Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  John thinks of brightening the mood. She’s always so sad, you see. He smiles because he feels like teasing. ‘Have you met that Mr Churchill in London, then?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He winks, a full grin on his face. ‘Thought you’d meet Mr Churchill, m’be the Queen herself up in London. Thought you’d be nodding at all them film stars, too. Elizabeth Taylor. Margaret Lockwood. I know them all, see, I like the Pictures.’ He winks again.

  ‘John!’

  ‘It’s nice when you laugh.’

  Lilia pushes her chair across the flagstones and disappears into the cold scullery. For a moment John wonders if he has said the wrong thing.

  ‘Glasses, please,’ she calls out, and soon she is back with Juniper’s latest bottle of whisky.

  The golden liquid swirls in each cut-glass tumbler. She thinks John does a strange thing as he splashes whisky on the stone floor and mumbles something, but she doesn’t ask what. They sit and they smoke and the liquor warms them in the hard kitchen chairs.

  A fat bug clatters against the window above the sink and Lilia squeals.

  ‘Jumpy tonight, steady!’ John laughs.

  ‘I cannot help! All day they do this. Those big insects, so ugly, crashing against the windows of the house.’

  ‘Maybugs.’

  Lilia drinks: it steadies her nerves. ‘But it is not May yet.’

  ‘Will be tomorrow. May 1st. They come a day early, mind.’

  Lilia shivers.

  ‘Don’t worry they don’t last long. Be dead by halfway through June.’

  The bug, tenacious, crashes into the lit window again. ‘I know this creature, John. We had them when I was a girl. Maikäfer.’ She closes her eyes. Her fingers tap on the table as the bug taps at the windowpane. Lilia stubs out her spent cigarette and she begins to sing.

  ‘Maikäfer flieg … Dein Vater ist im Krieg. Deine Mutter ist in Pommerland. Pommerland ist abgebrannt. Maikäfer flieg!’

  John stares. He waits until the echo of her voice and the thud of the insect are gone: it is such a pretty voice, he thinks, but they are such strange words.

  ‘What’s that about then?’

  Lilia opens her eyes. ‘It is a simple song, for children. It is like, what is yours, ah yes, “Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are gone.” My song means, “Maybug fly, your father is at war…” she stops as the bug clatters against the pane. Lilia wants to change the subject; she gulps the whisky. ‘John, you have always lived with your mother?’

  ‘She’s all I have.’

  ‘You should marry, have a family of your own.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t look for that.’

  ‘But it will look for you! You are a young man, you need family.’ Lilia pulls back the greaseproof paper: she offers a sandwich to John and nibbles at a crustless edge herself.

  The bug is gone.

  ‘You know, there are times,’ she says, ‘I regret bringing the children to this place.’

  ‘Fresh air. Good for them.’

  Lilia tries to smile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you stay, you reckon?’ John feels nervous, waiting for the answer. The egg and cress helps.

  Lilia is quick. ‘I cannot say. This is for Dieter now, but I think it is too much. Such a silly old house. Expensive to run, and we live poor here, like peasants. Dieter was raised in a city. It is hard for us all.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘But I have you to talk to, John, and that makes me happy.’

  He coughs on his whisky.

  ‘Why do you…’ she begins to ask but then she stops.

  ‘What?’ he smiles, the whisky clouding him.

  ‘I have always wondered why do you not walk in the front door? You use this,’ she points at the kitchen’s back door, the one that leads to outside brick steps that take you up into the light of a kitchen garden and a small gravel courtyard where Lilia and John have just planted out tomatoes in clay pots.

  ‘Just the way it is.’

  ‘It is so strange.’

  ‘Not so very much. And you’re always down here. I come straight to you.’ John blushes and Lilia looks away. She touches her hair; she’s had neither the time nor the money to travel into town to the hairdresser Juniper recommended. It is a pity, but Lilia doesn’t care, not yet.

  ‘I would like for you to walk in the front door, always.’

  ‘Can’t say I’d like it,’ John pauses, he looks straight at her, ‘Lilia.’

  ‘Then that is fair, it is your choice.’

  ‘It is.’ John drains his glass.

