FOXES, page 21
I totally knew what their hymn would be. I knew every word of it. As the running deer seeks the flowing brook, even so my soul longs for you, O God.
As they sang, Henry leaned in to my ear once more.
‘It’s coming to an end. You should go back.’
Moments ago, I would have given anything to run from this place. Now I couldn’t leave him. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m safe here,’ whispered Henry. ‘I’m one of them.’
His words chilled me. And then I realised. The cold silk, the flowing gown. He wasn’t wearing a dressing gown. He was wearing a red robe.
Under the cover of the singing, I fled back up the winding stairs. At the top I turned and shoved the door closed, and you couldn’t even see the join. I knew it was futile, but I pulled the heavy chest of drawers in front of the wardrobe. Then a chair, then a footstool on top of the chair.
By the time I’d finished my makeshift barricade the grey of dawn was bleeding through the curtains. As I fell into bed, the last thing I noticed was that the dog rose by my bedside had shrivelled into a little organ, pink as flesh, the vivid red quite gone.
41
Next morning, we left Cumberland Place early with no breakfast, on the (perfectly true) pretext that we had a very long drive up north.
I couldn’t wait to get into the small and safe space of the Mini. I had so much to tell Shafeen and Nel, and I couldn’t bear to sit through another meal with Lord and Lady Death and be polite through my teeth. It was hard enough to go and thank them in the drawing room where they were having their morning coffee, the countess behind Country Life and the earl behind Horse & Hound.
Rollo got to his feet when we entered the room and I marvelled at what a dreadful contradiction he was – he would happily brand my thumb and chase Ty with a pack of hounds, but God forbid his arse cheeks should remain in a chair while a ‘lady’ was standing.
Manners still uppermost, he warmly shook Shafeen’s hand. ‘Goodbye, Hardy,’ he said. ‘Beg pardon – Shafeen. We’ll await you at Longcross.’ He waved his arm to encompass us girls too. ‘It will be ripping to see you all again.’
Ripping, I thought as we went out to the car.
Ripping, I thought as I remembered Henry telling me of Reynard tearing his flesh.
Ripping – I thought of my dream and the fox torn apart by the hounds.
I had to hand it to Rollo. He could hardly have landed on a more fitting word.
42
The hardest thing of all, on that long car journey north, was dealing with my own feelings about Henry.
I recalled that little boy shut in the cupboard with Reynard – the sick fear as their predator/prey dominance swapped over, then swapped back again. No wonder Henry had become what he had become. Then I would remember the red robe and his words: I’ll be all right. I’m one of them. I was more confused about Henry than ever. He was, undoubtedly, one of the DOGS. I had been tried and branded for his murder, they had named him as one of their number and his name was on the family tomb with the other DOGS.
But.
He’d taken me to see the Red Mass and allowed me to overhear their terrible plans. Was he turning good? Could a baddie also be a goodie? Was Henry like Leon, a cold-blooded assassin, but a good guy inside?
Then there was the guilt and the grief – even now. If Henry was alive, then I shouldn’t be feeling either, right? But I’d been carrying those twin burdens for a year, and it turned out they were hard to set down. You couldn’t just switch feelings off, any more than you can stop loving someone if they die. Anger was also added to this perplexing mix. If Henry had swan-dived off Conrad’s Force and secretly been living the high life quite happily for a year at one of his many houses, how dare he put me through all that bereavement and regret? Then at other times I would feel the creeping certainty that I had killed him, and that I had somehow, through the performance of The Isle of Dogs, brought him back. Because if I hadn’t killed him, why had I been tried as a Manslayer by the DOGS? And if I believed that, then that made me, surely, crazy.
I felt like I needed some time to myself, like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, just to work out what I felt about it all. But that wasn’t to be. I had to come to terms with everything in a brand-new Mini Cooper with my best friend and my boyfriend. I had to face it all through talking, and there was plenty of time for that.
Shafeen’s reaction to the story of what had happened the night before was, perhaps predictably, disbelief. Shafeen the pragmatic, the practical, the prospective med student, just could not bring himself to accept the return of Henry de Warlencourt.
