Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘It was on that collar-thing.’ Dieter poked his lip out, he didn’t understand. ‘What is your name then?’

  The boy shrugged. Dieter noticed his eyebrows moving up, then down: it was nice to see his face move.

  ‘Have you forgotten?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Really? You’ve forgotten your own name?’

  The boy sighed.

  ‘That’s terrible. I couldn’t ever forget my name. I’m sure of it.’ Dieter thought. ‘We could find out if you like?’ He sat up, suddenly excited. ‘I’ll be crafty, like Sherlock Holmes. What do you think of that?’

  The boy sighed again and Dieter smelled gun smoke and metal, sea salt and rust. Dieter smelled Pa too, because Pa was still on the shirt his friend wore: strong and lemony. The boy pushed his finger against Dieter’s temple and Dieter felt something drain from him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He hiccupped. ‘Please.’

  The boy lifted his finger.

  It took a moment to recover: Dieter reached for the fruitcake. ‘How do you do that?’ he asked. ‘When you touch me it’s like I’m sinking, like I’m going to be terribly ill and I can’t think.’

  His friend suddenly sat up and jerked his head left, then right. He sprang into a crouch, knees bent and ready.

  Dieter was certain the boy was bigger.

  Then Dieter thought about the Wasteland and the Wee-Hoo Gang; he thought about running. ‘Do you want to play tig?’ he asked.

  The boy was blank.

  ‘OK, you be “it” and you chase me, but you have to give me a head start because you’re … you’re…’ Dieter wanted to say ‘growing’ but that didn’t seem right.

  Dieter sprang up, and then he was running through the haze of bluebells. ‘Come on!’ he cried as the trees blurred.

  The boy didn’t move, not yet. He was breathing in beech and oak and also pine from the forest nearby. He was greedy. He breathed in green and he felt green; he breathed in the sweetness of the bluebells and he felt sweet, and all this while dust-mites, dead moths and cobwebs shivered into life in the crevices of him.

  He twitched to the pumping suck of a fat tick on the doe that crouched in the fern behind him. He could hear her pant; he could hear the beat of her fearful heart. He breathed in, though he didn’t need the air, and his lungs turned from waterless casing to sponge; he felt fluid pump through arteries that had been black as lead. With his palms and his feet flat on the wood floor, the boy sucked up the sap from the bluebells, from their green stalks, from their buried white bulbs. He took it all until the frilled purple flowers around him were husks.

  At last he stood, face up to the shafts of sun. It was easy for him to move now. He had found it so difficult at first, he had been a stiff engine, pistons dry.

  A silverfish crawled from one nostril and it tickled the corner of his mouth until his tongue came out and swiped it. The boy watched Dieter disappear through the trees as he munched; he cocked his head to one side: he was waiting.

  He had been waiting for such a long time.

  As he walked bluebells shrivelled to brown beneath his feet.

  Awakenings

  13

  He didn’t remember.

  All was grey, as grey as the moth wings that filled his mouth. That was until the child spoke to him, until that Sugar child had him appear.

  It was a command, after all. The child’s blood had called to his in little seductive whispers, because the child’s blood was his blood. And so that day he had appeared by the window in the wooden shed. He had appeared and he had tingled and sparked and the Sugar child had fled.

  After all his years, decades, almost two centuries of wandering, this time he thought he had simply stopped, disappeared, and that was an end to it. But the child had come and he’d had no choice. He knew it would be such a long and hard battle because he had fought it before. He knew he had to remember.

  He didn’t know what he was, not yet.

  Was he born here?

  He knew he had died here: for now that was enough.

  In truth, he wanted to lie down, to stop and let the memories fall away like clothes in a fire. He would prefer that, to be nothing; but the child had called and now he was walking through this wood: his wood.

  As he walked, nettles tickling his legs, birds stopped their song.

  Foxes hid.

  Squirrels spat and retreated to their holes.

