There Are Little Kingdoms (18 page)

‘This should do the business, Angel,’ he said, as though predicting a safe landing in hazardous conditions. ‘Carajillos, isn’t it? Civilised.’

‘If we must,’ said Angelica.

‘No gun to your head, dear. You mustn’t always scold so.’

‘I’m not scolding.’

‘It’s your tone. It’s a scolding tone.’

It was falling so quickly into the patterns of a marriage. Some wind got up and the old house groaned and trembled. If the house ever stopped groaning and trembling, it would be time to worry. There were presences in the house, he was sure, but mostly benign. His Uncle Jack for one. Poor Jack! Jack was always going to be a man for the unquiet grave.

‘So what colour’s this one? What colour’s Joe?’

‘Oh! You’re unbelievable! You realise, I suppose, that you can be arrested for that type of comment now? They won’t care if you’re eighty-five! Joe is an honest and kind and loving man, he’s…’

‘Relax, Angel, you’ll give yourself blood pressure. He’s Manchester, is he? Well, rough old spot, isn’t it? I remember it must have been… ’38? Yes, and I’m in a low bar in Ancoats. No, hang on, was it Huyton? Remember the rhyme? Huyton, Huyton, two dogs fightin’! No, Huyton’s Liverpool. It was Manchester, it was Ancoats. Myself, Alec Whittle, Charlie Bamber, all that crowd. I dare say we’ve had a few. Ambrose Poll walks in, he says …’

‘Dad,’ said Angelica. ‘The last thing I need now is pub stories. You’re stinking.’

‘No, actually,’ said Freddie. ‘I’ve only had a couple.’

‘You’re stinking,’ she said. ‘You were stinking when I got back at two o’clock today—two o’clock, Daddy!—and you’re stinking now.’

‘Three or four, darling,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’ve had.’

‘Stinking. At your age!’

‘Your mother was never a shrew. Your mother was a marvellous woman. Liked a drink. Wonderful with money. Knew her horses. And she ate very rarely.’

‘You’re a washed up old sot. I should put you in a facility.’

‘You come up here!’ he cried. ‘You come up here with your bloodshot eyes! You bed the jailbird!’

She leapt to her feet and took the bottle by its neck.

‘How dare you! You drove my mother to the grave and you won’t be happy till you’ve me in t’same place! You go out of your mind! You lose the fucking plot! I mean that business with the headstones, Dad! The police called in? Community orders? At your age? You have disgraced this family’s name! AGAIN! We are lower than muck now! People smirk, in the village, they do! When I pass? They smirk!’

‘Angelica,’ he said.
‘Really.’

Bliss family arguments boiled up quick and subsided as fast. They had a couple of sips, they took down a couple of breaths. They gathered themselves.

‘Hillwalkers?’ he said.

‘That’s our market.’

‘Enormous gasping Germans in boots. Well, they’re back, certainly. Like the swallows. They’re all over the shop. They turn up here, you know? Bang on the door at all hours. They get lost. They say this direction is west, please? This direction is east? I say no wonder you lost the war. Can’t find your way to Keswick? How do you expect to find Moscow? In the snow?’

‘I’m headachey,’ said Angelica.

‘Blonde chaps. Healthy, yes, but tremendously dull, Germans. Don’t you find? Headache, darling? Eat some pills.’

The drinks became more brandy than coffee. She drained hers and went to the window for air. It was an enormous, leaded window, like a church’s, and she pushed it open as wide as it’d go, and climbed out for a turn about the unkempt gardens. It was a clear night and the sky was jewelled and the Plough was precisely where it should be at this late hour, indicating Carlisle. She had plans for a meditation space by the froggy pond. There would be dawn ceremonies. She had a loose white frock in mind. Also, she would relay the croquet lawn. There would be cream teas, served by pleasant local girls in crisp linen uniforms—that is the sort of thing that gets the foreigners gushing and ensures repeat business.

She fished the phone from her trouser pocket and texted some filth to Joe. He liked his filth, Joe. Perhaps it would be best if she didn’t hire girls who were overly pleasant. As soon as he was untagged, Joe would move up, and they would set about building their new life together. She had at last found her soul mate. She had known from the very first moment, six weeks ago. She exhaled raw happiness into the night-time garden. She danced back to the dining room for another drink or two.

Freddie Bliss had gone into reminiscence.

‘Lucia! Oh, she hated a snob. Marvellous throat, so sleek, like a swan! You’ve taken after my lot, more’s the pity. Bad luck, darling! Nose of a Bliss, certainly. Bulgy. Like your Uncle Alex. He went mad, you know. Poor Alex. That was a terrible end for any man to suffer, not to say bizarre. The papers were full of it. But Lucia! What does she do? Drives off the bridge at Ennerdale! Thought she was taking a left for Moresby Parks. Half in the bag, of course.’

