Black Rabbit Hall (22 page)

What if Jon is too straightforward for her? Too nice? Too untroubled? When they first met she worried that his unquestioning, cheerful upbringing, his relaxed, large family, put him out of her league. That he’d soon grasp his mistake. That it was impossible to straighten an emotional kink bestowed on you by your past: anything else was unsustainable pretence. She’d confided her fears to Louise, who’d simply said, ‘Don’t be a plonker.’ And she’d agreed with her. Jon and she loved each other. And yet. What if that initial worry was intuition, not paranoia? What if she’d been right the first time round?

Lorna tries to calm herself by taking yoga breaths. But they only seem to rush oxygen into the fire of her brain. She feels disoriented now, off balance. It is so dark in the room it’s as if her eyes are closed. There are so many different shades of black, from oily kohl to something that is beyond colour, an abyss in the shadows beneath the drop of the curtain. The darkness is not still either. It moves, billowing, contracting, alive. As she stares into it, heart
galloping in her ears, she can see flickering clips of her childhood: a felt-tip heart drawn on the back of Louise’s delicate hand with her and Louise’s names on it; the same hand, bigger, protectively holding newborn Alf, beautiful, sticky with birth wax, the shock of his Down’s diagnosis still a doctor’s round away; her adoption certificate in the torchlight under her Barbie duvet, the letters marching across it like ants, the sound of her mother violently rearranging the linen cupboard in the corridor, waiting for Lorna to be ‘done’ with the bit of paper so she could shove it back in the box file in the attic and pretend once again that it didn’t exist.

She bolts up on the pillow. Has she internalized her mother’s anxieties about her adoption? It’s never occurred to her before. Has she learned to see her own pre-Lorna Dunaway past – caught between the first beat of her tiny heart and the moment her adoptive parents bundled her into their arms – as a sheet of thin ice crackling over dangerously deep waters? Tread carefully, very carefully, preferably not at all. Her mind races in the dark, thoughts dashing about blindly, like creatures freed from a cage, until her eyes close and she sinks into the deepest black of all.

Some hours later, sickly yellow light waffles the floor beneath the folds in the curtains. Lorna’s head roars. She’s drenched in sweat, her engagement ring twisted around on her finger, diamond pushing into her palm. She stands up to use the bathroom, sinks back to the four-poster. What is the matter? Has she eaten something bad? Was it the crab at supper? That sticky ancient sherry?

She shivers beneath the sheets, hot, cold, hot. Someone
is banging against the inside of her skull, trying to get out. Or something. She imagines this is how a migraine might feel. Except she doesn’t get migraines. She doesn’t get headaches. She’s as strong as an ox – good genes, ha – and is rarely, if ever, ill.

The only thing to do is close her eyes. Close her eyes and pray for sleep.

A knocking on the door. She squints across the room. The yellow dawn has gone now. The room is stifling and razor-sharp sunlight is pouring through the gaps in the curtains.

A voice swims across the room towards her: ‘Everything okay?’

Lorna tries not to groan. A groan – and a self-pitying plea for tea and painkillers – is the noise she’d normally make on a morning like this, except she can’t because she’s a guest and her mother taught her that it’s bad manners for guests to be ill. So she says weakly, ‘Come in.’ The sound of her own voice crashes sickeningly against her eardrums.

‘Oh, what’s the matter?’

Lorna can only focus enough to make out the giant frizzy orb of hair, a human allium.

‘You look terrible.’

‘It’s my head …’ Her hand goes to it. She is half expecting to find it changed in some way, elongated, squashed or pulped. It is damp and hot.

‘You really do look pale. No, no, don’t get up.’

Lorna couldn’t even if she tried. ‘Must be a bug. Something I picked up on the train.’

‘Oh dear. Can I get you anything?’

‘Paracetamol would be good.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

Lorna lies back in the bed, feeling as if she may never get out, that it will eat her alive. The pounding intensifies. It has words. Jon’s words. Questions she doesn’t want answers to. It has a rhythm too, a nauseous swoosh, the sound of arterial blood, a river overflowing its banks.

Dill finally appears. ‘I couldn’t find any paracetamol.’

Lorna’s eyes rush with tears.

‘But Mrs Alton gave me these for you.’ Dill holds up an innocuous white cardboard box. ‘Painkillers. She gets migraines. Swears by them.’

Lorna will do anything to stop the sledgehammer in her head. She weakly shakes the box: two pills in a silver blister pack fall to the eiderdown. She tries to read the back of the packet – she can see a chemist’s sticker, they’re prescription – but the letters blur and smudge. She shouldn’t take them. It’s madness taking someone else’s painkillers, the sort of thing it warns you against on the side of the box, if only she could read it.

