‘Ne’mind. Look on the bright side. At least you won’t have to give me any money when I divorce you.’
Rufus half laughs. ‘Don’t even joke about it. You’ve no idea.’
‘I’ve got some idea.’
‘We’ll go bankrupt,’ he says, and his tone is uncomfortably matter-of-fact and emotionless.
‘No, Rufus. We won’t do that.’
He twists round to look at me and says: ‘You can’t say that, Melody. You don’t know. You don’t know any of it. I’ve dragged you into it and now you’re going to be dragged down by it along with the rest of us, and I’m really, really sorry.’
I try reasoning. Sometimes that works, I’ve found. ‘Rufus, you’re demoralised. Anybody would be.’
‘No,’ he says, with an edge of finality to the word. ‘I mean, yes, I’m demoralised, but my state of mind doesn’t alter the facts. We’re stuffed. Insolvent. Out of business. Broke. Bust. Cleaned out. Ruined.’
‘Insurance?’
A shake of the head. ‘Not for subsidence. Not around here.’
‘They can do that?’
‘Of course they can do that. That’s the point of insurance. They only insure you for things that aren’t likely to happen, not for things that might. They double your premiums for being old, you know, as well. It’s how they make profits.’
‘Jesus.’
‘This is going to cost – Mel, we’re not going to be able to find that sort of money. And Health and Safety won’t let us open for the season with the building unsafe, so there’s no prospect of any income.’
‘Can’t you borrow?’
Rufus’s laugh sounds out across the mud like a funeral knell. His meaning takes a moment to sink in.
‘OK. So how much do we owe?’
He names a figure that makes me gasp.
‘How? How? How does anybody borrow that sort of money?’
‘By being at school with someone whose family own a bank. And, of course, it wasn’t that much when he borrowed it.’
‘He?’
‘Daddy. Borrowed it in the nineteen seventies. Old mate’s interest rate. That sort of thing still went on, back then. He wanted it for one of his get-rich-slow schemes. I think it was the ostrich farm. That or the Alaskan goldmine. Or maybe the offshore trust with the unbelievable rate of return based on the fact that the man who was running it was tucking it all into a trust of his own in the Caymans. That one shook him, I can tell you. Said he’d never do business with a Harrovian again. But then, you know, there was Big Bang, and the nineteen eighties, and all the big banks started noticing that the small private banks were run by old Etonians without a brain cell to rub together, and so did the con merchants, and before you know it, your bank’s gone down with all hands and your debt belongs to some chap in Hong Kong who doesn’t have the same reverence for the Old School as Daddy’s friends had, and the silly old bugger hasn’t bothered to have limited liability to Lloyd’s when they go bust because everyone knows it’s just a licence to print money, and you’re running along only just managing to make the interest payments, and the roof’s falling off, and everyone in the village thinks you’re a laughing stock, and your forebears are spending money like it’s going out of style and just scattering bits of priceless jewellery about the place like they’ve come from Claire’s Accessories because they will not – will not – get their heads around the fact that there isn’t any any more, and running up tabs at all the local shops if you try to impose some sort of allowance on them because it doesn’t count as spending money, only it does, God knows it does, especially when they hide the accounts when they come in and you don’t know anything about it till there’s a bailiff on the doorstep, and I’m in despair, Mel. They just don’t listen to a word I say. They think that the fact that we’re an old family is enough, that Bourton has always been here so it always will be, and they don’t understand that you can’t just have money, you’ve got to make it. It took me five years just to get them to open up to the public. I don’t know what to do …’
Oh God.
A trout flaps and struggles in a tiny pocket of sludgy water below us. Poor creature: slowly suffocating in the place that should have been its haven.
I try a tentative suggestion. ‘Well, you know, you could always sell something …’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. There must be something. Isn’t that a Brueghel on the corridor up to the Lady Chapel?’
‘Oh, darling,’ says Rufus, ‘that would be so nice. You’re so nice. Solutions. God.’
‘Well. Why not?’
‘It’s a copy. Not even a very good one. That’s why it’s hung in that dark old corridor, so you can’t see too clearly.’
