Black Rabbit Hall (8 page)

Peggy tried to scrub all traces of Knight away with the bristle brush. But there is still a dark red splatter on the stone, like an exploding poppy, a smell of horse sweat and blood. The bobble of Knight’s brains and the brown tufts of his mane were all over the side of the stable, too, but Toby nimbly scrabbled up and scraped them off. He laid the bits of brain on the wall to dry, like little red and white jewels, so he could preserve them, add them to his collection of things dug up from the gardens and fields, fossils, rabbit skulls, crockery shards, cartridge cases, and the shrivelled lambs’ tails that drop off in spring. I think he’d do the same with Momma if he could. And I think that would be preferable to this: Momma buried beneath the soil like a broken butter dish.

That’s going to happen today. It’s the day of the funeral. Time has gone funny. Almost a week has vanished since Momma died, sucked into the hole that has opened up, black and deep and dangerous as a disused tin mine. It’s impossible to believe it’s Easter, that bluebells are budding in the woods. The sky is wintry, heavy and low, like something that’s going to keep falling until it crushes you flat. A brisk, eye-drying wind, smelling of rotting things, dementedly spins the weathercock on the steeple of St Mary’s, the church beside the old harbour. Its damp stone walls are pocked with yellow lichen, the stained-glass windows
crusted with salt. Like being stuck in the underside of an upturned boat, Momma always said, making us laugh during intolerable services that went on for centuries, far longer than any in London. Seagulls and pigeons line its gable roof, hungrily eyeing the tiny graveyard, Momma’s stomach-churning destination. The hole is already dug, the exposed worms kinking in the daylight. I hate the thought of her here. The graveyard is known to be a pickle of bones – bodies layered with more bodies, like thin blankets on a bed in winter – full of old dead Altons and mariners and drowned children who wandered out too far in the wrong tide or walked the mud flats of the creek for a dare or a sherbet fountain.

We gather outside the church door, avoiding the eyes of the people we might normally see at weddings or christenings, flinching when they hug us, unable to be comforted. They all talk in those whispery voices that adults use in children’s bedrooms when they think the children are asleep. The women touch Daddy’s arm, cock their heads. The men, with their chubby baby faces, clap him on the shoulder. Daddy nods politely, not quite meeting their eyes. If he did they’d see that the light has gone out of them as surely as a snuffed candle. I feel their gaze skating over me too. I hear them muttering under their breath, ‘She looks so uncannily like her mother.’ I let my hair fall in front of my face and hide there until the smiles slide off their faces and, slightly embarrassed, they move on.

‘It’s time, my darling,’ Daddy says, hand on my back. He tries to smile but can’t. I think about him sobbing last night, every night since Momma died. I don’t think there
can be a worse sound in the world than your father crying. He takes a deep breath. ‘Ready?’

I nod. I know what to expect. I’ve been to funerals here before. There is something about funerals that is all the same, like weddings in reverse. So I will pretend it’s someone else’s, not Momma’s. This is how we’ve decided to survive it.

The heavy church door opens with a pig squeal. The vicar apologizes, mutters something about rust. As if it matters.

Toby squeezes my hand. Stick together, be brave, the squeeze says. I squeeze back and we steer Barney and Kitty into St Mary’s, our feet falling into step, like soldiers.

The church smells of old flower water. It is all dank gloom, apart from Momma’s coffin, which is covered with pale pink ribbons and so many spring flowers – hyacinth, anemone, iris – that it looks like a garden. I like this. Momma loved gardens. She loved our garden. But it still feels impossible that she is actually in that box – my warm, pretty momma, who would bundle us up on cold, clear nights and take us outside to spot the Bear and the Plough glittering in the sky – packed up like a fancy Easter egg. I tell myself it’s impossible. It is not her.

