Happily Ever After

Chapter 11

11

BORLEY – THE HAUNTING OF BORLEY RECTORY, SEAN O’CONNOR

Hugo was not at breakfast that morning. This wasn’t totally unheard of, but I was still a little worried as I settled myself into the library for another dynamic day of staccato typing. The storm had died into a misty dampness that veiled the view, so I had nothing else to look at, just Oswald and the computer screen. Even The Master had chosen to stay where he was, tucked under my covers, so I was alone in the grey, dusty light, moving piles of books from place to place. I set up camp with my flask and some biscuits that I’d found in the back of the pantry, where Mrs Compton waged a low-grade war on the household by hiding any tasty comestibles, and started work.

Three piles of books later and the door opened cautiously.

‘Can… err… can I come in?’ It was Hugo.

‘Of course you can, it’s your house.’ I swivelled away from the screen to watch him slither through the door gap. He looked as though he hadn’t slept all night. His chin was stubbled, his eyes were red and there were dark shadows underneath them, and he kept swinging his arms and flexing his fingers as though he were a boxer about to go into the ring.

‘I think… look. We need to talk. About last night,’ he added, as though there was an entire string of past indiscretions for us to discuss. ‘But not in here.’

‘Oswald won’t tell,’ I said, pulling another pile of books over. I’d really only just warmed up properly after my soaking, and I wasn’t filled with the desire to go back outside again.

‘No, I know. It’s just… Mother might come in. And I’d rather she didn’t… I mean, it’s delicate and…’ Hugo swung his arms again, as though his whole body didn’t fit him properly this morning. ‘And I want to talk to you, properly.’

I stood up. ‘All right. But, please, not the icehouse.’

Hugo stared, wide-eyed. ‘Why on earth should I want to go to the icehouse?’

‘No reason. Long story. So, where?’

I followed him out of the library and up the stairs. ‘In here,’ he said, pulling a key out of his pocket and stopping at the door to the Yellow Room. ‘We can lock the door and Mother can’t… I mean, she won’t come down here anyway but… just in case.’

He unlocked the door and threw it open. I went in to see a small bedroom, charmingly wallpapered in a yellow floral pattern, and holding no furniture except three full-length wardrobes. Hugo, after an ostentatiously careful check of the landing, locked the door after us, and then hovered in the middle of the room, practically vibrating with nerves.

‘So,’ I said, when it became obvious that he didn’t know where to start. ‘Marie doesn’t exist? You made it all up?’

He shrugged. ‘I thought you’d seen me, on the day you arrived. I had to come up with something. Then, when you caught me that night, well, I thought a good ghost story might keep you from wandering around.’

‘So Templewood isn’t haunted at all ?’ I asked, thinking of the footsteps in the attic.

‘Not as far as I am aware, why?’

‘No reason.’ I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about those eldritch sounds that made me unwilling to lie awake for long, those rhythmic creaking boards that spoke of something that moved. ‘Just wondered.’

Idly, he walked up to the first wardrobe. It was huge, oak, and looked like something that might play host to snowy lands and gas lamps, but when he opened the door it was crammed full of evening dresses.

‘I know that Mother has been half-hoping that you and I might… she’d like to see another generation, know that the place is in safe hands, all that.’ Hugo gave me a shame-faced grin. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Oh, Hugo,’ I said helplessly.

‘And, I mean, I’m not gay and I don’t want to transition. Not at all. Quite the reverse. But I know this’ – he waved a hand at the frocks – ‘isn’t for everyone.’ He opened the next wardrobe. It was similarly filled to the brim with expensive-looking dresses. ‘Mother must never know.’

‘So, all those noises I’ve heard in here at night? That I thought was rats or ghosts?’

He dropped his eyes to the toes of his shoes. ‘I only dress at night,’ he said. ‘Can’t run the risk of Mother catching me. She goes to bed at nine with an Ativan and she’s out for the count until seven.’ Now he looked up at me. ‘It’s truly not a sexual thing, it might be better if it were. Can you forgive me, Andi?’

