Chapter Two
“How much?” James said, as I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes. “A serving is thirty grams.”
He put the kitchen scales down in front of me, but I didn’t use them; I already knew what thirty grams looked like. It was a tiny bite of breakfast.
I put a few back in the packet.
“Now you’ve had your fingers all over them,” he said. Well, I was the only person who ate them. He watched closely as I poured the milk, lest I got greedy with that as well.
“Don’t forget they’re dropping off my dry cleaning today,” he said, as he stuffed toast into his mouth and headed for the door. Before he left, he looked back at me. “You should get your glands checked,” he said. “You’re putting on weight like nobody’s business.”
For all the chips, nuggets, and fish fingers James shoveled down his neck, he hardly ever put on a pound; he was almost as thin as when we first met.
The only signs of the passing of twenty years were a few gray hairs and a sightly receding hairline.
Otherwise, he had the same smooth complexion, the same bright blue eyes, and the same pointy face, although more and more I was thinking he looked fox-like.
I didn’t top my cornflakes up immediately after he’d gone. I’d fallen for that before, taking out forbidden snacks as soon as the door slammed, only for him to return minutes later and catch me, mid-Monster Munch.
He nearly tore the house apart looking for more. He ripped open the kitchen cupboards and cabinets, he yanked a drawer right out and cutlery scattered across the floor. Then he went into the lounge, where he pulled the door on the dresser so hard, he damaged the hinges.
“Where is it?” he shouted at me.
“There isn’t any more,” I whimpered.
“Tell the truth, Daisy!” he yelled.
“I am! Grocery delivery brought it by mistake and I didn’t tell them.”
He calmed down after that and collected his things to leave again. “I’m only doing it for your sake,” he said, as he picked his keys up. “You know that, don’t you? The doctor told you not to eat that stuff.”
The doctor didn’t say that as such. It was just a generalized comment about a balanced diet, many years ago, when it mattered.
So, before I indulged in more cornflakes, I watched from the window as he went to the garage, then drove away in his Audi. Then I ate them there, keeping an eye out in case he came back.
Later, I would eat a bag of Monster Munch—of course there was more! I had a hiding place that James knew nothing about.
As luck would have it, the dry cleaning arrived while I was still eating my forbidden flakes, only a few minutes after James left; he must have passed the van on the road. I carried it upstairs, but instead of hanging it in the wardrobe, I took it to my sewing room and sat down at the table there.
A lot of girls these days don’t learn, or don’t like, to sew.
When I was growing up with my make-do-and-mend mother, I preferred foraging, which was another area of my mum’s expertise.
We’d spend long afternoons out in the fields and forest, picking bits and pieces to augment our meals with.
I could confidently eat my way through a British hedgerow.
But I didn’t like sewing: learning to attach a button, darn a hole, outfit your secondhand Sindys with garments made from outgrown clothes that were already hand-me-downs themselves. And have your playmates recognize their own discarded apparel on my secondhand Sindy dolls.
Sometimes people would bring us material that would otherwise have been thrown away. They’d hand it to my mum saying, “I know you work miracles with fabric, Lorna, so I thought you might like this.” It saved them the trip to get rid of it.
If my mother resented being used as the local recycling center, she never said so, not even the time it led to a flea infestation.
She’d bring whatever they had donated into the house, hold it up to the light, and say, “Now, what shall we make with this, Daisy Daydream? A nice sun hat?”—to a particularly threadbare floral duvet set with little left of it.
“A skirt?”—to a rich, flowing pair of russet curtains.
I hated to wear her homemade creations. I was once caught out in a pinafore, reincarnated as a waistcoat and skirt, and another time was spotted wearing next door’s old curtains as a T-shirt and shorts combo.
But where I walked steeped in shame, my mother used to wear her creations with pride.
“In years ahead, Daisy,” she’d say to me, “people will envy us for the riches we can make from a few old rags.”
These days, now that I can walk into any shop and buy whatever I want, I enjoy sewing.
It takes me back to evenings with my mum, cutting and stitching, pinning and patterning, chatting about school—mine or hers, we went to the same one—with Radio 2 in the background.
After she died, I started wearing the clothes we had made again; they reminded me of her.
