by Kim Newman
Kirsty withdrew her hand.
‘Tea,’ said Steven.
At this point, Kirsty hated tea. Its taste was constantly in her mouth, stronger than toothpaste or pepper. Throughout her life, there’d been no disaster that wasn’t supposed to go away after a swig of char. That stopped here. Tea. It was what was wrong with England. She would never again prepare or consume the vile stuff.
It was happening again. Just when she had something going, something that looked like it would work, Steven went behind her back and took it over. If he couldn’t, he would pull it apart, subtly at first and then blatantly. Rose Records, Oddments, Kirsty herself. Her interests, her projects, were threats to his pole position. He always reacted with decisive, destructive action.
She wouldn’t let him get away with it this time.
The Hollow, and all it contained, was hers. It had revealed its magic to her first. This time, she was at the heart of it and he the periphery. He couldn’t stand it. This was just a sneaky play.
He didn’t really want tea. He wanted to break her spirit.
* * *
This was only to be expected. He’d grasped the nettle and knew he’d be stung. The thing was to get it over with, to ignore the momentary pain. It was best done quickly. Later, he’d smooth it over and butter them up. What was important was that he make them realise this was where the slide stopped, where the weakness ended.
His wife and daughter stood together, close but not touching, eyelines divergent. He had to keep them apart. They were bad for each other, enabling each other’s weakness.
There was a natural division of labour. One to make tea, one to make the bed.
Tim should be here. He should see this scene, learn this lesson. It was in the way of things that Tim would rise in the family (fight and kill his father) and become the man.
Resistance was crushed. He had been firm, for once. There would be no more straying from the path. He was satisfied, confident.
(He had a half-erection.)
‘I’m glad we’ve talked this through,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon see it was all for the best.’
He let out the breath he had been holding.
Kirsty wheeled around, dressing gown falling open, red flush of anger on her chest, her hands claws. Surely, she wouldn’t make a punch-up of this? If she did, she would regret it. She would lose.
‘Steve, it’s time you listened to someone else,’ she said. ‘You’ve gone absolutely, barking…’
‘Are we early?’
* * *
Jordan’s head hurt from the current of ill-feeling flowing between Mum and Dad. It was like the old days. For a second, as the new voice filled the Summer Room, she was sure Veronica had come back too. A jagged shadow crept into the room, twiggy arms extended to embrace them all.
But it was a man.
‘I say, we are too early,’ he said, coming through the French windows like a comedy vicar.
Mum’s face went as red as her chest. She appeared to have trouble breathing. She looked a complete hag, hair a-straggle, dressing gown limp over her mostly undressed body. Her bra and knickers weren’t even a pair.
‘The minibus is parked in the drive.’
It was the brown man, Bernard Wing-Godfrey, dressed nattily in a beige cardigan with matching scarf and beret. People came in with him.
Mum held her robe over her body. Jordan stood still, afraid her parents would fall like dervishes on this poor interloper and hack him to pieces.
Others crowded in eagerly behind Wing-Godfrey, looking around, eager to be admitted to the sacred turf. Jordan took in a group of mannish ladies and womanly men, mild and apologetic, unsure how to behave.
‘Oh, bravo, Miss Naremore,’ said Wing-Godfrey, spotting Jordan, clapping softly. For a moment, she didn’t understand. ‘What a welcoming touch, the Drearcliff Grange colours.’
Her uniform was uncomfortable for a midsummer day.
A pair of tiny Japanese women in kimonos stepped forward and snapped off photographs on twin cameras. The flashes burst in her head.
Mum bolted, without a word, rushing for the safety of her tower.
It was left to Dad to cope. The man of the house, he had called himself.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Jordan, dear, could you get the tea going?’
The sentence took a long time to strike a spark in her brain. ‘Yes, Daddy,’ she said, finally.
As Jordan walked to the kitchen, the Japanese women snapped more photographs, a study of her in motion. She let her hair hang over her face and skulked rather than glided out of the room. Dad was going to get his way after all. Someone else – Jordan – was making the tea.
‘Will Kirsty, Mrs Naremore, be rejoining us?’ Wing-Godfrey asked Dad.
