The Manor

by Keane Jessie

  Soon it was over. They laid Charlie Stone’s son in the ground, and everyone went back to the big house.

  Nula was dazed with grief. Her beloved boy. She wouldn’t see him off on his first day at school, wouldn’t fret over him learning to drive, would never see him become a man, get married, give her grandchildren. All of that, she was going to miss. All of it, she’d mourn forever.

  ‘It was fucking tragic,’ said Beezer to Nula as he happened to be standing beside her at the buffet table.

  He had a paper plate of sausage rolls and Scotch eggs stacked high in one hand, a large Scotch in the other. Flashy, trendy Beezer. He was great with the kids, well with the girls, anyway, he didn’t seem to care for Harlan much. And as for women? He had all the gear and no idea. He never had a clue what to say to them, they were like an alien species to him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nula, who felt as if she was floating through a very bad dream.

  ‘Poor little kid,’ he said. ‘After that party too. At the christening. Christ, what a night we all had. Drunk as fuck, weren’t we? Even the kids were up half the night. Felt bad about that. Noisy music and all us lot dossing down everywhere and wandering the halls.’

  Nula didn’t want to think about the christening party. After little Jake died, she’d sacked Chrissy. Raged at her. Told her to piss off and be glad she wasn’t being prosecuted. That she should be grateful Charlie didn’t throttle her with his bare hands. Jake had been in her care. And Jake had died.

  ‘Poor bloody Harlan, must have been a shock, finding his little brother like that,’ said Beezer, scoffing down half a Scotch egg.

  Nula’s sore eyes focused properly on Beezer for the first time. ‘What do you mean? Milly and Harlan were asleep. They were up in the top nursery suite with Chrissy. Harlan didn’t find Jake, Chrissy did.’

  ‘Well no, I saw him down on the second floor. About four o’clock in the morning, it was, when I got up to have a piss. Stepped out of my bedroom and there he was.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Harlan. In his pyjamas.’

  ‘What, he was in the hallway?’ asked Nula.

  ‘He was just coming out of the room beside yours, the one right on the end.’

  Something that felt clammy and fearful was crawling up Nula’s spine. She could feel the room starting to sway. Beezer was talking about the nursery adjoining the master bedroom, the one in which baby Jake had been sleeping. Harlan had been coming out of there? Nula thought of Harlan, and of baby Jake who he was always asking to hold. But he wasn’t allowed to. He knew that. Not unless he was supervised.

  He’d gone there in the night.

  And next morning – oh Christ! – they’d found Jake dead in his cot.

  51

  For days Nula didn’t know what to do. Speak to Harlan, say What did you do? Accuse the boy when there might be nothing to accuse him of? Shake the living daylights out of him, demand the truth?

  But what truth?

  It could have been nothing. An innocent child, restless in the night, wanting to see his baby brother? But somehow Harlan never seemed innocent, did he. Or restless. Harlan was neat, precise, calm-eyed. And he was strictly forbidden to pick Jake up unless either Nula or Charlie or Chrissy was there.

  Chrissy.

  Chrissy was a local girl, the daughter of one of the village worthies; her folks, the Foster family, always attended church on Sunday. Thinking of the whole terrible thing now, Nula knew they should have got a proper trained woman, a Norland nanny maybe. For fuck’s sake, they could afford it! But no. They had still been trying to ‘fit in’ out in the sticks when they had hired Chrissy to watch over Milly, Harlan and newborn Jake.

  At that point they had still been trying to be one of the ‘country set’. Joining in shooting parties and wearing the wrong gear and feeling like a couple of pricks. What a total waste of time all that had been. But Chrissy had seemed a nice sort of girl: conscientious, never flashy. And so they’d hired her to live in and look after the kids, and the worst imaginable thing had happened.

  But how was that Chrissy’s fault, really?

  Cot death. It was a horrible thing to even imagine. When it happened to you, you were hit by a steamroller of grief. Of course she and Charlie had kicked off, blamed the girl for it. They’d both been wrecked by the loss of their only real son.

  Harlan had been in the nursery at four in the morning. Doing what?

