Chapter Eight
Sitting on her bed, Clem looked around morosely. It was getting dark, she was freezing and she was hungry. She had started to unpack earlier, but as the light faded she’d given up. This was not how she had planned things. All in all, her first day had been a disaster. Moira had been friendly and the deer up on the hill had been magical, but everything else had been a screw up. Nick was itching to sell this place and so far Clem hadn’t found a good reason to keep it. Except for all the people up here who relied on it.
She shone her torch on the picture frame by her bed and, kissing her fingers, touched the faces of her mother and father.
‘I’ve screwed up again, Da. I was rude to an old lady, upset a woman by casually mentioning that I might make her redundant, and broke the electrics. I’m just dragging that albatross from London to Scotland. I’m the albatross, Da. It’s not other people, it’s me.’
Sighing deeply, she’d give anything to hear his gentle replies, for her mother to come through with a cup of hot chocolate.
Finally, she couldn’t stand the silence or her loud gloomy thoughts anymore and she patted around the bed for her phone. Calling Ari for the third time that day, she added pestering Ari to her list of failures.
‘Fabulous. I was just about to call you. How’s it going?’
Clem was about to download but could hear the tiredness in Ari’s voice.
‘You first. You sound fed up?’
Ari proceeded to tell her about a site visit she had been on with the developers, and a tour of the local town.
‘I called Fanshawe and it looks like our uncle fixed everything by simply dumping people like rubbish bags. Oh and your staff up there? Totally uncovered. It’s a really lovely thing that your Miss Farano has been doing, but it means the staff have no pension rights, no work rights, no insurance policies in place to protect them. Nothing. We’re going to have to bring them back into the fold and try and sort out the mess retrospectively.’
‘Miss Farano said that David was looking to sell the castle?’
‘I can see why. The bills used to be huge for the place. What do you think? Should we sell it?’
Clem tried to look around in the dark and felt very uncharitable towards the castle.
‘Gut feeling. Yes. This place has money pit carved into every stone. But give me a few days.’
‘You sound fed up as well?’
Clem decided not to mention what a bitch the housekeeper was and made light of the cold and the dark, claiming it was a great adventure. If she said it enough times, she might even convince herself.
‘Tell you what, why don’t you run a bath? There may be some hot water left in the cistern. That’ll warm your bones, then snuggle down and binge-watch a boxset on your iPad? What about The Tudors, then you can cheer yourself up by pointing out all the costume errors?’
Clem laughed. It was a family joke that even as a little girl Clem would pay more attention to the costumes than the acting. When Darcy dived into the lake, her mother and sisters nudged each other, giggling, her father looked alarmed at their silliness and Clem remonstrated loudly that the cameraman hadn’t spent long enough zoomed in on his cuffs. This had set the whole family off in gales of laughter.
As she got older, she would spend her weekends in the museums, her nose pressed up against the glass, studying seams and stiches. The third time that she brought a magnifying glass, one of the curators was so charmed that they offered her a Saturday job. It was just basic stuff at the beginning, but Clem was in her element, and by the time she was eighteen she was allowed to work alongside the garment curators. During her lunch hour, she would belt across London and sit in the park by Central Saint Martins, the prestigious design school. She would blend in with the students and gradually they just assumed she was one of them and they would chat about lectures and assignments. Clem soaked it all up and felt that these were the best days of her life.
‘The Tudors would just wind me up at the moment.’
Ari suggested a boxset loosely based on Mary Queen of Scots, as she knew that would provoke her sister.
‘The zips! Zips! You monster, how could you remind me? I think I’ll watch The Queen instead. The costumes are spot-on, although I wish they’d spend more time on Princess Margaret. Her clothes!’
‘Yeah, funny that in a show called The Queen they choose to focus on her, rather than her annoying little sister.’
Both girls were now laughing loudly, reminiscing about various costume faux-pas. Finally, they hung up and Clem switched her torch back on. Her phone buzzed and she saw a text from Ari.
Thanks I needed that. Love you.
Clem replied quickly and then smiled to herself. Grabbing the torch, she walked gingerly towards the bathroom, where she was delighted to discover steaming hot water flowing from the tap. The noise of the water filled the silence of the castle.
Returning to her suitcases, she began to open them, looking for her wash bag and was thrilled to find some woolly socks, a hot water bottle, a packet of biscuits and a note from Aster ‘Just in case’. Blessing her youngest sister, she filled the hot water bottle from the tap and placed it in her bed, and then as the hot tap ran cold, she waited until the bath had reached a bearable temperature and slid into it with a deep and grateful sigh.
As she lay in the bath, her torch sent strange shapes across the wall and she played with her hands, making bunny ears and spiders. She remembered a time when she, Ari, Nick and Paddy were all in the bath. Their mother was telling them a story and their father was illustrating it with hand shadows. It was an old memory and one she hadn’t visited in years. It made her smile, but she realised now that her folks had been making the best of a bad situation. Maybe the money had run out for the electric meter again? As they grew a little older, she and Ari would take turns to put the fifty pence piece in the electric box and turn the dial. They would all clap and laugh as the lights would come on; Clem realised, sadly, it must have meant that for some time before they had been without electricity. Christ, how her parents had struggled. Now here was their daughter up to her pits in piping hot water living in a castle that she sort of owned.
Tomorrow would be a better day. She would follow her parents’ example and find the fun in every bad moment.