by Daisy Waugh
‘Keep it fun,’ repeated Alice. Should she be taking notes?
‘It’s only a bloody house, after all!’ India said. ‘And seriously, what’s the point of living in a bloody great palace like this, and spending all day and all night worrying about the roof, and the taxman, and the bloody tourists – sorry – and not even having any fun? Don’t you think?’
Alice tried not to laugh, but laughed anyway. She said: ‘So. I’m the Fun Manager, am I?’
India clapped her hands together. ‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘I knew you’d get it! We’ve got to think of lots and lots of ways of making money for the estate which do not involve – you know, boring meetings with boring people. And that’s it! So. Let’s brainstorm! Are you ready? Or do you want to settle into your lovely house first? I don’t want to rush you. What we need, obviously, is another movie to be made at the Hall. And let’s get some fashion shoots done here. Get lots of glamorous people up here, which is fun for us, great publicity for the house – and brings in lots of lolly, all at the same time. That’s my idea. Question to you: How are we going to do it? I know a few Voguey types. But film… I don’t know. Do you know anyone in the film world, Alice? Let’s invite them to stay with us, and then blow them away with… you know. Everything. Get Carfizzi to dress up as a butler. He loves that. We can really ham it up! Don’t you think? Hilarious. You look so rock’n’roll Alice. I just bet you know some of the coolest cats in town. Who do you know? Who can we invite up here to jolly the place up a bit?’
Alice did, in her ropey fashion, look quite rock’n’roll. But she didn’t know anyone in that world. Or if she did, she wasn’t aware of it, or couldn’t remember, or wouldn’t recognise them, or had no clear idea what it was they actually did. She thought about it for moment. ‘I don’t think it matters if you know them, India. I think you could invite pretty much anyone to stay here for the weekend, and they’d say yes. The question is, who do you want to invite?’
India loved that. At Alice’s words, her beautiful face lit up with pleasure. ‘That’s what I thought!’ she said. ‘I knew it! I knew I was right to want you on board, Alice. I knew it! You know everything, and you just don’t give a blue-arse buggery about any of it! Am I right?’
‘Well I…’
‘Don’t answer! I know I’m right. I know it. And when I’m old, Alice – I hope you don’t mind me saying this. But when I’m your age I want to be exactly like you. You are literally the coolest human being I have ever met.’ She leaned across the bangers and mash and wrapped Alice in an unwanted hug. Alice pushed her back into her seat.
‘Sorry!’ India said. ‘I see you don’t like that. I won’t hug you again. Got over excited! I’m so so happy you’re here, Alice. We are going to have a ball.’
CHAPTER 22
Kveta, the Slovakian housekeeper, had been over to the Gardener’s House with clean sheets and towels, and a bin bag to remove all the food in the fridge. She was annoyed about it, as she had enough on her plate, but she couldn’t send over ‘the girls’, because as usual they’d both called in sick. Lottie and Lisa were twin sisters, shy, young, goofy, whose mother worked at the Old Stable Yard retail centre and whose father managed the Tode Hall livestock. There was no chance of firing them without upsetting the parents (who weren’t at all goofy) and nobody wanted to do that. Unfortunately for Kveta, on top of being incompetent and immoveable, the girls were unusually susceptible to colds, and since one couldn’t seem to come to work without the other, they rarely checked in for work at all. Which left Kveta to keep the Hall in order on her own. It was no wonder the Gardener’s House clearout had been overlooked.
She’d left, without having done a particularly thorough job, by the time Alice returned, several hours later. Not that Alice cared or even noticed. Compared to the chaos of Clapham, the place looked like a Swiss science lab.
