Black Rabbit Hall (27 page)

Amber, August 1969

‘You’re not taking that filthy creature into the house!’ Caroline’s voice bounces off the brick walls of the kitchen garden, like a handful of tacks, carrying right across the terrace.

Toby and I stop arguing and crane our necks in the direction of the kitchen garden. And there is Caroline, wearing a red dress, sliced into four by the wooden slats of the gate like a magician’s assistant. She has her hands on her hips and is towering over Barney, who is cradling something in his arms.

‘What’s the rotten old pike prattling on about now?’ Toby’s shoulders square for a fight.

‘God knows,’ I say, clipped, still annoyed with Toby. We’ve been arguing about who gets the last dry towel that doesn’t stink of wet dog, but really we’re arguing about the fact that he is coming swimming with me. I know he’s checking that I’m not meeting Lucian behind his back – which I resent hugely, especially as this is precisely what I was hoping to do – and would much rather be alone in his tree house, shooting at squirrels with his pistol.

The tree house has three or four levels now, although it’s hard to tell, and he has nailed a calendar to one of its rotten planks, counting down the days until a meteorite or
something equally bad crashes into Cornwall, currently scheduled for the last week of August, our last day at Black Rabbit Hall. He has worked out the statistical probability of this event – not that probable, but possible – meticulously, with an enthusiasm that he never exercises at school, and is waiting with great relish for impending catastrophe.

I don’t believe anything will happen – another of Toby’s doomy prophecies – but it still somehow adds to the piquancy and melodrama of these last days of the holiday. Everything feels loaded, as if every hour counts.

The shortening sunny days are also overcast by the knowledge that Lucian will be going up to Oxford in September: the thought of being separated from him is almost unbearable. All we can do is cling to our sketchy plans for escape, which involve running away to New York together when ‘the time is right’, which it obviously never is, and descending on Aunt Bay. Much as I long to go – this morning I found myself dreamily doodling a circle around New York on the globe with a scratchy green pen – I can’t bear the idea of leaving everyone else behind. Can I really break Toby’s heart to save my own? Leave Kitty and Barney at the mercy of Caroline? What would Momma think about me deserting them? Would she forgive me?

As I cannot answer these questions, all I can do is wait to unite with Lucian back here at Christmas, and pray that, until then, we remain undiscovered. That in itself will be a small miracle. Even standing here on the terrace, goose-bumped in my swimming costume, I feel I might say or do something that will give me away at any moment.

‘Here she comes.’

Caroline marches across the terrace, tossing the words ‘Dinner at seven,’ at our bare feet as she clips past.

‘At least I know when to make myself scarce,’ retorts Toby, in earshot, as we walk into the kitchen garden.

It is a strange sight: Barney is sitting on the raised strawberry bed, huddled over what looks a bit like a black cushion. He glances up at us with a smile I’d forgotten existed, pure, wide, revealing the twisted milk tooth that has been threatening to fall out for days.

‘What’s that?’ asks Toby warily, although we can see what it is. We just don’t believe it. I pull Boris back by his collar.

‘A rabbit.’ Barney beams. ‘Look.’

‘A rabbit?’ We lean in closer to double check that the ball of fur is really alive, the nose peeping over Barney’s arm twitching. ‘A wild one?’

Barney shakes his head. ‘Lucian gave it to me.’

Toby’s lip curls in disgust. ‘
Lucian?
’

Barney drops his chin to nuzzle the bunny’s head. ‘Yeah, in a cardboard box. From the pet shop.’

‘But I thought you didn’t like rabbits any more,’ I say, realizing where Lucian shot off to this morning so furtively, refusing to tell me why. He’d said it was going to be a surprise.

‘I didn’t want to touch him. But then Lucian made me … He held my fingers against his ears and it felt strange and I didn’t like it and it made me breathe funny, but then he made me do it again and again until it felt nice.’ He looks up at me, honey eyes shining. ‘Feel how soft he is, Amber. Feel.’

I tickle the bunny behind his floppy-sock ears, awed by
Lucian, who in one sweet, insightful move has healed Barney of the irrational rabbit fear that set in after Momma’s accident, succeeded where we have not. Even Toby has to grant him that.

‘I wanted to call him Lucian …’

‘Oh, God,’ groans Toby, covering his face with his hands. I try not to laugh.

‘But Lucian said that probably wasn’t a good idea. So I’m calling him Old Harry. Like the ferry. Lucian says he’ll grow into the name. Even rabbits get old.’

