Black Rabbit Hall (6 page)

‘Oops. Sorry.’ Dill blushes again. ‘You did say, Tom.’

‘Jon.’

‘So can we see the rooms?’ Lorna pushes on gently.

‘Sweetheart,’ Jon lowers his voice, his lips skimming her cheek, ‘it’s getting late.’

‘We won’t be long.’ She turns back to Dill, dark eyes shining. ‘Where shall we start?’

‘Start? Oh, yes. That’s a good idea.’ Dill starts to stomp across the hall in her muddy boots. One of the laces is undone and trails behind her foot, like a rat’s tail. ‘This hall is the oldest part of the house, dating back to Norman times or something. But the place is a right old mish-mash, bits built and knocked down by different generations. The main bit is Georgian, I think, but the towers were added by some rather showy Victorians. Or it might be the other way round.’ She pauses, finger pressed to her mouth. ‘No, it’s gone. Sorry not to be more accurate. I’ve never been good with dates and things. This way, please.’ She pushes on a heavy oak door, lets out a small mew of exertion. ‘I must show you the enfilade.’

‘The what?’ mouths Jon to Lorna, stepping on to a rot-softened board and following Dill into a poorly lit corridor.

‘A row of connected rooms or something,’ whispers Lorna, who has recently been Googling stately homes in her lunch hours.

‘That’s right.’ Dill clearly has excellent hearing. ‘It links this wing of the house.’ Her face lights up with a smile, knocking ten years off. ‘And you know what? If you stand at the far end of the enfilade you can roll a ball from one end to the other, all the way back to the original hall!’

The comment makes Lorna think of children. She can almost see the ball rolling across the floorboards, flying into the priceless antiques, and it makes her smile.

‘Excuse me, Dill, your shoelace …’ Jon points out politely.

‘Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.’ Dill blushes, bends down and stuffs the lace into the boot rather than tying it, pushing open a door with her behind as she does so. ‘The drawing room. The Alton family’s favourite room, although it’s not used much, these days.’

The drawing room is so dark it seems edgeless. Only when Dill pulls back the heavy draperies at the French windows, filling it with crystal Cornish light, does it make any sense. Its walls pulse inky blue – the colour of deep ocean, Lorna fancies, far beneath the waves – and the paintings on the walls pop. The fleshy-faced ancestor portraits are there, of course, but Lorna is drawn to the moody seascapes, billowing skies, terrifying high seas, shipwrecks and crag-faced smugglers carrying booty on their backs along rain-battered beaches. What a comfortable place to witness man and nature at their worst, she thinks. Overlapping threadbare Persian rugs muffle their footsteps.
Plump chairs in rich velvets – petal pinks, ox-blood reds – huddle in gossipy clusters in the corners. Most inviting of all is the huge fireplace with its long leather-padded brass fender – glowing from generations of warming bottoms – and barrel-sized log basket. Lorna imagines that she could sit at such a fireplace with Jon on a cool evening and never want to leave.

‘Mrs Alton suggests that you offer a glass of something here. Some fizz? A cocktail?’

‘Perfect.’ Lorna notices a globe standing on brass feet in the corner of the room, the greens and blues of its lands and oceans faded, the colonies it delineated long gone. Forgetting herself, she reaches out and touches its parchment surface, making the globe spin and quiver slightly on its axis. ‘Oops, sorry. I shouldn’t touch.’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Dill shrugs, as if it were merely bric-a-brac. ‘Spin it if you like. It hums. It’s got a really nice hum.’

Lorna hesitates.

Jon smiles. ‘Go on.’

Oh, the hum. The drone of fat bumblebees in lavender beds. Lorna closes her eyes, letting the sound fill her, the house start to weave its spell. When she opens her eyes Jon is staring at her with a confused expression bordering faintly on alarm.

‘Perhaps we should move along, if you’re in a hurry. Mrs Alton’s adamant you don’t miss the bridal suite.’ Dill tugs at a thread. The cuff hole is expanding rapidly.

‘Oh, yes! I’m desperate to climb that grand staircase.’

‘We’ll enter through the top-floor landing, then.’ Dill
points out of the window to one of the stone turrets, reaching up to the pinking sky. ‘That’s where we’re going. That’s it.’

Lorna turns to beam at Jon: she hasn’t seen anything prettier, or more romantic. But Jon is frowning slightly. Something has unsettled him.

‘Mrs Alton thought most brides would prefer the turret to one of the grander bedrooms on the chamber floor,’ Dill explains apologetically. ‘It gets terribly cold, even in the summer. I’m afraid the chimneys are blocked with dead gulls. We need to get someone in.’