‘Forgive you for what? Liking dresses? That’s not really something that needs forgiving, is it?’

He gave a huge sigh. ‘Thank you. And no, not just for that. For being here, for letting Mother keep up her fantasies that you and I… that I’m just here to provide another generation. As I said, once Mother has… gone, I’ll be selling the estate. She wants to keep it, for Oswald’s memory, but I don’t have any memory of Oswald. He died sixteen years before I was even born.’

I inwardly cursed all my reading. Whilst the Bront?s, Dickens, Hardy et al had given me a grounding in life of sorts, they really hadn’t covered cross-dressing in anything like the detail that I could have done with.

Hugo looked so… so abject. As though his life was sitting around his knees in ruins and his every hope had died. I knew how that felt. I’d gone from a hope of marrying the heir to this estate, or at least a man with the money to travel in the kind of style you didn’t see very often when you lived in a bus, to knowing that I didn’t want my future to be a husband who looked better in clothes than I did. But the alternatives – the bus or my sister – could I compromise? I had no problem with anyone who decided they wanted to be someone else in whatever form that took; hadn’t I reinvented myself to a certain extent just to be here? And Hugo said it wasn’t sexual; he liked to wear women’s clothes, that was all. Could I be with someone who liked dresses? It was only clothes.

‘Show me,’ I said, and his entire face brightened.

‘ Really ? You’re interested?’

Not really, I wanted to say. But if talking to someone about his preferences made him feel better, then why not?

‘Just show me.’

I’d never seen Hugo so animated before. This was obviously the first time he’d ever had chance to share his interest with someone, and it was rather sweet to watch him pull each dress down from its hanger, take off the wrapping and talk about its history, the fabric, the hang and fit. The clothes were all expensive, designer and had history.

‘And this one’ – he unzipped a dress bag to release a blue silk dress – ‘I got from an auction. It used to belong to Elizabeth Taylor.’ He stroked the flowing folds of the skirt. ‘It wears so beautifully, although I don’t often put it on; it’s not really my size.’

‘Oh, Hugo,’ I said again, softly.

‘When I saw you in the library with that curtain on your head, for one second I thought it was some kind of judgement on me.’ He gabbled the words out really quickly. ‘I’d told you all those ghost stories to try to keep you hiding in your room at night, and then I thought that maybe there really was a ghost and it was coming to get me for making up that rubbish.’ He passed another hand over the beautiful silk. ‘But really it was just my conscience. Keeping secrets isn’t easy. And my brother…’ He stopped, his face twisting.

‘I hate my sister,’ I blurted out. ‘That’s my secret. No, that’s not fair, I don’t hate her. I wish I was more like her. She put her foot down with our parents.’ I remembered Jude again, aged about seven, stamping and hands on hips, telling our mother that it was ridiculous that she didn’t go to school, brandishing that copy of the Enid Blyton boarding school book that she’d been reading. She’d stuck to her guns and got Dad to invest some of his large savings in her education at a very good boarding school in the Cotswolds. ‘She’s pretty and she’s assertive and she gets what she wants. And what she wanted was a normal life.’

‘Well, you’re… not unattractive.’ Hugo put the dress back into the wardrobe again. ‘And I’m sure there’s a life out there somewhere for you.’

‘That’s not enough.’

His baffled frown told me that he didn’t get it. But why would he? Good looking, even as the second son of the estate, his future would be assured, by his batty mother.

‘My parents always told me that I could have the life I wanted. Whatever I wanted to do, to be, I could do it, it didn’t matter that I had no experience, no qualifications, no “special talents”.’

‘And that’s an admirable sentiment.’ Hugo tidied up some shoe boxes, piling them back onto the floor of the third wardrobe.

