Black Rabbit Hall (4 page)

‘Again,’ says Toby, stacking up more balls on the wall. ‘Fire!’

Again it falls short. Hopeless.

‘Fire!’

The third lands in the basket of washing.

‘Yes!’ Toby and Barney raise their fists into the air.

Peggy takes a moment to realize what’s gone on, first staring down at the green ball on her whites, gaze slowly moving to my brothers snorting on the wall. She sniffs – Peggy has all kinds of sniffs, this one is brisk, like she’s smelling sour milk – picks the ball out and tosses it to the ground. ‘Honestly.’

Peggy says ‘honestly’ like an older person, a teacher, a church-warden. But she is thirty-five, which is pretty old but not quite as old as Ambrose, Matilda’s tortoise. It’s hard to imagine Peggy any younger – or older – existing anywhere but here.

Toby says a fisherman jilted her at the altar and that is why she ended up at Black Rabbit Hall, cook, housekeeper and everything else. I have no idea if that is true, or how he knows it. But it feels true. Sometimes I catch her staring a bit too long at Daddy.

‘Boys,’ Momma calls. ‘No monkey business. Peggy’s trying to get on with things.’

Getting on with things is what Peggy does best, unlike the rest of us. She’s always in a flap the first few days we arrive from London, walking too fast, like one of Barney’s clockwork toys – I swear she ticks – swooping feathery
dusters about like wands, wiping floury hands over and over on her apron even when there’s no flour left on them, trying to remind my parents of her efficiency (and her famous pasties with gravy sizzling in their half-moon seams) even though we all know that Black Rabbit Hall would soon collapse into a pile of smoking rubble without her. And we’d have to survive on marmalade toast.

She has one of those faces you want to look at a little longer than is necessary – Matilda and I have decided this is the definition of prettiness – with round red cheeks that Peggy blames on the heat from our range (‘Hotter than Hades!’) and rain-grey eyes that always smile before her mouth. As my mother infuriates her by insisting she can wear whatever she wants, Peggy has imposed a strict uniform upon herself: an almost-black navy skirt that steams like a pudding if she stands in front of the fire on a damp day; a white shirt with a small frilly collar; a blue and white stripy apron tied around her waist, her name embroidered in cobalt cotton on its left-hand corner by Mad Mary in the village. I think there may be more than one apron, but they are all identical so I don’t know. Whenever I think of Peggy, I think of that apron, the way it makes you notice her small, unlikely waist, then balloons over her tummy and wide hips, like the festive roof of a circus tent. Barney likes to hide in it.

It’s no secret that Peggy loves Barney best, treating him to the forbidden jelly babies that she squirrels high up on a shelf in a battered tea tin. He reminds her of Little Lionel, she says, the youngest of her brothers. (Peggy is the eldest of eight, brought up in the teeniest, wonkiest cottage, like a gingerbread house made by Kitty at Christmas,
five miles down the coast.) But it’s also because Barney sticks daisies into her springy mat of frizzy brown hair – it’s so dense the flowers never move – and slouches against her calves while he walks ladybirds from one finger to another. Peggy’s calves are huge. But her feet are tiny so her legs suddenly swoop in at the ankles, like one of her nozzled icing bags. You’d think she’d fall over, but she doesn’t.

‘Barney!’ Peggy says, pretending to be cross with him. ‘Was that you?’

Toby slings a protective arm around Barney’s shoulders. ‘Oh, come on, Peggy. There’s no mark on the laundry.’

‘Not this time.’

Daddy is walking towards them now, shadow long and leggy, the sun a tinned peach half behind him. I wonder how it’s going to play out. He lifts his chin, scratches his throat. ‘What’s going on here?’

Peggy’s little silver crucifix swings on its chain in the dip of her neck. Barney holds his breath. Toby kicks his legs.

‘Everything’s just fine, Mr Alton,’ Peggy calls over her shoulder, giving Toby a sharp look as she walks back into the house.

Not much ever happens.

‘Well, that’s just perfect timing, isn’t it?’ Momma stands up, gazes approvingly at Kitty. The wind fills her white blouse, like a sail. ‘There. Sand brushed out. Plaits. Ribbons. Pretty as a picture.’ She turns to Daddy. ‘Isn’t our Kittycat a beauty, Hugo?’

Daddy circles his arms around Momma’s waist, dips his
nose to her neck and smells her like a flower. ‘Just like her mother.’