  The boy began to spit, too – he stopped beneath an oak, touched the rough bark and the old life thumped a fierce thump, up from the great gods of the earth – as he spat out his moths and his cobwebs, as he spat out centuries, or two at least. He spat out horsehair, twigs and bitter almonds, rat poison, cowrie shells and Indian ink. He spat and he spat until his voice came. The boy hummed first. Words were too many, too much, so the boy hummed and he walked, bluebells turning to dry crunch at his steps.

  He had once hidden in this wood. That was so much time ago – because he had forgotten the trinkets that are days, months, and years.

  Now he was the wood.

  This boy had seen the oaks fall for Navy ships, he had seen rats crawl up from the wood floor and eat a sleeping man. He had watched a child disappear into the fern and shimmer into nothing. He had seen cats’ eyes dance in the needle tips of the firs. He had seen a girl bury a living, wailing thing at the foot of a stream and he had watched a weeping willow grow there. He had heard bombs tick-tock in bottomless quarries and plump babies cry from rooks’ nests. He had seen men fight with hands, with swords, with knives, with poison, with guns and with paper. This boy had seen men kiss women and men kiss men; he had seen women kiss men and women kiss women. This boy had crawled inside an acorn; he had made men dance until their legs cracked. Once, too long ago, when he was proper flesh and proper bone, when he had hidden and whimpered in the wet hollow of an ancient oak, he had seen a silver deer with the pinkest eyes dance on its hind legs.

  This boy had seen men dig a grave for his mother while she still lived. He had seen her tied to an ancient yew and whipped and cut in the red garden. This boy had seen himself swinging from a rope coiled on an oak branch, his own neck snapped.

  This boy had watched these woods for all of his time.

  The smell of wild garlic tickled him and he walked on.

  Saskia’s Party

  14

  Juniper Bledsoe was walking fast across the bright field, her liver-spotted spaniels trailing behind her, docked tails paddling the air like rudders in her wake.

  ‘To heel, to heel,’ she said every few steps. It was a soothing chant for her as well as the spaniels because Juniper was on her way to Sugar Hall and recently that ghastly place was making her remember the strangest things; recently it put her on edge. Still, she was late for the girl’s party. She hadn’t taken to the lumpy thing, but there was dear Lilia to consider.

  Juniper didn’t know what to do and this was unusual. She didn’t know what to do about Lilia Sugar: poor Lilia, alone in that monstrosity. Juniper was seriously considering writing a fat cheque and telling Lilia, ‘Take this and run, run away!’

  She was considering running with her.

  It had become worse since the boy sickened. Now the child had been taken out of school and he languished at home (this, Juniper felt, was hardly helpful). It wasn’t a proper sickness; it was in the mind, and the little chap had become anaemic and accident-prone, his fingers covered in plasters, his eyes ringed with shadows. Lilia claimed the iron tablets were doing no good but Dr Portman advised patience as the best medicine.

  Juniper glanced up at the barbed wire that squared her field. She did wish her gamekeeper, Turley, wouldn’t do that; hang his dead trophies from the wire fence with little orange knots of bailer twine. Country habits, she thought, as she marched past the swinging corpses of magpies, stoats and ravens.

  ‘To heel, Bonzo, Farley! To heel!’

  Perhaps the girl’s birthday party will rally them all, she thou
ght. Perhaps the Hall was filled with lightness and laughter this very second.

  Juniper doubted it.

  She had known the Hall and all at the Hall since she was a young bride, just seventeen. Dieter’s grandfather – old Gerald Sugar had been a terrible flirt, even with her. ‘See you’ve got yourself a young filly!’ he’d said to her Brigadier once they returned from their honeymoon. ‘Broken her in yet?’

  He was a truly ghastly man but it had been such a decadent time, that time between the wars. She was barely out of school and hot summer evenings in daring and darling silk dresses and new jewels from her Brigadier had thrilled her. Gerald Sugar held roaring parties that would roar for days at the Hall. This was country decadence: roast swan, a fountain full of champagne and midnight ghost stories.

  Juniper shivered as she stood in the long grass.

  At the end of her first summer here, that terribly hot summer between the wars, Gerald’s eldest boy – Richard Sugar – was dead.

  Yes, Richard would have been Dieter’s uncle.

