Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  ‘Don’t say it like that Dieter, he’s very nice.’

  ‘He’s leaving soon, I heard him. He lives in America. He has to work. He wants Ma to go with him…’

  Saskia felt a hard twist in her stomach. ‘Don’t talk silly.’

  ‘He does.’

  She glanced over at the ticket office: she scratched her arm. ‘I said, don’t talk stupid, Dee. Mr Behr isn’t going anywhere, and if he is he’ll take us all.’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Ask him what?’

  ‘If he’s your father…’

  ‘Sh!’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  Saskia tugged at her gloves. ‘It’s a delicate subject.’

  ‘I’d ask him,’ Dieter hopped, arms out, ‘if it was me, and before he leaves.’

  Saskia noticed her brother’s hands, his fingers; they were plastered again; the nicks and cuts had come back. ‘Dee, you will look after yourself, won’t you?’

  He looked up at her and she suddenly felt scared for him.

  ‘I mean, I know things have been just awful, but we’ve got to grow up, haven’t we?’ She noticed how much taller than him she was in her new high heels.

  ‘I think they’ll hung her,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That lady, in the papers.’

  ‘What lady?’

  ‘The one with the blonde hair.’

  Saskia shook her head.

  ‘The one who shot her boyfriend in the street, you told me all about it.’

  Saskia opened her mouth, ‘Ruth Ellis.’

  ‘That’s her. They’ll hung her.’

  ‘Hang, Dieter. They’ll hang her…’

  ‘They’ll hang her, then,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Yes, it’s decided. They will.’ Saskia bit her bottom lip and tasted waxy lipstick. ‘Dee, please be careful.’

  ‘What of?’

  She didn’t know how to say it so her brother did it for her. ‘Don’t worry about me, Sas. He’s promised, he’s my friend.’

  ‘Dieter, don’t…’

  ‘I know you saw him, Sas, on your birthday up in that blue room, I know because he told me…’

  All at once Saskia was on her knees on the rough platform, damn her stockings, and she was hugging him to her, ‘Dee, come with me, come to London. Come with me now, why not? Flinty wouldn’t mind…’

  He felt limp in her arms. Then she felt him chuckle against her. He brushed her hair behind her ear, leant in and whispered. ‘He doesn’t mean to scare you, Saskia. He only wants to play.’

  She jerked back.

  Dieter’s voice sounded strange, his face was the same, though, pale and blank.

  ‘Stay away from it, Dieter,’ she said.

  ‘He’s my friend…’

  ‘Stay away from it…’

  He smiled.

  Saskia stood and she brushed the scree from her knees; she could feel her heart thunder. She glanced at the train tracks and tried not to think.

  Her mother and Alex were walking towards them now; they looked like a perfect couple, and together they could be her Ma and her Pa. A train hooted in the distance, and Saskia thought it was a little like the sound the nights here made, all those hissing and hooting owls.

  She gave her mother and Alex Behr a beaming smile. ‘Goodbye Ma. Goodbye…’ Saskia smiled her best smile, ‘Goodbye, Mr Behr.’

  He walked to her, ‘Call me Alex, kid.’

  With a lot of noise and fuss and steam, the train pushed into the small station.

  ‘Oh, my girl! Come here!’ Lilia cried.

  Saskia felt her mother kiss her on each cheek and then Alex hugged her and she thought he smelled of fine cologne and fathers.

  The steam settled; the train shrieked.

  ‘Bye, Sas.’ Dieter was still there though she couldn’t see him in the fog.

  She stepped back, ‘Bye, Dee.’

  Alex opened the carriage door.

  When the whistle blew and they all waved Saskia off, it was terribly grown up and terribly sad in a way that wasn’t sad at all.

  ‘You will be home two weeks Sunday evening!’ Lilia cried from the platform and Saskia felt her skin prick: she couldn’t think of coming back here. She settled into her carriage as the train said shu-tu, shu-tu, and she felt the two letters crackle in her summer jacket pocket: the one from Dieter to his old friend, Cynthia Nurse, and the other she’d received just the other morning. It had told them all to leave Sugar Hall and Saskia had found it on the hall table. She’d meant to give it to Ma, she’d meant to laugh at it because it was from John Phelps’ mother and she had sounded quite mad.