  Nula thought that maybe she was still out of her mind with the horror of it all. The baby’s death, the police investigation, the autopsy . . . ah Christ, the sheer torturous hell of that, of seeing the Y-shaped incision on her tiny little boy’s pale body when she had clothed him in his christening gown once more to prepare him for burial.

  Now she was thinking terrible thoughts, thinking . . . oh God yes, how could she deny it? She was thinking that Harlan – the boy they had invited into their home, cared for, clothed and fed – had done something awful to Jake.

  Day after day Nula sat and mulled it over. Charlie didn’t come near. He was out, about, drowning his grief by keeping busy or messing about down in his ever-expanding ‘menagerie’ beyond the orchard, which still gave Nula the creeps but seemed somehow to soothe him.

  It couldn’t be right, what she was thinking. She watched him, cool grey-eyed little Harlan with his neatly brushed straight honey-coloured hair, playing with his games out in the hallway, absorbed in his own little private world or giggling in corners with that oik Nipper.

  It couldn’t be right.

  But then . . . how much did they really know about Harlan? About his background, about the sort of family he originally came from? Nothing, really. At the time, they had just been delighted to have a son. Nula because it meant she wouldn’t have to endure any more pregnancies – which turned out to be not the case, anyway – and Charlie because it somehow seemed to prove him as a man, the stupid prick. And for a while, they had been happy. Maybe Harlan was not the sort of boy Charlie would have wished for – he wasn’t a rough-and-tumble type, after all – but he was a son, to train up in the businesses, both legitimate and otherwise, to carry on after Charlie was gone.

  But then had come Jake. Their real son. Nula thought about it all for a long time. And then, finally, sick at heart but sure of purpose, she knew what she had to do.

  52

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ snapped Chrissy’s father when Nula rapped at the Foster family door.

  The Fosters were pillars of the village’s tight-knit community, the very definition of respectability. When Chrissy had got sacked from her job as au pair to these brash newcomers with their sudden disastrous news, the whole village had rallied around the Fosters for support. Them, not the Stones, not the ones who were really suffering.

  Of course Charlie’s reaction had upset everyone. He was going to sue, he was going to see Chrissy in jail, she’d murdered his son in the night . . . Christ, how he’d ranted and raved. Told everyone in earshot that she was a bitch, a cow, and she was going to pay for this.

  And now Ben Foster, his long, tanned farmer’s face twisted with temper, was about to shut the door of his eighteenth-century cottage in Nula’s face.

  ‘Wait!’ Nula surged forward. ‘I just want to talk to Chrissy, that’s all.’

  ‘Well she doesn’t want to talk to you,’ he said.

  The door was closing.

  ‘Please, I need your help!’ said Nula desperately.

  Ben Foster hesitated.

  ‘Look – I need to speak to her. Not to accuse her of anything, don’t think that. I want to hear her version of what happened that night. That’s all.’

  ‘The police already questioned her. She was terribly upset by it all.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. But . . . can’t I speak to her? For five minutes? Please?’

  Now the door opened a fraction more. Foster’s face was stern, his eyes unfriendly. ‘I don’t want her upset. And she has been. She’s blamed herself, and that’s not the case. This sort of thing c
an happen. It’s awful, but it does.’

  ‘I’m not looking to lay blame on anyone,’ said Nula. ‘We’ve all been so gutted by this. It makes a person half-crazy. I’m sure you can understand that?’

  Now his eyes softened, just a bit. ‘I can understand. Yes.’

  ‘So can I talk to Chrissy? Please?’

  ‘All right then. Come in.’

  53

  Chrissy Foster was in her room, curled up on her bed reading a magazine. When her dad knocked at the door and she saw Nula coming in, her expression froze. She scrunched up on the bed, looking much younger than her nineteen years, pulling the sleeves of her frayed orange pullover down over her hands and crossing her arms defensively over her body.

  ‘I haven’t come to make trouble,’ said Nula quickly, seeing the alarm in the girl’s eyes.

  Chrissy’s father stood there, unmoving. Nula glanced at him. ‘If we could have a few minutes alone? Just to talk?’