  She is staring at the silver salvers. ‘Will these sandwiches be enough, John? For “the hunt”?’

  ‘I’d say it’ll be plenty,’ he lifts up a small triangle of sandwich, ‘I mean you don’t want to be galloping off after a fox with a belly full of egg, do you?’

  They both laugh and it feels good.

  ‘Be exciting, mind. Tomorrow. Been such a long time since we’ve had a crowd up at the Hall. Before the war, at least. Are you riding tomorrow – Lilia?’

  She laughs, her eyes a little wild. ‘Oh dear, no. I cannot. Peter, he told me. He said when he was a boy he goes out with them and the dogs they kill the fox and the man takes the blood and the blood is put on his face! Like savages.’

  ‘Blooding…’

  ‘This is a terrible thing,’ but just as Lilia says this, she knows she doesn’t believe it is so terrible.

  ‘Quick death, mind.’

  Lilia pictures big, slavering dogs. She stands, stretching her hands up towards the ceiling, and she walks to the range. Her knees click as she kneels to open a hatch.

  ‘Here, let me do that,’ and John is above her, his heat warmer than the heat of the burning wood. He is such a boy and such a big man, all in one, and the sound of his chest, it speaks to her, whispers to her, and makes her think of things she shouldn’t.

  ‘You cold?’ he asks.

  She is still kneeling. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come here, then,’ and his big hands are on her shoulders. She feels his jacket – warm with him – around her, and before she can protest she is guided to a chair and sitting with a glass in her hand, while John is on the flagstones in front of her.

  It makes her think of dogs again, faithful ones.

  ‘There are strange sounds in this house, John.’

  ‘Old houses do that.’

  ‘I hear the noises at night. I know there are unhappy things here.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You must know, you have worked here many years…’

  ‘Yes.’ John puts his hand on the wooden arm of her chair. ‘Best to let it be, Lilia.’

  Whisky stings her lips, ‘I am not frightened,’ she cups the tumbler. ‘It is only, what is the word? Queer. It is queer this place. That is a good English word, is it not? Yes. But places are nothing. It is the people, no?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘What has gone, John. It is here, around us. Always.’

  ‘That’s what my mam says. She says them that have passed on are everywhere and we just got to learn to live with them and they’ve got to learn to live with us, see.’

  ‘That is very true. I would like to meet your mother.’

  The black range taps out the pulse of its heat: tic-tic-tic.

  ‘I had always thought to fear the living,’ Lilia says, ‘not the dead.’

  John coughs, his knees hurt on the flagstone, but he doesn’t move. ‘Lilia, if you don’t mind me asking, how long were you and Master Peter married?’

  It is such a sudden question, out of nowhere. She stares through her whisky-fug, at him at her feet. ‘We met in London at the end of the war, but still there were bombs. We were in the underground, he lit my cigarette.’ Lilia winds her hair behind her ear, over and over; she feels the throb of thinking right at the base of her neck and it pricks like pins and needles. ‘You were here for the war, John?’

  ‘Home Guard. On acc
ount of the lungs. Not proud of it.’

  ‘There is no pride in war.’

  ‘I dunno about that…’

  Lilia laughs, but the throb grows stronger.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ he says again, still at her feet, still staring up with those blue blue eyes, ‘were you on our side, or theirs?’

  Tic-tic says the black range.

  John is as much a child as Dieter, she thinks.

  Tic-tic.

  Tic-tic.

  ‘I left Germany a long time ago.’

  Drip-drip says the tap that dribbles green.

  ‘I didn’t mean…’

  ‘No, I have heard the question before. Please, do not worry. What is your word? ‘Fret’, yes, do not fret…’ she reaches out to the arm of her chair and lays her hand on his. ‘I came here months before the war began. Then, once it starts, I cannot go home. Many of us are here in England, and then the war starts and some of us are put in camps. Yes, John, in England. Two boys I know, they are taken. I was not. I worked, and for a good family. Quakers.’ She coughs. ‘It is funny. I don’t tell anyone this. I don’t speak of it, but,’ Lilia breaks off; she takes her hand away, and drinks. ‘I think, sometimes it is hard. Yes, it is hard to remember what you were. It is hard to remember what you are.’