It had been a long day. Alice was tired. She ran herself a bath, smoked her evening joint – and then remembered she would need to make up a bed. India had muttered something about finding clean linen, but she hadn’t mentioned where, so Alice set about searching through the cupboards. Not as easy a task as it might seem, because the cupboards were still stuffed with Lady Tode’s belongings, also because of the peculiar number of cupboards – or so it seemed to Alice, who kept forgetting which ones she’d opened, and opening them again – and then getting distracted by the treasures she found inside: a pale gold Astrakhan coat, a signed first edition of Lesley Piece’s novel, Prance to the Music in Time, an ivory mah-jong set; a foldable top hat; a mahogany walking stick with a silver sword hidden inside; and then, the thing that stopped her mind in its tracks: lying upside down on top of a locked cigar box, an old, silver sugar dispenser, shaped like a bowling skittle, with a loose, hinged lid. It was heavily tarnished, and at first glance, nothing much: certainly not in comparison with the other treasures she had unearthed. And yet, for some reason, it captured her attention. She picked it up. It needed a polish.
With the bed still unmade, and the clean sheets yet to be located, she wandered back to the kitchen. She looked under the sink for some silver polish, didn’t find any, and decided instead to run the sugar pot under the hot tap. She used some of Lady Tode’s Fairy Liquid to remove the worst of the tarnish and then, finding a clean tea cloth (Ah-ha! Kveta had left a pile of clean laundry on the kitchen counter all along – there were bath towels, tea towels, bed sheets, everything she needed) Alice sat down at the kitchen table to polish.
The joint she’d rolled herself must have been stronger than usual: or perhaps it was the mix of cannabis, tiredness, solitude and fresh country air, but she polished that sugar dispenser with an other-world intensity – as if uncovering its shine was the only thing that mattered in her life: which, indeed, in that instant, it was.
And then at some point she resurfaced. She was back in the Gardener’s House kitchen, exhausted from all the polishing, a little lonely, missing her triplets, missing London, missing her grandmother. She noticed that her efforts had produced minimal effect on the wretched pot, and abruptly abandoned the task. She took some of the fresh linen from the pile on the counter and rambled upstairs to make her bed.
CHAPTER 23
The house, in the middle of so much silence, turned out to be noisy at night. Things creaked. Alice woke a couple of times, thinking she’d heard a door opening downstairs. The third time she woke she was certain of it.
She heard the squeak of a hinge: a cupboard, perhaps?
And footsteps, dammit.
She thought she felt a cold breeze. (How could she feel it, up here in her bedroom?)
She heard the clink of glass, or china.
And then – someone breathing in the hallway.
Alice was not easily frightened. But this was alarming. She wondered if it was her own breathing she was listening to, and told herself that it was. Except she knew it wasn’t. There was someone in the house.
She thought of the walking stick with the hidden sword inside. Which cupboard had she found it in? She couldn’t remember. Her bedroom was pitch black – a level of darkness Alice wasn’t used to, after a life in London. She could hardly even remember where the door was.
… A creak from downstairs. It was quite loud this time… She couldn’t just lie there…
She pulled back the duvet and carefully, softly climbed out of bed. The floorboards creaked beneath her weight. She stopped. Whoever was downstairs, stopped too. A moment of intense silence filled the house – and then whoever it was, broke into a run. She heard a clatter – deafening, in the darkness – as something hard fell onto the stone hall floor. Alice found the light switch and stepped out onto the landing. Another blast of cold air. She stumbled down the stairs – but she was too late. As her feet touched the bottom step, she saw a figure, tall and slim, hurtling through the open back door.
She ran after him. ‘HEY! YOU!’ she shouted into the darkness. Her voice sounded muffled in the open space. ‘Who are you?’ But her only answer was
the sound of his receding footsteps, sprinting. She tried to follow him, but it was pointless in her bare feet, and very painful. He was gone. She turned back towards the house and found, lying on the gravel, a shoe.
A brown lace-up from Church’s of Jermyn Street, size twelve. The back heel was trodden down, the sole was worn through in patches. She picked it up and took it back inside – was gazing at it so intently that she tripped on the laptop lying, smashed, on the hall floor.
She scooped that up too. Looked around her. There was no sign of any break-in, or not that she could see. Whoever it was, must have simply walked through the front door. Or the back door. (In her fuzzy state the previous night, had she remembered to lock either? Probably not.)
She stood very still, feeling her heart beat, wondering whether to call the police.
