I shivered. It wasn’t winter cold yet, not the sharp cold that makes your eyes water and your nose run, but there’s no mercy this close to the sea. Tonight it was a creeping foggy damp that got right in your bones. I hugged myself, the beads of mist on my thin shirt sleeves making me feel even colder as I pressed them to my skin.
‘Here,’ Sasha said. He shrugged out of his cashmere jumper and put it round my shoulders. It was warm from his body and slightly stale. ‘I need to make it up to Kim in the morning,’ he said. ‘She chose the best house she could find in a place she knows I used to love.’
‘Why did it bother you so much?’ I asked. Maybe it was because I was wearing his jumper, but I had forgotten for the moment that he was a client. Maybe the close damp stealing round us made me feel cocooned or something. For whatever reason, I spoke like we were just two people, the way he’d been speaking to me.
‘Who knows?’ Sasha said. I waited. ‘Yes, that’s not much of an answer, is it? What can I tell you? The party got slightly out of hand, as these things do. Some locals came and joined in. Not skinheads or anything. Kids we knew vaguely from days on the beach. But … our family’s idea of good fun for a crowd of teens wasn’t the same as theirs.’
I knew exactly what he was talking about, of course. It was the same on the island. Worse maybe. People like them coming up for the summer, driving their big cars too fast on the single-track roads, talking too loud in the pubs, asking for couscous and Tabasco in the corner shops and laughing at the puzzlement they caused. I had watched crowds of them at Talisker Bay at sunset, laughing and shrieking, ruining the high tide for the beach fishermen.
‘And it turned out they were right and we were wrong,’ Sasha said. Then he sniffed and shook his head. ‘Jesus, forget I said that, eh? I need a swim to sober me up. Come for a swim, Donatella. Come and be my little mermaid. Make me feel less of an old bull walrus.’ He was through the gate and holding it open for me. I walked backwards across the lawn.
‘No way,’ I said, ‘absolutely no way, and if you don’t stop I’ll go and wake everyone up.’
‘Oh, come on. You can practically paddle to Belfast from here.’ His voice was getting fainter. I walked over to the gate and peered after him.
‘Sasha, please,’ I said, then shrieked as he popped up from where he’d been crouching on the other side of the wall. ‘Jeez-us!’ I said.
‘Do you happen to know what this kind of gate is called?’ he said, opening it and closing it, clicking the latch back and forth.
‘Isn’t it just a garden gate?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘If you look closely at the fastening mechanism…’ I bent over the top to see what he was talking about ‘… it’s a kissing gate.’
His lips brushed mine, dry and warm, and I pulled back after less than five seconds. But five seconds is a long time in kissing and we both got the message. I got the message of what it was that had hooked Kim ten years ago. And he got the message that he wasn’t completely up a gum tree, trying it on with me. As well as that, I got a message from myself that my taste in men hadn’t improved any.
When I saw the glare of headlights swinging round on us, my first thought was relief. But then there’s a way people stand when they’ve just been kissing and might do it again, and as Jennifer’s car came round the bend of the drive and lurched to a halt, her door was already opening.
‘You fucking pig,’ she screamed. ‘You fucking goat. What are you playing at?’
‘I thought you didn’t like that kind of lang—’ Sasha said. He wasn’t even bothered. He was laughing. Me? I shot across the dark grass like one of the rabbits, darted into the drawing room and threw Sasha’s jumper onto the back of an armchair.
‘Twat!’ I told myself, under my breath. ‘Pillock!’
Peach opened her eyes and sat up blinking. ‘Is that Jelly back?’ Her voice was thick with sleep and booze.
‘Nope,’ said Sasha, entering the room behind me. ‘You must have been dreaming.’ Out of the corner of his mouth, he said to me, ‘She’s off again! She reversed all the way to the road. I didn’t know she was a good enough driver.’
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ Peach said. ‘I heard every word everyone said. The stitched lips and the locked box and I’ve remembered the last one.’
‘Never mind that now,’ said Sasha. ‘Time for bed. Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.’
Peach blinked up at him, working him into focus. ‘Did you do this?’ she said. ‘Did you bring us all back here?’
