I try to mumble that I wasn’t looking, but she just laughs and links arms with me.
The other girl’s behind, talking to Lynsey like a grown-up, asking her what year she’s in at school and whether she’s having a nice summer. Lynsey asks her back and the girl says she’s left school and she’s going to university next month. She’s going to be a teacher.
‘I’m going to university too,’ Lynsey says. ‘I’m going to be a vet.’
Then we’re at the kitchen. I know it’s scruffy because Mum’s told us all about it – no workspace to speak of, no proper units, cupboard shelves lined with newspaper – but I expected it to be clean. Mum comes in every morning when there’s people here and once a week when it’s empty. And I know she works hard because I do the ironing for all of us and sometimes her clean tabards still smell under the armholes when the hot iron hits them. So it’s a shock when I step through the kitchen door.
The sink’s piled with dishes and there are chopping boards and mixing bowls everywhere, even on the floor. Egg shells, still trailing snot ribbons of raw egg, have been left all around a scraped-out jug of something congealing to the colour of mustard, and the food mixer’s sitting with its head thrown back, its beaters crusted dark. Flies are everywhere, rising when we disturb them.
‘Yum, yum,’ says Morag. ‘Nice one, Aunt Anna.’
But she’s not looking at what I’m looking at and she’s not joking. The kitchen’s open to another room down a couple of steps to one side and the table in that half is crowded with bowls of food. Most of it’s salads, I think. Different mixtures of chopped-up stuff covered in salad cream, with a cake on a raised stand in the middle. It’s not a birthday cake. It’s a plain sponge with jam in the middle and icing on the top. Not even any candles.
‘Maybe we could throw a cloth over,’ I say. ‘Keep the flies off till we’re ready to eat?’
‘I’m ready to eat,’ the grown-up girl says.
‘Me too,’ says Morag in the 501s.
Lynsey gives me a worried look. Are we supposed to wire in to the birthday spread when the birthday boy isn’t even here?
‘How can you, after that lunch we had?’ says Rosalie. She shouldn’t be as confident as she is. If I had to wear that get-up I’d be mortified, but she’s not bothered.
‘Lunch?’ says the big girl. ‘I wasn’t invited to lunch.’
‘We went out,’ Morag says. ‘That was the deal. We had to sit there in a hotel dining room and make polite conversation and they agreed to leave us alone to enjoy the party.’
‘I was told to come at five.’
Lynsey and me were told the same thing, but it’s different for us because we’re strangers. That big girl’s a cousin like all the others and I understand why she’s pissed off.
‘Oh, Jelly,’ says Rosalie. ‘You didn’t miss anything.’
I’m staring at her and trying to decide if she can really be called ‘Jelly’ when noises upstairs make us all look up at the ceiling. There are thumps and shouts, then the thunder of feet on the stairs.
Sasha comes crashing into the kitchen with one of the other boys right after him, pulling at his shirt and dragging him down until they’re both rolling on the floor.
‘Fuck off, Paul!’ Sasha says. Lynsey gasps but I’m the only one who hears her. Sasha is kicking out and struggling hard but he’s laughing.
‘God, what’s that smell?’ says the grown-up girl who can’t be called Jelly, pulling her T-shirt neck up over her nose. The boy Paul is shaking something over Sasha, both of them choking and coughing as a cloud of white dust puffs out. It’s the talcum from our gift-set. I opened one end of it and sniffed before I wrapped it. They’re wasting it.
‘Drop your weapon!’ The short boy with the beard is here now. He’s got the cologne bottle in his hand. ‘Freeze or I’ll shoot!’ He launches himself on top of Paul and Sasha, squirting long squirts of the cologne until the nozzle stops and he’s got to let it go and start again. The smell’s even stronger.
‘You shitbags! It’s in my eyes!’ Sasha shouts, letting go of Paul and rolling away. ‘It’s in my fucking eyes.’
Paul’s still trying to empty talcum powder over him, but as Sasha scrambles to his feet, he gives up and throws the talcum tin into the sink beside the dishes.
‘Are you okay?’ the squirting boy says, sniffing and laughing.
‘No, I’m fucking blind,’ says Sasha.
