There Are Little Kingdoms

by Kevin Barry

  ‘I’m not talking a bloody B&B! I’m talking A BOUTIQUE FUCKING HOTEL!’

  The Bliss place was big enough, certainly, and it had bags of character. The countryside was bleak but impressive: fells and stone hills and sudden gorges. Angelica felt there were opportunities with walkers, dreamers, romantic types. She admitted there was work to be done. The house had animals in its walls. It had structural concerns. There was the wafting presence of the Bliss ancestral dead.

  From an exotic assortment of spirits, Freddie considered something green and conceivably… Venezuelan? He held the bottle against the window and moonlight made lurid the unreal green of its liquor. Well, one took one’s chances.

  ‘I must say,’ he said, with a relaxed grin. ‘I’m very much looking forward to the guided badger walks.’

  ‘Nothing is decided on badgers,’ she held up a warning finger.

  ‘But it’ll be a unique attraction,’ he argued. ‘Badger sightings are terribly rare. And I happen to know just the spot. I’ll tell you now, Angel—I can all but guarantee badgers. Of course, these will be nocturnal events, obviously, but that just adds to the fun of it. Night-time expeditions! A cloak of darkness!’

  Freddie Bliss was about to go with the Venezuelan when he spotted half a bottle of decent-looking Spanish brandy at the back of the press. This was a definite result. He waved the dusty treasure at his daughter and set free a suave smile.

  ‘Come, my darling,’ he said. ‘The night is young.’

  Angelica narrowed her eyes. She retained—despite it all—a good posture. She wore light fabrics in bright colours. She had a fondness for ethnic trousers, loosely worn, and these did not flatter. She had some handsomeness still but it was turning into something else. She had moved from city to city, and from town to town, propelled by a talent for hopeless optimism.

  ‘I’m warning you, Dad,’ she said. ‘What I’ve told you about Joe is in the strictest confidence. He’d be livid if he thought every old sod knew his difficulties.’

  ‘Where do you find these blokes, Angel? Pubs?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Seedy night-spots?’

  ‘Shut up! What do think I am? Some kind of tart?’

  ‘Well where did you meet him?’

  ‘We met on the Internet.’

  ‘I see,’ said Freddie Bliss, assuming some kind of motorway junction.

  The warmth in the air was still and oily feeling. Soon the lake would turn stagnant and rank. The yellow flowers of the gorse would dry out and become a nose-tickling dust. That was the first sign of the year turning.

  ‘I’ve been wondering…’ she said.

  She picked up the mallet again and swung it thoughtfully to test its heft.

  ‘I’ve been wondering if maybe we should… knock through some more? We’ve started so we’ll finish, kind of a thing.’

  ‘More, sweet? I’d be worried about draughts.’

  Three internal walls had already come down. All was rubble and wreck. For weeks, Angelica had stomped around in brown padded boots like builders wear, in a facemask, wielding the mallet, with her cheeks a flushed red against the whiteness of plaster and dust. A space the size of a football pitch had been cleared out downstairs. She now spent much of the evenings crawling around with a chalk, marking down where the new divisions would go.

  ‘You mean,’ said Freddie, ‘that now we put up new walls?’

  ‘Perhaps just screens,’ she said.

  ‘Like Japanese?’

  ‘Precisely, Dad. Lacquered.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘I’m thinking fin de siecle. I want an opulent feel. Decadent!’

  ‘Like a knocking shop?’ said Freddie Bliss.

  ‘More opium den,’ she said.

  The curriculum vitae of Angelica Bliss:

  She went first to art school in Leeds, where she discovered no aptitude for creativity, but fell happily pregnant by her free-drawing instructor, Kim, who was kind enough to drive her to Halifax for the abortion, and with a Yorkshireman’s swarthy panache offered to go halves on the cost. Then she took up archaeology at Liverpool, and talked excitedly for two years of Picts, Celts, and Roman walls, and she was neck-deep in mud on digs in North Wales, and the dig supervisor, Frank, vowed to leave his wife of thirty years for her, and there was a dreadful scene in a lay-by outside Wrexham: midnight, winter, early eighties. She had enough of learning then, thank you very much, and with a loan from her parents opened a candle store in Stoke-on-Trent. From there, she progressed to a transcendence workshop in Inverness, then a market stall in Camden Town, then a lost weekend in Murcia that lasted five years, then a period of intense political activism on behalf of the Turks in Dortmund, then a marriage of one year to a financial services executive in Kent, then a squat strewn with needle-thin junkies in Coventry, and finally a dull job at a call centre in Manchester. She had long since gone through her inheritance: all that was left was the house. She now stood in the middle of the house, late on a summer’s night, with the mallet hammer in her hands.

