Black Rabbit Hall (24 page)

The church is not nearly as full as it was for Momma’s funeral. Daddy said he wanted ‘a small affair’. But still. Faces are missing. Old London friends of my parents. Some cousins on Daddy’s side, the ones who smell of horses and wet dog and adored Momma. Aunt Bay, whom I overheard rowing with Daddy on the phone last week, Daddy bellowing, ‘And when is not too soon? I will never stop loving Nancy, so there will be no
right
time. Don’t you understand, Bay? It can never, ever be right.’ Not one American is here, in fact. I miss hearing voices that come from far-off places and motion pictures, proof that there are worlds outside mine.

Caroline’s side of the aisle is fuller: a different crowd, louder, more excited, not in the least awkward at being back so soon in the church from which we buried Momma. The men guffaw and flip the tails of their morning suits so that they hang out of the gaps in the back of the pews like black tongues. Sweat bubbles on their thick red necks. Their slim wives arch over each other, like grasses, eyes tracking each other’s outfits and shoes. They fold the order of service in half and fan fiercely in the church’s still, unlikely heat. One woman actually takes her stockinged feet out of her shoes and lays them on the flags, leaving unthinkable sweaty marks on the ancient Norman stone.

‘Gracious.’ Grandma Esme raises an eyebrow, peering across at the feet in amused horror. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever
seen so much Pan Stik in June, have you, darling?’ She squeezes my hand. Her emerald rings dig into the flesh of my fingers. ‘I fear that the bride’s lady friends might actually melt to the wick if she leaves it much longer.’

Daddy is standing at the top of the church, back straight, fists clenched, less a groom than a soldier facing the firing squad. Toby’s nail continues its
scratch scratch scratch
along the edge of the pew, his feelings conducted through it, picking at the hard brown polish like a scab. Barney’s arm wraps around his leg. Unlike Kitty, Barney can still remember Momma’s funeral clearly, enough for this to feel the same: the invasive hugs of strangers; the flowers; the pig squeal of the salt-rotted hinges as the church doors part.

At that squeal, everyone starts to swing around, straining to see the bride, smiling, fanning, whispering. The organist starts to thud out a tune. Daddy stiffens in his suit, pulls on the lobe of his left ear. The word ‘Beautiful!’ ripples from pew to pew behind cupped hands and beneath the brims of hats.

And he is. He is so beautiful I gasp.

Hair greased back, his mother’s hand locked on his arm, Lucian walks slowly up the aisle, jet-cold eyes straight ahead, face stern, unreadable, taller and bigger than I remember him at Easter. With every step he takes closer towards me, my body tightens. I don’t know how I will stand it when he actually passes, a mere twelve inches to my left. The urge to reach out to him is almost overwhelming. I want him to see
me
one last time, the girl he kissed, not a stepsister he will be forced to tolerate. But Lucian doesn’t look at me, at anyone, hesitating only once to encourage Kitty, who is shuffling shyly behind them, a
powder puff of pink and white tulle, hugging her bridesmaid’s posy close to her chest like a doll and looking for me in the crowd.

A small triumphant smile sets hard in the pale plaster of my new stepmother’s face. Her sharp chin is raised and there is something studied and queenly in her walk, as if she’s been rehearsing. Her dress – long, cream, seeded with tiny pearls – rocks back and forth as her legs scissor beneath it. She doesn’t glance at any of us either. Maybe she doesn’t dare: she surely knows Toby’s likely to explode, if not when or in which direction. Better not to tempt it.

But, unbeknown to her, Toby has promised me not to make a scene, for Kitty’s and Barney’s sake. I feel so proud of him for his restraint, knowing how it goes against his nature. During the vows, he squeezes his eyes shut, hands fisted at his sides, only flicking them open in the tense hush that clamps the church when the ring doesn’t fit the finger. We exchange a glance full of horror and hope –
please don’t let it fit!
– and watch, transfixed, as Daddy bends down again, ears throbbing scarlet. He shoves. Nothing. Caroline’s smile is frozen, her eyes darting, panicked, the wretched finger protruding into the sweating silence.

‘Oh dear,’ Grandma whispers, behind the order of service. ‘Her finger must have swollen in this ghastly heat.’

But Daddy gives the ring one more hard, desperate shove. And it is on, sealing all our fates in a band of tight white gold.

