“The children are a bit of a pain, though. It’s a good thing there are a lot of them, what with one thing or another, or we’d never get them to sleep in that attic.”
“The attic?”
“Silly. Nothing, of course, but they’ve got a thing about it being haunted. Camilla and Rain started it off, I’m afraid. I could brain Camilla, filing their heads up with spook stories and then taking off to university. Now Rain won’t go up there by herself at all.”
“Oh dear,” says Bridget.
“Oh, it’s fine. In a way they quite like it, I think. Gives them an excuse to get overexcited.”
“What do they say they see?”
“Oh, nobody’s seen anything. Well, except for Camilla, and she’s always had an overactive imagination. She claimed she saw a girl up there once. Came screeching down the stairs. In the middle of a dinner party, of course. The way they do. You know what they’re like. Any excuse.”
Dinner party. As if. Imagine if we’d had dinner parties. Who would we have asked? His friends from the dealing floor? Crammed round the four-seat table in our living room? A gramme of coke and a trip to Spearmint Rhino was more their style, the Big Swinging Dicks of Capitalism.
“Anyway. It just adds to the atmosphere,” says CallMeStella. “You can’t have a house as old as this without a few ghosts.”
I don’t think I want to hear any more of this stuff. I’ve got to be here by myself, remember? She digs deeper in the cupboard, concentrates on finding the Windolene so she can change the subject. It’s there, of course: right under her hand all along. Funny how you can see things and yet not see them. Happens all the time.
“Here it is,” she says. She knew she’d seen it somewhere. She emerges and hands it to CallmeStella.
“Oh, darling, thank you,” she says. “You are a star.” And stands there holding the bottle in a lost sort of fashion, as though it were some ancient artefact whose purpose she doesn’t understand.
“I’ll give you a hand,” says Bridget, resignedly.
“Oh darling,” says Ms Aykroyd again, “thank you.”
Bridget follows her into the dining room.
She hasn’t been able to work out much about the party, to be honest. It took her a full 24 hours to work out who the Aykroyd of the booking form was in the first place. It doesn’t help that, although they have twelve children – she thinks it’s twelve; isn't entirely sure as the house and yard seem to be swarming with visitors from the village and the county most of the time – between them, none of the adults seem to be actually married to each other. And none of them seem to mind. And though she thinks a couple – the parents of the many-parented children – might have been married to each other in a different combination at some point in the past, it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to any of them now.
That's what I should have done, she thinks. Illegitimacy doesn’t seem to matter as long as you talk posh enough. Or common enough. It’s only us lower-middles, with our fear of slipping down into the underclass, who seem to give a damn these days. There I was – I only married Kieran in the first place because I didn’t want my Yasmin to be a bastard – and obviously what I should have done was start talking la-di-dah and wearing velvet and smoking through a holder before breakfast. No father’s name on the birth certificate and he wouldn’t have had half the weaponry to pursue us with. No-one would have minded if my daughter grew up feral if I talked posh, like this lot, and the Social would never have dared to get involved. Upper-class bohemians seem to get away with stuff that the rest of us would never be allowed to do: flicking ash wherever, swapping bedrooms, dropping into the village and coming back with an entire houseful of people for a party. CallmeStella seems to know everyone around here: was born, she says, in the next valley and decamps down here for Christmas every year “visiting the haunts of my tortured adolescence without having to actually live with it”.
Bridget doesn’t mind, though. They’re jolly enough people, and friendly enough, and undemanding enough, as long as she doesn’t mind the fact that she will be finding discarded fag butts in the ginger pots for weeks to come. It’s nice, as a point of fact, after a week in which the silence of the house was not exactly oppressive, but brought home to her just how large it was, to hear the building full of the sound of talk and childish disagreements and, at night, the sound of singing. A couple of the guests are something to do with the stage – Bridget thinks she even recognises one of them from those BBC2 drama series where people hang about maundering over storm-tossed landscapes and nothing much actually happens. The piano in the drawing room has been opened, found to be in tune, and is sparked up every night. She likes it, the drifting small-hours sound of Fifties jazz, show tunes and – when local fervour, or local scrumpy, gets powerful enough, bellowed choruses of Trelawny.