  In the end, Saskia hid the letter; she hadn’t wanted to cause a fuss. She wouldn’t let anything change this, she simply had to leave.

  Half a day later, by the time Saskia stepped out of her damp train carriage and into the warm roar of Paddington, she had forgotten these two letters all together. In fact as the sound of London brought something back to life in her, Saskia Sugar felt she could forget it all: cold, old Sugar Hall; her mother and brother and her potential father, Mr Alex Behr.

  A Gift

  26

  Up in the attics of the Hall, through the thin glass of the blue-room window, the boy watched the car leave. They were taking the sister away, she was leaving for London; he knew that.

  It was almost warm in this room and sun lit the blue to a brightness that made him rub his eyes. He glanced back at the twin beds, they were neatly made with patchwork quilt covers, but only one had an indent in the pillow. The bars across the outside of the window threw lines of shadows on the sunlit, cluttered floor.

  It is a prison, he thought.

  No one had been into this room since that day he had crouched in the corner over there and watched those girls.

  He gazed down at the scattered toys – teddy bears, spinning tops, board games, wooden animals, the alphabet blocks he’d taken to, the strange clown with a key in its back – all of the bright things that had been tipped on the floor once the chaos began that day. The boy noted shattered glass and the rug turned over.

  He smiled. He could still taste those girls in the air and their taste was so sweet and pulpy it made his teeth ache. Those girls had been afraid; they had scratched at each other to get out, they had torn each other’s arms and cheeks when he’d brought darkness to this room.

  The boy breathed deep, and as dead insects twitched into life on the windowsill, he walked to the bed and picked up the pillow.

  Beneath it was a doll stuck with a needle and thread.

  He retreated to a sunny corner and he began to sew.

  ‘I am making,’ he said out loud. He was sewing what looked like hair onto the head of the doll: it was his hair.

  ‘This is for you, Dee-tah,’ he said.

  The doll wore the same velvet blue uniform with gold buttons that he had to wear, it wore the whitest of stockings too. He touched its coat: it was expertly done. As he threaded the needle through the doll’s head over and over with tiny, perfect stitches, he began to think about the child, about the last Sugar: Dieter.

  He wondered what he had learned from Dieter. It wasn’t much but perhaps it was enough. He had learnt that in London there were red machines called buses. (Dieter said these were two storeys high and had a bell that rang every time you wanted to stop.) He knew that Dieter came from London but his mother had come from somewhere else because another war had begun.

  More wars.

  Dieter had told him that if there were a war now, everything would be gone, even the birds, because this war would be fought with bombs that ate the air, bombs called HYDROGEN and ATOM. Dieter had told him there was a man called DAN DARE who would save them all from this, from all the bombs that ate the air.

  It was strange how Dieter kept asking him where had he been and why had he gone away, because he had only been sitting here in this blue room. He had been here all along.

  Then he thought about the doll he was making: he w
ould leave it on Dieter’s bed. He smoothed its hair then turned the doll, pulling up the small blue velvet jacket and teasing open the small gap in its back. The boy felt in his pocket, he brought out a handful of dead moths and he began to stuff them into the half-filled body of the doll: they crunched. ‘This,’ he said, ‘this is for you, Dee-tah.’

  It was the boy’s mother who had taught him this, she hadn’t taught him his name, his proper name, because she refused to give him one, but she had taught him this when his hands were too young and soft to hold a needle. She had told him this before they killed her.

  She taught him how to make and how to curse.

  The boy closed up the hole and finally cut the cotton with his teeth. ‘This is for you, Dee-tah,’ he said again as he held the doll up into the sunlight then he dropped it on the floor and he walked to the window.

  The boy was impatient.

  The boy was hungry.

  Butterflies, two Red Admirals, two Painted Ladies and a single Purple Emperor were crashing at the panes, thud, thud, thud. The boy gazed out at the gardens.

