Hold My Hand (11 page)

She's good at taking things literally when she thinks she might turn them to her advantage.

“A joke,” says Bridget. “A
joke
, Yasmin. There is
no
invisible man. Not one. It was a
joke
.”

“Well,
I
didn’t do it!” she says. “
Someone
must’ve, because it wasn’t me!”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that mirror jumped off the wall all by itself this morning.

“
Stop
it, Yasmin! Right now!” she barks. “You’re not getting out of bedtime by playing games. Into bed, now, or you'll – ” she casts about for a punishment “ – you'll  be making that bed
all by yourself
tomorrow.”

“No, Mummy!” Yasmin clings tighter round her neck, digs her knees into her stomach and back like a cowboy hanging on to a bucking bronco. “Nonono
please
, Mummy! I promise I’ll go straight to sleep!”

“You bet you will,” says Bridget, unpeels the clutching arms. The valerian tea is working and she feels too tired to reason, too tired to do anything but stumble back to her own room and get under the covers. She made eighteen beds today and hoovered the public rooms from top to bottom. Tomorrow she’s got to be friendly and welcoming and hand out eighteen sets of bath linen, show half a dozen adults round wood stores and laundry rooms and car ports. “I don’t have time for this, Yasmin.
Go to bed
.”

She's surprised how firm and determined she sounds. “No more nonsense,” she says. “Go on. Get in.”

Yasmin lets go, flops down onto the mattress. Her eyes are still tearful. “Please don’t leave me,” she says. “Please, Mummy.”

“Come on,” says Bridget. “Close your eyes and when you wake up it’ll be morning. I’ll leave the passage light on.”

A single sob. Blackmail, thinks Bridget. She knows she can always get round me by playing for tragedy. All my guilt, my big soft heart: I find it so difficult to say no to her because I feel so bad about the start I gave her. Not fair. I have to be tough. She pulls the quilt up so it covers her daughter’s body, tucks it in around her neck and shoulders while Yasmin continues to sob. “It won’t work,” she says. “Everybody has to go to sleep.”

She strokes a strand of hair away from Yasmin’s face. “There you go,” she says, forces her voice to lilt soothingly. “Nice and warm. Isn’t that better?”

“No,” says Yasmin. “I want to come and sleep with you.”

“Well the whole point of you having you own room is that you actually sleep in it. Come on, baby. Give it a little while. You’ll get used to it, I promise.”

Yasmin gives her the silent treatment.

“Now, you just roll over and go to sleep,” she orders.

Obediently, pointedly, Yasmin turns her back on the room, assumes a position somewhere between foetal and prayer. Bridget leans over her, plants a kiss on her hairline, just in front of her ear. “Nighty-night,” she murmurs. “Sleep tight, darling, and mind the fleas.”

Yasmin says nothing. Sniffs.

“Now, don’t sulk,” says Bridget. “I’ll see you in the morning. Remember that I love you.”

No answer. It’s amazing how early people learn that not responding to words of love is one of the most effective punishments there is.

Bridget retreats from the room, stands in the doorway and switches off the light. “Night night, sweetheart,” she repeats. Still no answer.

Her feet feel as though they have been glued to the sisal in the passage. Whatever she thought of the teenager who sold her the tea, it’s clear that she knew what she was talking about. She clomps back to her own room, drops her dressing gown on the floor and falls wearily into bed. The sheets have cooled while she's been in the kitchen. Still clean from their packaging – she couldn't resist buying new, in the market, to mark her new life – they feel crisp and luxurious. She burrows beneath them and listens to the wind. Enjoys the feeling of being warm and dry when the night is cold. It’ll be okay, she thinks. It’ll be okay…

The door opens. She doesn’t need to look toward the light to know that Yasmin is standing there. Determined little sod, she thinks. Won’t take no for an answer. Must’ve got that from her dad.

I’ll deal with it tomorrow. I’m too tired now. Tomorrow…

Small feet pad across the carpet. The bedclothes are drawn back, letting in the cold night air. Bridget moves over, makes room. I can’t do a tantrum tonight. Just tonight…

Yasmin gets in beside her. Crushes up against her and pulls an arm over herself. “I told you I couldn’t sleep,” she says. Presses her nose into Bridget’s armpit.

And Lily watches, and waits, as their breath slows, drops, turns to snores.

Chapter Eighteen

“So have you seen the ghost yet?”

Bridget, grateful that her face is hidden by the cupboard door, laughs. Half-laughs. A sharp, nervous titter. Because it's not the sort of question you expect to be asked when you've barely settled in.

“No. Is there one?”

“Of course there are. Dozens. You’d hardly expect a house to be four hundred years old and not have a few, would you?”

“I suppose not.”

Dozens I can handle. That’s like having spiders.

“I thought you said “ghost” not “ghosts.”

It’s Ms Aykroyd’s turn to titter. “Oh, don’t mind me, darling,” she says. “I'm numerically dyslexic. I’m surprised I didn’t say millions.”

