Happily Ever After

Chapter 22

MANDERLEY (AGAIN) – REBECCA, DAPHNE DU MAURIER

The house burned all night. I sat at Jay’s table, fingers wrapped around non-stop mugs of tea and wearing his baggy hoodie and some jogging bottoms that I had to tie up with an old dressing gown cord. Parts of my face stung, despite an evil smelling cream that Jay had found in the back of a cupboard and had liberally smeared onto my skin. But I was clean, I was warm and the worst of the shock was beginning to wear off, particularly now that my lap was being kept extra warm by the presence of The Master. He smelled horribly of smoke and the tip of his tail had a sore patch where it looked as though it could have been scorched, but he blinked up at me happily enough and his weighty presence stopped me from going to the window every few minutes to look out at the glowing sky.

Lady Tanith and Hugo had gone to Jasper’s house. He wasn’t there, but it turned out that the entire village knew where he kept the spare key and had left them to it. I was pretty sure they’d all gone home to mutter about Hugo’s unconventional wear and Lady Tanith’s uncharacteristic silence, but we were all safe. That was what mattered. How much sanity may remain intact was a question for the morning.

Jay occasionally muttered, ‘Hugo and the dresses, eh?’ or shook his head as though trying to rid himself of the sight of his employers in blue velvet and wafty chiffon, but he mostly kept an arm around me as we sat together on the sofa in his kitchen, stroking the cat’s head.

Around dawn I fell into a light sleep, my head on Jay’s shoulder but half-dreams telling me that I was still in a burning building jerked me awake every five minutes. The smell of smoke which lingered around us all, mostly from the cat’s fur, didn’t help. Vigorous cleaning activities gradually replaced the smoke smell with the smell of old fish, and we all stopped coughing quickly enough to realise that smoke inhalation wasn’t going to be a problem.

Then it was morning proper and things couldn’t be put off any longer. Jay and I bundled up in his gardening coats and set out for what remained of Templewood Hall.

The entire library wing was gone, nothing but a pile of rubble with split rafters protruding, like a mouth full of broken teeth. Next to it, the facade of the rest of the front stood, looking wobbly and unsupported. We walked around to the back, which revealed an empty shell, burned away to leave nothing but a few walls, and the remnants of the wing that Hugo and I slept in, still two storeys high but without a roof or any floors. Some tattered panelling jutted into what was left of the hall; cracked and stained black and white tiles still marked the floor. A stone figure lay toppled and headless amid the ruins and outside on the grass stood a few pieces of furniture which the firemen had pulled from the blaze or rescued from the water.

It stank. The whole site smelled of that half-chemical, half-smoke that I’d noticed up in the Yellow Room what felt like a century ago, and the grass surrounding the walls was trodden into mud and ruts where the fire brigade had done their best to save what could be saved.

Hugo and Lady Tanith were there too, standing shell-shocked and wearing borrowed clothing. Hugo had clearly raided his brother’s wardrobe, because he was enveloped in a duster coat and had trainers on his feet. Lady Tanith must have been lent something by one of the villagers, because she was clad in a blue tweed skirt and a pink jumper with an elephant knitted into it.

Jay and I, hand in hand and accompanied by the delicate tread of The Master, went over to where they stood and we all stared.

‘It’s all gone,’ Lady Tanith said faintly, her only acknowledgement of our presence. ‘All of it.’

‘Yes.’ Hugo’s eyes were shadowed with tiredness.

Around us, the fire brigade were rolling up hoses and packing away equipment. Someone had turned off the blue light, at least. They paid us no attention, for which I was grateful.

Lady Tanith turned to me. She looked almost skeletal in this early light, her skin drawn tight over her bones with weariness. The pink jumper did her colouring no favours either. ‘You left the gas fire lit in the library, didn’t you?’

‘No.’ My voice sounded raspy from the smoke and the shouting. ‘The canister was empty, so it wasn’t even on.’

‘Well, it must have been you,’ she snapped. One of the firemen walked past, arms full of something that dripped, and she grabbed them. ‘Where did it start?’ Lady Tanith asked, with no preamble such as ‘thank you for your help’.

The firefighter, who looked about seventeen and had soot smudges on both cheeks, sighed. ‘You’re the owner, right? You need to talk to the boss,’ she said. ‘I’ll send him on over.’

‘Well, of course it was you,’ Lady Tanith said in my direction, releasing the arm to let the exhausted firefighter carry on her journey across the Somme of lawn. ‘Who else would be stupid and careless enough? I shall be suing, of course.’

