Chapter 2
2
MANSFIELD PARK – MANSFIELD PARK, JANE AUSTEN
I sat on a horribly skeletal chair, trying to look comfortable and confident whilst feeling that I was perching on Death’s lap, watching the woman across the table from me. She was tall, very slim and had the pallid, aristocratic looks of someone for whom a suntan is the mark of the pleb and who only goes outside wearing Factor 150 and a big hat, and then only to interrogate the staff.
Currently, she was interrogating me. She’d introduced herself as Lady Tanith Dawe and I, with the taxi driver’s words resounding inside my brain, tried to keep my voice level, my knees together and the absolute hysteria which was trying to manifest, under control.
‘You may call me Lady Tanith,’ the woman said. She had to be around seventy or so, I thought. Her skin was smooth but her eyes were hooded and her mouth was contained within lines that spoke of a permanently dissatisfied tightness of lips. ‘My father was a duke, you know.’
I murmured a polite acknowledgement, trying to keep the eighteenth century out of my vocabulary, so I didn’t rush into words such as ‘it is truly an honour to make your acquaintance, your ladyship.’ Mostly because it felt less of an honour and more of a terror.
‘You don’t have many qualifications, do you?’
She had a printout of my emailed application on the table in front of her. She’d printed it in twenty point, so I could see it quite clearly, even upside down, past the piles of books that cluttered the surface of the not-nearly-wide-enough table that separated us. I wriggled.
‘No, but your job advert said that you didn’t?—’
‘That I value literacy and a familiarity with books over O Levels or HMRCs or whatever you call them these days, yes. I don’t want some hoity-toity university person thumbing through my valuable collection.’
The collection in question was mostly hidden by the sepulchrous darkness of the room, velvet curtains and dust, so I couldn’t comment. There was a slight smell of fish too.
Lady Tanith ran her eyes up and down me again. I was beginning to feel like a lame pony and almost offered to let her feel my legs, but her stare was so beady you could have made a necklace from it, so I didn’t. Her close contemplation convinced me I was sweaty and rumpled. My dress wasn’t the cool, stylish interview-wear I’d envisaged when I’d ordered it; it was shapeless and creased and I had the awful feeling there was a damp patch down my back. ‘Hmm,’ said Lady Tanith, down her nose.
I wriggled again on the dreadful chair. The smell of fish had intensified. I had nothing against sardines, but I preferred them to stay where they were rather than smell as though they were advancing on me and I wondered whether Lady Tanith, immaculate in her cotton shirt and trousers as she was, had a personal hygiene problem. I wriggled again, and the smell suddenly arrived on my lap, surrounded by the person of a rotund Siamese cat, who pulled a lot of linen threads as it arrived and then stood, perched awkwardly across my knees, its not-inconsiderable weight concentrated into four ridiculously tiny paws.
‘Ah!’ Lady Tanith’s face lost the crease of frown. ‘The Master likes you!’
I found myself being stared at. The cat had creamy fur, with espresso-coloured nose, ears and paws and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. ‘He’s…’ Heavy? Stinky? Fortunately I didn’t need to say anything, as she went on, filled with enthusiasm. ‘Well, that quite settles it. I may be a little dubious, but The Master is an excellent judge of character.’
A pink mouth, filled with teeth that looked as though they would be more at home being brought back from a jungle expedition as a trophy, yawned in my direction. Sardine-scented air puffed lightly around my face, and then the cat settled down against my chest, kneading the front of my dress into a tangle of loose threads with an air of total self-satisfaction.
‘What’s… his… name?’ I struggled to breathe past the implacable weight. I refused to believe that anyone gave their cat the name The Master. Unless they were a Grade A Doctor Who fan, and Lady Tanith had the air of someone who hadn’t watched TV since Richard Dimbleby.
‘Oh, we never speak his name.’ My interviewer was watching the ruination of my clothing complacently. ‘He wishes to be known only as The Master.’
The cat finally pulled the last thread and settled down, paws tucked under his rumbling chest, and blinked at me. I’d never had any particular feelings about cats in general, but was working up a real dislike for this one, which seemed not so much cat as an anchovy-scented boulder wrapped in fur. ‘Oh,’ was all I could say, but inside I was whole-heartedly agreeing with my erstwhile taxi driver.
