by Jenny Eclair
The woman may have had an armload of Cartier bracelets and rubies the size of blood clots that clipped to her ears, but her boy was dead, her best boy.
Bren couldn’t imagine how the woman felt. She had two children of her own, strapping things around the same ages as the surviving Carmichael children, but twice the size of Natasha and Benedict.
Oh, those poor little mites. They had witnessed the accident, actually seen what happened with their own eyes.
The butler told her this when she ventured up the day after the family went back to London. It was the first time she had ever seen him unshaven, his eyes wild and his shirt collarless.
Blake had stayed behind to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy, and as soon as the police investigation was done he was to arrange the packing up of anything that been left in the house. He would need help – Madam’s clothes, he despaired, her underwear, he didn’t feel it would be right if he were to touch such items.
So while Blake took charge of Teddy’s possessions, Bren and Abigail from the village packed up Peggy’s and the children’s clothes into various monogrammed leather suitcases. There was something macabre about picking up dead Ivor’s belongings. What was one meant to do with his dirty pants and socks? Bren found herself weeping over his pyjamas. They were almost brand new and still smelt of boy.
She would have taken them for her lad Robert, but Robbie, despite being two years younger, was already a good deal bigger than Master Ivor had been.
As compensation, she took a few satin hair ribbons for her daughter Sally, who, at twelve, was just a few months older than little miss sour puss Natasha, and Abigail took an unopened Airfix kit for her nephew. No point Bren taking it; Robert was useless at that sort of thing. His hands were already too big and clumsy, he was destined to end up on the farm with his dad.
The packing operation took all day and once the car was fully loaded, the leftover trunks were taken up to the attics for safekeeping. When it was all done, Bren and Abigail sat in the kitchen with poor Blake, who was still the colour of a bleached dishcloth after his ordeal, and listened as he recalled bringing the dead child up from the bottom of the pool, the saturated weight of him, the horror of it.
While Blake wept, Abigail made a pile of ham and mustard sandwiches, which they washed down with a particularly good single malt. She was quite drunk by the time she got back to the farmhouse down the road.
Matthew was furious with her. ‘State of you, woman!’ he ranted, refusing to be placated by the mother-of-pearl cufflinks she had swiped from Teddy Carmichael’s dressing room.
‘When am I ever going to wear cufflinks?’ he sneered. ‘I’d only lose ’em up a cow’s backside.’ So she put them by for Robbie on the off-chance that he would turn into more of a gent than his dad, but even as she hid them in the airing cupboard, she knew it was a futile gesture.
It was in all the papers, the locals and the nationals. Bren and Abigail had ghoulishly pored over reports of the ‘Tragic drowning of young Carmichael heir’.
‘Ivor George Bartholomew Michael,’ breathed Abigail. ‘How come posh types need so many middle names?’
The results of the inquest were published a few weeks later. Ivor’s death had been accidental – well, of course it had.
Bren wasn’t expecting to hear anything more from the Carmichaels after that. She expected the place to be sold, preferably to someone who would still require her services, but several months after Ivor’s death, she received a letter from Teddy Carmichael. The notepaper was headed with the eagle and wolf of his family crest, his handwriting a series of black ink loops.
A consignment of dustsheets was being sent to Kittiwake, he would like Bren to oversee the draping of the furniture and paintings.
The pool was to be professionally drained and Kittiwake was to be locked up for the foreseeable future. He would appreciate Bren accessing the premises on a weekly basis to air the place and check for any signs of physical deterioration, damp, dry rot, vermin and suchlike. Maybe her husband could accompany her?
Why? she pondered, does he think I’m scared of ghosts? Poor little Ivor, he wouldn’t have said boo to a goose, not without saying ‘Excuse me and I beg your pardon.’ Not like the other lad, Benedict. That one was a bit of a monkey in Bren’s opinion – still, rather a monkey than a misery guts. Obviously, Bren felt sorry for Natasha, what with having lost her brother like that, but she had never taken to the girl. She’d once taken Sally up to the house because Abigail had been poorly and young Sally was more than capable of running a Ewbank round and beating a hearth rug.