‘I’ll believe in him when I see him.’
‘Then what’s your explanation?’ I demanded.
‘That you were having a dream. A very vivid dream.’ He half turned from the passenger seat so that he could talk to me where I was sharing the backseat with our bags. ‘Think about it in filmic terms. The setting for the scene came from earlier in the evening when you’d been to the Christmas Mass at the London Oratory. The throne was the chair from the STAGS Club. The actors – the only people who spoke in this scene – were what we might call “established characters”; Rollo, the Old Abbot. And the only people they mentioned – Ty, me – were also known to you.’
‘There were two guys with a book,’ I protested. ‘And about fifty guys in robes.’
‘Did they speak?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘So they were, effectively, extras. And you have been harbouring, self-evidently, buried trauma from your trial,’ he finished.
‘I suppose you think that was a dream too, Dr Jadeja.’ I muttered resentfully.
‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘You have the brand. That’s empirical evidence. But there’s no empirical evidence to prove that Henry is alive, so I happen to think that he’s gone.’
‘Think? Or hope?’ I said, rather unfairly.
‘Let me ask you something else,’ he said, ignoring my jibe. ‘What did you find out? Something we already know. Aren’t we sure there’s a bigger conspiracy to do with a fox or a Fawkes or whatever? But what did you learn from this “Mass”? That Ty was going to be hunted on Boxing Day, and we’d figured that out for ourselves. That can’t be the whole plot. It’s going to take a while to get rid of all of us non-whites if they do it one at a time.’
‘What is this, Groundhog Car?’ I grumbled. ‘I’m getting used to not being believed in this Mini. OK, so what about the “fox in a box” incident? The story of Henry and Reynard in the cupboard?’ I’d had to give it a trivial name because I found the notion of Henry locked in the box room with Reynard completely horrific.
‘You dreamed that too,’ said Shafeen simply. ‘Foxes are all we’ve been thinking about for the last few days. Your mind has constructed a way to explain away Henry’s horrible character, and a reason for Cass’s dislike of the earl and countess.’
‘And the flower by my bed?’
‘Rollo and Caro had just been to Longcross,’ he said. ‘They could easily have brought one back. There were flowers in my room too. Yours, Nel?’
‘Yep,’ Nel, eyes on the road, confirmed.
‘Dog roses?’ I asked.
‘Well, no, but –’
‘It’s not about who put the flower in my room. It’s about who brought them to the hospital.’
‘Cass,’ said Shafeen.
‘Who hadn’t arrived by then. Henry was my first visitor.’
For the first time, Shafeen’s assurance slipped a little. ‘Well, that I can’t explain. But I’ll bet the Longcross Estate isn’t the only place you can get those particular roses in Northumberland.’
Everything he said made a certain sense – that was what was so irritating about it. I appealed to Nel. ‘Nel? What do you think?’
She almost met my eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘Well … Shafeen does have a point.’
I didn’t reply but looked out of the window at the speeding motorway. I knew I was right about this. But I knew I was right about something else too. I was certain that Henry would make an appearance at Longcross. Then Shafeen and Nel would have to believe me.
43
Whatever the other two said, by the time we’d reached Chester, all half-timbered and Christmassy under starry skies, I’d reached my own conclusions.
A) Henry was alive.
B) Somehow he’d survived the waterfall and had been hiding out for a year. (Or the play had actually brought him back, but even I couldn’t make a logical argument for that.)
C) Louis didn’t know he was alive, and Henry, for the moment, was letting his cousin think he was the heir of Longcross.
D) Henry may now be ‘Kylo Ren’, i.e. turning away from the Dark Side to the Light.
But I kept my opinions to myself as we drove through the electric gates of Nel’s house. It was a huge and floodlit mock-Tudor mansion outside of Chester called Alderley Nook. In a way it was as palatial as Cumberland Place, but here everything was brand new – there was no peeling paint or speckled mirrors, but a cinema room, a pool and lots of gold taps. Her dad wore lots of jewellery and her mum wore lots of make-up, they both called me ‘luv’ and they were the nicest people in the world. Nothing was too much trouble for them. They had no problems welcoming their daughter’s schoolfriends to spend Christmas with them, and actually on Christmas morning Shafeen and I both got a new phone, the Saros 9S. Best of all, Nel’s parents weren’t members of a death cult.
