Marlford (6 page)

Six

T
here was so much: pictures peeling from heavy frames, the skeletal remnants of dark furniture, cupboards stuffed with broken trinkets, lurching statues pale in the gloom, doors everywhere, unlit passages and narrow stairs, collapsed plaster and crumbling stone, the smell of rotting carpets and doomed wood, the irrepressible majesty of the confident spaces.

In the end, they chose a room that was empty apart from a four-poster bed with mouldering curtains, a greening mustard-gold, their edges frayed and their seams splitting.

Dan stepped warily towards the window, testing each of the floorboards in turn. ‘Turn on the light. Let's see properly.'

Gadiel searched both sides of the doorframe for a switch. ‘I don't think there is one.' He went back out to the corridor; when he returned he was puzzled. ‘There aren't lights anywhere. I don't think there's any electricity.'

‘Nothing at all? Don't be stupid. There must be, man. Even stately homes have electricity. Even the rich need
toasters.' Dan scrubbed angrily at the glass of the window with his wrist, working a circle into the grime and peering through it, as if to find the cause of such a complicated deception. All he saw was his own reflection, flat against the dark.

He pushed at his hair, turning away and flinging himself full length, backwards, onto the bed. They heard the squelch of the springs and, moments later, smelt a stale must. ‘We can't let it put us off, man. Not now, when we've got a good thing going. And I bet there'll be electricity downstairs. We should go downstairs again. We can set up the wireless.'

‘I don't know.' Gadiel went over to the bed and fingered the curtains gently. The fabric flaked, disintegrating under his touch. ‘I quite like it up here. There's something about it… it's as if they've lent us their bedroom, as if we've been invited to stay.'

‘Oh, come on, we're not house guests, man. This is a squat. It's a radical act of subversion.'

‘Still, I think it's a cool room. I think we should stay here.'

Dan sat up, brightening at a sudden thought. ‘OK – yeah, I see. It'll be ironic. A statement. The modern politics of equality and opportunity in the boudoir of the ancien regime.'

Gadiel rubbed away the greasy dust between his thumb and forefinger. He laughed. ‘You talk rubbish,' he said.

When they had first forced their way into the rear of the house, they had left their bags by the door. Now, they could not find their way back. The bedroom corridor was longer than they remembered; there were several flights of stairs.
Only the faintest glow squeezed through the scarred and dirty windows and the darkness disorientated them. They had not thought to mark their route and neither of them had noted any features by which to navigate. They had to feel their way, keeping close together.

‘We should have left a trail of string, like that Greek guy,' Gadiel said.

‘Theseus.'

‘Yeah, that's it – Theseus.'

‘And the Minotaur,' Dan reminded him. ‘It's just the kind of place for Minotaurs.' He pounced on Gadiel, gripping him by the shoulders. ‘
Rargh!'

Even such a stupid joke disconcerted them.

They found themselves on the ground floor in the most ancient part of the manor, the rooms smaller and lowceilinged, panelled in thick wood and flagged in stone, the air cool, trapped from winters long past. They came to a dead end where the passage was blocked by a wall and had to retrace their steps. They chose another door. The internal configuration of the house was baffling: different periods were overlaid one on top of the other, each wrestling with the next, grappling to overcome structures that had gone before: there were doors at odd angles; windows packed with stone or sulkily offering abbreviated views; cupboards and closets knocked through into airy chambers; elegant reception rooms eroded into cupboards and closets. The fabric of the manor seemed uneasily held, the aggression of its reconfigurations barely contained.

‘We could be here for ever at this rate, man, going round and round,' Dan complained. ‘I can't believe they could live like this. Why would they want to live like this?'

It seemed too insubstantial, their hunt for an untidy pile of carrier bags, tiny evidence of the present in the vastness of the past.

‘I suppose they knew their way around,' Gadiel answered, reasonably.

Dan opened another door to a dead end. ‘Look, man, in my house you open a door and it goes somewhere. There's a reason to open it. There're no tricks. It's honest. Here – well, it's… it's pointless.'

‘It's cool, though, too, don't you think?' Gadiel answered. ‘Isn't there a part of you that thinks it's really cool?'

‘I'm not taken in like that, man.'