I wave at Peggy through the car window as a column of vehicles pours up the drive from the church to Black Rabbit Hall, the bells pealing faintly in the distance. But her
expression doesn’t change. I don’t think she can see me behind the glass.

She is standing on the bottom step, next to Annie, lips pressed tightly into a fixed smile, wearing a new formal uniform: a black dress that makes her look really quite fat and a frilled white apron, cap pinned to a fuzzy bun of brown hair.

I roll the window down, suddenly desperate to connect to her, to everything that was good, warm, solid, smelling of bread. She sees me then. Her smile becomes genuine, full of teeth, and she flicks her eyes up, telling me to look at the sky.

Dark clouds are slugging towards Black Rabbit Hall, shadows over the woods, across the lawns, until, in no time at all, they are directly above us and releasing their load. Rain! Wild, wild rain that spits when it hits the gravel, flattens the flowers in their beds, makes the guests yelp and pick up their skirts, their feet spraying water as they run from the cars to the house.

Toby and I lose each other in the resulting pandemonium. The hall is a scrum of wet legs, dripping hats and women dabbing frantically at the sooty streams of make-up dribbling from their eyes. Boris – soggy, stinking – nudges his nose into their skirts. Big Bertie confuses everyone by chiming loudly and dementedly on the wrong hour, then chimes on and on, as if a cog has stuck, until a bloated man in a morning suit gives it a hard whack.

Peggy and her army of maids – pretty young fishermen’s daughters, scrubbed up but still smelling faintly of mackerel, buttoned into ill-fitting black and white uniforms – flit about in the crowd, desperately trying not to spill their trays of champagne as they get knocked and
shoved on the slippery floor and the hands of Caroline’s male friends skim their bottoms and grin at them, with mouths full of crowded yellow teeth.

I’m only interested in one person.

Lucian is standing dutifully next to his mother, staring out at the crowds, through them, as if pretending he is anywhere else: something tells me he senses my gaze, but he doesn’t meet it. A woman in pink is bending over Caroline’s white silk shoe – brushing her bottom on his thigh – frantically trying to rub the muddy gravel splatter off it with a handkerchief, while Caroline hisses, ‘Why the bloody hell is it raining? The weather forecast said it would be fine …’ and glares out at the bruised Cornish sky, as if it’s raining on purpose, which I think it might well be.

The rain continues to fall in sheets, creating, Grandma Esme notes with the tiniest glint of a smile, ‘utter havoc with poor Caroline’s carefully laid plans’. There can be no champagne reception on the lawn now, no dynastic wedding photograph framed by the rolling acres of the estate or the envied show of hydrangeas. Instead the guests are trapped behind the rattling windows of Black Rabbit Hall, watching slack-jawed as the wind tears at the pink and white gazebos, plucks pegs from the ground, the bunting from the trees, and blows a tower of white napkins high into the branches of the trees, where they flutter like surrendered flags.

‘Wanton destruction!’ Toby comes up behind me, eyes bright. ‘Absolute carnage!’

‘Maybe there is a God after all,’ I whisper, and we both snort with mirthless laughter, less than miserable for the first time that day.

Peggy busies past – sweating, plum-faced, as if she might burst. Grandma pulls her to one side and whispers something in her ear that makes Peggy clamp her hand over her mouth and go even redder. Soon her army of local girls appears with tin buckets, which they shove beneath the ribbons of water pouring from the ceiling (the ceiling that Daddy promised to fix before the wedding but, of course, didn’t). Caroline’s friends watch, appalled and fascinated, muttering things about Caroline having her ‘work cut out for her’, as if she was the one holding a bucket, rather than ordering Peggy about, with a fixed smile, then disappearing upstairs to change into yet another dress.

The leaking is at its worst in the ballroom: Caroline was warned, but refused to accept that it might rain on her wedding day. And although the ballroom floor hasn’t yet caved in under the weight of all the people, Peggy thinks this a real possibility, which has improved our mood a little. For the moment we have to make do with watching a drip bounce off the black lid of the grand piano and a bit of cornicing starting to crumble, carrying with it the hope of larger lumps of plaster falling down to knock the dull guests out cold.

At one point Grandma Esme looks so bored she might actually be asleep, eyes half closed over her untouched pink meat terrine. Kitty crawls on to her knee, overwhelmed and exhausted, sinking into her bosom, which is floral and pillowy, much like her sofa in Chelsea. If I could lie there I would.

