Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  She opened the next door. As she switched on the light she checked for objects, for value. Oldness held no charm for Lilia, though she had discovered she could sell it and if she could sell it then maybe they could survive. In a house where objects moved, where they disappeared, what did it matter if she joined in, too? She’d started on the knick-knacks, the trinkets that wouldn’t be missed because who was here to miss them? She had taken the train into Cheltenham one day in March, once the snows were manageable, with a small willow-pattern vase, two silver letter-openers, a red-faced Toby jug, and crested silverware wrapped up in a box held firm on her lap. She had walked the Regency streets searching for the Pawnbroker’s sign. In the end she’d skulked into a small antique shop with her package. Now the dealers came to her, and only last week she had thrown caution to the wind and sold the billiard table. A large truck had rattled up the drive and Lilia thought she would be caught, she thought the neighbours would see, and then she had giggled because of course there were no neighbours here, just the black and white cows and the lone farmer who crossed their land twice a day crying, ‘Hep, hep, hep. On girls, on girls. Hep!’

  It was strange now to go into that long billiard room and see nothing but a low hanging light fitting, its green shades illuminating a space, because what do you call a billiard room with no billiard table? All these proper names and proper rooms and proper Englishness, it was nonsensical; all these ancient things gathering spite and dust.

  Lilia tried another key.

  These weeks, these months, they were too little a time for a new life.

  She continued along the passageway. Not one of these damned keys worked.

  Juniper had left an hour ago, and tonight Juniper had sat at the kitchen table and pleaded with her. ‘I wish you would consider it, Lilia darling. Not for tradition and all that humbug, but just to get you out, to see people, to make you part of our little community.’

  Lilia squirmed. ‘I’m not sure I like these people.’

  ‘Ha! Oh, you are a blast, a breath of fresh air!’

  ‘But they have such dogs, you say…’

  ‘The gentlest of creatures, foxhounds. Though you must be about yourself with working dogs, keep them keen. We have a splendid Master of Hounds…’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Master of Hounds.’ Juniper raised her eyebrow because Lilia had started to laugh and she couldn’t stop.

  When her laughter was exhausted they left dogs and talked of husbands. They talked a little of love.

  ‘It must have been terrible for you, darling, ghastly,’ Juniper said.

  Lilia agreed.

  Now in the attic, she listened to the rats scuttle beneath the floorboards and stamped hard. The noise echoed.

  ‘Raus hier!’ she yelled.

  It was strange how it came to her quite easily in this house, her German, and her other language; the old songs of her mother’s she had worked hard to forget. She had been unable to speak it for so long. Literally, the words wouldn’t come.

  She shone her torch on the next door, but it was wide open. The door had a round, golden handle. Lilia knew John called this the blue room, he had told her to leave this door be. That was his phrase: ‘Leave it be, Mrs Sugar.’

  Lilia walked in. She tried the light switch but the bulb flickered then popped. She started, but soon she was smiling at her skittishness and using her torch. Lilia supposed this room was called the ‘blue room’ simply because it was blue. Its walls were a blue that was brighter than John Phelps’ eyes, bluer than the birds that twit-twitted in her kitchen garden. It was an ice blue. There were two small brass beds for older children, side by side. Lilia shone her light. The beds were made, not stripped. Patched quilts covered them and there were deep indentations in one, as if a something had crawled in here and nested. Lilia shuddered. She moved the torch to the only window; iron bars crossed it and the bright blue curtains were open, they trembled in the draft. Lilia inspected the corners of the room – it was odd that there was little dust. There was an open chest against one wall, overflowing with children’s toys and books. It was eerie. A large spinning top poked out, a red fire engine, three porcelain dolls, a golden teddy bear, and against the wall a pair of stilts. On the floor she saw a small clown and a woolly monkey, both holding cymbals, keys in their backs. And there, a neatly arranged tower of alphabet blocks. Lilia tried to read the words they spelled out.

  She stepped closer: she shone her light directly on them.

  She saw his name amongst the letters.

  ‘D-I-E-T-E-R’

  She gasped.

  Her beam of light flickered so she marched to the blocks and kicked them out of order. She shook her torch, the beam came back, but there was nothing but scattered letters now.