  ‘What we also need to think about,’ she said, ‘is the breakfast menu. Traditional? Kippers?’

  She swung the mallet. She took out a doorframe. There had as yet been little discussion about marketing. Angelica believed that once the camera crew had been, and once the programme aired, their name would be out there, and it would spread, and the business would make itself. She held the firm belief, always, that if your name was Bliss, then the stars were helpfully arrayed. Significantly, this had not proved the case for previous generations.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, throwing the hammer aside. ‘We really need to start getting some ideas down. They’ll be here for seven. Sharp!’

  ‘I’ve had a shave,’ said Freddie Bliss. ‘And I’ve given quite a bit of thought to what I’d like to say.’

  ‘What you mean, like to say?’

  ‘To camera.’

  ‘This isn’t about you! This is a renovation show.’

  ‘Fly on the wall, you said?’

  ‘Oh you know the type of thing, Dad. We’re battling against the odds. We’re setting up a new business. This is a story about life changes and DIY. The last-minute madness of the renovation. The drama of the first paying guests.’

  ‘You mean there’s a booking?’

  ‘Oh shut up! We’ll go out on the eight o’clock slot. The eating-your-supper slot. All we’ve got to worry about is keeping up with the business as it arrives.’

  The scullery ceiling caved in. Angelica shrugged heroically.

  ‘I rather thought,’ said Freddie Bliss, ‘that I’d talk about… courage.’

  ‘Oh dear Christ!’

  ‘I’ve never had any. Now you certainly do, Angel. You’re a tremendously brave girl.’

  ‘You’re background colour! You can say hello and look whiskery and that’s it!’

  ‘I’m worried about the lights. Will there be lots? Will there be… kliegs? If there are going to be kliegs, I’d better have a word.’

  They repaired to what was left of the dining room. It was a house of scurrying and of rising damp. Angelica remained confident they would be open for business in three weeks. Freddie couldn’t see it, unless they were to put the guests on beds of straw. But he was no longer a man to fret. He was, in the calmness of his age, a great believer in doing things right: after dinner, you have some more drinks.

  He placed the bottle on the table with a triumphant flourish and then sniffed at the air, sighed, and went to open the windows. Torpid and clammy, it was June, and the gorse on the low hills was an invitation to midges. The smoke from the candlelight would keep most of them at bay. He lit more, to be on the safe side. Angelica poured the coffee. Freddie added generous slugs of the cognac. It was a brand from the northern bit, something unpronouncable with lots of Xs and Ks, and it had a badly drawn bull for a graphic.

  ‘This should do the business, Angel,’ he said, as though predicting a safe landing in hazardous conditions. ‘Carajillos,
isn’t it? Civilised.’

  ‘If we must,’ said Angelica.

  ‘No gun to your head, dear. You mustn’t always scold so.’

  ‘I’m not scolding.’

  ‘It’s your tone. It’s a scolding tone.’

  It was falling so quickly into the patterns of a marriage. Some wind got up and the old house groaned and trembled. If the house ever stopped groaning and trembling, it would be time to worry. There were presences in the house, he was sure, but mostly benign. His Uncle Jack for one. Poor Jack! Jack was always going to be a man for the unquiet grave.

  ‘So what colour’s this one? What colour’s Joe?’

  ‘Oh! You’re unbelievable! You realise, I suppose, that you can be arrested for that type of comment now? They won’t care if you’re eighty-five! Joe is an honest and kind and loving man, he’s…’

  ‘Relax, Angel, you’ll give yourself blood pressure. He’s Manchester, is he? Well, rough old spot, isn’t it? I remember it must have been… ’38? Yes, and I’m in a low bar in Ancoats. No, hang on, was it Huyton? Remember the rhyme? Huyton, Huyton, two dogs fightin’! No, Huyton’s Liverpool. It was Manchester, it was Ancoats. Myself, Alec Whittle, Charlie Bamber, all that crowd. I dare say we’ve had a few. Ambrose Poll walks in, he says …’

  ‘Dad,’ said Angelica. ‘The last thing I need now is pub stories. You’re stinking.’