Lucian still refuses to look in my direction, which makes me yearn for and hate him equally, but Toby’s gaze is trained steadily on me – and only me – throughout most
of the meal, as if this is the only thing that is stopping him from yanking off the tablecloth or storming along it, kicking salmon into people’s faces.

If only he would. I now regret asking him to behave.

After an eternity, the meal is over and the guests, unsteady on their feet now, hooting, sloshing wine from their glasses, flow into the drawing room, where flickering candles singe swishing scarves and light the women’s painted, exaggerated faces from beneath their chins. Voices rise, fighting the jazz band that seems to get noisier and less tuneful with every number.

Strangers finger the stone busts and paintings, leaving greasy marks all over Great-Great-Grandpa’s face. They pull at the servant bells on the walls, blow the hunting horn, spin the globe too hard, loll on the furniture that has been pushed to the edges of the room, and rock with senseless laughter. The music changes, gets louder, faster, more confusing: it sounds as if we’ve been invaded by a charge of drunken fairground horses.

I stand on tiptoe in my silk pumps, craning above the bouncing curls, the sweating bald pates and sprouting ears, trying to spot my brothers and sister or Lucian, any familiar face. But I can’t. Caroline’s friends are starting to dance now, shimmying, doing funny things with their hands, making escape across the room to the door impossible. They grab me by my arms, try to get me to dance. Swollen bellies, hardened by champagne and gas, press up against me as I squeeze past.

In the end, I give up and flatten myself against a wall, waiting for the tune to end. A man with a moustache, foam-tipped with champagne, sidles up, stinking of
drink, asking whether I like my new ‘fabulously rich old stepmother’ before snorting at his own wit. A woman in a white mini-dress pushes him off – ‘Out of the cradle, you old beast, Bradley!’– introduces herself as Jibby and, with a startling lisp, starts telling me how my ‘dishy new brother, Luthian’ has broken her poor niece Belinda’s heart by not contacting her: would I give him a nudge and get him to visit the poor girl?

The peacock brooch! The relief of finding Grandma Esme is so great – almost as great as hearing Lucian has broken Belinda’s heart. I almost burst into tears. The Jibby woman excuses herself, staggering off into the crowd in silver knee-high boots.

‘Oh, darling. You look quite exhausted,’ Grandma says, grabbing my hands. She doesn’t look so well herself, older than I think of her in my head.

‘Where are the others, Grandma? I’ve lost them.’

‘Kitty and Barney were happily demolishing a bowl of candied nuts in the hall when I last looked. I’ve no idea what Toby is up to. But I think, considering, he’s behaved impeccably, don’t you? Let’s leave him be now, poor chap.’

I almost ask after Lucian, too, but think better of it in case something in my face gives me away.

‘Why don’t you sneak off, darling?’ she whispers. ‘This lot are far too pickled to notice.’

But at that moment Daddy walks back into the room. He is immediately cornered by Caroline and her tubby male friend, who vines his arm around Daddy’s neck and shouts in his ear, making Daddy recoil. I wonder if Grandma can see well enough to notice how uncomfortable he looks for a man in his own house, the way he seems to be stepping
back from both the man and Caroline, who responds by moving even closer, taut and anxious, repeatedly touching the studded jewels glinting in her hair. ‘Won’t Daddy mind? Aren’t we all meant to wave them off on honeymoon?’

‘You leave your papa to me.’ Grandma squeezes my hands. ‘I dare say if it weren’t for you there would have been a somewhat more colourful scene at some point in today’s rather lengthy proceedings. You’ve done enough.’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ I say truthfully.

‘You did everything. They take their lead from you, Amber. You were stoic, therefore so were they. You make them strong.’ Grandma smiles tearfully. ‘Nancy would be so proud of you.’

‘Thank you, Grandma.’ It’s the first time anyone has mentioned Momma all day.

‘Now just look at you …’ She sniffs, centres the bow at my waist. ‘You hold yourself with such dignity, unlike most of the women here. And you are quite, quite beautiful in that frock.’

I smile, unsure whether to believe it. Daddy’s secretary bought the shell-pink dress from Harrods. It isn’t something I’d have chosen. I’d wanted something shortish and sharp with black and white stripes, a big buckle and belt, something from Biba or Mary Quant, like the ones Matilda’s sister wears, but this has a tight bodice and a full skirt pushed out by two layers of petticoats, reminding me of photographs of Momma in New York in the 1950s. ‘The dress is a bit old-fashioned.’