  It had been a night in late August, and the heat so unbearable that the chill of the Hall had been welcome. That evening hot candle wax fell from brass and copper drip pans directly onto the white linen as they feasted on a bird-within-a-bird-within-a-bird. Rather drunk on champagne, Gerald Sugar had demanded a Ouija board. Juniper had never seen one. Still, it was a nonsense-word and a nonsense-thing. She remembered laughing wildly and holding her crystal flute in the air, showing off her handsome summer-brown arms in a particularly daring sleeveless, black dress.

  She knew she wasn’t pretty, even then, but she had been so young.

  A servant brought the board in and she was surprised to see a child’s board game. Gerald told them how he had found it in a bedroom, a blue room high in the rafters of Sugar Hall. Juniper had giggled and enjoyed the cool breeze that ran down the stairwell and blew through the open door of the dining room. She even laughed when all of the candles, bar one, blew out as old Gerald placed a cut-glass tumbler upside down on the board. She played footsie with her husband as Gerald called out in a grand voice, ‘Is anyone there?’

  It was less of a question and more of a demand.

  There was no reply.

  They soon abandoned the child’s game, the cut-glass tumbler lying on its side, and they turned to the brandy. A few guests seemed ruffled, but she fell deep into conversation with Peter, the younger, more delicate boy, and her age. He was going up to Cambridge that autumn and she was rather jealous. They talked the classics because she had devoured her brothers’ books. This was when Richard, the eldest son, leapt up and held a carving knife to his father’s throat. It was so dreadfully sudden. She remembered she’d thought it comical at first because the tall, blond Richard did so look like an efficient barber as he stood behind his father pulling the man’s chin up, a greasy bone-handled carving knife at his throat. Juniper soon recognised the eldest son’s feverish upper lip, the wrinkle of his papery forehead; she had seen the same look on the faces of her two brothers when they came home on leave from the great war. It was the very last time Juniper saw them.

  Richard Sugar was petrified.

  ‘Stop!’ she cried from the dining table, and Richard looked at her, yelped, and threw the knife to the floor. It clattered. He ran out through the open French windows and into the garish red gardens. She remembered how a moth flew in then, and hovered so close to a candle flame at the table that its wings caught fire. Frantic, it flew about the white cloth, smoking.

  Yes, Juniper remembered that: the small detail. She tossed water at the insect, and missed. The water simply drenched what was left of their bird-within-a-bird-within-a-bird. Finally, she threw her napkin over the poor thing, smothering the small flames.

  ‘Let him stew!’ the father yelled. ‘It’ll make a man of him, a night in the damned woods.’ Gerald ordered the servants to lock the doors and windows, and for a small moment Juniper wanted to pick the knife up from the floor and finish the job herself; she knew a little of fragile young men, but a lot about bullish fathers.

  She and the Brigadier left shortly afterwards. They said nothing of the ghastly evening as they undressed, as they lay together, as she wept after making love and the Brigadier called her his girl. No, they didn’t mention it: that was until Peter Sugar, the youngest son, was hammering at their door and all at once they were standing out on the landing watching the servants in their dressing gowns trying to calm the young man as he begged for help to search the woods.

  ‘Father wouldn’t want the police involved, you see.’

  ‘Does your father know Richard hasn’t come back?’ the Brigadier barked from their staircase.

  ‘No, no one at the Hall does, Sir. That’s why I’m begging for your assistance. Please, help me find Richard…’

  ‘He’s no doubt gone to town,’ her Brigadier said. ‘Why this fuss?’

  But Juniper had pitter-pattered down the stairs in her silk slippers and she was telling Peter, ‘yes, yes, of course we will help.’

  That was the night Richard Sugar was found dead in the woods. A few weeks later Peter was lost to Cambridge and then to London; Juniper was eighteen and she doubted old Gerald Sugar ever unlocked those doors again. The decadence of that summer was gone in an instant, decadence of that sort at least.

  Yes, they were all dead now, including her darling Brigadier.

  Juniper kicked her foot into the red earth of a molehill.

