As it was, Aunt Mirabelle greeted us at the end of a rather morose day.
‘Definite nip in the air today,’ she said, shuddering. ‘Let’s get you in and sorted, Pandora.’ She put her arm around Mother and gave me her usual vinegar smile.
Aunt Mirabelle is not my aunt but my mother’s childhood friend and my godmother, although I’m sure God had nothing to do with it. She is not real family, as I remind her frequently.
‘Say hello to Aunt Mirabelle,’ Mother directed.
‘Hello, Mirabelle.’
Mother did that thing with her lips that her facialist told her was counter-productive, as if she’d pulled in the drawstrings to stop anything escaping.
Mirabelle laughed. ‘Still the precocious little child, I see.’
‘Oh yes’ — Mother can’t remember my childhood — ‘Gone vegetarian now.’ She mouthed it like it was a urinary infection.
‘She’ll starve.’
‘I know.’
I watched disinterestedly, as they played with me like two cats pawing a dying sparrow. It was clear that, for once, Mother might be right about one thing (if still remaining true to her extreme narrow-mindedness): this was not the time to have become a vegetarian. What seemed to pass for home décor here, were the heads of large, dead animals staring down from the walls of the entrance hall, caught in their moment of death, which someone had taken great pains to preserve.
Mother turned to me. ‘You’ll starve,’ she nodded, with her usual hangman’s compassion. Mother doesn’t do maternal.
In her faux-country clothes, the polish of London still smeared all over them, Mirabelle looked every inch the wife of a banker. It would be too crude to put in print my shortening for ‘wife of banker’ but I’m sure you are with me. Why Mother had chosen to befriend such an inferior woman was a marvel to everyone. They didn’t seem to like each other, even when they were together. But they had been friends for so long, they’d forgotten why.
As we entered the vast hall, our footsteps echoed on the dark stone. An elaborate staircase rose up, snaked round and drifted away into a cavernous roof. The long picture windows seemed to be impervious to light, with only a faded glimpse of day allowed to seep through the heavy stained glass. Grim colours spread a bruised light over everything. It cast a quiet, ecclesiastical shadow as if it had been designed by someone who had many things to hide.
Thick veils of dust sifted through the still air, as though the house was slowly disintegrating into powder. Aged wood panelling and heavy varnished frames slowly crumbled, leaving a lingering dry tinder scent that permeated everything. This house was the kind of monolith the rampantly wealthy Victorians created as a mausoleum to live in. It was an unnerving old house and it wasn’t too much of a leap to imagine someone stuffing their mother and sitting them in the window. I looked over at Mother. It was a tempting thought.
‘We’ve got the run of the place,’ said Mirabelle.
On cue, footsteps fell methodically above our heads and a door slammed in one of the myriad vaults above.
‘Oh, except for the ghost.’ She laughed extravagantly.
We didn’t.
‘It’s the housekeeper. Deathly old bat didn’t know where the wine was.’
The house had been Mirabelle’s idea but, of course, Mother had booked and paid for it. A secluded mansion, let for only a week every year by its owners, a sort of Airbnb Brigadoon. A chance to get away from it all and presumably do some serious book club work, whatever that might entail. She’d probably seen it advertised in the back of one of those snob-rags she liked to read, Country Life and the like, which bore utterly no resemblance to Mirabelle’s life but suited her aspirational hunger.
Generally, their book club entailed arguing about which book to choose — hence Gone Girl three times. There would then follow a series of increasingly unpleasant emails about timings, venue and rather more personal matters: an elaborate meal at someone’s house with secret outside caterers, the house selected generally being the most recent one to have had a new kitchen/basement/spiral wine cellar/dungeon installed. There would be a frail discussion of the book — which no one had finished/started/bought, unless it was Gone Girl — crescendoing in an onslaught of intrigue and opinions, focusing on various mutual acquaintances, all fuelled by copious amounts of Prosecco. If you’re a member of a book club, I’m sure this will be painfully familiar but this house, with its lavish history of family misdemeanours and foul play, had yet to experience anything to measure up to the hysteria of a book club session at full throttle.
Mirabelle was a solid woman who had, ever since I was a child, been a remarkably accurate copy of the Trunchbull we’d seen in a production of Matilda. Mirabelle and Mother had momentarily lost me at the theatre that day. But I could see them from my hiding place. I’d watched them from a balcony. I’d watched how close they were. Mother always allowed Mirabelle to get much closer than I was allowed. Personal space, Ursula. Personal space, she’d always chime.
I watched her now, lingering on the edges of my mother as usual. She led us from dining room to reception as if introducing us to her country seat. Infuriating as it was, it did have a certain Cluedo-esque flavour, especially if I imagined Mirabelle as the stout, flush-faced cook, or possibly even the murder victim.
Each room was garlanded with momentous paintings — exotic battles, faded safaris, and the vast, billowing sails of romanticized ships. Family crests looked fallen. Faces loomed from dark varnished portraits, their unblinking eyes locked into the paint as if silenced for eternity but desperate to speak, to shout out, to warn. In places, dark outlines stood out starkly where missing portraits had once hung, as if they’d been scorched away by time. Perhaps family black sheep or bad apples, windfalls from the family tree left to rot elsewhere.
Every lacquered surface had ornately beautiful pieces immaculately placed. Mother always says that there is no requirement to suffocate every surface with clutter she has no time to clean. She likes to keep our home as clean as if we’re living in some post-death house clearance. She won’t even permit photographs in the house. ‘Dust traps!’ she cries, as if their dirty faces could lean out and clamp their jaws on passers-by. My photographs of Dad are locked safely in my dressing table, carefully preserved in the pages of Jane Eyre, somewhere I don’t think will ever trouble Mother. God knows where Mother keeps her photographs of him — within the pages of Gone Girl, perhaps.
‘To the library,’ Mirabelle announced, which didn’t seem important then. It may not seem like a familiar or essential room of a house, but it would become central to this house and this occasion. To anyone with even the flimsiest knowledge of murder mysteries, libraries are a prime murder location. Perhaps all those books relax people to the point where they can let fly their passions and either seduce someone or murder them.
The library at Ambergris Towers was a dream of solitary seclusion. Mirabelle said the housekeeper had explained the family made their fortune in the whaling industry and the sale of fat therein extracted — which is of course rather ironic, given that Mother and her book club have each paid out individual fortunes to have their fat extracted.
All manner of crannying nooks had been carefully provided to offer maximum privacy or disguise. Alongside each wall of extravagantly leather-bound books was an alcove with a finely crafted armchair. There was no abandonment of the past. On the contrary. Here, they had embraced it. A large old-fashioned radio remained, as if Chamberlain had just announced we were at war, its clock frozen in time with its hands stuck on twelve o’clock and, judging by the quantity of dust accumulated on its face, it had been twelve o’clock for many years. There was a dream-like silence, not even punctuated by the ticking of time.