Authors: Serena Mackesy
“Pathetic,” says Tessa, “cry-babies.”
“I’d keep away from the one at the back if I was you,” says Hugh. “I'll bet you five bob it’s got nits.”
Chapter Thirteen
Oh to sleep like a child again, so deep and sound that the world cannot intrude.
I guess I must have slept better than I thought, thinks Bridget. I didn’t notice her come in during the night at all, but she must have been here, curled up next to me, for a while.
Yasmin barely moves when she kisses her on the head, strokes a lock of damp hair back from her face and creeps from under the covers. It doesn’t seem so cold today. Of course it doesn’t. There’s watery sunshine leaking in round the curtains. The storm must have blown itself out in the night.
Bridget retrieves her trainers from under the bed, picks up the overnight bag she had the sense to pack with a few odds and ends of clothing and washing equipment and carries them through to the bathroom. By her watch, it’s half-past seven, and the sky is only just beginning to bruise through the window. Too early to call Tom Gordhavo and find out about the boiler.
Her teeth sing as she brushes them. She doesn’t bother with much else: a spray of deodorant under the arms in place of soap and a rubber band in the hair in place of brushing. She feels grimed and greasy, sludged with unsatisfactory sleep, but she feels better today: more hopeful. It’s a new life. Not a satisfactory one yet, but change brings possibility and possibility is a start.
I’ll have one more look for the boiler, she thinks, before Yas wakes up. It must be easier to find in daylight.
Everything is easier to find in daylight. The boiler turns out to be round the back of the flat door, in the junk room. She would have seen it immediately had the door been closed once she’d got the lights on, except that she had assumed that a boiler would be on an outside wall.
Sellotaped to the front – not the most obvious place for it, she thinks – is an envelope with her name scrawled on the front. Her new-old name, “Ms Sweeny”. For a moment she doesn’t even recognise herself, wonders who the envelope is intended for, then smiles wryly as she pulls it off, opens it. I’ll be really free, she thinks, when I stop thinking of myself as a Fletcher. Let it be soon.
The hand is scrawly but clear: the sort of handwriting which comes of expensive schooling. It's from Tom Gordhavo, of course: a letter and what looks like a contract.
“
Dear Ms Sweeny
,” the letter reads, “
welcome to Rospetroc. I would have been here to see you in in person but have had to go to Penzance for a few days. Please find enclosed our contract of work. Strictly we should have signed this before your arrival, but given the speed at which everything has happened, it wasn't really practicable. Anyway, I shall drop in on Wednesday afternoon: if you could have it ready for then, I would be greatly obliged.
The house is still in something of a state, I’m afraid. Frances Tyler seems to have left halfway through clearing up after the last bunch of guests. I am sorry to have left it for you, but I’ve been busy with the estate myself, and – hence the need for a housekeeper in the first place – finding reliable help in the village, even on an ad hoc basis, isn’t easy. Anyway, the first guests aren’t due until Christmas week, so I don’t doubt you’ll be able to get the place shipshape again in the time. Some beds have been stripped, but all will need laundering and airing, and making up again closer to the arrival time. Otherwise it’s really a matter of the duties we discussed when we met: cleaning, hoovering, dusting, relaying the fires, giving the kitchens a thorough going-over. Basically getting everything into a state that holidaymakers will be happy with. If there are any obvious issues you’re unclear about, we'll go through them on Wednesday.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Gordhavo
Yours sincerely, she thinks. Well, there’s posh. In the modern world you usually only get Yours Sincerely-ed when you’re in some sort of trouble. She lays the letter down on a mahogany card table whose hinges have worked loose so the leaf lies slightly askew, and turns her attention to the boiler. It’s old, but not as old as the monster which heats the main house. It has a thermostat, at least, and a tap at the side for the oil feed rather than the two-handed valve with which she struggled last night. She turns it and, frowning, presses the button to fire the pilot light.
A distant boom, as a bird scarer, is followed by a grumbling roar.
“Yessss!” says Bridget out loud, punches the air. Small triumphs. The flat will begin warming itself soon: she tried one of those last-ditch hopeless acts of the despairing last night, and went round the whole place turning the radiators on in the hope that they would warm themselves by willpower alone. Hopefully Yasmin will sleep on in her cocoon of curtains, leave her time to explore their new domain.
The house is unchanged, it seems, since her visit two weeks ago. In the dining room, she notices that the line of china figurines on the dresser has been turned inwards, so that they stare out at her from the mirror which forms its back. It gives one a nasty feeling, the sight of these frozen faces, tiny shoulders hard and unforgiving. Their eyes, like those of a good portrait, seem to follow her as she crosses the room.
A tumble of bedclothes lies at the bottom of the dining room stairs, thrown there by her predecessor in preparation for laundering. Pure cotton, she notices – her heart sinking at the thought of all that ironing – and sprinkled now with the coating of the dust that lies on all the surfaces. How long since she left? It looks like it’s been an eternity. She churns the pile with a toe, kicks it further into the corner and goes on through the house.
In the drawing room, on the gargantuan teak coffee table, a dozen mugs and wine glasses, their contents dried to stains with sitting. Two ashtrays overflow onto the wooden surface. A half-burnt log lies in a bed of ash. Cushions lie scattered and squashed as though the house’s occupants had merely gone to bed after a big night rather than packed up their suitcases and driven back to London. The mugs have had milk in them. Even in a room the size of her old flat, she can smell their yoghurty must. She finds a tray – sticky, with ring-marks bleached into the wood by bottle bottoms – on the side table, clears everything onto it. No point in leaving something as vile as this lying about when there's a dishwasher near at hand. If nothing else, she can at least put them out of her eyesight.
