Lily struggles. But Hugh has grown since he went away. He seems even larger than he was at half-term. He's got her by both arms, now, and simply lifts her off the floor and carries her toward the stairs.
“Please!” shrieks Lily. “Please… don't! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!”
“Sorry?”
“I'm sorry! I didn't do it! It wasn't me!”
“Well, what are you sorry for, then?”
“It wasn't… please!”
"Make your mind up," says her jailor. "You didn't do it, or you're sorry?"
Lily slumps in his grip. Hopes that the dead weight will be too much. Hugh, enjoying himself and strengthened by adrenalin, arrives at the stairs, humps her onto the first step. Takes pleasure in inflicting punishment for his own crime.
Felicity Blakemore turns away and walks off through the drawing room toward her study. There's a decanter of whisky in there. She feels she deserves one, after this dreadful start to the afternoon.
They both wait until she has gone. Both know the ante will be upped the minute they're alone.
Lily starts to swear. “You bastard,” she says. “You fucking bastard. I'll get you. I'll fucking get you, you bastard.”
Hugh laughs. Shows her how much bigger he is than she is. He gets his hands into her armpits, pokes hard digits into tender flesh. Hauls her to the top of the stairs and, once they're in the corridor, digs his fingers into her sketchy scalp and begins to drag her, flailing like a fish on a hook, up the corridor. She is screaming, now. With the pain and with the fear. “You fuckingfuckingfucking…”
She manages to twist her head around, bite him on the wrist.
“Christ!”
And now he's kicking her. Slapping her about the head. No-one here to see. No-one here to hear. And he gets her by the hair again and drags her into the four-poster room. Daddy's room. What must have been, he thinks, the room where he was conceived, though his mother moved down to the facing bedroom in the far wing so long ago he barely remembers them using it as a couple. No-one has slept here at all since his father went off to serve King and Country.
Hugh grabs Lily round the waist and throws her onto the heavy family bed, flings himself on top, pins her down. Enjoys the feeling of her body bucking beneath him. Gets her by the wrists and waits.
“Please,” she begs again.
“Please what?”
He smiles. Feels her breathe. Smiles wider. Presses his body down on hers. There's been a lot of that, in this room, over the centuries. Ancestors taming the peasantry by whatever means they had to hand. Lily looks appalled. Looks sick. tries to kick.
“Oh you – you fucking…”
Now he's got her by the wrists. Grins the victor's grin. She subsides. Fight and you make it worse. Isn't that what she's always learned? Fight, and you just make them more aggressive.
He leans forward, whispers into her ear.
“I can always come back, you know,” he says.
She turns her head away from him and finds herself looking at the cupboard. It's built into a deep recess in the wall, windowless and soundproof.
“Please,” she says. “Don't make me go in there.”
“Too late,” says Hugh. “Got to do what Mummy says.”
“Please…” she says. “I can't…”
And he moves against her. He is heavy for his age, despite the privations of rationing. Heavy and strong. She can smell the smell of him. He is Papal Scarlet.
Down below, in the courtyard, they can hear the sound of the others returning form the village. They are laughing, carefree. Lily feels despair soak her bones. They won't come looking for me. Won't ask where I am, even. I'll be shut in there and none of them will give a damn. Why was I born? Why did you make me be born, if life was always going to be like this?
Hugh dips his head down, sniffs at the scalp by her ear. Winning is good, he thinks. Especially here. In Daddy's bedroom. I'm the man of the house, now, I'm the one in charge.
“Never mind,” he says. “It won't be for too long. Just a while. And then I'll come and get you.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Michael Terry, I hate you. You and your skanky wife.
