Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  There are 7 leaks in the attic rooms. Last month I counted 12 dead rats, 3 crows, a something I think was a cat, and piles of flies in the corners. I can’t count the flies, there are too many.

  Last week we had a bonfire for the dead rats. Ma wore a hanky over her face.

  Saskia found a thing called a Priest Hole and she said that is for Catholics so they have somewhere to hide. Are you a Catholic, Cyn?

  In the olden days people called Roundheads killed people called Cavaliers in our dining room (or is it the other way round?)

  There are paintings of olden-day Sugars here. Ma says they are my ancestors. They are ugly.

  We have been here for 77 days.

  I can fit in the thing called the Dumb Waiter.

  I have grown 2 inches.

  There’s a river over the fields in front of us that sometimes looks like the Thames, but I know it’s not. Ma told me ponies get stuck there because the water goes away, but it always comes back.

  I have found a boy in the sheds and he wears a silver collar round his neck. He’s not a duppy, Cyn, honestly, he’s a boy. He won’t hurt me or stop the clocks.

  I am lonely.

  I wish…

  Exhausted, Dieter let the pencil drop; his hand cramped. The truth was he had so many wishes they buzzed around him like gnats. He pushed himself away from the desk and marched to one of the tall windows; he gazed beyond the lawns to the redness of the forest of rhododendrons where you could get lost for days on an adventure; he blinked at the overgrown tennis court where you could win every tournament in the world, and then he stared at the swimming pool puddled with water, black as a pirate sea. Dieter had played all the games he could think of out there: but it was boring being a tennis champion with no opponent and impossible to rule a pirate ship without hands on deck. Dieter breathed deep. Sometimes breathing like this made the jittery feeling of loneliness go away: sometimes. He touched the windowpane. He tapped on the glass with his fingernails, tip-tap-tip. Tip-tap-tip.

  Tip-tap-tip, the drizzle replied.

  A small white moth, furry, crashed against the windowpane and joined in.

  Flutter-flutter-tip-tap-tip. Flutter-Flutter-tip-tap-tip.

  It was strange that here they were in his grandfather’s house when there was no Grandfather anymore. Grandfather Sugar was dead, and when Grandfather was not-dead, Dieter never came to Sugar Hall.

  He knew that part of it was on account of Ma and Saskia being not-recognised by Grandfather (which Ma said was the same thing as being ignored). He knew it was because Pa was Cut-Off, which meant Dieter was The Only Hope.

  These phrases meant little to him; they were like, ‘RGT HON’. Grandfather was a ‘RGT HON’ which sounded funny if you said it out loud.

  Ri-git-on. Ri-git-on. Just like a frog in a pond; like the belching toad of fear that fizzed in his belly. Ri-git on, Dieter whispered.

  Tip-tap-tip went his nails on the pane. Tip-tap-tip. Flutter-flutter. Ri-git on.

  Dieter sighed and he placed his thumb and forefinger either side of the bridge of his nose. He pressed there just like Pa had whenever Pa took off his glasses.

  Yes, it was all Very Complicated. It needed Thinking About.

  ‘Grandfather Sugar is dead and this house is mine because I am the last Sugar left. My pa is dead and I’ve found a boy in the sheds,’ Dieter said out loud.

  Tip-tap-tip, said the drizzle as Saskia growled out that endlessly repeating hymn, her voice croaky at last, ‘Yes, all my dreams shall beee! Near-er my God to meeee!’

  Mr John Phelps Helps

  4

  In the yellow writing room Dieter’s milky breath clouded the windowpane. He drew a circle with his finger then rubbed away the middle. Dieter was a boy on a ship, a stowaway hidden in a cabin with his first sight of land.

  Ahoy there!

  Through his porthole he saw the bright black and white cows that clomped twice daily along the path by the fence. When he’d first arrived, those cows had scared him to death, now he liked the call of the farmer. ‘Hep, hep, hep. On girls, on girls. Hep!’

  Dieter had learnt another new word: silage.

  He spotted the dot of John Phelps on his black bicycle down by the Hall’s open gates and he had to stop himself crying out, excitement knotted in him, because Dieter adored Mr John and he wished he could call him plain ‘John’, like Ma did.

