by Pauline Fisk
Mad Dog shivered at the sight of that chain, but didn’t know why. He turned and fled, racing back round the house as if trying to escape some weird dance of death. In through the front door he ran, tearing across the reception area and back upstairs, taking endless wrong turnings in his panic but eventually making it back to his bedroom, where he shook Aunty awake.
‘We’ve got to leave! We’ve got to go! It’s the Manager! We’ve got to get out of here right now!’
Aunty wouldn’t go, of course. She was made of sterner stuff than that. Instead she went downstairs to see what was going on. By the time she reached the conservatory, however, the dance was over and the room stood empty. She walked around it, examining everything for evidence of mischief, but the heat had died down and even the black candles had disappeared.
Mad Dog didn’t tell her about the dogs in coats and party frocks, reckoning she’d never believe him. But he did tell her about the other guests, and the Manager’s part in it all, and she did find a bit of hot wax on a window sill and a few empty bottles shut under the piano lid.
‘Well, I’d say it looks like somebody’s been celebrating our departure,’ she said. ‘Though a bit too early, if you ask me. And it doesn’t take much to guess who.’
Next morning, after making a showy farewell to the Aged Relative and driving off noisily with a car full of children and luggage, Aunty parked down the road and sneaked back. She told Mad Dog and Elvis to stay where they were and not follow her. But, after waiting a couple of minutes, they were too curious to do anything else.
By the time they arrived at the hotel, Aunty had already come across the Manager – whose sudden emergence after a week of lying low was, she put to him, no coincidence – and had him in a corner like a rat in a shed. Mad Dog feared for her, wondering if she had any idea what she was dealing with.
‘Don’t think I’m ignorant of what’s been going on,’ she said. ‘And I’m not just talking about parties. I’m talking about the way you’ve got my mother under your thumb. Well, I want you out, and I want it now – you and your dogs with you. In fact, I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen the last of you. And don’t think you’re going to appeal to my mother over my head because – contrary to what she may have told you – she wants you out as well!’
Aunty meant it about not going anywhere. She’d have stayed there for the next hundred years if she’d had to. Mad Dog waited for the Manager to call down bolts of lightning upon Aunty’s head, but instead he slunk off to his quarters as if he was defeated.
It didn’t take him long to pack – but then he didn’t have much to take with him. Mad Dog watched him reappear, his dogs at his heel, an old coat thrown on and buttoned up to his throat. The Manager was licked, and he knew it. Mad Dog marvelled that he’d ever been frightened of this manky creature with his flashy charm necklace, and horrible tattoos.
But even so, as the Manager walked out, Mad Dog still found himself shivering as if the shadow of another world had briefly touched his own. And Elvis shivered as if he felt it too, and clung to Mad Dog’s side. And even Aunty shivered as the Manager passed her by.
Then he was gone, heading down the drive without a word to any of them, taking his dogs with him. At the road he turned back to give them a final dagger’s glance. Then he disappeared, and a burst of song could be heard upstairs in the house. It was as if even the Aged Relative recognised that something bad had passed out of their lives.
11
A Poisoned Chalice
Within the week, the Aged Relative was dead. Mad Dog scarcely had time to savour being home again when he returned from school one afternoon to find Aunty on the phone making funeral arrangements. Her face was as white as a sheet and her voice sounded strange and tight. The Aged Relative had been found dead by the woman from the post office out walking her dog. It had been a cold, crisp morning and the Aged Relative had been covered in frost as if she’d been out there all night, sitting on a bench in her garden, the property pages of the local newspaper spread out around her, several flats and bungalows circled in green ink.
‘I never believed her,’ Aunty said. ‘But she did have a dicky heart after all. And I was there. I saw what she was like, and I thought she hammed it up for sympathy. I feel so ashamed.’