  Ben Foster looked at his daughter. ‘Chrissy?’ he asked.

  The girl stared at Nula’s face. Then she nodded, very slowly.

  ‘I’ll be right outside,’ said Ben. ‘If you need me.’

  He went out and shut the door behind him. Nula took a step into the room and Chrissy shrank back further on the bed.

  ‘Look,’ said Nula. ‘Both Charlie and me, we were very upset about Jake. If we took it out on you, I apologize. I mean it. I’m sorry. But we were out of our minds. Don’t you understand?’

  Chrissy cleared her throat and nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘We really don’t blame you, Chrissy. Not any more. I promise you. Only . . . somebody has said something to me, and I wondered if you could shed some light on it. That’s all.’ Nula edged toward a hardback chair loaded with discarded clothing. ‘Can I . . . ?’

  Chrissy nodded. Nula shoved the garments off the chair and sat down.

  Chrissy tucked strands of pale blonde hair behind her ears and eyed Nula intensely. She had big stick-out ears, Nula realized for the first time, and it gave her a vulnerable look.

  ‘What’s this thing they’ve told you?’ Chrissy asked.

  ‘Maybe they got it wrong,’ said Nula. Now that it was coming to the crunch, she found that she really didn’t want to hear about it. She had to force herself to stay here, sitting with her hands on her lap, instead of running from the room. Aware of her chewed, ragged fingernails digging into the palms of her sweating hands, she fought for calm.

  ‘It’s just a silly thing someone said,’ said Nula, feeling her throat closing, her mouth drying to dust and ashes.

  ‘Oh? What?’

  ‘It’s wrong, probably. Only someone said they saw Harlan coming out of Jake’s room at four on the morning he . . .’ Nula swallowed hard.

  But Chrissy was shaking her head, frowning. ‘That can’t be right. Harlan was asleep in the top nursery. Milly too. I got up at seven to go down and see to Jake and they were both still sleeping.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ Nula was finding it hard to breathe now. ‘Harlan could have got up without you knowing, couldn’t he? And gone down to Jake’s room?’

  ‘Well . . . yes. He could have.’ Now Chrissy looked uncomfortable.

  ‘You didn’t find Harlan difficult to look after, did you?’ asked Nula.

  Chrissy shook her head.

  ‘Or Milly?’

  ‘Milly’s fine,’ said Chrissy.

  ‘Harlan was fine too? Easy to look after?’

  Chrissy shrugged. Alarm bells started ringing in Nula’s head.

  ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, he’s not exactly an easy child, is he?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Chrissy looked uncomfortable. ‘Did you know he hides food under his bed?’

  ‘What?’

  Chrissy nodded. ‘He does. I’ve found a few things under there. Boiled eggs. Stuff like that. An old sandwich, it was going mouldy. I picked it up to put in the bin and he threw a fit. I mean, he really hit the roof. He said it was his and I wasn’t to touch it.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ wondered Nula aloud. She hadn’t had a clue about this. Chrissy hadn’t told her.

  ‘Have you heard of RAD?’ asked Chrissy.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘I researched it after a few months of looking after Harlan. It’s reactive attachment disorder. It means they have no conscience and they don’t appreciate the consequences of their behaviour. I think Harlan’s got that.’

  It was warm in the sunny little room, but despite that Nula felt a chill.

  ‘You looked it up? Why? Did he do something you thought was strange?’

  Chrissy hesitated. Then she said: ‘He seems very detached, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’ Nula did think that. She’d thought it for a long time.

  ‘If I were you, I would go to where you got him from, and I would ask some questions. Because honestly, Mrs Stone, he doesn’t seem entirely “there”. And that would worry me. A lot.’

  Nula looked straight at Chrissy. ‘Has he ever done anything around you that makes you think he could be . . . not “there”?’

  ‘This is difficult . . .’ said Chrissy, shifting awkwardly on the bed.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s a good boy, mostly. I think he tries. He really does.’

  But he shouldn’t have to try. Should he? thought Nula. But she said nothing. She wanted Chrissy to keep talking.

  ‘It was about a month ago,’ said Chrissy. ‘It was . . . I dunno. Spooky, I think is the word. Frightening.’