‘You can convince yourself of anything, can’t you?’ said Angelica, pouring.

‘It was an accident, Angel! Lucia was in tremendous form that morning. She was right as rain.’

‘Dad? I think it’s time you thought about beddie-byes, no?’

‘Oh no,’ said Freddie. ‘It’s only half past two, dear. And may I apologise, again, for dinner being a shade late to table? It’s the dratted oven. Again! I’ll have to have a man over. Must be the fan. But no, dear, really, I sleep very little these days.’

A night bird’s call, it carried sadness to the room, and also the silver of hypochondria.

‘I think I’ve a fever coming up,’ said Angelica, hand to brow. ‘It’s the stress of the business. We need to sort out bedding, cutlery, flowers! We need to think about the painting and the plastering. There’s the question of staff. There are slates on the roof want replacing. Are you quite sure about the bank?’

‘Afraid so, darling. Chap went so far as to say it was one of the worst credit ratings ever recorded in the Northwest. I said, how dare you!’

The night murmured on, regardless. The night went about its clammy business. He watched Angelica with great interest. There wasn’t so much fun in the old thing anymore. Ah but when she was tiny! Some days, Lucia would take to the bed with one of her spells—Lucia got weak and pale and ranted sometimes—and Freddie would be put in charge of the baby. Those days were tremendous. He’d wheel her down the village in the pram. He remembered autumn weather, equinoctal gales. Hold on to your hair! And pushing the pram along, whistling, and the pram was a shield against the world. He’d take her down The Beekeepers in the afternoons, have a couple of swift ones. A malty ale, lovely, a scan of the paper, and her baby fists jabbing at the dust motes. It was late in the fifties. He was calming.

‘I’ve got it!’ she cried. ‘What if we called it ‘The Old Rectory’?’

‘Of course!’ said Freddie. ‘Because it was a rectory! Brilliant, Angel. Funny how things work out, eh? The likes of us? In a house of God? Lucia found it a frightfully glum notion. Oh Freddie, she said, a rectory? How dour! Uncle Jack wangled something with the Church. Place hadn’t been used in years. Parishes amalgamate, don’t they? There seemed to be no objection to me getting the keys. The deeds were another trick but there was little beyond Lucia. So I do actually have the deeds, dear, yes.’

‘A little sleep, Dad, don’t you think? Just for a while? Before the crew gets in.’

The house’s ragged orchestra struck up. Freddie heard it always as a small-town ensemble. He heard the wounded strings. He saw the bald elbows of the violinist’s rented dress suit. He saw the shiny pate of the third-rate conductor, consigned to the provinces after some murky scandal.

‘I remember the first night here. We ran around opening windows. We lifted the covers off the furniture. The birds, Freddie, she said, all the birds! I said yes, darling, there are very many birds, and there were, they were flying all over the bloody house—holes in the roof, hadn’t we?—and I opened some more of the wine. We didn’t at that point have any idea about the presences. The guests will have to get used. Jack himself generally keeps to the back rooms. I have no great trouble with Jack.’

‘I don’t believe any more,’ said Angelica.

‘You will again,’ said Freddie. ‘Of course I forget sometimes, at night, which is natural. I think she’s gone to the loo. I shout out: Lucia! Hurry up, darling! You’ll get your end! It’s bloody freezing in there. Carpets rather than tiles, maybe?’

‘I’m going to take my pulse,’ said Angelica.

‘Actually it’s probably what put me off the dozing,’ said Freddie. ‘But of course there’s always Italy, as well, isn’t there? To be honest, Angel, I don’t talk about it much. Not a great distance from Bolzano, I think. Oh! Difficult. Think about something else, that’s what I say.’

‘One hundred and four!’ said Angelica.

‘I don’t know about you, dear, but I’m about ready for another.’

The night progressed as the nights did. He talked of the trade in antiques among the long gone intimates of its northwestern scene. He talked of Charlie Bamber and Ambrose Poll. He confided the racetrack intrigue of the Skipton Fancy. He rescued the reputation of Freddie Bliss from the hammering it had taken in the infamous gypsy trial of ’74. He grew agitated when he told of the snubbing his wife had received from some of the other ladies—so-called!—of the area. Alice Hemshaw? Snivelling old trout, with her pearls and her bony elbows, with her gums. He paced the floor, with a glass of ancient Madeira to hand.

‘We were blow-ins,’ he said. ‘You never get over that. We were never churchy, of course, and that didn’t help. Never played golf. Never sailed. We liked a drink. We liked a flutter. We had fun! Is that a crime? Well string me up and flay me!’

Outside, the tawnies were hunting. It was quickening June, and there was an urgency. It was almost four o’clock in the northern summer. The house had settled over its long years, it had hunkered down into the Cumbrian shale. To achieve great age requires constant negotiation, and all of the late night groans and creaks were no more than the wheedling of the dispute. But lately there was a new nervousness to the house’s soundings. It had not reckoned on the return of a grown Angelica.