It's not just the stained sheets, or the upended ashtrays on the Persian rugs, or the streaks of oil-based makeup on the sofa cushions, or the broken glasses – three of them at least if you count the stems – on the front path where my daughter could have gone to play, or the great gash in the paint on the drawing room door-frame where you and your friends imported thousand-watt speakers to keep me and my daughter awake at night with, or the bleached stain on the dining room table where one of your friends tipped over a drink and nobody bothered to mop it up, or the fact that you used every single utensil – pots, pans, plates, bowls, glasses, mugs, cups, platters, cutlery, cooking irons, steamers, Tupperware, in both kitchens – to save yourselves washing-up and leave it for me to do once you'd gone, or the white powder – oh you are so Primrose Hill – I just spent an hour scraping out of the cracks in the coffee table, or the used condoms I had to pick out of the trap on the septic tank with rubber gloves, or the great big burn on the surface in the east kitchen where you put a casserole dish down without bothering to use a trivet, or the skid marks you feel it's okay to leave in your lavatory even though there's a brush right there, or the way you all balled up your towels and left them, damp, to suppurate rather than hanging them up, or even the fact that, after the way you treated us all week, the high-handedness and the order-throwing and the never-say-pleases or thank-yous, you didn't bother to leave even the tiniest tip, not one of you. You're probably the sort of people who use minimum wage as a justification for not tipping in restaurants.
No, it's none of those things, hateful though they make you. It's the way you've treated your room.
No-one behaves like this. The Gallagher brothers don't behave like this. What is it with this room, that it obviously makes its inhabitants mad? Turns them into some weird hybrid of human being and pig?
They've torn the place apart again. It's all back the way it was when she first arrived – the tester torn down, the paintings awry, the bedclothes ripped off and tossed through the open cupboard door. Only, it's worse. I don't know what they thought they were doing. There's a red wine stain on the naked mattress. And what looks like a patch of dried blood, to boot. And there's more. It looks as though they've gone through the contents of the jumbo-sized vanity case Skanketta Terry had with her when she arrived. Face cream. Body scrub. Shampoo. Poison by Calvin Klein. Palmer's Cocoa butter. Talcum, in a pot with a fluffy pink puff. Foundation. Fake tan. All of them, squeezed and shaken and ripped open and thrown around the room. There's eyeshadow trodden into the carpet. Conditioner – at least, please God let it be conditioner – sprayed all over the curtains.
You are so losing your deposit.
What makes people do things like this? Do they do it in their own homes? Do they?
It's ten o'clock at night and she's only got as far as clearing all the plates and glasses – dumped down and left, their leftovers unscraped, wherever the eaters ran out of steam – out of the rooms and into the kitchen. Yasmin starts school tomorrow, and then she'll be alone all day, in this big empty place, with all the time in the world to be methodical, to blitz from room to room, disinfecting the surfaces and oiling the wood. But now she's seen this, she can't leave it alone. All she was going to do was strip the sheets, but now that Yasmin's asleep, she's on her hands and knees on the mattress, dabbing at their disgustingness with stain remover.
What sort of person?
And the weird thing is, she feels as though she's being watched. Keeps catching herself, gasping and flipping round to look at the open cupboard door. He's coming. That's what keeps going through her head. He's coming. And when she looks more clearly at the shadows, distinguishes dark from semi-dark, of course there's no-one there.
Did I lock the door?
Of course you did.
Did I?
I don't remember.
He'll be back
He can't be back. He's never been here.
He's coming back and I can't get away.
She checks her watch. Quarter past. Will there come a time when I don't automatically recheck? When I just get into bed and stay there? It's not just the Kieran thing: it's the country thing. People round here don't spend their lives lying awake listening for the sound of breaking glass.
Better go down and check. I don't remember. Don't remember shooting the bolts. Don't remember rattling each of the ground-floor windows, one after another. Don't remember turning the big heavy key that sits permanently in the scullery door.
She goes down via the flat and puts her head into Yasmin's room. She is fast asleep, way gone; limbs splayed with such abandon she looks like a rag doll. She's been trying the spare bed again. The sheets are all piled up, thrown back as though she got out of bed in a hurry, the pillow slipped over the side between bed and bedside table. Never mind. She'll decide one day. She'll settle. Maybe I'll just leave it like that; not bother to remake it. She's just going to unmake it again.
