Black Rabbit Hall (28 page)

There is a terrible pause. The dining-room walls get redder.

‘I see,’ Caroline says tightly. The vein on her forehead pops. ‘Well, let us leave this discussion for now. I cannot stomach such passion before nine o’clock. I really cannot.’

The next day, the hairdresser – a heavy, angry-looking woman, with a heavy, lid-like fringe – clomps up the steps, clasping a large brown leather bag and wearing a look of grim determination. Like a doctor arriving to perform an amputation, Toby jokes blackly, then belts into the woods to think about meteorite storms.

The hairdresser – Betty, she says tightly, as if she’d rather remain anonymous – sets up in the kitchen, out of the way of the workmen, who appeared at the door earlier this morning and are now thumping about upstairs doing who knows what. She arranges her tools – comb, scissors, blue glass pot of oily pomade – on the wooden table with fat
butcher’s fingers. Bartlett offers her tea and cake, which she works from one side of her jaw to the other as she snips.

I insist on being last to have my hair cut and sit on the stool, watching, worrying.

The hairdresser is not as brutal as she looks. Lucian is even more handsome with his new short back and sides. (I pick a glossy dark lock of his hair off the floor and slip it into my pocket.) Kitty’s sweet curls aren’t massacred. Barney no longer has to blink through his fringe. He scampers off, rabbit over his shoulder, waving at me from the bottom of his spine, fingers like a tail.

‘Let’s get on with it, then, dearie.’ The hairdresser points at the kitchen chair, kicks the pile of hair out of the way.

I sit very straight, hands laced on my knee, firm that I want no more than an inch off. A smell of scalp trails from her moving fingers as she works the comb and cold metal scissors. It takes forever. ‘Done,’ the hairdresser says at last, shoving her things quickly into her bag.

My head is weightless, as if it might rise off my neck and float away, like a balloon. There are the long red tongues of hair on the stone floor. I reach behind me for where my hair should be swinging but isn’t: it is skirting my neck.

I run, horrified, in search of a mirror. Lucian is the first person I see, hovering by the boot room, as if he’s been waiting for me all this time.

‘Don’t look at me!’ I hold my head with my hands, feeling the tears burning in my eyes. ‘Don’t look!’

He pulls me into the room, shuts the door and kisses me all the way up my neck, which he says he can now bite, like a vampire, and makes me smile despite everything. Then, hearing steps on the stairs, we leap apart.

I feel a little bit less as though the world has ended until I walk into Toby’s bedroom. He is lying on the floor – bare feet up on the wall – peeling a hard, late-summer apple with his penknife above his head. ‘Look,’ I say, hoping he’ll tell me it’s fine. I still need his approval. ‘Look what the hairdresser did!’

‘Yeah, she’s cut Momma right out of you, sis,’ he says mildly, returning his attention to the apple. ‘I knew she’d do that.’

‘Well, you could have warned
me
,’ I yell, walking off, slamming the door.

I hear him shout, ‘I did.’

‘Toby, something’s happened,’ I cry breathlessly, throwing his bedroom door open again a few minutes later. He is exactly where I left him, lying on the floor, the apple peel now one long unbroken spiral, the fruit’s white-green flesh exposed.

‘You’ve already shown me your hair.’ One last expert twist of the knife and the peel drops to the floor. ‘It’ll grow back.’

‘No, not my hair. Forget my hair. Something much, much worse.’

He looks at me then, puzzled. ‘But nothing’s meant to happen until the last day of the holiday.’

‘Not one of your stupid planetary-event fantasies. Something properly awful. In the hall. Come. Come and look.’

The portrait that replaces Momma’s is far bigger. Not just in size. Caroline’s presence seems to bulge out of the vast ornate gilt frame, radiating its own particular chill into the hall. It captures not just Caroline’s likeness – even if
she does look years younger than she is – but somehow the scale of her ambition.

‘
Bitch
,’ hisses Toby, lips barely moving. ‘Stupid bitch.’ He drops the peeled apple to the tiles and pulls his penknife from his pocket. ‘I’m going to gut it like a fish.’

I grab his arm, making the knife waggle in the air. ‘No. When Daddy comes back later he’ll take it down.’

‘Daddy! Why do you still have faith in him?’ He snaps free of my grip. ‘Don’t you understand what’s happening here?’

‘He loves that painting of Momma. He’d never let anyone remove it from the hall.’