The other tall boy’s in the room now. Ramsay with the acne. The girls – Lynsey included – are walking round the buffet table with their plates pretending they can’t hear a thing.
‘You stink like a pile of poofters,’ says the beardy boy. Sasha’s rubbing his eyes with his fists, ignoring him. He keeps ignoring him until the beardy one’s standing close, then Sasha wraps him in a hug, smearing his face and hands all over.
‘Ha-ha, look who’s talking!’ he shouts. Then he grabs Paul and rubs against him like a cat. ‘There you go. If I’m honking like a cheap tart, we all are.’
Ramsay takes a step back but Sasha just laughs even louder. ‘I’m not touching you, Pus-factory.’
‘It’s hard to believe you’re sixteen, Sasha,’ says Jelly. ‘You’d be a backward six-year-old.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a drag, Jellifer,’ Sasha says. He’s still panting and his face is caked with a mixture of sweat and talc ‘I mix much better cocktails than a six-year-old.’
‘Big talk,’ says Paul.
Sasha hawks and spits into the sink. ‘That stuff tastes even worse than it smells,’ he says. ‘Bring sliced lime and a bucket of ice to the bar, my good man, and prepare to eat your words.’
I watch. They have got limes. And an ice bucket.
I help myself to some of the gluey salads – there’s plain pasta and plain potato, but there’s some weird mixture with eggs and olives and little scraps of the saltiest thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. Saltier than salt somehow and greasy too. And there’s a big bowl of black shining balls I think are brambles till I see Rosalie scoop up a heap of them on a cracker. Lynsey takes another cracker, smeared with brown paste.
‘This isn’t Marmite,’ she whispers, through a mouthful of crumbs. She picks two black olives out of the egg and potato and chews fast, to take the taste away. Her face screws up and she shudders. ‘And there’s something wrong with the grapes!’
‘Ssh,’ I tell her. ‘Have some cake.’
‘I want to go home.’ She’s scrubbing her tongue with a paper napkin.
‘No, don’t go!’ Morag says. ‘We’re going to play games when we’ve eaten. Tell us your favourite game and I’ll make sure we play it.’
So Lynsey goes out of the kitchen with the girls, trying to explain the rules of piggy-piggy-squeak-squeak and making them laugh. She’s trying to be funny, but a bit of me reckons it’s her accent cracking them up.
I go after them, more or less to get away from the smell of the gift-set and the sight of the flies, settled on the food now and laying eggs there.
Chapter 7
I took the chance to set out brandy and hot coffee in Thermos pots in the drawing room while they were eating their pudding. It was dark-chocolate lava cakes with white-chocolate sauce. Peach made that noise some women make about chocolate and most women only make in the bedroom. I’d wondered earlier if so much rich on top of rich would make them sick, but now I was hoping it would soften them up and slow them down. It had never occurred to me that the kind of people who could afford this place might be rough; that there might be trouble to navigate, fights to break up.
And whether or not it was my food, when they finally left the table – I was tidying the library and watched them pass – it seemed like they were pals again. Laughing and joking. I watched them all through the crack at the hinge side of the door. Sasha had his arm slung around Kim’s neck, Paul held Rosalie’s hand, Peach and Buck were arm and arm. Only Ramsay was alone. He brought up the rear a few paces behind the rest and, as he passed the door, he turned. Had he seen me? Would it matter
?
I knelt at the fire again. It had died down enough to let me reset it for the next day, but I needed to do it quickly and get the table cleared before they started passing the dining room on their way up to bed.
Then I spotted something. A sharp corner of white behind the fire basket. The gift card that Sasha had hurled in there had overshot and escaped the flames. I took the tongs and reached in for it. The envelope was warm and smudged with soot but it had protected its contents except for one corner that had burned away.
‘Happy anniversary, Sasha. And welcome back. Love from—’
But the name that had got so deep under Sasha’s skin was burnt to ashes.
I laid it on the cleared grate and covered it with twists of paper. Then I imagined the fire failing to light and someone dismantling the kindling to try again, someone – maybe Sasha himself – finding it and getting angry all over again. I took it and slipped it into my back pocket to put in the recycling.
The library looked perfect when I was finished. The cushions were banged and plumped, the magazines re-fanned and the curtains drawn back to let in the morning light. I pulled the door over and went to tackle the dining room.
