Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  Dieter couldn’t keep up.

  If only Sas was a normal sister, if only she was the sort of sister who wore trousers and thick shirts (like some of the girls wore at the village school) then Dieter could play British Bulldogs with her. And if Sas was like Cynthia he could play everything with her and he could tell her everything, too. It could be brother and sister who whispered in their beds at night as Ma slept her high-pitched sleep: it could be them who said things like, ‘Why did we come to Sugar Hall?’ and, ‘What’s going to happen?’ and, ‘Don’t worry, Dieter, I’ll make sure everything is all right.’

  But Saskia wasn’t like that at all.

  He kicked the fire-grate again and sparks flew up from the logs. ‘You’ve gone funny since we got here, Sas.’

  ‘I haven’t gorn anything, dear brother.’

  ‘Yes you have. You wear Ma’s dresses and you walk about the place and sigh, and you wear that thing,’ he pointed at her chest.

  Saskia gasped and clutched her hands to her. ‘All young ladies wear a brassiere!’

  Dieter kicked the cold paraffin heater; he had taken to kicking things and he remembered how that heater had made his eyes water and his throat stick in the freezing winter: he kicked it again.

  ‘In any case, Dieter, we are posh,’ Saskia told him.

  Dieter saw the commode in the corner of the room. ‘We’re not.’

  ‘Our pa is in Debretts.’

  ‘What’s Dee-breads?’

  Saskia raised her chin, Sense and Sensibility dropped from her lap. ‘It is a book of posh people. There are copies in the library. Our pa and our grandfather are listed.’

  Dieter didn’t want to hurt his sister’s feelings by stating the obvious, so he walked to his metal bed and sat down. This rattled the metal end of Ma’s bed, which in turn rattled the metal end of Saskia’s bed. Ma had squared the army beds she’d found, here in front of the fire, and John had put the furniture and the Modesty Screens behind them. This kept the big-room draughts out rather than the modesty in but at least the room seemed smaller, and they were thankful for that. At first Dieter hated sharing a room with his mother and his sister. All at once he saw things he didn’t want to see, like Ma sitting on her bed, her knee up to her chest and her fingers smoothing a stocking up her leg (and if he wanted he could watch as she hooked the stocking to her suspenders with a little white clasp).

  Dieter picked a scab on his knee as the sun came in golden, and light fell over Ma’s things on her dressing table. He watched them glitter: her malachite hairbrush and mirror, her abandoned lipsticks. Light flashed on the silver frame that held the photograph of Pa, Ma and Saskia, who was a tiny girl on Pa and Ma’s wedding day. Dieter had always been jealous of that picture because he wished he was there.

  ‘I am not thought of, yet,’ he whispered.

  In that photograph his father was a handsome man because it had been taken before his father’s hair went to black strands and his eyes went foggy. Dieter shook his head because the tight feeling was coming again, the one between his privates and his belly button. He picked up a shoe and flung it at his sister.

  ‘Hey!’ she cried.

  ‘I said, how long are you staying?’

  ‘Oh, forever and ever I expect; it was Papa’s wish for us both to live here.’

  ‘I mean how long are you staying in-this-room, stupid!’

  Saskia leapt up in mock horror and ran to the window. She pretended to smoke a cigarette in long, flowing movements, puffing and sighing. He watched her unlatch and push up the sash window.

  ‘Once we get this place up and running’ – she blew imaginary smoke – ‘we can have balls and tennis parties and hunts and we can play croquet. We could open it as a girls’ boarding school, like Malory Towers.’

  Dieter thought of the place mats they used for breakfast; the pictures of men on horses jumping hedges, dogs following, and the writing that said ‘The One That Got Away!’ and ‘Tally-ho!’

  ‘Oi! For Christ sakes!’ Saskia was suddenly yelling out of the window. ‘Them bleeding cows! Look at the mess they’ve done down there. I bloody hate them cows!’

  Dieter smiled because Saskia’s old voice was back.

  She sighed. It was a proper sigh this time. ‘Do you miss the flat?’ she asked, her voice just her voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too.’

  There wasn’t anything else to say, so Saskia pulled the window down, picked up her Sense and Sensibility and marched out.