‘It is. But it’s a lie. Look, I was raised in a bus. We moved all the time, never settled anywhere. I got all my education from reading, books were my only constant. And the books lied to me too. They said that all I had to do was to know what I wanted, and go for it.’ I stopped. The words were falling out of me in painful lumps, backed by all the emotion that I’d recently come to understand. But this was a man who liked to wear dresses. If anyone could come close to knowing how I felt at finding out that life wasn’t as easy as everyone made out, it would be him.

‘In what way isn’t it true?’

‘It might be true that you can grow up in a bus and go and – I dunno, set up your own company or be seduced by a billionaire or travel the world and all that. But only if you’ve got more. Only if you’re more than me. People expect someone who grows up like I did to be a kooky, ditzy pretty girl with a brain like razor wire. If you’re just ordinary, then nobody cares. You’ve got no education, no particular talent and you’re not even decorative. Life lied to me. Books lied to me. And my sister got a great life because she didn’t fall for the lie.’

‘Oh, Andi.’

Hugo came over and hugged me. It was a warm hug but totally fraternal.

‘Not to mention that I got a stupid name!’ I said, muffled against his shoulder. ‘I mean, Andromeda! I ask you. I don’t even look like an Andromeda – I ought to be all willowy and a bit wafty and “at one with the universe”. I should have been beautiful and wear a size six and have lovely hair.’

‘There is nothing wrong with you.’ Hugo gave me a little shake. ‘Don’t talk yourself down. You might not have masses of qualifications, but here you are, you’ve got a job. You’re doing good things.’

I stepped away. ‘Am I, though? Am I not really just doing some pointless data entry?’ I nearly slipped and mentioned my search for the diaries but managed to keep my lip buttoned on that.

‘You are giving my mother someone else to focus on, apart from me and Jasper, and that is an action worthy of beatification,’ Hugo said firmly. ‘When she’s complaining about you, or supervising you, then she’s leaving us alone, and my mother has taken an unhealthy interest in my brother and me since we were born. Oh, not like that.’ He must have seen my expression. ‘Nothing worthy of the tabloid press. It’s more that she has very firm ideas of how she wants our lives to go. I’m jealous of my brother, too,’ he added.

‘Because he got away with renouncing his birthright? How did he manage it, by the way?’

Hugo looked conflicted for a moment. ‘It’s not my story to tell, sorry,’ he said. ‘But it means that Mother has concentrated her efforts on me, and making me take on estate responsibilities. I can’t tell her I don’t want it either, the shock might kill her.’

There was a momentary silence; presumably we were both weighing up the pros of this happening. There didn’t appear to be any cons.

‘So, you see,’ he went on. ‘I could never tell her about this.’ A waved hand indicated the racks of frocks. ‘She so wants me to conform utterly. Saying that I can only marry a woman who can deal with a man who likes to wear dresses in his downtime – it wouldn’t go down well, let’s put it that way. Telling her that I’m going to sell the entire estate as soon as I inherit, pack up my collection and go somewhere where I can live the way I want to…’ He shook his head. ‘Not going to happen.’

I looked at him standing there, slender and attractive and yet with a dark loneliness about him. ‘Can’t you get away? You must have friends, people you could go and stay with to find a life away from the estate?’

Hugo shook his head again. ‘I’m not really the sociable sort,’ he said. ‘All the boys from school meet up now and again and I’ve been along once or twice to the reunions, but it’s all so – loud. It’s a bit like none of them have grown up at all, they’re all in their father’s firms or in banking or some such, but they all seem to be playing at life.’ He sighed. ‘Too much money and too much privilege. All I have is a crumbling old house and an estate full of people who pretend to be faithful retainers whilst plotting to move to the city and earn proper money doing proper jobs.’

‘Oh, Hugo.’ He looked sadly forlorn, standing in front of the wardrobe but staring out of the window into the darkness. My heart pleated with pity.

