Master of the House

I’m twenty-seven and my life is over. Living with my mum in the town that time forgot, back at the paper I did my work experience for. And I hope Károly is having a nice time with that bitch he was shagging behind my back. Fuck him, fuck her, fuck everything.

The morris music mocked me and I stormed away over the grass, intent on hiding out in the car until the prize draw was announced.

‘Lucy! Lucy Miles!’

It took me a moment to work out where the voice was coming from, but eventually I traced it to a bric-a-brac stall, presided over by an old schoolfriend.

‘Jamila. What are you doing in … what’s this place called?’

‘Fossey Bassett,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m teaching at the village school here now, Key Stage Two. I can’t believe it’s you. Haven’t seen you since A levels.’

‘Ahh, Stalag Tylney. I heard they turned it into an academy.’

‘Yeah. Same building, same teachers, same everything, different name.’

‘So how are you?’

We chatted, in-between serving customers with knitted egg cosies and the like, for a good half-hour. I kept my side of the story light, swerving questions by asking plenty of my own. Jamila was engaged to be married to a doctor, still living in Tylney, still seeing a lot of the old crowd.

‘Aren’t you in touch with anyone any more?’ she asked.

‘Nah. I stayed in London during university holidays and then got the gig in Budapest pretty much straight after graduation.’

‘Your mum must have missed you,’ she said, with a sideways look.

‘My mum? Are you kidding? I don’t think she noticed I was gone until I rang her up to ask her to send on some books.’

‘Is she still …?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to ask!’

‘Well, she’s still a tree-hugging hippy, if that was it.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I was going to ask if she still had that cleaning job up at the Hall.’

I stopped, picked up a china dog and examined it minutely, catching a breath.

‘No, no, she quit that years ago. She’s got a stall in Tylney market now. Crystals, tarot cards, all that kind of thing.’

‘Oh, right. Doesn’t she live in Willingham any more?’

‘No, no. She moved about a year after I went to uni. Why?’

‘Well, you’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ Jamila looked painfully furtive. She was never good at discretion.

‘Yes.’

‘You might know something about what’s going on up there … maybe?’

I put the china dog down. My hands were shaking.

‘At … the Hall?’

‘Dad says it’s been leased to somebody. A very rich person, maybe a famous person. And it’s being used for –’ she lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘– something dodgy.’

‘Dodgy? What sort of dodgy?’

‘You don’t know?’ Disappointment weighted her voice.

‘Give me a chance, Jam, I’ve only been back three weeks.’

‘Dad doesn’t know for sure, of course. But he’s heard so many rumours. Drugs, sex, porn, prostitution, all kinds!’

‘What? Are the family still living there?’

‘You knew Lord Lethbridge died last year, right?’

‘No. Shit. No. I had no idea.’

‘Well …’

The tannoy blasted into life, announcing the prize draw.

I cursed under my breath.

‘Sorry, Jam, got to cover this. Are you free for coffee afterwards?’

She shook her head, her dark eyes sad.

‘No, I’ve got house-hunting appointments with Akram. Really sorry. Can we catch up another time?’

‘Sure.’ I grabbed a business card from my handbag and waved it at her. ‘Sorry to be official. Got to dash though.’

I couldn’t think straight. I wrote the draw winner’s name as Sandy when it was Sadie and got all my shorthand symbols mixed up to buggery. I called the Church of England vicar ‘Father’ and dropped a complimentary scone smeared with award-nabbing jam on the grass.

After kicking Kai out of the scoopmobile (aka 2003 model Fiat Cinquecento) in Tylney, I found myself driving over to the other side of town, back out into the Vale. The road wound past field after field of bursting ripe fruit and vegetables, bordered by high green hedges. Pick-Your-Own signs flourished like native plants beside wooden five-barred gates. Every few miles, a half-timbered village punctuated the lushness, all the schools and church halls turned into holiday cottages and second homes while the local families were priced out to Tylney and, ultimately, Birmingham.

In the distance, high blue hills surrounded the fertile basin, a barrier to be crossed if you ever wanted to look beyond the Vale. But some never did. And then some came back.

‘Willingham’, read the black and white sign, then, ‘Best Kept Village 2010’. It was still looking pretty spruce, the green bordered with summer flowers, even the ducks on the pond exceptionally well-groomed. The little flat-roofed bunker where I learned to read and write still functioned as a school, apparently, and a huge banner across the railings proclaimed that Ofsted had rated it Outstanding.

The Feathers was a gastro-pub now and there was a small estate of new-built houses right on the edge of the village, still dusty from construction and with stickers on some of the windows.

Leaving the village, the grass verge on the right gave way to a high red-brick wall, following the road for more than a mile. The Hall. I passed the gated entrance, catching my quick glimpse of the driveway until it bent to the right, cheating the viewer of any sighting of the house itself. The stone stags still stood atop the gatepost pillars and the little lodge was still occupied, judging by its tidy state of repair.

More wall again, yard after yard after yard, bending round with the road until I came upon the river, sparkling and replete with anglers on both banks and then, beyond it, the caravan site where I grew up.