What else is important to put in about the first time I saw the Manor? The smell, of course, I should have done that right at the start. Not just because the house was so old, but because of the way the different families running the farm had been letting it go to hell for the last hundred years or so. So you had the old smell, which is one thing, and you also had that dark, dead-cold mousey smell of the layers of neglect, no getting away from either of them wherever you went. Six years of cleaning, six years of repairing and replacing, scraping and painting, digging away at those layers, and some days I can still taste them, both of those smells.
We didn’t get above the second floor that day because the third was closed off then, which everybody thought was just as well. It was, too, and not just because we were all absolutely worn out by that time. But all I’m going to say about the third floor right now is when Julian was home on his last holiday, he found a whole new room we’d never seen, a little tiny chamber like a lady’s dressing room, tucked away behind a door about as wide as an ironing board. There were a couple of semisecret passages, too, but they didn’t go anywhere. The third floor’s like that.
It made me think of Tamsin, when Julian found that room, because that was how
No, I’m scratching that out, that has to wait. I’m still talking about that first day. We brought all the other stuff in from the car and dumped it in the front parlor, which Sally’s got looking great now, but which was just bare and gray then, with nothing on the floor but a dirty rag rug and a beat-up harmonium in a far corner. Evan broke up a junky old table and got a fire going, but it didn’t help much, because the ceiling’s way too high. He stood up from the fireplace with his back to us, and took a really long breath before he turned around. “Well, my legions,” he said. “Doesn’t look much of a bargain, does it?”
Tony said, “It’s not so bad,” and Julian said, “It’s big,” at the same time. Sally just laughed. She said, “Darling, it needs work, I knew that. I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t need work.”
“The farm doesn’t,” Evan said, “not so much.” Then he laughed himself and said, “Well, yes, it does, it needs a deal of work, but I can handle that. It’s this house. I knew it was going to be hard for a bit, but I didn’t quite realize how hard. I want to say I’m sorry, everybody.” Then he looked straight at me and added, “Especially to you, Jenny. You didn’t need this on top of all the rest of it. I’m very sorry.”
So, of course, now everybody was looking at me. I could have killed Evan, and at the same time I felt guilty and horrible, because he was really trying to be nice. Sally put her arm around me and she said, “Jenny’s all right.”
Tony said, “We’re all all right. We none of us thought it was going to be a dizzy round of pleasure.” And Julian growled, “It’ll be like camping out. I love camping out.” So now I had to say something, but the best I could manage was, “Well, I don’t care, I wasn’t expecting… and I just let it trail off there. The absolute best I could do then.
“All right, then,” Evan said. “What’s for dinner?”
Because there wasn’t any Chinese fast-food place around the corner—there wasn’t any corner—and the nearest grocery would have been back in Sherborne, which is the nearest real town, which we’d passed through when I was asleep. But we did all right with the leftovers from the car, and after that we worked out who’d sleep where for now, and which bathrooms were usable—Evan got the boiler going, so there was hot water anyway, even if it was exactly the color of New York sidewalks. And then everybody went to bed early. Because there wasn’t anything else to do.
Tony and Julian were downstairs, trading rooms every five minutes. I was on the second floor, in the room right next to Sally and Evan’s. The way I was feeling, I was really hoping they’d put me in one of those mean little servant garrets, so I could catch TB or something. This one smelled major mildewy, like all the others, and the lightbulbs were so dusty you could tell they’d been dead for years. But it had ceilings so high I couldn’t see them in the darkness, and big windows for Mister Cat to come and go by—once we finally got them open—and the bed was all right, once I got some West Eighty-third Street sheets on it. It was a brass four-poster, but the canopy was just rags, and I pulled them all off.
I could hear Sally and Evan talking softly, even though I was really trying not to, I really didn’t want to hear them being private. Evan was saying, “I don’t think money’s going to be the problem. The Lovells are in this for the long haul—they’ll lay out whatever it takes to bring the farm back to life. I’m not at all bothered about that.”
“But it’s all going to take twice as long as you thought,” Sally said. “Because of the house. That’s the bother, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t get used to the way she sounded, talking to him—not like my goofy New York single-mom Sally, more like an older person, so thoughtful and mature it always made me feel strange. Evan laughed a little and said, “Well, it’s my fault, I should have stashed you lot back in London with Charlie, and come down here alone, until I got things put shipshape. I knew that, damn it. I just wanted you with me.”
I heard them kissing then, and I curled up tight and pulled that cold, floppy pillow over my ears. I didn’t expect to sleep at all, but I did, straight through, and I had one weird dream after another, all of them full of people I didn’t know. Sometime in the night Sally sat by me on the bed for a while, unless that was a dream, too. I should have asked her then, but I wasn’t about to, and now she can’t remember. But I think she did.
Okay. The first months were solid nightmare, and it’s no good my pretending they weren’t. And I was a big part of the nightmare, maybe the biggest, I know that. I’m not going to go on and on about it, I’m just going to say that I was absolutely miserable, and I spread it around, and if everybody else at Stourhead wasn’t absolutely miserable, too, it wasn’t my fault. I did the very best I could.
But I had help. There was the house itself, to begin with. If I ever knew a house that truly did not want to be lived in, it was the Manor back when we arrived. I don’t just mean stuff like that sidewalk-colored water coming out in smelly burps, or the wood stove smoking up the kitchen every time Sally tried to cook something, or the weird way the electricity was hooked up, so you could turn on the light in my bathroom and blow every fuse in the west wing. Or the Horror Of The Septic Tank, which I am not going to describe, ever. That’s not what I mean.
Since that last sentence, I’ve been sitting here for half an hour, figuring how to explain how all of us were always tripping and falling over nothing at least once a day, as though those beautiful old floors absolutely hated the feet that walked on them. I’m talking about the way you could hear ugly little murmurs in the two chimneys, even when there wasn’t any wind, and the way some corners just ate up light, just stayed cold and shadowy forever, never mind how many lamps you plugged in. And I’m talking about the quick, scratchy footsteps everybody heard right above the Arctic Circle, one time or another, and nobody wanted to mention; and about that east-wing window that wouldn’t reflect the sunlight. We couldn’t even find the room it belonged to, that’s how the Manor was.
Julian was wildly excited about all this at the beginning. He ran around saying, “It’s a haunted house, how splendid—I’ll be the only boy at school living in a real haunted house!” But there were a couple of rooms on the second floor that Julian absolutely would not go into, from the first day. Everybody else did—there didn’t seem anything weird or scary about these two at least—but Julian just stopped right at the door, like I’ve seen Mister Cat do sometimes, and nobody could get him to take another step. He kept mumbling, “It feels funny, I don’t like it.” When Evan tried to talk him into going in, he cried. When Tony teased him about it, Julian hit him. Of course he says he doesn’t remember any of that now.