‘I’ll have a room made ready for you.’ Lady Tanith stood up. ‘You may find that The Master wishes to sleep with you. He’s a dreadful flirt, I’m afraid.’
With that, she swept out of the room, closing the door behind her and leaving me in the semi-darkness of drawn curtains, with an enormous cat attempting to suffocate me.
I looked at The Master. The Master looked at me, long and unblinking, as though he were assessing his opportunities.
‘You are not sleeping with me, sunshine,’ I half-whispered, just in case Lady Tanith had her ear to the keyhole. ‘So you can get that idea out of your head.’
My bottom was going numb between the bulk of the cat and the knobblyness of the chair, my nose was itching at the dust and the fur and the dim glimmers of sunshine that managed to squeeze past the curtains weren’t allowing me much more than a glimpse around the room. I had been told it was the library and would be my workplace for the duration of my job.
Job! I would have laughed if the cat hadn’t been suppressing my lungs. Lady Tanith wanted someone to catalogue her books, but the airy library, crammed with first-edition classics, that I’d imagined had been subsumed beneath reality. This library was crammed, but in the same way a hoarder’s house is crammed. The vague rays of light which tiptoed between the heavy velvet drapery showed me piles, heaps and tottering mounds of volumes. The books were on shelves, on the floor, on the table, and weighting down the ends of floor-length curtains across the windows. They were stacked on window ledges and propped against the legs of my chair. Spines hung and flopped, half-detached from their volumes, like so many torture victims and some of the book mountains had slumped to form literary foothills of bent pages and collapsed covers. This did not, in short, look like a room where cataloguing was going to be a matter of scanning barcodes and checking dates. I began to suspect that my new job was going to be basic data entry, trapped in this room which felt like somewhere Poe would have deemed slightly too Gothic. Lady Tanith too had a horror vibe about her. She was playing the part of Lady of the House to such extremes that it couldn’t be real. Nobody could be that posh. But this was, to be honest, all I was fit for with my lack of any qualifications and my desperate desire for a live-in job that meant I wouldn’t have to live in a bus with a leaky roof and no toilet.
I sighed, and the cat rose and fell with the movement, adjusting his paws as he went. ‘Well you can’t stay there,’ I told him. ‘I ought to… do something.’
No answer. Just a rumbling purr, which came and went as though he had a motor underneath that I could feel through my insides.
The door opened. ‘Have you finished, Mother?’ a voice said from the oak-lined passageway outside. ‘Oh. She’s gone.’
The outline of a man stepped into the room, noticed me, and took a half-step back. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘My name’s Andi Glover. I came to be interviewed for the library job.’
A job that I was now most uncertain whether I wanted to take, as my taxi driver’s assessment of the situation here seemed to have been understated to an almost criminal degree.
‘Oh! She said – but I thought you were a man.’ The shape, outlined by the sun which came in from the window at the end of the hallway, wandered into the room. ‘Sorry. It was the name, you see.’
‘It’s short for Andromeda,’ I said wearily. ‘My parents are rather alternative.’
‘Well then, hello, Andi.’ The man approached me, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Hugo. My parents were rather traditional. Gosh, it’s dark in here.’
A brief handshake and then he moved over to the window and was tugging at one of the twelve-foot lengths of velvet which draped the aperture like the wrapping on an exclusive parcel. Dust billowed extravagantly, there was a ripping noise, and a curtain fell gracefully to the floor like an exhausted ballerina. ‘Oh. Whoops.’
But at least now I could see better, although that wasn’t much of a recommendation. The library was wood panelled; in addition to the piles of books on the floor, every wall was lined with shelves below the panelling and every one of those shelves was crammed with books to the extent that they lay three deep in some places. A set of library steps curved upwards on one corner, volumes heaped on each step and the blinding sun illuminated dust, some faded furniture, and Hugo who was still standing with one arm raised but now curtainless.
The place didn’t need cataloguing. It needed an industrial hoover, a shovel, and a furnace. Or bell, book and candle, because exorcism was also a possibility.
