I don’t even look at him as he leaves the room, I feel so betrayed.
The door closes. Anthony gives me a soothing smile. ‘So,’ he begins, ‘how are you?’
I’m pretty snappish with him. ‘First things first,’ I say. ‘If I’m going to have a consultation with you, I might as well at least know your surname.’
‘Certainly,’ he says calmly. ‘It’s McFarland.’
‘And you’re a doctor specialising in what, precisely?’
‘Oh, just a GP. I have Mrs Wattestone under my care.’
‘Right. So they’ve got Beatrice’s tame quack in to get me carted off to the bin, then.’
He finishes with my wrist. ‘Oh, I’d say that was probably a little extreme.’
‘Still. Gathering data, no doubt.’ Even as I say it, I realise that I probably sound disturbingly paranoid. It’s the sort of thing the Princess of Wales used to put in letters to her butlers. ‘Look, I’m OK,’ I say palliatively.
‘But you’ve had … an incident?’ It’s a pointed question.
‘I wouldn’t say it qualified as an “incident”.’
‘And how long,’ he continues as if I’d never spoken, ‘have you been having these experiences?’
‘I what?’
That’s a bit like that old ‘have you stopped beating your wife’ question. The question itself establishes the supposition as fact, and any denials are just going to sound like attempts at evasion.
I try anyway. ‘Never. Until I came to this house.’
‘Interesting. So you feel it has something to do with the house, then?’
‘No. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t related to some of the people in it.’
Oh, boy. This isn’t going my way. I can see him assuming all sorts.
‘Really?’ is all he says.
I heave a sigh. ‘Don’t try hoary old therapy tricks on me. Listen: I know perfectly well that there are people here who don’t want me to be here, and I wouldn’t put much past them.’
I have to stop. I have to stop now. I’m digging my own grave faster than David Blaine. I sound like a raving lunatic, of course I do. As long as you’ve already been primed to think that I probably am one.
‘I see.’
‘No, you don’t. You don’t see at all. You think you see, but you don’t.’
I can see he’s gearing up to asking me if I play with my faeces.
‘Look, it’s pretty easy to make someone look as though they’re unbalanced,’ I say. ‘Seriously. All it takes is a few words in the right ear and a couple of stage-managed incidents.’
‘Ah. There have been incidents?’
‘Yes. Yes there have.’
‘Would you like to tell me about them?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘I see. And how am I supposed to judge if you won’t tell me?’
I think about that one. ‘OK,’ I say. And I tell him about the missing jewellery, the perambulating documents, the car and the night I came home from London. And while I speak, I can tell that I’m sounding mumblier with each passing second.
‘Mmm.’ He looks like he’s doing some thinking. ‘Mmm. Interesting.’
‘So you see?’
‘Yes,’ he says, and I think he sees something completely other than what I’ve tried to show him. ‘Tell me. Have you been sleeping?’
‘Of course not. Would you expect me to?’
He doesn’t answer that. Instead he counters with a question of his own. ‘And would you like it if I could help you with that?’
The thought, I have to say, is deeply attractive. I think the chances of me sleeping tonight are pretty much zero. ‘You’d do that?’
‘If you like.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think it would do you some good. I could write you out a prescription, if you like.’
I look at him uncertainly. ‘Prescription for what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says, meaning that he does but wants to make me feel like it’s my decision. ‘I was thinking perhaps a course of diazepam might help.’
‘Valium?’
‘That’s a brand name, yes.’
I suppress a swearword. Valium. That was the drug of choice for miserable alky housewives when I was growing up. The ones whose doctors wanted to keep them docile.
‘Do you seriously think I need something like that?’
‘It’s up to you. But if you’re having trouble sleeping …’
‘And being a nuisance with my imaginary friends.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘It’s what you’re thinking, though.’
The soothing smile comes back on to his face. ‘You’re under stress,’ he says. ‘A lot of people find they help when they’re stressed. You could try them for a while, and then we could review the situation.’
Chapter Sixty
A Medical Opinion
There’s a tap at the door and Nessa puts her head round.