‘Welcome to Black Rabbit Hall, Old Harry.’ My fingers track a path in the gleaming fur.

‘Bartlett will have you in a cooking pot in no time,’ Toby says, lifting one of Old Harry’s comical ears and peering into its soft pink pocket. ‘Tasty.’

‘Stop it,’ I say curtly.

Barney’s smile is already starting to doubt itself. ‘Don’t you like him?’

‘I’m not sentimental about animals.’ Toby shrugs. And it’s true, he isn’t. He loves them, but not like that. He’ll eat anything that moves.

‘I didn’t want to love him, Toby,’ Barney blurts apologetically. ‘I thought something bad would happen if I did.’

‘Bad things don’t come out of love, Barney,’ I say, hugging him towards me.

Toby looks up at me fiercely. ‘What makes
you
so sure?’

I feel the helpless horror of a blush, made all the hotter for knowing what he’ll read into it.

‘Is there something you’re trying to say?’ The morning snaps then: the row over the towel, Lucian’s rabbit, Toby’s clenched fists. It breaks in two. ‘Well, is there?’

‘Don’t be such a berk, Toby.’ I steam away, my secret hanging by a bloody thread. Like Barney’s milk tooth, one small tug and it’s out.

I’ve discovered that life doesn’t always turn on the obvious things – people dying, marriages, all the stuff that gets carved on the tombstones – but little unrecorded things too. Kisses. Rabbits.

In the last week or so, Old Harry has become less a bunny, more a little god with miraculous Barney-healing powers. As befits such a creature, he sleeps in the chicken coop on an old silk eiderdown at night. The enfilade has become his racetrack during the day. Kitty wheels him about the hall under blankets in the toy pram, calling him Baby Harriet when Barney isn’t listening. Even Peggy, who says rabbits are pests and is still cranky with a horrid bug that makes her sick in the mornings, feeds him her sweetest carrots with her fingers.

Caroline, of course, has claimed the success as her own: Old Harry is living proof of Lucian’s kind nature (as opposed to Toby’s brutish one) and, by proxy, her own maternal prowess. She’s turned Old Harry into something that pits Lucian against Toby and Toby against Daddy and the past against the future. (No wonder Toby loathes Old Harry, who scampers from the room in fear whenever he enters it.) A couple of days ago, I overheard Caroline murmur sweetly, ‘Hugo, darling, Lucian reminds me so much of you, you know. Isn’t it uncanny that you and he are so very alike, both in character and looks, and you and Toby so different?’ She paused in a silence that I could only imagine was punctuated with Daddy’s whisky sip or
baffled smile. ‘We must take comfort that there is now a like-minded young man in the family who could manage Pencraw … should anything happen.’

Worse, Daddy has been inviting Lucian into the library to listen to jazz. Toby’s never been invited into the library to listen to jazz. It really makes me mad that Daddy is making an effort to get to know Lucian, but he never tries to get to know Toby. Maybe he’s scared of what he’ll find. Maybe he thinks he knows Toby already. Well, he doesn’t. Daddy doesn’t know Toby, any more than he knows me now. He has no idea that we are both different people from whom we were even at the start of the holidays, that everything has changed.

I think that adults must get sort of worn away over time, like rocks out at sea, but remain who they are, just slower and greyer with those funny vertical wrinkles in front of their ears. But the young are a different shape from one week to the next. To know us is to run alongside us, like someone trying to shout through the window of a moving train.

Caroline does not knock. ‘Still not dressed, girls?’

I cover the back of my neck with my hand, where Lucian’s mouth has left a pink mark. Kitty, who is lying across my pillow, looks up mildly, then carries on making her wigwam of Kirby grips.

Caroline glares at the piles of books and discarded shoes on the rug, the knickers hanging off the back of the velvet chair. ‘This room is wanton. Tidy it, Amber. Tidy it at once. Peggy’s attention should be on the public areas of the house now. I don’t want her wasting her working day
clucking after you lot, especially since her digestive problems are proving such a distraction.’

I start shoving the scatter of novels into a pile. Poor Peggy. It’s not her fault she feels rotten.

‘I’ve brought you some new dresses.’ Caroline dumps a sheaf of clothes on to my bed, smelling of shop.

‘I never get new things,’ sighs Kitty, adding one more Kirby grip to the wigwam. They all collapse, scatter like matchsticks.

I tentatively hold up a calf-skimming, bulrush-brown pinafore, buttoned up to the collar, quite the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen.

‘Ew,’ says Kitty, sympathetically.

