My four-week notice period seemed to last no time at all. In a ‘blink and you’d miss it’ moment, I’d had my leaving party, opened the cards and presents from my team – only one vibrator, I noted, the fitters were losing their touch – and had packed up everything I wanted to take from my little house.
Grant and Jenna were standing on the doorstep, practically with their faces pressed against the window, waiting for the keys the day I moved out.
‘Our first proper home together,’ Jenna said. They’d come over on the motorbike – ‘the van’s coming later’ – so she was turning a few heads in her leathers. I could see Mrs Next Door Right already preparing the indignation that a pair of Hell’s Angels were moving in to lower the neighbourhood. ‘I can’t wait.’
Grant had taken her hand. ‘I should carry you over the threshold,’ he said, and, laughing, did so. I tried not to remember him refusing to even attempt to lift me over the doorstep on our wedding day, despite Mum trying to encourage him. Even now, I still felt little pricks of resentment about the way he was so different with Jenna, but I stifled them. Jenna was lovely and bubbly and kind and she loved him, and her mental health seemed so much better now. Even Max remarked on the fact that she had recovered more since reuniting with Grant than she had during the months of therapy after the split with her abusive boyfriend. Grant was maintaining the ‘amnesia’ story and the wedding planning was going as well as could be expected, with Jenna’s ability to change her mind about the entire colour scheme every half hour. He was good for her. The fact that his redeeming factors hadn’t been enough for me shouldn’t enter into it. This wasn’t my relationship.
For appearances’ sake and because I didn’t want to seem a pushover, I moved all my stuff into my bedroom at Hatherleigh Hall. The fact that I never slept in it, because I spent every night with Max, was neither here nor there. But it did provide the perfect place for the piles of paper and my less-flattering clothes, plus many of the photographs of Mum and Dad, although I took advantage of Max’s offer to put some of them in the Piano Room and displayed their wedding photograph on the piano, along with Max’s parents.
Winter arrived. Max had been right, it was cold in the house. I could see my breath in most of the hallways. To try to preserve the fabric of the house, Max had to run heating, but Queen Anne windows didn’t keep much heat in, and Elizabethan walls didn’t provide as much protection against the weather as they probably had done when they were built. So we spent a lot of time in the study with a radiator, Max writing whilst I sorted, made notes, tried to keep him going with frequent cups of tea and coffee and carried on sifting through the paperwork Alethia had left. Our forays into the main house were usually limited to dashing along corridors in search of the source of mystery noises which Max suspected to be rats in the walls or things falling off other things, usually plaster off walls.
I began to learn that a house like Hatherleigh Hall wasn’t just a spread in a lifestyle magazine. It was a whole way of life, even if part of that way was rodent-repelling or attempts to restick eighteenth-century wallcoverings. It was nerve-shredding and expensive, but there was a huge amount of fun to be had too.
Only a skeleton staff came in over winter. I got used to coming across Daisy and her hoover in random rooms, and we hid from Mrs P twice a week when she came in to tidy the flat. She was, according to Max, very prone to telling long stories laden with doom and gloom which prophesied every kind of bad end you could imagine and could, apparently, have provoked a case of depression in Mr Tumble. So we kept out of her way, whilst I quietly speculated as to whether she could be related to Sheila. When Max was at the university, I dealt with various admin tasks, either generated by the house itself or by Max’s increasingly frantic attempts to write the Fortune House book whilst planning his psychology book and sorting out lectures. I got used to switching from filling in forms for Public Liability Insurance for the icehouse to searching online for a copy of Harry Price’s biography.
‘Well.’ Max pushed his chair away from the desk. ‘That’s the main body of the book about done. All I need now is a cracking ending to wrap it all up, and to sort the illustrations out.’ The Haunting of Fortune House was being published by his university, who were hoping he’d write what they called a ‘proper book’ next. The Psychology of Ghost Hunting was in the ‘preparation’ stages, apparently, which seemed to mean that Max had written the title down somewhere.