It was the first time Sally had met the Carmichael children. Ivor had shaken her hand and said what a pleasure it was, Benedict threw a ping-pong ball at her, which Sally threw right back, but Natasha had looked straight through her, as if the girl simply didn’t exist.
So, for over ten years, while the house was uninhabited, Bren went up once a week, gave the place a good sniff, opened a few windows, checked the empty kitchen shelves for mouse droppings and the carpets for weevils. Sometimes Sally went with her and peeked under the dustsheets at Peggy’s peculiar collection of modern art and begged Bren to open the door to the pool room – her mother had the key. ‘Just this once,’ Bren told her daughter. ‘Then don’t ever ask me again.’
It was dank in there, like a fish tank left to rot. The aquamarine ceramic tiles had begun to crack, but it was difficult to see the extent of the deterioration because the windows were too filthy to let in any daylight and all the electric bulbs had long since blown.
Sally clambered down the rusting iron steps and hopscotched across the bottom of the dried-out pool. ‘Imagine, Mum, it isn’t even very deep.’
Bren ordered her out. After all, she was hopping on little Ivor’s grave. ‘Oh look,’ crowed her daughter, reaching down. Sally stood back up and held out her hand, ‘a golf ball.’
Bren received a cheque from Mr Carmichael every quarter. In the autumn of 1953 she wrote to him saying that she thought the roof needed repairing and asking whether she should have the garden seen to. Kittiwake was starting to resemble something out of a fairy tale. The ivy grew thick and beneath its branches windowpanes began to crack and the wooden shutters splintered and peeled.
But Bren didn’t hear back from Teddy and eventually, after two of his cheques bounced, she received a letter from Mr Carmichael’s solicitor saying the property was no longer any concern of Mr E. Carmichael’s, and that all future correspondence concerning Monty’s Cove should be directed to its legal owner, one Margaret Carmichael, currently residing in the United States of America.
The address of a legal firm in Florida was enclosed and it took a few minutes for Bren to realise that Margaret meant Peggy. From then on, the money for Kittiwake’s basic upkeep came from its mistress.
Peggy’s signature on the cheques was small and cramped, as if an ant had taken possession of an expensive bottle of purple ink. As the years rolled by, the money kept coming, but in the summer of 1956 Bren noticed that the signature on the cheque, still in that same tiny hand, had changed from Mrs M. Carmichael to Mrs M. Alessandro.
‘Must have divorced poor old Teddy and got married again,’ she told Matthew, who didn’t take any notice. ‘I said she must have divorced Teddy and got married again,’ yelled Bren. Matthew was as deaf as a post these days and she wondered whether, given the chance, she’d divorce him and go and live somewhere else. But in reality she wouldn’t know where to go. So she stayed, and every Tuesday around midday she walked up the track to Kittiwake and dusted away the cobwebs. As the years rolled by, her daughter Sally got married and moved out, but Robbie stayed at home helping his dad out on the farm and one day she pawned the cufflinks so they could buy a new tractor. She always felt bad about that, they weren’t hers to pawn, she should have given them back to Mr Teddy, but he had died in tragic circumstances. Apparently a gun had gone off while he was cleaning it and blown away the top of his head. ‘Accident, my foot,’ spat Matthew gruffly. �
��That man knew exactly what he was doing.’
It wasn’t long after that that Master Benedict and his friends had started coming down to Kittiwake and . . .
Waaagh, waaagh, came the cry from the bundle by the Aga, and Bren hauled herself up to mix some formula. The infant was getting stronger and more demanding by the day.
Would the baby be any concern of Mrs Alessandro’s, pondered Bren, expertly scooping up the squalling infant. Was it her duty to inform Peggy that she had a potential grandchild here at Monty’s Cove?
Matthew told her not to interfere. He said that if Benedict or the mother didn’t come and claim the child soon, they would have to hand her over to the authorities – he didn’t want the little bastard cluttering up his kitchen.
‘Poor mite,’ cooed Bren, giving the baby a cuddle. What on earth was to become of her? Naughty, naughty Mr Benedict, this was all his doing.
