Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  ‘Lilia.’

  ‘Pretty name. Pretty altogether.’ Juniper laughed. Lilia blushed.

  Juniper; it was such a strange name. Lilia tried it in her head as they walked down the cold stone steps to the kitchen: Joo-nipper.

  This first encounter had been so brisk, so English, that Lilia had been dazzled, and when Juniper slammed her holdall on the kitchen table and pulled out a large brown package that dripped blood, Lilia gasped.

  ‘Beef,’ Juniper said, and she waved the package in the air; blood sprayed. ‘You’ll embarrass me if you don’t have it, dear. Larder the best?’ Without waiting for an answer she walked into the back scullery. ‘Ah, I see the old meat safe is still going. Good. Good. So, have you had a line of them? Visitors?’ Juniper marched back into the kitchen, wiping bloody hands on her wax coat. Lilia took a cloth from the sink: there was a trail of dark spots into the scullery.

  ‘Well? Visitors? Had many? While I was languishing in my sick bed?’

  Lilia couldn’t imagine this woman being ill at all: she was so thick and strong.

  ‘I was hellishly ticked off, you know. Once I heard you were here, I wanted to be the first. Well?’

  Lilia had to think while she crouched and dabbed at the blood. ‘The vicar and his wife. They came…’

  ‘What did they bring?’

  ‘Margarine.’

  ‘Frightful! Ghastly people.’

  Lilia hid her smile and swilled the bloody cloth. She checked her face in the dirty basement window.

  Juniper pulled out a chair, the legs squealed on the flagstones and she sat. ‘Now, tell me, what on God’s green earth are you doing here all alone, Lovely Lilia?’

  Lilia opened her mouth; she didn’t think she liked the nickname but she couldn’t think of what to say so she blushed again.

  ‘How about a little drop?’ Juniper took a flask of whisky from her greatcoat pocket, she reached for two glasses from the draining board and as she poured she gave Lilia sound advice about the rats and the bats and the moles that were ruining a perfectly good lawn.

  After a little whisky, Lilia took to Juniper more than she had taken to anyone for such a long time. Juniper had a strong nose with freckles and the tip of it seemed permanently red. Lilia thought this woman smelled of kindness, and it was a buttery, soapy smell.

  ‘You’ll die here, my dear, without help,’ Juniper told her.

  Lilia gulped her whisky, elbows off the table.

  ‘Really. We must rally round. I know things have been terrible for you. Otherwise why would you come to this damned place?’ Lilia swallowed. ‘I could not stay at the flat, I could not remain in London.’ She swallowed again. ‘This house is for Dieter. It is his.’ ‘Yes, I see,’ Juniper glanced about the kitchen. ‘Where’s the boy by the way? The heir.’

  ‘School. They have opened the schools at last.’

  ‘Heck! The village school?’

  ‘My girl, Saskia, she is…’

  ‘Didn’t know about a girl.’

  ‘She…’

  ‘Is she Peter’s?’ Juniper was so direct Lilia had to swallow more whisky.

  ‘No. She – she was before. Before Peter.’ Lilia baulked at her husband’s name; she hated to say it out loud. ‘She, she is … she was born in the war.’

  ‘You must have been pretty young.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Do you have family, dear? Back home?’

  Lilia drank.

  Juniper was silent: for a small moment.

  ‘Yes well, the war. There we are. The war. Still, we mustn’t dwell, must we? Tell me, what are your plans? For this old place? You can’t just rattle around in it.’

  Lilia was numb with whisky, though for the first time in weeks – sitting at that kitchen table – she felt warm.

  ‘You must have plans, Lovely Lilia. You can’t take your eye off the quarry. You must plot and scheme with a responsibility like this.’

  ‘I hate it,’ Lilia said and she felt the burn of whisky in her throat.

  Juniper didn’t blink. ‘I don’t blame you. I’d hate it, too, but the point is, you came here, so you must have a plan to make it work. Do you see?’

  Lilia was a little too cloudy to see, so Juniper spoke again about the rat problem and the cold winter. The two were connected. ‘They come into the warm, evil blighters.’ She also spoke of her time as a nurse in London during the war and Lilia nodded, trying to dodge any words that might take her back there. It seemed like Juniper Bledsoe was a countrywoman who had done it all, a woman who was bored at home now that her husband – who she admitted had loved her a little too much – was dead.