  Lilia shook her head; she was tired, exhausted. Dieter had come up here to play that was all; she would forbid him to do this again. She gazed down at the chest of toys and made herself calculate how much they might be worth, she had heard that antique toys sold well. The billiard table money would be gone soon.

  Lilia felt colder in this room, if that were possible. She shivered and she saw her breath come in white puffs in the torchlight. She balled up her free hand in her cardigan pocket, her knuckles rubbing against the pellets of rat poison as the freezing air tightened her chest. She stared at the fat and garishly striped spinning top and she wondered if Peter had slept in here as a young boy; it was a nursery after all. She thought of him in this bluest of blue rooms and her stomach twisted.

  Lilia backed out.

  Once she stood on the threshold she felt a little warmer, a little calmer, and she reached out to close the door. She pulled on the brass handle, but the door was stuck. Lilia directed her torch to the floor, she checked for carpet, rug, but nothing was caught. She examined the hinges; they seemed rust free. She tugged again, but the door truly was stuck solid. As her hand tightened on the round handle her skin tingled, and then she felt a sharp burn.

  ‘Ahh!’ she cried, but she wouldn’t let go. ‘Close!’ she spat and she jerked her whole body with the effort. Lilia was going to fight and she pulled and she pulled again.

  All at once there was no resistance and the door shut, the slam echoed. Lilia fell back on the passageway floor, bottom first.

  ‘Verdammt!’ she cried as her torch rolled along the ground.

  The passageway was musty beneath her. There was a draft like cold breath up her skirt because she had changed when Juniper arrived. Trousers, she thought, I should always wear trousers in this old place no matter who visits; there is no shame in trousers. She touched her stinging palm, but the light was too dim to see. She blew on the skin the way she would blow on her children’s scalds and grazes.

  She lay there.

  It is strange how we bury these things, she thought, and it is strange how and when they come back. At the oddest of times: when I am peeling potatoes, when I am polishing the silver. Lilia wasn’t expecting this, not now, because as she stared into darkness all Lilia could see was the wind in his blond hair, the dancing wind teasing Peter’s dead face.

  Peter had died hardly a whisper of days ago. Was it one hundred and eighteen days: one hundred and twenty-two? Lilia had tried to wipe the memory of the police knocking at her door that morning, the policeman and the policewoman, and it had been so early, dawn just coming. She had tried to erase the memory of seeing Peter hanging from a rope, the birds flit-flitting from branch to branch of the London plane tree in the courtyard of Churchill Gardens. It was as if the birds were trying to wake him, to warn him. She had tried to wipe the memory as clean as she had wiped her surfaces in her kitchen at number 52C.

  Peter had killed himself hardly a whisper of days ago.

  The bank of water was gushing over her now. She had been holding it back for so long it was a relief. Lilia was panting, eyes wide.

  She saw herself, fifteen years old and picking tired and mouldy winter berries from the hedgerow of the English holiday camp in Dovercourt. They
had travelled so far to get there, through strange names; Hook of Holland, Harwich, to this place, to this England.

  ‘Hook of Holland,’ Lilia said from the rug.

  She had been one of the eldest. Some were so small, such tiny children. She had had a baby thrust into her hands at Schlesischen station. Take. Take. Take, the parents had said. ‘Nimm es, nimm es!’

  Her two brothers had looked bored, but her mother and her father were trying not to cry, hugging the life out of her on the platform.

  ‘It’s a holiday. It is a holiday, Lily.’

  ‘A holiday,’ her father told her, ‘you remember that.’

  ‘You will stay with nice people.’

  ‘See you, sis. Take care of yourself.’ That was Ari, she was sure: Ari her favourite brother, Ari who kept her secrets.

  She hadn’t thought of Ari for so long.

  That evening at Schlesischen station she had been angry. She didn’t cry. She held her nose up and didn’t kiss them. She walked onto the train, she’d show them; sending her away like this. Then it was too late because the other children were crowded at the window and she couldn’t see a thing. The train moved and her parents were gone. Lilia thought of her brother’s cheeks, Ari’s cheeks, they were like Dieter’s.