  As soon as she was gone, Dieter leapt off the bed and ran to the far corner of the room, to his father’s trunk.

  It was a big leather bulky thing, a wardrobe in itself because you could stand it on its end, click the clasps and it would unlock. No clothes would fall out because these were neatly folded in internal drawers or hanging from a silver rail in tissue paper.

  Dieter opened it.

  He was stunned for a moment because it smelled of Pa, of Pa, of Pa.

  He hadn’t seen much of his pa, but he knew he smelled of old books and pomade. Pa smelled of lemon and car wax.

  Pa.

  It was getting harder to recall his voice. Trying to remember him was like being stuck in the smog. Dieter had to peer hard into the murk and wait for the figure to come to him.

  He knew that Pa hadn’t been a Pa who sat with them in the evenings listening to the wireless. Yet he had been a Pa who took them to Regent’s Park, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and for tea and scrambled egg at The Lyons Corner House on The Strand on Saturdays. He was a Pa who only ever kissed Ma on the cheek, never on the lips, when he said goodbye on a Sunday evening and left them for the week. He was a Pa who left small brown envelopes of money on the sideboard; he was a Pa who took them for a week’s holiday every second week of July to Camford Sands, and came home with sunburn on his nose and shoulders.

  Dieter had a shoe of his father’s; a brown brogue without laces. He kept it under his bed. Cynthia’s mother, Mrs Nurse, had taken most of his father’s things for The Salvation Army. Mrs Nurse stood in their living room and told them, ‘Where’s sense now, children, keeping them? It’s keeping sadness.’ And she made a noise that sounded like, ‘cuh dear, cuh dear’. And so the whole family had scurried about the flat pinching what they could and squirrelling it away before Mrs Nurse had the lot for the tramps. Ma had packed this trunk with Pa’s shirts and wrapped his hairbrush and comb in her best silk dress. Saskia pinched Pa’s tobacco pipe and shaving foam brush, coloured like the tip of a wolf’s tail, and all Dieter got was one shoe. He often thought of the other shoe and who might have it; who at the Salvation Army had found a use for Pa’s one brown brogue shoe, with its leather tongue hanging out?

  Dieter fell into his father’s shirts, mouth open, he swallowed the smell and then he lay beneath them: the shirts swaying from their hangers on the silver rail. Dieter considered each one. He particularly liked the look of a crisp white shirt; it was the smartest. He unhooked it, stood up, chose a pair of dress trousers and pushed the trunk shut. There was nothing to do now but put his plan into action, so he skidded across the room and ran out into a rat-infested passage. Dieter took big creaking jumps down the wide oak staircase at the front of the house, his hand catching on the cobwebs between the barley twist rails, the shirt gripped under his arm. He counted, one step, two step, three step, four, until he reached twenty-three and landed with a slap on the huge black and white tiles of the grand hall.

  He ran out, through the porch, down the grey stone steps, and into the red gardens. At the tennis court he paused to watch blue tit parents flit from tall weed to tall weed, their fledglings beneath them peep-peep-peeping and giving that little powder-winged flutter. The babies looked so fat and helpless, but the parents were thin, like Ma, and it made Dieter sad. In the patch of lawn beyond the pool he heard a giggle; it was Ma. Mr John was saying, ‘Six weeks and them seeds’ll all shoot up, you mark my words. New life takes that long. You got to thin them out mind. Y
ou got to be harsh.’

  They were still digging up the croquet lawn; planting, making plans.

  April sun was shining on Sugar Hall and Dieter cursed himself because he had forgotten sandwiches. Any waiting, Dieter knew, had to involve sandwiches. That was why you had sandwiches at train stations and bus depots and sometimes on ships. Ma had come to England on a train and a ship and she told him that when she arrived at Harwich she was given a box in which there were two cheese sandwiches.

  ‘Two cheesed sandwiches,’ Ma said, eyes bright, ‘and they were the best meal I have ever had.’