Peach had drunk more than everyone else. Of course I knew she had let all three of her own glasses be filled – I had filled them – but she had dragged Sasha’s and Ramsay’s glasses to her place setting and drained them too. Kim hadn’t finished anything except her water and had only taken a single bite of her pudding. It sat congealing on her plate, the chocolate lava that had oozed out warm now a cold sticky mess. Rosalie had eaten half of hers, then helped herself to grapes from the bowl on the sideboard. All the men had scraped their plates clean.
There were some spills, but the napkins were folded, not crumpled into the chocolate on their plates and they hadn’t started mucking about with the centrepiece or the candlewax the way some people do if you leave them at a table for long enough. The worst was that Kim, maybe to keep her hands busy while she wasn’t eating, had picked the label off the pudding wine and ripped it into confetti. It sat in a little pile beside her plate.
‘We’ve got a hamster,’ I told my mum, when she lifted the phone. The last tray-load was through and the kitchen door shut.
‘If that’s all…’ I heard her groan and stretch.
‘Are you in bed?’ I said. ‘All right for some. I’ve got a cake to ice yet.’
‘I’ve got a mini-bar full of ten-quid Mars Bars to pretend don’t exist. And an alarm clock set for five.’
‘You win,’ I said. ‘Anyway, they only want one sentence on it. No roses or anything. One bag of icing and a single nozzle change.’
‘What was it again?’ said my mum. She had forwarded the email request, with a laughing emoji.
‘There’s no love like your love,’ I said.
‘Aww. Maybe all this wedding palaver’s got me but I think that’s nice now.’
‘Most of it’s nice,’ I said. ‘The Os are nice. Ks can be a bitch.’
She laughed and we said goodnight. But when I’d hung up I suddenly felt uneasy for the first time. I couldn’t tell if it was her being so far away or me being on my own with that crowd. Or maybe it was only the quietness of the kitchen. I switched the monitor on but no sound came out of it. Maybe they’d all gone up already and I hadn’t heard them.
As I walked along the corridor, though, I could hear the click of billiard balls and the knock and rumble as one of them dropped into a pocket and ran along the channel.
‘Goodness gracious, great cues of fire,’ sang Buck.
‘You’re absolutely insufferable when you’re winning,’ said Ramsay. ‘Did you know that?’
‘I wonder what I’m like when I’m losing,’ said Buck. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever find out.’
In the drawing room, the silence was explained. Rosalie sat on the floor at Sasha’s feet, a brandy snifter dangling from her fingertips and her head hanging down. Sasha himself sat back comfortably against the couch cushions. Paul was in an armchair by the fire, staring into the flames. Peach was either asleep or unconscious, half lying on the smallest of the sofas.
‘More coffee?’ I said.
Rosalie lifted her head. ‘We’ve been reliving old times,’ she said. She sounded even drunker than she looked. ‘Kimmie went off to get her beauty sleep, so we thought we’d get our boring reminiscences out the way. Reminiscences,’ she said again, and made a better job of it this time.
‘Peach,’ said Sasha. Then louder: ‘Peach! Do you want coffee?’
Paul shushed him. ‘Don’t. It won’t sober her up. It’ll wake her up and then we’ll have drunk Peach yakking all night.’
‘Did you know why she’s called Peach, Donna?’ Sasha said.
‘Peach Plummer,’ I said, but even as I said it I realized Plummer was her married name and the nickname must have come long before it.
‘Peach schnapps,’ said Sasha. ‘During our first family party here at The Breakers, Peach drank an entire bottle of schnapps. It was the start of a long and illustrious drinking career.’
‘Sasha, you promised we wouldn’t talk about it any more,’ Rosalie said. ‘It’s a different house. Different name. Let’s just forget.’
‘Should I…?’ I didn’t know how to ask about plastic under-sheets and sick buckets without offending them.
‘Lay some in for this weekend?’ said Paul. ‘No, no, no, she’s never touched it since.’
‘Ver’ good thing,’ said Rosalie. ‘She had a complete black-out that night. I think if she took a sip of peach schnapps even now – even two and half years later – it would all come rushing back and she’d go stark raving bonkers.’