I didn’t react. I was too busy trying to stare into what remained of the library to make sure that there was no trace of the diaries left. It didn’t look as though I needed to worry. Anything that was left of any of the books was reduced to single pages or charred covers, everything so water-soaked from the hoses that it was unrecognisable. There was nothing left of Oswald bar a small piece of standing wall from which an iron fixing drooped from one hinge. Lady Tanith was right. It was all gone.

‘At least we rescued the dresses,’ Lady Tanith went on. ‘Hugo, how could you be so ridiculous !’

Hugo gave me a quick glance of agony, and then turned to his mother. ‘I…’ he began but she steamrollered on.

‘Those dresses are priceless . They should have been in fireproof cupboards and protected! When I think of what could have happened… You have Moschino there, you know! And Dior!’

‘Yes,’ he said faintly. ‘I know.’

‘And vintage too! Some of those dresses are irreplaceable! Unique!’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said again. I got another ‘help me’ look over Lady Tanith’s head, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Even your father had the sense to put his dresses away in storage!’ Lady Tanith went on. ‘Incidentally, he had some very good diamonds which would look wonderful with that velvet.’

Hugo’s eyes became enormous and I saw his mouth flail for words. ‘Dad?’ was all he could come out with, and the word was almost lost in the arrival of a brusque, burly man, who’d taken off his fire helmet and looked tired, but In Charge.

‘You the householder?’ He addressed Hugo, who still couldn’t manage more than a squeak.

‘Templewood Hall is mine,’ Lady Tanith said, with dignity.

The firefighter scratched a stubbled chin. ‘Right, love,’ he said, and the fact that this unwarranted mateyness went unchallenged only went to show me how shocked Lady Tanith really was. ‘You’re going to want to talk to your insurance company.’

‘How and where did it start?’ Lady Tanith turned the basilisk stare on me again. ‘ That is the matter of most concern at present.’

‘Best guess right now, in the roof. Looks like candles left alight.’ Scratch, scratch. ‘Course, we won’t know until we do a proper examination, but that’s what we think. Someone left a naked flame up in the attic, rafters caught and it went through the roof space. Good job you had the alarms fitted, but you should really have had a sprinkler system, place that size.’

He wandered off to berate his inferiors, and I looked at Lady Tanith. Something in my eyes must have told her that I knew, because she suddenly went very white.

‘Come on.’ Jay drew me gently aside to let another firefighter pass. ‘Let’s go and sit on the icehouse for a moment. Everyone has a lot to process just now.’

As we walked away, I heard Hugo say, ‘Dad?’ again, still faintly.

Lady Tanith didn’t seem to be able to reply just yet.

Jay and I sat on the humped grass of the icehouse roof, looking out at the activity surrounding Templewood Hall. Tyre marks scored his carefully mown lawns, the bushes and flowers in the bed that concealed the fountain workings had been trodden down where the hoses had attached to the water supply. All the undergrowth that surrounded the house had either been burned to stubs or broken and battered by the weight of water poured into the building, and pools and puddles of it still stood on the earth.

‘What a mess,’ I said.

Jay squeezed me around the shoulders. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘By next summer you’ll never know there was a fire. All the perennials will come back, the grass will recover and the annuals would have died off anyway, come the first frost.’

‘I actually meant the house.’

‘Oh. Yes. Of course you did. Yes. That’s – that’s a bit of a mess too. Sorry. I was just being a gardener there for a minute.’

I smiled. ‘Is that your default then? All about the plants?’

I got another squeeze and a sideways smile. ‘Not always. I can diversify.’ He fiddled with one of his hearing aids. ‘Into surprising areas too. You wait and see.’

The warm flush came up again, welcome in this early morning chill. ‘I shall look forward to it,’ I said.

We stared on. A lump of stone that had been jutting precariously from the side of the west wing fell into the scorched ruins with a sound like resignation.

‘Hugo likes dresses,’ I said, eventually, when we had wrung all the visual potential out of the scene.

‘I gathered,’ Jay said, dryly. ‘And you’re not quite as keen, I take it.’

‘It wasn’t just that.’ I kept my eyes on the rubble-strewn lawn in front of us. ‘Not really.’

‘No. Plus, here’s me swanning in with my charisma and charm.’

‘And that.’ A pause. ‘Do you think I’ll make a good gardener?’