“Well, no,” says Bridget. “the only thing that’s gone bump in the night since we got here was Yasmin falling out of bed.”

Ms Aykroyd – CallmeStella as she refers to herself – laughs again. “Well, that’s good. It wouldn’t do to be too psychic around here, I’d’ve thought.”

Bridget hears the jangle of gold bangles as she leans a hand against the door jamb.

“I don’t know anything about ghosts,” she says, hears the Old Retainer in her voice as she says.

“Darling,” says Ms Aykroyd – she’s the type who calls everyone darling because it saves having to learn their names – “that’s the spirit. Didn’t he tell you about them? Tom Gordhavo?”

Bridget shakes her head. “I can’t say he did.”

“No, I suppose he wouldn’t have. I should think he’d have a hard enough time finding someone to come and work here as it is, without filling their heads full of notions.”

“I daresay he did,” says Bridget. “And that was why he got me. Still: take more than a few ghosts to scare me off.”

Ms Aykroyd laughs again. “Oh, I know,” she says. “I’ve been here every year for the last fifteen years. I do hope you’ll stay, though. it would be nice not to have to get to know a new person every time we come down. More like coming home. Anyway, ghosts just add to the atmosphere, as far as I’m concerned.”

Bridget glances up. She’s not sure if this last statement was for real or a joke. It’s always hard to tell with these arty types: they’ll tell the story of their granny’s deathbed as though it were a theatrical anecdote. It’s hard to tell which way the Aykroyd party go. They’re Creative, certainly – that’s easy to spot, what with the kaftans and the head-wraps and the oversized junk jewellery hanging from every extremity, and the complicated facial hair that sprouts from the men’s (and one or two of the women’s) chins like topiary. And the fact that it’s hard to distinguish which of the twelve children belongs to which of the six adults. At least two of them, she’s worked out, seem to be related in one way or another to at least three of the grownups, and a couple to only one of them. But whether they’re the sort of artistic that actually believes in horoscopes and phantoms and the power of the ouija board, or sees them as entertainments to be consumed with cocktails, it’s hard to tell.

“The children are a bit of a pain, though. It’s a good thing there are a lot of them, what with one thing or another, or we’d never get them to sleep in that attic.”

“The attic?”

“Silly. Nothing, of course, but they’ve got a thing about it being haunted. Camilla and Rain started it off, I’m afraid. I could brain Camilla, filing their heads up with spook stories and then taking off to university. Now Rain won’t go up there by herself at all.”

“Oh dear,” says Bridget.

“Oh, it’s fine. In a way they quite like it, I think. Gives them an excuse to get overexcited.”

“What do they say they see?”

“Oh, nobody’s
seen
anything. Well, except for Camilla, and she’s always had an overactive imagination. She claimed she saw a girl up there once. Came screeching down the stairs. In the middle of a dinner party, of course. The way they do. You know what they’re like. Any excuse.”

Dinner party. As if. Imagine if we’d had dinner parties. Who would we have asked? His friends from the dealing floor? Crammed round the four-seat table in our living room? A gramme of coke and a trip to Spearmint Rhino was more their style, the Big Swinging Dicks of Capitalism.

“Anyway. It just adds to the atmosphere,” says CallMeStella. “You can’t have a house as old as this without a few ghosts.”

I don’t think I want to hear any more of this stuff. I’ve got to be here by myself, remember? She digs deeper in the cupboard, concentrates on finding the Windolene so she can change the subject. It’s there, of course: right under her hand all along. Funny how you can see things and yet not see them. Happens all the time.

“Here it is,” she says. She knew she’d seen it somewhere. She emerges and hands it to CallmeStella.

“Oh, darling, thank you,” she says. “You
are
a star.” And stands there holding the bottle in a lost sort of fashion, as though it were some ancient artefact whose purpose she doesn’t understand.

“I’ll give you a hand,” says Bridget, resignedly.

“Oh darling,” says Ms Aykroyd again, “thank you.”

Bridget follows her into the dining room.

She hasn’t been able to work out much about the party, to be honest. It took her a full 24 hours to work out who the Aykroyd of the booking form was in the first place. It doesn’t help that, although they have twelve children – she thinks it’s twelve; isn't entirely sure as the house and yard seem to be swarming with visitors from the village and the county most of the time – between them, none of the adults seem to be actually married to each other. And none of them seem to mind. And though she thinks a couple – the parents of the many-parented children – might have been married to each other in a different combination at some point in the past, it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to any of them now.

That's what I should have done, she thinks. Illegitimacy doesn’t seem to matter as long as you talk posh enough. Or common enough. It’s only us lower-middles, with our fear of slipping down into the underclass, who seem to give a damn these days. There I was – I only married Kieran in the first place because I didn’t want my Yasmin to be a bastard – and obviously what I should have done was start talking la-di-dah and wearing velvet and smoking through a holder before breakfast. No father’s name on the birth certificate and he wouldn’t have had half the weaponry to pursue us with. No-one would have minded if my daughter grew up feral if I talked posh, like this lot, and the Social would never have dared to get involved. Upper-class bohemians seem to get away with stuff that the rest of us would never be allowed to do: flicking ash wherever, swapping bedrooms, dropping into the village and coming back with an entire houseful of people for a party. CallmeStella seems to know everyone around here: was born, she says, in the next valley and decamps down here for Christmas every year “visiting the haunts of my tortured adolescence without having to actually live with it”.