‘What sort of cracking ending do you have in mind?’ I turned away from the papers I was still sorting through. Alethia had kept some interesting recipes and I’d been extracting them in the hope that we could use a few in the café next year. The more acceptable ones, obviously, I didn’t think the visitors to Hatherleigh Hall would be particularly entranced by Tripe and Parsley Stew. I was still searching for the recipe for the famed parkin.
‘I’ve worked in chronological order.’ Max swung the chair back on its two rear legs and, somewhere, Sheraton whirled in his grave. ‘First stories of ghost sightings or experiences through to present-day explosions and body finding. I thought I’d finish off with what we’ve got so far on the identification of the body – that it could be John, from all the evidence we’ve got. I’ll leave the cause of death as an accident, though, no need to drag the family name through the mud when we have no proof. And now the site is cleared, I thought we could take a run out to get some final photos, give the place the once over.’
‘That sounds nice,’ I said, looking out of the window at the leaden sky and outlines of trees reduced to dark silhouettes. ‘Can we wait until July?’
‘I was thinking tomorrow?’ He grinned. ‘We could take a picnic? Jenna said she and Grant may come over, we could all go up there together. She’s still trying to help him recover his memories, you know.’
‘If they start to surface, I volunteer to be the one to bash them straight back in again.’ I removed another envelope that had had illegible notes scrawled on it in pencil. ‘Actually, a picnic on the moors sounds rather good. As long as it doesn’t snow and trap us all up there. I’ve seen those films. We’d end up eating each other, or there’d be a werewolf. Or a serial killer.’
‘Alice, has anyone ever told you that you have an overactive imagination?’
‘I think you mentioned it, last night.’ I wiggled my eyebrows at him.
‘Oh yes, so I did.’ He waggled right back. The chair legs creaked, and I had a moment of wondering whether you were allowed to fix antiques with a couple of screws and some superglue. Nothing expressed the divide in our upbringing like the casual way Max treated things that I dared not even dust. ‘Anyway, Mrs P will do us a hamper and Jen said she’d bake some bits and bring them over.’
I hoped she’d got to grips with my oven. We’d had the occasional midnight phone call from either a panic-stricken Jenna or a laconically unconcerned Grant about the randomness of my little house. The inability to fully shut the bathroom window and the tendency of the electricity to trip out on windy days had prompted them to ask if I’d mind if they called in some professional builders at their own expense. Strangely, I had not minded at all.
‘I will wear all my jumpers,’ I promised.
‘And…’ Max stood up now, for which both I and, presumably the chair, were grateful. ‘I’ve been thinking. About the Fortune House. More exactly, about that site up there, on the moor.’
‘Mmmm?’ I began tidying the papers I’d been sorting through back into their usual uneven lumps.
‘I was thinking, of, maybe, rebuilding? But not the house as it was, more a proper traditional moorland cottage. There’s a fair bit of land with it. I could turn it into some kind of central location for taking groups of researchers up onto the moors. And then, when it’s not in use, we could have it as a weekend place. What do you think?’
‘A weekend place? When we’ve got—’ I waved a hand at the Hall, where we could have occupied a different room every day of the week and saved an entire floor for ‘the weekend’.
‘Well, yes, but this house is work, isn’t it? At least, that’s how it feels to me. It’s like living above the shop. I thought it might be nice to have somewhere else to go. Somewhere a bit less—’ he copied me and waved a hand, ‘flamboyant.’
‘Well, I…’
‘And I thought you might like somewhere to be able to get away. And study.’
It felt as though ice had now begun to form down my spine. Part of me wondered if this was shock of some kind, or just the cold draught that tended to creep in under the door as the house cooled. ‘Study?’
‘You still want to be a veterinary nurse, don’t you?’
Now I nearly fell over, as though the draught contained some kind of paralysing agent. I’d mentioned it to him once. Once. And he’d remembered. ‘Veterinary nurse?’ The words tumbled out of my open mouth.