‘Wouldn’t he? Don’t you get it, Amber? It’s not about love now, it’s about power. Money.’

‘What?’

‘Caroline is rich. We’re poor.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Daddy’s blown it, Amber. He’s blown the lot since Momma died, and there wasn’t that much to begin with, not enough to keep this house going anyway. Honestly, I’ve seen all the unpaid invoices, the ones he hides in his desk drawers.’

‘Black Rabbit Hall’s never been smart. Nobody minds.’

‘
Caroline
minds. And she’s going to keep spending on the house until she’s made it hers.’

‘It’s still Daddy’s. Ours. Yours.’

Toby’s face closes, cold, impassive. ‘The person you think of as Daddy, he’s no longer Daddy. He’s someone else.’

‘No,’ I say, refusing to believe it. ‘Don’t say that.’

‘None of us is who we were, are we?’ he says pointedly. ‘And it’s all because of Caroline and Lucian.’

‘None of this has anything to do with Lucian,’ I blurt before I think, the urge to defend him instinctive.

‘It’s nothing to do with Lucian,’ he mimics in a girl’s voice. ‘Lucian the bunny lover. Lucian the perfect son. When will you bloody well
wake
up
, Amber?’

I’m shaking. I can’t trust myself not to say the wrong thing. I start to walk away, but Toby won’t let me.

‘Look.’ He grabs my arm, gesticulates wildly with his knife in the direction of the portrait. ‘This is nothing. This is not even the start. It’s a warm-up. All traces of our family will soon be gone, scrubbed out of this place, just like that portrait. And because we are part of Momma, we will be rubbed out too, eventually. Especially you. Yes, you, Amber. In her eyes, you
are
Momma. You look more and more like Momma every day. That’s why she cut your hair. That’s why she’s putting you in those foul dresses! Can’t you see?’ he shouts, as if somehow this is all my fault.
‘
The only way she’ll get rid of the last trace of Momma is to get rid of
you
!’

I don’t dare suggest that I think she might be making me as unattractive as possible because she suspects me and Lucian. I can’t risk watering the same thought in Toby’s head, the dark seed that is waiting for its moment to push into the light, like a spiked bramble through the floor.

‘Black Rabbit Hall won’t be anything to do with the Altons in a generation’s time.’ Toby stares up at the portrait, dwarfed by it. ‘It won’t even be here, most probably. She’ll sell it. They’ll turn it into flats, an old people’s home or something.’

‘Rubbish,’ I say, voice shaking. ‘You are the eldest son, the heir.’

Toby lets out an odd hollow laugh. ‘Caroline is manoeuvring Lucian into position and you know it.’

‘Lucian would never accept –’

He whips around to me. ‘How do you know? How do
you
damn well know what he would or wouldn’t do?’ His breath is sweet and sickening in my face.

‘Because …’ The words fail on my tongue.

‘Because what, Amber?’ His eyes narrow, a cold light glinting between the red barbs of his lashes.

‘He’s on our side.’

‘Is that what he tells you? Are you that gullible?’

‘None of this is his fault.’ I know I should shut up. But I can’t. If only I can make him understand.

‘
Don’t …
Just don’t defend him.’ He speaks very quietly, a low growl. His eyes are crazy, pupils dilated now. ‘Not when I’m holding a knife.’

‘What are you going to do? Stab me?’ I hold out my bare arm, press it up against the blade, daring him to push it into my pale skin. Something in me – fury, frustration, love – comes loose inside. ‘You’ll have me forever then, won’t you? It will just be us. You can put me in your room,’ I shout back, ‘sit me on the velvet chair and – and leave me there until I rot and then you can buff my bones with your special cloth and put me in your bone collection!’

Toby looks hurt. He moves the knife away from me. ‘What? What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You. Won’t. Let. Me. Go,’ I sob, all the tears rising up at once.

‘I’d never hurt you. I’d never ever hurt you.’ He throws the knife clattering to the tiles. He grips me by the
shoulders, trying to shake something out of me. I carry on gabbling, Toby saying, ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ until I do.

‘Remember our promise when Momma died?’ I close my eyes to block him out. But he is inside me too, so I can’t. ‘Do you?’

I want to say yes. But guilt makes the word clot.

‘Look at me.’ He searches for something in my eyes. Not wanting him to find it, I look away but he tilts my jaw up roughly, forcing me to meet his gaze. ‘You. Me.
Us.
Always us. That’s what we promised. Do you remember? Tell me you remember. Say it. Say it out loud.’

