Black Rabbit Hall (20 page)

I should have known Toby would lead us all the way up here. Not in our usual place by the swing but further upstream where the trees get confusing, the creek narrows, seeming to flow in two directions at once, and the bank drops so steeply that if you slip in it’s really hard to get out.

Barney holds my hand a little tighter. We stop, tense in the restless solitude of the deep wood. Where is he? And that’s when we hear a hoot.

‘That’s him.’ Toby does owl hoots better than anybody.

And there he is, a dart of red, nimble as a deer. When we finally catch up with him, he is leaning, barely out of breath, against an old apple ladder that reaches into the swollen belly of a huge tree. At the top of the ladder – about ten feet up – there is a platform made from old planks, willow and stolen bits of kitchen-garden fencing, leading into the tree’s lightning-charred hollow.

‘You built this tree house?’ I say, beginning to grasp the level of feverish activity that must have taken place in the days while he waited for us to return to Black Rabbit Hall.

‘Caroline has her plans. I have mine.’ Toby nods, eyes sparkling, hair in tight sweat-damp curls. ‘I am one step ahead, Amber.’

‘Kitty doesn’t like it,’ my little sister says, tugging on my hand. ‘Nor does Raggedy Doll. It’s too high.’

‘Think of it like a Wendy house.’ Toby squats down to Kitty’s eye level, trying to reassure her. ‘You’ve always wanted a Wendy house, haven’t you? Come on, let’s go up.’

Kitty shakes her head. ‘I will fall.’

‘You won’t. Not if you tell yourself you won’t.’ Toby taps his head. ‘Falling is all in the mind.’

‘He’s right, Kitty. That’s why I don’t sink in the sea,’ says Barney, matter-of-factly. ‘I tell myself I won’t and I don’t.’

Toby ruffles his hair. ‘Good man, Barns.’ He leaps up the first two steps, making the whole structure sway.

‘Are you absolutely sure it’s safe?’ I ask, anxious about Kitty, not known for her climbing skills, going so high.

‘Safest place on the estate,’ says Toby, sounding slightly weird again, making me wish I hadn’t asked.

I’m the last to go up, pushing through a hatch of chicken wire. I cannot help but imagine Toby jamming it behind us and being stuck in here forever, no one knowing where to find us. As I crawl in, knees sore against roughly nailed planks, I sense that I’ve crawled into Toby’s head. And, for once, I’m not sure I like it.

The interior seems airless, as if we were underground, even though we’re high enough to break our backs if we fall. There is a narrow bed – an old camp mat on top of a bed of pine needles – a neatly stacked pyramid of tinned foods and beers, dusty bottles of wine stolen from the cellars, a tin cup and a hand-drawn map of the estate on the wall, with odd red arrows labelled ‘escape’, which make the hairs on my arms prickle. Worse, I spot the small pistol from the drawer in the library lying beside the bed and a huge knife hanging perilously from a nail, a knife that Great-Grandpa used for skinning stags.

Toby switches on a torch, bringing to life strange bits of his face: tunnel of nostrils, the angry shelf of his eyebrows. ‘I can tell you don’t like it.’

I try to smile. ‘I do, it’s just … that knife.’ I point to it, dangling perilously over Barney’s head. ‘I don’t like that.’

‘Out of the way, Barney.’ Toby pulls it down off its hook, shoves it under the pillow. ‘Happy?’

‘The gun. We’re not allowed to touch the guns.’

He shrugs. ‘We’re not allowed to do lots of things.’

‘Is it loaded?’

‘Stop the old-lady fussing, will you?’ He crouches forward to the edge of the platform and pushes back a bit of garden netting that he’s camouflaged with leaves. ‘Barns, come here.’

Obediently, Barney crawls forward. I stare at the gun, a chill running up and down my spine like cold fingers, wondering how I will remove it, if I should warn Lucian.

‘If you sit still at dusk, you can see badgers, deer …’

Barney’s eyes grow wide. He flicks them back at me for reassurance. ‘Ghosts?’

‘No ghosts, not yet,’ says Toby. ‘But there are rabbits. Many, many rabbits, and hares.’

‘I don’t like rabbits.’ Barney crawls back from the edge, pushes up against me.

Toby and I exchange glances and I know we’re thinking the same thing: nothing will ever be right until Barney loves rabbits again. This is just another of those things that we don’t want to be true but is.