  ‘Heart attack, five years ago. Dreadful. Mighty older. Almost a good innings.’ Juniper sighed, ‘Death duties,’ she said. ‘Will they swallow this place up?’

  ‘I do not know,’ Lilia shrugged, because even at this first meeting Lilia found she could only be open and truthful with Juniper Bledsoe.

  ‘Have a solicitor?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Do you have a good solicitor, dear, looking into it?’

  ‘I…’

  Lilia found she had to be quick to finish her sentences with Juniper.

  ‘Well you can use mine, good man. I’ll arrange it. If you don’t mind.’ Juniper paused. ‘And are things hard, Lovely Lilia? I mean, did Peter leave you anything, apart from this horrid place? What I’m trying to ask, my dear is, is there money? Ghastly thing to talk about, but in these times, needs must. Can’t stand pussy-footing.’

  ‘No,’ Lilia said. ‘No, there is … there is really nothing.’

  ‘You can’t go back to London?’

  Lilia bristled. ‘No, I cannot. For today we cannot live anywhere else but here.’

  ‘Yes, well, that is understandable.’ Juniper drained her glass and slammed it on the table. ‘I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it, Lilia, but I am dreadfully sorry you know. It was awful what Peter did.’

  Lilia nodded.

  ‘He always was so put upon by that ghastly father of his. It really is quite sad. But, we’re here and there we are. That’s the way it is. I hope you don’t mind me talking like this. Tell me about your children, dear.’

  And so Juniper carried on, and on, and Lilia was soothed by the sound of a stranger’s voice and by a stranger’s whisky.

  Juniper liked to visit at least three times a week now, and whenever she did Lilia would wave a tipsy farewell from the big stone steps of Sugar Hall, and for a very small moment all was fine.

  Her cigarette was done; she spat on the tip, crushed it, and buried it in her pocket. Lilia looked up at the library bookshelves: she was onto ‘D’ and ‘Dickens’, and now she knew she was as bored as Lady Deadlock. She sorely needed Juniper and her whisky today.

  Lilia tugged off her headscarf and walked to the huge spotted mirror on the library wall. She laughed: her Dieter was right, it was her hair that was the worst; two thick wedges of dark growth were bold at her crown while the rest of the blonde felt and looked like straw. Her eyebrows were thick, she hadn’t a stitch of make-up on and her fingernails were black with dirt. Lilia unbuttoned the army coat and hung it from the bookshelf’s ladder. She went up on tiptoes in her gumboots – a difficult manoeuvre – and examined herself.

  She certainly wasn’t Lovely Lilia any more: she looked a sight in Peter’s old tweed trousers, rolled up at the ankle. Her body had changed too; she’d become wiry, stretched. There was no pleasing plumpness to her cheeks or her breasts. Lilia gripped her hands in tight at her waist, and turned, a profile pose: she had lost her bottom, too.

  She was thirty-one. Surely it couldn’t be over yet?

  Lilia barred her teeth at her reflection, a warning dog. She wanted to howl, but instead she stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry.

  ‘Sugar Hall,’ she said to her reflection, and suddenly her breath was white in the cold: she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

  Lilia spun around to look behind her.

 
; There was no one there; of course there was no one.

  She reached out to touch the wallpaper, black silhouettes of oversized butterflies stood proud on the blood red paper. Fleshy, she thought. Lilia felt movement beneath her fingers.

  She jumped back and grabbed her coat from the ladder; she plunged her hands into the itchy arms and marched across the room, singing. It was an old song in an old language she had hoped to forget.

  ‘Bak, bak, Kuchn! Der Bekker hot gerufn,’ the words came quick and easy, and she knew why her daughter sang alone for hours in this house.

  Saskia was scared.

  ‘Bak, bak, Kuchn! Der Bekker hot gerufn,’ Lilia cried, ‘Wer s’wil gutn Kuchn machn…’ She cut off and hurried across the worn red rug as fast as she could, but the rubber of her gumboots kept catching on the bunched thread, pulling her back.

  Dieter Writes Two Letters

  3

  Sugar Hall, Sunday, about a quarter to three, April 17th 1955

  Dear Cynthia,

  How are you? I am very well…

  Dieter chewed the end of his pencil. He liked to feel the wood splinter in his mouth.