  Lilia Digs

  6

  When Peter Sugar carried Lilia Sugar over the threshold of Flat 52C, Shelley House, Churchill Gardens, she screamed with pleasure. She wasn’t a new bride, they had been married five years, but still she begged for this one little thing, this giggling lift into a new home. Lilia wasn’t someone who liked to show herself, but as she stumbled into the bare flat and saw it so neat, so clean, so brand spanking new, so empty, it made her heart sing and her mouth shriek, ‘Peter, oh, Peter!’

  He set her down and picked one of her stray blonde hairs from the front of his coat. ‘Sh! Lily, don’t make a scene.’

  She smiled because Peter suited her so well: he disliked intimacy as much as she did, but today things were different.

  ‘I cannot help this! Look! So new and bright!’ She marched off down a small corridor to the three bedrooms (three!): one for her, one for Saskia and one for Dieter.

  ‘You will spend more time with us, yes?’ she said and the words echoed off the bare white walls.

  Lilia pushed open each door, crying out at the shiny new floors, the spick and span windows and the river view. She breathed in the smell of new paint and plaster. ‘So beautiful,’ she said to herself, and she erased the memory of their last flat, a dark Victorian terrace with a shared lavatory in the backyard. How a man like Peter Sugar could be so poor, she didn’t know. He told her he was cut off; he said they had no choice. Lilia’s fingers tingled on the handle of the bathroom door.

  ‘Oh, Peter! Look! A bath! A lavatory!’ Lilia couldn’t help pointing and naming things as if she were an explorer discovering a new species. She touched the cold porcelain; it was bright and white and never used. How wonderful, she thought, we are the first: this is a new country, a new planet, fresh and clean. Lilia tried to remember the English phrase. Yes, this was a clean slate. Suddenly she regretted packing up their possessions from their last flat; Lilia wanted everything to be new.

  She walked into the largest bedroom. She supposed that this would be her room, and their room when Peter was at home. It was so beautiful, empty like this. The golden floor and the bright white walls, the new windows and – was that…? Yes: it was a radiator. Lilia felt a happy lump in her throat.

  Peter walked in.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Peter was in one of his black moods. He held his hat in one hand, ready to be placed back on his head. He marched up to the large window and stared down at the Thames. For a moment Lilia felt anger, she almost yelled, ‘Well go, go then!’ But she had learned over these years that with Peter Sugar everything was not how it seemed and this everything would just have to do. He had tried to tell her once, in his own way; he had said the words ‘a certain kind of love’ and ‘marriage’ and ‘I would like a son’. At the time it had been more than enough for Lilia, for what else did she have? A ready-made daughter who needed a father, that was all. And anyway, didn’t she think him quite the thing as the doodlebugs fell and he lit her cigarette in the darkness of the tube station – the Angel – didn’t her hard heart flutter when she saw his wide gold signet ring? And when he spoke of Cambridge and a place called Sugar Hall, didn’t her heart swell more? It had stopped swelling of course and she was so glad; in fact it reduced to quite a normal size a year after they were married and Dieter was born; when they still lived in Peter’s shabby flat and he’d pawned the signet ring and never spoke of Sugar Hall again. Lilia’s heart maintained a regular beat when he came home on Saturday morning and left Sunday night. Lilia’s heart was quite immune when all Peter did was read The Secret Garden to Saskia on the days he was home, in fact her heart was fine, as long as Peter left the brown envelopes of money on the kitchen table before he left. They were kind to each other, she held onto that, and she asked little of his life, and he would entertain the children every Saturday and Sunday. Lilia had found herself quite content.

  ‘It is so ugly,’ he said, staring out at the Thames.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it is, Lilia. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘What do I not understand?’

  ‘Modernity. Like this.’ His long fingers gestured back at the empty flat. ‘It is ugly.’

  Lilia bunched her hands into fists.

  ‘And that…’ Peter pointed out of the-soon-to-be-her-bedroom window, at Battersea Power Station, ‘…a monstrosity.’

  ‘I like it. It is strong. Powerful.’ Lilia bunched her fists tighter and glared at the tall chimneys.

  Peter shrugged and placed his grey trilby on the crown of his head. He was looking so tired, she thought, she must save coupons and cook meat for him at the weekends.

  ‘So, Lily, the movers will come later today.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I will see you on Saturday.’

  She was still staring down at the rumbling swell of the Thames.