‘I bet you are, really. I bet you love it.'

Dan gave a short, bitter laugh and walked on.

At last, and all of a sudden, they found themselves in another set of rooms, defiantly simple. Somewhere a tap dripped.

‘I remember that! I remember the tap!' Gadiel was triumphant. He rushed ahead. ‘Look, Dan, that's the window we broke to get in.'

They were back at the bags. Everything was as they had left it: shards of glass kicked into a corner, a window wedged open. They stared at the evidence, baffled by it, in the end, as much as relieved; it drew them back from the illusions of the manor's interior, unexpectedly confirming the ordinariness of their arrival.

‘And look – there're lights here and everything. Look!' Gadiel pointed above his head to a single bulb, brown with filth, stuck with flies, the most marvellous of discoveries.

He found the switch and flicked it on; the bulb buzzed
and gave out a dim glow, enough to grasp the extent of the kitchens, stores and pantries, small workrooms at the back of the manor, which led one from the other, looking out on to an internal courtyard through a row of wide windows. Pale blue paint peeled from the plaster; cupboards hunkered against practical brown tiles.

Gadiel extracted a cobwebbed bundle of wax candles from the shelves and examined it solemnly. ‘We should borrow some of this stuff,' he said, but there was little left to scavenge and they were steadfastly practical, looting nothing more than some string, a dish of clothes pegs and a bar of green soap, nibbled at the corners by mice.

As they collected their things, Dan pulled a portable radio from one of the carrier bags, holding it up solemnly, a trophy. ‘We have to listen. They'll be nearly there won't they, already?'

Gadiel flattened his hand over his mouth, making his voice crackly, distant. ‘Apollo 11, this is Houston…'

They laughed together.

They argued about the route back to the bedroom corridor, and, in the end, it may have been only by chance that they came upon the narrow, turning staircase that took them up. They paused at the barricade that marked the end of their part of the manor: the corridor was properly truncated here, bricked up with roughly cemented breeze blocks that prevented access to the wing in which the Bartons were still living.

‘It's not much, this.' Gadiel tapped lightly on the barrier. ‘They'll hear us. It might frighten her.'

Dan held his candle high. ‘Who?'

‘Ellie. I don't want her to… you know, she might not like it.' Gadiel leaned forwards, putting an ear against the breeze blocks.

‘But that doesn't matter.' Dan spoke more loudly than he needed to. ‘What she thinks doesn't matter – this is a political act, man.'

‘Sssh.' Gadiel flapped a hand to try to quieten him, and the candle flame leapt. He drew back from the barricade. ‘Of course it matters. She's been nice to us. They gave us supper; we just turned up at the house and they gave us supper.'

‘You make it sound biblical.' Dan smirked. ‘Come on, Gadiel – we're squatting. It's a recognized form of protest. It's a movement.' He pressed his spectacles hard against his nose. ‘“
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all
.”' He shrugged. ‘You see?'

‘But it's not as simple as that,' Gadiel insisted. ‘Not here.'

‘Come on, that's Marx. Karl Marx. Don't you believe in a new social order?'

‘Yeah, I suppose.'

‘Of course you do. That's why we went travelling, isn't it? To see something of the world, to make a difference.'

‘I thought you just wanted to try out the van.'

‘Oh, come on. I had bigger ideas than that.'

‘Not till the van broke down and we turned up here, you didn't.' Gadiel grinned.

‘Yeah, I did. But I knew you wouldn't come if… Man, you see? I knew you'd be like this if I'd proposed a radical agenda.'

Gadiel was unmoved. ‘How had you planned to change the world, then?'

‘See
the world, I said.
See
the world.' Dan poked at his spectacles. ‘Which is what we're doing.'

‘Well, we've not seen much of it. It's not been a week since we left.'

‘Yeah, and already we've started a squat. Come on, Gadiel – you're being negative, man.'

‘But there's only two of us,' Gadiel pointed out. ‘And no one even knows we're here. How's that going to make a difference? It doesn't make sense if there's only two of us.'

Dan slapped his hand against the breeze blocks. ‘Others will come, won't they, in time? They'll come and join us. Other people will hear about it and come.'

‘What other people?'

