Authors: Eve Chase
‘Funnily enough, I didn’t notice. Time has quite flown.’ Mrs Alton knocks the pills back with efficiency, dismissing the tumbler of water with a flick of the hand and using the sherry to gulp them down. ‘But I suppose I should rest now, or that dreadful doctor will start pestering again.’ She reaches for her cane. ‘Yes, that is quite enough for now. Quite enough.’
Lorna’s heart sinks. Just when she felt she was getting somewhere. Still, to be fair, Mrs Alton looks quite drained beneath the powdery blooms of blush on her cheeks, giving her the eerie appearance of an aged china doll.
Seeing Mrs Alton rise, Lorna leaps up and helps her to her feet, supporting her gently beneath her forearms, just as she used to do with Nan. Only Nan’s arms had felt soft and plump, like socks filled with warm sand. Mrs Alton’s are sinewy, stringy, the tendons crunching beneath the wool of her jacket. Thankfully, Dill takes over.
‘I may be a while,’ Dill apologizes to Lorna, as she walks Mrs Alton to the door, the cane reaching out in front of
them like an insect’s proboscis. ‘Will you be okay just knocking about on your own until dinner?’
‘Perfectly,’ Lorna says. She could do with a chance to recover from the intoxication of sherry and smoke. ‘Please don’t worry about me. I’m quite happy moseying.’
‘You could have a look in the library. There are lots of photos, house records, that sort of thing in there.’ Dill coughs, waving her hand in front of her to clear the air. ‘If you’re happy with that, Mrs Alton?’
‘Happiness has nothing to do with it, Endellion.’ Mrs Alton raises her cane and steps forward. ‘It is about survival now.’
Lorna decides to take that as a yes.
Lorna swoops the phone around the bay of the library’s window-seat, like someone trying to catch a butterfly in a net. Yes! One signal bar. Connection to the outside world. ‘Jon, can you hear me?’
There is distant chatter at the end of the line, the sound of someone who has left their mobile switched on in their pocket and is walking down a busy London street.
‘Jon, it’s me.’
A crackle, a hiss, silence. She tries again. The same happens. Lorna cannot help but wonder if the disconnection is symbolic of something else, something about the state of their relationship, the bickering before she left for Cornwall. Downhearted, she drops the phone back into her handbag. She’ll phone him later. He won’t be able to talk properly if he’s on site anyway. At least her number will have come up: he’ll know that she’s tried.
She looks around the library, eyes hooking on the horse’s
skull in the box. Does it have something to do with the first wife’s riding accident? No, of course not. That would be far too gruesome.
She looks away, turning her back on its unsettling lunar stare. If she wants to have a good poke around before Dill reappears, she needs to get a move on. She peers up at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – endless gilded spines – and trails a finger along a shelf, thrilling at the sheer abundance of books.
There were books in her house when she was growing up but they were always borrowed from public libraries, their jackets encased in floppy plastic sleeves, with strangers’ sticky thumbprints at the bottom of the pages. And there were only ever six at a time. Occasionally she’d glimpse libraries like this in a National Trust property – rarely stopping. Mum wasn’t interested in books unless they were bodice-ripper romances, which she’d read in a scalding hot bath, foamed up with a squirt of Radox – and the young Lorna would marvel at the fantastical idea of having a library of her very own, dozens of books just sitting there, waiting, books you could stick your ‘This book belongs to …’ label into, books that didn’t attract pocket-money-gobbling fines if you didn’t return them in time.
She steps back, catching her heel in a hole in the rug as she tries to make out the tomes on the upper shelves: a row of fat burgundy leather spines that could easily be photo albums, each labelled with a different decade in pale gold letters. She decides to risk the library stepladder, a leggy contraption that protests noisily when she rests her weight upon it.
Lorna climbs until she’s on a level with the lowest teardrop crystal of the chandelier. The dust is even thicker on the shelves up here, mixed with dead bluebottles and mummified bees. It feels notably cooler too – confusing: isn’t warm air supposed to rise? – and as she reaches up and pulls down a leather-bound book that reads ‘1960s’ her scalp prickles. Judging by the dates carved into the tree, this should be the decade that Barney and his siblings lived here.