The dining room still smells: fag smoke, stale wine. She passes through the ground floor slowly, methodically. Anteroom windows. Drawing room windows. Far kitchen. East wing door. Front door. There's a bolt undone at the top, but of course the key has been turned. Of course. I remember it now. I remember, because I had that stupid thought as I turned it: locking out is also locking in.
She glances over her shoulder. The trouble is, a house like this is meant to be full of people. Not people like the Terrys, perhaps, but without them, with their noise gone when they took off the way they descended, like a flock of starlings, the contrast is even greater. Without them, the shadows are thicker, the dark places darker. Without the restlessness of human presence, every sound, every adjustment in the building's five-hundred-year-old frame, resonates like gunfire. When they go, because they were there I am more aware that I am alone.
She peers out into the garden and the yard beyond as she rattles the dining room windows. She has never seen darkness like it. Hills on every side hide the lights from the village, and clouds obscure the moon. The only illumination comes from her own windows: the lights in here and in the four-poster room show frost-blanched winter privet as crouching trolls, the old yew a hunchbacked giantess, the knot where a branch must have been removed years ago a single, staring eye.
It's beautiful. Come on, it's beautiful. People would give their right arms to be living like this.
The windows are secure. She draws the curtains to shut out the night.
Half past ten. Up at seven to get Yasmin fed and tidied in time for school. She needs a proper breakfast inside her: needs to make a good impression. The last thing she needs is to be a labelled an attention-deficient townie before they've had a chance to get to know her. Her reading's bound to be behind the others'; they didn't seem to do much at that last school apart from refuse to exclude people and send the kids who came in carrying knives to the counselling team.
She turns off the dining room light, quickly pulls the door to. Kitchen windows. Scullery. All fine. The tap is dripping and she twists it closed. Maybe I should put those curtains on to wash. One of them, anyway, before I go to bed. They're so heavy they'll take a week to dry. Damn those Terrys. I'll call Tom Gordhavo in the morning and give him the full run-down. He needs to know, or I'll be paying for the breakages myself. Imagine. What can have got into their heads that they thought it was – what? Funny? – to vandalise their room like that? How long did they stay in it after they'd done it?
She remembers the discarded slips of origami'd paper she collected from the carpet; pages from porn magazines cut down to size so they showed lips and breasts and unmanned penises, folded over and over again. Of course I know what got into their heads. It doesn't take a rocket scientist.
She feels surprisingly weary as she mounts the flat stairs. The way she used to feel, in London, when lack of sleep weighed heavily. People like the Terrys, she thinks, are bullies. They get as much pleasure from dominance, from causing trouble to other people, as they do from their behaviour itself. I lived like that for too long. It wears you out. I'll be glad of my bed tonight.
The room stinks of spilled perfume. It'll take a steam cleaner and a pint of Febreze to get that out. Vile. Vile people. Thank God they're gone. Thank God, she thinks, we're alone at last.
She takes the dressing-table chair over to the window and stands on it. The pole is a long way ahead, at the full stretch of her reach. She knows she should wait until the morning and fetch the stepladder, but tiredness makes her obdurate. She wants the Terrys expunged from the house, and she wants it done as soon as possible. She strains, gets her index finger onto the bottom of the first hook and pushes. It pops out. There, she thinks. Drops her hand down to shake her arm out. It is aching already from working above her head. Damn you, Michael Terry.
It takes five minutes to liberate, hook by hook, the curtain from the rings. By the time it's done, she is sweating. Her calf muscles ache and so do her shoulders, the arches of her feet cramping from too long on tiptoe. I must look crazy, she thinks, from outside; teetering on a chair at eleven o'clock at night. The thought makes her glance down at the empty garden. Silver moonlight is beginning to break through the clouds, dappling the frost-crisp lawn.