  ‘What did he do, Chrissy?’ Nula was staring at the girl’s face.

  ‘Milly and Harlan went to bed as normal. Then I settled little Jake down for the night and went back up to go to bed next door to the top nursery. I have the monitor, as you know, so if Jake cried I’d hear it straight away and go down.’

  ‘Yeah. I know that.’ It saved Nula herself the bother of night-time feeds, changes, anything. Now Nula wished to Christ that she’d been more hands-on, more involved. More . . . ah but Jesus, what was the use? She felt the awful depression stealing over her again, blackening her mood. Jake was dead.

  ‘So I went back up to the top nursery and got into bed and went to sleep. And then . . .’ Chrissy’s voice faltered.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then something woke me. I don’t know what. It was bright moonlight. The room seemed full of shadows. So I reached out, switched on the bedside light and . . .’

  ‘What? Go on for God’s sake.’

  ‘He was there. Harlan. He was standing right there, leaning over me.’

  Good Christ.

  ‘Did he want something? A drink of water . . . ?’

  ‘No.’ Now Chrissy’s face hardened even though her voice shook. ‘He didn’t want anything, Mrs Stone. He was leaning over me, and he had a knife in his hand.’

  54

  Belle was doing everything she possibly could to console Milly over the loss of her baby brother. Jill was touched to see them out on the lawn together, Belle putting her arm around a crying Milly, hugging her. Sometimes, she listened in to what they were chattering about.

  ‘We’re the can-do girls,’ she heard Belle say to Milly. ‘All right? We can be very sad about Jake, but we have to remember, he’s safe in the arms of the angels now, and he’s happy. The best thing we can do for him is to go on with our lives and be happy too.’

  Jill felt choked up to hear it. She drove the girls over to the grave; Harlan didn’t want to go, he stayed home.

  ‘There’s nothing there, anyway,’ he told Belle and Milly callously. ‘Dead’s dead, that’s all.’

  ‘Shut up, Harlan,’ said Belle.

  ‘Make me,’ he snapped back with a grin.

  Belle didn’t bother. They took flowers to the graveside, and filled urns carefully, arranging the blooms just so. They looked beautiful.

  ‘I don’t like to think of him down there, alone,’ said Milly, starting
to howl again as they stood beside the grave, preparing to go.

  Jill patted her shoulder. Belle gave her a hard hug. ‘He’s not there any more, Mills,’ she said gently. ‘He’s in heaven. Smiling down on us.’

  Jill looked at Belle with pride and had to brush away a tear. Belle was going to help Milly through this. And everything – sooner or later – would maybe turn out all right.

  55

  Chrissy had suggested Nula get some answers, but how? Charlie was away on business. He was always away, since it had happened with little Jake. It was like he couldn’t face the reality of their situation, that their child had died. He wouldn’t even visit the grave with Nula. He got furious if she so much as mentioned it, so she had to go there alone and stand there looking at the tiny prayer book headstone and wondering why?

  But then she knew why, didn’t she? It was because they were wicked.

  She thought back to those wild parties they’d once had. The unbridled sex, the swinging they’d once indulged in, before the babies, before her depression set in and gripped her so tightly in its merciless iron jaws. And the drugs business. That, more than anything, meant they were damned to hell. Didn’t it? Maybe they deserved to lose Jake. But her mind kept going back to Chrissy. He’s not ‘there’.

  Christ! What did that mean?

  But Nula knew. Of course she did. She hadn’t ever allowed herself to fully acknowledge it before, but she let the thoughts stream through her head now and they made her dizzy with dread. Harlan wasn’t normal. He didn’t interact properly with other children. Not even Milly, really. There was that one village boy who trailed around after him, that surly bullish creature Nipper, but could you really say that he was Harlan’s friend? No. You could not. He was more of a follower, she always thought.

  Mostly Harlan played alone, out there in the hall, and when he finished playing he would take his toys back upstairs and put them in the box marked HARLAN in the top nursery. He was meticulously tidy; in fact, he hated anyone touching his toys. If any went astray, he threw a spectacular strop that verged on hysteria.