‘Hi, love,’ she says. ‘Can I come in?’
I force myself to sit up. God, I must look a sight. I’ve been here crying under the covers for a good hour, and even my hair is encrusted with salt. I do a big snort, fill my mouth with snot and tears, swallow.
‘Been sent to check up on me?’
‘Naah. Private consultation. I’ll leave you alone if you want.’
‘No. Come in.’
She advances, perches on the edge of the bed. Feels my forehead. ‘So what is all this?’
‘Oh, Nessa,’ I manage before the tears come again.
‘Oh, love,’ she says, her voice all nurse and her face all friend. ‘Come here. You need a hug.’ Feeling her solid body against mine, I’m like a child. Wail like a child while she rubs my back.
‘They all think I’m mad. All of them. Even Rufus.’
‘No they don’t. No they don’t. Shhh. Tell me what happened? Tilly’s been very worried about you. We both have.’
I tell her. While she listens, she holds my wrist, looks at her watch, puts her hand on my forehead again.
‘Well, your temperature’s up a tad, I’d say. Mind if I stick this in your mouth?’
I lift my tongue out to receive the thermometer from her top pocket.
‘Moo fink ver migh’ be fumfin wrong wiv me?’
‘Naah. Nothing much. Although there will be if I forgot to wash that thermometer after I took it out of Beatrice’s backside.’
The thermometer shoots across the counterpane.
‘There,’ she says. ‘You can still have a laugh. Not dying yet, anyway.’
I give her an experimental snuffle.
‘I don’t really take her temperature that way.’ She picks up the thermometer and shoves it back in my mouth. ‘Just fantasise about it. I like to think of ways I could torture the old bat. It stops me doing it for real. Sometimes when I’m feeding her her slop I fantasise I’ve laced it with Ex-lax. Yes, that’s better,’ she says approvingly as she watches my reaction to this statement. ‘Jesus, it’s cold in here. No wonder you don’t sleep.’
‘Rufus does.’ I feel the prick of tears as I remember the look on his face when I spat the Judas accusation at him.
She seems not to notice. ‘Rufus grew up this way. He’s like a hamster. Goes into hibernation every night. You, in the meantime, are used to sleeping in the buff under a single sheet. You need to buy some thick jammies and a beanie hat. Not very bridal, I grant you, but he’s the one who wants to live in this hellhole, and I’d say any type of bride was sexier than a dead one.’
She goes quiet for a moment, lips moving as she counts under her breath. ‘Tell you what, your circulation’s a tad sluggish. Not so far as to be worrying, but … are you sure you’re not taking any sedatives or anything?’
I shake my head. ‘I bought some St John’s Wort at the chemist’s today, but I don’t suppose it will have had time to do anything at all.’
‘No. Takes at least a couple of weeks for that stuff to kick in.’ Sh
e takes the thermometer out, gives it a squint. ‘And your temperature’s up by half a degree. Again. Not such a lot, but …’ she shrugs. ‘I’ll keep an eye on you. Have you been eating?’
It’s my turn to shrug. ‘And throwing it back up again.’
‘Well, that’s not much of a surprise. If I had to eat those pheasants, I’d throw them up.’
‘I was buying a pork pie,’ I tell her, ‘at Lambourne’s in Stow. That was why I was up there in the first place. I thought maybe I could keep it up here and eat it in secret.’
Nessa laughs. ‘Well, there you go. You’re way off mad yet, girl. Those pies are ripsnorters. They’re the dog’s bollocks.’
‘I thought they were meant to be pork.’
She laughs again, claps me about the shoulder.
‘So what’s the verdict?’ I ask.
‘You know what I think your problem is? Stickybeaks. Stickybeaks and stirry old chooks. What you need is a bit of rest and a bit of privacy and you’ll be as right as rain.’
‘But what about the car?’
She reflects. ‘Yes. You’re right there. There’s no way around that one, is there? I’ll call Littlemore and get them to send a van and a couple of blokes with white coats.’