A bit of her feels cheered up. Another bit feels even lonelier than before. Bridget has never had enough friends to have had a huge house party like this, even if she could afford it: tables of twelve or twenty all in a row scarfing vegetable lasagne and talking themselves hoarse. It’s not the way her parents lived, and it’s not the way anyone she knew lived. Parties, pre-Kieran, were the sort of parties where you couldn’t actually hear yourself shout, let alone sing, in corners of whatever the coming venue was that year. She’s a child of the club boom. Has the tinnitus to show for it. Even when they weren’t in cavernous aircraft hangars where the speakers were a million watts and the humidity was over a hundred per cent, it was taken for granted that, if you had people round, the first thing you did was turn the stereo up to full.
She’s not sure if she can remember ever having a conversation with more than one person at a time. Everything she’s ever known in terms of social talk has involved swapping over: pressing your lips against someone’s ear and bending your head for them to do the same to you; never seeing the expression on their face when they heard your bellowed words.
How ironic. There we were, having fun, and we never got round to making any friends. The only person I’ve ever really had long talks with as an adult was Carol, and that was because she came from upstairs rather than from my social life. I didn’t even talk to Kieran much, really, not even at the beginning. We were always loved-up, or hung over, and then later I avoided talking to him because I never knew where it might lead. Stupid, isn't it? How people base their entire future happiness on things like whether they like going out to the same sorts of places, or whether their friends are impressed when a guy turns up in an Audi; that they never think about what will happen when fashion moves on and you can't do the e’s any more because it’ll harm the baby.
But they’ve been lovely with Yasmin. Included her in everything. She seems to have spent every waking hour running up and down the corridor with one child or another: or sometimes a dozen. She’s met some children from the village, and the prospect of school doesn't seem so bad to her any more. Maybe some of them will be real friends, in the course of time. At least she won’t turn up to school a stranger.
“I'll tell you what,” she says to Ms Aykroyd's back. “I’d be grateful if you’d mind not doing too much ghost talk around Yasmin. She’s only six and I could do without her getting ideas to scare herself with when the place is empty.”
“Oh, darling,” says Ms Aykroyd. “It’s only games.”
“And she’s only six,” she repeats, trying to sound pleasant but firm. “Six-year-olds can’t always tell the difference.”
“Well, you can never start too early on training their imaginations. It’s all part of helping them become free spirits.”
They stop in front of the mantelpiece. On the mirror, a childish hand has scrawled “fuck off” in bright red lipstick.
If that’s an example of free-spiritedness, thinks Bridget, I'll go for inhibition any day. She doesn’t say anything, of course. Not her place. She’s a housekeeper, she must remember that. Discretion is what she’s paid for. Discretion and the sort of incurious efficiency that makes paying guests fee
l secure. She is, after all, only among these people, now they’re settled in, when someone comes and finds her and asks for her help.
She starts to move the figurines. They’ve been turned round again to face inward, she notices. A bizarre obsession, and one that seems to be shared by everyone who passes through here. Perhaps the Gordhavos actually keep them like that – some family custom – and it is she who keeps setting them wrongly.
Ms Aykroyd hovers. “Frightfully sorry,” she says.
“That’s all right.”
She's obviously hovering in the hope of dismissal. Bridget gives it her. Doesn't really want to get drawn into lengthy chat, anyway. “You get off,” she says. “I’ll do this.”
“Are you sure?” She sounds relieved. Though she’d be right hacked off if I’d said I wasn’t.
“Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Well…” Ms Aykroyd makes a show of looking at her watch. “I suppose I should… lunch coming up. If you’re sure you don’t…?”