‘I’m not really cut out for this Lord of the Manor lark,’ he said. ‘But Mother is determined that I’ll run the place with a rod of iron, so she keeps trying to instil a ferocity into me that’s just not there.’ Now his handsome face was pulled tight around the eyes with hopelessness. ‘I haven’t got it in me to bark orders and demand obedience. Even the cat doesn’t listen to me; what hope have I got of getting a workforce to? It ought to have been Jasper. He’s good at all the officious stuff, but the bugger managed to worm his way out of it and left Mother to me.’

‘Life can be a bit of a shit really, can’t it?’ I patted his arm.

‘Indeed it can.’ Hugo gave me a wan smile. ‘All we can do is make the best of what we’ve got. Play the hand we were dealt, and all that.’

I went to the door. ‘Anyway, I had better go back to cataloguing that bloody library, because right now it’s all that’s providing me with a sense of self-worth.’

Hugo smiled. ‘Can I recommend a pair of Manolos for that?’

I had to laugh. ‘Not really going to work for me. But you have at it.’

He unlocked the door and we both went out onto the landing, meeting The Master coming from the direction of my room with a determined expression. The cat and I descended back to the grim dark of the dust-haunted room, while Hugo went off to do his own thing, hopefully feeling a lot lighter and a lot happier now that his secret was out in the open.

I felt, mostly, cheated.

After a morning’s work, I went for a walk in the grounds again. I needed to avoid Hugo for a while, I decided. Not because of anything he’d done – I didn’t feel the disgust or horror that he had clearly feared I would, but I needed time to think. If marrying Hugo wasn’t totally out of the question, and it did seem to be something Lady Tanith was working towards and even Hugo didn’t seem revolted at the prospect, plus now I had his misplaced sense of guilt on my side – was it something I felt I could do?

I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jeans and strolled along one of the winding paths through the shrubbery. I could marry Hugo. I already knew his secret, so he would feel he could be open with me, and that was healthy. I could live here until Lady Tanith died – all right, it wouldn’t be my first choice, but the house could be lovely if someone who wasn’t obsessed with the previous owner took over and actually changed things. And then – then we could travel. Tour the world. Probably with heavy emphasis on couture clothing shops and places that sold designer shoes in size ten, but still. We could.

But then I thought of the trade-off. My husband would wear women’s clothes whenever he could. We’d go designer shopping, not for me, but for him, and Hugo had the tall, slender build that looked great in sample size clothing. We’d be at all the fashion shows, London Fashion Week, Paris, and all the while he would be handling fabrics, thinking of how they would drape, the fit, the cut. Everyone would look at me and think how lucky I was that my husband bought me couture, or vintage dresses with history, possibly with a side order of what a waste it was, buying such lovely things for such an ordinary looking girl. Then there was the enormous factor of my not fancying a man who wore dresses. Hugo in male garb, yes, absolutely. But I couldn’t look at him in azure silk and tassels and feel the same way.

Not even to save me from the bus. Not even to stop me having to go cap in hand to my sister. The parents would probably go down a storm in their new series, touring North America in the Winnebago and come home full of plans and contracts and the possibility of an extended stay in the States or Australia. They wouldn’t even notice that I was still there, still hiding out in libraries and trying to pretend that hashtag Vanlife was working for me.

I shook my head and stopped by a small tree with branches weighed down by the formation of berries. I banged my head slowly against the trunk. Stay here, with Hugo, or go home? Either option seemed equally dreadful right now.

‘What has that tree done to you?’ It was Jay, emerging from cover like a scruffier version of the god Pan. ‘And have you got my jumper? I’m going to need that, it’s bloody cold first thing in the morning.’

‘Sorry, no,’ I said vaguely. ‘I didn’t know I was going to see you.’

Jay looked at me, his head tilted to one side. ‘Did you sort out your person?’ he asked.

‘Person?’

‘The one you saw outside last night. Did you find them?’

I was instantly thrown back to Hugo, running off into the night and my stomach gave a jolt. A bus or a man who wears dresses. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, thank you, I did.’

‘Hmmm.’ He came closer, fiddling with the hearing aids, tucking them more firmly behind his ears. ‘You don’t look happy about it.’

