, I’ll eat raw limpets for Toby.

‘Your turn.’ I throw him the sharp, flat bit of stone and he whacks it hard at the base of a limpet, prising its muscular foot away from the rock before it has a chance to lock down. It occurs to me that we’re all a bit like these limpets, sticking hard to our rock, what remains of our family, as the tide tries to suck us out.

‘Got it.’ He leaps up, so springy on his feet it’s as if he’s weightless. No wonder he’s constantly in trouble at school. He can’t sit still for more than thirty seconds.

‘Amber.’ Kitty wanders over, rattling a bucket of shells and crispy mermaid’s purses scoured from the strand line. She looks at Toby, puzzled. ‘What you doing, Toby?’

‘Foraging for my lunch.’ He gouges out the stringy meat of the limpet, holds it up on the tip of his finger, enjoying the gore, then casually drops it into his mouth. ‘Delicious.’

Kitty is horrified. ‘That’s Kitty’s limpet friend.’

‘Not any more. Want to try one?’

She holds Raggedy Doll in front of her face. ‘No!’

He chips off another. ‘Hungry, Barney?’

Barney pretends not to hear and stabs his stick into the
rock pool’s seaweedy edges, trying to flush out fish. He is at his least miserable on the beach, far away from the spot in the woods where Momma died. It’s the only place where you can feel his old spirit stirring.

‘Or are you a girl too?’ teases Toby.

Eyes watering, Barney makes himself eat the raw limpet. He wants Toby’s approval, correctly suspecting that part of Toby blames him for initiating the line of dots that led to Momma’s death: chasing the rabbits, Momma heading out with her weak leg and wrist, and whatever else happened that Barney refuses to talk about.

Toby ruffles his hair. ‘Good man, Barns.’

‘Yuck. That’s so yuck. Raggedy Doll wants to go back to London and eat Nette’s cinnamon toast.’ Kitty holds up the doll – gnawed, ferociously over-loved. ‘Don’t you, Raggedy Doll?’

‘I’m never going back to London,’ says Barney, quickly retreating to the rock pool in case he’s offered another limpet.

‘School starts next week,’ I say, reminding myself. Toby and Barney may want to keep free-falling at Black Rabbit Hall but secretly I’m looking forward to being back with my friends and studies, the petty comfort of enforced bedtimes, rules involving indoor and outdoor shoes and brushing hair before bed. A bit of distance from Toby too, although it feels mean to admit that.

‘I will hide here in the cove and no one will find me,’ says Barney.

‘You must never hide here on your own. It’s dangerous, Barney,’ I explain, for the hundredth time. We caught him
just in time last week, blithely wading out into a rough sea with a net. ‘The water comes right up to the cliff at high tide. You can get caught out.’

‘I can swim!’

‘Yeah, but it sucks you under. There are weird currents.’

Barney picks up a small crab by a claw, watching it scuttle helplessly in the air. ‘Well, I refuse to go back to London. It’s too …’ he pauses, thinks about it ‘… small.’

I smile because I know exactly what he means. This last summer at Black Rabbit Hall has been vast, boundless.

We sit in easy silence for a bit, throw a stick into the sea for Boris. A black cormorant flexes itself on a rock, wings outstretched. A cloud slips over the sun. The temperature drops and the sea changes from clear blue to murky dark green, like a glass of Kitty’s paintbrush water.

‘Amber?’ Kitty presses up against my legs, sand-gritted and chilled.

‘Yeah?’

‘Is London still there?’

‘Yes, of course it is.’

‘And Nette?’

‘Nette and Nanny Meg and Grandma Esme. And your little bedroom with the Flower Fairy painting on the wall. It’s all as it was, Kitty,’ I say, stretching it a bit.

‘I can’t imagine two places at once,’ she says, looking worried. ‘I can’t imagine London any more.’

It does feel impossible sometimes that both this place and London can co-exist. Our lives are so different. ‘Busyness is a tonic,’ Daddy says, which means school, prep, museum visits; tea at Matilda’s and Grandma’s; trips to
London Zoo, the Natural History Museum, fittings for shoes and coats, our lives ordered, arranged, the days backed up with things to do so that we have as little time to think about Momma as possible. But here, of course, it’s a different story. It’s always a different story at Black Rabbit Hall. It unspools everything.

Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers when she was alive and not much ever happened: burying her long legs on the beach, Toby and I watching Daddy kiss Momma behind a veil of meaty barbecue smoke. When it rains, if I stare long enough, I can actually see those miniature moments caught in the fat drops that roll down the kitchen windows, just before they flatten on the sill. Momma pops up in odd places.

‘It’ll all be there, the moment we step off the train. Hey, you’re shivering, Kits. Come here.’

I flick the worst of the sand off her skin, wrap her in my cardigan and sink my chin on to the cushion of her curls. I love the squidge of Kitty in my arms – she’s plumper than ever on account of all the sympathy sweets. If I can’t sleep I go into her bed, where she still sleeps like a baby, balled up with her bottom in the air. More often than not, I’ll wake up to find Toby in the tatty tartan armchair opposite, as if he’s been watching us and dropped off too.

‘London is still there,’ Kitty repeats, just when I thought I’d settled the issue. ‘Our house is there. Momma’s not there.’

‘That’s right, Kitty,’ I say, pleased that she finally seems to get it.

She looks up at me, asks sternly, ‘So where’s Daddy?’

‘Daddy’s in Paris.’

Her eyes are blue and round in her face. She blinks, and it’s like butterflies opening and shutting their wings. ‘Why is he in Paris? What’s Paris?’

‘Paris is the capital of Germany, dumbo,’ pipes up Barney.

‘Paris is the capital of France, Barns.’ Toby whacks him across the legs with a rope of seaweed.

Kitty is still looking up at me, blinking.

‘Daddy is in Paris for business,’ I explain more slowly. ‘But he’ll be back at Black Rabbit Hall at the weekend, okay?’

‘But the weekend will take years to come.’

‘Two days.’

Toby sits down next to me on the rock, pale beneath his tan, holding his tummy with one hand, where the muscles carve horizontally. Boris drips out of the waves and shakes stinky dog water all over us.

Toby pushes him away. ‘Ugh, all I need.’

I smile, realize what’s going on. ‘Another limpet, Toby?’

‘Don’t.’

I wriggle my toes into the warm, powdery top layer of sand and stare out at the darkening sea, keeping half an eye on Barney, just like Momma used to do in the days when I was free to be a kid. Kitty hums beneath her breath. I recognize it as the tune Momma used to hum when she brushed Kitty’s hair.