House of Trelawney

by Hannah Rothschild

  Ambrose would treat Trelawney as a weekend home and let the place decline even further. If the house were Toby’s, he’d dedicate his entire life to saving it. Walking down the hill, he realised that there were some who left and some who stayed; some who were bound to live their lives away from their place of origin. Arabella, Ayesha, Ambrose and Celia were wandering spirits, but he was a stay-at-home type. He’d do everything—anything—to remain at Trelawney. This was his calling.

  * * *

  While Ambrose hadn’t been granted the gifts of either imagination or intelligence, the meaning of the dream which woke him night after night was clear. However much he’d drunk, irrespective of the amount of exercise or narcotics taken, at some point in the small hours he awoke, crushed and pinioned under the collapsed walls of Trelawney. He struggled to sit up, trying to push the masonry off his chest, clawing at his nose and mouth to clear away the dust. Repetition offered no comfort: each time was more real than the last; each dream took longer to recover from.

  He was often, as on this occasion, woken by panic attacks. Fighting to regain his equilibrium, he went to the shower and stood letting the hot water wash away the sweat. His body heaved with the effort of catching breath. He never knew how long the attacks would last; sometimes they were short, at other times interminable. The doctor had prescribed Xanax and beta blockers, but nothing worked. After twenty minutes he left the shower and walked dripping wet to the kitchen sink. He poured a glass of water and downed it before pouring and drinking several more. Looking out of the window, he judged it was about 4 a.m. There were a couple of lights on in neighbouring apartments and he could see a woman getting ready to leave; she must work on a Far Eastern trading floor, where the day started at five. Ambrose had been assigned to the Real Assets department and was currently shadowing “Mad Moose,” a trader who specialised in coffee and nuts. As a younger man, MM had spent weeks at a time navigating ports in Africa or rivers in South America to secure the best deals. Now so much was done on computers and the trader could only follow what was happening on the ground on Google Earth, complaining bitterly and constantly about the erosion of his “real skills.” After work, with no friends in London, Ambrose spent his meagre wages at the gaming tables and bars in Soho. A good night was defined by how little he lost at poker and whether he could walk without falling over.

  Though he didn’t have to leave for work for a few hours, Ambrose was reluctant to go back to sleep. He made a cup of instant coffee and sat at the table looking out over Docklands, down at the concrete pathways where ant-like figures hurried towards the Underground, knowing that soon he’d join that well-worn path: another little insect. He dipped a digestive biscuit into the brown liquid. There was an art in not letting the wheat and sugar dissolve entirely. If he got the first dunk wrong, it was a bad omen for that night’s card game. He left the biscuit a fraction too long and a chunk disintegrated. Frustrated, he threw the coffee away. He couldn’t afford to lose any more money this month.

  Ambrose lived his life according to a series of bizarre, ever-changing superstitions, ranging from melting biscuits to cloud formations, enabling him to avoid any direct responsibility for unfortunate or unforeseen outcomes, such as his girlfriend’s recent departure, his inheritance, his failure to pass any A levels, his losses at the gambling table or extra pounds gained. He was a blamer, swamped by choice and privilege, and were it not for the internship at Kerkyra Capital, he’d have continued to muddle on through a miasma of self-pity. Exposed only to Kitto and his ilk, and the unworldly masters at school, he’d had no idea that men like Thomlinson Sleet existed. To him the hedge-funder was the acme of all things admirable: fabulously wealthy, unbearably narcissistic and utterly uncompromising; a higher form of being. Sleet knew all about hero-worship and how to exploit it; the trick was inconsistency. At one moment he was crushing, the next he showered the younger man with gifts and opportunities. Ambrose mistook the attention for genuine concern, never guessing that he was just a pawn in Sleet’s master plan.

