It was the living that concerned Juniper.
Yes, as she straddled the stile, Juniper decided to help Lilia more than she had because Juniper realised how much she liked Lilia – she couldn’t fathom the reason but she knew it was tied to her strong spirit rather than her weak body. After all, the poor thing had survived in this ghastly hall with two children for over five months, and Juniper could hardly survive the day in there.
She would write that cheque. She would get them all out of the ghastly place.
She jumped to the spongy ground. It was a strange and very small world, Juniper thought, and she snuck her hands in the sleeves of her tweed jacket and marched on.
Thunder
19
Once Juniper left, Lilia didn’t think of pinching herself – she pinched, and hard. Now red welts patterned her arms.
Alex was here: Alex Behr.
The last time she saw Alex Behr she was fifteen years old.
He had found her here, in the mausoleum of Sugar Hall. It wasn’t what she had expected today, it was enough that the Nosey Parkers from the village had come, it was enough that Saskia’s friends were to be entertained, it was enough that Dieter wasn’t strong like he should be, it was all enough. And now here Alex was.
He held her hands so tight her ring pinched, but she wouldn’t move. They were done with talking. There was too much and too little to say. She gazed at him. She was sure her Alex Behr was hidden somewhere in this man’s face: the bright brown eyes, the freckles on the bridge of the nose, the thick hair. She’d let her fingers rest in that hair when she was nothing but a child. They would swim in the river with her brothers, she and Alex. He would tease her, splash her, tell her she was skinny Lily. Then they were older and he had teased her but it was different. She had known – even then – that he loved her.
Alex Behr, four years older and her brothers’ friend: her brothers, she wanted to block their names out, but now Alex’s voice had broken her because it was a voice that belonged to another life, it was a voice loved by another girl – Lily Fisch.
She felt her skin prick with panic. Suddenly she wanted to scream but she didn’t. She noticed Dieter standing by the door.
‘Lily,’ Alex was speaking, ‘I said, why here, Lily? Why are you here, alone?’
‘I am not alone, I told you.’
‘Yes, yes…’ Alex looked over at Dieter and smiled.
‘I am not alone,’ she repeated.
‘What is this place?’
She shook her head because she hardly knew.
‘I do not think this is for you, Liliana, not for you.’
She tried to laugh because Alex Behr hadn’t changed, here he was after sixteen years telling her what she should do, telling her what was right and what was wrong: what was right for her.
‘Sh, Alex, sh…’ she whispered. ‘Please. I need to hear about your life. Tell me now. I want to know your life.’
He grinned; his teeth were better than they’d ever been as a child. He reached out and he touched her hair.
‘You’re blonde, Lily?’
She felt like blushing and she couldn’t fathom why. ‘It suits me,’ she said chin out.
‘You think?’
‘Alex, stop it,’ she smiled. ‘You cannot be right about everything. Tell me about your life. Please.’
He sighed. ‘I live in Brooklyn. I like Brooklyn, just next to the park.’
‘Brooklyn,’ she said, and it sounded strange.
He was stroking her cheek, ‘Lily, my Lily, where have you been? I have written, written so many times…’
‘Please, no. You tell me about your life…’
It was a strange feeling when she heard the scream, it came from beyond the closed library door and it was as if someone was screaming for her. A silence followed that seemed louder, as if the house was holding its breath, preparing itself for the next outburst.
Alex started. ‘Lily, what is…?’
More screams followed, and they came at different pitches. Alex stood and rushed to the door. He looked back. ‘Lily?’
She didn’t move. Whatever was coming, she didn’t want it. Lilia Sugar, Lily Fisch, or whoever she was now, was tired; she was exhausted. She wouldn’t move. Let whatever was out there stay out there. She wanted this moment with Alex, the flurry of this surprise hello, the tenderness of it; she wanted to tease it out. But now she knew it was over because something dreadful was happening out there.
Lilia considered the English word, ‘dread’.
She swallowed air like she was drowning. Yes, she had thought it before and she thought it again; she was drowning.