  Now Lilia was seeing it all: the moist, mouldy berries in the hedges at Dovercourt, those berries in her hand, in her mouth, and then the wind in Peter’s blond hair and the birds in the London plane tree. There was the dark stairwell on Mülhauser Strasse, too, and the Quakers she’d lived with in Nailsworth – Mr and Mrs Dunbarr – the smell of their pigs, the sweet and sour taste of Mrs Dunbarr’s gooseberry jam, and the silence of the cold Quaker meeting house. They were a kindness those meetings, sitting in that hall and watching the clock’s brass pendulum tick – tick-tock, tick-tock – while she tried not to think. Then there was the day she had thrown herself down the steps of the farmhouse because suddenly she knew (it had been such a silly idea, but one of the land girls had told her it would do the trick, get rid of what she didn’t want and get rid of it fast). Then four years later there was the scratch of a match on sandpaper in the silence of a blackout, she remembered the sound, there was a handsome man – Peter Sugar – lighting her cigarette in the tube station as they waited for the doodlebugs to be finished falling on London, the city that wasn’t hers.

  Lilia gasped.

  That last part was like a silly film, and like a silly film she had edited out so much.

  Yes, her mother’s dimples, the Hook of Holland, John Phelps’ blue blue eyes, the silence of the Quaker meetings in the cold meeting house, the kindness of Mrs Dunbarr’s hands once Saskia was born and Lilia sobbed and told her about that dark stairwell on Mülhauser Strasse, the boy in the brown uniform and what he did to her (and it was something she hadn’t told her own mother because where was her mother to tell?) Yes, there was this everything, and then there were the crowds at Schlesischen station, and waving at Mutti and Papa when she couldn’t even see them. There was the train with all those children and the smell of fear and milk and sick. There was the journey and that boy who had died in her carriage.

  But there were also those two cheesed sandwiches at Harwich, there was Dovercourt and the mouldy berries that had tasted so good and, yes, there was Peter. These pictures were coming all at once now. There was no grown Lilia, no little Lilia, there was just Lilia: Lilia in black and white, Lilia in Technicolor, Lilia throwing herself down the stairs of the farmhouse in Nailsworth, Lilia lying here on the rug of the attic in Sugar Hall, Lilia watching these moments of her life as if she were sitting in the 2 and 6s.

  She wondered if the rats might crawl over her and eat her up. She wondered if at last she was mad. She listened to the scuttling and Lilia willed herself to let nothing else in: nothing but the noise of the rats.

  On occasion, Lilia Sugar’s will failed her.

  The owls cried out again from the great cedar, and Lilia shifted her position, the small of her back settling into the floor.

  ‘We are marooned,’ she said out loud.

  How she longed for the noise of London, it had drowned out so much.

  Lilia knew that if Juniper could see her now she would say, ‘Stand up and pull yourself together.’ This wasn’t a particularly English trait; Lilia’s mother would have said the same.

  ‘Stand up! Stop moping! There’s worse, you know!’

  She tried to think of worse, she tried to imagine worse until she felt a little better, and when she felt a little better, Lilia sat up.

  Recently Lilia had read about old houses being flattened to the ground to build new; it was a new world after all. She had seen pictures of grand mansions crushed by machinery and wrecking balls simply because they were of no further use. Defunct: that was a new word for her. De-funct. Lilia reached out in the darkness and felt for the iron hoop of keys, for her torch, and she knew the wrecking ball wasn’t a bad idea; not a bad idea at all. Suddenly she didn’t care about the wilting daffodils and the growing bluebells and the red, moist earth here. She didn’t care about the planting out and the fresh green shoots and the thought of tomatoes. Lilia wanted rubble and a wrecking ball, she wanted all this gone.

  The boy had been watching the woman as she felt in the darkness for keys that would never lock these rooms. The boy turned his head, the bones in his neck unlocking.

  The woman had been thinking such things. Now he saw the big machine and the stone ball crashing through the walls of Sugar Hall, leaving nothing behind but rubble and dust.

  He liked this woman.

  She is drowning, he thought, because now he could think. Since the child’s blood woke him in the shed, he had begun to think and it was like shaking bluebottles from dustsheets.

