Happily Ever After

Chapter 14

14

BAG END – THE HOBBIT, J R R TOLKIEN

Another week crawled its way past, like a horror-fiction zombie.

Summer was inching to a close now. The leaves on the beautiful trees all over the estate were lightly touched with burning colours, the flower displays flared and died back to architectural seed heads and vibrant foliage. The tinkle of the pond fountain began to sound less wonderfully cooling and more like a presage of bad weather.

Hugo and I had great fun with his clothing collection, though. Now I had stopped thinking of him as my future, it was a lot easier to take an interest in his ‘hobby’, and he sometimes let me try on some of the couture collection. For the first time in my life I found out what it felt like to wear evening gowns teamed with Manolo heels, and if the price was that the man beside me was similarly dressed – well, that was fine. We’d lock ourselves in the Yellow Room most evenings, once Lady Tanith was safely asleep, and dress up, chat and generally form a friendship which was much better for not having an enormous Dior-shaped shadow over it.

Hugo was fun. He was amusing, intelligent and attractive and I found myself having moments where I would wonder whether I really could make this my life. But then he’d step out from behind the changing screens in his blonde wig and a dress allegedly once worn by Marilyn Monroe and shoes that cost more than I would earn in a lifetime, and I would know that I couldn’t. He looked better in the dresses than I did too, having the straight up-and-down figure that could be padded in appropriate places, whereas I already had the padding and it wasn’t always in the right place for the dresses to hang properly.

We talked about our upbringing and experiences. I learned more than I needed to know about what boys got up to at prep school, and Hugo found out that life on the road wasn’t a romantic gypsy-idyll of living off the land.

Hugo lived under a weight of expectation. ‘Once it was obvious I’d inherit, my life was over,’ he said sadly, pulling a zip down slightly to give him room to slump onto the floor.

‘Couldn’t you have refused? Told your mother to leave the place to a cats’ home or something?’

Hugo turned big eyes up to me. ‘Would you want to say no to my mother?’

I thought about this. ‘I see your point.’

‘Besides – I do have a sense of duty. Oh, not to Templewood, that’s just a house, but to Mother. I know she seems to be sensible and stable…’ He busied himself pleating fabric between his fingers, so couldn’t see me rolling my eyes. ‘But she’s very fragile really. When he renounced the estate, Jazz took me to one side and asked me to look after her. It was an easy enough promise back then, she was hysterical and I was thirteen. Over the years I’ve come to realise just how much of myself I’ve had to give up to Templewood.’

Hugo said all this in a completely matter-of-fact way, without a trace of self-pity and I realised that he really did love Lady Tanith. I wanted to ask him what kind of love she had for him; how she could happily require him to live this solitary, undemonstrative existence, all good manners and keeping up appearances. It made me realise that money wasn’t everything, and that I might have lived in a bus but at least my parents – distant and preoccupied though they might have been – had shown that they loved me, when I’d been a child. Once I’d become an adult they’d somewhat cast me adrift and become wrapped up in their own world, but really? Did that matter? I had my freedom, such as it was. Poor Hugo didn’t even have that.

We did have points of contact in our parents though; my father, with his early retirement and large pension fund, sounded similar to Hugo’s father Richard: family wealth, no need to work, cruising through life doing what he wanted. Although, in Richard’s case, this seemed to consist of keeping the estate up to scratch and indulging in even more book buying – half the library stock was down to him, and his trips abroad to acquire more books had, apparently, given Lady Tanith the opportunity to learn how to manage the estate in his absence. Hence Richard’s bequeathing it to her to run on behalf of their sons, rather than directly to his eldest son Jasper.

And when I wasn’t pretending to be a Hollywood star at her first premiere, or listening to tales from Hugo’s boyhood, I was sneezing my way through cataloguing.

There were no diaries. I’d come to terms with that. If Oswald really had kept any, then maybe he’d disposed of them before he set off for Switzerland. Maybe he’d destroyed them in grief when Caroline died. Maybe he’d buried them in the garden, under the arcane workings for the fountain, in the middle of that flowerbed. I didn’t know. They certainly weren’t anywhere that I could find them, in that dusty, still-too-dark room where I sat for most of every day, staring at a spreadsheet until my eyes bulged.