That was when she heard the thunder.
For a moment she thought how refreshing a summer storm might be, but at the same time she knew it wasn’t that sort of thunder, this noise was coming from inside the house.
This was it then: at last Sugar Hall was falling to the ground.
The thunder rumbled above them: louder, louder.
‘Lily!’ Alex cried, and finally she sprang up.
She pushed past him, past Dieter, she pushed the door and marched into the passage and out onto the hall.
She would put a stop to this.
The thunder was coming from upstairs.
Lilia was sick of being scared in this house, she was sick of panic. She walked across those silly black and white tiles to the foot of the stairs, she put her fists on her hips and she looked up.
High up on one of the dark landings she saw shapes blur with movement as they turned in wide circles from one landing down to the next. That was the thunder and it came with squeals and whimpers. The shapes began to come into focus and all at once Lilia knew she was staring up at legs: the flash of girls’ legs through the barley twist rails. She saw flashes of white underwear, too; she saw skirts swishing, ballooning up in white, brown, yellow and blue.
As the legs tumbled the thunder grew louder.
Saskia and her friends must have been up in the attic and now they were gathering momentum as they ran down in one great rush.
Lilia tried to spot Saskia in the jumble of limbs because she suddenly thought how she would love to slap her daughter’s legs, like her own mother had slapped hers; her mother whom she had loved more than ice cream. How Lilia would love to put Saskia over her knee and slap her pink thighs until they scalded red: Saskia who was ruining her peace now, Saskia who had always ruined her peace.
The girls yelped as they stumbled. Lilia held onto the newel post and wondered if they’d trip over each other and fall all this way down. She wondered if there would be blood and, if so, how much. She wondered if the other girls would stumble and land on top of Saskia, crushing her. Lilia noticed a flash of colours now as the girls grasped hold of the banisters at each turn: she noticed the bright colours of their evening gloves; the whiteness of their bobby socks.
Suddenly Lilia was jealous of Saskia, this fat-hipped girl of hers, so spoilt, so unwanted. She felt it rise up in her as she stared up at her clumsy child running down the stairs. Lilia reached out and held onto the thin brass chain she’d looped across the staircase. She shook her head, for by God she didn’t want to remember all that. Still, she couldn’t stop staring up at those ugly girls and their ugly dresses with their ugly spoilt and fat legs as they thundered down these ugly stairs. No, Lilia didn’t want to remember: she had to stop herself remembering. But it was here, right here, she could taste it: Berlin and the boy who had done that to her (she had the urge to point up at Saskia and yell ‘that!’)She didn’t want to remember the boy’s eyes and his wet lips as he spat at her and grunted over her like the pig he was. She didn’t want to remember his breath, strangely sweet like he’d just eaten a toffee, as he growled ugly words in her ear. She didn’t want to remember how he pulled her in from the street and into a stairwell of a building on Mülhauser Strasse. When Lilia saw the light brown uniform she knew what it meant. Then she couldn’t think because his breath was so close as he spat his words at her, �
�Nimm dies, nimm dies, nimm dies!’ He’d laughed then, ‘Mein Geschenk für Dich, mein Geschenk für Dich!’
He’d told her: have this, have this, my gift to you.
Lilia stared up at her daughter and she wanted to laugh. It was his gift thundering down these dusty steps: her girl with heavenly hips and that boy’s eyes. Lilia had woken up the next morning in the stairwell in Mülhauser Strasse and a woman had stepped over her, like this happened every day. It did, of course.
The four girls turned on the first landing and they rushed down the last set of stairs in a pack towards her.
They were a strange sight, their demi-waved hair matted with sweat, their faces white and their mouths drawn tight, teeth showing like frightened cats. The one she knew as Tina had a torn sleeve and Saskia had lost a shoe somewhere on her journey down; her neck was terribly scratched, too. Another had spots of blood on the front of her dress, and the short fat one had a small cut below her eye. The thunder kept up and Lilia stepped away. Saskia was the first because she was pushing the other girls back as she leapt, four steps before the hard floor of the hall. Saskia snapped the thin brass chain with her heavenly hips and landed with a great thud on the black and white tiles. Lilia noticed her wince; she watched her daughter stand up, shake herself, and then run to the open front door.