‘I don't know. But that's how squats work, man – they grow.'

‘Yeah, and what will happen then? To Ellie? We'll have to go back to university at the end of the summer and – well, then what?'

Dan shrugged, setting off for the bedroom, his candle light bobbing. ‘It'll be out of our hands, man,' he answered, talking as much to the fickle shadows as to Gadiel. ‘The squat'll have a life of its own by then.'

Seven

E
llie turned away from the lime avenue and the mere, on to the rutted tarmac lane that led to the hutments, walking unhurriedly to the two lines of oblong shacks, patchworked in corrugated metal and wooden panels, greening in the damp shade of a row of fir trees. The buildings were featureless. The hutment closest to the manor, still in use by the men, was in reasonable repair – it had been mended in places; the ground around the doorway trodden smooth – but the rest were overgrown with brambles and spiked through with twisted saplings; they created an ugly scar of ruined shacks, their roofs collapsing and rusting, their walls splayed. The barbed wire that had once coiled around them was denuded, like the coarse hair of a very aged man. It sprang in odd directions, forced into crude and unexpected sculptures, finally slinking away towards the end of the lane and disappearing into a shallow sinkhole. The field beyond, bounded by a black-and-white metal fence, was neatly planted with barley, pale and dense, almost ripe.

Ellie collected water from the standpipe so that she
could wash dishes in the wide, flat sink which was secured to a wobbling trestle of sorts at the side of the hutment. From the lane and the strip of cleared land alongside, she picked up empty beer cans and a number of dog-ends, then went behind to the toilet, which she sluiced with water from the hose, jamming the wooden door open with its wedge to air the cramped and foetid space within.

Inside, the dormitory was laid out with two parallel rows of metal bedsteads, twenty in all, most of them empty; a single, large table was the only other piece of furniture. She made the three beds nearest the door and collected the washing piled on the floor.

As she cleaned, she recited Shakespeare, the complaints of injured Caliban accompanying the brisk scratch of the broom. But the verse flustered her; she found the conversations of the previous evening cramming back into her head, the words stripped and prickly, meaning nothing now. She grabbed one of the metal bedsteads, letting the broom drop, breathing hard, sickened with the dizzying sense that she was falling. It took her a while to compose herself. When she set to work again, she took care to sweep more slowly, beginning a leisurely dramatization of
The Lady of Shalott
, transporting herself to a springtime of lilies; a blossoming island where she drifted on the dark river of Tennyson's long poem, beautiful and bewitched, half-sick of shadows. Standing on her toes, she looked out of the high window, expecting to see the approach of an armoured knight through the narrow slot of brilliant light, his figure massive on the jewelled saddle of his heavy horse. She heard the thunder of hooves from the fields beyond, the rattle of armour, her sigh.

She could not quite believe it when he did not appear.

She pushed the trailing washing into a sack, smelling the men's familiar scent of stale cigarette smoke and damp cloth.

‘We've been considering the matter of the van,' Hindy said.

Ellie started. They were standing by the table at the end of the hutment, watching. Alongside them, the door was still closed. She wondered if she had somehow summoned them by flapping out their smell from the grubby linen.

‘And the young men who came to supper last night,' Hindy continued.

She hoisted the sack over her shoulder. ‘I thought I explained. The van is broken. It's awaiting repair.'

‘We've been to Home Farm to suggest Oscar makes a visit to the stable yard. And we've decided to have a word with you.'

Hindy and Luden looked at Ata steadily; he stepped forward.

‘Miss Barton, when we first came here, it was a real country estate,' he began. They must have allowed for the kindness of his tone, his natural sympathy. Something about his slenderness, too, and his dark skin, gave his words a delicacy. ‘It was in many ways, for us, the apotheosis of England. Of civilisation, if you like. It's what we'd been told about, as boys – it's what we'd imagined when we came to this country. But we found ourselves trapped in the cities, jaded and disillusioned, unable to find a place for ourselves, overlooked on account of our way of speaking, our manners and our clothes. It was coming here, to
Marlford, that changed everything. It was what we'd been searching for.'

There were no interruptions. The other two men stood expressionless, their eyes cast down, while Ata represented them.