One morning I woke to my ‘day off’ and couldn’t face my usual routine of going for a walk and hoping to meet Jay again, sitting in my room eating a sandwich that I had furtively made whilst avoiding Mrs Compton’s infrequent kitchen activities, and then having an early night. This Sunday being bright and fine, I decided to do some laundry. Not exactly a pastime that was going to bring the men flocking, but then they had so far not hurled themselves through my door whatever my activity, and I needed clean jeans.

Hugo had shown me the washer-drier machine, hidden away at the back of the boot room behind a panelled cupboard door designed to keep the signs of domestic drudgery from the upper class, and I occasionally braved the wrath of Mrs Compton to wash my things.

Today she caught me. ‘Slut,’ she muttered, walking past me as I wandered back upstairs with my knickers on display in a plastic basket. I thought this was a bit over the top as none of my underwear had any slutty tendencies and all my knickers were quite substantial. I just smiled. Mrs Compton seemed to suffer from a form of class-orientated Tourettes and couldn’t stop herself from bursting out in epithets when she saw me. She could, however, restrain herself nicely in the vicinity of Lady Tanith and Hugo, so I didn’t think it was a psychological problem, other than that occasioned by thinking I was beneath everyone.

I took the load of clean and dry laundry back to my room and began sorting through my remaining clothes for other things to wash. The dress needed cleaning. We were, I was aware, looming up to the next twenty-first. I was dreading having to dress up, but I was looking forward to the slap-up breakfast and three course dinner that resulted. I pulled the dress out and laid it on the bed, then went for a rummage in the cupboard I used to keep my clothing in.

There at the front was Jay’s jumper. The one he’d draped around me when I’d been soaked, sitting in the icehouse entrance on the day of the storm. I hadn’t seen him around much since my tour of the garden, except as a figure on the horizon in big boots and donkey jacket, wielding loppers or a digging tool that looked as though he may be off to a day of serial murdering, so I’d forgotten that I still had his jumper.

He’d asked for it back twice. Here it was, smelling slightly musty. I should take it back, just in case he came up to me during the memorial service to ask for it again, and then I’d have to answer questions from Lady Tanith and Hugo about how I knew Jasper. I really didn’t want to give Lady Tanith any more excuses for pursing her lips at me and sighing.

I picked up the jumper, pushed it into the carrier bag that had been my repository for my worn and dirty clothes, and set out. It gave a purpose to my day off and, I reasoned, was merely an extension of my usual stroll around the grounds, although why I needed to justify my activities to myself I wasn’t sure. Something of Lady Tanith and Mrs Compton’s attitudes perhaps were getting to me more than I cared to admit.

The day had come in misty. Not cold, or warm, just a grey envelope that curtained the world from Templewood, and echoed the dust that I encountered every day. I set out along the path to the estate village, feeling as though I were fighting my way through a haunting. The gravel crunched into the silence, trees were bleak outlines, and drooping autumn flowers occasionally flopped from their restraining beds like sanatorium patients trying to escape.

It was further to the gate in the yew hedge than I had remembered. My jeans and trainers were damp by the time I got there, and the wrought-iron curlicues of the metal gate held beads of water, prism-copies of the grey surrounding me. It was all very atmospheric and portentous. Even the yew, sagging under the weight of its own history, had pleated and curved into horrific shapes that could, to the susceptible, look like agonised faces. I opened the gate, trod my careful way through the churchyard, and on out the other side into the little square of houses.

I knew Mrs Compton lived in one. She had an army of ‘day girls’ – most of them older than her – who came in to help with the never-ending task of trying to keep Templewood clean, or at least habitable, so some of those must live here too. And there must be other garden staff, although I’d only ever seen Jay, but he wasn’t single-handedly keeping the flowerbeds in line and the further reaches of the estate grass cut. There were the carpenters and joiners and plumbers and others who worked locally and were entitled to an estate cottage and whom I occasionally saw wandering about at a distance.