  I am very well and so are Ma and Sas (even if Sas is a silly old moo because she’s singing on the stairs right now, it’s awful) I hope your Ma and you are jolly good.

  He was sitting at a desk in the yellow room on the second floor. Here, canary-yellow moths with intricate patterns on their wings danced on the lemon-yellow wallpaper. Dieter was used to the eccentricities of the wallpaper in this house, he hardly noticed now.

  I still wish you were here with me, Cynthia, and now more than ever because guess what? This morning I found a strange boy in the sheds. He frightened me, Cyn, but I want to see him again. You’d tell me not to, you’d tell me he wasn’t right, I know you would, but there’s no one else to play with. He didn’t speak but I know he’ll be my friend. Sas and Ma don’t believe in him, but you would. I am making it my mission to find out about him. I’m going to be as sharp as Sherlock Holmes…

  Dieter glanced up at the letter he’d already written: it was a thin thing with ‘To The Boy In The Shed’ on the envelope. He picked it up and sniffed it. Dieter knew that letters held secrets so he hated to read them. He also knew that letters kept people alive; at least they kept the idea of people alive – Ma had taught him that – so he had to write them and he had to read them.

  Cynthia, he wrote, I wish—

  Dieter dropped his pencil. He picked at the fluff of green baize on the desk top and he thought about Cynthia: Cynthia Nurse the best Wee-Hoo in the world; Cynthia who lived above him at Churchill Gardens, Cynthia who could use a slingshot, Cynthia who could run faster than Tommy Perrot; Cynthia who could recite her Bible off-by-heart, Cynthia who could hex you, too. Today was a Sunday so she’d be back from church with her ma, Mrs Nurse. Mrs Nurse dressed Cynthia in so much white on Sundays that the ribbons in her dark hair looked like snowflakes.

  Dieter looked up at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. Bong-bong-bong it said as the grandmother clock on the landing replied, bing-bing-bing.

  Three o’clock.

  Cynthia would have sneaked out by now, her white puffball dress and her ribbons hidden under her bed. She would have crept down the concrete steps of Shelley House, Churchill Gardens wearing her play dress and an old brown cardigan that was too big for her. The cardigan had leather patches on the elbows, and it was her pa’s. Cynthia brought it over to England in the bottom of her trunk and she said it smelled of cherry tobacco and fried fish, and it was all she had left of her pa because Cynthia had come to England on a boat just like Ma had (and Dieter often wondered if Mrs Nurse and his mother had just sailed up the Thames, right by the Wasteland, and jumped off). Cynthia said she came from an island made of coral where fish could fly and a schoolteacher called Mrs Briscoe hit her with a cane. Cynthia called it Bar-ba-dos.

  There were magic words on her island, Cynthia said, and she whispered them in Dieter’s ear as they lay on the tar roof of Churchill Gardens.

  ‘Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux,’ she whispered.

  Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux.

  It rhymed if you let it.

  Cynthia said it was a dangerous spell. She said it meant ghosts and bogeymen and werewolves. She said a duppy was the worst because it could make time stop still; she said a duppy wanted to steal your soul or your skin, sometimes both. In the heat of a summer city night, as they lay on their backs on the roof of the flats and giggled at the stars, Cynthia Nurse told Dieter Sugar everything she knew about duppies.

  ‘They’re mean. My mum said when she married my dad they left Jamaica because of the duppies, but the duppies followed them anyway.’

  ‘My ma says ghosts are sad.’

  Cynthia smacked her lips and kicked her legs free of her sticky nightie. ‘Mean-sad. Duppies are mean-sad because they’re ancient and if you’re sad too long, you get mean.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  But Dieter knew Cynthia was right: there was sad and there was mean-sad like those duppies she left behind in the coral-island home that was no longer hers – Bar-ba-dos.

  ‘I think you get mean if you can’t go to where you’re supposed to,’ Cynthia said and she squinted at the half-moon as Dieter stretched out in a starfish shape, his fingers and toes touching her on one side.

  ‘Like where?’

  ‘Like heaven or hell or just that place you’re supposed to be,’ she said, because although Cynthia was a church-girl, sometimes she had other ideas. ‘Mum says duppies play tricks on us, she says they can steal our souls, trick us into swapping our soul for theirs, so all of a sudden we’re them and they’re us and they get to live again.’