Still, we must walk towards it, Kitty pulling back on my hand, intimidated less by Momma’s coffin than all the pomp. The crowd follows behind us in solemn, coughing silence. There are not enough seats in the church. I’m glad. It would be much worse if there were empty spaces. People are standing, staring, jostling for a prized view of the coffin through the forest of hats. We walk to the front row,
eyes hot on our back. The church doors squeal again, clump shut.

‘Psst!’ Only Aunt Bay’s full film star lips are visible beneath the cartwheel rim of her hat. She’s in the row behind us wearing a black mini-dress – a glimpse of thigh revealed above the pew – that reminds me of all the reasons Momma adored her, and all the reasons Daddy doesn’t really approve. She grabs my hand, trailing the smell of cigarettes. ‘How are you, baby?’

My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Aunt Bay’s American accent is too much, too close to Momma’s. It’s what I would hear if she walked through that church door, lifting her hair off her shoulders, laughing, telling everyone it’s all been a silly misunderstanding and another case of English fuss.

I can’t stop doing this, imagining Momma bursting back into life at random moments. Neither can I stop replaying that day, making things turn out differently, pulling time back and forth, alive and elastic as gum, snipping out the day of the storm entirely and making Big Bertie’s chains and cogs jolt forward to the day after, eating sandy sandwiches on the beach.

‘Honey?’ She pushes up the rim of her hat, so that I can see her kind, red-rimmed eyes, spidery long lashes.

‘I’m very well, thank you, Aunt Bay,’ I say, because this is what Altons are expected to say.

‘That’s my girl,’ says Bay. She has a small chunk of lipstick on her front tooth that looks like pale pink icing. ‘Nancy would be so proud of you. She loved you so much, Amber.’

My throat locks. I know Momma loved me. For some
reason, I don’t want to be told that she did, as if that might not have been the case.

‘Will you come and see me in New York?’

I nod, thinking of Aunt Bay’s hotel apartment, where there is a fat man called Hank on a desk and you have to knock past guests arriving with suitcases, guitars slung over their shoulders. How Aunt Bay would leave us playing dominoes with Hank while she and Momma went to shows on 42nd Street.

‘Please stand,’ says the vicar. There is a rustle. Bay’s hat obliterates the view for the row behind. There’s a tut or two.

‘I’ll take you to Coney Island, up the Empire State,’ she whispers. ‘If you ever need somewhere to escape you come to me, OK?’

I don’t nod then. Why would I ever want to escape what remains of my family? Just the thought of not being with them makes me feel dizzy.

‘Right, Amber?’

‘Shush, please,’ whispers Mildred, one of my father’s tall, cross cousins.

Aunt Bay turns and smiles at Mildred and carries on talking, only louder, which is very Aunt Bay. ‘You’re a quiet girl with a big heart, Amber. You need to make it a strong heart too. You’re the lady of the house now.’

Lady of the house? I don’t like that idea at all.

‘But you can cry all the same. You’re allowed to cry, honey. Really.’

I try to cry for Aunt Bay but my tears are stuck.

Mouths open, sing, exposing jam-red throats. I turn to check Daddy is not going to mess up. He is staring directly
ahead, face blank, back straight, chin raised but shoulders shaking, little judders, like the engine of the boat made when he and Momma used to putter up and down the creek, laughing, sharing a cigarette.

Speeches. Poems. An American. A duke. A colonel. They talk about how Daddy fell in love with Momma’s spirit. Her ‘thirst for life’. Her love of home and family and horses. How Daddy brought her here from America and she fell in love with Cornwall. How she’d introduced the locals to the delights of pumpkin pie. How she didn’t even like killing the rabbits. Because that’s what Nancy was, a nurturer, a mother, an animal-lover, a Joan Baez fan, someone who saw the good in everyone and everything and liked to sing around the fire.

Everyone is snuffling quietly. But Aunt Bay is howling and saying, ‘Sweet Jesus,’ not very quietly at all, over and over, even though she doesn’t believe in Jesus but a bearded man in orange robes who lives in India. ‘My baby sister. Oh, sweet Jesus!’