They just weren’t in evidence now.

Even though it was a Sunday afternoon, all the houses looked deserted, in their square surrounding a green which bore a maypole like the mast of a schooner which had sunk into the ground. No children played, no dogs barked. It looked like the opening titles of a horror film. I realised that I had no idea where Jay lived, in this Village of the Damned. I couldn’t go around and knock on every door, could I? I was half afraid that doing so might awaken something that had been better left asleep, so I walked a small circle on the grass of the village green and tried to look for clues.

All the cottages were identical. Low eaves of thatch, which meant that the upper stories had windows that poked out through the reeds. Small lower casements, diamond-paned in black. Identical red doors, with a glass panel, letting light into, no doubt, identical hallways.

But only one had a climbing rose, past its best now but still spurting its way over the facade in a last show of petals. An immaculate flower border lay under the single downstairs window, bearing a late display of dahlias with their pom-pom heads decorated with fog-sequins like a button box overturned.

It was somewhere to start, anyway, so I crossed the green, leaving a trail of silver footprints behind me, and knocked on the door.

After a few moments of hush, there came a shuffling, and Jay opened the door. He was wearing a fleecy suit and enormous knitted socks.

‘Whassamatter?’ he asked, blearily, scratching a hand through his hair.

‘I brought your jumper back.’ I thrust the bag towards him. ‘Thank you,’ I added.

A gradual, blinking wakefulness arrived on his face. ‘Oh! Oh, right. Yes. Right. Good.’

He took the bag, but I’d looped it over my wrist, so we were, for a moment, joined by a Sainsbury’s cable, him trying to pull it off over my hand, while I tried to disentangle it so it would slide off. We wrangled for a second.

‘Look, it’s bloody freezing; come in a second while we get this bag off.’ Jay scuffed a few steps back, his socks slithering on the patterned tiles of the hallway floor, and I, drawn by the orange plastic, followed him inside.

A closed door to our right was presumably the living room, fronting onto the green. At the end of the hallway I could see a kitchen, where a couch lined one wall and an Aga another. A cast-off blanket showed that Jay had been lying on the couch.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked him. ‘You’re not ill? I wouldn’t have come if I’d thought you were ill, I just wanted to bring your jumper back and I found it in with my washing and remembered you wanted it.’

‘Oh. A conversation. Hold on a minute.’ He let go of the bag and turned, shuffling a floor-clearing way into the kitchen. I followed and caught up as he looped the second hearing aid into place. ‘Right. Go.’

Cursing myself for forgetting his deafness, I repeated myself, although I mostly edited it down to asking if he was feeling all right and that I’d brought his jumper back.

I got a smile. ‘No. Not ill. I’m good. Just – well, it’s Sunday. It’s my day off, and if I choose to spend it lying around in my PJs eating crisps and watching Netflix while scratching myself, well. What else are Sundays for?’

I looked around the kitchen. It was warm and bright and tidy and some mismatched blue and white crockery stood on a small dresser in the corner. There was no huge teetering pile of washing up waiting to be done, or damp just-out-of-the-washer clothes mouldering in a basket, and it struck me as unnaturally neat until I realised I was comparing Jay to the only other man I really knew, who was Jude’s husband Ollie, whose opinion of housework could be summed up as ‘ignore it until it goes away’. ‘Too many late nights being dark and tortured?’

‘Ah.’ A hand scrubbed through his hair again. ‘You remembered that.’

‘Yes.’ I wasn’t quite sure why I had remembered it. The vaguely Heathcliffian surroundings, perhaps, in that muddy shelter.

‘Well, I may have exaggerated a touch. I have terrible insomnia. Awful. So I sleep when I can, which was today…’ Now he pointed at the couch. ‘Until a literary-inspired presence from the Big House woke me up.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said, confidently. ‘You must have already been awake.’

Jay tilted his head. ‘I… might not have been?’