  This woman is drowning on air, he thought.

  He crouched above her, taking in her breath, sucking.

  Strange woman, but he liked her scent, and her taste.

  She is sweet but she is bitter, the boy thought.

  The clocks in Sugar Hall stopped, arms trembling on the half hour, and the boy smiled down at Lilia in the darkness.

  Maybug

  10

  Dieter wakes to the feeling of a hand in his in the darkness. The paraffin heater in the bedroom is dull and smoking; the wood fire is out. He squeezes the hand but suddenly there is nothing but air. He hears a faint giggle above the buzz of Saskia’s snores. When feet slap the floorboards, Dieter sits up to the click and squeal of the latch as the door of their bedroom creaks open. He wraps his tartan dressing gown tight around him, gripping his toes into his slippers. The draft from the fireplace chills his back as he picks up a torch.

  Dieter runs.

  The colder air of the passageway wakes him. He hears soft footfalls on the staircase. He knows it is the boy from the shed because the boy comes to him regularly now, in fits and starts, flashes and moments.

  This is different, Dieter can feel it, this is a game.

  He wants to play.

  ‘Ready or not,’ Dieter whispers, and he switches off his torch and waits for his eyes to adjust. The bright moon shines in through the elegant hall windows, onto the staircase, and there is the boy in Pa’s white shirt, it reaches almost to his bare ankles. Dieter smiles, shoves his torch in his dressing-gown pocket and bends his legs, poised to sprint. ‘Race you,’ he says.

  He skids to the top of the staircase and tumbles down the steps, jumping onto the black and white tiles of the hall. Dieter hears voices echo up from the kitchen. It sounds like laughter; it’s Ma and a deeper voice, Mr John, but why is Mr John here at night? Suddenly that doesn’t matter and Dieter runs to the front door.

  The vixen pitter-patters across the grass, eager to feed her cubs. She tenses as she sees Dieter beneath the porch’s iron lantern; the owls in the cedar of Lebanon behind her fly up in retreat. Dieter is scanning the lawns for his friend but the fog from the river hangs above the grass. A huge bug crashes into his chest and he cries out, batting it away. It lands heavy on the po
rch and he watches it struggle, fat and hairy and brown like varnish; it sounds like an airplane’s propellers.

  Then Dieter sees something move; Pa’s white shirt is glowing as the boy walks down the gravel drive.

  Dieter follows.

  In the downstairs kitchen you can hear the sound of teaspoons crashing against the Hall’s finest bone china: sugar dissolves.

  ‘You are kind to stay, John, to help.’

  ‘Not at all.’ John nods at the sandwiches. He hasn’t been much help with the delicate work of mixing boiled egg with cress and cutting the loaves into thin slices. He pressed the butter in so hard he broke the bread. They have been boiling and cutting since Dieter was put to bed with hot milk and cinnamon. They now have four large silver salvers of egg and cress triangles. John watches Lilia takes out her packet of Craven A, she lights two: one for her and one for him.

  ‘I cannot believe I let Juniper persuade me.’

  ‘It’s tradition.’ John takes the cigarette, shy.

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘How many…’ Lilia starts at the bark of the vixen ‘ …how many hunters will come?’

  ‘That’s a horse that is, a hunter. And the folks who’ll be here are called the hunt.’

  ‘How many, then?’ she rubs her thumb across a deep groove in the table.

  ‘A fair few, I’d say.’ John tastes the cigarette; he loves the feel of smoke in his throat, though his lungs don’t.

  The vixen cries out. Lilia gasps. ‘Poor thing,’ she says, and in truth she does feel like crying.

  ‘Don’t fret, last hunt of the season. She might get lucky. She’ll have a rest after tomorrow. If they don’t get her, that is.’

  The black range sounds a loud pop of heat and Lilia jumps in her seat.

  ‘Steady, Mrs Sugar.’

  ‘Lilia.’

  ‘Lilia.’ John fidgets. ‘Old houses make noises, it’s what they do, Lil-ia.’ He taps his boot on the slab floor as Lilia hums her off-key hum and smoke clouds swirl in the underground room.