She flumps to the threadbare rug and slaps open the heavy covers, revealing a starry swirl of green marble endpapers. Yes, it’s a photo album: eight small pictures to the double page, their corners tucked into lacy creamy card, each page covered with a thin sheet of waxed paper.
Lorna parts the paper like curtains, smiles. ‘Hello.’
Four children. All startlingly pretty, popping off the page. The eldest two – Toby? Amber? – must be the twins, although they don’t look in the least disturbed. The youngest – Kitty? – is cherubic, like a girl from an old Pears ad, hugging a funny cloth doll. And there he is, the little boy who called out to her from the woods. For it must be him, cheeky grin, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his shorts, shoulders raised, as if he’s struggling not to explode into giggles. Barney is so animated, so full of life, it’s almost impossible to believe he died so young. She strokes his image gently then, lump in her throat, quickly turns the page.
The most noticeable thing about the Altons as a troupe – and they do look like a troupe, bundled together, arms thrown casually over each other’s shoulders, mischievous rabbit-ear fingers above each other’s heads – is their spirit,
which shines through the fade of the years, written in a beautiful Italianate hand – ‘Summer ’65’; ‘Easter ’66’ – at the bottom of each page. You can’t disguise happiness in children, Lorna knows from experience. Those who have it own it. They gleam and glow. And it hangs around this group of children like a golden aura in every photo: yelping into the sea, hanging upside down from branches by their knees, eating sandwiches on a windy beach, huddled grinning and frozen beneath tents of towels.
Oh. Who’s this? The first wife? No. She can’t imagine the current Mrs Alton feeling overshadowed by this lady. Curvy girl-next-door-pretty, she stands at the back of some of the photographs, wearing a boldly striped apron.
Flipping another page, Lorna sees her mistake. No, no, that must have been a nanny or a housekeeper.
This
is the wife and mother. Blimey. What a beautiful smile. No wonder Mrs Alton struggled. In one photograph the first wife is laughing on a beach, lithe and model-like in a white bikini, her long hair wet, arms crossed, shoulders braced, as if emerging from a freezing sea. In every other shot there is a child attached to her: wrapped around her leg, sitting on her shoulders, little hands around her neck, lying on the ground playing with her toes. And Mr Alton presumably – pretty hot himself in a posh old-school James Bond kind of way – is gazing devotedly at her in almost every photo. It’s obvious this woman is the humming heart of the family. How on earth had it coped without her?
The answer perhaps lies in the following few pages, after a gap in the dates. Rejoining the family in late ’68, the mood is sombre, the pictures no longer labelled by that lovely handwriting. And the mother is, of course, nowhere
to be seen. While the earlier pages of the children – the family as it was – seemed to pour light into the room on opening, these puff out a fine flour of dust, suggesting no one has turned to them for years. Or maybe it’s just that the times have so obviously changed.
Mr Alton, where he appears at all, is grim-faced, hollow-cheeked, his once lustrous hair thin, salted with silver. The golden glow has leached from the children too, taller now, lanky, mistrustful of the camera. Still, Lorna’s relieved that they’re huddled together, like young animals bunching for protection and warmth. They’ve got each other at least.
Ah, here she is: Caroline, the new Mrs Alton, towering at the back of the photograph, a striking glacial blonde in her forties, hand resting stiffly on Kitty’s shoulder. Mr Alton is not looking at this wife but out of the frame, his eyes distant, posture slumped. Next to him stands a sullen, handsome teenage boy, awkward in his height and jacket. Lucian? It must be. Yes, he has Mrs Alton’s sharp good looks. Something else too. A handsome boy indeed.
The twins are shadows of their former selves, their gaze often bewildered, as if they’ve been picked from one life and buried in another. In one Christmas photograph – there is an enormous tree, like something from a town square, buried in presents – Toby looks ready to explode. Amber has her hand on his arm, as if trying to restrain him from doing or saying something. The scowling carries on into the wedding pictures – oh dear, that’s a second marriage portrait and a half – and into a blazing summer that … suddenly vanishes. Lorna skips ahead, searching for the rest. But no: for some reason, the photographs
abruptly stop in August 1969, the decade closing prematurely in a flutter of blank waxed pages. She slams shut the photo album, feeling drained, as if she’s lived ten years in as many minutes. No more photographs. Not today. She has a wedding to plan, she reminds herself. She must get on.