Oh, do go away, thinks Bridget, irritably. “I’ll get it done much faster if I’m by myself,” she says.
A crash upstairs, followed by the sound of wailing. Too heavy, thinks Bridget. Too large to be mine. “Oh dear,” says Ms Aykroyd. All the other adults have gone on a day trip to Tintagel. “I’d better go and…”
“Yes,” says Bridget. “It sounds like that’d be a good idea.”
CallmeStella shuffles off. Bridget unfurls a duster, leans toward the glass with a cloth-wrapped finger. The lipstick is thick, as though it’s been heated and painted on with a brush. Amazing. If a kid of mine did something like this, I wouldn't just…
Suddenly, from upstairs, the sound of voices. United voices: raised and organised. They are counting, slowly, deliberately.
One… two… three…
She hears a door open, and the sound of running feet. There's a game of some sort afoot.
The footsteps scutter back and forth for a moment, as though their owner is undecided as to which way to go, then make their way up the corridor toward the dining room stairs. As they begin to descend, she stays her polishing and turns to see who’s coming.
It's Yasmin. Looking almost as unkempt as an Aykroyd. Someone has put half a dozen plaits in her long dark hair and tied them off with strips of rag so that she looks like a small and rather giggly Medusa. Barefoot, she seems to be wearing what looks like a party dress: powder-blue satin, gone to holes, several sizes too big and several decades too old for her. She reaches the bottom of the stairs and, in that childish way, only notices her mother’s presence when she gets there. Jumps, laughs at her own foolishness and then grins.
Twelve… thirteen… fourteen…
“What on earth are you wearing?”
“Oh,” she says distantly, looking down and rubbing the cloth between thumb and forefinger, “dressing-up clothes. I found them in the attic. There’s a great big trunk. Lily showed me.”
Bridget doesn't have the faintest idea who Lily is, Doesn’t even know if she’s one of the Aykroyd party, who all seem to rejoice in names like Summer and Moonlight – she wonders if somewhere in an alternative universe there’s a sort of anti-hippie culture which rejoices in filling in tax returns and gives its children all the nature names like Winter and Mudslide that the flower people eschew – or one of the village kids.
“I’m not sure if you ought to be wearing those,” she says. “I’m not sure if Mr Gordhavo –”
“Lily said it was all right,” Yasmin assures her. “She says she wears them all the time.”
Twenty-three… twenty-four…
Yasmin looks wildly over her shoulder. Bridget has forgotten the intensity of feeling that a childhood game can arouse.
“Never mind,” she says. “We can talk about it later. What are you playing? Hide and seek?”
“No,” says Yasmin. “Sardines. I have to hide and everyone has to find me and get in with me.”
“Oh, yes,” says Bridget. “I used to love that one. Where are you going to hide?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how about under there?” She gestures with her duster toward the huge cloth-covered table.
“Tchuuch!” groans Yasmin. “You’ve only gotta be thick, Mum! That’s the first place they’ll look!”
How funny, thinks Bridget, she's already losing her London accent and she’s just been hanging around with these kids for a few days. She’ll sound like a proper Cornish Pisky by the New Year.
“Well, I don’t know.”
Thirty-one… thirty-two…
Yasmin leaps from foot to foot as though she’s suddenly found herself standing on hot coals. “Hurry up! I've only got to fifty!”
Bridget casts about her. Behind the curtains? Behind the sofa in the second salon? Too easy. Not enough room.
She gets it. “Come with me! Quickly!”
She’s noticed that the window seat in the drawing room, which runs the whole length of the south wall, is lidded along its length for storage. Not that there’s anything in there apart from a few Hoover attachments, a few half-burnt church candles, a box of bulk-bought china plates and a lot of dust in there now. It’s these sorts of details that make a house a holiday home. Anything of any real value – sentimental or fiscal – will have been taken away from here years ago.