  ‘Lily, did you hear what I said?’

  She had forgotten him, ‘Oh yes, Peter dear, I will see you.’ She walked to him, her heels harsh on the new floor and she pecked him on one cheek. He always smelled so nice, his cologne fresh as cut lemon.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said and he turned, his grey coat flowing as he walked.

  ‘I will cook meat, beef if I can find!’ she shouted after him. She counted up her ration tickets in her head, but the door had closed and he was gone. Lilia was glad the children weren’t with her, she would pick them up later, but they would all be in by the end of the week. She turned on the spot, her arms out and she cried out, ‘Wheeeeeeee!’ She didn’t care if the new neighbours heard; Lilia was happy.

  Now she was finding the old spade went into the croquet lawn of Sugar Hall quite easily: like a hot knife through butter, she thought, and she smiled at the English phrase.

  Digging. It was strange. Here she was digging up Sugar Hall’s lawn: Lilia Fisch, Lilia Sugar, or whoever she was now. She pressed her foot down hard on the top of the spade John Phelps had found in one of those awful sheds; she tugged on the wooden handle and the red earth came away as easily as stewed meat from a bone. She felt the shadow of the Hall behind her, and the huffing and puffing body of John to her side. She liked John working at her side; at last Lilia was grateful for human contact.

  ‘You see, six weeks, six weeks you’ll see something,’ he was saying and shaking a packet of seeds.

  The spring sun struggled above them and Lilia noted the faded and crisp snowdrops and the fat buds on the rhododendron bushes that crowded this garden; she pushed her spade into the old croquet lawn and the earth came up redder than before.

  A Murder

  7

  The long black shed smelled of creosote and setting onions. Dust danced. In this magic place Dieter had found twenty-three toothbrushes, thirty-one puttees and a green army jacket that had reached his knees because the army had lived at Sugar Hall during the last war.

  He was sitting on the skin of an old air-balloon, Pa’s white shirt and dress trousers in his lap. He’d found the balloon the first morning he woke at the Hall. This was the morning he’d dared to go out into the vast gardens alone as Ma and Saskia snored beneath dusty blankets and their overcoats. It was the morning Dieter first found the black water in the swimming pool, the weed-pitted tennis court, the little gravestones with the Roman names, and this line of long sheds.

  Two of the sheds were roofless, rotting; three were padlocke
d shut, but this one was easy to open. He remembered it had been such an adventure for a first morning, and he’d felt like that orphan girl in that book his father liked to read out loud, The Secret Garden. Yes, Dieter felt like Mary Lennox: he’d felt brave and spiteful and he’d soon forgotten the ye-ye-ye-ye-ye of the vixen pawing the lawn for worms, he soon forgot the screeches of the early morning owls as he searched this shed for treasure and found the balloon crumpled in a corner.

  What a find it had been!

  He thought it was a parachute at first, and for a moment he didn’t breathe because he knew that with a parachute comes a parachute-ist. He’d read about them in The Eagle. Parachute-ists were the soldiers who came down in enemy territory and said, ‘Oh cripes, Jerry’s on the loose!’ and asked for bread and ham from French peasants who said, ‘Oui’. Dieter followed the strings, expecting to find a shrivelled old soldier attached, but instead there was a wicker basket. He had read Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, the story of Samuel Ferguson flying across magical places called Zanzibar and Timbuktu, so he recognised this as an olden-day hot air balloon and the source of a great adventure. Once he wiped the decades of dirt from a patch he saw it had vibrant colours – blues and yellows and reds in banded patterns across its skin and Dieter was so excited he’d danced around that old balloon whooping, until the silverfish, the spiders, the owl pellets and the sunlit air of the shed danced too. This was the moment Ma had opened the shed door and screamed, ‘Out, out, out! You must never, never! You stay in the house! I forbid it, Dieter!’ Yes, she’d dragged him out and slapped his legs until he cried.

  Ma had not hit him before.

  Of course he sneaked back whenever he could. In fact Dieter was using Ma’s mending patches and thread from her sewing-box because it was his Big Plan: he was going to use this balloon to fly back to London, to Cynthia and the Wee-Hoos, they would get such a shock!