‘Oh.’
‘The original went for death duties some time in the nineteenth century.’
‘Oh. How about the Caravaggio?’
‘Granny would eviscerate anyone who touched that.’
‘Oh,’ I say again.
I pick a stalk of grass, start shredding it between my thumbnails. ‘Babe, we can find something. I know we can. It won’t come to that.’
‘It will, you know.’
He puts his head in his hands and to my shock I realise that he’s doing it to hide the fact that he really is crying. My heart does a huge, dizzying lurch. Seeing someone you love cry is the worst thing. It’s the time when the lies, the mutual fantasies that bind love together, are shown in all their tawdry worthlessness, like paste diamonds under strong light. When the belief we all cling to that we are one as two, that love confers invincibility, is shown for what it is: a hopeless expression of the search for heaven. Because I love him, I love him with all my life, but I can’t reach him. Maybe that’s what love is for: it’s a confidence trick we play on ourselves to fool us into believing we’re not alone.
I reach out and take him in my arms, press kisses on his temples, stroke away his tears with faltering fingertips. Whisper soft assurances like you would to a child. Hush, my love, be still. I’ll take care of you. I’ll bind you safe and keep you warm.
‘I so want to walk away,’ he says. ‘My whole life I’ve wanted to walk away. Run away. When I was a child. Looking at the damp streaming down my bedroom wall and the rats scurrying off when you turned the light on in the cellar and the plaster coming off in chunks from the Great Hall ceiling and the elms crashing down in the park and the houses in the village emptying out one by one and the peacocks dying on the lawns and mould inside the wardrobes and silverfish pouring out from under the lino and beetles in the carpets and paint peeling from every single wall, and everyone told me, over and over again, how lucky I was, what an awesome responsibility and an incomprehensible privilege. Mummy and Granny, talking about sacrifices and determination, battles and wars, bravery and grit, all of it so that I could be the heir to Bourton Allhallows, and take on the noble duty of preserving it to pass on to my sons. And I knew even then that it wouldn’t be possible, that there was dry rot in the timbers and woodworm and Dutch Elm and deathwatch beetle and something very, very wrong with the foundations, and that I was going to be the last one. That I wouldn’t be able to keep it going any longer. It’s beyond anything. There isn’t a lottery win, or an upturn in the market, or a mystery benefactor or a surprise legacy that could sort this out. It’s just a matter of time.’
It’s all right, my love. I’m with you.
‘And yet even though I’ve known it was inevitable,’ he says, ‘I feel like a traitor. If I have to walk away, I will be betraying everything. All the ones that came before me, and all the ones that will come after, will look on me as the coward, the one who wasn’t up to the job, the one who sold his birthright. That’s all that’s kept them going, you know, over the last hundred years. Each son, terrified that he was going to be the one. Each one of us pretending he loved the place that smothered his ambitions. It’s destroyed Daddy, and it turned Granpa into a raging drunk, and it’ll get me in the end, whatever I do to stop it.’
>
I’m speechless. I’d not thought of it this way. I’ve thought of all these people as rendered helpless by privilege, and now Rufus is wanting me to believe that they’ve been sucked dry by a house. Are people really like that? Is this what happens to great families, as the bloodline to the high-achieving villains that once headed them gets thinner and thinner? At what point in a family’s history does the stuff they have accrued become more important than the family members, the offspring merely custodians of bricks and mortar, rather than individuals in their own right?
I suddenly understand, now, why Mary and Beatrice put so much store in status, why Tilly is apologetic as though her very presence in a room were an embarrassment. Surrounded all their lives by husbands and fathers and brothers whose only function was to caretake an architectural vampire, they have been raised to be nothing but addenda to the caretakers. Status is the only thing available to them, and Tilly, husbandless and undereducated, has no more status in the world than the girl behind the checkout at Tesco. I find myself quietly grateful for the Aussie Battlers who raised me. Far better to be the offspring of the working classes on the way up than the overlords on the way down. No wonder they don’t like me. No wonder. Snobbery is so much more complicated than simply looking down on people. People aren’t really offended by their social inferiors. They’re threatened by what they represent.