Good question, Jordan thought.
* * *
From the tree, Tim saw non-combatants wander onto the field of fire. A platoon-strength group had come round from the drive and were infiltrating the house through the French windows. The smiling pane was laughing. With these hostages in its power, Tim could do nothing. Or so it thought.
If it was the only thing to do, Tim was prepared to be ruthless, to make sacrifices. He would cry later, after the war was over and the victory won.
The U-Dub was cocked. The aches in his shoulder and elbow had been there so long he was used to them, would miss them if they were gone.
DefCon 1. At least the waiting was over.
He fixed on the smile and smiled right back.
* * *
Dressed hurriedly, hair at least combed, Kirsty dashed downstairs. She paused outside the Summer Room and caught a low rumble of chat. A blurt of genuine laughter startled her. She must have made a lasting impression on Wing-Godfrey’s Society.
She took a deep breath and pushed the door in.
Steven was playing host. Jordan meekly served tea, dreadful simper plastered on her face, eyes suggesting she was screaming inside.
‘Ah, Kirst,’ said Steven. ‘Come in and meet the Society.’
Attempting poise, she entered the room. Wing-Godfrey smiled at her, raising a mug in half-salute.
‘This is Mrs Twomey,’ said Steven, indicating a horsey, bluff middle-aged woman – Drearcliff Grange’s Angela the Boss grown up. ‘Miss Hazzard, Mr and Mrs Bullitt, and Cynthia and Megumi Kanaoka, from Japan.’
Miss Hazzard was young, blonde and angular enough to suggest spinal deformity. The Bullitts were an enormous woman and a tiny man, their matching mulberry cardigans studded with enamel badges of Weezie, the Drearcliff Grange coat of arms, the Gloomy Ghost and other Teazle characters. The Kanaokas, obviously, were the camera twins.
‘This is our After Lights-Out Gang,’ said Wing-Godfrey.
They all dutifully laughed and smiled. The Japanese women bobbed and bowed, which set the rest of them off again, like nodding dog car ornaments.
They must be expecting Kirsty to go mad again. With an axe.
‘It’s just as I always imagined it,’ said Miss Hazzard. ‘Hilltop Heights.’
‘Except it’s not on a hill,’ added Mrs Bullitt. She had a very strong Birmingham accent.
Kirsty thought of the exercise book upstairs on her dressing table. She was horribly tempted to tell them Weezie lived at the Hollow before Louise disguised it as the Heights, but kept quiet. She still needed to think out what to do with the relic.
‘Drink up,’ said Steven, ‘and you can take the grand tour. We have another child around here somewhere. Don’t be surprised if he pops up out of a hole in the ground.’
‘Like the Wiggy-Wig,’ ventured Miss Hazzard.
‘Indeed,’ said Steven, who had no more idea than Kirsty who or what the Wiggy-Wig might be. These people had their Teazle memorised.
‘You’ve a lovely day for it,’ said Kirsty, unclenching her teeth. ‘We’ve been lucky with the weather.’
Wing-Godfrey smiled sagely.
This was not down to her being her usual inept self and forgetting that the Society were coming. They really h
adn’t fixed a date. This was a total surprise. Wing-Godfrey had said a Saturday, not this Saturday. A big appointments diary lay beside the telephone; nothing was written in it until Tim’s first day of school in September. If this visit were arranged, she’d have noted it in red. Despite what Steven thought of her, she wouldn’t forget a concrete arrangement and let it creep up on her.
This was a trap. Somehow, she had been set up.
God, she hoped there were enough biscuits. They probably expected cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, or baskets of Drearcliff Grange tuck. Not just tea, but high tea. She wasn’t prepared.
‘Shall we start in the orchard?’ said Steven, standing to one side to let the guests use the French windows.
The Japanese women led the expedition. Wing-Godfrey hung back.
‘That’s better, Kirsty,’ he said, looking at her clothes.
The brown man went to join his comrades in the orchard.
‘I swear I didn’t know,’ Kirsty insisted.
Steven’s face was shut.