‘You didn’t have your hearing aids in. If you’d been asleep you wouldn’t have heard me knock.’ I waved a hand at the hallway and the front door. ‘You were awake and you saw me through the glass door.’

The head tilted further. ‘Did your voracious reading happen to include Sherlock Holmes , by any chance?’

‘It might have done,’ I admitted, slightly ashamed. This was Jay’s house. He was perfectly entitled to spend his time however he wanted, and it was none of my business whether he’d been awake or asleep. ‘Anyway. I’d better go.’

Jay laughed. ‘Oh stay and have a cup of coffee or something. You’re here now and I’ve blown my cover as a brooding hero by answering the door wearing a onesie and slipper socks, haven’t I?’

Feeling slightly more cheerful, I sat down on the sofa. ‘I think you rather shot the brooding hero down when you mentioned watching Netflix, eating crisps and scratching yourself.’ I stopped myself from going on to mention that, anyway, I knew he was gay.

‘True. Can’t, somehow, imagine Mr Darcy rattling about Pemberley dressed like an overgrown nine-year-old whilst filling his face with cheese and onion.’ Jay put the kettle on the Aga and spooned coffee out of a labelled jar into two mugs. ‘Anyway. How’s life up at the House? Have you found those diaries yet?’

Oh God. I’d forgotten that I’d mentioned the diaries. Lady Tanith didn’t want her sons to know about them until she’d had chance to ‘vet’ them first. ‘Er. No. I’m beginning to think they’re mythical.’

‘So you’re still cataloguing? How’s that going?’ He leaned back against the rail of the Aga and looked at me. I found that I was trying to pinpoint his resemblance to Hugo and failing. Jay certainly didn’t look nine years older than his brother. Perhaps… perhaps Oswald had been Jasper’s father? But Richard was Hugo’s? I tried to remember everything I’d ever gleaned about precedence of inheritance, and whether the age gap between the brothers was sufficient to mean that Jasper had been born around the time that Oswald died. ‘I’m sorry, was it a difficult question?’

‘Oh, no, sorry. I was… thinking. Yes, still cataloguing. It’s going to take me years at this rate, if Lady Tanith doesn’t throw me out on my ear first, but I don’t think she will because the cat seems to like me.’

‘The Master? Yes, he likes me too.’

‘Clearly he’s an impeccable judge of character then,’ I said, and it came out more sarcastically than I meant it to.

‘Ah, I’m not so bad.’ The coffee was made, and Jay and I sat side by side on the couch to drink it. ‘Compared to most people round here, anyway. Have you met Mrs Compton?’

‘Oh yes. And you’re right. She makes Caligula look like a friendly and polite citizen.’

‘She’s my next-door neighbour. No wonder she adores Lady Tanith; they were clearly both cast from the same mould. I keep waiting for the evil to seep through the dividing wall, like damp.’

We sipped our coffee. I looked sideways at Jay, who, despite a fair amount of static resistance, had crossed one leg over the other. His upper sock was trailing, his sleeves were up around his elbows and his tattoo was bold along the inside of his wrist.

I had to say something.

‘Does the tattoo – does it mean something?’

The mug stopped moving. The trailing sock went still. ‘Yes.’ Jay hardly lifted his mouth from the mug to speak, so the word was echoey. ‘Yes, it does.’

Well, being gay wasn’t something to be ashamed of, was it? I mean, unless you were Lady Tanith, of course.

‘Is it, like, something to do with Pride?’ It was the best way I could think of to let him know that I knew about him, and I was rather smug about the subtlety with which I introduced the subject.

Coffee slopped down his fleecy legs. ‘What? No!’

‘I’m sorry. I know I’m not supposed to know, and I haven’t said anything, only Hugo got a bit – emotional, and he told me.’

Jay was staring at me, eyes huge. The coffee stain was spreading along his knee and the mug was still at an acute angle that meant more spillage wasn’t out of the question. ‘What the hell? I mean, what can Hugo possibly have to say about me ?’

I stared back. ‘I know there’s an age gap, but he’s still your brother.’