I pretend to wipe away a tear, and keep focused on the others, making sure no one else causes a scene.

They are all under orders to be brave. Kitty is fiddling with a stray thread on her button, flicking it back and forth with her fingers, Momma’s death still too vast for her to grasp. Barney is staring down at his shoes, polished to mirrors, biting his bottom lip, breathing fast and hard. Toby stares ahead, rigid, chest inflated, his neck blazing red at the back, as if his skin is bursting with the effort of holding the feelings inside. We all want it over. Anything but this.

When Daddy steps out of his pew the church stills and
the snuffling stops. He looks older and smaller than he did only days before, the hair at his temples the colour of cutlery. When he looks up at the silent congregation his eyes are blank and bloodshot and make me think of the fish that get caught on the creek as the tide rolls out, flapping on the mud until they stop.

The hush is broken by the crinkle-crackle of foil.

‘Kitty!’ I hiss, realizing that she is unwrapping a small chocolate egg in her pocket.

She looks up, indignant, hot-cheeked. ‘It’s Easter! Aunt Bay gave it to me.’

‘You can eat it afterwards.’ Mildred’s mouth purses disapprovingly in the tail of my eye.

Kitty drops the egg into her pinafore-dress pocket. I pull her close. Barney too. He feels limp and cool, all his usual fidgety energy gone. No longer more alive than everyone else. The opposite. He still hasn’t told us what happened in the woods – what he saw – and when pressed, he just says he can’t remember anything before sitting at the fireplace, drinking cocoa, the bang of the gun. I’m not sure I believe him.

I think about Momma in London before we left sitting on the turquoise chair, saying, ‘Worrying is a mother’s job,’ and I feel as if I’m going to shatter into a million pieces. Who will worry about us now? Who will look after us now?

The answer hits with a heavy punch. It. Will. Be. Me.

Daddy’s mouth opens. At first nothing comes out. Toby and I exchange looks. From nowhere comes the urge to laugh. I bite down on my lower lip, terrified that I might actually do it. Then the piece of paper Daddy is holding
begins to tremble, like the feathers on the sobbing women’s hats. And the giggle leaves me as suddenly as it came. Someone help Daddy. Someone help him. After a long stretch of awfulness, the vicar walks up to him and, gripping one of his arms at the elbow, tries to direct him back to his seat. But he refuses to go. The vicar, unsure what to do next, sheepishly retreats.

‘Thank you all for coming,’ Daddy says at last, raising his shot-red eyes again. ‘I know many of you have travelled many miles to be here.’

Shoulders drop. Legs stretch. We breathe again. Toby scuffs his shoe on the church floor.

‘Nancy would be enormously touched to see …’ Daddy stops. He is staring over my left shoulder, his mouth dropping open, his notes starting to slip from his fingers. Everyone glances over to see what has startled him.

At the back of the church, in the latecomers’ pew, there is a woman with an almost-smile and an upward tilt of her chin, relishing the curious stares. I suppose you wouldn’t have hair like hers if you didn’t want to be noticed: silvery blonde, scraped hard off her face and coiled luxuriantly on the crown of her head in fat rolls, it’s the kind of hair-do you never see south of the Tamar. Her face is sharply featured, handsome rather than pretty, with a thin, slightly curved nose and polar blue eyes made bluer by sweeps of the black eye-liner pencils Momma used when she went to parties in London. Tossed over the shoulder of her pitch-black coat, like something freshly killed, is a red fox fur.

The hush sounds whispery now, full of saliva. It takes an eternity for Daddy to start talking again.

‘She’d be enormously touched to see our tiny church so
crowded,’ Daddy says at last, sounding less sure of himself. ‘But there are some women who cannot help but change the lives of all those they meet …’

Daddy pauses, stutters, gazing at the blonde woman. Toby and I frown at each other, thinking the same thing: weirdly, it sounds as if Daddy is talking about someone else, not Momma at all. And it feels like this until Daddy says quickly, ‘Nancy Alton was such a woman.’