‘I think you will make an excellent gardener.’ Another momentary pressure around my shoulders. ‘You will be fine.’

‘All those hours I spent cataloguing the library.’ I sighed. ‘What a waste of time.’

We sat for a while longer, and then we were joined by Hugo and The Master. Lady Tanith we could see in the distance, berating the fire brigade and directing those of the locals foolish enough to come for a look at what was left of the house. She’d got them humping any saved furniture and goods off towards the village. Poor Jasper was going to come back from wherever he was to find his house full of smoke-scented Regency tables, and his mother.

‘Well,’ Hugo said, carefully spreading his brother’s coat out underneath him and sitting down beside us. ‘Today is turning out to be most surprising.’

He looked at me, sitting with Jay’s arm around me, resting myself comfortably in the crook of his arm, and smiled.

‘What are you going to do, though?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ Hugo said again, ‘it turns out that the house burning to the ground may be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’

‘OK,’ Jay said slowly. ‘We might need a bit more detail on that one.’

‘I take it you know about the…’ Hugo hesitated, rearranging the folds of coat under his leg so as not to have to meet our eyes. ‘The, um, the clothes. Thing.’

‘I gathered.’ Jay didn’t look at Hugo as hard as Hugo wasn’t looking at him. There seemed to be some kind of bloke-communication going on that I was outside of, and it consisted of absolutely not talking about anything, ever.

‘So.’ Hugo cleared his throat, obviously searching for the right words. ‘According to Mother, Dad was… well he had… it was… and apparently he had quite a collection. They’re in storage, somewhere in York. Some are on loan to the V she must have forgotten to extinguish them after this evening’s Oswald-worshipping session. Perhaps the guilt of burning down the house and destroying all her own collection of artefacts had made her see sense. Or perhaps she was actually glad . Perhaps the fire had removed that obligation that she’d felt, to keep him alive in her memory. She had, after all, had a lot of experience of life-changing events and having to start again in different places. Maybe her background might actually have made her more resilient to new beginnings; perhaps knowing that things could change and improve would stand her in good stead here. I’d never really thought of Tanith as adaptable and flexible, but she couldn’t have had the life she’d had without a certain degree of overcoming of stress. I gave a tiny smile. The fire might turn out to be the only way this could ever have ended.

Plus, it had destroyed Oswald’s books, and, Lady Tanith would believe, any chance of finding those diaries. Well, she was right there.

‘We probably won’t need any gardening done for a while,’ Hugo said eventually. I didn’t know whether he was aware of it, but he was stroking his knee now, almost as though he could already feel that velvet or satin or silk beneath his fingers. A museum of historic costume would be Hugo’s idea of heaven, plus he’d be allowed to travel, to actually look at new potential artefacts before he bought them, rather than having to rely on online photos. He would get to meet real people, make new friends. Maybe even meet people with similar interests to himself, eventually, and stop being that lonely little boy unhealthily co-dependent with his mother.

‘That’s fine.’ Jay gave me a small wink. ‘We’re thinking of moving on soon anyway.’

‘Good, good.’ Then Hugo suddenly reached out and caught my hand. ‘You will stay in contact, won’t you?’ I was surprised to see tears in his eyes as he looked at me. ‘I don’t have that many friends, and now you know about… the dresses, I couldn’t bear us to lose sight of one another.’

‘Of course we will.’ I was touched. ‘This has all been…’ I groped for the right words. ‘An experience,’ I finished.

Jay just said, ‘Mate,’ and slapped Hugo’s shoulder. I assumed this was some sort of guy acknowledgement.

‘Plus, we have to keep an eye on you, to make sure that Lady Tanith hasn’t suddenly decided to run amok, because of losing all her things,’ I said, prosaically.

‘She’s not that bad.’ Hugo smiled.

‘She bloody is,’ Jay murmured into my ear.

The cat wandered over from his exploration of some small mouse holes in the turf and his forensic examination of the sore end of his tail, and stuck his nose in my eye. Then the four of us sat back in the dew-damp grass to stare over the ruins of Templewood Hall and contemplate new futures. I leaned against Jay, feeling his reassuring arm around my shoulders, and contentment crept up through my body. I had a future, gardening with Jay. Hugo’s museum would mean freedom for him and even Tanith was free now too. No more Oswald to obsess over. Maybe there could be a winsome retired professor for her to marry somewhere out there?

It didn’t matter. We were all safe, it was a beautiful morning and things were looking up.