‘Upsy-daisy!’ Sasha put out his hands and Peach took them. ‘Heave-ho!’ She tottered a little but he grabbed her under her ribs and they made it out of the room. I took a deep breath and let it out in a whistle, then started tidying.
* * *
By the time I got upstairs, all was quiet. A lamp glowed dimly on the half-moon table at the end of the long corridor, showing me the little heaps of phones, tablets, laptops and cables outside every door. I’d wait awhile until everyone was definitely asleep before I started creeping around, gathering them.
First, I settled down at the little writing table in my room and wrote my diary: food and drink notes; how many baskets of logs we’d got through; which chairs no one had sat in; which rooms had got the most use. I was disappointed no one had been in the study yet, if I was honest. I wondered if I should maybe start a jigsaw on the round table in there. It was a trick I’d learned to stop country-house-hotel guests mumping if their rooms weren’t ready. Give them a tray of tea with buttered gingerbread and a jigsaw with the edge done and all the bits turned over the right way and they’d be sorry when their rooms were ready. Buttered gingerbread was the key. Or malt loaf. Banana bread at a push. So long as it wasn’t biscuits from a packet. I looked at myself in the black glass of my window. This was going to work, I told my face. I knew what I was doing. I was going to cope with this single-handed weekend and my mum was going to promote us all weekend up in Glasgow. Everything was fine. There was nothing creepy about the house. This was just a strange crowd. I yawned at my reflection and then had to wipe spit-squirt off the open pages of my notebook before I started writing out their names to test my memory.
Fuzzy Peach, Sweary Buck, Jennifer, if she ever reappeared, Sasha the Snake, Kim the client, Tall Paul and his wife, the fragrant Rosalie. I didn’t even need a mnemonic for her. I’d cracked it. There was just one left. I stared into the mirror. The one with the skin. I could look it up in Kim’s emails, or nip out and read the label on his door, but I had a better way.
There’s a trick that always works. I put my hands flat on my desk and told myself my left index finger was the first letter of his name and my right was the last. I closed my eyes and started reciting the alphabet. I’d only got to G, with no fingers moving, when a thud on my wall jolted my eyes open. Ramsay!
Good old subconscious, I thought, as I went to investigate.
Peach was making her unsteady way along towards the room she was supposed to be sharing with Jennifer. She must have stumbled and fallen against the wall.
‘You okay?’ I said softly. She looked at me out of one eye, the other screwed up. I had never been so drunk it was easier to focus with one eye but I’d seen it.
‘Going to throw up in privacy,’ she said. ‘Don’t want Buck taking the piss all weekend.’ She must have seen my face, because she went on, ‘Don’t worry about your lovely bathroom. You don’t get to be such a spectacular lush that your husband kicks you out and keeps the kids without learning how to be a civilized puker.’
‘Oh, Peach,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Me too,’ she agreed. She burped, but didn’t make a move. I wanted to encourage her to hurry but I didn’t want to offend her.
‘Anyway, I’m not as bad as they all think,’ she said. ‘I didn’t black out tonight. I didn’t fall asleep. I really did hear every word everyone said. And I remembered the third swear.’
‘That doesn’t matter now.’
She was swaying. ‘No, but I re
member,’ she insisted. Her voice was getting low and thick. ‘No one else remembered except me. For the deepest, darkest secrets of all, you have to swear I’ll go to my grave.’
‘And what’s the deepest darkest secret of all?’ I said.
Peach came very close to me and spoke in a whisper.
‘She died, Donna. She drowned in the sea.’
Chapter 8
They were gone! The scene popped into my head the second I woke the next morning and I snapped upright. Last night, when I talked to Peach in the corridor, the laptops and phones were gone from outside the bedroom doors. I had watched her lurching along towards the bathroom. If they’d been on the floor I’d have been scared she’d step on one.
I bounded out of bed and put on a dressing-gown. A quick peek round the corner confirmed it. The hallway was empty.
If one of these jokers had hidden the devices, I’d get in trouble for not picking them up quick enough. I knew I would. Same way I once got blamed for some toffee-nosed madam breaking her crown on a goose drumstick. She said she’d thought the meat was all carved off the bone, which was pure crap, because who picks up a gob of meat that hasn’t got a bone in it? She said I should have warned them as I served it and the arsehole manager backed her up and scolded me.