‘Shall I bring you a glass of water?’ Dill asks kindly.

She nods. She doesn’t ask about the dose.

What day is it? Where is she? Gripping a bedpost, Lorna pulls herself up. Her head is foggy, vision smoked at the edges, her stomach loose. It takes a few moments for the previous day and night to come back in a soft-focus mush, the moments falling apart as she reaches for them, the magical removal of pain, feeling, all sense of time. But … no … surely she wasn’t stupid enough to take someone else’s prescription pills. But the empty white box is on the floor. The bed is a mess, as if she’s been trying to plait the
sheets during the night. And the room stinks. She staggers from the sweaty tangle of linen, slams open the window and inhales, dewy ivy brushing her face. Seaweed. Wool. Bacon.

Bacon? Oh, no, she’s late for breakfast. A day late for breakfast. She tries to text Jon – ‘message unsent’ – and after a brutal cold splashing from the bath’s shower hose, dresses in a hurry, hopping across the rug, one foot stuck in a shoe, running her fingers through her hair. She trips down the narrow stairway until she gets to the door that leads directly to a floor she doesn’t want to be on. One more flight down. Two. Another landing. Bewildering. Three tin buckets, plinking with drips. Finally, at the bottom of the staircase she looks around. A stuffed stag stares back at her, seeming faintly surprised.

Where’s the dining room? It isn’t making itself at all obvious. She turns into an unfamiliar long, dingy corridor, crashes into a room full of brooms and mops and upright floor polishers, another with furniture draped in white sheeting, lumps of pale ceiling plaster scattered across the floor like split bags of icing sugar. She retraces her steps, cloud-headed, cursing beneath her breath until she sees the words ‘Dining Room’ shimmer in faded gilt letters on a dark grey door. The relief is short-lived. She hears the clink of cutlery. Damn. They’ve started.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late …’ Her words trail off. She was not anticipating the dining room to be quite so grand or red or the table so enormously big. Mrs Alton still manages to dominate it, sitting upright at one end with perfect posture, a fork of scrambled egg poised mid-air. Petal, the ratty terrier, sits on her knee, one muddy paw on a
lace-edged tablecloth, greedily eyeing the fork. Mrs Alton’s lips twitch, but she says nothing.

‘My alarm didn’t go off,’ Lorna mutters, as if she would have heard it if it had.

‘Oh, it wouldn’t. Not in this house.’ Mrs Alton brings the fork to her mouth. ‘I’m just glad you’re feeling better and that the bridal suite has proved itself to be so suited to such deep slumber, Lorna,’ she adds, making no mention of her little gift of the catatonic pills, horse tranquillizers, whatever they were. ‘Do sit down.’

Lorna sits between some complicated cutlery. As she does so, she gets a sudden, vivid recollection of waking up and seeing someone standing in the doorway of the bedroom. Clearly, she was wired.

‘I trust you’re hungry.’ Mrs Alton feeds the dog a triangle of buttered toast from her fingers but is watching Lorna intently, her gaze precise, as if something has sharpened her interest since yesterday.

‘Oh, yes,’ Lorna says, even though she’s not sure she is. Her body still feels as if it might not belong to her. She wishes she couldn’t smell the dog.

There is endless toast, different shades of burnt, in a silver toast rack. A fruit bowl full of strawberries and, if she’s not actually hallucinating, tiny black ants scrabbling over them. Four jars of marmalade, some looking decades older than the others. Mushrooms swimming in butter. A horrifying limb of black pudding. Her hands stall on the table as she wonders when to declare her vegetarianism, whether etiquette dictates that she should just help herself or if she should wait to be invited. She half expects a maid
in black and white to come up behind her with a pair of silver tongs.

Instead, Dill appears, wearing a battered navy overall and a look of delighted surprise. ‘You’re here!’ she trills, as if she’d expected Lorna to do a runner in the night. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Much better,’ she says, embarrassed, hoping Dill hadn’t witnessed her at her most spaced.

‘Tea?’ Dill pours it through a silver strainer into the prettiest gold-rimmed china teacups. ‘Bacon and eggs? One of Betty’s eggs. Most of our hens are menopausal, but our Betty Grable is hanging in there, isn’t she, Mrs Alton?’

‘Indeed. Dear old Betty.’