‘We’ve got to make the best of this,’ he said. ‘Jord, get to work in the kitchen. Root out some provisions. We’ve got enough apples, at least. They’ll like apples from the orchard. For the associations. And we’ll need gallons more tea. These are what you might call tea people.’
He had got his way about that. Kirsty wasn’t inclined to protest.
Jordan looked to her for confirmation of orders.
It broke her heart, but immediate needs meant she had to back Steven up.
‘If you could, darling,’ she said. ‘We’d owe you a tremendous favour.’
‘Tremendous,’ Jordan repeated.
Kirsty nodded.
Her daughter began collecting empty mugs from various surfaces and coasters.
‘United front,’ said Steven, offering Kirsty his arm.
Damn it, he had won. He was master here. She was just a bubble-headed ornament.
She would not let this rest. Inside, she boiled like a kettle.
Composed and smiling, they stepped into the orchard and found the Society looking up with awe at the house, exchanging Teazle tit-bits. The Japanese women used rolls of film. The Bullitts were canoodling; Kirsty overheard Mr Bullitt call his wife ‘Head Prefect’ and shuddered to think of their sex life.
(She and Steven had played that game.)
Miss Hazzard looked through the tree telescope, at the standing stones. Wing-Godfrey stood by her, proprietarily, lightly holding her head as he had held Kirsty’s. He was overly prissy about touching anyone. Perhaps that came from so long a confinement, removed from human contact beyond the occasional beating.
She didn’t want to feel sorry for him. She was angry at his imposition. She wasn’t even sure there wasn’t some sinister purpose to this visit.
Steven, who knew nothing about Louise Teazle, led them around the outside of the house, spouting like a tour guide, running through the original features they’d left alone and pointing out what they were doing with each room.
The Society were especially interested in the East Tower, where Louise had lived.
‘I’ve occupied her study,’ Steven said, ‘and Jordan, our daughter, has the bedroom.’
Miss Hazzard sighed out loud, trembling with ecstatic envy. The girl couldn’t be twenty. Shouldn’t she be interested in clubbing, drugs and wild boys? What had driven her to seventy-year-old kids’ books? She wasn’t really deformed, just a victim of bad posture.
‘What of your plans to open the place to the public?’ squeaked Mr Bullitt. ‘Bernard has been telling us about Mrs Naremore’s exciting ideas. I dare say this could be quite a tourist trap.’
Steven looked as if he’d been shot but tried to cover up.
‘Kirst is getting ahead of herself there, I’m afraid,’ he said, darting a venomous glance at her. ‘We’re not really set up for that sort of thing. Short on reliable staff. You might have noticed. Oh, we try, of course, but we’re proper ones for the odd spot of bungling.’
‘Still, such an opportunity…’
Mr Bullitt looked up to his wife for support.
‘We’re certainly not ruling anything out at this stage,’ said Steven. ‘It’s early days yet.’
He would never let Kirsty make anything of the Hollow. Any time she raised it, he would bring up this incident as a humorous justification for stamping on her projects. Had he somehow contrived the situation? Set her up for a humiliation so he would have unlimited ammunition?
‘A museum,’ Mrs Bullitt said. ‘That’s what this place should be, for the public trust. It’s a national treasure, a resource. Teazle belongs to us all, you know.’
‘But the Hollow belongs to us,’ said Steven, uncomfortable but firm.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bullitt.
When the place came on the market, why hadn’t these people put in an offer? It wasn’t as if it had been overpriced.
‘I don’t know that I could live here,’ said Miss Hazzard. ‘Too many…’
‘Associations?’ suggested Kirsty.
‘…ghosts,’ the girl said.
* * *
When the fruitcakes left, if they ever left, he would strangle Kirsty. Slowly. This disaster was down to her failure to share information, to keep track of important things. She’d given a vague invitation and not remembered when the Society got back to her. Now, the Hollow was invaded.