‘Anyone for a jelly baby?’ asks Toby, because it’s depressing to linger on rabbits and the way each of us is no longer
who we were in the process of becoming when Momma was alive. ‘I’ve stolen Peggy’s secret supply.’

Kitty starts pushing the sweets into her mouth faster and faster. For a while there is just the noise of the trees and birds and us chewing, until she says, ‘Why isn’t Lucian here?’

Everything silences, even the birds. Kitty freezes, the jelly baby a small lump in her cheek. Only her big blue eyes move from side to side, from me to Toby and back again.

I stay silent, fearing that whatever I say will be misinterpreted by Toby or, far worse, will invite Kitty to make a direct reference to our beach trip. Although I’m not sure why it must be kept secret – Caroline suggested it, I haven’t done anything wrong – I have decided it’s easier to say nothing.

‘I like Lucian,’ says Barney, coming to Kitty’s aid. ‘And I like his car because it’s really shiny, isn’t it, Amber?’

I swallow hard. Did Barney see us drive off after lunch? How could he? I deliberately took them to the ballroom to play on tricycles, so they wouldn’t see me get into the car or ask questions.

‘But I
don’t
like Lucian’s mummy,’ Kitty adds, starting to chew more cheerfully again. ‘She’s like a seagull that wants your chips.’

Toby laughs, a short, hard laugh that breaks the tension, a karate hand through glass. It’s actually quite useful to have an enemy to laugh at, I realize. Everything will be okay as long as the enemy is someone else.

Daddy looks up from his papers with a frown. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, leaving a crease on the bridge of his nose that gleams in the morning light filtering through the tall library windows. ‘What can I do for you, darling?’

‘I wondered if we could talk, Daddy.’

‘Talk?’ Daddy says, as if I’ve suggested something outlandish. ‘Oh, I suppose I could do with a break from this lot anyway.’ He pushes the stack of papers away from him. Sticks his silver fountain pen in his breast pocket.

I glance out of the window to see a slice of Lucian’s car, already packed, the neck of the guitar sticking out of the open boot. Should I go and say goodbye? I have no idea when I’ll see him again. Today – the day Lucian leaves and everything returns to normal – already seems greyer, full of the old problems, a world looking back not forward.

‘Peggy’s done a formidable job of managing the estate in the last few months, but I’m afraid some things have inevitably passed under the radar.’ Daddy looks glumly down at the papers.

‘What sort of things?’

‘Bills, goddamn bills, Amber. I’d be better off tossing my cash into the Fal than throwing it at this house. But don’t look so worried. The Altons always find a way.’ He blows out, lifting his coarsened silver hair. ‘We won’t lose the house. I’ll make damn sure of it.’

This fighting talk makes me feel more anxious.

‘But I’ve had my head in the sand far too long.’ He loosens his collar. ‘About time I dealt with it, Caroline’s quite right.’ What’s
she
doing advising him? Daddy impatiently gestures at the other side of the desk. ‘Sit, darling.’

I pull up the stool, elbows on the spongy green leather top of the huge desk – Toby says Daddy makes us sit on the other side of it to shrink us to a more manageable size – trying to ignore Knight in his black velvet-lined box, everything that happened that night still whirling silently in the star-shattered hole of his skull.

‘So?’ says Daddy, his smile not quite as open as it was a few moments ago.

I shift on the stool. ‘Well, it’s Toby.’

‘I feared it might be.’ Daddy shuffles papers that don’t need to be shuffled, thumping them into a straight pile. ‘Nose put out of joint by Lucian, I gather. Devilishly unfriendly. I expected better of him.’

‘Well, it’s not really that,’ I say, wondering who suggested this version of events. Caroline probably. ‘Daddy, he’s built this tree house.’

‘A tree house? Really? Where?’

‘At the far end of the woods. Upriver. He’s got food in there, a knife, a bed … a gun. Daddy, he’s taken the pistol. The one from the drawer.’

‘Did I not lock it?’ He rubs his face wearily, stifles a yawn. ‘No, I suppose he shouldn’t have the pistol, although I had a collection of guns at his age so I do understand the attraction.’

‘But, Daddy …’ sometimes my father seems to belong to another age entirely ‘… it’s as if he’s making
preparations for the world ending,’ I say, hoping that he’ll grasp the nuttiness of it. ‘He keeps talking about this bad thing that’s going to happen at the end of the summer holidays. Some sort of disaster.’