‘Lovely.’ Lorna is unsure she can face an egg but can’t help feeling that it would be a personal slight to turn it down as the chicken has a name. ‘But no bacon for me, thanks.’

‘No bacon?’ Dill looks baffled.

‘I’m a vegetarian. Well, I eat fish.’

‘Good heavens.’ Mrs Alton presses her napkin to her mouth.

‘I should have mentioned it earlier. Sorry.’

‘No problem. Eggs coming up,’ says Dill.

‘I must warn you that it will be rather cold, especially the scrambled,’ says Mrs Alton, recovering herself, gritting her breakfast with salt. ‘Unless Endellion sprints from the kitchen, a form of exercise to which she is not naturally disposed.’

Dill smiles, not rising to the bait. ‘The kitchen is not very convenient, Lorna, too far from the dining room,
which is why we usually keep ourselves to the east tower kitchen. But this is a special room and you a special guest. We thought you’d enjoy it.’

‘It is an amazing room. I love the red walls.’

‘In the early days, when I first came here, Lorna, I tried to use this dining room for every meal but it beat me in the end. All that lukewarm food.’

Lorna finds it hard to imagine Mrs Alton being beaten by anything.

‘Pencraw is a wild horse, Lorna.’ Mrs Alton sighs. ‘Quite impossible to control. It took me many years to accept that. Such a determined new wife I was.’

A wild horse? An unfortunate turn of phrase, considering the manner of the first wife’s death. It makes Lorna wonder if so much time has passed that Mrs Alton no longer makes the association or, more chillingly, if she does and says it anyway.

‘I hope that the peeling wallpaper won’t put you off your food.’ Mrs Alton smiles. ‘It is in a rather worse state than I remembered.’

‘It feels like a palace to me.’ Lorna reaches for some toast, self-conscious under Mrs Alton’s tracking stare. ‘We can’t even fit a proper dining table in our flat.’

Mrs Alton coughs on a mushroom. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Too small,’ explains Lorna, wishing she hadn’t mentioned it. ‘But we’re hoping to move somewhere bigger soon.’

‘I wouldn’t recommend anywhere with more than six bedrooms for a couple starting out,’ says Mrs Alton, thickly buttering another triangle of toast for the dog. ‘Anything
bigger can become a terrible chore unless you’ve got the staff. Endellion, Petal is still hungry.’ Mrs Alton tickles the dog under the chin. A string of dribble ropes from Petal’s mouth to the table. ‘One of his doggy biscuits, please.’

‘Coming up.’ Dill’s espadrilles make a squelching sound. The moment the door closes it feels like the last bit of normality has left. Lorna feels faintly claustrophobic, despite the room’s generous proportions. It’s not unlike the feeling she had in the turret after she’d closed the heavy brocade curtains. Mrs Alton’s gaze is still boring into different parts of her: fingernails, nape of her neck. She’s never felt so blatantly scrutinized and wishes she’d had time to brush her hair.

She peers over Mrs Alton’s shoulder to the window. ‘The lawn is extraordinarily lush and green this morning,’ she says.

‘That’s what you get after a night of rain here. Not that you’ll have rain on your wedding day, of course.’ She grimaces. ‘Not like I did.’

At the mention of the wedding, Lorna’s heart immediately quickens: the phone conversation in Dill’s office feels like something hard and indigestible in her stomach. Should she mention the wedding-licence issue now? Or is this the least of her worries?

‘The weather is rather good down here in the autumn. The sun comes out on the weekend the tourists leave. Nature has a wicked sense of humour.’ Mrs Alton eyes her coolly over the gold rim of her teacup. ‘You are still set on an autumn date, I trust?’

Now she must mention it. For all she knows, Mrs Alton may not even realize that a licence is necessary. ‘Well, there
are a few things we need in place first. It’s the wedding licence, you see. Jon couldn’t find a record of one at the council.’

Thunderous silence. A flush of fury spreading up Mrs Alton’s scraggy neck.

‘Eggs!’ Dill calls, oblivious, pushing the door back with her bottom, the two boiled eggs rocking in their cups. She puts the plate down, looks from Lorna to Mrs Alton and back again. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Lorna seems to think we are ill equipped for a wedding,’ says Mrs Alton, tightly.

‘I was just wondering about the – the wedding licence,’ stutters Lorna, wishing she’d sent an email after she’d got back to London, rather than try to have it out here while she’s feeling so delicate.

‘Ah, yes.’ Dill clears her throat, colours slightly. ‘Soon. We’ll have one soon.’

‘Is this yet
another
ball you have managed to drop, Endellion?’