Max came over and put both hands on my shoulders. ‘If you repeat everything I say, this conversation is going to take a lifetime.’ He kissed my hair. ‘But, since we’ve actually and hopefully got a lifetime, I’ll finish my bit and then you can repeat as much as you need to. Yes. I want to build a cottage on the site of the Fortune House, and we can do what we want with it. Rent it as a holiday cottage, crayon all over the outside, blow it up, whatever. Only, no, not the blowing up thing, I don’t think the police can stand another detonation up there. Okay, it’s your turn now. Oh no, one thing more, I nearly forgot. I picked up some of the information from Askham Bryan college on their Foundation Degree in Veterinary Nursing the other day. It’s not that far from here,’ he added.
‘Max, I…’
‘Well, I’m not going to be writing books forever, am I? It just feels like it at the moment,’ he finished, with a decidedly glum note to his voice. ‘You can’t always be my attractive assistant, you need to do something for you.’
‘Oh.’ I had to step back away from him now. This was… actually, I didn’t know what it was. Too much. It felt like too much. ‘Max, I don’t know.’ I turned away and started tapping the edges of the papers, trying to make some kind of neatness out of chaos. Did I still want to be a veterinary nurse? I mean, yes, on the one hand, I did. On the other – I was no longer the sixteen-year-old ingenue with the world just opening up to her. Maybe I should know my limitations and stick to admin. Admin stayed where you put it. Apart from this pile of paper, which kept trying to demonstrate that gravity was omnipotent.
‘You can do anything you want, Alice.’ Max sounded very serious now. All the laughter and teasing had gone from his voice. ‘Be anything.’
‘Except that I’ve had thirty-four years of being me and half of that has been spent on spreadsheets, timetables and window fitters. It’s a bit late to be an astronaut.’
‘You’d had a lot of years working for the window people. You threw all that over to come here.’ He was looking at me with a very direct, dark look. Challenging me. I was quite unused to the feeling, normally everyone did what I said. ‘I know this place is hardly the space shuttle, but it’s still a change. You did it once, you can do it again.’ He picked up a massive magazine-like sheaf of paper and added it to my current pile. ‘I’ll put this here. It’s up to you what you do with it.’
‘I came here because you needed me. And you promised me an attractive remuneration package.’ I carefully kept my eyes away from the brochure.
‘Perhaps, but I am sure that there are fluffy animals out there who need you too.’ Max walked to the door. ‘Plus, and I hate to say this, attractive as my package is, you need to earn your own money.’ Then he went out, quietly closing the door and sending all the single sheets of paper from my pile dancing and flirting.
The horrifying heat and redness hadn’t been in evidence quite so much in recent days. Not only because it was cold and my body kept all its heat for necessary functions, but also because having Max around a lot of the time meant that my initial crush on him had died down to something more manageable. It’s hard to have a crush on someone you’ve seen fleeing down a corridor in the middle of the night towards the toilet, or peeling off his socks to stare morosely at feet that had been in soggy boots all day. But now the heat came back. It prickled my armpits and the back of my neck, then made its way round to fry my cheeks.
I hadn’t thought of needing to bring money in. Me, Alice, who usually thought of everything! I’d been seduced by, well, yes, by Max, but by the whole lifestyle of the big house. Even though I knew he worked hard to keep the fabric of the place going, I’d been happily tootling about being his ‘assistant’. Working on ideas for making the house earn its own keep more profitably to be sure, but still. Max loved teaching psychology and it gave him a wonderful excuse to indulge in his ghost-hunting passions, but even so, it hardly brought in enough to keep us in wall plaster and damp proofing.
The door opened again. Max and I looked at one another and then we both said ‘sorry’ at the same time.
‘Why are you sorry?’ He was balancing two mugs of coffee, one in each fist and trying to sidle past the spreading paper pile without spillage.
I explained my thinking. ‘I never intended to just sit here and take money from the estate,’ I said, with my cheeks still pulsing with blood. ‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘And I didn’t mean that you had to go out and earn money to support this place.’ He put a mug down in front of me, where it formed a small brown puddle on the ‘tripe and parsley’ recipe, which was probably the best use for it. ‘I only realised how it may have come across when I got into the kitchen. I meant that you should have money that isn’t dependent on me. Obviously you’ll be getting a salary for all the work you’re doing on the books, and helping me and everything, but I thought–’ Max stared down at where the ink was running into the spilled coffee. ‘I thought it might be nice for you to have a chance at doing what you’ve always wanted.’
