Black Rabbit Hall (21 page)

Lucian stops at the end of the drive, the engine purring, and opens the passenger door for me. ‘I’m glad you agreed to make me late.’

‘Well, it beats feeding the chickens.’ I hop out of the car, trying to hide my pleasure in delaying his departure to Devon. That he chose me over Belinda, even if only for twenty-odd minutes.

‘Good. I’m glad.’ He glances up the drive warily. ‘I hope Toby won’t be too cross.’

‘Oh, he won’t find out,’ I say quickly, my heart starting to race at the thought of being caught. ‘He’s still in the woods. Tree-house business.’

‘I wish he’d show it to me.’

Unlikely, I think. ‘One day,’ I say.

The afternoon light slips behind his dark eyes so that I can see their hidden toffee colour, like the coloured-ink twist in the centre of a marble.

‘Well … until next time.’

‘This summer?’ I say unthinkingly, as if I’ll be counting the days until the next school holidays. Embarrassed, I brush the flower heads and pollen off my poplin dress, the one I’d chosen so carefully this morning because it brings out the green of my eyes and makes my breasts look bigger.

‘I hope so.’

‘I thought you hated Black Rabbit Hall.’

‘I did. I changed my mind.’

‘Oh,’ I say, failing not to grin stupidly. ‘Well, bye then.’

I go to step past him, but the space between us seems to contract and we awkwardly bump against each other. Flustered, I move backwards, tangling my hair in the low branches of the tree. He slams the car door shut. And it should be a final sound, the promise of an ending. But it isn’t. The noise cuts through the summer air, like a starting whistle. We stare at each other, see it in each other’s eyes. Something is out, released.

I know it’s going to happen the split second before it does. But the kiss is still a raw shock, nothing like I ever imagined. His hands grip my waist, yanking me towards him, his breath fraying in my ear, my hair pulling on a twig until it snaps, the taste of salt and saliva and honey. We kiss and kiss until my jaw and tongue ache and I can’t breathe and he suddenly pulls away and pants, ‘Sorry. God, I’m so very sorry.’

‘I’m not.’ The words just blurt out before I can stop them. Mortified, clamping my hands to my mouth, I stumble up the verge into the woods, hearing him call my name, once, twice. Then, when I’m hidden by foliage, I lean back against the tree, catching my breath, resting my hands on my knees, and listen to the rumble of Lucian’s car fading. I know I need to move, that Toby will soon be returning from the tree house, wondering where I am, the distance between us closing.

I walk shakily back to the house, the air fluting through my fingers, the taste of him on my lips, the birdsong wild and ecstatic. When I get to the stream, where the water
pools beneath the giant rhubarb, I peer in, checking my reflection, sure that guilt must be written all over me. But the water cuts my glowing face into shimmering ribbons, smudging my hair, my smile, making sunlight dance in my eyes. Will Toby know? Will it be obvious? I lick my fingers, frantically smooth my hair – picking out the snapped twig – and my creased dress, pulling at the sticky dampness where my bottom met the leather car seat.

If I can run upstairs before anyone sees me, have a hot bath, brush my hair, change my clothes, who will ever know? No one could possibly have seen us. And no one would guess in a million years. But as Black Rabbit Hall rises above the ridge of the lawn, this all seems less certain. The stone falcons glare down their sharp beaks as if they know exactly where I’ve been, and, as I climb the grey stone steps, a different girl from the one who ran down them half an hour ago, the thrill of the kiss mingles with a small sting of fear.

Lorna

Dill’s office is a small brick-walled room, tucked above the steps to the wine cellars. Dill mutters something apologetic about it being only temporary and not ideal as it was the place where pheasants used to hang – there are metal hooks along the walls – so she’s sorry if it pongs a bit, and if the phone starts to crackle it can be remedied by a vigorous shake of the handset. But Lorna isn’t listening. Jon wants her urgently. She’s worried. ‘Jon?’

Dill shuts the door softly behind her. A bee the size of a mouse appears from nowhere and starts to throw itself at the small-paned window in hopeless bristly thumps.

