Making Marion (11 page)

O
n Tuesday evening, at quarter past six, I knocked on the kitchen door of Hatherstone Hall. Erica whipped it open, her eyes gleaming.

“Marion! Come in! How amazing to see you. We're all ready to go. Reuben, will you take Marion's coat? And please see to the dog.”

Ah, I see. Erica playing at being Lady Hatherstone.

On one end of the enormous kitchen table sat three carrier bags and several plates, spoons and other kitchen equipment laid out next to them with military precision. Still dressed in his muddy farming gear, a five o'clock shadow sharpened the angles of Reuben's face. He hung my coat on a hook behind the kitchen door and leaned back against the worktop, folding his arms. His dog, who must have doubled in size since last I saw her, padded across the kitchen tiles to lie on his feet.

“Hi.” I pulled a face, apologizing for taking over his kitchen.

“Hi, Marion.” He smiled, resignedly, and I remembered he knew this wasn't exactly my idea.

Erica looked at the dog. “Reuben! She can't stay here. Aren't you going to put her outside?”

“She's fine.”

“It's unhygienic, having an animal in a food preparation area.” Erica whisked over to the door and opened it, calling for the dog, Lucy, to come. Lucy didn't move.

Erica wouldn't give up. She kept slapping her hands against her thighs and calling Lucy's name. This felt like a bigger issue than food
hygiene. In the end, Reuben clicked his fingers, and Lucy ambled to the far corner of the room, where I saw a massive cushion tucked into an alcove. She curled up onto her bed, resting her head on her paws.

Erica paused for a tiny moment before straightening up and fixing a breezy smile on her face. “Right. Shall we get started?”

She ushered me up to the table and pulled out a stool to perch on, leaving me standing. I had dressed in my increasingly baggy jeans and a grey sweatshirt, fully anticipating the spills and splatters of my comprehensive ineptitude. Erica wore a Cath Kidston apron over a knee-length cream woollen dress.

“First things first! You've washed your hands?”

I nodded, hating myself for blushing. Hating myself more for stooping to answer the question.

“Right. Well, today I thought we would start with a simple tomato pasta dish, followed by crème brûlée. Okay?”

“Sounds good.” I hoped that dress wasn't as expensive as it looked. Then I sort of hoped it was and that Erica slopped a load of sauce on it. Then I mentally slapped myself on the wrist for being a bitch.

“Have you ever cooked pasta before, Marion?”

“Um. Yes. But mostly I use a ready-made sauce, from a jar. By the time I get home from work…”

“Don't worry, it's pretty easy really. I brought my pasta machine so we can make the dough from scratch. You're going to be amazed at what you can achieve when you try!”

For the first time in my life, I wanted to punch someone. By seven o'clock I was ready to grab her bouncy, glossy, naturally blonde hair and stuff it into the rollers of the pasta machine. Then a miracle happened. I stood slicing onions while Reuben chopped celery opposite me. Erica, who had been
supervising,
had a phone call. She disappeared into the pantry, returning five minutes later pale-faced.

“That was work. The ad campaign has just come back and it's a
disaster
. The title font is cerise, when I specifically ordered raspberry. It's riddled with mistakes. I'm going to have to go and fix this.”

She slipped off her apron. “I'm so sorry, Marion. I feel awful about having to leave you in the lurch. You were doing so well. Reuben, do you mind helping Marion finish her lesson? It would be such a shame for her to have to quit now and go back to tinned meat and fish-fingers.”

Reuben put down his knife. He looked up at Erica. “Don't worry about us. Will your work be okay about this? You'll be able to sort it out?”

Erica smiled, showing most of her perfect white teeth. “It'll be fine.” Then, for the first time, I saw her smile waver. “Well, I hope it will.”

“Thanks anyway, for going to all this trouble,” I said, continuing to chop the onions. “Shall we save you something for later?”

“No.” Erica kissed Reuben goodbye. “It'll take forever. But hopefully I'll be done by Fire Night. See you then.”

Erica left, and facing Reuben across the table I almost wished she'd been able to finish the lesson. The first thing he did was turn the radio on. Nottingham Forest playing football. He stood and listened until the commentator announced the score. Forest were one-nil up. As if someone had thrown a switch his tension vanished.