‘There is no doubt,' he went on, ‘that Marlford was where we wanted to be. But, over time, Miss Barton, we've found we've had to work with increasing determination to preserve our place here. And now, with the van in the stable yard and unknown young men invited to dine – well, we're concerned. You might say we're anxious.'

Ellie wished she could think more clearly, but there was still the rhythmic gallop of her knight's steed clacking in her head and beneath it, like the rumble of distant thunder, voices, glances, the unanchored words of the boys' arrival.

‘Look, I know how you like it, of course I do. But I don't really see that anything has changed. Marlford is fine. It's just a van.'

Ata began again. ‘If Lady Wilshere had remained, we would have been confident of—'

‘Please don't! My mother has nothing to do with this.'

He put up a hand in apology and smiled. ‘We don't wish to cause hurt, Miss Barton, of course. But it's clear to us that if Lady Wilshere had remained at Marlford, then this conversation would never have been necessary. She was such a young woman when she came, hardly older than you are now, I suppose—'

‘The same age.'

He inclined his head very slightly in acknowledgement. ‘But her influence was immense.' He glanced for the first time at his friends, for validation of his assessment. They
both nodded. ‘We grew to trust her extraordinarily quickly. And she grew to trust us. To rely on us, I would say.'

‘I don't quite see what you want,' Ellie said. ‘I've heard these stories before.'

‘We're simply making known our concern, Miss Barton.' Ata paused. ‘We're beginning to find your father – well, unreliable.' He wiped his hand across his mouth. ‘He's very much the youngest son, I'm afraid, and ever since we first had the pleasure of his acquaintance, well… of course, he was thrown after the war – coming back a hero, and finding there was no one to come back to.'

‘We've advised him as best we can, given the circumstances,' Hindy muttered.

They looked at her, expecting something she did not understand. She glared back in return; they had never before called him a hero, she was sure of that, and she found the idea irritated her.

‘I have a great deal to do.' She took a step towards the door but it was clear they would not let her pass; they shimmied very slightly sideways, blocking her exit.

‘We simply want to speak to you, Miss Barton,' Hindy said.

‘But what about? Not about the van again, surely? I really don't see what I can do.'

‘You're the future of Marlford, Miss Barton.' Hindy made it a simple fact. ‘We have to speak to you. We're old men. When we're gone—'

‘Oh, wait – no.' Ellie felt a stab of fear. ‘I don't see how I'm the future of Marlford. Not at all. With all the debts and Papa and… you're mistaken.' She tried again to escape, pushing forwards towards the door.

Luden hooked his arm through Hindy's to brace their line. ‘We hoped for sons, of course – everyone did,' he said. ‘We spoke to your mother a great deal about it. But, in the end, circumstances being as they are, there's just you. It's an outcome we all have to accept, however painful.'

Ellie felt her cheeks burn. ‘How dare you? How dare you say things like that?' It was not as angry as she had intended. She heard her own distress too clearly.

‘Miss Barton, we just want to help,' said Ata. ‘We regard it as our duty…'

But she could not listen to any more. She threw the sack down and pushed past them, flinging her arm hard against Luden's bony shoulder. She might have called out, she was not sure; all she knew was that she was running from them, ripping through the long, damp grass, her tears choking her.

Turning into the woods, following a line of old trees, Ellie pulled through the brambles and trailing ivy, the hawthorn that snatched at her arms. She ignored the pricks and grazes; she went on too fast, her dress tearing, pushing on, deeper into the wood. She did not know where she was; she had no sense of Marlford, only of the clasp of foliage around her and the men somewhere behind, tilting space, so that no matter how fast or how far she ran, she was always tumbling back towards them.

Bursting out at the far limit of the woods, she was brought up sharply by the sudden cleanness of the sky, and the boundary fence at the edge of the estate, with a crop of barley sparkling beyond. A figure was sitting on the metal railings, precariously balanced, his back to her approach.
He was so out of place, such a breach in the confusion of her thoughts, that she did not recognize him, but there was something in the curve of his silhouette that drew her, and she went on watching him.

She stood quietly, knowing only gradually that it was Gadiel. Even then, it was several minutes before she spoke. ‘Did you find a garage, to fix the van?'