‘I’d much prefer a turret,’ says Lorna. ‘Wouldn’t you, Jon?’

He hesitates.

Dill bites her lower lip, sensing Jon’s reservations.

‘The bride’s prerogative.’ Jon digs his hands into the front pockets of his jeans with a boyish shrug that is disarmingly at odds with his big frame. ‘Lorna must love it, that’s all. I can sleep anywhere.’

‘We’ve done the turret up specially,’ says Dill, with a relieved smile.

‘Who used to be locked up in it, then?’ Jon asks, only half joking.

This visibly throws Dill. ‘I … I …’

Lorna comes to Dill’s rescue. ‘Stop teasing, Jon.’ She glances up at the turret again. And it is then that she sees it. The flicker of a curtain. A face at the uppermost window. She blinks and it’s gone. A trick of the light.

Lorna pushes a snowdrift of dust up the dark banister as she climbs, her other hand holding Jon’s tightly. She says
nothing but is experiencing the electric snap of a
déjà vu
so strong – like a frozen memory abruptly thawed – that she has to touch her temples to neutralize the crushing sensation. The higher they get – first floor, second, third – the stiller, darker and more decrepit the house becomes, the tighter her head. She takes a sip of water from the bottle in her bag and feels a little better. Maybe she’s just dehydrated. Or in delayed shock from the near-accident. She needs tea and cake.

‘You all right, sweetheart?’ Jon asks quietly.

‘Of course!’ She doesn’t want to distract him, or say anything negative. More than this, she doesn’t want him worrying that the house is stirring something inside. He thinks she’s too stirred up already, she knows that, her mood giddily elated one day, flat and morbid the next, as she feels her way into this strange new world without her mother, all its contradictions and consequences, the grief, also the release. They walk up one more flight of stairs. The tightness in Lorna’s head subsides.

Jon peers through a powder-blue door, ajar on the third floor. ‘Looks like a bunch of kids have just left this room, doesn’t it?’ he observes, standing aside to let Lorna see too.

‘Oh, it really does.’ There are so many children’s things, seemingly left where they were thrown. In the corner of the room, partially covered by a blanket, is a dappled grey rocking horse the size of a small pony. Beneath its front hoofs, a dolly’s cradle. Closer to the door, a mildewed pile of books:
The Secret Garden
,
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Milly Molly Mandy
,
Rupert Annual 1969
… A shiver tingles up her spine – she’d read and loved many of these books as a
child: an instant bond with the departed children, one that transcends both time and class.

‘This floor’s not used any more,’ Dill says, reaching over and closing the door, as if she cannot bear to see its contents. ‘Mrs Alton has no need for so many rooms.’

‘Does anyone?’ Jon asks, the seriousness of the question lightened by his smile. Lorna knows all too well what he’s thinking: so many people without homes at all – and it’s true that too many of her pupils live in hostels or B-and-Bs, one family to a room – and this vast house is populated by just one old lady and her housekeeper. Rationally, politically, she agrees with him. Secretly she’s rather pleased that houses like Black Rabbit Hall still exist.

‘How many rooms are there, Dill?’ she asks. The house really feels like it might go on forever, doors behind doors, worlds within worlds.

‘You know, I don’t think anyone’s ever counted them.’

‘Bedrooms?’

‘Hmm. Nine, I think. Not including the old staff quarters on the top floor. The house is actually smaller than it looks. Oh. Oh, no. I’m going off!’

The noise is shrill and insistent.
Beep beep beep beeeeep.
Dill pats her jumper frantically until she locates some kind of paging device beneath the layers of matted wool and silences it. ‘Such a racket. So sorry. Mrs Alton needs me. I’ve got to go. Now … what to do …’ She clicks a fingernail against her teeth. ‘Could you come back tomorrow?’

‘Today really would be better. As we’re here.’ And nearly got mown down by a tractor on the way, Lorna is tempted to add. ‘A whiz around the bridal suite? We can be really quick, I promise.’

Dill looks torn. Another impatient beep.

‘Come on, Lorna. Dill’s busy,’ says Jon, pressing his warm hand on her lower back. ‘I reckon we’ve got a real taste of the house already.’

Dill’s eyes brighten. ‘Hang on! How about you wait for me downstairs? Mrs Alton will be very upset if you don’t see her bridal suite, I’m sure of it. I won’t be long.’

‘I’m afraid we must be –’ begins Jon politely, the jiggle of his foot revealing his impatience.