  Mr John wasn’t old; Mr John had a fine head of strawberry-blond curls. Mr John was handsome, he made Dieter think of Dan Dare and he wished Mr John owned a uniform (even if he hadn’t gone to war on account of his lungs). Mr John had no Pa, just like Dieter (though he said it was the bees that got his pa).

  Dieter rubbed away the trickles of condensation on the windowpane; he wanted a clearer picture as his handsome friend pedalled up the long drive.

  John visited because there were things that were difficult for Ma, and although Dieter knew John couldn’t help Ma with every difficult thing, like sadness, he could hit the taps that dribbled green with a spanner; he could climb up onto the roof as Ma worried below, and he could bang until the gush of water stopped. Ma said if it wasn’t for John Phelps they might be dead.

  He watched as John left his bike against one of the grand pillars and bent over to take off those shiny bicycle clips; the ones Dieter wanted to steal, jackdaw that he was. From the window he saw John ruffle then smooth down his curls and then he saw him do something very silly, which was cup his hand over his mouth and sniff. A glossy raven hopped on the lawn behind him. This was Rosie, John’s pet. Dieter knew that people usually had budgies or dogs or cats, maybe cockatiels or parrots, but John told him he’d had Rosie since she was an egg. Dieter watched Rosie hop-waddle with bowed black legs. Hop-waddle. Hop-waddle, like she had rickets (and Tommy Perrot’s big sister had had rickets and Tommy said no one would marry Sheila now).

  A door slammed at the back of the Hall; it was the servants’ entrance because John said he’d never walk in the front. There was the sound of his hobnailed boots as they echoed up the back stairs and into the grand hall.

  Saskia stopped singing. Dieter heard another door slam.

  ‘Oh, John, so nice, you have come!’ Ma shouted. Ma tended to shout at people who weren’t her immediate family. Saskia said that Ma thought shouting would make her English clearer.

  ‘You have come! Now you follow, down to the kitchen. Sit, have cheesed sandwich. Have tea. Dear John…’

  Dieter reached out for a swatch of yellow curtain. He wrapped himself up in custard yellow and breathed in its damp, dishcloth smell. Dieter felt the hard hit of the fat coin sewn into the curtain’s corner. The coin thumped against his ankle as he listened to Rosie the raven out on the lawn, skittish, chasing flies and butterflies and cawing her caw, because Rosie wouldn’t ever hop over the threshold and into Sugar Hall.

  It was time for work and Dieter was following John up the back stairs to search out the latest roof leak. John was wearing the leather gaiters that protected his ankles from the rats. They were only halfway up when John said, ‘Hold on, son. Have to get my breath.’ He sat on a narrow step and pressed his palm into his skinny chest. ‘Give me a minute,’ he said.

  John had bad lungs. This wasn’t the same as a bad arm that would get better: John said his lungs could only get worse, and he wheezed in the musty air of the back stairs.

  Dieter sat next to him and saw a thin-skinned pulse shimmering on John’s neck: it made him think of the baby rats, and he hadn’t thought about them for so long. He’d found them the first week at Sugar Hall; they’d squirmed in a nest of tweed on the floor of a wardrobe. They were hairless and pink, their closed eyes black mounds. Dieter had picked one up to see every blood vessel, every one of those heartbeat shimmers as the baby rat’s see-through skin pulsed. Dieter had held it in his palm and skipped down the stairs to Saskia. He’d found her in their makeshift bedroom on the first floor and he held out his hand, ‘I’ve got a present for you. Look!’ he cried, and Saskia screamed. The baby rat wa
s terribly cold by the time he put it back in its tweed nest, it was so cold Dieter thought of hot water bottles and hot bricks, all the things they had to use in their own beds now.

  As Dieter stared at the beating pulse on John’s blushed-red skin, he couldn’t stop thinking about baby rats.

  ‘Want a proper listen?’

  Dieter started. ‘I beg your pardon, Mr John?’

  ‘Come on, lad. You put your ear up and listen to me rattle.’

  Dieter was shocked when John took off his jacket and unbuttoned his checked shirt almost to his belly button; he was shocked because not only were there a few long blond hairs on his chest but he wore no undershirt. And Dieter thought it was very peculiar that John pulled his shirt down over his smooth shoulders, rather than taking the whole thing off. It reminded Dieter of the ladies in the paintings here at Sugar Hall, the ladies in ballgowns with their white shoulders and the bulge of their bosoms showing just above their frilled bust-lines: except John was too thin for bulges and too handsome for frills.

