Sugar Hall

by Tiffany Murray

  ‘But I don’t like cows.’

  He bent his knees, too, and she felt his arms around her waist. With their feet pushing from rock to rock they floated together in the weak summer current of the river. Lilia rested her head on his shoulder, and at last she thought of nothing.

  Alex was thinking. He was thinking of that day at the river in Demmin, even now. The memory was fresh as new paint and it was a clean memory because here she was, his Lily, not dead, not dead at all. That day Lily had been wearing a summer dress in pale blue, he was sure, and she had dangled her legs from the bank. She had blushed and smiled and then he’d crawled out of the water, knelt down and kissed her. It was a daring thing to do. He was a friend of Ari’s, but still. That day Alex couldn’t help himself. That day young Lily Fisch pushed him in the river, and that moment was the moment he knew he’d love her for as long as he could. He’d love her because she had laughed.

  Now, floating with her in his arms, Alex remembered it all perfectly: holding Lily Fisch, kissing Lily Fisch with simple teenage kisses down by their river back home.

  Alex felt young and he had felt so old for so long.

  ‘I’m going to swim,’ Lilia murmured at his ear, and she untangled herself from him. He stared across at her – wet in her slip – but before he could reach for her she had pushed off into the current. Alex sighed and fell back into floating, content: there was no rushing with Lily Fisch.

  Beneath the water, he listened to the run of the River Wye and the rush of his own blood. He could hear Lilia’s splashing from a distance but beneath the water everything seemed so fantastically cut off; there was the thud-thud-thud of his heart, his breath and the trickle of water. Alex squeezed his eyes shut and breathed through his nose. He was trying to think of good things; he was trying so hard to think of good things and with the smell of Lilia on the tip of his nose it should have been easy.

  The feeling was creeping up on him, though, like a fever. It was the river’s fault. When he’d stood on the shore and saw the low hanging branches of a willow dragged out like tugged hair he’d felt it shiver into life. Now, he couldn’t stop it.

  Alex had returned once after the war. There was no one to go back to, but the fact that he was driving to his town a grown man when he had run away from it a scared boy, pleased him. By his second day there, he realised the trip was mistake. That morning an old, spitting man at the bus stop had told him a story he didn’t want to hear. (Of course the trip had been filled with these stories, but this one was different: it had been a shock.) The man’s teeth had been worn to stubs and the smoke in his mouth seemed black as he’d spoken of the river.

  ‘OK, maybe it wasn’t a thousand, maybe there were nine hundred. Nine hundred killed themselves. Out there in the water,’ the old man said.

  The ‘nine hundred’ had been men, women and children. The war was over and these men, women and children were defeated, and though Alex couldn’t be sorry about that, he’d baulked at the old man’s tale. The Red Army was advancing and so these nine hundred men, women and children of the town – once his town – had walked to the river and drowned themselves (though in the case of the children, Alex thought, they had been drowned). At the time he’d been in America, he’d heard nothing of this: nothing of these German civilians and their final act. Later that morning as he’d stared down at his childhood river (because he’d had to go back to it, he’d had to see how a town could drown) all he could think was – it was such a small river for nine hundred – maybe a thousand – to drown in; it was too shallow. Drowning in it must have taken all the will, all the effort in the world.

  Alex sat up; he couldn’t see Lilia, the cows were drinking at the shore and the current had taken him too far. He stood and the water rushed from him; the river reached his hips.

  She was floating beneath the shadows of the weeping willow – the dangling, light branches tickling her legs. She was holding onto one branch to stay put, to stop the current taking her. She heard splashing and when she saw Alex wading towards her she closed her eyes as little waves pushed up against her: she tasted little trickles of river in her mouth.

  His hands were underneath her body; he held her as she listened to the rush of her own blood in her ears, to the current of the bright river.

  When he guided her to the bank beneath the willow, when he kissed her and she felt herself being pushed into the silty mud, Lilia pulled off that silly white vest of his and she kissed him back. For so long now Lilia had thought of nothing but old songs, she had been singing nothing but old songs. But as Alex Behr kissed her, as he tugged off her slip, Lilia thought of Saskia’s Dansette record player and that one song ‘Dreamboat’ by Alma Cogan.