‘A few more minutes,’ begs Lorna. She grabs his hands. ‘Please.’

‘We’ve got a booking for dinner, remember? And I’ve still got to study the map, sort out how to get back to the B-and-B.’

Lorna seizes on this. ‘Okay, you do that. I’ll wait. Ten minutes, then I’ll join you.’

As Jon walks away, Lorna feels the pang of separation, as if part of her is walking away too. They’ve been so close these last few days. She almost runs after him. But something holds her. The pull of the house is just a little too strong.

Lorna doesn’t understand it at first. The star-shattered hole in the middle of the forehead. The shape of the skull. Then the bones come together, the animal emerges. For it is surely a horse’s skull with its snooker-ball eye sockets, the long nose bone curving to meet the long jaw, like an extended beak. She shivers. The skull is brutal, pagan, luminous in the black box. She treads silently along the worn rug and peers into more of the dusty cabinets: stuffed birds, squirrels, baby deer, rabbits, spirited natural
creatures sewn into a second life as stiff mannequins. She remembers Jon’s aside earlier – ‘This lot would stuff their own ancestors given half a chance’ – and feels their dull glass eyes track her as she walks to the window-seat, mobile tight in her hand.

Lorna’s search for phone reception has led her into this long, dim library – two brass doorknobs off the enfilade. Acres of books. An old oak desk the size of a small boat. A peculiar cluster of museum-style cabinets. Maybe too peculiar.

She’s glad to have a view from the window of Jon and the car. He is sipping a bottle of water, studying the map, singing along to music. She loves to watch him when he’s unaware of it. He’s the least self-conscious man she’s ever met, so quietly at ease with himself, sure of who he is, what he wants. She wonders what would have become of her if they hadn’t both been at that party in Camden, the one she nearly didn’t go to. If she hadn’t clocked the glorious blond bear of a man in the crowded, smoky kitchen, pouring guests’ drinks to help a stressed hostess. He’d had a nasty cut on his hand, the one that was pouring the vodka. A slipped saw, he’d shrugged when she’d asked, no big deal, would she let him make her a drink? Sexiest thing ever.

She texts her sister, Louise:
Amazing. Will tell u all l8r
. And she just has time to call her father. She has to call her father.

‘Dad, it’s me!’

‘Hi, Sunshine!’ Doug’s voice lights up as it always does when she phones, making her feel guilty for not phoning
him more often. ‘Sorry, one sec – let me put my cup down. It’s burning my hand off. There. I’m all yours. Everything okay? Is the jet stream ruining your week too? Can’t be worse than here. Been raining all sodding day. Not that they’ve lifted the hosepipe ban. Do those ponces at Westminster ever actually look out the window?’

‘Doubt it.’ Lorna sits down on the window-seat’s tapestry cushions.

‘Hope you’re tucked away in a cosy little pub somewhere.’

‘Oh, no, we’re still at one of the venues, actually. Well, Jon’s sorting out the car. I’m in the house’s library, waiting to see the bridal suite.’

‘This late?’

‘Yeah, well, the house was hard to find.’

‘Ha! I bet Jon didn’t like that. Tell him he needs to stop relying on that bloody satnav.’ A recently retired London taxi driver, her father prides himself on never getting lost anywhere, ever, and thoroughly enjoys it when other men do.

‘But we found the perfect house eventually. Well, I think it’s perfect.’

‘And Jon doesn’t?’

‘Hmm.’

Doug’s laugh is still the gravel-truck laugh of a twenty-a-day smoker, even though he gave up ten years ago and now only smokes when drunk at Christmas. ‘Something tells me you’ll talk him round.’

‘It’s a wonderful house, Dad, tucked away on the Roseland Peninsula.’

‘Oh, the Roseland, that takes me back. There’s a smashing little caravan site down there, just outside Portscatho. Tiny. A cut above. Your mother loved it.’

Lorna’s thrilled to have confirmation that they stayed so close. Her memories of their family summer holidays are scuffed, like photographs carried around too long in a purse: the blue loo smell of the supposedly state-of-the-art caravan that was always breaking down; Louise’s mattress pressing through the wire mesh inches above Lorna’s face; Mum cattle-prodding her around endless National Trust properties while Dad and Louise got to build sandcastles on the beach. Funny what sticks.

‘The best shower block in Cornwall,’ her father continues. ‘Hot water all day. Free soap, the lot. Weren’t many caravan sites like that in those days.’ He’s more talkative than usual. Lorna fears that this is because he is spending hours alone. ‘Sorry, give us a moment, Lors.’