  ‘Go on, lad,’ John said, ‘listen.’

  Dieter pressed his ear, then his whole cheek up against John’s hot and bony chest. John’s skin smelled of carbolic and boot-polish and the sound of breath in his chest was the sound you hear under the waves at the seaside (and Dieter had been to Camford Sands). It was a deep in, and then a whoosh! out. It was the tide’s rattle; the click-click-clicking of broken shell and salt-worn stones pushed back and forth on the seabed: it was the sound of something that had saved John from the army and the war. Dieter was thrilled, he sat back and wiped his ear, wet from listening.

  ‘That’s quite strange.’ He looked up at John’s bird-egg blue eyes: they seemed sad. ‘Mr John, are you younger than my pa is?’ Dieter corrected himself, ‘Than my pa was…’

  ‘Aye, a fair bit younger than Master Peter, your dad, like.’ John coughed. ‘Younger than he was.’

  ‘Were you Pa’s friend?’

  John chuckled, his lungs hissing. ‘Master Peter was a kind man, mind. He’d give us his shoes, he’d write letters when letters were needed. When my mam worked here I were younger ’n you and I’d see Master Peter when he was home.’

  Dieter tried to picture John in Pa’s patent leather dress shoes; he wondered if they’d creaked as much as they had on Pa’s feet.

  ‘When did you last see my pa?’

  It looked like John was thinking. ‘Can’t say for certain. A long time after the war.’

  ‘Why didn’t he bring Ma and Sas here?’

  ‘Him and Old Sugar – that’s your granddad – well, they didn’t see eye to eye. It was sad your dad doing what he done.’

  Dieter noticed John’s eyes seemed a darker blue.

  ‘Why do you think he did it?’ Dieter asked, because no one talked about Pa and that morning at Churchill Gardens when the policeman and the policewoman knocked on their door.

  John rubbed his face with his hands. ‘Oh, I don’t know, lad. Maybe it’s like a fox or a rabbit in a snare. They’re caught, see, there’s nothing they can do, but they’re still alive. So what they do is gnaw at themselves, they gnaw at that leg ’til it’s off, and then they’re out of the trap. They die but they’re set free, see?’

  Dieter didn’t. He tried to but it was like a pea-soup fog and he thought that nothing would ever be clear again.

  John took in a lungful of dusty air. He pushed his slim shoulders back into his shirtsleeves and grasped his knees to stand. ‘Right,’ he smiled, ‘do you want me to show you a secret?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be a secret if I told you now would it?’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘It’s a special place your pa showed me. It’s dangerous, mind,’ he winked, ‘Your pa and me, we’d dare each other and we’d both lose. Cowards we were.’

  Dieter wanted to shout, ‘My pa wasn’t a coward! My pa was in the war!’ but John’s eyes twinkled so he didn’t.

  ‘Yeah, cowards.’ John turned on the step, and then he was muttering something Dieter couldn’t understand and walking up the last of the back stairs to the attic rooms. ‘You coming, then? I’m only offering this once.’

  The tall corridor was dark. Of course Dieter had skipped along here before, but now, as his eyes adjusted he saw a door with a round golden handle in front of him.

  John tapped on the door with his fingers. ‘There’s a secret in here, lad,’ he whispered. ‘A mystery.’ John was patting the door now, palm down, as if the wood was a wild animal he had to tame. ‘Still warm,’ he muttered as he put an ear to it. ‘There’s stories in here, lad, ancient ones.’

  ‘What stories?’

  ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just can’t.’

  Dieter thought John’s eyes looked sleepy, as if he was being hypnotised.

  ‘What is in there?’ Dieter whispered. He stepped closer, took a deep breath and touched the wood. Heat pulsed through his fingers and he gasped.

  They both jumped at the sound of footsteps: a sweet voice began to sing.

  ‘Bak, bak, Kuchn! Der Bekker hot gerufn!’

  ‘That’s your mother,’ John twisted his head at the noise and he stepped away from the door. ‘Reckon we better keep this for another day.’

  ‘No, please!’

  ‘Wer s’wil gutn Kuchn machn, der mus hobn sibn Sachn,’ the voice sang.

  ‘What’s she singing about?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s Ma’s language. She sang that to me when I was a baby.’

