by Lucy Atkins
I have finally taken his basket down to the cellar. I cannot bear to look at it, sitting empty, but I also cannot bear to throw it away. I remember when I bought it for him I paid extra for the thickest fleece because he deserved the best. It took him over a year to even lie in it. He would push himself under the table instead and watch me with his nose on his paws. His instinct was to find somewhere dark and sheltered where he might not be noticed.
The rescue centre filled me in on his past. He needed a quiet house, they said, no other pets, definitely no children. He was half-starved and dehydrated when the RSPCA officers got him. He’d been discovered by a bunch of teenage boys who had broken into an abandoned house in Moulsecoomb. He was sleeping in his own excrement, consumed by mange and fleas, very close to death. When the rescue people explained that he limped as a result of multiple fractures in his hind legs, most likely from kicks, I knew that he was for me. He maintained a hearty dislike of men with beards and would cower or snap at them in the street.
I brought him back to Ileford four years ago on a warm September afternoon and nursed him with fresh cuts of meat – pigeon breast, pheasant, chicken or venison from the estate. Every night at bedtime I cracked an organic egg into warm milk for him.
He only ever bit me once. We had been dozing by the fire and my elbow knocked a dictionary from the table. It landed on his head, rousing him from a deep and vulnerable sleep. It was self-defence to bite, pure reflex. When I drew back, clutching my shin, a peculiar terror saturated his eyes, a mixture of guilt at what he had done to me and dread at what I might do in return. As I wrapped my trouser round my leg to stem the blood I felt my eyes fill with tears, not from pain but from pity.
I tried to smile and coax him to me. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I scared you, you poor lad. I won’t hurt you, Bertie boy, I’ll never hurt you.’ But he drew himself low on the carpet and quaked.
Someone had done awful things to that dog, but I never would. I still have the pale crescent tattoo of his teeth on my skin. It is a valuable reminder that nobody is beyond redemption, nobody unworthy of love.
I decided, after this incident, that I must make Bertie understand that I would never abandon, reject or hurt him. I kept him with me every hour of the day, I even took him into the lavatory. It took a year and a half, but one cold March evening he crawled up next to me on my bed, ears flat, curled tight at my feet and stayed there all night. I have never slept better.
After that he was my devoted friend. When I scratched the tender spot behind his ears he would gaze at me with pure gratitude in his dear brown eyes. He would never have run away from me, I do know that. So I let him down. I should never have left him with Olivia when he was sick and weak and confused. It was a mistake to allow her to persuade me to leave him.
She keeps telling me that I should replace him. I should get a wolfhound, she says, the sort of proud creature that belongs in a seven-bedroom Victorian Gothic manor. Apart from the obvious lunacy of suggesting that I could ever replace Bertie, I did find it unsettling that she should suggest a wolfhound. I questioned her thoroughly but she insisted that it was just a random breed, plucked from nowhere.
She wanted to know why I was so bothered about wolfhounds so I told her the myth of Violet’s ghost. Lady Burley always insists that, if you look out of her bedroom window early on a misty October morning, you can see Violet on the driveway in a long grey dress, corseted and hatted, walking her wolfhound, vanishing between the elms.
Lady Burley has another Violet story, too, which is even sillier. I heard it as a child, on one of my visits to Ileford, and I told Olivia about it, though I did not tell her I had the story directly from Uncle Quentin himself. It was the only time, as a child, that I met him and I don’t remember his face, even, just a big tweedy presence and the fear that his words inspired in me. If I pushed back the cover of the well, he said, I would see his mother’s face staring back up at me and I would be cursed forever. His mother, Violet Burley, drowned herself in the well after his two elder siblings died.