Momma rests her chin on his shoulder and they stand like that on the terrace for a moment, swinging slightly, like they’re being rocked by the wind. I look away. When they’re like this, it’s like nothing exists but them, and I glimpse the people they must have been in that unbelievable pre-history before I was born. Probably, Toby and I came out of an intimate moment like this. We all did. Barney, I know, was ‘a happy accident’ – I overheard Momma and Daddy talking late at night once – and Kitty born to be company for him, as there’s such a big age difference between the top and bottom of the family. ‘The bookends,’ Daddy says. Last year Matilda offered a more detailed explanation – courtesy of her big sister, Annabel, the one who got expelled from Bedales – about what causes such ‘happy accidents’. It makes me feel strange to see my parents like this now, knowing all the things I know.

‘Did you find our little squatters then, Hugo?’ asks Momma. Boris flumps down at her feet, panting.

‘Gulls.’

‘Oh, I was hoping for a nest of pterodactyls.’

‘It’s a bother, Nancy. We’re going to have to get someone up there.’

‘But who can blame them wanting to nest at Black Rabbit Hall?’

Daddy laughs, a low, rich laugh that could only come from a tall man.

‘Now, Mr Alton …’ Momma takes off Daddy’s hat, leans forwards until the tip of her neat nose touches his.
No one else would dare do that. It feels like the rest of us have to knock to enter. Just like we must do at the library door when he’s working. He works a lot. This is because the family fortunes never recovered from the crash of 1929, Grandpa’s death duties or his fondness for the casinos of Monte Carlo. (Before we were born, Daddy had a brother who liked to gamble too, but he fell off a yacht in the Mediterranean, his body scooped up in a fishing net a week later. Disappointingly, Toby and I have been unable to extract any more gruesome details. His name was Sebastian, but he’s never mentioned.)

‘Mrs Alton.’ He pulls her closer. Their shadow stretches like a cat on the lawn.

‘I’m going to take Knight out for a quick ride.’

‘Not with that gammy leg.’

‘Don’t be such a fusspot. I’ll be quite all right.’

‘Nancy, it’s reckless.’ Daddy’s brow furrows. He has a short, square brow that furrows easily, thick dark hair and no bald shiny bit. Matilda says her mother keeps saying Daddy is the spit of Omar Sharif. ‘Look at the sky. This sunshine won’t last. And you know how Knight rides in a storm. He’s a nutty creature at the best of times.’

‘The storm won’t hit until later. You just said so yourself.’ She flicks Daddy’s hat lightly against her thigh. We all know Momma will get her own way in the end. It’s like watching butter melt in a pan.

‘The doctor said your leg needs a good rest. And your wrist.’

‘I’ll ride Knight like a fat donkey on the beach, I promise, darling.’ She puts his hat back on his head, kisses him on the mouth. ‘See you soon.’

‘You’re impossible,’ Daddy says, looking at Momma as if he wouldn’t have her any other way.

When Momma leaves, our family huddle disperses, like when you take the magnet away from iron filings.

Toby and I joke that Peggy has shooed off the storm – ‘It’ll be back when it’s hungry.’ Toby tuts and I laugh at his Peggy imitation, far better than mine – and we drift lazily towards the kitchen, where our tea is running years late on account of the range dying after lunch. Barney and Kitty – who has manhandled Raggedy Doll into Great-Grandma’s wooden toy pram and wrapped a red balloon around its handle – follow us, as they always do, until Barney suddenly shouts, ‘Woo! Rabbits!’

He streaks off across the green lawn to the dashing brown dots, followed by Boris. The warrens are around the hydrangea bushes just before the woods. They always vanish into them before Barney gets anywhere near.

I roll my eyes. ‘It’s like he’s spotting a herd of unicorn every time. He’s five. He’s seen millions of rabbits.’

‘I reckon Barney will always be excited by rabbits,’ Toby says. ‘Just one day he’ll pretend he’s not.’

The dining room is at the bottom of the east turret, round and red and slightly damp, like the inside of a fruit pie. But it’s miles from the kitchen, which makes Peggy complain about her feet. So when it’s not Christmas or Sunday lunch or a meal involving Grandma Esme, who claims to be ‘constitutionally unsuited to eating anywhere but a dining room’, we eat in the kitchen, my favourite room at Black Rabbit Hall with its cornflower-blue walls – blue is meant to keep the flies away – and a larder with a
happily broken lock. Unlike the rest of the house it’s always warm.

Curious things go on in the kitchen: bread dough rises in china bowls, like a row of pregnant bellies; pig guts soak in salted water before being stuffed and turned into hog’s pudding; tin buckets writhe with conger eels, awaiting dismemberment. There are often buckets of crabs, too, which Barney refuses to eat because crabs have character. I can’t throw the poor creatures into the boiling water – a living thing must feel pain – but once they’re cooked, I’ll help Peggy pull out the dead man’s fingers and suck the sweet white flesh from the claws. If they’re dead, I don’t see how they can mind. I wouldn’t.