After a lavish Christmas breakfast Nel drove us the short distance into Manchester, and I fell into one of my dad’s legendary bear hugs. Dad’s hair was longer, and his beard was shorter, but otherwise he was just the same. After cups of tea, and a shower of hugs and kisses and thank-yous, Nel left and Dad did us an amazing Christmas lunch, which turned into Christmas dinner. He’d done turkey, crackers, paper hats, the lot. Happily, he’d always got on well with Shafeen, and they talked a lot about India, as my dad had filmed there loads. As twilight fell, and the candles were lit, and we sat in our paper crowns, the conversation got more in depth. We talked about everything, including, quite surprisingly, my mum.
‘What was Greer’s mum like?’ Shafeen asked, when we’d all had enough wine to loosen our tongues.
’Ambitious,’ said my dad, leaning back in his chair. ‘Driven. Funny. She had a great sense of humour. Has. I don’t know why I’m talking in the past tense. She’s not dead.’
‘Are you … still in touch?’ asked Shafeen.
‘Of course.’
Shafeen glanced at me, seeing if I minded all this interrogation about my mum. I didn’t. I was listening. ‘Where is she now?’
‘Prague,’ said Dad. ‘She’s costume designer on a feature film. One of those interminable Marvel ones. Presumably making spandex onesies, as that’s all they ever seem to wear.’
I took a swallow of wine and asked the question that had been bothering me a lot recently. ‘Does she ever ask about me?’
‘Constantly. I send her all your news, and school reports.’
Suddenly my paper hat was annoying me so I took it off, laying it among the cracker debris. I’d successfully shut my mum out of my mind for so many years, but I’d been thinking about her much more lately. Maybe it was meeting two other mothers from their respective places on the good mum/shit mum spectrum; Missy Morgan and Caro de Warlencourt. ‘Why doesn’t she ever get in touch with me? I mean, today’s Christmas Day. Would a present have killed her? Or a card?’
He shrugged. ‘I know. She was never very practical. Even when we were together, I would do all that stuff. She wants to get in touch, badly. But she thinks she’s given up the right to interfere in your life.’
‘I’ll say.’
‘She thinks any contact ought to come from you. She’s just waiting until you’re ready.’
He looked at me, his paper hat at a crazy angle.
‘Are you ready?’
There was a lot going on in my life right then. I had to make sure Ty was all right first – at the moment I felt more like a mother than a daughter. ‘Maybe in a bit.’
‘You could drop her a line. I’ve got her email address.’
‘No,’ I said, looking at Shafeen. ‘That seems a bit too Savage. I think I’ll write her a letter. But not yet. Soon.’
44
Dad’s flat in Salford Quays only had two bedrooms, but the sofa in the living room was a fold-out futon for guests, and my dad had very pointedly rolled it out and made it up for Shafeen.
My dad was cool about us, but not that cool. When Shafeen was in the toilet I stood in the doorway with my dad, his arm round my shoulder, looking at the arrangement of pillows and duvet. As ever with my dad, I fell into playing our movie game. This time I was looking for a film where a dad was trying to frustrate his daughter and her boyfriend sharing a room. ‘Meet the Parents?’
He did a terrible Robert De Niro impression. ‘You talkin’ to me?’
‘Your house, your rules, huh?’
‘Yup,’ he said, smiling.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I’m an eighteen-year-old.’
‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘But you’re my eighteen-year-old. So if there’s going to be any funny business, you can at least have the decency to sneak around behind your old dad’s back, like we did in my day.’
I hugged him and kissed the side of his beardy face. He was pretty cool after all.
Shafeen did, indeed, pay me a midnight visit in my bedroom. We kissed for a bit, and things were getting pretty hot and heavy when I saw my old soft toy Tigger. I’d got him for my fourth birthday, when I’d decided, with the certainty of a toddler, that he was the only character in the Hundred Acre Wood worth knowing. He looked pretty sad now, the black and orange of his stripes more grey and marmalade, but I’d loved him for fourteen years – longer than I’d loved anyone, except my dad.