‘Decades,’ said Paul. ‘Not years.’
‘Twenty-five of them. That’s what I said,’ insisted Rosalie.
‘Is this you not talking about it any more, dear sister?’ Sasha’s voice sounded sardonic but his face had not a whisker of a smile on it anywhere. ‘Is that your best effort at locking the box?’
‘No,’ said Rosalie. ‘Don’t say that. It’s a secret. It’s a secret secret.’
‘Come on, you drunken mare,’ said Paul, getting himself to his feet and putting his hands out for his wife. ‘To bed with you.’ I stepped forward and relieved her of the brandy glass.
‘Will you brush my hair?’ Rosalie said, as they left the room.
‘Well, if there’s nothing else,’ I said to Sasha and to Peach’s closed eyes and open mouth.
‘Aren’t you dying to ask?’ Sasha said. He stood up and put his glass on the mantelpiece. ‘Great dinner, by the way. And excellent brandy.’ He went to the door and called across the corridor. ‘Come and scoop up your sister, Buckaroo!’
An answering shout of ‘One last frame,’ came back from the billiards room.
‘Well, if—’ I said again.
‘Locked in a box is the first level of secrets, you see,’ said Sasha, coming back and standing in front of the fire. He was rolling on the balls of his feet, his hands clasped behind him.
I’ve never known someone go from nasty to nice by drinking. Nice people get nicer and nasty people get nastier. Sometimes nice people get nasty. But here was Sasha not sneering or scoffing but just talking to me, with a hint of brandy softening some of the sounds.
‘We were big on secrets when we were kids,’ he was saying now. ‘It was the first swear. “I will keep it locked in a box.”’
‘Is it you?’ I said. ‘Playing practical jokes. Did you put the box up the chimney?’
‘The next was “I will keep it behind stitched lips”,’ Sasha said, ignoring me. ‘I was never sure what was behind the stitched lips, mind you. I think it’s the key that locked the box. Once it’s been gulped down, you know. Or maybe it’s the secret itself. If the box doesn’t work. You see?’
‘Not really.’
‘Take Peach’s black-out that night. We never told the grown-ups. We stitched our lips. And then the grown-ups stitched them even tighter, of course.’
&nb
sp; ‘Gruesome,’ I said. ‘What was the third swear?’
Sasha looked at me out of bleary eyes. ‘How did you know there was a third?’
‘Of course there’s a third swear. Three billy goats gruff, three wishes, three little pigs.’
Sasha shook himself like a dog. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Down to the beach. I might even swim. The last time we were all here we went swimming in the moonlight.’
‘Was it late September?’ I said.
He gave a soft laugh. ‘It was not. But consider the Gulf Stream.’
‘I think the Gulf Stream’s overrated. But it’s not just the cold. I don’t think it’s a good idea, in the dark, after a big dinner, and a glass of wine or two.’
He laughed again. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘A walk, then.’
To be honest, even that wasn’t a great plan. It was black as hell outside and he was pretty hammered. He didn’t even get a coat. He went straight over to the bay window and slipped out. I looked at Peach and at the coffee-table, crowded with chocolate papers and brandy glasses, then I hurried out after him.
‘Sasha?’ I called, in a kind of loud whisper. He had vanished, it seemed, then he turned and I saw his pale face. He was halfway across the lawn to the gate in the wall that led to the beach path.
‘Look, why not take a turn down the drive to the road?’ I said, when I drew up beside him. ‘That path’s a death trap. There’s tree roots and it’s steep as anything.’
‘I remember,’ Sasha said. ‘It was a golden summer, Donna. And my sixteenth birthday party was supposed to be the jewel in the crown. The oldsters went off and left us. We had the house to ourselves. Keys to the cocktail cabinet.’
‘How old were the others?’ I said. I would have given Sasha a few years on Paul, although Ramsay was harder to pin down with his scarred face. But hadn’t Rosalie called him ‘Big Bruv’ at one point?
‘Old enough,’ he said. He’d reached the gate but he turned and leaned against it instead of unlatching it and passing through. ‘Not old enough to get served in a pub, but old enough to have one wild night to remember. Or forget, in Peach’s case.’
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