Mother and child sat together in a corner and chose a cartoon. Theo watched. In the end, they chose the story of Bobby-X, an ordinary high-school kid who is secretly a ninja spy working for the Company to help stop the evil anarchists before they can destroy innocent children’s lives. He supposed it was quite good, in its way.
Upstairs, a plug was pulled.
Water drained away.
Theo and Kirsty waited in silence.
Helen came downstairs.
She was wearing clean pyjamas and socks. A towel was wrapped expertly around her head.
She took in the room, the cartoon, and at a cry “Aunty!” shuffled over to the child to hold her tight and exclaim how wonderful it was to see her and how she hoped she’d been good at school, good with her mum.
The child scowled, but yes, she’d been good just like everyone wanted her to be…
“Bed!” barked Kirsty.
“But Mum…”
“You’re not going to behave badly in front of Aunt Helen, are you?”
“No, Mum.”
“Bed!”
Mother and daughter hurried away.
Helen sat in the seat that Kirsty had vacated, and examined the half-consumed plate of ham and cheese in front of her. After a while, she reached out, made herself something resembling a sandwich, put it on a napkin and took a careful bite from the corner. The bread was thick and tough, took a long time chewing. She worked, swallowed, laid the napkin back on the table, folded her hands and looked at Theo.
“So,” she said. “We should talk.”
Chapter 56
“Family is everything,” Helen said.
“Family is everything,” whispered Dani Cumali to the winds that shred the ghosts.
“Family is everything,” muttered the father of the man who would be Theo as they severed his hand at the wrist.
“Family never did very much for me,” muses Theo Miller, the real Theo Miller, the one whose grave has no name.
They sit by the fire as Kirsty puts her daughter to bed, and Helen declares again, sacred words to steady her souclass="underline" “Family is everything.”
Her voice, tired, ragged around the edges. Theo wondered how much the words were costing, how much she remembered of the days before the forest, hot baths and this house, or whether she could still remember the smell of urine and puke on the bedroom floor.
After a while she leaned back in her chair, arranging words slowly around ideas, piecing them together as a child might tentatively try some new mathematical formula, or an artist compose with unusual paints. They came slowly at first, then a little faster.
“My son has been poisoning me. He has been… no, that’s not the place to start. I have this condition. My kidneys. Really, I feel absurd when I say it, you always think it’ll be something like the heart that gets you rather than bloody urine. It’s manageable. Not treatable. Just manageable. But after Philip found out—after he started… treating… me, it was…
My friends would visit, people I’ve known since I was… and they’d talk to me in that stupid little voice, that stupid ‘Oh Helen isn’t it lovely yes it’s so lovely you’re so lovely well we’re going now.’ Even though I wasn’t there, even with the drugs, I still knew. They put it in my drink, at first. Sedatives, mostly. Some other things. My son didn’t come to see me. He had people for that.”
A pause, scratching at the skin on the inside of her right arm. It flaked in little white mounds of damp flesh, forming ridges under her nails. If she noticed, she didn’t seem to care.
“Family is everything. I was born into wealth. We were what you would call the landed gentry. My father was a sir, my mother was a ma’am, and we lived in desperate poverty. It was desperate poverty because we had a manor house in Devon, and the upkeep of the place was eighty thousand a year. My father farmed the land nearby; to not farm the land was to let it spoil, and to let it spoil was to destroy the essence of what the land was. What it means to have land. What it meant to our ancestors. My mother worked as a manager at a call centre handling telecoms complaints. Between them they brought in around sixty thousand, which was spent on stopping the roof falling down—and the roof was always falling down—repairing the tractor, paying labour, providing electricity, water and heat for a family home containing seven bedrooms, five receptions, three kitchens, eight bathrooms and a billiards room, though no one enjoyed billiards except me. They took out loans, mortgages, and every few months let visitors come in for a fee, in order to raise a little more cash. But they were very badly organised; they never promoted it properly and never managed to turn the house into a business. Sometimes people turned up to the official open days. Usually people would just drift in at random, assuming that you were living in a public museum. My brothers hated it, and once George even threatened a man with a shotgun, and was arrested and had to be got out by his godfather, who was the magistrate. We couldn’t have afforded the indemnity. If my father had been willing to let someone else do the farming, if he’d not resented the idea of any other kind of work, then perhaps we could have saved something. But quitting wasn’t what men like him were meant to do.
By the time I was sixteen, my older brother was off at university, where he got a 2.2 in economics, and my younger was thinking of joining the army. I knew that we were in trouble, so I’d set up little events—fêtes and open days and trips for the local scouting group—to try and raise some cash. I’d get a few hundred quid too, but it never meant anything. Not in the grand scheme of things.
I tell you this because it’s very important that you understand—we never considered selling the house. Never. And we never went to the pound shop either. Frugality never occurred to us as an option. We still wore the best clothes, attended the best events, ate the finest food. We had no conception of alternatives.
Attempting to run the estate in a more businesslike manner, hosting weddings, conferences, that sort of thing—it wasn’t what you did. The house, the lands, the title. This was why we were born, our purpose, and we would see it all destroyed rather than dream of leaving our home. We felt, I have to tell you, very sorry for ourselves. Surrounded by silverware and the weapons of our grandparents pillaged in colonial wars, my family and myself would very calmly and simply state that we knew precisely how the people on council estates felt, except that they were lucky because they could get emergency corporate sponsorship, and we weren’t eligible.
When I was twenty-three, my father died, and the estate passed to my brother. He moved back immediately—it was his duty—and continued to run it into the ground. It wasn’t ever said that I needed to go, but it was obvious. He was the master now and naturally Mother could remain, but siblings were… well it smacked of something medieval, shall we say. Successors at the dinner table, with opinions…
I moved out, got a job selling perfume at the local superstore pharmacy. I wasn’t very well educated. It had never seemed like something that a girl needed to be. But my name still got me into the right places. When people asked what I did, I said I was a perfumer. Perfumer is an acceptable business for a daughter, as are vintner, equestrian and extreme sports. I met Jeffrey, my husband, at one of these parties, and lied to him about where I really worked until the day after we were married, and he laughed and forgave me instantly and we were very much in love.
Very much in love. It is important you understand this too.
Of course I had a duty to perform here, at Danesmoor. Jeffrey knew I understood what these things meant. I valued family as much as he did. It is incredibly important that these things are preserved, it is as vital as any library or work of art. We are the history of this nation, we hold within us part of its culture, which if it is destroyed is the death of a piece of Britain that everyone, no matter what, loves for its beauty and its charm and its essential Britishness. These things must be protected, and to do so, of course, I had to have boys. The line passes down through the boys, not because of sexism but because that is the culture, the history, the truth of who we are. I will not say anything else on that.