  ‘No, actually,’ said Freddie. ‘I’ve only had a couple.’

  ‘You’re stinking,’ she said. ‘You were stinking when I got back at two o’clock today—two o’clock, Daddy!—and you’re stinking now.’

  ‘Three or four, darling,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’ve had.’

  ‘Stinking. At your age!’

  ‘Your mother was never a shrew. Your mother was a marvellous woman. Liked a drink. Wonderful with money. Knew her horses. And she ate very rarely.’

  ‘You’re a washed up old sot. I should put you in a facility.’

  ‘You come up here!’ he cried. ‘You come up here with your bloodshot eyes! You bed the jailbird!’

  She leapt to her feet and took the bottle by its neck.

  ‘How dare you! You drove my mother to the grave and you won’t be happy till you’ve me in t’same place! You go out of your mind! You lose the fucking plot! I mean that business with the headstones, Dad! The police called in? Community orders? At your age? You have disgraced this family’s name! AGAIN! We are lower than muck now! People smirk, in the village, they do! When I pass? They smirk!’

  ‘Angelica,’ he said. ‘Really.’

  Bliss family arguments boiled up quick and subsided as fast. They had a couple of sips, they took down a couple of breaths. They gathered themselves.

  ‘Hillwalkers?’ he said.

  ‘That’s our market.’

  ‘Enormous gasping Germans in boots. Well, they’re back, certainly. Like the swallows. They’re all over the shop. They turn up here, you know? Bang on the door at all hours. They get lost. They say this direction is west, please? This direction is east? I say no wonder you lost the war. Can’t find your way to Keswick? How do you expect to find Moscow? In the snow?’

  ‘I’m headachey,’ said Angelica.

  ‘Blonde chaps. Healthy, yes, but tremendously dull, Germans. Don’t you find? Headache, darling? Eat some pills.’

  The drinks became more brandy than coffee. She drained hers and went to the window for air. It was an enormous, leaded window, like a church’s, and she pushed it open as wide as it’d go, and climbed out for a turn about the unkempt gardens. It was a clear night and the sky was jewelled and the Plough was precisely where it should be at this late hour, indicating Carlisle. She had plans for a meditation space by the froggy pond. There would be dawn ceremonies. She had a loose white frock in mind. Also, she would relay the croquet lawn. There would be cream teas, served by pleasant local girls in crisp linen uniforms—that is the sort of thing that gets the foreigners gushing and ensures repeat business.

  She fished the phone from her trouser pocket and texted some filth to Joe. He liked his filth, Joe. Perhaps it would be best if she didn’t hire girls who were overly pleasant. As soon as he was untagged, Joe would move up, and they would set about building their new life together. She had at last found her soul mate. She had known from the very first moment, six weeks ago. She exhaled raw happiness into the night-time garden. She danced back to the dining room for another drink or two.

  Freddie Bliss had gone into reminiscence.

  ‘Lucia! Oh, she hated a snob. Marvellous throat, so sleek, like a swan! You’ve taken after my lot, more’s the pity. Bad luck, darling! Nose of a Bliss, certainly. Bulgy. Like your Uncle Alex. He went mad, you know. Poor Alex. That was a terrible end for any man to suffer, not to say bizarre. The papers were full of it. But Lucia! What does she do? Drives off the bridge at Ennerdale! Thought she was taking a left for Moresby Parks. Half in the bag, of course.’

  ‘You can convince yourself of anything, can’t you?’ said Angelica, pouring.

  ‘It was an accident, Angel! Lucia was in tremendous form that morning. She was right as rain.’

  ‘Dad? I think it’s time you thought about beddie-byes, no?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Freddie. ‘It’s only half past two, dear. And may I apologise, again, for dinner being a shade late to table? It’s the dratted oven. Again! I’ll have to have a man over. Must be the fan. But no, dear, really, I sleep very little these days.’

  A night bird’s call, it carried sadness to the room, and also the silver of hypochondria.