  ‘I saw. They tied her to the yew tree,’ the boy nodded at the window. ‘In these gardens, they buried her. She was not dead, my mother. I heard her scream and it was the scream of a knife.’

  The boy’s head was unsteady on his shoulders; it was his turn to feel dizzy now. The lawns were untidy – not flat and clipped as they once had been. Buttercups and clover had taken over and the thistle was tall – some yellow, some purple. The boy supposed it was thistle, he was always learning, you see, with each new generation here at his Hall he was learning. He didn’t like to think of his mother’s scream, he didn’t like to think of touching the scars on her neck, her back. The boy had too much past and so he turned from it. He wanted to suck up the present and the future. He wanted to learn. The boy felt himself shimmer in the sunlight.

  Beyond the ha-ha, in the field with the big tree, he saw the man. The man was dragging a large basket across the field. The boy watched him struggle as he tried to hang the skin of an air balloon from the branches of that big tree.

  He knew this man: he knew he had eyes as blue as this room because he had known him when he was a child. The boy thought: yes, he was called John and he would hide in the scullery with his mother.

  The boy burped: yes, he was hungry.

  The River

  27

  In the cold kitchen Lilia poured her coffee into the cracked cup she was growing fond of. She had been sleeping so soundly, as deep as the ocean her mother would say, it had been hard to wake. She sipped the black drink, one hand around the hot porcelain as she thought of fire lanterns. They had been so beautiful the other week: little golden wishes rising into the sky. Lilia knew she was becoming sentimental and it was Alex’s fault.

  She placed the greaseproof paper on top of the damson jam and she swilled the bread knife. Dieter had made such a mess getting his own breakfast; the loaf had been hacked at, she had even found a slice in the porch, jam everywhere. He was working his way through the jellies, the blancmange she had made: half-empty bowls were on the table. She couldn’t be angry with him because it was such a relief to know he was eating. John had mentioned he was looking sick again, but Lilia refused to see it: her boy was eating her out of house and home! He was out there playing in the summer morning! He was getting better and she had cancelled the doctor!

  Dieter had a project, the balloon, and it was a comfort to know he was out in the bright morning, planning the balloon repairs with John. She wouldn’t hear from them today. She reached over the Belfast sink to wipe the windowsill down with a cloth; it was covered with small white and dead moths, they’d been trapped in this underground kitchen overnight, she supposed.

  Lilia dragged a kitchen chair from the damp shadows and sat in the light shafting down the back-door steps. She smoothed her dress and wondered if the little red patterns on it were strawberries or cherries. She peered up at the beginnings of the busy garden. Summer was deafening there: the chirruping insects and birds that made her ears ring. She thought of her tomatoes and cucumbers, her potato plants and her mint and she inhaled it all. She was glad the damp chill of the house was at her back because Lilia wouldn’t think of winter, not yet. She would only think about today because today was beautiful, today was alive, and Lilia Sugar felt that life pulse back into her.

  When Dieter didn’t appear for lunch, she didn’t worry; he had had breakfast and it meant the doctor was right, it meant things were back to normal. In London Dieter would be lost for the whole day on the Wasteland with his friends; he’d come back when he was hungry. She and Alex had decided to bring their lunch out into the garden and they sat on the very edge of the ha-ha, staring out at the fields. Bramble curled up from the drop. Alex looked up from his plate. ‘You are happy today,’ he said to her, and it didn’t sound like a question.

  She smiled and ripped at the bread.

  ‘You’re hungry today,’ Alex laughed. ‘You look very beautiful, Lily,’ he told her, and she blushed. It was as if she was fourteen again and they were sitting at the Fisch’s dining-room table with her mother fussing over them all. It was almost like that, but of course it was nothing like that.

  He took out a white handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘We should do something, Lily.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You promised me a swim, remember?’

  She laughed, ‘Are you saying I’m getting fat?’ Butter shone on her lips. She put one hand on her waist and one arm up in the air, twisting in her seat.

  He smiled. ‘No, no, my Lily, I am not saying that. What I am saying – I am saying “let’s go swimming”.’