‘Nessa, I feel …’ I’m hopelessly lost as to how to express it. Alternative therapist maybe, but I’m as inarticulate about my own feelings as the next guy. You still tend to stick to talking about people’s holidays when you’re poking them in the feet.
I get my hand taken for the second time today, but this time it’s the firm, reassuring hand of friendship. ‘I know you do,’ she says simply. ‘Don’t let them win, girl. You’re better than that.’
We sit for a minute, just holding hands, then she gets up, goes over to the armchair-cum-closet and throws me a robe.
‘I lost Beatrice for an hour once,’ she tells me. ‘I thought I’d put her down for a rest in the garden when actually I’d left her on the khazi. Mind you,’ she adds, ‘I think it might have been one of those accidents of the Freudian persuasion.’
Chapter Sixty-One
The Fall of the House of Wattestone
Rufus is white with fear. Green about the gills. It’s the only way of putting it. It’s like someone’s turned down the reds on his colour palate. He’s got eyes like saucers and his hair is standing on end. Maybe that’s from dragging his hand through it, but the effect is the same as though he’d just opened a cupboard door and found an ogre.
At least, thanks to Nessa, I’m dressed and my hair is brushed. Otherwise I’d’ve been sparko when the summons came, via Tilly, for everyone to gather in the library.
‘What’s going on?’
Tilly shrugged. ‘Haven’t the foggiest, but I don’t think we’ve all been written into a comic opera.’
‘Sounds more like the end of an Agatha Christie to me. Do you think he’s found out where the bodies are buried?’ As I said this, I got another pang, a stab of guilt for taking the mick when there’s obviously something serious in the air. God, am I even going to be robbed of my flippancy? What weapons will I have left?
‘More like that they’ve lost the venue for the hunt ball and want to have it here, I’d say. That would be a joy,’ said Tilly. ‘Got to go. I’ve left Lucy locked up in the old salt safe and I’d better get back before she turns inside out and shrivels.’
So here I am, and I’ve found the room full not only with Wattestones, but with the surveyor and the geologist as well. And all of them sporting that don’t-care look on their faces which in England passes for concern.
‘So what’s up?’ I ask as I take a seat by Tilly and start poking my goddaughter with an index finger. She’s a nice little thing, Lucy. I don’t mind what people say: I like gingas. They look like they’ve come pre-peeled.
‘Right, well, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ says Rufus.
‘Oh, dear,’ says Beatrice. ‘Not another socialist government.’
‘No. Worse than that, I’m afraid.’
There’s an explosive sound of disbelief from Beatrice’s corner.
‘This is John Gregory,’ says Rufus. ‘He’s the surveyor from English Heritage. And this is Colin Bardwell. He’s a geologist from Oxford. The university,’ he adds, I guess because otherwise Beatrice will be asking why they didn’t get one from Fortnum and Mason.
‘Uh-huh?’ says Edmund. ‘So what’s the verdict?’
‘Not very good, I’m afraid,’ says Colin Bardwell.
‘Not very good at all,’ echoes John Gregory.
They both look expectantly at Rufus. Evidently neither of them wants to break the news himself.
‘OK,’ says Rufus, and his hand flies up his hair. I am surprised he’s not started pulling it out, from the look of him. ‘Right, well. It seems – there’s no other way of putting it – that the whole place is falling down.’
You don’t say. And he needed to pay these guys to tell him that?
The news takes a while to sink in. For the first time, probably ever in history, not one single member of the Wattestone family has an opinion. Finally, Tilly hoists Lucy up on to her shoulder and says: ‘How, exactly, falling down?’
The geologist clears his throat. He wears thick-framed glasses and a cagoule indoors, and his curly hair looks like it’s been cut by lamplight, in a tent, with the little scissors on a Swiss Army knife and no mirror. He looks, in short, exactly how I would expect a geologist to look. ‘Well, it seems … I’ve been going over the old plans of the house and grounds, and I think the most likely explanation is the goldmine.’