Bren doubted Peggy knew about Benedict’s jaunts down to the Cove. In fact she very much suspected that Mrs Alessandro or whatever she called herself was completely in the dark about the shenanigans that had been going on over the past couple of summers.
The whole thing had got out of hand for a while, girls running naked onto the moonlit sands, bonfires on the beach, screaming and silliness long into the night. Matthew used to go out with his shotgun and fire shots into the air, adding to the madness, warning Robbie, who was a grown man, to stay away. Not that he did. Bren knew he used to slope off there. Saw his shadow on the hill, heard the click of his bedroom door when he came in at all hours, marvelled at how he could get up at five to do the milking when he only got in at three, but she kept her trap shut, so as not to upset Matthew.
The place was a magnet for folks with nothing better to do than drink themselves silly and act the goat. Mostly they were posh types from London, their little sports cars getting stuck in the muddy lane, shrill voices screaming with laughter and young Master Benedict in the middle of it all. What was he now, twenty-two?
Still a monkey, though. Burning furniture on the lawn at midnight, flames dancing high into the summer night sky, girls in ball gowns balancing along the perimeter of the walled garden. Anyone could have fallen, anything could have happened.
Bren had thought about writing to Mrs Alessandro on a number of occasions. Benedict might be an adult, but he was still her son, didn’t his mother have a right to know what was going on? But she kept putting it off and eventually, when the weather cooled down in October, the flashy cars disappeared and Kittiwake fell back to sleep, her deserted rooms echoing in the silence, empty again.
Apart from the blonde.
Bren had nearly had a heart attack when she came across the girl one Tuesday morning in November, drifting around the place like a little pot-bellied ghost. She recognised her immediately – she was the one that didn’t sound like all the others. This one sounded like a Cockney, all knocked-down beehive and slingbacks. Said her name was Serena and that she was waiting for Benedict to come back, said she wouldn’t go until she saw him again, said she didn’t care how long she had to wait, said she had something to tell him.
‘And you must have been the something she had to tell him,’ she cooed into the baby’s tiny ear.
Bren felt a pang of guilt. She’d made it quite obvious to the girl before Christmas that she thought she was an interloper and that she should leave. The girl must have avoided her in the weeks leading up to her confinement, she must have hidden up in the attic in amongst the suitcases thick with dust. Had she given birth in the house all alone? Surely not, someone must have helped her . . . And then it struck her – Robbie. Her son had always been soft-hearted, he’d have come to the rescue. She’d wondered how he’d known exactly which baby formula to buy for the child once she’d taken up residence by the Aga, and the penny had finally dropped when she recalled the cardigan the child was wearing when she found her. No wonder it had seemed so familiar – she’d knitted it herself.
‘Ask no questions,’ she muttered to the baby, ‘you’ll be told no lies. And with any luck your daddy will come home soon, sweetheart.’
13
Benedict Returns to Meet the Baby
Kittiwake House, Cornwall, February 1963
‘Oh, I don’t think so, Bren. I mean, look at it – does it look like me? I don’t think so.’
‘She,’ Bren told him. ‘It’s a she.’
Grudgingly she had to admit he was right: the baby didn’t look anything like Benedict. There wasn’t a single drop of Greek blood in her pallid little body. On the contrary – she was so pale there was a tinge of pale green about her, and what little hair she had was the colour of dirty straw.
It was almost March, the baby was approximately a month old and her presumed father had finally returned from the skiing trip he’d left London for the previous November.
Ridiculous, thought Bren, never mind three months, the longest she’d ever been away was for three days, and that was on her honeymoon. It was meant to be a week but they’d come home early because Matthew missed the cows.
As soon as she’d realised the master was back, Bren had walked up to Kittiwake with a basket over each arm. One contained a chicken-and-mushroom pie for Mr Benedict and a portion of his favourite bread-and-butter pudding, the other held the baby and a couple of bottles of formula.
He was delighted to see his supper, but confused by the baby.
‘In a drawer? Serena’s brat, you say? Well yes, she was a very rickety-rackety kind of girl, but leaving a baby in a drawer – well, that takes the biscuit, Bren.’