I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as I went down the back stairs in my dressing-gown to start some coffee and get going on the hollandaise. And going through to lay out juice and cereal didn’t help my mood. Whoever built this house couldn’t get past the sea view to think about sunlight, and while a west-facing dining room’s fine for evenings – because dinner’s more about lamps and candles anyway – it’s hopeless at breakfast time. We had done our best, with pale striped wallpaper and curtain poles long enough to keep the windows completely unobstructed, but it niggled at me.
I went to look at it from the bright end of the room, and decided it would do. They probably lived in city flats with no daylight to speak of at all. And, besides, out on the lawn a black rabbit was nibbling busily. I smiled. The Breakers was idyllic and I was mad to think otherwise. I should take a picture of those rabbits and get them on our website gallery, really. Then I heard a creak overhead – Paul and Rosalie’s room – and hurried out to shower and dress before anyone saw me in my jammies and asked for a refund.
Something caught my eye as I was leaving the room but, with no coffee inside me, I was still too dull-witted to do more than flag it for later. Good thing too, because I barely got out of sight before Ramsay came bounding downstairs in a running vest and tiny shorts and went out the front door.
By the time I was dressed for the day with my hair scraped up in a ponytail and my face bare – no one wants to look at sticky lipstick first thing – I could hear various showers running and a hairdryer blasting away in Rosalie’s room.
I took bowls of blackberries and blueberries in to set out on the sideboard, started in on a warm baguette and was ferrying in the first of the coffee when Paul appeared.
‘Hi,’ he said. Then: ‘Oh, my God, I’ve completely forgotten your name.’
‘Donna,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Then for laughs, I added, ‘I can’t remember if you’re Paul or Ramsay.’ Because I’d smiled he had to smile too, but it nearly killed him. Either because he reckoned he was too cute to be mistaken for Ramsay with his ravaged face or just because he had no sense of humour before his coffee. For whatever reason, he sat down with his face like a skelped arse and asked what was for breakfast.
‘Irish Florentine,’ I said. ‘Bacon instead of the spinach. Or a general fry-up if you’d rather.’
‘I’ll have the full heart-attack,’ said Buck, coming in with his hair wet. ‘Don’t suppose there’s black pudding, is there?’
‘Some of the best black pudding you’ve ever tasted,’ I said. ‘We get it from a farm butcher in Castle Douglas.’
‘I’ll have the eggs,’ Paul said, as if I’d forgotten him.
‘One eggs F, one fry-up,’ I said. I took the long way round to the kitchen, checking in the bank of linen cupboards along the back corridor. Sheets, towels, tablecloths … the same neat piles of linen I’d shelved there as soon as the paint was dry. No sign of the missing devices.
Back in the kitchen, I hit speed-dial and tucked my phone under my chin while I started the sausages.
‘Hiya,’ I said, when my mum answered. ‘Are you at the convention centre already? It sounds packed.’
‘I’ve sent you some pictures,’ she said. ‘It’s pandemonium. Going really well, though. Those close-ups of the dining table and master bathroom are bride catnip. It was well worth the cost of blowing them up.’
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘It’s great publicity even if it doesn’t cough up any actual bookings.’
‘Eh? I’ve got two bookings for a recce – cake-tasting and all that – and a twenty-four-hour hold for an actual wedding. Don’t you ever check the live calendar?’
‘Wow!’ I said. But I knew my voice sounded hollow. ‘Listen, I’ve got a bit of a problem down here.’
‘Tell me,’ my mum said. Of course she did. She always said I could tell her anything.
‘I’ve lost their devices.’
‘What did you say?’ The background noise had got even worse because someone was talking over a Tannoy. Or maybe she just wished she’d heard me wrong.
‘They put them out on the corridor floor, like room-service trays, and I was supposed to take them and lock them in a cupboard so they’d have a proper break. But I forgot.’
‘Well, obviously someone else took them. Isn’t one of the guests a teacher? She’ll be used to confiscating phones. I’ll bet you it was her.’