‘Rufus,’ I say, ‘I feel obliged to point out that you’d be doing our kids a favour if you broke the chain. Why not call it quits? There might still be a pop star, or an IT billionaire or something, who’d think it was worth the small change for the big-face cachet of a slice of history like this.’
He shakes his head. ‘I can’t. It would kill Granny. And probably Dad, too. It would break them, and I can’t do that.’
‘But if it’s a choice between—’
‘Anyway, it’s not really my choice,’ he says. He’s sitting up now, and he’s surreptitiously wiping his face as though he thinks I might not have noticed his tears. ‘Apart from anything else, I can’t do a thing without the trustees’ say-so.’
‘Well, surely the trustees will be able to see that there’s nothing else to be done? Seriously. I don’t have any brief for living in a castle myself. It’s ruining my clothes and I’m getting chilblains.’
‘Darling, think about it. Who would you think the most likely people to be trustees are?’
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘You’d be much better off divorcing me now.’ He puts an arm behind my back. ‘Even without children you’d probably get a nice little settlement. We’ll have bugger-all in a few years’ time.’
I pinch his thigh, hard. ‘That’s not even funny.’
‘We’ve got excellent accident insurance, as well. After Granpa got killed out hunting and we realised we could have completely refurbished the orangery with the settlement.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind. So what are we going to do while I wait to bump you off, then?’
‘I don’t know. Same old story, I suppose. Job by job and hope for the best. I’ll have to get the surveyors in to look at this. It obviously wasn’t a fluke last time. So we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed. Maybe I can fix it. Maybe there’s a way.’
‘Well, you know what we say in Australia?’
‘What?’
‘If it can’t be fixed with pantyhose and fencing wire, it’s not worth fixing.’
Chapter Forty-Two
Dad’s Big Gesture
We’re down in the cellar, wearing waders, alternately loading a couple of wheelbarrows with Edmund’s wine and wheeling them to the door, where Tilly lumbers it, bottle by bottle, up the steps, when Edmund’s voice echoes from up in the house. None of us has exchanged a word about the fact that the grownups, as Rufus and Tilly refer to the olds, have been conspicuously not in evidence all morning, none of them so much as sticking a head out of the front door to tell us about breakfast, which we missed.
‘I say!’ calls Edmund.
Rufus and I are in that weird state where you are both freezing cold and covered in sweat all at once. Tilly’s hair sticks to her forehead and she already looks fit to drop. But she won’t go and rest, and, though the work we’re doing is probably less demanding than hers in a lot of ways, none of us is prepared to accept the potential consequences of making a pregnant lady wade in backed-up drain water.
It stinks down here. Where the rest of Bourton Allhallows smells faintly fungal, the cellar smells of rats and rotting things and old earth and, now, sewers. I have sent Mum off in the limo to pick up some medicated shower stuff – there’s a craft fair on in Stow anyway, and I’m sure the ceramic-cottage shops will keep her entertained for most of the day – but we’ll still probably go down with Weil’s disease, maybe a spot of cholera. God knows what ancient spores are lurking in the bones of the house, just waiting for a bit of water and an unwary passerby to wake them up.
‘I say?’ calls Edmund again.
Tilly wipes her forehead with the back of a hand that clutches a bottle of 1974 Petrus. ‘Down here!’
Footsteps, then a silhouette blocks out the feeble light. We’ve got a gas lantern lit at the far end, by the wine racks. The leccy has long since died. Probably sometime around 1953.
‘Good show.’
‘You’re welcome,’ says Rufus.
‘You are being careful with the labels, aren’t you?’
‘Doing our best.’
‘Only, it won’t do if I can’t tell what everything is.’
I draw breath to say something sarcastic, but feel Rufus’s hand on my arm.
‘I’m doing what I can, Dad. You might want to put in a bit of time with a magic marker after lunch.’
‘Do I?’ says Edmund. ‘Well, yes, I suppose I might. Good thinking.’