  John’s knees click. ‘Did Master Peter speak German?’

  Lilia wishes John would stop asking foolish things.

  ‘Peter…’ it is so easy to say his name tonight, ‘Ob Peter deutsch gesprochen hat? Yes. That was his job. Translator. There was much work. War, it does not simply – poof! – end. War, it is bleeding. It is taking time. There are people. People are a war. Peter, he put people back with people. He tried to save, but sometimes…. It is like baby cats. Like kittens. Sometimes it is no good and people do not want to be saved. Do you understand me, John?’ Lilia glances over at the kitchen table, at the bottle, and wishes she had more whisky in her glass.

  ‘To be truthful with you, not all.’

  ‘Maybe that is for the best. It is all so long ago. We must say this.’ Lilia hugs herself, feeling warmth, such a rare thing in this place, but she wants to stop talking like this because it makes her shake. ‘Please, tell me, what happens, John?’ she whispers, ‘tomorrow.’ She watches him stand and rest his leg against the range; she wonders how he can stand the heat of the metal.

  ‘They come up, 7 o’clock.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Men and animals?’

  ‘Aye, women and children, too. And a few of those ladies they still ride side-saddle, never seen as how a woman can do that…’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Right, well they all come up on their horses, dogs and all.’

  Lilia shivers.

  ‘And we’ll be here and I can hand out the refreshments,’ John speaks like a gleeful waiter, ‘and the master of the hounds has his hot port because he’s partial, and the rest have their port or their whisky – Mrs Bledsoe said she’d bring that – and by this time the hounds are fretting, and the master of the house – which is you, I reckon – gives a little talk…’

  ‘Oh no…’

  ‘Well, I don’t ’spect they’ll be worrying about that, and then, well, they’re off, and God help the fox. Bad time this late. Whelping.’

  Lilia watches John’s face; the heat from the burner has given him a flushed look and he seems lost for a moment, his head against a blouse of hers that hangs from the wooden Jenny. His blue eyes are – for a moment Lilia can’t think of the word – yes, that is it – they are wistful – John Phelps looks wistful.

  ‘And that’s that,’ he murmurs.

  Lilia leans back in the spindle-back chair; she will sleep in it tonight. John’s coat is around her and it smells of man, which to Lilia is tobacco. Peter preferred cologne on his hands and pomade in his hair. Peter liked everything clean. She thinks of the hunt. She wishes she hadn’t let Juniper persuade her into it. ‘The Meet’, Juniper called it, and still Lilia doesn’t know whether Juniper intended ‘meat’ or ‘meet’. The meat. The meet. The hunt. The hunters. It makes little difference. It will still give her this night of sleeplessness, of ironing the children’s clothes and hoping to God that the grand men and women on those horses won’t laugh at her and her measly offerings; these dreadful egg and cress sandwiches, curling even now on the silver salvers on the table, salvers she will sell next week. She prays they won’t laugh at her and her terrible hair with its black roots showing. Lilia wonders if she will still be drunk in the morning and then she wonders if the baying dogs will eat her and her children, and all for a damned silly English fox.

  The boy is pulling Dieter’s hand so hard it hurts. Dieter doesn’t know how because the boy is so much smaller than him. And his touch, it makes Dieter feel so terribly sick, so terribly dizzy.

  It’s making him burp.

  The moon follows them down to the faraway cowshed where the farmer milks twice a day. As they creep past the farmhouse a black and white dog on a thick chain barks, then whimpers. Then they are walking up the hill, looping back towards the Hall, and Dieter finds himself at the other end of the red gardens. It is such a strange way to come, he thinks.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The boy says nothing as they march past the greenhouses – a forgotten village of shattered panes, rotten canes and weeds. They duck through an arch in a tall brick wall and into a small enclosure. This place is littered with small graves: Dieter knows because he often sits here. The stones are terribly old and some of the names have flaked away. Some are Roman, and Dieter once wrote them down in his exercise book: there is ‘Romulus’, ‘Remus’, ‘Caesar’, ‘Caius’, ‘Pompei’ and ‘Scipio’; and then some are simply letters, ‘D’, and ‘J’, and a ‘K’. He did wonder if they had been soldiers, centurions, poets; then he wondered if the headstones were so small because – he reasoned – people were smaller back then. Ma laughed when he asked this, and she told him that these graves were the graves of pets; she said this was a place where foolish Englishmen buried their dogs because Englishmen treated their animals better than they treated their children.