Bren lit him a fire in the drawing room and arranged his supper on a tray. The baby remained in her basket by the hearth while Benedict ate. Now and again he leant forward and pulled back the cover of her basket as if hoping she might have magically turned into cheese and biscuits.
Once his supper was finished, Benedict wiped around the rim of his pudding plate with his middle finger. He was a greedy man, thought Bren. Wine, women, pies – Benedict had what her husband called an appetite.
‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did sleep with the girl, but this baby?’ He peered again into the basket. ‘Are you quite sure it’s even hers? Only, it doesn’t look much like Serena either. Remember, she was the one with the golden hair.’
‘That hair was dyed,’ Bren reminded him. Men could be so stupid sometimes. ‘She got it out of a peroxide bottle. Who knows what colour she was underneath all that bleach.’
‘Yes . . . but she was very pretty,’ recalled Benedict, licking his lips like a wolf in a fairy tale, and Bren felt tempted to tell him how some women could create alchemy on their faces with a few cheap tricks and a steady hand with the eyeliner.
‘Thing is,’ he continued, ‘I couldn’t possibly look after it. I’m only here because I’m in hiding.’ And for the next half-hour Benedict had explained to Bren in great detail how he was untangling himself from an unfortunate Alpine romance that had blossomed during some rather prolonged New Year celebrations.
An Austrian heiress, apparently. Much as he could have done with the money, it wasn’t worth the grief – the girl was insane, threatening to throw herself off a ski lift if he didn’t propose, accusing him of stealing her virginity and ‘besmirching her reputation’.
‘Seriously,’ Benedict sighed, ‘it’s 1963, I didn’t think girls cared about having their reputations besmirched. I thought it was all the rage.’
He would sleep, as he always did, in his father’s old dressing room – for a week or so until the Austrian affair blew over. ‘I tell you, Bren, it’s no longer a mystery how World War Two got started.’ His plan was to return to London once the hoo-ha had died down.
As for the baby, he told the housekeeper not to worry. Serena would be back soon enough. ‘Let’s face it, Bren, mothers don’t abandon their babies.’
But even as the words fell out of his mouth, a shadow of doubt crossed his face and they both knew that wasn’t always true.
So Bren walked back down the t
rack with both baskets, one containing the empty pie plate and pudding Pyrex and the other containing the baby, and when she got home Matthew yelled that if that brat woke him one more time in the night, he was going to put her in a sack and chuck her off the clifftop. But they both knew he didn’t mean it, not really.
Every day for the next fortnight, while Mr Benedict lay low, Bren walked up to Kittiwake with a basket of dinner for the master. And every day she took the baby with her.
What else could she do? Matthew wasn’t going to look after it, neither was her lad Robbie. As for Sally, she was a married woman now, expecting her own baby and furious that this little impostor should have landed first.
‘I can’t leave her on her own at the farmhouse,’ she told Benedict. ‘The cat could sit on her face, a lump of coal could jump out of the fire and set the place ablaze, and God knows she doesn’t deserve that.’
It wasn’t long before she noticed that when she was busy in the kitchen and the baby cried in the drawing room next door, by the time she went to pick her up, Benedict had got there before her. He lifted the baby up with one hand and walked around with her pressed against his chest, singing out-of-tune pop songs.
Bren didn’t suppose he knew any nursery rhymes. Peggy Carmichael hadn’t seemed the type to sing ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ with her children.
‘She likes Anthony Newley,’ he told her one afternoon, and she saw him plant a kiss on the baby’s bald patch. ‘My sister Natasha used to get dolls for birthdays and Christmases,’ he told her. ‘I always was a bit jealous,’ and then his nose wrinkled in sudden disgust. ‘But God, Brenda, something seems to have exploded in the pants area and I’m afraid that’s not my domain.’ He passed the child over as quickly as if she were a rugby ball, and as Bren busied herself in the kitchen with warm water and cotton wool, he leant against the doorframe and casually informed her that he was going back to London next week, now that ‘the coast was finally clear’.
‘The Austrians have retreated at last! But I tell you, Bren, this business with Baby Stinky Pants and the near-miss with Fräulein Whatserface have taught me a lesson. I shall be stocking up on the prophylactics in future. We don’t want any more accidents.’