This was probably a story Uncle Quentin invented to keep children away from a dangerous well, or perhaps just because he liked inventing stories. He was, by all accounts, an unhinged fantasist. He famously brought a dancing bear back from India in the 1930s and kept it in the cellar. He used to wander round the manor stark naked, ringing a cowbell to alert the maids, who would flee when they heard it. He once rode into one of his dinner parties on the back of his dancing bear, which became very distressed and bit part of his leg off. As his eyesight faded, later in life, he got the gamekeeper to clip the wings of all the pigeons and partridges so he could walk right up to them and shoot them. Among his papers I found a set of homosexual pornographic stories he’d written (very badly). They were all set, rather oddly, in Arthurian times.
When I started the preliminary research for Annabel, I was able to prove that Uncle Quentin’s story about his mother was nonsense. Quentin’s two older siblings did die, but she did not kill herself because of it. She in fact died of puerperal fever six days after producing Uncle Quentin. Perhaps he preferred to heap the blame on his siblings. I understand this impulse. A child takes on such guilt for a mother’s death.
I have never seen an Ileford ghost, though once or twice I have stepped out of my study very late at night and known, just for a moment, that someone was standing quietly in the shadows by the stairs to the servant’s quarters. Of course, the human brain is biologically wired for trickery; we must be alert to the unseen threat. Our capacity for visitations, chimeras and frights is a perfectly sensible evolutionary by-product.
My legs catch my eye. They look very large and pale, poking out of my Bermuda shorts, their lumpy terrain mapped by blue veins and blotches. They look as if they have sucked up the moisture from the Ileford air and brought it with them onto the ferry. I hope the dry heat of southern France will help my joints, my knee in particular. I am beginning to feel seasick now. I am very bad at transitions and departures, even when I have chosen them.
I find myself suddenly filled with trepidation that Olivia might not want to pursue the Chocolate Cream Poisoner idea. If she says no, I actually do not know what I will do. I could resume my own small research studies, of course, but I will never be able to publish them and my days will be taken up, once again, with the Sisyphean task of managing a Victorian structure that is hell-bent on collapse. I cannot bear to go back to that. I cannot live like that again.
Ileford without Bertie, without Annabel – and, yes, without Olivia – has nothing to offer me. When Lady Burley goes – if the will passes probate – it will still not be enough for me. I should be glad to own such a place, but I do not want it. All I really want is my own home, with its narrow galley kitchen looking onto the lovely, overgrown garden with my apple and pear trees, my straggling gooseberry bushes. I want my Edwardian windows and the smell of my books. I even miss the faint sound of traffic at rush hour. But that is the one thing I cannot have because, although it was my home for thirty-three years, it was never mine. Someone else, presumably, is living there now. I wonder if they have ripped out the bathroom, built a side-return kitchen extension, laid hardwood floors, brought in a garden designer with gravel and ferns.
My sudden dark mood, I know, is down to the anxiety of transit, the judder of the ferry beneath my feet, the smells of vomit and bleach and sun cream and other peoples’ food, the intrusiveness of all these bodies, the nesting mess and stink of families. When I feel this sort of hypersensitivity to my surroundings, one thing that can help is to distract myself by thinking about work.
The Chocolate Cream Poisoner file is in my bag right now. Perhaps I will get it out in a minute. I must be optimistic. This will fascinate Olivia too if only she will listen. The subject marries all of her professional interests, after all: Victorian women, insanity, asylums, criminality. It even took place in Brighton, her hometown. The desire to discuss my idea, to get my teeth into the research again, is almost physical. I have the urge to get
up and walk but there is nowhere to go on this container of bodies; people are pushing and lurching up and down the aisles, bumping into one other while the sea sways beneath.
In just an hour the ferry will dock in Dieppe and this, the worst part of the journey, will be over. There is a long drive ahead but I will be alone in my car, which will be infinitely preferable to this floating hell. I just have to focus on the goal. I am sure that when I finally get to the village and find her we will talk about my idea in great detail and – without all the distractions and tensions of home – Olivia will love it as much as I do. I know she will. She has to.