‘I was about to hang up.’ Jon’s voice sounds muffled, distant, as if he might be phoning in from a different planet. ‘Come and rescue you.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ She laughs warily.

‘You could have called me.’ He can’t hide the hurt in his voice. In London they normally speak on the phone two or three times a day. ‘I didn’t know if you were all right.’

‘I tried to phone. The signal is terrible, you know that. But I’m fine, honestly. Why wouldn’t I be?’

A moment passes. She pictures his large hand running through his golden hair. ‘I just worry about you.’

‘I’m not a child,’ she says, a little irritated, perching on the swivel chair, trying to find some space for her elbows among the clutter on the desk: bills – overdue, red – falling out of a wire rack; an ancient beige PC; a tea-stained copy of
Country Life.
‘Is that it? The urgent thing?’

‘No, it’s not. Lorna, listen, I did a bit of digging around about your Black Rabbit Hall.’

She doesn’t like that idea. Almost as if he’s checking up on her. ‘Er, why?’

‘Something didn’t feel right. Didn’t add up.’

‘You’ve lost me.’ Lorna tries to open the window to let the bee out but it’s stuck tight. So she draws the curtain to contain the bee for the duration of the phone call, plunging the room further into gloom.

‘I can’t really let you down gently, I’m afraid. Lorna, there’s no wedding licence.’

She feels it like a temperature drop. ‘I … I don’t understand.’

‘We can’t have a wedding at Black Rabbit Hall. The owner has no licence to hire the place out to a member of the public as a venue. No insurance. None.
Nada
.’

‘But they can get one? It must just be a formality.’ She curses Jon’s attention to detail, his respect for the kind of rules that beg to be broken.

‘I don’t think so. Health and safety, fire regs, they’re just … miles off, sweetheart. Given that, asking for a cash deposit up front sort of stinks.’

She’s sure she can smell it then, a metallic smell like the trace of coins. A faint meatiness. She bites the edge of her finger, wondering what to do. Does her dream end here?

‘I’m sorry. I know you’d set your heart on that house.’

She sits up straight, mind made up. No, it is not the end. ‘We will still have the wedding here.’

‘You’re not serious?’ He laughs in disbelief.

‘Why not? Come on. What’s the harm? Who’s it hurting? The last time I saw a policeman was at Paddington station. There are no neighbours for miles to complain about noise or parking.’

‘The whole thing would be closed down like some … illegal rave or something. Just forget it.’

‘I won’t. I can’t, Jon. I just can’t.’

‘What’s got into you?’ Jon says quietly.

She hesitates, tells him the truth. ‘This house has got into me. It’s got under my skin.’

Lorna feels his judgement then. His confusion. The gap stretching between them, gathering speed, like a train pulling away from a station.

‘Okay, listen. You need to leave. Today. That place is messing with your head, sweetheart.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’ve only just arrived.’ She wraps the telephone cord tightly around her finger. ‘And I’m having a wonderful time.’ She doesn’t intend it to sound so charged – as if the wonderfulness excludes him – but somehow it does. She shuts her eyes for a moment, trying to recalibrate, feel close to him, say the right thing. But it’s as if they’ve been parted for years, not days. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He is silent for a moment. ‘Is there some bloke there, or something you’re not telling me?’ He’s only half joking.

‘A
bloke
? Here? Like a gardener? A handsome young butler? Jon, please.’

‘I don’t know what to think.’ He’s cooler now. ‘You sound so … weird.’

‘Thanks.’ Hating being shut out of his warmth, she goes on the defensive. ‘Is this about the fact I’m here at all? That I dared to go away for the weekend without you? Because if you think I’m going to turn into some 1950s housewife just because we’re engaged, well, we – we need to talk, we really do.’

‘I didn’t want you to go because it was an odd invite, okay? And it’s so far away. There’s no one around for miles.’ He hesitates, changes the timbre of his voice, something harder to ignore. ‘You’re vulnerable at the moment, Lorna. You’re still grieving, all over the place.’