“Okay. Let's get on with it. Grab a pan and heat up some oil. No – not that much oil! Just enough to coat the onions…”

It was hard to tell if Reuben was any good as a teacher, because I was such a disaster as a student. He intimidated me. I still hadn't forgotten the chicken incident, and he just seemed so
big.
Not so much physically, but he seemed to take up so much space with, I don't know, his personality or something. Not the most graceful person at the best of times, I became clumsy, awkward and scatterbrained to the point where I felt ready to bash myself over the head with the antique copper frying pan.

Reuben grew increasingly impatient and frustrated, though to his credit he did try not to show it. At eight-thirty I finally tipped a plate of stuck-together spaghetti clothed in watery-yet-burned tomato sauce onto two plates.

We stared at the food for a few moments.

“Sorry. I've wasted your evening. And made a total mess of your kitchen. Maybe we should just throw this in the bin. I can make an edible cheese sandwich…”

“Sit down.” Reuben pulled out a chair for me to sit on. “It's taken us two hours to make this dinner. I've been lugging vegetable boxes since half past six this morning, and I'm so hungry that this doesn't actually look too bad. Stick some cheese on the top and it'll be fine.”

We grated some cheese on the top. A lot of cheese. It was not fine. I managed to force down a few forkfuls.

Reuben had no such qualms, finishing his plate, and the rest of mine, before pushing himself back from the table and stretching his legs out. “There. You can tell Erica your first lesson was a success. We made a pretty good team, even without her
supervision
.” He winked at me. I grabbed my water glass and hid behind it.

Reuben smiled. “Erica means well; she just gets a bit carried away sometimes.”

“I can see she really loves being here – at the Hall.”

His smile disappeared. “Yes. Yes, she does. In small doses.”

We ate our sloppy crème brûlée without talking. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, just the quiet of people too exhausted to bother making conversation. I cleared away the remains of the meal and washed up while Reuben, who dried, suggested what I could do to improve things next time. Did I want there to be a next time? I wasn't sure yet.

 

My visit to the home of Morris Middleton, aka the minstrel, aka the unpleasant man who had been rude to me at the festival, counted as just about the creepiest afternoon of my life. I had known the kind of terror that turns your spine to water, at the hands of my imaginative cousin, and grown accustomed to the drip drip of slow, steady, stomach-curdling dread that came as an inevitable side-effect of living with my mother. But this was just plain weird. Bad weird. Thank goodness for Ada.

I picked Ada up from the thatched cottage she shared with her sister, and we drove through increasingly narrow, potholed lanes through the forest until we reached a tiny, semi-derelict ruin hidden under the eerie shade of towering pine trees. If Ada and May lived in a fairy-tale house, this had to be the home of the evil villain. I pulled up on the patch of dirt standing in for a driveway and switched off the engine. In the murky light under the trees, the gloom heightened the impact of cracked, peeling walls and rotten frames surrounding windows so grimy no one could have seen inside, not even once they had crept right up to the front entrance.

As Ada lifted her hand to knock on the door, a sharp cacophony of barking burst through the flimsy wood, then a heavy thud on the other side as a large animal threw itself against the inside of the door. When the next crash threatened to break the door down, Ada had to grip hold of me to stop me sprinting back to the car. She peered in through one of the filthy windows and shouted through the glass.

“Morris! It's Ada. Stop fooling about and open the door! And mind you get the wolves under control first. You don't want a repeat of what happened with Mrs Grant!”

What happened with Mrs Grant?
I might have said that out loud, but I think my voice had reached supersonic frequencies that only the wolves –
wolves?
– could hear.

After a few more knocks and yells from Ada, a lot more barking, growling, snarling and scratching from inside the house and some muffled swearing, Morris Middleton, aka the craziest man in the forest, opened the door.

He slipped through a gap just wide enough for his beer belly, slamming the door on the beasts trying to shove their way out after him, and gestured with his large, grimy head toward the back of the building. Without his medieval hat, I could see he had one of those heads with hair just about everywhere except on the top where hair ought to be. I didn't blame him that the hair was stained yellow in places, and lank and scrawny. It was probably a hard job to
look after hair that long growing in all those places. His head must represent Ada's worst nightmare.