‘Us,’ I whisper, the simple word making my eyes swell with tears.

Lorna

‘You can’t cherry-pick what you remember, Dad. Not any more.’ Lorna turns away in fury. But she can still sense her father behind her, still see him slumped on the parched edge of the lawn, chest rising and falling inside his Hawaiian shirt, head in his hands. She hesitates only for a moment then starts to walk up the drive towards Black Rabbit Hall, which is shimmering in the haze of late-summer heat, something made of air not stone.

‘Sheila might have mentioned a big house once,’ he calls weakly.

Lorna whips around. ‘
What?
’

Doug rubs his face with his hand. He’s spent most of his married life learning how to tread carefully around this subject: it is hard to unlearn these things, even now when it matters more than ever. Lorna’s garbled tale – something about a name embroidered on an old apron, an unknown twin – has knocked him sideways. ‘She … she said that the lady at the adoption agency in Truro had let something slip …’

Lorna runs back, kneels down on the grass, face millimetres from his so that she can read every twitch of truth in his soft brown eyes. ‘Did Mum mention Pencraw Hall?’

‘I’m not a hundred per cent. But I think that she might
have.’ He stares down at his hands sheepishly. ‘Or something like it. They all sound the same these houses.’

‘So that’s why you didn’t want us to have the wedding here?’ She wishes that Louise hadn’t felt the need to give them privacy and disappear into the woods with Alf. Her sister wouldn’t let Dad wriggle out of any hard questions.

He nods, pulls the collar of his shirt away from his sweating neck. ‘I knew it would stir up no good, if it was this place. And I was right, wasn’t I?’ He looks very tired, as if he’s ageing in front of her eyes. ‘Look at you. It just breaks my heart. It breaks my heart.’ His eyes bulge with tears. He nudges them away with a knuckle. ‘Your life’s with Jon now, love. Not here.’

‘But it
is
here, Dad. I think a part of me knew it – I felt it the moment I walked into the house. On the stairs. That moment on the stairs.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, love.’

She shakes her head, gasping back tears. ‘And now I
know
that I’m screwed up, not that I might be,’ she says fiercely. ‘That I am.’

‘Lorna, stop that. You’re not screwed up, not at all.’

‘The rejected twin! How can I
not
be?’

‘You’re made of much stronger stuff than that, Lorna, and you know it.’

‘No, I
don’t
know it, Dad. All I know is that Jon comes from a nice, normal family and will not want this in his life. Who would? A mother to his children, handing down her own weird issues to her kids, I don’t think …’ Tears tie her tongue.

‘Why would Jon ever think that? Jon adores you. And you’re amazing with kids. You always have been.’

‘But what if I’m like my biological mother? The kind of woman who could choose one twin over another. What sort of woman could do
that
? That’s what he’ll be thinking. That’s … what I’m thinking,’ she says despairingly, covering her face with her hands.

‘Oh, love. Come here.’ He hugs her to his chest and she hears the ba-boom of his heart, smells tea, washing powder, sweat. ‘You’re getting carried away now.’

But she’s not. Something has become horribly clear. She pulls away from him. ‘I can’t marry Jon. I’m going to call him and tell him.’ She starts digging in her bag for her phone. ‘I can’t put him through all that.’

Doug holds her by the shoulders. ‘Stop. Just stop. Remember what Nan said? Don’t rush into big life decisions when you’re upset or on an empty stomach.’ He nods at the phone in her trembling hand. ‘Put that back in your bag. Ask me what you like. I’ll tell you anything I know.’

She wipes her eyes, puts the phone back. ‘I need the whole story, Dad.’ If you don’t have the beginning of your story, she realizes – even a not very nice beginning, one you wouldn’t write yourself – you can’t understand the middle, let alone the end. ‘Don’t miss anything out.’

He blows out long and hard, stalling for time. ‘Well, first, you’ve got to remember that the adoption agency didn’t tell you a lot in those days. And your mum kept so much to herself.’

‘Stop. Are you trying to say you know the weight of a sperm whale, and what was in the top ten in March 1952, all that complete and utter
rubbish
, but you don’t know your own daughter’s origins?’

He winces. ‘Well, yes. Sort of.’

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘I never gave two hoots if you came from the primordial soup or Buckingham Palace – don’t you see?’ He tucks a lock of damp hair behind her ear. ‘You were my beautiful Lorna. You still are. You always will be. It doesn’t matter where you came from. It made no difference to me then and it doesn’t now.’