‘It has thrown up something of a dilemma.’

‘Want to talk about it?’ Jay threw an arm out. ‘Come and have a coffee.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ve got a flask.’ The tattoo on his wrist flickered in and out of vision under the sleeve of his donkey jacket as he waved his arm again at a canvas knapsack on the grass the other side of the tree. ‘You look like you could do with a chat.’

‘I can’t really say anything; it’s not my secret to tell,’ I said, suddenly awkward.

‘Ah well, maybe you could give me the précised highlights then. Leave out any incriminating details?’

‘I think that would leave me with the words “the”, “and” and “wardrobe”, actually.’

Jay laughed and pulled a flask out of the bag, then sat down on the grass, his bare legs stretched out in front of him, and poured two cups from the old-fashioned tartan covered vacuum flask. ‘Narnia stopped being a secret about sixty years ago. Sit down. Tell me as much as you can, as much as you feel comfortable with. You’ll feel better, I promise.’

He looked at me over the rim of his plastic mug, sipping. The coffee smelled good, breakfast had been a long time ago and I really didn’t feel up to trying to force lunch out of Mrs Compton who had a propensity for asking why I needed another meal when I could do with losing a few pounds, and I was being paid to work, not eat.

I sat down next to him and took the other coffee cup, then found myself telling Jay about Hugo. That deep well of loneliness that he seemed to be perching over, trying to keep his mother happy by taking on the management of an estate that he resented. I managed to steer clear of mentioning the dresses, none of that seemed to matter as much once I’d heard him talk about the future that was being thrust upon him. His life revolved around being the second son, unprepared for the lifetime commitment that Templewood had become, and his bitterness towards his brother for breaking out. This led to me blurting out all the stuff about my sister and our relationship; about having to find myself a life without any real preparation apart from books. I went on for quite some time.

Jay drank his coffee and listened. He was very good at it, keeping his head tilted, presumably to hear better, his eyes flickering between my face and his booted feet, and not interrupting. He didn’t seem to have suffered as much as I or Hugo had from the late night and the soaking. There were no shadows under his eyes, although he clearly hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

At last I stopped. The coffee was almost cold, but he’d been right, I did feel better.

‘So, you can’t tell me what it is that you found out?’ He took the coffee cup from me, tipped the cool dregs onto the grass and refilled it. ‘But you don’t want to be with Hugo now?’

‘I’m not entirely sure that I ever wanted to be with him,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘It’s more that – fiction gave me expectations, I suppose. And now I feel stupid.’

‘Real life doesn’t have a narrative.’ Jay poured himself another cup of coffee. The cuff of his jacket rolled back and revealed his tattoo fully to the half-hearted sunlight. The design was small but looked like a posy of flowers tied into a bunch with a rainbow-coloured ribbon. ‘That’s the thing. It’s messy and confusing and heartbreaking, and things don’t always happen in the right order. Heartbreak doesn’t always mean that you get the guy in the end; sometimes you just get more heartbreak.’

‘But that’s not fair,’ I said.

‘No, but it is life. Books have to have lots of stuff going on and well-reasoned endings, otherwise nobody would read them. But life isn’t tidy like that. Bad stuff happens for no reason, then there’s five hundred pages of getting up, going to work, and going to bed. No happy ending, no narrative causality. Just shit and boredom and unhappiness.’

He sounded sad and slightly bitter. I drank the last of the coffee.

‘It’s not fair,’ I said again, putting the cup down.

‘No. It’s not unlike books that have to be fair, usually. The detective always solves the crime, the spaceship always discovers the lost planet.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘The hero always gets the girl. Or boy.’ He fiddled with the hearing aid again. ‘If the book doesn’t end the way the reader expects, then the reader feels cheated. It makes them feel stupid, that they invested all that time in a story that didn’t give them what they wanted.’

I sighed. ‘Life cheats all the time. It doesn’t have to give us what we want.’