‘How did you know that?’ I said.
‘What? Kim told me in an email. Donna, I haven’t got time to chat. How’s it going in general?’
‘Weird,’ I said. ‘Hostile. Fine, from our point of view. Except – like I’m trying to tell you – for about five computers and seven mobiles vanishing overnight.’
‘Trust me,’ said my mum. ‘One of the women probably stepped in. My money’s definitely on the teacher. Or is there a bossy one?’
‘The teacher is the bossy one. But she left.’
‘What?’ She sounded bothered for the first time. ‘One of the guests has left?’
‘Like I told you. Hostile. They’ve driven one away already and the weekend’s hardly started.’
‘As long as it was nothing to do with Home From Home,’ my mum said. I thought about what Jennifer had seen before she roared off and gave an uneasy little laugh. ‘And as long as it wasn’t the one who’s paying the bill.’
‘Nope and nope,’ I said. ‘This is more like old ghosts from the last time they were all together. They were right here, Mum. They stayed in this house. And – like I said – there are ghosts.’
‘They’re having you on,’ my mum said. ‘Maybe they think that’s part of the fun for a house in the middle of nowhere. Hey! We should do that for Hallowe’en. Haunted-house weekends.’
‘Except the one who said that most definitely wasn’t having fun,’ I said. ‘She was dead drunk and she’d just woken up.’
‘Probably had a nightmare.’
I nodded – as if she could see me. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Families,’ my mum said. ‘Bound to be undercurrents.’
But when I went back into the dining room to deliver breakfasts and take orders from the new arrivals, they were chatting away like a house on fire.
Everyone was there except Ramsay and Peach, but both arrived within minutes, Peach coming downstairs slowly with a glass of what looked like Alka-Seltzer and Ramsay loping along from the front door, breathing hard and dripping with sweat. His running top was stuck to his body and showed that he didn’t have an ounce of spare flesh on him anywhere.
‘Freak,’ Paul said. ‘There was a mix-up in the hospital. No way you’re related to me.’
‘Nor me,’ Buck said. ‘What are you in
training for?’
‘Sublimating your illicit proclivities, isn’t it?’ Sasha said.
‘Don’t choke on that dictionary,’ said Buck. ‘You’re worse than Rosie.’
‘Donna, if I spread a towel on the chair can I have my breakfast now?’ Ramsay said. ‘I’m starving.’
They sat in different seats from the night before, Sasha in front of the window and Kim at his side. They were holding hands on the table-top. Buck stayed close to the food laid out on the sideboard. Rosalie drew out the chair next to her and patted it for Peach to sit there.
I ferried in more plates of bacon and sausage, more mounds of velvety Florentine. Peach watched them pass and moaned in her throat.
‘You should eat,’ Ramsay said.
‘After I’ve had my liver salts.’ Peach raised her glass. Rosalie gave it an odd look, then quirked a smile at Sasha.
I saw Sasha’s answering glance but didn’t know what it meant.
‘So, Buckaroo,’ said Ramsay. ‘I take it you’re not in training any more?’
Buck laughed, rolled a sausage up in a slice of buttered bread and dipped it into a pool of tomato ketchup. ‘One five-K was my whack,’ he said. ‘It nearly killed me. I raised twenty grand, though.’ Ramsay gave a long sinking whistle. ‘Anyway, I don’t need to run. They recruited me for the phones. I do twenty hours a month cold-calling.’
‘What’s this?’ said Kim.
‘Operation Smile,’ Buck said. ‘Corrective surgery for harelips and cleft palates in the developing world.’
‘Oh!’ said Kim. ‘Of course.’ She gave him an awkward little grin.
Buck smoothed his moustache with his napkin and flashed his eyes at her. ‘Don’t feel bad,’ he said. ‘My handler at Smile’s blootered through all my finer feelings. Then all my coarser feelings. Samundra. She’s based in the Philippines. Every time I try to get out – pleading shiftwork and kids – she sends me a new photo of another sloe-eyed tot.’
‘And now,’ said Sasha, ‘because you’ve lost all sense of what birth defects are suitable for table conversation, we all have to think about it whether we want to or not.’
Go to My Grave Page 9