Her eyes flash. ‘It makes a difference to
me
.’

Doug looks genuinely baffled. ‘But you always said it didn’t. You told me and Sheila you didn’t want to find your birth parents. If you had, we’d have helped you.’

‘How was Mum going to help exactly, given that she could barely even say the word “adoption” without looking like she was sucking on a hornet? Why did no one ever
talk
about it?’

‘It – it sounds so weak now. But the truth is, your mother suffered so many miscarriages – five in all – before we got you. She’d had so much loss, so much heartbreak, Lorna. She never thought she’d bear her own child. And I think the thought of you … not being fully hers, maybe wanting to look for another mother one day, it was just too painful.’

‘I had feelings too. I had rights,’ Lorna whispers. She’d known about the miscarriages, although she’d never known it was so many. Poor Mum. No wonder her childhood memories of her mother pregnant with Louise involve her lying in bed for endless anxious months, lest she lose the miracle baby.

‘Seventies, eighties, it was a different era. No one talked to kids about anything, not like you’re meant to these days.’ Doug frowns. ‘Some kids were never even told they were
adopted at all. It was thought for the best. Not to muddle things up.’

‘Why come to Cornwall, then? Why not stay away?’

Doug’s face softens. ‘She loved it, always had. Came here as a kid herself. And I think she always felt it was the land that had … given you to her in a way. It was the happiest day, Lorna, the day you were put into her arms, really. It happened so quickly. We only got the call a few days before. A Cornish baby, they said, were we interested? Sheila thought it was Fate.’

‘But I still don’t understand why she brought me to this house. It doesn’t make sense, Dad. It just doesn’t.’

‘I’ll agree with you there.’ He shakes his head. ‘But she did get fanciful about these things. Stuffed her head with those silly historical romances.’

‘She didn’t need to. She had her own secrets and melodrama, didn’t she? Only it was all hidden away.’

He reaches for her hand. ‘Lorna, I’m sure she would have told you everything one day.’

‘One day? Dad, I’m thirty-two!’

‘She didn’t know she was going to trip, did she?’ His reddening eyes plead for understanding. ‘No one knows exactly when they’re going to die, do they? If we did, we’d all unburden ourselves in time, Lorna.’

‘Oh, my God.’ She claps her hand across her mouth, heart skipping a beat. ‘Dad, you’re right.’ There is no time to waste. She leaps from his arms, kicking up a milk of gravel dust. If she runs fast enough she might just run back through time, she thinks, push a pinhole of light into the dark.

In the drawing room, Dill’s eyes widen beneath her plume of hair, dustpan brush slipping from her grip. Lorna pants, hands on her knees, looking up, searching for a connection, the recognition of blood. But she finds only a pulse of disbelief, faint embarrassment.

‘Hi.’ Dill smiles awkwardly.

What should long-lost sisters do? Hug? Kiss? Lorna isn’t ready for that. So she stutters something improbable about her father, sister and nephew having just arrived at Black Rabbit Hall – the word ‘sister’ trailing an uncomfortable choke of smoke behind it – and needing to find Mrs Alton urgently, before it is too late.

Dill does not ask why – Lorna wonders if she guesses – and suggests she goes to the white bench above the cliff. Look out for the blue sports car. Dill glances down at Lorna’s bare feet. Would she like to borrow some shoes? There are a lot of wasps on the ground. All the windfalls.

Yes, Lorna thinks, mind racing. Cidery autumn is pressing in. And after the harvest, death and decay. Mrs Alton could be dying right this moment, starting to rot, like a soft black apple. Why
not
die now? Or in five minutes? Or ten? That’s what her mother had done, after all. Died, sucking down all the secrets with her. She won’t let it happen again.

Lorna yomps away from the house in heavy borrowed wellies. She stills only at the edge of the woods, breathless, fingers on the flaking metal of the gate: it began here, she realizes, with a sharp intake of breath, the syrupy smell of pine. The woods – the tree – were the gateway to it all.

A child’s whoop. Lorna flinches, unsure if she heard the sound in the roar of her own head, until it is followed by
the joyful boomerang of Alf’s laugh through the trees: Alf laughing at himself laughing. That’s what Barney might have sounded like, she thinks, closing her eyes for a moment, sucking the laugh inside, letting it fill her with a funny kind of strength.

