‘No I’m not,’ she says. ‘What makes you think I’m posh?’
Jade laughs out loud, scornfully. ‘Are you mad?’ she asks, eyeing the two-hundred-year-old beech trees, the way they’re planted in a perfect line, a precise distance apart, along the length of the drive, masking the house at the end. Her own home is also set back from the road, also hidden from the glance of passing vehicles, but the approach is a muddy track where brambles, elder and blackthorn fight for primacy. To her, posh is having a shower attachment on the bath taps instead of having to use a mug to rinse your hair with. It’s eating things you actually recognise from the adverts on the telly. It’s scrapping your car when it can no longer be nursed through the MoT, rather than leaving it to feed the stinging nettles in the field. To Jade, the kids on the modern estate on the other side of the village are posh.
Where Jade comes from, ‘posh’ is an insult. To Bel’s people, it’s an expression of aspiration.
‘So have you got a swimming pool?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Pony?’
‘Miranda’s got a pony. Michael says there’s no point in me getting one, as you need to start at Miranda’s age to be any good.’
Even to Jade, this sounds like an excuse for unfairness. She squints sideways at Bel, but her face is impassive. Now there’s posh, she thinks. That face – the one where you don’t show any feelings, ever – is something only posh people are good at. She finds a fallen stick on the gravel of the drive, and swipes at the heads of the cow parsley on the verge. ‘I’m bloody starving,’ she says.
‘Nearly there,’ says Bel.
‘Who’s Miranda anyway?’
‘She’s my half-sister. She’s six. She’s Michael’s,’ says Bel, and doesn’t notice the purse of the lips that greets this statement. Every family has its moral code, and multiple parenthood is a violation of Jade’s. Her father may be free with his fists, but he’s never played away. It’s never occurred to her to wonder who would want to play away with a pig farmer who holds his coat together with binder twine.
They pass through the high wall, bathed in the baleful glare of stone lions, and see the house before them.
‘How many of you are there?’ asks Jade.
‘Four. And Romina. She lives in the flat,’ says Bel, and gestures at the stable-block to the right; a red-brick mini-me of the big house, right down to the tall, fluted, non-functional vanity chimneys. She feels a twinge of embarrassment as she speaks. Hopes Jade won’t judge her on her stepfather’s shameless display of superfluity. She’s glad the cars have been put away in the garage. Deduces that Jade doesn’t have a Range Rover, a Porsche and a Golf GTI lined up on her own gravel sweep.
‘Posh,’ says Jade, and starts towards the front door.
‘This way.’ Bel turns round the side of the house.
‘You don’t use the front?’
‘Nobody does, in the country,’ says Bel grandly, parroting her adults, then blushes. ‘N-no. I always use the back.’
Jade shrugs and follows. She doesn’t like the look of the front much anyway: the shutters are closed across the whole façade, the dead eyes of the house staring sightless into the empty courtyard. She follows Bel up a dank side path. After what feels like ten minutes of damp and foliage, they emerge at the servants’ entrance.
Bel puts her hand on the large brass door handle and pushes. The door doesn’t move.
‘Bugger,’ she says.
‘What’s up?’
‘Locked.’
‘We never lock our doors,’ announces Jade. They have nothing to steal. And anyway, the dogs would see any interloper off before they got within a hundred yards of the house. And if they didn’t, the sound of them would bring Ben Walker and his twelve-bore round from the pig sheds before they got past the washing lines.
Bel tries the door fruitlessly one more time, then starts off in the direction of the stableyard. Jade plods patiently in the rear. ‘Who’s Romina?’
‘Miranda’s nanny. She’s meant to be keeping an eye on me. Come on. She’s probably in the flat.’
She leads the way back up the alley and beneath the grand arched entrance to the stableyard. It’s quiet here, and shady: two wise, curious heads, one bay, one chestnut, appear at stable doors and watch them as they cross the flagstones. Bel greets them and receives a friendly whicker in response from the bay. ‘Trigger and Missy,’ she says.
Jade walks over and holds a hand out to be sniffed. Feels gentle velvet lips brush her skin, the snuff of warm damp breath on her fingers.
‘That one’s Trigger,’ says Bel.
‘Hi, Trigger,’ says Jade, and continues to rub the horse’s nose as she looks around. It’s a big-face stableyard, the sort that was originally built to house carriages. An elegant arched door, echoing the lines of the belltower arch under which they’ve just passed, leads to a barn. Funny, she thinks. I’d always heard it was really old, this house, but it looks brand new. There’s nothing out of place here.
Every door, apart from those of the two inhabited looseboxes, is closed and latched; a burglar alarm is conspicuous in its turquoise livery on the wall of the tack room. It’s weird, thinks Jade. I mean, you’d expect a wheelbarrow or a couple of hay-nets or some mucking-out tools or something. But the whole place looks disinfected, as though nothing ever happens to mess it up. It looks like someone’s come along with a bottle of Domestos and scrubbed it with a toothbrush.
Trigger, finding that Jade has no titbits, chaws down on her knuckles with his teeth. She snatches her hand away, then pushes his nose softly away from her with a clenched fist. ‘So which one’s Miranda’s?’ she asks, though both look to be sixteen hands high.
‘Neither. Trigger’s Michael’s and Missy’s Lucinda’s. They’ve just been brought in to be fittened up for hunting. Miranda’s pony’s in the bottom field.’
‘Mmm,’ says Jade. ‘Better not go over my dad’s land. He’d have your guts for garters.’
‘I don’t think anyone would want to hunt over your dad’s land,’ says Bel. ‘They’d lose the scent among all the pig shit.’
She glances sideways at Jade as she says this, to check what the reaction will be. She’s testing the waters, seeing how far she can go with teasing. Jade laughs. ‘Too right,’ she says, ‘and I don’t s’pose as the barbed wire’d be too popular neither. So where’s this flat then?’
‘Over here.’ Bel leads the way to a neat white-painted tongue-and-groove door by the side of the barn, its ornaments the same twisted black iron that decorates every other door and window in the complex. ‘Her car’s not here,’ she says. ‘She wouldn’t have parked it in the barn. She never puts it indoors when Michael and Lucinda are away.’
She rings the doorbell and they stand back as the sound echoes up the stairs. There is no response. Somewhere out in the cornfields a skylark gets up, twinkles its way into the blue, blue sky.
‘Bugger,’ says Bel.