  It was Lilia – such a sweet, pretty face – who made her think of this past. It was strange how certain people did that, unlocked something. Juniper had come to the conclusion that some people brought the past with them like so many ghosts.

  ‘To heel, to heel,’ she murmured at the spaniels, and she was glad of her tweed suit, usually so bothersome in the summer.

  She rested on the top of the next stile, looking out at her land, and from here, land that belonged to Sugar Hall. It was the boy’s now, she supposed, although she knew there were solicitors involved and Lilia didn’t understand the half of it. She could hear the creak of diggers in the valley beyond: they were clearing council land for those houses, for ‘estates’ that would soon give a fresh meaning to that word. It was a pity she and the Brigadier had had only dogs; there had been no children (although Juniper preferred the term ‘child-free’ to ‘child-less’). It was simply a pity because of all this. This damned land. She sighed at the green fields and she began to hum, for a strange sort of song had been chiming in her head all morning: a song that came from another memory in this blasted morning of recollection. Juniper just couldn’t stop herself humming it as she stood, brushed her skirt down and jumped off the stile. When she marched across the next field, her hum turned to words.

  ‘We came from way out West. We came to do our best. To fight for right, and against the might of Nazi terror-ist,’ she sang and giggled, though the memory was sad.

  A boy had taught her this song during the last war, a boy she had nursed, a boy who had died (and she had nursed so many, watched so many die). But this boy she remembered clearly, though his name only came to her as she’d sat on that stile: Edwin. He had been an RAF pilot, and in her nurse’s uniform Juniper would put her ear close to his lips as he sang, ‘We have our boys in blue, in grey and khaki too, we’ll sing our song and they’ll fight along against the Nazi terrorist.’ Edwin told her how he’d heard a man called Al Jennings sing this very song on the BBC in England, and that was why this was a great country this Mother Country of his, and it would always look after him like a beloved son. Edwin sang as she changed the dressings on his stumps; gangrene had set in and she prayed the morphine would take him. Edwin, who told her stories of his island, Jamaica, and of his parish, St Thomas; Edwin who whispered Hitler was coming to get them, so when the recruiter came calling he and his mother had taken no time in deciding. He was the man of the house and he must protect his sisters from Hitler.

  He was so young, and he had sung to her.

  It was Junipe
r’s job to nurse the men who would not recover. Her superiors said she had a knack for it. It made her think of her own father and his hands, the way those hands had put his animals out of their misery: calm and swift. The horses, the many dogs, that gigantic bull; none of them saw it coming. That was the only knack you needed in death, Juniper decided: kind hands and the ability to distract. She had managed this for her many dying boys: public school boys, country boys, Londoners, Scots, Welsh, and those ones who had come from all over the world to die here, in England and for England, under her eye.

  It was too unbearably sad.

  Juniper took a man’s white handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. Sentimental old fool, she thought, and she cried out, ‘to heel!’ to her bolting spaniels. She was quite out of breath as she walked up Sugar Hall’s long gravel drive, past the first open gate, then the second. She paused and stared up at the house. Truly, she hated the place; it made her remember the strangest things. She had to get Lilia out. She looked down at her shoes: muddy. Her stockinged legs were pitted with goose grass and seed. Juniper thought of Elizabeth Bennett arriving at Netherfield, and she laughed. Juniper Bledsoe was faithful to two things: the spaniel and Jane Austen.

  ‘Hallo! Halloo!’ she cried as she walked into the chilled hall, and for a moment the thrilling skitter of her spaniels’ nails at the threshold of the Hall allowed her to forget it all.

  A Trial

  15

  Saskia and her three school friends were crowded around the Daily Mirror in the Hall’s boot room. Saskia was lounging on a ratty armchair, while Kit, Tina and Shirley sat on the floor around her. Saskia was a little Sultaness in one coral and one mint green glove, because the girls had rifled through a cache of mismatched evening gloves in the Ottoman. It was Saskia’s Sweet Sixteenth, and although the boot room smelled of rubber, wax coats and gristle, these girls had given it a sugared note of Fruit Pastels and high spirits.

  ‘She doesn’t look like a murderer.’