  Lilia began to hum.

  By the time they were chasing each other through the beech and oak wood, they felt like tiny children. They shrieked with pleasure as nettles snapped at them along the pathway. Alex was laughing from the bones in his legs up to the crown of his head. He felt weak with it; he felt weak with Lilia.

  ‘Come on!’ she cried.

  And they ran; their clothes tight with damp.

  Lilia was sunburnt and she relished the rough sting of it on her shoulders, her forehead and cheeks. She felt the damp and the slime and the mildew of Sugar Hall pass through her. This morning she had woken up a toad but now she was a bright, sun-warmed bird: a freed canary, or a finch – clear and colourful with a beak of steel. Lilia felt strong and suddenly she knew, as she ran and her new breath cut her, that she was leaving Sugar Hall. She would simply go. She would pack up and sell every knick-knack and oak table in that place and she would take the money and she would buy a washing machine, a Frigidaire, a few months rent on a new flat in London. Perhaps she’d buy a ticket to New York. She would send Saskia to secretarial college and Dieter to a good school, not the best, but a school close to home wherever they lived and she would forget all this and she would let her shoulders brown in the sun and her laughter come out, and there would be no past, only their futures.

  Against the Clock

  28

  Once a little darkness fell Lilia forgot happiness. Once Dieter’s supper plate had cooled at the kitchen table and she and Alex had searched Sugar Hall from top to bottom, she couldn’t remember what happiness was. She jumped onto Saskia’s old bike. She refused the car.

  ‘Don’t be crazy, Lily, he’s out there somewhere, playing. He’ll be with John.’

  ‘You take the car and find Juniper. Alex, you find her. You remember her house?’

  ‘Yes, Lily, yes, but…’

  Lilia was already pedalling down the gravel drive. At the second gate and past the grand sycamores she turned left onto the black lane, brambles biting at her bare legs and arms; she knew the way without seeing much.

  It seemed endless, this dreadful lane: endless and black.

  At last she rumbled to the bottom of the hill. Here at the crossroads she turned right and soon she was passing the church and the vicarage. There in the distance was the village shop, the pub and the green. Lilia’s dress stuck to her back, she battled to catch her breath but she kept on, skidding into another sharp right and on, on up to the line of cottages that backed the village.

  There were still people out; it wasn’t so late. He is just playing, he is out playing like he used to play in London on the Wasteland, she thought, when she and the other mothers had to shout and beg for their wayward children to come home. Lilia pushed her whole weight down on the pedals. John’s home was the semi-detached on the end. The cottages were brick but painted white. Here she would find Dieter: here she would laugh at her silliness and take him home.

  She threw the Raleigh into the nettles, ran up the path and pounded on the door. ‘John! John? It is Lilia, Lilia Sugar. John!’

  When he finally stood there, blocking the light from inside, a surprised look on his face, Lilia wanted to scream. His mother was pulling at his elbow. ‘Let her in, John, let her in.’ Lilia hadn’t seen the mother before.

  She sho
t under John’s arm and into the house. ‘He is here, yes? Dieter, he is here?’ she said this though she knew the answer. Lilia began to wring her hands. Her legs felt wet; she glanced down to see long and deep scratches pearled with blood.

  ‘Dieter, he is…?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He is here?’ she shouted.

  John’s raven flew off the edge of the draining board and onto the kitchen table. There she saw the pink bodies of three skinned rabbits. At last Lilia screamed.

  ‘Lilia! Sh! Sh, now.’ John went to her but she stepped back. ‘Let me see to those scratches then,’ he said, and he went to the sink for a cloth. As he passed the skinned rabbits he laid a white cloth over them, then knelt at her feet and wiped her legs with another. Lilia felt soothed. Gaslight threw shadows on the walls and for a very small moment she felt as calm and clouded as a petted dog; this tiny home was warm, and she envied John and his mother. His hands were on the back of her calf now, holding her, and then he was standing, dabbing her arms, and she saw there were streaks of blood on the off-white cloth.

  ‘When did you last see him, John?’