At the other side of the house, in between piles of wood, junk metal and about a thousand empty beer cans, Morris Middleton led us inside a lean-to containing a bloodstained table on which lay three dead squirrels. One of the squirrels had its guts half pulled out. A bowl holding what looked like lots more guts stood on the floor beside it. A sink that may have once been white hung against the wall adjoining the main house. A high shelf ran along one wall, and a black three-legged stool stood next to the table. Oh yes, and a thick, buzzing crowd of fat, shiny flies swarmed on everything. I cannot even begin to describe the stink. Except it smelled of dead squirrels, blood, guts, filth, unwashed crazy forest man and a zillion flies.

I stepped as far back into the (thankfully wide) doorway as I could without being actually outside again. My skin crawled, imagining flies already burrowing beneath my clothes. I tried to keep my features neutral, fighting the stench. Ada had no such qualms. She stuck a lace-edged handkerchief in front of her nose and scowled at Morris Middleton.

“This is repulsive, Morris! We can't talk in here.”

Morris squatted on the stool, tugging at the squirrel innards. I turned away, sucked in a lungful of relatively clean air and tried not to gag.

“I don't want to talk. I didn't ask you to come. If you don't like it, you can – ”

“Mor-ris,” Ada sang, pulling a bottle of whisky out of her shoulder bag while still managing to keep the handkerchief pressed against her face. “Let's not be too hasty, now. We know you are a busy man and your time is precious.”

He glanced at the whisky, then sighed. “Wait five minutes.”

We waited on the scrubby grass behind the house, carefully avoiding the piles of dung. Hoping they were animal in origin.

The minstrel emerged, as promised, five minutes later, wiping his hands on a grey rag.

“What?”

“Good afternoon, Morris. How are you? Are you keeping well? The wolves? All healthy, hale and hearty?”

Morris tucked the rag into the top of his woollen trousers. He folded his arms.

Ada smiled. “Oh, Morris. Drop the hard man act, please do. You know I've been interrogated by far worse.”

He sniffed. I waited, trusting Ada knew what she was doing.

“Marion here is looking for information about the Robin Hood Festival. From maybe the first or second year. She wants to know about this man.” With that, Ada offered Morris the photograph he had snubbed a month earlier. It was only a copy I'd made, but I still had to fight the urge to snatch it back out of his filthy, rank fingers.

“It's in the cellar.” Morris curled up the corners of his mouth. “You'll 'ave to look yerselves.”

Ada looked at me. Her eyes shone. “Well? What are we waiting for?”

 

I closed my eyes, which actually made no difference in the pitch-black cellar, thought about my warm, wonderful daddy, and edged forward down the slippery steps until I met the bare earth floor at the bottom. Ada, proving beyond any doubt to be indeed the fearless adventurer her stories suggested, followed behind me with a torch, the handkerchief now secured above each ear with a hairclip.

“Well, how interesting!” She whizzed the beam of the torch around the tiny room, revealing flashes of wooden crates stacked up against every wall. “A veritable treasure trove of secrets could be hidden inside these boxes!”

It felt like forever before we found the right box. Each container had been labelled with the year of its contents, but the writing – messy to begin with, and done in charcoal – had rubbed and blurred, becoming almost illegible. The boxes were stacked in no particular order, and we had to turn some of them around before we could find the date. The cold, dank cellar air, laden with mildew,
was suffocating. I felt profoundly grateful for Ada's cheerful chatter. Every time she paused for breath the sound of rustling, scuttling feet was enough to make me light-headed.

When we eventually found the box for 1981, the first year of the festival according to another internet search on Jake's computer, it was too heavy and awkward for us to manoeuvre up the steps. We had to stay in the cellar while we rummaged through the mouldy contents, finding newspaper clippings, minutes of planning meetings and eventually what we had been looking for: an original programme from the Robin Hood Festival. A quick flick through in the torchlight revealed a photograph of my dad, again in Robin Hood costume, laughing with another young man dressed up as Little John. The musty cellar disappeared around me, momentarily lost in the dappled sunshine of the forest.