The funeral service was held in the church at Parson’s Bridge, which was up the valley from the Aged Relative’s now defunct B & B. The sisters all attended, dressed in deepest black and wearing expressions to match. Afterwards a lunch of drinks and snacks was served in the dining room, and everybody looked at everybody else, all secretly wondering the same thing – how the Aged Relative had decided to dispose of her estate.
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. After lunch, the Aged Relative’s solicitor appeared, and read out her Last Will and Testament. All the children were sent out to play, but none of them went far, hanging round the garden as if they knew that something special was happening indoors.
The general feeling seemed to be that the Aged Relative was a secret millionairess. Luke said his mum reckoned she had Rolls-Royce cars stashed away, and properties in the south of France. Mad Dog told them all about the Aged Relative’s jewelled rings. Hippie said that if his mum inherited any money she was going to spend it setting up a Buddhist retreat. The only one who sounded a note of caution was Rhys, whose mum was certain that the Aged Relative would leave her secret millions to the local donkey sanctuary to spite them all.
She wasn’t far wrong either, at least about the spiting bit. The sisters came out arguing, cut off without a penny – all except for Aunty, who had inherited the lot.
The Aged Relative had done it on purpose, of course. Her Will was meant to set them at each other’s throats – and it had worked perfectly. The arguments rolled on for days, on the phone and in each other’s kitchens, the general feeling being that Aunty had slyly weasled her way into everybody else’s inheritance.
Along the Gap, the atmosphere was electric. Aunty, angry and hurt, announced that the Aged Relative’s money was tainted and she wouldn’t take a penny of it. In fact, she’d share it round and leave herself out. But her sisters wouldn’t have it. The Aged Relative had referred to them in her Will as a ‘worthless bunch’ and they were mortally offended.
So Aunty was in the money, and there was nothing she could do about it. She owned a house. She had, if not a Rolls-Royce, at least a beaten up old Range Rover. She had money in the bank. She even had the gold rings – which, though not as valuable as they looked, were still worth what Uncle called ‘a bob or two’.
Uncle said that an injection of cash never went amiss and that Aunty should cheer up and make the most of it. But Aunty couldn’t see it that way. He said that this bequest was her chance to make something of herself.
‘It isn’t a bequest,’ Aunty said. ‘It’s a poisoned chalice.’
They were up at Devil’s Bridge at the time, taking a long hard look at the Aged Relative’s house and deciding what to do with it. Aunty wanted to get rid of it, and as quickly as possible, and Mad Dog agreed with her, but Uncle saw things differently.
‘It’s not just a house, it’s an investment,’ he said. ‘It might look gloomy now, but if we did it up we could put it on the market and make a whacking profit. It wouldn’t take much. Just a few repairs and a lick of paint.’
Aunty was persuaded – but lived to wonder what she’d done. Once the repairs had got under way, walls were found in need of shoring up. Broken wiring had to be ripped out. Plaster crumbled at a touch. Pipes leaked and had to be replaced. Floorboards were found to be rotting and roof joists sagged, costing a small fortune to repair.
In the end, the ‘few repairs’ took more than a year to do and involved architects, builders and a structural engineer. Once started, it seemed, there could be no going back. The sisters called the project Aunty’s ‘folly’ but Uncle continued to insist that it was an investment.
He was right too, because once the house was in a good enough state to put on th
e market, it sold with extraordinary ease. No sooner had the estate agent’s photographs gone into the newspapers, than people started phoning up. And, no sooner had the first of them been to see it, driving all the way from London, than Aunty found herself with an offer that she couldn’t refuse.
Everyone was astonished, including Aunty’s sisters, who said that they were pleased for her – but didn’t look it. A firm of flashy architects turned up at the London people’s request to work out how to turn the house into a luxury hotel, complete with hot tubs and a swimming pool. A completion date was agreed for contracts to be signed and Aunty got on with a string of last-minute jobs that she’d promised to do before handing over.