‘The goldmine?’ asks Beatrice. ‘But that hasn’t been worked since the eighteenth century.’
‘Granny,’ says Rufus, ‘you know that’s not true.’
‘Yes it is – oh,’ she says.
‘What?’ I ask. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Stupid, short-sighted greed, that’s what,’ says Rufus bitterly. ‘I’m afraid the Wattestone family didn’t want to pay tax like everyone else, so one of the ancestors came up with the wizard wheeze of saying the mine was dead and dealing in gold on the black market.’
I’m not quite there yet. ‘Sorry?’
Rufus sighs.
‘Your husband tells me,’ says the surveyor, ‘that the seam of gold didn’t actually run out until some time soon before the Second World War.’
Rufus nods. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Dad?’
Edmund looks a little pink in the face. ‘So I gather …’ he hedges.
‘No, not “so you gather”. You were there at the time. That’s how we had the money to build the Victorian wing and the Edwardian wing, and how come we managed to keep hold of an entire village when virtually every other estate in the country sold theirs off. And how come we carried on employing the same number of people for decades despite electricity and tractors and combine harvesters and machine shearing and automated milking systems and the rest of it. People in tied cottages tend to keep shtum, don’t they, if the alternative is homelessness and unemployment?’
‘I don’t get it,’ I say. ‘So we’ve got some sort of back tax problem?’
‘No,’ says Rufus. ‘There’s a statute of limitations on those sorts of things. It’s far worse than that. What we’ve got is a honeycomb of unmapped tunnels running under practically every square yard of the park. And it seems like they’re probably running under the house as well. Because that’s what happens when you’re not being kept an eye on by people who know what they’re doing. You dig about the place and jabber on about ancient skills and government interference, and no one has the first idea where they’re actually going down there in the dark. Remember when the Greek temple collapsed back in eighty-seven, Dad?’
‘That was the hurricane,’ says Mary.
‘We were lucky the insurance company fell for that,’ says Rufus. ‘But it wasn’t. You know as well as I do that a bloody great hole opened up underneath it and it all fell in. If the entire country hadn’t had claims in at the same tim
e, they would probably have sent someone out to check and noticed it themselves. Anyway, the same thing’s happening to Bourton Allhallows now.’
‘But how come,’ I ask, ‘there’s been no sign of it up until now? If the workings have been abandoned for over sixty years, surely …?’
‘Trees,’ says the surveyor. ‘I dare say it would have shown under the house eventually, but I would say that the entire park has been held together by tree roots for the last couple of hundred years. The thing is, for the height of every tree, there’s a root system at least as long under the ground. Sometimes twice as long. And you used to have excellent tree planting in this park.’
‘Until Dutch elm,’ says Rufus glumly.
‘Europe. Stuff and nonsense. I knew no good would come of it,’ says Beatrice. Everyone ignores her.
‘I told you,’ Mary says accusingly to Edmund, ‘you should have replanted.’
‘Wouldn’t have made much difference,’ says John Gregory. ‘Even if you’d planted straight away, they wouldn’t be much over thirty feet high by now. The old root systems have shrivelled up and rotted, and as a result the ground’s a bit like Emmenthal. It’s surprising it’s held together as well as it has, to be honest. As for the house … well. I don’t think any amount of planting could have stopped what’s going on now.’
Mary’s finally catching on. ‘So how much,’ she says, an edge of panic to her voice, ‘is it going to cost to rectify?’
The surveyor shrugs. ‘Hard to tell without a lot more work, I’m afraid. We’ll have to get some sonic equipment in to see what the extent of the workings are. And, of course, it depends how bad the damage to the house is already and how much more there is before we can stop the rot. Though I have to say, from the look around I’ve had, it’s pretty bad.’
‘So how much?’ she asks again.
Rufus clears his throat. ‘Anything between fourteen and thirty million pounds,’ he says.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Selling off the Silver
The surveyor and the geologist make themselves scarce in a flurry of briefcases and waterproof fabric. And the elder half of the family goes straight into denial the minute the door shuts.
Simply Heaven Page 39