He flashed me a smile. ‘No. I was born with a hearing defect. I thought that would be as bad as it got, but – well…’ Now his eyes went to the tattoo on his wrist and he rubbed it with a finger. ‘There were other complications. Like I said, no fairy stories here. At least, only of the evil, dark fairy kind.’ For a second he looked as haunted as I’d believed Templewood to have been, then he glanced back up at my face, and smiled. ‘We make our own stories, I guess,’ he said.

‘And my sister made her story so different from mine that it itches.’ I felt slightly embarrassed by seeing Jay’s pain. Almost as though I had to remind myself that I was also entitled to unhappiness. Mine may not be tragedy on tragedy, more Northanger Abbey than Hamlet, but it was all relative. My unhappiness was all relatives. ‘If I could have been more like her…’

‘Then you wouldn’t be you,’ Jay interrupted briskly. ‘And you’d have none of this.’ A wide arm indicated the lush grassland, with its backdrop of gently flowering shrubs and elegantly draped trees. ‘So you can’t compare non-existent lives. If you had been someone else, you may have been heartbroken by now and vowing to hide out in that bus and never meet another man.’

‘“Hurt and must never love again”?’ Some of those stories where the heroine or hero had promised themselves that they would never fall in love because they’d been dumped once had been, I had thought, unnecessarily overwrought.

‘That sort of thing. Or – or worse things could have happened.’ Jay looked back down at the grass again. He stroked it gently with one finger, revealing the tattoo again, so that the colours changed and flexed with the movement of the muscles of his arm. ‘Trust me.’ He looked up and into my eyes. ‘You’re doing all right.’

Brisk then, as though he felt he’d said more than he should have done, he tapped his cup against the ground to empty the remains of the coffee and began screwing the flask back together.

His sudden movement made me feel dismissed. ‘I suppose I ought to go back,’ I said.

‘To the dust and the spreadsheets?’ Jay stayed sitting while I clambered to my feet and handed him back the mug.

‘Yes. And because I don’t want Hugo to think I’m hiding from him. I don’t want him to feel that I… that I think less of him because of… what I found out today,’ I edited carefully.

‘You’re very kind.’ The words didn’t have the expected undertone of amused sarcasm; they sounded as though he meant them.

‘Maybe. Thank you for the coffee.’ I lingered for a moment. Walking away felt – not right, somehow. As though Jay and I had shared something more than coffee, something that had bound us together, although I had no idea why I should feel like this. He’d hardly spoken, while I’d gabbled enough for two.

‘I’ll see you again soon.’ He began to pack the flask back into the rucksack that had held it. ‘I have to; you’ve got my jumper.’

‘Yes.’ I was backing away slowly, leaving without leaving.

‘Go on, go!’ He was laughing now. He’d lost that strange, bitter tone that he’d had when he’d talked about life. ‘Spreadsheets wait for no man.’

‘They do, actually. They wait for me, anyway.’

‘Well, Lady Tanith won’t.’ He nodded behind me. ‘I think she’s coming for you.’

I turned around. Lady Tanith was, indeed, crossing the lawn at a vigorous pace. The Master trotted in her wake with his tail in the air, like a very small pageboy.

‘Andromeda. Why are you not in the library?’

I turned around to say something to Jay, but he’d gone. Evaporated into the bushes, knapsack, coffee dregs and all, leaving nothing but a small patch of crushed grass and some waving branches marking his passing.

‘I’m on my lunchbreak,’ I said.

‘A lunchbreak which has extended for’ – Lady Tanith ostentatiously looked at the slim gold watch on her wrist – ‘an hour and twelve minutes. I should like you to get back to work now. Thank you.’

She turned again and set off back towards the house. The Master hesitated. He looked up at me and twitched his tail.

‘Traitor,’ I said quietly. He blinked at me. ‘Come on, then.’

Together we set out across the grass, following Lady Tanith’s earth-scorching passage, back to the library.