Olivia
South of France, Day Three
It was the fifth year running that the three families had been away together and they soon slipped into their usual roles. Em fussed around with the younger children, taking the girls for nature walks or helping them to construct fiddly fairy towns out of twigs. Chloe, always good at relaxation, spent hours on a sun lounger with The Goldfinch, wearing a kaftan over her white bathing suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat, her long limbs slowly turning golden. Khalil and Al chucked balls with the boys or drank small bottles of beer in the shade and talked about sport. David either joined them or devoted himself to planning, shopping for and cooking all the meals.
Everyone understood that this was David’s way of relaxing on holiday, he loved nothing more than to cook for his friends, so they allowed him free rein and took turns to wash up. But there was something more obsessive about his activity this time. Olivia could see that the pleasure had drained from the process, leaving only a relentless drive to source and prepare food.
He would disappear after breakfast, sometimes taking Jess or Paul, though never Dom, or occasionally with one of the adults, in search of a particular kind of olive oil or a vineyard he had read about, returning early afternoon to a house full of starving, bickering children, bringing bags full of tapenade and olives and bitter leaves, fleshy tomatoes and crisp baguettes, soft-pelted peaches and cheeses that oozed and reeked, even when layered in waxed paper and striped plastic bags.
This feverish catering was, Olivia knew, a reflection of his guilt. She was almost relieved that he could not maintain the pretence of relaxation.
‘Is David OK?’ Emma said on the third morning, as the two of them drank coffee under an umbrella on the terrace while Jess and Nura played in the pool. Emma’s freckled skin was covered in a thick vernix of sunscreen and she was wearing a shapeless linen dress and Birkenstocks. Olivia wished that Emma would just relax, like Chloe, and stop fussing around and worrying about everyone, stop noticing everything. It made things harder.
‘It’s just that David seems a bit, I don’t know, frenetic,’ Emma said earnestly.
Olivia made a non-committal noise and stretched out her legs, crossing them at the ankles. David had left early that day in search of a particular kind of cured meat only to be found an hour’s drive over the hills. He could have taken Dominic, actually spent some time with him, but, as far as she knew, Dom was still in bed. At the last minute, Chloe had leaped off the sunbed, thrown down The Goldfinch, grabbed her straw bag and sunglasses and run after him to the car, shouting, ‘Wait! I’m coming!’
Olivia considered explaining to Emma what was really going on with David, but she knew that Emma’s shock, or worse, her kindness and sympathy, wouldn’t help.
‘So, is everything OK?’ Emma pressed. ‘Is he really stressed out? How’s his book coming along?’
‘Well, it’s not, really. That’s part of the problem.’
‘But wasn’t it supposed to be published this autumn, around the same time as yours?’
‘His publication date’s been moved. It turns out he still has quite a few revisions, so it’s not going to be published probably till next autumn now, at the earliest.’
It was a fortnight since she had seen the email from David’s editor with the subject line ‘Trust – further notes’. The attachment contained twenty or more pages of detailed corrections and comments, most of them major and distinctly tetchy.
That was the first thing he had lied to her about. Over the past six months, whenever she’d asked about Trust, or wanted to know when she’d be able to read it, he’d said it was almost done. But his editor’s email had been overshadowed by what she discovered next in his inbox.
‘It might be for the best,’ said Emma. ‘I mean, you two can be quite competitive, can’t you? I was a bit worried you’d be warring over your sales figures.’
Olivia laughed. ‘If we did I’m sure he’d win.’
‘Really? I don’t know, Liv. Would he?’ Emma knitted her brows. ‘I read an article the other day saying the market for popular history books is booming. And your Annabel sounds brilliant – I can’t wait to read it – and you’ve also got a really strong public profile now. Last time you and I went for coffee three people asked for selfies and we were only in the cafe for half an hour. I actually think your book is likely to be huge, bigger than you’d think.’
‘Well, there’s no way of predicting that.’
‘To be honest, though, I don’t know how you’ve written a book on top of everything else you’ve got going on.’ Emma sighed. ‘You’re just amazing, Liv. Your workload must be horrendous. I know I couldn’t work like that any more, not with Nura.’
‘You could, you’d just get an au pair. I mean, there’s no way I could do this without Marta.’