I slop my way through thigh-deep slurry towards the stairs. If Edmund is going to create a hiatus, I intend to make the most of it. Tilly has already sat down on a step, and I’ve got the one where her feet are resting earmarked for myself.
‘Was there something we could do for you, Edmund?’ I ask.
‘Was there?’ he says vaguely. Edmund is quite infuriating, sometimes. ‘Oh, yes. Your father wants us all in the breakfast room. Says he has a proposition.’
I reach Tilly and settle below her. She puts a sisterly hand on my shoulder. I glance up, gratefully, and give it a pat.
‘Can’t it wait till lunchtime?’ asks Rufus. ‘We’re a bit busy …’
‘No,’ says Edmund, ‘it can’t. Honestly, you young. We don’t ask a lot of you, Rufus. I think you could at least—’
‘We’re saving your wine cellar here, Edmund,’ I say sharply.
‘Well, it’s your father,’ he says, with ineffable reasoning.
‘What time is it?’ I ask Rufus quietly.
Tilly removes her hand to check her watch. ‘Half twelve.’
Rufus sighs. He seems to be sighing a lot, lately. ‘Well, I suppose we could do with a break.’
Then, for Edmund’s benefit: ‘We’ll be up in a couple of minutes.’
‘Right-oh,’ says Edmund cheerfully, and goes away.
Once he’s out of earshot, Rufus lets fly with string of expletives. ‘Bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody hell. Bloody bollocking buggery.’
‘You forgot bastards,’ I remind him.
‘Bastards,’ he says. ‘Right, well, better see what the old sods want this time.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to swear a bit more first?’ asks Tilly.
‘No, I’m done. But thanks for asking.’
‘Can I just say fuck it?’ she asks.
‘Well, normally it would be fine, but I’m not sure if you should be doing it in front of the baby.’
‘Sorry,’ she says. Then she bends her head and strokes her tummy and says: ‘Sorry, baby.’
I affect a little squeaky, foetus voice, put my face near her navel and say: ‘Piss off.’
For some reason, this strikes all of us as hysterically f
unny. A relief of tension, I suppose. I laugh till my belly aches, leaning on my sister-in-law’s thigh for support. I can feel her shaking next to me, hard belly and soft breasts pressed against my side. And suddenly, out of the blue, in the middle of my laughter, I feel almost tearful.
‘I do like you,’ says Tilly.
‘Yeah?’ I tell her, and gulp back my emotions. ‘Well, back atcha.’
‘Come on, you old slags,’ says Rufus, sloshing his way towards us with an armful of what looks like champagne, ‘on your feet or they’ll be sending Roberts in after us.’
Tilly takes two attempts to get up, uses my shoulder for leverage. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says, ‘I can’t wait till this is over. I feel like a water buffalo.’
‘Look like one too,’ says Rufus.
‘Mmm. That was why I came home. For the loving support of my family.’ She grabs four bottles of red and waddles up the stairs.
Dad’s grinning like a shot fox. He’s practically rubbing his hands together. Obviously he has something up his sleeve or he wouldn’t have sent for us all in this drum-roll fashion. Both families are gathered in their entirety for his announcement, Beatrice and Yaya eyeing each other from opposite sides of the room like baleful walnuts. You couldn’t get two more contrasting grannies. Each is a granny-stereotype in her own way – Beatrice the fluffy, scented granny with the heart of industrial diamond, Yaya the resentful, gloomy Mediterranean granny with the pockets full of contraband sweeties – but neither is recognisable to the other as an acceptable example of dignified old age. Mum is telling Hilary some involved story about a row she won with Harrods in Kuala Lumpur Airport and Hilary has one leg crossed over the other at the knee, and jigs his ankle. Why do Englishmen do that? Seriously. You’d think Hilary was pretty poofy even if you didn’t know he was. If you see what I mean.
There are no seats left. I know it’s the warmest room in the house, but I’d swap that for a chance to sit down for a bit. The three of us stand, vaguely dripping, on the rug.
‘They think they’re really something,’ says Ma, one of her favourite phrases; ‘way they go on in there, you’d think they owned the shop, not worked in it.’
Simply Heaven Page 27