All over the place? She most certainly is not. And she doesn’t feel vulnerable. She doesn’t even feel as if she’s grieving now. No, she feels alive, fully charged for the first time in months, in a different place altogether. She just doesn’t know how to explain this to Jon without sounding even loopier than he evidently thinks she is.

‘Ever since we visited that house things between us have been, I don’t know … off. You get a fevered look in your eye when you talk about it.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, just shut up, will you?’ Shocked by the hardness of the words, she tries to make amends. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean …’ But part of her did mean it. And her words limp off into a punishing silence, broken only by the bee’s futile battle to escape the curtain. For a moment it feels like her behind that curtain, pushing against something thick and strange, something she doesn’t understand.

‘You know what, Lorna? I’m not going to shut up. I
think it’s time you were honest with me – and yourself – about why you can only think and talk about that half-derelict old house in Cornwall.’

‘I love it.’

‘It’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? It’s about your mum.’

She flicks her finger against the rusty wire letter tray, tries to swallow the lump that has hardened in her throat. ‘I want to find out why there are photographs of me and Mum on the drive. It’s bugging me, okay?’ She decides against telling him that she also desperately wants to know what happened to the Alton children at the end of the summer of ’69, especially to a little boy called Barney. ‘I know it sounds silly.’

‘Not at all. It’s natural to try to put the pieces of a puzzle together after …’ He stops, searches for the right words. ‘To make some sense of the senseless. Give me a bit of credit, I do understand.’

‘You don’t,’ she mutters.

He ignores this. ‘But it’s not just that. It’s not just about those photographs, is it?’ The telephone feels hot and heavy in her hand, a loaded gun. ‘You can’t keep running, Lorna, circling your past rather than facing it head on, pretending you’re searching for one thing when you’re actually digging for something else.’

Jon is tugging her somewhere she doesn’t want to go, pushing her into the bricked-up space in her own head. He’s been trying to get her there for a while: she resists, he keeps trying. The urge to slam down the phone is almost overwhelming.

Jon takes a deep breath. ‘Lorna, I always wondered if
you’d want to search for your birth mother after Sheila died.’

The trapped bee bursts out from a gap beneath the curtains and spirals dementedly into the air, like a pilotless plane. Lorna is rigid, her fingers cramping around the phone, fighting a rising nausea. ‘That’s not what this is about,’ she manages, a tremor in her voice. ‘I’ve got her name. I could find her, if I wanted to. But I decided not to trace her long ago, you know that.’

‘No. Sheila decided. She made you feel guilty for even wondering about it, let alone asking any questions. She was terrified that one day you’d go off searching for another mother, rejecting her. That’s why she couldn’t talk about it. That’s why she didn’t even tell you that you were adopted until you were nine. She couldn’t bear the idea, could she?’

‘I’d better go, Jon.’ Her voice is barely a whisper now. She feels unexpectedly protective of her mother while recognizing the painful truth in his words.

‘Lorna, please. We can search for your birth mother together. We know she was Cornish, that you were adopted from Truro. I want to help. That’s why I suggested we might visit there, that time in the car.’

‘I remember,’ she manages.

‘Please, let’s do it together. There will be leads. It may be easier than you think.’

‘I’m not looking for that woman. I don’t want to find her.’ She doesn’t tell him she could never risk rejection twice: she knows that uttering those words out loud will make her cry. So she says, more emphatically, ‘I’ve never wanted to find her,’ and feels her resolve harden.

‘Not consciously.’

A sharp intake of breath. She can think of no smart response.

‘Shit. I wish I was with you now. This is no conversation to have on the phone.’

She hears footsteps outside the office door, faint, getting fainter, someone walking away. It occurs to her that someone might have been listening.

‘But I should tell you … since your mum’s funeral you’ve mumbled your birth mother’s name in your sleep a few times.’

She starts, a cold sensation in her stomach. ‘Why … why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was waiting for the right time. There wasn’t one. I’m sorry.’

Her eyes fill. She blinks back the tears.