  Lilia took another big bite from her bread, golden with butter, and she nodded, showing her teeth as she ate. Lilia Sugar was very, very hungry.

  She had left a note on the kitchen table.

  Dieter darling and John, We are out to the river, we are swimming. There are sandwiches and drink in the larder. Ma xx

  She and Alex had parked the car and were walking down through the woods to the River Wye. It was nothing like that brown churn of mud, the Severn, over the fields from Sugar Hall: the Wye had her thinking of childhood summers. She turned to Alex on the path. ‘It is such a waste that car, only sitting there,’ she told him.

  ‘We’re using it today, Lily.’

  ‘We should use it more.’

  ‘Well, I’ll drive you across the sea in it, Liliana, all the way to Brooklyn,’ he laughed as a branch hit him on the cheek and Lilia was surprised to feel a girlish flutter.

  The cover of the trees was welcome; the thin beech leaves were cool shadows of green. Lilia focused on every nettle, every hoop of bramble that stuck out from the verges; she twisted and jumped and giggled as her bare legs were brushed by stings, by thorns.

  ‘If you run, Lily, they don’t hurt.’

  ‘I can’t run!’

  ‘Sure you can!’

  Lilia held her towel and bolted into a sprint, leaping over the green nettles, careful of her footing on the damp path. Alex wrapped his towel around his neck and admired her as her laughter echoed in the woods, blackbirds shrieking and scattering.

  ‘Hurry!’ she cried.

  The sudden brightness of the meadow stunned them for a moment: it was a golden blur of buttercups. The red earth of molehills dotted the ground while black and white cows grazed. This close the cows scared Lilia, she had never liked cows; their doleful eyes seemed a lie. She remembered dissection class at school, the bull’s eye; it burst under her scalpel.

  Dizzy with nerves, they giggled like children.

  ‘Run!’ he yelled.

  And they did.

  They were out of breath by the time they reached the riverbank; they stood, silent, as whirlpools spun in the flowing current. It was silly; they had no costumes and suddenly they were shy. Alex listened to the angry hum of brown horse flies. Lilia bent down and unclasped her blue scandals.

  She was so quick; her dress was over her h
ead, and in an instant she was walking down the incline in her slip, to the little piece of shore splattered with cowpats and deep hoof prints.

  ‘It is not cold, Alex!’ she cried, ‘at least only a little!’

  She watched him as he gazed down at her dress in the thick grass; she wondered if he saw the strawberries on it, or perhaps they were cherries. A milk cow lowed behind him, he jumped and Lilia laughed, splashing. It really was so silly, she thought: they’d swum together as children, as teenagers, and now they were adults they could do as they pleased, but she knew Alex was shy as he unbuckled his belt, folded his glasses and placed them in his brown shoe.

  Lilia watched him strip to his underwear, his vest. He had been a slight boy but she had always loved the darkness of his skin. It was far browner than hers, even without sun, and it seemed to shine. She skimmed the surface of the water with her cupped hands as Alex stood on the shore, fists to his hips; elbows out like a bird. The top of his chest was dark with hair.

  He waded towards her in his vest and underpants. He was such a neat man that it almost made her laugh.

  ‘Do you swim here often?’ he asked, eyes squinting in the sun.

  Lilia decided to make him smile. ‘No, Alex, I come here only with you.’

  He walked against the current.

  ‘Swim, Alex, why don’t you swim?’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  They were bashful again, and then they heard rumbling coming from the bank. They turned to see the cows tumbling down the incline, over their clothes; one after the other, clumsy and dangerous and heavy with milk.

  ‘No!’ Lilia cried.

  ‘I’ll go back,’ he turned in the water.

  ‘No. Stay.’ She reached out for him.

  The cows lurched towards the water and Lilia bent her knees until her shoulders were under and suddenly, this close to him, she didn’t care about clothes or shoes or glasses or cows: Lilia’s hands moved around his hips.

  ‘Our clothes are ruined,’ he said, smiling down at her. ‘My glasses will be crushed.’

  ‘I hate cows,’ she murmured.

  He stroked her hair, her cheek, ‘You live in the countryside.’