Hugo advanced until I could see him properly. He was wearing a shirt and jeans, had messy pale hair which looked as though he’d just got out of bed, and was incredibly good looking. Sharp bone structure counterpointed huge dark eyes and made him look like a reverse image of Lady Tanith, to whom he bore a very strong resemblance. He had her very slender build with added height, the casual leanness of a greyhound, and I couldn’t stop staring at him. Hugo was, in short, absolutely gorgeous.
‘Will you take the job?’ Hugo asked me casually, as though we’d met at a cocktail party rather than me being stapled to a chair by a cat and him wading through the remains of soft furnishings. ‘Do you think?’
I tried to weigh up what to say. ‘It’s pretty much the only thing I can do’ would make me sound desperate. ‘Over my dead body’, although true, might prejudice him against me, and I really did need the job.
And , whispered that tiny voice inside me, the voice that had kept me going over the years, you know how this goes, don’t you? You fall in love with the son of your employer and marry happily into money and… and… dust, an overweight cat and an absolutely insane mother-in-law , finished my practical side.
‘I’m thinking about it,’ I said, truthfully.
I got a radiant smile. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It would be marvellous to have someone new around the place.’
My eyes rolled wildly, wondering when Igor was going to step out of the shadows. Hugo sounded as though he hadn’t met another human for decades, other than to experiment on, my mind whispered. But it also practically yelled that he was stupendously attractive, well-mannered and rich. A little bit of family insanity could be overlooked for those advantages, surely?
He left the floor-level curtain and came over, perched on the edge of the table his mother had stared at me over and tipped his head to one side. ‘Is The Master bothering you?’
‘I would quite like to stand up,’ I said, adjusting my buttocks so that the chair didn’t cut quite so deeply into my spine. ‘But I didn’t like to move him, now he’s got…’ I trailed off as my attention was caught by the portrait at the end of the library, now picked out by a spotlight of sunbeams which were unwisely making their way through the dust. It was enormous , bigger than life sized, and the light didn’t reach the top so all I could see was a huge overwrought frame and a pair of painted knees. ‘What is that?’
‘Oh, that’s Grandpa,’ Hugo said, unconcerned, and he leaned forward to sweep the cat from my lap in a movement which seemed suspiciously practised. ‘Bugger off , Master.’
The cat, seemingly unperturbed, jumped down as though the movement had been all his own idea and he was fed up with sitting on me anyway. The long, creamy body vanished under the table with a wobble of fur, a twitch of a dark tail and was succeeded by sounds of vigorous fur-licking in the shadowy darkness.
‘Your grandfather?’ I stood up stiffly and followed Hugo across the book-littered floor to gaze up at the portrait.
‘Yes. Wait a moment.’ He went to the wall and flicked a switch, whereupon a light suddenly illuminated the entire enormous picture in a spot-lit glare. ‘Oswald Matcham Dawe. OBE, Bart, or something. I’m surprised Mother didn’t give you chapter and verse on him as soon as you came in.’
The portrait showed a man, somewhere in his mid-fifties at a guess. Grey hair, black suit, rather gaunt but handsome and with an air of supercilious melancholy. He looked, I thought, rather like a Jane Austen hero might, a few decades after the story ended. He was framed in a ridiculously overdone gilt box with curlicues, swoops, swags and elaborate flourishes, like the mind of a German medieval sculptor on hard drugs.
‘He was an author. Made his money on the back of some rather dubious business dealings just after the war, retired to take up writing, and established the library. Mother came to Templewood as some kind of companion to his wife, married their son and – well, the rest is history and me and my brother.’ Hugo flicked off the light and the enormous man faded back into the darkness, except for his knees, which reflected the sunlight in a disconcerting way. ‘Would you like a tour of the house? I’m assuming Mrs Compton will be making you up somewhere to stay – the Blue Room, probably, that’s where visitors are usually put.’
The cat under the desk was making horribly squashy noises and the sardine smell kept rising up at me, so I picked up my bag and said, ‘Yes, please.’
‘Excellent.’
Hugo led the way out of the library and I watched his back view with a degree of complacency. He was attractive, he was attentive and he was interesting. I reckoned we could be announcing our engagement within six months, if I played my cards right.