Jay stood up now. His socks meant he slid a small circle on the floor, like an agitated dog trying to escape a bee. ‘No he isn’t! I’m sure I would have noticed.’

Something in my chest fell, like a suitcase from a wardrobe. ‘He’s not? You aren’t Jasper?’

‘Of course I’m not bloody Jasper! Jasper lives three houses down, but he spends most of his time in London! Why would you think I was Jasper?’

I tried to remember how I’d rationalised it all to myself. ‘You said they call you Jay?’ was the best I could come up with.

Jay crouched down in front of me. The fleecy onesie bagged just about everywhere it was possible for an all-in-one to bag. ‘My name is James,’ he said carefully. ‘James Williford. I am not, nor have I ever been, please God, related to anyone at Templewood.’ His voice shook slightly, I wasn’t sure whether with emotion or whether he was trying not to laugh. ‘Do you think,’ he said, still carefully, ‘that you might have been trying to impose narrative structure onto the randomness of life again?’

‘It seemed logical,’ I muttered into my mug, trying not to look at his face, where amusement was definitely winning out. ‘Jay – Jasper. Garden design. And I thought the tattoo might be some kind of gay symbol.’

Jay rubbed at his wrist and pulled his sleeve down to cover the image of those bursting flowers. ‘Jasper’s gay?’ he asked. ‘Well, that certainly explains a lot.’

‘Only Lady Tanith doesn’t want people to know.’

‘I bet she doesn’t.’ Jay had his eyes screwed up, as though he was trying to reframe the way he saw me. ‘So you’ve been going along all this time, thinking that I was part of that, quite frankly, lunatic set-up over at the house? Is that why you talked to me? Is that why you let me show you around the gardens?’

‘What?’

‘Well, you’ve been hanging around outside a lot. Then there was the night it rained and we met in the icehouse, and you were very chatty when we talked about gardening. Have you been lurking around trying to befriend me because you thought I was a son of the house?’ Jay put his endangered coffee down on the pine worktop. ‘Because somehow I slotted into your literarily inclined view of how life goes?’

‘No!’ I got to my feet too. It was unpleasant, being suspected of nefarious practices by a man wearing an all-in-one sleepsuit and huge grey socks. ‘I just put two and two together…’

‘…and made eleven…’

‘Yes, maybe. But I only even suspected you might be Jasper the other day. I didn’t want to mention it before because you didn’t seem to want me to know.’

‘I didn’t know ! If I’d thought you thought I was Hugo’s brother I would have disabused you of that little notion straight away,’ Jay said, heatedly. ‘So you went round the gardens with me, thinking that I was Jasper? And not saying anything?’

‘How could I? There wasn’t much of an opportunity to bring it up, when you were quizzing me about the bus and Jude and things like that. And anyway, I thought I wasn’t supposed to know and that you were keeping quiet about your family connections,’ I finished, and put the coffee mug down next to his, only harder. ‘And I resent your implication that I would only talk to you because I thought you were Hugo’s brother.’

With that I swept my way out of the kitchen and, after a brief tussle with the front door, out onto the green. Jay made no attempt to follow me and I wasn’t surprised. Mostly, because I didn’t think he would want to be seen out in public wearing that terrifying outfit, and also because I could see his point of view.

By my own admission I’d shown that I had half-hearted designs on Hugo and then told Jay that I had found out something that had put me off him. If I had thought he was Jasper, particularly before I knew Jasper to be gay – would I have rewritten the story? Would I have decided that my lot was to marry the elder son, not to inherit, but to enjoy the family wealth and background?

I could see how Jay might think so. But it wasn’t true! The thought rankled. It wasn’t fair either, to assume that I was – in the words of Mrs Compton – a ‘gold digger’. All right, I may have come here in the first place with a lot of novel-inspired assumptions and conclusions but I’d put those aside, hadn’t I? I’d found out for myself that life wasn’t what books had led me to believe it would be, with its meet-cutes and its happy endings.

So, angry with myself, but even angrier with Jay, I stamped my way back across the green, still silent in the mist, and back to the house.