Where before I only saw shame in wearing my schoolmates’ castoffs, now I appreciated the skill that went into repurposing them.
People wondered if I might leave the village after my mum died.
I was generally ostracized there, due to an incident some years before, but I meant to go on living in the place I was born and raised in and where my ancestors, for centuries before me, had lived.
So, I stayed and I walked out in the clothes made of their own discarded items and I felt their eyes following me, and I felt hostility and I carried on.
Now, James hated me to wear anything that cost less than ￡1,000 in public.
If a garment didn’t have a designer label on it, if it hadn’t been modeled by an A-list celebrity, if it didn’t cost at least as much as some people’s monthly income, it wasn’t good enough for him.
While I couldn’t entirely avoid the designer clothes, I wreaked havoc with my accessories.
As we headed out to a networking event, I’d often risk his wrath by draping myself in something he last saw protecting our privacy in a front-facing window.
I liked to see how long it was until he noticed.
And I think every girl should learn to sew, not because I think every girl ought to be out wearing her neighbors’ old bed linen, but because if you can’t sew, how are you going to do this:
I carefully unpicked the seams on James’s shirt.
Then, with the precision of a master tailor, began to sew them back up, just a tiny bit tighter.
I would enjoy seeing his discomfort later, as the material strained in all the wrong places and he tried to compensate for it by standing up straight and sucking his stomach in.
Let’s see which of us needs to get their glands checked.
I stitched away, daydreaming about my plans for James. When he shuffled off this mortal coil, it had to look like an accident. He is a lot bigger than me and I wouldn’t be able to move the body, so I would have to raise the alarm and have the corpse taken away for me, no hard questions asked.
So hard was I concentrating, I nearly jumped out of my skin when the big bell, from the main door, rang. I opened a window and looked down into the driveway. Mrs. Billings was standing outside—it was gone ten o’clock!
“Cooee!” she shouted, waving up at me. “I forgot my key!”
James doesn’t know I’ve given her a key and he wouldn’t approve, but I’d known Mrs. Billings all my life and she had one to our old house in the village, for emergencies, so I gave her one when I moved here.
It didn’t seem right not to, and anyway, I thought it would be handy in case I was out when she came to clean. But, it transpired, I was never out.
“I’ll be down now,” I said. Then I scrambled for some clothes—shop-bought jeans and T-shirt for now—and ran down the grand staircase, across the regal entrance hall, passing the partial Elizabethan suit of armor and the family tree with just James’s and my names at the top.
It had replaced an ancient tree, started by the branch of the family that came before me, the Penneys.
Their names had cascaded down from the founding marriage in the fourteenth century, a long list of Richards, Eleanors, Edwards, Catherines, Margarets, Mabels, Henrys, and the occasional Hugo, to the final Lord Ashbury, the last of the direct line, who died when I was at school.
When James installed the new family tree, he bought us our own coat of arms as well, from a company in Nevada. He had it carved and mounted above the front door, and that made me angry: my ancestors, who had built this beautiful house, obliterated and replaced with cheap rubbish.
I was a descendant, but I had no position or power over what happened to Langley Hall. I was from an illegitimate branch who never featured on the tree, in the history books, or at the time of the wealth distribution. I had no claim on the house.
For centuries, Langley Hall, situated just outside the village of Upper Iffley, had been the jewel of the West Country, standing in the middle of its estate, deer grazing on the grounds in front.
Upper Iffley sits on the River Iver, about fifteen minutes’ drive from the town of Tippington, or forty if you’re on the bus, and around an hour from Bristol.
It’s an old, old village, with an entry in the Domesday Book, alongside Lower Iffley, which was deserted during the plague in the fourteenth century so that only Upper Iffley remains.
In the center is a village green with a duck pond.
The church, the pub, and the village shops are huddled around it.
The streets leading haphazardly away from the green are rows of thatched cottages, one of which I grew up in.
Farther out are houses made from stone, with slated roofs, then brick with tiled roofs, becoming progressively more modern, until you reach the new estate on the outskirts of the village.
The people living there are considered foreigners by us locals, but it is still a small village—you can walk the entire perimeter in about half an hour.