  He was holding her arm, blowing on the bramble scratches.

  ‘John, when did you leave the Hall?’

  He walked back to the sink and dropped the cloth on the draining board. ‘I haven’t been up to the Hall today,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  John looked guilty and she wondered what for.

  ‘I haven’t seen him; I haven’t seen the lad today. Not at all.’

  She felt her knees go. ‘John, please…’

  ‘I was shooting, see…’ he nodded at the rabbits.

  ‘Yes he was,’ the mother barked, ‘and a few rabbits is nothing to write home about.’

  Lilia turned to see the old woman glaring at her from the foot of the stairs. She found herself wanting to laugh; his mother was worrying about the rabbits. What did she care for rabbits!

  Lilia held her hands together; it steadied the shaking. ‘John, you will come back with me.’

  ‘Don’t get messed up in things that don’t concern you,’ the mother growled.

  John picked up his coat. ‘I’m going to help, Mam,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back soon as I can.’

  With her chin out and elbows to the west and the east, Mrs Phelps shook her head, but they were already out of the door.

  There was a small crowd on the grey steps beyond the open porch. The light from the old glass chandelier in the grand hall poured out. John was guiding her on the bike, his hands on the bars. ‘We’ll find him and in no time,’ he was saying.

  Lilia jumped off the bike and stared at the gathering. She was thinking of deep wells and quarries, of locked and forgotten rooms that could swallow her boy up, of those priest holes, that dumb waiter, of the black sheds at the end of the red gardens, of treetops, bulls’ horns, horses’ hooves, train tracks, guttering, dark lanes, snares in the wood, and, oh, the black water of that old swimming pool.

  She was thinking of hunger and thirst and rusty farm machinery. The more hands the better, the more eyes the better, she told herself.

  Juniper walked forward and hugged her. ‘He is not with John, then,’ Juniper said. ‘Now, I’ve brought three of my men, don’t fret, darling, we’ll find the boy.’

  ‘Where is Alex?’

  ‘Inside, on the telephone.’

  As Juniper released her, Lilia looked over at the men. She recognised one as Juniper’s gamekeeper. She supposed the other two – younger, but with the gamekeeper’s eyes – were his sons. They were staring in at the hall, mouths open. She noticed their guns: thick black twelve-bores cocked over the crooks of their arms. ‘No guns,’ she said in a whisper: and then louder. ‘No guns, Juniper. Tell them.’

  Juniper nodded and the men pulled out the red cartridges with their thumbs and forefingers, delicate as ladies picking up dainties. They put the cartridges in their pockets and laid the empty guns against the wall.

  Alex walked down the steps to Lilia. He hugged her and she felt rather crushed. ‘The police will be here when they can,’ he whispered into her ear.

  She wriggled from him, ‘They are not coming now?’

  ‘They are waiting until the morning.’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Lilia, they are right, a boy sleeping in the woods, that is all, a boy off with his friends…’

  ‘Dieter doesn’t have any friends here!’

  The gamekeeper and his lads looked away. Alex pressed her arms as if he was trying to push her back together again. ‘Trust me, Lily, he is having boy’s fun, mischief, I am sure.’

  ‘How can you be?’

  Juniper clapped her hands together: Juniper was taking control and Lilia was glad. ‘I’ve brought my horse and one other, will you ride, Lilia?’ she asked.

  Lilia shook her head; she was scared to death of Juniper’s huge horses, their thighs wide as fat dogs.

  ‘Then, John, you are to take Lilia. Turley, you sweep the woods in the opposite direction with your boys.’

  The gamekeeper nodded.

  ‘And I’ll take Hispid out on Black Boy Hill. Would you join me, vicar?’

  Lilia hadn’t noticed the vicar beneath the porch.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ Alex said, ‘someone should be here when Dieter comes back.’

  ‘First we search this house,’ Juniper told them.

  ‘But we’ve looked,’ Lilia whispered.

  Juniper ignored her. ‘First the house, and then the buildings out there, the sheds for a start.’

  ‘The swimming pool,’ Lilia whispered again.

  ‘Turley, you start with the outbuildings. Then on to Sugar’s woods.’