It was around this time that Mad Dog started noticing a change in Aunty. Once, when they’d been working on the house, she’d insisted on only having bare essentials around them. But now it seemed that half their clothes had worked their way up there, not to say anything of half their books, CDs, toys, cooking pots, a portable TV and even a couple of family photographs that appeared one day, hanging on the wall to make the place look ‘homelier’.
Why they’d want a house that they were selling anyway to feel homelier, Mad Dog couldn’t imagine. But, by the time a sofa had worked its way up there too, along with a couple of armchairs and even some spare curtains, Mad Dog was beginning to feel alarm bells ringing.
Another change he noticed was in Aunty’s attitude towards her neighbours. In the early days, she hadn’t been interested in making friends, but now she was even trying to make them for him too. The girl who lived down at the post office was his age apparently and seemed ‘very nice’, and so did the boy in the stone house next to the railway station, and another boy whose parents owned a holiday cottage next to the big hotel.
‘We should invite them round,’ said Aunty. ‘Get to know them. What do you think?’
Mad Dog said he didn’t want to get to know new people, especially in a place they’d sold and weren’t ever to see again. Aunty said she understood, but that didn’t stop her making friends of her own. She even invited all these new friends to the party she’d decided to throw the day before signing over the house.
Mad Dog worried about this party. Something about it set alarm bells ringing too. The whole village was invited and so was everybody back in the Gap. Aunty worked her fingers to the bone, anxious to show the world what she’d achieved. The night before the party, she was up until the early hours preparing food.
By the time the first guests were arriving next day, everything was in a state of perfect readiness, right down to the last leaf chased off the lawn. Aunty looked happy and relaxed, waiting for her sisters to come and see that what she’d achieved wasn’t a folly after all.
But they never came. First one and then another phoned with apologies, saying they couldn’t make it. Aunty took it personally, of course, but Uncle said he wasn’t surprised. All year long they’d refused to come up and see what she’d done.
‘It’s their loss,’ he said. ‘Don’t get upset. The rest of us are going to have a great party without them. And you’re going to have a great party too. You deserve it. You mustn’t let your sisters spoil your day.’
True to his word, the party was a huge success. All the new friends from the village arrived in force, along with most of Uncle’s side of the family and a couple of wild-card Williamses who’d only come, Aunty reckoned, to report back to the sisters. The London people turned up too, having been invited to meet their new neighbours, and Aunty was in her element, serving mountains of food and making it all look effortless.
When the supper had been cleared away, a band set up and everybody danced. The London people declared themselves delighted with the village into which they were buying. At the end of the evening they even made a speech about it, flushed and excited, talking about feeling part of the community already. Then the post office lady’s husband – who was a local councillor – made a speech in which he said that community life came with responsibilities and he hoped the London people would feel free to muck in with the rest of them.
Then it was Aunty’s turn for a speech. Worn out with hard work by this time, and flushed with just a little bit too much white wine, she got to her feet.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ she said, looking round at them all. ‘It’s been a great night and a great end to a strange and unexpected period of my life. I scarcely can believe how much things have changed since Mother died. How much this house has changed as well. It’s been hard work all the way, but worth it.
‘What I’m showing off tonight bears no resemblance to what I started out with. And how I feel about it bears no resemblance either. At the time, the words I used for my bequest were poisoned chalice. I wished I’d never seen this house. And yet now I’m proud of it.
‘You builders have done a great job, and you architects, electricians, plumbers and engineers too. And you, our friends here in the village, have done a great job too, giving us support which has been much needed. So thank you, all of you. But don’t think you’ve seen the last of us – because you haven’t.’
Aunty swayed on her feet. Everybody was staring at her. They plainly didn’t have a clue what was coming next. Not even Uncle knew. But Mad Dog did. Suddenly he knew what all those warning bells had been about!
‘Tonight,’ Aunty carried on, beaming round at all of them, ‘tonight, for the first time, I can see something I should have realised long ago. This thing that I’ve inherited here – it isn’t just a house. It’s a place as well, and it’s the people in it. Over the past few months, you’ve all become a part of me. Once I never would have thought it, but now this house feels like home. And that’s why I’ve decided not to sell after all.’