Bridget drapes the curtain over her forearm. There. It's all worth it. The light is so strong, now, that she can see the relief on the monochrome landscape below her. Flecks of silver in the granite walls of the house catch the light, glitter. Everything is shiny, polished, as though it has been washed by rain.
A light comes on in the east wing.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Bridget has an out-of-body moment. Sees herself wobbling on the chair, curtain beginning to slip. How funny, she thinks, calmly, observing herself. My ears are cold. Like someone's rubbed them with ice.
And then a rushing sensation, and she's back in her own nervous system. And the cold has become burning heat and then cold again, and then with another rush she's boiling. Can feel just how cold the winter night is, coming off the window. Swallows. Blinks to clear her eyes, hopes that what she's seeing is an illusion.
The light is still there, in the first-floor window opposite the one where she stands, in the blue room. Filtering, warm and gold – Tom Gordhavo insists on yellow-tinted light bulbs for atmosphere – round the drawn curtain.
I locked the doors. I locked them and there's someone in the house.
The strength deserts her thighs and her knees give way. She has to grab at the window latch to stop herself tumbling to the ground. Yaws like a sailor in stormy seas, leans her shoulder against the panes.
The light is still there.
What do I do?
She stares and feels the prickle of hair on her shoulders. She's cold again, now.
Is it moving? Or is it me? It looks like it's swinging side-to-side, like someone's walking up and down with it. Or maybe it's me. Maybe it's the rush of my pulse, screwing with my vision.
It could be anything, Bridget. It could be a timer switch. You've never looked out of this window at this time of night before; maybe it goes on every night and you just didn't notice.
No, but… I cleaned that room today. I would have seen it. Surely I would have seen it?
There's someone in the house. Someone in the house with us.
What do I do?
Call the police.
Come on. What if it is a timer switch? You'll get a reputation for crying wolf and then if you need… really need them… go and look. Go quietly and listen, and if you hear anything, come back and barricade the door and call for help.
But what if that's what he wants? What if he's waiting for me, if he's turned the light on to lead me up there, away from Yasmin, if he's waiting and when I come…
He can probably see you now. Silhouetted in the window.
She gets off the chair. Crouches below the sill. Struggles to contain h
er breath.
Ok. Ok. Think.
Maybe if I just ignore it. Assume it's nothing. Lock myself into the flat and get into bed and in the morning…
With all my clothes on.
Like I'd sleep.
I have to go and find out.
Like a stupid girl in the movies, walking alone through a darkened house towards the sound in the cellar.
Or what? Or wait for him to come to me?
After the light in the bedroom, stepping into the corridor is like being enfolded in pitch. The urge to turn and run is intense. She longs to put a hand out and flick the switch as she finds herself standing beside it.
Yes. And let him know you're coming.
I should have something. A weapon. Even the chicks in the movies find weapons before they go into the dark. A fire-iron or something. The iron. A statue or a vase. Something heavy. Everything I can think of is downstairs. There's nothing here.
Yasmin's here. All alone in her room. I should lock her in. Keep her safe if anything happens to me.
She glances back over her shoulder at the darkness beyond the bedroom door.
If I lock her in, I'll be locking myself out and I'll stand no chance.
I need somewhere to run to.
She looks forward again. Into the dark. Struggles to swallow. Her mouth is dry. She can't see a light at the end; the two-door room in the middle cuts it off.
Six rooms. Six gaping rooms between where I am and the light.
She casts her mind through them, sees herself exploring each room in the blackness, tries to remember what is in each, what she has moved and dusted and checked as she's cleaned. On the bedside tables. The dressing tables. The windowsills. A house like this should have alabaster tables lamps, brass candlesticks, pokers. Except that Tom Gordhavo has taken everything that could be stolen, and nailed down the rest. It has the look of gentility, Rospetroc, but it's as much of an illusion as a country house hotel: decorated with a mind to a light-fingered clientele and a writ-happy society. There's nothing there. In those gaping spaces.
Hold My Hand Page 16