As well as Tigger, there was a picture of my mum and my jewellery box with the ballerina inside it, waiting to revolve to ice-cream-van music when you lifted the lid. I might’ve been eighteen, but this was a child’s bedroom. I gently pushed Shafeen away. ‘Not here,’ I said, through the hot jumble of lips and hair and teeth.
He rolled off me, lay on his back and sighed heavily. ‘Not here,’ he sing-songed. ‘Not at Longcross. Not at Cumberland Place. Someday, somewhere, Greer, we’ll find the right bed.’
I hoiked myself up on my elbow and put my chin in my hand, looking down at him. ‘Wow, Shafeen, I really didn’t think you were that kind of guy.’
‘What kind of guy?
‘The sort to pressure a girl into something she’s not ready for. Not very gentlemanly, is it?’
That struck home. He backed off straight away, actually getting up off the bed as if it had burned him and apologising profusely, and then of course I felt terrible. I tried to explain. ‘I mean, of course I’m ready, but I don’t know why it doesn’t ever seem to be the right place.’
‘I’m just not sure it’s geography that’s stopping you.’
‘What else would it be?’
‘Who else, you mean?’
He sat on the edge of the bed, continents away from me now. ‘It was hard enough to battle him when he was dead. If you really think he’s alive, that’s another matter.’
‘Why? Last time he was alive I still chose you.’ I didn’t stop to think about the lunacy of this sentence.
‘Did you, Greer? We only started going out once we thought he was dead.’
There was really no arguing with that piece of chronology.
‘And even then,’ Shafeen went on sadly, ‘he was still getting between us.’
And I understood, then, just how much he’d had to put up with. Really, he did deserve some sort of an explanation. We were both eighteen. We’d been going out for a year. It was fair enough for him to expect that we would take things to the next level. But he was perfectly right. There was something holding me back. And it was time to give it a name.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I have been holding out on you. And it is because of Henry.’ I took Shafeen’s hand in mine as I tried to explain. ‘We started going out in the wake of his death. And I felt guilty, and sad, and a whole mess of emotions. I think that did stop me getting … close … to you. I was grieving, yes, but I was also dealing with the fact that I’d effectively ended someone’s life.’ He looked so forlorn I put my hand to his cheek. ‘But it wasn’t because I had feelings for him. I mean, I had feelings about him, but I hated him.’ If I said it, it had to be true, right?
Shafeen looked at me intently. It was hard to hide from those dark searching eyes. ‘That may have been true … then,’ he said, echoing my own word. ‘But it’s different now. You are more … sympathetic towards him.’
He was right again. It was all because of the ‘fox in a box’ story. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘even if you think Henry in the cupboard with Reynard was a dream, I still think Henry had a pretty difficult childhood.’
Shafeen’s answer was surprising. ‘Oprah Winfrey,’ he said.
I thought I’d misheard him. ‘What?’
‘Oprah Winfrey,’ he repeated. ‘She had a terrible childhood and suffered dreadful abuse. Now she’s one of the richest and most successful women in the world, and, more importantly, she’s a noted humanitarian, doing tons of charitable work and loads of good deeds.’ He shifted his weight a little on my duvet. ‘What I am saying is, even if Hitler was smacked as a child, it was still his fault he turned out to be Hitler. He was solely responsible for all the horrors he perpetrated. There’s such a thing as personal responsibility, Greer. It is possible to escape your upbringing.’
I sat up against the pillows and thought about what Shafeen had just said. He was right, but I realised it was only fair to tell him what I’d been thinking ever since the Red Mass. No – before that. Since The Isle of Dogs, and the incantation of the Grand Stag – the same incantation which, maybe, had brought Henry back to life, Practical Magic style. It was time. I took his hand again. ‘In the play – The Isle of Dogs, I mean – the enchantress warned Queen Cynthia that if she brought a loved one back from the dead, it might not be in a form she recognised – or even desired. That the Earl of Greenwich might be horribly changed. And in fact, he was.’