‘Like going back to school? I dare say it will be a shock to the system – September always is after a summer down here.’ He smiles kindly, and I feel a moment of hope that he might be willing to listen properly. ‘He’s got a bit of time at least.’

‘I think it’s more serious than that.’

‘Serious? Amber, darling, dealing with Toby since …’ there is a hiccup of silence where Momma’s death should be ‘… these last few months has been damn near intolerable.’ He pushes a large box of dusty pink Turkish delight towards me. ‘Rather good, I must say. Try one. Caroline brought them from London.’

I shake my head. ‘It’s just that there’s something properly not right with Toby. He’s less himself than ever. Than at Christmas, say.’

Daddy looks out of the window, grim-faced, the cheerful Turkish delight moment gone. ‘Well, he’s started a new school. I dare say that requires some getting used to, especially as he arrived with a bit of a reputation.’

‘I don’t think he likes the school much, but it’s not that.’

Daddy pulls on his earlobe, uncomfortable. The papers on his desk start to shift and flap in the breeze coming through the open window.

‘Daddy, he’s worse now than he was straight after … it happened.’

He considers this for a moment – chin sunk into hands – then seems to sit straight, flick it off. ‘Amber, darling, I hope
you know how I appreciate your kindness to your siblings this past year. It hasn’t gone unnoticed.’

For some reason the praise makes me feel even worse. Like I’d had a choice in any of it.

‘I think we’re all guilty of thinking you older than your years sometimes. But there are many things you still don’t understand, my darling.’

I see then that while Daddy has thick skin – ‘thicker than the rump of a Gloucester Old Spot’, Grandma Esme says – Toby barely has skin at all. He feels everything far too much, Daddy too little. And this is part of the problem.

‘But I understand Toby, Daddy. I understand him better than anybody else does.’

He coughs. ‘Amber, you’re not the first person to draw my attention to this.’

‘Did Grandma say something?’

‘Toby’s last school suggested …’ his face clouds ‘… some kind of doctor. Some charlatan from Harley Street. But I won’t do that to Toby, turn him into some dead-eyed creature, however difficult he is.’ He adds, more emphatically, ‘Nancy would never forgive me.’

So rarely does Daddy mention Momma directly that her name sucks all the air out of the room. Even he looks shocked. This is how we miss her now, less with a sadness that we swim about in and more with sharp spikes of feelings that pop up unexpectedly, like foxgloves in the woods.

‘I want him to be happy, Daddy. Well, not that so much,’ I say, realizing the impossible reach of my ambition. ‘Just more like he was, I suppose.’

Daddy smiles at me then, vague, full of love, like he used to smile when I was Kitty’s age. And I feel a pang for
that time, when I didn’t yearn to know anything beyond what Daddy knew, trusted his judgement completely.

‘Amber, remember that strength of character is forged through hardship, not fun. If we aspire to duty and hard work then,
if
we are lucky, and only if we are lucky, happiness may come.’ He slams a paperweight on top of the papers, crushing them flat. ‘Pleasure is a by-product, not a bloody right, as my brother Sebastian believed.’

My mouth drops open. I feel my drowned rogue uncle in the room. I can almost see him, slipping beneath the gentle Mediterranean waters.

‘If Toby is to inherit this estate – learn how to be the custodian of this house – he needs to pull himself together, sooner rather than later.’ A muscle is pulsing in his jaw, sweat forming on his brow. ‘That’s all there is to it.’

‘But what if Toby
can’t
pull himself together?’ I stutter.

‘ “Can’t” is not a word we use in this family.’

‘No,’ I say, looking down, biting my lip. ‘Sorry.’

‘So, what do you think we should do?’ he asks a little more gently.

‘I don’t know.’ I was hoping he would. ‘I guess something has to change. But, um, I’m not sure what.’

He stares at me, mind turning behind his eyes, like the invisible chains pulling the King Harry Ferry across the smooth surface of the river. Then he stands up, fists punching down on the desk’s leather top. ‘Thank you, Amber. I do believe you’ve unwittingly answered a question, a rather enormous question, that I’ve been tussling with for a few days.’ He sets his jaw, as if forcing himself to consider something unpalatable. ‘Something has to change. You are quite right. It is my duty as a father to make that change.’

‘What?’ I ask, puzzled, hoping it’s nothing too drastic.

‘I dare say you’ll all find out soon enough.’ He retrieves his silver pen from his lapel pocket, pulls off its lid with his teeth. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got bills to pay.’