‘Go away,’ she said again, glancing at the butler’s dim window – the servants’ quarters stuck out of the main house like the bottom of the letter L and Heinous Henry’s room was across from her, diagonally so. He was most likely still downstairs, seeing to the accounts or bullying the cook, but you could never be sure. She imagined him – the awful creep – crouched below his windowpane, eyes greed-shiny in the gloom, ear cocked, hands down his trousers. And why imagine him with his hands in his trousers? What did that have to do with anything? Anyway, he was an awful, awful creep. ‘Go away,’ she repeated. ‘I’m bored of you already. Genuinely.’
Bart stepped out from the dark, stopping under the high lantern. ‘Come down to me or I’ll wake up the whole fucking house, Bettina.’
Another glance at the butler’s window. ‘The house is still awake, you turnip – it’s only ten. Go home.’
‘I’m going to start singing. I’m going to sing. I really will – you know I will. I’ll tell everyone that you tempted me with your flame-red tresses and your gorgeous wobbly boobies. You tart. I’m going to start singing.’
‘Christ.’ He was always trying to get her into trouble. He minimised the consequences because he had in his head that her parents were these easy-going, liberal-minded poodles, when in fact they were just playing a part and cared deeply what the old guard thought of them – even those they made fun of, such as the parson and his wife, who had ‘such sticks up their backsides, they were basically God’s lollipops’, but heaven forbid that Venetia and Montgomery Wyn Thomas ever express a contrary opinion in their presence, atrocious frauds that they were.
‘Go to our spot, I’ll come and meet you. If I get caught I shall kick you where it hurts.’
He fell to his knees, hand on his heart. ‘Oh, please don’t make promises you cannot keep, my goddess.’
‘I actually hate you.’
A small wood stood between Wadley House and the beach. Bettina loved this wood and as a child had considered it her own private playground, imagining faeries and wood-imps and will-o’-the-wisps behind every tree, and sometimes spying on the maids as they swam half naked in the waterlogged ditch they mistook for a lake. The moon was bright and the clouds sparse, allowing just enough illumination to see by. Bettina knew her way perfectly well, having made this journey thousands of times over her life and many of these in the dark (thanks to Bart), but still her slippers stumbled over rocks and into dips in the dry cracked mud – she hadn’t dared bring a light of her own; there were too many eyes around here, twitching bright eyes like gold coins. She picked up a snapped-off branch and used it like a blind man’s stick. Her robe was red. But it had no hood. And wolves did not exist in this part of England, not any more.
‘Absurd,’ she said to herself, in a whisper. ‘Absolutely raving.’
Soon the wood faded, its trees growing sparser, its tangled undergrowth turning to pale, shorn grass. The sea lay ahead of her, its dark rolling mass swallowing the panorama. The moon was bright out here, in the open, without its pauper’s beard of trees, causing a silvery gleam to coat the flat pebbles which preceded the sandy beach. She followed the thin boardwalk, seeing a small light up ahead, coming from under the pavilion. Her father had had it erected on Armistice Day, and for days afterwards it was kept lit through the night and was filled with drunk, exuberant people who tossed booze from their glasses as they danced uninhibited to live brass music or sat shivering in their winter coats and scarves with slippery smiles on their faces. One man had got so drunk that he went in the sea for a swim – this in the early hours of the morning – and got stunned by the freezing waters and was swept out with the current and drowned. Idiot. He’d been an unmarried schoolteacher, supposedly, from the boys’ college. His death had been like a bucket of slop thrown over the party and the revellers went home finally and returned to their daily, sober miseries.
This was three years ago and still the pavilion stood, its steel rivets super-rusted by the salted air, the canvas awnings covered in gull shit, one half drooped and sulking. Bart was sitting on the ground inside with a paraffin lamp at his side, casting a defiant orb of light around him. In his lap was a bottle of rum, which was apt, since he looked as drunk as a sailor, his blond-tipped lashes bobbing under the weight of collapsing eyelids.
She’d played with Bart from a young age, since they were babies practically, and still they were monkey-nut close, writing daily letters to each other during term time and meeting by night in the holidays (her father, being a hypocrite and a tyrant, didn’t approve of their spending time alone together). They had the same sense of humour, affecting a dry, ironic outlook, and they eschewed exclamation marks in their correspondence and looked down on earnest people. Sarcasm, contrary to popular belief, was the highest form of humour. Everyone else was wrong. Everyone else was stupid.
Bettina sat down opposite him, legs crossed, and fixed him with her most withering look (she practised these looks in the mirror). ‘Bartholomew, you bastard,’ she said, punching his shoulder. ‘Dragging me out here at this hour.’ She hit him again and he tried to bat her hand away. ‘I could’ve been eaten by wolves, you awful nightmare.’
He smiled devilishly at her and offered the bottle of rum. ‘Go on, don’t let me drink alone.’
‘I’ve got to pack for school tomorrow.’
He pushed the bottle in front of her face. ‘Then let’s celebrate the end of the holidays.’
‘No, let’s not.’
‘Let’s. Please. We haven’t got long to have fun like this; we should take our opportunities. Soon you’ll be a horrid debutante and you’ll acquire a horrid husband and I’ll never get to see you again, and it’ll be fucking horrid.’
‘You are relentless. I loathe this quality in you. I absolutely loathe it.’
The wind outside blew against the canvas flaps and they made a loud thwap-thwap sound. ‘Drink, my goddess,’ he said. ‘Drink.’
She felt something cold and wet under her ankle – a ribbon of seaweed. She tossed it at him and took a sip of the rum. It was warm and disgusting. She didn’t have a taste for alcohol, not really, except the creamy liqueurs her mother sometimes let her have at Christmas, and even these she would weaken with extra cream.
‘Cigarette?’ said Bart, taking two out of a silver case with a falcon engraved on the lid (it’d been his father’s) and lighting both before she could answer.
‘Thank you,’ she said – she did in fact want one.
He snapped the case shut and leaned on one elbow, tilting his head back to blow out the smoke. ‘I can’t believe you were willing to leave without saying goodbye.’
‘I was planning to say goodbye on the way to the station. I was going to wave my hanky out of the carriage window in a mournful fashion.’
‘Bugger off. A proper goodbye, I meant.’
‘So this is a proper goodbye? Drinking stolen booze under a mouldy canopy?’
‘Indeed.’ He squinted as though through a monocle. ‘A jolly good send-off. The sea air in your lungs, what could be better, old chap?’
‘My bed.’
He wiggled an eyebrow. ‘We could do that.’