She went to the kitchen and booted the laptop and the
whoosh
and the
whumpf
as it took life was so familiar, a reassurance. She went to eBay and increased her bid for some ochre-coloured tiles reclaimed from the palace of a Carpathian count. She went to her usual chatroom and flirted a little with a reformed arsonist from the Black Country. He had been coming on fruity these past nights: she would have to dampen his ardour. She was spoken for. She checked her mail: nothing much. She took strangely, then: she was at once in the damp and green of anxiety.

In the dining room, Freddie Bliss stood by the bay window and spoke to the last of the night.

‘The immediate concern was footwear,’ he said. ‘Boots, plain as. A stout pair of boots can save a man. And under the circumstances, we knew that, with the what-you-call-it coming… what do you call it? In winter? The shortest day? What do you call it?’

He turned to an empty room, and smiled.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Never mind. I know! Solstice.’

He set to writing some notes. He still had a supply of the letterhead paper from Bliss Antiques, which had gone out of business in 1975. If the television people finished up early, Angelica might manage a trip to the village. Freddie didn’t go so much now. He sent down notes instead. He wrote one for the video man.

‘Please,’ it said, ‘nothing else with this Tom Hanks person,’ and the name was twice underlined.

Angelica returned. She appeared to be having trouble breathing.

‘You look gaunt, darling.’

‘I’ve got NIGHT FEAR!’ she cried.

She picked up the mallet and slapped at the wall. This was the wall that divided the pantry from the dining room. The plaster crumbled, willingly enough, but the brickwork was stubborn. Angelica was fagged out—she hadn’t the strength for large-scale destruction at this hour. She was determined, however, to keep busy.

‘This old rad,’ she said, ‘how long since we’ve had heat out of it?’

Freddie Bliss considered the rusty, leak-stained radiator and thought for a moment.

‘The sixties?’ he tried.

‘Right,’ said Angelica, and fetched the claw hammer.

Freddie Bliss made some fresh drinks. He always kept a little of the good stuff back for late on. The fizz of the tonic quieted by the dash of the gin. The glass clouding up as the limes cut in. Poetry, and Angelica, panting, attempted to wrench the rad from the wall. She got it part ways out, and then stopped.

‘What’s this?’

‘What’s what, Angel?’

She yanked up a clutch handbag, so old to be almost fashionable, its grey leather softened and cracked with age.

‘Must be one of your mother’s. It must have fallen down there. Show!’

She opened the bag and spread its contents on the dining-room table. Freddie Bliss was rapt with attention: he was half thinking there might be an old tenner forgotten. But it was mostly photographs, from the war years and before. Training at Carlisle. The weekend trips home before shipping out. Arm in arm in a pub, the pair of them shining with youth and love, in the autumn of 1942. There were a few of his letters home, those that had got through, with lines of neat Xs for kisses. There was the notification of dishonourable discharge from His Majesty’s Forces.

‘Why has she got all this here?’

‘It’s what she’d have hidden on me,’ said Freddie Bliss.

‘Why not just burn the stuff?’

‘It’s important,’ he said, and he shrugged. ‘But it doesn’t matter now.’

It didn’t matter. Enough time had passed. These were the remnants of another life, and he could look on that life as a stranger would. Angelica sobbed.

‘Courage, dear,’ he said.

‘Courage!’

‘I never had any,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve shown some, I really do. But not me. Ambrose Poll? Yes. Charlie Bamber? Charlie absolutely dripped with the stuff. But Freddie Bliss? No. I scampered!’

He moved through the woods. This was Italy, 1943. He had a flame of colour in his cheeks, and the ice had formed into a webbing between the black bones of the trees. The sun through the ice made a palatial blue light, and he winced. At each crack of the ice, he jumped from his skin. He had lost his coat. In the panic of his flight, everything had got thrown in the air. His old boots had split open. He felt the cold come in. His fingertips blackened with bite. There were moments he thought he had passed over. He had to fight hard to distinguish himself as a living thing, among the trees and the ice, beneath the sky. His vision started to blur. His fear went. He fell down in the snow. Smiling, he lifted his head from the ground. In the near distance, the whites and blues of winter were disturbed by a shape that had a smokiness to it, a dark shimmering, and he crawled to it and found that it was a horse. It had been slit along its belly and it lay dead in the snow but it had its heat still. He lay with it. He huddled as close to it as he could get. He scolded himself. He said you shan’t, oh you can’t, and then he did. He put his hands into the wound and dug them deep. He forced his arms in, past the elbows. The organ heat saved him but his mind became unseated. He became weightless, untethered. It was as if he had stepped off a plane.