  He was living in one of Sleet’s staff flats: small, white and impersonal. There were only three steps from the kitchen unit to the bed and two more to the bathroom. What it lacked in size, it gained in functionality. Unlike Trelawney, water came out of the taps, the lights worked, the surfaces were easy to clean and the air conditioning kept the temperature constant. Best of all was its absolute anonymity; there were four hundred flats in the building and he’d never need to know the name of another person. At home, people knew each other’s business; he was judged and found lacking. He would, with Sleet’s help, prove them all wrong. He would be the 27th Earl of Trelawney and no one would ever forget him.

  * * *

  Arabella and Tuffy sat side by side at the table, the great-aunt calling out specimen names while her niece typed the results into a computer. This data collection was to be part of an addendum to Tuffy’s paper linking warmer weather to an increase in insect-borne diseases.

  “Why did you never have children?” Arabella asked.

  “Can’t abide the little creatures.”

  Arabella fought away tears. “I’m a child.”

  Tuffy snorted with laughter. “I put up with you because you are a person, not a child.”

  Arabella wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

  “Don’t move,” Tuffy said, jumping up and fetching a Petri dish from a cupboard. Arabella froze as instructed. Taking a small wooden spatula, Tuffy carefully scraped the snot from Arabella’s wrist and put it into the dish.

  “What do you want that for?”

  “Waste not, want not.” Tuffy carefully labelled the dish and put it into her fridge, which contained only things of scientific use.

  “What was your childhood like?” Arabella asked.

  “Boring, boring, boring.”

  “But you lived here!”

  “It was a different time. It took a nursery maid a whole hour just to put on the layers of petticoats, and then there were the hundred brushes of the hair, morning and night, not to mention the agony of ringlets and ribbons; a prize cow had nothing on us. Then I spent the morning with a governess learning to sing or sew. It was absolute torture, especially as my brothers were flung outside on horses or with guns.”

  “Bet Uncle Tony wanted to swap.”

  Tuffy laughed. “He had his story, I had mine.”

  “I’ve never believed in stories,” Arabella said.

  Tuffy shook her head. “Our ability to tell, create and believe in stories is Homo sapiens’s most powerful weapon. It’s how we organise ourselves, how we control each other, how we justify our decisions. If we didn’t have them, we’d be like fleas or rabbits or any other member of the animal kingdom, beings just trying to get through the day.” She got up and filled the kettle by the sink. “Religion is just a story. Waitrose tells a better story than Lidl. Most things you learn at school are irrelevant, but you’ve been assured they’re important. You buy your car from one company over another because a salesman told you a better tale about its gearbox or revolutions per minute.”

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with us?” Arabella said.

  “Look at your grandmother trying to keep the past alive by retelling all those family histories over and over again, trying to convince anyone who’ll listen that it did matter. Your poor father lacks panache and showmanship and can’t persuade anyone to follow him. Your brother Ambrose doesn’t have any imagination—his whole world stops at the end of his nose.”

  “How do you know so much about him?”

  “Times change; types don’t. Every family has an Ambrose. It’s bad luck when his kind is the son and heir.”

  “I don’t understand how this affects Trelawney. The castle’s been here for eight hundred years; surely it will just go on.” Arabella accepted a cup of tea from her aunt and blew on the surface to cool it down.

  Tuffy ignored
this remark, stood up and reached for a file on top of her desk and began looking in it for a piece of paper. “I know I put the results in here,” she said, flicking through the index.

  “I don’t know why we have to let visitors tramp around the place,” Arabella continued. “Mum only sold forty-five cream teas last week; the deep freeze is full of leftovers.”

  “Here it is!” Tuffy found what she was looking for and started to transcribe a series of numbers from one piece of paper to another. “It takes enormous willpower and self-belief to cut the umbilical cord, to begin another story. Most of us practise natal homing—I’ve taught you about that. Your parents and Blaze can’t imagine a different kind of life.”

  Arabella nodded. “Salmon are prepared to die in their journey upstream just to get back to their place of birth. Sea turtles are compelled to lay their eggs on old stamping grounds even if those places have been built over.” She thought for a moment. “But there’s no evidence that humans, unlike other members of the natural world, are driven by geomagnetic impulses of olfactory cues.”