You could have heard a pin drop. Mad Dog looked round the room. Everybody was staring at Aunty, including the London people whose smiles were frozen on their faces. But Aunty only had eyes for Uncle, whose whole face had formed itself into a silent, Whaaat …?
‘What I mean,’ Aunty said, looking at him directly as if no one else mattered, ‘is that I simply can’t go through with it. And I don’t see why I should. What have I got waiting for me down in the Gap? My sisters don’t want me, so why am I selling up? It makes no sense. I mean, if someone else can turn our beautifully restored property into a money-spinning country-house hotel, then why not have a go ourselves? You know – test the water and see how we get on. We mightn’t be able to afford hot tubs and a swimming pool and things like that. But I could run the kitchen, and you could run the bar and we’ve just about got enough money to take on a couple of staff. We could make a go of it. I’m sure we could. I know we’ve never done anything like this before, but we’ve just about got the capital to launch ourselves, and I believe we’ve got the will. It’d be crazy not to go for it. So, what d’you think?’
Mad Dog didn’t stay for the fall-out. He slipped from the room without anybody noticing, and went up to his bedroom. Here, not quite knowing what he was doing, or why, he built an enormous barricade of furniture around his bed and sat behind it in the darkness, wondering what had hit him.
Downstairs, the London people were exploding with fury, Uncle was in a state of shock, villagers were gasping and builders were rubbing their hands with glee at all the new work that would need to be done.
But, upstairs, all Mad Dog could think was that he’d been deceived. For a whole year now, Aunty had been talking about selling the house. Every time Mad Dog had moaned on about how much he hated Devil’s Bridge she’d said, ‘Not much longer now.’
And he’d believed her. In good faith he’d even helped her. And now the poisoned chalice had been passed on, and it was his. The house loomed over him. The months ahead looked bleak. Who could blame him if he felt conned?
12
Testing the Water
Aunty didn’t seem to realise that she was conning anybody. Next day when she tried talking to Mad Dog, she used that phrase again. Testing the water. That was all she was doing, she said.
Trying something out because she’d always regret it if she didn’t.
But Mad Dog wasn’t listening. As far as he was concerned, having an inheritance had plainly gone to Aunty’s head. Her sisters were right when they whispered behind her back. She was a sly one, like they said.
It was the start of a wretched period in Mad Dog’s life. The family moved back down to No. 3 but Aunty was scarcely ever there, too busy at Devil’s Bridge for any life at home. She tried persuading Mad Dog to join her at weekends, but he was having none of it. What he needed, she said, was a spirit of adventure. But Mad Dog couldn’t see anything remotely adventurous about turning his back on the Gap, the barge den, the harbour and the wild waters of the Rheidol in order to move up to some cretinous hotel. Adventures were all to do with waves as high as skyscrapers, wide horizons and open roads. They weren’t to do with business undertakings, preparations for Christmas openings and months of organising yet more builders.
Mad Dog hated change, but refused to talk about it. He took to building barricades in his bedroom and hid behind them, trying to keep out of everybody’s way. Aunty hated his barricades because they told her, without a word being said, exactly what he felt about what she was doing. But, for all her dismantling them, Mad Dog was always building new ones and she was never around long enough to stop him.
In this manner, autumn turned to winter and Christmas approached. Aunty was up at the hotel more than she was at home and Uncle started going up there too, taking Elvis with him but leaving Mad Dog round at Luke, Hippie or Rhys’s houses, where he was forced to listen to their mothers going on about what a mistake their sister was making.
As far as Christmas was concerned, Mad Dog reckoned it had been cancelled for the year. Maybe there was seasonal cheer along the rest of the Gap, but no one round at No. 3 was putting up decorations, not even a tree, and there was none of the usual smell of Christmas cooking.