‘I’ve always done admin,’ I said, slightly weakly.
‘But you haven’t always wanted to do admin, have you? And – and I know that you’d hate to feel dependent on me, well, on the estate, for money. You want your own career. So you feel secure.’
‘I’ve got the rent from my house.’ I realised, as I said it, that this was also slightly contingent upon Max, with it being his sister renting it, and how hard it may be to re-let if they left.
‘What I really thought was it’s what you’ve always wanted to do, be a veterinary nurse.’ Max propped himself against the side of the desk. ‘Why not train now? Then you’ll always have that qualification. Once you’ve got to the bottom of Alethia’s pile, obviously. There’s a vet on the estate who will take you on for your training, I’m sure, and running this place—’ he jerked his chin at the walls, ‘isn’t really a full-time job, it ticks over nicely. Maybe, in a few years, we could start thinking about opening more than weekends and for weddings, but that might be something for the next generation…’ He stopped talking, swallowed coffee and then coughed most of it back up over his shirt, whilst going purple.
I watched, dispassionately, for a moment until he regained his breath and stopped gasping. ‘Or…’ he finally managed, ‘it can go to the National Trust. I’m not forcing any child of mine to take it on.’
He was thinking of the future. A future with me. And our possible children. It came as something of a shock, even though I’d had no reason to doubt him. Hatherleigh Hall could be my future. That was a big thing. ‘Coffee is still coming out of your nose,’ I observed.
‘I know. I think I must have leaky valves or something. But you don’t object, in principle?’ He wiped his nose on a piece of rag that he dragged out of his pocket. It looked as though it had previously been used to clean paintbrushes.
‘To the idea of making this place profitable? No, I think it’s a great idea.’ I managed to drink coffee whilst keeping my eye on him. If he was going to backtrack, I wanted a clear and cogent plan for no misunderstandings.
‘That, and there being another generation,’ said Max. ‘Only, I’d really like children. They don’t have to inherit all this, and they most certainly do not have to go to boarding bloody school. But I thought I’d run the general idea past you, in case you need to do a Rebecca and bow out gracefully.’
I sipped again. Grant’s refusal to try for a baby had made me cautious. Whilst I had known that Max wanted children, I wasn’t quite as sure of my own position nowadays. But then I looked at him, and wilted crush notwithstanding, and ignoring the streaming eyes and nose, he had the bone structure and leggy elegance of aristocratic genes. He had kindness and concern for others, patience and tolerance, and he hadn’t been lying about being sensational in bed either. ‘Well,’ I said, mouth sideways on my mug. ‘We could give it a try, I suppose.’
‘I’ll get you a ring and everything. We’ll do it properly.’ He was still trying to mop coffee from his shirt. ‘It’s sort of expected, you see.’
‘Are you proposing to me? Or are we planning some kind of business merger?’ I still wasn’t quite sure what to feel. Amusement was winning out at the moment.
‘I can’t – I mean, I’m not really sure how one does this sort of thing. No practice, you see.’ Max finally stopped snorting and blowing. ‘If you’d like a bit more romance, then I could go and fill the Blue Room with petals and borrow Jen’s music again.’
‘No, no.’ I was laughing now. Properly laughing. It was a laugh that let go of a lot of the past. ‘No, this is fine. Practicality is far more my sort of thing, Max. All the romance in the world won’t make a dodgy proposition any less odd. This is the best way, for both of us, I think.’
‘Is it dodgy?’ He stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket and looked at me directly now. His eyes were red and streaming and yet he had never looked more gorgeous.
‘No.’ I kissed him. ‘Absolutely not. And I will look at the veterinary nurse training information, thank you. I just need to sort out the rest of these papers so you’ve got an end to your book first. One challenge at a time, that’s what I used to tell the window boys. Worry about number fifteen after you’ve got number twelve sorted.’