The other three girls tumbled past, and then Lilia felt inclined to look up once again.
Far up, on one of the upper floors, she was sure she saw something shimmer. It was almost gold: it sparked. She couldn’t see anything clearly but she heard a boy’s giggle. The sound made her swallow her breath, because Dieter was over there standing next to Alex, and anyway this wasn’t the sort of giggle to warm your heart, it was the sort of sound that froze it sure as the North wind.
Alex watched all this from the middle of the hall and he thought of nothing because Alex knew how to blank his mind. He had become expert at it.
‘Beruhigt Euch, Mädchen!’ he said as the girls ran past him.
As for the girls, they ran out into the bright garden, out onto the lawn, then past the sprouting tennis courts and the vegetable patch, on and on until suddenly, out of breath and stunned as rabbits, they couldn’t run any more and each girl dropped as if touched on the shoulder by a hypnotist and told to sleep. Each girl fell to the lush green ground and each girl slept where she lay: a tangle of flushed coltish limbs, a mess of flared skirts and bobby socks.
Saskia snored immediately.
The Lepidopterist
20
It had been a disaster of a birthday party, that much was clear to the vicar, Ambrose Hetherington. His housekeeper had brought in tea and Madeira cake while parents were called. The whimpering girls from Sugar Hall had been given blankets, and for now they shared the flower-patterned sofa that dominated his living room (part of the garish three-piece suite his wife, Daphne, had insisted on).
‘It felt like bees, like a swarm of bees,’ one of the hefty girls had told him when they’d first tried to settle them. ‘It was suddenly black and I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe,’ she’d sobbed. Ambrose had attempted to engage. ‘Where were you, child?’ he’d asked.
‘In that blue room. I trod on Shirley.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘We all trod on Shirley, didn’t we?’
The lumpiest, clearly Shirley, had moaned and Ambrose had stepped back. It was the Sugar girl who’d continued. ‘It was day outside and I’m sure the curtains were open, but suddenly it was dark in that room and when we ran, Shirley fell, and we trod on her. Poor Shirley.’
Since the Madeira cake, the girls had thankfully fallen silent. They nibbled on the sweet sponge and stared – rather lifeless – at Daphne’s samplers that adorned one wall. Ambrose didn’t care for Daphne’s samplers, they told him, ‘Bless This House’, ‘A Man’s Heart is His Home’ and ‘A Woman’s Work is Never Done’. Ambrose turned to the small animal figurines that crowded shelves in the corner of the room. These were also Daphne’s: minute, shiny and badly made, they reminded Ambrose a little of her.
One of the girls kept pulling the top of her ripped sleeve up towards her shoulder; another held a hand to her cut cheek and swollen eye, the hair on the head of that lumpiest girl buzzed with something like static and her foot was set up on a stool, tightly bandaged. The daughter, Saskia, was rubbing her fingers over her scratched neck and cheek. She wore one shoe.
Female hysteria, the vicar thought, and he shuddered from his toes up.
The thing that irked him most about these girls was their awful mismatched gloves: long evening gloves in mint green, coral, siren red, cobalt blue, ivory and black. He attempted to calm himself with the thought that parents would be here soon.