  ‘That’s dreadful.’

  ‘A dog howls in the night, that’s a duppy.’

  ‘Like Mrs Anderson’s dog?’

  Cynthia punched him. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she cleared her throat. ‘Just be careful, Dee. My mum says don’t go out when the moon’s full and stay away from the crossroads. That’s where the duppies are.’

  Dieter felt warm in that somewhere beneath his belly button as Cynthia whispered in his ear. ‘Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux. Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux…’ Dieter’s nose twitched along with the night-sounds of London: the growl of cabs, the push of the Thames, the roar of red night buses, but Cynthia wouldn’t stop. ‘Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux,’ she whispered. ‘And there’s the heartman, too. He steals children’s hearts and gives them to the devil. You wake up in the morning with your ribs open and an empty chest and you’re dead.’

  Dieter shivered.

  ‘Duppy, Baccoo, Loup-garoux.’

  ‘And these ghosts, they never go away, Cyn?’

  ‘Mmm-uh. Never.’

  ‘So even when you’re dead you can live and live and live?’

  ‘I suppose, if you’re sad and mean enough. Though it’s not really living, is it?’

  Dieter felt Cynthia’s hand in his and he wished with all his heart that she would live and live and live. Though even if she died, even if she was stuck neither here-nor-there forever, he knew Cynthia Nurse would never get mean. That night, Dieter made a promise to himself, and it was to watch out for ghosts, particularly the mean-sad ghosts.

  ‘Duppy, Baccoo, Loup-garoux,’ he whispered at the green baize desk in the writing room of Sugar Hall. He listened for the Hall’s clocks: but they hadn’t stopped; time wasn’t standing still. Cynthia didn’t need to worry; there was no duppy here. The boy in the shed was just different, that’s all.

  He looked up at the face of the grandfather clock: it was ten past three.

  ‘Nearer my God to Theeee!’ Saskia cried from the landing. ‘Nearer to Thee! E’en though it be a cross that raiseth mee!’

  Dieter picked up his pencil and thought of the letter-writing tips he’d read in Saskia’s Bumper Guide for Young Ladies.

  ‘If you are writing a letter, tell your correspondent where you are. Consider the scene to describe the scene…’ it ha
d said.

  ‘Cyn, I told you there are strange noises here, didn’t I? Ma says it’s the forest behind us, but it isn’t because trees don’t scream…’

  He stopped.

  Dieter considered Sugar Hall.

  This place was a sort of big that forced you to make up words that had you stammering, because it was gi-gi-normous, it was gar-ga-ga-gantuan. His grandfather’s house was a million times bigger than their flat but not as big as Buckingham Palace. Maybe on the tops of his letters he should write ‘Sugar Kingdom, Sugar World, Sugar Skies, Sugar Universe’. He thought of the first night here when Ma had to lay their coats on top of the bedclothes and they all slept in the same bed, huddled, because there was nothing but the scuttle of rats and the howl of something terrible outside that tickled the white-blond hairs on his head. That first night he had decided Sugar Hall was a Black Forest Gateau (the one Ma made when he was younger once she’d saved up enough ration tickets). Yes, this place was a Black Forest Gateau because it was made up of layers – of floors upon floors of rooms – and as Sas said, God knows what lurked in the shadows. Dieter wondered if God did know, though he suspected it was more likely to be the Devil, and that was why Ma had dragged a commode into their bedroom and locked them in every night.

  Dieter decided to make a list of facts. It was going to be very long.

  Cyn – since I last wrote these are the things I have found out…

  In this house 21 doors are locked and 19 are open.

  I have found a room stuffed with frightening things. Masks made of wood and animal heads are nailed to the wall. I saw three zebras, a lion, a tiger and a big black cow with horns. They have glass eyes and their skins are on the floor. The masks frighten me more than the animal heads.

  In the same room are glass cases filled with butterflies and moths. The butterflies and moths are pinned down so they can’t move. Some of them are GIANT and bright but I don’t like them.

  Ma has locked this room up.

  There is a front staircase and a back staircase. There are 62 steps to the back staircase because it goes all the way down to the cellar and all the way up to the attic. Ma said this was for servants.