  Tuffy sat back in her chair and looked at her niece. “You have the makings of a scientist. You’ve proved my point: we come back because we want a sense of an ending.”

  Arabella stared into her tea. “Why did you never leave?”

  “There weren’t many options in those days. Marriage or being a governess. Both seemed appalling.”

  “What’s wrong with marriage?” Arabella asked, but couldn’t think of anything to say in its favour.

  “I preferred study to the business of loving.”

  Tuffy put down her cup and, picking up two butterfly nets from behind the door, handed one to Arabella.

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll find some orange-tipped Fritillaria on the escarpment. Now that the rain’s stopped, I think they’ll be back.”

  Arabella jumped to her feet. The pursuit of insects was far more interesting than this endless chat about Trelawney. They left Tuffy’s rooms and went out past the big house. The sun was setting, but heat shimmered over the horizon. Harvested fields were dotted with bales of straw. There was one lonely white cloud, perfectly fluffy and round, as if a child had drawn it on a neon-blue sky. The two of them walked in companionable silence.

  “Did you always like animals better?” Arabella asked.

  “Gosh yes!” Tuffy said. “They are so uncomplicated and free of pretensions.”

  “Do you ever get lonely?” Arabella tried to imagine a life without her school friends or family.

  “With so many billion creatures all around me? Hardly!” Tuffy bent down and turned over a fallen branch to reveal hundreds of woodlice, ants and worms which had made their home in the bark and in the damp ground around it. She and Arabella crouched down side by side and watched the insects. After a while, Tuffy carefully replaced the moss and stick. Then she stood up and looked at her niece.

  “I’ll only ever give you one piece of advice, dear Arabella. Make work your friend—it will never let you down, never leave you and, the more love and attention you give it, the more rewards you’ll receive. Now for goodness’ sake, stop all this incessant questioning. We need to hunt butterflies.”

  Although she sounded fierce, Arabella could see that her great-aunt was enjoying the conversation and this made her happy. She had had a miserably lonely summer. Toby had hardly left his bed and her mother, aunt and grandmother were obsessed by visitor numbers and cakes. Most of the time she couldn’t follow what Tuffy was talking about, but she understood enough to know that her aunt’s world could become her world and the thought filled her with excitement.

  “There’s one,” Tuffy yelled, as a fragile orange and white butterfly hovered over a bush about thirty feet in front of them. Wielding her net like a sword, Arabella charged through the prickly gorse in search of her prey.

  29

  The Birthday Party

  SATURDAY 5TH DECEMBER 2009

  “You are cinematic gold, Ma’am,” Damian Derbish told Clarissa as she finished her last piece to camera.

  “Derbish, how many times do I have to tell you that the Queen is ‘Ma’am’; I am ‘Your Ladyship’?”

  The documentary producer hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. He had come to the castle on a whim in July after the local paper had singled out Trelawney’s opening as the event of the week and the Dowager Countess as a national treasure. He made a small filler for the regional news which, thanks to Clarissa’s performance, had been picked up by the BBC’s News at Six. For Damian, who had spent his entire career bumping along in local television, this was a game-changing moment; he envisaged a prime-time international series, The Trelawneys, with spin-offs including a feature film (he had already mentally cast Meryl Streep as Clarissa). He had also designed his own range of merchandise: the Trelawney Teaset and the Trelawney Twinset. This eccentric aristocratic woman would lift him out of his small flat in downtown Plymouth to a detached house on the edge of Dartmoor. The family would upgrade their car from a Skoda to a 2004 series X5 BMW.