  The men nodded and marched off, cigarettes red dots in the half-darkness.

  ‘The rest of us crack to it, one floor each to start with, and here’s chalk…’ Juniper handed a nub of white chalk to each one of them. She knew this from her stint driving ambulances: if a building was empty, if a room was clear and checked, you marked it.

  ‘Every room you check, mark a cross on it, and then we know where we are. You don’t mind do you, Lilia? The marks, I mean. It’s a pretty foolproof system.’

  Lilia was staring into space.

  ‘The marks. You don’t mind, the marks on the doors, darling?’

  Lilia snatched a piece of chalk; she shook her head. No. No. No, she thought, mark everything; mark it all in this damned and awful place. Mark it all and we can burn it later. Lilia ran up the steps. ‘I will start!’ she cried, and she sprinted across the hall, along the cold passageway, and down the hard and stone steps to her basement kitchen: Lilia would check and chalk the meat safe, the cupboards, and the small hatches of the black range.

  The west wood was dark and loud and John held her hand. They each had a torch. The Hall hadn’t given up her boy, but now each door was patterned with a white cross.

  John walked a step ahead as they followed the path. Lilia’s throat was cracked from crying, ‘Deeeeee-taaaaaaaaaah! Deeeeeee-taaaaaah!’ She was quiet now; a few murmurs of ‘Deee, Deeee, Deeeee,’ was all she could manage as she walked: exhausted.

  John led her through the wide, wet fronds of bracken. He switched off his torch: hers, too. ‘We’re better in the dark. Just follow me,’ he pulled back the fern, grasped bramble stalks with thumb and finger. Soon there was little scrub on the ground and John was pushing away the sweeping brush-tail branches of Douglas firs as he led her deeper into the forest itself.

  It was made up of darkness and echo in here, Lilia thought. The spongy ground made her footsteps nothing. All seemed dead to the eye as John’s grip grew firmer with each step. Damp and bog filled her nostrils, she cringed at the howling sound the fir trees made above, and she thought of those who had hidden in a forest, for years and years and years. She had read about them; men, women and children hiding in the thick trees, the dead trunks, the moss and the excrement; hiding from guns and from soldiers
and from war and from death.

  John kept the pace up.

  She suddenly covered her nose. ‘Oh God, John, the smell!’

  A tawny owl shrieked.

  There was a creaking noise, different from the creak of the branches in the wind. John switched on his torch and she saw them.

  Foxes.

  ‘Ah,’ she cried and she covered her mouth, her sandals dug into the soft ground.

  ‘Only vermin,’ John said.

  The foxes were hanging in a circle. Four were fresh, bright and red, but one had clearly been there for so long it was black bone.

  John pulled her to him. In the folds of his jacket, his arms around her, she felt the wave come and Lilia gave in: she sobbed. She pressed her face into his chest and open-mouthed soundless sobs cut into her.

  ‘Lilia,’ he whispered.

  When she raised her head she knew John was going to kiss her and she didn’t care. He lifted her chin, wiped her cheeks with his rough thumbs, and very gently, he kissed her on the lips: it was a child’s kiss, really. Lilia didn’t want a child’s kiss, and she fought against it by opening her mouth and pushing into him with her tongue. He pulled away but then he came back and he kissed her hard on the mouth. His stubble hurt, but not enough, Lilia wanted something to bring her back to life: anything. She had to breathe through her nose and the terrible smell of those foxes filled her as John kissed her with sucking swallows. Lilia pressed into him and he groaned, she guided his big paddle of a hand between her legs; she felt for him. His mouth pulled away again, he gasped, but then he buried himself in her neck, his other hand moving up her body, yanking her little dress decorated with strawberries or cherries away from her chest. Lilia felt her back rub against the bark of the fir tree as she held onto him, and helped him push into her.

  She stared up at the trees, she saw nothing; she felt nothing. There was only blackness and the smell of the dead foxes and the sound of John’s breath, deep and sharp, as if he were running, running, running, as if it was all happening too soon. He whined. Poor John, she thought. She felt his hand pinch at her breast and she cried out, ‘Deeeeee-taaaahhhh!’