  As the boy pulls him past the dark stumps of gravestones, Dieter imagines tall grey deerhounds in bright waistcoats beneath the ground; he thinks of white Scottish terriers in tartan kilts. Then the boy stops and bends down for a moment, trailing his free hand over the edge of one small gravestone. Dieter thinks of the time he visited a graveyard with Ma. It was before Pa died, before the fact of anyone dying had occurred to him, and he had been very little. He remembers how Ma knelt: perhaps this is what you did in a graveyard? She picked up a little pebble and placed it on the smooth top of a marble gravestone. Dieter remembers this and the fact that his new wool shorts had itched.

  They pass a huge stretched-out yew tree and in front of them the forest of rhododendrons begins in red and pink. In the daylight these half-open flowers are red as a double-decker bus.

  ‘Why are we going in here? I don’t like the rho-de-do-de-den-drums,’ Dieter whines but the boy drags him through the thick bushes: thin petals, moist leaves and stunted branches catch on his dressing gown, in his hair. He feels so sick and now he is frightened. When they make turn after turn in the dense shrubs, Dieter wonders how he will ever find his way out, and then suddenly, they are ducking through another arch in a brick wall. They are in the clearing with the swimming pool.

  In the moonlight the water is shiny black and it stinks. Dieter knows there are things in there: three wooden tennis rackets, a cane chair and a parasol – shredded – and something dead he’d decided was a small dog because he spent an afternoon poking at it with a stick.

  ‘I don’t want to go in there!’ he cries, tugging backwards. The boy lets go and Dieter’s sickness lifts: he checks his nose for blood, but there is none. The moon shines on the boy as he walks to the swimming pool’s edge. He rolls up the cuffs of Pa’s white shirt and stretches his arms out at his sides.

&nbs
p; ‘We’re not really going for a swim, are we?’ Dieter says, because the boy looks ready to dive in. Dieter struggles but he can’t help it, he finds himself walking towards the edge of the pool until he is standing next to him; the boy is a magnet.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ he whimpers. ‘I don’t want to jump into that.’ Dieter stares down at the water; he wonders how deep it is.

  There is a light hum in the air and something hits him square in the face. It isn’t a punch or a slap but a bounce; something ricochets off his cheek as the hum turns into a rumble and the rumble glows bright green in the dark.

  Dieter sees them – because they are a ‘them’ – buzzing together in a great luminous cloud, they are flying towards him. He squeals, but he can’t move. He is frozen and they are on him now and he cries out, ‘Mekon! Mekon! Mekon!’ because Dieter doesn’t know they are fireflies, little drops of toxic green. Dieter thinks they are aliens, outriders of the Mekon’s army coming to suck the life from him. They fly in his mouth and he has to spit them out.

  They fly onto the boy, too. They latch onto his outstretched arms, his hair, his bare legs, but the boy doesn’t squirm. More come, all crashing straight into the boy now, until he is encased in luminous green and Pa’s shirt glows.

  Then the sound changes, something heavy is droning in the night air, and all of a sudden fat things are bouncing off Dieter’s head. He squeals as they plop into the filthy water; they are the same fat bugs that have been crashing through the Hall all day.

  Maybugs.

  They hit Dieter in the chest, hard, and he has to slap himself to get the crawling insects from him. He teeters at the pool’s edge. ‘London, is the place for me,’ he cries, ‘London, this lovely city!’

  When the moths come they sound like feathers. Some are tiny and plain, the size of a farthing, some are as large as rats and as bright as kites, and some are stuck with pins. They land in the grass and tickle their way over Dieter’s slippers to his ankles, then up his legs, to his hips, to his chest, to his face: their soft furry bodies purring with speed. They thrum against his ears, tickle his hands, then sharp pins scrape across his skin. Dieter stumbles, trying to brush them away. ‘Make them stop!’ he cries. He’s wobbling now, on the lip of the pool. ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop them!’