Black Rabbit Hall is not a house that lends itself to ‘getting on’, any more than it does phone calls, Lorna soon discovers. It unfolds at its own pace, its corridors, anterooms and the repeated pauses of its views fostering a dreamy kind of lingering, an openness to getting lost. Is this because it was built for the leisured classes, she wonders, or is it something else?
Just when she thinks she’s done with a room at Black Rabbit Hall and is about to leave it, Lorna notices something she hasn’t before and it holds her there a little longer, not only in space but also in feeling, as if the house somehow forces the external and internal to synchronize.
The drawing room is proving particularly sticky. She blames the globe. There’s a technique to the globe: it hums better if you push it, lightly, from the left. The longer you let it hum, the deeper and louder the hum becomes, as if you’re walking towards a hidden beehive. And she’s noticed another funny thing too: a small circle – wonkily drawn in green biro – around New York. Why?
Her mother never really got it, Lorna decides. She assumed that grand, gilded rooms and old masters told a stately home’s story, the historical details filled in by an obsequious tour guide. But the real story is hidden, scribbled somewhere by a human hand that was probably doing
something it shouldn’t. Like this inked circle. Or the carved tree in the woods.
Then she stops short. What if she is underestimating her mother? What if her mother always knew of another story bubbling beneath Black Rabbit Hall, like an underground stream? The idea makes her skin contract, the hairs rise. After all, the house sign must have had some significance. Why else would she make them both pose against it for photographs? It doesn’t make sense. But it will. The answer has to lie here in the house somewhere. Where next?
Annoyingly, the ballroom is locked. She stands outside it in a vast, grand corridor that has all the warmth of a walk-in fridge. Maybe she can get a view of it from outside. She follows the kitchen garden’s crumbly red-brick wall, until she sees a long line of windows. The glass is so dirty it’s hard to see anything through the bottom panes. But in a nearby blanket of buttercups she spots a cane chair splitting apart, like a huge old basket. With some effort, she drags it over and clambers up, fearing she might plunge through its seat at any moment.
The ballroom ceiling is a field of pale green with cornrows of gilt moulding, the floor a huge expanse of wonky dislodged parquet. Two teetering columns of stacked white chairs and the carcass of an old grand piano, its lid smashed. And … yes! A hydrangea! There really is a hydrangea growing through the floor, pressing its blue petals against the glass, like a hothouse flower. The tractor driver hadn’t made it up. She can’t wait to tell Jon.
Or should she?
There is a possibility he’ll use it as evidence of the
house’s unsuitability. Feeling a prickle of irritation – mostly at the idea of Jon, the one who’s defensively taking form in his absence – she jumps off the chair, refusing to dwell on what the state of the ballroom might mean in terms of wedding practicalities, how the guests might eat and dance on such a floor in such a room. She’s barely thinking about their wedding at all. No, other things have taken over.
There is still no sign of either Dill or Mrs Alton as she crosses the hall’s chessboard tiles and creeps up the staircase, heart drumming at her own audacity, speeding up when she gets to the point on the first landing where she felt so peculiar on the first visit. There is one room in particular she’s dying to revisit. She finds it easily enough on the third floor, the powder-blue door, the one Jon peered through and thought looked as if the children had just left. She nudges it open, immediately trips over a shoe.
She picks up a dirty white plimsoll, flexing it back and forth, light and rubbery in her hands, wondering to whom it might once have belonged. Desiccated sand falls from its heel and scatters across the floor, each grain a beach in miniature, a sandcastle, a summer long gone, she fancies. She respectfully places the plimsoll back where she found it, steps into the room, sure she can hear the chatter of children in the wind that blows through the gaps in the window frame, the repressed giggle of a child hiding behind the long yellow curtain, making the fabric shake.
There is the dappled grey rocking horse: it makes her think of the skull in the library now, so she quickly looks away. The well-thumbed books, some of their corners bookmark-turned. She crouches to the grubby floor,
picks through bent boxes of Monopoly, broken toy tea sets, Matchbox cars, blunted colouring pencils, discovering a rickety wooden toy pram that looks like something that has endured centuries of bossy little girls. These must have belonged to the Alton children. She cannot help but tidy them, wiping away the dust, putting lids back on boxes, settling an old, balding teddy in the pram.