Steven was handling the crisis with consummate diplomacy and skill. After the spectacle Kirsty made of herself when they arrived, Wing-Godfrey’s weirdies knew something was wrong. He exerted his powers of persuasion to make them forget the fright in her knickers and project an image of normality. He gritted his teeth as if clamping an imaginary pipe and talked bollocks about the house and grounds. He was a spellbinder; they’d all go away idiotically happy, privileged to have been shown around by such an expert. He also dropped a few digs to let them know he wasn’t completely a subscriber to their daft religion. The Hollow was his home now. He wouldn’t be pushed about because of their devotion to a fusty spinster whose books only sissies would have read at his school.
Keeping the group together was hard. Their subtly different enthusiasms pulled in different ways.
‘There’s a division in our ranks,’ Wing-Godfrey explained, in the hayloft above the garage, ‘between those who primarily prize the Weezie books and those who rate Drearcliff Grange above all.’
This empty space was a Weezie site.
If this went on and on, he would have to read the blasted books. He could never trust Kirsty, who had actually read Teazle as a girl and again recently, to guide parties about the place. Maybe now things were better with Jordan, she could be trained up and fed full of the information. She had always been good at passing exams. The uniform had gone over well. Just the sort of frill that sold a prospect. Putting this together was just like assembling a big money deal.
Steven was ready to move on, but the Weezies – Mr Bullitt and one of the Japanese women – were exploring a shadowed corner that was a lair for some species of twee creature. Mrs Twomey, he gathered, was a lifelong ‘Grange Gel’, and impatient to get on. She wanted to see ‘the West Wing’.
He ran a head-check. The Society had seven members, present and accounted for. Or was it one president and seven members? He had an idea the Bullitts had a family member with them, dragged along unwillingly on this expedition. Or was it Wing-Godfrey who had a shadow?
He counted again. Eight heads, excluding Kirsty. Fine.
This space had changed. He’d thought of turning the hayloft into a suite of offices. There was room for serious computer and communications equipment. He had envisioned a grown-up version of the Steve caves he’d made as a kid, with a bar and a pool table. When he first climbed up here, he knew it was a man’s preserve, just as Jordan’s bedroom and the spare room Kirsty called the sewing room were female spaces.
Now, with the Society pottering around, the hayloft was spoiled. Even at the height of summer, there were draug
hts. A rotten smell suggested parasite problems which hadn’t showed up in the sinister survey. The roof was too low. He kept scraping his head on beams.
No. There would be no office-suite here, no den, no Steve cave. He just didn’t like the hayloft. He didn’t know why.
Did something live here?
To keep calm, he counted again. Nine heads, including Kirsty. Ten, with himself.
He must be wrong.
No. He knew enough about the Hollow not to be fooled. They had another guide on this tour.
He counted, slowly this time.
By opening the bale-door, Steven let in enough light to see everybody clearly. If only they wouldn’t drift around the place so much. What was so fascinating about empty corners?
Nine.
Or ten.
He looked at each one in turn. There was no one left over, no stranger.
‘Let’s see if tea is ready,’ he suggested, his voice sounding weak in this echoey space. ‘Then, we can tour the inside of the house.’
He wasn’t sure he wanted this lot traipsing through his office and bedroom, but anything was better than staying in the hayloft.
‘That’s too much to ask,’ said Wing-Godfrey, sincerely.
‘No,’ Steven said, hating himself. ‘I insist.’
‘We are fortunate that custodianship of the Hollow has fallen to such sympathetic and congenial persons,’ said Wing-Godfrey. ‘I propose you both for lifetime honorary membership…’
‘Seconded,’ said one of the others.
‘No opposition? I should say that’s the easiest decision this thorny little group has ever made. Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Naremore. Welcome to the Louise Magellan Teazle Society.’
Steven really wanted to get out of the hayloft. He couldn’t believe he had contemplated working in this hideous, oppressive space. His jaw hurt from smiling. His gut churned with the strain of keeping so much inside.
‘You’ll have to take the Drearcliff entrance exam, of course,’ said Wing-Godfrey. ‘But that should be no problem for you. Miss Hazzard sets the paper. She’s the ranking mistress of Teazle Trivia. When Mastermind had Teazle as a specialist subject, the BBC came to her to set the questions.’
The shadows were getting thicker. Steven was going to scream. A trickle of sweat got in his eye.