‘Weirdly specific, but I get your meaning.’ Max kissed me back. ‘By the way, I will propose properly, one day. Flowers, ring, champagne, all that. I just wanted you to have advance warning. So you know that I see this, us, as being something real. Before I embarrassed myself totally, you see.’
‘And coughing up coffee whilst trying to ascertain my position on marriage wasn’t embarrassing?’ I rested my forehead against his and tried not to look at the stains.
‘Mortally. But it’s you, Alice. I don’t have to be something I’m not, with you. You understand. You see somehow, what, and I hesitate to say this because it does make my dating history sound far more extensive than it was, what my previous girlfriends didn’t. That Hatherleigh Hall isn’t just somewhere stylish to live, it’s a duty and obligation. It’s a bit like…’ He trailed off and stared around the room, obviously searching for a suitable metaphor.
‘It’s like an old faithful pet.’ I helped him out. ‘That you owe it to, to keep in as good condition as you can, for as long as you can.’ Then I gave him a stern look. ‘Just don’t start comparing it with mating dogs, because I already know about your tendency to fall back several hundred years in your ancestry whenever animals are mentioned.’
I picked up the papers to try to shove another armful back, and an envelope fell out. It was very thin, but of the thick kind of parchment that speaks of Importance and Solicitors. I opened it without really thinking.
‘Yes, I think we’ve rather covered that one.’ Max looked down at the envelope. ‘What’s that?’
‘I think it’s Mrs Fortune’s will. A copy of it, anyway.’ I unfolded the paper. ‘Yes. Look. It’s her leaving everything to Alethia. “To my daughter, Alethia Ermintrude Fortune, I leave and bequeath my entire estate.” That’s all straightforward, anyway.’
Max read over my shoulder. ‘No mention of John. Not even a token bequest.’
Now we both glanced up and met one another’s eye. ‘That’s reasonably conclusive,’ I said. ‘Nothing left in trust in case he came back from London? No money put aside for him?’
‘She knew he was dead, didn’t she?’ Max went over to the window and looked out over the dark acres. The night was so still and cold, I could almost hear the ice forming on the lake. ‘It sounds definite.’
‘Ghosts.’ I went and stood next to him, and he curved his arm around me as though he’d been doing it forever. ‘Maybe whatever was left of him haunted that house?’ I put my head on Max’s shoulder. There was a lovely feeling of permanence coming from him, but it was largely overpowered by the smell of coffee from his shirt.
‘What really happened?’ Max’s eyes were raking the tree-dotted fields. I wondered whether he was still looking for the shade of his mother out there.
‘Short of finding a written confession amongst all that lot, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’ I bumped my head against him gently, to let him know that I’d noticed his introspection. ‘But it wasn’t ghosts. You know that really, don’t you? Just weird stuff and brain farts and misperceptions. There are no ghosts, Max.’
He sighed and gave me a little squeeze. ‘I know. At least, I think I know. Jenna talking about our mother was just a small child not being able to separate dream and memory from reality. The dead don’t come back, do they, Alice?’
I thought of my mum and dad. Of all the hospital appointments, the treatments which made them feel worse, the scheduling of drugs and doctors, and the pain. ‘I think, maybe, they deserve a rest,’ I said. ‘Not to be wandering about after they’ve gone. If they know they did a good job while they were alive, then that’s it. And I’m sure your mother knew she’d done a good job with you and Jenna – it may have been cut a bit short by the accident, but she’d made you resilient and healthy and able to go on without her.’ I put my hand on his cheek. ‘We have to let them go,’ I whispered.
Max’s head slumped forward for a moment. Then he took a deep breath. ‘Yes. You’re right, of course you are.’ He turned round. ‘My wonderful, wonderful Alice. Sensible and gorgeous and practical and mine.’ He paused for a minute, looking into my eyes. ‘Sorry. Did that sound a bit possessive and weird?’
His eyes were amazing. Huge and even darker than the night encroaching against the windows, with little tips of reflections from the light. ‘Perhaps a little bit.’ I stretched myself against him. ‘But not necessarily in a bad way.’