  The song filtered up through the rat-gnawed floorboards. John cocked his head, and Dieter reached out and touched the shiny brass handle of the door. He shuddered as the blond hairs on his neck stood to attention, ‘Please can we go in?’

  John was putting the key in his pocket. ‘It’s an old story,’ he muttered. ‘Better let sleeping dogs lie.’

  ‘Bak, bak…’ his mother sang.

  ‘But I like stories, I like dogs.’

  ‘Bak, bak…’

  ‘Let’s keep it like that then. Don’t want to fret your mother.’ John walked away, tick-tack-tick in his hobnail boots and towards the singing voice that was getting louder.

  ‘Putter un Salz, Milch un Mel, un Safran, Safran: macht dem Kuchn gel!’

  John looked back. ‘Come on, lad, we’ve got a leak to find.’

  Dieter sprang into a run, but in the opposite direction: back to the servants’ staircase.

  ‘Hey, where you off to?’ John cried after him.

  Dieter was jumping down the steps because he’d had a brilliant idea, and the idea was all thanks to John. It was because of John unbuttoning that shirt of his: though it wasn’t the creamy look of his white shoulders that got him thinking, it was the fact that –even with his terrible cough – John had worn no undershirt, and that was something Dieter had found the oddest thing. It was almost as odd as the small boy in the shed wearing nothing at all.

  Thinking about that Dieter saw how he could coax the boy out with something better than cake, better than Milk of Magnesia, or even The Eagle (for perhaps the boy couldn’t read, just like Tommy Perrot).

  For this something better, Dieter need his pa’s trunk.

  The Shirt

  5

  Saskia Sugar was slumped in a nut-brown armchair by the crackling fire. She wore her mother’s midnight-blue dress; a blue beret pulled down over her ears. Her ankle socks were baby-blue and her sandals red. Saskia wore the only arresting colours in this room because it was a predominantly brown room and this was why Lilia Sugar had chosen it for their bedroom: plain brown was a relief in this house. Of course this wasn’t meant to be a bedroom; encased in wood panelling, softened by brown rugs and brown velvet curtains, stalked by an oily rocking horse with dead-glass eyes in one faraway corner; this room had once been a playroom for generations of Sugar children.

  There was a book on Saskia’s lap – Sense and Sensibility. For the last two days Saskia had been telling her brother how s
he wished he were a sister, she’d even called him ‘Marianne’. It had been worse last week when Saskia was reading Little Women and cast herself as Jo March; Lilia as Marmie, and Dieter as all the other sisters: prim Meg and pretty Amy and poor coughing Beth. Dieter had shot her with his Dan Dare ray-gun.

  Saskia loved pretend. Saskia wanted to be an actress. Saskia kept a copy of Forever Amber under her bed.

  ‘Oh my, how the days are long!’ she cried from the armchair because she didn’t like these Easter holidays: Saskia was a London girl and she didn’t yet understand the boredom of the countryside. She let the back of her palm drop on her forehead: her beret fell to the floor and she left it there. Sometimes her mother called Saskia a slattern.

  Dieter kicked the fire-grate: sparks sprayed. ‘How long are you going to be in here?’

  ‘Oh, dear brother, but for a kind word or a smile!’

  Dieter screwed up his face. ‘Don’t talk like that, Sas.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Like that. La-di-dah.’

  Dieter knew what la-di-dah was because he’d sat through elocution lessons with Mrs Channon who smelled of pilchards and lived three streets away from Churchill Gardens. Ma told him she didn’t want him sounding like her or the Wee-Hoos or the West Indian girl, Cynthia Nurse. After his lessons, Dieter would skip down the pavement muttering, ‘Mrs Chaynon smeeels leek tinned saylmon.’

  Still, Dieter didn’t sound as posh as Saskia did now.

  He remembered how only a few months ago Saskia was standing out on the balcony of Churchill Gardens and yelling down at Flinty Smith, ‘Jezebel! Bleeding Jezebel! I’ll have ya!’ because Flinty had got off with Jack Perrot, Tommy’s big brother and Saskia’s dreamboat. Now she was speaking like the lady on their first television set who said, ‘All-eggs-arn-drar Pay-lace’, and she’d gone from worshipping a crooning Johnny Brandon to idolising a bellowing singer called Mario Lanza.