Daphne had switched on the four-bar heater even though it was summer, because these girls would shiver. She sat adjacent to the fire, smiling at the children, while he stood in front of the red-hot tubes, his knees bending like a policeman. He hated to be alone with women, and this was more than uncomfortable. The other men, Phelps and a strange man with an accent, had left for the Hall (the vicar still couldn’t believe Phelps had been standing in his drawing room in his boots because Daphne was too slow with the newspaper). The men had driven back to the Hall, the vicar’s shooting sticks under their arms to check for robbers, gypsies, or both, these were the usual culprits. Ambrose knew that anyone could sneak into that big place and hide for weeks if they chose. It was a vast and foolish place for a widow and her children. Daphne had even told him how this little family had crammed themselves into one room –and he supposed the Sugar woman, Lilia, was used to that sort of living. He had hoped to see more of the house today, but it had all ended so mysteriously, Juniper Bledsoe barging in and telling – not asking – them all to leave when they hadn’t even cut the girl’s birthday cake. And now he and Daphne had only been home an hour or so when the odd – but he had to confess, pretty – little Sugar woman was knocking on his door with a gaggle of hysterical girls who had refused to walk back into the Hall.
‘I won’t go back in there, I won’t!’ one had sobbed.
‘A boy, I saw a boy,’ the fat daughter said.
Ambrose felt as if he had been let into a secret then, but so far no amount of subtle prods or blatant questions had illuminated much beyond this statement.
Yes, heaven knows what had happened up at Sugar Hall, although Ambrose had an inkling.
He glanced at Lilia Sugar sitting in the armchair with her son; they were squashed in together and it was unseemly. There was no denying that she was a pretty thing, but Ambrose did wonder what sort of life she had come from. He knew she was German, but the children seemed English enough. Still, the world was different now and people were forever telling him all that shouldn’t matter.
Of course, it did.
He watched Lilia lean over and kiss the son and heir, Dieter, on the crown of his head; it was a loud kiss and Lilia came to rest her cheek on the boy’s fair hair. Ambrose didn’t care for the way the boy’s red legs stuck out of grey shorts; it looked ridiculous for the child must have been ten at least. The boy reminded Ambrose of the drooling blond Labrador pup Daphne had once taken in. Still, as he bent his knees while standing in front of the electric fire, he felt the pricking of guilt. After a first brief visit back in January, he and Daphne had ignored this family because – he reasoned – they had made themselves easy to ignore. He had felt it best to leave well alone. It was the battered air of this Sugar woman that irked him; it was as unseemly as this show of affection between mother and son. The vicar saw this family as barnacles, foreign barnacles because the rock they clung to wasn’t even theirs. They were tenants, squatters.
Ambrose bit hard into his soft Madeira cake as the bars of the fire grew hot on the back of his dress trousers. He watched the lumpy Sugar daughter stand up, place her blanket on the arm of the sofa, and in a loud voice ask where the toilet might be. Ambrose shuddered as he wiped crumbs from his cuffs.
Toilet: yes, it rea
lly was unseemly.
Later, when his house was quiet, the children gone, Ambrose Hetherington stood in front of his thick-legged writing desk, the ironing board out and pointing its nose towards the drawn curtains. His study door was locked. Daphne would never come in here unannounced, but Ambrose preferred the security of a lock as he stood, trouserless, his tight sock suspenders digging in below the knees and just the way he liked it.
He folded the pair of ironed white underpants, placed them on the pile, and picked out the next: only he could ever iron these intimate things of his, it was bad enough the help dealing with the washing and boiling of his smalls, let alone spending time pushing a hot iron into their creases; perhaps looking a little too close, perhaps allowing drops of sweat to fall on the cotton. Ambrose turned his underpants, pressed the iron down, and coughed.
Not long after those parents came to pick up their charges, faces white with worry – and who could blame them – the drawing-room door had opened and Phelps and that foreign man had walked in. Ambrose thought how strange that was, his own doors being pushed open roughly while the maid, Gladys, squawked from the hall.
‘It is empty up there, Lilia, we’ve been through all the rooms,’ Phelps said to the Sugar woman. ‘Just a lot of mess in the old blue room in the attics.’ Again, Phelps hadn’t taken off his boots.
‘It’s as if the girls had been playing, Lily,’ the foreign man added, and he’d knelt in front of Mrs Sugar like a suitor, holding her small hand and rubbing it. ‘I think those girls spooked themselves,’ he nodded at the daughter who had fallen asleep on the sofa next to the rag-tag boy.
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