And realised that even now she wasn’t alone. Again from inside the house, she heard a sound. The clink of china. It was coming from the kitchen. Alice turned to open the kitchen door behind her. A tall slim woman sat at her table, in the darkness, drinking from a cup.
‘For God’s sake!’ Alice said, and switched on the light.
The woman appeared undisturbed, and continued to sip daintily from her cup. She was elegant, in her late sixties, her dark grey hair pinned up into a fantastic chignon, wearing a flowing silk 1960s pantsuit. She had good deportment: the straightest back, the longest neck, the slimmest wrists Alice had ever seen. She looked, in fact, more like a dress mannequin than a living, breathing human – which, of course, she was not. Alice knew that at once. She knew it, without knowing it. Nothing much rocked Alice. She stared at the woman sipping her tea, and the woman stared haughtily back.
CHAPTER 24
‘What are you doing in here?’ demanded Alice. ‘This is my house.’
‘I beg to differ,’ the woman replied, in a voice so grand, so languid it seemed miraculous to Alice that tongue and throat had submitted to the imposition of forming the words at all. ‘On the contrary,’ the woman continued, ‘this house is mine. What are you doing in my kitchen, and why aren’t you wearing any shoes?’
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve just got out of bed… Who are you? Why are you here? Did you see that man? What the—’
The woman gave an infinitesimal shudder. (Too many questions.) ‘My name,’ she said, ‘is, or I suppose, if we’re to be literal, it was Geraldine, the Lady Tode. I am the mother of Sir Ecgbert Eleventh, who died earlier this year. His widow, Emma, Lady Tode, of whom I have come here to speak, was my daughter-in-law. I had understood that she would be living here. But now of course she’s dead.’
Alice, standing in her pyjamas, peroxide hair in her face, hand still resting on the kitchen light switch, said: ‘Well, but – so are you dead, Geraldine?’
Geraldine, Lady Tode closed her eyes. ‘Please don’t call me Geraldine.’
‘The man who ran out of the house – did you see him?’
She opened them again. ‘That was poor Mad Ecgbert, of course. Come to fetch some of his mother’s belongings, I presume. You’ll have to change the locks, you realise. Of course it might help if you actually used the locks, too. But you weren’t quite up to it, were you, when you stumbled off to bed last night?’
‘You were here last night?’ Alice said. ‘I’m confused—’
Geraldine Tode held up a hand for quiet. Her large sapphire ring caught the light. ‘I know exactly who you are, Alice Liddell. We’ve met before. But you won’t remember it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You were very young. You used to come and stay with your grandmother, when your mother was ill. You were a dreadful nuisance, but you couldn’t help it, I suppose…’ She noted Alice’s ongoing confusion. ‘Your grandmother, Violet Dean, was for many years my lady’s maid.’
‘… Really?…’
‘And actually, I was rather fond of her.’ Geraldine Tode glanced at Alice, who was still looking confused. ‘Oh do buck up,’ she snapped. ‘Sit down and have tea with me. We have information to trade.’
Alice didn’t want tea. Nevertheless, clearly, there were a lot of questions hanging. She shuffled her bare feet across the cold wooden kitchen floor, and sat down at the table.
‘Take some tea,’ Geraldine ordered. Alice noticed an empty cup and saucer already laid out for her.
‘I don’t want any.’
Geraldine poured her some anyway. Steam rose from the cup as she tipped it in, but when Alice took the cup and drank from it, the liquid was stone cold. She choked a little on the shock. Geraldine watched, amused.
‘I’m a ghost,’ she said. ‘What did you expect?’
Alice said: ‘Am I the only one who can see you?’
The question seemed to irritate her. Most questions did. She said: ‘How should I know? I’m not in people’s skulls. Emma couldn’t see me. Nor can that ghastly little man… I think my darling grandson, poor Mad Ecgbert, sees me sometimes. But because everyone insists on telling him he’s mad, he doesn’t seem very willing to believe it… He saw me just now, by the way.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what made him skittle off like that. Not you. Don’t flatter yourself! As far as he knows, this house is still his mother’s home. Except of course she’s dead.’