  Clarissa loved the camera, loved that hundreds more people had come to Trelawney since her debut on BBC One South West. She liked walking up Launceston High Street and once again being recognised for who she was. One lad asked for her autograph. She declined, of course. At least someone in the family was trying to keep the roof on. Since her TV appearances, the weekend visitor numbers had risen from a few score to several hundred. The magic break-even point—the amount of footfall the house needed to meet the oil bills and start a minor repair programme—was a thousand paying adults a day, three days a week for six months a year. Blaze was still meeting the shortfall but, although her investments had recovered, she’d made it clear that this arrangement was not indefinite.

  I will not let Trelawney go down, Clarissa thought, even if it means looking faintly ridiculous in old ball dresses and exaggerating my pronouncements. Damian was a perfect foil who, in normal circumstances, she would not have given one iota of attention to, but he’d do for now. When I have my own television show, she pondered, I will demand a better kind of producer. If only her old friends William Holden and James Stewart were still alive. Jimmy had said she’d make a great star. “Aren’t I one already?” she’d asked him coquettishly. He’d kissed her hand. “The rest of the world deserves to see you in close-up,” he’d replied. Oh, those had been the days, the good old days.

  “Where is my stole?” Clarissa asked.

  “Ginny, Ginny, quick—get Her Ladyship’s fur,” Damian told his assistant who was also the cameraman, the sound operator, the driver, the tea-maker and the editor. Ginny Barloe, aged thirty-two, had her own (largely unprintable) thoughts about Clarissa Trelawney and her airs and graces. She had voted for the local Communist Party in 1997, and again in 2005, with the sole aim of getting rid of people like the Dowager Countess, who thought they were different, a cut above, merely because some ancient ancestor had managed to buy a title. She agreed to go in search of the mangy white fur if only to escape her boss’s sycophancy. Leaving the Great Hall, she heard Damian start up again.

  “My Lady, I have shown the rushes to the Head of News South West and he agrees that we could edit your pieces together and put out a whole half-hour feature.”

  “A half hour?” Clarissa said coldly.

  Damian wiped the sweat off his brow. “Maybe we could make a fifty-minute programme?”

  Clarissa turned away to hide a look of delight and stared out of the window. Behind her she could hear Damian’s heavy breathing; he wanted the limelight as much as she did. She counted to ten, partly to let him suffer, partly to ensure that her voice didn’t betray even a smidgeon of enthusiasm.

  “One has a lot to say.”

  Damian could hardly contain his excitement. “Of course, it would mean having access to a few family events, behind-the-scenes kind of things.”

  “There are no ‘beh
ind the scenes.’ This is my life.”

  “We would need to add a bit more texture, a bit more layering.”

  “I thought this was about me?” Clarissa wheeled round to face him; two red spots had appeared on her papery cheeks.

  “We need to see you in context. The great matriarch. The keeper of the flame and, if you don’t mind me saying so, society’s ethereal beauty.”

  Clarissa nodded graciously. Damian was desperate for her to agree. Without the other members of the family on board, he’d never get a longer commission. The old lady on her own could sustain a twenty-minute film, but fifty was a stretch too far. His hope was that, once the cameras were rolling, the cracks in the family’s guard would slip and reveal their dysfunctional behaviour. Even though the film crew had spent less than three days in the castle, he had picked up many tantalising snippets of information. The sudden appearance of an unknown granddaughter. The cook’s grandson, a boy made good, who was part of the largest tech company in south-west England. The elder grandson and heir, soon to turn eighteen, who never came home. The heartbroken younger grandson, who hardly left his room all summer. The granddaughter whose spare time was spent catching fleas with a mad old aunt. Then there was Blaze, who dressed only in black and white silk and smoked thin cigarettes with gold tips. The recent return to the marital bedroom of Kitto, which seemed directly linked to his wife’s growing irritation with everything and everyone. “You couldn’t make it up,” Damian had told his senior producer. “You couldn’t, and you don’t have to.”

  “Your daughter and daughter-in-law have been quite reticent about appearing before the camera,” he said now, thinking of how Blaze left the room when he entered and refused to answer any direct questions. Jane simply went bright red and clammed up. Kitto wafted around the place wearing a beatific smile.