‘Oh no. Marta seems great, and it works for you, but I don’t miss the law one bit, I feel nothing but relief to be out of it. And I could never get an au pair anyway. I couldn’t bear to miss out on Nura’s childhood.’
Olivia tried not to react. Emma didn’t mean it as a criticism. After twelve years trying to conceive, it was only natural that she should want to focus on her child. Emma always approached everything with complete commitment and diligence. She’d got herself a City law career straight out of university while Chloe had discovered yoga, travelled to India, then come back and taken waitressing jobs, and Olivia – not really knowing what else to do – had started her PhD. Emma had been the first to settle down too. She moved into Khalil’s flat at the hospital only a year after college and married him at twenty-four. It was probably not surprising that she had taken the same approach to motherhood.
Olivia knew that the stab of irritation she had just felt was not really anything to do with Emma’s comment about the au pair. Its prickly roots were clamped around her own maternal guilt. She desperately needed more time with her children and they needed more from her too. Dom was troubled and angry and she knew that she wasn’t helping him – she didn’t know how to help him. Paul was unhealthily obsessed with screens, Marta seemed to give him free rein, and Jess definitely needed more attention than she was getting. All this was only going to worsen if she had to accept the BBC offer. The thought of dancing on TV made her feel ill. She was used to some exposure but not at that level and not of that sort. She didn’t want it.
It was certainly true that her life would not function without an au pair. Marta had been with them for almost a year now, and while Olivia had not exactly warmed to her, she was competent, intelligent and responsible. It had been a good decision to have someone older – Marta was twenty-four – and although David complained initially about having someone in the house, he didn’t really mind Marta too much. He treated her a bit like a grown-up daughter; Olivia had even come home a couple of times to find them in the kitchen discussing Marta’s applications for her Master’s degree in economics.
She fanned herself. She was in a black T-shirt and cut-offs and it was too hot for black. There was no breeze at all. Perhaps she should go and get her swimsuit on and join the girls in the pool, but she knew she shouldn’t, she needed to go upstairs and get some of the work out of the way. Jess was harassing Nura to do a somersault. She demonstrated without effort, her body lithe and slippery while Nura stood and watched, nervous and static, her skin slick caramel against her pink goggles. Jess always seemed to dom
inate Nura. Perhaps this stemmed from being the youngest, with two big brothers to control. There was something of David in her, a confidence that Olivia herself lacked. But she did need to learn about kindness and tolerance too.
Emma was right. It had been mad to embark on a book, but at the time everyone was telling her she must capitalize on her public profile. She’d also been intrigued by the challenge of writing a popular book – she instinctively felt she could do it well. It would be fun just to tell a story, rather than produce a rigorous critical analysis. And, in truth, a part of her, that she wasn’t particularly proud of, was ambitious and driven, always reaching for the higher rung, always looking for acclaim, praise, recognition.
Still, she could easily have ignored the leaflet that day. If she had, she might still be trawling around looking for a book idea even now. It was the foul weather that did it. It was February half-term, eighteen months ago now, and the rain was relentless. David was away as usual and Marta had mild flu so Olivia had taken the children down to Sussex for a few days. Stuck inside the Farmhouse, the rooms seemed to shrink. Dom was fuming because he had wanted to stay in London with the friends who were, even then, becoming problematic; Paul was glued to the Xbox and Jess either fought with Paul or whined that she was bored. When the leaflet flopped onto the doormat Olivia seized on it.
The Real Diary of a Victorian Lady!
Come and see a most exciting local discovery! A sensational Victorian diary, handed down through one family. On short-term loan by Lady Catherine Burley of Ileford Manor.
The museum was only a twenty-minute drive away. She forced Jess into the car with the bribe of a hot chocolate in town on the way home.
She felt Vivian’s curious presence the moment they came through the door. There was an odd tension, as if there had been an intake of breath. Olivia’s first thought was that she had been recognized. She waited for a comment, and wished she had remembered to brush her hair, but there was silence.