Bridget doesn’t mind, though. They’re jolly enough people, and friendly enough, and undemanding enough, as long as she doesn’t mind the fact that she will be finding discarded fag butts in the ginger pots for weeks to come. It’s nice, as a point of fact, after a week in which the silence of the house was not exactly oppressive, but brought home to her just how large it was, to hear the building full of the sound of talk and childish disagreements and, at night, the sound of singing. A couple of the guests are something to do with the stage – Bridget thinks she even recognises one of them from those BBC2 drama series where people hang about maundering over storm-tossed landscapes and nothing much actually happens. The piano in the drawing room has been opened, found to be in tune, and is sparked up every night. She likes it, the drifting small-hours sound of Fifties jazz, show tunes and – when local fervour, or local scrumpy, gets powerful enough, bellowed choruses of
Trelawny
.

A bit of her feels cheered up. Another bit feels even lonelier than before. Bridget has never had enough friends to have had a huge house party like this, even if she could afford it: tables of twelve or twenty all in a row scarfing vegetable lasagne and talking themselves hoarse. It’s not the way her parents lived, and it’s not the way anyone she knew lived. Parties, pre-Kieran, were the sort of parties where you couldn’t actually hear yourself shout, let alone sing, in corners of whatever the coming venue was that year. She’s a child of the club boom. Has the tinnitus to show for it. Even when they weren’t in cavernous aircraft hangars where the speakers were a million watts and the humidity was over a hundred per cent, it was taken for granted that, if you had people round, the first thing you did was turn the stereo up to full.

She’s not sure if she can remember ever having a conversation with more than one person at a time. Everything she’s ever known in terms of social talk has involved swapping over: pressing your lips against someone’s ear and bending your head for them to do the same to you; never seeing the expression on their face when they heard your bellowed words.

How ironic. There we were, having fun, and we never got round to making any friends. The only person I’ve ever really had long talks with as an adult was Carol, and that was because she came from upstairs rather than from my social life. I didn’t even talk to Kieran much, really, not even at the beginning. We were always loved-up, or hung over, and then later I avoided talking to him because I never knew where it might lead. Stupid, isn't it? How people base their entire future happiness on things like whether they like going out to the same sorts of places, or whether their friends are impressed when a guy turns up in an Audi; that they never think about what will happen when fashion moves on and you can't do the e’s any more because it’ll harm the baby.

But they’ve been lovely with Yasmin. Included her in everything. She seems to have spent every waking hour running up and down the corridor with one child or another: or sometimes a dozen. She’s met some children from the village, and the prospect of school doesn't seem so bad to her any more. Maybe some of them will be real friends, in the course of time. At least she won’t turn up to school a stranger.

“I'll tell you what,” she says to Ms Aykroyd's back. “I’d be grateful if you’d mind not doing too much ghost talk around Yasmin. She’s only six and I could do without her getting ideas to scare herself with when the place is empty.”

“Oh, darling,” says Ms Aykroyd. “It’s only games.”

“And she’s only six,” she repeats, trying to sound pleasant but firm. “Six-year-olds can’t always tell the difference.”

“Well, you can never start too early on training their imaginations. It’s all part of helping them become free spirits.”

They stop in front of the mantelpiece. On the mirror, a childish hand has scrawled “fuck off” in bright red lipstick.

If that’s an example of free-spiritedness, thinks Bridget, I'll go for inhibition any day. She doesn’t say anything, of course. Not her place. She’s a housekeeper, she must remember that. Discretion is what she’s paid for. Discretion and the sort of incurious efficiency that makes paying guests feel secure. She is, after all, only among these people, now they’re settled in, when someone comes and finds her and asks for her help.

She starts to move the figurines. They’ve been turned round again to face inward, she notices. A bizarre obsession, and one that seems to be shared by everyone who passes through here. Perhaps the Gordhavos actually keep them like that – some family custom –  and it is she who keeps setting them wrongly.

Ms Aykroyd hovers. “Frightfully sorry,” she says.

“That’s all right.”

She's obviously hovering in the hope of dismissal. Bridget gives it her. Doesn't really want to get drawn into lengthy chat, anyway. “You get off,” she says. “I’ll do this.”

“Are you sure?” She sounds relieved. Though she’d be right hacked off if I’d said I wasn’t.

“Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Well…” Ms Aykroyd makes a show of looking at her watch. “I suppose I
should
… lunch coming up. If you’re sure you don’t…?”

Oh, do go away, thinks Bridget, irritably. “I’ll get it done much faster if I’m by myself,” she says.