‘Like you,’ Alice said again: for her own clarification more than anything else. She would have liked Geraldine to acknowledge the fact, but Geraldine ignored the comment.
‘As far as Mad Ecgbert is concerned, this house is still empty.’
‘Do you think he recognised you?’ Alice asked.
Geraldine, outraged, said: ‘Well of course he bloody well recognised me. I’m his grandmother. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alice. ‘Depends when you died. Ecgbert’s my age – my twin, actually… How old was he when you died? What year was it?’
Geraldine drew herself up. There was something indefinable but very slightly impertinent, she felt, about Alice’s tone. She chose to ignore the question. ‘… You do realise, Alice dear, that I am your elder and by some stretch?’
Alice laughed. ‘I should hope so!’ she said. ‘Tell me, when did you die?’
‘… I died…’ began Geraldine, Lady Tode – her face clouded, and her piercing blue eyes glazed, briefly. ‘I “died”, as you put it…’ she began again, ‘since you so badly want to know, and by the way I think it’s a remarkably insensitive question, in nineteen seventy-one.’
‘Nineteen seventy-one. So Ecgbert would have been four years old. It would be quite surprising if he did recognise you,’ Alice said.
Geraldine Tode dismissed the comment. She waved it aside with her delicate, sapphired hand. ‘I’m his grandmother. He will have seen pictures. I was a great beauty in my day, Alice.’
‘I can see.’
‘I could have married anyone.’
‘You didn’t do so badly…’
Geraldine Tode shook her head. ‘You’re quite wrong. He was a dreadful man. Queer as a nine-bob note. Like most men. The Todes, I’m afraid, make dreadful husbands.’
‘They have a lovely house though.’
‘Too big. Mother always said the Todes were vulgar, and she was absolutely right. There’s no need for a house to be as large as this. Look at Chatsworth – perfectly large enough. A perfectly reasonable, manageable size. Whereas Tode Hall is silly. I always said so…’ She laughed, but she wasn’t really talking to Alice anymore. ‘It used to infuriate Sir Ecgbert.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘The Todes are ghastly. Always have been. Very vulgar, and actually quite dim. Land people, really. I should never have married into them…’
‘Well – all I know… is too many are called Ecgbert. I never know which one anyone is talking about.’
Geraldine looked at Alice with disappointment: Violet Dean’s unfortunate granddaughter was obviously stupid. ‘It’s very simple,’ she said slowly. ‘We have young Egbert, without the “c”. In our day we used to call men like that “ch
inless wonders”, although Egbert has rather a manly chin. Young Egbert, sans “c”, is of course my youngest grandson. I call him the Young Buck from Wandsworth.’ Geraldine smiled, pleased with that, took a deep breath and continued. ‘He is the young man whom my quite wicked daughter-in-law chose to inherit over her own darling son, Sir Ecgbert Twelfth, otherwise known as Mad Ecgbert. Mad Ecgbert is the individual whom you just now spotted running into the night, having broken into this house in search of something by which to remember his wicked mother. We don’t know what it was, and so far as I could tell, he left without it. Mad Ecgbert’s father, my son, was of course also called Sir Ecgbert. He was married to Emma, recently found dead in the mausoleum, and he really was a dreadful man, if I say it myself as his mother… All of which goes some way to explaining Emma’s numerous extramarital affairs. I must say it’s always been a mystery to me quite how – or if – my son sired a single one of those three children. I don’t believe for a second that Australian Esmé is a Tode. He’s too short. Also… I mean, those meaty forearms…’ She considered it a moment. ‘I should think he’s Mellors’s son. But that’s neither here nor there. My husband was also a Sir Ecgbert of course. But he died years ago. He died playing polo, just after the War.’ She paused, and seemed to run out of interest. ‘And he was ghastly too,’ she added. ‘So. I hope that’s clear. The question is,’ Geraldine Tode leaned forward, and Alice noticed a cool breeze coming off her, as if she’d just stepped inside after a long winter walk, or perhaps, from a fridge: ‘What I want to know is, who killed my daughter-in-law, Alice?’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Who killed Emma?’