The next dress is even worse, sickly yellow and made from a fabric as rough as hop sack.

‘A thank-you would be good manners, Amber,’ says Caroline, sharply.

‘Kitty shouldn’t like to wear those either,’ Kitty points out reasonably. ‘Nor would Raggedy Doll.’

‘Shut up, Kitty.’ Caroline’s mouth presses together. The morning light – filtered through the ivy – makes her look almost ill with irritation.

‘It’s … it’s awfully generous of you, Caroline …’

‘I want you dressed properly. Smartened up. I’ve booked a hairdresser to come tomorrow.’

‘A hairdresser?’ Lucian loves my hair just as it is. He’s made me promise never to cut it.

Ignoring this comment, she flings open my wardrobe doors, flicking dismissively through my favourite dresses on the rail. ‘I’ll get rid of these old things.’

‘Oh, no! Not those.’ I can’t tell her that I stuffed all my
favourite London clothes into a suitcase this summer – not risking the usual tatty Black Rabbit wardrobe – because I knew Lucian would be here. ‘There’s nothing wrong with any of them.’

‘Nothing wrong with them?’ She snorts, laying them over her arm. ‘No one but your father could fail to notice that your dresses are far too tight and ridiculously short, Amber. They are no longer appropriate on a girl your age. You are too …’ Her gaze guns to my breasts. Mortified, I cross my arms over my nightie. She stares for an eternity, fingering the pearls at her throat, almost as if she’s forgotten herself, then turns on her heel and snaps, ‘Get yourselves dressed, girls, and come down to breakfast before it becomes luncheon.’

I cannot bear the idea of Lucian seeing me in something so ugly so I throw the brown dress aside, slip on one that I bought shopping with Matilda in Chelsea – peach, skimming the knees with big white buttons the size of tea cakes – and wear it defiantly down to breakfast.

Caroline’s eyes slice into the dress like scissors. But she says nothing. Instead she rests her knife calmly on the snow of the tablecloth and turns coolly to Lucian. ‘Darling, I thought we might invite Belinda over this weekend. Before you go up to Oxford. We’re running out of weekends now.’

A dry bit of toast catches in my throat. I cough and splutter and pick up my water glass too abruptly, making it splash across my front.

‘It’s not really Belinda’s kind of place, Ma,’ he says, straining to sound casual.

‘Nonsense. Belinda will love Pencraw.’ Caroline picks
up her knife again, scrapes a thin layer of butter on to her toast. ‘Jibby Somerville-Rourke, Belinda’s aunt – remember Jibby? At the wedding. Unfortunate lisp.’

Lucian nods, shoots an alarmed glance at me. I’m suddenly very glad that Toby hasn’t bothered to come down to breakfast. He’d pick up on our unease right away.

‘Well, the poor woman has written again,
hounding
me for an invitation to Belinda and herself, of course, as a chaperone. She says Belinda has been rather hopeful of one all summer but it has proved inexplicably elusive.’ She leans towards Lucian, who backs away minutely. ‘I do believe she’s pining for you, my darling.’

I play with a button on my dress, cheeks burning, throat tight. Belinda. Rich, beautiful Belinda.

‘I planned to help Toby this weekend.’ There is a breathlessness to Lucian’s voice now. ‘He’s set on some engineering project over the river, isn’t he, Barns?’

‘A rope bridge.’ Barney sucks greengage jam off the back of a spoon. He grins. ‘Scary. No sides.’

‘The best kind,’ Lucian says, trying to make things light but not managing it.

‘But Toby won’t want you to help, Lucian,’ Kitty points out cheerfully. ‘He doesn’t like you joining in, remember?’

Caroline smiles to herself, glad to have more evidence of Toby’s hostility. I know that she will repeat this to my father later.

‘I so want to meet Belinda. I love the name Belinda,’ Kitty continues maddeningly. Raggedy Doll lolls forward on her knee. ‘There is a girl called Belinda at school. She
has the longest plait in the class. Her nanny ties it with a pink ribbon on Fridays.’

‘That grubby little doll is in the marmalade, Kitty. Please remove it.’ Caroline turns back to Lucian, speaking more sternly now. ‘You’ve not seen any of your set for weeks, Lucian. I think you could certainly do with a reminder of civilized society before returning to it. And you have every right to invite them to stay. This is
your
home now too.’ She glances at Toby’s empty seat. ‘Don’t let anyone make you feel differently.’

‘Then I exercise my right not to invite them here,’ Lucian flashes. ‘Not Belinda. Not any of them.’