Lorna cuts across the field, no longer wary of the horned cows lumbering towards her. There are three twists in the cliff road before she hears flapping – like a tent loosening from its pegs – and glimpses the shredded car roof through the hedging. Beyond it, Mrs Alton is perched on the white bench, cane extended, staring out to a sea that fades from parrot blue to green. A breeze buffets up the cliff, playing with her grey cape and curls.

Lorna hesitates, on the edge of retreat. Does she really want to know the answers to her questions? Would it be possible for her and Jon never to refer to Black Rabbit Hall again? To pretend this summer never happened? For a moment she almost believes it would work, that she could just turn around and walk away, stuff the past into a box, like her mother had done. Then she pictures Peggy Popple sitting on this bench – over three decades ago but the sea, the sounds, the smells just the same – her tough housekeeper’s hands loosening her apron, resting on the warm fleshy swell of her babies, swimming in their own dark waters. And she knows she cannot go back. That it is already too late. ‘Mrs Alton,’ she calls quietly.

Although a tremor of recognition passes through the old woman she doesn’t turn around.

‘May I?’ Lorna walks over to her, sits. The wood feels damp and cool through the cotton of her dress, gumboots heavy on her feet.

‘Of course.’

In the unforgiving sea light, Lorna can see that the tips of her lashes are frosted with fallen face powder. Her ermine features are pinched. The heavy make-up cannot hide the spongy lilac shadows beneath her eyes. She doesn’t look well at all.

‘Mrs Alton, I need to talk to you.’

‘Indeed you do,’ Mrs Alton replies, with the resigned air of someone who knows interrogation is inevitable. The wind flaps up her hair, exposing an unsettling patch of white scalp.

‘It’s about my …’ the words stick in her mouth ‘… my mother.’

‘Yes, Dill warned me. She was gabbling terribly. I didn’t know what had got into her.’

‘You … you knew my mother?’ she stutters. There is a rushing in her head – fear, excitement, blood – that sounds like water.

‘All too well.’ Her face remains unreadable.

‘What was my … she like?’ A curlew dives down the cliff, feather-ruffling the air.

‘What was your mother
like
?’ repeats Mrs Alton, making the question sound even more pedestrian, unequal to the enormity of the subject. ‘It depends, my dear, as everything does, on whom you ask.’

‘I’m asking you,’ Lorna says quickly. She’s not going to take any of Mrs Alton’s tricksiness today.

‘I will be diplomatic.’ Mrs Alton stares grimly ahead at the dip-dyed sea. ‘Your smile is her smile.’

Oh. Lorna closes her eyes, hit by a wave of relief. She has a smile like someone else’s smile. Just this tiny nugget
of knowledge feels unexpectedly precious beyond words. How many times over the years has she looked in the mirror and wondered?

‘When you sleep …’ Mrs Alton coughs, spluttering into a handkerchief ‘… you sleep with abandon, arms above your head. She slept in exactly the same way.’

So Mrs Alton
had
been watching Lorna sleep. They were the marks of her cane at the bridal suite door. Had she checked on her when she was wiped out by those pills too? Had she even given her those pills for that purpose? Lorna shudders slightly, the light fingers of unease starting to tap down her spine.

‘Lorna, my dear.’ Mrs Alton moves closer, her face a bleak landscape of powdered pores. ‘That night you interviewed me under the guise of writing the website pamphlet or some such, I knew there were other forces at work.’

‘Forces?’ The hairs on Lorna’s arms lift. ‘I – I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, you will,’ Mrs Alton says coolly, returning her gaze to the sea. ‘Over the years, I have learned not to underestimate Pencraw.’

A flock of gulls mews wildly, spiralling upwards as if disturbed by something on the rocks. Lorna suddenly wishes she could lift off, too. Stupid, but she feels vulnerable.

‘Your mother hated me, of course. I won’t pretend otherwise.’

‘Sorry?’ She hasn’t heard it right.

‘I was not Nancy. I was not the American airhead, perfect and dead. That was the problem that would never go away.’ Her jaw tightens. ‘I was set up to fail.’

Lorna recoils. Something about the cruel description of the first wife. Or maybe it’s just that there is something repugnant about being old, so close to the end, and not at peace.

‘It was a battle from day one.’ The cane starts to tremble in its nest of crooked fingers. ‘A battle to the death as it turns out.’

The wind picks up then, starts to rush up her nose, tug at her hair, as if Mrs Alton’s words have unsettled the atmosphere itself. Lorna edges away.