She holds her hand out to her daughter and they jog quietly into the drawing room. Bridget lifts the lid on the central part of the seat.
“Come on!” she says. “There’s loads of room in here.”
Yasmin looks at her in amazement, as though she’s only just discovered that she has the ability to think independently. “Star!” she says. “How did you know that was there?”
“I know everything, darling,” says Bridget. “You know that. Now hurry up and get in.”
Forty-three… forty-four…
There’s room enough inside to house an entire army. The only thing that will give Yasmin away is her tendency to giggle. She climbs inside, lies down like a princess in a glass coffin and crosses her arms over her chest. “Okay,” she says.
Bridget drops the lid down, strolls casually back to return to her cleaning. There’s only the final F of OFF to get rid of now. She picks up the palate knife and scrapes the top layers away, sprays Windolene over the patch.
Coming ready or not…
A herd of water buffalo stampedes from the master bedroom.
Bridget rubs. It must have been very greasy lipstick: theatrical lipstick. the sort of greasepaint you see on movie still from the Thirties and Forties. The smears are taking ages to dissipate.
The sound of feet and voices scatters, dies away. She imagines Yasmin, lying in her wooden coffin, wriggling with the effort of suppressing the urge to leap out and show everyone how clever she has been.
A couple of the Young thunder down the stairs, shriek to a halt when they see her.
“Hello, Leo,” she says. “Hello, Rain.”
She doesn't like Leo much. He's one of those thickset boys who tends to tell people how things are in a stern, unsmiling fashion. She suspects he might be a bit of a bully: certainly, most of the other children seem to obey him at speed when he issues an order.
“Hello,” says the boy. Puts his hands on his hips and looks anywhere other than at her. Some kids are like that. It’s not a social comment. they just don’t think of adults as being worthy of their attention unless they want something from them.
“Are you playing a game of some sort?”
“Yes.”
“Hide and seek?”
His eyes flick over to her. No, she sees him think, she’s a grownup and someone we won’t see again after this week. Not worth the effort of explaining.
“Sort of,” he says. “Have you seen Yasmin?”
Well at least my daughter’s not infra-dig. “I’m not sure if I ought to tell you,” she teases.
He thinks I’m mad. Funny how people with no sense of humour always assume it’s that other
people are stupid, even when they’re nine years old.
“It would spoil the game, wouldn’t it?” she finishes.
He gives her a look, ignores what she’s said. “Which way did she go?”
“If I told you that, I’d be a snitch.”
Rain – droopy hair that looks, appropriately enough, permanently damp – sticks her head under the tablecloth. Comes out, combs her bangs back down with greasy fingers. “Not here,” she announces, and trots off to the kitchen.
Leo thinks for a bit. God, I hope Yas doesn't end up shut up alone with him for too long. “Right-oh,” he says. Takes off in the opposite direction from the one his sister’s taken.
An eruption of shrieking upstairs. Someone’s obviously found somebody. Half a dozen sets of feet rumble off up the corridor toward the far end of the house. They must be well scattered now: this is the perfect house for hide and seek. You could hide anywhere here. All those dark places and hidden doorways. I’m glad we’ve got good locks on the flat door, for the night-time.
She turns back to the mirror, resumes her polishing. Once this is done, she thinks, I’d better go and relay the drawing-room fire. Not so much out of a wish to provide the guests with cosy snugness for tonight, but because I know no-one will sweep the grate out before they rebuild it themselves, and that grate can’t really take more than one fire before it’s full. It’s amazing how much ash you can get on a Persian carpet if you don’t know what to do with a dustpan. Earlier this morning, she saw Humphrey, the one she thinks is probably CallmeStella's partner, and the one she thinks is probably his ex-wife, carrying a log the size of a crocodile across the garden from the woods beyond the pond. If they try and burn that tonight, damp and green as it is, there’ll be bits spitting all over the place. Best not to set things up so any more damage can be done.
Hold My Hand Page 11