  ‘I think I’ve a fever coming up,’ said Angelica, hand to brow. ‘It’s the stress of the business. We need to sort out bedding, cutlery, flowers! We need to think about the painting and the plastering. There’s the question of staff. There are slates on the roof want replacing. Are you quite sure about the bank?’

  ‘Afraid so, darling. Chap went so far as to say it was one of the worst credit ratings ever recorded in the Northwest. I said, how dare you!’

  The night murmured on, regardless. The night went about its clammy business. He watched Angelica with great interest. There wasn’t so much fun in the old thing anymore. Ah but when she was tiny! Some days, Lucia would take to the bed with one of her spells—Lucia got weak and pale and ranted sometimes—and Freddie would be put in charge of the baby. Those days were tremendous. He’d wheel her down the village in the pram. He remembered autumn weather, equinoctal gales. Hold on to your hair! And pushing the pram along, whistling, and the pram was a shield against the world. He’d take her down The Beekeepers in the afternoons, have a couple of swift ones. A malty ale, lovely, a scan of the paper, and her baby fists jabbing at the dust motes. It was late in the fifties. He was calming.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ she cried. ‘What if we called it ‘The Old Rectory’?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Freddie. ‘Because it was a rectory! Brilliant, Angel. Funny how things work out, eh? The likes of us? In a house of God? Lucia found it a frightfully glum notion. Oh Freddie, she said, a rectory? How dour! Uncle Jack wangled something with the Church. Place hadn’t been used in years. Parishes amalgamate, don’t they? There seemed to be no objection to me getting the keys. The deeds were another trick but there was little beyond Lucia. So I do actually have the deeds, dear, yes.’

  ‘A little sleep, Dad, don’t you think? Just for a while? Before the crew gets in.’

  The house’s ragged orchestra struck up. Freddie heard it always as a small-town ensemble. He heard the wounded strings. He saw the bald elbows of the violinist’s rented dress suit. He saw the shiny pate of the third-rate conductor, consigned to the provinces after some murky scandal.

  ‘I remember the first night here. We ran around opening windows. We lifted the covers off the furniture. The birds, Freddie, she said, all the birds! I said yes, darling, there are very many birds, and there were, they were flying all over the bloody house—holes in the roof, hadn’t we?—and I opened some more of the wine. We didn’t at that point have any idea abou
t the presences. The guests will have to get used. Jack himself generally keeps to the back rooms. I have no great trouble with Jack.’

  ‘I don’t believe any more,’ said Angelica.

  ‘You will again,’ said Freddie. ‘Of course I forget sometimes, at night, which is natural. I think she’s gone to the loo. I shout out: Lucia! Hurry up, darling! You’ll get your end! It’s bloody freezing in there. Carpets rather than tiles, maybe?’

  ‘I’m going to take my pulse,’ said Angelica.

  ‘Actually it’s probably what put me off the dozing,’ said Freddie. ‘But of course there’s always Italy, as well, isn’t there? To be honest, Angel, I don’t talk about it much. Not a great distance from Bolzano, I think. Oh! Difficult. Think about something else, that’s what I say.’

  ‘One hundred and four!’ said Angelica.

  ‘I don’t know about you, dear, but I’m about ready for another.’

  The night progressed as the nights did. He talked of the trade in antiques among the long gone intimates of its northwestern scene. He talked of Charlie Bamber and Ambrose Poll. He confided the racetrack intrigue of the Skipton Fancy. He rescued the reputation of Freddie Bliss from the hammering it had taken in the infamous gypsy trial of ’74. He grew agitated when he told of the snubbing his wife had received from some of the other ladies—so-called!—of the area. Alice Hemshaw? Snivelling old trout, with her pearls and her bony elbows, with her gums. He paced the floor, with a glass of ancient Madeira to hand.

  ‘We were blow-ins,’ he said. ‘You never get over that. We were never churchy, of course, and that didn’t help. Never played golf. Never sailed. We liked a drink. We liked a flutter. We had fun! Is that a crime? Well string me up and flay me!’

  Outside, the tawnies were hunting. It was quickening June, and there was an urgency. It was almost four o’clock in the northern summer. The house had settled over its long years, it had hunkered down into the Cumbrian shale. To achieve great age requires constant negotiation, and all of the late night groans and creaks were no more than the wheedling of the dispute. But lately there was a new nervousness to the house’s soundings. It had not reckoned on the return of a grown Angelica.