But there are no creatures in buckets today, just a greasy-looking soup bubbling on the stove that we fear is the dreaded kiddly broth, one of those recipes Peggy says we will ‘learn to like’ and never do. And the smell of the long-awaited scones: gusts of Heaven every time she opens the range door. Impatient now, we fidget around the old servants’ table. When the scones finally appear, their tops are cracked a perfect gold. Toby bags the biggest, then has a moment of repentance and offers it to me. I let Kitty have it. Barney will be left with the smallest, of course, if he’s lucky enough to get any at all. Rule is, if you’re not here you don’t count.

The clip-slip clip-slip of Momma’s riding boots in the corridor. We sit up straighter, brighter, anticipating her walking through the door.

‘Momma.’ Toby wipes jam off his mouth with the back of his hand. He grins like he hasn’t seen her for weeks.

‘I declare myself officially alive again.’ Momma tosses
the liquid copper of her hair. There is a splatter of mud up the back of her white blouse that makes me think she’s not been riding Knight like a fat donkey on the beach at all. ‘One. Two. Three.’ She crowns our foreheads with wind-cool kisses, looks around the room and peers under the table. ‘Where’s Barney?’

We shrug, mouths full of clotted cream and seedy jam made from last summer’s strawberries.

‘Peggy, we’re one down. Any idea where Barney is?’

Peggy slides another plate of scones on to the table. ‘I thought he was with you, Mrs Alton.’ She starts to hand around the second batch, deliberately slowly in order to test Toby’s urge to grab.

‘Well, he’s not. The scamp.’

‘He went off chasing rabbits half an hour ago, Momma,’ Toby says, talking with his mouth full. ‘With Boris.’

‘Those two,’ sighs Momma, with a smile. ‘May I?’ She takes a scone and dips it into the cream. ‘Criminally good, Peggy.’

‘I’m sorry about Barney, Mrs Alton. I should have checked.’

‘It’s not your fault, Peggy.’

‘I do my best, Mrs Alton.’ Peggy always says this, leaving a pause for confirmation afterwards.

‘Of course you do, Peggy. I’ll go fetch Barney. It’s no problem.’ Momma bends down to Kitty, flinching a little as she does so, as if her bad leg is bothering her again. ‘Where will I find your imp of a brother now, Kittycat?’

‘Is an imp like a limp?’ asks Kitty. We ignore her. You have to or you’d be answering questions all day.

‘He’ll be at the new den with Boris,’ I say.

‘Should have guessed.’ Momma bends down, adjusting her riding boot. ‘Oh, wait a minute,
there
’s Boris!’

Boris skulks out from behind the kitchen door, tail flat, eyes doleful. He looks guilty, as if he might have eaten a tub of lard or chewed a favourite slipper.

Momma rubs his ears, frowning now, unsettled by Boris coming back to the house alone. ‘Where’s your partner in crime, mister?’

Boris presses himself against her riding boot. She looks up at me. ‘Where’s the den, honey?’

‘Past the stream. On the banks of the creek.’ I drop clotted cream on to my scone, squidge it down with the back of my spoon. ‘Where we had the bonfire the other night – you know, just before the ground gets all marshy, near the big tree.’ It’s our favourite tree, an ancient oak on the muddy gum of the river, a long length of old rope tied from its upper branches. You wrap your legs around the bristly knot at the bottom, kick off from the bank and fly out over the river, filled with air, thrills and friction burns in funny places.

There’s a rumble outside. It feels suddenly chilly, as if someone’s whipped a blanket off the day. Momma walks to the window, presses her hands on either side of the dark wooden panelling, a knee on the window-seat, looking to the wild sky gathering above the woods. ‘I fear Barney’s about to get a proper soaking.’

Peggy joins Momma at the window, fingering the silver crucifix at her neck. ‘I don’t like the look of that, Mrs Alton. Looks like it’s been blown in by the devil himself!’

Toby and I try not to laugh. This line will feed nicely
into a joke later. Neither of us feels in the least sorry for Barney, who could probably do with a good soaking.

‘I’ll get my boots and mackintosh and fetch him for tea. He can’t be out in that.’

‘No, Peggy, you get on with the tea.’

Toby stands up. ‘Do you want me to go, Momma?’

‘That’s gallant of you, Toby, but no, you eat your tea. Knight’s saddled up. I’ll be back in a flash.’ Momma walks to the door, calling over her shoulder. ‘At least Barney will have worked up an appetite.’