He continued to be still; she thought he had not heard her. When he finally turned to her, he seemed grave. ‘No. Not yet.'

She went up to the fence and followed his gaze across the field. ‘It's a nice day.'

He resisted her pleasantries and slid down from the railing. ‘I felt we might be out of line,' he said. ‘Last night. Turning up like that.'

‘Oh, no – not at all. Hardly anyone comes. No one comes. But that doesn't mean…' She pulled at the fabric of her dress in an attempt to conceal the rips, then worked with quick fingers, gathering up her disordered hair and pinning it tightly. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. I'm just sorry that supper wasn't more elegant.'

‘I enjoyed it.'

‘Did you? Good. That's good.' She dabbed at a graze on her arm and, for a while, nothing more was said. She wondered at his silence but she liked the way it settled between them, and did not disturb it.

When he finally spoke, it was with reverence. ‘This is such a beautiful place.'

‘Oh, I don't know…' She was taken aback by his solemnity. ‘It's not what it was.'

‘That's what makes it beautiful, don't you think?'

This seemed a remarkable statement.

‘I could show you around one day, if you have time. There are some lovely corners left, even now. And you might be here for a few days if you're waiting for the van to be mended.'

‘I'd like that.' Gadiel smiled at her. ‘But I've explored a fair amount already.'

‘Oh, no, not just around the village—'

‘I wasn't at the village.'

‘Weren't you? But you found somewhere to sleep?'

He brushed something from his arm. ‘Yeah, fine, and well… I came back and had a look round. That was all right, wasn't it?' He spoke quickly, not allowing her time to answer. ‘And so I've seen quite a lot. I was up all night. You can see quite a lot in a night.'

She could not believe this was true. ‘I was up early, too.'

He shook his head. ‘No – all night. I never went to bed.' He laughed at the look of dismay on her face. ‘Don't worry. It's not a crime. We tried to get the radio going so we could listen but there was hardly any reception, so I thought I'd come out and watch the moon instead. But there wasn't much to see.' Patchy clouds had quilted the dark; there had been few stars, the sky flat and homely. ‘It was a shame, though, about the radio. Did you hear it?'

Ellie fiddled with a crusted spot of rust on the fence. She had no idea how to reply. So she shook her head.

‘You missed it, too?' he went on. ‘It's miserable, isn't it? It feels like we've missed out on something massive.'

He offered her a sad smile; she did not understand the sympathy in it.

‘But I hung around outside, anyway. I needed the air.'
He reached out and took her by the hand, peeling her fingers gently from the fence. ‘And I found something. Something amazing. Come on, I'll show you.'

He ducked under the lower railing and led her over the uneven ground that skirted the field. After a while, they turned back towards the manor, looping right with the mere at their backs, dipping down into a kind of dell, shaded by overhanging trees; huge slabs of coloured quartz, stabbed through with grass, rose in tortured walls high above their heads, closing them in, so that Marlford was out of sight, leaving just a rough sky and an uneasy sense of isolation.

‘It's the rockery,' Ellie said.

‘Just wait.'

‘It's not natural. It was a fashion. They wanted to create a kind of magic landscape. It was a romantic construction – it's not real.'

Gadiel did not seem to be listening. He pulled her on, sinking slightly into the moss which banked up under an old silver birch but when a fern grazed softly against his leg he stopped, glancing down, and was suddenly aware of her hand in his. ‘Oh, sorry. I didn't mean…' He let go and stepped to one side. ‘Look.'

She knew what it would be. In an almost perfect circle of flat ground, enclosed by the largest of the rocks, there was a fantastical stone zoo: a host of small dogs with wings; angelic cats sprawled side by side; horses almost in flight; a petrified piglet with a slumping belly; a rabbit; two owls and a peacock; a mongoose; a kangaroo and some kind of monkey, all draped with stone veils and shrouds, wings stretched, magnificent. The muddle of growth was
trimmed here, the statues brushed free of lichen and grime. The animals sat proud of the grass, glaring at the intrusion.

‘It's the pet cemetery.' Ellie hardly moved.

Gadiel walked forward into the circle and bent to caress one of the dogs. ‘Really? That's what it is? All this?'