In the scullery, she rifles in the undersink cupboard and finds a roll of black bin-liners, a quarter-pack of Persil and a can of spray starch. Something, at least, to be going on with until Wednesday. Presumably there are stocks of cleaning stuff somewhere, but she's damned if she's found them yet. Anyway, at least she can do a rinse cycle on the dishwasher and get the bin up and running. She tears a bag off and takes it through to the kitchen.
The bin is already running. Another couple of days, and it would be doing it literally. When she lifts off the chrome lid, the stench is enough to drive her back a couple of paces, force her to take the Lord's name in vain.
“Jesus God,” she says. Gulps, gags.
Despite the cold, the smell is vicious. The bin is halfway full. She glimpses a chicken carcass, green, nestling on a bed of blueish, orange-streaked fur before she slams the lid back down.
Bridget scurries across the room, slams the cold tap on full and grips the cold china edge of the butler's sink while her stomach does its best to rip its way out of her body via the navel. She gags, once, twice, feels a chill sweep down her upper arms. Her tongue seems to have doubled in size, to be blocking her airways. She coughs, from the diaphragm. The chill has been replaced by a fine sweat, now.
She bends down, takes a deep draught from the tap. Delicious well-water, soft and peaty.
“Christ, that was close,” she says out loud. Turns back and looks at the bin as though it were a troll in the corner. She'll have to do it at some point. But not until she's fully prepared. How can someone just leave a house like this? This Frances must have been a total slut. Total. I’d never leave a house like this for someone else to find. I even scrubbed down my skirting boards when I left Streatham, and that was for the building society. She must have been a total slag.
Or she left in a serious hurry.
She eyes the fridge. It hums gently beside the bin, getting its temperature back down after the power outage.
Don’t let there be food in it.
Of course there's food. People always leave food at the end of short-term rentals. It’s a form of tip. Often the only
form of tip. And anyway, the vegetable basket under the sink contains potatoes, carrots and an onion, all sprouting, all blackening; it was obvious there’d be food elsewhere.
What have I let myself in for?
Crossing the room feels like crossing the Steppes on the way to battle.
Bridget pulls down a sleeve and holds it across her face. She's had enough nights without electricity to know how quickly a fridge can turn. Especially when it contains…
Milk. The remains of some salad vegetables, little more than an auburn sludge in the drawer. Phosphorescent bacon. What was once pate, probably, but is now merely something that lurks.
I think that might have been trifle.
Oh, god, no. It’s fish pie. Oh my god.
Whatever is in the freezer, it’s melted, collapsed, melded together, frozen again. Whatever, it’s black and faintly viscous. She slams the door, leans against the top. Breathes.
She knows already what the dishwasher will contain. Doesn’t put herself through the ordeal of verifying it. Simply checks that the door is firmly closed and sets the dial to a full-heat pan wash. Even if it is empty, the machine itself will benefit from a cycle, after sitting unused for so long. But she’s pretty certain that it isn't: that whatever has been left in there will take more than one cycle to become safe.
I'll buy a face mask in Wadebridge. Food, bedclothes, fan heaters, face mask, washing powder. Wellington boots. Rubber gloves. Disinfectant.
She takes another drink from the faucet, waits while her churning stomach comes to a rest. Goes to see what other horrors the house holds.
Soap rings in the bathrooms. Mildew on unaired shower curtains. Carpet slightly crunchy underfoot. A window sill full of dead flies in the pink bedroom. Frances must have been letting things go long before she left. There are signs everywhere: dried flowers on the landing whose predominant colour scheme is dustbath grey; fingermarks by the light switches. The door to the attic lies slightly ajar. She pushes it to, makes her way up the corridor. Glances in at the bedrooms as she passes them. Not too bad. Quilts stripped back, hanging over bed-ends; pillows stacked on chairs. Some of the mattress protectors look like they've seen a bit of use, but there's nothing here a bit of Oxi-Action won't shift. This’ll be okay. Once I’ve got the first dreadful push over with I’ll be able to –
She stops dead in the door of the final bedroom, the one at the end of the corridor, just before the door to her own flat. It’s the room with the four-poster: the one which must always be claimed by the alpha couple when they arrive because it has the obvious look of a master bedroom about it.
“Good God,” she says.
Someone’s had a riot in here. It looks like someone’s gone down to the village and brought back a gang of bored teenagers and a couple of gallons of scrumpy. The tester is ripped from its hooks, and has been thrown across the back of an upturned armchair. Curtains hang crazy from a sagging pole. Someone's taken a vase and simply thrown it into the middle of the bed. The mattress is stained, from the looks of it irrevocably, where the contents – melted, blackened arums and a couple of pints of brackish water – have landed and been left to lie. Bedclothes lie heaped on an upended armchair. A portrait has been knocked off its hook: hangs diagonally, its surprised subject teetering over a chest of drawers, cast-plaster frame chipped and scratched.
In the far corner, a door hangs open. She didn’t notice it, when she was doing the tour with Tom Gordhavo; unpanelled, it is covered with the same paper that decorates the walls, has a handle of glass. Beyond, the space yawns pitch-black. It’s a cupboard of some sort, dug into the thick outer wall of the house. She steps over, peers inside.