‘You’ll let me in everywhere else but there, won’t you?’ Jon’s voice breaks, which makes her feel worse, that her past is affecting the people she loves, seeping out despite her attempts to contain it. ‘I lay awake all last night thinking about it, missing you, wondering why I’ve allowed it to go on so long. You come with no-go areas, Lorna, you know that? You won’t let me in. But I want a wife who tells me everything.’ His voice chokes again. ‘I want all of you or …’

‘Nothing?’ She gulps.

‘That’s not what I said.’

Lorna suddenly remembers an ex-boyfriend – the one before Jon – telling her that she tested relationships to destruction to prove they weren’t worth saving. That she built walls around herself that made true intimacy impossible. The relationship imploded shortly afterwards. And here was Jon trying to say the same thing. But she cannot
break down those barriers, even for Jon. She doesn’t know how.

‘Sweetheart, are you there?’

She will lose him over this. Deep down, she is certain that will happen: it’s what she’s always feared, that she will lose the one man who makes her feel anchored and safe and loved. And if you fear something you imagine it, and can recognize it when the process starts to happen. And it starts like this.

‘Say something.’

The bee settles on her bare knee, almost weightless, a small tickle of life. She stares down at it, this beautiful frightened thing, and she knows the moment is pivotal. That it matters more than anything. That she might still have a chance to save her relationship. But something locks her throat. No words come out at all. And the bee flies off towards the window, trapping itself behind the curtain once more.

Submerged beneath the cloudy water – the bath is more like a wild pond – Lorna holds her breath until her lungs hurt. It helps to stop her thinking about the awful conversation with Jon, the lack of connection between them, as if someone has come along and snipped the wires. She’d tried to call him back once she’d composed herself and her hands had stopped shaking but she couldn’t get through on the mobile. When she called on Dill’s phone it went straight to voicemail. And, shamefully, she was enormously relieved. After the crab salad supper with Dill on the terrace – Mrs Alton wasn’t hungry – she didn’t try to call him again.

A little voice inside her head cannot help but wonder
whether it might even be easier to walk away now, call the whole thing off, than look deep inside, risk searching for answers to painful questions that Jon seems to be demanding she ask. If this is the beginning of the end, why not get it over with?

Lorna blasts up out of the water, gasping for air.

Alarmed by the escalating negativity of her thoughts, she stands in front of the bedroom window in her pyjamas, hair whipped up in a towel. The starless dark presses against the dimpled glass. There is no comfort of a moon tonight, no glowing dot of an aeroplane, nothing that might prove she isn’t sealed off in Black Rabbit Hall’s bridal suite as completely as a figure in one of the snow globes she used to collect as a child. She hears a faint fizz of rain against the glass. With a rattle of curtain rings, she shuts out the night with heavy brocade, herself in.

The bed’s four posts loom like ebonized tree trunks. She clambers between them, tries to settle against the stack of pillows that smell of unfamiliar washing powder, old linen dried in the salty outside. She wonders who else has slept in this ancient bed, who was conceived on its lumpy mattress, who took their last breath on its sagging springs before a white linen sheet was lifted over their face. She can see it so vividly. The sheet. The face. God, she’s so tired.

She must sleep. If she sleeps, all will be surmountable again, all the floating bits of the day will come together, like a slow-motion film of a cup smashing to the ground, played backwards. She parts the swishy silk fringing of the lamp, switches it off and waits for sleep to take her. It doesn’t.

Instead, the day flies at her, like that frenzied bee in
Dill’s office: the names scratched on the bark; the haunted children’s faces in the photo album; the phone’s spiralling cable, Jon’s oddly unfamiliar voice; the wrongness of their conversation, the way it doesn’t actually sound like them at all, the people they were before they came to Black Rabbit Hall.

She wonders then if Black Rabbit Hall, the planning of the wedding, is a secret test of her and Jon’s compatibility, one that carries the possibility of failure. Like those couples who go together into counselling expecting it to fix their relationship, only for it to confirm that it is beyond saving.